UnchartedParent.com

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I’ve written about this before, and I’m sure I will again.  How many years have I got until my kids become adults?

This will be quick, though, because as I write this post, I’m waiting for the school bus to pull up so I can have one of those conversations with my children.  You know what I’m talking about: the conversations you have 8,617 times between the ages of four and, oh, twenty-one and hope that at some point, they actually stick.  The conversations that are about taking responsibility for their belongings and their work and how these actions may seem insignificant now, but they will truly have consequences as they get older.

It’s bad enough that I received a forlorn call from ten-year-old “Jack” this morning, asking if could please deliver his sneakers to school because he’d forgotten them.  (And when I retrieved his sneakers from the mudroom, I discovered six-year-old “Emmie” had left hers behind as well.)  It’s winter in New Hampshire, kids.  You leave the house in snow boots, and the sneakers go in the backpack every day.  EVERY DAY.  You’re old enough to remember that.

But what irritates me more is the notecard I received from Jack’s teacher with his grade on a recent science project, something to which he’d devoted considerable effort.  Jack didn’t do as well as he otherwise might have on this project, however, because, as the card noted, he forgot the data for his project at home.  Without the data in his hand, he was also unable to explain its meaning.

Jack nevertheless earned a decent grade on his science project, and I now face the task of trying not merely to make him understand that he could have done better if he’d remembered to bring in the data–he’ll get that–but that it matters.  Jack is a happy member of the “good enough is good enough” club, and I’ve yet to find a way to convince him otherwise.  I’ll explain that he should always want to do his best, that he should be responsible, etc., and he’ll point to his grade and repeat what he often says: that his teacher rarely gives out a top grade (she told me this herself; sigh).  Implication: “Mom, I did fine, so stop bugging me.”

Maybe I’m overreacting.  Maybe I worry too much.  They are, after all, just kids.  And, to be honest, they’re my kids–and I’ve been known to back the car out of the garage and forget where I intended to go.  Maybe I should replace my “Don’t Forget Board” with giant photographs of what they need to bring to school tacked to the mudroom door every day.  On the other hand, maybe I’m at fault and an enabler, and I shouldn’t deliver their boots to school when they call; maybe the kids would learn their lesson if they had to struggle through Phys Ed in their snow boots a few times.

Okay, there’s the bus turning the corner now.  Gotta go.  Conversation awaits.  If you have thoughts on kids and responsibility, let me know.

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Neither of my children has ever asked me if the Tooth Fairy is real.  Given their ages and personalities, I find this odd.

My ten-year-old son, “Jack,” has always had a good grasp of the distinction between fantasy and reality, and has found both realms equally valid as long as he knows where he is at any given moment.  For example, when he was younger, Jack enjoyed both animated, talking dinosaurs and more scientific explorations of the prehistoric animals in books and DVD documentaries.  A few words of clarification in response to his questions were all that he needed to understand what was truth and what was just for fun.

Six-and-a-half year-old “Emmie,” on the other hand, requires more explanation in these matters.  She believes everything she hears on the school bus, everything a classmate has ever told her in school.  But she knows stories can be pretend, and she’s working hard to understand which ones are made up and which ones are true.  So she asks questions, and every answer leads to four more questions.  Those answers lead to more questions.  And so on.

I assumed the dissolution of standard childhood myths would follow my kids’ usual patterns.  But you would think I’d have learned by now not to make assumptions where kids are concerned.

As Jack lost his first round of baby teeth a few years ago, my husband and I waited for our practical child to ask the inevitable question: is the Tooth Fairy real?  But he never asked.

Emmie recently began to lose her baby teeth, and we were certain that our second child would call us out on our mythical-creature impersonation.  Instead, the morning after Emmie left tooth number three along with a note for the Tooth Fairy under her pillow, she ran into our bedroom and delivered unexpected news.

“The Tooth Fairy left me a dollar,” Emmie shouted, waving the bill in the air.  “And something else.” (more…)

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Woo-hoo!  It’s finally here: a snow day!  In New Hampshire, we live for snow.  Skiing, sledding, snowboarding, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, building forts, hot chocolate by the fire, yippee, hooray, where’s it been until now?

Or not.

I dislike pointless, bitter, cold weather without snow or, worse yet, freezing rain as much as the next person.  But today’s snow meant NO SCHOOL.  I hate to be a Snow Scrooge, but after sharing a sick day with six-year-old “Emmie” earlier this week, I was already behind in my list of must-accomplish writing tasks for the week.  (In case you’re new to the blog and Emmie’s mind, you should know that my beloved daughter is very sweet, very charming, the queen of random association and thinks out loud.  All.  The.  Time.)

Here’s how The First Snow Day of the Year went down.  (Note: all times are approximate.  When one’s head is spinning, the last thing one does is look at a clock and jot down the time.)

6:00 am

Ten-year-old Jack bounces into our bedroom and our bed.  My husband checks his Blackberry.  “Go back to bed,” he grumbles at Jack.

“No school?” asks Jack.

“No,” replies my husband.

“YAY!!!!”  Jack bounces off the bed and out of our room.

I bury my head under the covers.

8ish am 

I knew I should have gotten up early and gotten to work, but, well, I didn’t.  I take my coffee and, still in my bathrobe, venture over to my laptop to begin the email/Facebook/Twitter daily ritual that serves as my pre-writing warmup.  The kids are playing in another part of the house.  Maybe this will work.

8ish am + 5 minutes

The kids are giggling hysterically.  Aw, that’s nice.  Me: tweet, tweet.

8ish am + 10 minutes

The kids are wrestling on the floor–right next to me.  When I ask why this activity must happen here when there is an entire house at their disposal, I get no response.  This does not bode well.

8:45 am

Husband goes out to shovel.  The kids are getting noisier.

9:25 am

Emmie comes to me in the office.  “Jack was playing with a ball and he hit his foot on the sunporch door.”  She stares at me.

The sunporch door is glass.  “Is he hurt?” I ask.

Emmie nods.

I go into the playroom and find Jack lying on the floor, wearing his sad face.  By looking at this face, I can tell that yes, he hurt himself, but he didn’t break anything and he’ll survive.  (It’s that mom-doctor degree at work again!)  So I make him laugh while instructing him to take off his footie pajamas so I can look at his toes, which are fine.

9:28 am

The kids begin to argue, and it occurs to me that weather is cruel to moms and that I need to make my kids go play in the snow.

9:30 am

The kids ask if they can go out to play.  I resist the urge to respond, “Hell, yes.” (more…)

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Welcome back from the holidays, everyone.  I hope you had a lovely time with family and friends.  No time to waste here on small talk, though.  Let’s dive right in to the new year.

Will you walk with me through a few hypothetical scenarios?  Great.  Let’s go:

• Your third-grader is learning multiplication in his local public school.  It looks funny: the problems sport diagonal lines everywhere, and frankly, when he explains them to you, the method makes no sense.  He says it’s “the lattice method.”  That’s crazy, you think.  What’s  wrong with multiplication the way I learned it?  So you march into school and demand that your son be taught multiplication your way, and only your way.  The school must comply.

• Your first-grader is learning to read.  (Yay!)  But the public school employs that questionable “whole-language” approach.  You like phonics.  You speak to the teacher, who explains that actually, the curriculum utilizes a combined method because individual children learn differently; this way, each child will be able to find a way to learn that works best for him or her.  Bah, you say.  You go over the teacher’s head and insist that your kid learn phonics only.  The school must comply.

• Your middle-schooler is learning Earth Science.  My child doesn’t need to learn about the three kinds of rocks, you think.  What a waste of time.  Plus, don’t feed her that garbage about the Earth being millions of years old.  I want an alternative science curriculum.  You know where this is going: the school must comply.

• One more: your high-schooler is assigned to read, oh, anything: Dickens, Shakespeare, Morrison, Atwood, Lee, Fitzgerald, Tan, Salinger, Orwell, Angelou, Frank, Douglass, Hemingway, Achebe, Walker, Kafka, Cather, Poe, Ehrenreich or any book that includes poor people, death, sex, minorities, rich people, blood, unhappiness, drugs, happiness for the wrong reasons, questions, fear, greed, people who are “different” or people acting like real, flawed human beings.  You, the parent, object to this smut.  Do I need to tell you the result at this point?

So what crazy proposal am I describing with these hypotheticals?  Sadly, I am giving you examples of what can happen under a new law passed yesterday in my home state of New Hampshire.  That’s right: this is now the law of the land where my children go to school.  (And I’m ashamed to say that one of my own state representatives was the sponsor of the legislation.)

The new law allows parents to request an alternative school curriculum for any subject to which they register an objection. (more…)

As I write this, we’re about halfway through our version of the holiday season: one child’s birthday, Hanukkah, Christmas, wedding anniversary and New Year’s.  Yesterday I served cocoa to first-graders, taught fourth-graders how to gamble (i.e., taught them how to play dreidel) and with the help of a friend, prepared enough traditional Hanukkah food-fried-in-oil that my entire house now smells like a giant french fry.

Then, in the best of Jewish customs, we ate.  And ate.

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Even as we continue to light the candles on the menorah, our thoughts are moving to the cookies the kids and their cousins will set out for Santa Claus alongside the carrots for his reindeer.  (Hey, Rudolph gets hungry, too.)  With all of these holidays in December, the whole month is hectic, crazy, fattening and fun.  It’s also peppered with occasional moments of realization that these little kids aren’t so little anymore.

Those are the moments when I stop, take a picture and remind myself what December is really about for our family.

Uncharted Parent will take the next week off to enjoy the rest of the season to the fullest.  Also because, let’s face it: the kids are out of school and we all know what that means for writing.

Whatever holiday you celebrate this month–whether it’s your own or you’re sharing in the joy of a loved one’s holiday–I and my family wish you happiness, love and peace.

See you in the new year!

The baby in the photo above is just a few days old.  He’s still exhausted from the difficult birth, and from the colic that plagues him whenever he’s awake.  If you look carefully at the middle of his forehead, you’ll see a small streak of blond; that’s the color all of his hair will turn soon.  (And yes, he really was born with all of that hair.)  His parents have been waiting for him for a long time.

Ten years ago, that baby was my and my husband’s combined Hanukkah, Christmas and anniversary present.

My son, “Jack,” turns ten in just a few days.  This means I’ve been a parent for a decade.

In some ways, I’m still the person I always was.  I care about people, politics and the world I live in.  I love books and learning–both for myself and others–and I’m interested in reasonable viewpoints that are not my own.  I over-stress and under-sleep, I’d rather enjoy the company of friends or read than watch bad television, and I have more items on my “things I want to do in my life” list than I could ever hope to accomplish.

But I’m not the same person I was ten years ago.  Back then, I couldn’t understand what it means never to make any decision without considering the implications for another human being.  The point seems obvious in the context of, say, choosing one’s next career move.  But even something as simple as a friend’s invitation to meet for dinner now generates a quick computation of my schedule, cross-checked against my kids’ calendars and, if I find there a pre-existing event, determining if the event is missable or not.  Every time.  If I devote X amount of energy to activity Y, will there be enough of me to help my child with goal Z?  And so on.

Parenting is the trick of sharing personhood while still maintaining one’s own identity.  (And if you doubt this, parents of preschool or school-age kids can consider that transformation you made, without any intent on your part, from “Mr. X” to “Alex’s dad.”  Yup, that’s who you are now.)

How could ten years of that not change a person?

What is the reward for this change?  In my case, I have the privilege of parenting two of the coolest people I know.  As Jack is the one who has sparked this post, I’ll address these next words to him: (more…)

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This week, it’s the girls’ turn.

Last week, I posted a list of book recommendations that ought to keep the ten-year-old boy in your life reading for a long time.  But even though I focused on boys because I initially sought suggestions for my own son, I thought I ought to come up with a list of recommendations for girls, too.  With lots of help from you, I have.

Each of the books or series below has been recommended for girls (or girls and boys) who are about ten years old by one or more blog readers via blog comment, Facebook comment or email. (Some of these books will work for younger kids.)  As with last week’s post, I’ve added a bit of commentary here and there, as well as a couple of titles I couldn’t resist including.

One note before we get to the recommendations: some of you may wonder why I’ve divided the books by gender.  Why, you may ask, is it necessary to separate books into “boy” and “girl” categories?  Can’t girls and boys read and enjoy the same things?

Yes, of course they can.  Plenty of quality storytelling transcends gender–just ask J.K. Rowling.

But we ignore reality if we pretend that boys and girls aren’t at least a little bit different, and sometimes they seek out different reading material.  For example, you’ll see the very popular American Girl books on the girls’ list below.  Parents of boys, what do you think?  How many of your tween sons are going to read those books?  If we want to encourage all of our kids to read, we have to accept that one of the many factors that can sometimes influence our kids’ reading choices is gender.

Keeping that in mind, I’ve created two lists below based on the recommendations people sent in: one for girls, and one for both girls and boys.  But remember: these are just lists.  As always, you know your kid best.

Ready?  Here we go.

For Girls

Fantasy/Adventure/Mystery

• Anatopsis, by Chris Abouzeid
• The Sisters Grimm (series), by Michael Buckley
• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo
• Dragon Slippers (series), by Jessica Day George
• Island of the Aunts, by Eva Ibbotson (includes lots of humor)
• The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls, by Elise Primavera (“Perfect novel for getting reluctant readers into bigger books.”  — Chris Abouzeid, author of Anatopsis)
• Theodosia Throckmorton (series), by R.L. LaFevers (ancient Egyptian artifacts; how fun!)
• Dragonsong (first in the Pern: Harper Hall trilogy), by Anne McCaffrey (a YA route into McCaffrey’s famous world of Pern)
• Enola Holmes Mysteries (series), by Nancy Springer
• Trixie Belden (series), by multiple authors (a bit dated; think Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys era) (more…)

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Wow.  I asked for suggestions for good books for a ten-year-old boy, and you delivered.  Readers, parents and writers contributed dozens of recommendations that can keep my son (and yours) engaged in stories for a long time.  Thank you!

You can find many of these recommendations in the comments to the original post from two weeks ago.   However, I also received numerous suggestions via email and Facebook posts, and I want to share those with you, too.  I’ve compiled a list of the recommendations below and added a little commentary here and there.  Now you can add something to your child’s Christmas or Hanukkah list that’s not a toy, not electronic (well, unless it’s an e-book) and will take his imagination on a different kind of adventure.

But what about the girls?  In my original post, I sought suggestions for reading material for my own son–hence the bias toward male-oriented reading material.  Of course, many of the books below will appeal to the girls in your life, too.  But I think it’s safe to say that the list does exclude some excellent books that would hold particular appeal for girls.

So now that we’ve taken care of the boys, what books would you recommend for ten-year-old girls?  What great books do you think work for both boys and girls of that age?  Please share your favorites in the comments below.

On to the recommendations for boys.  Please note that I have left a few recommended books off of the list.  When I looked into them, there were some I just didn’t feel I could include in a post about reading material for ten-year-olds.  That doesn’t mean that the excluded books aren’t good for an older audience.

The Recommendations

First, these books received multiple recommendations

• The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (series), by Lemony Snicket
• Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
• The Dark is Rising (series), by Susan Cooper
• A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

With regard to Harry Potter, all I can say is, “Of course.”  And who doesn’t like A Wrinkle in Time?  I couldn’t persuade “Jack” to read past the first few pages of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but that doesn’t mean your child shouldn’t give it a try. (more…)

Just in time for the holiday, six-year-old “Emmie” has revealed a secret and girls everywhere can be thankful.

“I know how to get boys to like you,” she announced yesterday.

Oh, really?  “How?”

“Here’s what you do.”  She straightened her back and pushed her plate away to set the stage.  “You smile at the boy, like this.”  Emmie tilted her head and flashed the smile that has won her more battles over the course of her six years than any argument or temper-tantrum ever could.  Seriously, Helen of Troy had nothing on Emmie.  “You do that for ten seconds.  Then you ignore him.  And he’ll like you.”  She pulled her plate back and resumed eating her dinner.

Is this kid six or sixteen?

Despite Emmie’s confidence, her big brother was not convinced.  Nine-year-old “Jack” shrugged as he shoveled pasta into his mouth.  “That wouldn’t work on me.”

I’ll leave you to contemplate what this exchange means for the future of all the residents of my household, except I’ll note here that my husband and I have been contemplating adding bars to Emmie’s bedroom window for her teen years since she was two years old.  As for the truth of Emmie’s secret, I’ll just tell you this: Emmie has better people skills than anyone I know.  She understands how people work.  What you do with that information is up to you.

On a separate note, thanks to everyone for your fantastic book recommendations for a ten-year-old boy.  Many people left recommendations here on the blog, others left them on Facebook or emailed them to me.  I plan to compile them soon into one place where they will be accessible for future reference (and for holiday shopping).

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

(Turkey credit: handmade by Emmie)

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I need a little help.

I know, often I’m the one recommending books to people.  But when almost ten-year-old “Jack” recently surprised me by telling me he’d be open to book recommendations, I was shocked.  After all, each of my previous efforts to recommend reading material to him consistently resulted in said book being banished to the darkest recesses of the “If Mommy says it’s good, it must not be cool” closet.  (Sorry, Roald Dahl.)

Jack, thankfully, loves to read, and when a book or series appeals to him, you don’t want to stand in his way.  His tastes are fairly specific, however, and I’m still trying to decipher them.  Last year, he read abridged, adventure-leaning classics at school and loved them.  But when I attempted to introduce him to similar books outside of school, he refused to look at them.  Then, on his own over the last six months or so, Jack powered through all of Redwall, a twenty-one book, middle-grade fantasy/adventure series by Brian Jacques.  Jack repeatedly cited the suspenseful nature of the books as the reason he didn’t want to put them down to go sleep/go to school/take a shower, etc.  But prior to reading Redwall, a friend had lent Jack the first book in the popular Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan.  Jack read one chapter, then tossed the book aside.

Finally, when I’ve tried to introduce Jack to books on other topics he usually finds interesting, like sports, he doesn’t want to read them.*

Hmm.  I have to confess I’m out of my element here.  I may breathe books, but the reading affinities and quirks of ten-year-old boys are not my specialty.

Jack’s found himself a new series to read for now: The Ranger’s Apprentice, by John Flanagan.  He tells me it’s got the same attribute going for it as Redwall: “It’s so suspenseful!”

I’d like to be ready with some good suggestions for Jack when he’s done with The Ranger’s Apprentice, and that’s where you come in.  If you’re a parent, reader, writer or anyone who is familiar with books for ten-year-old boys who like suspense, what books would you suggest a mom recommend to her son?

*Fortunately, Jack does allow me a little more leeway with the books I read to him at bedtime.  Otherwise, we’d never get to have discussions like the one prompted recently by The Long Secret.  Good for us?