Today I was visiting hotels in LA with the lovely Ciaran from Los Angeles Moms Blog to find a location for an upcoming Silicon Valley Moms Group event. It was rainy, pouring actually, but it was still beautiful. I could have stayed there all day. In fact, I almost missed my plane back home.
It is Robin and I's birthday tomorrow. Kisses to you, my twin sis! So glad we got to spend the day together yesterday at Disneyland being grown-ups.
During the first week of kindergarten, I was hyper aware of my twins' teachers. Having decided to separate them in kindergarten, I hadn't given too much thought to the ACTUAL teachers before school began. I was focused on the kids and how in the world we would ever get out of bed and get ready for school and out to door by 7:30am. When we arrived that first week, I quickly shifted gears to start comparing these two very different teachers.
My kids have teachers who are opposite extremes in some ways. In Phillip Done's book Close Encounters of the Third Grade Kind, he discusses the Messy and the Tiddys. As in teachers' desks. There are messy teacher desks and tiddy teacher desks (you'll have to read the book to find out which one Mr. Done is...I'm not letting any of his secrets out!). Being Tiddy with a little Messy thrown in (as in...I WANT to be a Tiddy and am a Tiddy most of the time, but I sometimes don't have the time to be as Tiddy as I want to be, so can be perceived as a little...Messy at times. Not that I am unsecure about that or anything.)
Ben's teacher is a Messy. I don't know how she finds ANYTHING in her room! But, find it she does. And she is so warm and caring and fun that I really don't mind so much anymore. (I DO worry a tab about Ben learning some (further) messiness from his adored teacher, but that is really my job anyway.
Lily's teacher, on the other hand, is a Tidy. Uber-tidy. She is SO organized, she doesn't even need a room mom. She has everything neatly labeled and put away and...tidy. Lily has a special folder that goes back and forth each day for her papers - this teacher is actually teaching tidiness, which I so value.
I adore each of my kids' teachers. Being a Messy or a Tidy is only part of this hugely challenging and fun job. I thank Mr. Done for sharing a little glimpse of what it is like to be a teacher.
This post is part of the Silicon Valley Moms Group book club today on Phillip Done's latest book Close Encounters of the Third Grade Kind. I received a free copy of the book to use for this discussion. Join in the discussion here!
Today was Monday. Mondays mean something more now in our household, because Ben and Lily have started kindergarten and it is the start of a week when we have to get out of the house early, early, early and go, go, go. I have to say that I have had a case of the "Mondays" for the last couple of weeks. I have to psych myself up for this whole thing that feels like a race to nowhere sometimes.
What to do to make it better? How about doing one nice thing? Today I got a call from my babysitter's mother. My babysitter was scheduled to come over tomorrow afternoon to watch the kids while I had a lunch meeting. However, her husband was diagnosed with Stage 4 renal cancer several months ago, has been in the hospital for a week or so now and she just got a call to head back to the hospital because "he's not doing well." She likely won't be making it to our house to babysit tomorrow. This man is 42 years old. 42!!! Being a cancer survivor myself, I know how tough it is to have cancer as a young adult (I was 28). And to have a spouse that is sick is almost harder, in some ways. After all, caregivers get very little breaks from all the stress. There is no time for themsleves. In a way, this babysitting afternoon was not so much scheduled because I need it (I could have asked my mom), but because SHE needs it. Being a caregiver is SO tough. I was looking forward to Ava telling her beloved babysitter "I love you. Will you swing me. Push me in the back, please. Push me super high!" Since I can't give her that...what can I do for her?
I looked through the book Do One Nice Thing by Debbie Tenzer today, searching for something to do for my babysitter, my friend. I came across something that I have been meaning to do FOREVER. I signed up to be an organ donor. I think I may have the sticker on my drivers license, but I wanted to be sure that I made my wishes clear and that I notified my family about it. So I headed over to www.DonateLife.net and got it done. I have no idea if my organs would even be "good" - I can't be a blood donor, for instance, since I have had a blood cancer, chemotherapy and the rest of it. But why not? Maybe it will benefit someone, somewhere, sometime.
I have been working on habits in my household and in my life lately a lot. Laundry habits, paper clutter habits, homework habits. Do one nice each week sounds like a nice habit to get into. Ideas are plentiful when I just look around.
My thoughts are with my babysitter tonight especially. We love you! Come over and play ANYTIME you need a break and a few "I love you's."
This post was inspired by the book Do One Nice Thing by Debbie Tenzer and is part of Silicon Valley Moms Group's September book club for this book. You can read more posts for the book club here.
Sometimes I am sad to be done having babies. Even though I have three wonderful kids and do not need ANY more. Even though my tubes are tied, so it is not even an option. Even though I had pretty horrible birth experiences.
My births were actually not horrible in the sense of the actual birth procedure part of it. I had two planned c-sections, both of which went great and I recovered well from. I learned some things about planned c-sections...if anyone is preparing, here is what I recommend:
My births were horrible in the sense that all of my babies went straight from the OR to the NICU. I never held a baby right after birth, I never breastfeed a brand new baby (it was around 2 weeks post-birth for each of them, I pumped in the meantime), I never came home from the hospital with a baby, which was....VERY tough.
My twins, Ben and Lily, were premies, due to preeclampsia that hospitalized me on bedrest for a month before they were born at 31 weeks. Ava was a full term baby, but was born with Presistent Pulmonary Hypertension in the Newborn (PPHN). I thought premies were tough. A very ill baby who is hooked to more and more machines as her body tried to make the switch over from being in the womb to being out of the womb, who was extremely close to dying in the 2-3 days after birth before she finally turned the corner, well...that made premies look easy.
I REALLY enjoyed and appreciated seeing Mark Sloan discuss PPHN in his book Birth Day, as it was always hard for me to explain to people what having a baby with PPHN was like. The phrases "stuck in fetal mode," "caught in a trap," "up and down pattern" were exactly what Ava experienced as a baby with PPHN. Like the baby Dr. Sloan talks about in his book, Ava narrowly escaped being placed on the last resort effort of ECMO and her life was saved by the medication nitric oxide. She turned her corner on Mother's Day, 6 days after she was born.
It has always been amazing to me that any of my babies survived. And that I survived. Had we all been born just a couple of generations ago, it would not have been possible, not at all. It is a very different world of obstentical and neonatal medicine that exists today. And to the doctors that make that possible, I say thank you very much.
This post was inspired by the book Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D., which the Silicon Valley Moms Group bloggers are discussing today for our book club. (Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for review.)
Being a work-at-home-mom, it seems like I should be able to just throw a load in a couple of times a day, get it dried and folder and put away, while I'm on a conference call or making dinner. Easy, right? Right?....Nope.
I shut the door regularly to our laundry room. It's a good thing we remodeled our house before we had kids. When we moved into our house 6 years ago, we had a galley kitchen and the washing machine and dryer were right next to the stove (bonus counter space!). Alas, there was no storage...and no door to shut. We created a laundry room and all I have to say about that is Thank God.
There are constantly stacks and piles of dirty laundry, clean laundry, folded laundry. The washing machine and dryer seem to always be on (in fact, I can hear it. Right. Now.) Sometimes I forget about a load for a few days and have to rerun it. I feel GREAT when I can actually get it all done - usually before we are leaving for a trip or having houseguests or a party - but the feeling of doneness is so very fleeting. Because the second I swoosh the last drawer closed, there comes 3 sets of muddy footprints and accompanying muddy pants and socks scooting down the hall, there comes an accident from little Ava (Yay! She's potty trained!...mostly), there comes the dress-up princesses who have spilled chocolate milk down their fronts, there are Jeff's socks which for some unknown reason he leaves under the couch pillows while relaxing to Jimmy Fallon late at night, there comes ME who has been pretty good at working out on a daily basis lately, so much have clean Lululemon pants for tomorrow.
Michael Miller's book "What happened to the girl I married?" includes an entire section on laundry. Yes, it sounds a lot like a rant at times (see above rant for an example), but here's the thing - it's TRUE! This guy (a Silicon Valley executive) took a year to spend in his wife shoes as a stay-at-home-parent and one of his first "chores" (as he calls them at first, before realizing the error of his ways) is to improve the process of the laundry. He, like many of us I believe, found himself defeated, defeated by the laundry.
My husband and I have tried similar process improvements. Ala Fly Lady - do one load of laundry a day. Simple! Right? Nope, nope, nope. Too much going on. Pulled in too many directions. Priorities - everything is a priority. And sometimes, for the laundry, I just have to simply close the door.
Original Me Too You post. This post is part of the July book club for Silicon Valley Moms Group, discussing What happened to the girl I married? by Michael Miller. Read other book club posts here.
Vblogging, it is all the rage, don't you know?
I haven't done much of it (yet...), but today I got together with a few of the moms from Silicon Valley Moms Group to shoot the new series of episodes sponsored by Yahoo! and shot by The Go To Mom and her awesome crew that will be aired in a few weeks, featuring moms talking about different issues. Some will be very funny, some will have constructive advice, some will raise awareness about issues. I am pretty excited about it.
Here's a photo, taken by Jill Asher, co-founder of Silicon Valley Moms Group, of Myrna and Sheila, my cohorts in our video shoot today on Children and Technology. (We were all tweeting the shoot...one of the episodes is on Twitter, by the way, featuring @janemaynard and @techmama.) The garden setting, the cozy atmosphere, the professional crew, the munchies - it was all good.
I was a little bummed to have to leave right when my twin mom friends Akemi and Linda (from @geminicrickets) and Bonggamom showed up to shoot an episode about Twins: Separate or Together for School. It would have been fun to hang out with them and hear what they had to say. Oh well, I will need to plan better next time for more babysitter time...
Outlets a-plenty at the PBS Super Why event with Silicon Valley Moms Blog bloggers
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a great event with fellow bloggers from Silicon Valley Moms Blog to learn about the Super Why show from PBS. After wining and hor-dourving (loved those sliders) in the courtyard of the Stanford Park Hotel in Menlo Park, we headed up to a conference room equipped with wireless access and electrical outlets at every table (thank-you-very-much-PBS-you-understand-bloggers). My kids have watched Super Why a few times over the past 6 months and love it, so I am familiar with the show. It was really cool to be able to sort of go behind the scenes with PBS to find out what goes into making a kids show. Below were the highlights for me. We were also given a bit of "homework" to take home and report back on, which I will get to....sometime next week I hope.
PBS sees parents as partners. They are always looking for ways to extend the show and the learning into real life and to get kids' parents involved with the learning. Rather than "just watch the show while I make dinner/fold laundry/do a work conference call/surf Facebook" and then it is over, PBS tries to suggest to the kids that they ask their parents to do some activity which then extends the learning in the show. I have seen this in action many times - for instance, after my kids watched Curious George's real life experiment segment on freezing water into ice (which come after the cartoon part), my kids asked me if they could put water in cups and add rocks, cheerios, etc. and freeze it). PBS knows that when parents work with kids outside of injesting the media, it works that much better. I really like this concept - it is one of the reasons why my kids have been in a parent particiaption preschool (and why I am president of the board there this coming year!). I truly believe that a parent's involvement and interest in their child's education can make up for almost any other negative factor (large class size, no funding for extra-curricular activities like art or drama, whatever).
PBS always starts with a need - literacy, science, technology, engineering, math - and then asks what are the precursors for those skills? But PBS also thinks about the whole child. Academic is one part, but social, emotional, and physical development is also part of it. SuperWhy is a great example of this - while the show is very focused on literacy, social and emotional lessons are also built into every episode.
Angela Santomero, creator, head-writer and producer of Super Why (she also created Blue's Clues), told us that the Super Why show's beginnings came from the thesis she wrote for her Masters degree in Education. (An aside: Angela also related that her two girls have inspired her to write about girl empowerment (for instance, in one episode of Super Why Rapunzel lets HERSELF down)). She loves Mister Rogers (yes! those sweaters and sneakers!) and her research in children and television was fascinating. It starts with simple relationships: kids who watch Mr. Rogers share better, kids who watch Sesame Street learn, kids who watch Power Rangers kick/engage in activity. The quesiton was: can we use the medium of TV to make reading cool and bridge the gap? A great tidbit was that when Fonzi took out a library card on Happy Days, library cards went up 500% by teenagers - wow, talk about making reading cool.
More to come with our SuperWhy homework...
This is not a paid for post. Copyright 2009 Me Too You/Linsey Krolik.
High school was, for me, a period of time when I felt absolutely invinceable. I will never forget one New Year's Eve that I told my parents that I was going to my friends house and my friend told her parents that I was going to her house. Instead, we hopped on a bus to Denver for the night, which was about 45 minutes away from where we lived in Boulder. We met all kinds of people, went some random places...and missed our bus back home. We had $20 to our name and were able to find a motel room to spend the rest of the night (about 4 hours) in. There were cockroaches in the bathroom, it was in a bad part of town, it was...kind of creepy. When we awoke the next morning and got ready to leave, we looked around for the room keys. They were found as we exited - they were IN the keyhole, OUTSIDE the room. Talk about unsafe.
As I read the book Testimony by Anita Shreve, I was reminded how stupid teenagers can be, how flippant they can be with their lives. I was lucky - this incident didn't end in tragedy. Oh, and I DID get caught by my parents. It was the one and only time I was ever grounded by my parents. (Not that I didn't do other things in high school that were ground-worthy, but they used the guilt method of discipline for the most part.)
This post is part of Silicon Valley Moms Group's book club for June. Join in the discussion on DC Metro Moms Blog and read what others have to say about the book.
