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Monthly Archives: August 2013

That Time Of Year When I Stress About Birthdays

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by IfByYes in From The Owlery

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

birthday parties, science world, three year olds, Vancouver, venues

Owl’s third birthday is coming up very soon, and that puts a lot of pressure on me.

Owl has been looking forward to his birthday party… well, since his last birthday party. Every time he sees cakes in the store, he says “Some day, I’ll have a birfday, Mommy! Then I get birfday cake. Some day. Some day…”

Ditto for balloons, party hats etc that he sees hanging on the rack.

“Ooh, I get dis when I have my birfday.”

He spied an Angry Birds cake in Dairy Queen in July and he still talks about getting an Angry Birds cake. I’ll try and get him excited about ANYTHING ELSE.

We were originally going to have his birthday at the same place we had his last party. It was cheap, and fun, and he had a great time.

Unfortunately, they were booked solid through September.

So we had to start looking at other options.

I didn’t really like any of the other options – yeah, we could reserve space at a local play gym, but he could go to those any time – and does.

But by some miracle, Science World had an opening, at our preferred time, ON HIS BIRTHDAY no less. BOOKED.

But then there was more stress – their party for 2 and under is cheaper and more simple – you get a party room, and access to the centre. You also get free admission for 10 children under 3 (which is dumb, because they admit children under 3 for free anyway) and for 10 adults (better).

The other option is for 3-7. They have a 30 minute science “demo” and you get admission for 10 kids over 3, but only 2 adults (basically, you and your partner). It also costs way more.

So we had to decide what to do. Would Owl appreciate the 30 minute demo enough to justify the extra money? Don’t forget that we’d have to pay admission for all of the parents too. Oh, and at least half of the invited children if not MORE would be between the ages of one and three. We definitely don’t know 10 children over three.

So we went with the cheaper, more boring option. I keep having crises of anxiety where I worry that I’ll regret not getting the actual guided program. Otherwise, we just paid for a room, right? I mean, sure, it’s a room at the SCIENCE CENTRE, which is AWESOME, and we’ve been wanting to take Owl there for a long time. But will the kids play with each other? Probably not. They’ll probably eat food, open presents, and run off to explore the centre and won’t play with each other.

Maybe I should have just rented out the play gym.

ARRRRGH.

The kid better enjoy this.

 

 

Why Parenting A Toddler Drives Me Nuts

19 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by IfByYes in From The Owlery, Life and Love

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

basic concepts, explanations, parenting, patience, questions, stupid questions, toddlers

I have never been very good at tolerating stupid questions.

Which sometimes makes it hard to parent a toddler.

PH loves the toddler years. He hated the baby stage, but he loves answering the kind of aggravating questions demanded by our child every minute of every day.

I am not so patient.

My struggle with stupid questions began in childhood.

For several years my only friend was a girl who was funny, generally kind, and shared my love of animals and imaginary play. Unfortunately for her, and me, she wasn’t very scholastic, and tended to ask what I considered to be really stupid questions.

And I didn’t handle it well.

I don’t know why stupidity sets my temper off so much, but I could never just handle stupid questions calmly.

When my friend, who was 12 at the time, asked me what “unpredictable” meant, or asked me what two times eleven was, I couldn’t just calmly define “unpredictable” or say “22” like a normal friend might.

I felt compelled to make her THINK.

“It’s the opposite of predictable. Do you know what predictable means? HOW CAN YOU BE IN GRADE SIX AND NOT KNOW WHAT PREDICTABLE MEANS?”

or

“How can you not know what two times eleven is? The eleven times table is easy! What’s two times one? OKAY NOW DO THAT TWICE.”

To her credit, she handled my flares of temper quite calmly.

But I knew that my meanness got to her, and if she hasn’t been in direct contact with me since we were 14, even turning down an invitation to my wedding, it’s my own fault.

I knew I had a problem, and I really did work on it.

One year I made my New Year’s Resolution “Be nicer to Lucy” and I hung it on my door so I could see it every time I went into my bedroom.

It helped.

I learned to swallow a lot of mean thoughts and give more basic answers to questions that seemed painfully stupid to me. And when I couldn’t do that, I at least managed to be kinder in my explanations.

But I didn’t perfect it.

All through junior high and high school I struggled with responding to questions that I perceived as stupid without biting people’s heads off. I found that quantity mattered. One stupid question I could handle. Maybe even two, or three. But if I heard too many in a day I’d start to snap.

But every year of my life, I have gotten better at keeping my temper when people ask me stupid questions, or don’t seem to understand basic things.

For a while I even believed that I had completely overcome this problem.

If anything, I am frequently praised for my patience with difficult clients, and my ability to explain things clearly to people.

…Then I became mother to a toddler.

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Reasons To Have More Kids: Only Mediocre Reasoning

09 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

book reviews, bryan caplan, economics, kids, parenting

PH got $100 in Chapters money from his workplace for being generally awesome, and I used part of my share to pick up a book I’ve been eyeing for a while:

Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids

It seemed apropos, since PH and I are starting to think about committing this insanity again. I liked the Freakonomics sort of look to it, since I really enjoyed NurtureShock, which is also full of wacky thought-provoking research.

It was interesting, if not as convincing.

Really, this book isn’t going to convince you to have more kids if you don’t want more kids. His only real argument in favour of kids is that if you enjoy the one or two you have, you’ll probably enjoy a third or fourth as well.

It’s mostly just full of stuff to convince you to commit to it if you’ve already been tossing around the idea by poo-poohing a lot of common reasons NOT to have more kids.

Objections that he lays to rest through careful logic:

Myth 1: Kids are too costly, time-wise and financially speaking.

He argues that kids are only time consuming because we make them that way. While the baby years are unavoidably filled with work, he says that people over invest their time and money in their kids these days, by spending thousands on organized sports and lessons rather than let them run off and play on their own.

According to his statistics, the average working mother still spends as much or more time actively parenting her children than the average home maker did back in the 50s.

As Hannah over at Hodgepodge and Strawberries once pointed out, scheduled activities really eat into your time – organized sports and the like are a parental time-suck that hardly existed a few decades ago.

When I was a child, things were different. For one thing, North America was covered by glaciers. For another thing, when it came to sports, we kids were pretty much on our own [….] We rode our bikes to the field, played the game, and rode our bikes home.

At dinner our parents might ask us how the game went, but they might not. It was no a big deal either way. We didn’t expect the grown ups to think it was all that important. We didn’t think it was all that important. It was Little League.

If an adult had appeared at the Wampus ball field and spend an entire game yelling at the players, everybody would have thought that person was a lunatic” – Dave Barry, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead

So Bryan Caplan says that parents spend so much time taking their kids back and forth to organized activities and trying to have “quality time” that they end up cheating themselves out of the joy of more children.

He isn’t telling parents not to sign their kids up for anything, but points out that if you cancelled the one or two lessons a week that you kid really hates going to, you might have time for another kid.

Myth 2: Kids need to be supervised to be safe

Caplan buys into the Freerange Kids philosophy, and even quotes from that book. He argues that today`s children are the safest in the history of ever, and that the chance of your child actually being kidnapped from the playground across the street is so remote that it isn`t worth you losing a lot of sleep (and time) over it.

He encourages parents to let their kids roam free, so that parents can have some downtime and be less stressed and more able to actually enjoy being parents when the kids come back inside.

Myth 3: Over-parenting can change your child`s life

This may be his most challengeable argument. He says there’s no point in spending a lot of time on one individual kid, because twin studies (he’s big on identical twin studies) show that separated twins raised by different parents still turn out pretty much the same. Thus, your children’s futures are largely genetically determined, and as long as you help them reach their full potential by feeding them nutritious food and loving them well, they’ll be just fine. Investing hours and hours on flash cards and piano lessons won’t actually have much of a measurable effect on who they are.

Personally, I found this to be a slightly odd argument. He’s trying to convince me that I should parent more kids, while convincing me that my parenting doesn’t make a lick of difference.

The point he should have made clear, is this:

If I want to have a child who turns out to be brilliant or famous, or good at music, or good at science, having more children improves my odds more than simply trying to turn my single kid into a prodigy. I know what it is to be the only child, and thus the seat of all hope and disappointment. I think THAT would be a great argument to have more kids, but I actually heard it from my mother when I was a teen.

I also felt really bad for adoptive parents when reading his twin studies, because he makes you feel like a total lame-duck parent, just a sparrow raising a cuckoo. But he does go on to say that if you do really want your parenting to make a difference, you should adopt from the 3rd world, because you will really be giving them a noticeably different and better life and helping them reach a potential they would not have reached in an African orphanage.

So there’s that.

Myth 4: We have too much population already

Caplan fights this argument with an economist’s point of view: more population is better, he says, because a higher population can support more people with fewer dollars spent per person. Sort of like Wal-Mart.

As the baby boomer generation ages and the younger population shrinks, the taxpayer burden gets heavier because fewer workers are around to help pay pensions for all of those old people. We’re like an upside down pyramid. Instead, the younger population should be larger, so that each person contributes a small amount of money while providing MORE social services to those who need it.

He also points out that our environmental and poverty problems are not a matter of how many people are in the world, but how unfairly the wealth is distributed and how messy our technology is. He points out that the best way to solve our current problems is to have some visionaries invent cleaner technology, more ways to use our world sustainably, and better ways to share the world’s wealth.

He says the best way to increase our chances of producing the next world-saving genius is simply to produce more people. It’s like buying more lottery tickets to improve your chances of hitting the jackpot.

I actually found this a convincing argument. I have always said that intelligent people SHOULD breed, because higher IQ is correlated to a lower birth rate, probably due to things like foresight, and putting off children until a higher level of education has been completed.

But since IQ is at least partially inherited, filling the world with more stupid people than smart people seems like a great way to not only supply morons like Akin as potential leaders, but to idiots to vote for them as well.

—

Ultimately, I can’t say this book convinced me to have more kids.

It spent far too much time trying to convince me that my parenting doesn’t matter in the long run (even he couldn’t argue that parenting doesn’t make a HUGE difference in the short-term, resulting in either a pleasant well-balance kid or a crazy brat), which was hurtful and not particularly inspiring (yes! I want to have more children who I will be unable to influence on a long term basis!) and not enough time on arguments like:

  • The more kids you have, the more likely you will be to produce the musical/scientific/literary genius you always wanted.
  • The more kids you have, the fewer taxes per person everyone else will have to pay in the future.
  • The more kids everyone has, the better a chance that someone will come along to straighten out the oil barons.

The book is full of interesting statistics, research and data, but it’s not very convincingly written. However, I am inclined to check out that Free Ranged Kids book, since he quotes from it constantly and seems to get a lot of his data from there as well. 

He also promotes cry-it-out and I sometimes get the feeling from him that he is against abortion (he spends a lot of time arguing that you owe it to your future children to let them be born, which sounds suspiciously pro-life). That, plus his economist’s arguments for increasing the population, made the book feel a tad right-wing, and I wasn’t overly comfortable with it. 

I would say that Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids makes some interesting points, but isn’t very convincing, because he can’t argue the fact that people with small children are overall less happy than people who don’t have kids at all.

All he can really do to fight that is point out that people who have children are happier and more satisfied with their lives 20 years down the road.

That’s nice to know, but it doesn’t help me when I’m wondering how much more sleep my husband can lose without turning into The Hulk.

Sneaky Spam

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 3 Comments

Spammers are getting cleverer, and occasionally getting past my spam filter. I’ve gotten some insulting spam in the past, but now I’m starting to see middle-of-the-road comments that almost seen genuine when taken out of context.

Like this one, which would sound fine if it weren’t made on THIS blog, where I hold grammar so dear: 

of course like your web site however you need to check the spelling on several of your posts.
A number of them are rife with spelling issues and I to find it very
troublesome to tell the truth on the other hand I will certainly come back again.

Or this comment, which very nearly fooled me:

A motivating discussion is worth comment. I believe that you need to publish more about this subject, it may not be a taboo matter but typically people don’t discuss these topics. To the next! Best wishes!!

I totally almost published it before I realized it was made NOT on one of my posts about miscarriage or teen suicide, as I originally assumed, but on a two year old post about how hard it is to find a Halifax style donair.

You lose. Please play again.

Doomed To Frumpery

02 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

bad clothes, bbw, clothes, consignment clothes, fashion, flattering cuts, large, Value Village

I recently “liked” a Facebook page called Voluptous Vixens, which posts pictures of big, beautiful women looking fabulous. I love it, it gives me hope.

…You CAN be fat AND sexy!

But I didn’t know where these women find their clothes, because as far as I can tell, everything over size Medium looks like it was rejected by the fashion police as “too hideous for normal people to wear”.

We went to Value Village recently to try and find me some new shirts. I kept finding really cute ones, and then realizing that I was in the Small or Medium section. Cute top with a picture of two sushis saying “Soy happy together”? Small. Flatteringly cut empire waist top? Small. Cute black tank? Medium.

And then you move into the Large and Extra Large section, and all you can find are shirts like this:

20130728-070913.jpg

Finally! The hairy-chest look for women!

20130728-070850.jpg

For people with fond memories of ‘The Electric Company”

20130728-070938.jpg

For those who no longer care

20130728-070829.jpg

For those who confuse “precious” with “stylish”

20130728-070839.jpg

Just… no.

20130728-070902.jpg

For those who think bright red is slimming, and golden stars are great all year round

20130728-070925.jpg

Another hairy shirt! THERE WAS MORE THAN ONE

20130728-070953.jpg

Because nothing says “feel thin” like horizontal stripes and a baggy shape

20130728-071001.jpg

Why yes, that IS green velvet. GREEN VELVET.

 

So then I gave up and went to real stores, where everything, even larges, make me look like I’m still pregnant.

I ended up going to Penningtons.

When I walked in, I thought I had entered heaven. Stylish clothes! People heavier than me! A dress I couldn’t wait to get my hands on because it looked so great for summer, so slimming, and such a perfect in-between of dressy and casual.

I spent two hours in there.

…and emerged empty handed.

It turns out that while my waist is a size 17, my upper body, and legs below the waist, are drowned in even Pennington’s smallest sizes.

Which is when I realized that ALL my weight is carried in my belly. In fact, looking at my profile, I can see that I DO, actually, still look pregnant.

It’s like my belly, which had started to gently expand shortly before my fated ultrasound, never went back.

I’ve always kept my weight on my belly, and now it’s worse than ever.

And I don’t know what to do. I’ve been eating low calorie, thanks to the girl diet, but my belly hasn’t budged.

So, basically, I’m too thin to be a Voluptuous Vixen, and too fat to fit normal clothes.

…Should I just buy maternity shirts and accept people’s congratulations?

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