Social eating doesn't have to suck

It's amazing to me how great it feels to cook with people who eat the way you do.

I went to another one of Monica Corrado's cooking classes last night. I've taken a series with her on the using basics of Nourishing Traditions for feeding toddlers (and the whole family) as well as a series on flower essences and essential oils for healing. Last night's class was on gluten-free baking. The breads and muffins were delicious, and I learned a lot. It's so nice to feel reassured that all the effort I put into getting farm food and to sticking to this diet really do make a difference.

Classes are educational, but the community feeling is the most important thing you can't get from a book.

Off with our heads

"Where's Mommy's head? Oh, I found it."

My son enjoys playing with the magnet a friend made for us 10 years ago after we appeared as Homer and Marge Simpson at her Halloween Party. But a few months ago, he put the craft-store magnet to the test and found that it was not difficult to rip his parents' heads off.

As if we needed any help with that.

E's dad and I do not exactly exemplify the kind of mindful, intentional life we value. LJ is great about getting good gas mileage, so I know he's paying very close attention to the way he drives - spending time in neutral (we have an automatic), not accelerating when he's going to have to stop. I admire this and try to follow his example, but it's easy to get out of the habit, just like it's easy to forget to sit up straight with my abs supporting my back. I can get on a roll but then get lost in NPR or Music Together and realize I'm racing to a red light with slumped shoulders.

Lately we are just about at each other's throats over the house and our finances. After seven years in our home, we're trying to purge as though we were moving. This is necessary and cathartic but also time-consuming, and challenging to do with a 2.5-year-old. We have also found ourselves at odds over money. We do not go on lavish vacations or buy expensive jewelry or technology, but we do spend a lot on good quality food and alternative health care. And kid clothes, and some toys, and classes, and childcare. And sippy cups.

So somehow we've started spending a lot more than we did 2.5 years ago -- even 1.5 years ago when the kid was only eating from his mama (who was so tired she needed lots of acpuncture and other support to keep her thyroid and depression in check). And by "somehow" I mean we both have analyzed our spending individually but haven't worked on a budget and protocol that makes sense for both of us for right now and for our future. In this economy, our failure to watch our lead foots is, as my husband says, "stupid." I'm offended to be insulted, but he's right.

I don't know how long it's going to take, but we have to get this stuff out of our basement or happily into storage spaces. I've been Freecycling and Craigslisting like crazy. The soft vinyl bags LJ barked at me for buying months ago are indeed yucky, not only for the off-gassing they did but also because the soft flexibility I bought them for (to ostensibly fit better in a small space) is frustrating. They don't stack or smoosh - they are just kind of messy. It's just like our lack of clear-cut boundaries and guidelines for ourselves.

My last post was almost a month ago, "Gardening at Night," in which I wrote about what a difference it made to spend 15 minutes as a family weeding in our front yard. Once all the grass was gone, the liriope started to flower. It was like the plant could finally breathe, finally had the nutrients it needed. We'll have to get back in there and weed again soon, I know. It doesn't end.

I'm hoping we can work toward moving our physical and financial lives into the land of purple flowers.

Gardening at Night

"I think you left a diaper at playgroup," my friend said, offering to drop off the stinky yellow Fuzzi Bunz a few hours later. Now sporting a white diaper and blue Crocs, my son accompanied me outside when she drove up and, after she pulled away, he insisted on going to the end of the street in search of the neighbor's cat.

After initially turning him down because dinner was almost ready, I decided some outside time after a late nap was a good idea. But as we too frequently meet neighbors while in varying states of undress, I insisted we first go inside to slip on some toddler shorts. I asked my husband if he wanted to join, which I immediately re-heard through my son's mouth: "Do you want to come with us, Daddy?" We all ventured out into Friday night dusk in search of felines, but somehow we got fixated on the ground instead. "We could weed," I offered, having lamented just that morning how I was almost as overwhelmed with the overgrown yard as I am with our overcluttered house.


So we all started crouching down, pulling up the tall grass that seems to be loving our drought, cracked earth and all. It wouldn't look so bad if we hadn't actually gotten landscaping done that makes it obvious it's not purposeful filler among the more manicured liriope. We probably did a decent job with some but just did damage control with others that will grow back.


There's still plenty to do, but what we did in 10 minutes made a big difference to our eyes. And in the process, we got to breathe still warm but non-conditioned air, talk about roots, and listen to cicadas, a word my son now knows at age two that I don't think I knew until I was twenty-one. My husband told me a story about he and E seeing a cicada up close at the park the other day; its clumsy flight as it left a leaf almost slamming it into their heads before it caught its breath and lifted up and away. That's an image I might never have owned if we hadn't gone out tonight.

Always a resister to seriously setting a routine, I wondered how much less out of control -- and more connected to each other -- we'd feel if we did ten minutes of weeding every Friday night. We spend so much time in tag-team mode, with one parent playing with the kid while the other cooks or cleans. As a result, our son misses out on some basic, work-oriented family time where we all just undertake a task together. It may be that he is only now ready to participate and have much patience in yardwork and housework, but my husband and I have been stuck believing we are more restricted than we actually are -- as parents, as owners of a small house with too much stuff, and certainly as people who just don't have enough time.

While I snapped this photo, the cat let my son touch his ear for the first time.

Sometimes it takes a stupid thing like a forgotten diaper to get our heads out of our butts.


---
See R.E.M singing "Gardening at Night" on YouTube

Preschool Dropout

So I changed my mind. Not that I think preschools are evil. I don't. I'm just not going.

This past year seemed so successful and good for my son, I didn't question that I would want to do a preschool again this coming year in addition to our Waldorf parent-child program. I did look around at other schools that would have less intense cooping commitments, but I settled on staying where we were because of its very play-centered culture, proximity to our house, and fabulous wooden playground.

But as the less-scheduled summer wore on, I found I was dreading the cooping, dreading all the time to prep his food and label every single little thing (and not be able to include raisins or carrots or other foods on the no-no list, and feeling less and less comfortable about all the compromises I'd have to make -- antibacterial soap, bleach water, snacks I might not approve of or packing extra just for my son.

But the big thing was time and community. Once I'd attended two events through the Waldorf school, I realized how tough it would be to fully participate in two different communities. And three hours of preschool on non-cooping days really meant only two and a half hours of "childcare" and also came along with the expectation of staying after school for 30-45 minutes to play on the playground, sharing the responsibility of watching the cooper's child while she was cleaning the classroom. Add onto the cooping once every five or six school days the additional commitment of performing a job for the school, completing continuing ed hours, and performing buildings and grounds cleaning (with yucky toxic products). With a coop, there's always more you can be doing to help other people out. I want my lines cleaner.

I realized I'm ready to do more work from home, and what I really want is just childcare -- preferably in a home without toxic products or questionable food and preferably with just one or two other kids, not eleven. I want my time with my son to be my time with my son and my time alone to be my time alone -- not have them mixed together, especially since my son usually had a better time at school when I wasn't cooping. I couldn't fit in additional childcare along with two days of coop and one day of Waldorf school plus keep up with my playgroup and maybe take another session of Music Together or pursue a French class my friend recently started. I care more about E enjoying music and art and learning the language his cousins speak and maybe also learning the language lots of folks in our community speak (Spanish). With him at school, there wouldn't be any mornings left for us to just go to the zoo or hang out at home or run errands together.

Finally, when I read Wendy Ponte's article, "No More Homework" in the current issue of Mothering magazine, I found myself becoming less open to the idea of public school for my son in the future. Although I taught high school English for six years and believe that most kids do need to be assigned books and writing assignments, I also don't like the idea of my son getting pumped with worksheets and drills at age six. I don't think I'm up for the challenge of homeschooling if I don't like Waldorf, but I'm certainly leaning more in that direction now than I used to be. So why start with the structure of school so early?

The one day program last year was of great benefit to a kid who had a strong social side but was struggling with intense separation anxiety. Now my son asks about new friends and even new babysitters after just one meeting. I may be proven wrong in a few months, but right now it looks like E does not need the consistency of a preschool community.

So I quit. I sent one letter to the school and one to the school friends. Maybe I'll post those and comment on them later. For now, here in short form are my reasons, which might serve to help others quesitoning the same decision.

1. Time
-Too much structured time out of our week, excluding other activities I'd prefer
-Too much prep time for me, especially compared to having a sitter in our home
-Unlimited time (that I don't have) that could be put into community
-Not enough consistent free time for me to work

2. Green compromise
-Shared snack that might not be gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, corn-free, sugar-free (and not sure I want to force the whole group to conform to our needs & preferences). The last day of school featured color/HFCS-containing ice desserts
-Products I don't approve of (cleaners, soaps, etc.) - and soap is used A LOT
-Other kids have plenty of commercial product awareness, TV exposure, etc.


What we'll miss:
-Unstructured play time with lots of great manipulatives and projects
-Seeing the same kids regularly
-Learning from other parents
-Lower cost of preschool vs. nanny share or in-home daycare

Like mother, like son?

"Where's the red pepper?" I asked E as I spooned the pesto out of the VitaMix. We'd just returned home from a week in Maine. While I unpacked, my husband came in from watering the plants with a huge bunch of basil and a small pepper that was about the size of our toddler's fist -- a little bigger and much redder than when we left. Volia: a dinner concept.

The pepper plants were gifts from an apartment-dwelling friend who ran out of room on her patio. E and I planted her leftovers in containers, too, because the plot where we used to garden in-ground has in the past two years become too shaded by ill-conceived pear trees (even though we removed two of them), and we weren't willing to utilize more visible parts of the yard for a garden. We did a few herbs in the ground in our side yard but did the peppers, tomato, basil, oregano, rosemary and some peas from seed (way too late, but they sprouted) in containers near the kitchen. I figured he'd benefit from the experience of a little planting even if it wasn't in the ground. He loved his Toddler-sized garden gloves and Kids' Hand Tool Set I bought from The Wacky World of Children, but the Toddler's Single Watering Can has gotten the most use.

"I eat it," he said, pointing to his empty mouth to clarify he meant past tense. LJ and I looked at each other.

"What do you mean? Where?"

"In the dining room."

We looked around for evidence. Nada. No seeds, no stem. A week later, we believe him; he really did eat it all, apparently while I was whirring away with the blender and stirring the Tinkyada rice pasta. We picked a green pepper a few days later, and his first thought was, "I want to show Daddy," who wasn't yet home. His second thought was to lick it and tease me that he was going to eat it. His third thought was crunch. The half-eaten pepper went into the fridge as evidence.

I'm told I did the same thing as a child -- ate peppers right out of the garden. But a major difference is, we really had a garden. We outfitted my whole fourth grade class with pumpkins. There were rows and rows of vegetables, thickets of berries, huge sproutings of rhubarb. Somehow I keep thinking my son will have those memories of living in the country even if it's not his experience.

LJ and I have been flirting with the idea of adding on to the house for a long time. Recently we've thought that we just need to purge all our unnecessary stuff and then just move out of the DC area to somewhere with clean air -- a place where our money will buy a bigger house and a bigger yard where we can grow most of what we'd want and live with less negative impact than our current suburban lifestyle. I loved that my son got to pick asparagus and strawberries at my parents' house in Michigan in June and that in July he walked right up to fennel growing at Beech Hill Farm in Mount Desert Island in Maine. (Well, I liked that he had the opportunity, not so much that he was so manic my husband had to take him out of the barn while I bought produce). Part of me wishes gardening was an everyday part of our lives.

But there sure is a lot of driving that goes on to get to my folks' house and to get to places out in the country. Maybe moving out to the western DC suburbs isn't such a crazy idea after all, LJ and I started to think. Housing prices are tanking. We could get something roomy and with a big yard and still be commutable to lots of places without much more time/gas/money than we currently spend. Why do we need to live so close to the city?

But I think we've come to realize we do like where we are. I've got a lot of friends here. I can walk to a grocery store and quickly get to whatever other places I need to go without having to cross town or country. And I can be on the bike path in about three minutes, carrying me to parks, a nature center and miles of wooded trail. I've got several options for natural foods grocery stores. I can get organic (and local when available) produce delivered to my home through Washington's Green Grocer, I'm not far from a farm drop where I can get pastured eggs and grassfed beef, and I could be part of any number of CSA's (community-supported agriculture) for produce if I could get over the issue of negiotiating an afternoon pickup around a child's sleep schedule (the main reason I didn't continue this year with Potomac Vegetable Farms).

And honestly, we have a big yard for this area. There's an entire steep slope that gets plenty of sun, and it's no picnic to mow it. So why don't we just make it a priority to garden? That would take something of a mindshift for us, since I'm not my dad and my husband is not his step-dad, who last year donated tons of produce to Food Gatherers in Ann Arbor. Somehow my fairly mainstream neighbors can find the time to grow a nice garden with three kids. The mom recently told me, "R just picked a green bean and ate it. Now I don't have to worry about her getting a vegetable!" As the parents of a son for whom green beans are our default/backup/quick-easy food and who will choose my sugar-free cookies with zucchini and carrot over frozen Van's (gluten-free) waffle, surely we can muster the mettle.

So it's not a done deal, but our next quest -- along with purging our junk through Freecycle and Craigslist -- is to research what we'd need to do this fall to prep our slope for a terraced garden in the fall.

I hope that by next summer we won't have any more Fuzzi Bunz diapers drying in the sun to broadcast our crunchiness, but I do hope we can build a decent garden.

Preschool is not evil

My son had terrible separation anxiety starting at age seven months. Other people could leave their children during playgroup to go pee. My son wailed like I’d tied him to a tree and was throwing water balloons at him. Those first winter holidays at eight and nine months were terrible; no relatives could hold him. The boy was on my back in the Ergo most of the time. Even my husband got the cold shoulder.

In January, our son played on the floor while we listened to a parenting lecture on separation anxiety. The expert suggested that it was likely our son might just always have a hard time with each new transition or new caregiver. At the same time, it was clear that the boy was an extrovert who liked to be around other kids. He lit up while playing with his older cousins at Christmas, as long as I was in view. I figured if I was ever going to get a break or get him comfortable with leaving me, it would have to be in a social setting. Maybe if he got attached to a place and to certain people, I thought, then he’ll feel more comfortable away from me.

I didn’t expect to start preschool earlier than almost anyone else in my circle of friends, but I wanted to know what my options were. I went to two open houses that winter he was almost one, and I found one program that had a class for infants and young toddlers where my son could go the following fall. There were six kids to three adults – one teacher and one aide, both of whom were there every week, and one cooping parent. When I observed the class in action, I got a kick out of kids just a few months older than mine sitting at a table “chatting” about their snacks. Wow, they are already real kids, I thought, cooperating and building community. It was only three hours a week in a gentle program at a place with a great playground that my son would get to play on each week, I was assured, unless the weather was terrible. And there was nothing close to an academic agenda; it was all about play.

So I applied. I got wait-listed. And then I got in. E was not quite 18 months old and a relatively new walker when September rolled around. Before school started, grabbed the face of another boy on our get-to-know-you playdate. I didn’t know what to expect with such intense emotion and still some concern separating from me.

I asked to coop the first day of class, and I couldn’t keep E from nursing, he was so unsure what to think. If didn't let him latch on, he just wailed and grabbed at my pantleg such that I was of no help to the others in the room. The next time I cooped wasn’t for another six weeks, and we made it without a bra strap out of place. Those first five weeks he cried when I left him and a little occasionally after. The boy whose face he grabbed cried so hard one day he threw up. But he and my son both talked about each other at home, and they did have fun at school.

One day in early November, the other boy’s mom requested a playdate on a Monday, the day before we had class. There were no toys in the sandbox, and she explained that only the teacher could get out the trucks. Her son didn’t utter a peep the next day or any day after that all year. My son took one more week to give up the ghost, and then he just never looked back.

What I liked best about our experience at preschool was the fact that he got to interact with other adults and learn new ways of coping with challenges. He and I had been so deeply attached, I think he needed to have some time on his own to find his own footing. He still nurses (at 27 months), and I have to say he still seems rather in love with his mama. I think there were some other factors that contributed to his ability to warm to school, but I do believe that school was of great benefit to both of us in getting him past the intensity of his separation anxiety.

Another thing I especially liked was the longer duration of play. At home I struggle to find even 20 minutes to full-on play with my son without interruptions or distractions. In classes (which we haven’t ever enrolled in, except for Music Together), he gets at most 45 minutes of activity with a lot of hustle and shuffle on either side of that directed “on” time. The one time I observed Gymboree, I felt like the pacing was devised by the makers of Ritalin; it seemed like the program was set up to give kids a short attention span. At school he gets at least 45 unstructured minutes inside twice and 45 minutes outside with gentle transitions in between – no jerky stop-start in and out of the car from the class to the grocery store to home to put in the laundry. I can’t imagine how I could be disciplined enough to give him this kind of temporal space if I tried to homeschool him, and our postage-stamp living room certainly doesn't match the physical space he has at school.

It’s important for my son to see the real world and to see me interacting in it. But I also feel it’s important for him to have time to just be a kid with other kids somewhere safe, with creative outlets I don’t always have at the ready -- and with patience I rarely have.

This year he’ll be at the coop twice a week, and though I know he may be a little sad not to return to the same teacher, I have no concerns about him having separation anxiety from me. He is happily independent but also incredibly attached to his parents and very clued in to people around him. He knows by name – and asks about – at least a dozen people within a block of us and dozens more with family and other friends. When we met the grabbed-face boy for a summer playdate at school a few weeks ago, my son asked where their other classmates and teachers were. He’s learned to care about other people and to take an interest in their lives and to see that he and they all go on and can have a good time even (maybe especially?) if his mama isn’t around. He likes me a lot, I know, but he also realizes that fun doesn’t start and end with Mama.

I’d like to think I could create a program like this myself, a program that wouldn’t have the stuff I don’t appreciate, like artificially-colored and flavored popsicles (at the end of the year) and the daily use of antibacterial soap (also see CDC report and Mercola article . But I have a lot of other things I want to do that I think I’d be better at doing and that would make me a happier person, hence better mom. As much as I’d like to fully buck the system, feed my kid vegetables all day and never have to put snacks in little containers unless we’re both having a picnic together, I know I’m not cut out for homeschooling. Cooping every five or six weeks is plenty.

So we’re also doing a parent-child program at a Waldorf school to see if that approach is for us. I welcome guidance on bringing more of a sense of ritual and rhythm to our lives. Making food from scratch and from organic ingredients is a big plus over playing with gluten-filled boxed mixes. There’s no question that I prefer my son around natural toys. Fortunately, our coop is pretty good about using quiet toys and providing opportunity for fantasy, so I don’t think there will be huge of a leap to the Waldorf program.

However, there will be some significant differences. I worry that I’ve been a little too cerebral and talky with my son and have certainly allowed him to develop too close of a relationship with the camera (and the computer that stores the camera’s photos). But there’s more to Waldorf philosophy than what it has to say about language and technology, and I look forward to learning what that is alongside my son.

"Add Image"

"We're going to get kicked out of the Waldorf school next year," I keep joking. My son knows way too much about technology, I fear. I have a lot to learn about Waldorf education, but I know that computer use before high school is discouraged (as is all electronic media throughout childhood). My son, at age two, loves the digital camera, and he knows how to use it. Whenever I take photos, he asks, "Can I see?" and gets mad if I explain to him that we're trying to enjoy the actual experience in front of us instead of the representation of it.

But I'm a documentarian at heart. I was the editor of my high school yearbook, resurrected my college yearbook, and, as a teacher, advised my school's literary/art/photography magazine. It's always bugged me that our photojournalistic wedding photographer didn't also get posed pictures of me and my husband. And I seem to be trying to make sure I never have that kind of regret with my son.

So now I have a kid who proclaims, "I wanna see pictures!" whenever we're in the basement where the bulk of our images are stored and who whines, "I want de video" if he's stuck on stills on the digital camera. I wonder how all this media is affecting the brains of kids who now repeatedly see visuals of experiences they might have otherwise only vaguely remembered. So far I only see the benefits in terms of vocabulary and connection to people, but what will it do further down the line?

I really liked the Reggio Emilia preschool I observed. The space was like an art studio where every object was held with reverence. I liked the idea of having kids reflect on what they did and be able to look back at their process through pictures and words. But at some point, I do feel like for all the intentionality of doing the art and being involved in the process, there's a higher value placed on showing what the process was. The physical product representing the meta-process is the thing that lasts.

Even if I'd gotten into the Reggio Emilia school, I think it's better for my temperament to find some balance through Waldorf education. I hope to learn a lot this fall in our parent-child class -- enough to decide if the fit feels right and is worth paying (for future years) about ten times what the low-key "learn through play" co-operative preschool we're already in costs.

Although I think I could temper my son's love affair with photos, I do like it when I capture something I didn't know was there or couldn't have shown him in the moment -- like the ripple above. When he was throwing so many rocks in the water, listening for the thunk and then looking for another, bigger rock to throw, we didn't have the chance to see the circles. In the dappled light, we were too busy exclaiming over the sound or the splash. And my son was too busy having fun to care that I had the camera clicking away. I have to give some credit to technology when a digital image can help me better appreciate the beauty of one moment that might have otherwise slipped through my fingers.