Resolutions

Being a parent is never easy. At least, it never is in our house.

At various times, my husband and I have the “why is this so hard?” conversation. Luckily — so far — only one of us is in that mood at any given time, so the other one can soothe instead of suggesting adoption as a way out.

“We love our children. It’s not that bad. Remember that this is just a phase…”

Is it by chance that my husband is downstairs, on the cusp of 2011, playing “Stupid Girl” by the Rolling Stones? Really, really loud?

But parenting is like nothing else in that it always matters. I can’t think of another job, even the one where you sit next to the red button waiting for the president’s call, where you have such power to screw up — and such power to inspire — a single life.

Today my son noticed a magazine that came in the mail: Parenting for High Potential from the National Association for Gifted Children.

“That really doesn’t make much sense,” he told me. “I can imagine some things that parents can do to really screw up a kid, like, you know, if they were really mean to them or they didn’t let them learn anything. But I can’t think of a single thing a parent can do to make a kid do better.”

[Just at this moment, there is an orange and white cat sitting on my lap, purring, looking up at me with a soul-searching look a love and admiration. Who says they aren’t spawn of the devil?]

My son had no idea what an effect such a simple statement could have on a parent. I spend way too much time — in all aspects of my life — trying to figure out how I can do better. I ponder how I can shrink my belly, how I can be a better friend, a better wife, and — of course — a better mother, more often than I care to admit.

Part of this is the perfectionist mind-set, which is why parents like me need magazines like Parenting for High Potential, to remind us how crippling perfectionism can be.

But part of this is just the process of being a mother, taking on a role that no one could warn you about.

[Now my husband is blasting “Under my Thumb,” so that’s how things are going…]

I periodically read something along the lines of “things I need you future parents to know about parenting” by some other Mommy Blogger. Fellow bloggers, we are wasting our finger power! Future parents will never understand until it is they standing there in front of that psychotic 2-year-old, thinking, How did I get myself into this?

As parents, we take on an awesome (and I mean that in the real sense, not in the slang sense) responsibility: What we do with, for, and to our children will last their lifetimes. Our children, just their fact of being, will forever change our relationships with our spouses and with ourselves. This really is bigger than being president of your corporation, bigger than a Grammy, bigger even than winning this week’s church bingo game.

So my resolution, this year and every year, is to be a better mother, to be a better partner to my husband, and to let myself be better all around. And how I need to do this is by letting go: I need to let go of the idea of that my children will ever be perfect, that my husband will ever be perfect, and that I will ever be perfect.

The best we can be is good, and that’s something we can work a lifetime on.

Every day, every month, and every year, we get the chance to try again.

It’s an awesome responsibility.

ps: Once you’re done feeling guilty, and if you like that devil’s spawn sitting in your lap, go visit the best cat videos of the year. You’re worth it.

A problem of definition

I have two wonderful and rather intense children. Our days can often be quite lovely. Often there’s a lot of argument and obstinacy. But all in all, we make it through our days pretty well.

This is not how I would have described my family a few years ago. When my daughter hit the toddler stage, it was as if our family had been sucked into a hurricane. All the wisdom written about in parenting manuals and all the advice from highly experienced early childhood teachers just simply did not apply. Something seemed wrong.

It all came to a head when it became clear that school was not a place our daughter was going to thrive. In fact, it seemed to be a fight to the bitter end: either school would destroy her, or she would destroy the school.

All of this led us to the office of a well-regarded child psychiatrist, who, with very little attention paid to the little girl in front of her, started talking about “rapid onset bipolar disorder.” We left the office feeling like something was wrong. After some discussion and reading, we decided not to return.

I’d read enough about this so-called disorder to smell a skunk. Parents like us are desperate, yes. We find no help in traditional parenting techniques, certainly. Our lives are turned upside-down by one person, definitely. But to say that our brilliant, wonderful, creative daughter was mentally ill? This was a step we just couldn’t take. We didn’t go any further than that, and here we are today. Our days can actually be pleasant and sometimes even border on serene.

A lot of parents are taking that other route, but I don’t blame them. A well-respected professional tells them that their child has a mental disorder. Their lives have been sucked into a hurricane. There is even a drug the child can take! A return to normalcy is promised.

Problem is, it’s all based on misinformation and misunderstandings, and I’m not the person telling you this. It’s the person who wrote the book on mental disorders.

There is an excellent article in Wired Magazine this month about Allen Frances and his crusade against DSM-5, the upcoming update to what our nation’s psychiatrists define as mental illness. Though the article spans many topics having to do with DSM-5, the paragraph that caught my eye concerned Frances’ dismay over how the DSM-IV, of which he was lead editor, affected one particular mental illness that hadn’t even existed before:

Shortly after the book (DSM-IV) came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes.

The article goes on to point out that the most influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar in children had been paid by Johnson & Johnson, the maker of the drug used to treat it.

The Wired article is not online yet, but you can read Frances’ argument in Psychiatric Times. Reading this doesn’t make me feel smug; it makes me feel ill. I am so sad for all those families whose real problems were caught up in a fad. I am so sad for all those kids who are being left with lifelong health problems from the drugs they took. I’m especially sad that even if they choose to stop today, what’s been done to them cannot be undone.

Dealing with a difficult and unusual child is never easy. Perhaps the answer will involve drug treatment, though it doesn’t always. I’ve written before about the various steps we’ve taken, and how it has affected our lives both good and bad. The process has been infuriating, isolating, depressing, maddening. The route we chose to take was slow-moving and indefinite. But at every point on this slow-moving journey, we could have turned onto a new path. We could, and did, question the choices we were making. We made a choice to let our child be who she was, to work with what we had, and see if we could find a healthy path for her.

The drugs, we knew, would always be there if we chose to use them. But we could never look at drug therapy with the cavalier attitude of that psychiatrist, who seemed only to be thinking about pacifying the hurricane now, not how to work with it longterm.

I’m so glad that Allen Frances is sticking his neck out for all those other kids, whose parents didn’t feel they had a choice. And I hope that the people writing the new DSM-5 understand the awesome responsibility that comes with defining those parts of children’s behavior that are mental illness. I hope that they look down on the floor and really see that little girl they are fitting into their box.

The eight-year-old singing seamstress

I see by the date of my last post that I’ve been gone a while. To give you a bit of perspective, this is what hits me come late November:

  • Thanksgiving
  • Daughter’s birthday
  • Husband’s birthday
  • Chanukah at our house
  • Christmas at my parents’ house

See? You don’t have it so bad after all with just two holidays! It would probably be OK except for the way that Chanukah bounces all over the place. Darn lunar calendar. Just when I get a fix on Chanukah that spans Christmas, I get Chanukah in November. Oy.

But daughter’s birthday leads me to my rant of the day, or rather, sage advice of the day. Too tired to rant.

Daughter loves sewing. She always enjoyed making little things by hand, then friend Heddi got ahold of her and she joined Heddi’s sewing club. Now, she is simply mad about sewing.

The other day, I had to tell daughter that I was sorry to inform her, but she couldn’t only do sewing in homeschool. She looked at me with that newly minted eight-year-old dismissive stare. And went back to sewing.

Till the darn machine jammed and she was crying again.

Now, sewing and crying have always gone hand-in-hand for me, but I thought with her things might be different. I admit that I got so mad at my old sewing machine, which never worked, that I gave it away. That was the better fate I’d chosen: if I hadn’t found someone to haul it out of my house, I would have pitched out a second story window.

So as her birthday approached, it occurred to me that what we needed was a sewing machine. One that worked, preferably. So I set the grandmas on the problem, and we decided on a cheap, cute thing that would probably break in a couple of years, but at that price, we could just buy a new one, right?

Now, you think I’m a writer because I have wisdom to impart, but I’m here to tell you today that I’m a writer so that I can find my various patches of idiocy and publicly purge them.

What was I thinking?

Am I not the writer who tells you to spend more money and buy local? Am I not the homeowner who will tell you that every piece of cheap junk I ever had cost me more time and in the end more money than buying the high-quality thing to start with?

Yeah, well I guess I’m just flappin’  my lips here, because I didn’t take my own advice. I e-mailed a link to the grandmas. A cheap, cute machine that she’d love. Free shipping!

For a year or two, I thought.

Try a day or two. The darn thing kept jamming. Finally I called a service center over the hill and he told me that I should already have told myself (and what Heddi, who is the patron saint of sewing machines, also told me): This was not the sewing machine for an eight-year-old girl. It was cheap. It was picky. It was going to keep on jamming. It was eventually going to get itself thrown out a second-story window. That would be its good fate. If it met its end on a bad day, it was going to become a science experiment, and the death would be slow and painful.

So we sent it back. I hauled my kids into a wonderful local sewing machine shop, Judy’s. Judy showed us the machines that would suit a highly creative, eight-year-old singing seamstress. I bought it. It’s now on our dining room table, happily purring away.

Now, this story may have an end that hasn’t come yet, but tonight’s end is a happy one. We stayed local. We spent more money. We got a good, solid thing (it even has some metal in it!) that will serve us well and make us happy.

Well, OK, I will admit that personally, I will still view it with suspicion, no matter how well it works. But for an eight-year-old singing seamstress, it’s a dream come true.

Winter break in Santa Cruz — now what do we do?

Kids spend the last couple of weeks of fall session looking forward to winter break, but parents face a new dilemma: with school and afterschool activities on hold, how to keep the kids busy?

If you’ve got a kid who needs physical activity on rainy days, there are great options available.

Santa Cruz Soccer Camp is offering indoor soccer, which is something unusual for soccer fans, says owner Bill Trimpi.

“Indoor soccer is a great change of pace for children who normally have recess and or P.E. outside,” he explains. “The quality and action of balls bouncing off walls is exciting and entertaining, which keeps the attention where it should be—on the activity.”

Partial-day camps are available for kids ages 5 to 9 at Holy Cross Gym in Santa Cruz. More information: santacruzsoccercamp.com

Basketball Jones offers camps for honing basketball skills. After camp on the second day there will be a special session on parent/camper “Skills through Drills.” This special presentation will allow parents to gain firsthand knowledge of the drills, right alongside their child.

Full-day camps are offered for two days for kids ages 9 to 17 in both Santa Cruz and Aptos. More information: basketballjonescamps.com

Santa Cruz Sports Central offers a week of Camp Flip before and after Christmas. Olympic gymnastics equipment along with trampolines and bounce houses provide hours of fun activities for the children.

Half- or full-day camps for kids 3 to 12 years old. More information: scsportscentral.com

Other children are more interested in creative expression. West Performing Arts gives them the opportunity to be dramatic before and after Christmas, learning and performing plays like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Wizard of Oz, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

One- to four-day camps are offered for kids 5 to 12 years old. More information: westperformingarts.com

Art teacher Jenni Newton offers two holiday gift-making workshops at the Studio Pallette. Participants will create unique handmade works of art to give as gifts for friends and family.

3-hour workshops December 4 and 11 are open to all ages. For more information: thestudiopalette.com

The Discovery Learning Center is a new non-profit in Santa Cruz that offers classes and a lending library for families. They will be hosting two special events in December: Seasonal centerpiece-making (free to members or a small donation for non-members): Kids and adults will make beautiful winter centerpieces featuring a candle and lots of creativity. Zuzpel (Puzzle) Day (free): Join with other families to complete an enormous, 1500-piece puzzle, or do one of your own.

Centerpiece-making, December 21. Zuzpel Day, December 28. All ages welcome. For more information: dlcsantacruz.org

The Mad Molecule, a new science store in Aptos, is hosting winter break science camps at the Aptos Grange. Science experiments are different for each session of camp so kids can go as much as they’d like without repeats. Experiments include Glowing Bubble Ooze,
Monster Marshmallows,
Plasma Grapes,
High-Tech Science/Gizmos & Gadgets, and
Laser Lights.

Half- and full-day camps take place in the weeks before and after Christmas. For each session there will be a younger and an older group (5-8, 9-13) with special staff for each group. For more information: 688-ATOM

Two much-loved holiday performances return to Santa Cruz this year. Tandy Beal’s Mixed Nutz, an amusing, circus-inspired take on the Nutcracker, will return to UCSC. If you’re looking for the old classic, Santa Cruz Ballet Theater offers all the bells and whistles (and sugar plum fairies) at the Civic.

Tickets for both performances can be purchased at santacruztickets.com.

Cabrillo Stage is offering the classic SCROOGE, based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This musical is the timeless tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a lonely miser who is visited on Christmas Eve by three spirits who teach him lessons of love and giving. Purchase tickets at cabrillostage.com.

Many other family-friendly events and activities are available around the county. Downtown Santa Cruz offers Snow Night, when kids (and really big kids) can play in trucked-in snow, a holiday parade, and carriage rides throughout the month. Visit downtownsantacruz.com for more information.

In the Santa Cruz Harbor on December 4, scores of decorated boats parade about the harbor for the Lighted Boat Parade. Visit SantaCruzHarbor.org for more information.

Roaring Camp Railroads in Felton offers a holiday tree walk in addition to their annual holiday lights train. Ride vintage excursion cars, adorned with thousands of colorful lights, as they roll through city streets past homes of Santa Cruz. For more information, visit RoaringCamp.com.

And don’t forget our most esteemed visitors who don’t charge a cent for admiring their beauty. Hopefully clouds of monarch butterflies will be on hand at Natural Bridges State Park to dazzle us with a holiday show only nature can provide.

For links to educational information that will prepare your kids to understand and admire the monarchs, visit exm.nr/9wkVUP.

Enjoy the season, and spending time with your family!

More math stories

NOTE: This post has been updated by a new, consolidated post and list of Math Stories which you can find here.

I wrote a blog a while back about math stories, then turned it into an article, which ran in the California Homeschooler magazine.

I’ve gotten a lot of great comments on this article. (Aside: Post comments on my blog, please! It’s so lonely in here. People are always e-mailing me or sending comments via Facebook, but I’d love you-all to talk to each other on my blog…) It’s great to know that others are interested in this subject.

Correspondent Dodi sent me this list, which I thought I should pass on:

Just read your article in the HSC magazine.  I, too, looked for math taught through stories for my daughter (now in 7th grade) and kept a list of favs.  I thought I’d share them with you.  They don’t all fit your exact criteria, but I thought they were all delightful and worth recommending.

  • Grandfather Tang
  • Little Numbers and Pictures that Show Just How Little They Are
  • Big Numbers and Pictures that Show Just How Big They Are
  • Sir Cumference and the First Round Table
  • I Can Count the Petals of a Flower by John and Stacy Wahl
  • Doorbell Rang, The
  • Sea Squares
  • Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar by Anno, Mitsumasa
  • One Grain of Rice
  • Each Orange Had Eight Slices
  • A Remainder of One by Elinor Pinczes (div.)
  • Amanda Bean’s Amazing Dream (mult.)
  • My Full Moon is Square (mult., squares)
  • One Hundred Hungry Ants (div.)
  • The King’s Commissioners by Aileen Friedman (mult.)

Enjoy! My daughter and I are presently having great fun with Geometry for Every Kid. Though that’s not a math story, it was the Sir Cumference books that got her excited about geometry, so there you go.

Now available