A Penny for Your Swears
Can I really take a day off? I’ve been sick for two weeks, and moving at the usual pace required to maintain our family’s happy every day life, and finally asked Kevin last night: Do you think that if I spent a day in bed, it might help me kick this virus? And he said: What are you doing tomorrow? So, CJ and I slept in till 10am!!!! I’m leaving supper up to Kevin (he could pull a soup or stew out of the freezer). And I’m planning to go to hot yoga this afternoon. I skipped my Thursday evening class due to sheer exhaustion.
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Kevin and I both operate in similar ways: we both like to improvise. We’ve made many of our major (and minor) life decisions on the fly, on what might seem gut instinct rather than carefully plotted research, though I like to think our quick-strike decisions actually arrive out of a long, quiet and invisible processing period. One small example: the way I’ve chosen the “right” time to move babies out of our bed and into their own–each time different, but each time also quite suddenly arriving at a moment when change seemed imperative, and the answer miraculously appeared.
Long explanation for the penny jars you see above, labelled “Movie Jar” and “Respect Jar” (which could also be called “DisRespect Jar,” but that doesn’t have quite the same positive ring to it). I’d written my previous post on Thursday afternoon, wondering out loud how to educate our family on the larger community and global issues around us, and how to motivate us to act on our values. I appreciate the thoughtful responses that arrived. We’re not alone in thinking about this. Kevin and I briefly discussed holding a family meeting, and I scrawled out a few ideas on a piece of paper.
Thursday afternoon, the kids started swim lessons. On the whole, the solo-mom outing went really well; we were all working together. But on the drive home, my cherished eldest son was using language that was not acceptable (mind you, he doesn’t use swear words; but the words he was using were equally disrespectful: “fat,” “poopy-head,” and my all-time fave “butt-brain.” Yes, my sweet Albus, when in a fit of frustration, particularly likes to pull that one out of his back pocket.) As we walked through the front door, me laden like an over-worked camel with toddler under one arm, diaper bag and swim bag and someone’s snowpants and etc. over the other arm, listening to my half-grown child growl because I’d insisted he carry his own backpack, I said, “We need a swear jar.”
(In fact, to make a long story even longer, I’d lost my patience over said backpack. I’d been standing beside the truck, holding it out to him to carry while he destroyed snowballs instead, till finally I’d tossed it into the snowy driveway with a semi-sarcastic comment, which, I was embarrassed to observe, was overheard by a neighbour walking his dog. Nothing like being confronted by a little “as others see us” perspective. The kid wasn’t the only one in need of a swear jar, in other words).
At supper, I said, Let’s have a family meeting. And then, When could we do it?
How about right now? said AppleApple.
The meeting was informal, which is how our family seems to operate. It was brief. It was to the point. We talked first about Haiti. Everyone but Albus offered ideas about how we could help. Then we talked about finding ways to express our emotions appropriately. Again, Albus was silly rather than receptive. I was feeling rather hopeless. Are we in for a decade of defensive eye-rolling? But fortunately, Kevin picked up the ball and asked Albus what he thought about what we were discussing. After some hedging and more silliness, he slipped closer to seriousness. And that’s when we came up with the penny jar idea. I’m not even sure whose idea it was, in its final rendering. One jar, into which we’d put enough pennies to rent a movie plus buy some candy, the other jar, which would receive a penny every time we used a bad word–but more than that. Every time someone behaved in a way that was not respectful to someone else. It would be a family jar, not an individual jar. We’d have to earn our reward together. Any money in the “respect jar” would be given away.
We’re only on day two, but it’s a good thing this week is a short week–movie night will be on Saturdays. I’ve noticed that I frequently (to myself and under my breath) use words I consider to be disrespectful. Every time, I drop in another penny. This will hopefully begin to take effect on my behavior. Albus is certainly taking it to heart. Respect is a concept we can all grasp. The idea is that we help each other to be more respectful rather than pointing fingers or accusing.
We shall see …
And I liked that family meeting. It was noisy and chaotic, but everyone got a chance to speak. We must make it a regular occurrence.
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That photo above is what’s happening RIGHT NOW upstairs. Everyone in the playroom (my office) playing Playmobil, Daddy watching soccer on the internet.
Where Ideal Meets Real
So. I have a plan to hold a family meeting. But we have two separate topics to discuss.
First, I want to talk to the kids about the humanitarian crisis happening in Haiti right now, and I want to ask them for ideas about what our family could do to help out. And I want to broaden that out to talk about ways we could help in our own community more often.
(I’ve also requested an interview for my ParentDish column with Craig Kielburger, who is a young Canadian man I greatly admire–his parents, too! The mandate of his foundation Free the Children is to help North American children to help other children around the world–in essence, educating our children, helping them to make the connection between their own actions and the effect these can have on other children’s lives. I’m really excited about talking to him.)
That’s topic number one.
Topic number two might sound a little out there, but I’m thinking of having a family meeting about creating a family mission statement (and I must confess, we NEVER have family meetings, and I’m not entirely sure what this will look like in practical terms–sitting around the dining-room table with pieces of paper and pencils? Will we make it more than five minutes before chaos erupts??). Now, a mission statement sounds almost too serious, but what I’m hoping to accomplish is that we can all agree on some basic guiding principles for our household.
This is what I’ve jotted on my piece of paper: In our family … everyone is respected. In our family … it’s okay to feel mad or sad, but we express our feelings appropriately. In our family .. we ask for help when we need it. We help each other. We help others, too.
These are my ideas. How to bring everyone’s ideas into it? We’ll see. This is yet a pipe dream. My motivation for doing it, however, comes from a rather dark place, and that is the anger we’ve been seeing our older children express, recently, and our inability to help them find ways to express this anger appropriately (or to interpret it). I want to stress that I don’t think anger is a bad emotion. It’s human. But destroying your baby brother’s duplo project in a fit of rage isn’t a good way of expressing that emotion. So far, Kevin and I are not getting far with our attempts to step in and help the children find another way. Time-outs work, sort of, at least for removing the child from the situation. But anger tends to be an emotion that is actually pointing toward or masking more complex emotions. Ever felt angry about a situation, only to gradually recognize that your anger was saving you from experiencing a much more frightening emotion like fear or grief? Sometimes anger can give us a feeling of power in a situation in which, if we stopped to think about, we’d realize we feel awfully terribly vulnerable.
Stop me now, I’m rambling.
And it’s time to get ready for swim lessons.
Above, my youngest, sharing a quiet moment on the couch. And I caught it before it devolved!
No Title Because No Time
Writing day: organizing and planning for future interviews and columns, which takes more work than one might suspect. It’s the background hidden labour that will bear fruit down the road. Today I have almost too many ideas. Which is better than too few.
What We Made
It was AppleApple’s turn to plan and help make supper this weekend. I suggested she look through Passport on a Plate, a cookbook for children that is underused in our house because it has no pretty pictures or photographs. But it does have menus from a variety of countries around the world. She listened as I read out country names (and in the case of Africa, an entire continent), and as soon as I read Japan, she said, Japan!
She chose miso soup, sushi rolls, and I added in vegetable rice because I thought the menu looked too slight (it turned out I was wrong, and we’ll be eating the completely untouched pot of vegetable rice for our supper tomorrow). I also suggested green tea ice cream for dessert (she wouldn’t have dreamed of purchasing such a luxurious treat), and we improvised with mango sorbet and Mapleton’s chai ice cream.
Today was our cooking day. I promised we’d start by 3pm. But at 3pm, I was still immersed in a self-inflicted photo organizing ordeal which I vow, as of right now, never to force upon myself (or my family) again. This past year has been our family’s most documented year EVER. And I’m beginning to question the need for so much evidence. Why this compulsion to collect the details? We have the blog, which has photos; we have a beautiful scrapbook I made online–more photos, but a creative final product; and now we have actual photographs, printed out, placed into (approximate) chronological order (definitely the most maddening task of my afternoon), and then into photo albums.
Next year, I’m going to let everyone choose his or her five favourite photos, get prints of those, and leave it at that.
Where was I? Oh, yes, 3pm, AppleApple’s buzzer went, and it was time to rouse myself and get to work. But because I have an obsessive personality, and need to finish one thing before starting another, I stayed seated at the dining-room table, butt damn near numb, and directed her to measure out the sticky rice we would need to make the rolls. The bag was apparently open. Rice everywhere. Never mind! I remained glued to the photos: “Just pick it up and put it into a one-cup measuring cup.”
Enter Kevin.”What’s going on in here?”
“Oh, some rice just spilled.”
“It’s everywhere.”
“Is it?” I couldn’t see. I was stuffing photos we didn’t need into albums. “CJ can vacuum it up,” I said. Yes, I actually said that.
“There’s a bit of extra stuff in here,” AppleApple said, at last, her cup measure full.
“What sort of stuff?”
“Like a bit of dirt and stuff.”
Okay, you’ve got my attention, kid. Limbs creaking, I rose and rinsed the rice. AppleApple vacuumed. She does it for real, and CJ does it as a hobby.
“We’re not off to the best start,” I admitted.
As the rice came to a boil, I managed to stuff the final stack of photographs into an album. I was back to the present. Praise be! Things became much more pleasant after that. AppleApple chopped red and green peppers and cucumber into matchsticks. I strained the chicken stock that had been simmering on the stove all day.
“I just read a book called Naomi’s Road [by Joy Kogawa],” AppleApple told me, out of the blue. “When I got to the end, it was still kind of sad. Why would a book end like that?”
Oh, be still my heart. She wants to talk critically about literature!
I said: “When I get to the end of a sad story, sometimes I make up another ending for it.”
“I do that too! Except it’s not a different ending, I just think about what might happen next.”
Ah, yes, exactly.
“Sometimes the author wants the story to go on in the reader’s mind. The author might not want the reader to know everything.”
“Maybe some things can’t get fixed up.”
Yah. I know.
Later, we rolled some sushi. We made it look pretty on the plates. We pretended we were running a restaurant, and everyone loved that, even our resident grump, Albus (taking over that role for today, anyway; we share; everyone takes turns). Instead of putting the pots on the table like we do most nights (classy, I know, but it makes for less dishes afterward), we served from the kitchen. We took orders. Everyone ate the miso soup! Everyone! Even fussy Fooey.
“What’s this green stuff?” “Seaweed.” “Oh.” Slurp.
Everyone had seconds. The rolls were passable, if not as awesome as the real thing. The wasabi was HOT. The rice went into the fridge for tomorrow. And we polished off a litre and a half of ice cream for bedtime snack. Pretty awesome.
Fooey’s planning to look up the recipes from China for next week. Albus wants Russia the week after. Can’t wait.
Laundry Geek
This photo is for all of the laundry geeks: my bed, evening, basket of clothes. Wet clothes. Waiting all day to be hung. In the background, dry clothes, waiting to be folded and put away. Guess how I solved this dilemma? Yup. I put the basket on the floor and went to bed. These got hung the next morning, more wrinkled than usual.
One more confession. This week we had some sick people in this house, and yesterday I chose to use the “home sterilizing unit” (aka the drier on high heat) for one load.
Because the folding and putting away often happens around bedtime, I’ve been getting a lot of help. CJ in particular adores carrying pants and shirts to various drawers and stuffing them in. Sometimes he even gets things in the right drawer. And Kevin’s been helping out more too. All-family-participation in chores: yippee!