Professor Mom

Aliki
Chronicles the life of a mom, teacher, and writer trying to stay sane amid the chaos of daily life.

archives

October 30, 2009
In the land of the living...
Every year for the past few years we've hosted a family Halloween gathering at our house. My kids love to decorate for Halloween, and I love the chance to host a holiday party--especially a party that involves cooking up ghoulish looking cookies and other Halloween-themed food. I was so prepared this year--in advance, for once. Weeks ago I bought the party plates and tablecloth, and I've been collecting recipes and party ideas, and browsing Halloween sites for what seems like forever. It doesn't look like it's going to happen this year. Thanks, H1N1. Even if I were feeling better, which I'm...
Children, Halloween, Holidays, Parenting, Parties, Recipes
October 28, 2009
Note from the trenches
You might feel the need to Lysol your computer monitor after all the H1N1 posts I've been putting up this week... It must be some type of cosmic joke that after spending so much time wrestling with the H1N1 vaccine question and writing about it yesterday, I would come down with the flu. THE flu. All those people who joke that H1N1 is nothing? They're wrong. It's a pretty cruddy thing to happen, in my opinion, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I was completely unprepared for how quickly it would knock me off my feet. T. first got sick on Saturday, and by Monday morning I was feeling that...
Children, H1N1, Health, Moms, Parenting
October 27, 2009
Irony and indecision
Irony pronunciation: \ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\ Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural iro·nies Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler Date: 1502 the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning OR Spending weeks and weeks debating whether or not you should get the H1N1 vaccine for your children, making the decision to go ahead and do it, then finding out that you can't get the vaccine anywhere, even if you beg and plead, and wring your hands. ************ I took the kids to the playground last week when T. and...
Children, Dads, H1N1, Health, Moms, Parenting
October 26, 2009
Lying low
We had all kinds of busy and exciting things planned for the weekend: there was the vegetarian potluck on Saturday, and pumpkin carving, and an outing with friends, and we'd talked about a hike in the woods on Sunday, to celebrate the return of crisp, fall weather. But on Saturday morning, in the wee hours of the morning, T. woke me up by crawling into bed next to me and uttering the ominous words, "I don't feel very good." Then she settled her hot little body around mine and I lay awake, feeling an almost audible toll of some warning bell somewhere: fever, oh no! I should have known. On...
Children, Family, Health, Holidays, Parenting
October 23, 2009
Feed the soul (again)
Something has happened to my internal clock, and to the internal clocks of my students, and my husband, and my poor children, who usually hop out of bed pretty wide awake every morning (my kids can go from asleep to awake in .2 seconds). Every day this week I've surfaced painfully from a deep sleep and every day this week I've had to drag both L. and T. out of bed. Even the dog has a hard time getting up. She follows me downstairs in the dark, but races to her second dog bed--the one in the office--to catch a little extra snooze time while I blow dry my hair. And my students are droopy,...
Children, Food for Thought, Greece, Parenting, Recipes, Vegetarian Recipes, Vegetarianism
October 22, 2009
Paper dreams
One thing that's really struck me as different now that T. has a couple months of kindergarten under her belt, is what effect school has had on her assertiveness. She's a pleaser by nature and sometimes asserting herself takes a back seat to my big-hearted girl's desire to please. But we've noticed at home that she's holding her own with L. They are squabbling and fighting more because of this, but I imagine that once both of them adapt to this shift things will settle down--at least I hope so (please oh please). T. is soaking up everything she learns at school these days, and with all this...
Arts & Crafts, Children, Early Learning, Kindergarten, Moms, Parenting
October 21, 2009
Time out
Yesterday I finally did what I had put off for two years--I skipped out of my office hours early (grouching all the way to myself about the work I needed to do) and headed to my OB/Gyn for that exam--you know the one--the one that's supposed to happen annually but the one we moms often put off because, well, we're awfully good about taking care of other people, but sometimes not so good about taking care of ourselves. While I was there I learned two unexpected things: 1) My driver's license expired in August and 2) According to my insurance company I'm a forty-year old MALE. I had checked in...
Health, Moms, Parenting, Women
October 20, 2009
Talk back
There's a new campus-wide cell phone policy in place at my school effective this academic year. It's nothing earth shatteringly new, only that by making it 100% official we faculty can send a student to the equivalent of the principal's office for being caught more than twice texting in class. Despite all this, there are one or two students in every class I teach who just.can.not bear to be parted with their cell phone for even one second, let alone a fifty-minute time period. I catch them, their phones flipped open in their laps under their desks, fingers straying to those tiny tempting...
College Life, Parenting, Students, Teaching, Technology
October 19, 2009
Sharing
As parents, we all seek to encourage sharing, but this time, I could have done without... R, our 5 year old, went from a typical high-energy day to completely lethargic, feverish, and a chronic cough Friday morning. I took him to the doctor and he tested positive for H1N1. Despite my best efforts to wash our hands frequently, use sanitizer and do every basic flu prevention remedy, I got sick the next day, and now G, our two year old, is sick as well. Thankfully R bounced back very quickly, and has been fever and cough free since this weekend. Me? I went to the doctor and was told to...
Sickness
October 19, 2009
Salvaged
This weekend my mother-in-law visited and brought with her several tattered cardboard boxes filled with all sorts of odds and ends from my husband's childhood years--the missing years, as we have called them, because while a quick trip upstairs to my parents' attic will open up a time capsule to my childhood, Scott thought for a long, long time that all those boxes were lost--thrown out by a renter who had once used their family's garage and taken it upon himself to do some housecleaning. But there they were, surfacing like sunken treasure after all these years: boxes of old records, bags...
Children, Family, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Marriage, Parenting
October 16, 2009
Doing the math
L.'s Fall Break ended last week and we're now a whole week into the second quarter of L.'s fourth grade year. I like to stand back and survey the big picture from time to time, and the start of a new quarter seems the perfect time to do that--coming on the heel of a good two-week break for L., and that brown envelope that came home--the one with the report card, and goal sheets; the one that always seems to reduce my child to black and white numbers on a page. When L. finished up last quarter and brought his report card home, we sat down and looked at it together--well, Scott and I sat down...
Children, Early Learning, Parenting, School Daze, Special Needs
October 15, 2009
Crustless wonder
When I had lunch with T. for the first time at school on Monday, one thing was made blatantly clear: this is a girl who likes her lunch. And while she had fun talking and being silly with her friends, she also worked her way dutifully through all the compartments in her bento box, until there was little, if anything at all, left behind. This is a girl whose highlight of her week last week was getting 60 cents one day to buy milk. Chocolate milk. And a girl who likes it when I make silly sandwiches with silly names for her like Ants on a Pillow (peanut butter on 1/2 an English muffin, with...
Children, Food for Thought, Lunch, Parenting, Recipes
October 14, 2009
Me Day
Yesterday morning my office-mate/friend and I joked that we weren't the only ones who benefited from the two-days off for Fall Break. We left our clunky, prehistoric printer in a non-working state on Thursday--whirring endlessly to itself, and a couple of error lights flashing on and off. Tuesday morning it was, miraculously, back-to-life again, doing what it was supposed to do--no help from anyone. ***************** On Monday, my last day of the four-day Fall Break weekend, I took a Me Day. Sometimes I do manage to squeeze in some Me Minutes, mainly spent in the car driving from one child's...
Moms, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues, Work
October 13, 2009
Declaration of independence
When I teach the first semester of Freshman Composition, I usually assign a particular reading to my students--one dealing with the question of public space, what it is, how it can be altered, and who alters it. The revelation-turned-argument the author, an African-American writer, makes is that black males have the power--whether they want it or not--of altering public space wherever they go, regardless of who they really are and by virtue only of the color of their skin. My students' reactions to the author's revelation are always divided into two categories: 1) the well...DUH! reaction...
Children, Dads, Early Learning, Moms, Parenting, Social and Emotional Issues
October 12, 2009
Going Colonial (with kids)
There are those family trips that tax you, so that you just can't wait to get home and settle back into ordinary life; then there are those magical trips where everything goes so wonderfully, where you find yourself feeling like a kid again, and in an out-of-body-type experience you watch your own children having the time of their lives and you think to yourself, they're going to remember this--because you remember having vacations like that when you were a child. Our trip to Colonial Williamsburg was just like that--a wonderful, albeit short--getaway from it all. If you haven't had a chance...
Children, Family, Family Travel, Parenting, Travel with Children
October 8, 2009
Vision
L.'s fall break is winding down. On Monday he heads back to school, and we take our deep breaths and cross our fingers, and hope for the best. It's been a great two weeks--not just because we've been able to snatch some extra sleep (T.'s school starts at 9:10, L.'s at 8:20) in the mornings, and I've been able to free myself from the tyrrany of the daily doughnut, and from the homework battles, and the daily reading logs that feel literally like extracting water from a stone, but because we've enjoyed the chance to reconnect with L. again. There are too many days when L. seems so far from us,...
Children, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, L., Life in General, Memories, Parenting
October 7, 2009
Bag of Tricks: Bully Prevention Awareness
Did you know that this week is National Bullying Awareness Prevention week? Even if your child hasn't reported any bullying problems at school, I think this week is still a great time to talk with your children about friendship, kindness, and the importance of reporting bullying of any kind to teachers, staff and parents. So often we aren't motivated into action until something affects us personally; I'm guilty of this as a parent myself. But I think our children learn the most from the examples we set at home, and outside in the community. Sometimes we have to do more than just assume that...
Bag of Tricks, Children, Early Learning, Parenting, School Daze, Social & Emotional Issues, Special Needs
October 6, 2009
Family-friendly?
If you are a working parent, is your company family-friendly? Take a minute to think about what you think family-friendly really means--in your ideal world (we're not talking reality, here). You can make a list, as I make my students often do in class, whenever I want to challenge them to think about a topic. Some things I would put on my list would be: 1. Good affordable health care benefits for families (including dental and vision) 2. Flexible work time 3. Extended leave for pregnancy/illness 4. Ability to bring children to work on school breaks 5. Family-friendly "atmosphere"--meaning...
Children, Dads, Family, Juggling, Moms, Parenting, Women, Work
October 5, 2009
10 ways you can tell you're a parent (even at a rock concert)
1. You feel smug because your cool low-slung Levis with the hole in one knee still fit and your daughter looks at you and says, "Oh no, Mama! You need to sew that hole!" 2. The only binoculars you can find to take to the concert are your nine-year old son's night vision ones. 3. You bring them anyway. 4. You empty your pockets for security at the concert entrance and find: a kleenex, chapstick, one acorn, and a rock shaped like a light saber. 5. The only chapstick you could find to grab out of the car before the concert was your daughter's cherry-berry lipsmackers. 6. You notice several kids...
Children, Dads, Family, Moms, Parenting
October 2, 2009
Jedi and Bono
We have exciting things afoot for the weekend! We'll kick things off Friday with the much anticipated (well, by one of us, at least) premiere of a new season of Star Wars: Clone Wars. L.'s been looking forward to this for weeks and weeks, and I'm not sure what he's most thrilled about: the new season, or the fact that he gets to watch a full hour of television on Friday night (our kids don't watch television past 6:00 pm, unless something really unusual is happening around here). He's got the night all planned out, right down to the celebratory lemon-lime soda he gets to drink that night (out...
Children, Family, Marriage, Parenting
October 1, 2009
Happy Birthday to Me!
My birthday is Friday. I will be thirty-three years old. I am not as depressed as I was when turning thirty. I shy away from birthday surprises. I squirm if somebody sings the birthday song. I don't like birthday parties. The birthday parties I remember weren't mine. A family friend had one daughter, Tina. Every February Tina had a birthday party. Her duplex apartment was decorated with balloons and backdrops, piñatas, and party favors. Tina had what I wished for. Her Barbie dolls had horses, cowboy boots, a big dollhouse, and a red convertible Corvette. She didn't know what it was like to...
Aging, Birthdays, Values, Wisdom
October 1, 2009
So there
I was talking with a fellow teacher from another college recently and I mentioned to him how much I enjoy reading my students' essays and finding out more about who they are, and where they come from. I told him that the stories they sometimes share with me through their writing are sometimes deeply personal, and that I felt privileged to read them. "Really?" He looked surprised and uncomfortable. He preferred, he told me, to think of his students in as anonymous terms as possible so he could concentrate on objectively teaching them the material. "Really?" I countered. I can see his point in...
Children, Parenting Teaching, School Daze, Students