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Halloween Out of a Can
My timing is all off, and it's a good thing my kid is too young to care much about tradition or atmosphere because I'm really sinking into a low energy holiday pattern.
Late last week I strolled alone to a local pumpkin patch, the Food Emporium to you, to find the subject for Felix's first Jack-o-lantern. (Yes, I forgot entirely about it last year.) Many people have told me about their happy pumpkin patch and apple picking outings. I've received the pictures of cuteness to show for it, and I plead no car and no time.
Thursday evening, after Felix tried to carry the pumpkin he didn't select around, and pronounced it "Very, very heavy" he picked out a face for the pumpkin. . . out of a carving kit I found at the local drug store around the block from the Food Emporium Pumpkin Patch. He opted for the ghost, I suspect because we taught him that ghosts say "Boo." I am happy that there was no dragon picture in the drug store kit, since he knows what they say, too.
Surely he won't mind if his mother saves her creative energies for when he's older to appreciate them- say when he's 35 or so or has a child of his own that needs entertaining.
This is not to say that I don't enjoy Halloween and other holidays, but they always sneak up and I find myself without a plan, thus: no homemade costumes, no pumpkin patch photo shoot, no super cool pumpkin design and I am the woman who buys trick or treat candy the night before and winds up with old lady delicacies like individually wrapped gumdrops. My husband says we will gain a reputation as the Dud House if I don't watch it. (Miraculously, this year, there was still some good stuff left at the stores last night, so now we have much too much.)
And then the kicker came Sunday evening when the house suddenly reeked and it was revealed that Felix's Ghost was beyond moldy. It didn't even make it to Halloween. (Was this because I found an inferior supermarket pumpkin? Was our pumpkin doomed because it suffered from the obscure Pumpkin Blight brought on by the wet summer that apparently severely damaged the New York State pumpkin crop this year? Did I carve too early?)
Happily, the neighborhood is compensating for my shortcomings. This afternoon one of the local parks is having some toddler festivities with bales of hay for photo opportunities and all Felix wants to do is climb on things anyway. I'm hoping I can convince him to wear his costume briefly.
Next year, we'll take originality under advisement.
posted by Elise at 4:48 AM
2 Comments
Mothers Who Hate?
So the Guardian in the UK came out with an article that discussed a conference that went on today in London about bad mothers. The event, "Bad Mothers?: A Day of Talks Exploring Maternal Complexities and Conflicts, In Literature and Life" which was held at the Woman's Library (and one can't help but find it a little amusing that this was scheduled so close to Halloween).
The day broke down into a series of talks, some about literature, some involving literary readings, several historical talks, but the whole event had a bang-up kick off with Rozsika Parker's eleven am talk: "Torn In Two: The Unacceptable Face of Motherhood." Parker wrote a book, which first came out in 1995, also called Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence.
She's a psychotherapist who has observed in herself and in her patients extreme maternal conflict: mothers who experience true love and true hate for their kids- and their kids for them. Parker believes that the heart of a solution to this extraordinary, potentially extraordinarily damaging and painful dialectic, is acknowledging the variety of feelings mothers have towards their children and working on ways to accept and acknowledge these things before guilt and it's companion resentment become overwhelmingly destructive.
I suppose this makes sense to me, but this notion of the Bad Mother (so infinitely less sexy than the one of the Bad Girl) seems rather fresh in people's minds. Where does the standard come from by which people measure themselves, their love, their feelings and find themselves eternally, horribly wanting?
What is wrong with accepting that children and their activities can be kind of tedious or mean and even unappealing? I think about this every time I see this one advertisement for Volvo cars that is in heavy rotation. In it, a little chatterbox child blathers on and on while her father, hesitant to interrupt straps her in and drives her home. It makes my teeth itch, but I can't begin to really say why, and it seems like an extreme reaction to what is supposed to be a cute or appealing scenario. I know there will be times when my kid will make me insane. But there are very few people who don't try my patience occasionally and I can accept this unfortunate truth about myself.
It does bother me deeply though that I fail at some horrible external standard that shifts all the time. The competition for good mother-ness is horrible. Someone I know lorded the fact that she had the "perfect birth" over me, when I had considerable amounts of intervention. . . to the same happy end, and I still feel a little irritable about that conversation. Or why do pregnant women feel obliged to call themselves "bad" for having a cup of coffee or for hating playdates or for not relishing their children's infancies? Why is it such a reflex to fall upon the sword of badness instead of accepting that goodness and badness is going to shift around always, often many times in the course of a day or an hour?
Since I had Felix, I've had plenty of moments of boredom and anger. I've been abandoned by a few friends, which is sad, and I've made numerous adjustments and accommodations, some of which have bothered me, but none of which have bothered me so profoundly that I have felt obliged to hate anyone.
Where do the incredible intolerance and the impossible standards come from?
I know they're there and like all the other monsters, I'll do my best to keep them out.
posted by Elise at 5:02 PM
2 Comments
Preschool Preview... The Saga Persists
At yet another preschool application event, I witnessed another in what will become an encyclopedia-length list of moments that, when pulled out of context, make New York City parents look insane.
This school's philosophy, like so many, is developmental and the director illustrated one her points about dealing with children doing battle with one another over toys by saying that they don't enforce "sharing" per se, but work on behavior that eventually lends itself to sharing and taking turns and all those things one wants one's kid to do spontaneously.
And then the floor opened up for questions and someone raised a hand asking: "I really like this idea of not sharing! Do they really have to take turns?"
If a journalist had been in the crowd, he or she would have been drooling with glee. It is almost certainly not the case that the parent in question was revealing a desire to raise an entirely selfish child who would refuse to let others play with his or her toys and who would grow up to cut in lines and steal taxis and parking spaces and be otherwise incredibly insufferable. And yet...
And yet the competition for preschool spots is so insane that it is hard not to look at all of one's rivals with a spot of jaundice, skepticism, and fear that if one is lucky enough to get into any of these places one will be surrounded by these people. I speak for myself, but judging from the way people were giving each other the once over, I'm not alone. And even accepting the hideous spirit of competition that makes everyone a little sharp or scared still doesn't keep me from wondering what people are thinking with the questions they ask and whether they are secretly revealing ugliness about themselves or actually being sort of interesting.
It's all a huge crapshoot anyway. Lots of schools set up literal lotteries that determine whether or not you can even apply, let alone attend. So is everyone crazy or is it just the effects of pressurized circumstance? I have a few more events to attend before I can really presume to be presumptuous about this business.
posted by Elise at 2:15 PM
1 Comments
It Gets Them Around
So, I suspect the scooter is on the decline for very little kids because suddenly- and by this I mean for the last 2 weeks- I find myself dodging around a new wheelie phenomenon: the bike without pedals.
Am I late to the game? This is something that just seems ridiculous but I have to admit that the children I see wheeling themselves around on these things get up quite a head of steam and are just as good at banging into trees and terrifying their parents with short stops in front of busy avenues as kids with "traditional" bikes that you can actually ride.
I can't accurately describe how these things work, except to say that children sort of run with the un-bike between their legs and then kind-of perch on the seat while steering the front wheel with the handlebars in ways that are probably familiar to you.
A search revealed that these things are actually well known among bike enthusiasts, in Europe at least. There are versions called "Scooter Bikes," and then there are things that look more like bike than scooter. The idea behind them is that they supposedly train children to be more competent in the ways of balance and general bicycle comportment than training wheels.
The ones I have seen are smooth elegant wooden contraptions, and the Like a Bike, which seems to be the popular brand is attractive enough to be featured at the rather daunting "design store for children" that I look into from time to time and admire and then leave feeling that the toys are too lovely to even consider bringing into my house.
So, what's the word on these things? Do they help avoid training wheels? Is there something awful about training wheels in the first place? Isn't there something immutable about the rite of passage where a kid screams in terror as some beleaguered parent gives a wobbly two-wheeler a shove in some relatively empty park area? I vividly recall my own yelps as my father sent me rolling on my way. This is why in later years I signed up for driving school, declining his offers to teach me the rules of the road.
What's the deal? Are they fun for kids? They don't come cheap and I'm not actually shopping, but I'm intrigued, amused, hate skateboards, and I know that the Era of Wheelie Entertainment is closing in on me and I just want to be prepared.
posted by Elise at 8:00 AM
4 Comments
Howling
How do you feel about horror? I don't think it's a bad thing to be scared by fiction. There's plenty in real life that is terrifying in ways that offer no catharsis or resolution so it's actually quite pleasant when reasonably nice or at least hard-working people manage to vanquish hideous monsters.
I have been thinking a lot about horror lately and not just because of Halloween. I've just read the review of the latest and last in the Series of Unfortunate Events (which someday I hope to read to myself or my child). The review mentions that kids often find morbidity comforting, which was absolutely the case for me. And I keep catching previews for the latest scary movies. (Most of these aren't so appealing. They're either kind of silly or their nihilism is too aggressively cool. I was liking the nonsensical Japanese horror movies that are getting remade constantly for a while, but now they're all running together, so I can only think of one general creepy creepfest: TheEyeGrudgeRingDarkWaterRing2PulseCureEtc.)
Last night I watched a picture that came out in 2002 called Dog Soldiers, and the title pretty much says it all. There are soldiers and there are dogs. There is also something nasty in there about the urge to harness nature and force it to do the terrible things we'd rather not muddy our hands on, but don't think this movie isn't entertaining. It carries its politics even more lightly than Alien carried its feelings about corporations and capitalism.
This is a werewolf movie. Werewolves are among my favorite monsters. I used to favor vampires because of all the rules they have to follow in order to survive, their complicated etiquette (needing to be invited into houses), and strange sense of community (but if you think they're all stuffy effete types, take a look at Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark). Werewolves are so much less fussy. Their rules are more difficult to tamper with, and unlike vampires, once transformed, werewolves no longer are good conversationalists with whom one can negotiate.
I also have a thing for wolves, generally, apart from my horror movie fixation. A few years ago, I had a remarkable encounter with two wolves that offered me the closest thing I anticipate having to a conversion experience. (Here is where I met these creatures, and if you're local you can visit.)
Anyway, if you're looking for some shivers for Halloween, and aren't likely to be out and about at parties and whatnot, you could do much worse than Dog Soldiers. (The director had another movie out this summer about a group of women spelunkers and the nasty things they encounter in caves appropriately called The Descent.
posted by Elise at 7:30 AM
1 Comments
Oh, It's a Sign All Right
I had to go to the Upper East Side this week and while navigating Lexington Avenue, I peeped into a passing stroller. I do this a lot now, though I admit it is less to get a gander at the baby within's cuteness and more to see is the kid is asleep. (My child has not fallen asleep in a stroller since he was about five months-old and, embarrassingly, if he is kept out for so long that he realizes he is very, very tired will start shouting "BED!" from his rolling prison.)
At any rate, I looked into the stroller and saw a generic baby with a plastic little stop sign dangling over her head, which read: "Please wash your hands before touching mine."
Why is this a good idea, this little touch of unpleasantness? It doesn't matter that the stupid sign says "please," it's a little bit of modern rudeness that only serves to distance people from each other.
I know. Of course I know. I know all too well how important it is to keep an infant's hands clean. My objections have nothing at all to do with practicality. What is wrong with simply saying, gently: "Oh, could you please wash your hands?" What is wrong with talking to someone? AND, AND, if someone actually commits the heinous act, one can always, wash one's baby's hands. Portability is one of the nice things about those baby wipes (and they apparently take out all kinds of stains).
Really, if you can't get up the guts to politely ask someone, stranger or friend, to wash before noodling with your baby, you have no business having one. That is a tiny and easy battle and things only get harder to negotiate as the kid grows. And those problems won't really fit on signs you can hang off your kid's jacket.
Having a child, especially in a city, really doesn't give anyone license to be obnoxious and self-involved and the facts that people fall into hideousness all the time, and companies are willing to make products with idiotic cutsie names that encourage this behavior, is no reason why it should be thought of as inevitable or amusing.
I suppose on the plus side, if I see any kid even partially obscured by signage, I know I oughtn't bother with the parents. So maybe the little missive has a purpose after all.
posted by Elise at 5:27 AM
19 Comments
A Few Flickers of Interest
The week has barely begun and Slate has managed to cater to a double header of parental preoccupations: autism and preschool.
I love Emily Bazelon's articles about family and educational issues, and this week she has an interesting piece about how much education is required for preschool teachers.
She isn't poking at any hot potatoes, leaving that instead to her colleague Gregg Easterbrook who has a follow up to an article he wrote a month ago about his suspicions regarding a connection between television watching and autism. Brows are furrowing.
And the Guardian just recently published a Best/Worst article (everyone's favorite kind) on places to give birth. Sweden is best, safest, happiest. Niger is the most dangerous, where women in their reproductive years have a 1 in 7 chance of dying as a result of a complication or infection related to pregnancy or childbirth. The details are heartbreaking, not just as a result of comparing these two countries to each other, of course, but seeing the facts laid out side to side highlights that awfulness and threat for women in Niger.
It was with some amusement that I realized last night that Aaron Sorkin must occasionally look at New York Magazine. In Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, as Ed Asner wanders off, he tosses this over his shoulder: "Tell your kids to learn Mandarin." A long ago article says that Mandarin is the language of choice for parents who want their tots to grow up to be competitive in the new global economies. It's a joke, of course, but it's one of those lies that tells the truth.
posted by Elise at 5:47 AM
0 Comments
It Isn't Just One of Your Holiday Games
Thrills n' Chills!
On the 11th, the New York City Health Department released, finally, its statistics for baby names in 2005. I know the world has been holding its breath. I love these lists and really look forward to them for reasons that are mysterious to me. I love the fact that 242 families who probably never had anything to do with each other named their daughters "Gabriella." Why is "Jayden" is so much more popular than "Jaden"? Why is "Phoenix" a boy's name? (It doesn't appear as a girl's name at all, in spite of the popularity of all of the X-Men movies.)
Emily remains the number one girl's names after it unseated "Ashley" which clung to the top position for way too long. But nothing compares to the tenacity of "Michael" which has apparently been the number one boy's name in New York City for 20 years. New names to break into the top ten are "Rachel" (which kicked "Brianna" down to number 14) and "Nicholas" (which bumped "Ryan" into the 11t h spot) otherwise, little changes.
Because they don't shift around that much, I don't find Top Tens particularly interesting, but I have always been intrigued by the longer lists that the City also offers. As long as 10 babies receive any name, that name appears on the Big List. This year the Big List for boys has 162 names on it, starting with the inevitable "Michael" and winding up with "Zain" and the Big List for girls has 149 spots: "Emily" to "Zaniyah".
The Big Lists are then broken down by vague ethnicity (after the "All" categories you can see statistics for Black, Hispanic and Asian & Pacific Island names). I would have been more interested to see a name breakdown by borough or even neighborhood (since I spent so much time in Morningside Heights, I am snarkily curious about academic kid naming tendencies).
Do other cities offer this sort of extensive reporting? Of course the annual round-up press release is reluctant to just provive entertainment without the frisson of worry, so it also comes with information about window guards, avoiding second hand smoke, SIDS and lead poisoning prevention.
posted by Elise at 7:24 AM
0 Comments
Hat's Off
Indulge me in contemplating what I suspect will be a long-standing brain tangle about Halloween.
Last year, before the advent of free will, Felix would have been happy to wear anything for Halloween. The whole thing was really just a parental diversion anyway. It wasn't as if he actually went trick or treating or could walk, even, so the only problem really was how to get him to look as cute as he possibly could for pictures before I spilled something on him (party in the park and another one in the building lobby). My husband handled costume selection, due to my indecision, and he did a great job (monkey, if you must know), and there is a photographic archive to prove it. Halcyon day, indeed.
This year, something like taste has begun to develop in my kid's brain. It has nothing to do with his interests (which tend towards dogs, fish, snakes, construction equipment, watermelon and tomatoes these days) and more to do with comfort. He will not wear anything on his head.
I probably mentioned this peccadillo of his over the summer because I frequently got crap from acquaintances and strangers about Felix being bareheaded under the blasting Manhattan sun. That was annoying, but for some reason I am more growly about the fact that all toddler Halloween costumes seem to require some kind of headgear to make sense.
A compromise has been reached. The kid will be dressed as an imp regardless of whether or not he deigns to wear his little hood with horns. But are there things I haven't thought about?
Do you have ideas for non-hat costumes? I sense this is a question that will dog me for a few years and could use some future ammunition.
posted by Elise at 5:34 PM
2 Comments
Everyone's a Critic- Or an Editor
For the longest time, a large piece of graffiti (created by the "Warren Street Vandalism Literacy Project") remained pristine. All across a construction site that is protected by white pieces of painted plywood, some industrious folks had created a little alphabet lesson. (O is for Ontology, P is for pencil, Q is for quark... you get the picture.)
And then autumn arrived, and with it the know-it-alls I love so dearly. As you can see, they felt obliged to correct the entry for the letter "U," but, and I mean this sincerely, something really wonderful happened. When they discovered they were in error, they apologized and stood corrected.
Imagine a world where people said this sort of thing:
"I'm sorry. I had no idea that drinking coffee (eating shrimp cocktail, snagging some sushi) when you're pregnant isn't a problem."
"My apologies. I forgot it is none of my business whether you breast feed or not."
"I know I told you that your kid would catch pneumonia if you let him run around drooling without a bib on, but I guess I was wrong."
Now dream on.
posted by Elise at 12:20 PM
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Painless Improvement
Autumn is the season of good intentions. Having grown up in academic environments and followed that up by spending all sorts of time in school, I think of the new year in terms of sharp pencils, sweaters, and promises to be smart, disciplined and efficient with good eating habits and nicely brushed hair. And tidy.
And then candy corn season rolls around and indolence settles in and I remember my true nature.
This is not to say that I give up the struggle and in my efforts, I embrace all kinds of peculiar self-improvement methods. The latest is a way of getting myself to read things I wouldn't ordinarily pick up, mostly because I'm swamped with other books.
I read somewhere about Daily Lit, a free email service that emails little bites of public domain texts to you every day until the book has finished, and am completely sold. Each morning (sadly at an hour that has been steadily creeping back further and further) while Felix smears his face with preserves and toast, I gulp down a fragment of The Beautiful and the Damned. Unless I get ambitious or really fall in love with the book, it will take me 160 days to get through the thing, which is quite some time, but when I think that there is a good chance I wouldn't have read it at all (Fitzgerald is not my favorite), I realize it isn't a bad deal and those early morning minutes can just as easily be spent contemplating my toes, which is more depressing and less edifying.
Daily Lit doesn't have enormous amounts of stuff, but I’m pleased to plan a future with painless self-improvement. Next stop: Paradise Lost, I think. I remember nothing of it from high school, and it is only 108 segments long. I suppose if you really want to live with something you could sign up for Emily Dickinson's poems, which arrive in 444 parts. If one wanted, one could even program a theme month. October, for instance, lends itself to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a mere 32 parts) or a Sherlock Holmes case, like the relatively brief A Study in Scarlet (51 days of entertainment).
Daily Lit does offer a "read the next segment immediately" option for people who get caught up or who just hate cliffhangers. I can imagine a few moments in The Moonstone (238 parts) or The Portrait of a Lady (2 volumes, 264 parts total) that would make me demand to read several sections at a time.
Who knows if this self-improvement project will have life after The Beautiful and the Damned, but I have a small sense of accomplishment for at least 5 minutes every morning, and since this is the season of bulk candy, I need some virtue to counter my gluttony.
posted by Elise at 12:16 PM
3 Comments
Krispy Teacups
Finally, something nominally interesting in the New York Times Magazine. I got peeved a few weeks ago when they ran a long and embarrassing excerpt from Susan Sontag's diaries. Surely, even if she didn't name names directly, she couldn't have meant for all of that mind-blather that she (and everyone else, really) generates and blots out to be published for everyone to read, squint at, wonder who she was talking about or sleeping with and feel squirmy about.
Anyway, it's a little after the fact to mention it but Emily Bazelon had a longish piece ("So the Torah Is a Parenting Guide?") in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday about the psychologist and writer Wendy Mogel and her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children. Now, parenting manuals aren’t my bag as a rule, and I'm not entirely sure the religious element is so crucial when it comes to theories of parenting, but I was still intrigued. At its heart the book suggests that parents generally tend to overemphasize the importance of things that can be measured- grades, test scores, athletic performance- over the general behavior of life. This results in children who feel extremely pressured to perform in school but who have problems doing rather quotidian things (laundry and simple socializing, for instance). Mogel reports that college guidance counselors tend to refer to this type of kids as "teacups" and "krispies" and note that they don't tend to adjust well to independent lives.
The article points out that while much of what the book teaches comes from lessons extracted from Jewish texts, these approaches are not novel to other religions or to purely secular psychology (cognitive behavioral therapy, especially follows some of the recommended techniques).
It is unlikely I will read this book anytime soon, though Bazelon's piece is really interesting. Read it while you can. These aren't really the challenges I'm facing as a parent (there is still the chair struggle, which I don't think Mogel can help me with). But I took my first preschool tour yesterday and I looked at large groups of children in classrooms and wondered about the pressures they would be facing soon and what sort of trick it might be to keep my kid from turning "krispy" in the face tests and competition. Some Yoda-type figure would no doubt point that I must smash my inner "teacup" in order to finagle a well adjusted kid.
But I don't really go in for pop psychology either.
posted by Elise at 11:06 AM
4 Comments
Ending Koala Overkill
I know, I know, as if there could be such a thing, but I was in Australia, on Kangaroo Island, for a delightful fragment of my honeymoon, and while I was there I learned that the koalas are eating themselves out of house and home. They have no natural predators on Kangaroo Island, where the population consists primarily of sheep (with smaller numbers of fairy penguins, echidnas, kangaroos, wallabies, exquisite birds, sea lions and farmers).
We had numerous discussions with people about the koala overpopulation problems and now, years later, it is quite rewarding to see that a possible solution is in the works: Koala Contraception.
The koalas, at the time didn't appear to have any sense that they were in danger. This appeared to be pretty much how they spent the bulk of their days.
One of the many things I loved about Australia was the way in which the country is so concerned with and so creative about protecting its natural resources. I wish these impulses and innovations would catch on elsewhere... here for instance.
posted by Elise at 12:54 PM
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