When I love the idea of home school is when I see Fyo fascinated by the learning opportunities within our own environment. Outside, is our fish pond. Our house doesn't really have walls, just a ledge that he can peer over into the fish pond.
In the morning, as we wait for the water to boil for the morning's first cup of coffee, we go over to the fish pond to count the frogs sitting on lily pads. Then one day, we saw a collection of black frog eggs sitting on one of the lily pads.
A week later, we had ourselves a new batch of tadpoles. We walked outside so we could peer closer into the pond. We saw black squiggly question marks swimming along the wall of the pond and eating the fish food, he had scattered.
"Fish" he said. For Fyo, everything in the water, from tadpole to dolphin, is a fish. Kent and I watched the sperm like creatures and felt that awe you feel in the presence of new life. I also felt that awe of realizing how much I forgot from my high school biology class.
"I think the tail grows into the spine," Kent said.
"It must. They look so much like embryo, and I think that's what happens in the womb."
But in the end, we didn't know. So, we're watching them to find out.
Now in the morning, Kent scoops out a glass of water with tadpoles squiggly swimming and Fyo peers in to see what he calls fish.
I try to be positive, I really do. But I battle a deeply ingrained cynical streak. I try to be nice, and truth be told, people and things get on my nerves. In the parenting world, there are things I can’t really take any more. Especially when people say them in reference to my child. Actually, when they say them at all. I wonder why some people become parents. Really.
For example:
1. “He’s just doing it to get attention.”
Um. Yes. Kids need attention, and if you don’t want to give your child attention, you really should have thought about that before having one. I do get that some people have children not after a rational thought process, but at the whim of their hormones. Still, pay attention to your child. And if you don’t like how your child demands attention, then teach him appropriate ways to ask for attention or for what he needs. At the very least, consider if you weren’t trying so hard to ignore your child, then maybe he wouldn’t be sticking an entire box of Legos up his nose trying to get you to notice him.
2. The Terrible Twos
I feel for two year olds. They’re still relatively new to the planet, no longer infants, still babyish, mostly toddlers, but they’re in between a pile of milestones of talking and physical coordination. Really, any of us, would get frustrated when we constantly bump our heads against our own limitations and somebody else’s boundaries, then someone has to go and call them terrible on top of it. My husband and I started getting warnings about how the Twos begin at 18 months; I put a stop to it being called terrible. Inevitably, these parents roll their eyes at me and utter an “Oh, you just wait…” Maybe so. People did the same to my husband and me when we were pregnant and dared to suggest that surely it was possible to parent, travel, sleep, and not have a house full of plastic crap that the baby industry deems necessarily for your child’s survival? “Just wait…” parents, siblings and friends said.
Well, guess what? We sleep, and have slept from the beginning and we travel and we don’t have a house full of crap that Babies R Us says we need. So there.
Yes, I do have exhausting days as I interact with my son as he tests limits and boundaries and as he wants to grab anything with a cord or buttons or as he wants to watch movies all day and when I say no, he cries. I get frustrated. I wish he would nap like he used to all day long. But I still wouldn’t say he’s terrible or that this age is terrible.
It just seems unfair to label the kids without even giving them a chance. It’s like assuming children growing up in the lower class inner city are criminals in the making before they’ve completed the 8th grade. And it negates the gifts of this age, that in one day, my son says 10 new words or takes himself to the toilet without any prompting from my husband or I.
3. The Dinner Table Dynamics.
Clean your plate. Eat three more bites. Eat your vegetables. If you don’t finish, then no dessert. If you’re not hungry enough to eat your dinner, you can’t be hungry enough for dessert.
Blah blah blah.
This all strikes me as Depression-era parenting, or back in the day when families didn’t know the next time they would eat so they really had to take advantage of their meals, not just for their appetites but for the nutrients their bodies needed to survive.
Despite the recent recession, I doubt kids still need this at the dinner table.
Dare I say that I even think it is disrespectful? Kids need to learn to listen to their own bodies and they can decide for themselves when they are full. When half our children are obese, does it really make sense to instill in them that they need to clean their plate even if they are full? Does it benefit them to teach them that they can get their parent’s approval if they eat three more bites?
And the dessert? You might as well say to your child, “Yes, you’re right to not like vegetables and to like dessert.” Also, honestly, as an adult, when I want dessert, I do eat less dinner, otherwise I get full. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I have no problem teaching my child to do the same.
Plus, this whole thing is weird. I mean, no one says to my child’s grandparents, “Eat three more bites, then you can be done.” Because it would be weird. Adults get to say when they’re full, why not teach children to respect and listen to their bodies and say when they’re full too?
4. “He needs to get a grip on himself” or “He needs to calm himself down.”
Whatever. I have met adults who do not know how to get a grip on themselves or calm themselves down. My son is a child, and he is still actually learning about his emotions, as children do when they aren’t quite two.
I want my child to learn to be compassionate and respectful. The best way to teach him this near as I can tell? Treat him with compassion and respect.
5. Smacking and Spanking
Recent studies on smacking and spanking all show that it leads to more aggressive children and even contributes to school bullying and as a result, school violence. Yet parents still smack and spank their children, largely because, as one or two has protested to me, “I was smacked as a child. It is an apt punishment.”
Really?
I admit, I am a bit neurotic when it comes to parenting, and I am often asking myself about the larger picture in terms of what my actions are teaching my son. But the smacking seems like a no brainer.
Mostly, it gets on my nerves when I see it on the playground. Or when someone else’s child smacks my child. Then the parent or nanny rushes over and smacks their child, (so it becomes clear where he learned it) and then what happens? The child smacks my child again (for his getting in trouble), because now, as they inevitably protest, they are playing make believe and my child is the baby while the other child is the parent.
It’s enough to drive you batty.
Selfishly, what I hate most about this, is when I insist my child not be babysat by people who smack, spank or hit their children, even if these same people are friends or family, I’m the one who looks like a total witch. Granted, this is a small price to pay to insist on my child being respected, so I’ll pay it.
When my husband Kent and I decided we wanted to live overseas, our friends and families warned us to do it before we had a family, because you couldn’t really travel once you had a family, or that you could but it was very difficult. When we then said we were trying to get pregnant, our same friends and family shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders as if we were lost causes and there was no hope for us.
But why not? Just because most people settle down when they start a family and find a house in the suburbs doesn’t mean every one has to. Especially when I have a phobia level fear of the suburbs. We still had places we wanted to see; did having children mean we were supposed to give that up until they left home? What? Who said?
My husband looked for work overseas, found a job that would take us to Singapore (but first to LA), I got pregnant, had our son (while still in LA). My husband’s Uncle Charlie told him that he had rocks in his head; we took that as a blessing and off we went.
It turns out people were wrong. You can travel with a baby and it is actually easier than people say or think it is. At least we’re finding it to be.
In Singapore, we met a lot of expat families who, like my husband, had found work that took them to Singapore. Singapore is relatively child friendly. They have clean sidewalks where you can push your prams and strollers. You can have a full time live in nanny for not much more than a car payment.The doctors do over medicate (ie they will prescribe antibiotics for teething pain and just about everything else) and it is too hot to play outside unless you happen to be at a water park, but other than that, lots of families love it there.
But when my husband’s project ended, we decided to come to Bali so he could recover from the exhaustion his long work hours left him with. Once he was well rested,we could figure out what was next for us.
Yet in Bali, we’re tempted to stay and create a home here. Part of this is the beauty of the island, the lush green and terraced rice fields, the cheaper cost of living for a higher quality of life, the beautiful people, and to a large part, the quality of the expat community.
Turns out we are not the only ones who one sat up in bed one day and decided they wanted to take their families overseas to live.
We’ve met numerous families who are actually spending their entire year traveling. Every where else that I have lived, it has taken me at least 3-6 months to really make friends and cultivate friendships, yet in Bali, we meet other families, instantly discover we have a variety of things in common, whether it’s what we do or want to be doing for work – or how we want to work (a few hours here and there and from a hammock vs. a cubicle) or we’re hoping to find viable alternatives for our children’s education. More so than anywhere else I’ve lived, we meet people who want to live lives that set good examples for their children – lives where they don’t have to sacrifice any of their values.
We’ve met a family we affectionately call the Australians. Ginny and Chris have four children, all about two years apart. Ginny is still breastfeeding her youngest who is three weeks older than Fyo. This seems a small thing to have in common, but when we lived in Singapore, I was one of four women still nursing a toddler. When Fyo and I had a bit of a rough spot, I went to a breastfeeding support group. Needless to say, Fyo was months older than any other baby there and the lactation consultants’ advice? Wean him. She said this despite the WHO poster behind her head that proclaimed “Nursing Mothers Make the World a Safer Place – Breastfeed for 2 Years.”Obviously, I ignored the Lactation consultant’s advice having decided she was grossly uninformed. So when I met Ginny, with a solid 8 years of breastfeeding to speak from, I asked her every question I had been saving up since I left LA. She probably felt as if she had been ambushed by a La Leche League meeting. She gave me lists of books to read for the next phase of parenting. She and Chris parent in a very similar style to Kent and I, so I was relieved when I discovered that I enjoyed being around her children. It is probably politically incorrect to say so as a parent and a person who supposedly loves children, but there are loads of children, I don’t enjoy being around. There are children who in fact grate every last nerve I have. Ginny and Chris have spent four years living in the Bush in Australia and are spending a year in Bali and traveling around SE Asia. With all four children. And Kent and I were warned you couldn’t travel with one.
Another of our favorite families, John and Sarah from the UK are spending the year traveling with their 3 ½ year old daughter. Fed up with the rat race, and education system in London, they are interviewing new places to live and raise their daughter. They share Kent and my dream of living and working everywhere as writers. Both husbands have a love of music they want to work with.
We met a family from the Netherlands that I started talking to on a dirt path in the middle of a rice paddy only because their children are so beautiful they literally took my breath away. The conversation started like this:
Me: (GASP) (recovering breath) What beautiful children!
Fleur: (in her beautiful person and beautiful parent voice): I could say the same to you.
Over breakfast we then exchanged contact information. A few weeks later, we had lunch. We talked about how we were doing our children’s health differently as we had found most physicians practice medicine from a fear of liability more than an interest in good health. I had talked to Ginny about education and how I do really believe in home school, but I want to spend my day writing and working on my projects – how do I do that and home school my son? I don’t know that I want to spend the time every day – I have reservations about how it would work in our lives. But Fleur educates her six year old daughter at home and she doesn’t do it at all in the way I had imagined: spending six hours a day at the kitchen table going problem by problem on some math worksheet. I then asked her all the questions that had been cluttering my mind. It turns out she incorporates it into cooking and making dinner. Their lives and daily activities become about their children's education. And she does this despite home school beingillegal in the Netherlands. She too gives me a list of authors to read that I eagerly look up on Amazon when I get the chance.
I can’t count how many times I have heard the now clichéd quote from Hillary Clinton about how it takes a village to raise a child. It does. I’m not disagreeing with that even as I hate clichés. But I would also say it takes a village – a community- to raise a parent. It is just as important – if not more so – for parents to have each other to talk to and commiserate with, to learn from, exchange resources (whether it be reading lists or take out delivery menus), form babysitting co-ops, and so on. I would even suggest that parents mistreat or disrespect their children, it's not out of ill intent, but out of fatigue and their own lack of support or emotional resources. Half the time when I see a parent speak disrespectfully to a child, it's really just because they are tired.
As Kent and I explore our options about where we want to live, travel and create home, this has become one of our major criteria: we want neighbors and community. We want to live next to families. We want to create a village as much as we want to create a home.
I don't want to sound like a whiny snot or an idiot, though I will, so I'll just accept it now. I do not understand how Mother's Day works now that I am a mother.
I mean, I get the call your mom part.
But when it comes to me, as a mother, I don't get it. Here specifically is what I don't get:
When your pregnant, everyone and their brother, especially anyone who is bound to get a promotion in relationship (as in grandparent or great-grandparent or aunt etc) calls and tells you Happy Mother's day. They even send small gifts of jewelry or nice cards or flowers.
Then you become an actual mother by delivering the child. Your husband is very sweet to you, especially if you're breastfeeding every hour still, because he is dumbfounded that you haven't actually put your child down since it was born. Except that briefest of five minutes for a hot shower when you insisted on washing your hair. Also, your best friend or sister tells you Happy Mother's Day, and all your friends that happen to be mothers say Happy Mother's Day as well as tell you what a great mom you are. You do the same to them (and you do mean it -you're not just saying it to stay in the club).
But the people who the year before sent small gifts and flowers? Your own mother or grandmother, not to mention mother-in-law and so on?
Nothing.
Not even a "And same to you" when you tell them Happy Mother's Day on your obligatory fire prevention phone call you do every year so that you don't spend your summer with a sulking and bitter mother.
As my 18 month old son says with accompanying hand motion, what gives?
Does it just work to the generation up with exceptions made when you're pregnant? So until I die, I will be telling my mother and mother-in-law happy mother's day and they never have to say it to me?
This is where I realize that no matter how old I get or how enlightened or how many yoga poses I master, when it comes to my relationship with my own mothers (actual, in-law, what have you) I am still 13 years old. I hate this. I hate being that woman who in all ways feels smart, accomplished and happy with her life, but inside, is still a 13 year old who wants approval. Not even the full stamp of approval like they do to beef in the supermarket, but just a half a sentence from one of the mothers saying happy mother's day. Oh, and they think I am a terrific mom, because my son is an utter delight to be around. Because he is.
My husband tells me often I am a great mom. And I think I am, not because I like to brag, but I do think I am a good mom to my son. He is a happy, sweet, smart, funny and all around awesome little boy, and I don't think he would be if I wasn't. He also hugs me often, which I think means he likes me.
I know, I know. Even as I have that voice in my head protesting, "Would it kill ya to wish me a nice mother's day?" I know, this is reward enough.
As always, in these icky-I-feel-like-a-bitch-but-I-do-kind-of-have-an-issue-here moments, I think (because I'm a mom and it's what moms do) what would I tell my son if it were him? And of course, I'd tell him approval be damned. Or in the words of my Thai fortune teller: the people who love you and understand you, love you and understand you. The people who love you and don't understand you, don't understand you.
So I'll just meditate on that as I strike a yoga pose.
PBS recently ran a Frontline episode on vaccines, called "The Vaccine War." This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy - as if there aren't enough antagonizing issues out there especially in realm of parenting. I hate the word "war" and that it gets used in this kind of context, as if to suggest there is not room for all views or that the answer lies in one side trumping the other. Dr. Jay Gordon says as much in his response, "PBS, Shame on You." Dr. Gordon's view on vaccines is my favorite take on an usually positional and polarizing issue. He asks a lot of good questions about vaccines and the current vaccination schedule. He also finds value in both sides. Mostly, in the vaccine debate, it's the positional attitude each side takes that I hate. Even if I agree with one side or the other, I hate the attitude that one side is right while the other completely wrong.
Generally, in parenting, I think different things work for different families, and there is not a "one-size-fits-all" approach. In terms of vaccines, for us it came down to a series of choices we were making. If I wasn't going to breastfeed, or if our baby was going into a large daycare at six weeks old, then we would have made very different choices.
Mostly, it came down to our (really, my) gut feeling and I do agree with Dr. Gordon: all the shots that a 3 month old gets on the current schedule make me squemish. It seems like an awful lot of chemicals to be injecting into such a small body. Also, for me, there are still too many unknown questions about vaccines. Even if the research shows vaccines are not responsible for the increase in Autism, we cannot deny that there is a rise in Autism; it must be linked to something - if not, vaccines, then what?
The squemish feeling also comes as much from the big business side of vaccines (i.e. that the people researching them happen to be or related to the companies making and selling them) as the fear-based knee jerk reaction that dictate everyone needs them. Last year's Swine flu debacle may serve as an example of the fear that circulates around illnesses and their vaccines.
So we put them off. We put off all his shots. Then we traveled.
It is our traveling that has people ask our take on vaccines. I did do a lot of research before our child was born and before we traveled. Before all my research, I knew that I was not worried about my child contracting polio. After all my research and confirming that we are not going to any of the remote villages in the four remaining countries where polio still exists, I still am not worried about my child contracting polio. Also, we continue to do research as we travel. We always check the WHO website before going to a new place. It's never a fully resolved issue - but what is in parenting? The sting of parenting does mean that you always question if you made the right choice even as you know you made the right choice with the information you had at that moment.
Our doctor in Singapore (Singapore does heavily vaccinate no questions asked) was rare in that she respected our views and even, quietly, agreed with them. She said, usually Singapore pediatricians would give us a hard time and if we stayed in Singapore, our son would have to get his shots to go to school. But she also said, regardless of where we go, he's fine without them. And, at 18 months, our son is still breastfed, and we ensure that his diet is nutritious and unprocessed to keep his immune system strong. Again, it's a series of choices...
While I've been wanting to toilet train our toddling tot earlier rather than later (I have no interest in having a four year old in diapers), our foray into the toilet training realm began unceremoniously one afternoon when Fyo began to fight getting his diaper changed. What I mean by this, is that he would either kick nonstop or run away until I chased him down. I hate power struggles, so I said, "Fine. You don't like your diaper changed then I'll take away the diapers." After this, at home he went naked from the waist down. We then began to introduce his toilet chair into the routine as well. So he goes to the toilet when we first wake up in the morning or after naps, before bath time and so on. The first day he wasn't so sure about sitting on the toilet chair, but it wasn't long before we had some successes. A couple times he stood up and clapped, then pointed to the toilet where we poured his toilet chair's contents and waved good-bye. At one point he was so amazed by his new found ability to pee into containers that he marched right into the kitchen and peed into the soup pot too.
According the experts, there are a few reasons why it was not a good time to attempt toilet training. The first is Fyo's chronic constipation. Experts generally agree to get your child past the constipation before beginning training. Other experts, however, suggest that it might actually help your child's constipation if he regularly sits on the toilet after meals and begins to learn to relax.
The other thing is that experts generally recommend beginning toilet training when there is nothing else going on in the household, like for instance over a summer when no other activities are going on. We were two weeks away from moving, not just houses but countries, from Singapore to Bali. And, upon arrival in Bali, we would stay in a couple different places.
Now we're in Bali, in our second place of stay, and I have to say, Fyo is doing great. Plenty of my friends have told me to when in doubt, follow your intuition and respond to your child's cues even at the expense of experts. We brought his toilet chair with us (it is the green plastic five dollar number from Ikea) and in each new place it comes out of the suitcase and goes in the bathroom. He then knows where to find it. Granted, it helps immensely that we chose a place to live where even when it pouring rain, it is warm enough for Fyo to go without pants. After he wakes up in the morning, we take off his diaper and he goes without (even during his naptime and he stays dry - and I guess the day that he doesn't, well, we'll be glad we're using somebody else's bed). He does wear a diaper to his three hours of nursery school, and most the time, he wears his swim diaper (one of the reusable swim trunks kind) in the pool. We do have the old fashioned kind of cotton training pants because I do not understand the point of pull-ups disposable diapers; I want him to feel when he's wet, not have it disappear as if he had just peed in a swimming pool. When he gets more fluent in being able to tell us when he has to go, then we'll start using them.
But the biggest reason why I am so glad we continued on the path? The cost of diapers in Bali. Despite being a relatively poor country, diapers are at least one and half times more expensive than they were in Singapore and I suspect the reason is because the locals don't use them. They follow the Elimination Communication path practiced by many in India and in parts of Asia. The second biggest reason why I'm glad? The waste we save. Fyo is 18 months old. With the average boy in the US achieving fluency in toilet training at 39 months - even if it does take us the traditional ten months for Fyo to get really facile, we still save a year's worth of diapers from the world's landfills.
My husband and I have been living in Singapore for six months. We moved from LA for his job (a sound and visual design engineer working on the Universal Studios theme park going in on Sentosa, the island off of Singapore). In Los Angeles, where we gave birth at home and had an amazingly supportive group of friends I met through the Moms group through our midwives office, our parenting philosophy seemed mainstream. Breastfeeding beyond six months, co-sleeping, tuning into baby's cues and so on. In terms of our families, my family thinks our parenting is genius, while my husband's family thinks they have reason to be concerned (as demonstrated by newspaper articles pasted into emails to my husband). In Singapore, we are out of the parenting mainstream. Most the island, I suspect parents in the way my husband's family is used to parenting (mostly formula fed, cribs, when a baby cries, instead of picking the baby up, they either rock the stroller or shake a toy in its face). In my six months here, I have met five other women who were still nursing their toddlers. All of them were expats. I think there are two of us who co-sleep. Not that it matters. I do think people need to do what works for them. Singapore, I imagine, is like most places in that there's a spectrum of people doing everything. I have grown into parenting in that I don't need a approval that I'm doing it right. Fyo is now old enough and an absolute gem; he's the proof that whatever we're doing works (for him). That being said, I'd be lost without having my LA Mom friends and other like minded friends online and on facebook. Community is more important than ever, even if it is no longer my mom's group where we hang out with snacks and our babies on blankets. And now, having grown into parenting, I have met other Mom friends, who I adore and enjoy, and who parent totally different than I do, but who still have very similar values. Next week, with my husband's job drawing to a close, we move onward to Vietnam. We fly into Ho Chi Minh City. We have no idea how long we'll be there, but we plan on traveling north until we find a nice beach town where Husband can catch up on his sleep. We're looking forward to Vietnam as it's a country, we've both been interested in seeing. We have no idea how long we'll be there, where we'll be going after that or when we're officially going back to the states. I have relatives who hate this and who I think consider us completely irresponsible. I don't talk to them often. I'm a bit sad to be leaving Singapore (though, I do really hate the weather). It seems that for whatever reason, it takes six months to make good friends. Singapore is also amazingly baby friendly. Most restaurants have baby chairs (high chairs) and even wait staff who are happy to carry your child around the restaurant and show him the kitchen while you enjoy your drink. Because Singapore is so safe, I never worried about my son being kidnapped. The sidewalks and subways are stroller friendly (in most places) unlike other cities in this neck of the woods. And as everyone says, Singapore is clean. Now that I know we're leaving in just over a week, and that we're leaving for an indefinite period of time, I am a bit overwhelmed in my mind, in terms of all that there is to do just like there is with any move (packing, purging, and so on). I also now realize that I know very little about Vietnam and have little idea of what to expect. Except our only requisite for the place we stop long enough to unpack our suitcase? Internet.
I write. Sometimes to explore and discover, sometimes to reflect, sometimes to respond and share and sometimes just because. I meander through parenting, books, education, things that irk me and things that delight me.
