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.