'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!
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My daughter was born in 2019. She was always an easy baby, compared to our inconsolable first-born. The newborn sleep was still not perfect the second time around, but in a lot of ways, I could already tell that she was going to be a different child than her brother, right from the start. When she was about 5 months old, my husband went out of town one weekend for work. I kept the baby up for a little bit after putting her older brother down to sleep, and we hung out in the darkening living room, enjoying some 1:1 girl time after dark. The sun had set and I noticed that she was looking out the window, and I wondered if she was looking at the lights outside? Curiously, I rotated her to face the darker end of the room, to see whether she would turn her head back towards the light coming through the window. When she did not, I was a bit surprised, and continued to turn her body this way and that, only to realize that actually her head seemed to only turn to face always the same side of her body, and then back to midline. She almost never looked towards her right shoulder, past the midline. Over the course of the next few days, I confirmed this observation again and again by watching her closely, and was stricken with a deep sense of guilt.
--How could I have not noticed this before? I felt ashamed of my previous oblivion, and was Googling madly to see what it meant that my precious daughter could not rotate her head in both directions. When my husband came back from his trip, he tried to assuage my fears. "I am pretty sure I have seen her turn her head to the right before," he said. He was as certain that I was being paranoid, as I was sure that I was not. I made an appointment with our pediatrician, but began gently stretching her neck while I waited for the still-a-week-away appointment. By the time I saw a doctor from our pediatrician's office, her neck already seemed better. The doctor encouraged me to continue to stretch her neck, and said that often the newborns will just get better with this over time. I was not convinced that she would get better "on her own", because over the next week, I saw the pain and resistance in her eyes whenever I would try to stretch her neck the way the doctor had shown me, so I made an appointment with a newborn masseuse (technically, it was a body worker who worked with adults, but who also came highly recommended by local moms for treating infant torticollis), who was able to restore her full range of motion in three miraculous visits -- or so, I thought. When she left the masseuse's practice after three visits, N seemed visibly limber and free, able to rotate her head to the right while laying on her tummy, and showed only a small bit of tenseness/discomfort when I would massage her back or shoulder. I felt so happy to have found her the antidote to her illness (or so I thought). Fast-forward to 7 months, my daughter was still not sitting up, and could only occasionally roll over in her bed, and almost always rolled in one direction only. The doctor had remarked at 6 months that she seemed to be generally on track with her development, and did not seem concerned about her torticollis. At 7 months, however, N was unable to place any weight on her left hand or be able to push her head off of the ground more than 2 or 3 inches, and I was getting quite worried. I brought her back in to the pediatrician's office to make sure there was nothing wrong with her left shoulder (as in, was there a shoulder sprain?), and this time, a different pediatrician did a thorough examination and advised me to take her to PT. This pediatrician noted that my daughter was unable to place any amount of weight on her feet, which developmentally typically happens around 4 months. She said that N appears to have a slightly weaker muscle tone on the left side of her body, but regardless, PT would be able to address the vast majority of these cases and bring her function into the normal range. I immediately contacted an early-intervention agency in our area and waited for our intake appointment, scheduled to take place in February 2020. The wait was excruciating, because I did not know whether she would ever walk, if she could not bear any weight on her feet? Finally, the day came for our intake appointment for early-intervention services. The specialists at the early-intervention intake appointment assessed N in the areas of gross-motor, fine-motor, and speech development using a set of detailed rubrics, behavioral observation, and interview with both parents. They determined that N qualified for state-subsidized intervention services. In order to qualify for these services, she needed to be either 1.5 standard deviations below the mean in that particular assessment area, or delayed more than 25% of her age in months in that area. Across the board, they noted that her torticollis had caused delays in her gross-motor development, her use of her right hand (both gross- and fine-motor development), and in her cognitive development (since she only looked left and so seldom used her right side of her body, she could not really explore her environment, feed herself, or "self-advocate" in ways that were appropriate for a 7-month-old). We set up therapy immediately, with weekly PT sessions to address gross-motor delays and monthly OT sessions to address fine-motor delays (including challenges in self-feeding). By the time N started therapy, she had already completely plateaued in development for 2 or 3 months -- an eternity, considering she was only 8.5 months old. I write about this now, because I want to say that when all of this happened, initially I felt so many negative emotions. I grieved for the assessment results -- that she truly was so delayed in her development and that the future seemed uncertain for her. Simultaneously, I felt also an immense sense of relief, that my mother instincts were not false, and I was not being paranoid at all. I felt angry that the pediatrician's office had missed several flags along the way, and that it took my own insistent advocacy to get her the help that she needed. But, over time, all of those negative emotions have faded. I look back and feel only immense gratitude -- that I trusted my instincts, that we were able to access such a wonderful organization in our area, that we were able to continue virtual services seamlessly during COVID shutdown, and that my daughter has responded so well to a variety of interventions. I also feel so incredibly hopeful for the person that my daughter has turned out to be thus far. Over the course of 6 months, she has made a tremendous amount of weekly progress, smashing every goal they are setting for her. Her journey with the PT and OT has shown me that she is both curious and resilient. She is too young for me to know exactly how she will fare in formal school setting, but what I can say is that she affirms for me (as her brother did, in different contexts) that we are each far more than the raw talents we were born with. N has had to work very hard at every skill: rolling over, sitting up, crawling, walking, climbing, pulling toys apart, feeding herself, and manipulating small objects. Every skill, every step of the way, she has practiced and focused and beamed with pride when she is able to do something all by herself, and then she would rush to do it again and again, thereby showing incremental progress day after day. She has taught me more about joy than I could have imagined, and she has a sense of humor, a spunk, and a can-do attitude that are all of her own. Looking back, the greatest lesson I have taken away from this second-time-around parenting experience thus far is to see our children for who they are, not just who we wish they were. They come to us with different gifts and also different challenges. Those challenges don't need to define their achievement, but it is our job as parents to see our children for their needs (as well as strengths), in order to help them be and feel successful on their own terms. I have been reflecting a lot about self-limiting beliefs.
It all started when we made these new friends a couple of years ago. They are a married couple, and their kid was in the same toddler soccer program as our big kid, L. My husband, G, started getting friendly with the dad during the soccer program, which annoyed me initially because they were always off in the corner chatting, so I had to run around with L during the soccer program while being fairly pregnant. But then, we met his wife, and it was all good because I liked her right away. We have been hanging out more with this family over the course of the past year, and we just really like them. Besides being incredibly down to earth and genuine, the thing that has made the biggest impression on me is how both of them DO NOT seem to have self-limiting beliefs! The husband is learning to swim currently, because he has set a goal to do a triathlon when he turns 40. Have you ever met a person who has decided to do a triathlon, before they know how to swim?! The wife has had a spotty academic record because she had to care for her younger siblings financially when she was in college, but she is applying to a prestigious MBA program so that she can advance her tech career while on upcoming maternity leave! This lady bikes up and down the hills in our city while being 8 months pregnant, while carrying her 30-pound toddler on the back of her non-e-assisted bike. So incredibly inspiring. I just love everything about them, and they have helped me to examine my own self-limiting beliefs. Because of them, I started practicing biking with my younger toddler. (Before this, my husband gladly rode with both toddlers on his non-e-assisted bike -- on a crazy bike rig that weighs about 80 pounds including both kids.) I started riding my bike with a sack of rice, training three times a week when both kids would go down for a nap. I started with 10 pounds, then upgraded to 20 pounds. Recently, I started carrying my actual toddler, which has been amazingly gratifying, even though I was a little too ambitious and we fell on a slippery gravel trail last week. The whole idea of self-limiting beliefs is one that I have been really thinking about. What can we accomplish, that seems currently impossible? It is an idea that I have been talking extensively to my oldest kid about. L is at a wonderful age where you can really talk to him like a real person. He is 4, which has its challenges for sure (recently, before I noticed, he was throwing fist-sized rocks over our fence onto the sidewalk, which is incredibly dangerous and almost hit a passer-by), but he is also capable of holding some big ideas in his head. During our COVID-19 homeschooling, the idea that everything always seems impossible until it is done (a quote from Nelson Mandela) has come up again and again. L is naturally risk-averse, which is both a blessing (for me, as a parent -- he has never tried to climb anything dangerous or tried to run into the street) and a challenge (he is scared to walk down tiny hills sometimes, or to climb play structures that he had done a year prior). Being at home with me, we have had the chance to work on taking risks on a daily basis, which has had a huge noticeable impact on L and his growth mindset over the course of several months. He learned to ride a pedal bike (before COVID, he had never agreed to be on a bike of any kind, either balance bike or bike with training wheels), learned to jump off of benches and rocks, learned to ride a two-wheeled scooter, and learned to read in English. In acquiring each new skill, L has had self-doubting moments where he felt like the next stage of achievement was simply impossible. And then, what seemed impossible would become achievable after some risk-taking (bribing), a lot of pep-talking, and a lot of repetitive, low-pressure practice. In response, he now says things like, "Everything takes practice, and you will improve!" and "Everything is impossible, you know? Until you do it, and that's it." To me, that is everything; that mindset is way more important to me than the actual skills he has gained. But, as I work with L on these skills and his growth mindset, I have been reflecting critically about where I practice what I preach in my own life. How can I teach my child to take risks, without modeling it myself? It seemed impossible to carry a child on my bike. It seemed impossible to home-school my defiant toddler while managing a baby with developmental delays. It seemed impossible for me to take on teaching my child to bike, when my husband is the best biker in the family. It seemed impossible to get my child to speak Mandarin, when I am the only person who speaks to him regularly in that language. For a long time, I was anxious to improvise music with my husband, because I felt like I was not musical enough. Each time I have had a self-limiting belief, if I worked at it steadily, I have been able to show myself that that limiting belief is not actually accurate. So, my new goals (which currently seem impossible) are: I want to get comfortable with taking my children out on the water, in a kayak, all by myself. I want to start a business (for profit or non-profit, I haven't decided) to provide tools to help average parents with reinforcing mathematical understanding at home. Will these goals be achieved? I don't know; but what I can do is to take teensy, little steps towards realizing those goals, and hope for the best. What are your self-limiting beliefs, and in what ways are they holding you back? |
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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