Digging the Whole Hole: Home Improvement Projects with Kids

We all know those people who are really good with their hands, though this is not their paid work.  Like my neighbor, Danny, who built a chicken coop last Fall, or my brother-in-law, David, who created built-in bookshelves spanning his living room wall.  I’m awed by these people.  Were they born with an uncommon gene cluster that supports building ability?  They seem so unlike me in this way.

But the more I think about it, their success lies as much in having a “can do” attitude, as in possessing good visual-spatial skills.  My husband, Todd, and I have a “think we can, but we’re a little nervous” mentality when we consider building things.

However, we both want to teach our kids how to do things for themselves.  We don’t want their only option to be paying someone else to do maintenance and repairs.  Yet, they wound up with us as parents.

A little back story:  Over the past year, it’s been much more challenging for my sons, Stephen 12 and Daniel 10, to share a room.  As experienced parents are no doubt aware, boys of similar ages have a strong magnetic attraction housed deep within their bodies.  This magnetic pull makes it impossible for one boy to walk past the other without being sucked into his space and bumping him.

Luckily for us, we (like the Brady Bunch’s Carol and Mike before us) were in the possession of a fairly livable basement room.  The time had come to turn it into a bedroom.  We began the process this past summer.

Step One was creating a bigger window with a deeper window well.  For a room to pass as a bedroom according to code, it must contain a window through which a big ole firefighter with all his equipment can enter.  Our basement room already had windows, but only a very slender firefighter whose buddies carried his equipment in through another entrance could have fit through.

We hired one of our neighbors, Kent, a contractor and carpenter, after informing him we wanted to do as much of the work as possible.  Kent’s face lit up when he heard he wouldn’t be digging, breaking up concrete, and painting.  We gathered our kids around while Kent explained our parts of the job.  Stephen and Daniel were highly motivated for this project because it meant their own rooms at the finish.  Annie, our 7 year-old, was less excited about digging a 6 foot wide, by 5 1/2 foot deep hole outside our house.

“Brutal. There’s no other word for it,” Kent pronounced, when explaining the digging.  “More dirt will come out of that hole than you ever imagined.”

It was a blazing August when we began to dig (with the help of a rented jack hammer).  When you sweat, the dirt sticks to your exposed skin.  Not just the fine dust, but small clumps of damp, loamy earth clung to our bodies.  However Stephen, soon in the hole up to his thighs, soldiered on.

Since our project was in full view of neighborhood goings on, we soon garnered onlookers offering encouragement.  Todd, Stephen, and I took turns in the hole, filling one bright orange work bucket at a time.  Then Daniel and Annie would empty the bucket into a creaky wheel barrow and dump the dirt into various designated spots.

Three brutal, exhausting days later, the mammoth hole was dug.  Annie was thrilled because she figured a big hole was sure to keep away the burglars she worried about at bedtime, like a moat.

After another week, the concrete guy came to cut a bigger window hole out of our foundation.  Sawing cement takes much longer than cutting wood.  We got to know him well.  By day’s end, a grey cloud of cement dust hung ominously over our side of the street.

Next we broke up the cement, and the boys hauled the pieces away.  Meanwhile, Kent was busy with another project.  This meant we literally had a 6×5 foot hole in our house for a week (covered with a flimsy piece of wood).  I spent a lot of energy that week trying not to think about that hole.

Eventually the window was complete.  We lowered a painted, metal window well into our hole and used some, though nowhere near all, of our excess dirt to fill in around it.

In the end, we saved $3,500 by doing our own work.  But we also taught our kids how one tackles a big project.  They saw that if you don’t know how to do something, it’s worth consulting with someone who does.  They learned that hard, sweaty, brutal work, is part of the process, and they experienced the feeling of pride that comes from doing something themselves.

I know the digging experience has stayed with Stephen because in September his Language Arts teacher assigned a writing project on “one of the things you did this summer.”  When I asked him what he ended up writing on, Stephen replied, “Digging the big hole!”

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Recommended reading:  Living Simply with Children: A Voluntary Simplicity Guide for Moms, Dads, and Kids Who Want to Reclaim the Bliss of Childhood and the Joy of Parenting, by Marie Sherlock.

I really savored this book because, unlike many of its kind, this one presented an overall mindset for this type of parenting, in addition to offering simple living suggestions.  This is a bedside table regular in my home.

However, other friends of mine experienced this book as too preachy, and thus it didn’t motivate them to undergo eco-minded parenting changes.  It’s worth checking out at least, to see which category you fall into!

Lizard Or Snake? Fascinating Gender Research about Children.

“Mama, I’ve finally decided what kind of pet I want.  Number 1 is a lizard and number 2 is a snake.”  That was Daniel, my 10 year-old, the other day.  By the phrasing of his question, you’d think I had inquired what type of pet he would like.  You would be wrong.  Since we are thinking of living abroad for a chunk of time, I’ve been actively avoiding anything near a “pet conversation” for the last 6 months.  But that didn’t stop Daniel.

My first reaction to his comment was visceral, a kind of internal, repulsive shiver.  If we were acquiring a pet, snake and lizard would be my second and third from last choices.  Spider would be dead last.  Daniel is clearly a boy.

My mind drifts back to the days when toddler Daniel, deep in his truck phase, would say, “Some day I’m going to drive a big rig that hauls Dorritos, the one with the picture on the side.  What kind of truck do you want to drive, Mama?”  I’m about as much of a truck person as I am a spider person.  It’s hard enough for me to climb behind the wheel of our minivan. I’m pretty sure I’ll never be driving a “big rig” in this lifetime.

It can be strange raising an opposite sex child.  I love him so much, but there are parts of him that seem forever foreign to me. (Don’t even get me started about those scary, angry-faced Bionicles Daniel loved for years.)

When these issues arise, and invariably lead me to some guilt, I ask Todd how he’s faring raising our daughter, Annie.  In our latest conversation Todd admitted that the aspects of girl culture he currently finds hardest are:

• hair issues:  Brushing it, styling it, the way it can affect a person’s mood.
• girl crafts:  Todd can hardly bring himself to enter Michael’s or JoAnn’s Fabrics.
• role playing pet dog and owner:  This makes him want to run and hide.

I always feel better after talking to Todd.  But then I was recommended a book which enlightened me even more, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, by Leonard Sax.  When I finished reading it, I’d used half a stack of tiny post-its, marking pages I wanted to read again or share with others.  All of the findings Sax describes are from current research.

For example, girls hear better than boys.  Who knew?  Sax recommends that boys sit near their teachers, especially if they are women and naturally talk more quietly because they hear more acutely.  He suggests there are cases of misdiagnosed ADHD, which simply involve a boy being distracted due to his inability to hear what’s being said in the classroom.

Then Sax makes this noteworthy statement about girls on the home front.  “I can’t count the number of times a father has told me, ‘My daughter says I yell at her.  I’ve never yelled at her.  I just speak to her in a normal tone of voice and she says I’m yelling.’”

Here’s another good one.  The eyes of males and females contain vastly differing distributions of rods and cones, and M and P ganglion cells.  The male eye is organized to answer the question, “Where is it?” and thus is skilled at tracking objects in the visual field.  Whereas a female’s eye is quite different, according to recent science, and is set up to answer the question, “What is it?” The female eye has a superior ability to gather information about texture and color.

These optical findings have numerous ramifications, but one I found fascinating as a child psychologist was related to kids’ drawings.  A researcher in this area gave a beautifully succinct summary: Girls draw nouns and boys draw verbs. Thus, it’s evidently quite normal for young boys to create frenzied scribbles described as something moving fast, crashing, or exploding, using colors such as grey, black, and blue.  This is what male optical ganglion cells are wired for, writes Sax.

Most of us are aware that young girls’ drawings, on the other hand, tend to utilize a pallet of warm colors which often make fairly coherent humans or animals.  Again, female eye structure makes these types of pictures much more likely.

Why Gender Matters lists so many useful research findings (such as why boys are drawn to risky behavior, how to train girls to be more daring, and what teacher characteristics and strategies boys and girls respond best to) that I can’t describe them all here.  But I simply can’t end without offering one more example.

In Sax’s words:

“Boys as young as two years of age, given a choice between violent fairy tales and warm and fuzzy fairy tales, usually choose the violent stories.  Girls as young as two years of age consistently choose the warm and fuzzy stories.  Researchers found that five- and seven-year-old girls who prefer violent stories are more likely to have significant behavior problems than girls who prefer warm, nurturing stories.  However, among boys, preference for violent stories is not an indicator of underlying psychiatric problems.  A preference for violent stories seems to be normal for five to seven-year-old boys.”

I don’t know about you, but this finding brought me relief.

So here’s my thinking about Daniel’s proposition.  I will never live in the same house with a snake.  I would perhaps consider a lizard, but only if my “new and better” proposal is rejected.  A hermit crab.  Barbara Kingsolver wrote a gorgeous essay about her daughter’s pet hermit crab in High Tide in Tucson.  Did you know that, even hundreds of miles from the sea, a hermit crab follows certain oceanic rhythms daily?   Sold me.  We’ll see about Daniel.

Other stories or suggestions about raising opposite sex children?  Leave a comment!

My Humble Warriors: Yoga with Adolescents and Tweens.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my worries about my older son’s looming middle school transition led me to enroll him in a yoga class.  For approximately one afternoon I even believed yoga would solve almost all the problems Stephen would encounter in middle school.

By the day of the first class, my expectations had reduced themselves to normal proportions.  Todd and I decided to bring both Stephen and his 9 year-old brother, Daniel, to our yoga class.  Beforehand, we explained to them the differences between “good pain” and “bad pain” they might experience in class, so they wouldn’t push too hard and become injured.  We also demonstrated some basic yoga poses in our small, carpeted living room.

As the initial class began, we found places in the back of the airy, window and mirror filled room, and spread our brightly colored mats in a row.  Considering they came from a background of soccer, basketball, and bicycling, the boys kept up fairly well in those early classes.  Stephen commented, “Yoga is harder than it looks.”  Daniel enjoyed watching his numerous and varied yoga classmates, especially from inverted positions.

Prior to each yoga class, we deposited our 6 year-old daughter, Annie, at the YMCA childcare, since she was too young to attend the Y’s yoga classes.  Poor Annie.  She’s the one in the family to whom yoga has come most naturally.  She does children’s yoga videos during her quiet time at home, and often refers to the video instructor as “my yoga teacher.”  Annie spends much of her free time each day in Jelly Legs, a shoulder stand with wiggly feet high in the air.

Because we knew how much Annie desperately wanted to be part of our family yoga experiment, after each yoga class we taught her the new poses we’d learned in our living room turned yoga studio.

As you may have predicted, over time Annie’s brothers began to balk at attending yoga class.  “I don’t want to go tonight!  I ran around at school and rode my bike home.”  And, “Believe me when I say that none of my friends do yoga.”

“Sorry guys it’s not a choice at this point,” I’d reply, a position which seemed to oppose the principles of yoga.  But I wanted the boys to experience a full yoga course before stopping.

I recall the beginning of one class.  I had a boy on either side of me sitting on his blue sticky-mat scowling.  To be honest, even now the boys complain some on the way to yoga.  But once class starts, something shifts. They move through the frequently arduous, often awkward poses, and by the session’s end, they are as sweaty and calm as the rest of us.

Returning home, the mood is always lighter.  Usually we talk and laugh about which pose we couldn’t come close to holding.  The boys consistently enjoy seeing their parents struggle in certain positions.

Then the conversation invariably moves to our favorite poses.  Daniel’s favorite pose is Side Plank.  You move from a push-up position to a side-facing one.  Balancing on one arm, your body creates the shape of a scalene triangle with the yoga mat.  When I begin this pose, my supporting arm starts to shake almost immediately.   Daniel’s does not, and he’s exceedingly proud of this.

Nonetheless, I’m still trying to decipher the reason Daniel, more than his brother, says he doesn’t really like yoga.  I think Daniel is not yet fully clear about his reasons either.  He fights the hardest to skip class, but then is the most enthusiastic in our post-yoga debriefs.  And he’s used yoga breathing exercises with much success when he can’t sleep at night.  Who knows?  I’ll let you know when I get a better handle on this, if ever.

Stephen’s best yoga pose is Humble Warrior.  I think part of the reason he loves it is that, like Side Plank, I can hardly achieve this one.  It favors those with strong thighs.  Humble Warrior starts with a deep lunge.  Then you clasp your hands straight out behind your back and lean over so that your same-side shoulder is touching your same-side bent knee in the lunge.  Seriously, I get sort of out of breath just envisioning it.

But I love that Stephen loves Humble Warrior.  It brings me right back to the reason I wanted him to learn yoga — to use yoga’s teachings during adolescence.  Lessons such as: being less reactive when you are frustrated or uncomfortable, using breathing as a way to remain calm, and simply noticing your reactions to various situations.

Even though, Stephen doesn’t regularly talk about what he’s gained from yoga, I do think it’s given him some new tools for his toolbox of coping skills.  And this thought helps me feel a little calmer as I now watch my Humble Warrior bike off to middle school each morning.

My Savasana Aha: Yoga Could Benefit My Middle Schooler.

About halfway through my son Stephen’s fifth-grade year, I started to worry about middle school.  Basically this meant I began to dwell on my own middle school experience, since Stephen’s, of course, had yet to begin.

As most adults would attest, spending much (or even any) time remembering middle school is simply not good.  My long-forgotten middle school memories seemed to grow when exposed to the light of day…

Dark hallways; tile as far as the eye could see in dull shades of banana and sea foam; the unappealing scent of cafeteria food wafting throughout the brick building; the banging of lockers; the metallic scuffing and scratching of desk chairs; and the crush of humanity at class dismissal when it became clear that far too many 12 and 13 year-olds were crowded into one location.  Middle school.  (And this is obviously just a surface description.)

On the other hand, during Stephen’s fifth grade year, I was also practicing more yoga.  We’d recently joined our local YMCA which offered free yoga classes as part of the family membership.  This price worked for us!  My husband, Todd, and I were attempting to fit yoga into our busy schedules whenever possible.

Ahhhhh yoga.  Well at least that’s how you feel at the end of a class.  I remember my first yoga experience, though.  I kept thinking, “The people in Yoga Journal don’t look like they’re in this much pain.  Someone should have told me how much these ‘sensations’ will hurt!”

About four years and two babies later, I sampled another yoga class.  Now I was prepared for the “intense sensations” of some poses (though I didn’t expect to have flashbacks of labor while in a five minute Pigeon pose).  This time around yoga stuck.  How I wished I’d done yoga during college, and even more so during graduate school.  But yoga encourages us to live in the present, so I pushed those thoughts aside and kept attending classes.

Then one day that year, when I was thinking too much about middle school, I was in Savasana pose at the end of a strenuous class.  I was resting on my back on my purple foam mat, on the teal-tinted marmoleum flooring, in the peaceful plant-filled yoga studio.

In Savasana pose you simply lie there and let go of any thoughts that enter your mind.  Except here’s my dirty little secret… sometimes I do my best thinking in Savasana pose.  At this particular moment, I realized that the lessons I’ve taken from yoga could be really useful in middle school.

For example:

• Noticing what you are feeling but not immediately acting on it.
• Staying in a challenging situation (or yoga pose) for a while and “sitting with” the discomfort.  Think: learning new geometry concepts.
• Learning to simply breathe when the going gets tough.
• Being flexible in body and mind.

And Sat Bir Khalsa, Ph.D. says this is just the beginning of what yoga can offer.  Dr. Khalsa, a neuroscientist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, studies yoga’s affects on depression and insomnia.  He notes that as well as helping one reduce “unmanaged stress,” practicing yoga “enhances resilience, and improves mind-body awareness which “can help people adjust their behaviors based on the feelings they’re experiencing in their bodies.”

From what I’ve read, western research on yoga is in its infancy and we’ll likely discover more yoga benefits in coming years.  However, what I’d found for myself through yoga, and the research results I’d seen thus far, were enough to convince me that yoga could benefit Stephen as he began middle school.  And heck, if we were bringing Stephen, why not bring his 9 year-old brother Daniel too?

Read next week’s post to find out how the yoga trial went over with my 9 and 11 year-old boys.

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Here’s an article I just came across about bringing yoga into elementary schools.  Check out the e-newsletter it’s in, EdNews Parent, for smart and on-target articles about kids and schooling.