The other side of my main blog. It's a collection of interesting things from around the web (and every once in a while, a few personal thoughts).
Showing 14 posts tagged parenting
What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon - if we live long enough - of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigour that once was ours.
Great essay.
“Parenting is more about patching up skinned knees than keeping them from climbing too high.”
It’s hard to find a parenting article these days that doesn’t preach about the evils of saying “No” to your kids.
I’m going to throw it out there that maybe one of the causes of everything that’s wrong in the world today is that we don’t hear the word “No” enough. Life isn’t just about saying “Yes” to things that are right. It’s also about saying “No” to things that aren’t - things that are morally wrong, or could hurt us, or aren’t worthy of our time and attention.
By painting the word “No” as a thing from the devil we’re losing the vocabulary to deal with the distinction between what matters and what doesn’t. What’s right and what’s wrong. What’s edifying and what’s harmful.
Sometimes “No” is absolutely the appropriate thing to say. I’m fairly convinced that saying things like “No, don’t run into the road because a car could hit you” helps to teach our kids to say “No” to more metaphorical potential car crashes as they grow up.
High-res
This is one of my favorite photos of my daughters and I. It’s not a great angle, and it’s far from perfectly posed, but it’s us, for real.
On my left: my crazy, energetic, always-excited 3-year old. Strong-willed to the max, a true leader, and a heart bigger than all of us combined. I sometimes struggle to keep up with her, but every day I’m amazed at her intellect, sense of humor, and ability to speak truth to what we grownups believe are complicated situations.
And on my right: the 6-week old. The dream baby. The one who quietly fits in. Who turns whenever she hears her sister’s voice. The one who doesn’t seem to have a care in the world - as long as she’s held and loved and cared for.
These are my girls, and I love them to death.
At 9:15pm on Thursday October 4th our second daughter was born. She is a little bit early, so she is still in NICU as she recovers from a slightly underdeveloped lung. My wife and I are trying to give her as much skin-on-skin contact as possible, and since we also have a 3-year old at home, we’ve been a bit like ships in the night as we take turns being with each of our daughters.
The NICU experience has placed us in a very strange bubble. We want to do more for our daughter, but all we can do is hold her as much as possible as she sleeps. This results in lots of thinking time. So here, in no particular order, are some of my observations about this experience, mostly written on my iPhone with my daughter sleeping peacefully on my chest.
We are confident that our daughter will be home with us within the next few days. But we are part of thousands of families who have to deal with this kind of situation every day — a birth experience that is so completely out of your frame of reference that your mind and body have trouble catching up to reality.
The sun is shining outside and I know things are going to be ok for us. But I’ve also seen unspeakable tragedy during my time at NICU, and I’m writing this to ask that you support those around you when you suspect that they might be struggling. Because chances are that they’re not going to post about it on Facebook.
Lovely post on not allowing the difficult side of parenting to make you not appreciate the good parts.
I feel the wet, gloomy Tuesday all around me as I get my daughter out of the car at her preschool. She’s excited. There are puddles everywhere, and she wants to jump in all of them. We make a game out of it as I hold her hand and make sure she doesn’t skip a single one. The delight on her face — her ability to experience a simple joy so completely — is infectious. She spots her best friend as we walk up the steps. “Sebastian! Sebastian!” she shouts at him while pointing at me, “This is my DADDY!” I smile a tired smile as my mind drifts to the night before.
It was another rough one. My daughter woke up at 2am and immediately started talking to herself. She has an inner ear infection and it’s messing with her sleep — but her mood is immune to the bug. So as she sees me shuffling into her room she yells, “Daddy! I’m a CATERPILLAR!” Even half asleep I know immediately where this is coming from. She and my wife were looking at two caterpillars in our garden earlier that day. They named the caterpillars George, and… Oh no. I can’t remember the name of the other one. That’s annoying. I should be able to remember the name of the other caterpillar.
The other piece of the puzzle is that I’ve been making up lots of stories for her lately. She wants me to tell her chair stories, table stories, band-aid stories, tree stories, bed stories, and bath stories. Each time I somehow manage to squeeze out a barely plausible plot around these inanimate objects. In a moment of inspiration I even came up with a band-aid song — it’s a song band-aids sing when you attach them to little boys and girls. “I’m healing, I’m healing, I love healing you. I’m healing, I’m healing, I love healing you.” Not my best work, but she loves it. This original storytelling has sparked her own imagination into full flame (“Once upon a time, the froggy JUMPED into the water, and then Mickey came and SAVED him. THE END!”).
So I put all these pieces together in a split second. It’s amazing what our brains can do even when they’re not supposed to be functioning. She’s telling herself a caterpillar story because she now loves making up stories, and George and the other caterpillar (damn, what’s his name?) make for good protagonists.
Still, it’s 2am. So I try to shut the whole thing down. I know I shouldn’t. I know I should encourage her imagination. But it really is 2am. So I say, “No, honey, you’re not a caterpillar. You’re a little girl, and you need to sleep because it’s the middle of the night.” She tries to reason with me, but I don’t budge. She stays quiet for a few seconds, and then decides that as much as she likes having me in the room, the current situation isn’t optimal for her immediate needs. “Daddy,” she says firmly, “you have to go back to your OWN bed.”
I don’t know what to say to her. This amazing daughter of mine, who loves books and stories and adventures. Who fills her nighttime boredom by making up stories about caterpillars. Who, at the age of 3, has the ability to weigh the pros and cons of a situation and come up with a solution to get what she wants (which in this particular case involves me leaving the room so she can carry on pretending to be a caterpillar). I kissed her on her forehead and left the room.
So now it’s the morning after, and she proudly announces to her friend that I’m her daddy. She wants the world to know that she belongs to me, and I to her. Like all parents I know it won’t be long until she doesn’t want to identify with me any more, so I try to cherish the moment. But I’m exhausted, so I store the memory, hoping that I’ll be able to recall and reflect on it properly later. You know, when things settle down a bit.
Things didn’t settle down, of course. I suspect things won’t settle down for years to come. Parenting sometimes feels like running on a treadmill — if you don’t look at the signs around you, it feels like you’re moving fast but getting nowhere. So you begin to rely on those signs to convince you that time is, in fact, moving along.
I hear it’s supposed to be Spring now. And in a few days George (I’ve given up trying to remember the other caterpillar’s name) will turn into a butterfly and we’ll get to explain that little miracle of nature to my daughter. I’ll continue to be exhausted — especially because our second daughter is only weeks away — but I’m also determined to keep showing up. Even if it’s 2am. Right now my daughter wants me in her life, and I need to be there for her, because the time will come when she needs to find her own way. And then it will be too late to wish that I listened more carefully when she told me the names of her caterpillars.
“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like, how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”
“There is, I think, no greater pursuit, and no greater challenge than the finest of lines that must be walked between directing a young mind, and letting that mind flourish of its own accord, wandering where it may. The desire between shielding her from harm and allowing her to make her own mistakes is mental tug-of-war that never ends.”
Now I know why parents are such creative people. We’re “groggy and unfocused” ALL THE TIME.
In a study published in the journal Thinking and Reasoning last year, researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks reported that imaginative insights are most likely to come to us when we’re groggy and unfocused. The mental processes that inhibit distracting or irrelevant thoughts are at their weakest in these moments, allowing unexpected and sometimes inspired connections to be made.
This post is a little (ok, a lot) off topic, but it generated enough discussion today that I believe a little more attention is warranted. After reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears to my daughter for the millionth time this morning, I threw out a random tweet about something that bothers me every time I read the story:
Since the biggest bowl of porridge is the hottest by the time Goldilocks gets to it, you’d think that the middle-sized bowl would be just right, and the small bowl would be too cold. Instead, the story goes that the middle-sized bowl is too cold. It doesn’t make any sense.
It turns out that people have fairly strong opinions on this matter. I’d like to review some of the responses and hopefully come to a conclusion about what’s really going on here. Christo went with a time-based argument:
Possibly, but I don’t buy it. Since the family is going out on a walk together, I think we can reasonably assume that they would be eating breakfast together (and that everything would therefore be prepared at the same time).
Some people went with a surface-area argument:
This is plausible, but there’s one problem with the argument. If the middle-sized bowl is flatter with a bigger surface area, one can reasonably assume that the biggest bowl will also be flat, with an even larger surface area. The biggest bowl should therefore be the coldest, and we all know that’s not the case.
Some of the suggestion were a little preposterous. I mean, we all know bears don’t need air conditioning:
The argument that carries the most weight in my view has to do with the material that the bowls are made of:
At first I found it a little far-fetched that the bears would use bowls made out of different materials, but I just don’t see another argument that makes sense. There are, of course, other open questions in this story. For example, why do Mama and Papa bear live in the same house, but sleep in different beds? But I guess we’ll argue about that another day.
For now, can you think of any other theories about the porridge-temperature situation? You can comment on Google+.
