Chicago Moms Blog

The Horn of Plenty is a Parade Float

It's been hours since my last meal, but I have that uncomfortably stuffed Thanksgiving Day feeling. It's not a full belly that is making me feel over-served; it's reading the latest dispatches from Haiti. 

Forty thousand people are camping in Jean Marie Vincent Park in the devastated city of Port-au-Prince. Shelters made of sheets, cardboard and pieces of wood shade families from the sun and rain. Women wash clothes in plastic tubs on the basketball courts. To get clean water, residents carry jugs and buckets to a slow filtration system installed by Operation Blessing. "We have nothing," says the young mother, waiting for food.

I turn away from the pictures of the Port-au-Prince encampment. Suddenly my family's average American home and our average American lifestyle strikes me as strange as that of the space-age Jetsons. 

Bedtime Stories

Any parent who has laughed with their kids at the comic work of Mo Willems knows that Easy Readers sometimes contain brilliance. The other night during bedtime reading with my girls, I came across a Frog and Toad story that just about blew my mind. 

Arnold Lobel's collections of stories about the devoted friends Frog and Toad have been around since the seventies. Lobel's tales even inspired a hit musical on Broadway in 2003, based on his work. However, the story "The Surprise" from the collection Frog and Toad All Year was new to me until last week. It unreels in 12 brief pages, told in typically simple, declarative sentences. The repetition of the phrases becomes nearly a hypnotic chant and I was close to zoning out as I read the words to my girls. Until I came to the story's twist.

"It was October," begins Lobel. 

Frog looks out his window and sees leaves all over his yard. He decides to help out his friend. "I will go to Toad's house...I will rake all the leaves that have fallen on his lawn. Toad will be surprised." 

An American Momma in Copenhagen

When I found out that Dear Husband might be going to Copenhagen to work on the videos for Chicago's Olympic bid presentation, I insisted we make it a family trip. We returned from Copenhagen, Denmark this week after a thirteen day visit. 

Well, we didn't get the Olympics, despite Randy's fantastic work (at least to my proud eyes.) But this post isn't going to be Monday morning quarterbacking about how great/tragic it is that Chicago dodged a bullet/lost the bid.  

While I was explored the city with my two daughters, I experienced a bit of culture shock. Perhaps the word "shock" may be too harsh a work in a land of soft skies and kindly Danes - perhaps I should call my reaction to the Danish parenting attitudes a cultural surprise.

I won't claim to have taken the pulse of a country in a week, but as I bumbled through Copenhagen's strange but beautiful cityscape, I did notice very different expectations and customs from what I see in the midwestern United States. The kind of parenting I encountered was mostly that of relaxed attitudes, tolerance and patience. Parenting in the age of anxiety? Not so much in Northern Europe. 

Patience is the Name of a Game of Cards

I have a vision, a still unrealized vision, of my family of four.  In the picture in my head we are sitting at a round table, playing a game of cards.  Nothing fancy or complicated, just Go Fish or maybe Crazy Eights.  Even War would be fun, but that game might be too challenging for four-year old Nora, who still needs to stop and think before she remembers that ten is more than nine.

We have a long way to go before this vision becomes real.  Six-year old Mia still insists to the point of tears on winning any competitive games she plays.  She's happiest engaged in fantasy play with no clear winner or loser, narrating elaborate adventures for her little plastic animals and magnet fairies.   When Mom or Dad try to join in, we usually end up being chastised by our little megalomaniac as if she were directing a Hollywood blockbuster.  "No, no, no!  You need to move the kitty like THIS!"

There's another obstacle to the realization of my dream-evening.  My husband has been working crazy hours.   On the weekends when he is not at the office, we pack our days with outings.  We don't often have the luxury of empty time with all four of us together.  When both parents are at home at the same time, it's such a rare treat that I usually choose to go for a run or attempt to scale our perpetual mountain of laundry.

Crime and Punishment

I was big news in our village last week.  

The suburb where we live, north of Chicago, is so small (HOW SMALL IS IT?!) well, our village is so small you're guaranteed to run into someone you know at the local ice cream shop, so you better comb your hair before you go if you're into that sort of thing, but it's okay to let your freak flag fly if you're not.  Our village is so small I regularly cross into the towns that border on the north and south during my daily walks.  So small that when I told my husband and my friend Kristen that my credit card had been stolen, they both had the same reaction:  "You're going to be in the Police Blotter!"

Our local weekly paper prints a list of the latest area misdemeanors off the town police blotter.  Minor thefts, DUIs, high school vandalism -- it's the only part of the paper I read.  I usually smirk at the news, picturing little old ladies accusing hired workmen of pilfering their misplaced brooches.  In a neighborhood where violent crime is a rarity, kids spray-painting "Penis" on a garage door is the heights of hilarity for the neighbors not involved.  And my own little brush with crime left me largely unscathed so I was just curious to see how the paper would mangle the details.

The week before, at the fitness center, I'd had a funny feeling from the girl coming out of the locker room wearing wintry clothes and carrying no bag. I did nothing of course, just grabbed my purse out of the locker and went home.  Luckily, the credit card company called a couple hours later to ask if I had spent $800 at Best Buy or $70 on cigarettes at the gas station that morning.  Which I had not.

The Season for Reading

I have a summer confession.  Given the chance, I could read all day.  Let the ants take over the sink of breakfast dishes, let the damp pool towels pile up; I'll be on the couch with my book. Talk about the lazy days of summer.

Spring has its cleaning; fall is all about preparing for school; winter days get filled with labor-intensive holidays followed by the survival mode until spring.  Now we have time and ease.  School-year obligations have disappeared.  The children are happy at daycamp and their world of play has expanded to the yard, the neighbors, the sidewalk, the parks, the beach, the pool.

In the last month or so I've neglected a long list of projects, 

Body of Knowledge

Solve the following problems.  Read all instructions, then throw the magazine/book/laptop across the room because one piece of advice about changing your life sounds as good as its contrary about acceptance.  

Mathematics

As of this afternoon, I weigh A pounds, which is B pounds more than last summer, C pounds more than the day I got married and the same as when I was D months pregnant.

In the last year my bra size has changed from # to $.  Wearing knit shirts and my old bras, I now appear to have X girls instead of Y.   My husband does not complain.  The conundrum:  now that I'm % years old, I've finally found the self-confidence to wear the more revealing clothes I shied from when I was &.

Brownies for Breakfast

My father-in-law fed my daughters chocolate brownies at breakfast.  

High fat, high sugar and caffeinated chocolate do not equal healthy breakfast in our house.  There's no way in hell my four and six year old could wheedle their way into dessert after cereal if I was in the kitchen.  Mia and Nora know I'd probably just snort at their request and offer them some fruit.  But this morning I was sleeping while they ate.  Randy's father had asked for breakfast duty the night before.

I had to laugh when the girls ran to me with the happy news.  

"Grampa Bob gave us brownies for breakfast!"

"I feel like Bill Cosby," said my father in law.  Randy and I laughed in recognition and started singing, "Dad is great!  He gives us chocolate cake!"

Ants! Rated NFS (Not For the Squeamish)

The screaming from my six-year-old and her playdate friend had been echoing through the house and yard for the last hour, but this particular wailing took on a different key.  Not as playful as "MIA, MIA, MIA, HELP ME TEAR THE IVY OFF THE HOUSE TO MAKE A GIANT BIRD NEST!!" nor as shrill as a genuine emergency call, this time the "MOMMY!" had a tone of thrilled horror.

"MOM!  THERE'S INFINITY ANTS IN THE BASEMENT!"

At the far end of the basement, I see it.  A roiling city of tiny black dots.  I hold back the gag reflex and try to feel thankful the infestation seems to be contained in one spot in the middle of the rough cement floor.

Years ago, when I first started teaching, I would assign my freshman English students a short story from 1938 called "Leiningen Versus The Ants."  Carl Stephenson's tale of a Brazilian plantation owner and his battle against a plague of flesh-eating fire ants is a real barn-burner.  Every sentence of dialogue seems to end in an exclamation mark: "They're not creatures you can fight--they're an elemental--an 'act of God!'"....  "And every single one of them a fiend from hell!"  Bored with the paper-flat characters and over-wrought narration of Leiningen's adventure, I dropped the story off my reading list after teaching it a couple of times.  For a time my students had seemed to like it...and the struggle it portrayed offered a simple way to teach the literary concept of conflict.  "Man Versus Nature," I would write on the blackboard.  In the September heat, my students would copy it down in their notebooks or look out the window at our lifeless view of the roof of the library. 

Damn Kids

Kids. They complicate everything.  A thousand unfinished sentences.  Plans waylaid.  You're puttering along, the machine of your day running smooth - then you hear a wail for the bathroom. Or food.  Or there's sudden silence and you glance over your shoulder to find the toddler hard asleep in her carseat.  She's sweaty and open-mouthed.  Her cheeks are adorable and your elusive dream of arriving on time and drool-free slips away.

The other day I confided to my teacher friend Kerry my dream of a weeklong writers retreat.