Tag Archives: children

Elizabeth Edwards: The Parent I Want To Be

It was with heavy heart that I heard the news two days ago that Elizabeth Edwards was losing her battle with Cancer. The news links all said she had months, maybe weeks to live. I knew that they wouldn’t be reporting it if it were that long. Our media doesn’t have that sort of patience. I knew that if they were reporting it, Elizabeth had days.

I was right.

Yesterday, one of the women I have grown to look up to left us. She is no longer in pain. There will be no more chemo, no more medications or doctors visits or days where her body just felt lousy. But there are also children who miss their mother and will miss her for the rest of their lives. My prayers of strength of heart and soul go out to them.

When I read of Elizabeth’s breast cancer, it struck a chord with me. I waited a while to have my children, and there is always a fear in the back of my mind, that I will not be around for all of those big moments: graduation from college, marriage, grandchildren. My own father died young and wasn’t around for some of my big moments. He saw me graduate college and graduate school, but left this world before my wedding and the birth of my children. It would break my heart to leave my children under any circumstances, and I watched with awe as Elizabeth Edwards seemed to handle her cancer with grace, dignity and hope. She faced death, and she helped her children to face it to. She was strong, but that is almost not a strong enough word for the fortitude she demonstrated as a parent.

I want to be an amazing parent. To not just make sure my kids eat enough, but to help shape and guide them to become the absolute best they can be. To love them unconditionally and instill in them the sense of self I already have of them. Every day I set my own personal bar high. As an outsider looking in, I believe that Elizabeth did too, and she reached that bar every day and in every way she lived loving her children.

As time fills in the wounds of missing their mother, her children will always know in their hearts that she loved them more than anything else. I hope that they will also know, they were blessed with sharing the world with a wonderful human being.

We all were.

Rest in peace Elizabeth. You showed many people how to live. For that I am personally very grateful.

by Rocket Science Mom

Photo graciously provided through the Fair Use Doctrine, some rights reserved

Christmas – Getting To Play With Toys All Over Again

One of the best things about having my babies was getting to play with TOYS all over again! I spent many a happy morning, building block towers so that my sons could knock them over again; creating towns with train tracks, fields and herds of domestic dinosaurs. In December we would build a crèche using toy animals. By Christmas Eve night, the crèche had become O Sprawling Metropolis of Bethlehem with many villages, fields and animals galore.

“Umm, maybe not the dinosaurs,” I would say. “But MUMMY, Baby Jesus loves ALL the animals.”

“Oh! I see…”

So much for my tasteful nativity scene!

Creative play is important. We know this. Given a heap of blocks and a few wooden or plastic animals, kids will make an imaginary world come to life. Add a cardboard box or two for hours of entertainment. You can join in the fun, if you’re feeling extra-creative!

Wood vs. Plastic:

Wooden toys far surpass plastic for sheer toughness. Our wooden toys withstood heavy use… The plastic toys ended up in the bin. Environmentally and financially, wooden toys get an A+.

Don’t Get Carried Away…

It’s tempting to buy everything in the store! But really, less is more. Investing in a few good quality toys will sound like very good sense if you happen to step on a broken piece of cheap plastic toy in the night. A recent poll found that children only play with five percent of their toys… Think of all that money spent on stuff that will lurk at the bottom of the toybox, unused. Usually, the latest flashy toy will be played with once and the ones that have been around for generations will entertain your kids for years to come. Good quality toys are recyclable too: Our wooden blocks and train tracks have been handed down to happy little cousins, even after being bashed, crashed and loved to death by my three boys!

Our All Time Favourites:

Wooden Blocks

Dress-up clothes

Sets of animals and people, farms and buildings

Matchbox and Hot Wheels Cars

Cardboard boxes, glue, crayons and bits of paper

Musical and percussion instruments

Bath toys

Lego

Books

Board games

A Teddy Bear!

by Nan Sheppard

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Photo graciously provided by tinkernoonoo, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved

Use Catch Phrases And Calm To Manage Tough Moments

One of the most important facets of the Love and Logic technique is empathizing with children when they get into difficulty. I will openly admit that this has been difficult for me to pull off, because I too quickly end up sounding sarcastic or insincere. That pretty much ruins what I’m trying to accomplish and over the years I’ve given up in frustration more often than succeeding.

The good people at Love and Logic suggest saying something like, “Bummer!” or “Oh dear.” Find a phrase that works well with your own personality and use it all the time. This for some reason was hard to do, and I’ve tried a few different ideas out over the years but nothing has really fit. “Bummer” or “Oh dear” just aren’t quite a perfect fit for us.

Tonight though, I think I hit on what will work for both me and the kids. It’ll run something along the lines of “Oh man! That looks really difficult.” or perhaps “Dude! That’s a tough one.”

There’s more to the equation than just using the right words though. I think that not being angry is a big part of the success that Love and Logic parents enjoy. For me personally, getting to that point? Not so easy. And while I’ve attained a degree of calm in my life for now, there’s no guarantee that I won’t relapse into an angry fit here and there. (I just keep trying; and letting go of things that annoy.)

It’s not completely clear why I’m handling things with more calm than in the past. Perhaps I’m finally growing up. Well. Sort of. I hope to continue to be annoying in my children’s eyes young at heart for many years to come.

I bought an iPod last year and it has been quite popular with the children. I also bought a case for it, because keeping my possessions in mint condition is a value. Not so for the boys. They’ve been taking it out of the case and it is now scratched. On top of that, it’s common to find the battery run down or they put it where I can’t find it.

I sadly told them that they can’t borrow my ipod anymore, because it’s not being treated well enough. This morning I was pretty surprised to see my case in The Mercenary’s hand, walking into church. He’d taken it to cover the iPod he bought (with his own money) last week. Talk about a double standard! i made a big deal of teasing him over the whole thing, but I wasn’t really angry. Getting upset isn’t going to take the scratch out, and hopefully he sees my side of things.

Or at least he will someday when he buys his own car and I ride in it eating a really crumbly snack and leave my drink and coat and papers in the seat. Heh.

Innnnn the meantime, I plan to keep saying “Dude!” or “Oh Man!!” and cultivate more empathy.

by AmyL

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Photo graciously provided by Andrew*, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved

Lifestyle and Environmental Clues May Help Our Children with Autism

The following is an Autism survey that we at GNMParents support and urge you to pass along. It was created by Mischelle Miller-Raftery, PhD, who explains her research below:

Autism has reached epidemic proportions, yet even with the increase in research, no one has come up with the proverbial “smoking gun.” Research may never be able to pin down the exact causes. What we can hope for is that research will give us clues as to what is contributing to autism and what is triggering the genetic malfunction causing autism. For example, researchers at the UC Davis have found preliminary results that certain flea and tick shampoos used by mothers during pregnancy has a statistically significant rate of the diagnosis of autism in their children—more research is needed.

In the past there was a battle between a pure genetic malfunction verses a pure environment exposure being the cause. Most researchers now believe that it is a combination of these two factors that cause autism. Of course, genetics will likely be shown to play a significant role in many cases of autism. But, genetic mapping is a slow process and may take years or even decades to complete. Therefore, we must begin to look towards the environment. What in our world is triggering the autism gene, or combination of genes, to become active? This is the primary question researchers are posing now.

Why is it so difficult to determine a cause? Every child is unique with a different genetic make up as well as different environmental exposures. What causes autism in one child, may do nothing in another child. However, with good research we will be able to determine these environmental causes and begin to eliminate then from our house, our environment, and our world. Your help is needed…

I have developed a survey for mothers of children who have been diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder (Asperger’s Syndrome, autism, and pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified). This survey asks general questions about the mother’s environment and lifestyle choices during pregnancy. The mother will be asked to fill in each question for the time period during their pregnancy with the child who was diagnosed with autism.

The premise of this study is to look for trends between environmental exposures and autism. Specifically, this study explores multiple exposure combinations which might have occurred during your pregnancy. The goal of this study is to explore the possible environmental influences on autism.

To qualify for the study, the participant must meet the following criteria.

Your participation in this study should take about 25 minutes. To begin now, please click the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3YBPGBT

For additional information about the study, please contact me at mm@mischellemiller.com

Thank you,
Mischelle Miller-Raftery, PhD
California Southern University, 2009

Graph Paper Pictures

The younger boys celebrated their 8th birthday this weekend, and each received his very own Etch-A-Sketch toy. They got up this morning and boy did the creativity abound! I think they spent two hours making pictures together before they even wanted breakfast. Captain Earthquake brought his over to show me an abstraction that he’d made where all the edges looked like cubes. We laughed over some possible descriptions. I thought it looked like buildings reflected on a river or a maze while he said it was a road leading into a city or perhaps a Robloxian.

It occurred to me that doing a drawing on graph paper and coloring in the sections with different colors would be really fun. So we dug out the colored pencils and graph paper and went crazy. It was fun! After a few minutes of coloring in random blocks, we started drawing pictures. The rule was that you had to stick to the lines of the graph paper (we eventually broke that rule too, when the mood struck).

If you have some graph paper and a half-hour, try this with your kids. Let them decide on the rules (and let them change the rules if they want – half the fun is hearing your parent say “Do it however YOU want”). We enjoyed some time together and I got to talk about some drawing techniques without being threatening or sounding like I was correcting their efforts. Each boy did something different and all of us had something to be proud of when we were done.

The picture above is the one I did. The boys laughed at the scale of my pink flower, then they decided that it should be a TV flower because it was square. When I attempted a bird in the tree, the Captain informed me that I had drawn a penguin. So I announced that my penguin knew how to jump into trees. After we abandoned the “draw on the lines” rule, the hammock and table were added. I coulda done a much better bird if the rules had allowed curves. But that challenge made the whole thing so much more fun. I’m glad we drew together.

by AmyL

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Photo graciously provided by jurvetson, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved