It’s clear I haven’t been blogging much by how my LWOS announcements stack up. And lest anyone harangue me for working on those posts instead of Aurora’s birthstory, I wrote the LWOS posts up while I was still pregnant. So there. Anyway, this post is a fun one, about something astonishingly cool that Rowan did.
http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2008/07/upside-down-and.html
Tooth #2 is officially gone!
It’s the matching bottom tooth, so now he has a great gap front n’ center bottom, through which to whistle, or rest a straw. The Tooth Fairy brought him a lovely silver dragon charm, which he has not physically let go of in 24 hours or so.
This one hung on for very little time, compared to how long the other one was wiggly, which tells me that I’d better get busy stockpiling Fairy gifts.
Oh, and how’s this for cool? Picked it up off a homeschooling list… sometimes, when there’s no tooth at all, the Tooth Fairy randomly shows up with new toothbrushes, encouragements to brush, and other dental hygiene goodness. How cool is that?
Last night, the waiting was over. After wiggling around for three solid weeks, Rowan lost his first tooth.
I‘d been in a meeting in Menlo Park in February 13, being all busily corporate, when Jason IMd me with this exchange:
11:54 AM teamhudson: hello love
11:57 AM guess what?
11:58 AM me: what?
11:59 AM teamhudson: Rowan has his first loose tooth
bottom front middle right incisor12:00 PM me: eeeeeeeeeek
12:01 PM teamhudson: uh huh
12:02 PM I think I’m right in thinking that’s also the first one that came in
12:03 PM several places say that’s likely, and he’s about the right age
12:04 PM me: I think so; he is
teamhudson: Cuz my first reaction was “Already?”
I‘ll be honest; I was trying hard not to choke up, that my little boy’s first loose tooth happened while I was not home. I freaked just a little that it meant I was somehow A Lesser Mother. And of course, because it’s me… I also immediately started researching.
There are all kinds of beautiful options for creative treatment of the Tooth Fairy gifts for girls. Pearl bracelets, charm bracelets, necklaces… all kinds of gorgeous options. For boys? Not so much. And it made me really, really sad that for girls, there is imagination and creativity, but I guess little boys are supposed to be OK with spare cash. It’s kind of the same thing you find about boys’ clothes. Sports, military themes, and commercialization are fine. It’s impossible to find a boy counterpart to the cute pink t-shirt we bought one of the nieces, that spells out in rhinestones, “Fairies Rock”. How about “Elves Rule”, huh?
So, determined to do better, I flung a quick request northwards, and within days, Rowan’s Auntie Ria had made a gorgeous glossy red beaded pouch (Rowan’s favorite color), and Nana and Grandpa Al had found a Sac Dollar and a small charm with gold dust to put in it. I was set… materially… to respond to the eventual loss of the tooth.
Except that then there’s the philosophical question. Do you tell them about the Tooth Fairy, or not? I know people who consider that sort of thing to be a form of institutionalized lying. We haven’t gone too overboard with Santa or the Easter Bunny; I think Rowan already is fairly sure those are just made-up characters. So this was my chance, if I took it, to put the magic back in, and give him something else to believe in. I quizzed Jennie, my hairstylist, about what she’d done. Her sons are slightly older than mine, and she admitted that it had been as much of a question of hers as it currently was of mine; what’s the right thing to do? Give em reality straight-up, or keep the magic going? She polled her clients, when it had been her son’s turn, and discovered that the majority of grown adults wished their parents had held the magic for them for just a little longer.
Naturally, it wasn’t even a question for Jason. He held out for magic. So yesterday evening, when Rowan came yelling “Mama! Mama! It’s out!”, I had my plan of action. I pulled out the pouch (which he instantly adored), told him it was for holding his tooth, we put his tooth in there (after showing it proudly to Kestrel, to Papa, and to Uncle Marc), and then when he went to bed, we hung it from a ribbon on the ceiling, so that the Tooth Fairy could come take the tooth and replace it with treasure.
After he fell asleep, but before I did (and there’s a tight time window there), I tipped up the pouch, got the tooth, and placed the treasures inside. And teared up, just a little. It’s hard to put into words, the confluence of emotions, at that point. I remember being the kid wondering what the Tooth Fairy would bring. I was the Mama, in charge of making that dream happen. I remember being the kid, totally unable to keep my tongue from testing that weird spot in my teeth where something wasn’t any more. I am the Mama,
trying to capture that in a picture.
This morning, he woke up early, and I could hear him checking out what the Tooth Fairy had left. He rocketed upstairs to share his “loot” with me, and ask me why the Tooth Fairy doesn’t let itself be seen, and why it had left what it did, and and and…
Mission accomplished. The magic is there. And he’s looking forward to the loss of the next tooth, to see what the Tooth Fairy comes up with this time. And so am I.
Previously, I’ve posted about Digital Natives, (here and here) mostly in terms of how unschooling is pretty much the most ideal way to approach the sticky problem of trying to be an authority to someone who can look up your sources faster than you can.
It did not occur to me, until I was sitting in a room with about 40 other corporate web content delivery professionals (a set of Kiss-of-Death adjectives if ever there were), at a recent gathering for sharing of information about using multimedia on websites, how thoroughly our assumptions are informed by the schooling we got. The point was to familiarize people with the technologies available, and give them some ideas for how to use them.
So how come, I’m sitting there wondering, less than 1/4 of the presentations actually used multimedia? See, corporate folks? Their attention is on keeping their jobs, and looking good for their management. Sort of like how kids in school want to impress the teacher. More and more, I’m convinced that they don’t actually participate in the web beyond what’s required in their daily work, the same way that schooled kids tend to do what’s required for the grade, and not much more, and certainly not much different.
For example, one presentation stressed strongly how important it is to have good solid metadata in things like videos, because there’s no text for a search engine to provide more context and/or relevancy through, so the tagging you give is pretty much all you get. People all over the room are nodding and smiling, like this is news.
Um, hello? Old news, folks. My son Rowan, who is five, understands metatagging. He knows how to start the laptop, launch a browser window, get to YouTube, and search for Tom & Jerry cartoons… in English. He also gets really upset when his searches return videos in other languages (although sometimes he thinks the Japanese ones are pretty funny…). He gets that lack of appropriate tagging is a usability problem, because that’s what it is for him. Of course, he doesn’t have the language to fully express all that the same way we do. But the fact is that as a consumer of multimedia content, his behavior and his reactions are utterly predictable, and at age five, he is already forming opinions about the technological acuity of the people who post such content.
You can remind people to tag their content, but if they are not consumers of such content, they won’t really understand, as Rowan does, how insanely frustrating it is when it all goes pearshaped.
So then, later in the day, people are talking about using new media (whatever that is) to attract “the new developer”… you know, the youth who are driving things now. And I’m nodding, cause I totally agree. And then they start talking, heaven help me, about the Universities and speaking to college students! And in my head, I can see Rowan, already cruising the web, already conversant with how to click past annoying Flash intro pages, already becoming a savvy consumer of online technology. Considering the ugly brushes we’ve already had with minor forms of academia, (here and here), the very idea of my child going to college is ridiculous, and waiting to graduate from the Ivory Towers Of Ossified Thinking to become successful is laughable in the economy of today.
Rowan knows who Duke is, he knows what Flash animation is, and he knows to look for the blessed “skip this intro” buttons. He knows what HTML is, and I’m teaching him coding, a little bit at a time. I think about him encountering his first “Hello, World” and I cringe just a little bit. Just like it’s absurd for a roomful of adults who don’t even use multimedia to stand around talking about presenting it to people who are native users of it, it’s absurd to think that someday some professor will be more competent to teach my child about the Cloud than he, who’s been breathing it for years, is.
I‘d like to really recommend that my colleagues and compatriots leave work early, go home… and watch their kids interact with the digital environment. They will learn far more from that exercise about the context of the Digital Native, and about the reality of content propagation for that audience, than they will by listening to a roomful of Digital Immigrants blather on about a sky they’ve never even really seen.
I snapped this picture, on the fly, as we were heading out one day. Rowan had asked Jason if he could “do something”. He was impatient with simply staying out of the way as we cast off from the dock, and wanted to be in the thick of things, so Jason had him hold the emergency rudder on the port side, that we’re using while we figure out how to fix the gear box (which is going to be a whole long post of its own over on my other blog, shortly.)
After we were back to dock, and I was sorting pictures, this one struck me. I started showing it to people who don’t really know my sons, and all of them pegged him at 11 or 12.
Um, he’s five. Five years old. A baby still. Right? Please?
As I’m pregnant with our third baby, my brain is naturally focused on baby things. So it’s all the more startling to see my first baby becoming really quite the stellar young man.
A few nights ago, he asked to sleep in his own bed, in his own room. All the way across the boat from us. I know that for most Americans, the notion of a five year old still in bed with his parents is somehow a little squidgy. I’m not going to bother with that discussion here; if you aren’t familiar with the research, go dig it up. Rowan had been getting increasingly annoyed with Kestrel, whose sleeping style is clearly my penance from my mosh pit days. Some nights I can almost hear the Offspring (ha!) in my head while Kes flips around, slamming into every surface around him, including us. And of course, my belly isn’t getting any smaller; I take up more room almost daily.
So there’s my little guy, sleeping in his own bed, by his own choice, totally wrapped up in his moons and stars quilt, surrounded by stuffed animals, in the room we created for him (pictures of that will be on the other blog too, just as soon as I knuckle down and write that post. Wheee!). I woke up and went to check on him at least four times in the night. Like he was a newborn or something. Who’s having trouble letting go? Oh, that would be me.
He’s come back into our bed, and gone back to his… like every milestone Rowan’s faced in his entire development, he’s facing this one with grace and maturity, with no drama, and a great deal of confidence. I’m bracing myself for the day, which I’m sure is coming soon, where he moves out and is gone to his own bed, permanently. And honestly, it’s not like I won’t mind having the extra room. And eventually, it’ll be neat to only share my bed with my husband again.
But between Rowan’s look in that photo, and his sleeping in his bed, I can tell you, I am hoarding every precious moment of these last days of his babyhood. I somehow have a feeling I’m going to need them.
My pal Kimberly over at Trial of Labor just tagged me with a bunch of homebirth questions. So hey, whatever gets me back at the page and blogging, right? Thanks Kimberly!
Here are her questions:
The story of Kestrel’s birth covers most of that.
It’s so so so strange to me that this discussion even needs to happen. Just three generations ago, homebirth was the norm, and now it’s this freakish thing. The first American president not born at home was Jimmy Carter. Hospital birth is a recent phenomenon, and I really want to know how The Machine managed to destroy thousands of years of wisdom in a few short generations. Chilling, isn’t it? I wrote a post, which was actuall a letter to the Midwifery Board of California, here. That also addresses a lot of how I feel about questions one, two, and three.
Oh, the doubters say, but women died back then. Hello, read the news? Women are dying now. America’s birth statistics are apalling.
As far as partners being on board; I had some pretty gnarly PPD after the cesarean, and Jason was far more terrified that he’d be stuck with that woman for the rest of his life than he was worried about a homebirth outcome. Wise man that he is, he saw the homebirth of our second baby as his last, best hope of reclaiming his pre-cesarean wife. Turns out, he was totally right, and is now a pretty staunch advocate for the rights of birthing women, and the rightness of birthing at home.
I also wrote a post over at Life Without School, about the impacts of homebirth on older siblings, and knowing what I know now, I find the whole idea of removing your older children from the birth environment pretty abhorrent. No wonder siblings have issues, when they’re removed from the primary bonding loop. Families are birthed, not just babies, and the older kids are part of that family.
I could babble on, but I’ll stop there. Birth belongs at home.
Here are the fantastic pictures that Dana took at our ill-fated trip to the lake. Enjoy! And doesn’t Rowan look just like Jason in the first image?
http://www.kelpcritter.com/photography/LaureenKids/
Thanks Dana!
July 17, 2007. Rowan is five years old. Pictures of the birthday festivities, which stretched from July 4 (when Nana and Grandpa Al came down) to July 17, (when Bamma and Bampa visited), finally ending (we think) on July 19, when yet another of Auntie Ellen’s fantastic cards arrived in the mail, can be seen here.
I can’t come up with anything to say that doesn’t sound trite, or overdone, or already done. It’s been an honor, a privilege, a roller coaster. I have had the inside of my head thoroughly reupholstered. I am nothing like the person I was six years ago. All because of him.
I have never had another human being impact the entire course of my life the way Rowan has. I think about the girl I was before I got pregnant with him, and I laugh outright, when I’m not busy cringing. My view was so much more narrow, and my opinions so much more lightly held. I tolerated more guff in my world, and I allowed more prevarication. In the interest of just getting along, I let more chaff pass through my life.
And then Rowan happened. As I say in the real version of his birth story, he “ripped my world view apart and reassembled with staples and vicodin.” Sounds harsh and painful and transformative, which it was, but by now, I can be incredibly grateful that I was given the gift of sight, of really seeing this whole world around me accurately. Too many people sleep through; Rowan woke me up.
So happy birthday, Rowan. And many many more. I can already see glimmers of the person I think you’ll become, and I can’t wait to see what amazing steps you’ll take on that path between now and then. I love you, little man.
Yesterday, Marc took the boys to the park for three solid hours of hardcore, all-out, total gonzo playtime, so I could knock down some of my insane to-do list. And when they got home, Rowan sidled shyly up to me, and waited for me to shift my attention from the screen to him.
One at a time, he pulled from his pocket an unruly mix of small flowers. Clovers, which are hardy and endured the compression well, and buttercups, which didn’t, so much. He deposited them one after another into my hand and said “I picked flowers for you, Mama, because I love you.”
Without waiting for a reply, he turned around and headed outside to jump on the trampoline. So he didn’t see me get all teary-eyed. It didn’t matter that I reacted; it mattered that he’d done what he’d intended to do.
Unconditional love, five-year-old style.
This post is very, very close to my heart. Happened just the way I wrote it. Check it out here:
Thanks again, Mom.
A friend recently informed me that February 12-18 is Random Acts of Kindness Week. Kind of a cool idea, I thought. Although the idea that kindliness to strangers needs to be so actively encouraged is a little bit sad…
But not nearly so sad as the idea that was explored on one of my mommy groups in the not too distant past, about how random acts of kindness from parents to children also need to be actively encouraged. Check out this little ray of sheer brilliance from a writer I really respect, Pam Sorooshian, called “Becoming the Parent You Want to Be“.
If you’re like most of us, the idea that you should proactively go do something cool for your kid doesn’t occur to you outside of holidays. I was sort of horrified to realize that I hadn’t been doing that at all. And so I began.
I am absolutely ashamed to report that the first time I brought Rowan a spoonful of peanut butter (one of his favorite treats just now) while he was watching TV, just out of the blue, he looked at me like he was confused. “I didn’t ask for that.” he informed me. “I know, baby, I was just bringing it because I thought you might like it.” He smiled and accepted it, and in that instant, I became more determined than ever to work on “Just chang[ing] the next interaction you have with the kids.” Because if my relationship with him is closer than most of the relationships I see, and if even my kid was surprised when I went out of my way for him… things were far more dire than I supposed, from his perspective, and there was not a moment to lose.
So every day since that day, at least once, I engage in some proactive parental Acts of Kindness. I bring him something, I go find him and suggest we go bounce on the trampoline together, I do something, anything, that indicates to him that I love him, care for him, and want to be with him, above and beyond sheer parental maintenance.
It had honestly never occurred to me that this exercise had any ramifications beyond simply strengthing connection, which is what people who love each other are supposed to do naturally anyway. But I had completely forgotten that children model what they see, and that even though you may forget, they see, and they remember.
Yesterday, I pulled a 12+ hour day at work. At one point, Rowan came into the office, and asked if he could sit on the bed behind me and watch Dora on the spare computer. And mid-Dora, he asked if I was OK. I’d been rubbing my neck. I explained to him that I was working, and that things at work were kinda frustrating, but he shouldn’t worry about it too much, and just then, Dora asked us to do the Monkey Dance, so that was the end of that heavy discussion.
Later in the evening, after dinner, I was sitting in the rocker, massaging my face, where the knots in the muscles around my eyes from the tension of staring at the screen all day made little bumps all over. Rowan looked at me, jumped up from the couch saying “I know!”, and dashed off. Whatever. I kept rubbing the stress points in my face (or was that rubbing my face, which was one giant stress point? Hard to say.)
Beaming from ear to ear, my son handed me my silk flax-and-lavender eyepillow. “I got it for you, Mama, to make your eyes feel better!”
Good thing it’s absorbent, because I started crying into it.