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New Britax seat designed to work for older kids
Last week the folks at Britax unveiled their new combination booster seat — the Frontier 85. I waited to blog about it because I wasn’t clear what improvements they had made to the earlier version of the already highly-rated Frontier.
After an exchange with their press people, I found out that the new design expands the weight limits for the seat in both configurations (up to 85 pounds with the five-point harness and up to 120 pounds as a belt-positioning booster.)
Other changes include increasing the harness height for taller kids. The height and weight improvements are important as more states, including Texas, raise the age to keep kids in booster seats longer. Here, kids up to age 8 and shorter than 4 feet-9-inches tall are legally required to be in a booster seat.
Not having tried the seat, I wouldn’t consider it for a 5-year-old. The suggested retail price is $279, and Britax seat rarely go on significant sale. There are much cheaper models for older kids that are seat belt positioned only.
However, if you’ve got younger kids that you want to keep in a five-point harness as long as possible (as is recommended by experts) and don’t want to be bothered buying another seat when that one is outgrown, then the new Frontier 85 might be worth looking at. The new seats will be available starting at the end of this month.
Another seat that gets a lot of buzz on the mom boards I frequent is the Graco Nautilus, which has a lower price point (models start retailing at $179). The 3-in-1 seat (five-point harness, plus high back and backless booster) has an upper limit of 65 pounds in the five-point harness and 100 pounds with a seat belt.
I’m realizing that we will be in the market for one of these types of seats soon. Ayanna will be nowhere near big enough to ride safely in the cheaper boosters when her baby sister outgrows her infant seat.
What’s been your experience with combination booster seats (Britax or other brands)?
And if you’ve got thought about other kid products be sure to check out our new Raising Austin forum for parents. It’s just getting off the ground, but there’s a whole section for the community to talk about products and recalls. I’ll be writing more about this later, but would like some folks to head over there to get the conversation started first.
Image: BritaxUSA
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Movies for women for a good cause
On Sunday night Lunafest is coming to Austin. The touring film festival of nine short films by women filmmakers will be shown to raise breast cancer awareness at La Zona Rosa, 612 W. Fourth St.
Just a look at the film list shows a dizzying array of women’s experiences, tackling topics including women’s health, motherhood, body image, sexuality, cultural diversity and breaking barriers. Some of the films are fiction; some are documentary. All are directed by women.
All proceeds will go to the Breast Cancer Fund. Yes, I know, it’s Oscar night, but this is for a good cause.
Tickets are $15 in advance; $20 at the door; $10 for students. Tickets are available at http://gettix.net/theatre/texas/?event_id=3202 There is a pre-party at 6:30 p.m. and the films will follow.
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Giving kids the names of things
I have vacillated and avoided giving Ayanna the biological terms for her girl parts. Mostly I’ve just avoided it.
I’m not sure why. Perhaps because that is what my mother did with me. I’m pretty sure I never heard the word vagina until some public school health class. But then again, her version of the talk was handing me a book on the subject when I was 10 years old.
But last night I finally decided to give Ayanna the right words. Since we’ve potty trained, we’ve really had to work to get her to wipe properly. Occasionally she’ll complain that she’s “red” which usually means that she’s irritated from improper cleaning.
But then she started checking the “red” and would tell us that she was red, when she wasn’t. So I told her that “it” was pink and “it” was supposed to be pink.
Then last night she told me at bedtime that she needed to “wipe my pink,” which is when I realized how ridiculous this whole thing was. Little girls have arms, legs, teeth, feet and vaginas. If I don’t tell her the right words to use, how on earth is anyone (pediatricians, daycare, etc.) going to know what she’s talking about.
So I told her that was her vagina. She repeated the word, wiped and appeared to be satisfied.
Of course the concern is that little kids are going to run around yelling names of private anatomy parts at inappropriate times. But how appropriate is a kid running around screaming “my pink” or any of the other more common, but not-subtle names that have been created for the female nether regions.
Do you use anatomically correct terms with your kids? (Heads up: Our auto filters may delete legitimate uses of certain terms. I apologize in advance, but is better than letting inappropriate uses run rampant without me knowing.)
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Play-Doh time = better handwriting
More and more kids are going to see occupational therapists for mild problems like handwriting difficulties rather than the traditional disabilities, according to the New York Times article “Watch how you hold that crayon.”
Although interesting, if you wade through the hand-wringing about the Manhattan preschool situation there is this more fascinating little nugget:
But Anthony DiCarlo, the longtime principal of the William E. Cottle Elementary School in Tuckahoe, N.Y., a suburb north of Manhattan, said that many children are experiencing delays in their fine and gross motor skills.“Almost all our kids come into kindergarten able to recite their letters and their numbers,” Mr. DiCarlo said. “Some can even read. But in the last five years, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of kids who don’t have the strength in their hands to wield a scissors or do arts and crafts projects, which in turn prepares them for writing.”
Many kindergartners in his community, he said, have taken music appreciation classes or participated in adult-led sports teams or yoga. And most have also logged serious time in front of a television or a computer screen. But very few have had unlimited opportunities to run, jump and skip, or make mud pies and break twigs. “I’m all for academic rigor,” he said, “but these days I tell parents that letting their child mold clay, play in the sand or build with Play-Doh builds important school-readiness skills, too.”
There is it again. Let the kids play.
I suspect the delays in fine and gross motor skills are as much a matter of over-scheduling, as it is the understandable parental desire to limit mess and chaos. Molding clay has a nasty habit of getting ground into carpets, crayons inevitably melt into chairs and paint will get in the most undesirable of places.
At my day care earlier this week, I got an apology from one of my infant daughter’s teachers. Apparently it was “art” day, which means they put my five-month-old in a high chair and let her go to town with some green non-toxic, washable paint. They cleaned her up as best they could, but Elizabeth still had paint on her clothes and under her fingernails.
“Some parents complain,” said Ms. L. “They hate when the kids come home messy.”
I assured her there would be no complaints from me. Paint residue means that she is learning about texture and working on finger dexterity. And that is a good thing.
Elizabeth’s older sister helps me pack in the mornings by screwing the lids on all the empty bottles for my pump.
A friend of mine urged me to wait as long as possible to teach my 2-year old how to do that, because that would inevitably lead to more trouble and mess.
I shrugged. While I appreciate the advice, it’s my job to figure out how to keep her out of the cosmetic jars. It’s her job to figure out how to get into them. And it’s a small price to pay, compared to the cost of an occupational therapist.
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When a snow day is a school day
We’ve been watching the fluffy flakes fall from the office window all day, and more than a few of us are wishing we were with our kids.
At bare minimum, I’m hoping that my oldest daughter’s day care took them outside for a few minutes to enjoy the snow. Winter storms are rare here and snow is the one weather event that seems to bring out the child in us all. Sure it is messy, but it is possible that this is the only snow Ayanna will see for the next three years.
As a kid there is nothing better than waking up to snow, even if its just a fraction of an inch. And in Austin, usually that’s enough to make school officials call the whole thing off. Warm temperatures earlier this week apparently foiled that winter ritual and without the risk of freezing roadways, it is business as usual.
But one of my friends forwarded this email from her son’s school teacher, which suggests that some Southwest Austin kids did get to enjoy today’s flakes.
Dear Parents,Today we took a little side trip in our learning. We studied the effects of pressure on mass in the formation of spheres. We studied the effects of speed and trajectory using the spheres. We also studied the effects of temperature on human skin. Mrs. B. had her camera, so we posed for a picture after we were thoroughly versed…
Hope you had as magical a day as we did…
Ms. A.
Did your kids get outside today?
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Baby calming classes in March
Wondering why your baby carrier is killing your back? Or out of ideas on how to soothe your sweet infant to sleep?
If you can wait that long, you might check out the baby calming classes being offered at Special Addition (3800 North Lamar Boulevard) next month.
Yes, the nurses will show you how to swaddle a baby at the hospital, but it gets trickier as baby gets bigger. Infants may be little, but they are tiny escape artists, even from things that will calm them down.
With our first kid we assumed that she didn’t need to be swaddled any more because she kept breaking free of the receiving blankets, then wondered why she wouldn’t stay asleep.
Kid No. 2 is five months old and is still swaddled in her fussier moments and it works like a charm. Both kids would throw their biggest fits just before dropping off to sleep.
The folks at Special Addition are offering their free semi-annual class on baby calming and baby wearing in March. No registration is required and the classes are being offered March 19 and 20 at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.
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Advice to parents on explaining crash
For my 2-year-old daughter, the sounds of National Public Radio are the soundtrack for her rides to and from day care.
She has never given any indication that she was listening until Thursday afternoon, the day that Joe Stack crashed his airplane into an office building less than two miles from our home.
“Airplane! Going to the airport!” she exclaimed during the national news report about the Austin crash, that killed Stack and IRS employee Vernon Hunter.
I panicked. How much did she understand what the reporter was saying? And how do you explain something like that to a toddler? I had no clue.
So, I ignored her, the moment passed and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then, this weekend, I drove past the gaping, blackened Echelon I building sitting right on U.S. 183, and I realized that I was going to have to tackle this topic eventually. We drive this route at least once a week.
Fortunately Ayanna wasn’t in the car on Sunday, but I could clearly hear her voice in my head asking “What happened?”
How to tell her without making her afraid?
Austin child and family therapist Katie Malinski is also a parenting coach. Apparently, I’m not the only one wondering. She has gotten lots of questions in the past few days about how to handle just such an inquiry.
She has written a fantastic post on her blog giving concrete advice about how to answer questions about Thursday’s crash.
She starts by reminding parents to stay open to communication:
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you need to give your child a particular piece of information, or say a particular phrase. Parenting is never accomplished in one moment.Then later she gets down the nitty gritty:
Do you have to drive by the building? If your young child asks you what happened, you can say“A plane crashed into that building today.”
With older, or more inquisitive children, you might add in more details, either initially, or as part of the conversation, including phrases like:
- A man flew a plane into that building.
- He did it on purpose.
- A man who worked there died, as did the pilot. Other people were injured.
- That building has many government workers in it, and the pilot blamed the government for his problems.
- It’s normal to feel angry, even very angry sometimes, but it’s not normal to act out feelings like that. He has hurt many, many people with his choices.
There is lots more in Malinski’s post and it is worth reading, no matter the age of your child. Good luck. It’s hard enough trying to wrap your brain around something like this happening so close to home without trying to anticipate the honest and usually direct questions from children.
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Austin Baby shutting its doors
Natural baby supply boutique Austin Baby (701 S. Lamar Blvd, 448-0118) is shutting its doors, according to a post this week on the store’s Facebook page.
“Dear Friends of Austin Baby, We are sorry to announce that we are closing our store. We appreciate all your love and support and will miss all our Austin Baby friends. We will miss watching your little babies grow up as fast as they have.”
The source for cloth diaper supplies, slings, BPA-free feeding items and other goodies started the business out of owner Erin Sheppard’s home. Sheppard opened a store in North Austin in 2007 and later partnered with Angela Colbert, moving to South Austin. That success led them to move again to the space on South Lamar in February 2009. The current incarnation included a sizable room for classes on babywearing, cloth diapering and meetings for other Central Texas mom and baby groups.
I visited the place a couple of times, even though we use disposables. Their sling selection was one of the best in town and the store floor was a comfortable place to try on several models to figure out what worked best with your own kid rather than try to guess from online descriptions.
I’ve tried to reach the owners, but no word yet on what will become of the diaper service or the online store. We’ll keep you posted.
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A mom’s hunt for toddler underwear
Add this to the ever-growing list of things that I never thought I’d be spending my time on. Kids underwear.
We have successfully potty trained our 2 year old, and it is time for Ayanna to move on from her padded cotton training panties. This should not be hard. After all, when I was a kid, underwear just sort of appeared in my drawers until I was high school aged — cotton briefs in beige, white and, if they were on sale, pink.
Oh, but things are not that simple.
First, Ayanna has apparently trained earlier than many kids, so finding panties in the smallest size is not an easy thing. Combine that with the fact that my little girl, though tall for her age frankly does not has much of a butt (not from my side of the family.) Her pants and even her current training underwear are forever sliding downhill. (Fruit of the Loom and Hanes start at Size 4. She is more like Size 2-3)
Everything at Target and WalMart looks like Dora the Explorer threw up on it. I like Dora. We have Dora flannel pajamas. We have a Dora action figurine. I intend to draw the line at Dora underwear (and that goes for any of her licensed character friends from Nickelodeon and Disney.) I’ve just had enough.
So then I wandered into GapKids, willing to pay a little more, if I could find something that A) fit well and B) had some innocuous design. I was elated to find not only basic white, but some cute designs without any cartoon characters in size XXS.
I skipped the “low-rise” cut and just got some bikini briefs, not thinking that they meant adult-cut bikinis. I though I had perhaps paid too much ($22.50 for a pack of 7), but these should work. After all, I skipped the lowrise cut.
Oh, but I was mistaken. I pulled them out of the package at home and let’s just say the lack of front coverage was startling for a product aimed at little kids. When they say bikini cut, they mean bikini cut.
So then I hunted online and there is as vast selection of girls underwear that appears to meet my criteria on screen at least, but they start at $8 a pair. Not an acceptable option since my daycare tosses underwear if the occasional accident is more than just urine.
I may have to order some from Swedish company Hanna Andersson, which offers 3-packs in for $14. Still not cheap, but they have sizes that fit even 10-24 month old babies in classic styles.
I’m sensing that as the girls get older this is going to be an ongoing problem. Finding age-appropriate clothing should not be this hard or expensive.
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Talking to toddlers about race
This weekend I ran a small social experiment, mostly just to see what my daughter’s responses would be.
Ayanna has had colors nailed pretty solidly since she was about 18 months old. We’ve discussed the color of the sky, bugs, bibs, food, shirts, pants and flowers. We have never talked about the color of people’s skin.
So I asked Ayanna, now 2 1/2, what color is her sister? Brown. What color is she? Brown. OK. What color is Mommy? Brown. And then the clincher, what color is Daddy? Yellow.
Personally I thought she would say pink, but who am I to question how she categorizes hues in the literal sense. Peach isn’t part of her vocabulary, yet.
In a multiracial household, we haven’t really talked about race with the kids. I suppose I’m waiting for them to bring it up.
I’ve questioned this approach internally since hearing this piece on NPR this fall shortly after the birth of my second daughter.
Headlined “Can babies be racist?” the interviewer talks to researchers who have found that kids make associations based on race much earlier than we thought — as early as six months old.
Professor Professor Briggite Vittrup from Texas Woman’s University talked about a 2006 study where parents started dropping out as subjects, even though they knew the subject matter going in, when they were asked to talk about race with their kids. The reason: It was just too uncomfortable.
The non-discussion of race, even if there is no malice behind can have consequences she says.
Children are exposed to so much - whether it’s from television which contains a lot of stereotypes, especially racial stereotypes. They hear things at school, from their peers. And then if there are no conversations at home, they form their own opinions. And I think that became very clear when we looked at their perceptions of their parents racial attitudes, where a lot of children just said they didn’t know or they thought that their parents - their white parents didn’t like blacks, even though when we looked at the parents racial attitudes measures, these parents had no problems with black people.
At Ayanna’s age, it isn’t so much that I’m uncomfortable with the subject. I just don’t want her to contribute to her starting to sort people the way she sorts her shirts. She just doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about sameness and difference, or really express what she thinks about those things, or even answer the question why she thinks something is the way it is.
I’m hoping we are transmitting some lessons about race in other ways, though.
One of the reasons we picked her daycare was because of the diversity of kids and teachers. Before settling on her current center, I visited one where all the administrative employees were white and all the care takers were African American. That was a message I was worried about.
Her current classroom has an diverse staff in the classroom and outside — Asian, African American, Hispanic, Caucasian. Same goes for her classmates.
After our little question and answer session this weekend, I paused to see if any other questions arose. Nope. She just wanted to watch her cartoons about spiders.
How have you broached the subject of race with your kids and at what age?
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Olympic watching with kids
The Vancouver Olympic Games are the first ones that I’ve had the chance to watch through the eyes of a little person — or at least the first ones in 30 years .
I had forgotten how watching the atheletes jump, kick and slide makes you feel — for an evening — what it might be like to be able to do the same thing.
As I expected, I missed the opening ceremonies. Ayanna is too young for that to hold her attention for long and bed time called. On Saturday we caught some of the luge which held her interest, but she had a hard time following the camera angles and didn’t quite get the concept that it is a race of sorts. Explaining the sled and the ice to a two year old is hard work.
But last night watching the mens moguls and the figure skating we hit pay dirt. She ooohed and aaaahed over the jumps and spins. All the female skaters were “princesses.” And before long she was spinning herself off our couch. “I’m jumping, mommy!”
It’s going to be a fun couple of weeks. Now if I can just not get teary every time I see the Proctor & Gamble commercial that’s been running about the Olympic moms. If you haven’t seen it, here it is. If you are prone to tears and have kids, have a tissue handy.
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The first year of sleep-away camp
Last summer we sent our son Ben for nine days of fun at a Jewish camp near Waco. It brought out interesting emotions in all of us.
Ben, who was 8, became more self-sufficient in many ways. He had counselors but no Mom. Of course, I realized there are gaps in learning, particularly when it comes to dressing himself. In 100-degree heat, he wore sweatshirts and long pants fairly regularly. He missed both laundry days, which lead to the saddest — and only — note from camp: “Dear Mom, I have no clothes. Can you send some?” Of course, this came on the day before we were going to pick him up.
His sister Ava, then 5, thought this was the best nine days of her life… but she got lonely and ended up sleeping in my bed most of the nights.
My husband was down right weepy and made proclamations like: “We are never letting him go away again.”
But the most surprising reaction was mine. I don’t consider myself a helicopter parent at all, but with my child far away, I felt a complete lack of control over his life. I obsessed over weird things such as had I remembered to tell him where his hat is. And every day, I became obsessed with looking at pictures online of the day before. I searched crowds looking for my son to make sure he was participating and not standing in the corner. I freaked out over the sweatshirt wearing. I send him e-mails several times a day and wondered why he never wrote me back. I was the type of parent I vowed to never be.
Then he came home. And he was happy. And we were all happy to see him. And he was happy for clean clothes. And he made new friends that will be with him when he returns to camp this July.
And isn’t all of this — the adventure, the learning to make new friends, the learning to let go, the learning to be self-sufficient — the point of sleep-away camp after all?
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The looming camp years
If you haven’t checked out our camp guide, take a look — even if your kids aren’t of camp age yet.
I was floored at the options in town for summer camps, which can start at age three. There are computer camps, horse camps, tennis camps, film camps, nature camps and film camps. And then there’s just plain old camp.
It is a boon for working parents and stay at home parents alike. For working parents it addresses the immediate need for child care in the non-school months and for all parents its a chance for kids to hone in on interests that might not be developed during the school year because of a lack of time, space or access.
My mom was a stay at home mom and she made the most of free museum days and cheap summer activities. But my most memorable summer was the one when I got to go to music day camp for five weeks at a local community college.
As much as I enjoyed the laziness of summer and the endless days at the neighborhood pool, being surrounded by kids my age who shared my interests was an experience that is tough to replicate.
So, even if your kids are a year or two away from needing or wanting camp, take a look so you can start plotting your strategy. Many of the popular day camps fill up fast, so don’t let this cold snap fool you. It is definitely time to start thinking about summer.
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What if: 52 weeks of maternity leave
So in honor of the start of the Winter Olympics, our travel writer (and grandmother to two) Helen Anders wandered into our work area and reminded three working mothers that in Canada maternity leave is a year long.
And yes, that is almost all paid leave (55 percent of your salary in most provinces, up to $447 a week.) The split works like this: 15 weeks for actual maternity leave and the 35 weeks parental leave that can be split with the father. That’s a grand total of 50 weeks, then you can take two more weeks unpaid.
I wish. Just to be freed from having to pump every day and waiting until the sleep schedule got more sane, I’m totally with the Vancouver plan. The additional baby smiles and giggles are just a huge bonus.
One of the moms, fellow Mama Drama blogger Nicole Villalpando, raising the question: What if you don’t want to stay at home for the year, are you then branded as the ‘bad mom?’
She was ready to come back at the end of her leave (14 weeks and 15 weeks, respectively) with both kids, and even now, thinking about staying home with two kids full time seems a bit overwhelming.
“I would have liked to have had to the option to go part-time,” she said. “But I missed adults. I wanted to be here.”
I don’t know what the mommy wars are like in Canada, or if they are just an American affliction. But it is unfortunate that the debate in these parts is an all or nothing proposition. When I told people that I was going back to work after my first kid, I was met with pity and the refrain “Too bad you have to go back. But if you have to, you do what you gotta do.”
I know if was an attempt to empathize, but I’m one of the conflicted ones. I adore my babies, but there are a lot of positives that come from me working that go far beyond keeping our bank account out of the red.
Working motherhood is hard. And yes, there are those who have to, but there are also those who WANT to for various reasons. And that doesn’t make them bad mothers. Just like being at stay-at -home mom doesn’t make you an under-achiever or anti-feminist, or whatever negative adjective people like to throw in there.
In my case, even in my daydreams about winning the lottery and not having to worry about my paycheck, the daydream includes me doing something else (blogging part time, taking classes, doing contract work from home or volunteering) — just not on my current zany schedule. And I would still, probably miss this place.
My friend Jennifer, who is stay-at home mother of five and home schools, cautions anyone thinking about quitting full-time work to make sure you’ve got back up care for a few hours a week. “Or else you will go bonkers. It is really intense.”
So my question is (and please don’t let this get ugly, kind readers) if you had the option of Canada’s parental leave program, would you take the whole thing? If not, how much would you take?
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Britax recalls Blink stroller
The folks at Britax have apparently decided to try to get ahead of the recall curve and are voluntarily recalling their Blink stroller.
I got this in my email this morning:
“Because we’re committed to creating the safest products for children, Britax is conducting a voluntary safety recall on its Blink stroller. The recall is in response to a potential risk of harm when a consumer opens or closes the stroller. No injuries have been reported, but as an extra precaution Britax will provide free remedy kits to all registered Blink owners. We encourage all Blink owners to visit www.BlinkRecall.com or call the Britax information line at 888-427-4829 for further instructions.” —Jon Chamberlain, president of Britax
The Blink, like most strollers have hinges similar to the ones responsible for the Maclaren recall in November. Those hinges were involved in about a dozen cases of fingertip amputation.
Since then several companies have recalled their strollers, including Graco and Regal. Keep an eye out, I expect more companies will offer hinge covers for their customers.
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Green family guide from National Geographic
Having a family has forced me to confront just how much trash we generate. There are of course diapers, but then everything for kids comes in seemingly 10 layers of packaging.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about our foray into having a paperless kitchen. So far, Dave and I haven’t really missed the paper towels I hid out of reach.
The only part we’re struggling with is drying meat for cooking. The meat juices stain the cloths, which while they are still usable, look a bit unsanitary. We’re trying to remember to quickly rinse those out before throwing them into the laundry bin, so I’m hoping for better results in coming weeks.
My husband also has pulled a few sheets of paper towels to steam some broccoli in the microwave, but other than that we seem to be on track.
The funny part is that I think we’ve confused our 2-year-old since I’ll ask Dave for a paper towel, when I mean on the the white cloth diapers we’ve been using. Ayanna now calls these “paper towels.”
For more tips on how to green your household, check out National Geographic’s new “Green Guide for Families.” It has nearly 400 pages of tips for parents looking to be more environmentally conscious.
It answers questions such as “Are cloth diapers really better for the planet?” (Answer: Depends on how you wash and dry them.) and “Are there eco-friendly and less toxic sunscreen for kids.”
The volume is a little overwhelming to read from cover to cover, but can be a handy reference guide when you are thinking about your next baby step in converting to a greener life. There are also multiple entries ear-marked for families on a budget (Isn’t that all of us?)
For other National Geographic green books, go to www.preserveourplanet.com/books.
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New PBS science show targets girls
Next week PBS will roll out its newest science programming for kids, this time targeting girls.
SciGirls, a weekly show featuring real girls (not actors) solving their own scientific problems. The live action is interspersed with animated characters Izzie and Jake, who attempt to tie the series together with their own adventures.
The goal, according to the creators, is to get girls thinking about science, technology, engineering and math. And to that end, the show has funding from Exxon Mobil and the National Science Foundation.
The show is an outgrowth of a nationwide network of science clubs that share the same name. I wasn’t able to find any SciGirl clubs in Austin, but the national group just launched a bilingual initiative in South Texas last year.
The show itself, targeted for girls ages 11-14, is pretty cool. Although I wonder if they overshot their age range. We showed the series premiere to my co-worker’s six-year-old daughter who loved the show, but hated the animation. Even so, she asked to see the second episode on the preview DVD.
The best thing about the show? The girls do all the work, including mucking around in a pond emptying turtle traps and sawing boards and PVC pipe. Adults are around as consultants, but the ideas and effort are all girl power.
The show also illustrates why single gender science clubs are valuable. The girls are more likely to show some trepidation about power tools and dirt. Hesitation in a mixed group usually means that the boys wind up doing the yucky business, while the girls sit on the sidelines.
Girls clubs force girls to step up and tackle their fears. In the episode about the turtles, even the girl who is a little freaked out about snapping turtles, winds up holding one.
Another nice touch is the mini-bios of the girls who are solving the problems. The segments portray them as multi-dimensional people who dance, love horses and draw. It’s a nice contrast to the “nerd” characters in a lot of kids programming, where the girl science geek is also a social outcast.
Girls are tricky audiences, and if I had to guess, this audience will skew younger than the creators have pegged, more in the range of 8 to 10. Even though the girls in the show are 11 to 14, young girls tend to look up to older girls. You know — little girls want to be tweens, tweens want to be in high school, and high school girls want to be in college.
If our six-year-old tester hated the animation, I can’t imagine that tween set will be enthralled.
But even if the show misses its target audience, it still might net its desired result — getting girls to think early about math and science. Why let boys have all the fun?
Locally, SciGirls will air twice a week (same episode) on KLRU at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursday, starting Feb. 16.
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Jenny Sanford and love — actually
On Saturday we actually got the kids to bed in enough time for Dave and I to pop in a movie.
Coming off a discussion about chick flicks and which ones hold up over time, we settled on re-watching “Love Actually,” which we both agree that seven years later it is one of the best chick flicks that appeals to both genders.
For me, some parts are harder to watch than they used to be, especially the mom confronting evidence on Christmas Eve that her husband’s eyes have strayed. The kids are giddy and bouncing, so she can only take just a few solitary minutes in her room to cry and then put on her happy face again. Then off to the kids’ Christmas play.
With the kids around there just isn’t time to have the nervous breakdown she so justly deserves. I can’t — and don’t want to — imagine how that feels.
It is the type of thing that parents have to do with unfortunate regularity. As part of the parenting gig, it is our job to hold it together in front of our children for divorce, death and all other calamities that come with living.
Which brings me to Jenny Sanford, ex-wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. (Yes, the one who disappeared to visit his mistress in Argentina.)
Jenny Sanford was on NPR this morning, in part to promote her new book “Staying True.” And if the first pages are any indication (see the NPR website for a sneak preview) it offers a glimpse of a woman in the public eye keeping it together for her family, but refusing to do the traditional “stand by your man” routine that political wives often find themselves subject to when their men stray.
Divorce is ugly, and Jenny Sanford doesn’t glamorize the truth in these pages. But it appears she has found a way to take the high road without becoming road kill herself.
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Bridging the day care communication gap
The New York Times had an intriguing article today about the communication gap that often exists between moms and their nannies.
Many mothers who employ nannies are actually overstretched working women, a number of whom (contrary to their professional personas) suffer from an inability to clearly express their expectations and demands to the people they pay to care for their children. The result is a peculiar passive-aggressive form of communication, a less-than-ideal dynamic between worker and boss. The mother, at times beset by guilt, a touch of intimidation or feelings of her own maternal inadequacy, fails to articulate what she wants from the nanny — and then complains to friends, her spouse or an Internet message board when she doesn’t get it. (The father in many cases steers clear of the whole relationship.)
The whole thing (including the bit about the husbands) is a huge over-generalization, but bear with me here.
Now, I do not have a nanny. But I don’t think the communication difficulty is exclusive to the nanny-parent relationship. There’s an element of difficulty in any relationship with a child care provider.
I can’t ask my daughter’s teacher to do her laundry, but I did take offense when it was obvious they didn’t think Ayanna was ready to be potty trained and I was confident that she was.
I admit I wasn’t exactly direct with my instructions, after all the teacher had been instrumental in training dozens of kids and I had never so much as had a test run. But, then again, I know my daughter best of all and in retrospect I should have been more firm. (That first day was a disaster. The teachers kept sending her to the bathroom every 20 minutes, resulting in crying and several accidents when she decided to resist.)
Why wasn’t I more forceful? I’m not exactly a shrinking violet in the office, so why would it be any different here?
It’s not mommy guilt as the New York Times article would suggest. In our case it is the recognition that one-plus-one doesn’t always equal two with little kids. There are multiple ways to get to a destination and day care providers know most of the routes.
Maybe I’m wrong, but treating the folks who take care of your kids like “just an employee” would seem to be as much as recipe for disaster as not conveying your expectations. It’s a difficult dance.
How have you navigated the relationship with your child care provider?
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Scary spray — priceless
Regular readers know that the fear factor in my house has been growing exponentially. What started as my 2-year-old’s fear of the ceiling fan months ago has escalated in to full blown nighttime terror and has made bedtime a miserable experience for us all.
Some night were better than others: The crying wouldn’t start until after we left the room. Other nights Ayanna would plead and resist even getting into bed because she knew we were headed out the door.
We tried consoling her. We tried not responding under the assumption it was a stall tactic and not real fear. We tried a night light, and then even started just leaving the lights on. It was hardest on my husband, since our four-month-old generally want to nurse after Ayanna goes down for the night. A chorus of a hungry infant, plus a terrified toddler is not music to anyone’s ears.
But this week we discovered “Scary Spray.”
I’d read about parents who would spray the monsters away with pretty squirt bottles. There are even products called Monster Spray that you can buy. I was not convinced that this was the route we should take, especially since we could never get Ayanna to tell us exactly what was scaring her. All she’d say was “Scary! Scary!”
But Wednesday night was the worst yet. I could hear Ayanna crying and screaming on the other side of the house, inconsolable because she didn’t want to be left in her bedroom. Forty minutes of Dave trying to hold her, telling her that she was safe, telling her that there was nothing to be afraid of and that we loved her had no effect on calming her.
When I walked into the room, I saw that he had covered her fish music box that she’s listened to every night since she was 5 months old. This time she didn’t even want that turned on because that was “scary” and still they were at an impasse.
So, I took a turn too and then had a moment of inspiration. I said, “I’ll be back. I’m going to get something to make the scaries go away.”
I grabbed the pink spray water bottle we use for her hair and told her that I had put something special in there. I told her that I would use it, if she lay down in her bed and I reminded her that she would have to go to sleep afterward.
She calmed down and agreed (A good first sign.) Then I stood in the middle of the room and sprayed in all directions. “Bye, bye, scaries.”
I kissed her and walked out of the room. Silence. Blessed, silence.
It’s been three nights since we discovered scary spray and bedtime has been drama free. I am stunned that it was that easy and am still holding my breath at night anticipating the return of the screaming.
I prefer to tell my kid the truth. But at 2 1/2 years old lots of things seem magical and unpredictable — the furnace the roars to life at will, the fish mobile that stops without anyone pressing a button, the humidifier that bubbles unexpectedly. No amount of rational explaining is going to make those things any less scary right now.
By the time she figures out it’s just tap water with no magical properties, she’ll likely be old enough to understand that those noises can’t hurt her.
Until then, scary spray is my ticket to the return of a peaceful house, and if anyone tries to tell the kid there’s no such thing as “scary spray” they will have to spend the next week trying to put her to bed.
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Trying out the paperless kitchen
At night, after the kids are asleep and if I can keep my eyes open for another hour, my husband and I pop in a video from “Blue Planet” or “Planet Earth.”
We got the both BBC nature series as a Christmas gift and are working our way through them. The videos are amazing, a quantum leap forward from “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” of my youth.
The show always ends pointing out how rare various species are becoming and the effect that global warming is having on habitats. Then we go to sleep a little depressed.
“It’s so big,” says my husband Dave. “Really, what can we do?”
We are not hippies. I drive a small SUV and we use disposable diapers. We do use the blue bins the city gives us to recycle and have a set of reusable grocery bags. We’ve recently switched to buying as much local produce as possible from the fine folks at Johnson’s Backyard Garden.
But after reading this post by Simple Mom, I got inspired to cut down on our household paper output. A paperless kitchen.
In her post, I recognized two of her obstacles to making it happen. A) Paper towels are far too convenient and cloths are impossible to find. B) How do I know which cloth to use?
So, I put the roll of paper towels under the cabinet. And placed a bin on the counter and filled it with two dozen cloth diapers (very absorbent, relatively cheap, bleachable and I already have about a dozen that I’ve been using as burp cloths anyway).
The paper napkins will be the next to go. First, I must find outstanding white sale and load up on cloth napkins.
With two kids, I have to do the laundry non-stop anyway. We also have a drying rack in our garage to air dry a good portion of the grown ups’ laundry. And we already have a hamper in the garage which is where our dirty linens go, so we don’t have to dig and sort them out from the clothes.
We’ll see how this experiment goes. I’m pretty optimistic that it will make a sizable dent in our garbage output, maybe even allow us to move to the city’s smallest bin (saving money there too).
Composting will be next, but we have to clear out the backyard and plant a garden first — and that’s likely to be a while. We barely got around to pruning and mulching what little landscaping we have.
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Yes, she does sound close to “bagina” but that’s more identifiable than something that starts to sound like “bubba.”
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If she can’t pronounce her V’s, does she say bagina? Can’t imagine how that’s harder than vulva.
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Thankfully I grew up on a farm. I had one set of good clothes for church on Sunday. Everything else was fair game to get dirty. I take the same approach with my two girls. If they are dirty, then they are having fun.
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