Deep South Moms

Balance? What Balance?

There is only one area of my life where balance is present. That's the 4 year old: he loves to walk on parking space barriers, curbs, to hop on one foot, and to stand one one foot on the bathroom stool. His balance is pretty good.

His sister, 20 month, has such a disconnect between balance skills and unbridled enthusiasm for trying to do everything her brother does that she has earned the nickname Princess Whups-a-Daisy. In the last month, she's skinned knees, fingers, and her ear; bruised her shins and back; and split her lip.

On a good day she can go as long as an hour between falls, which usually occur because she is gleefully sprinting somewhere. Last week it was dancing backwards off of the neighbor's porch, where mercifully she only grazed the concrete step with the edge of her ear, instead of crashing into it with the back of her skull. So yeah, not much balance there.

Upstairs, Downstairs, All Around the House

I don't want to jinx anything by announcing it prematurely, but I think we're going to buy a house.

We used to be homeowners. In fact, this will be the 4th house I've owned. But after I got laid off and we moved across the country, we rented.

The especially interesting thing is that the house -- a duplex -- we are working on buying, is the same one we are currently renting.

And that brings us to a new set of decisions.

Right now, we live downstairs. The upstairs unit is pretty close to identical to ours, but with more light. And without people running around on top of us.

On the one hand, both of those things would be nice changes. On the other hand, even moving just upstairs is still moving, with all of the chaos and packing and insanity that involves. The kids will be big enough by the time we could move that they could both navigate the stairs independently -- the reason I chose the downstairs unit in the first place was horror at the thought of trying to help an almost-3 year old and carry an infant up and down all those stairs, every day.

Regional Cuisine, Or, The Things We Do for Our Kids

When I first moved to the South, one of the regional cuisine facts that took some getting used to was iced tea.

I've always loved iced tea, but since I was about 15, I've preferred it plain, maybe with some lemon. In the midwest and the mid-atlantic, when you order iced tea, they ask if you want sweetener with that, so discovering that you have to specify "un-sweet" or you get something approximating tea syrup in most Southern restaurants was a shock.

Now, I'm back in Milwaukee, and I want my kids to have the full local cultural experience -- which means Friday Night Fish Fry.

The problem is that I don't like fish.

Oh Boy...Scouts

It's been an emotional week at school.

My children attend a wonderful, charming, small, urban, public charter, Montessori school. They have an associated toddler program, and by a wonderful miracle, a space opened up early -- at exactly the day when Josie was old enough to start.

That was Monday.

Tuesday evening, the school had a meeting to discuss whether or not to begin a Boy Scout Troop for our students. (Technically, a Cub Scout Pack, I learned.)

Boy Scouts at my son's school.

On the one hand, helping boys to learn leadership, outdoors, and craft skills is a good thing.

On the other hand, Boy Scouts of America is an organization that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 to guarantee their right to discriminate against gay people. Incidentally, they also prohibit participation by atheists.

Those aren't the values of my school, and they aren't my values. I was, frankly, astonished that we were even considering affiliating ourselves with the Boy Scouts.

Take Your Foot Off of Your Sandwich!

Before I was a parent, I never imagined how many things we specifically learn -- or teach!

Now that my son is 3.5, the constant teaching, and the constant repetition of most of those life lessons, leaves me exhausted.

This morning's unique lesson was that feet do not belong in your sandwich. Perhaps we could have avoided this if we insisted on breakfast at the table. But I am not a morning person, and neither is my partner. We need the help of television and other parenting crutches in the morning.

School & Mama Pressure

My son is only 3. He goes to a crunchy public charter Montessori school. Each parent is required to put in approximately 30 zillion volunteer hours, although fortunately for me, everything you can imagine counting -- even parent teacher conferences -- counts towards those hours.

But certain things get a little bit competitive among the moms.

Especially food.

Parents rotate bringing in a week's worth of "Healthy Snacks," and the kids are quite free with their opinions about good snacks vs bad snacks. Parents also provide potluck dinners once/semester, and the day before Thanksgiving, for lunch, a potluck "Harvest Celebration."

Open Letter to Scholastic Book Fair

Dear Scholastic VP Responsible for the Book Fair:

It is Saturday night. I was supposed to spend this evening watching trash TV, eating a take out frozen custard sundae, and relaxing.

Instead, that frozen custard is churning in my stomach, and I'm trying to decide how badly my 3.5 year old son will feel when I tell him that we have to return his new Bakugan and Life Size Dinosaur books, because they came from a company that doesn't want people to know that families like his exist.

I'm talking, of course, about your outrageous effort to tell author Lauren Myracle to change her new book Luv Ya Bunches so that one of the characters no longer had lesbian moms.

You see, I am a lesbian mom, and also the Co-Chair of my school's Scholastic Book Fair. Which is began last Tuesday and runs through next Wednesday.

Happy Banned Books Week

In case you missed it, Banned Books Week started on Saturday and runs through October 3. This annual observation by the American Library Association is intended to draw attention to censorship and attacks on books in our public libraries.

Americans who live in the Northeast or on the West Coast often think of this as a problem unique to the South, or maybe also the Midwest. While those regions certainly have their share of challenges to library books, this problem is everywhere.

The nice folks BannedBooksWeek.org have helpfully created a Google Map of the continental US with all of the book challenges that have been reported to the ALA between 2007-2009. The map includes examples from Oswego Lake, Oregon, to Yorba Linda, California, to Miami, Florida, to Waltham, Massachusetts and Brooklyn, New York, and a great many many places between.

According to the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom, "ALA recorded 513 challenges in 2008 but estimates that this reflects only 20-25% of actual incidents, as most challenges are never reported."

The Top 10 most frequently challenged books in 2008 were:

Blindsided. But Sometimes Doing the Right Thing is Easy.

Aside from phone calls where someone tells you that your child is sick or injured, I think I got the most stressful kid-related phone call of my life this morning.

It was from my neighbor, Martin, whose youngest children go to the same neighborhood day care that my baby attends. There was a sign posted on the door. Because of a municipal business occupancy permit issue, the center, which cares for 20 children, was being shut down effective tomorrow. Only 3 children -- the number anyone can care for in home without a license -- could continue there.

On Fire

You know those days when you are completely in the zone? You're productive, you're speeding through your To Do list as though it were the newest novel by your favorite author, and everything just works?

I'm having one of those days, and frankly, I think I'd forgotten how amazing they were.

This morning, I finished a first draft of a business plan for a small business that two partners and I anticipate launching later this year. I even did things like break-even analysis and cash flow projections, both of which were uncharted territory for me. And I sent it to my business partners for feedback.

Then I bought a file cabinet on Craigslist for $15. So I can file my articles of incorporation and bylaws, once I finish those. I even hauled it into my house alone, which was not the high point of the day. On my way home with the cabinet, I stopped at the neighborhood gelato store and acquired delicious non-dairy desert treats for dinner tomorrow evening that includes a dairy-allergic child.

Installing my new portable dishwasher, a birthday present for Jill and for me from my Mom, was the next item that had been languishing on my list for the last 3 weeks. I knew I needed a part, and after the first visit to the hardware store, I was sent home to bring back part of my faucet as well as the hooker-on-er doohicky for the dishwasher.