Things that were said, in all seriousness, in a meeting I attended today (a selection).

"Let's start with the purpose and ramify down."

"I don't think we need to get super-formalistic."

"We need to language this."

"There will be two baskets of operationalization of it."

...who talks like that?!

HOPE

Yesterday I was driving along when I noticed a man in the car next to me gesticulating wildly. He held up a finger, and then a thumb, and nodded at me and grinned. I thought over my bumper stickers - Obama, Creative Commons, ACLU...what did he mean with the gesticulating?

And then, of course, I got it. One more day.

I rolled down my window at the next light. "I can't wait!" I yelled over to him, with a big grin.

"One more and out the door!" he replied, and drove off smiling.

I love that since Obama was elected, I have had many of these moments. Strangers, stopping to comment or smile. The day after the election, a man outside the grocery store asked me, "How ya doing?" and I told him, "Better than I've been for the last eight years," and we smiled at each other.

Despite Rev. Warren giving the invocation, this is a great day. My heart is full.

Global citizenry

Squid and I went to the San Francisco protest against Israel's actions in Gaza today. We didn't make signs or chant, just added to the throng, but it was good to go. I have been feeling very helpless about the whole thing - and I am, I mean, what can I do, but this was something, so I did.



Squid enjoyed it all from his backpack, chatting with the people handing out socialist literature about airplanes and charming the ambulance drivers parked nearby into flashing the lights for him and giving us a tour of the back of the ambulance. We talked a little bit about how the people were angry and sad, and how we were there to tell people who were hurting other people that we didn't like that and we wanted them to stop. There were counter-protesters across the street, and we talked about how not all people agree about what is right.

We hit the playground at the park where the rally was being held for fifteen minutes or so near the end, when he'd burnt out on walking around. There were some parents there teaching their three-year-old to chant, "Free! Free Palestine!" But I don't teach the Squid to chant or make him carry signs. He can make up his own mind about the issues when he gets older, though of course I won't be shy about sharing my opinions with him. I bring him with me because I want to model engagement for him, to show him that it's important to be informed and active in causes you care about. It's part of being a global citizen.

I'd like to model something more meaningful than rallies for him, but I'm still trying to figure out where and what volunteering and/or activism fits in to my life. And he's young enough that I have time to figure it out. In the meantime, this was good.

New Year resolve

This year I made a nice amorphous resolution - I know, against all the conventional wisdom about what makes them effective, but I had my reasons - to push myself a little more. I imagined that this would take a million small forms - writing more, exercising more, volunteering more, taking small risks, stepping outside of my bubble a little. And yesterday I met up with a long-lost friend (thanks, Facebook!) and had a really nice time reconnecting. We told each other our narratives of the last fifteen-odd years, and laughed, and found that we still like each other. It was good to reach out like that - that's one kind of push.

But David had a lot of great things to say about what he's doing with his life and how he's seeing things that made me realize - out is not the only kind of push. More is not the only kind of push. Maybe pushing can also be to slow down. To pay attention to what I'm already doing. I'm not sure how I might do that yet - there is so much more I want to do, after all, and I am not good at seeing stillness as progress - but it's a thought that I hadn't quite had in quite that way before, and a good one to take into the coming year, as I navigate all the ways I can manifest my resolution.

Squidbits from two years, ten months

The initial shock of the threeness is wearing off, and we are all enjoying one another again. The challenges are challenging, natch, but there's so much growth going on too that it can't help but be exciting.

Christmas was a blast - we had the whole neighborhood over on Christmas Eve, and he rioted with the other kids in a way he's never quite managed before. Sometime in the last two months, since he saw them at Halloween, he tipped over that "big kid" line, and now the three and four year olds accept him as one of them. The amount of destruction four kids can cause to a home is stupendous, can I just say? I cleaned up after them, and I swear they managed to dismantle and scatter every single multi-part toy in the house. I'm just glad we left the Legos until next year.

He made a beeline for the tree on the morning of, but only managed a few presents before deciding he needed to play with his new cars. That's fine. We all had a lovely Christmas - and then I woke up the next day so cranky nobody in the family could stand to be around me and have been recuperating ever since. No, I don't know why. It just happens sometimes. And the holidays - with their chain of multiple days spent in the house with everyone - create a cabin fever that doesn't help. We've been trying to get out to museums, the library, parks, train rides, gyms, or whatever we can to help with the stir-craziness, mine as well as his.


Squid at the Children's Museum

I can't remember what he was doing the other day - something during a diaper change, kicking or wiggling or something, and I told him to cut it out. He looked at me solemnly and asked, "Does it make you nuts?" Which is both hilarious and shaming, because that's totally what I say to him when he is driving me crazy - "Stop that, it's making me nuts!" Things that make me nuts: clinging to my legs when I am trying to walk; asking for food and then not eating it; shoving things in my face repeatedly; breaking down in whiny sobs at the very mention of some disfavored thing, regardless of whether or not it will actually be foist upon one, collapsing bonelessly in public when we need to go somewhere and refusing to move...oh, toddler.

I was apologizing to him in the library for having been so crabby, and I said to him, "Mommy's having a hard time today." "No, Mommy," he said. "You not having a hard time. You want to read the garbage truck book again. You happy, Mommy." If only flat contradiction of reality actually worked. That would be awesome.

His bossypants is in full swing, too. I get told what to do a lot. As do the dogs. As does Himself. As do all our houseguests. We were in the bedroom sorting laundry a few days ago and Himself was, for reasons known only to him, entertaining himself by poking me in the butt every time I turned around. "Cut it out!" I said to him.

"It's okay, he can't see," Himself said. (The Squid was playing in the bathroom, just out of sight.)

"I don't care if he can see," I said. "I care that you are poking my butt."

There was a brief moment of total silence, and then a curly brown head popped out from behind the bathroom door. "You poke Mommy's butt, Daddy? That not good, alright? You have a time out!"


Squid explains the inner workings of a combine harvester

He's getting good at fiction and pretend. He turns random items into spaceships that go "up up up into spaaaace! Blast off!" and then go to the garage and...do something with compost, I don't know. There was a story about a fish, a yellow fish, driving an airplane. He tells me about long dreams about combine harvesters and balers that go fast and go into space. He sings songs about rice, and astronauts, and driving in the car. He has enough narrative ability to be able to tell me stories about what happened at preschool, now with some causal links, though the veracity of the stories is always in question. ("Poppy hit me an' Samantha frustrated. I have a time out." may be something that happened weeks earlier that he's still working through, or a reverse story in which he hit Poppy, or a combination of the two, or something else entirely.)

He also knows what rebar is for ("it make concrete fwexible an' strong"), which is my favorite piece of information to make him recite for other adults. I mean, I didn't teach it to him as a party trick - he picked it up from reading one of our books - but I think it's fascinating that he remembers. I've been doing more and more explaining to him at a high level, because so much of it sticks that I am constantly amazed. I explained to him yesterday on the train that the Doppler effect is the name for what a constant sound does as it moves closer and further away from the listener (okay, slightly inaccurate, but I do simplify somewhat). He didn't pick up on that, precisely, but he can now make the noise of a train passing by - nyoowwww! - and identify it as the Doppler effect. Smart little dude. He likes to read books that have big chunks of text now, and he really listens and understands what is being said.

Like I said, an exciting time.


Squid in the cockpit of a 747 at the Aviation Museum

And now for some only tangentially related observations I wrote down a few months ago and never posted:

I think I kind of horrified another mother at the Squid's preschool when he was first starting. He was in tears as I walked out the door (Nooo, Mommy! Don' wanna go preschool!) and she looked at me sympathetically and said, "That's so hard. The first few weeks I used to drop mine off and then go cry in the car!"

I shrugged. "Well, you know, we're used to it. We have dogs."

She looked at me like I was insane.

"I mean, my dog has separation anxiety, too." I tried to explain, but she started to sort of edge away from me and got in her car quickly. Apparently Good Mothers do not equate their children with their dogs in polite conversation.

But it's true! Dogs really do prepare you for kids.

You learn, for example, that if you come back in and soothe and cuddle and reassure your small being when they are distraught about you leaving that this will actually encourage the behavior and that it will get worse over time. If you say goodbye to them firmly and leave like it's no big deal, after a while, they will learn to be more matter-of-fact about your departures and arrivals. You learn about regular mealtimes, arranging for caretaking ahead of time, and getting up in the middle of the night. You learn that it's more important to be consistent than almost anything, because nothing trains faster than random reinforcement, so giving in "every once in a while" is the worst thing you can do. You learn that physical attention is just as important as mental attention.

And let me tell you, our house? Halfway kid-proofed way before we had a kid. All of our furniture is leather or wood, easy to clean up after spills. All of our floors are wood, because pet hair and stains ruin carpet faster than anything. All of our garbage cans are tall and have tight-fitting lids to prevent rummaging. Almost everything we own is machine-washable because of the pet hair. We stopped leaving the toilet seat up years ago. Sure, we had to put in electrical socket covers, cabinet locks, and doorknob covers once he started crawling, but that was it.

People told me before I had a kid, "oh, kids are nothing like dogs." Which is true! Dogs are smarter than kids, for the first couple of years, at least. And then kids grow up, and dogs don't, and the balance shifts. The differences are legion. This doesn't mean that dogs aren't great prep for the advent of a kid. Because after years of dealing with dogs, a little spit-up and some newborn diapers are like, nothing. I would tell you about the things I've had to deal with with my dogs over the years, but you might be eating as you read this, and I don't want to put you off your food.

Cats don't really prepare you for kids. Too self-sufficient. Fish, rodents, and most birds neither, though some of the larger parrots would be good prep. Horses, no, goats and sheep and rabbits, no. But dogs - dogs are the closest thing you can get to kids before actually, you know, having kids yourself. I'm trying to find the article I'm remembering that said that the best predictor of the childcare labor split in couples with pets was the petcare labor split - which has certainly been true in our case - but I can't find it, so it may have just been one of my crackpot theories.

Of course, this is just me. We did not do attachment parenting, or anything like that, and I am a more boring and rules-oriented parent than I had thought or hoped I would be (I had to give up on drawing with him this morning because I got all freaked out about how he was losing the pens and caps, instead of just letting him, you know, make a mess and create stuff). And maybe if we have another kid that kid will react horribly to all the parenting techniques we've used on the Squid, and I will have to scrap this whole idea altogether. This is just how it looks from here, right now, though that disclaimer could go on pretty much anything I write, pretty much anytime.


The many faces of Squid