Every baby shower needs booze and a copy of The Three-Martini Playdate, right? Three reasons I love living in Oregon: I get to share it with these people.
Apparently, I didn't get the black/grey outfit motif, ruining yet another photo.
For some good, thought-provoking reading, go look at the comments in my last post. Ted even read through all of them and made the point that those are some good parents writing in. Love the well-mannered pirate story. Thank you all for all your thoughts. So much to think about.
One of my best friends from high school is now the mom to three kids, one more on the way. She is a very good mother. I mean, stellar. Totally stellar. She made the very good point one day that even though some people may consider her to be too strict, she never ever has trouble finding a babysitter. Her kids are lovely to be around, even the stronger-willed ones. Her kids are simply very happy. She's doing something right.
I sometimes call her with parenting questions, and we end up talking for a couple of hours at a time. I love her, love her, love her. She is also a straight talker, sometimes pretty blunt. One of my favorite quotes of hers is something like this, "I don't get people who say that you have to choose your battles with your kids. Honey, I fight every single one with mine, always to win." As any good Southern woman, she speaks in hyperbole, so you know, she's exaggerating a little. Maybe.
Since becoming a parent, I've thought a lot about what battles are worth fighting with my child and which are okay to let go, if any. The pastor of the church I grew up in had an extremely strong willed daughter who fought them on everything. One of the battles they chose not to fight with her was the battle over what she would wear every day. So every day, she got to pick out her own clothes, even as a 3-year-old. It was entertaining to see what she'd show up to church wearing on Sundays, but her parents' allowing her this area of freedom stuck with me. I thought it was wonderful. Because really, as long as your kids aren't naked or cold, what does it matter what they're wearing?
We definitely have chosen a few battles to fight with Abe. But I want to hear from you: what battles do you fight with your kids? More accurately, which battles are you most determined to win? Why?
Ted made the very good point that talking about parenting styles is akin to discussing religion or politics. Potential touchy subject. It's partially why I didn't disclose which battles we fight with our child; too much chance of sounding pious or like I'm trying to make someone with differing styles feel guilty. So feel free to leave anonymous comments if you want your identity hidden.
I'm pretty sure just including a link to someone else's post is cheating for this month of daily posts thing, but I'm going to do it anyway. Click here to read what Staci did on her four days with us in Oregon. Cute Abe stories and pictures included.
When I was a kid, my parents used to go camping with us a lot. Sometimes we stayed in a tent, other times a cabin, sometimes we drove across the country in a borrowed big blue van to see Yellowstone, where my mom would yell at us to put down the barbie-dolls and look out the window. That was back in the day when a six-year-old didn't have to be strapped down in a seatbelt, so my sister and I would play on the floor of the van, building sets for the dramas going on in barbie-dollville. Who could be bothered to look at national forests when our little people were getting kidnapped, married and having babies?
These frequent camping trips are something my parents did right in raising us. There is nothing like waking up in a cabin or a tent and having breakfast outside among trees, preferably beside some water too. When we weren't driving cross country, we would camp in local national parks, like Tishomingo or Tombigbee. Tishomingo was my favorite because there were huge rocks with tiny crevices that we could hide in. And let me tell you: maybe it wasn't safe, but my parents let us wander. We'd often go with another family with kids, and all us kids would live out all sorts of dramas in those rocks and woods. We just knew that we had to be back to the campsite when it started to get dark. That was about the only rule.
On one of these trips, one night I went outside with a couple of the kids and one of the parents. I can't remember which parent; in a way, they were all peripheral characters on these trips. The three of us sat outside on the back porch of the cabin, two of us on a swing, one of us on a chair. We told "chain story" for what felt like hours. The only light we had was what would leak out through the window of the cabin window, so it was pretty dark. And it was scary too. That was the best part. If I could remember which parent this was, I'd be sure to tell him/her thanks for playing "chain story" with us so late into the night.
For a few years, I was a girlscout, and I went on several weekend trips to girlscout camp with my dad and my best friend's dad. Both of them were the "superdads" of our troop. We'd camp there in the yurt-style tents, the ones with a wooden floor and heavy canvas tops that zipped down both ends. There were four cots in each tent, so my dad and I would be on one side, my friend and her dad on the other. My best friend was an amazingly gifted farter, so she'd hold them in right until she thought we were going to sleep. Then she'd let one fly, and we'd all crack up, even our dads. She was this small dainty blond girl, but oh could she ever fart.
Our dads were kinda hard-core campers, so they always picked the campsite that was farthest from the dining hall. It probably wasn't even a quarter mile away, but as a kid, it felt much farther. I think they probably felt like our girlscout camp tents were too cushy, so they wanted us to tough it out by having the farthest hike from the dining hall. One night after dinner, we'd forgotten to bring our flashlights, so we had to make our way back to our camp in the pitch black. Maybe our dads weren't scared at all, but they sure didn't let on to us that fact. They sufficiently convinced us that there were all kinds of wild creatures lurking around the trees, slobbering and panting, waiting for young girlscout meat. And wasn't there a story told as well about a suicide in these woods? A hanging? On this exact same path we were on? Can't you hear the creaking of the rope in the trees and the crows circling? Is that the squeak of rats trying to nibble on the flesh of the deceased?
I loved that stuff. Loved it. So now as an adult, one of my happiest smells is that of a campfire. If I'm driving and catch a whiff, I'll roll the windows down and breath it in. Ted and I don't camp nearly as much as we should. We both realized that we're too old for tent-camping, on the cold hard ground. No fun in that. We do like cabins though, especially soft and warm hotels, like the one we're staying in right now.
Ted's working on a small film right now that is shooting near the town of ZigZag, one of my favorite place-names of all time. The hotel where the crew is staying is pretty dreamy, so Abe and I drove up yesterday to join them. I slept so hard in this pitch-black room on a bed with a down comforter in a room with a flat-screen tv and fancy bathroom that we decided to stay an extra night. We watched Kathy Griffin before bed, slept until 10, breakfast at 11, beautiful hikes along a creek and marsh, and now naptime for Abey Babey while Daddy works and Momma blogs.
This is exactly my kind of "camping." This afternoon, Abe declared to me that he is Little Bear, I'm Momma Bear, and Daddy is Father Bear. These are our names. I'm hoping he's inspired by these woods we're in and not just the tv show. No matter though: I realized while surrounded by these mossy woods with fern carpets, these beautiful Oregon forests, that I hope Abe and any future Rooney children fall in love with nature the way I did as a kid.
Don't worry: we'll be sure to leave the nice hotels sometimes too, though I can't garantee a tent. We'll go the yurt or cabin route, with as much freedom to roam as my inner mother-hen can tolerate. And I'll be content to be a peripheral adult too, letting the woods, rocks, streams, and campfires take center stage. I'm looking forward to hot chocolate and "chain stories" on a swing, hopefully one that creaks eerily so I can tell that ghost story I heard once at girlscout camp...
We have been taking a day to do laundry, catch up on the newspapers that have been stacked up, sleep later than usual, eat fried egg sandwiches and sweet potato casserole. In about an hour, Abe and I are driving up to Mount Hood to join Ted who is up there working. Should be interesting. We may be out of range until tomorrow night, with no internet connection (gasp), so I'm doing today's post early.
Our friends Dani and Tommy and Judah have put together a book to raise money for wells in Africa. It would make a fantastic Christmas gift. Abe and a few other blogging kids are featured in the book. Maybe my favorite thing about the book is the Amharic phrases, even written phonically so you can pronounce them correctly. I highly recommend it. Make the world better: go get a few of these books.
Abe used to be a face-maker. He started as early as 11 months making funny/weird faces deliberately to make us react. We strongly encouraged this. He seemed to reach a pinnacle when he was about 18 months. In the archives of this blog are a few (okay, many) examples of Abe's face-making skills.
Eventually, he got lazy though. He just did his vampire-face and not much else. I'll say what everyone else was thinking but was too afraid to say: he was getting a little boring, honestly. He needed to amp things up. No slacking in the Rooney house.
Enter this lady:
She's the one in the red scarf taking in the spray at Multnomah Falls as Abe yells at the falls.
Staci has only been here since Friday morning, and look what Abe is doing:
This is Abe's "scared."
Not a bad effort. We're not going to let him slack off too much anymore. Thanks Staci, for kick-starting the faces again.
November is National Blog Post Month, or something like that. I looked at the site from a friend's blog, and I started to join but then I had to give my email address, and I don't see the point of giving my email address, and I couldn't take the time to read all the fine print because I was up last night from about 4-6 am feeling sick from having put in my belly the following items: meatloaf, white wine, twix candybars from Abe's Halloween basket. Everyone steals their kids' candy, the best kind, at least before they're old enough to realize what they're missing. Abe hasn't asked for candy once today, not once. No idea why not.
I think anyone still reading our blog is going to regret my snap decision to join in the month of daily blog posts. I rarely have anything important to say. I'm hoping that committing to writing a post a day will nudge me into going more into details about this next adoption. I have been hesitant to write about the adoption for various reasons, which I may get into at some point.
For now, I'm pretty sleepy. And we have a guest in town that I'm ignoring (well, she's reading a book while Abe is rolling around at her feet, so I think she's okay with the current state of things). So I'll leave the obligatory Halloween report.
We started the day by going with our friend Staci who is here visiting from Los Angeles to the Portland Saturday Market, with a side-trip to the original Voo Doo Donuts.
Abe tried on his costume a few days before Halloween, yelled "Let the wild rumpus start!"
Halloween is exhausting if you're the parent of a toddler. Last year was easy. We just walked the little chicken to a few doors on our block and then came home to hand out candy from the warmth of our own home, with the little guy unaware of the sugar he was missing.
This year? Abe knew very much what was going on and wanted in on the action. Also, our neighborhood is a popular one, so it's always pretty chaotic and crammed with kids and parents. At several points during the night, I wasn't even sure where we were. I was so focused on these things: never letting Abe out of my sight, not stepping on his tail, keeping other kids from stepping on his tail, keeping him from stepping on his tail, making sure he actually said "trick or treat," making sure he didn't grab handfuls of candy, making sure he made eye contact with each neighbor as he said "thank you very much" when he was most wanting to tear open each piece right then and there, and again not stepping on the tail amidst the crowd of kids as we walked away. We were making the rounds with three other families on our block, Abe being the youngest of all the kids. Keeping up was a challenge. Thankfully, one of the dads kept yelling for everyone to wait for Abe.
Exhausting.
Here's just a little taste of the chaos:
We had trick-or-treaters coming by until after 10pm. We'd gone for an hour to our next-door-neighbors for drinks, came home, and had a crew of kids show up at 10:30. And I never should have consumed that combination right before bed. Gross. Made for an exhausting night.
One of my favorite things about Halloween in our neck of the woods: the George Washington statue always gets a hat. Last year was a dunce's cap. This year, a black bucket.
Three reasons I love living in Oregon: I get to share it with these people.
Apparently, I didn't get the black/grey outfit motif, ruining yet another photo.
