Why it bothers me that there aren't more black kids on screen

Last weekend, Zippy and I went to see Chimpanzee. We've been looking forward to it since we first saw the trailer months ago and it was a fabulous film on all levels. But as we watched the previews - trailers for upcoming kid flicks like Brave and Madagascar 3 - I once again wondered, "Where are the black people?" This question has been on my mind a lot lately when we watch movies or television together. Zippy is becoming more aware of skin color and race, so I'm more tuned in these days to what media is telling him about it. What I'm seeing - or rather, what I'm not seeing - bothers me.

Musings on Hubby's Me-Time

Today I came home to find The Schedule for The Season on the kitchen counter. I had almost forgotten that The Season would soon be upon us - The Season being Hubby's recreational softball league and The Schedule being games 2 nights a week for the next 3 months. Okay, can I confess something here? Promise not to tell Hubby? He may have an inkling about this, but I try to hide the depth of my feelings. I dread The Season. Yes, I 100% dread it.

I didn't always feel this way. Back before we had kids, softball was no big deal. On game nights I would work late or relax at home by myself or go to the games to cheer him on. But now? Well, kids change all of that!

From only to big sib: Age difference and personality play a role {Point 2}

Last Friday, I shared the first "point" from the research on how kids adjust to becoming big sisters or big brothers, which emphasized that there is no one common reaction. Kids' reactions vary and how each child responds depends on many different factors. Point 2 starts to explain some of the variation in how kids adjust.

Point 2: Your child’s age, developmental phase, and temperament (personality) play a role in shaping how he reacts. 

Age - Younger kids (say, 2 and under) can't really understand the changes at a cognitive level. Research suggests they may have more problems than older kids when baby arrives, although the evidence isn't clear-cut on the matter.

It is probably easier to prepare older children for the birth of a sibling. During my pregnancy with Bee, he was old enough and his verbal skills were such that we could talk a lot about what it might be like to have a new baby, read books about it, and talk about what babies need. After Bee was born, Zippy and I could talk about how he felt and what things had changed vs. what was the same. The older the child, the more this type of preparation and discussion is possible. But a younger or less verbal child may not be able to process things in this way and as a result the transition may be bumpier.

Project Healthier Food: Steps we're taking to eat better

My kids loooove fruit and that makes me so so happy.  I love when our fruit basket looks like this after grocery shopping:

And then it looks like this at the end of the week: 

If you let your kid bring home a dead fish....

I learned a very important lesson this week. Are you ready, mommas and poppas? This is one every parent should know. It may save you a lot of trouble someday:

If you let your child bring a dead lake fish into your house, 

it may be difficult to get the dead fish out of your house.

This is especially true if said child loves animals. And especially if he is a known collector of random crap and has a tendency to become overly attached to everything from scraps of paper to pine cones. Do you know how many bags of twigs and leaves and dead bugs are sitting in our garage as I type this? Lots. I have to follow a stealthy, undercover-like process to get rid of anything Zippy "gathers," which is something I should have kept in mind when the fish situation arose.

Here is the story of how I learned this valuable lesson, and why there is currently a dead fish named Flipper in my freezer.

From only to big sib: What the research says {Point 1}

This dude is getting his science on!

A couple of months ago, I wrote a series of posts about how we helped smooth Zippy’s transition from only child to big brother. (You can find those posts here, here, here, and here.) But then I found myself wanting to know what the science says.  Is this transition as big a deal as parents think it is? Do most kids show some difficulty making the adjustment? Is there something the research can tell us about how to help our kids adjust?

Having a research background is both a blessing and a curse. I often feel a pull toward wanting to know what the evidence is for an idea or theory, rather than rely on my own opinions, intuitions, and wives' tales. But then I get totally overwhelmed by just how much information exists and conflicting viewpoints and the realization that even science is not certain. And I just want to get back into a nice little bubble with my own personal theories and forget some expert is out doing the research to guide us in the right direction. Sometimes my desire to know the answer just kicks my butt.

Not-So-Wordless Wednesday: My Mud Monster

Once in a while I see a "Wordless Wednesday" post on someone's blog and I think, Hey, maybe I should do that. "Wordless Wednesday" is a post where you just post a photo. Presumably on a Wednesday. That kind of appeals to my lazy side. But then I think, Who am I kidding?  I don't "do" wordless. I do word-y. I am, like, genetically and biologically prohibited from wordless. There is a reason my childhood nickname was Motormouth, a nickname I have come to understand more fully after giving birth to my very own Motormouth. Seriously, Zippy will start talking non-stop the moment he wakes up and all I can think is Where is my coffee??? Oh, but I love that boy.

Anyway, I have this picture that would be my Wordless Wednesday picture, except I'm adding words. Because, besides the fact I can't keep my mouth shut, I was thinking about what this picture says to me and how pictures of our children and families and of anything, really, often say so much more to us than to anyone else. We look at these photos and see the stories behind them. We remember the moments captured and, if we're lucky, the emotions we experienced. And thinking about all that I realized why I love this picture so much.

To the astute observer, this is a picture of a cute kid covered head to toe in mud. Yes, you are 100% correct. But it is so much more than that.

Becoming a bird-watching family. Yeah, we're dorky like that.

Cardinals in the back yard

When Bee was born, one of my aunts and uncles gifted him a bird feeder. Now, this aunt and uncle have a history of giving very unique and memorable gifts. Like when I was a kid in the 80's (crap, am I that old?!) and they would give us cooperative board games, like Save The Whales. No one else gave us cooperative board games, which is probably why I still remember laying on the floor with my sister moving our little silver whales around the board. When I was pregnant with Zippy, these were the only relatives that thought to buy us anything like "The Family Book" about how families come in many variations ("Some families are different colors...") and later gave Zippy "Mama Voted For Obama" (yes, she did!). Just last week, they mailed the boys a kit for Sea Monkeys. Fun stuff.

But I was like, a bird feeder? For a baby gift? Hmmm. Interesting. Please don't tell them, but it sat in our garage for a good year and a half.

The search for new childcare begins

So here we go. Let the search for new childcare begin. Yesterday afternoon we attended a meeting at the boys' childcare center where we learned that the center will be closing this summer. Ugh. So, so bummed.

We suspected this might be coming and I was able to put it out of my mind all week, but driving to the meeting Friday afternoon I found myself getting nervous about whether our suspicions would be confirmed and hoping not. We had received a memo on Monday that there would be a meeting on Friday at 5:00 and no one knew what it was about. Well if that didn't sound ominous...

Join the party! {Ultimate Blog Party 2012}

Woohoo! I love a good party! So I'm joining in the Ultimate Blog Party 2012. Thanks 5 Minutes for Mom, for having us all. We'll try to behave.

I am a little late. Can we call it fashionably late?

I'm Ellie. By way of getting to know me, I thought I'd share how we throw a party at our house. We like to have our parties in the summertime of course. Lots of good friends, family, and neighbors. (We're blessed to have so many wonderful people in our lives.) Chicken and burgers on the grill, pony-keg and margaritas ready. Bubbles and sidewalk chalk and sprinkler for the kids, corn hole and badminton for the big people. Then, when the sun starts to set, Hubby starts a fire in the fire pit. So pull up your lawn chair, make a s'more, chat in the dark with a beer in hand. Happiness.

Freeze Frame {Just Write}

Tonight Bee curled up in my lap in his too-small footie pajamas. I laughed at him when we put on his pajamas, ones he hadn't worn in months, and we could barely zip them. They stretch taut over his belly - that chubby belly, the lingering reminder of his baby-ness. Striped green pajamas that need to go in the box we keep of clothes for donation or consignment. That box, tucked in the deepest corner of his closet, is always filling up too quickly.

Holey appreciation

Last week, I made Zippy buy himself a new pair of socks. Well, to be more specific, I made him give me 50 cents toward a sock. This was after he had put holes in four socks within a matter of days. And I'm not talking about any ordinary holes. The kid had all five toes sticking out, which he thought was hilarious. My grandmother was a master seamstress and even she couldn't have saved these socks.

Holes in clothes have been an on-going battle in our house, particularly with Zippy and his jeans. If we're lucky, new jeans last a few weeks before he puts holes in the knees. I finally gave up my crusade for well-maintained clothes after accepting that I can either let Zippy play care-free or I can constantly tell him to "be careful" in hopes of keeping his clothes in one piece, but I can't have both. Play wins out.

Could a little television actually be good for kids?

Since Zippy was little, we’ve had a set of pretty consistent tv rules:   

1. No more than 1 hour/day, with the exception of movie night.
2. Educational and prosocial shows only.
3. The tv is generally off while the kids are awake, unless they are the ones watching (or SportsCenter is on while Hubby cooks). That way they don’t “accidentally” see or hear something that isn’t appropriate for little ears. How I miss watching the evening news!

But of course there are times we deviate from these rules, and vacation is inevitably one of those times. I’m sure Zippy in particular watched much more than an hour/day at Grammy’s house and since she didn’t have On Demand cable, he watched whatever happened to be on, including a few episodes of Sponge Bob and Scooby Doo.

When we returned from vacation, Zippy tried to convince me that Scooby Doo should go into regular rotation at our house. I explained the reasons that wasn’t going to happen. “Daddy and I want you to watch shows that teach you things and help your brain grow. Scooby Doo is fun to watch, but I don’t think it helps you learn much.” Zippy thought for a moment. “Mommy, it does! Scooby Doo teaches me not to believe everything I see!” That is a very creative angle, Z, but the answer is still no. 

Because I’d much rather he watch television that sparks this kind of creativity:

Risk vs. Responsibility: Musings on Trayvon & the hoodie debate

Risk vs. responsibility. 

As a graduate student I had an interest in dating violence and abuse. While working with rape survivors in our department clinic, one of my supervisors introduced me to the distinction between risk and responsibility. For example, a young woman might place herself at higher risk for sexual assault by drinking heavily or by going somewhere alone with a guy she had just met, but this didn’t mean that she was responsible for the assault. Denying someone the ways that they can acknowledge and reduce their risk of being harmed disempowers that person, yet we must always remember that ultimately the perpetrator is fully responsible for his actions.

This distinction between risk and responsibility crossed my mind last night while I was watching the CNN special Beyond Trayvon: Race & Justice in America¸ which aired Friday. At one point, there was a short discussion about hoodies, touching upon whether clothing plays a role in racial profiling. I thought about the outrage last month in response to Geraldo Rivera’s suggestion that parents shouldn’t let their black or Latino children wear hoodies, alongside the fact that many parents of black/brown children do in fact set limits on what they wear or where they hang out in an effort to protect them.

Eliminating morning nursing (our weaning saga continues)

I wrote my first post about nursing a toddler - "To Wean or Not to Wean?" - in early November. Clearly I decided it wasn't time yet, because here I am five months later, still writing about how to wean my little Honey Bee. Although I've set some limits and eliminated our after-nap/after-work nurse, Bee still nurses three times a day. Weaning has been a slow process, mainly because my ambivalence often results in inertia. I can't decide what I want to do, so I just keep doing what I'm doing and figuring when I'm ready, I'll know it. And I keep hoping Bee will wean himself, although all signs point pretty clearly to Not-Gonna-Happen.

If I mention I am starting to feel ready to be done with breastfeeding, the response I usually get is, "Yes, Bee is getting too old for that." An interesting response, because I've never suggested his age had anything to do with it. His age isn't the issue for me at all. It is always the time involved.