Moving Quickly

I've been amazed in the past week at how quickly a move can be arranged. We got our 30 days notice on our rental December 1. We signed a lease December 6. On December 8, I booked packers/movers, hired cleaners (for the old place), changed utilities and mail service, and scheduled my parents to come help. We'll get our stuff packed on the 15th, camp out in our new place that night, and then move in on the 16th. We should be completely out of our old place by the 20th. (Now if the landlord will let us end our lease on the 21st, we'd be stoked.)

For this move, the logistics seem to be the easy part. Much harder is explaining to a 3 year old and a one year old what will be happening. The big selling point for my son is that this new house has grass in the back AND the front (we currently have a 3'x3' concrete 'porch' in the front), but he's still uncertain about leaving our neighborhood friends. His only other experience with moving was last December when we moved across the country; we haven't seen his Massachusetts friends since.

We're all a bit frazzled with the speed at which we're moving, and we're still recovering from Thanksgiving and it's accompanying illnesses. We're also a bit fearful of all the changes, even though many of them--like the walkability of the neighborhood--will be positive changes. But we're grateful for our new house and how quickly it has become ours. We hope it becomes our home just as quickly.

Lame Mom Move

On Sunday, after church, my three-year-old son was playing with a little spinner toy and taking turns quite nicely with a little girl (the spinner belonged to a third child). Our church meets at a high school, and the kids were running around outside the auditorium. Everything was going swimmingly, until my son got that mischievous grin and tossed the spinner right into the trash can. I managed to take the filthy can top off with one hand--the other was holding my daughter--and was pleased to find that the spinner had landed in a recently replaced and very clean trash bag, right on top of a clean bulletin. It looked germ free to me! So I took it out and handed it to my son's playmate.

A moment later, I saw the girl's dad returning the toy to its owner with instructions to clean it and taking his daughter to wash her hands.

Now I'm the mom who hands dirty trash toys to kids.

And the moral of the story? I'm debating between "not all trash cans are dirty inside," "you can't judge a trash can by its dirty lid, nor the quality of a mom by her cleanliness," and "all moms need grace."

I think my son misses Massachusetts

My son was "cooking" this morning with his play (read: cheap) flour and sugar, some finely grated string cheese, and some grated fig newton. After he was done, he dumped a bunch of flour on the counter and pressed it flat.

"Oh, look! Flour mountains!" I said.

"No, it's snow flour," he answered. And then he used a cookie cutter to make some snow angels.

Voting is Crazy-Making for Silicon Valley Mom

Tonight I finally filled in my Santa Clara County, California, absentee ballot, just in time to go walk it in to a polling station tomorrow. Not only did we get to vote for President/Vice President, US Representative, State Senator, and State Assembly Member, we also got to vote for one judge, one county board of education member, two local school board members, and four city council members (with nine in the race). And we got to vote for twelve state ballot measures, and four county ballot measures. Since my husband and I just returned to the state this year and are new to the county, we didn't simply get to research the current propositions, but we dove into all of the history of the issues we could find as well. It took at least two full evenings. Thank goodness for the internet and for a husband who's a committed voter and excellent and highly educated web researcher.

So what have I learned in this process? Everybody likes parks. Very few people like the VTA (Valley Transportation Authority). Incumbents know a whole lot more about the job than challengers do. Candidates that have good websites feel a lot more vote-worthy. And I really hate talking about politics. Especially with my mom.

Even though we hold the same core values and agree on some key issues, we vote differently on almost everything. In the 2004 election, she called to say, "Don't vote. You'll cancel me out!" Tonight when I called to ask for a recipe, she asked how I was voting on some of the propositions. I told her reluctantly, and then I couldn't remember any of my suave and convincing arguments. Somehow in the face of someone totally convinced of the rightness of her political views, mine seemed to wither. The truth is, I'm not totally certain of my political views or how to fix the problems in the world. And I don't agree with every position of every person I voted for. Our two party system sets up this lovely false dichotomy, which seems amplified by proponents on each side, but political issues seem so much more nuanced and complex to me, and I don't like to be judged by a label that doesn't totally apply.

I'll turn in my ballot tomorrow, having exercised my power to participate in government, having done my civic duty, and having modeled for my kids that voting is something you do. Then on the walk home, they'll squabble over who gets to wear my "I Voted" sticker, and I'll be glad not to have to discuss politics for a while.

Experimenting in the Kitchen

I've been experimenting in the kitchen lately, which means my son has too. We've been making whole wheat bread, various soups, pumpkin muffins (from a box), and roasted pumpkin seeds. My son usually helps dump together the ingredients and stirs. His own menu usually includes strange concoctions of whatever I'm willing to sacrifice from the cupboards and the fridge: yellow split peas, almost old green beans, grape tomatoes my mom left here, half a jar of ground cloves. He usually cooks in the sink, and the big bowl ends up sitting there until I dump it out.

I've been trying to think of ways to let him explore cooking without it driving me batty. So yesterday at the grocery store, he got to choose some ingredients that will be just his. He chose rice, black turtle beans (chosen for the name, I think), and mini marshmallows. Other than not being allowed to roast the mini marshmallows on tiny sticks, he had free rein.* He dumped and mixed, and seemed to be having a good time. And then he asked for more ingredients.

So now our sink has a rice/beans/marshmallow/warm water concoction in it (he didn't want the moldy bread I offered). And while he had a sense of ownership, it was not as much fun as really getting to explore in the kitchen, even with a bunch of "no"s along the way.

*While I was typing, I realized I didn't know if the expression was "free reign" as I first typed it, or "free rein." It does refer to horses, not kings and queens. See bottom of this page.

Shouting

Yesterday afternoon, during the witching hour--that hour right before dinner when the kids go crazy--I totally lost my cool. My son was pestering me to pick up a pen cap off the floor for him while I was stirring meatballs into hot spaghetti sauce and my daughter was hanging on my leg whining. I turned to him and shouted "Hey!" with what I thought was a withering glare. I caught myself, took a breath, and apologized: "I'm sorry for shouting at you. I shouldn't have done that." I thought, rather proudly, that I was doing such a great job parenting, providing him with an example of contrition without justifying my actions. But he totally missed that point. "Mom," he said. "Shouting is what you do at birthday parties! But you shout 'surprise.'" I had just started a party without even knowing it.

Pirate Rules

I made the mistake the other day of telling my three-year-old son that pirates don't follow regular people rules, they follow pirate rules. I meant to highlight the idea that pirates aren't just anti-rule; they have their own set of codes that rule them on the high seas. But the nuances were lost on the three year old. Every time he did something he's not allowed to do, he'd say, "Mom. I'm following pirate rules."

These pirate rules included everything he wanted to do but isn't allowed: laying on top of the kitchen table, spraying the laundry hanging in the back yard with water from the hose, poking his sister with the toilet paper holder. Following pirate rules in our house often meant behaving unkindly.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what are the most important things to teach my kids, and where obedience falls into the mix. It's easy to decide that I want them to be able to think for themselves and make wise decisions, that I want them to explore their world, that I want them to be creative, that I want them to know the value of working at something that's hard for them. But much of the time I just want them to do what I say.

I've read many books on the subject of raising kids, and each one touts a different highest value. For one author, it's obedience. For another, it's kindness or humane-ness, and the critical thinking skills necessary to make humane choices. For another, it's responsibility and thinking for themselves. For yet another, it's love of learning and creative problem solving.* And these are all good things. I suppose this is the problem of parenthood. There are so many good things that children are and that they can become, and there's no philosophically and practically perfect system for enabling the good.

My dad's advice is to raise kids you'll like to hang out with as adults, because you'll spend a lot more time with them when they're adults than when they're kids. That seems a good place to start, even as I puzzle over what my parenting priorities are. I'm not a big fan of pirate rules, but I love the sparkle in the eyes of the boy who's inventive enough to try to follow them.

*Books referred to:
--Ted Tripp's Shepherding a Child's Heart (I do have some strong philosophical disagreements with Tripp)
--Zoe Weil's Above All, Be Kind (it includes some great questionnaires to help parents think through their values and how those values should affect their parenting)
--Foster Cline and Charles Fay, Parenting with Love and Logic (lots of practical application, though I'm still thinking through some of the claims they make)
--Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting (this one really challenged me to think about what values I hold, and he provides lots of psychological studies to establish his argument)

Hamster Wheels

I really wanted a picture of a hamster in a wheel on a street or sidewalk with cars in the background for my blog image. No luck. I did find photos of hamsters in wheels with no background, of people in very large hamster balls in a big pool, and of a few people-sized hamster wheels in various environs. By far my favorite was this one:

This "Green Wheel" was designed by students from Dalhousie School of Architecture as a "playful protest to the lack of public green space in Halifax" (see whole article here).

So instead of a picture of a hamster, or my head photoshopped onto a hamster body or this guy's body, you get to see a little bit of me and more of my sleeping daughter. I can't really argue for it fitting the theme, but in my book, you really can't do better than a sleeping baby.

Fall in California

The last week or so I've been lamenting that we ever moved back to California from New England. The primary reason? The fall colors. I've been forgetting about the most miserable week of the year in January where you feel like your pee might freeze inside your body when you go outside. And the gross humidity of summer that made me throw all green-ness to the wind and run three large air conditioners constantly in our 900 sq.ft. condo. But fall.

Our favorite fall event was the Ashfield Fall Festival, held on Columbus Day weekend in a tiny hilltown. The churches all serve food, local performers grace the stage, and kids run a game area with all homemade games. We learned the first year we went that we had to take cash; no one took credit cards, and the closest ATM was 6 miles away. We also learned our first visit that our first stop should always be the old town hall to line up for fried dough with maple cream dripping off it. We'd get our dough, sit on the steps with other families, and get sticky while listening to a bluegrass trio standing off to the side.

On Sunday we found our Fall Festival here, in Los Altos. Instead of taking over the main street and the common, we got the California version of a common--a cordoned off parking lot. There were carnival rides and crafts, a climbing wall, a stage with a mediocre band, a few food stands, and a classic car show. It felt rushed and busy. But maybe I just felt rushed and busy, not able to take a California fall for what it is--a slightly cooler version of summer with scarecrows and pumpkins--and longing for the simplicity and tradition of a small New England town.

How this Blog came to be called "The 'Amstr Wheel"

The title combines to quirky bits. First, at one time my email name was "amstr@ . . ." and a good friend still calls me by that particular email name. Second, I heard a quiz question on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" about a hamster outrunning traffic in his little hamster ball somewhere in the UK (see story here: "Speeding Hamster Overtakes Rush-Hour Traffic"). In trying to come up with a blog name, the two seemed to collide.

Many things in my life right now seem kind of hamster-wheely. I'm a stay-at-home mom by day and a grad student in Renaissance Literature by night. Both things require lots of routine, and I don't feel like I'm making much progress when I take account at the end of each day. I'm learning to trust, though, that the lesson of the tortise and the hare is true. I'm deciding that 15 minutes of writing is better than none, and that spending time with my kids now playing hide-and-seek under clean sheets will pay off later. I'm certainly having to be slow and steady and to trust my own pace. With enough time, maybe I'll win the race, or at least pass by all those crazy commuters stuck on the freeway and going nowhere.