children – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

THE STORY ELANA (3 years old) TOLD ME AT THE BEACH

The three bears went for a walk and there was a little girl and her name was Goldilocks from all the dolls and they went for walk and they walked and walked (dancing walk demonstrated here) and then she sit on one of the chairs and it was too hard. And then she tried the medium one and it was too slowwww and then she found the baby one and she rocked and rocked and rocked and she fell down and the chair broke. And her tushie got hurt so she needed to go in bed And she walked and walked up the stairs and then they did something and then she ate her porridge and then she "this bed was too hard" and then "that bed was medium" and "this bed was just right." And the three bears went home and said "who has been eating my porridge?" And the Poppa said (very loud deep voice, with facial expressions to match) "WHO’S BEEN EATING MY PORRIDGE?" Then Poppa Bear said "WHO’S BEEN SLEEPING IN MY BED?" and then Baby Bear said "THERE SHE IS NOW!!!" and she left her shoes and ran away. And she also…..

Dad can I go outside???

(NOTE: Elana woke up early Sunday and she and I were visiting and looking out at the ocean while I worked on my computer. As Elana was leaning over my laptop in great interest her father came upstairs and suggested she "tell Cindy a story and maybe she’ll put it on her blog." So she did. And I did.)

TIME PASSES: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A LONG-TIME FRIEND

Saturday night we went to an 80th birthday party. It was for someone whose 43rd we’d also attended — a long time to know someone. He’s a wonderful man with a wonderful family, and you would know his name if I wrote it here – but it was his party not mine and somehow it feels intrusive to tell you who he is.

When I was first in the news business, he taught me a great deal. Ever courtly and generous, excellent at what he did, he shared so much of what he knew and felt about news, politics, government and life. With humor. And a gentle sense of irony. I wish I could communicate how thrilling it was to wander through the tunnels under the Senate, past the secret offices where senators met for gumbo and whiskey, around the corner called "coffin corner" because when the dead lay in state, the coffin had to be tipped vertically to get around the corner on its way to the Rotunda that was its destination — with this gifted man as my guide.

All his kids were at the party of course, along with their spouses and a ton of grandchildren. All four kids were younger than these grandkids when they attended our wedding. There were (very short and funny) speeches, lots of teasing, and not an ounce of pretense or artifice. Of course, the fact that all of them were so happy to see me after our long sojourn in California and year on separate paths, made me feel great. Even so, the great gift of this evening was that I didn’t even think of that until later. When you share so much of life, and work, affection and high regard with someone, you have the luxury of honoring them without obsessing about what it all means to you. That should tell you more about him than anything.

JULIE’S SHOWER: WHO EVER THOUGHT RAISING SONS WOULD BE SO GREAT!

OK so I grew up with sisters. And I went to a women’s college. And most of my life I’ve worked in offices with more women than men (amazing, no?) So, when I was pregnant I was terrified at the idea of having boys. They were so strange — so noisy — I had no idea what was coming. Except that what was coming was Josh. And then Dan. And it turned out that — hang on sisters — boys are a blast, great company, luuuhhhv their moms and — boys are easier! I know this because I’ve watched my friends raising daughters and the tensions are fierce. Girls and their mothers — boys and their dads. Not easy.

But let’s get back to basics. Little boys run around a lot and make noise. They jump off things. They ride the dog around and fall off and hit their heads and need stitches. They, later, seem to be trying to kill each other much of the time. And before I go any further – let me tell you that there’s an old shrink saying that therapists never believe that babies are born with personalities until they have their second child. This is also true with many women regarding gender differences – it hits you once they show up. My kids are feminists and very good to the women in their lives as far as I can tell – but they are men and they were boys and that is not like being a girl. Nope.

I have great memories from when they were little – stomping around singing Free to Be and Da Doo Ron Ron Ron and The Garden Song and Abiyoyo, skiing down black diamond slopes and going to Yankee Stadium to see Billy Joel and Carnegie Hall to see Pete Seeger and Madison Square Garden to see Sesame Street on Ice and being dragged to an infinite number of Police Academy and other disgusting movies.

And I lived in alien space much of the time. Some of our hit toys (ie things I would NEVER have had in my house if there were not these strange male creatures inhabiting the premises — and pre-video game age of course):
One of those Radio Shack electronics build-your-own thingy kits that make bells ring and bulbs light up if you hook them up correctly.
Legos
Anything aviationary
Anything Star Wars
Anything GI Joe
Voltron
Weird wrestling stuff (boy did I fight that one!)
Folk music (that’s my fault though)
Baseball cards (and proudly, I did NOT throw them out)
Stuffed animals
Ernie

No Mary Poppins books (I tried) but I did get to read all The Great Brain and Ralph S Mouse and Timothy Goes to School and a gazillion baseball player bios.

There’s serious stuff to having sons, of course. We have to be sure, no matter how much we love hanging around with them, that they get enough alone time with their dads or some other male figure. And wave bravely as they off together on a Sunday (also your day off after all) without you. We have to accept and celebrate the guy stuff.

Just like girls, but differently, we have to let them know we think they can take care of themselves – enable independence at each landmark, if we think they can handle it, even when we really want to help. It’s so easy, with a boy, to want to remain more connected than is useful for them as they grow. At certain points they may pull back for a while, when they need to untangle. We have to let them and respect the struggle

With regard to respect for women – I am deeply impressed with my sons’ perspectives. I hope that being honest and respecting their developing attitudes, helped. I never threw a Playboy out of our house but I made it very clear how I felt about them in the (brief) period they were around. Anything like that, of which I (or my husband) disapproved, had to come out of their allowance. They had to put their money on the line – and I think that helped more than locking it all out of the house and pretending they weren’t interested. It also helped us understand where their heads were. Although that is easier for boys because they are, honestly, more straightforward.

Of course none of what I write here applies to all boys. Much of it may apply to plenty of girls. But it was my experience and in a kind of stream of consciousness baby shower kind of way it’s what rose to the top. The bottom line though, is that even though it’s scary if you’ve lived in a world of women, as I had, they are just wonderful. Most of all, because I know Julie, from reading your blog for so long, you would be a great mother to any child with whom you were blessed, this kid is in for a great life. And where advice is concerned, I say take it only as far as your gifted mother gut takes you. Where the two collide, trust yourself. Girl, boy or android, that way your little one will always be in the right hands.

HUNDRED DOLLAR LAPTOP: ONE PER CHILD – AN UPDATE

The One Laptop Per Child project is an exciting one; I’ve written about it before; that November 3rd post garnered a remarkable level of traffic. On Christmas eve, another story appeared. Here’s how it starts:

Laptop Project Enlivens Peruvian Hamlet Dec 24, By Frank Bajak [this is also an AP photo]

ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) – Doubts about
whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the
morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children
got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families
whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops – people who can ill afford pencil
and paper much less books – can’t get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they’re already powering
up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At
night, they’re dozing off in front of them – if they’ve managed to keep older
siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

"It’s really the kind of
conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian
backwater up a precarious dirt road.

You can read the rest here. It’s popping up all over the place. The state of Maine has had wonderful results in its efforts to distribute laptops to junior high kids, too. You don’t have to go into the developing world to see the value of universal access, even in places where it may seem far-fetched unless you know the machine and its capacity. Here’s more.

More resources:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) http://laptop.org/

OLPC Wiki http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home

Nicholas Negroponte at TED http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41

60 Minutes piece http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/69/one_laptop_per_child

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY: ROBERT FROST, YEAR’S END, AND FAMILIES

Nothing ever stays still, does it? I remember a Robert Frost poem we read in high school – Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower,

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

As this year draws to a close, I’m so aware of the rocky ride between joy and pain that life brings us. Children succeed and are happy; suffer, argue, question and, as adults, make huge decisions whose consequences are no longer our business. Others we love face illness, work stresses and moments of spiritual angst. And we ourselves struggle. With our own pain. With the knowledge that the best times — the gold — never last and must be cherished for the time we have them. And with the realization that the job of parent includes a form of built-in obsolescence, that rescuing, even those we love, is not always a gift to those we try to help.

I’m still learning how to be the mother of grown men. They have been and continue to be a joy to me but the best gift I can give them, struggle to give them, is to be available but never more than that. I’ve done pretty well, but in moments when I worry – health issues, love issues, work issues, life-changing issues – I have to hold my breath and hope. To remember that over the years we’ve provided one another with many moments of "something gold" and that now, as their parents have, they must pass through their own moments of sublime and ridiculous, gold and dross.

There’s an old saying that "you’re never happier than your least happy child." I struggle not to allow that to be true. The best gift I can give our boys – and for that matter my husband as well – is to separate, to trust them in their journeys and crises, joys and troubles. To love them, listen to them, and respect them enough to allow them to live their own golden moments and mourn their loss – hopefully with enough experience over the years to understand that even as a moment of joy departs, another is forming just around the bend.

LEAVING SAN FRANCISCO – AND IT’S SAD

I’m in the Red Carpet Room at SFO and very sad. Saying goodbye to my kids is always a wrench – for them, too. I want to write about leaving but it’s the kind of thing that says more about them than I feel fair revealing. Suffice it to say that on this week of Thanksgiving I’m as thankful for them as it’s possible to be.

I was so sad that when we went through security and they took my H20 spray away from me I burst into tears. My sweet husband is on his phone trying to find a way to buy a replacement for me on the web. God bless him — I do, every day. See you in Washington.

I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO (SORT OF)

This has been a wonderful trip, and by the time this appears I’ll be returning to Washington, the city by the Bay behind us. We’re going back at the end of December so it’s not as sad as sometimes, but when you leave your children it’s bittersweet at best. Most of what we did was more wandering than scenic but here’s a bit of it.

Tour trolley

Balloon gladiator with sword

San Francisco Apple store the Friday after Thanksgiving
It was a mob scene

Apple 2

More when we land. That’s all for now.

HEY MACY’S – ON THIS THANKSGIVING, THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

When our kids were little we used to take them, in the freezing Manhattan November, to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. For the twenty years we lived in New York, from Josh in a carrier on Rick’s back, to Josh on his shoulders and Dan in a Snugli, to the two boys worming their way past the grown-ups to stand in the front of the crowd at 75th and Broadway, to the years we went to our friends’ house overlooking Central Park West on Thanksgiving eve and watched them blow up the balloons — all the years of Columbus Avenue cocoa and popcorn, we were there. When they got older, the boys went together without us; the two of them joining the crowds (the TODAY SHOW just told me that this year there are 3.5 million people along the parade route) with the finesse of New York kids. I cherish those memories; I know they liked it but I don’t think as much as I loved watching them respond to the balloons and the music and the colors and the crowds.

If I weren’t in San Francisco without all our albums I’d scan a photo of the kids waving from the top of a newspaper vending machine, or on their dad’s shoulders, or looking up at the balloons with such magical wonder that I can’t describe it. But we’re here and no such photos inhabit my laptop, so I leave it to your imagination.

We left Manhattan for LA in 1992 and I haven’t been to a Thanksgiving parade since. I don’t even recognize all the balloons. Central Park West belongs to other parents and kids now; nobody who’s only seen it on TV can imagine the excitement, the smells, the noise, the freeeeezing cold and thrill of watching their kids wave to Big Bird and Bob IN PERSON!!!! I’ll always have a deep affection for Macy’s and the gift of that annual celebration of family, joy and, yes, thanks. Nobody can give a gift better than the gift of memories and they certainly have done that. Every single year.

ISN’T THAT THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE?

We leave for San Francisco in the morning, I’m not packed, I have a class tonight and an appointment in 15 minutes. So this is a shortie. I’m so excited to see our kids and, as usual, nervous in advance. Last year I wrote a post called "I Don’t Want To Be a Turkey on Thanksgiving." Sort of the same feelings this year; being considerate of adult kids and their autonomy NOT from things you might do on purpose – those I can control. It’s the stuff that can happen by accident and end up being an issue that I always worry about.
If there’s anything I’m thankful for it’s the gift of these two young men who have grown into such fine people. Even from all the way across the country, they bless my days. Makes Thanksgiving mean a whole lot.

How I CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT THE IDEA OF A BRIS

Many of the Jewish kids I know were circumcised but never had a bris (a ritual circumcision – complete with ceremony and prayers.) That was true in our family. I always thought it as barbaric. I have come to see the ceremony as one of the loveliest in Judaism. I’ve just come from one for our rabbi’s fifth child. The ceremony begins as the families of the new child line up at the door to the shul and pass him along toward the bimah, with all the congregation singing a song of congratulations. Many family members – aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings, have a role — blessings to say, children to hold, passages to mark. Each older sister and brother gets a gift.

There is of course a serious ceremony within the celebration – the honoring of the covenant that God ordered and Abraham honored. The physical idea of the circumcision is tough – even for deep believers, I think, but it’s interesting that research in sexually transmitted diseases – even AIDS, shows that circumcised men contract and transmit these diseases less frequently. Of course there’s no hard evidence that there’s a connection but it adds to the considerations about the process itself.

The most important part, to me, is the welcoming of the child into the community both the broad of those who worship as observant Jews and of the closer extended family that surrounds the synagogue. There were kids hanging off the railings at the front of the synagogue, family members gathered to the side (that’s the photo), singing, crying and lots of reunions of people from far away who’d come together to celebrate. The little boy was named for his parent’s cousin who died, at 23, of Muscular Dystrophy. As the Rabbi spoke about him, he struggled not to weep – the combination of joy at the safe arrival of his son and memory of the loss of the man whose name this child now bears – were almost overwhelming. Many of us felt it too.

It’s taken me quite a journey to come to comprehension of it all and I’m sure I haven’t made it clear enough to you – but I guess the bottom line is that the combination of faith, joy, timeless ritual, love and friendship is a powerful gift — tough to learn to accept but, ultimately, something to treasure.