Shorts

My crowdsourcing experiment worked out well- you all convinced me that Colorado in early May with a 5 year old and 2.5 year old would probably not be the best choice. I listed out the other places we can fly to non-stop from San Diego, and we looked at the list and our map and decided to visit San Antonio and Austin, instead. Depending on how the trip plans out, we might head down to somewhere on the Gulf, too. My husband (who desperately needs a new blog name- he hates Hubby, and I hate typing out "my husband" every time I want to talk about him) is lobbying for including Houston, so he can go see the space center. I've got a couple of guide books, and am about to start the planning. If you have any ideas on what we should see and do in that part of Texas, leave them in the comments!

I haven't figured out where to go for our getaway, but I got a lot of ideas, and @Calee sent me a link to an Orange County post that describes a getaway that we might do in the future, if we don't do it for my 40th.

-------------------------------

Pumpkin LOVED her first soccer lesson in the new, more competitive class.  She did not notice that several of her friends are quite a bit better at soccer than she is, and I'm certainly not going to point it out to her. Anyway, she's not the worst at soccer, either, despite her father's worries about her "ball skills."

Pumpkin also loves having all the soccer gear, so I guess I should stop being a grump about it. It is startling, though, to look out across the field and see her running around in real soccer gear, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, just like the big girl soccer players. A lot of her day care friends are in the same class, and I look at them all running around and can't believe how big they look, how much like kids instead of the babies I remember them as.

------------------------------

One of the other moms at soccer was also pretty startling to see. She is friends with one of the moms in the day care crowd, but her child isn't in our day care, so I'd never met her before. Her child, in fact, refused to play soccer- she had been signed up for the class Pumpkin played in last year, and screamed and clung to her mother when her mom tried to get her to play. When I saw that the "little kid" class was right next to the "big kid" class, I tried to convince Petunia to play in the little kid class, and she would have none of it. Who knew a soccer class could be so scary? Petunia LOVES kicking the ball around at home.

Anyway, this mom was painfully thin. Not, "gee, she must have a high metabolism" thin, but thin enough that my first thought when I saw her was that perhaps she has an eating disorder. Her legs were honestly about the same size as my arms. I could tell this because she was wearing leggings. Of course, I have no idea why she is so thin. Maybe that's just the way her body is. But she did not look healthy- her eyes looked sunken. Her little girl, on the other hand, did look healthy- so hooray for her if she indeed does have an eating disorder and is not passing that to her little girl. I can't imagine navigating the rough waters of feeding toddlers and preschoolers if I had eating issues of my own.

I realized that I'd rather be in my situation (trying to lose ten pounds) than in hers, any day, whatever the reason for her extreme thinness.  I was surprised to find myself so comfortable in my own skin.

And then I grabbed a handful of the Cheetos someone had brought, because they are yummy.

------------------------------

Petunia is getting more intelligible, but she still has many, many adorable toddlerisms. She asks for her "cue-kick" instead of her music, and at dinner time she usually wants to sit in my "wap". She knows the signs for all the colors (and a lot of other things- the fact that she's been slow to become intelligible when speaking has meant that she's kept using signs), and she's been teaching them to her day care teacher, which is amusing all of us.

She can count to five, and even higher if you don't notice that she always skips "seven" and often skips all they way to "seventeen" for some reason. She also knows most of her letters, and every time she sees the letter her name starts with, she points it out and reminds us it is "for Petunia".

I think the cutest thing she does right now, though, is sing and dance along to Pumpkin's Dance & Learn Chinese DVD. Pumpkin can sing all the songs, and Petunia tries very hard and does surprisingly well. And she loves doing the dances with Pumpkin.

A close second is how she reads Blue Hat, Green Hat, a Sandra Boynton book my parents recently gave her.

"Re' shirt, boo shirt, lehlow shirt.. POOTS!"

-----------------------------

We're at a fairly happy time in sibling relations. Petunia often wants to do whatever her big sister is doing, and Pumpkin is not yet old enough or bored enough with the phenomenon to protest most of the time- so we get a lot of heart-meltingly cute "sisters playing together" moments. They will both run around the backyard flapping their arms and yelling "fly! fly!" Or, Pumpkin will start singing and acting out a song about taking baby steps and then taking big steps, and Petunia will run over to join in.

They still yell at each other, though, and today they got in a huge pout contest over whose turn it was to play with one of the trains- so don't be fooled into having a second kid on my account.

Weekend Reading: The Inspiration Edition

This week, I have some links that I find inspiring, and a link that wants to be inspiring, but I just find interesting.
First, the inspiring ones:

• Both Cal Newport and Laura Vanderkam wrote posts about not getting so busy that you can't do high impact work. Cal noticed while he was in school that the more important a professor's work was, the more comfortable that professor was with taking time off, and points out that busyness != creating actual value. Laura has the similar observation that sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take the time to think.
• I found this quote from Ira Glass about creating things via @bluemilk's twitter feed.
• I found this quote about claiming time to work as a mother from the comment's section on FeMOMhist's excellent post about splitting parenting with your partner.
• I really liked this old post of Scalzi's about his response to being laid off. Now, in most practical regards, my response to being laid off (it has happened to me twice now- and I've written about the most recent time and my response to the first time I witnessed lay offs) has been completely different.  But I agree with him 100% about taking control of your life and about how lay offs can often inspire you to look around and find a better work situation

And now the sort of inspiring but really just interesting one, which my husband (a TED talk junkie) sent to me:



First of all, I completely disagree with him about velcro. That was an awesome invention, and my husband tells me it is taught as an example at engineering school. I think he is suffering from a bias against practical innovations in favor of theoretical advances. In truth, the world needs both.

I'm also not sure what to make of his assertion that you don't want to let your family stand in the way of your success. I like the line about not treating your spouse and children as jailers- but what solution is he advocating? Not having a family? Reaching for "it all"? Being a crappy spouse/parent so you can focus on your career? It is unclear. He should have talked less about how he is not a child-hater and more about what he actually meant here, I think.

Personally, I am not just aiming for a great career. I am aiming for a great life. And for me, the components of a great life include family and career.  I think that neither having a great career nor being a great parent are all-consuming pursuits. In fact, for me, I would do worse as a parent and worse at my career if I tried to make either of these things all-consuming. So maybe I agree with him- but it isn't clear if this is also what he is arguing.

And, also courtesy of my husband, The Real Housewives of Disney isn't inspiring at all but made me laugh.

And finally, the discussion of giftedness, etc., in the comments section of my last post may well be more worthwhile than the post itself... go check it out if you find the topic at all interesting.

Perfectionism and Non-Academic Pursuits

FeMOMhist has had a couple of really interesting posts about recent testing that has revealed just what a rare zebra her son is. (She had an earlier post where she made the analogy of having a gifted child to be like having a zebra in a world that expects horses.)

This, in conjunction with some recent events, has got me thinking. It is too early for me to know whether Pumpkin is a zebra or just a rather speedy horse, and it is way to early to know how Petunia will develop. (For what its worth, I myself was probably a fast horse growing up, although I did get "tracked" into the gifted program and that was awesome. My husband was probably a zebra.) So, the musings in this post are not really directly about my kids. They are more general musings that may or may not apply to my kids. Time will tell.

Anyway, one problem that a lot of gifted kids have is perfectionism. The theory is that they are so used to having things come easily that they are afraid to try to do something that they can't be perfect at- or something like that. I am not as up on all of this as I probably should be, with kindergarten barreling down on us and all.

To me, the fact that school often fails to give gifted kids the opportunity to overcome this perfectionism in a safe environment is one of the most troubling things about the thought of trying to navigate a gifted child through standard schooling. I've watched far too many unreformed perfectionists flame out in college or graduate school to take this lightly. In all cases, the person was clearly gifted, but at some point ran into a class or an experiment or something that was too challenging, and just couldn't handle it. None of the cases I am aware of turned out tragically- everyone is living a reasonably happy life, if not necessarily fulfilling the potential that people- and they themselves- saw in their younger selves. But my god, they went through hell for years getting to that point. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and I certainly don't wish it on my children. I am convinced that it is far better to figure out how to handle challenges and failure young, when most people figure that out.

So it scares me a bit to see Pumpkin suffering a bit from perfectionism. We have been working on this with her, and I think we have made progress. As I point out above, for all I know, school will provide sufficient challenges for her, and give her the chance to learn how to get her perfectionist streak under control.

But still. This is an area of parenting I think about quite a bit.

I've been pondering how my husband and I escaped the perfectionist trap. My husband still has a bit of a perfectionist streak in him, but he (mostly) uses it to ensure he produces high quality work, and is not paralyzed by it. I, on the other hand, am definitely not a perfectionist. I take pride in my work, and I try to do a good job. But I am for some reason rather good at letting things go, even when they are not perfect.

Now, obviously, basic temperament plays a big role here. But I am starting to form a theory about another factor that might be involved. Both my husband and I were fairly active in extra-curricular activities, right through college and beyond, keeping with them even though we weren't anywhere near the top of the field. For him, it was sports- even though he does not have the build that makes him a natural at most sports. For me, it was music. I can't speak for my husband, but I know that one of the things I had to consciously work on and overcome with my music was the tendency to want to stop and go back and fix a mistake. This is obviously not "allowed" in music- you just keep going. I clearly remember struggling with that, and even once I'd gotten to the point where I'd keep playing, I had teachers tell me that I needed to work on my "poker face"- i.e., I shouldn't wrinkle up my nose and shake my head when I hit a wrong note. I never completely conquered that tendency, but I got a lot better. Apparently my "tell" in later years was that I'd raise my eyebrows when I hit a wrong note.

I have long credited this experience with my relative comfort with public speaking. If you make a mistake when you are talking, you just correct yourself. This is so much easier than having to just keep going without even acknowledging the mistake- my God, people might think you don't even know you did something wrong!  But now I think the impact was perhaps more profound than I realized. Could this be why I'm comfortable taking risks and making mistakes at work now?

This train of thought has changed the way I look at the non-academic pursuits we've signed Pumpkin up to take. I used to think of swimming as just a necessary thing (because everyone should know how to swim) and soccer as something we did because Pumpkin wanted to hang out more with her friends (and because my husband had a weird issue with her lack of "ball skills"). Now, I think that they may be more important than that.

Recently, Pumpkin announced that she wanted to stop going to swim lessons. Since she announced this right at the end of the day on swim lesson day, and neither of us had the energy to force the issue that night, she got her way for that one lesson. But as my husband and I talked about what we would do if the swim lesson refusal continued, he hit upon the reason she was refusing to go. There had been a trainee teacher shadowing her regular teacher at the last lesson, and she had let Pumpkin's head sink underwater at one point, which (1) freaked her out, and (2) convinced her she was "no good" at swimming. My husband worked out a plan to get her over that experience, and she went back to swim lessons. A couple of weeks later, she swam across the pool unassisted. She was so unbelievably proud of herself. And we took the opportunity to point out how this was something she thought she couldn't do, but she practiced and got better at it.

So tonight, Pumpkin and I went out after dinner and bought her the gear she needs for the next round of soccer classes, which start on Friday. She's excited for this class, but I'm a bit nervous for her, because it is more structured and competitive than the class she took last year- hence the need for shin guards and cleats (which annoys me no end- do five year olds really need this gear? I need to find the less upwardly mobile soccer class, I think). She has many talents, but so far, we have seen no sign that sports will be one of them. She will no doubt start figuring out that her friends are better at this than she is soon. I no longer think that is a bad thing.

Crowdsourcing my Travel Plans

This weekend, my parents came over and watched the kids for a night while my husband and I absconded to the O.C. for some grown up time. We stayed in a business hotel near a mall, and slept, watched dumb TV that was not at all appropriate for children, did a little shopping without a child begging for whatever bauble had caught her eye, lingered over dinner and margaritas, and just enjoyed each others' company. We do this from time to time, and it is awesome, even though people snicker at the fact that our romantic getaway is a nondescript business hotel in Orange County. I can't really explain to them- a really cool location would actually detract from the point of the trip, because we'd feel like we needed to go out and appreciate it. This location is enough like our regular life to let us just relax. We are both very, very grateful to my parents for giving us the chance to do this from time to time.

But... in a couple of months, we have a bigger getaway coming up. I'm turning 40, and my parents have offered to give us two whole nights away. The big birthday and extra night away seem to demand something a little extra, so we're planning to go some place different. The only problem is, we don't know where.

On this getaway, I realized what I want for my 40th escape. I want a place with a nice, low key bar with a good view (ocean, probably, but that isn't required) and yummy fru-fru drinks (margaritas are on the outer end of the allowable non-fru-fruness), within a couple of hours by car or plane from San Diego. The bar should be walking distance from a nice, comfortable hotel- not necessarily super luxurious, but that would be OK, too. I only turn 40 once, right?

I am drawing a blank, although, to be fair, I haven't done much searching yet. But I thought I'd ask you guys- where should I go to celebrate my 40th birthday? And make no mistake- I'll be celebrating not drowning my sorrows. I have a great life to show for my 40 years!

And while I'm asking for travel advice.... we're also in the early stages of planning a family vacation. As you may remember from our Great California Road Trip, one of my secrets for happy travel with little kids is to plan the trip to just this side of obssessiveness. OK, maybe to just on the other side of obsessiveness. So there is a lot of planning ahead.

Anyway, my husband really wants to go in May, to take advantage of the fact that this is the last year we can take a trip without worrying about school holidays. We've tentatively picked Colorado as our destination. We'd fly into Denver, spend some time there, and spend some time driving around a bit. We'll probably only have a little over a week, given the current state of our time off balances.

So: is it insane to go to Colorado in May? My husband really wants to go to Aspen (I have no idea why- we aren't skiers). We'll obviously want to see the Rockies. What are the chances that we'll enjoy doing that in May?

If we go, what are the must see things with a 5 year old and a 2.5 year old?

Flood me with advice, oh wise readers. I don't guarantee I'll follow it, but I'll definitely read and appreciate every single comment!

Weekend Reading: The Short and Funny Edition

Today is my husband's birthday, and my parents are here to watch the kids while he and I get some alone time this weekend- so I'll keep this short. And funny.

I found this Cracked post about how The Karate Kid ruined us all via another post about things that rich people shouldn't say.  I don't remember how I found the first post, but I will note that it references the same article about rich people in Toronto that set Scalzi off on the rant that I liked so much.

On a completely different subject: this video came from the birthday boy, who swears that they used to show sheepdog trials on prime time TV when he was growing up in New Zealand:




To be honest, I get the giggles just thinking about the fact that sheepdog trials were once considered prime time viewing. But I think the video is funny even without that background.