This showed up at my door last week:

~RCH~

Choose life!

Eight years ago tomorrow, my best friend received a life-saving kidney transplant.

She talks about it more eloquently than I could, so I'll simply point you to her and tell you, from personal experience, what an amazing and important gift organ donation is.

I can't fathom my life without her in it.


~RCH~

A cowpie for Johnny Lingo

Take that, Johnny Lingo!


~RCH~

The Bad Mommy Hall of Fame: A confession

*Gulp, deep breath*

My confession: In a group of kids, I can't distinguish my own child's cries. On the monitors at night, I often can't tell my baby and toddler apart.

We went to the park this morning for our weekly play group and I let the toddler run off to play by herself while I strolled with the baby or sat with the other moms. I kept an occasional eye on her, of course, to make sure she didn't wander off or get stolen, and I went over once to remind her to let the other kids have turns on the slide. But for the most part I let her have her space while I tended more closely to the baby (who has been known to topple head first out of her stroller, even while restrained, in a desperate effort to eat sand).

The toddler was fine. She played happily for 30 minutes or so, shouted "Look at me, Mommy!" a few times as she scampered around or zoomed down the slide. She came over once to give me a nasty looking dinosaur toy she found half buried in the sand. ("Rooooaaar!") She played well with the other kids. And then we mommies heard someone crying.

"Is that Ethan?" one of them asked, and I didn't look up because I was futzing with the baby's hat.

"No, I don't think so," Ethan's mom said.

The crying continued and I silently tsk-tsked to myself. "Oh those kids," I thought. "I bet it's Janssen. He's always crying over nothing...."

I finally looked up to see my toddler stumbling toward me, sobbing, COMPLETELY covered in sand on one side -- it was caked into her hair, her face (even her eye!), her arm, her leg.... Such a pitiful sight. I cleaned her up with some wet wipes and help from the drinking fountain, held her on my lap with some tasty cold water until she calmed down, and determined there was no serious damage.

None of the mommies saw it; my toddler still isn't to the age where she will tell me where she's hurt (I asked and she pointed to the bandaid we put on her arm just for fun yesterday); the only kid old enough to give a somewhat coherent report -- a 5-year-old -- could only tell us that "Marcus threw sand on her." He may have after whatever happened had happened, but she didn't get caked in sand like that head to toe by a few fistfulls from another kid. She fell from something. Our best guess is that she got going too fast on the slide, and fell off onto her side (face first, it looks like) rather than gracefully hopping off.

In any case, she's fine. No limping, no cuts, no bruises, no blood.... I think it simply scared her (the thing that seemed to upset her most was getting dirty, lol -- she kept sobbing, "Mommy, I'm so messy! Even my tooooootsies!")

I just feel so terrible that (a) I let her play by herself, almost entirely unsupervised, when she's probably still too little and (b) that she cried for so long before I even realized it was MY CHILD.

Where was I when they passed out the maternal instinct? Aren't mother's supposed to know their kids' voices? Certainly their cries! This isn't the first time I've not known it was her (or the baby, as the case may be), simply the most dramatic.... I'm kicking myself for not being more tuned in! What's wrong with me? Where are the "mommy ears" I was supposed to get the moment she was born?

*Sigh!*

Anyway, there you go -- that's my confession. I don't recognize my own child. I think that more than qualifies me for the Bad Mommy Hall of Fame.


~RCH~

Feminist Mormon Housewives

I've always considered myself to be the first two, and now I guess I'm the whole shebang! Whatever that actually means.
http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/


~RCH~

I've been mulling

1. I've heard rumors that my parents had a master plan for our education that went beyond, "Hey, let's send 'em to school." For instance, I remember attending plays and symphonies with them when I was young. I figured they were just looking for something to fill the time; now I find out they wanted to enrich us with early and frequent exposure to the arts. I can't tell you how special it made me feel to discover that, even so long after the fact.



2. My sister has created a secondary blog to discuss educational research and philosophy as she works to bolster my niece's education. I'm fascinated by what she has to say.



3. My toddler and I are in a rut, and a rather unhealthy one at that: We watch entirely too much tv, and the laissez-faire days that worked so well when she was a baby have made us both stir crazy and irritable now. She has too much energy to burn in the small confined space of our living room, where we spend most of our time; I have too little energy to deal with her patiently and well.

These three factors have got me mulling over how to be a better parent to my busy, busy girl. I think she's bored. I've come to the conclusion that she and I would both do better with more structure in our lives. I don't want to schedule away all her free play time, and I can't afford to send her to preschool or any sort of lessons, but she needs to spend her days doing more than staring at the tv screen or at me and our four walls. She needs enrichment, stimulus, a routine that she can look forward to....

In typical RCH fashion, I first focused my energy on the chart I would design to give her a visual representation of her new life: It would be elaborate and fabulous! Created in Adobe Illustrator in full color, with intricately drawn analog clocks so I could teach her about time, printed as an 8x10 at CVS on glossy photo paper on which I could use dry erase markers for the day or week's variables (did you know you can do that with glossy photo paper?).

But of course, a cool chart doesn't really address the issue -- and without pondering the substance of these new and improved scheduled days, what would I put on the chart, anyway? So I began to contemplate that last night. I have no child development credentials (as I lamented recently), and I don't feel like I have the time to thoroughly research the matter the way my sister has. But I know my kid; I know her interests and attention span and I think I know what she's capable of (though, being a mother, I can't be blamed for thinking she's a TOTAL GENIUS, lol).

I've come up with one sample day's activities and a "curriculum" that I hope will translate well to lots of other days. Each afternoon (I think I'll leave our mornings lazy, as I often don't feel fully awake before noon) we'll focus our attention on a given topic in four ways: academic development; an activity song or game; emotional or social development; and an art or craft project. My sample day would go as follows:

Topic: My Body!

• Counting Parts [Academic] - "What do I have 1 of?" I'll ask, and we'll talk about having one head, one nose, one mouth, one belly button, etc. "What do I have 2 of?" Two hands, two elbows, two eyes, etc. You get the idea.



• Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes [Activity Song]



• Making Faces [Emotional/Social] - The two of us will make and guess facial expressions.



• Sticker Faces [Craft] - I have a sheet of stickers with various eyes, noses, mouths, ears, and accessories (hats and glasses and that sort of thing). I would give her construction paper circles and let her fill them up with different combinations of stickers to make her faces.

None of these activities will take very long, and I don't even think I'll plan them back-to-back. I'll simply use them to break up the day from our usual snack time and play time and tantrum time. ;-)

Any input from the peanut gallery? I'm still very much in the mulling stages -- pondering now what other topics and activities we could add to the repetoire, how to fit them into my makeshift curriculum, and how to implement the whole thing (including the design of a fabulous chart!) -- so if anyone reading this has ideas or opinions to share, please leave me a comment. I'd really like to figure out something that will work for us, and that will make her feel special ~28 years from now when she looks back on her childhood.


~RCH~

Just so you know:

I am profoundly irritated tonight, though for no reason in particular. Which in itself is profoundly irritating.

GRRRRRRRRRRR.


~RCH~

Now I'll never be a teen model!

Well, that'll teach me to play with my kids.

I sat on the floor yesterday evening to play with my slap-happy toddler as she climbed back and forth over me, giggling wildly, stopping occasionally in my lap to give me an exaggerated hug before scampering off again (only to come at me once more from the other side). She became more and more animated as the game continued, laughing louder, climbing faster, limbs flailing, until -- *THWACK!* She kicked me in the nose, hard.

I burst into tears.

I checked my nose for blood, but there was none. I wiggled it for signs of broken bones, but everything seemed intact. I think it swelled slightly at the time, but I don't have so much as a bruise today.... All that pain and nothing to show for it. Figures.

To their credit, both my kids came to my rescue as soon as they saw me crying. The toddler calmed down, patted my head and said, "I know, Mommy. I know. I'm so sorry you have an owie. It's okay, Mommy. If you rest you'll feel really, really better." The baby, who had been playing with some Peek-a-Blocks at the other end of the room, crawled over to me, hoisted herself into my lap, and opened her little bird mouth as if to give me a kiss.

So I'll never be a teen model, but the upshot is that even the painful moments of motherhood turn out to be worth it in the end.


~RCH~