An Award, Just When I Need It Most

My husband has never outgrown his childhood love for superheroes. A classic portrait of Superman hangs over his desk, and he never misses a film adaptation of his favorite comic book characters. He can tell you about Spiderman's childhood with a biographer's accuracy, and he knows all about obscure superheroes like The Sandman and Ghost Rider. Now I get to tell my husband that he is in fact married to a superhero, or more precisely, a superheroine, as Fourmother has honored me with a Wonder Woman award. Hence the nifty bouquet of roses and winged "W" insignia.

It couldn't have come at a better time. I could really use some super powers right now. Michael (the aforementioned hubby) is away on a business trip, a ridiculously LONG business trip, and I am now experiencing life as a Single Mother. Ahem. A Single Working Mother. And it is not easy.

I may not have an invisible jet or gold bracelets that can deflect bullets, but I do have a few other secret weapons. I have the Madeline videos that I rented from the library, which can buy me a little time to send work off to a client. I have a hidden stash of chocolate that can stop a tantrum in mid-screech. I can do a pretty good Cookie Monster imitation. And I have an iPhone now - yes, that exorbitantly priced little gadget - which lets me respond to work emails from the playground so no one has to know that I'm not at my desk. Linda Carter, eat your heart out!

But I could use more, many more super powers to get me through this week and all the way to Monday, when hubby will stumble off his red-eye flight and back into our lives. I could use super powers to fill the fridge with nourishing meals for the next few days. I could use super powers to scrub my daughter's potty, keep raccoons out of the garbage, and fold more goddamn laundry. I could use super powers to stay loving and kind toward my hubby despite his maddening absence.

On a happier note, I would like to pass the Wonder Woman award along to Colleen of The New Unschooler for her intrepid foray into unschooling with her 12-year-old son. She tells us in her blog that she just had a birthday, so I think roses are in order. Besides, her boy will be really impressed to hear that his mom is a superheroine.

superheroes
Wonder Woman

Happiness

From the Land of Make-Believe

We have arrived at the age of the Imagination. For the past month or so, we have seen our couch turn into a train, and we've had long conversations on the phone with Charlie Brown. We have strapped Winnie the Pooh into a toy stroller and taken him to the chocolate store. We have carefully wiped our teddy bears' bottoms, patted them dry, and wrapped them in real diapers that we ourselves do not wear anymore. We have eaten slice after slice of pretend pizza.

Come to think of it, I've watched Amelie's imagination slowly begin to bud and flower over the course of several months now. The more skillful my daughter becomes with the English language, the more intricate her world grows. The two forces - language and imagination- are expanding in tandem, as if sprouting from the same seed. And they are moving forward at a furious rate, like fast-growing vines destined to twist themselves around everything in sight.

I've said this many times during the course of Amelie's small life, but I'm saying it with even greater fervency now: I do not want to forget any of this. It's incredible to watch my child begin to make sense of her world by spinning stories around it. What a lush, crazy, wonderful garden the human mind is! We really are all innately creative beings. We begin as artists. Whether or not we are lucky enough to remain so throughout our lives is often another story.

My dream is to protect this fragile, golden kernel of creativity that lives within my daughter. Keeping Amelie out of school - all too often the land of conformity and lowest common denominators - might be one way to go about it. Is it naive to think this way? I wonder. It is certainly not conventional to think this way. And something tells me that's a good thing.

homeschooling
imagination
make-believe

She Eats Bananas, Eggs, and Yes, Chocolate

I'm singing the Picky Eater Blues lately. My girl is oh-so meticulous about what she chooses to put in her mouth. When it comes to dinner entrees we are down to three or four things. Pasta with butter, cheese, and broccoli that she picks out. Couscous with butter, cheese, and peas that she picks out. Scrambled eggs will do in a pinch. (And it's always a pinch. Perhaps I should start raising hens.)

Until very recently Amelie even rejected pizza. I was outraged. A child who won't eat pizza? So I went to work on this. (You would think that I'd choose a more valiant crusade, like kale or spinach. But no. I wanted a normal, pizza-eating child.) And wonder of wonders, she eats some pizza now. But only broccoli pizza. And she won't eat the bread. She carefully picks off the broccoli and cheese and eats those. Just to keep me on my toes, it seems. (Though I suppose I did choose the right crusade.)

I get such a high when Amelie eats something green. It's quite a feeling, like I've just won an all-expenses-paid vacation for two to sunny Jamaica. It's a level of euphoria that's entirely out of proportion to the situation.

Oh, and my girl has so many rules - ridiculous rules! Have you ever heard of a child who will only eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while she's riding in the car? I swear, if I put a pb&j on a plate in front of her at the table, she won't touch it. But I'll stick it in a baggie and five minutes later, as we're rolling down the block, she'll munch it happily en route to the store or playground. Same for baby carrots. She only eats them when she's in motion. When I put them on a plate, alas, they lose all their sex appeal.

The New York Times recently ran an article called Picky Eaters? They Get It from You. I read it with a guilty sense of recognition. Yes, I was the child who would eat only spaghetti with red sauce. Apparently this is an evolutionary response - a survival mechanism designed to prevent us from ingesting potentially dangerous things. So I suppose I should be more understanding of Amelie's finicky nature, and proud to have such a Darwinian masterpiece of a daughter.

An accompanying article called The Experts Suggest offers a few strategies for us meal-challenged parents. It seems I'm doing everything wrong: Making Amelie a separate dish instead of serving her what her parents eat, and resorting to bribery (if you eat some spinach I'll let you watch that video!).

Well, it's back to the cutting board tonight. Onward I go, clinging to the slender hope that my girl will eat something green, transporting me to a kind of bliss unknown even to the most deeply meditative and enlightened monks of the Himalayas....

picky eaters

3 a.m. Musings, and a Recipe

I can't sleep, so I have redesigned my blog. I've been meaning to do this for some time. It was just, well, too PINK.

What's with the pink, anyway? I never used to like the color particularly, but after I gave birth to a girl child, I started putting it everywhere. This is embarrassing but true. I fell into the pink trap. I latched onto the girlie-girl hue as a way of announcing to the world that yes, my nearly bald, androgynous infant had two X chromosomes, thank you very much. (Why is it so important to most of us parents that people recognize this? I suppose we want even passers-by in the street to know at least the bare basics about the amazing being that is our child.)

So, away with the pink. Except for that pink ribbon of sisterly support. THAT can stay.

Anyway, in the spirit of mommy bloggers always looking to share the latest domestic coup, I am going to offer one of my family's favorite new recipes now. (Yes, this is a complete non sequitur. I am writing this at 3 a.m., so you must forgive me. Try these muffins, and you will forgive me. They are delicious. And besides, I needed a reason to post the image at top of my domestic-goddess-in-training. You will notice that she is wearing a PINK top. Though I prefer now to think of it as a subdued salmon color.)

Carrot Cake Muffins

2 cups shredded carrots (approx. 6 carrots)*
1/2 cup raisins
2 1/2 cups whole-wheat pastry flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 coarsely mashed bananas
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup orange juice
3 Tbsp honey and/or 2 Tbsp molasses
2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 375. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper baking cups. Brush or spray with canola oil.

Mix the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, ginger, and cloves in one big bowl.

In another bowl, mix the banana, oil, orange juice, honey/molasses, and vanilla until well blended.

Gradually add the wet ingredients to the dry, blending well with each addition. Stir in the carrots and raisins.

Spoon into the muffin cups and bake 40-45 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

*Note: Use a food processor (not a hand grater) to shred the carrots or you will begin to despair, and to curse me for sharing this recipe with you. And I wouldn't want that to happen.

By the way, this is a modified version of a recipe from Healthy Cooking for Kids. Enjoy.

mommy bloggers
muffin recipe
pink

The Life of a Blog

Thanks to Fourmother for tagging me with the latest meme and inspiring a post today. For this meme I'm asked to choose 5 posts that show "The Evolution of My Blog." Why not?

Playing Hooky is still very young, barely out of diapers as far as blogs go. And I'm not nearly up to speed with my posting yet (though I strive to pick up the pace). But here goes.

1. When I launched this blog with my first post, Busting the Stereotypes, I hadn't yet decided whether or not I wanted to homeschool my daughter. (This photo of Amelie is one of my faves.)

2. Not long after, I wrote about making in-roads into the homeschooling culture in Finding Community. What a relief it was to connect with like-minded people who were really doing the homeschooling thing! Homeschooling was starting to sound not just doable but exciting to me.

3. I often agonize about decisions. But it didn't take me long to decide that homeschooling would really work for our family. School was starting to look less and less appealing as a choice for Amelie, while I could imagine our daughter really thriving under the loving guidance of her natural teachers: her parents. I announced my decision to homeschool in How Can We Not?

4. Big commitments often stir up the darker waters of Doubt. Although I was sure of my decision, I needed to write this post as a way of venting a few reservations I still had about homeschooling.

5. In A Freelance Student I embrace the homeschooling lifestyle as a perfect fit for an unconventional (and, I'd like to believe, free-spirited) family like mine.

And now I ask five bloggers to share the evolution of their blogs:
A Happy Childhood Lasts Forever
Freakmom's Space
Into the Studio
Have Fun * Do Good
Dispatches from the Final Frontier

homeschooling
meme

A Good Read

"Most parents feel fondness for those rare, odd moments when they have knelt close beside a son or daughter to transmit the mystery of some ancient, incidental craft: tying a bowline, weaving a pigtail, nipping the suckers from a tomato plant. These are now Hallmark, quality-time moments, exploited by advertisers and available on weekends--we want more of them, we long for that sort of warm proximity in which what we do is necessary, unforced, and precisely as it should be....

"In the end there are reasons beyond education (Can we really detach education from everything else?) to homeschool--a misnomer, in this context, for doing what human beings have always done in bringing up their children. There is a love to be cultivated, an instinct to be nurtured, a need to be satisfied at both ends."

--David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

It's been several weeks since I've finished reading Guterson's book, but passages like these have stayed with me. Written by a high school English teacher, novelist, and homeschooling father of four, Family Matters is a defense of homeschooling as a choice "neither extreme nor outlandish." The book is anything if not sharply intelligent and exhaustively comprehensive, looking at homeschooling from all angles, from legal to theoretical to financial. Guterson inserts just enough anecdote to keep it lively, though I did get a bit bogged down in the theory section. The final chapter puts an elegant cap on Guterson's ultimate message: that our culture tends to alienate parents from their kids, and that homeschooling is one way to restore a sense of connection that's often sadly imperiled these days.

Hear, hear.

homeschooling
David Guterson
Family Matters