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~ the musings of a left wing left hander with two left feet

If By Yes

Tag Archives: childhood

Neighbourhood Friends

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

childhood, free range parenting, friendship, neighbours, old friends

I met up with an old friend the other day.  She lives in Ontario, but her father and step mother live on Vancouver Island, so she and I got together for lunch while she was passing through Vancouver on her way to the ferry.

“I’m trying to remember when we met,” she said.

I couldn’t remember either. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t in my life.

We lived down the road from each other, on different streets but only a two minute walk away, when I was a young girl in Ontario. I’m pretty sure I was playing in her bedroom and she was swimming in my pool when we were three and four years old.

I remember the names of her Siamese cats and I remember the crisp, British voice of her live-in grandmother. I remember playing in her back yard and sharing popsicles on my back deck.

We haven’t lived in the same city, or even the same province, since we were nine years old.

We aren’t particularly close nowadays. We don’t call each other for a chat and we don’t know the intimate details of each other’s personal lives. But we send Christmas cards, and get together whenever we find ourselves in the same city. She visted me in Nova Scotia when we were teenagers, and again when we were in University. She came to my wedding.

She’s my friend, one of only two people from that time in my life with whom I am still in touch.

I had other neighbourhood friends. The boy next door, Joey, into whose house I often burst without knocking. Colleen, who was my bike riding buddy. I have lost touch with them, but they fill my childhood memories of hot summer days, trick or treating at Halloween, and building snowmen in winter.

It’s funny how you make your own community when you live in a big city. A small city block becomes its own small town. These neighbourhood friends were not my only friends, but they were special because they were also my community.

Now Owl is getting old enough to be able to run and play outside without my direct supervision. Our housing complex is made of clusters of townhouses, doors facing each other, with green quads in between. They make perfect meeting places where children can play and neighbours can talk.

We are lucky to have several fantastic neighbours, and even luckier that the family directly across the quad from us has two small boys right around Owl’s age. One of them is 5 months older, and the other is less than a year younger.

Not only can we swap babysitting, but our boys are starting to realize that they have ready-made playmates living just steps away.

“Owl! You’re my friend, Owl!” is a constant refrain whenever Owl is outside and the neighbour boys spot him through the window, and if Owl hears their voices outside he drops what he is doing, tugs on his shoes and runs outside to greet them.


Sometimes they play tag outside. Sometimes they crash into our house and sometimes they barge into the other house. They fight and make up, run and shout. Screen doors bang and small childish voices fill the air, and I am just so, so, grateful.

I’m grateful that these boys provide distraction for Owl, whose constant need to interact sucks me and even my doting mother in law dry by the end of the day. Heck, by the middle of the day. Okay, by mid morning.

I’m grateful that they are good kids from a loving family, and they don’t fill Owl’s head with corporate characters or guns or gender stereotypes.  If anything, they run around in Ramones tee shirts and have little familiarity with many of the things Owl brings home from the kids in his daycare.

I’m grateful because there is something inexplicably peaceful about sitting on one’s stoop at eight in the morning, sipping a Diet Pepsi (normal people can replace that with the word “coffee”), nursing my baby and listening to the joyful shouts of small children.

IMG_2523

But most of all, I’m grateful that Owl has neighbourhood friends. Maybe they’ll still be in touch 30 years from now. Maybe they won’t be close. Maybe they won’t even live in the same provinces.

But I like to hope that if one of them is in town, Owl will meet them for a lunch and a drink, and they can sit back, and talk about old times.


Maybe Owl will say, “hey, remember my bouncy castle?”

Maybe they’ll say, “hey, remember going out on our Dad’s boat?”

owl on boat

Maybe they’ll ask each other “when did we meet?” and then realize that they have known each other since birth, that their parents witnessed each other’s pregnancies, and that they are part of each other’s life stories.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the peace.

Oh The Places We Will Go…

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by IfByYes in From The Owlery

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

child development, childhood, fun, imagination

I am loving Owl’s imagination.

He was showing signs of imagination from a year and a half or so onwards – making vroom noises when playing with cars, telling us that a toy is sleeping, and so on. But in the months since he turned two his imagination has skyrocketed.

Everything, it seems, is actually something else.

His toy phone is a lollipop. A pine needle is a hockey stick. An upside down bucket is a stove. His poop is a seven. His toast is the letter C, no, it’s a turtle, no, now it’s a car, no, now it’s a dinosaur. RAAAWR!

He tells me that his toy monster/monkey/plastic toy man is a baby and that I shouldn’t touch it, because the baby is sleeping (my mother brought him my old baby doll from Nova Scotia so he can have an actual baby, which might be helpful in the future).

Driving him to daycare the other day I was told in quick succession that I was a cat, that we were both trains, that the car was a train, and then that I was a bicycle and he was a motorbike.

Last night he told me that his penis is a yo yo.

I love it.

First of all, it’s hilarious, and because he isn’t trapped by social conventions he thinks of the most bizarre and incongruous things, which I really enjoy. It’s a little like living with a crazy person. A cute one.

Second of all, it makes life easier and more fun.

One day he wouldn’t put his coat on while he kept insisting that he was a robot. I spared myself a tantrum by addressing him as “Mr. Robot”, and when thus appropriately dubbed he put on his coat and went out to the car quite cheerfully.

I’m really looking forward to when his ability to develop complex “let’s pretends” improves, so I can get him to do whatever I want by saying “Let’s pretend…”

If I want him to be well behaved in the grocery store I can invent a game where we have to pretend that we’re stocking up for a journey on the seven seas and talk like pirates the whole time.

If I want him to be quiet in a library we can pretend that the whole place is rigged for a bomb that will go off if we speak too loud.

If I want him to get dressed fast in the morning we can pretend we’re firemen, or that a dinosaur will eat us if we don’t hurry up and get out of the cave.

No only will it make things fun for him, it’ll make things fun for ME.

I spent my entire childhood in an elaborate game of “let’s pretend” which I remember quite vividly. A lot of my childhood memories have clearly fictional elements, like the memory of going out to see someone’s yacht and being followed by a large brontosaurus, or chatting with trees in the school playground.

I lost human playmates when I reached 13 years old, because everyone was too cool for let’s pretend. I had to play it quietly by myself in such a way that no one would notice.

Finally I was introduced to D ‘n D in my twenties before I found that again, and that’s not portable. I can go play D ‘n D, but then I have to go back to my boring old life.

Once Owl is old enough, life can be fun again.

Right now, penis = YoYo is the best he can manage.

But it’s a great start.

20130126-134724.jpg

20130126-134828.jpg

Beware The Seahorse, Children. It’s All… Soporific And Stuff.

06 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by IfByYes in From The Owlery

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

babies, childhood, conditioning, fears, psychology, sleep, weird

Okay, here’s where I explain the loss of the seahorse.

Remember the seahorse?

We really came to depend on that seahorse. During the whole Go The F*** To Sleep incident, Owl would often drift off to sleep staring dreamily at the seahorse’s glowing tummy.

When he started daycare, the seahorse went with him every day to help him go down at nap time.

Then, one Saturday a couple of months ago, Perfect Husband picked me up from work and told me that Owl was afraid of his seahorse.

“Don’t be silly,” I told him, “he fell asleep to it just last night – he just lay there and watched it until he drifted off, while I hummed in the rocking chair.”

“Well, he found it today and he brought it to me, so I turned it on for him, and he started to scream.”

“He must have just gotten a teething pain at that exact time. It must be a coincidence.”

To prove PH wrong, I turned on the seahorse and showed it to Owl when we got home that night.

…He took one look at his musical bedtime pal and burst into horrified, heartbroken tears, and ran off to find his Dada.

Monday afternoon, when I picked him up, Daycare Lady told me that Owl hadn’t slept. He kept standing up in his playpen an screaming in a heartbreaking manner which was entirely unlike him.

I couldn’t understand how he could have developed a fear of his seahorse literally over night, but it was looking more and more like this was, in fact, the case.

I asked Daycare Lady if anything bad had happened to Owl with the seahorse – maybe another child had thrown it at him?

No, she didn’t think so. She checked with her helper lady, and helper lady hadn’t seen anything like that either.

In any case, the next day he went to daycare without the seahorse and slept fine.

So I put the seahorse aside for a while.

I miss the darn thing because now if I want Owl to go to sleep without being on the booba, I have to sing “Mama’s Going To Buy You A Mockingbird” over and over and over and over again. I have had a sore throat lately and this ISN’T HELPING.

Besides, the music is soothing and I missed that, too.

In our organizing stint last week I dug up good ole’ Glowy again, and I offered it to Owl. It had been months. Surely… whatever it was that upset him about it… was forgotten by now.

It started well.

He seemed happy to see it and reached for it. He even pressed the belly to turn it on.

Words cannot express the look of betrayal that crossed his face when the music began to play.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME??

The crazy thing is, every time I turned it off, he’d go over to the thing and turn it back on. 

"hey, it stopped! Let's just press the tummy and..."

"ARGH OH NO, WHY??"

(click the pictures for close-ups of the agony)

"HOW CAN I BEAR THE PAIN??"

"Hey, I didn't say TURN IT OFF..."

Suffice to say we’re baffled.

Attachment Theory 101 Part the Second: Mediocrity for the win

13 Friday May 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, My Blag is on the Interwebs, Pointless Posts

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

ambivalent attachments, amygdala, attachment parenting, attachment theory, avoidant attachments, babies, behaviour, brain development, child development, childhood, emotions, impulse control, neuropsychology, parenting, parenting styles, prefrontal cortex, secure attachments, toddlers

Remember how I threatened you with a sequel to my Attachment Theory 101 post?

Ha! You guys thought I forgot, didn’t you?

Well, I didn’t. I just try to space these super serious posts so I don’t scare you all away. You’ll notice that this post will be followed up by something entirely frivolous, because that’s what the people want.

In this post:

How attachment theory applies to the biology of the human brain and body, and why extreme methods, like Tiger Mom or Blossom Mom “strategies” of parenting don’t really make a lot of sense.

Or, put even more succinctly, why it is important to be a mediocre parent and good to screw up every now and then, as long as you hug and make up afterwards.

Continue reading →

Happy Mother’s Day! Look, I’m all wee and stuff!

08 Sunday May 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love, Vids and Vlogs, We Are Family

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

childhood, home videos, mother's day, mothers, parents, videos

In honor of Mother’s Day, and Babby turning eight months old, I present this video.

Now I will return to being coddled and pampered as I so richly deserve, because I happened to give birth last year.

The money in my pocket bit is sort of a lie. I have poop bags in my pocket. That’s similar.

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