Fordham Miller Fare

upstaged

i was walking home the other night, after our first significant snowfall, and came upon our neighbors, three young female undergraduates, trying to get their car unstuck from a small snowbank (you know the snow bank at the intersection of the driveway and the road that gets formed when the plow comes by?  yeah, that one).  i offered to help, and went to get some cardboard for under the tires, and some sand, and a shovel.  when i came back, i asked if they had tried rocking the car, or if they even knew how to rock the car (forward, then reverse, then forward, then reverse).  really they only had to get unstuck and then take a wider turn into the driveway, and i think they would have been fine.  i was all set to teach them a few things about how to get yourself out of sticky snow situations, when an SUV pulled up behind us, and a guy popped his head out the window and said, 'i've got a strap, you want me to pull you out?'  they were delighted, of course, and the kindess of strangers is certainly a good thing. but all my hopes of teaching these young women a little self-sufficiency went down the tubes.  ah well...

in other snow related news, i love my ergonomic shovel.  it took a little while to get used to, and it's no good for digging out a tire, but as a back saver goes, it's awesome.

This (Wretched) Old House

It is daunting being a homeowner.  It is further daunting still being a homeowner of a 150 year old house.  And it is most daunting of all being a landlord to an apartment which is half of a 150 year old house.

Actually, most of that isn't true.  Because mostly, I just ignore the seventeen million things around my house that need fixing that I will never get around to.  Or least not until the kids are in college.  Which is why we've had a closet door collecting dust in our garage for 7 years, and a porch in need of refinishing for 4 years, and the garage window that's been dangling precipitiously out of it's frame for...well, ever since we moved in.

But I have tenants, and they, rightly so, do not have to ignore what is wrong with their/my house.

So, it was pointed out to me that it might be slightly inconvenient to have a thermostat located in one's bedroom when two other occupants of the same apartment might need to tip the heat up a bit at 3 or 4 in the (cold New England) morning.  And so that was how I came to add 'relocate a thermostat to opposite side of wall' to my skill set.

I was all ready to hand the job over to the plumber, but the fact that the plumber usually takes several months to make it over here (by which time it will presumably not be winter), combined with some advice I got about how EASY it would be for me to do myself, led me to give it a shot.  No problem, this person said, all you gotta do is drill a hole in the other side of the wall, and pull the wires through.  But after I got through taking off all the thermostat-y parts, this is what I had to contend with.

It looked sorta like the box for an outlet or a light switch, but it wasn't (I don't think!), and it had me very confused.  Where were the tiny, easy to maniuplate, color-coded wires I was told to expect?  This all looked so...menacing.  I was filled with trepedation...but after 10 minutes of mumbling to myself (and realizing that if I gave up now, I'd still have to put everything back together again AND pay the plumber to do it the right way), I decided to ditch the box, pull the wires through, set everything up again, and hope for the best.  And it worked!  I think!  And I feel just the teensiest bit proud of myself, and just the tiniest bit less resentful of my wretched old house.

And what did my daughter tell me this evening, after my small but significant handywoman victory?  That she wants to be a cheerleader.  And when can she have a credit card.*

*Please blame the book 'The Accidental Cheerleader' for these comments.  And please note that I refused to BUY this book from the Scholastic flyer sent home from school, but the darn thing showed up at a recent book swap and I missed my chance to make it disappear.

going out on a limb

i was at my mom's a few weeks ago, outside of baltimore.  there was a rather large branch that had fallen in the backyard, and it occurred to me that i could use it for a project that morgan and i had talked about: tree blocks.  they have them at the nature center where morgan and i go for "nature preschool" one morning a week, and they are a nice tool to engage kids in "nature play."  and the branch was perfect.  i sawed up a bunch in varying sizes, and loaded the rest of the tree limb into my car (in manageable chunks) to bring home for more sawing.

since i was at my mom's house with maddy, i thought i would engage her in some fairy house making.  we had a great time.  maddy found a nice slab of rock for a roof, some empty nutshells for bowls, i made a little fire grid with some small sticks, and maddy selected some nice leaves for the doors.  i had thought of the blocks as a gift to morgan, but as maddy and i played with them i realized they would both probably get a lot of use out of them.

when i got home a few days later, i presented the set to morgan.  he got right to work, and before i knew it he had used a blue pen to draw a "map" and a "lake" on the large rock that had formerly been the roof.  when i asked him what was on the map, he told me: "here is the mall, and here is where the fairies park their cars."  i was stunned.  i have taken these guys to the mall in our town about 5 times in seven years.  they watch tv, but almost exclusively PBS kids television.  where did he come up with the mall?  and fairies, driving cars?  i let it pass, not wanting to squelch his creativity.  but later, the topic came up again, and again with the cars.  so i said, "you know morgan, i don't think fairies use cars."  to which he replied, "yes they do mama, when their wings are broken."  i can't express in typeface the wonderful "don't you know anything mama" tone he used to enlighten me to this basic fact.

the kids have been home three out of five days this week due to colds.  yesterday, when maddy took a surprise nap after a dose of dimetapp, i brought the tree blocks out on the porch and morgan went to town again.  i had a gazillion phone calls to field, so i peeked occassionally out the window and saw him building and chattering away.  at one point between phone calls, morgan requested a specific tiny, wired remote control car to use, because he had built a garage for those fairies (presumably the ones with the broken wings).  the car in question had broken some time back, so we gathered a few pull-and-release numbers, because his plan was to have the car knock down one of the blocks in order to gain entrance into the garage.

for those of you who don't know morgan, he is not your average rough-and-tumble "boy's boy."  he's pretty timid, keeps to my side nicely, and while he has shown more interest than maddy in some typical boyish toys (balls, cars, trains), he's not as focused on them as some boys i've seen.  but i have come to believe that there are some important differences in the biological makeup of boys and girls, which can be quite a heavy position to put forth and still maintain your status as a liberal feminist thinker.

which gets me to the book i just finished reading: why gender matters.  it has reinforced a lot of things i have been thinking in the years since becoming a parent, and given me new things to think about as i experience the education of my and my friend's children.  i'll bear the slings and arrows if necessary*, but i think there's something to be said about biological determinism.

*woe be unto those among you who ignore the fact that i bought my boy pink sandals and dressed my baby girl in sports motifs!

pop kiddie culture OR don't say i never took you anywhere

i wisely waited for kristen, bestower of dora tickets, to have the first say on the event.  i think i wanted to hear her take before coming out with my own.

first off, i argue that dora was not necessarily played by a woman.  true, true, i googled as many Dora Live! pictures as i could, and they all pointed to decidedly female actors.  but i still say that should the lead have fallen ill twenty minutes to show time, adam sandler's Lucy the Gap Girl would have made a great understudy.  and if peter pan can be played by sandy duncan, i say it's time for men to start filling Dora's shoes.

on dora itself (and mass media, pop culture and parenting), i'm a mixed bag.  on the one hand, i want to be pure.  no sugar and no tv and no computer and no saturated fats and no bratz dolls and no gendered clothing and no white flour and all that jazz.  on the other hand, i am weak.  so there's television and cookies and computer and pink jackets* and flashing tennis shoes and let's not even talk about family Survivor night.**  oh, but still no bratz dolls.

ironically enough, going to Dora in my rented monster truck was remarkably un-pc-guilt-inducing.  and the show was somehow decidely non-nightmarish.  two factors helped immensely.  (1) we had free parking about 5 blocks away, so we skipped the traffic jams on the way in and out, plus the kids had to work for it ("back in my day, kid, i had to walk 2 miles in a snowstorm for the ice capades."). (2) i seem to have effectively trained my kids not to drive me insane with pleading for toys and treats (tho' maddy and i did get in a tussle over what size of popcorn to get).  so we got to focus on the show, which the kids clearly enjoyed, and not the smoke and mirrors that serve to drain one of a good $40-60 bucks before the evening is over.

just so you don't get the idea that this was any kodak family moment, on the way back to the car maddy kicked a rather large abandoned styrofoam tub of ketchup lying in the street, and got condiment all over her white dress shoes.  she then proceeded to hissy fit the rest of the way to the garage, and she and morgan almost boiled over on the way home, to the point where i thought maybe we'd lost kristen as a babysitter for good.

but all's well that ends well.  next stop, disney world.

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*pink jacket for maddy, pink shoes for morgan.

**i live in fear of maddy betraying our Survivor secret in the wrong company. say, for example, at nature camp.  we'd have to go around with a red 'S' on our fronts, heads bowed in shame.

The Clothes Make the Man

Gender bending continues to be a theme in our house.  A couple of days ago, while watching fireworks at another family's house, Morgan got into a conflict with the girls over a game of pretend.  See, Morgan wanted to be a princess, and of course I was the only one who spoke up and said that, yes, in fact, he COULD be a princess, after all it was only a game of pretend.  The girls were not having this.  Finally they offered him the role of prince, to which he replied, "then who should I fight?"  And there you have it.

Later, I tried to explain to Madeleine that it was alright for boys to wear nailpolish and lip gloss and fancy shoes, and pretend to be princesses, even if most boys don't usually do this.  We've successfully covered the ground that boys can have ponytails, and boys can wear skirts, because living in the progressive area that we do, there are examples here and there that I can point out (and going to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival every year also provides a solid sampling of real life examples).

But Maddy seems hung up on a boy's feminine proclivities in the public realm.  Quoth she, "if Morgan does things like wear nail polish and lipstick when he's older, I'll be embarrassed."  This from the girl whose day-to-day fashion sense is, oh...expansive, shall we say.

The problem is that mostly we see guys who have donned skirts or grown ponytails in what is still a very MALE fashion.  As such, they are still identifiable as masculine to my children's eyes.  Crossing that fine line into the decidedly feminine brings on some confusion.  Witness their first experience of true cross-dressing in the Strolling of the Heiffers parade in Brattleboro, VT: "there was this girl wearing a dress, but when she talked she sounded like a BOY."  So, how do you explain this to a 4 and 6.5 year old without having an Eddy Izzard/Dame Edna film festival?

I plan to post again with my diatribe on the absolutely horrendous fashion options available for boys, complete with graphics.  For now, check out this post on boys in evening dresses by Nervous Girl.  I think we should get those boys together for one awesome tea party.