Professor Mom
Chronicles the life of a mom, teacher, and writer trying to stay sane amid the chaos of daily life.
archives
May 30, 2008
L.'s last day of second grade is today. They've had "last days" all week, really. Monday was a holiday, and then Tuesday was "game day" and the kids got to sit around most of the day and play their favorite games with each other. I was especially jealous of "bring a book and read" day on Wednesday. I had just gone to the library and checked out some good books for myself to read for a change, and the thought of being given a whole entire school day to lounge around in my pajamas with a pillow and some good books made me drool. L. opted to wear regular clothes, of course, but he did bring a...
Children, Dads, Lessons to Live By, Moms, Parenting, Parenting Advice, School Daze, Social and Emotional Issues
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May 29, 2008
I rode the elevator to class with one of my students yesterday. She missed class on Tuesday--a definite no-no for summer school--and I could tell she was nervous about talking to me. She took a deep breath and plunged right in: Her three-year-old son had food poisoning on Monday night.
"I couldn't leave him with the sitter," she told me. Then she looked away for a second. "I'm...I'm still very attached to him and didn't want to leave him alone."
She seemed apologetic, almost--ashamed to admit this.
I wanted to take her by the shoulders and stare into her eyes and tell her, "Of course you're...
May 28, 2008
* Let me preface this by saying that we do not live in squalor, but in the South, and it's summer and buggy. Enough said.
I snuck upstairs this morning to get my shoes right before heading off to work. T. was, supposedly, still sleeping. When I crept into our bedroom, though, I found her wide awake, lying on her back in our bed and staring at the wall in rapt concentration--like someone studying something very detailed and absorbing.
"Mama," T. whispered to me in hushed tones. "There was a happy spider on the ceiling, and now he's on the wall!"
She pointed with her finger and I...
May 27, 2008
A couple of months ago I took T. to a birthday party at the house of one of her little school friends. As soon as we walked in the front door, I was struck by the fact that there were framed wedding pictures hanging in several places in the living/dining room, and a massive white embroidered wedding album lying out on the sideboard in the hallway. I asked the hostess how long she and her husband had been married (they have two children) and she told me nine years. Instantly I remembered a theory a graduate student friend of ours had shared with us while we were over at their...
May 26, 2008
On Friday we loaded up the kids, the dog, our suitcases, and every stuffed animal L. and T. own, and we pointed the van north and headed out of town for the weekend. We stayed the weekend with my parents, so we could go to a wedding about an hour away from where they live. The trip to their house is always frustrating; it’s one of those car trips that should take a lot less time than it actually does take. But once you factor in the bathroom stops and the horrendous traffic going across the Woodrow Wilson bridge, the trip ends up taking quite a bit longer than you optimistically hoped it...
May 22, 2008
I don't know how it is with your children, but I've noticed that my kids often behave in unpredictable Jekyll and Hyde ways when in public. One day they will be as good as can be, causing heads to turn, and strangers to comment in pleased tones about how well-behaved and sweet they are; then the next day heads turn in altogether different ways, and everyone gives you a wide berth, hoping against hope that whatever is wrong with YOUR kids that day won't rub off on theirs.
On Monday, for instance, I had a dentist appointment at 4:00, which meant I had to pick L. up at 3:00 and take...
May 21, 2008
It's that time of year again--the time for endings and beginnings; for saying good-bye to classrooms and teachers and the old ways of an old school-year. I look at the second-graders at L.'s school and they seem suddenly all arms and legs and missing front teeth. They carry around Harry Potter books and beloved webkinz, and talk about big kid stuff like THIRD grade. At T.'s school the kids are coming into their own, suddenly, dividing themselves up by boys and girls; T. comes home with gossipy-like tales of who did what to her, and why. They seem to realize, with that uncanny instinct...
May 20, 2008
I can't shake the feeling that summer will be over in the blink of an eye. Of course, I know that we still have many months of hot, humid, buggy, pool-filled and popsicle-sticky days ahead of us. But I started teaching summer school today, and it was with a heavy and somewhat sad feeling, mixed incongruously with the tinge of excitement I get whenever a new semester begins, that I got up this morning, made coffee, swept up T. with her tousled, sweet-smelling, bed-head, and planted a kiss on her soft cheek. When I left, T. watched from the front window, shouting "Bye Mama!" over and over again...
May 19, 2008
This past weekend was a little out of the ordinary for us in two ways: 1) we did a lot socially and 2) we slept in. The sleeping-in part is a little unusual, although one of the perks of having older children is that they do sleep more as they get older – even difficult, hands-on sleepers like ours. So don't despair, if you do have early-risers like we once had; even a year ago, I never thought I'd see the day when I'd wake, peer at the clock, and find it reading "8:15" and, better yet, discover that although L. had been up for two hours, he spent it all finishing up A Wrinkle in Time from...
May 16, 2008
I have a favorite children's book I used to read when I was a child, and I read through it recently with T. It's set a long time ago, in the 1900s, and in the book the mother, a writer, is always telling her kids to "be good dearies and play" while she sits and does an hour or two of writing. Then, when she's done, she sends her stories off to her editor and devotes herself to playing with her children – who, all the while, have been keeping nicely to themselves while their courageous and talented mother earns her livelihood writing.
Are you laughing, yet?
I tried this experiment on T....
Children, Lessons from Little Ones, Parenting, Preschoolers, School, Social and Emotional Issues, T., Teaching, Work
May 15, 2008
On our kitchen table at home is a pile of catalogs and summer events calendars. I've been collecting them for some weeks now, and I leaf through them while I'm sipping my coffee, or eating breakfast. My head swims when I look at all the activities you can sign your kid up for during those summer weeks:
--Sewing camp (really!)--Horseback camp --Colonial camp (dress up like early settlers and make candles!)--Music camp--Chess camp--Robot camp--Doll-making camp (rag-dolls, not even American Girl dolls)
And the list goes on. There are workshops for kids of all ages--day-long ones, and week-long...
May 14, 2008
I like reading Aliki’s posts. We have much different experiences, which leads to our having much different perspectives on the “life and times” of parenting. Different perspectives are good things. While I agree with everything she has to say about the amazing benefits of parenting, I still don’t understand why we have to get so defensive about the study in question. (Which, by the way, appears to be rehashing old data – so, it’s not all that valuable, anyway.)
The fact is that parenting brings massive challenges. It causes great anxieties, worries, self-doubts and insecurities that we...
May 14, 2008
A favorite blogger friend of mine wrote the other day about a recent study out there claiming that parenthood does not, in fact, bring joy and fulfillment, that children are a source of misery and stress, and that raising them is a "lifelong challenge to your mental health." Where the data for this study came from is anyone's guess, actually, but I thought a lot about it yesterday--and about my blogger friend's counterpost as I sat during morning remarks at the faculty "development" workshops I attended. (I developed many thoughts during these workshops, so it was all good--mission...
May 13, 2008
Monday was my Day Off. All this week I have work-related workshops to attend--all designed for my professional and personal betterment. But on Monday I snatched 25 minutes of extra-warm snuggle time in bed with T., and I got to pack L.'s school lunch while still in my pajamas; I got to pour myself a second cup of coffee, and I got to spend a good hour and a half playing Mama Bird and Baby Bird with T. until it was almost 10:00 and definitely time for a change.
T. has never been much of a child to play with toys. She won't sit down for any length of time and play with an object,...
May 12, 2008
T. has her own way of doing everything. You can show her the "right" way--or the way YOU think things ought to be done--but then she'll turn around and give the task her own personal trademark spin. If I give her a plastic bag, for instance, and ask her to help me empty the bathroom wastebaskets, she'll dump the trash onto the floor first, then spend her time picking it all up off the floor and placing it into the bag. I've shown her many times the better way to do this--the way that doesn't involve actually having to TOUCH the trash, but she looks at me and nods and then goes about doing it...
May 9, 2008
For my first Mother's Day, when L. was just 10 months old, my mom sent me a white T-shirt with "Mom" printed on the front. This was an unlikely gift, actually, for both the giver and the recipient (I'm not a T-shirt person), but she'd gotten the T-shirt for free and I was, after all, a "Mom" finally. I still have the shirt. I keep it folded in my drawer and it's moved with me three times now. I'm as attached to it as I would be to any thoughtful gift from someone I love--that shirt, a little corny and oversized, is special to me because I connect it so closely with that first Mother's Day of...
May 8, 2008
About once a month or so I meet for coffee with a group of women from a parenting group. My husband and I are both closely involved with this group, but the coffee mornings seem to belong to the moms. These mornings are not regularly scheduled events, but about once a month someone will send an email out to the group suggesting a meeting at one of the many coffee shops in this area. Sometimes the invite has a desperate tone to it and comes out of a feeling of being overwhelmed and overburdened, and sometimes it just comes out of a truly social need to just get together for an hour or two...
May 7, 2008
It happened yesterday afternoon--again. Right before I was going to head out to pick up L. from school, Scott put on some music and T. and I danced. She was filled with delightful energy and we held hands and twirled and jiggled together. Earlier, after lunch, we'd snuggled in the hammock, soaking up some together time after a busy start to the week.
"I have to go pick up your brother," I told T. at 2:25, after we'd danced our fill to Lucky Dube. Since Scott was home yesterday, L. and I had some one-on-one time planned: a trip to the polling place to vote in the primaries, and then a...
May 6, 2008
I was recently invited to a virtual baby shower for a blogging friend of mine who is expecting her second child. I had never been invited to one of these before, although I've attended quite a few flesh-and-blood showers (that sounds kind of gruesome, actually, but I hate referring to the world outside of the Internet as "real life," since I blog in real life and real-life people read what I write). I've written before about the tease I sometimes find the Internet world of virtual friendships to be, and how I long for real connections -- voices on the other end of a telephone, or a...
May 5, 2008
On Sunday we had a total of 20 minutes of peace between the two kids. Those 20 minutes took place -- aptly enough, I suppose -- during Family Cook Night. L. was too busy chopping carrots and cucumbers (he even sliced a tomato, which was real progress for him! I had to hold the tomato, though, as it was "too squishy" for L.'s finicky tastes) to bicker with T., and T. was too busy setting the table and giving everyone too many napkins to bicker with her brother. But aside from those 20 minutes, Sunday was one long fighting-tooth-and-nail fest between the two kids,...
May 2, 2008
Last night, while dozing and resting with the kids during their respective bedtime routines (rituals), I realized yet another one of the many marvelous things about being a parent: It must be the only job (vocation? state-of-being?) where you can spend a solid 10 minutes with one child at bath time discussing the virtues of various body parts and, 45 minutes later when that child has drifted off to sleep, spend 20 minutes in a darkened room with the older child discussing evolution, the possibility of life in outer space, and the Big Bang theory.
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Not long ago I overheard a...
May 1, 2008
How do all you parents out there carve out time for yourselves? Not the you, yourself, personally (I can manage this here and there, and the bathroom is sometimes a good place to retreat to, unless your kids follow you there, which mine often do)—but the big YOU as in the two of you. Among the many things we need to work on as a parenting couple is trying to carve out some more time for the two of us to reconnect—especially during times of high stress. I just got off the phone with my husband, who seems a bit beaten down by the week, and the trials and tribulations of parenting lately....
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