Attack of the Plastic Princesses

I never made a conscious list, but if you’d asked me what kind of mom I’d be before I had kids, I would have said:

-My children would play primarily with non-toxic, sustainably harvested wooden toys.

-I would nurse every child until at least age 1.

-Organic fruits and veggies would be part of every meal (after age 1).

-Cloth diapers only!

-My children would not watch videos — or anything on a screen — until at least age 2.

-Disney princesses, Barbies, and any other plastic characters hawked by ginormous toy companies with questionable ethics would NOT be part of our family culture!

Now, to be fair to myself, I did do a few of those things…for the first year of our first child’s life. But somehow, three years later, Barbie has taken over our house.

More accurately: the Disney princesses wore down our resolve, and Barbie was the second line of attack.

It’s still a mystery to me HOW Fiona first became obsessed with the Disney princesses. You may be thinking: “You don’t KNOW? Where were you? Weren’t you watching?!?” All I can say is: Yes, I was watching, but I still don’t know. What I do know is that — despite the fact that I’d never bought her anything Disney, never knowingly exposed her to anything Disney — a few months before Fiona turned 2 it was like a switch flipped on in her brain and suddenly it was ALL about Disney princesses. Almost exactly one year later, the Barbie switch flipped on. As younger sisters, Campbell and Georgia never had a chance of avoiding the obsession.

Of course, nobody really had a chance of avoiding the obsession, and I was naive if I thought that this was something I could control. One mom vs. the combined force of Disney and Mattel: sounds like a pitch for the next Michael Moore documentary (Mike, call me). Maybe, maybe if we never left the house, I could have shielded them from the pervasive marketing of these two companies. Because this is how I think the switches in Fiona’s brain were flipped: all it took was one trip to Target — or, for that matter, the grocery store, where today she noticed Barbie mouthwash. And we don’t even go shopping very often, but the girls can (and do) check out Disney/Barbie books and DVDs from the public library.

It’s a humbling business, this parenting. Could I have fought against the marketing that spurred Fiona’s insatiable desire for anything Disney princess/Barbie? Could I have sat her down and said, “In our house, we don’t play with these things?” Of course I could have.

Did I? No, I did not.

And sometimes, I feel guilty about that decision. But mostly I’m okay with it.

Why? Well, first of all I’m not convinced that Disney princesses and Barbies pose an inherent danger to my children. I’m aware that they’re not the most intellectually enriching toys — although they certainly keep the girls engaged in imaginary play for hours — but it’s not as if these are the only toys or books available in our house. I do recall a big brouhaha over Barbie dolls some years before I had kids; I believe the debate centered around the (valid) accusation that Barbie dolls provided young girls with unhealthy body images and shallow role models. I’m also fairly certain that, if I scratched the surface, I could come up with numerous ethical concerns attached to both Disney and Mattel companies. I could easily look both of these issues up online, but I haven’t, because I know what I’ll find: lots of loud opinions.

You could accuse me of moral laziness, and to some degree you’d be right. Especially when it comes to corporate ethics; I’d like to take ethics into account in everything I do, but frankly, I just don’t have the energy. I’m more than willing to boycott some obviously bad things, and write letters, and so on. But my first priority is to keep a household (mostly) afloat and relatively peaceful.

I’m also trying to equip my children to function in the big bad world out there, not subject them to some experiment in absolute moral purity — in the same way that I’d prefer to allow my kids to have chocolate and learn how to eat it in moderation, rather than ban sweets altogether. As for the morals of the Disney princesses and Barbie themselves: they’re certainly shallow, cliched, and unrealistic looking — plastic, in every sense. But if a 6-inch plastic toy is what my daughters are ultimately going to choose for their lifelong role model, there’s a lot more wrong in our house than the toys we play with. Furthermore, the stories that go along with these plastic princesses ultimately have to do with the power of love, friendship, and being true to yourself. And that I can work with.

The other reason I haven’t banned the plastic princesses from our lives is because, in the big scheme of things, any gains to be had from booting out Barbie don’t seem worth the ensuing battle. If my preschoolers love a certain toy (and they DO), and I don’t believe it’ll ruin their characters for life (and I don’t), then it’s not worth the fight. Some things are worth the fight, like sharing and washing your hands and keeping your underwear pulled up, and sometimes I feel like I’m fighting all day long. But who was it that said: “Tyranny breeds resentment”? (Just Googled it: turns out it was me, and a handful of online gamers. But nobody suitably quotable). I think that my kids will be more likely to respect my position in the bigger fights later on if they know that I’m selective but serious, rather than if they perceive me as wantonly denying them anything fun. You may ask: “But aren’t you worried that you’ve already lost control, and that they’ll be smoking crack outside the A & W at age 16 because you let them play with Barbies?” Absolutely. I’m worried about a lot of things, but only time will tell.

Here’s what I can control: the attitudes I model to my girls about Disney princesses and Barbies. So I don’t go overboard with enthusiasm when it comes to these toys. During Fiona’s Disney princess mania, I quietly steered her towards Pocahontas and Mulan, and she remarked, with admiration, that they were the “strongest” princesses. I have personally bought them almost nothing related to Disney princesses or Barbies; they have one tub of my old Barbies (Doesn’t recycling offset the ethical concerns?), and their grandparents supply the rest (and if parenting’s taught me anything about grace, it’s that you don’t muzzle the grandparents!). Never once have I said, “Hey, let’s play princesses/Barbies!”

But Erick and I still feel like Barbie has taken over our house.

POSTSCRIPT: Just so we’re good: I did not write this to justify myself, or, GOD FORBID, to suggest that anybody should go and do likewise. I wrote this because it’s something I’m right in the middle of, something I’m still struggling with. I wrote it to share, because I’m more and more convinced that the best thing we can do for each other as people – aside from babysitting each others’ children – is to share: that it’s hard, that it’s confusing, that we’re not the parents we expected to be, that if we hear the theme to “Barbie’s Fairy Secret” one more time we are going to LOSE IT! So please, feel free to share back. Feel free to completely disagree with me, and pass along any tips on how I can get this stuff out of the house without alienating my children forever!

Georgia Elizabeth Hope

Just about one year ago today, many of you received the following announcement:

Hello, friends & family!
We’re thrilled to announce the happy & healthy arrival of our third daughter, Georgia Elizabeth Hope Gong. Georgia was born on March 1, 2011. A typically tiny Gong girl, she measured in at 5 lbs, 8 oz and 18 inches long. Everyone’s doing well, and we’re all back home now. Fiona & Campbell are embracing their roles as big sisters. As the lone male in our family, Erick is planning on getting a male dog (a companion for long, QUIET walks in the woods) and a shotgun (for the teenage years).

We can’t wait for you all to meet Georgia!
With love & thanks,
The Gongs

A Word About the Name: Georgia’s first name comes from the song “Georgia on my Mind,” made most famous by Ray Charles. For some reason, Faith heard this song frequently throughout her pregnancy, and we thought it would make a pretty girl’s name! Upon looking into the song’s history, we also liked the fact that on March 7, 1979, in a mutual symbol of reconciliation after conflict over civil rights issues, Ray Charles performed it before the Georgia General Assembly. Georgia’s two middle names come from her two wonderful grandmothers, Elizabeth (Betty, Erick’s mother) and Hope (Faith’s mother).

It’s cliched, but it’s hard for us to believe that our third daughter is already one year old.

I find it more difficult to write about Georgia than about either of our other daughters. After all, the original Pickle Patch was started back when we just had Fiona, and it was TOTALLY focused on: Fiona. An entire blog about one little baby! Back then I had no difficulty documenting her every move. Perhaps one reason that this is harder to do for Georgia is that I just don’t have the time to pay attention. The sad fact: the more children you have, the less attention you can give to each of them. And the baby is, quite honestly, at the bottom of the pecking order. Everything they can do you’ve seen twice before, and their needs are more basic than the complex socio-emotional needs of the older siblings.

But I think it’s more than just a matter of my time. I think it’s also that, having seen two older children grow past babyhood, I realize how little we still know Georgia. When our older children were Georgia’s age, we extrapolated many things about their personalities and preferences that later turned out not to be true at all. You think that, as a parent, you know your children better than anybody else — and that may be accurate for a time, but the truth is that it’s very, very hard to really know another person. Even when it’s your own child. (Even when it’s yourself).

But this is about celebrating Georgia, and there is plenty to celebrate! Here’s what we DO know about Georgia at age 1:

-She is VERY loved, by every member of our family. Everybody wants to hold her, hug her, tickle her, and “help” her all the time.

-She is a trooper about being dragged around from place to place. This all started back when the poor kid was one month old and we lugged her cross-country to Vermont to find a place to live. Two months later, we moved her cross-country for good, and then proceeded to shuttle her around to all her sisters’ activities. No complaints from Georgia about any of this.

-She is NOT a trooper when it comes to physical discomfort. Unlike both of her sisters, who do a pretty good job bouncing back from falls, headbangs, and scrapes, Georgia will scream at the smallest bonk. And don’t even try to touch her neck, ever. A wee bit dramatic, this one.

-Also unlike both her sisters, she has four whole teeth at the age of one (they both got teeth much later), comforts herself by sucking on two fingers (neither sister did), and is crawling (neither sister crawled before walking).

-She loves: using chopsticks to simulate playing the drums, dancing, reading books that have little flaps to open, and pulling things out of anything.

-She has the best laugh in our entire family, hands down.

So, Happy First Birthday, Dear Georgia! We love you very much, and look forward to figuring out more about who you are as you continue to grow.

Back to the Start

Our second child is nothing if not confident. I don’t know where she gets it from — certainly not from emulating me. It’s like she was born knowing who she is, and being completely happy with that.

Recent example: Erick took the girls out on Saturday morning and had to cram them all into a small bathroom to change Georgia’s diaper. He set Campbell up on a table where she could see herself in the mirror, thinking that would keep her occupied. Did it ever! According to Erick, Campbell looked at herself in the mirror like she’d never seen herself before, gasped with pleasure, and said, “Daddy, I’m so PRETTY!”

And then this morning I took Campbell and Georgia to Open Gym. Open Gym is a great little thing that Middlebury does during the winter months: they open up the town gym (basically an old high school gymnasium) two mornings a week to preschoolers. There’s a closet filled with mats, hula hoops, basketballs, and toy cars for the kids to play with. It’s as close as you can get to an indoor playground, which is essential when the weather is blah.

Today at Open Gym, Campbell spotted a scooter; not just any scooter, but a PINK BARBIE SCOOTER. It looked kind of like this:

And because she is so confident and determined, and because that scooter was just so PINK and alluring, she hopped right on. Campbell is two years old, a SMALL two years old; the handlebars were about even with her head. But she grabbed on, and because she’d never scootered before, she started wiggling her butt around to make it move. Obviously, that didn’t work very well, so I tried to teach her how to push off with her foot and then pick it up so she could zoom.

It’s kind of a hard concept to master, but after a couple tries she got it! She’d push with her foot and lift it up just at the right time.

The only problem was that she was moving backwards.

And that, I couldn’t help her with. I was able to teach her how to move, but I couldn’t teach her how to go in the right direction.

But here’s the thing: she didn’t care. It didn’t matter to Campbell that she was putting in all this effort just to move backwards. She just wanted to MOVE, and any direction was the “right direction.” She was really, really pleased with herself. So Georgia and I applauded and cheered, and it was a fun little morning.

I think there are some lessons in there about life, and motherhood. (But right now I have to hunt down our “1” candle, because Georgia turns 1 tomorrow. We have a 2, two 3s, and a 4. I know we had a 1, because we used it twice in the past, but of course I can’t find it now. Fate of the third child.)

In Sickness and in Health…

Here’s a little insight into how I work: my sacred times of day are naptime (roughly 1-3 PM) and bedtime (after about 7:30 PM, depending on how long it takes the girls to unwind), and it’s during those times that I sit down at my laptop and write things for this blog. It’s also during those times that I clean the house, prep meals, and work on any other household projects. (And shower, although not very often). But lately, the thing I’ve been enjoying most is writing these posts. That may not be saying much when the other option is scrubbing toilets, but I truly love writing. I’ve always loved writing, but now that I’m home with three girls it feels particularly necessary. It feeds the creative part of my brain, as well as the adult conversation part of my brain — even if the conversation is one-sided most of the time. I suppose it’s kind of like writing in a journal. The “social media” aspect is nice, because I’ve never been much good on the phone, so this saves me having to make 50-some phone calls. But even if nobody read this blog, I’d still keep writing it.

Because my brain is usually dealing with about 50 things at one time, and maybe also because of pregnancy hormones (Georgia’s not one yet, I can still blame pregnancy hormones, right?), I really need to write things down right when I think of them. So that means that I have a lot of partially-completed drafts for this blog sitting around, waiting to be freed into the blogosphere. I was going to post one of the more generic drafts today. But then I decided to go ahead and be real. Because the truth is, it’s been a rough couple of weeks at Casa Gong.

As often happens in winter, there are a LOT of sicknesses going around here in Vermont. Thus far, we’ve been lucky; we even (knock on MacBook) managed to avoid the STOMACH BUG that was so bad they sent an email out to the entire Middlebury College community telling everyone to wash their hands. (Which made me chuckle; the only time Erick got those emails at Berkeley was when there was a bomb scare or an armed vigilante on campus). But this last bug got us, and it got us good.

It’s an upper respiratory thing, marked by a sore throat, post-nasal drip, a horrible cough, and loss of voice. I was Patient Zero. I don’t often get sick, because frankly I don’t have time. But this virus got me when my guard was down, because Erick’s parents were visiting. The first weekend they were here, Erick and his parents took all three girls to the aquarium in Burlington for FIVE HOURS, which meant that I had FIVE HOURS ALL TO MYSELF! The last time that ever happened was well before we moved to Vermont. So there I was, able to breathe normally for five hours, and my blood cells apparently just sat in their lounge chairs with beers and said, “Hey, let’s let this friendly-looking virus in!”

And then everybody else got it. Amazingly, this is the first time that every member of our family has been sick with the same thing. I’ve always heard about this happening, but it’s never happened to us — until now — because on the whole our family has been blessed with very good health. Which is something that I will never, ever take for granted again …for at least two weeks.

The three sick Gong girls with Granddaddy and Grandmommy at the end of their visit.

Here’s how the various members of our family get sick (in the order of sickness):

Me: I mostly just keep doing what I normally do, but I just feel extra sorry for myself. The problem is, I don’t have a good model for how to be a sick adult; growing up, I can’t ever remember my parents being sick. Certainly I can’t think of a single time when they took to their beds because of illness. The only exceptions: when my mother broke her pelvis falling off a ladder, and this past November when my father broke 2 vertebrae and 4 ribs falling off a ladder. My family is TOUGH, and if they’d just keep away from ladders, they’d probably live forever.

Georgia: Poor Georgia is like an adorable sick puppy dog. She doesn’t get fussy when she gets sick, she just snuggles up to you and moans. When she got sick this time, her eyes and nose got red and swollen and started oozing. Turned out she also had an ear infection, which is the first ear infection we’ve ever had in our family (knock on MacBook).

Fiona: Fiona loves the drama of being sick, so she kept reminding me throughout the day: “I still feel sick.” Unfortunately, this particular bug was just gross enough to keep her grumpy and home from school for a whole week, but not enough to wipe out her energy. So she was like regular Fiona, just grumpier and with frequent illness announcements.

Campbell: Campbell gets sick like me — she just denies it. “I’m NOT sick, Mommy!” she’d say. I’d take her temperature and it would be 102. “I’m okay!” she’d insist, “No medicine!”

Erick: Oh, Erick. When Erick gets sick, it completely takes him down. This time was no exception — he’s been the sickest of all of us. His cough is so bad that he can’t sleep at night. And, as I type this, he has not been able to speak for four days. Which is a huge problem because this past week was the first week of classes, so he had to teach with no voice. Then he’d come home from work and, after the girls were in bed, we’d sit at our laptops and Google chat about how the day was. Really.

It’s been bad. And hard. And I’ve been grumpy because, as the first one to get sick, I was also the first one to get well…just in time to take care of everyone else. The highlight of my Wednesday was (I’m not kidding) walking down the driveway to bring in the trash bins, because that was the only time I got to leave the house.

What I’ve realized: I’m not very sympathetic when my family gets sick. This kind of surprises me, because I like to think of myself as a compassionate person. I want there to be more justice and peace in this world, I like helping people when they need it, and I try to make my life about loving my neighbor as myself. But then my kids and husband get sick, and I get…grumpy. Why is that? Why is it always so much harder to love the neighbors who live in your house than to love the neighbors who live next door? Maybe it’s because my parents never got sick when I was a kid (although my mom certainly took great care of ME when I got sick), so I never grew up having to be sympathetic to sick family members. Maybe I have trouble understanding why other people can’t power through illness like I tend to do. Maybe because at heart I’m a deeply selfish person and I resent having the needs of others impinge on my schedule in unplanned ways.

Probably all of the above, but to quote G.I. Joe: “Knowledge is half the battle!” I’m going to make a greater effort to be more sympathetic towards my own immediate family. Consider it my Presidents’ Day resolution. Feel free to ask me how it’s going 🙂

Crafty

A brief clarification on the last post: The Pickle Patch is still here, and I’ll continue to provide regular updates on our family’s life in Vermont. On The Willows is an entirely different blog, created by a friend of a friend for women to share their life lessons, to which I will contribute from time to time. My posts there will likely be a little different than the ones here: less day-to-day, more personal, fewer pictures of the kids. But I’ll provide the link when I do post over there, on the off chance that you’re not getting enough information here!

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program….

Just as I am not a born cook, I am not by nature a crafty person. On the basis of once having taught elementary school (which should require a minor in bulletin board design) and having received a graduate degree in studio art, I could perhaps pass for creative. But I’ve never been able to sustain any interest in things like scrapbooking, knitting, or jewelry making.

I do, however, have more desire to be a crafty person than I do to be a great cook, if only because the results can be enjoyed a little longer. So, when we moved to Vermont and my mom offered to bring up her old sewing machine, I jumped at the chance. Mind you, I haven’t sewn anything since I made a cupcake pillow in junior high Home Economics, but I envisioned snowy evenings hunched happily over the sewing machine, turning out cute little dresses for the girls.

And guess what? This is a happy story, not “I Love Lucy” meets a sewing machine. The only part of that vision that didn’t materialize so much this year was the snow.

As with cooking, it helps to have crafty friends. Upon moving to Vermont, I met one of the best: my friend Courtney. Courtney is the mom to two of the girls’ favorite friends, Wyatt and Isabelle. She is also an artist (you can see/buy her prints here), she sews, she cans, she hunts, she raises chickens, she works two jobs. Oh, and in her spare time, she and her husband Cris are building a house. In short, Courtney and Cris are the two people I know who would have no problem starting their own civilization from scratch. It was Courtney who lent me this book, which is what got my sewing started:

It’s a great book if you’re looking to sew something for a little girl and don’t know what you’re doing.

The first little girl I was looking to sew something for was Fiona. Two reasons for this:

1. She had a birthday back in November, and I figured it would be more meaningful to make her a dress than buy her something. So I had her pick out a design in the book above, and we went to the fabric store and she picked out the fabric.

2. Fiona loves clothes, and has a very particular sense of style. Given that Erick has been known to wear clothes until they actually fall off of his body, and I gave up caring about what I wore four years ago (when it became clear that no matter what I put on in the morning, it would look like a used napkin by the evening), this is clearly an inborn trait of Fiona’s. She loves to choose her outfit for the day…and then change it…and change it again. I have actually had to make her “Clothing Change Tickets” that limit her to two clothing changes a day, or I’d never get her to leave her closet.

So, with the pattern and fabric chosen, I got to work. Two-and-a-half months later, here’s the result:

That could reasonably pass as a dress, right? Success! And it was FUN. I’m using the leftover fabric to make one for Campbell now.

One thing I will say about sewing: I’m not sure that it’s actually more economical than buying clothes. This may be because we have an incredible children’s resale store in town called Junebug where I can find like-new clothes for $3, but fabric plus thread plus buttons plus trim are fairly expensive. And then there’s a little thing I’ve learned about from being married to an economist called “utility cost,” which takes into account the value of my time. So, at the end of the day, I’m not sure I saved any money. But I did have fun, and perhaps I gained a little bit of “crafty cred.”

Fiona modeling her new dress. (YES, this is the pose she hit when I said, "Fiona, let me take a picture of you in your new dress." I have no idea whose child she really is).

On Fear and Love

Something new & exciting today: I’m over at On The Willows! Click here to see the post.

Culturally Deprived

(Something a little different with the photos: In keeping with the theme of today’s post, I’m sharing some of our outtakes to show that we do not, in fact, have perfect children)

Partly because I have a very sweet husband, and partly because that very sweet husband owed me just a little for recently attending a week-long conference in Ghana, I got to have a Moms’ Night Out last week. This involved dinner (at the new Thai restaurant in town! Yes, Middlebury now has a Thai restaurant!) with 7 other lovely moms. During the course of this dinner, one of the other moms mentioned that her sister had criticized her for raising her children in Vermont, because this choice meant that her children would be “culturally deprived.”

Of course, my first reaction was: What a HORRIBLE, narrow minded, judgmental thing to say!

But upon further reflection, I realized that the sister might be right. If I understand her definition of “culture” correctly, then you can certainly make the case that I — and by extension my children — am culturally deprived. Whether it’s due to living in a small town in Vermont or to having 3 small children, some evidence in favor of my cultural deprivation:

-It’s a huge deal that we finally have one Thai restaurant in town.

-I am aware that the Academy Award nominations came out recently. I do not know which movies were nominated, but I can assure you that I have not seen them.

-I have been to the theater once since we moved here, and it was to see a video version of a National Theatre of London production.

This realization sent me into a tailspin of self-justification to this sister, whom I’ve never even met. “Okay Miss Fancy Pants,” I said to the invisible sister, “maybe your kids will grow up knowing how to recognize a de Kooning painting and attending the symphony and eating Spanish mackerel tataki. BUT will they know what it’s like to look up at the sky and see all the stars? To spend summer picking berries? To swim in a freshwater lake? To visit the dairy farm that their milk comes from? To know what to do if you meet a bear? To spend hours playing in the snow and then come in and spend hours doing nothing by the fire? Isn’t THAT ‘culture,’ too?!?”

And then, just the other night at a Super Bowl party, as I scooped up Campbell who was screaming because I’d denied her a second cup of juice, a kindly looking older man said to me, “I had six kids. And you know what word wasn’t in their vocabulary? ‘No.’ All I had to do was look at them. But kids these days are different; they get away with murder.”

So I nodded and smiled and said, “Uh-huh,” and removed Campbell from the premises. But all the way home I was seething: “Okay Mr. Cranky Pants, I’m pretty sure that exhausted two-year-olds have always thrown fits. And while we’re at it, let’s see those kids of yours. Happy? Well adjusted? What’s their relationship with you like? AND while we’re still at it, how about we check in with your WIFE and see what see has to say about your discipline policy!”

Ugh. In both of these cases, I’d allowed myself yet again to get caught up in the Great Parental Judgement Game.

Of course, most of life is a Judgement Game. Most of us aren’t born as whole, secure, fully actualized people, so we fill up our empty spaces with stuff (knowledge, jobs, relationships, actual stuff) and then we look around and measure our stuff against other people’s stuff to see how we’re doing. The Judgement Game doesn’t stop when you have kids — unless, unlike me, you waited until you were a fully actualized person to have kids — it just grows to encompass your kids.

Which is problematic, because kids by nature are very flawed little people. Yes, I’ll say it again: kids are all flawed, even incompetent, little human beings. They’re supposed to be, which is why they aren’t leaving you for Harvard Law at 4 hours old. They’re born unable to feed themselves, poop in the proper receptacles, or hold their heads up. Things gradually improve, but there’s a reason why the legal age of adulthood is 18 (and, as far as I’m concerned, I’d like to consider moving the legal age to 40, because I frankly don’t feel much like an adult even now). If I’m not mistaken, the whole point of parenting is to raise these little messes into passably self-sufficient adults.

Think about that: we take these flawed little folks in our lives, and our tendency is to add them to our “stuff” category, to let them reflect our own self-worth back to us. We measure them against the other flawed little people out there, and we use the results to justify our own flawed parenting against that of other flawed parents, and thus begins the Great Parental Judgement Game.

I am as guilty of this as anybody. Or maybe I’m the only one guilty of this, and you have no idea what I’m talking about. Either way, I’m getting tired of it. Here’s why:

-Comparing my parenting choices/style/decisions (call it what you will) against those of other parents gives me too much credit for having control. Speaking only for myself, when I think about my life and my parenting, I find that most decisions weren’t really decisions at all. I didn’t embark on “adult” life or on parenting with a clearly mapped-out course; things just happened and I responded. “Choosing” to raise my kids in Vermont? We do love it here, but that “choice” had more to do with an available job offer for Erick. And I can tell you that, no matter how many parenting advice books I may read (and I’ve stopped reading them altogether, because why waste what precious little reading time I have on that?), when it comes to day-to-day life I will always revert to what comes naturally. Sometimes that means losing my temper and yelling, and then I feel bad, but in the end I’m pretty sure that it’s better for my kids to have a real person for a mother rather than a parental advice book.

-Parenting as competitive self-justification is not fair to my kids. It’s not fair because I can’t expect them to be perfect — they’re kids. It’s not fair because it makes me focus more on my audience than on the needs of my kids. If I’m playing the Parental Judgement Game, then I’m constantly looking around at other parents to judge how they’re doing, and I’m also constantly worried about how they’re judging me. Do you find that you become a totally different parent in public than at home? Some of this is appropriate, because in public there are other people to consider from a manners standpoint, but I often worry too much about how I come off to other parents. Too strict? Too loose? My kids don’t need this kind of insecurity, and neither do I. Which brings me to: it’s not fair to my kids for me to expect perfection from myself. We bandy around the reassurance that “there’s no such thing as a perfect parent,” but it seems to me that we all still keep trying to reach that illusive goal. Really, though, what is a perfect parent? No two children are alike, no two parents are alike, and we’re all a fantastic mess of beauty and muck. Even if I were to somehow become that “perfect parent,” what would that mean for my kids? What would they have left to strive for, if not to do things better than I did? What would they have to overcome? How would I ever get them to leave the house?

-Finally, this Parental Judgement Game isn’t fair to any of us. I honestly believe that nobody sets out to be a bad parent. Certainly there is a small handful of parents who may deserve that title, but I’m fairly sure that’s because they are too broken for their good intentions to win out over their pain. The rest of us are just trying to do the best we can with the kids we were given and whatever skills and handicaps we have. And generally it all works out okay. Generally your kids reach age 18 able to feed themselves, poop appropriately, and hold their heads up. Call it success or call it a blessing — same thing, as far as I’m concerned. So maybe we (I) could stop playing judgement games with ourselves and with our kids, and just show each other a little grace.

I recently put up a sign in our kitchen (found online, attributed to Plato but I can’t confirm that) that says: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Ain’t that the truth? And I’m pretty sure that it’s not the person with the most culture who wins.

NOTE: I realize that recent posts have been a little less news-y and “we went here and did that,” and a bit more reflective. I blame the winter; it’s either this or take to drinking. You may just have to get used to it, or perhaps the shallower posts will resume in the spring.

Sisters….

I am an only child. And Erick was an only child for the first five years of his life, until his brother was born. In other words, we had absolutely no preparation for what is going on in our house.

Our three girls are 20 and 19 months apart, respectively. Fiona tells me she has no memory of life without Campbell. (Which really makes me wish we hadn’t crammed so much into those first 20 months of her life. Taking a 4-month-old to the aquarium? Can you say “First-time parents?”). I’m willing to guess that, when Campbell’s old enough to express it, she’ll tell me she has no memory of life without Georgia. And Georgia will never, ever know what it’s like to not share a house with two incredibly loud and overly affectionate big sisters.

Campbell turned 2 shortly after we moved to Vermont, and that milestone was also a turning point for the relationship between Fiona and Campbell. It’s hard for me to put into words what this sister relationship is like. Perhaps those of you who are blessed with sisters could do a better job, but perhaps it’s really a nonverbal force. I will say that their relationship gets stronger every day (and louder, and more fraught with fights), that it’s one of the things that makes me happiest about being a parent; Erick and I find ourselves looking over their heads at each other and exchanging “WOW” glances almost daily.

It’s hard to imagine two people better suited to each other than Fiona and Campbell. Fiona is more moody and introspective, but sweetly sensitive to the emotions of others; Campbell lives life all out on the surface, and could care less what others think of her. Look askance at Fiona and she’ll crumble; yell at Campbell and she’ll either ignore you or smile. Fiona has a very active imagination and is scared by even the thought of evil; Campbell will tell you several times a day that she’s “not afraid of anything!” Except that Campbell is really, really afraid of doctors; Fiona loves going to the doctor. When they play princess, Fiona is always the princess, and Campbell is almost always her pet cat (or lion). BUT, they both love chocolate, and ice cream, and peanut butter, and singing, and reading, and running around in circles, and flashlights, and building pillow forts, and animals, etc etc. Here are a few examples to illustrate their relationship:

-Campbell rarely addresses Fiona by her actual name; to her, Fiona is “Sister.” I finally pointed out to Campbell that she does, in fact, have another sister, which might become confusing once Georgia is old enough to respond. Campbell looked at me blankly, and continued playing.

-Due to a combination of their birthdays and the kindergarten cut-off date here, Campbell will be just one year behind Fiona in school. This means that next year they’ll be attending the same preschool, Fiona with the 4-year-olds and Campbell with the 3-year-olds. Fiona can’t wait; she’s already telling Campbell: “Next year you’ll be a big girl and you’ll go to my preschool. You’ll be in the 3-year-old room, but I’ll see you on the playground.” And Campbell can’t wait; she told me, “Next year I’ll protect Sister at naptime and on the playground.” I’m sure she will.

-When Fiona started full-day preschool this year, I thought that Campbell (as the classically overlooked middle child) would relish the chance to have three days a week alone with me. I was wrong. By about 11:00 each preschool day, Campbell and I have some version of this exchange:

C: Mommy, where’s Sister?

Me: She’s at preschool, Cams. We’ll pick her up this afternoon.

C: Let’s go pick her up now!

Me: Why?

C: Because…I love her!

-And finally, the sleeping situation. One of the best parenting decisions we ever made was to have our girls share a room. This was partly necessity: living in the Bay Area on a graduate student’s stipend, we couldn’t afford to rent more than a 2-bedroom house — and partly philosophy: we knew from recent travels in East Africa that our girls were lucky to have beds, let alone a room/we hoped they’d learn the joys of sharing/we hoped they’d become better sleepers as a result.

Well, it’s hard to know whether sharing a room made them good sleepers, but if one sister wakes up screaming in the night, the other two do have an amazing ability to sleep through it. This soundness of sleeping is offset somewhat by the nightly bedtime party that happens after we say goodnight and shut the door; our girls probably get to sleep much later than they would sleeping alone, since they spend upwards of an hour talking, singing, and playing in bed. (For an idea of what this sounds like, imagine Kate Bush, times 3. Imagine these 3 Kate Bushes singing, for the sake of argument, “Wuthering Heights,” but each at a 1 second delay. And there you have it). This has only intensified since Fiona decided that sharing a room wasn’t enough; now she shares a bed with Campbell. So, the scene at bedtime is this: Campbell at the head of her twin bed, Fiona facing her at the foot, and Georgia standing up and peeking over the railing of her crib to see what her crazy sisters are up to. And they love it; they love, love, love it.

This sisterly sleeping arrangement is my biggest carrot and stick. If there’s too much fighting or laughing after bedtime, all I have to do is threaten to move somebody to another room, and everything settles immediately. On the other hand, just about the best reward I can offer them (besides chocolate) is the chance to nap together. I separate the girls for naps, because Fiona doesn’t usually sleep during naptime anymore and Campbell still needs her sleep, but they lobbied so hard to be able to nap together that I’ve started to allow it as a once-a-week “treat.” Nobody sleeps, but they will happily not nap together for hours.

Where Georgia will fit in to all of this, I just don’t know. What I do know is that both of her older sisters adore her, and they want to hug, hold, and carry her until she gets fed up. Georgia adores them back; her huge smile lights up whenever she sees one of her sisters, and she is just chomping at the bit to be able to join in their shenanigans. But the oldest two are so close, it’s almost enough to make us have a fourth child just to give Georgia her own special buddy. Almost.

I know these girls will grow up and fight more, and about more serious things than who gets to hold the Barbie. I know that a day will come when they’ll want their own rooms. I know that they may end up living miles away from each other. But whatever happens, I just hope that they will love each other forever. I hope that Campbell will always be willing to protect Fiona at naptime, and I hope that Fiona will always be willing to hold Campbell’s hand at the doctor’s office. Because I can’t think of a better gift as a parent than to know that your kids will have each other after you’re gone.

The Art of Doing Nothing

Another big change that happened when we moved to Vermont: I stopped working.

Those of you who have never thought of me as a heavy-hitting career woman are absolutely right, but I did work continuously as the part-time director of Project Peace East Bay from the time Fiona was about 7 months old up until Georgia was born in March 2011. (SHAMELESS PLUG: If you have money that you’d like to donate, and particularly if you live in the East Bay, give Project Peace some love. It’s a small nonprofit org that does mighty things, and is doing even mightier things now than when I was at the helm. Not that the two are related or anything….)

I was able to pull this off because Erick’s wonderful parents lived 45 minutes away and are both retired. So, two or three days a week they would drive over to Berkeley and spend all day with the girls. This continued for 3 years. It was such an ideal situation that I’m almost embarrassed to admit it. I LOVED going to work, because I got to use a part of my brain that wasn’t actively employed by parenting, because I got to interact with other adults, and because I felt like through Project Peace I could actually do some good for the community — which was good for my girls to see. And I honestly never felt guilty about leaving the house for a second, because the girls had a chance to form amazing relationships with their very own grandparents.

All of this came to an abrupt halt with our move to Vermont. With no grandparents within easy driving distance, and a new baby, new house, new job for Erick, and new community to navigate, it was clearly my season to stay at home. And I have only been grateful that we made this choice, and for this time at home. It’s been a very sweet season, although not one that I expect — or even hope — will last forever.

I wrote that preface because I’m concerned that what I’m about to say may come off as a luxury “problem” only to stay-at-home moms. (“Oh, here she is complaining, while I’d LOVE to be at home doing nothing with my kids!”) And I’ve never seen such nasty comments or unfortunate misunderstandings as those that occur in the dialogues between stay-at-home and working mothers. So I want to be clear that, as someone who has been fortunate enough to be in both roles, what I am about to write has more to do with how you spend your time while at home, for whatever amount of time you happen to be there.

All clear? Good. (And sorry for any over-explanation. This is also how I deal with the BIG QUESTIONS from our girls, like “What is love?” and “Why can’t a man have more than one wife in our country?” and “Why is Daddy having another Scotch?” I basically over-explain until their eyes glaze over and they aren’t paying attention anymore.)

So. We’ve been spending a lot of time at home doing nothing these days.

Partly, I blame the weather. Although it’s been an abnormally mild winter here in the Northeast, it has still been quite cold. Cold enough that we consider a high of 36 to be a heat wave — and I can tell you, it really does feel that way. Plus, we get about 2 hours of sunlight a day. So leaving the house, even when it’s possible, isn’t always appealing.

But partly, I blame myself. While we certainly have our regularly scheduled activities each week — playgroup. library, open gym, preschool drop-off and pick-up (yes, I count this as an activity!) — I’ve not been attempting to fill up our free time with the same enriching outings as I did over the summer. Given a choice, my girls usually vote to stay in. And since, as previously discussed in this blog, it’s kind of a hassle to get three little girls winterized and out the door, most days I’m just as happy to acquiesce.

Okay, so we’re at home a lot. But there are different ways of being at home. My ideal of being at home — the kind of being at home that I imagine all other mothers are accomplishing — involves art projects, family baking, and enriching learning activities. Like the fantastic activities listed on this wonderful website, which a friend of mine passed along over a year ago. Have I done ANY of the activities listed on that website? No, I have not. Because, whenever I propose a “quality at-home activity,” I’m either rejected outright, OR the activity devolves into a free-for-all with the girls and house covered in paint/chocolate/stickers/tape/etc., and me yelling.

What they’d rather do is pull all the cushions off of the sofa, take off all their clothes, and pretend to be princesses/lions/Barbies. And the oldest two are old enough now that they don’t even need me, except for every 5 minutes when they suddenly demand my COMPLETE FOCUS so that I can be the evil stepmother/witch/fairy in their story. That’s 5 uninterrupted minutes when I can clean something/throw dinner in the crockpot/check email (not necessarily in that order).

So, I ping-pong back and forth between “productive” work around the house and playtime with the girls, and by the end of the day I feel like nothing has been accomplished. The truth is, I’m not very good at doing nothing. I come from a long line of people who will do just about anything to keep busy. All of which means that I feel guilty a lot. Guilty that I’m either not doing enough with the girls or not doing enough around the house. Guilty that Fiona still can’t quite write the “N” in her name. Guilty that Campbell is either colorblind or truly doesn’t know the difference between red and green. Guilty that I left Georgia propped up in a corner 10 minutes ago. Guilty that no matter how fast I run, the dust balls and cobwebs will always have me beat. Guilty guilty guilty….

Until I was brought to my senses by a perfectly-timed email from my wise friend Jen. Jen has 3 kids slightly older than ours, took over for me at Project Peace when we moved (and is doing amazing things there), and is basically someone I’d like to be when I grow up. Also she surfs. All Fall we were exchanging brief and business-y emails, mostly her asking me where she could find various files. But out of nowhere – you know how sometimes you get a message just when you need it? — she inserted this little nugget into an email:

I know it sounds absolutely completely insane, but enjoy the “slow” life trapped at home with your little people. Truly, lay around with them in your PJ’s the whole day staring at grass or dirt or something. Life is a rush here and we seldom get to do those small things anymore.

I quote this email to myself almost daily. So, that’s what I’m trying to do: practice the art of doing “nothing” with my girls, which will probably add up to a whole lot of something when I look back on it. And to be okay with it, to get over the guilt, which really shouldn’t have to be a cornerstone emotion of motherhood. Because I figure that maybe if I can banish the guilt, then maybe I can actually be present in the moment and fill my guilt vacuum with joy.

The Joy of…Cooking?

When we moved to Vermont, it wasn’t just a change in location, weather, lifestyle…it was also a change in our cooking arrangements.

Let me ‘splain: When Erick and I met, my cooking repertoire involved either a) walking down the block to Burritoville, or b) opening a carton of yogurt and stirring in some granola. (In my defense, I was living in a New York City studio apartment smaller than most walk-in closets). Once we got married and acquired all kinds of nifty kitchen tools, I entertained brief visions of the delicious meals I’d cook for my husband. I even recall making gazpacho, once.

103-0318_IMG — Can you spot the cook in this picture?

Now, for virtually our entire marriage, Erick has been a graduate student. While he was a hardworking graduate student and disciplined about going into his office daily (in Berkeley I suspect this was mostly to get away from the house filled with babies), he did have a great degree of flexibility. If he left the house at 10 and returned at 4:30, it was no big deal. So, a brief time after our wedding, Erick announced, “You know, I actually enjoy cooking. All day I’m working with ideas and I feel like I have nothing to show for it at the end of the day. It’s nice to come home and create something useful. I’d like to take over most of the cooking.” I can’t remember if this was before or after I gave us both food poisoning from undercooking pork dumplings, but either way I was happy to turn over the cooking to Erick.

And that was our arrangement…until this year. Now that he has a real job — not only a real job, but a job in which he will be judged closely for 7 years to determine whether he’ll make tenure — Erick is no longer flexible. His hours now are more like 8:30-6; reasonable enough, but bedtime for our girls is at 7 (as it will be until they turn 18), which means that we need to eat right when Erick walks in the door. This conundrum became clear to me shortly after we moved here. I looked around for other willing cooks, but as I’m the only other member of the family who can currently reach the kitchen counters, the cooking duties fell to me.

But guess what? We’re doing okay. For those of you who’ve been worried about the health and well-being of our family, I will refer you to the photos in this blog. Don’t we all appear healthy? Well fed?

So, how did I do it? Here are 5 Tips For How I Found (Some) Joy in Cooking and Kept My Kids on the Growth Curve:

1. Make friends with people who can cook. Back in Berkeley, I knew a lot of REALLY GOOD cooks. Perhaps the best was my friend Celeste, who somehow managed to be an outstanding cook while working as a nurse practitioner at a Spanish-speaking health clinic and being a great mother to two beautiful girls. (Miss you & love you, Celeste!).

Because Celeste is an amazing friend, when I was pregnant with Georgia she asked me about throwing a baby shower. Now, I happen to think that by the time you’re having your third child, you’re done with baby showers. I didn’t need one more baby thing (although if Georgia had been a boy, he’d have been wearing lots of pink), but what I DID want were: 1) a girls’ night out with friends, and 2) recipes. Because Celeste is an amazing friend, she made both things happen. Here is the recipe book she put together, with recipes from my Berkeley friends:

This was one of the best gifts ever. I’ve made almost everything in it, and it’s all family-friendly and delicious. Better yet, I get to think about my friends while I’m cooking. (I especially appreciate the little personal touches they added to their recipes; for instance, my friend Laura confessed that she sometimes feeds her kids her peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, which is something I will definitely try someday!).

By the way, if you’re a friend who cooks, and you have a delicious, simple (preferably involving a crock pot) recipe up your sleeve that I do not yet have, I’m still accepting submissions. 🙂

2. Make friends with your crock pot. This is our crock pot:

We’ve had it for a while, but this year I’ve come to appreciate it on a new level. It is, hands down, my favorite kitchen tool. Why, you ask? Here’s what it’s like when I try to make dinner WITHOUT a crock pot:

It’s 5 PM. We’ve recently gotten home from picking Fiona up from preschool. Because she’s been on her best behavior all day, she’s exhausted and ready to cut loose. She incites Campbell to join her in a game that takes on different names, but basically involves putting on dress-up clothes and running in circles around the house while taking out all the toys within reach and dumping them on the floor. Oh, and screaming at the top of their lungs. They’re happy enough, so I prop Georgia up in the kitchen with some toys and try to prep dinner. Interruptions every 5 minutes or so because: Fiona has to use the bathroom, Fiona/Campbell wants a drink, Campbell hit Fiona, Fiona/Campbell injured herself, someone needs a costume change, etc. By 5:30, I give up and put them in front of a video. At that very moment, Georgia decides she’s DONE being good & quiet, and she wants her dinner RIGHT NOW! I put Georgia in her high chair, fix her a bottle, throw some Cheerios at her, and attempt to fix dinner with one hand. Shortly thereafter Erick walks in the door, dinner’s not yet done, the other two girls are getting hungry so all three girls are screaming, and I’m a wreck.

Now, here’s what it’s like when I make dinner WITH a crock pot:

It’s 9 AM. We’ve just returned from dropping off Fiona at preschool. I put Georgia down for her morning nap. Campbell plays or looks at books or eats a snack while I toss some ingredients into the crock pot and turn it to “Low.” By 5:30, dinner is ready.

Which scenario would you rather live out?

My best crock pot resource, to date, is this blog (suggested, I believe, by the amazing Celeste). Usually what I do is to search it (most often the night before) for whatever ingredients I have in the fridge.

3. Do not expect your kids to eat what you cook. All kids are different, but with very rare exceptions, here is what our girls will reliably eat: mac & cheese, peanut butter & jelly, grilled cheese, pizza, crackers, and potato chips. This is not for lack of trying; our girls were born in Berkeley, for crying out loud. They have all been offered spinach, broccoli, carrots, and all other manner of healthy and wholesome options. They just won’t eat them.

So for lunch, they pretty much get a rotating selection of things that they will reliably eat; they’re happy, and it’s easy for me. But when dinner rolls around, there’s someone else to consider: Erick. He’s a good guy, and he spends all day teaching undergraduates the principles of economics, and when he’s not teaching, he’s conducting research that deals with how to stamp out HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. It just doesn’t seem right to welcome him home with: “Hi, honey, how’s the AIDS stuff going? Here’s a PB & J!”

It took a couple of months of having my heart broken when my girls would not eat my dinners, but then I realized that I could make the most delicious meal on earth, and if it didn’t fall into one of the six food groups listed above, they’d have none of it. So I just stopped sweating it. I make grown-up dinners that Erick and I will enjoy, and this is what I serve. And I don’t cook a separate dinner for the girls, because that’s just craziness.* But I don’t fight with them either, partly because they’re girls and I have firsthand experience with eating disorders, and partly because this is just not one of the battles I choose to spend my energy on. If they don’t eat dinner, we have more leftovers for later. If they’re hungry, they should have eaten dinner. And I have confidence that they’ll make up the calories later. Possibly through consuming massive quantities of crackers, but isn’t that what multivitamins are for?

*I do break this rule when I’m preparing something fancy and expensive for dinner, like rib eye steak. Rib eye steak before my girls = pearls before swine. They get mac & cheese on those nights.

4. Practice the art of one-stop shopping. Especially if you have young kids, the worst part of cooking is having to SHOP for the cooking. I have partially solved this problem by doing my shopping in one place (Hannaford’s) at one set time (Friday morning) each week. If we run out of food before the next Friday rolls around, it’s just too bad.

One-stop shopping is much easier to do here in Vermont than it was in Berkeley. Berkeley, the beating heart of the locally-grown, organic, free range food goodness movement, had an overabundance of fresh and wholesome EVERYTHING, but it wasn’t all located in one place. By the end of our time in Berkeley, “we” (by which I really mean Erick — in our house, the cook does the shopping) sometimes had to visit no fewer than FOUR food stores per week in order to gather all of the produce, meat, and grains that “we” needed.

There’s something to be said for simplicity. In our small town, there are basically two chain supermarkets (one on our side of town, one on the other side), a local food co-op. The Middlebury Food Co-op could have been uprooted from Berkeley by a tornado and deposited down here in Middlebury (and somewhere along the way, you’d look out the window and there would be Michael Pollan riding a bicycle outside. Taking the Wizard of Oz reference too far? Okay, that’s all).

fp-q-and-a-michaelpollan608 — Michael Pollan, not on his bicycle.

It is filled with locally-grown, organic, free range goodness. And — I am about to utter blasphemy here — I do not shop there. I hope to, someday, like when all three girls are in school, but right now I can’t convince myself of the logic — or the economics — of shopping at the Co-op. Expressed in an equation, it would look like this:

Less consumer guilt < Cost of my time + cost of my sanity + more expensive food

I haven’t run that by Erick yet, but it seems sound to me. So I shop at Hannaford’s, and I do so for one reason, and one reason only: the car carts.

The car carts can keep our girls entertained for almost an entire shopping trip.

I shop on Friday mornings because Fiona is in preschool so I only have to wrangle 2/3 of our girls, and because for some reason I am always able to get a car cart on Friday mornings. (If you are from Middlebury and you are reading this, DO NOT take my car cart! I will sic Campbell on you. Also, if you have a car cart and only one child in it, I fully expect you to remove your groceries and hand over the cart immediately, because I WIN! Okay, that’s all).

Here is my shopping routine:

-Grab a car cart, stuff Campbell and Georgia into it and hand them snacks

-Using my very organized shopping list that is divided according to the various zones of the store (guess which Gong grown-up created the shopping list?) to guide my shopping, throw groceries into the cart as fast as I can (I’m always AMAZED at how many groceries a family of 5 needs each week — by the end of the trip, the front of our cart is actually dragging on the ground)

-Choose the check-out line that’s as close as possible to the lottery ticket dispenser (which has enough blinking lights to hypnotize the girls during the worst part — checking out a cart filled to dragging with groceries).

Done! As one of the girls’ friends is prone to say: “Easy peasy, mac & cheesy.”

5. Accept who you are, but don’t rule out miracles. I am more of a baker than a cook. I appreciate precise directions and sweet results (as opposed to Erick, who hates having to follow a recipe). So when I have dinner going in the crock pot, it enables me to use the girls’ naptime to bake. This way, even if my dinner wasn’t so hot, I can redeem myself with a yummy dessert that EVERYBODY in our family will eat. Play up your strengths, I always say.

Another tip: when baking, it's a good idea to get your kids to do the tasks you hate, like sifting flour.

But sometimes miracles happen. Like this Fall, when I actually invented a pretty good pot roast recipe. I will share it with you below as a reward for making it through a long post that included very few pictures of cute children. I promise more pictures of cute children very soon.

Faith’s Pot Roast (That the Gong Girls won’t touch)

3 lb beef roast

1/2 c. water

1 c. beef broth

1 package onion soup mix

1 bay leaf, crumbled in 1 tsp. salt and 1 tsp. pepper

handful of rosemary

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 onion, chopped

Throw it all into a crock pot and cook on low for 6-8 hours. Voila!