'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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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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