not grey at all

I've been ignoring this cultural phenomenon for months now, but now that I am using a kindle, I find that I have to see Fifty Shades of Grey every time I look at the Kindle ebook options on Amazon. In.the.first.three.slots. gross. If a man said on Facebook "whooo! I just got some pornography in!" we would not think twice about blocking him. If a man said "I am so excited about this pile of pornography that I got that I'm ignoring all my personal responsibilites to engage in a fantasy life that no woman could ever live up to!" I would find him unbearably creepy and probably even threatening. Here's the thing: erotica IS the female equivalent of pornography. Men respond to images, and women respond to fantasy and language. Fifty Shades of Grey is erotica, and it's fan fiction that was originally based on the Twilight characters, which were poorly written enough. Essentially, it's derivative porn for women. All this discussion of who might star in the movie? A movie about these books would be pornography, or it wouldn't cover the book. I'm concerned that enough women are already in controlling and abusive relationships wih men, and this series glorifies that. I have not read any more than the snippets I've seen in other reviews, and I found the writing juvenile and creepy, just like the status updates in which women are gushing over this foolishness. People complain about their marriages/relationships, but reading about abuse and debasement (and a stupid woman's codependent acceptance of this treatment) won't improve anyone's shot at a lifetime of love and respect. I think that announcing that you LOVE FSoG invites speculation/imagination about what your personal tastes might be, and I find that unwelcome.

No-tella

We had a great surprise last night-- a quick visit from my dad!  Papa Benjamin was in the house, and the kids got to have breakfast and play with him this morning. I had a head's-up a few days prior, but the kids had no idea.  He's en route to New York and Massachusetts on business and to pick up two of my younger sibs who were helping my brother Nate and his wife settle in there.

Today I did my yearly exercise in parental penance by taking the kids to the youth festival at one of the larger parks.  It is a hockey rink  (no ice) full of tables where people from local organizations can give away literature and trinkets, etc. There is live entertainment and a free unhealthy lunch, and it's a favorite event for my kids, so we do it every year as part of our back-to-school routine.

Dan has a dinner tonight, so we're just taking it easy, eating off-brand Nutella (aka, No-tella) on store brand (HFCS free) bread and whatever is in the freezer.  Summer is winding down, and we're ALL feeling it!

104 Days

Okay, so it's been forever, and my recent posts haven't been a personal since they've been the drafts for the local parenting magazine blog.  I need to write down what's going on so that I remember it!

The kids are all doing fantastic!  Great summer, very busy, lots of fun with friends and family.  Mara and Aidan are squabbling more than I'd prefer, but otherwise things are pretty peaceful.  Dan is teaching a few courses this summer to help the financial margins be a tad wider.  Ian is growing so fast and is sporting a mouth full of big kid teeth.  Aidan is active and enthusiastic about life. Mara is into everything and underfoot all day, and her smile and creativity warm my heart daily.  Ella is a roly-poly 9 months!  She's about to get her first teeth any day and has begun to crawl.  She eats real food and sleeps at night.  Easy baby most of the time!

We have done lots of VBS this summer, lots of friend time, plenty of park playtime, some swimming, a few concerts, and one terrible library event.  The kids don't really care about story time, and my fines are a bit up there, I think thanks to Ian taking library books to school for book report approval and then never bringing them home.

We've traveled to Indiana twice, once to celebrate a cousin's first birthday and see all of my siblings, and once to see our Notre Dame friends before one dear family moved to California.  We were so blessed to go to the going-away luau and have fun with friends.  Following that, my parents took the older 3 kids for a few days so that Dr. O' and I could get a break.  It was heavenly!  We had a date with Ella at Later Gator and got locked out of our car.  AAA to the rescue!

The big kids returned, and a few days later we drove to Nags Head, NC for an Outer Banks vacation with Dan's brother and his family.  We had not had a vacation since our honeymoon nearly 14 years ago!  The combination of cousins and grown-ups was just perfect, and everyone had a fantastic time!  We ate great food, played on the beach, played in the pool, and got lots of relaxation in. Aidan took to the waves beautifully, and while they liked the water, Ian and Mara preferred the safety of the sand and shallows.  I think we'll be paying for a surf lesson for Aidan some day!

The plan is for me to begin taking education courses this fall to get expanded licensure in middle school and special education so that I can be ready to teach again when the girls go to school.  I need to do something for my brain, and this is free!  I want to be ready to do whatever job God has for me, and education seems like the way to go for now.  

The kids start back to school in 2.5 weeks!  Great summer, and looking forward to a great school year for all!

Treacherous waters of raising daughters- thoughts on beauty and intelligence

I'll admit it. The thought of raising girls stresses me out! The pitfalls are all too numerous, and their effects are often lasting.

There is a duality of narcissism and inferiority that threatens our children's stability and happiness. If my daughter puts her confidence in being a pretty girl, will that stunt the development of her character? If she puts her confidence in her intelligence, will she become lazy and shy away from anything that requires hard work and discipline, or might she shy away from demonstrating her intelligence in front of boys? If she feels unattractive, will she be potential prey to the man or boy who makes her feel beautiful? If she is made to feel stupid, will she rely on the judgment of others rather than developing her own ideas?

The cultural phenomena of children's fashion, beauty contests, and popular TV shows are symptoms of a society that values the thin and the cosmetically perfect, along with the wealth and fame that these traits supposedly bring. I worry that kids are learning that if they are not wealthy and famous, it's because they are not thin enough or beautiful enough. If fame, wealth, beauty, and thin-ness are my daughter's goals, where will that take her? What kind of person will she become? My faith teaches that the pursuit of beauty leads to deception, vanity, and indiscretion. Definitely not the path I wish to steer my girls toward! I want to teach them to care for their bodies and their inner and outer beauty as gifts from God. I don't want them to choose their playmates based upon which ones are the prettiest and risk falling into harmful company.

I also mentioned intelligence as one of the traits I'm also uncomfortable with praising. Why? Intelligence is partially genetic and partially environmental, but what the person DOES with their intelligence is their actual accomplishment. When I praise a child for being smart, they hear and internalize it. When a task is difficult later, they may come to the conclusion that they are not smart, that they no longer have this trait that I praised them for, and that I am a liar. Instead, I praise my children for their hard work and problem solving; in other words, I praise them for USING their intelligence.

For this reason, I am resisting the tendency to emphasize these traits of brains and beauty, which my daughters have plenty of, in favor of emphasizing more lasting and beneficial qualities. If my daughters are kind, confident, resourceful, and hard-working, I will be proud of their accomplishments. My preschool daughter enjoys dressing up and playing princess games and putting huge bows in her hair, and I am happy to give her the opportunity to play in the girly-girl realm, as much as it's not my thing. She's also happy with oatmeal in her hair and sitting in the sandbox building forts all day, so I think she'll turn out just fine!

Turning "Greenish" and Saving Green: Lessons we have learned as a family of 6

Over the last 10 years, my lifestyle has changed considerably. My husband has gone through grad school and gotten a job. I've quit working full time and started a family. And kept going. We have four kids, and one of our big concerns is the environmental impact of having a larger family. We want our kids to be good citizens who live mindfully, but that's not how our progression toward "greenish" living began. Nope, it began with grad school and soul-grinding poverty. We do this stuff because it has solved problems that we have faced, it saves money, and it actually simplifies the shopping process that would otherwise be taken up by extreme couponing. I consider us "greenish" because I don't sweat it if we can't recycle or compost an item. We don't drive a car that gets anything resembling good gas mileage. And of course we eat bananas that are more well-traveled than I am! When my husband was in grad school, and we were living on a tiny stipend with kids, I learned to make many of our favorite foods from scratch from bulk ingredients, saving money and packaging, and improving our health. Our first had feeding issues, so I had to experiment to get him to eat anything. After that, making baby food for our second child was a breeze. I had thought about cloth diapering our first, but my mother-in-law talked me out of it. Had I known how long my sons would take to potty train, I would've investigated a bit further, but the initial cost scared me. After my boys spent 3.5 to 4 years in diapers (long story) and I was still washing out funky underpants, I decided to give modern cloth a try for child #3. I loved it, and it brought about a laundry revolution in my house! With the residue-free detergent needed to maintain cloth diapers, I no longer needed fabric softener (1/8 cup Epsom Salt in the wash for clothes). Also, if I left a load overnight (always), I didn't need to rewash it because there was no build-up on our clothes! I started making my own detergent and scenting it with eucalyptus oil, yummy! I've had to tweak it for Wheeling water, but I have a new formula that's working great! Baby #4 is happy and dry in the same diapers her sister wore, and child number 3 potty trained much younger than her brothers did. I also found that hanging diapers in the sun made them smell clean and look great. We make wipes out of old t-shirts and wet them with a little soapy water. We cut paper items like paper towels, napkins, and plates early on to save money. Then I mixed up my own cleaners with a few cheap and safe ingredients, and I found that cleaning didn't make me feel sick! When we had kids, we didn't plan for them to be breastfed until just before the first one was born, and he nursed for 9 months. The next three have never had formula because they didn't take bottles, and they've been with me most of the time anyway. Even though we've always qualified for WIC, we haven't had a need for formula for long, which has saved a lot of containers and washing water. Having a lot of kids means that everyone figures you need clothes and gear and toys and books, and lemme tell you, it's so TRUE. We have been blessed by this fantastic form of recycling, and we are happy to pass it on when we are finished with it! And at our kids' ages (6mo to 8 years), they absolutely don't care whether they are the first to wear something or not. We have found that chasing deals for this stuff takes gas money and time, and amassing too much stuff requires a lot of storage, so we keep enough off-season clothes for one kid's size in a tote bin, and we get rid of anything that doesn't fit in the bins. Now that our family constitutes a "large family", or so EVERYONE in Kroger tells me, I have to work to keep healthy food in these growing bodies. By slow cooking and then freezing beans, I have a ready supply of BPA-free beans for 1/7 the cost, and the ones I cook are organic! It also cuts out a lot of trash from all those bean cans. By using one container of Stoneyfield yogurt to make all our yogurt each month, I'm saving about $30 and lots of plastic containers (yes, we eat a quart of yogurt every other day!). We make bread that has no icky additives and doesn't require a plastic bag each time (it doesn't last that long with all these kids to eat it!). We're getting back into gardening this summer, and I'm excited to see our seedlings sprouting in the basement. What I like about our lifestyle is that my kids don't have a sense that we should go out and buy things as a first resort. It has made them more resourceful to see us make things, reuse things, and use things until they're worn out. It helps them to have sense of thankfulness when they do get something new and to take care of their belongings. They are more creative when the toys don't do the playing for them, and that's why they're out in our green yard building a ramp and a catapult at the moment. Curious about making some greener choices for your family? We have a good thing going at Wheeling Mountain Sprouts, a support group for parents who are interested in any aspect of natural parenting. Check us out on Facebook, or join us at 10am on the 3rd Saturday of each month at Edgwood Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Chaos with a side of bacon

I often find myself in this odd predicament of standing in the doctor's/dentist's office making appointments figuring "I'm a SAHM with a flexible schedule currently surrounded by boisterous small people who just want a lollipop and to get out of this office". This is true. However, there is a serious flaw in my system when my kids have run the battery down on my iPod battery down during the visit, and I can't access my iCal to check for conflicts. I make the appointment, shove the card into my purse, and try to get out of that office without any incidents. Thank goodness most of these offices call us with reminders later! What has been happening recently is that I have accidentally scheduled appointments on a random day off in the Ohio County Schools schedule. I took all four kids to a dental filling, and they were great, including the kid with the cavity. Last Tuesday, however, was much more complicated. It was Election Day, which means that I needed to vote AND there is no school. It was also review and final exams week at WJU, where my husband is a professor. And the baby had a check up that resulted in 3 prescriptions. It all started out fine but went downhill from there! Dr. O', husband extraordinaire, offered to keep the big kids while I took the baby to her appointment. In the spirit of fairness, I took two kids and left him with two. What should've been a routine check-up turned into multiple diagnoses requiring a stack of prescription slips. I filled them all but cleared her up just fine with one, by the way. Lesson learned. The office visit lasted two hours and resulted in yet another visit tomorrow. We rushed home to let Dr. O' get to his noon class, and I left my stuff in the van planning to drive him in so that he could avoid getting rained on and we could get the prescriptions filled. When we got in, the other kids were eating lunch, and the baby was hungry. Dr. O' kissed me goodbye and left, and I assumed he was walking to work. An hour later, I had the kids all ready to go get the baby's prescriptions, and one of the kids shut the door behind us at the EXACT moment that I realized that we didn't have the van. Or my keys. Or my purse with my little-used cell phone. No windows were open to shove a skinny kid through to at least let us all back inside. THIS is why we bought a house near campus, because I have locked myself out half a dozen times! I informed my kids that we were walking to campus. I found an umbrella stroller on my porch along side the double jogger stroller that I would have taken had the front wheel not been in the van. We had no way to carry the baby's heavy carseat that far, but I decided we'd figure something out. I pushed preschooler girl in the stroller and carried baby girl in the Boba carrier while carefully instructing the boys on safety as we walked to campus. We arrived safely and found Dr. O' between classes! Eldest child said "we should've known better than to leave travel arrangements to someone as absent minded as Dad!", which was true but not very kind. Dr. O' took baby girl to his class, much to the delight of the undergrad girls. I drove the van home with the rest of the crew and picked up baby girl's carseat. Dr. O's class didn't have any questions about the exam, so class was brief. He watched the kids for a few minutes while I ran to the WJU gym to vote. Civic duty done, I piled the kids back into the van, kissed my beloved, and headed to Kroger. We had 20 minutes to wander the store while waiting for her prescriptions. Baby slept in the Boba, and two kids rode in the cart. They were remarkably well behaved, and I was informed several times that I "have my hands full!", which is the stupidest thing ever to say to a mother. Ever. While we were there, I picked up some nitrate and nitrite free bacon and let the kids pick out some fruit for a fruit salad. That night we enjoyed Breakfast for Dinner, one of my family's favorites. A bit of bacon, whole wheat pumpkin waffles, scrambled eggs, and fruit salad. The waffles freeze well, and I make a double batch of these on a regular basis. I highly recommend them with a drizzle of real maple syrup, not that corn syrup junk. I of course posted the bare bones of this day on my Facebook page because I found it funny. A few friends offered encouragement or registered their shock at our survival. I admit that at one point, I would've probably just cried and been completely overwhelmed. Last Tuesday, though, I was actually glad that all the crazy happened on the same day because it seemed less surprising that way! My advice to one Facebook friend who was once my little ninth grade student and is now a momma of two is to "just keep calm and keep moving". We can TRY to be organized, but life with kids IS chaos. Success or failure each day is in how we deal with the chaos!

My White Flag in the Mommy Wars

I've been reading some reviews of Elizabeth Badinter's "The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women" and at the same time feeling so much in agreement with many of her points, yet feeling that we would never be able to have coffee together. I would agree with her that women can have it all, but as someone I read years ago put it, "just not all at once".

Like this French philosopher and feminist, I am an educated woman and also a mother. I think mothers should be able to choose what kind of family life they want to have for themselves and their children. We are both alarmed by the burden of guilt that mothers are carrying today. However, our viewpoints diverge when it comes to parenting philosophy. She feels that the cause of feminist equality as a societial value is more important than the decisions of an individual mother, that when one mother makes the decision to stay home, she's making a choice that when combined with all the other mothers who make the same decision leads to an aggregate weakening of the strides made by previous generations of feminists. She believes that all women need to be in the work force. She sees natural labor, breastfeeding, cloth diapering, and making homemade baby food as forms of modern maternal slavery. Bottles, convenience products, vaccinations, and childcare are the means of feminist freedom in her mind, and many young women are abandoning them in favor of a cult of all things "natural".

What Badinter seems to not see is that fidelity to the cause of feminism also robs women of the right to parent the way that some of us wish to. I have been home full or part-time for the last 8 years. I like to work. I like the feeling of earning money and contributing to our family's financial health, but working isn't the only way to do that. With small children in my home and a husband in school, I felt that my efforts would be better spent in trying to make the most of my husband's stipend rather than getting a teaching job and watching my paycheck go to daycare expenses and feeling less control over the quality of our family life. Now that my husband has a job that allows me to stay home full time, I continue to manage our resources carefully so that I can stretch our budget to fit our growing family's needs. My plan is to finish up a master's degree by Spring 2014 and get back into teaching when my children are all in school in Fall 2016, and for now I am reasonably content to be at home. I don't always like my choice, but I ackowledge that it's mine and live with it.

The problem is that women are becoming so polarized on the issues of motherhood. Instead of providing support to all women to parent the way that works best for their families, many women are quick to engage in the "Mommy Wars", with women like Badinter on one end of the spectrum and the hippie Earth Mommas (for lack of a better term) at the other end. The moms in the middle of all this are left feeling guilt and pressure and alienation from all sides. I find myself there too!

Traditional feminism relies on a degree of "choice" that denies the nature of women and motherhood, I would argue. It requires that women be unencumbered by their families, and these requirements come from other women. It requires a control over one's personal life that just does not exist with small children, who are creators of chaos and do not operate on anyone's schedule but their own. Guilt among working moms is common, as is the pressure to get quality time with their children and to be successful in their careers.

On the other side of the Mommy Wars is this trend toward natural parenting. In its extremes, it reveres and glamorizes all that is natural (although let's face it, asbestos is natural) to such an extreme that either alienates mothers or draws them into its tractor beam of guilt. Pressure is common in this demographic as well, as is rampant fear. It reminds me of Charlie Brown's Christmas Special in which he is diagnosed by his friend Lucy with "panto-phobia, the fear of everything!". Women like me have enough free time to Google all kinds of scary things, and we either become paralyzed with alarm or become empowered to find solutions. I am careful to make sure that my interactions are about empowerment as mothers rather than a monolithic movement based on mutual guilting. I see some young moms determined to embrace all that is natural in order to follow this doctrine of Good Motherhood, and I want to say to them, "you're wearing yourself out for nothing! Enjoy your baby, and do the stuff that actually helps your family". Natural parenting at its best empowers parents to find non-corporate solutions to the common problems that young families face, and its environmental and social impact can be powerful when it is spread by positive example and not by pressure, guilt, and fear.

Feminism at its best empowers women to make the choices that work for themselves and their families as well. It involves women speaking out about their needs at work and making sure to support each other in getting those needs met.

I don't view my life as maternal slavery at all, even on the days when I've handled more poo than I'd care to elaborate on. It's my way of parenting with the least amount of guilt. I see my life as voluntary service of my family, training them to become independent and thoughtful people. And it will be voluntary service of my family that motivates me to go back to work some day. As I sit and breastfeed in my bathrobe while typing, I'm looking forward to it!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sabrinaparsons/2012/04/11/is-modern-motherhood-working-against-women/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/12/france-feminism-elisabeth-badinter
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/has-motherhood-replaced-sexism/