Through The Looking Glass

Sam is cracking me up today.

This afternoon, while Will and his mom were out buying Sam a bed of his own (which I am certain I will write about at great length, possibly with teeth gnashing and angst), Sam wouldn’t stop hollering. He was getting more and more angry/frustrated/upset and I could not figure out what he needed from me. Finally I offered him some food (he’d already nursed). I gave him some hummus and he ate something like half a cup of it. He usually eats about a teaspoon of anything we give him! I guess he’s decided it’s time to get serious about eating. Which means I will have to be more attentive and less casual about solids — I have not worried at all until now, because he is getting 100% of the nutrition he needs from milk. But it seems that he has decided that won’t do any longer.

And speaking of food, we had Ethiopian tonight. Sam loooooooved the yellow lentil dish. He liked the injera too, but I don’t think he actually ate any, just ripped it to shreds. When we got home, Gramma gave him a bath (yay!) and then Will and I struggled with him for a while, trying to get him to bed. We realized he just hadn’t had enough wind-down time after dinner, and let him play with his blocks for a while. Then Will had a real brainstorm and ran him another bath. They just got out and Sam is sounding ready for sleep.

The end.

3:44 a.m.

Except that I am not pregnant again, gods be praised. (You know, gods or lack of sex, whatever you like.)

So yes, I have been awake since 2:45 or thereabouts. WHY? It is so unfair. Even Sam is sleeping beautifully, unlike yesterday when he woke up for the day at 4:00 after tossing and turning and crying all night. We managed to stay in bed till 5:00 using the clever strategy of Boob In Mouth.

My mother-in-law is in town, which is lovely but does make it more awkward to stay in my pajamas all day and not leave the house ever. On the other hand, Sam is now clothed for the next six months or so, which is good because he had seriously outgrown almost everything. And! He has these shoes, which make me absolutely giddy.

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11:22 a.m.

Right, then. I had to go back to bed because Sam was bleating for milk. From about 4:00 till around 6:30 we were in a pattern of Sam nursing, me falling asleep, and the second I drifted off Sam headbutting me looking for more milk. Will eventually got tired of Sam kicking him every time he headbutted me, and they got up. I slept for a little over an hour. I wish I could say I’m feeling refreshed.

Anyway. It is nice having Will’s mother in town, nice to see Sam interacting with someone who is not us but with whom he clearly feels entirely at home (though honestly, I think he feels totally at home with the checkout clerk at Trader Joe’s, but let’s not tell Gramma). There were about five minutes, during which she kept suggesting, over and over like a broken record, that I start running Sam’s bath because he was so tired and he was crying and maybe the water running would distract him and shouldn’t he have his bath now? when we’d already made it perfectly clear that Will was going to take a bath with him as soon as he got back from the store, which is only two blocks away. Where was I with that sentence? Ah yes. There were those five minutes which made me kind of want to kill her, but then she let it slip that she just wanted to see him take his bath, which of course she cannot do if Will is in it too, and then I felt bad because I had to say no anyway. He was too tired to be in the tub by himself.

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12:26 p.m.

What’s funny is that I meant my post title to refer to being unable to sleep in the middle of the night, but it is equally applicable to being totally scatterbrained. Which I am. So I am going to just hit the publish button right now and stop trying to think of something clever or interesting to say.

About a month ago we were at a party with some other parents. Several of the moms were sitting together, and one of them was answering their questions about her homeschooling of her two children. I listened with interest, as I was a homeschooler and it is our intention that Sam be as well. But it became clear very quickly that this family had school at home, which is not our plan.

“It makes sense,” she was saying. I was nodding my head. “After all, it is the parents who teach a baby to walk. Why not teach him reading and mathematics?”

Wait. A parent teaches a baby to walk? Really? How careless of me to let Sam figure it out by himself. Next you will tell me that I can’t just give him the car keys without ever letting him observe me driving, or practice it with my supervision. (Actually, that is a terrible comparison, as driving does require some teaching, where walking does not, barring any serious disabilities. Perhaps a better example would be eating, as he learned to chew all by himself from watching us do it, and the idea that we could teach him to eat is almost as hilarious as the walking one.)

I’m a little bit of a radical, I think. You probably already gathered that from my pro-home birth stance. What you may not know is that I intend to “unschool” — that is, to allow my child(ren) to learn from the world around him, as I believe human beings all would do without the interference of school. That does not mean I will be uninvolved in his education: my job as his parent is to facilitate his learning, and I will do that by exposing him to the world around him (not just at home as “homeschooling” implies), with trips to the zoo and the library and the grocery store and the movies. I will read to him and answer his questions about what the letters mean and someday he will, unprompted, read to me (or, with my luck, to Will — but if I am honest Will is probably going to do 80% of the reading aloud around here anyway, what with his deep abiding love to the printed word and inexhaustible store of voices). We will watch TV and play video games and go for walks and have play dates and cook and listen to music and build things and paint and all of it, every minute, will be an education.

One of the worst things about my brief stint as a WOHM (Work Out of the Home Mom) was the possibility that my plans might never come to fruition; that I might have to leave my family to be a breadwinner. Home/unschooling is one of the Top Five things that I am looking forward to as a mother, one of my favorite reasons for having a child in the first place. The thought of losing that almost killed me. (I am scared every single day that it might happen again.)

I want to explain why I look so forward to unschooling, but I’ve been having trouble articulating. How do you explain to someone what it is like to just live? Well, Amanda has done it beautifully. Reading that made me unspeakably happy.

Let me break down my history a bit: unschooler until age 9; parents divorce and mother’s need to work leads to public elementary school, where it is discovered that I am reading at college level but behind in most other subjects (school, having no facilities to cope with my mental arithmetic, considers me behind because I have not memorized the times tables, despite my ability to add large columns of numbers and make change); this is followed by one year in public middle school and one year at a magnet school (I am on the honor roll at both, but never get better than a B in gym class; in 8th grade I study 10th grade mathematics and complete two years’ Latin studies in one); autodidact from age 14-19; one year of college, which I determine to be a waste of my time. I scored in the 99th percentile on the GED after being thrown out of the prep class on the grounds that I was too smart to be there. I got a 1250 on the SAT (old scoring of 800 possible on each Math and Verbal): 700 verbal and 550 math, with ZERO prep.

I am a high school dropout and I earn almost four times minimum wage, making my own hours and working from home. Clearly unschooling has not hurt my chances in the world.

“But what about socializing?”

Socializing? In what world does that happen in school? The best friends I’ve made were not made at school. At school I was picked on and excluded, like everybody else. The purpose of school is not socializing, and in general socializing is not allowed. Lunch is 30 minutes (not even enough time to eat properly, let alone forge friendships), and recess (if you are lucky enough to have recess) is about the same. The only boon to socialization that school gives is the ability to meet people with whom you can socialize on your own time. Going to the park or the library offers the same opportunity. There are also homeschooling groups in almost every area which offer the chance to meet other kids who are not in school, as well as providing a group for “field trips.” I remember going to a bread bakery with a homeschool group when I was young, which was a wonderful experience I would not have been offered in elementary school. (Actually, my sister’s private school class may have made that same field trip, but only because the bakery owner’s son was in her class.)

So let’s not have any more of THAT nonsense.

The other argument I hear frequently is “Well, my kids need structure.”

That’s nice. I am not trying to negate your experience; please do not negate mine. I would suggest that structure is possible without school, that learning at home should happen regardless of school, and that perhaps your children would like to set their own boundaries. However, your family’s needs are your priority and my family’s needs are mine. I am stating my beliefs, not dictating yours.

But because I believe so strongly in this subject, I will recommend that everyone on earth should have a peek at the writings of John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, and Grace Llewellyn. (My copy of The Teenage Liberation Handbook is missing again. Has anyone seen it?)

I think that’s all I’ve got to say on the subject right now, but I’d love to answer any respectful questions you might have, and/or to hear about your experiences.

(New category name stolen from Miranda, whose blog I found through Stephanie.)

(There isn’t any shame involved, actually, but I didn’t feel like writing “shameless plug.”)

My review of The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten is now up at Noneuclidean Cafe.

Amusingly, the book was a gift from one friend named Jim and the journal is edited by another friend named Jim. At least, I think it is amusing.

Remember this? Transcribing book titles is taking for-fucking-ever. We’re about halfway through. I haven’t even opened the boxes of clothing yet. Or photographed the larger items.

What I have done is posted the list-in-progress here. I’ll be editing in more info (such as author) as soon as I can. I can’t figure out any way to allow comments on the page, so if you want any of the books, leave a comment here. I thought $1 apiece for mass market paperbacks, $2 for trades and $3 for hardbacks, plus postage. Does that sound fair? Some of them are not in great shape, so less for those. And of course feel free to make an offer for larger lots.

An ad that I am proud to run.

Pictured is Sam in his baby bracelet.

I am proud to know that making this bracelet for Sam (and one for another baby born one week earlier) was the inspiration for this wonderful shop.

I can attest to the quality — not only in Sam’s bracelet but also in the bracelets I ordered for Sam’s grandmothers for Christmas. (You can see my mother-in-law’s here, on the left.)

And look how adorable!

In early February I signed up to review Babyproofing Your Marriage. (Yes, I really am almost two months behind. Oy.) The book arrived and I started to read it, in fits and starts as most of my reading goes lately. I didn’t like it at first, but I assumed that I was just tired and cranky and on the defensive.

Well, unless the second half of the book is a complete 180 from the first, I can only expand upon my first impression: I hated this book.

My marriage has taken a toll since Sam was born. Will and I have had to work harder than either of us imagined in order to remain friends. Sex is almost nonexistent and tempers are short. So I thought surely this was the book for us — even if it didn’t teach us anything, surely it would help us to feel less alone.

Nope.

The marriages described in this book are utterly foreign to me. Scorekeeping? We are both far too tired. Do we gripe? Sure, we’ve both whined, “But I already did such-and-such.” But that’s as far as it goes. The Ten O’Clock Shoulder Tap? Will is asleep before me almost every night, and when we are both awake he is just as unlikely to be thinking of sex as I am — perhaps more. I wish he would roll over and grope me once in a while (though it might be awkward, as Sam sleeps between us).

It may be that part of our disconnect from the couples in the book is our work situation: Will left his job/was laid off (however you want to put it) right when Sam was born, and has only gone back to work part time; I have worked part time at home as well. We manage to find plenty to resent each other for, but it is not for him getting to leave every day or me getting to spend more time with the baby. We are both completely capable in nearly every aspect of child-rearing (he, sadly, has not yet started lactating), and equally culpable for the disaster of our finances.

I found the solutions offered in the book to be downright offensive. The Training Weekend? How is it OK to leave your partner flailing at something you know he will fail at, just to prove a point? What kind of cunt would do such a thing? And the Five Minute Fix? Sorry, blow jobs are given around here out of lust, not as a bargaining chip.

I stopped reading about halfway through because the book was actually making me nauseated.

You can read other reviews in this Blogher Virtual Book Tour here.

The Ergo:

The stroller:

His stylin’ (if slightly askew) new shades are Kidz Banz. I wanted red but Will preferred black and I’m so glad because they’re perfect. (But if we get a spare, we’re getting red.)

After sleeping for an hour this evening, Sam decided to be awake. He was really incredibly cranky about it at first, and I almost lost my mind. Then he decided he just wanted to hang out and play, and we were fine with that (if not exactly thrilled).

So he’s on the floor, playing with his blocks.

Here’s what you need to know: his blocks (most of which were mine when I was little) are kept in a pink plastic tub from the hospital. Every day he dumps them out and spreads them around. I occasionally put them back in the tub, usually with some inane running dialog about cleaning up (hopefully not too pushy). He puts individual blocks into the tub sometimes, as well as pulling them out.

Tonight he dumped them all out and then started picking them up one at a time and very methodically putting them away. If he missed, he would pause, look hard at the block that hadn’t made it into the tub, and carefully pick it up and try again.

He put away more than a third of the blocks before he changed his mind and dumped them out again.

Now he’s putting them away again, and is about halfway done.