Sew Dots on Your Clothes

That's an order.

Because I've been sewing jersey dots of varying sizes on my remade t-shirts, and I think they look spiffy:

But I worry a little that I'm like Bandana-Dan, a boy I went to elementary and junior high with, who decided somewhere in 7th grade or so that it would be cool to tie bandanas to nearly every part of his body (hence the nickname).  It wasn't cool, but he really thought it was.

Maybe my dots are like that.

Uh-oh.

Screw it.  Rock the dots!

Case In Point

I know I went a little overboard with that last technology post.  But come on.

Like, today:  I get to work, I'm getting ready to go to Nuclear Power and Public Policy, feeling a little nervous but excited, and I look at my new computer.  Total freak out, because there is not little pluggy thingy for me to hook my computer up to the classroom projector.  Luckily, I realized this two hours before class and the bookstore was still open and they hooked me up with this little doohickey:

FOR THIRTY FREAKING DOLLARS.  So now I can go teach class.

That's me making a judgmental face at the doohickey, in case you can't see it.

I still love the mac.  I took that picture with it, for God's sakes.  I mean, how cool is that?  But thirty dollars for that little pluggy thing?  Ridiculous.

For Posterity

Addie, on her first day of first grade at her new school.

More details as they become available.

Treat Your Kids Like Dogs

Well, not really.  If you are a psychopath, don't read that heading literally.

For all of you relatively healthy breeders out there, though, this is kind of true, isn't it?  If you've been to my house, you know I'm a big fan of sticker charts and signs and suggestions for my kids (and for me, especially seeing as Nolie can't read yet).  Sometimes these schemes work, and sometimes they don't.  We started a sticker chart for Nolie to try to get her to try new foods:  no dice.  The make-it-yourself-nights work much better (last night:  make-your-own-Japanese noodles).  She's actually eating some vegetables now.

But sometimes the charts do work.  I don't want to jinx anything, but I don't think it's too premature to say that we may have solved our sleeping problem with Nolie.  Remember how she was getting up at night, several times a night?  And how we were having trouble getting her to fall asleep?  Well, we are now up to about an 80% success rate on both items, and I will stop badgering all of you for advice.  Here's how we did it:

1)  We got the fine folks at Nolie's preschool to stop letting her nap at school.  The girl won't nap for anything when she's home, usually, but apparently at school, come naptime, she collapses like a sack of bricks and can't be roused.  We've asked them to wake her after a half-hour, and this seems to help with the night-time going to bed.

2)  Uh, I may have been reading the girls Harry Potter aloud before bed for a while there.  What was I thinking?  Nolie is four, for God's sake.  Addie loved it, but it was just too scary for Nolie.  So we're still reading a chapter book together before bed, but then Addie goes off to her room to read Harry Potter and Nolie and I listen to a few songs.

3)  Most of all, though, most of all, is this:

That's right.  It's one of those over-priced dry-erase calendars you can buy from Office Depot (and yes, it would have been pretty easy to make one at home, but sometimes a gal only has so many hours in the day, and anyway, it ended up being the best $20 we've spent in a long time).

See the N/A markings on there?  No, it doesn't mean "not applicable."  They are initials for Addie and Nolie.  Whenever one or the other sleeps through the night without coming out of her room, she gets an initial on the calendar the following morning.  Once she has built up five initials, she gets this:

A ticket to watch a tv show (or, on the reverse, to play on the computer).  Just a half-hour, and they can watch it when they wish, other than in the morning before school or right before bed.  We put this up last week, and each has already earned a ticket, plus has two initials going.  That was an immediate, noticeable, and sustained change, people.  And it means we are much happier because we also our sleeping through the night.  Except for when our pea-sized bladders wake us.  But that's for another post.

I should also note that neither kid has spent her ticket yet, which amazes me.  I thought they'd blow them right away.  But, nope.  They're used to not watching tv after school now, and so I imagine they will spend them this weekend.  

This may not work with your kid--their motivations are so different depending on their personalities.  But I'm so relieved and happy this worked for us.  

Ima go take a nap.

Half-Ton Everything

I was picking Nolie up at school today, and all the kids were crowding the street-side fence enjoying a spectacle something like this:

Minus the big guy without the shirt, anyway.

Basically, someone across the street from Nolie's school parked their truck too far off the street and high-centered their ginormous Ford F-250 in the ditch.  It was a nice truck, maybe even new.  Luckily for dude with truck, another dude with truck had his towing cable with him, and was able to pull the first dude with truck out of the ditch.  There were some very strong male pheromones emanating from this scene, with first dude with truck looking rather sheepish while second dude with truck looked like he had just descended from Mount Olympus.

I sympathized with first dude with truck.  You spend a lot of money on your new truck, thinking that bad boy can do just about anything--haul shit-tons of manure; plow streets; move furniture; pick up lumber from Home Depot; off-road.  And then you high-center the darned thing right in front of your kid's school, with about a thousand preschoolers gawking, tongues out.  You find that you need yet another truck to help your truck go about being a truck.  It must have been quite disorienting.

I'm feeling the same feelings, not about my truck, but about all my new gadgets.  Until this spring, all I had was a wimpy little Dell the size of a matchbook and a disabled Blackberry that only functioned (gasp) as a phone.

Now, through some weird turn of history, I have this phat new macbook pro; a Droid; an iPod; and a Kindle.  I enjoy and use them all, believe me.  The mac has totally changed how I work, for the better.  My droid keeps things easy and convenient because it syncs to my Mac so I can be more deliberate about what I commit too and when, and even though it doesn't work very well as a phone, it has brought me into the world of facebook and texting, which allows me to connect much better with friends.  The iPod has helped me hang in there with the running, which makes me feel better about myself and life in general.  And the Kindle is, well, just awesome.  I've been doing much more reading than I did before because that thing goes everywhere with me and I can try new books with one click.

Don't get me wrong:  I'm clear that absolutely none of this stuff is necessary.  I'm clear that it's really bougie and potentially unethical to have all this stuff.  Bad for the environment.  Bad for the Chinese people who may eventually recycle these electronics and be poisoned by their innards.  Potentially bad for me and my soul, who fights hard against consumerism and loses so much of the time, and who fights hard to be present and loses so much of the time.  I'm familiar with the library (go every week), with the concept of making-do, with the perils of lifestyle inflation.  But I still have the gadgets.

The worst part, and what makes me feel like dude with truck, is that, for every gadget or new thingy I obtain, I must in turn obtain an entire infrastructure to maintain said thingy.  Getting the droid necessitated getting media stations and extra chargers and special covers and an expensive data plan.  Getting the mac meant buying new software to sync the Droid, a warranty, a new external hard drive, mouse, and keyboard, and a new laptop protector.

Even getting new bikes last summer (which we needed, really, because our old bikes were built for people the size of leprechauns and were falling apart) has necessitated new infrastructure:  new bike lock, tuning, water bottle holder, degreaser.  And we can't use our bike trailer because of the disc brakes, so we haven't ridden them as much as we might because the kids can't come.  Either we wait for the kids to get older or we get a new bike trailer.

It's something, isn't it?  We do our best to get around some of this by buying things used off of Craig's List, or fashioning old items to fit the new.  But with electronic gadgetry in particular, this is tough.

I'm thinking about a colleague who does development work in Honduras, and who says this is a particularly Northern malaise.  In Honduras, if your TV breaks, you call the TV guys, they show up with their tools and bench, fix your component, and you go back to watching your TV.  Here, you throw away or donate your old TV and just buy a new one.  We don't know how to fix our TVs, even if we want to.

I'm thinking about a recent discussion at Get Rich Slowly, too, where they talk about shifting from spending your money on things to spending your money on experiences, because things always lose their shine, require more spending, break, or suck the life energy out of you just maintaining and storing them, whereas experiences stick with you because they literally change who you are.  If you're going to spend, spend on a class or trip and not a TV.

I'm thinking about No Impact Man and Dandelion Bones and going on consumption diets and wondering if it's time for one of those, and if I can really shift my behaviors on this again.  How can I move away from being dude with truck?  How can I avoid getting high-centered on consumption?

What do you think?  I sound more agitated about this than I am.  Compared to twenty-year-old me, I'm a virtual ascetic.  But I still could be better.  I could focus a lot less on stuff.  How about you?  What tricks do you use to focus not on things but on people and experiences?

Oh, yeah. Parenting.

Right.  This is supposed to be a blog about parenting, and not just every little thought that crosses my mind.  I'll try to behave.

So, school starts for Ms. A. on Monday, and for me, and it feels a little like I'm a bull rider, lodged in the gate, waiting for the insane riotousness to begin.  I'm trying to stay calm, but that bull is a-buckin' underneath me, and not in a good way, either.  I'm reminded of the final scene of my favorite Steve Martin movie, Parenthood, where Martin's character is looking around at his kid's school play, which has gone terribly wrong, and he feels like he's on a parenting roller coaster, where nothing goes as planned, and it's making him sick.  Eventually he learns to enjoy the ride, but it takes him a while.

That's some metaphor-mixing for you:  bulls and roller coasters.  But that's pretty much parenting, as I see it.

Anyway, I did want to share one little revelation, for those of you who have kids and are struggling at all with picky eating.  You might remember that this was a serious issue for us not too long ago (now surpassed by our issues with Nolie waking up a gajillion times a night).  Nolie wouldn't eat anything, and we were making multiple meals every night.  Suck-o-rama.

Then, thanks to I-remember-not-which of the many blogs I try to keep up with, we stumbled upon the "Make-Your-Own-Whatever-Night" thing.  It started on Tuesdays ("Kids' night" at our house) where the kids chose pasta as the dinner theme, but all of us wanted different pastas.  Addie wanted red sauce, I wanted pesto, Nolie likes plain.

Eric is at work and doesn't get to choose.

Enter "Make-Your-Own-Pasta-Night."  I put out all the sauces, sautee up some veggies, put out some cheeses (soooo glad I'm not vegan anymore, though that's for a different post), put out olives, prepare a bowl of steaming-hot pasta, and WALLA! as Nolie would say.  Everyone's happy.  Not only that, but getting to choose which foods they want means the kids are more likely to try new things.  Nolie may say she only likes plain pasta, but now she's getting a little bit of olive oil, and putting tomatoes and olives on top.  It's a start.

We also do Make-Your-Own-Burrito night, and will soon add in Make-Your-Own-Soup/Salad/Sandwich-Night and Make-Your-Own-Pizza-Night.  It's a lot more dishes, but everyone gets to eat what they like, I feel less stressed, and the kids are trying new things.

There.  I have solved your picky-eating problems, and I'm exhausted.  Don't expect another parenting post for a long, long time.

I'm Taking a Break

Not from blogging.  You would never be so lucky!

Nope, I'm taking a break from reJuJu.

See, I haven't been interested in sewing for weeks now.  Knitting either.  Which is pretty weird for me, yeah?

And I've been thinking, maybe it's because it became something else I had to do.  Another item in a long to-do list.  The stores needed stuff to sell, and I had to make that stuff.  Needed, had to.  Not my favorite words, always.

I've also been thinking that it's because I started thinking more about what I thought would sell than what I felt like making.  I know it shouldn't have affected me, but it just sort of quashed my creativity.  I don't totally understand this, but it happened.

For example, this crazy ruffled tee is probably too out there to sell in either store:

It's a little rugby-meets-beauty pageant.  But I really liked making it.  It felt silly and creative and exciting.  I haven't felt that feeling in a while.

The new semester is starting, too, with lots of new projects on the horizon.  I feel reinvigorated by work and don't need to grasp at other career ideas so much (not that reJuJu was a career.  More of a career-fantasy, maybe).  The kids are playing soccer and having playdates and starting school.  I like snuggling with Eric and watching Tosh.0 at night.  I want sewing to be something I get to do and not something I have to do.

I'll miss that little bit of spending money I earned, but in the end, if I'm choosing between how I spend my time and how I spend my money, I guess I'm more interested in time.

I sound a little defensive.  I guess I'm afraid of quitting, and part of me feels like I'm quitting.  But mostly I know I'm not.  I know I'm just taking a break, giving myself a break, and that's just the right medicine.