A short post after a wonderful day of being a mom. Breakfast in bed, an afternoon of “Nims Island” and finding a new dryer (after 25 years the old one we inherited from the previous owner finally died) so that I can engage in the 10 loads of laundry that have been waiting for me.
I read this short piece by Anna Quindlin when my children were first born. “On Being Mom,” is a lovely piece that I think of every Mother’s Day. Enjoy!
Posted on May 11th, 2008 by Sam
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This is a rant i found about the recent studies of Media and very young Children… there is no black and white and this helps explain why. I found this commentary on some small blog based in the south somewhere… here is an excerpt from the posting:
“I completely agree with not putting a television in any child’s room. It’s bad enough for adults to have one in their room. The last thing we want to do is be irresposible parents. Parents should be reading books to their children, playing outside with them exploring their world or playing with wooden toys in their living room with their mom and dad at the same time and eating nothing but organic foods (slo cooked and prepared by their mother while wearing clogs) Wait a second, don’t wooden toys come from trees….yikes! How dare those crack researchers at the UW insult my parenting skills with their phone survey of 150 people. My twins didn’t start really talking until they were twoish which we thought was due to the fact that they were preemies and lived in a multi-lingual household. And here it was Baby Einstein’s fault all along…that’s the reason they they spoke 6 fewer words. Now 4 years later i can’t get them to shut up! Do i put my child in front of the TV every time i get a chance? Do i force my child to get his comp time in? Do I lock my kid out of the house to force more experiential learning into him? Do i tell him start reading everytime he gets close to a book? Absolutely NOT! Because we’ve instilled in him a love of learning and that my fellow parents goes a long ways in this day in age. So drop this trendy anti-media anti-technology phobia and get real… smart that is and just follow your child’s lead with what you think is the best guidance possible. By the way, my son is so skinny I’m thinking of making him read more… or was that watch TV more to gain some weight!”
Posted on May 7th, 2008 by Administrator
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It is almost a certainty that this year’s award will NOT be coming to me. Know when your watching TV and you see the “prize van” drive up with balloons and you just know, deep in your gut that they’re coming for you with that big Publisher’s Clearing House check? It’s the same with Mother of the Year except that I know my prize isn’t coming—at least not after my performance this weekend.
It was the first nice Sunday in I can’t remember how long in Seattle so we decided to venture out. There was an event I wanted to check out at the Seattle Center called Northwest Enterprising Moms and I figured that would be a quick diversion and we could spend the rest of the time at the big fountain. After seeing some other moms I know through business and chatting away, a short stop over turned into an hour and my kids were getting anxious. Then anxious turned into pissed off. And pissed off turned into tears. Ugh. Bad mommy. Selfish mommy. So I finally tore myself away and scooped Logan off the floor and promised to not only buy him ice cream and a new baseball mitt but that I would never do that to him again. And of course, we left. Wait, we get to the fountain and where is Johnny and Blaise? We searched everywhere for them and couldn’t find them. After about 30 minutes and steam coming out of my ears, Johnny appeared but where was Blaise? I could not believe it. I panicked. I tore across the field back to the exhibition hall. I had visions of CPS coming to my door and telling me what a crap mother I was and being put in mommy jail. Sure enough, there she was. Now as terrifying as this was for her and for me (presumably for Johnny too but who in the heck knows sometimes) she did absolutely the right thing. She went to the gals I was talking to who were my friends although she’d only met them that day and stayed with them until I came back. She was scared I know but handled it like a pro.
We all try so hard every single day to be good mommies. To take good care both to encourage, be patient and above all, not do too much long term damage. I’ve never gotten over my mother throwing away my favorite jeans while I was away at summer camp because she just couldn’t bear to patch them one more time. When I got home that summer, Sears was all out of purple toughskins and I could never replace them. I still haven’t gotten over it (ok, so they weren’t 7’s but then I didn’t care how my butt looked then) and let my mother know that every chance I get. We’re not perfect. We’re inconsistent and fallible. But I know that for me the most important thing to remember is that it’s not about ME, it’s about them. So next time you just happen to leave your child unattended like baggage at the airport, think less about you being a bad mommy and more about whether your child is safe and happy.
Posted on May 5th, 2008 by Sam
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For me, oddly enough, it’s when everything is going wrong and feeling out of control. The reason I haven’t blogged in such a long time is not for lack of want. But for the lack of time and control I seem to have over what some call, “work/life” balance–it’s what I call, the roller coaster of owning your own business and being a mom–scratch that and reverse it. What I realized last night was that writing is a much better outlet than blueberry pop tarts!
We named this blog, Play Is The Work for Jean Piaget whose truly dedicated his life to honoring children and the way they live, work, think and play. Johnny and I have dedicated our lives and passion to the very same thing. We hope that through Braincandy, we can reach many more parents–especially moms caught in the “perfect mommy” syndrome.
Look for more posts to come as I rededicate myself to the PlayIsTheWork blog. Thanks for checking in and checking back. We hope to give you great insight, resources and a great community.
Posted on April 29th, 2008 by Sam
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Carol Dweck’s recent book and research is positively one of the most important pieces I’ve read in the last five years. “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” is a fascinating text and one that I recommend for anyone who has young children. I’ve always been an advocate for understand early what type of learner your child is. In medicine, they call it “presenting itself.” You have to be a perceptive parent—especially when your child isn’t verbal, but for the most part I think you know your child and how they learn. With my twins it’s like a Petri dish experiment all the time. Blaise thrives on praise—no matter how hard or easy the task, she wasn’t to feel like she’s successful. Logan for the most part rolls up his sleeves and takes on a good challenge. His issue is more around how long he can focus to accomplish it.
Mindset is “an established set of attitudes held by someone,” says the Oxford American Dictionary. It turns out, however, that a set of attitudes needn’t be so set, according to Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford. Dweck proposes that everyone has either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is one in which you view your talents and abilities as… well, fixed. In other words, you are who you are, your intelligence and talents are fixed, and your fate is to go through life avoiding challenge and failure. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is one in which you see yourself as fluid, a work in progress. Your fate is one of growth and opportunity. Which mindset does your child possess? As a child grows and begins taking on harder and harder tasks in school, it’s important to understand what type they are so that as a parent we can council and support them appropriately.
I do believe the book is a very good read but if all you have time for is this summary article, it offers a tremendous amount of insight.
Posted on January 6th, 2008 by Sam
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I know, I know, conjures up visions of Tevye playing his violin in “Fiddler on the Roof” right? That’s sort of what I mean but not really. I’ve always been a sucker for tradition. It’s one of the things that I have always believed grounds me. It’s also something that has left me with many, many wonderful childhood memories. In my family, it was a tradition to go to our friend’s cottage in Northern Michigan every November to bare witness to the changing of the colors. We’d get out in the forest with the gimungous trees and try to find the biggest, reddist leaves we could get our hands on and then press them between wax paper and keep them to show them off at school the next week. We always had a tradition of going ice skating on one of the local lakes right around Christmas and I can still feel the heat of hot chocolate drunk out of a thermos running down my throat and warming me all the way down to my toes.
Now that I have my own family, I spend time thinking about what my children will remember as the traditions from their childhood. I’m sure some of our traditions we’ve already started unknowingly. But around the holidays we’ve decided to be a bit more overt. We did some ice skating at Seattle Center which was loads of fun.
We spent Christmas Eve lunch at the Space Needle and spent Christmas day with our friends who have what they call, “the Christmas for misfit religions” (basically because no one other than them are actually ChristiansJ) For the second year in a row we road tripped down to the Olympic Rain Forest and stayed in the Lake Quinault Lodge. The lodge was made famous by Roosevelt who was so inspired when he visited he decided to create the Olympic National Park service. Pretty awesome! This time we took friends which was double the trouble, double the fun. The kids are already talking about going next year.
It feels like we have a pretty solid platform to build on. But one thing dawned on me as we were deliberately creating our traditions and memories. The traditions can be as simple as Friday night movie night or a family walk by the lake on Sunday mornings. It’s really capturing the moments again and again, those are the things our children will remember.
Posted on January 3rd, 2008 by Sam
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