Week Wrap Up & Highlights

1. We did not get raptured. (Sadly, the ants that have infested our house after an intense week of rain did not get raptured either. Cheeky bastards.)

2. My Sis guest blogged on growing up dyslexic. (Click here if you missed it - it's fantastic and worthy of discussion.)

3. In between all the rain, we had a few bursts of sun where Fyo and I could play outside.

4. Sis then did a post on Husband's and my wedding, gorgeous, perfect and impromptu event that it was and invited me to guest blog for her too. Such fun! (But I haven't done it yet. This coming week! )

5. Husband and I ordered a new organic bed (!!!) - king size to accommodate our growing family and our big dog Finn. Then we had a lunch date in Madison Square Park and appreciated the public art on display in the park. I didn't take a picture of the art because I was distracted by my fantastic lobster sandwich that I think was my best meal this week.

6. My Saturday post for Connected Mom. (Yes, I did. I wrote about the in-laws, but somebody has to - when I was looking for helpful perspectives to get me through some of the relationship rough spots I found nothing on that particular relationship).

7. Gender neutral baby clothes (though I discovered most gender neutral clothes are actually in the boys' section).

8. Such good books from the library - I also picked up David Elkind's The Power of Play and Fyo picked out A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss with illustrations by Maurice Sendak.

9. Husband cleaned out and organized the pantry

10. We had a day of napping and going to bed easily (after two days of no nap). Ah bliss!

Reading up on Gender-Neutral Parenting: It Started with the Clothes

I came home last night from the library with such good books, I didn't know what to start with. I ended up starting with Lise Eliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain for the simple reason that the librarian had placed it on the top of the stack. I've read Dr. Eliot before, in her book, What's Going on in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years which began my phase of geeking out with baby neuroscience books. I found What's Going on in There? fascinating, but also dense and a bit scholarly, which is why I tend to recommend Jill Stamm's Bright from the Start. It's more accessible and easier reading - especially when most your reading time is on your side while you nurse your newborn to sleep.

But in this pregnancy, as I've mentioned, I've spent much more time thinking about gender and gender neutral parenting. It started with the clothes, and me wanting to dress my unborn baby in red, and not in pastels as if my baby was actually an Easter egg. When my search for bright colored baby clothes became harder than I ever thought it would be, I started wondering why I felt like the only parent who wanted to dress their child outside of the pink-blue-last resort-yellow/green color scheme.

If only for the reason that I know the sex of our unborn child and my husband does not. It's an experiment on our part. My husband wants to be surprised. But I'm a planner and have nesting hormones taking my body hostage. Given that my son was born three weeks early and we were so unprepared, so that my husband had to run out for diapers early in my home birth labor, well, when second arrives on the scene I don't want to have to worry about clothes.


In my first pregnancy, we found out we were having a boy and between the two of us, we had four nephews and their hand-me-downs. Two of those four were twins. I can't tell you how many clothes we had. Or shoes. We didn't have to buy a thing.

And I'm realizing now, we were fortunate to have good hand-me-downs. Thankfully, my sisters-in-law feel the same way I do about not wanting footballs all over their baby boy's clothes. Most our hand-me-downs were greens, oranges, yellows, jeans, stripes, blues, reds and the like. Our hand-me-downs were covered in animals - yes, they were the kind of animals that if you met them in the jungle you'd be dead, but on baby pajamas they were cute. And they were clothes that would not be inappropriate on either sex (orange and white striped pants with a white t-shirt - that kind of thing).

Then one of my sisters got pregnant with a boy and my sister-in-law with the twins had a friend who was also having twin boys and we did what you do with hand-me-downs: we handed them down. We were also packing up our house for storage before we set out for our year abroad, so it didn't make sense to save a lot of baby stuff when we were paying for storage. I picked out my very favorite of my son's clothes - and ones that happened to be (I thought) gender neutral - and kept those. Essentially, I had a shoe box of baby clothes for our much desired second child.

And I thought it would be easy to replace them with equally free and fantastic hand-me-downs.

No such luck.

In the time since my son, or rather my nephews, were born, the clothes have changed. I got two bags of "gender-neutral" clothing off craigslist. We don't own a car, and in Brooklyn, if I go to the trouble of taking the subway over to someone's house to pick something up, I'm not going to change my mind about wanting to buy it or take it home once I get there. But when I got these bags home and opened them up? Essentially the mother had had a boy and a girl and shoved everything into the same pile. The boys clothes were camouflaged and covered in football helmets. And the girl's? I had never seen so many rosebuds, butterflies, or pink in my life. Seven and half months into pregnancy and my first bit of nausea came when looking at all that pink and all those footballs.

This will make me sound like a witch, but I hate football. I hate pink (except in small doses or next to colors like brown, black, grey, or navy.) Rosebuds and butterflies are fine - but outside where they belong.

Out of two bags of clothes I found two white onesies. I also snagged some awesome winter sleeper pajamas and white bunting that I actually love. Everything else went back into the bags to go back on craigslist.

I told my mom, my step-mom, and my mother-in-law, that I think the clothes are far more sexist than they were when I was a kid. I don't remember having my first pink dress until I was six. My three mothers agree and say that I am correct.

Indeed. Lise Eliot writes, "Unlike a generation ago, when parents actually worried about stereotyping their children, the new focus on nature seems to be encouraging parents to indulge in sex differences even more avidly...The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences. Your son's a late talker? Don't worry, he's a boy. Your daughter is struggling with math? It's okay, she's very artistic."

Personally, I find this troubling. Maybe because I was raised by feminist leaning mothers, maybe because I went to college reading Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine and Susan Faludi's Backlash without ever taking a Women's Studies class, but I'm constantly shocked by how sexist our society still is - and how even male friends of mine - seemingly enlightened and in some cases married to very strong women - still think nothing of referring to women as girls or talking about their bodies as if they were chickens to roast for dinner.  Given the disparity just in baby clothes and the current mode of socialization for kids being born today, I'm scared to think of the implications. You can buy heels and bikinis for three year old girls. Isn't that disturbing?

Eliot's writing again is fascinating -and a bit dense - (She does her research and she thinks things through) but well worth it. So far, I mean. I read the first fifty pages before passing out last night, but so far, I can tell it will be a book I refer to often, if only because she points out and demonstrates that while yes, there are differences in the sexes, but mostly, actually, we're the same. Biology-wise anyway. Everything else is essentially socialization. This makes it a book that I wish those giving us gifts would read, (I know this too makes me sound witch-y) if only so they knew where we were coming from.

This of course only increases my search for gender-neutral clothes. And I admit, it doesn't make me the most popular with my mother - who while she dressed my sister and me in reds, browns, greens, and blues is so peeved that I won't tell her the sex that she insists she isn't buying my child anything until it's born. When I say I want gender neutral clothing - even after the child is born - she tells me of the cutest rosebud outfit she found in Macy's. When I say I don't want rosebuds? She tells me how the woman she bought it for loved it. What do I tell her? Send the receipt.

My in-laws this last weekend indulged me, as we shopped for both children and I rummaged through the boy/girl racks at a consignment shop trying to find all the gender-neutral clothes. My father-in-law congratulated me on all the good deals I had found, but then said, he now agrees with my mother - nothing else until the child is born. Because apparently you can only buy so many gender neutral clothes.

I should tell them all what store clerks tell me, stay in the boys clothes. For whatever reason, the bright colors and safer things go there. Because God forbid someone dress their boy up as a rosebud.

Wordless Wednesday - Just In From the Library!

I Am Dyslexic

Today I have my first ever guest blogger! Yes my very own sister! Sis (because she is sis to me, but Phaedra to the rest of the world) indulges me often by listening to me talk through my ideas on education, what I want for my children in their education, researching pre-schools, wondering if the experience I want for my children actually exists within a school building, etc. I also spend a lot of time ranting to Sis about the pre-school programs I find - that brag about how they will prepare my child for kindergarten by teaching him phonics and letters - when I think (after reading Mem Fox's Reading Magic) guessing how words is just as important (just watch a small child try to sound out the -tion sound). Because Sis is dyslexic, she too rants about the over-emphasis on phonics and how she always found it frustrating in learning foreign languages.

Sis started thinking about her experience growing up dyslexic and asked if she could write an essay for my blog as part of my ongoing considerations about education (and had me think about spending my entire blogging week thinking and writing about education). So here she is, my fantastic dress making sister, who made my wedding dress (in eight days and made it so it fit inside a Priority Mail envelope) and who I think in all ways is a genius and certainly the (first) best thing to happen to me (second and third of course is husband and son and fourth the soon to be baby). You can see her blog and work here.

 

I Am Dyslexic

By Phaedra Elizabeth Paulson

I am dyslexic.

When I was about 6, my dad pulled me out of one elementary school where my 1^st grade teacher wanted to hold me back a year, and put me into an elementary school where the school principle (Ms. Betty Campbell, you were an angel) had me tested for all kinds of “learning disorders”. It was her that got me the early diagnosis of dyslexic.

So really, I’m a lucky dyslexic.

The diagnosis of dyslexic I imagine was a relief to all my parents. From my dad and my step-mom it seemed like their mentality was: okay, this is the problem, we can address that. And they did. I was taken weekly to a tutoring company (called Learn to Learn, no judgment there) that apparently specialized in kids like me, “Bright kids that are ‘slow learners.’’ From this company I had nearly an hour of tutoring every night from my dad and step-mom, after school and through the summer.

By the time I was in the 4^th grade, I was pulled out of class for my remedial spelling lessons, where I was tutored one on one with a special ed teacher. Then later, I was pulled out of class for my reading lessons, again, one on one. (oh, public school system of 25 years ago, how we miss you.) It wasn’t until the end of the school year that I was told my reading lessons were actually above my grade level. I was reading for comprehension above the rest of my class, just spelling below my grade level.  I was main-streamed the next year.

Technically from the fifth grade forward, I was a “normal” kid, just a really bad speller.

Like I said, this makes me a lucky dyslexic.

What’s interesting to me looking back, is how often I have been labeled by others and labeled myself as a “slow learner” without thinking for a second what that actually means.

What is actually true is I struggled with reading and languages. In other areas I actually learn very quickly.

Years ago, someone asked me how I felt about the label, of learning disabled that is applied to dyslexia and I said, that label gets schools money to help the kids that are.

But it’s not that simple.

At the time, it never occurred to me that I had any negative repercussions on my psyche. Now I’m not so sure.

While I did fairly well in school, I definitely started to give up by high school. Yes, I’m sure normal teenage angst and rebellion played a part in my disinterest in school. But so did feeling like I’d never be put in an advance class due to my “issues” and that I had to sit through my English classes with my fellow class mates, that somehow never seemed to be able to remember what they had read and understand it. And yet, they had never had their own special ed teachers.

While my high school teachers likely didn’t know I was a “slow learner” or  “learning disabled”, I think I had a fair chip on my shoulder that academia had given up on me. Or, at the very least, had let me down.

So then, the sewing.

Once I had taught myself how to do this thing, that was to make the things in my head, well, I guess you could say I was hooked. I was 15 and it’s been a life long love affair ever since.

Sewing, pattern drafting, building the garment was something that came easily to me and I think my relief at having found something that I could excel at was actually profound.

What is curious to me, is there are designers and highly skilled seamstresses and engineers and carpenters and makers of all things on both sides of my father’s family. My dad and uncle have built and rebuilt airplanes. My uncle IS an aeronautical engineer.  The similarities in the problem solving that gets a dress or a corset built is not dissimilar to my way of thinking then what gets an airplane or a house built. It’s almost like “thinking as an engineer” is a genetic trait. So is dyslexia. Dyslexia gets passed down, while a daughter can get it from either parent, a son will only get it from his mother. From the experience of my dad teaching me how to drive, I promise you, I got this genetic trait from my dad. Neither one of us seemed to be so solid with our right and left. But they didn’t have this diagnosis when he or his brother were kids. That the family stories were about how neither of them seemed to do well in school despite clearly being bright and capable is, well, curious.

Last night, my sister was relating a story at her dinner party of how when we were kids, she thought I was being difficult or lazy, maybe that I was just trying to get attention with my reading struggles. The discussion got me to thinking. (hence this essay) Am I still nervous about this kind of judgment? Even though I have no fear that she thinks this now?

In this climate of our currant education system, my heart breaks at the idea of all kids being pushed into this box of teaching to the test and that all intelligence is based on reading and language and math. I never would have survived school like that. I love learning. I love working on challenging design projects and figuring out new ways of solving design problems. All of this I learned outside of my public school education. But I did learn it.

25 years after being labeled “normal”, I am still grateful everyday that I found something that proves those other labels wrong.  I don’t think anyone in my life needs me to be a talented designer to be reassured that I am not a slow learner, I’m sure my siblings and all my parents think I am quite bright. When I tell people that I am dyslexic they often ask, “really?”So it’s interesting to me that my natural tendency is to do what I do out of the sight of others. I did not thrive in the corporate design world, yet, people like, even love what I design and make. This last year I quit my corporate design job to finally focus on what I really wanted to do, to work for myself making custom things, to work one on one with my clients. I know this is the right place for me to be, working with my hands, bringing my ideas to fruition, working with a client to create the best thing for her and her event. There are so many things about this job that feels like it’s a good fit for my skill set. However, there is a part of me that wonders, am I, maybe a little, hiding from the judgment of those labels? Do I still feel that fear of people thinking I’m stupid? And the best way to hide from that is to work on my own, behind closed doors? Where I can’t be judged? Where what matters is the end result, not how I got there, not how I figured it out?

I think so, a little bit, yes.

People often seem to be uninformed about what dyslexia is. They think it means I can’t see the letters on the page or that I just, still as an adult with 2 college degrees, can’t read. They think it means that I am actually learning disabled.

I’ve met parents of young children that share stories that they fear their kid might be dyslexic, it’s an odd conversation that follows when I say, ‘your kid will be fine, I’m dyslexic’. “But did you recover? Are you still dyslexic?” . Um, yes. but you memorize the letters and use spell check and move on. It comes out really, like an old accent, when I’m really tired or drunk (If your kid is writing school papers while drunk you have bigger problems.) or when I’m trying to learn second languages, oh so help me with the foreign languages.

Now I wish I could reverse the label. I can’t speak for any other kind of “learning disabilities” or “learning disorder” but those categories really piss me off.

I didn’t fit into the box that said, I should have been a lawyer or professor, or any other kind of reading focused career. But I do belong in this box, the one about working with shapes and materials and the physics of how x will effect y if I do this. None of that makes me learning disabled. Clearly, I have learned to read and write. Clearly I have learned how to learn.

Like I said, I am lucky. I’m lucky for 2 reasons. The first being that Ms. Betty Campbell said, “there is nothing wrong with that child”. And the second is that my dad as a (highly likely) undiagnosed dyslexic himself, understood exactly the way I understand my world and believed and agreed with her.

There’s room for all our learning. We need both people like me and people like Tara, my writer and English professor sister that didn’t get it then, but knows now, I wasn’t being lazy. I just see things from a different point of view.

And I am thriving in my skill set.

Sunday on the Brooklyn Bridge

My in-laws are in town (not to worry - it has surpassed expectations and been a lovely visit) and my FIL (father-in-law) wanted to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The last time I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge was September of 2008. I was visiting my sister from LA with my husband, was seven and half months pregnant with my son and had literally just started to show (thanks to the stomach muscles that come with 25 years of ballet).

And now-

We measured him Saturday night. At 2 1/2, he's 40 inches tall. He was born at 19 1/2.

Husband says I can't call him a baby any longer - because he is now all little boy.


And again, 7 1/2 months pregnant. 

The Business of Education

Last night, I read this disturbing Editorial in the New York Times on Scholastic's Big Coal Mistake - where they produced a fourth grade lesson packet on energy paid for by the American Coal Foundation. This lesson packet mentioned the benefits of coal but failed to mention things like toxic waste and gee, I don't know, things like Black Lung or the people who we hear about every year or every other year who get trapped inside a coal mine and die.

Last year, Scholastic also encouraged schools to have classroom parties with and to collect labels from the sugary drink, Sunny D.

As I researched pre-schools in my neighborhood, I was relieved to find the school here and there who didn't give the kids juice. My son, like me and many in my family, is a bit sugar sensitive - not that we don't have it, but we use organic free-trade non-bleached good quality sugar (which I have to say has actually increased the quality of my baking) and we eat sweets sparingly. In the past, we've given my son a half a cup of diluted orange juice and he turned into a demon. I know some doctors say that sugar does not contribute to hyperactivity, but I don't think they have children.

Anyway, in reading this editorial yesterday, I added another strike in my list against the public school system. I have a lot of concerns about the schools, education in general, kids getting what they need in the classroom, and so on. I haven't researched education as much as parenting, but almost - and it's slow reading on my part. Mostly because I get depressed. I read the fantastic Diana Ravitch's Life and Death of the Great American School System (which I highly recommend), and while I think she is right about a lot and found it an eye opening read, it left me completely hopeless about the future of education in this country, and even around the world.

This morning I woke up thinking about Scholastic's stunts and thinking that now in addition to having to worry about my son getting too much homework (as I also read yesterday here) in subjects where homework is useless (all of them except math) (for some of us who remember our school experience this may strike us as one of those moments where we say "duh"), or over tested for statewide standardized tests that have nothing to do with the curriculum he's getting in the classroom, or that he could get a really good teacher who loves teaching and loves his/her subject matter, but somehow fails to produce good test results in his/her students and ends up fired, or whatever else, but now I also have to worry about my child being advertised to - not just in school hallways as he walks past vending machines full of junk food, but in his lessons and school books? Great.

By the time I was sipping my coffee,  my head was spinning with the realization of all the vested interests in our so called public education system, from the companies who write the standardized tests and textbooks and compete for school districts and teachers' attentions, to school lunches, city and state governments, teachers unions, school buses (dare we dream of the hybrid bus or would that threaten oil interests?), and well, the list goes on.

I started to ask myself, who really is teaching our children? Can we begin to see why the interests of our kids has gotten lost, when public schools are now as much a business as anything else in the marketplace?

I see stacks of library books, new research topics and a new series of blog posts in my future as I think about untangling this knot.

Rhubarb!

Growing up, we had an enormous rhubarb plant, and we never did anything with it - because my parents complained it was too tart to eat and there was nothing good to do with it. Then just a few years ago, a friend in Denver harvested the rhubarb from her yard, made pans full of rhubarb crisp, and then had a bunch of us over. I discovered my parents were wrong. I could have devoured the entire pan. I didn't. I stopped short of a plate.

Only because I was worried what people would think of me if I did finish an entire pan by myself.

This past week, I saw the season's first rhubarb and its glorious red stalks at the Farmer's Market. I took a pound and a half home for my first ever rhubarb crisp. Mine didn't come out as good as my friend's, but still with a scoop of Coconut Bliss Vanilla ice cream, it was delicious. I think next I'm going to attempt the classic Strawberry Rhubarb pie. Yum!