Quirks

One thing I love about having four children is being able to compare and contrast their personalities. It was an enormous relief to me when my second baby was born being completely different than her older brother. He had been such a difficult, attention-needing, intense baby that I had seriously begun to wonder whether he [...]

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On Censorship

A friend just told me that her eleven-year old daughter was chastised for reading Twilight in her grade 4/5/6 classroom, on the grounds that it is “inappropriate” reading material for someone of her age. Too much about relationships or something like that. I don’t know the whole story, but even hearing that little bit of [...]

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Score!

My fifteen-year old son wants to go thrift storing with me tomorrow! Update: Purchases: one (working!) projection alarm clock with am/fm radio three matching dinner plates one camping thermos one stainless steel rack for purposes unknown Total cost: $3.82

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An Explosion of Hearts

This is the first time any of the kids has managed to take me completely by surprise. Usually I catch wind of whatever they have up their sleeve long before it happens, or I orchestrate the surprise myself, giving one of them the seed of an idea, and then “forgetting” when the time comes. I [...]

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As the Mood Turns

It’s amazing what a difference 24 hours can make. Yesterday I was happy, calm, the picture of beatific motherhood. Today, not so much. After 3 hours at the hot and noisy swimming pool, and a crawling drive through traffic on streets that had been scraped down to an icy varnish by the overnight street cleaning [...]

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Boiling it Down

My main goal as a parent is to be able to provide an environment for the kids in which they have as much freedom as possible to develop into the people they were born to be. I want them to feel safe, and supported and free to experience their internal worlds. I want them to [...]

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Being Whole

Another negative aspect of rigid gender stereotyping is that some women, in their efforts to distance themselves from some of the more limiting expectations, end up denying a part of themselves. I speak from personal experience. I was a real tomboy as a child, and I revelled in being a tough, wiry little kid. When [...]

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An Ode To My Mother

My mama and I have as complicated a relationship as any other pair of different yet similar kinfolk do, and it’s been further complicated by choices both of us have made. I fled home as quickly as I could in my teen years, trying to put distance between me and the overwhelming murkiness of our [...]

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On My Own

Well, they’re off to the lake for two weeks with their dad. Which makes this less of a team effort and more of a solo project. That being said, this blog started out as a way for the kids to publish their own work, but like all of the ideas I come up with and [...]

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A Confession

A beautiful Sunday morning sleep in. I was poked in the ribs at 7am by the littlest princess, who said she was hungry and could I make breakfast, but I only half awoke, just enough to tell her to make her own toast, and then fell right back asleep. When I finally stumbled down the [...]

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Who Knows?

When school let out in June, Big Girl L was adamant that she wanted to homeschool for grades 7 and 8. She was tired of the other kids, tired of managing school on top of a demanding diving practice schedule, and eager to have time of her own again. She dragged a desk home from [...]

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Girl Power

In lieu of any of the zillions of other things that she could have done with her afternoon, Junior Miss Twelve got into character. She took great pleasure in swooping around in her cape, vanquishing forces of doom and swiping drinks from her sister’s lemonade stand. I took special delight in her masked mania because [...]

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The Encroaching Cloud of Doom

The kids are back from their two weeks at the lake. I’m back from my two weeks of camping, canoeing, and cottaging. Which all added up to one huge mountain of laundry. I spent the bulk of today scrabbling to put a dent in the neglected household chores, all the while fighting down the rising [...]

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Growing Independence

Parenting doesn’t come with a set of rules, which was something that bothered me a bit when the kids were younger. If I just knew for sure that this would turn out alright. Am I doing this properly? All of my decisions around the kids seemed fraught with enormous potential long term implications, and there [...]

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14A

Last weekend L and Jay and I watched Juno, the movie that stars Ellen Page as a 16-year old girl who gets pregnant and gives her baby up for adoption. R watched a bit of it, but soon excused himself, and T was at a birthday party. I watched it once before I rented it [...]

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Danger Moves

The week before she left for her diving trip L didn’t seem interested in playing with friends. She hung around the house, reading, packing, and making up crazy games for the little kids. Her parting gift to Jay was a trip to the playground, and a lesson on back flips off the swing set. She [...]

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Planned Obsolescence

We’re at a funny stage in our family homeschooling journey. I still have lots of ideas for projects, and still add items to the ongoing list of topics that I think the kids would enjoy learning about, but we almost never seem to get around to any of them because the kids are invariably busy [...]

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Blob Day

We still don’t have a name that quite fits. Anything Goes Day, Lazy Day, Greedy Day, Crazy Day, Slob Day, Blob Day. None of them capture the essence of our no rules, no manners, no meals, no nagging day, but the kids don’t care. They were in unanimous agreement that we should make it a [...]

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On the Road Again

Off on another diving trip tomorrow. The third meet in 2 months. This time it’s for the Nationals, the competition that they work towards all year. Some other parents are going, and I seriously considered it too, but in the end I decided to stay in town with the other three so that I could [...]

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The Art of the Deal

Little boy in garden observing wildflowers and making careful pencil sketches in his nature journal? Hardly. More like little boy writing five sentences in trade for thirty minutes of computer time. I’m so concerned about limiting his screen time, he’s so single-minded in his resolve to obtain more time and the two of us have [...]

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