Summer Updates

Due to my expanded summertime childcare hours, part two of our D.I.Y. home project, and a train trip to San Francisco, I will not be posting for the next two weeks.  In the meantime here are some updates people have requested.

A summer evening at Chautauqua park in Boulder

Natural Consequence Outcome

Daniel had an amazing time in Yellowstone with his grandparents and cousin on their Road Scholar intergenerational adventure.  Although the weather forecasts had suggested the trip would be cool and wet, luck shined down on them and their weather was ideal.  Great conditions for learning about and enjoying Yellowstone.  Subpar conditions for suffering through the natural consequence of being cold due to forgetting your fleece jacket.  (See post.)  I guess Daniel will have to learn the importance of packing carefully on another vacation.

New Pet(s)

Those of you who read the post, Lizard or Snake?, may be interested to know that on Daniel’s 11^th birthday, after hoping and waiting for two years, he received a lizard.  He named his new leopard gecko, Zorro.   Since leopard geckos typically have a twenty-year lifespan, Todd and I were hoping to find a “previously owned” gecko, thinking we could perhaps cut the lifespan in half that way.  I know that sounds callous, but twenty years of life!  This means that my own grandchildren might play with Zorro some day.  We struck out on the “used lizard” front and ended up purchasing a young gecko, our only pet store option.

Zorro sports a rainbow of colors overlaying black dot designs, which would make a college kid choosing a first tattoo jealous.  His cage needs to stay between 80° and 90° F, a bit of a challenge.  Once a day Daniel feeds Zorro a live cricket.  Crickets cost 11¢ apiece.  They often die before Daniel is ready to feed them to the gecko. We’re still figuring how many crickets to buy at a time, but Daniel buys them with his own money.  We don’t have an abundance of crickets in Colorado, but I think our next step will be to have Daniel learn the cricket catching trade (as long as local crickets won’t injure Zorro’s delicate Middle Eastern constitution.)

On Annie’s 8^th birthday she became a “parent” as well.  She picked out two Chinese dwarf hamsters.   She’d been hoping for a hamster since last year and dutifully checked out hamster books on each library trip.  After all that reading I’d learned a thing or two about these little creatures.  I knew most hamsters are loners, but dwarf hamsters are an exception.  I also read that their lifespan was 1-2 years, and they had no special temperature requirements.  Since Jumper and Puffer reside in Annie’s room, she is learning the true meaning of nocturnal.

Stephen’s Lesson in Consumerism

My sister, Heather, gave Stephen her old iPod complete with hundreds of great tunes.  After a while, though, the battery stopped holding its charge.  Hence Todd and I took a trip to the Apple store.  We went alone because we’ve learned not to bring our children into this computer “candy” store.  We showed the teenage salesman Stephen’s iPod and asked if we might purchase a new battery.  He looked at the gadget, declared it to be in good condition, and informed us that it was what Apple refers to a classic model.  Then the salesman said they don’t sell replacement batteries for classic models.

When I related this experience to Stephen, he responded in an incredulous whisper, “Planned obsolescence!”  After my disappointment at the Apple store, I was buoyed by Stephen’s accurate use of knowledge gained from the Story of Stuff video.

Stephen came home from science camp today saying that for those of us who use Google, there is a lower energy alternative called Saveswatts.com.  It’s sponsored by Google but has a black background, among other small differences, and uses less energy per search.

A Birthday Party Game that Makes Kids Think

My friend Marsi has always had a knack for birthday party games.  One year Todd and I followed up on one of her good ideas and created a complex treasure hunt.  We’ve now done the treasure hunt for probably five birthday parties over the past three years.

A small warning:  Once you create this type of treasure hunt, the children (your own and previous year’s guests) will request one each year.  So be sure to keep your clues filed somewhere easy to find on the computer for future year’s modifications.

For the actual treasure hunt, it’s worked well to split party guests into two groups, each group having a coach, as well as completely different sets of clues.  Make the clues fairly challenging and feel free to throw in a few rhymes.  Here are some examples we used this year with 6-8 year-olds.

1.  Annie likes me but I’m not to Stephen’s taste.  We’re friends with tea, ice cream and toothpaste.  (mint growing in the garden)

2. Without me people would stay on the ground.  With me they check out the mountains around.  (the staircase to our neighbor’s upper deck)

3. I have numbers but am not a phone.  I have letters but am not a book.  Outside is where you should look.  (our car’s license plate)

4. I can swallow it all, even worms too.  Then come next year, your garden looks new.  (our outdoor compost)

This game takes some work to set up, but the kids’ pride in working so hard to decode the clues makes it well worth the trouble.  More than one parent informed me that their daughter had come home that afternoon and created her own treasure hunt for her family to follow.

Natural Consequences Are Painful to Observe

“I think I’m going to miss you guys a little, but mostly it will be really fun.”  These were Daniel’s parting words as he left with his grandparents for a week-long trip to Yellowstone.

Elderhostel, recently re-named Road Scholar, organizes numerous trips for seniors, many of which my parents have thoroughly enjoyed over the past 15 years.  A few years back fellow participants enlightened my parents about trips designed for grandparents and one or two of their grandchildren (between ages 8 and 12).  These adventures are known to be some of the best Road Scholar offers.

Stephen took the first grandparent/grandchild trip with my father and stepmother last summer.

Destination:  Grand Canyon

Length:  5 days

Activities included:  hiking, train trip, boat trip, and swimming

There were also hands-on classes with naturalists.  A high point was building the sediment layers of the Grand Canyon using play dough in shades of red, orange, and tan.  They were even given various fossils to stick into the correct rock layers.

Daniel’s time in Yellowstone will include bicycling, horseback riding, and kayaking.  Also on the trip is my stepsister Lisa’s oldest son, Grant.  Living in separate parts of the U.S., the boys hadn’t spent time together in the last 5 years, so Daniel (who you’ll recall is one of my extroverted children) was thrilled by this prospect.  And indeed the boys got along swimmingly during the days they spent in Boulder before leaving for West Yellowstone.

Daniel was overjoyed to spend 24 hours a day with Grant.  The boys’ interests matched up like cog and chain on a bicycle, an apt description since we spent much time on bikes each day.  We rode to get groceries, to show Grant a large prairie dog community, to visit the used bookstore to stock up for the car trip.

The only problem came when it was time pack up for departure.  Daniel had one eye on packing and the other on what Grant was doing across the room.  Even when Grant was out of the room, full-focus eluded our Daniel.

Todd and I looked at Montana’s upcoming weather.  Highs in the 60s, lows in the 30s, with some clouds and rain.  Not exactly easy summer weather.  Because of this we ended up doing most of Daniel’s packing for him.  Right here, the experts would probably tell me I should have left this to Daniel.

But here’s the deal.  I can’t seem to let my kids experience natural and logical consequences when it comes to warmth and thirst.  These are such core survival matters that it’s hard for me to let the kids fail or suffer from their mistakes in these areas.  Yet, I look around and other people don’t regularly struggle with these lessons for their kids.  Why me?

One theory.  When I was a kid my stepfather, Dan, owned an outdoor equipment and camping store called Appalachian Outfitters.  He opened this store long before REI dominated the scene.  Appalachian Outfitters was the place in the DC area where you went when you wanted to start doing more serious hiking or rock climbing, for example.  You’d walk in and be advised by an employee who had just returned from climbing Everest.

It was a cool place, and when I was old enough Dan recruited me to work there.  After enduring a summer of counting inventory in the dim, dusty warehouse, I was promoted to the clothing and hiking boot section of the store.

Appalachian Outfitters was one of those local businesses that took pride in customer service.  I was trained extensively on fitting people with the correct shoes and boots for their needs, and teaching them the difference between down, thinsulate, polypropylene, wool, 60/40 cloth, nylon,  and gore-tex.

Before I began to work at my stepfather’s store, he’d often have to badger me to wear a hat in the winter.

“You know you lose 99% of your body’s heat through your head,” he’d admonish.

“But Dan, I just curled my bangs!”

I’m not sure Dan was aware of it, but my working at his store was nearly a perfect solution.  Once I started educating others about how to stay warm and dry in the elements, I took the message to heart.

Research shows that if you can get a child to teach something to another, they will learn the lesson best themselves.  That’s the thinking behind “group work” at school, everyone learns from it (though it also seems many don’t enjoy it).  The same idea is used to explain why first children tend to have slightly higher IQ scores than their siblings.  They spend so much time “teaching” their younger brothers and sisters.

So working at Appalachian Outfitters laid the groundwork for my future challenges when it came to letting my kids compromise their “warmth” due to poor clothing choices.

As for my issue with thirst, it may be related to spending my childhood in humid Virginia.  Yeah we got thirsty, but there was so much moisture in the air that simply breathing practically met your liquid needs on hot days.  Then I moved to the Mountain West, land of no humidity, and I was suddenly thirsty a lot.  I noticed people carrying around water bottles and soon became a convert.  But the Virginia kid in me is still a bit worried I’ll be caught without needed water at some point in this partial-desert.   So, of course, I transfer this little anxiety to my kids.

Daniel and his escorts left for Yellowstone two days ago.  A few hours after they left, I saw Daniel’s fleece jacket on the floor of his room.  I’d carefully explained to my distracted child that on this trip “his warm outer layers would be a fleece and a gore-tex shell.”  Now he was minus the fleece.

Daniel will, therefore, be experiencing what many parenting books refer to as natural consequences.   As psychologist Lynn Clark writes, nature does the punishing for the poor choice, not the parent.

What Clark does not explain is how uncomfortable it is to watch this outcome unfold.  When the consequences are not a problem for me – falling into a chilly stream in summertime when you weren’t being careful at the edge, not eating enough dinner and being hungry later, forgetting your homework and suffering your teacher’s wrath, I do fine.  I can let my kids struggle (and learn the vital life lessons) while remaining fairly calm.

But with warmth and thirst issues, I’m sitting on my hands, and talking myself down.  Luckily by the time I’d learned of the forgotten fleece, said child was 100 miles away.  I called my parents later and I’m proud to say that I did not beg them to buy another fleece.  Instead I urged them to let Daniel suffer a bit.  Daniel could always wear multiple layers of long-sleeve t-shirts from his suitcase.

So, I did it.  Daniel is on a cold trip in Yellowstone without a fleece and hopefully he’ll learn a lesson about careful packing (against a backdrop of having an amazing time with his cousin and grandparents).

Oh, and did I mention that when Daniel first called home, he had yet to realize he didn’t have his fleece?  (He’d been in the car for much of the prior day.)  But he did complain, “You didn’t fill up my water bottle!”  Another natural consequence followed, no doubt.  I merely said, “I’m sure you figured something out.”  Perhaps I’m slowly improving.

____

Note:

Psychologist and parent Lori Gottlieb just wrote a great article in The Atlantic titled, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why the Obsession with our Kids’ Happiness May Be Dooming Them to Unhappy Adulthoods.”   It discusses similar issues of letting our kids experience life’s hard knocks.

How Not to Read Shakespeare

My plan had such potential!  Why did it crash and burn so quickly?

I wanted to read some Shakespeare with my kids this summer.  When I mentioned my idea to a few other parents, one loaned me a version of The Tempest that she and her 10 year-old daughter had loved.  It was an adaptation written by Lois Burdett, an elementary school teacher from Ontario, Canada.  She evidently teaches Shakespeare to 8 and 9 year-olds by changing the plays into long rhyming poems.

Here is her beginning to The Tempest:

I convey you to Europe, off Italy’s coast,

A sorcerer, Prospero, will soon be your host. 

As we wait his arrival, cast down your eyes,

The ship below us is near its demise.

It tosses and heaves in the frenzied sea,

The storm boils with anger, wild as can be.

A few pages into Burdett’s Tempest, I began to adore it.  I couldn’t wait to read it aloud to my 10 and 12 year-old sons.  Yes there was challenging vocabulary, but she also included the well-known passages, such as:

Full fathom five, thy father lies:

Those are pearls that were his eyes,

Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell,

Hark! Now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.

The boys sat patiently at first as I translated the difficult words and summarized tricky sections.  They seemed to be following the plot fairly well.  A half hour later we quit for bedtime.   As we sat down to read the next day, however, each began to balk.

“Why do we have to read this again?  I don’t like this.”

I pushed on, hoping they’d settle into it.

But when I corralled Stephen and Daniel for our third session, they mutinied.  I couldn’t believe it!  Burdett teaches Shakespeare to children younger than mine.  I guess I just assumed my kids could do it.

I was so disappointed and frustrated.  As I thought about it later, maybe my disappointment was because I myself had enjoyed the reading so much.  Finding reading material that is engaging for parents to read aloud is nearly as essential as picking books the child is drawn to.  This parent is partial to rhyming books which use interesting vocabulary.  Burdett’s Shakespeare was ideal for me.

My first response was to get angry and warn the boys that they weren’t going to pass the summer reading comics.  But after I’d cooled down I remembered the words of Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish in How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk.  (Stephen is turning 13 in mid July and I want to be ready.)

“Invite your child to give his or her point of view then ask them to brainstorm ways to solve the problem.”  (This is so obvious it hardly merits writing down, but evidently I needed to hear it for the who-knows-how-many-ith time.)

When I asked the boys why they didn’t want to finish The Tempest, Daniel, my 10 year-old, responded that the poetry format was too hard for him to follow, even with my explanations.  Stephen reminded me that he’d read Macbeth at school this past year.  He said he’d rather read Shakespeare’s actual words on his own, not aloud.

I thought to myself, “Some people spend years of graduate school deciphering Shakespeare, and you’re going to just comprehend it on your own?”   But, I didn’t say anything.

Since none of us is at our best right now while living with construction in our basement, I handed this struggle over to Todd.  I think he was happy to take a break from fitting glass block into a wall to distribute more light.

Within the next half day Todd had managed to have a constructive discussion with all three kids about some of the academic tasks we’d like them to work on this summer.  If you don’t count Shakespeare, mostly it’s math and Spanish, and not a lot mind you.  Maybe an extra 1-2 hours each day broken into two sittings.  Nothing compared to school.

Possible morals to this story:

1. Don’t read Shakespeare when your home is under construction.
2. Canadian children have a greater natural love for Shakespeare than American kids?
3. Let Todd run any family meeting addressing academic goals.
4. Females enjoy Shakespeare in a rhyming poetry format more than males.  Accept it and move on.
5. Have your kids share their summer wish lists with you before diving full-force into your own.

What am I missing? Advice?  Leave a comment below!

Raising Your Spirited Child While D.I.Y. Remodeling

When my son Stephen was a year old, I visited my aunt and cousins in Seattle.  While we toured their recently renovated home, my aunt commented that kids have different “space needs” as they grow, and ideally one can expand a house here and there so it can grow with them.

I remembered looking at my outwardly calm, teenage cousins and wondering just what my Aunt Rika meant by this.  My energetic toddler seemed to need infinitely more space than these low-key girls.  But I figured I’d cross that bridge when I got there.  Most likely I was soon distracted by the need to protect their lovely home from Stephen’s tottering energy.

In the past couple of years, I’ve returned to my aunt’s advice.  As my two oldest kids have grown, they’ve begun bumping into each other more frequently in our small home.  Sometimes this seems to be for the pleasure of the contact.  Our boys speak to each other physically as well as verbally.  Other times it reflected the crowding in the bedroom they shared as they grew taller by the month.  This prompted us to move toward “growing” our house.

Each summer Todd and I take on at least one moderately challenging home improvement project in our home. Last year we created an egress window in our basement which allowed Stephen to move into his own bedroom down there.  In the process we dug and hauled more dirt than I ever believed possible.  (See the Digging the Whole Hole post, one of my favorites.)

This summer we are demolishing an interior wall in the basement, and erecting a new one.  This will yield one medium-sized bedroom for Stephen and another larger multi-purpose room.  The big room will serve mainly as a kids’ rec room.

We hope to fit a small ping-pong table in one part and create a movie watching zone in a second area (with a home office nook thrown in as well).  We wanted to make a space for our kids and their friends to hang out, now and in years to come, separate from the regular family areas.  Our kids may still end up spending all their down time at friends’ houses, but at least we will have made an attempt at keeping them here.

So here we are midway through the remodel.

Todd and I did indeed demolish the wall on our own during the kids’ last two days of school.  The demolition was physically challenging but surprisingly satisfying, aside from the abundant dust.  And happily, we found the wood studs in good shape and reusable.  Next we’ve been watching our contractor, Alex, build the new wall.  It’s halfway complete.

The surprise was that the remodel itself wasn’t the hardest aspect of this process.  Instead the rough part has been the five of us living in a space the size of a hotel suite. This, my friends, has not been pretty. Why did I not foresee this?

As I was moving the contents of a bookshelf to prep for the demolition, I came across a book I’d read eight or nine years ago, Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, Energetic, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka.  I’d read it first more as a child psychologist than a parent.  I’d heard rave reviews from many a parent and wanted to see for myself.   When I found the book the other day, something urged me to re-read it.

These days my kids don’t fit the typical definition of spirited.   And though my husband has referred to me as “high maintenance, but in a good way” more than once, I didn’t expect to see myself on so many of this book’s pages!  Perhaps it should be titled Living with Your Spirited Mom.

On other pages I also see my kids, and lastly even some of my husband.  Todd is probably the least “spirited” of the five of us.  Remember how he was also the one who we predicted wouldn’t eat the marshmallow in the Marshmallow Test for self-control?  Not fair.

But it turns out these personality variables which lead us to be more or less spirited are part of our innate temperaments.  We are born with these genetically based temperament characteristics and we can work with them, but we can’t change them.

In the 1950’s personality researchers Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas were among the first to describe temperament.  They identified nine temperament traits, each on a continuum from mild to extreme.  Spirited children tend to fall on the extreme end of some to many of these traits.

So I’m reading about temperament, amidst loud banging and high-pitched drilling coming from our lower level, while dust defies gravity by wafting upstairs as if our not-so-big basement simply can’t contain it all.  The smell of the dust is somewhere between chalk, paste, and a more intense chemical that I don’t want to think too hard about, or I will definitely become more spirited than I wish to be.

I look up from my book and see three additional bookshelves and two beanbag chairs which usually live downstairs, somehow stuffed into the corner of our already European-sized (read: small but workable) living room.

It occurs to me that I probably struggle more than I realized with the temperament traits of adaptability (how we handle changes and transitions in our lives) and sensitivity (heightened awareness of noises, smells, lights, textures, or changes in mood).

As I read another chapter, I am informed that introverts need their own private space in order to recharge.  This renovation has taken my most introverted child, Stephen, out of the bedroom he waited eleven years for, and back to sharing a room with his brother.  Upon reading this, I went straight to our bedroom to clear a space on our window seat for Stephen.  At least he’d have one small place in which to read in peace.

Then there are my two extroverted children, Daniel and Annie.  This project has cut into their social schedules quite severely.  We’ve been so focused on the remodel work that we haven’t let them have friends over regularly.  “As soon as the new room is done” isn’t working anymore.  Annie has been getting surly, and Daniel has been sneaking time on his brother’s eight year-old, hand-me-down iPod which evidently has one video game on its tiny screen.  Who knew?

The last thing I am reminded of when reading the Spirited Child book is the fact that all five of our family members are either high or extremely high on the temperament trait called energy level.  We don’t do well sitting, standing, or being still.  Perhaps this is why you see an exercise theme consistently running through this blog.

When we are stressed or cooped up, we need to move even more than usual.  Therefore my new family survival plan, at least until the basement project is finished, is to exercise (whether working out at the gym or playing at the park) with the kids at least three times a day.

Sound tiring?  Perhaps you were lucky to be born lower on the energy level continuum than we happen to be!  If so, just sit back and enjoy it.

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