This fall, my older child is headed to Kindergarten, and I have many feelings about this! First and foremost, I am excited for him, because this past year has been unpredictable in so many ways, that I hope Kindergarten will finally bring with it some more predictability and stability in friendships. I am also curious as a parent to see how he will respond to adversity and setbacks in this transition. For most of his life, he has attended the same daycare -- from about 14 months old to now, age 5. This past year, however, has shown us that he has a resilient side to him. During COVID, we have had to adjust his routine and school attendance patterns many times based on local public health data, our visits with his grandparents, and his therapy needs; he has bounced back from the many changes and disruptions by remaining mostly cheerful and optimistic. I am sure Kindergarten is going to hold challenges for him, but I feel hopeful that he will grow from those challenges and become a stronger person for it.
As a parent, of course I also have some anxieties as well. Mostly, I am still trying to figure out which elementary school my child should attend. Our district has a system of lottery-based enrollment into specialized public schools, as well as a public neighborhood school where you are guaranteed a seat. We are currently on the wait list for a particular specialized (projects-based) school in our neighborhood, and it seems quite likely that we will receive an offer by the end of the summer. I feel fine with sending my child to either that choice school or our neighborhood school based on their programs alone, but I have heard some anecdotal stories that indicate that my son may face some racial prejudices in these schools. (What parents from the local families of color have told me is that he will almost certainly have those negative interactions no matter where he goes, and the administration is either going to brush my concerns under the rug or be blatantly racist themselves. Such is the deep systemic issue of segregation in our city.) Another major issue I have learned about our district (and this is common knowledge) is that some essential academic services are funded by the PTA. The state and local governments chronically underfund public education (due to insufficient local taxation), and so every year, each school's principal creates a "wishlist" for the PTA that might include things like: hire a counselor and an art teacher. The local PTA for that particular school looks at the list of requests and approves what they think they can fundraise to support, and that is how the budget becomes complete for the year. This system is horrifically inequitable, because as our local elementary school has a PTA budget of around $250,000 per year, an elementary school in another part of the city that is predominantly made up of families of color could not consistently raise enough funds to have so many on-going programs and benefits for the students. On paper, each school is funded the same amount per student, but in reality, resources vary greatly from pocket to pocket in this huge district. What I have heard parents of color phrase it as is that they are put into the impossible position of choosing: Do I want my child to grow up in well-resourced, overwhelmingly white, schools that will subject them to regularly occurring racist experiences, or do I want my child to grow up in a diverse neighborhood with under-funded schools? I know this is not a problem unique to our city, but it breaks my heart that the opportunity gaps run so deep. And yet, another problem is also that the public schools in the more affluent parts of town are in competition with private schools. Our city has a very high attendance rate of private schools (22% of all K-12 students), and many of these parents who are donating money to the local PTA to make sure their kids receive the best-funded public education do not want to share that PTA pot with schools in other pockets of the city. At a certain point of financial contribution, the wealthiest of those public-school parents will start to consider pulling their kids out of the public schools and paying for a private education. The odds are stacked against equitable public education funding in our on-the-paper "progressive" city. This past year, as I was looking for opportunities to head back to work, I also looked at working in public versus private schools. When I left my teaching job two years ago, I was sure that I would end up in a public school next, but a pandemic and a steep public school budget cut later, I was scrambling to find any job available. In the end, I took a private school teaching job, with lots of questions about the role that I play in furthering the inequities of this broken system. (I don't regret my choice, because months later, I still have not seen any public school jobs be posted in my area of expertise, and I have been keeping a fairly close eye. That honestly is crazy, because generally there is a lot of demand in my area. I feel relieved that I had made the right choice for our family to take the private-school job that came up, when it did.) In the fall, our baby will be starting daycare for the first time (after being home for the entire pandemic thus far); our big kid will be starting Kindergarten; I will be teaching at a new-to-me school and having my first driving commute in years; my husband will need to manage the dropoffs of both kids in the morning via bicycles, since we only have one car; I will be picking both kids up and dumping big kid's bicycle in my car everyday. It will be a lot of changes! I am feeling intimidated just thinking about the huge changes ahead for our family, but I also feel so fortunate that we have been able to take so much family time this past year to slow down, breathe, and be with one another.
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During COVID isolation, the person that I worried about the most was my dad. Since he lives alone in L.A. and we are fairly COVID-cautious, we had not been able to visit him for well over a year. Finally, this spring, we made it happen!! We drove down the coast to Los Angeles, stayed with my dad for a few days, camped in the area, and then drove back up the coast and mostly camped along the way. We had done this same road trip a few summers before with just our oldest kid (then two years old), but this time we had two kids in tow, a more compressed time frame (only about 2 weeks total), and it was a different season of the year. I had some anxiety going in to the trip, but surprisingly, everything went off without a hitch.
Here were some things we considered in our trip planning:
In completely other news, a note on milestones! I am super proud that my son finished the first box set of Sagebooks before we left on our trip. He now can read 100 of the most common Chinese characters! While on the trip, we only briefly reviewed for about 10 minutes, one day in the car (I had prepared some sentence strips in case he was bored in the car and interested in doing Chinese practice), and it did not seem to affect his retention. We came back home and this week he seamlessly slipped back into reading new lessons. Hurray! To celebrate his accomplishment, I had made him a picture book using mostly characters he has learned thus far. It was amazing to see him opening up the picture book I made and just reading it to himself. But, the clearest testament to his language improvement was that he was both interested and able to have simple conversations in Chinese with my dad during our visit, which he had never done before! It was so sweet to see their budding relationship. My son, who can be very resistant to affection and "strangers", held my dad's hand during a short hike near the Hollywood hills. I am certain this would not have happened, if my son and his grandpa still had a gaping language barrier. It made all of the Chinese lessons we have done thus far at home feel totally worth it. Our daughter is also picking up a ton of words as she approaches her second birthday (later this month). To my delight and surprise, Chinese is still her dominant language, although she is very interested in speaking bilingually and would often say the same word in both languages. I am trying to pause to enjoy this moment -- all of us still being home, and her still being so cuddly, joyful, and sweet. (I hope that cuddliness never changes, but my son has definitely outgrown that phase?) Looking forward to longer and brighter days in the weeks ahead. I want to confess that I am not a religious person. I am not religious, and I would not really say that I am even spiritual. I believe in a general moral compass and doing our best everyday. I know that is dangerous, in a way, because we are human and our view of what is right or wrong is limited to our subjective experiences. But, I also have trouble reconciling that scripts handed down from ancient times could do better to dictate what is right or wrong, than what we are able to collectively perceive and understand right now as humans. So, there it goes, my imperfect faith in humanity.
Anyway, that is a roundabout way to explain that often, when I am in a place of struggle, I have to look inward for optimism or inspiration. I don't look outwards because I think that someone else might come and save/comfort me from my troubles, but I look inward and try to shift my perspective, so that I can find something to appreciate about every moment, even the challenging ones. I don't know what it says about me that I was able to do this even when my (beloved) late mother was very ill. I remember visiting her while she was undergoing one of her last rounds of chemo treatment, and she looked so frail and ill and deeply unhappy. I remember talking to her when she had the energy to talk, and then silently telling myself that those days were hard -- so hard, in fact, to see someone who was always such a source of optimism and strength in my own life to be so devoid of life -- but that some day, I was going to look back on even those days as still the "good days", when I still had her around. I felt so much gratitude that not only did she make it until the birth of my son, but that they always had a mutually joyful relationship in their brief interactions. (He's much more challenging these days, and he also cannot remember her, besides recognizing her from pictures. A part of me laments that she can't be here to see him having grown so much and accomplished so much, but another part of me thinks it's probably better that she only had sweet baby interactions with him.) During the pandemic, looking inward for optimism has been extremely helpful. 2020 was very hard as a whole, but I found myself constantly shifting to a mode of deep gratitude for health, family, nature, and love. Today, I wanted to sit down and write a love letter to my husband, particularly through the lens of my son's recent therapy. (He started feeding therapy a couple of months ago, and is due to start OT in May, when we get back from our road trip, to address some vestibular and sensory issues.) My husband won't actually read this, because he's not much of a blog-reader or a social media person. But, I wanted to write it for myself, as I have wanted to for some time. We have been together since September 2006, and married since March 2013. During that time, things have not always been peachy sweet, but I have always appreciated our deep love, friendship, support, and partnership. Over time, I have come to learn that my husband is very different from me. I love and appreciate him for our differences, even though sometimes I do feel frustrated for our differences as well. I try to focus on how our differences strengthen both our marriage and parenthood -- as my friend recently said to me, "I have always thought that you and G complement each other very well, both as humans and as parents." My husband is a self-taught, engineering, persevering kind of person. From things small to large, he likes to always try to do it by himself. When the toilet breaks, instead of calling a plumber, he would happily spend two days on the bathroom floor, taking apart all parts of the toilet, fixing the leak and learning about how the toilet works (and then refer fondly to the incident for years afterwards). When our wooden shutters broke in Berlin, he parked himself in the living room for over an hour, trying to fix it, instead of heading outside with me as promised. This guy converted our grill to a natural gas grill, even though technically you are only supposed to do it if you are a certified plumber. He has written an entire distributed database from scratch and is in the process of creating a new programming language. No biggie, but this guy likes to do everything by himself. He once started a company from scratch and then sold it, and he has started multiple business ideas since. I adore and respect that can-do spirit about him. --BUT, the flip side is that my husband never likes to ask for help. He does not like to follow recipes or Lego instructions; he does not like to watch YouTube tutorial videos; he does not like to read parenting books; and he does not like to seek therapy (for us or our kids). He feels like other people's insights are mostly too general / not that useful. The most sensible way to learn, he thinks, is by trying things out yourself and then adjusting the course based on your own intuition. I feel like that is where I come in. In school, I was proficient at playing the "school game." As a student, I did not like ambiguity (something that I still struggle with as an adult sometimes). If I started a task, I wanted feedback right away to know if I was on track or not. I liked drafts of assignments, and then improving based on feedback. How that translates to me being a parent is that I devour parenting books, digest their philosophies, try them on my kids, read tons of articles, talk to other parents in my community, and am enthusiastic about seeking additional professional help if I am still in doubt. I am the over-researching antidote to G's under-researching self. By ourselves, I think each of us would have floundered perhaps as parents. Trusting others' professional opinions on everything and trusting others on nothing seems each to be too extreme, by itself. Together, however, I think we do strike the right balance. With both of our kids, I would suggest here and there that they might be a little off-the-norm in certain areas. Like, our 4-month-old is taking an hour to drink just 4 ounces of milk? Our 6-month-old still can't really roll over or push her chest up with both hands? Our 4.5-year-old still is scared to walk down the stairs and to lather on sunscreen? My husband would do his part to resist, resist, re-s-i-s-t.... until he breaks down and says, "Okay, fine, you seem very concerned, so let's just look into it." I know that therapy is not his thing, and he would rather see our kids experimenting, persevering, and finding their own way through to the other side of any challenge, but the important thing is, he acquiesces and compromises. And then once the therapy starts, although I still take the lead in filling out the forms, scheduling the visits, and running the show, my husband shows up with his warmest, most enthusiastic self. As far as the kids could tell, we are on the same front, rooting for their therapy success. And for that, I love and appreciate my husband more everyday. We don't need to be the same person, or to see eye to eye on everything in parenthood. Maybe he is right, and maybe I am just a paranoid mom. Or, maybe I am right, and our kids need extra help. But, I love that in spite of his preconceived notions and inclinations, he supports my decisions, big and small, in our marriage. And that has always been the most defining character of our relationship. I often feel like parenting is challenging, because it's the ultimate projects-based learning experience. You go into it with almost zero expertise, and you hope that after 18 years (or in our case, 18+3 years, because our kids are 3 years apart), you would still want to hang out with this partner. So far, so good. <3 I have had a brain dump that I wanted to write about, but have not had the time or energy to do so. So, here we go. It's mostly for myself in hindsight, but maybe it will be interesting to another parent.
My son, who is 4.5, is just starting weekly feeding therapy with an SLP. That's a statement that probably requires a lot of unpacking, but basically he is so averse to trying new foods, that we decided to get him help. When he was about 1.5, he started skipping lunches at school on a daily basis. My husband recommended that we offer him frozen-food entrees every night, after we offered him something else to eat off of our plates. Sounds reasonable, right? If you have a kid who is a picky eater, you might guess what happened next. Soon, the frozen foods were all that he would eat. Fast-forward three years, he was becoming more and more choosy. He started to refuse things like pizza, or Mac n Cheese that is not a particular brand. I decided one night to say to him, that if he refused to eat any of the pizza his dad had made especially to his taste, then from that night on, we would stop offering him any frozen foods. He would just have to eat our food everyday. My child and I are similarly stubborn. That night, he refused to eat. For the next five nights, he skipped five dinners in a row because he did not want to eat the same food as us. On the 6th day, I weighed him to get a baseline weight, and I called the pediatrician, worried that all of this food protesting was going to cause permanent issues. The nurse at our pediatrician's office advised us to stay on course. She said, "Don't offer him a separate dinner. Keep dinner conversations light, and don't talk about who is eating how many bites. Call us back if he starts to lose weight, or if things have not gotten better in a month, but it should sort itself out." Over the next month, things did get better... until they got worse again. He started to eat parts of our dinner, until he started to skip entire dinners again, several times in one week. We tried to keep dinner conversations light, but "how many bites" and "I definitely won't eat" were the only things our son wanted to talk about. Desperate, I looked up feeding therapy help and got connected with an SLP who does virtual sessions within our insurance network. Well, we are only one week in. I really have no idea how well it will or will not work, but I will say that it has already alleviated my own anxiety to have someone who is qualified guiding us through this tricky transition. From the time when we stopped offering frozen food until now, our son has made some progress (small in my eyes, but probably huge to him). He will now eat parts of most of the dishes that I cook, even though it's just a few bites some nights (more on other nights). The SLP diagnosed him with an oral-motor delay as well, that may be impacting his eating of complex foods. She is optimistic about being able to help him make improvements in eating; I am optimistic as well, because after the first session with her, his attitude towards new foods has already shown a small positive improvement. (I could be wrong about this, but it's my maternal intuition, anyway.) But, this post isn't about the feeding therapy. It's actually about something that I have been thinking about, related to being a parent. A friend said to me at some point, that her child (like my big kid) struggles with taking risks and growth mindset, and she struggles between letting him be himself and trying to help him improve. I have been thinking a lot about this in the context of L starting therapy. It is incredibly emotional for a child to start and receive therapy at this age, because at a deep level, we all want to be loved for who we are, and requiring on-going therapy seems to suggest that who we are needs to change / is not enough as it is. (My younger child has also received a variety of therapy services, but because she is so young, she does not experience those complex emotions.) It helped me to reflect upon the fact that they are really not mutually exclusive -- I can both love someone (including my child) unconditionally and want to actively help them grow as a person. My husband and I have had a similar discussion before. One time, he gave me some feedback about the way I communicated, in the middle of an argument. To which I said, "Well, that's just how I am! You were okay with that about me before, and now you are not okay with it?" He replied, "That's not who you are. That's what you have always done, it's not constructive, and it does not have to be what you do, moving forward." His statement was hard to take at the time, but it's true -- what we have always done/been, does not have to define who we are/what we do moving forward. I can both love my child unconditionally, and help him to see that he is risk-averse and that he needs to practice taking small risks everyday. I can love my child unconditionally, and help him to get the therapy that he needs. Just writing this down for my later self. PS. I was quickly talking about this with my husband in the car yesterday. My husband goes a step further and says, "I think because we are their parents and we love them unconditionally, our role is to help them to become better versions of themselves." I also agree with that. To help someone make a fundamental shift in their natural inclination (like helping my big kid become more of a risk-taker) is a really tough task; you have to leverage a ton of relationship with that person, and who better to do it than a parent? It's a new year, and with it, I feel invigorated with new hope for the future, as well as some trepidation. Since I last posted, my son had stayed home for a while, until yesterday when we finally sent him back to school. It has been a good run at home. He worked on biking, math, and Chinese many days. After the holidays though, he started feeling sad and really missing his friends, so when the local COVID numbers became more reasonable, we sent him back to school. We are still incrementally working on Chinese with L, in order to maintain some academic rhythm to our days. I think he is now up to recognizing about 50+ Chinese characters. I still make and use the flashcards, where I put out the recent characters and their associated pictures for him to match up, but when he picks up a pair, he also uses it in a sentence. I find it is both a good way to make the review feel less tedious (more active on his part, and he can make it fun by constructing whatever sentences he wants), and also a sneaky way to encourage him to speak in more complex ways. A little while ago, I also pushed back and asked him -- my first time ever making this explicit request -- to try to speak to me only in Chinese. When he asked me why, I explained it this way: "We should always be improving and practicing something. You can already express yourself very clearly in English, so now it is time for you to practice speaking in Chinese. Once you are able to speak Chinese fluently, we can practice something else, like maybe Spanish." I found that framing language learning this way helped to avoid power struggle, because I did not say, "Chinese is part of my heritage and I think it's important for you." At his age (4.5), anything that helps to diminish power struggle is a win in my book. I also struck a compromise with him that if I notice he is trying to mostly speak Chinese to me during the day, then at bedtime, I would read to him bilingually. Else, I would read only in Chinese, since he needs the extra Chinese exposure. He thinks that is a reasonable compromise, and overall I have noticed a really good effort from him most days. When he forgets, I remind him either with an exaggerated, "Haaa??" or I give him a sentence starter in Mandarin, by translating the first part of his thought into Mandarin. He responds pretty well to both forms of reminder, and I am so proud to see that his language grasp is slowly improving. (He now asks me to teach him transitional phrases like "because" and "therefore", instead of just saying them in English, interleaved with Chinese. I think that is a really positive sign.) We have been biking and hiking a lot as a family since I last blogged, which has been a sanity-saver, because during this COVID winter we have not been seeing many friends, even outdoors. We also went sledding twice since winter started. Since my son was out of school between Thanksgiving and mid-January, for two recent weekends in a row, we have met up with his daycare friends for a playdate on bikes. Super surprising to me is that my son, who is physically VERY anxious to take risks, is actually a pretty confident pedal biker now. I honestly attribute it to him learning to bike on hand-me-down cheapo bikes that cost either nothing or just $20. He is on a free-to-us 16-inch bike at the moment, and it has a solid frame and weighs quite a lot. It is far from the fast, light bikes that I initially considered buying for him, but he has adjusted to it and rides it up a small, steady hill (130 feet of elevation over a mile) without resting. That particular route to the park includes some minor street riding as well, along a quiet street, and one time he was ahead of me at an intersection (I was walking his baby sister in a stroller) when I saw him waving to signal a driver through the roundabout. My big kid is growing up so fast! (I can't believe we are signing him up for Kindergarten right now!!) A particular delight for me recently has been to see my younger toddler blossom. Due to torticollis, she has received PT and OT help since last February, and SLP help since October. In the last couple of months, she has grown an astonishing amount, that all of her experts are ready to graduate her from their services. It has been amazing to see her improvement, and as her mom and primary caretaker during the day, I know it is no accident. More than any help she has received, she is such a determined little gal and just chooses a task and works herself at it until she gets it. She learned how to put together a jigsaw puzzle this way, over the course of several weeks, even though in my mind I thought it was way out of her reach, and similarly, just this week I saw her slaying a pretty complicated shape sorter stacking toy that she definitely could not do at the start of January. I forgot to mention Christmas, but this was the first year that my son wrote a letter to Santa. (He wrote it himself because I thought it would be a cool and semi-academic task for him to do, and actually it was pretty legible except for two important words being jumbled together. He asked for "a train" and Mercy Watson chapter books. "Santa" gave him train pajamas and two Mercy Watson books, which he promptly started reading on Christmas.) We dropped the letter off, and he was able to get a personalized response back in the mail! He was pretty excited that Santa's elves commented on his good manners in saying "Please" and "Thank you" in his request. We managed to make it a special Christmas, filled with many new traditions, even though we definitely missed traveling to visit the grandparents. Lastly, we are embarking on some new endeavors at the moment. I am currently food-training my 4.5-year-old, potty-training my 1.5-year-old, trying to sign up for Kindergarten / research after-school care options for next school year, learning new digital-teaching tools, and simultaneously trying to find a teaching job for the fall while still being a SAHM and tutoring on the side. That's probably story for another time, but, needless to say, there is never a dull moment around here.
A couple of days before Halloween, my son went to the bathroom to pee one morning after eating breakfast and noticed there were a few drops of water on the bathroom floor, presumably from when one of us had washed our hands earlier. He came outside to grab the kitchen rag to wipe the bathroom floor, and when told that we didn't want him to use the kitchen rag in the bathroom, he broke down sobbing. He sobbed so hard, that it could not have been about the rag or the water. It was not the first time in recent weeks when he had broken down crying at the drop of a hat. I held him and asked him what was wrong, and eventually it came out in broken pieces, that he just felt desperately sad about being at home without seeing his friends. He had been home with us from the start of March to the end of October, with only a handful of interactions with kids his own age during that time. My son, who is normally a bright and happy child, was really struggling mentally to cope with what seemed to be a permanent predicament.
It broke my heart. A week or so prior to this, I had grieved when we saw other kids at the park and he ran away from them. I had grieved when his bestie saw us outside and ignored his multiple attempts to say hello. I had grieved when we were over visiting a newborn's family, and the older child sprayed a few drops of liquid on his neck and my son had cried and screamed. My husband and I had a long chat that day of the bathroom sobbing incident. We decided after consulting our pediatrician, (tons of) mom friends, our daycare director, another daycare parent, and a friend who works in public health in our city, that we would send L back to school even though it means greater COVID exposure risk for our family. We made that decision because our son's mental health was clearly suffering, and at age 4, we had asked him to be at home for 8 months with no end in sight, and it was cruel to continue to shut him off from the world when he did not have the emotional capacity to cope with the indefinite wait. Once we made the decision to send him back to school, it lightened my own mental load immediately. We sent our son back to daycare on October 30, and within a couple of days, he went back to his normal, chatty, rambunctious, and happy self. It was a really tough decision, as the COVID numbers in our area are still going up, and there are some outbreaks at local daycares (not ours yet, thankfully). We plan to keep him out of school for a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving and after Christmas, assuming that other families will be seeing extended family members during those holidays. We try to balance the risk by sending him to school for only the first half of everyday. At school, the kids nap without their masks on, and I wanted to avoid that needless exposure. So, he wears his mask during the first half of the day and then I pick him up after lunch, while his little sister is napping at home. It's not perfectly safe, of course, but I feel like daycare is a necessary risk, considering that we don't know what the next school year will look like and whether there will be another long stretch of time without regular peer interactions for L. As I know is true for every family, parenting in 2020 is just being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I was incredibly grateful to read today that one of the vaccines in the works has the potential of being 90% effective. Last week, I was immeasurably happy that the Biden-Harris ticket won the election. Among other things, it gives me a glimmer of hope that our country could be on track to curbing the spread of the virus in 2021. Keeping fingers crossed for 2021. 'Tis the spooky season! We finally carved our pumpkins yesterday. I think they did not turn out as well as last year's pumpkins, but considering that now we have two little ones running around, it was not bad! My husband also roasted some really delicious pumpkin seeds, which we had never done before. Now that the sun is setting earlier, we have been trying to eat dinner early on Friday nights, so that we can either play boardgames or do crafts as a family after dinner to ease into the weekend. This past Friday night, we had our second family Halloween craft night. This time, I thought it might be fun to make a ghost garland together, since it requires only printer paper, scissors, a hole-puncher, and some clear tape. Surprisingly, the family was super into this simple craft! My husband and I enjoyed making various designs of ghosts on tri-folded printer paper, and my son enjoyed cutting them out. (The adults cut out/hole-punched the faces, since they were a bit tricky, and I helped with taping the garland pieces all together, but my son was happy to cut out all the ghost outlines, and I think he did a very nice job "cutting on the line"!) My daughter enjoyed sitting on the bench, touching the paper scraps, and being one of the big kids. Below are some finished products. If you are looking for a fun and easy Halloween activity still for this coming week, I would highly recommend trying this! My husband remarked that the last time our house was this decorated for Halloween was when we threw a huge Halloween bash 4 years ago. Earlier in the week, when I was out walking with my kids on a particularly dry and windy day, we enjoyed seeing all of the colorful fall foliage. We collected some leaves from the floor and made foliage crowns! Such an easy and fun thing to make. My daughter, in particular, loved her crown and wore it around the house on multiple days. In other updates, we have been going to the library every week, now that our local branch offers curb-side pickup for the books that we have reserved online. This week, we coincided our library pickup with dropping off our ballots for the November election. In light of all of the voter suppression, I feel so incredibly fortunate to not only live in an area that has had a track record of extremely effective voting-by-mail, but to be able to walk to our nearest ballot box, which is located next to our neighborhood branch of the library. I usually take one or both kids with me to drop off our ballots. This year was no exception, and my son was very excited to be the designated ballot-inserter! After we dropped off the ballots, we walked literally less than 10 feet to get in line to pick up our library books. Our latest stash from the library includes two books about gender identity. My son enjoys both of them very much! One is called I Am Jazz and it is told from the perspective of a (real-life) transgender child, Jazz Jennings. I agree with the review on the back cover of the book that says that the best part of the book is that Jazz is never apologetic about who she is. From beginning to end, the book has no feeling of shame, and L says he likes "everything" about the book! The other book, Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, is about a boy who likes to wear a dress and high heels at school. It's more nuanced than I am Jazz, because it is not clear if Morris is exploring a different gender or if he is simply creative and likes to play outside of the norms of stereotypical gender roles. I really like this book, because it reaffirms that everyone is okay to wear what they like to wear, and they don't owe anyone else an explanation. My son also really likes this book (no surprise there; I think it is really well-written, thoughtful, and FUN). He told me, at one point, that I had already asked him multiple times, "Is that nice?" when other kids at school bully Morris for wearing a dress. I think some things bear repeating, and I told L that if we both can agree that it is not nice, then if L were to see someone at school acting that way, he should stand up and tell them, "Hey, that's not nice! You should not do that!" L nodded and replied, "Or, I can also tell the teacher."
The books from the library are part of my on-going attempt to expose L to issues outside of himself. In my reflection about home-schooling, I have been thinking a lot about teaching empathy, compassion, and self-regulation. I think that generally, my son can be empathetic and reasonable, but he is not consistently so. I can do a better job in focusing on building up his socio-emotional skills, even though it can be hard to teach that in a vacuum, when he is not around other kids except for his little sister. One thing that I will try to do in the coming months is to introduce an emotions chart. My son has maybe only 6 or so self-regulating descriptors that he currently uses: happy, sad, mad, tired, hungry, thirsty, and scared; and he sometimes says "This is taking too long!" instead of saying he feels impatient or "This is too hard!" when he means to say that he feels frustrated. I want to increase his facility with emotional vocabulary, to increase his ability to label his own feelings. I also want to encourage him to practice articulating boundaries like, "I don't like it when you __________ because ___________." Like anything else, I think it will just take practice for him to get better with it, and if we practice using that language even just once a day, everyday, then we will see dividends in a little while! Fall is my favorite season. There is something about crisp fall days that is like none other. Last weekend, we drove out to a beautiful location for a recommended fall hike. The hike was super easy (I actually wouldn't really call it a hike, as the entire route was only a mile and it was paved to help with preserving against the harsh wintry elements; the toughest part was actually driving over a gazillion huge pot holes on the way there with our tiny sedan), but it was absolutely Pacific Northwest postcard gorgeous.
I am semi working on keeping my anonymity on this blog -- which is to say that if you know me personally, you could probably figure out that this blog is mine based on its content, but I could still write whatever I feel like writing about, without it bleeding over into my professional life. So, this is the best picture I could find where the faces are not clearly seen. You can see how clear the water is and it just constantly takes my breath away to live in a city, but to have access to such natural beauty. Nature fills me with wonder and gratitude in all seasons. |
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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July 2021
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