Category Archives: parenting

environment, frustration, Monkey, parenting, Political

Little red riding hood…

2 Comments

Little red riding hood and the big bad wolf…

One of the odder things about living in New Jersey is the existence of blooming roses in December and January. They simply will not die!! I am pleased to see new buds every few weeks. Monkey is on permanent rose watch, checking them each morning on the way to school. She has definately mastered the stopping to smell the roses aspect of life.

I am with Hatchet in the argumentative child department, but I fear I only have myself to blame. She attended law school classes with me for 3 out of 5 of her formative years, one can only imagine that rubbed off on her.

This morning was a lovely example of the daily arguing:

She woke up 30 minutes early and came into my room.
Monkey: Mommy, the sun is out!
Me: Morning honey, what time is it?
Daddy: mumble mumble…. 7…. grunt
Me: Please go get dressed and I will be up in a minute
Monkey: no
Me: Monkey, you need to get ready for school, please go get dressed
Monkey: I don’t want to
Me: Your dad is trying to sleep a little longer, please go get dressed, I will be right out!
Monkey: Mom! I don’t want to!
Me: If I have to ask again, I will not be happy.
Monkey: I don’t WANT TO!!
Me: 1…2…3….
Monkey: **fierce growls of frustration, stomping out of our room.** FINE!!

Sigh, it is always a bad sign when the first conversation of the day is an argument. It followed with breakfast (didn’t want what I made), teeth (didn’t want to brush), shoes (was too busy playing leapfrog to put them on), and coat (didn’t need it).
By the time I got her in the car we were already late, and I was developing a headache.

I think I am going to have to begin sending her to school in bare feet without her teeth and hair brushed on an empty stomach. How long do you think I will be able to keep that up before I get approached with a child neglect concern?

Yesterday, after arguing with me over everything all day, I asked her if she had to argue with me over every single thing! Her answer: No. She argued about arguing!! Argh!!

However, she is getting better at cleaning her room, doing her homework, and eating her dinner, so I am counting my blessings. Also, I have learned from reliable sources that this argumentation is the cost of intelligent children. So, my choices are frustration, or fewer smarts. hmmm….

Another political message:

Save the big bad wolf!!


(image from http://www.tvdance.com)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to release a proposal to strip wolves of their Endangered species act protections across most of Wyoming and de-list wolves in Idaho, where the state is poised to kill up to 75% of the wolves living in the Lolo district of the Clearwater National Forest. Changing the status of the wolves will likely allow the use of aerial gunning and other lethal control methods to kill as many as two-thirds of the wolves in Wyoming and as many as 54 of Idaho’s 65 wolf packs. The states are interested in lowering the wolf population because they cause losses to livestock on some farms and ranches. However, this natural wolf-like behavior is the exact reason they were listed endangered to begin with. Wolves were eradicated from their historic ranges when humans began using those habitats for ranching and farming, and the wolves began hunting livestock as their natural prey disappeared.

If the US Fish and Wildlife service is allowed to delist wolves, there is no expectation that they will remain a recovered species. In fact, with two states already poised to destroy more than half the current population, there is no reason to expect wolves will survive long at all.

Please visit the petition site and lend your voice to the outcry against destorying wolves once again. We worked so hard to get this species to recover, do not allow FWS to strip them of thier protections now!!

frustration, Monkey, parenting

Liar Liar…

2 Comments

Lying rears its ugly head…

Okay, so I am a little psycho about lying and secrets. After working with children who were sexually abused, it is easy to worry about those magic phrases of horror “don’t tell anyone” and “It’ll be our little secret.” I have worked very hard with Monkey trying to get her to understand that we don’t keep secrets from mommy and daddy, and we don’t lie. (I understand that she will get to a point in her development when she will need to do both those things, but by then she will be old enough to know that she needs to tell me if anything abusive is going on.)

Which is why my mind is in complete panic mode tonight.

My story begins several weeks ago when Devon and I were driving back from Lowe’s with Monkey. We were laughing about something and she said “If you two don’t stop laughing, I’m gonna kick your ass.” I would love to say I was shocked but it was too funny for me to anything but snicker uncontrollably. When Devon and I had regained control, I asked Monkey where she had heard it. She got really quiet and said “I don’t want to tell you.”

hmmm….

That phrase began the worst night we had had in a long while. It took four hours, a grounding, loss of tv for a week, and loss of computer for a week for her to tell me where she had heard it. So my little plan of teaching my daughter not to keep secrets from me or lie to me had seemingly backfired. We had another long talk about how important it is for her to tell me the truth. We talked about trust and safety. We held firm to the consequences and continue to express the importance of truth and openess in our family.

So tonight she calmly asks me if she can say “what the fuck?”. I answered no of course and then asked where she had heard it. Sigh.

“I made it up.”

She was in her room in minutes with the directions that she would not leave her room until she told me where she heard it and had stopped lying to me. She spent twenty minutes screaming “I made it up mommy, I promise” before I walked in to her room and told her to look me in the eye and tell me the truth. She calmed down, looked me in the eye, and said “I made it up mommy, I promise.”

(At this point, I had a slight problem. The first thing she asked me after I asked her where she heard it was “Are you going to call their mommy and daddy and tell them I told?” I told her I didn’t know if I was going to call them but she still needed to tell me who said it. That’s when she claimed to have made it up.)

Why would she ask if I was going to tell someone’s parents if she made it up? I ask her after being bold faced lied to.

She says “I would really like an answer to that question.”

I tell her “I am sure you would, but you can’t keep secrets, even if I am going to call their mommy and daddy and tell them, so please stop lying to me.”

So she screams “I am not lying to you, I made it up!!”

At this point I want to bang my head against a wall until I can no longer feel pain. Instead, I tell her “fine, I will not call their parents, who said it.”

She responds “someone at school” and later gives me a name.

Now the problem is, she has been lying to me over and over and over again for the past half hour, she has begged me to believe the lie, has promised me she is telling the truth, has acted offended that I would doubt her veracity, has looked me in the eye and lied to me. I tell her, you are still grounded in your room, because you lied to me. Why did you lie?

“I wanted to be a good friend.”

SO we had a long talk about how lying to mommy and keeping secrets does not make you a good friend, and friends who ask you to keep secrets are not good friends. We talked again about safety and truthfulness and trust.

What in the world am I going to do if she keeps flat out refusing to tell me when other people have done something wrong? How could I have worked this hard to insure her safety, only to have completely screwed it up?

Help!!

holidays, Monkey, parenting

New traditions that will not die…

5 Comments

I was feeling pretty desperate to have some holiday cheer this year. I was missing the myriad of family traditions I have enjoyed throughout my life. Mom and I shopping for inexpensive gift bags and wrapping paper in all the little crappy discount stores we can find. Standing outside in the cold with Dad as he hangs the outdoor lights. Helping Mom or Dad lug the tree up from the basement amid much grunting and occasional profanity. Untangling boxes of lights, searching for ornaments, etc. I was anxious to start this year out with new traditions, ones that would somehow replace the old ones.

Here’s the tricky thing about traditions, you should never, never, try and create them. Whenever you do, they fall apart. For two weeks we have been planning on taking Monkey to a lovely tree place and getting our tree. I imagined a lovely cold winter’s day with the three of us sipping hot apple cider and strolling through row after row of trees until we found the perfect one. It would be tall, even, and surrounded by a halo of sunlight. Angels would sing as the tree emerged from the others surrounding it. Obviously, my expectations were a little high.

This morning we began our new tradition with breakfast at a nice new diner we found by my office. It was a pleasant meal, with yummy food and good conversation, but like most adult oriented events, Monkey got a little squirrelly in the end. We stopped by the neighboring dollar store, in an attempt to share in Mom’s and my christmas tradition, and found amazing deals on gift bags (sorry Mom, these blow to hell any deals we have ever found before!). However, the store held more allure than it should have and sucked us in for longer than we expected. Monkey had a bad case of the “gimmes” and the gift bag choosing was punctuated by many “oh my god you have to see this!” and “can I have this” comments. Even Lee was sucked in to the power of a store labeled “Everything 99 cents or less” and picked out some storage stuff for the basement and some Vonage Orange dishtowels. (It was the air Mom, you know what that canned air can do to a person!)

Finally, we were on our way to the tree event!! Of course, we had to stop at Lowe’s because my co-worker had suggested we get our tree there, and while there we had to buy stuff to repair the fence out back. Sigh.

Finally, we really were on our way to picking out our tree. We went to this little place called Dearborn Farms. They had rows of trees, live trees, poinsettia’s, and a grocery store. Lee commented that we were trying to buy our tree at Marczyk’s, a Denver store known for it’s good food, and exorbitant prices. Monkey wanted every single tree we saw. Here she is with one of the smallest she wanted to get…

We were trying to decide between a live tree, that might end up dead after we inadvertently neglected it for a while, or an already dead tree. This was the beginning of the end for our new family tradition. Before I knew it we were standing in the freezing cold, Monkey was madly racing around with a balloon, Lee and I were arguing over whether or not we should get a tree, and I was beginning to feel the beautiful dream of our new tradition slipping away. Hell, it was speeding away in a tacky gas-guzzling Hummer. The only scrap of the dream left was the cup of hot apple cider clutched tightly in my freezing wind-chapped hand.

We gave up on the tree, we came home, and I cried about all the christmas traditions I am missing this year.

Then I lugged down into the basement and unearthed last year’s fake tree. There was some cursing. I found the ornaments. Lee put up a fence. Then Lee dragged the tree out of the basement.I baked fresh cinnamon rolls and proceeded to drop their freshly frosted stickiness all over the kitchen floor. I made cinnamon toast and apple cider tea and we hooked up the lights.

We hung ornaments and giggled about the slightly off center nature of our tree. Monkey started taking pictures when she wearied of hanging ornaments.


We took some of Monkey’s tiny ornaments and attached bows to them. We used the rest of the bows to make the tree look a little old fashioned. We had a great time decorating our little, crooked, plastic tree. When we were finished with all the ornaments, it was time for Monkey to place the star of the top of the tree. Of course, the star is made of heavy copper metal, and weighs a ton, and the top is very weak, so we had to engineer the top in such a way that it could hold the star. After a little while, we managed to get it to stay.

Finally we had a lovely tree, and a happy family tradition complete with cursing, inconvenience, laughter and love. My lesson, don’t try and replace old family traditions with manufactured ones. If you’re lucky, you can stumble across new traditions, but the best ones aren’t created, they just naturally occur.

Love to all my old traditions! I miss you!