Bad car, ma

We've had the worst car karma this entire calendar year so far. Cars crashed by "friends" and strangers, cars broken down. . . The front of our house is starting to look like a wrecking yard. Please put a good word in to the car gods for us. We need this trend to reverse itself. Or, solution pictured?

Dander zone

You know you need to plan a serious intervention when your baby gets snowed on as you lean over him for a little bit of coo-nversation--you know that infant-mama back-n-forth? I saw the dander falling on my baby's perfect skin as I smiled at him from above and thought, oh no. This dandruff problem I have is out of hand. And guess what. I gave into a TV ad and got myself some Head & Shoulders shampoo. (They should be paying me for this.) In the shower, still with the foam in my hair, I became the girlfriend handing her boyfriend the shampoo with a disapproving face and simultaneously her man closing the shower curtain and reappearing with a huge smile and a smooth scalp. Surely enough, the shampoo worked instantly! I mean, where did all those truckloads of dandruff go (besides on my baby's belly)? It's truly a mystery. I'm a convert now. Head & Shoulders is pure magic at work.

Awkward

This is the awkward stage when I still look five months pregnant, my boobs are big enough to feed an army of babes, and my hormones are wreaking havoc on what used to be a head of thick, luscious hair. Ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid I'm going irreversibly bald. Will you still love me in a wig?

Wordiac

At 24 months, the average toddler is supposed to know between 50 and 75 words which the child is beginning to string together into two-word verb-noun "sentences" such as "baby sleep" and "want milk." Well, my daughter is way ahead of time, as you can see here. Yesterday she asked her dad, "What time is it? Is it six o'clock?"

There is a girl at her daycare who is about three months older than my daughter. Our daycare provider always raves about how this little half-white, half-Asian girl knows her ABCs, children's songs, and now her shapes. Anisa knew all of that when she turned two as well... besides the shapes. Maybe I'm overly paranoid or hypersensitive, but my half-black and half-white girl is as smart and equally verbal as the other girl, and my fear is that the daycare provider, who is otherwise kind, generous and loving, does not see that because of my daughter's race. I worry that at age two she is already being underestimated as a learner.

This possibility has inspired a strange reaction in me. I'm thinking about the long road ahead of us on which we may be forced to prove others' assumptions about our daughter's intelligence wrong. I am noticing around me the manifestations and defiances of the myth of white superiority, Asian model minority and Black inferiority. I have never been a drill sergeant-type mama; I never felt the need with my white son. So, I hardly recognize myself already starting to feel protective of my mixed-race daughter. I'm seeing how bias, albeit unconscious, could hold her back in the future and I'm feeling the urge to compensate for this. Should I be more deliberate and structured about her learning, already at age 2, than I ever was with my white son who is about to turn 10? Should I start teaching her some explicit lessons besides casually teaching her words in Czech? For instance, teach her the names of shapes and the sounds of letters which is not something I worked on with my son at this young age because, since he is white, the thought of having to prove anything about his capabilities to anyone had never occurred to me? I wouldn't want to do this to burden her. We would have to have fun as we do this--my criterion. But it somehow feels important to arm her with quantifiable knowledge for the long road ahead. Is that what King's father was thinking when he and his son embarked on Learning Time with Daddy?

My 3yr is a whiz kid. Is your Three year old on this? and he just turned 3#father#power#eachoneteach2
Posted by Donald Hill on Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Rotten

I just discovered some rotten baby spit up in my infant's neck folds. No knowing how long this moist residue has been there. Am I a bad mama?

How long?

How long is it going to take for my belly to deflate?

Growing up

My oldest son is suddenly so grown up. He has his own cell phone, and instead of pooping, he talks about taking a huge dump.

Blame game

Yesterday marked a milestone. I discovered my daughter drew on our outdoor bench with a pen while I wasn't looking. I told her that's not okay, that she should only draw on paper, which she knows well. In response, she said: "Písi bratr" which in Czech kid language means, "Brother wrote it."

Can you believe it? Already trying to blame her brother and she is not even two yet? We're in for a real adventure ahead.

Smiles

Solomon has started to smile at people. His smiles are no longer indicative of just gas incidents or other digestive moments. He is beginning to interact. Happy day!

Filter me this

How is it that by my son's age, my sister and I had developed such refined filters. By nine we definitely thought before we spoke. Our main objective when speaking with relatives was not to offend anyone in the family and to preserve a sense of harmony. This was instilled us so strongly, yet my parents' childrearing style was so loose and liberal. We never got spanked or punished, but we were very polite and thought carefully about what we say and how we behave. My son, on the other hand, has a very feeble filter, if I can even call it a filter. He doesn't have much of a concept of how others may perceive what he says. Two examples from today:

I was driving all three of my kids in a highly unreliable car. He knows the car has issues and is a little sketchy to drive. The baby was starting to cry, and my almost-two-year-old was starting to whine and scream in irritation as well, which always makes me frantic behind the wheel. When I started singing "If You're Happy and You Know It," he corrected me, saying there is only one way to sing the song in correct order. I responded that pretty much anything can be inserted in the blank in the song, sort of like in the game Simon Says. And then my son joked about how he could insert a line that says to crash the car. Yikes! How would he not realize that's not a funny, but a stress-inducing thing to even put out there.

The other example from today would be that when he found a basketball on his bed which I had given to him as a surprise present, he immediately questioned whether it was new because of discoloration he had noticed on it. He argued that the ball must be used which irked me mainly because he kept arguing and not listening to what I knew to be true, and what he said seemed judgmental, like he wasn't appreciating the present.

How can it be that his politeness filter is so underdeveloped when I constantly model empathy and when we talk about impact of words and actions quite a bit. Is he just not very emotionally mature? Is it the larger societal context in which he is growing up? I just don't understand.