Taking the Scenic Route

not sure about that “total joy to be around” thing,  but the rest of it is pretty accurate.  I took the “What age do you act?” quiz floating around on some of the blogs in my ring, and it was 10 years off, but I am not telling anyone which way.  lol.

Some photos I wanted to share of Zane’s cousin Gabe.  (technically second cousin, but Zach and Kaz, Gabe’s mom, were as close as siblings growing up).  Gabe’s dad sent us some photos and said it was fine for us to put them up, and so I am excited to share a few pictures.  They live on the west coast, so I assume this isn’t a vacation, but just a weekend at the beach this December. 

Gabe & Jesse, his Dad

It looks like Zane & Gabe share a love of trains!

I can’t wait to get our guys together again some day! 

The last time they were together we all looked like this:

Jessie and I are in the back, Kaz & Zach in the middle, with Gabe (5 months) and Zane (2 weeks) in front

Wow, that was a while ago….look how itty bitty those boys are.

Went out to my folks last night.  Zach spent the evening showing Dad how to work a program on the computer.  They picked up some pizzas for supper, which Zane was really happy about.  Zane had a lot of fun playing with Grandma.  He messed around on the piano for a while  (with Grandma clapping during the pauses in the ‘concert’), and spent a lot of time with ballons, and ballown sting.  Mom has the helium tank we used for Zach’s graduation party stored in the front room (more formal living room and dining room combo) where we had Zane playing and we blew up a bunch of balloons with partial helium/partial air.  That made them more floaty, but not “got to the ceiling” floaty so you could hit them and they moved in slow motion.

On my list of things so absurd that I like them.  “Darth Tater” is being released this spring.  This is an actual toy.  I heard about it but thought it was a joke until I went to the Star Wars site. 

He better watch where he puts that lightsaber or he could end up a pile of French Fries.

eta:  Does this make Luke & Leah Tater Tots?

Interesting article in an Indian paper (India Indian, not Native Americans)  They have discovered a way to make fuel from plastics.  Two major environmental concerns addressed at once….really neat stuff!

Converting plastic waste into petrol!

This is an amazing discovery and a great thing, unless of course you want to continue a war for oil.  I wonder why we haven’t heard about this discovery here in the U.S.?

Shopping

No luck on the table quest yet.  We did find a really good deal on a table at Dillards, of all places, but it is just plain not our style.  It was the floor sample and was fairly banged up, but that didn’t really bother me too much for the price because it will look fairly banged up in short order anyway.  However, it was a set with butt-pinching fan back chairs.  I don’t really like that style of chairs anyway, but if ever there was a style of chair that was consistently uncomfortable, that would be it.  In the hundreds of chairs my tush has test driven the last year, I can remember ONE that wasn’t horrible.  If only there were the perfect mission style, medium stained cherry table with large comfy chairs in our price range.  *sigh*

We did score some deals on a few winter items at Old Navy.  Zach got 2 zip front fleece jackets for $4/each and a $3 black sweater.  I got a pair of yoga pants and a matching jacket on sale too.  I think it was the first time we have ever gone there and gotten stuff for us and not Zane, but Zane has plenty of clothes right now and we have almost nothing that isn’t ripped or stained.

You know, we used to love browsing around stores.  Not neccessarily buying anything, but just hanging out. Not true anymore..  About an hour into it Zach gets this look on his face that just screams “I would do anything to own a transporter right now”.  I hope he starts liking it again someday, I miss that.

A serious dress code

So, is there a dress code for that “actor’s studio” show?  I have flipped past it a lot of times and have never seen any one wear anything but black on the show.  Maybe it is to create the illusion that they are *serious* people doing *serious* work in a *serious* industry so they wear *serious* clothes, which is of course, *serious* black.   They look seriously uncreative for “creative” people.

Quest for a new table

Our table is teetering on disaster.  It certainly has a right, my parents bought it when they did the kitchen remodel in the early 80s.   We have been looking at buying new table for well over a year now, but this week we got a little more serious.  Every day when I dropped Zach off at the school for class, I would go visit a various stores with furniture to see if they had a table in a lower price range. 

The fact I went shopping, by myself, with a three year old in warehouse furniture stores should tell you how much we need a table.  Every table I was interested in, I sat down in the chair to see if it was comfortable for my ample tush.  (picture an elephant sitting on a coffee can for some of the chairs).  Every time I sat at a table, Zane pulled up a chair and started “eating” and would get rather upset with you if you got up too soon.  He also sat on couches and pretended to pick up a glass on the coffee tables and take a drink, and would have to put the cup back down before he would get up and move to the next table or couch.    My little OCD child would also go around pushing all the chairs in under the table and make sure there was nary an open door in the entire store.  However, that was simply a warm up for the “real” furniture stores.  The main difference between warehouse stores and fancy smancy stores is that warehouses have things set up in easy to manage rows, where as in the fancier stores everything is laid out in an impossible maze, with lots of breakables lining the path.  I guess the extra charge for the furniture is the finder’s fee paid for the delivery person to find the piece again…that, and breakage.

We still haven’t found a table.  There are two in the running right now, a granite top table with honey colored wood.  (love the top, seriously considering stripping re staining the wood if we get it). and a cherry looking modern looking sleeker table.  We might make the trek later today if we are feeling brave.

fun quote I found while looking at knitting sites on the net

“knitting is fundamentally a  binary code, featuring top-down design,
standardized sub-modules
and recursive logic that relies on ratios, mathematical principles,
and an intuitive grasp of three-dimensional geometry.”
Kim Salazar

Yesterday was the much anticipated Dr. Phil show with Dr. Bob Sears on it.  I really wish Dr. Sears had been able to speak a bit more on the topic of co-sleeping, but I really appreciated some of Dr. Phil’s commentary.  That Kranner guy, the seriously anti co-sleeping ‘expert’, came off as an angry little man.  He was so hostile towards children I can not imagine people actually agreeing with him, unless they share his view of children as manipulators.  I was shocked and pleased when Dr. Phil pointed out that co-sleeping has been the norm for hundreds of years, and is still the norm in non-Western culture.  It has only been a fairly recent invention in Western Society.  Kranners arguement was that you have to look at the communities value system…here we value independence and autonomy.  I don’t quite understand how that is a totally good thing.  Why is it wrong to value community and family as much as the individual? 

The message boards at Dr. Phil are rather interesting too.  People just have this persistent incorrect assumption that Attachement Parenting is the same thing as Permissive Parenting, and it is so untrue.  I wish Dr. Phil would do a show that explained AP as a concept, because people really have the wrong idea.  AP is about following you child’s cues so you can enable them to make honest developmental leaps when they are ready instead of when it convinenet for the parent.  For instance, it would be really convient and make my life easier if Zane was potty learned.  It would be cheaper and, in theory, less laundry.  (I say ‘in theory’ because at this point, that wouldn’t be true…I would just be washing clothes and sheets instead of diapers).  He is just not ready yet, even though I WANT him to be ready. 

People have this idea that if you take your baby to bed they will never leave.  Why would they think that?  I already notice ds is starting to desire to get to sleep on his own in his own room every once in a while, and I follow that cue.  He isn’t ready yet to do that full-time, but there is a subtle, gradual increase of it and I never force him one direction or the other (take him to be when he isn’t interested, or vise versa).  Granted, kids are different, but I imagine that all kids, given a stable and nurturing environment, are going to naturally make that transition.  How many 16 yo have any interest in sleeping with mom & dad every night…it just doesn’t happen (unless there is another issue of which co-sleeping is a symptom). 

And people also have entirely the wrong idea of anti-Cry It Out.  Cry-It-Out refers specifically to a method of getting a child to sleep, not to daytime interactions.  A CIO family beleives that a young child should just ‘deal with it’ and plop them in a crib and leave them.  A child in that family ‘learns to sleep’ by crying until they are so exhausted they pass out.  I honestly don’t remember Zane ever crying at bedtime as an infant.  (there are some short tears of protest as he has gotten older when I say ‘time for bed’, but they usually only last while he grumpily walks from his room to our room, if that even)  Bedtime was not really any different than any other time…he nursed, but he was tired so he fell asleep.  When he was really little, we would then lay him on a pallet we made up on the floor a few feet from us so that if he woke up, we were right there.  When he had consistently stayed asleep for several hours, we began to lay him down in the bed when he fell asleep, and then, after a while, we began to have an actual bedtime routine where he falls asleep in the bed.  He is now at the very begininning of wanting to fall asleep in his own bed every once in a while, but I suspect it will be a gradual transition, just like everything else.  (I remember the time somebody asked me when he night weaned, and I laughed because I had no idea….I could point to a vent several months earlier where I vented at the frustration of him always needing to nurse at night, but the change happened so gradually that I missed exactly when the final step occured)

anti Cry – It – Out does not mean I never want to hear my children cry.  I still see crying as primarly a form of communication, and a release of emotions, and don’t see it as him trying to manipulate me.  When he cries because he has not gotten something he wants (basically, a tantrum), instead of dismissing him, I realize that for my ds, a large part of it is because he doesn’t have the words to express how he is feeling, so I help him find some words if I am pretty sure I know what is going on.  (i.e.  :  It sounds like you are really mad because you can’t go outside right now…it is hard to wait, isn’t it…it makes you feel really mad inside when you can’t have something you want..ect.)  By giving him the words to express himself, he calms down a lot sooner because he knows he has been heard and knows his feelings matter.  It dosn’t mean he is going to get his way, it just means it is ok to be upset about it and we need to learn how to handle dissapointment and anger in appropriate ways.  It does NOT mean that we will give them their way to avoid tears…far from it.   There are, of course, overly permissive parents in AP, just like there are overly dictorial parents in Babywise, but those parents represent the extreme ends of both styles, and both are harmful to children, IMO. 

And the times when he is crying because he is hurt, emotionally or physically, I comfort him, the same way I comfort my spouse, my friends, or my parents when they are upset and crying.  Crying is the appropriate response to emotional overload at times.  It isn’t something I can ‘fix’, but I can be there for them.  I wouldn’t abandon them when they were upset, why would I do that to a child who has even less abilty to handle to onslaught of emotions?  By responding to ds’s cries, I am teaching him not only that I am there for him, but how to be there for other people…developing empathy for people’s pain.

Somebody sent me this link describing a Harvard study in reguards to cry-it-out and other attachment parenting issues that I found interesting.  Harvard University Gazzette