How to Raise a Daughter Live-Blog

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my children, I LOVE my life, and I wouldn't trade it for the world or anything in it.  But at the end of the week my battery is low, almost empty, and I can only laugh when my kids are screaming and crying and I am up to my neck in housework and I have to get over my desire to cry and throw all of the toys that Reilley is throwing at me back at him and said "uh oh!" as cute as he does and hope he will just clean them up himself.  Instead I take a deep breath and thank the Lord for being my strength, for knowing my limits and for carrying my through those moments when I lose all hope for my sanity to return.

“What is called “sex education,” whether for kindergartners or older children, is not education about biology but indoctrination in values that go against the traditional values that children learn in their families and in their communities.

Obviously, the earlier this indoctrination begins, the better its chances of overriding traditional values. The question is not how urgently children in kindergarten need to be taught about sex but how important it is for indoctrinators to get an early start.

The arrogance of third parties, who take it upon themselves to treat other people’s children as a captive audience to brainwash with politically correct notions, while taking no responsibility for the consequences to those children or society, is part of the general vision of the Left that pervades our education system.

Sex education for kindergartners is just one of many issues on which Barack Obama has lined up consistently on the side of arrogant elitists of the Far Left. Senator Obama’s words often sound very reasonable and moderate, as well as lofty and inspiring. But everything that he has actually done over the years places him unmistakably with the extreme left elitists.”

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As parents of this new generation, we are surrounded by technology.  I grew up immersed in technology due to the fact I’m a “giga-byte,” the first generation not to know life without a computer.  Though my parents didn’t have to worry about giving me typing lessons the same time I learned to write, they seemed to have raised me in simpler time.  Now stores sell toddler digital cameras, toddler video games, toddler Mp3 players, and my personal favorite, toddler-size keyboards.  At least with the boys so young and out of school, I can keep them from learning about these teenager toys masquareding as children toys.  I wonder how you parents with elementary school kids do it.  We are all trying to navigate this new territory, wondering what toys are necessary to help our kids succeed in a technological world and which ones can wait until they’re older and can buy it with their own money.

My in-laws were teachers, and when Evan was just a babe in arms, I asked them about the new toddler computers.  They answered that they noticed the more technology kids received the smaller the attention span.  They urged me to wait as long as possible, so I plan on taking their advice.  Of course, my father-in-law was horrified over how many to toy cell phones we owned (four, but most of them say the alphabet, so these phones could act as a teaching aid) and that Sean was walking around the house with one.  “Gee, we do have a toy rotary phone, if that makes you feel better,” I countered.

That’s the other thing about technology.  Kids just want to be like their parents; hence, my boys are talking on toy cell phones and pacing around the house like their daddy when he’s on a business phone call.  (I kid you not; my husband cannot sit still when he’s on the phone, and neither can my sons.)  Evan vacuums with a toy lawn mower because he has never seen his father mow the grass, just his mother vacuum the floor.  In fact, my sons scramble to get on the computer where they pretend to type and move around the mouse.  They have their own broken keyboard that I painted for them.  One day my husband found Evan typing on the computer all by himself in the office.  When my husband asked Evan to come and play, Evan looked at his daddy and said, “I can’t.  I’m working.”  My husband was shocked, but I pointed out that is exactly what my husband does and says when he is working from home.  Evan was just mimicking.  (I think it was a little sad though.)

Another time my husband and I caught Evan at the computer, Evan said, “I’m writing an email!”

My husband was shocked again, turned to me, and said, “He’s a genius!  I wouldn’t have said that at his age!”

I answered, “Of course not, they didn’t have email when we were kids.  We would have said we’re writing a letter.”

So, yes, I know Evan and Sean will have an Mp3 player at a much earlier age than me. They’ll have a digital camera at the same age I got my first film camera.  They’ll play video games at an earlier age.  Hell, they had the Disney Channel at an earlier age than me.  I plain refuse to let my kids become addicted to video games and the internet.  I have stated that they will not have computers or TVs in their rooms until their in middle school, and I will be six feet under before I let them have a connection to the internet in their own room.  (They can just use the family computer where I can look over their shoulders.)  And at one point, I thought I wouldn’t have to buy them a cell phone. Ha.  Now I’ll have to figure out how to limit it.  I just have to make sure my husband and I do this technological parenting as smart as we can and kick them out of the house when they are reaching zombie stage, staring at a video game, trying to conquer level 63.

So after I turned off the lights and took Sean to bed, my husband and Evan began a long discussion of whether there were spiders or not.  My husband turned the conversation to the spider Evan made and how it kept all other spiders away.  So Evan climber out of bed, petted the spider, and laid it down to go to sleep.  Then Evan climbed back into bed and asked his father to sing him the Tiki Room song, which my husband didn’t know.  After contemplating this new development, Evan asked for a song about a Tiki, a pineapple, a princess, and a unicorn.  (I plan to write down the song my husband came up with.)  Then Evan pointed to one of his red Chinese paper lanterns and said that it was Mars.  The conversation went on.

After an hour, Evan was finally asleep, and my husband was free from his obligation.  He decided to go to bed too.  Now I wonder what kind of consequence this solution has. . . .

I believe that the male of the species should be out and about hunting for food during the day - letting the mothers get on with raising their offspring. But when both parents must be together constantly and there is no way to avoid it, then the discipline has to be sorted out. This is something dOH and I agree upon at least. So, because we are together in this 'unnatural' way, things have to be decided once and for all.

We are begging to differ. We cannot meet in the middle. I will not go back to the way it was, he does not understand that there is another way. So be it. The girls soon will be with me whilst dOH is out 'hunting' anyway and the time I spend with them is becoming sweeter and more graceful as I move deeper and deeper into this respect and autonomy. It feels like an organic and natural process running under its own steam, I couldn't stop it if I tried.

I overheard Bubble telling her cousin this morning that she didn't like her daddy sometimes, especially when he shouts at her. He has certainly been shouting alot recently.

I don't know what she says about me, but I hope it is not the same thing.

I know that if I told dOH what she said this morning, he would turn around and say, "I don't want her to like me, I want her to behave herself."

And on the subject of her cousin. She slept over last night. A lovely polite and meek child, who always says please and thank you. Compare this to my scallywag who shouts and jumps and, I have to admit, is at times down right rude, (I am working on that, but it is taking time) gets excited and jealous and upset and in a rage, sometimes all at once. Everyone loves her cousin - afterall she is so good. Bubble is a rebel but I see her passion shining through, because I have stopped to see the reasons behind her behaviour and I know why she needs to do it, hell, I feel like behaving that way sometimes too.

She has not been beaten back by the adult world; she lets here emotions run strong, even if they are frowned upon.

Perhaps this is what dOH dislikes. OK, I totally understand that children should not be rude to adults and unfortunately, with this relaxed parenting regime has come a measure of rudeness that is unacceptable, but I am doing my best to gently let her know that it is wrong, but I refuse to quash her natural vivacity. DOH does not discriminate between heartfelt emotion and naughtiness. That is the thing I cannot bear.

So we are now begging to differ. When he takes charge I must now bite my lip; let him do it his way. I have noticed that Bubble has started running to me in these times of 'hard discipline' by dOH, but I have agreed to say nothing against him.

Thank goodness I will have the kids to myself over the winter. That is when the stress usually runs very high.

"I like Caroline," I said, "but we have no connection it in our family.  I like Carolina because not only is it just a name that I like, one that reminds me of summers in the Appalachians, but it also references our family's history of naming women after southern states." 

"Hmmm," she said, and eventually came on board in her classically supportive way. 

So our "girl name" has been Carolina for months and months.  I do love it.  I think it's beautiful--interesting, feminine, easy to spell, recognizable internationally (It's a very popular Latina and Italian name), and so forth.  People do keep asking if we will pronounce it Car-o-lihn-a or Car-o-leen-a, which feels more complicated than I imagined.  Folks also so seem to think immediately of the states of North and South Carolina when we say it, which is a stronger association than I was looking for.  As I wrote in my earlier blog post, I do think that once we have a personality to attach the name to, the state association would fade and she would just be herself, Carolina, but still, the experience of circulating our potential name hasn't exactly confirmed it hands down for us. 

As I told my mom, one of the attractions of the name "Carolina" for me is its ability to reference an oral history of family female geneology.  Our first daughter's name referenced both of Steve's grandmothers.  Now it's my turn.  I don't have any women named Carolina in my family, but my great great great grandfather Whiting moved from Virginia to Alabama before the Civil War and named his first 4 daughters after the states that he loved: Virginia, Alabama, Florida, and (I think) Tennessee.  His fifth daughter he named Sally.  Such is the oral history, the story, that I have heard dozens and dozens of times.  Giving my daughter a name that reminds us of this story (and helps her to remember the names of her great grand mothers) is attractive to me, even though I'm so very glad that the Union won the Civil War.  I think that these oral histories, particularly about women's names which so often get erased, are important. 

Over the months, we have softened to a baby name stance of telling people that we will name our little girl "either Carolina or Caroline" but that we would wait and meet her before deciding.  Steve has still only been 95% enthusiastic about these names, and he pulled out my Ellis Family Reunion directory this week to see if any other names appealed to him more.  It was sitting open on the kitchen counter a few days ago when I read:

"On June 18, 1868, in Aiken, S.C., Judge Ellis was married to Phoebe Caroline Prioleau, daughter of Samuel Prioleau of Charleston and Juliana M Fripp, his wife."

We had already considered and declined the name Juliana, but here was a use of Caroline that I hadn't known about.  Phoebe Caroline Prioleau.  Hmmm.  That intrigued me.  See, as I just said, one of the points to me of names is the stories that they enable us to remember and transmit across generations.  So if my daughter asks me (and people then ask her) why she is named Caroline, I could tell her that her great great great grandmother was named Phoebe Caroline Prioleau, and that she came from S Carolina and moved with her husband to Atlanta, where he became a judge after the Civil War.  She was my grandfather's grandmother, and the barrier island where I played on the beach as a child (Fripp Island) was named for her mother's family.  That's oral history at work.  And I like it.

So we'll see.  We can either go with the story from my mother's side of the family about Mr Whiting naming his daughters for southern states, or from my father's side of the family about what we know of the Ellis line.  Perhaps we will name this child "Caroline Prioleau Ellis TenElshof", with a fourth name on the birth certificate just for historical fun.  Perhaps we'll wait and see whom she reminds us of :)

The first article, by Sarah Lyall, a correspondent for the New York Times and recent author of an ex-pat view of the British, asks in the headline 'Why are you Brits such DRUNKS?'. The answer could be related the title of the second article, "Mum branded a 'disgrace' after she buys 13-year-old daughter stash of alcohol to take on school charity walk".

But the problem is that I talk to 13-year-olds every day, including yesterday, for whom getting drunk is regular behaviour. These are not down-and-out rough-and-tumble council estate kids with no hope. These are middle class kids from tidy homes. They can't imagine being able to socialise or have fun without alcohol. The kids yesterday attributed my lack of regular drunkness to my wild religious fanaticism, you know, the fact that I believe in God.

But neither yesterday's children nor my present school stand out particularly. At my last school, 14-year-olds regularly talked about going out and getting drunk. And it was not like they were sneaking out of the house to do it. Their parents preferred to know where they were, even if it was stumbling down the streets throwing up or urinating in alleyways, behaviour that was also well-known by their fellow pupils.

And I have seen it myself. My favourite kebab shop is for obvious reason right in the middle of the drinking establishments in our fair city. Any time from 8:00pm on, teenagers, usually wearing the slightest amount of fabric that could called clothes, and shouting the foulest language, wander up and down the lanes in drunken packs.

The one thing they all of these pupils have in common is that they were girls. It's not that boys aren't doing the same thing. Rather it seems to be the new expression of feminism - working very hard to equal, and now it seems outdo, the men. And if they are drinking like this in their early teens, think of what they will be like in a few years.

I flew for the first time when I was 14.  It was a big deal.  I had a brand new Levi's denim leisure suit to wear, and my parents had prepared us to be a part of "high society."  We were served a hot meal, by beautiful and smiling "stewardesses."  This was the pinnacle of success in the eyes of my parents!  Now, riding in an airplane isn't much different than riding in the bus - only it takes longer and is more dehumanizing.  Air travel has lost it's charm.

Traveling alone used to be relatively easy.  I'd rarely check bags, so it was just a matter of walking on the plane and walking off severl states away.  Now, however, traveling with The Wife, Darling Daughter, and soon-to-be-toddler, Smiling Son, we've clearly lost that sense of simplicity.  There really is nothing easy about traveling with a young family.

First, there is the luggagae issue.  We, apparently, need to be prepared for any and all eventualities.  Then, we need car seats, stroller, diaper bag/backpack, toys, favorite books, dolls, food, drink, and of course, whatever else we deem can't be lived without.  To top off the complications, United has started charging for every checked bag.  Fifteen bucks for the first bag and twenty-five for every bag after that.  While this did provide some incentive to pack lighter, it made packing more like a Sudoku puzzle and less like a high society adventure!  It also meant that we pushed the limits of how many carryon items we could stow in the overhead bin and at our feet.

I've also learned that prepublished airline schedules are more like wish lists.  One doesn't really get to determine when one's family flies anymore.  We merely get to submit a wishlist and hope the airline will honor that.  In our case, we've discovered that early morning flights have a negative effect on our ability to remain sane.  

So, I booked a flight that was supposed to leave early in the afternoon and would plop us down just before bedtime.  But about a month before we flew, there came an email that expressed the United's attempt at making our day a living nightmare.  They had added a three hour layover to our itinerary and we wouldn't arrive in Omaha until just before midnight.  Apparently the scheduling computer has never traveled with small children.

Food is no longer a luxury included in the week's wages I gave them for the privilege of being dehumanized by the system.  So, my Goregeous Wife made preparations to bring along two meals for the day.  In case you don't know, this isn't as easy as it may sound.

Fortunately, my kids are not TV watchers.  I believe this contributes to their ability to self-entertain themselves, but it doesn't take away the fact that four people who can easily fill up a 2000 square-foot house are now crammed into a space about the size of our refridgerator - for most of the day.  It's OK though, we'll be fine, really!

The biggest stressor of all, at least for this Daddy, is the responsibility for keeping my family safe and sane.  Being a naturally protective individual, I tend to take this role way too seriously.  I'm on the lookout for people who may want to steal, or molest, my kids.  I'm on the lookout for people who may try to rip us off.  I'm constantly aware of "stranger-danger."

Then there's the fact that I don't have a lot of confidence in the poor souls entrusted to screen our luggage or the people getting aboard the plane I'll be flying on.  There's something not-so-comforting about the fact that they make my 13 month-old Smiling Son take off his shoes before going through the metal scanner.  In fact, I'm not even sure how limiting the amount of carry-on fluids helps.  Other than the fact that I end up drinking a lot more tap water when I fill my water bottle from the drinking fountain in the terminal.

When the logical side of my brain stops to think about it, I realize there are not many crimes commited in airports.  In fact, there is so much security at airports, it would be incredibly stupid for anyone to attempt a major crime there.  However, that's where my previous experience with career criminals and knowing their judgement is often clouded by their low IQ, or drug induced state of mind.

By the end of the day, I am mentally exhausted.  My Gorgeous Wife takes good care of the physical and emotional needs of the family, but it is I who is left with the role of constant vigelance and regular patrolling of the perimeter.  This is a lot harder than I make it look.  I could really use a couple of staff members with ear-piece radios and small arms, but lacking the budget for that, I'm left to take care of everything on my own.  It's a tough job, but... well, you know!

As we left the plane in Omaha, the flight attendant gave my Darling Daughter her first set of wings.  She thanked us for having well-behaved children.  DD walked off the plane with her head held high.  She is beginning to realize that the possibilities are endless!

So, until the return flight, I'll be recuperating, via rest and relaxation.  A man has to prepare to defend his family at all costs, at every turn, whenever the need arises.  The reality is, there is little danger.  Planes are safer than cars and there is less stranger danger in an airport than at the local Wal-Mart.

In fact, the best support I can offer my family is to stay healthy: emotionally, spiritually, physically, and socially.  This health can be transmitted to my family and provide the kind of leadership that will provide a solid foundation and positive trajectgory to my kids' lives.

So, doing some quick mental math- $25 admission to California Adventure (a special rate for Trick or Treating) x 20 people = $500, plus the cost of pizza, cake, decorations (there were tons), breakfast on Saturday, and whatever else, all for a 9 year old's birthday. That is way too freakin' rich for my blood!!

In these difficult and scary financial times, with Wall Street having it's biggest one week dump in history, I'm looking for ways to lower costs and cut corners. I'm walking around behind my family turning off lights, using fans instead of A/C, clipping coupons. We're driving cars that are 5 and 6 years old (paid for!), taking our lunches to work and school, going out to eat far less. I'm paying cash instead of using credit. I'm certainly not going hog-wild on the birthday parties this year. And Christmas will be a scaled-back affair.

Are you doing anything differently to save money? Or, more accurately, to not spend so much? I'd love to hear your frugal ideas.

VeganMoFo Day 11

Vegan Lunch Box by Jennifer McCann

I'm sure all of you have heard of the amazing Vegan Lunch Box book and the original Vegan Lunch Box blog that started it all.

I started reading about the fantastic meals that Jennifer would make every day for her son before I was interested in blogging and before I was pregnant. I think it was the only blog I used to read back then!

The lunches were amazing, healthy yet fun, nutritious yet fun and best of all vegan yet still fun!

I used to cut and paste all the pictures and recipes I liked into a folder so that when LP was bigger (I was nesting by this stage!!!) I would be able to make her delicious lunches. We even got ourselves a Laptop Lunchbox (ok, it was big time nesting!).

When Jennifer self-published Vegan Lunch Box, I was clicking on the "buy" button as soon as I read her announcement.

And just recently I splashed out on the new edition too, mostly because it has been reorganised to make it easier to get around. The sample lunches are now listed at the start and now all the recipes are grouped into relevant sections, whereas with the original the whole book was divided into lunches, which was nice but a bit harder to browse.

Littlepixie is still too little for a packed lunch, but that hasn't stopped us sampling some of the delights in VLB, the "Massur Dal & Carrot" soup is yum, as is the "Sneaky Momma's Black Bean" soup. The assembled lunches are inspirational, might I point you to the Hallowe'en entry on her blog as a wonderful example of the creativity involved! It's worth noting that the recipes yield reasonably small amounts, presumably as they are intended to be lunches for children not dinners for big heffalumps like me & Mr. HPP!

Jennifer has kindly posted lots of her recipes on her recipe blog shmooed food, including one of our current favourites, Full Meal Muffins.

And she has just added a recipe for homemade maple syrup to her recipe blog, which is wonderful because that stuff is so expensive in Ireland, and it's such a waste when you're just chucking it in a cookie mix to sweeten it! So you can use this "maple syrup" in your cookies and save the real stuff for your pancakes & salad dressings, where it really counts!

Now, I need to send Jennifer a bill for all the bento items I've been accumulating over the past year or so, I've gotten so many ideas from this book & her blog. I now have a box full of exciting lunch accessories and nik-naks just waiting to be used and it's all her fault :)

So my recommendation to you, dear reader, is that whether or not you are raising vegan kiddos, or indeed any kiddos, buy this book, your lunch-time tummy will thank you!

For those of us with the self-published first edition of her book, there is a list of some typos here. And as always, you can find yummy looking photos on Flickr.

So, dear reader, are you a fan of Vegan Lunch Box too? What have your favourite Lunch Boxes been?

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He cries, distracting my focus. I shake it off. He cries louder, more insistent. qDaddy is in there with him; I'm sure he's fine. But he needs me. I huff, put down the laptop, and go to him. I pull him into my chest and cradle his soft body. I smell his still downy head and trace his smooth skin with my hand while he nurses to contentment. I am grateful for his demanding nature, grateful that he still calls me to his side at night.

8:20 am

Last one to bed, first one up. I am back at work when she creeps around the corner, stealth in her footie pajas, grin lighting her face. I love how happy she is to see me in the morning, to reunite. I put down the laptop and lift her onto my lap. We speak of dreams and I am happy to share a quiet moment alone with her. misterT is usually vying for attention at this hour, but Saturdays are different, usually. "What's Daddy doing?" I ask. "Just sleepin'," she replies. "Silly sleeper-inner! You better go wake up that sleepy head!" I know, of course, that qDaddy is at least somewhat awake, as I have heard misterT yelling "DA!" at him for about an hour now, and I snuck a peek of the babe crawling on qDaddy's face. Fancy scurries off for a wake-up kiss and I return to my screen. I have about seven minutes before they are all up and descending upon me.

His preschool probably does not help our police-prisoner relationship. The other day when I dropped him off they had all these kids out in the yard digging a hole. All that was missing was a Cool-Hand-Luke prison guard saying, "What's that hole doing in my yard, boy? Fill it in."

After I pick him up from preschool, he sometimes goes through a two-hour period of resocialization. He lists all the people he knows, putting the adjective "stupid" in front of every person. I find chocolate and bananas speed up the process of getting him "back in the world."

It's not easy being a kid, is it? Kids are by their nature mentally underdeveloped. In preschool he is thrown into a whole yard full of snot eaters, screechers, pushers, eye-pokers and self-defecators, himself included. I can understand why he sometimes prefers the company of snails.

 Baby Place: The starting point for information on pregnancy, birth and babies.

  Come on, do it for Finn!  This blog post is just soooo much better if you have this song playing!  And a quick apology too ... I'm not as blog saavy yet as my techno-cousin Cat, who has whole musical albums playing as background music on her blog!

  Now, if this were a Jeopardy game, I'd use the following questions as my "answers" to this "answer" -- Finn's current obsession.

  The actual Jeopardy round would look or sound something like this:

  Answer:  Finn's current obsession.

  Question:  What, as of 2004, was 46,837 miles long?

or ... 

  Answer:  Finn's current obsession.

  Question:  What came into being as a result of President Dwight D. Eisenhowser signing the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 on June 29, 1956?

or ...

  Answer:  Finn's current obsession.

  Question:  What cost over $421 billion to build and took more than 35 years to do so?

or one more ...

  Answer:  Finn's current obsession.

  Question:  What is the largest public works project in history?

  (Admit it, you want me on your Trivial Pursuit team!)

  I have to say, we didn't see this one coming.  Of course, we didn't see "Singin' In The Rain" coming as an obsession for Michael when he was 18 months old, and we didn't see Caroline's obsession with pink Boynton pigs coming before it happened either.

  But all of a sudden, a few months ago already, Finn took to, well, highways.  Yes, highways.  Expressways.  Interstate 96.  Interstate 69.  U.S. Highway 127.  Fortunately enough, and perhaps fueling his obsession, we live within a few miles of a convergence of 3 pretty major highways in Michigan, all named above, and there's Interstate 496 and Business Highway 27 close by too.

  It started, I think, once he intuited that the highway is where you can drive the fastest.  That immediately became an interest in how fast we could go on the highway (e.g., "Daddy, are we going 70 miles now???", he'd ask gleefully).  And then a comparison of "fastness" between our van and other cars around us (e.g., "Daddy, are we going the same fast as that car?").

  Later, when we'd drive over I-69, which we have to do from DeWitt to go anywhere around Lansing, he began to notice the on-ramp you could turn down to accelerate toward the highway.  And then he noticed the corresponding off-ramp on the other side of the highway.

  Eventually, Finn started to ask what highway we were on.  He quickly memorized that Highway 96 was the road to and from Michael's mom's house and Grandma Zech's house, respectively, in Grand Rapids.  And then he picked up on Highway 69 just being a flip of the numbers making up "96," and started recognizing too the Interstate "shield" red and blue of the highway signs.

  Before we knew it, trips down the highway became running narrations from the back right child seat in our van of the on-ramps and off-ramps we were passing and whether we were going the "same fast" as a car next to us.  The questions came fast and furious:  "Are we getting on the highway?" frequently hit us almost as soon as we turned off our street to head somewhere.  Or "Which highway are we taking?"  (Kara has made some attempts at staving off the questions, like her "one-highway-question-per-trip" mandate, which sort of worked ... at least for one trip!)

  We are often heartily chastized and met with disappointed moping if we dare to take the back roads to, say, Aunt Amy and Uncle Ken's house -- once Finn realized we could also take I-96 most of the way there or back.

  Of course, these were also opportunities for giving our son great joy.  More than once I've gone way out of my way on a trip to or from downtown Lansing (the straight shot for which involves no highways) to get there or home by adding several miles to go out to a local highway to give Finn the thrill and surprise of hitting the open road.  He literally shrieks with surprise and happiness when he finds out he's about to get a ride on the highway, even though it's only for a few miles.

  The highway obsession has taken over Finn's play too.  We have a Thomas-the-Train table in our basement that quickly lost its tracks so that Finn could play make-believe highway games on it with his toy cars.  He's precise enough in his play to tell us which highway he is on, which off- or on-ramp he's about to take, when he's taking an interchange between, say, 96 and 69, or 69 to 127, etc.  I scored major Finn bonus points last week when I taped a large piece of newsprint paper over part of the table and drew in the highway interchanges and some on- and off-ramps for some more realistic-looking fun.

  This is a kid, frankly, for whom I have no fears of ever taking a long road trip to Florida!

  As I look at this from a (21st Century) parental standpoint, I'm thrilled at how eager Finn is to take all of this highway stuff in and learn it.  He's evolved now to wanting to know the names of the streets we drive on in town to get to places like the grocery store or his preschool.  Not only has he quickly memorized them all, but also in their proper sequence.  Other adults are taking notice too.  His preschool teacher pulled Kara aside recently to commend Finn for telling her the street sequence to get to our house.

  I love too that this kind of play doesn't cost us anything.  We don't have to buy any new toys, or keep up with any particular trend, for Finn to be able to pour his heart into his highway play.  Of course, we do have to pay the crazy price of gas to give him the joy of the open road, but we'd be doing that anyway.

  So that's it.  Finn's life is definitely a highway right about now.  How long it will last we don't know.  I just know we're all enjoying the ride.

"I think Britney looks very pretty in her pink dress and I think it would be fun for you to have a dress that you could wear when you are playing dress-ups. But little boys don't usually wear dresses so I don't think we can get a dress for you. Would you like me to see if I can buy a pink T-shirt for you?"

In this way you are giving your son guidance about what you want him to wear but accepting that he can also wear pretty colours. Both boys and girls like to dress-up as adults and may act out roles of the opposite sex. When a little boy puts on a dress and make-up it doesn’t mean he is rejecting his male role. When playing make-believe and dressing up children are spontaneously and openly acting out the various activities that are part of their everyday life.

So here I am, reading, eating, drinking, and the bedroom door ever so slowly creaks half way open, but no-one appears.

"Is there anyone there?" I say.

Very slowly, at almost ground level, this little head partway appears, then disappears.

I laugh.

Into the room comes flying a screwed up piece of paper. Quickly followed by a solitary Batman glove.

I really laugh, and from behind the door is a huge chuckle.

Each day has many little joyful, crazy, moments like these.

Stuttering Resources for Parents

The Stuttering Foundation

Kids Health for Parents

MedicineNet

The National Center for Stuttering

Mommy: [taking toothbrush] Okay. Open, please.

Peanut: [snatching brush back] Mommy don't want it.

Mommy: [puzzled] Okay. I don't want to?

Peanut: [yelling] Peanut say DO it, Mommy DO IT!

The clear, direct, and humorous writing style allows parents with hectic lives to quickly read the book, absorb its concepts, and put them to use. Each chapter ends with reflection questions to reinforce the themes from the chapter. The book continues its effectiveness whether or not the reader answers the questions. However, thinking about the questions might shed light on you, your kids, and your relationships.

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