Monthly Archives: September 2013

Way too many things to think about

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It’s October tomorrow. That means I’ve a lot of planning to do. For instance:

Planning in further detail our trip to Ireland at the end of the month -

  • what I’ll wear
  • what I have to buy in order to wear these things 
  • how I’ll masquerade as a stylish person instead of a slobby soccer mom who wears the same pair of jeans and scuffed mary-janes every single day
  • if the kids need new shoes for all the walking in rain that will happen (answer: yes)

And boring stuff like

  • car seats to borrow
  • things for kids to do on the journey

Additionally,

  • touristy-type things we might do when we’re there, now that the children are a little older
  • people I need to contact to see if we can pin down when we might see them
  • how wet an Autumn they’ll be having for those specific two weeks

Also, not to forget,

  • working out our best marathon-viewing opportunities, because of course B is running the marathon . 

Then, as a subheading, we have not merely

  • Halloween in Dublin: do we have to bring costumes? what costumes? where will we do the trick-or-treating? does B want to do some sort of elaborate themed family thing? (Answer: over my dead body; only if he organizes the whole thing; therefore, no.) Dash is talking about some variation on last year (Luke Skywalker) that involves a green lightsaber (very specifically) and a brown cloak and I think it’s just a ploy to get a new lightsaber when it’s neither his birthday nor Christmas.

but also (sigh, sunrise sunset, etc),

  • Mabel’s fifth birthday, in Dublin: do we have a family party? In which case, where? Can I bake a cake in our Air B’n'B rental apartment? Do we bring presents to Dublin? (No. What sort of idiot do you take me for?) But then I need to buy or order presents before we go so they’re here when we get back.

And of course, planning a birthday party with her friends for the weekend after we get back, when we’ll be only just over the jet lag but I’ll still be expected to infuse us all with sugar some more and again and repeatedly, unless she wants a broccoli cake which sounds to me like a great idea but maybe not to her brother’s taste.

Which planning will not be a trivial matter even though I can just bung an evite out there (thank the deity for evites; I love ‘em) because we’ll have to figure out

(a) just girls?
(b) which girls?
(c) just girls and one boy?
(d) siblings?
(e) just the one sibling of the one boy so Dash has a friend?
(f) and the one who’s the twin of one of the girls?
(g) but then, what about the boy whose birthday party she’s attending next week?
(h) parents?

And then we have to hammer out the decision in such a way that she doesn’t decide the next day and every next day after that to change her mind in some new and unspecified direction. Which probably means just inviting feckin’ everyone.

And then, there’s always looking way ahead to Christmas and making a cake and planning to go to the Nutcracker for the first time and whatever other things we should do when we have Christmas here instead of in Ireland.

So you can see why planning what we’re having for dinner tonight has just fallen completely by the wayside. Maybe there’s something in the freezer.

Slow-flowing river
Think calming thoughts.

Baby update

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The babies have been earning their keep lately, you’ll be pleased to hear.

They’ve been going to school.

Some of them are exemplary students.

And they all have their names on flashcards.

After a hard morning’s learning, it’s time for a snack and some TV.

The Internet: not so scary after all

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D’you remember the movie The Net ? Sandra Bullock, presumably alongside some forgettable male, played someone who was so plugged in to technology that she never left her house, ordered pizza on the Internet, had no friends and no outside-world contact. Your classic movie introvert geek – the it-could-never-happen-in-real-life twist, I suppose, being that she was a pretty young woman instead of a Comic-Book-Guy-esque bloke. She got mixed up in something, she made magic with her fingertips on the keyboard, the computers fizzed and popped, and lo, everything was all right in the end. She was probably even enticed out of her apartment and into the real world.*

The future looked pretty bleak though, and it was a cautionary tale for those people who might end up like Sandy. Don’t get too attached to the Internet, they told us, or you’ll lose yourself down a rabbit hole of online dating (DANGER, WILL ROBINSON) and endless cheesy pepperoni. You may even forget how to communicate with the guy who brings the pizza, and then he won’t get a tip. And then he might murder you. (Different film. Probably.)

But then there’s this.

Last week a friend of mine was having a bit of a hard time. Some other friends got together, had a quick whip-round, and bought her a present to cheer her up. She was touched and delighted. All these friends were geographically spread across three countries at the time, and most of them had never even met her, or each other, and still haven’t.

Elsewhere, a woman who has helped many parents over the past several years by providing invaluable support and information had a family crisis. There was an outpouring of love and prayers and good vibes for her situation, as a whole passel of people who have been helped by what she has done saw a chance to give back, if only with thoughts and words, a fraction of the good she has done for us.

Once upon a time there was a girl whose not-so-secret desire was to be a real writer. She still hasn’t quite got around to writing that book, but thanks to the Internet, she got to write regularly and get encouraging feedback from an array of friends and strangers, and it meant oh so much to her. Because the Internet means she is a real writer.

People on the Internet make a difference for others, without necessarily leaving their houses. They build communities, they make friends, they have real relationships and provide true, unjudgemental empathy. They also have fun dates and meet nice people and, hey, order pizza without going outside, and that works pretty well.

The Internet is not such a scary place, is what I’m trying to say. It’s growing up and turning out not so badly, I think.

* I purposely did not look up the movie ( on the Internet ; oh, the delicious irony) to find out more about what actually happened, lest I touch the delicate bloom of my ignorance and discover that I was completely wrong and my whole carefully constructed (ahem) argument falls apart at the seams. If necessary, you may understand that this is my imagining , from this later point, of what The Net was about. I’m positive it was Sandra B, though. That much I know.

Love is…

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I love that we can ask Dash if he’s a little concerned and he knows we’re quoting The Princess Bride .

I love that Mabel just spelled the word “sad” all by herself, and said she knew it was an A in the middle because it’s the same sound as in “cat”, which is the only word she knows how to spell apart from her name.

I love that Dash is reading an honest-to-God chapter book for his nightly reading these days. A simple one , but a chapter book nonetheless. Before vision therapy , the idea of his reading that much text on a page was unthinkable. The words don’t go blurry any more.

I love that Mabel keeps announcing things like “Mummy, three and three more is six!” The wonder of math, afresh.

I love that B is reading The Hobbit to Dash at bedtime these days. I thought it might be a bit ambitious, but so far it’s going well.

I love that when Dash criticized Mabel’s drawing of a dinosaur, she replied, “When you say that, it makes me feel as if I’m not important.” He apologized. I high-fived myself in the kitchen.

I love that Dash is finally old enough to make his own damn cardboard swords instead of bugging us to do it.

I love that Mabel can brush her teeth all by herself.

I love that we can take public transport into the city, walk around, do a museum, and get home again WITHOUT A STROLLER. Escalators and steps are so much easier than finding the hidden elevator every time.

I do love babies, but I love having big kids too.

Damn nature, either way

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We all know by now that I am not really very Good With Nature. I like it in small bursts away from which I can easily get. I like my concrete and my pavements and my tall buildings, actually. I feel safer on the asphalt. Nature is unpredictable. One misstep and you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with a gammy ankle.

On Sunday we went Into Nature, not far from home. We saw deer and found geocaches and got fresh air and the weather was delightful and by the time we were done it was too late to go home and make dinner so we had to go out for burgers and chips. (Fries.) (We still say chips. It’s our one victory over our children’s American vocabularies.)

Well, feck nature, I said the next morning, as I plucked a whole bunch of pin-head-sized ticks off my son’s body, and one slightly bigger one off my own a few hours later. Fecking deer. Sod off, Bambi.

Dash is always a magnet for wildlife, and he had been wearing shorts too. That evening I was still combing him – almost literally – for ticks when I noticed he seemed to have met a particularly angry swarm of mosquitoes as well. On his lower back.

That’s odd, I thought.

Then he disrobed for his bath and I found more little welts coming up all over his hips, as if he’d rolled around naked in a hornet’s nest. Very odd. Exactly the opposite of where mosqitoes normally get him, on his arms and legs – though he had a few on his neck and ears too.

By Tuesday morning I was having Other Thoughts about the bites. Like that maybe they were not bites, but a rash. A rash I couldn’t blame Nature for, apart from the regular nature that we have to put up with because it is Us because we are not yet cyborgs. (Oh, how I yearn for those cyborg days.)

I really thought he had chicken pox, and sent him to the doctor, who sent him back with a label saying “Probably Not,” since he’s had all his shots and the rash didn’t look quite right for that. Apparently kids can just get a rash as a reaction to a cold virus, and he had brought a cough home from school last week that we have all come down with after him.

This morning I woke up with a few scattered itchies myself. Since I’ve had chicken pox too (yes, the real thing; they don’t vaccinate for it in Ireland), I suppose this means that it’s very unlikely to be it. Which is good, because I sent him back to school this morning. From a distance, you can’t even tell he looks like a disgruntled mosquito took out his rage all over Dash’s backside.

So I suppose Nature’s off the hook for this one. For the moment. But I’ve got my eye on you, Nature. (Picture me doing that two-fingers-to-eyes movement that indicates menacing watching. I’m like Tony Soprano over here.)

Free-range parents v. the Lorax

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One of my favourite things about our neighbourhood is the Sunday morning farmers’ market. We show up some time after ten, the kids get chocolate croissants, we get coffee, we sit on the grass, friends appear, kids run around, we chat, it’s nice. I buy some vegetables, usually.

The children all like to climb two trees nearby – one in particular is sturdy and child-friendly, branches low enough to the ground for a tall five-year-old to boost themself up, spread wide enough to hold four or more at once. They play monkeys, and baby birds, and jungle animals, and every now and then a parent is called over to put up or take down a smaller child and be drawn into the game.

Yesterday morning was just the same.
“Where’s Dash?” B asked me.
“In the tree,” I said, waving vaguely in that direction, where I could see a flash of blue Superman t-shirt between the green leaves.

A few minutes later Dash and his friend came back to us. The friend was looking upset and as she sat on her mother’s lap and began to cry, I asked Dash what had happened, afraid she’d hurt herself.

“She’s a bit unhappy because a lady told us to get out of the tree,” he told me.
“What lady?”
“The lady over there.”
“Why? Were you doing something wrong?”
“No, we were just in the tree.”

My friend (also a mom of tree-climbers) and I went over to see what was what. The children all came with us, six of them, all a little unsure and wondering what was going to happen. We told them that they were allowed climb in the tree, because all their parents said they could. We told them it wasn’t against the law. We put those who wanted to climb back up in the tree.

The elderly lady approached us, looking disapproving. We thanked her for her concern. We said that we allowed our children to climb the tree, that they were doing it no harm, that they played here every week.

She told us they shouldn’t, that they were damaging the tree. We said they weren’t. They all know not to put their weight on branches that are too slim to bear it. It was a face-off, it really was.

“Make them come down, or I’ll… I’ll call the police,” she wavered, beginning to rummage in her fanny pack for a phone.
“Okay, ” we said. “Call them.”

We stood there putting one child and another up and down according to their whims, as she ambled away and then back, and then took up sentry duty sitting on a nearby rock. She glowered. The children were a little worried and kept telling us she was still there. “That’s okay,” we said. “You’re allowed be in the tree.”

A few minutes later, when most of the kids had tired of the tree and run off to play hide and seek, a police car rolled up and came to a halt in that corner of the parking lot. The lady began to talk to the officer. As I approached from the other side, I heard him say “…it’s not illegal…”
He looked over at me enquiringly.

“Thank you,” I said. “We just wanted to confirm that it’s not illegal for children to climb trees.”
“It’s not,” he said, and I gave him a little thumbs up and a smile.

There was just one four-year-old still in the tree at the time. Then the officer leaned out of his window and asked his mother to take him down, because of “citizen complaints.” So she did, because we are all good law-abiding citizens who do what the police tell us, even when we were abiding by the laws the whole time.

We were pretty disappointed in that. The policeman probably took the path of least resistance, and decided that appeasing a cantankerous old lady by removing a child from a tree was the easiest thing to do.

But it leaves us in limbo and with unanswered questions from our children. If it’s not illegal, why should they have to stop doing it? Why should the cantankerous old lady win? Should we just take our children to a purpose-built playground structure if they want to climb so badly? But what if we want to enjoy the market at the same time?

And I feel bad for the old lady, who may be many years away from remembering how much fun it is to climb a tree, or even how it’s nice to watch your children climb trees instead of playing computer games; who might feel that a tree like that, in a public place, is a treasure that must be protected from little limbs and weighing-down torsos, from children who are little more than vandals and their parents who are jumped-up rebellious teenagers in her eyes.

And I admit that there was a little thrill there, in standing up to an old lady. We tried to be as respectful as we could while letting her know we disagreed and felt she was overstepping the line. We tried to model – what? good rebellion? – for our children. We tried to show our children that we were the grownups who knew the right thing to do, that they could always trust us to be their moral compasses even when others who saw themselves as authority figures might have different messages.

Climbing trees is more complicated than you might think.

———-

To be clear, I don’t want to make the old lady the villain of the piece. She has her opinions, and one of them is that our children shouldn’t be climbing that tree. Like the Lorax, she speaks for the trees. And I don’t blame the policeman, really, for asking us to get the kids down. His job is to keep the peace, and he probably knows that old ladies with nothing much else to do all day are more likely to disturb his peace than busy families who can just head on elsewhere.

It’s just a funny story, really, about the day the police came to tell the children not to climb a tree.

That said, we’ll all be back there next weekend, I think, and if the kids want to climb the tree, we’ll be letting them.

Gainful employ

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I have a contracting job. I’ve spent about five hours this week doing work that people will pay me actual money for. This is quite exciting, I have to say. It gives me some focus when Mabel’s in school (apart from focusing on not cleaning the house, which is something I put a great deal of concentration into) and the idea of getting a check at some point in the future that I can bring to the bank and turn into money that I can exchange for goods and/or services is fairly mind-blowing.

I’ve done freelancing in the past, since I turned my back on the world of 8 to 5 and decided to go all out having babies and baking muffins instead, but they were once-off projects. This is (should be; not counting chickens) more of a regular, steady thing. Of course, I need to keep a chunk for tax, and I should really put all the rest away for our retirement, or into the college fund or something (there is no college fund; the children will have to go to college in Ireland, or get scholarships) but I’m busy spending the rest in my head several times over on boots and bags and new jeans and a cleaning lady and a professional hair-dye job.

Sigh. My wants are modest and meagre.

The work is good. It’s not exciting stuff and copy-editing is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but I’m funny that way. It’s challenging enough to be satisfying, and I was able to jump right in and get down to it straight away, which is nice when you’re only working in one-to-two-hour bursts. It’s really very gratifying to not only remember that you have skills that people will pay for but actually find the people who want to make use of them.

**********

I should say something about my new purple badge. I was very happy to be nominated for a Blog Award Ireland and I’m most delighted to have made the shortlist. (I’m also thrilled that the Irish Parenting Bloggers are so well represented, despite the lack of a dedicated Parenting category.)

I’m in the category called “Diaspora”, which is what Irish people call anyone who emigrated, because Mary Robinson said it in 1985 or sometime, and it sounds all poetic and stuff. It was nice of them to have a category for non-residents, though it does mean I’m up against all the might of The Irish Times’s Generation Emigration blog, for instance, which seems like a bit of a hard act to follow. Nevertheless, as we say in these situations, it’s an honour just to be considered.

Blog Awards Ireland 2013 Shortlist Logo  

Mabelisms

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Mabel was feeling a bit off-colour on Monday, because she was about to come down with a stonking head cold. I didn’t know that, of course, and I was co-oping at her school. As far as I was concerned, she was just being ornery.

I tried hard to look at it from her side: when she’s at home she’s Home Mabel and when she’s at school she’s School Mabel, but when I’m at school too, she’s both, or neither, and she’s pulled in all directions. It’s got to be hard.

But she beats the Shakespearian Insult Generator for epithets, sometimes.

At playground time she told me, of her best friend, who was sweetly trying to help, “He’s a big lump of chocolate.”

This was meant to be an insult. I pointed out that it sounded quite delicious, so she came up with a few more choice phrases for him and then turned on me.

“You’re an egg that’s been boiled and cooked in the oven.”

 I was duly chastened.

Spidey Sense

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Welcome to the September 2013 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Staying Safe
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama . This month our participants have shared stories and tips about protecting our families. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.
***

One day during the summer, I took the kids to a playground in a part of town I hadn’t been to before. The venue had been suggested for a meetup with some other friends, but it was clear before I left the house that nobody else was likely to make it. Never mind, I thought, we’ll check out somewhere new. It’ll be an adventure, I said.

The route was straightforward and we were there in about fifteen minutes. There was plenty of space to park, a lovely new-looking pirate-ship shaped playground structure, clean bathrooms, and a river view. There were some other children at the playground and everyone had a good time for a while, until we got hungry.

We took our lunches over to the picnic tables. I noticed some people sitting at the tables were older men, smoking, not seeming to have anything to do with the children at the playground. Not to put too fine a point on it, they looked somewhat homeless. We sat at a further away table without making any avoidance too obvious – it was reasonable to want a clean table in the shade. My kids and I had a little discussion about smoking. Apparently they lead a sheltered existence, because they don’t see it very often so they always feel the need to comment , and then I have to agree that smoking is bad for you but that it’s often hard to stop once you’re in the habit, in case those people are listening and taking umbrage.

A group of summer-camp kids and their supervisors came along and started unpacking lunches at the tables beside us. This was obviously a perfectly safe area. But I was starting to feel a little uneasy, nevertheless.

A little further along the waterfront I could see another playground – one of those red and yellow plastic ones you can see for a long way. It looked cheerful and I suggested we check it out rather than going back to the pirate ship, since our friends were clearly not coming and the other children playing there seemed to have gone home. My son wanted to walk the fairly short distance, but I insisted on going back to get the car and driving down to the parking lot beside the other playground. I said it was because we had to put our lunch things back in the car anyway, but the truth, which I was still only half admitting to myself, was that I wanted to know I had a quick exit strategy, just in case the other playground turned out to be not so child-friendly.

I drove the scant quarter mile along the road, with the seven-year-old laying the blame for global warming squarely at my feet all the while. As we turned into the second parking lot, I took in a few details. The building beside the playground seemed to be derelict, but a young man was standing on the steps. Loitering, you might almost say. There was a truck with a worker loading or unloading something park-related and official around the side. As we approached the playground, I registered the following:

  1. The swings and slides were in some disrepair.
  2. There were no children to be seen.
  3. The only other cars in the parking lot were two parked beside each other with open doors and one person in each, conversing, or exchanging illegal substances for money, or something. 

Now, I’m not the most noticing of people, and I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but something about fact number three there just screamed “drug deal” to me. I swung all the way around the parking lot and smoothly back out again and announced that we were going home, actually. The four-year-old in the back (who had fed all her lunch to the geese) exploded with misery, and the seven-year-old wasn’t far behind. Being driven slowly past an enticing new playground and then whisked away was high on their list of atrocities, but I just didn’t feel comfortable and no amount of wailing was going to induce me to stay.

As we drove away and the indignant cries died down, as I – incidentally – missed the on-ramp I needed and started to get lost in an unfamiliar part of town that I was noticing looked more and more sketchy, I took the opportunity to explain to my kids the importance of listening to your Spidey Sense.

My invoking the webbed wonder made them stop and pay attention. Your Spidey Sense, I told them, lets you know when things aren’t right. Listen to it. If you feel uncomfortable in a place, or with a person, even if it’s a grown up who’s supposed to be in charge of you, that’s your Spidey Sense telling you to leave. Even if you can’t see anything wrong, if you know there’s no logical reason to feel that way, just go.

So I explained the things that had made me uncomfortable in that place – the possibly homeless men, the derelict building, the absence of other children at the unmaintained playground – and I told them that I felt it wasn’t a safe place for us to be, and that was why we’d left. (I didn’t mention the drug deal. It might have been a perfectly innocent job interview. Or something.) They listened, they took it in, and they stopped calling me the worst mother ever for leaving a set of swings unswung in.

Two children on a tyre swing at a playground
Not the playground in question

I haven’t read The Gift of Fear , but I know that listening to your Spidey Sense, or however the author may term it, is a vital message of the book. And, though I’ve been lucky enough never to have found myself in a situation I couldn’t get out of, the older I get, the more credit I give to my gut feelings. It’s never too early to teach your children to trust their instincts. It might just keep them safe.

***

Carnival of Natural Parenting -- Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

(This list will be updated by afternoon September 10 with all the carnival links.)

  • Stranger Danger — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama shares her approach to the topic of “strangers” and why she prefers to avoid that word, instead opting to help her 4-year-old understand what sorts of contact with adults is appropriate and whom to seek help from should she ever need it.
  • We are the FDA — Justine at The Lone Home Ranger makes the case that when it comes to food and drugs, parents are necessarily both their kids’ best proponent of healthy eating and defense against unsafe products.
  • You Can’t Baby Proof Mother Nature — Nicole Lauren at Mama Mermaid shares how she tackles the challenges of safety when teaching her toddler about the outdoors.
  • Bike Safety With Kids — Christy at Eco Journey In the Burbs shares her tips for safe cycling with children in a guest post at Natural Parents Network .
  • Water — sustainablemum explains how she has used her love of canoeing to enable her children to be confident around water
  • Safety without baby proofing — Hannabert at Hannahandhorn talks about teaching safety rather than babyproofing.
  • Coming of Age: The Safety Net of Secure Attatchment — Gentle Mama Moon reflects on her own experiences of entering young adulthood and in particular the risks that many young women/girls take as turbulent hormones coincide with insecurities and for some, loneliness — a deep longing for connection.
  • Mistakes You Might Be Makings With Car Seats — Car seats are complex, and Brittany at The Pistachio Project shares ways we might be using them improperly.
  • Could your child strangle on your window blinds? — One U.S. child a month strangles to death on a window blind cord — and it’s not always the obvious cords that are the danger. Lauren at Hobo Mama sends a strong message to get rid of corded blinds, and take steps to keep your children safe.
  • Tips to Help Parents Quit Smoking (and Stay Quit) — Creating a safe, smoke-free home not only gives children a healthier childhood, it also helps them make healthier choices later in life, too. Dionna at Code Name: Mama (an ex-smoker herself) offers tips to parents struggling to quit smoking, and she’ll be happy to be a source of support for anyone who needs it.
  • Gradually Expanding Range — Becca at The Earthling’s Handbook explains how she is increasing the area in which her child can walk alone, a little bit at a time.
  • Safety Sense and Self Confidence — Do you hover? Are you overprotective? Erica at ChildOrganics discusses trusting your child’s safety sense and how this helps your child develop self-confidence.
  • Staying Safe With Food Allergies and Intolerances — Kellie at Our Mindful Life is sharing how she taught her son about staying safe when it came to his food allergies.
  • Don’t Touch That Baby! — Crunchy Con Mom offers her 3 best tips for preventing unwanted touching of your baby.
  • Playground Wrangling: Handling Two Toddlers Heading in Opposite Directions — Megan at the Boho Mama shares her experience with keeping two busy toddlers safe on the playground (AKA, the Zone of Death) while also keeping her sanity.
  • — Mommy at Playing for Peace tries to accept the bumps, bruises and tears that come from letting her active and curious one-year-old explore the world and take chances.
  • Preventing Choking in Babies and Toddlers with Older Siblings — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now gives tips on preventing choking in babies and toddlers along with Montessori-inspired tips for preventing choking in babies and toddlers who have older siblings working with small objects.
  • Keeping Our Children Safe: A Community and National Priority — September has many days and weeks dedicated to issues of safety; however, none stir the emotions as does Patriot Day which honors those slain the terrorist attacks. Along with honoring the victims, safety officals want parents to be ready in the event of another disaster whether caused by terrorists or nature. Here are their top tips from Mary at Mary-andering Creatively .
  • A Complete Family: Merging Pets and Offspring — Ana at Panda & Ananaso shares the ground rules that she laid out for herself, her big brown dog, and later her baby to ensure a happy, safe, and complete family.
  • Be Brave — Shannon at Pineapples & Artichokes talks about helping her kids learn to be brave so that they can stay safe, even when she’s not around.
  • Catchy Phrasing — Momma Jorje just shares one quick tip for helping kids learn about safety. She assures there are examples provided.
  • Know Your Kid — Alisha at Cinnamon&Sassfras refutes the idea that children are unpredictable.
  • Surprising car seat myths — Choosing a car seat is a big, important decision with lots of variables. But there are some ways to simplify it and make sure you have made the safest choice for your family. Megan at Mama Seeds shares how, plus some surprising myths that changed her approach to car seats completely!
  • I Never Tell My Kids To Be Careful — Kim is Raising Babes, Naturally , by staying present and avoiding the phrase “be careful!”

This entry was posted in adventures , Parenting and tagged carnival of natural parenting , playgrounds , safety on by .

Perfect moment

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As I put Mabel to bed tonight, she looked up at me and announced, “Mummy, you are very beautiful.”

“Thank you,” I said, doing my best to practice taking a compliment graciously. “So are you.”

“Some day I’ll be a very beautiful lady,” she said.

“Yes, you will.”

All I have to do is not mess with that perfect confidence.