Moving on out.

Okay, so it turns out you can't have a password on blogger, only a select group of invitees, and I don't really feel like dealing with that. So I'm moving over to wordpress - http://phredfwedschweffel.wordpress.com/. If you would like the password and didn't get it from my previous post, leave a comment at the new site. See you on the flip side!

H1N1

I was talking to my mom today about h1n1, and she mentioned a newsletter she'd received (she subscribes to all kinds of health nut newsletters) that was recommending extra vitamin D to help prevent it. The newsletter cited a very interesting case study from a facility in Wisconsin: http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/mobile/Nutrition/Vitamins/vitamin_d_protects_against_h1n1_-_new_evidence_160920090655.html

I did confirm that Dr. Glick does in fact work at the Wisconsin Center, and I checked pubmed for info on vitamin D too - meta-analysis of studies on vitamin D since 1948 showed no negative side effects (although research on its positive effects was inconclusive). I figure it's not going to hurt and may help, so I'm on board. If you think this sounds like a good idea, pass it on! (but wait until after tomorrow so there isn't a run on vitamin D before I get mine ;))

Raising a boy.

I've just started re-reading "Raising Cain" by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. There are a few paragraphs that really struck home with me the last time I read them, and again today.

"Popular culture is a destructive element in our boys’ lives, but the emotional miseducation of boys begins much earlier and much closer to home. Most parents, relatives, teachers, and others who work or live with boys set out to teach them how to get along in the world and with one another. In the process of teaching them one thing, however, we often teach them another, quite different thing that ultimately works against their emotional potential. Traditional gender stereotypes are embedded in the way we respond to boys and teach them to respond to others. Whether unintentionally or deliberately, we tend to discourage emotional awareness in boys. Scientists who study the way parents shape their children’s emotional responses find that parents tend to have preconceived stereotypic gender notions even about infants (like the father we know who bragged to us that his son didn’t cry when he was circumcised). Because of this, parents provide a different emotional education for sons as opposed to daughters.

This has been shown to be true in a variety of contexts. Mothers speak about sadness and distress more with their daughters and about anger more with sons. And it shows. A study observing the talk of preschool aged children found that girls were six times more likely to use the word ‘love’, twice as likely to use the word ‘sad’, but equally likely to use the word ‘mad’. We know that mothers who explain their emotional reactions to their preschool children and who do not react negatively to a child’s vivid display of sadness, fear, or anger will have children who have a greater understanding of emotions. Research indicates that fathers tend to be even more rigid than mothers in steering their sons along traditional lines. Even older siblings, in an imitation of their parents, talk about feelings more frequently with their two-year-old sisters than with their two-year-old brothers.

Here’s how this gender socialization can look in its mildest, most ordinary form: Brad is four years old and has a question about everything. His mother fields most of these questions because she’s with him more often than his dad, and even when the whole family is together, she typically is the more verbally responsive of the two. She tries to give all questions equal attention, but what she doesn’t fully realize is that she, like any parent, subtly shapes the kinds of questions her child asks.

“Mommy, why do I have to sit in a car seat if you don’t?” he asks. She responds with a discussion of the safety advantages, and explains how it is against the law for children to ride in a car unless they ride in a car seat. Because of her thoughtful answer, Brad feels rewarded for asking about how things work, and is thereby encouraged to do it again sometime.

But in the park, when Brad points to a small boy who is crying and asks his mother why, she gives a much shorter and less animated answer. “I don’t know, Brad, he just is. Come on, let’s go. It’s not polite to stare.”

The truth is, Brad’s mother may not know why the little boy is crying, and she is teaching her son good manners when she tells him not to stare. But her short answer is less engaging, less informative, and less rewarding for her son. It subtly discourages him from thinking any further about why someone cries or what might have moved this particular child to tears. Her quick closure on the inquiry also may convey her own discomfort with the subject – a message boys frequently “hear” when fathers give short shrift to questions or observations about emotions.

Studies of parent interactions with both boys and girls suggest that, when a girl asks a question about emotions, her mother will give longer explanations. She’s more likely to speculate with her daughter about the reasons behind the emotion or to validate or amplify her daughter’s observation: “Yes, honey, he does look very sad. Maybe he’s got a little hurt, or he’s lost his toy… What do you think?” the message the daughter gets is that it’s okay to be concerned about another’s feelings; her natural concern and empathy are reinforced.

Boys experience this kind of emotional steering constantly."

Since reading this book, I've tried to incorporate talking about feelings with Ant on a regular basis - in examples like the one given above about the child asking questions about emotions, as well as asking Ant if there were things in his day that made him feel one way or another. I also try to give him words for how he might be feeling when he has a tantrum or gets upset about something, as well as telling him how I'm feeling when I'm in less than a good mood.

What kinds of things do you do to help encourage emotional literacy in your boy/s?

Is it over yet?

Fun filled day today:

4am - Ant starts crying, gets up out of his big boy bed (HE made the transition about a week ago; asked to sleep on the queen sized bed in his room and so far has been pretty good about staying there with the threat of going back into his crib if he gets up). Mark goes in to comfort him and ends up sleeping in the bed with him.

6:15am - I wake up when the alarm goes off to find that Mark isn't there. I go into Ant's room to wake Mark up - no Ant, and no Mark. ??? Okay, maybe they went downstairs and are on the couch? Check downstairs, no sign of them. Back upstairs, look in Ant's room again, nope they're not there. Maybe Timmy's room? Nope. Ohhhhhkaaaaay. Maybe they really are downstairs and I just didn't see them? Check in the living room again, including the corner where they might be on the blanket. No. Basement? Probably not because it's cold down there. Okay, not there either. One more iteration - check in MY room because I'm starting to think I'm crazy - no. Not in Ant's room, nor Timmy's, nor downstairs, nor in the basement. Did they take the car somewhere? Nope, that's still in the garage. Now I really am going crazy. I knew it was unlikely, but the thought crossed my mind that they had been kidnapped somehow? Go to Ant's room one more time - there they are! Ant was camoflaged by his blanket, and Mark by the black comforter where he looked like a much smaller lump than I ever would have imagined. Whew!

7:45am - off to work.

3pm - meeting with my boss. Tell her that I don't want to go back to full time (I'm currently working three days a week by using my vacation time). She isn't as upset as I've imagined she'll be, says she'll see if it's possible for me to continue to work part time and will let me know. All in all a much better conversation that I had anticipated, and a big weight off my mind as I had been feeling like I was lying to her knowing that I didn't want to come back to full time but not letting on yet.

4:45pm - arrive back at home. Check the mail. Find that our estimated tax payment did not get picked up AGAIN! I had put it out for the mailman yesterday along with another letter - the other got taken yesterday, but of course, not the one to the IRS that HAD to get mailed. And today we didn't get any mail, and he ignored the flag. Crap!

8pm - kids down in bed, grab some supper and head out A) to return some clothes from Xmas / after sales that don't fit, and B) go to the South Station post office to mail the payment to the IRS. Use my GPS and miss the exit I'm supposed to take, so it ends up taking me about five minutes longer to get to the store than it should.

8:40pm - go to park in the garage at the Pru - $9 for 0-1 hour, and decide there is NO WAY I'm paying that much to park for 20 minutes. Drive around to find a parking space.

8:45pm - find the space, turn the car off, and go to get the stuff I want to return out of the shopping bag. Only to realize that I left one of the two shirts at home. Sigh. Off to the post office.

9:14pm - done at the post office, IRS letter duly postmarked. Turn on GPS to get back home. It doesn't tell me in time that I'm looking for a right exit to the Mass Pike; instead I get on 93 South because I can't remember if I need to do that or not. NOT would be the appropriate answer. More detours. Sigh.

9:20pm - Get off on the Mass Ave exit heading to Storrow Drive. Find that the exit I need to take to Storrow is closed. ARE YOU KIDDING ME????? AND, my phone / gps is now dead.

9:30pm - Decide to take Mem Drive. Oooooh, there's a starbuck right there and I've been craving a frappucino, which I decide to treat myself to given the snafus of the evening.

9:32pm - Pull into the Starbucks parking lot to find that, jokes on me, it closed at 9:30. At this point I have to start laughing.

9:48pm - Woo-hoo the Starbucks on my way home is still open, much to my surprise. Head on in and ask if their frappucino machine is still on. Guy says, "Why wouldn't it be?" to which I respond, "Because that's the way my night is going!". He's a total sweetheart and gives me a free taste of their hot chocolate with salt and caramel (YUMMMMMMM), in addition to supersizing my frappucino.

10pm - the end. I hope!

6/6/6

So this meme has been around for a while (e.g. Molly and DD) - go to your sixth picture folder, pick the sixth picture, and give the story behind it. I have my pics organized by year, then by month, so my sixth folder was 2004, sixth folder in that was December (I didn't take pictures every month back then), and this was the sixth picture:



It's of us dishing up Christmas dinner. What's funny is that when I looked at the thumbnail, I thought to myself, there's my sister and Mark... who on earth is that red-head? I then realized that it was ME, back when I dyed my hair!! And I cannot for the life of me figure out what was on the plate my sister is holding. Any guesses?

I also like Molly's idea of picking a few more sixth pictures.

Here's 1999/June/sixth pic - our wedding day:



2003/Australia-South Africa trip/sixth pic - did you know that the tiles on the Sydney Opera house are not, in fact, white? I didn't 'til we went there:



And finally, out of my Cakes folder, a cake I created in decorating class:

Photobooks

Last year, after a fair bit of looking around, I made a photo book of Ant's first year using Picaboo. It was the only photobook editing tool I found that would allow a reasonable amount of text in addition to pictures, and allow for a larg-ish number of photos on a page.

This year I figured I'd look around again and see if there was anything else that was a bit more flexible - the one drawback of the picaboo software was that although there were quite a lot of page templates to choose from, they didn't necessarily combine the elements I wanted, and there was nothing I could do. I was hoping they'd have more templates by this time, but no dice.

I didn't find any other editing software that I liked better, so I started Ant's two year book in Picaboo again. Somewhere, though, I saw an ad for My Canvas, and thought I'd check it out, as it wasn't one I'd come across in my search.

I have to say that I love, love, love it! It's less expensive than Picaboo, and has complete and total flexibility. It comes with backgrounds with placeholders for text and pictures, but you can add more, edit sizes, duplicate any elements on the page. It's perfect! If anyone else is looking to make a photobook that is a bit more complex than the standard ones lots of places do, I cannot recommend this enough!

Of course, this is with the caveat that I don't know how the printing is going to turn out - we'll have to see on that.

Whirlwind - and results!

The past 6-8 weeks have been a whirlwind of house work and getting things ready for the changes to come. Our house was built in '99 with three bedrooms upstairs that we were originally using as our bedroom, the guest room, and the office. When Ant arrived, we turned the guest room into his bedroom, leaving the spare bed there so when push comes to shove we still have a place for people to stay. Now that Fwed is on the way, we decided that we hardly use the office anymore as we both have laptops with wireless access and mostly use our computers downstairs - so it made sense to turn that into Fwed's room. We do still need a place to put some office stuff, so decided to finish the basement. It ended up being a much bigger endeavor than I imagined at first.

1. Clean out and organize the garage so we had a place to store all the stuff from the basement while we were working.
2. Install shelves in the garage to accomodate all the extra stuff that now needs to be stored there
3. Move everything from basement to garage (we had a lot more crap than I ever imagined!)
4. Get the basement done - my BIL and his friend did most of the work for us, in terms of putting up a wall between the laundry room and basement, putting up the drywall
5. Get the plasterer in to plaster the drywall
6. Clean up from 5 (LOTS of dust!)
7. Paint the new basement (I love the color blue we chose, definitely makes me happy)
8. Install trim
9. Paint trim
10. Choose carpet, get it installed
11. Move stuff back from garage to basement
12. Clean garage (I swept and MOPPED the basement because of all the dust - I had to laugh at myself while mopping though!)
13. Move office furniture down to basement
14. Move rest of office furniture to attic
15. Put together crib

That's as far as we've gotten - still have a huge amount of junk and paperwork in the office that needs to get filed / sorted through / recycled before we can move the dresser into place and get rid of or move the file cabinet. But we're getting there, at least now Fwed has a place to sleep.

The other nice thing is that it means that the whole idea of a new baby seems to have become more solidified in Ant's mind. He is now calling the ex-office the 'baby's woom'. This morning he wanted to jump in the baby's crib, so I said he could after we changed his diaper. Once I put him in there, he said, "Baby come out of mommy's belly soon. Baby sweep in cwib. Baby dump (jump) in cwib wif Antony!". I had been saying to him in previous days that the baby would be coming out soon, and would eat, sleep and cry a lot - he put together 'baby sweep in cwib' and 'baby dump in cwib wif Antony' all on his own though! I had to explain that the baby wouldn't be doing much jumping to start with - but it makes me feel a lot better about the upcoming changes that Ant seems to be starting to accept and understand what will happen.

Much better than the "no thank you baby" I got when I first told him this weekend that the baby would be coming out soon!

Top of the post has one view of the basement before / after (unfortunately I didn't think to take a picture of the REAL before, that is before we moved all the junk out!)

You can't make this stuff up.

Title and email courtesy of my sister (S is my niece, who will be 3 in October):

S discovered something that she thinks is totally hilarious… When we were driving back from AC I turned around and was telling her something and must have raised my eyebrows. All of a sudden her little face lights up and she says, “Mommy! What are those lines on your forehead?!?” (Picture her tone of voice as totally awestruck). “Can I touch it??”. She must have made me raise my eyebrows 10 times so she could see the cool lines. She wanted to know why she doesn’t have any. Hard to explain to a two year old that mommy is OLD and those lines are not that funny to me. Last night she remembered about it and wanted to see the “Rainbow on Mommy’s head”

I must say, I do prefer for the lines on my forehead to be called my "rainbow" rather than just wrinkles!

Me so quirky!

Ova Girl wrote a brilliant post describing six quirky things about her. I have way too much time on my hands (NOT), so I signed up to continue the meme. I had fun trying to come up with six interesting / different / wacky things about myself - it took me a while. Because I'm really just so normal. Titter.

1. The quirkiest thing about me, although it's not a personality quirk, is that I hiccup. Not your average run of the mill bout of hiccups every once in a while; I have hiccupped every day since sophomore year of high school. I have just passed the 19 year mark (egads!) It's not constant by any means, at this point it's probably on the order of a dozen times a day, but it's completely random, and usually only 1-3 hiccups at a time. When they first started it was hundreds of times a day (yes, I did count), but they've slowed down to quite a manageable clip now. Quite a conversation piece, let me tell you!

2. I was born in South Africa, moved to the States when I was ten. Which, unfortunately, was too young to keep my accent. I have a pretty vanilla American accent now. But there are a few words that I have real trouble with pronouncing the American way, with really no rhyme or reason. They are (in no particular order): garage, water, and herb. The latter, of course, I pronounce the way it's supposed to be pronounced, with an H sound at the beginning. There are no "erbs" anywhere near my house! ;-)

3. I really cannot stand having the sheets on my bed tucked in. I don't exactly feel claustrophobic, but I like to really snuggle into my bed, and with the sheets tucked in on the sides, one just can't do that! Anytime I go to a hotel, one of the first things I do is pull the sheets out of the sides.

4. Excel files. Data. I'm a fanatic! I don't just make lists in Excel, I make files that do all kinds of calculations for me. Sometimes I even write macros to make things easier. I have a file that calculates my weight gain while pg (and compares this time to last - so far exactly the same, strangely enough). I have one that has all my friends' due dates in it, and updates to show how many weeks they are any time I open it. When I was tracking Ant's words, my Excel file computed the new words added each month, previously suspected words that were now confirmed, total words, and number of words starting with each letter. I admit it, I'm a total geek!

5. I really hate wasting paper towels. It seems like such a silly thing to use a disposable wipe for things where a re-usable one will do. To that end I now have four sponges next to my sink - one for cleaning Ant's dishes with (so it doesn't ever touch things that might get him sick), one for our dishes, one for counters, and one for the floors. And yet somehow I still feel like we go through paper towels at an inordinate rate. Perhaps I should institute a paper towel sign-out sheet. Only partially kidding!

6. Consistent grammar / spelling mistakes drive me nuts (not typos, those happen to everyone, yours truly included). I really have to reel myself in from commenting about them (not on blogs, but RL). "Your" when "you're" is what is intended. "It's" instead of "its" or vice versa (although I must admit, I do catch myself with that one from time to time). I/Me. A few I've recently come across on some of the message boards I frequent - "vile" instead of "vial", and "nauteous" instead of "nauseous" are more common that I ever would have imagined. I read those and have to tell myself, "down, girl, down!"

So those are six quirky things about me. I'm becoming all full of angst about choosing six other people to tag for this task; and don't feel quite right stealing OG's method of tagging the first six commenters (plus, honestly, I don't want to discourage anyone!), so I'm just going to leave it at this - if you haven't already done this exercise and feel like taking some time for a bit of self reflection, leave a note in a comment, and I'll link to your entry. I'd love to read it!

And re-reading this post, I have to add another quirk; I have a very very hard time ending a paragraph without an exclamation point. I must EM-PHA-SIZE my excitement! Sign of a poor writer, I know, but I just can't help it. (I even wanted to put one there, but had to stop myself.)

BPA free?

I was pointed to a contest to win one of two BPA feeding kits by the delightful Tonya.

I have been hearing about a lot of people choosing to use the "Born free" bottles for their babies recently, as well as just bad things about plastics in general.

It's one of those things that I feel like I should do something about, particularly for Ant's sippy cups because he chews the hell out of the lids, and I can actually see little fibers coming off. But at the same time, finding plastic free (or BPA-free) kids stuff is not the easiest thing in the world, and I hate to say it, but I've just been too damn lazy.



But, thanks to Tonya and the soft landing site, it's just gotten a lot easier.

I get the last laugh!

I have recently acquired a penchant for losing things. I've always had it - my driver's license that goes missing for months only to be found in the pocket of some shorts I wore last summer, that kind of thing. But it's been bad recently, particularly with important things, like, oh, my credit card or the car keys. The keys (only the real ones of course) are one of Ant's favorite toys, always guaranteed to calm him down, so they had a tendency of getting misplaced. So far, one of our station wagon keys got so misplaced it has yet to be found, after turning the whole house upside down. Not too long after we got a replacement (for the not miserly cost of $144, gulp), my key to the convertible went missing.

Mark kept asking me if I'd looked for it yet, my answer was always, "no, I didn't get a chance". Finally, one night, he said "please! just look for it!". So I did. I started in the cupboard with the jackets, as that is a very common hiding place for things I'm missing.

Checked through my spring jacket, even though I haven't worn it in ages. No key. My fall jacket, same. My two winter jackets, despite having felt in both their pockets recently. No dice. Next in line was Mark's jacket, so I figured what the heck I'd check that one too. Nothing. He gave me a bit of grief for it though - "Why are you checking *my* jacket?". Next up was his nice winter coat. Hand in one pocket, again empty. The other pocket though??? There was the key, nice and snug. In HIS jacket. (He must have put it there when we went out for NYE).

I definitely laughed last!