The Old School Dilema

This week was school registration week here. And it of course got me all in a twitter.

Currently, Al is enrolled in the French Immersion Kindergarten. Before moving to Vernon, Al had been attending Vancouver's public Montessori school and we loved it. But the public Montessori doesn’t start here until grade 1, so we had some deciding to do re. schooling. And ultimately we decided to take our first tentative steps into "regular" public school and try out French Immersion. I am so far unimpressed.

I'll be the first to admit I've got some real issues when it comes to schooling and educating my kids. Let's blame it on my own childhood trauma. My sad little story of childhood whoa is pretty unremarkable, common even. I went through several grades with an undiagnosed learning disability. And by the time I was officially tested and diagnosed with a learning disability I'd heard that I was either slow or lazy from too many adults and I'd given up. I became a huge advocate that school sucked. The day I graduated from high school was one of the happiest of my life, not for the accomplishment, but because it meant I'd never ever have to go back. I hated school.

Now I'm the grownup, and it's my kids reaching school age, and I of course spend hours upon hours weighing the pros and cons of every educational option. Probably not the healthiest of approaches but I am what I am.

So, no we're not happy with our French Immersion Kindergarten choice. It's great that Al's getting some exposure to the French language, but all in all, he's not getting a whole heck of a lot out of it. Al of course loves the movies that he gets to watch sometimes in the 2 and a half hour class, like Dora in French (!) and an animated version of the beloved book Corduroy (a bedtime favourite here for years, but I guess his teacher would rather show the movie), but he complains that class is boring, that the teacher talks too much, that the other kids are always disturbing his projects, that he feels frustrated when the teacher ends reading time too soon. And the French seems to be more annoying to him than anything else. Like it gets in the way of getting the information he really wants.

The end result of all this is that we're taking Al out of French Immersion come grade 1 and were putting him back into public Montessori school. It'll be a much better fit for him, and hopefully I'll be able to relax for a few years before I start to obsess over his future high school choices.

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do

Two weeks ago I saw this clip of Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talking about the need for children to challenge their environment and earn a few scrapes and bruises in the process.



I couldn't agree more.

It's Like There's A Party in My Mouth And Everyone's Invited

My daughter is approaching 7 months in age. And the inevitable questioning about what she's eating and how much is she eating and how often she is eating have been dogging me for weeks. We haven't really taken the time to properly introduce solid foods yet. A few finger fulls of rice here, a mushy banana bite there... she's our third child. We're just happy she hasn't figured out how to download inappropriate web material yet. And frankly, the last few times we stuck food stuffs in her mouth she just made a funny face like we'd spiked her food with lemon juice and spat it out.

So the short answer to the how/what/when of solid foods is nothing, zip, nada. Thus far, her and I have found breast is best. That is until this afternoon.

Today my little girl discovered the delicious sensory symphony that is the Cheese Nip, and she is forever changed. Now, before you condemn me as a bad mom polluting her pristine and untainted child with processed snack food I just wanna say she was never pristine and untainted; again, she's our third child. The crud she's gummed off her brothers' dirty little boy hands has probably inoculated her against all major infections and exposed her to toxins best left a mystery.

But back to the Cheese Nip... I was myself enjoying a post-afternoon activity/pre-dinner snack of coffee and Cheese Nips, surfing the net with my little girl bouncing on my knee, when I noticed the look of great desire on my little ones face. She was watching so intently and longingly as I pulled a cracker out of the box, she followed the cracker, mouth open, droll spilling over her plump lip, as the Cheese Nip made the journey from the box to my mouth. What could I do? She clearly wanted one so bad. So I broke off a cracker piece and held it up to her mouth. Never with such enthusiasm has she pulled my hand to her mouth. She was clearly very excited by the opportunity to at last eat something she'd seen everyone else eat. When the sweet, salty snack first went into her mouth she looked puzzled. Unsure what to make of the weird crunching it made when her little teeth pressed on the flaky goodness. But then, her eyes lit up and her little legs began kicking. Once her taste buds registered the exaggerated taste of processed cheddar cheese baked into a refined wheat flour cracker her world of food sensations was blown wide open. She sucked and gummed that bit of cracker until it oozed out the corner of her mouth. Then she grunted for more.

It’s good to be a third child.

Being Three

I love my children. They are smart and funny and kind and have made my world a better place. Their sweet smiling faces, the way they giggle with each other, the sound of their gentle breathing while they sleep all bring a warmth to my heart that is indescribable. So why is it that they can also drive me nuttier than a squirrel at a coconut convention?

It's a strange experience to love someone so immensely and at the same time want to box them up and ship them off to some remote town in the Himalayas. But truly, I have no one to blame but myself. I knowingly and wantingly brought 3 amazing, but all be it insane, little people into this world. And now I must sleep in the over-crowded, toy-strewn, jelly-stained bed I made.

Currently, it is my three year old who is giving my maternal instincts a kick in the pants. Whoever came up with the term "terrible twos" clearly had their children sent far, far away before said children reached the true terror that is three. My days are filled with "No!", "I wanna do it!", "It's my turn!", "Do it now!" and my personal favourite, "You loose, Stinky Pete!” If I had a quarter for every time my 3 year old gleefully looked me right in the eye as he found a new way to cause my lips to purse in frustration I'd be on a first name basis with my local Starbucks barista (or bartender). It isn’t until you’ve tried to reason with a three year old that you truly come to understand the complexity and subjectivity of truth. It’s almost a philosophical experience when you think about it; almost. Where else outside the halls of academia does one truly get the opportunity to examine the fabric of reality, perception and truth? Was that bite of apple I just had truly his bite? How do I know that the apple is still as good as it was prior to the bite? Isn’t the esthetic reality of an apple lessened by its lack of wholeness? And am I really a poopy-head mommy?

I've read the articles and books that all assure me that this is all perfectly normal, a development stage, a step in the direction of self reliance and discovering his place in the world. I've gone through this once before with my now 5 year old, so I am aware that there will come a time when we are no longer at the mercy of the whims of a logic-impaired Spider-Man-lover with a Napoleon complex. But, oh lordy!

Catching Up

I never got a Halloween post out. I’d intended to describe the insanity of my afternoon trying to keep my children from killing each other during their manic ride to the highly anticipated after-dinner trick-or-treat time. I so wanted to get something out there about how cute my boys were (they were Death and Robin, by the way), and how amazingly heart warming Halloween has become as an event to be shared as a family. But like many things on my way-to-busy mommy agenda, it never happened.

I spent the day after Halloween recuperating. The boys didn't have school and we spent the day coming down from the evening’s festivities, eating way too much candy and general after-holiday hyperness. Then came Friday, then all of a sudden it's Saturday and blogging about the goings on of an event that was 3 days ago became forced. Man, cyberspace moves fast. Or perhaps it’s my life that's charging along at breakneck speed.

If I'm going to write about what is happening for me now I would have to talk about my stumblings into the world of cloth diapers. We did use cloth diapers with the boys, but in the eyes of true cloth diaper users we were cloth diaper cheaters; we used a service both times. But not this go-around. Oh no, this time, with my third and last babe, I decided to join in with those proud cloth diapering mommas and earn my environmentally conscious mommy badge and really cloth diaper. That means buying into a whole system that involves liners, and pockets and folds and snaps and covers. Truly, an engineering marvel. Predictably, I could go on and on about the immense cloth diaper culture that is out there. There are women who create and sew intricate and stunning diapers with embroidery and hand dyed fabric for other women's babies to poop in. Cyber cat-fights break out at various on-line malls as intelligent, caring, and normally sane women virtually elbow each other to the front of the check out line to get the cloth diaper they've deemed to be good enough for their sweet babe's little bum. Of course, the vast majority of cloth diaper users are simply people who prefer to use a more environmentally friendly means of keeping pee and poop off the furniture. Disposable diapers are choking our landfills and wasting irreplaceable resources, don’t ‘cha know.

Wanting to lessen the constant nagging guilt all we educated middle class types suffer from, my husband and I want to use cloth diapers, and I want to get excited about them. Really I do. The flat cotton cloth diapers of my infanthood are still used, but the real cloths diapering passion lies with the cloth diapers that are shaped, fitted, and are surprisingly attractive. These high-end human waste containers aren’t as straight forward to use as your standard issue Pampers. After an exasperated call to a good friend I was made aware that I was leaving out the all too important diaper cover step (that’s what truly keeps the dry side dry). I am sure there will be more exasperated phone calls to be made in the near future, and I’ve yet to catch the cloth diapering shopping/collecting bug, but at least I get to go to bed tonight with the self-satisfaction of someone whose done a good, earth-friendly deed today.