Half Changed World

Skip this one if you’re squeamish.

The boys now have their own rooms, but have been moving back and forth between the two, sometimes in their own rooms, sometimes both in one.  Last night, D asks if he can sleep with N in N’s
bed.  N says ok, so I say sure, as long as you guys actually settle down and get some
sleep (because they both have school today).

N is fussy in the night, and we’re both up a few times to check on him.  At one point, I hear him crying, but let T go downstairs since I handled the last one.  But then I hear T saying "oh my god" and then asking "what did you have for dinner?  Did you have ketchup for dinner?"  I know we didn’t have ketchup, so I figure I had better get downstairs.

N has thrown up.  Not onto D, but
onto his bed and the floor (which has light colored carpet).  And it’s bright red.  And we can’t figure out what it could be.  What it looks like is pomegranate seeds, but N says that he didn’t have any at school.    So we’re a bit freaked out, but not too panicked, because it doesn’t really look like blood. 

So
we send D to sleep in his own bed, and change N’s pjs and
sheets and start cleaning the carpet.  But as soon as we put oxyclean
on the stain, it turns blue.  Suddenly I realize that what we’re looking at is the blackberries N ate for dessert.  Blackberry juice is an indicator, so in the acid of his stomach, it
turned bright red.  And the oxyclean is a base, so it turns it blue
again.

I’ve promised the boys we’ll experiment with some mashed up berries so they can see the effect in a less gross context. 

(BTW, the oxyclean did a fabulous job of removing the stain overnight.)

I’m giving a talk tomorrow night at a networking event about women and the nonprofit sector, particularly some studies that have found that a) women are the majority of workers in nonprofits but b) women still earn less than men.  Most of the attendees are likely to be in their early to mid 20s, without kids. 

I’ll talk about how women are less likely to negotiate, more likely to expect (wrongly) that hard work will be noticed and rewarded even if they don’t.  But I also want to talk about the work-family stuff that I cover here.  I’m going to say that I think women are more likely to choose jobs based on satisfaction, less on an expectation that they’ll be supporting a family.   And that by accepting less money, they’re also reducing their bargaining power in relationships down the road.  And I also want to mention the roles of unpaid internships and student loans in affecting the options that are open to you.

Any suggestions?  Good stories that I can use?  Advice that you wish someone had told you?

So I blew off the first session of my conference today to go to Mommies and Muffins. And you know what?  I loved it.  I enjoyed watching N negotiate with his friends over the toys, and bring me into his play.  (Did you know that patting your knees is needed to launch a little people airplane?  Neither did I.)  I loved watching him point out his scabs to everyone who would listen, and explain that he had a boo-boo but it was getting better.  I liked watching him clean up, far more cooperatively than he ever does at home.   I loved sitting with him on my lap at circle time, happily singing in English and Hebrew.  I liked the concentration with which he strung beads on a plastic lanyard to make me a necklace (which he pronounces exactly the same as his name).  And the muffins weren’t bad.

Would it have been a disaster if I hadn’t gone?  No.  Not all the kids had parents there (one boy’s daddy came).  The ones whose parents didn’t come didn’t seem to particularly mind.  The teachers and other parents helped them string their necklaces.  N enjoyed having me there — and having some extra time with me without having to share with his brother — but he wouldn’t have been traumatized if I hadn’t.  Not even worth a quarter in the therapy jar.

But I’m glad I went.

(I’m scheduled to participate in MotherTalk this Friday, so no Tuesday book review today.)

Jody and Phantom Scribbler and chicago mama all have thoughtful posts up about the NYTimes article about redshirting kindergarteners.

D’s birthday is in January, so he’s in the middle of his class age-wise, one of the smallest kids, one of the most advanced academically.  One of his good friends, with a July birthday, is doing "junior kindergarten" this year — but he has some sensory issues, and I know his teacher were worried about his ability to stay on task.  It’s not clear how much easier he’s going to find it next year, though.  N’s birthday is in October, so he’ll be nearly 6 before he starts Kindergarten.  If I didn’t know that other parents were likely to be holding their summer-birthday kids back a year, I might be in the school office, arguing to let him start a year early.   I was 4 when I started school (November birthday, December cutoff) and didn’t suffer.

I think the points the author made about the class issues are real ones — redshirting kindergarteners is definitely an upper-middle class phenomenon — but am unconvinced that it matters in the scheme of class inequities in education.  For one thing, I’m doubtful that many poor kids are going to be sitting in the same classrooms as those redshirted kids.  EdWeek has a new tool out that lets you generate reports for any school district in the country on graduation rates and school segregation levels. I took a look at the one for Alexandria and was shocked to see that its school system scores a .78 (on a 0 to 1 scale) for racial segregation and a .52 for socioeconomic segregation.  Those numbers are far higher than average for either Virginia or the country as a whole, but what makes them really shocking is that all the segregation is in the elementary schools — there’s only one high school (TC Williams, of Remember the Titans fame) and two middle schools.

And we’re not talking separate but equal either.  My friend who has her kindergartener in one of the predominantly white, middle-class, active PTA schools has been told that her son has been identified as gifted and talented (even though the pull out activities don’t start until 3rd grade) and invited to come in for a meeting to discuss the curriculum.  I’m quite confident that if any such process were happening at D’s school, we’d have heard about it.  We haven’t.

A year ago, in my post about the decision to send D to this school, I wrote " What I worry about is whether they’ll learn that school is something to be endured."  I do think this fear has somewhat come true.  D’s bored a fair amount of the time at school — his biggest complaint is that it takes up too much of his day.  And the whole class often loses privileges when some kids misbehave.  D’s counting days to the end of school.  And frankly, I am too.

Over the next two weeks, I have been "invited" to the following activities:

• Field day at D’s school — 9 am to 2 pm tomorrow
• "Mommies and Muffins" at N’s preschool — 9 am to 10 am next Tuesday (they had "Daddies and Donuts" earlier in the year.
• "Moving Up" ceremony at N’s preschool — noon to 2 pm next Friday
• "Coming Out" ceremony at D’s school — 9 or 10 am the following Monday.  (Yes, that’s what they call it.  It’s to celebrate the Kindergarteners.)

Meanwhile, I have an in-town conference to attend Monday through Wednesday of next week, and a business trip the following Monday evening through Tuesday.

I’m definitely skipping Field Day and the Moving Up ceremony —  T will attend the Moving Up ceremony, and may go to some of Field Day.  (N also has a dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon, scheduled before we knew about Field Day.)

I’m feeling like I should really go to the Mommies and Muffins event, because if I don’t, N may be the only kid there without a mommy present.  (Since preschool is 1/2 day, 3 x a week, most of the families have a SAH parent.)  But that would mean missing part of the conference.  And then D will be hurt if I don’t go to his Coming Out ceremony.

Why do schools think it’s a good idea to schedule daytime events that parents are expected to attend other than graduation/moving up/coming out ceremonies during the last weeks of school?  Grrr.

We’ve been in the new house for almost a month now.  We still have a bunch of boxes to unpack, only one room that’s been painted, and a list of things to do that seems to gets longer rather than shorter with time, but it’s starting to feel like home.  I like everything about the house except my commute.

I’m still trying to sort out the options.  The fastest way to get to work is probably to drive.  But it’s bad for the environment, it stresses me out, and parking downtown is expensive.  If I could find a carpool, that would be a clear-cut winner, but so far, I haven’t been able to find anyone who is interested via the neighborhood list-serve.

I tried taking the metro to the bus one evening, and I’m pretty sure that’s not a viable option.  The main problem is that the bus I need only comes every half an hour, so I’d either have to give up another 10+ minutes to the lead time I need to be sure that I don’t
miss it, or risk having to sit around the Pentagon bus terminal for another half an hour.  And it’s a long ride.

Today’s experiment was walking home from the metro station.  It’s a long walk — about 4 miles — but the exercise is good for me and most of the walk is quite pleasant.  But if I’m going to do that, I need to figure out a way to get across routes 50 and 7 that doesn’t require walking through the middle of Seven Corners, which is about as pedestrian unfriendly an area as humanly possible.  If I figure out a route that makes sense, biking to the metro might also be a reasonable possibility.

What I’ve mostly been doing so far is driving to a metro station and leaving my car there.  Since D is finishing the school year at his old school, I’ve been generally driving him to school and parking in our old neighborhood — but that only works as long as I still have the Alexandria parking sticker on my car.   Once I’m not driving D to school, I’d be willing to park at the metro station near us, except that it generally fills up by 8 am.  And my understanding is that there’s a waiting list for the privilege of paying for a guaranteed slot.  One of my friends says that I can park in her neighborhood without a sticker, so I may try that.

The Post had an article this weekend about people who were responding to the high gas prices by telecommuting, one or more days a week.  This makes a lot of sense — it’s one of the few ways that people can really cut down on their commute in the short run, since most people can’t move or change jobs on short notice.  I’m definitely hoping to telecommute at least once a week — my organization is pretty open to it. (One of my coworkers actually lives in Colorado.)

I think I’m in paradox of choice mode here.  When I lived near the metro, I took it to work without thinking about it, and didn’t really pay attention to the semi-regular delays and overcrowding.  And if I lived out in the boonies, I suspect that I’d just drive and not worry about it.  But because I have choices, I’m aware of the downsides of all the possibilities, and keep looking for the perfect one.

So, I finally read the book that was referenced in that discussion we had about better and worse ways to praise kids.  The book is Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck, and it’s vastly better than the magazine article that kicked off the discussion.

The basic argument in the book is that people approach things with either a "fixed" or "growth" mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that intelligence, or athletic ability, or musical talent are inherent to the individual — you either have them or you don’t.  So you treat setbacks as a sign of failure, and avoid challenges whenever possible.  You believe that effort is a sign that you’re not naturally smart or talented.  By contrast, if you have a growth mindset, you believe in the power of learning and effort.  You treat setbacks as learning opportunities, and seek out challenges.  Dweck has lots and lots of examples, from sports, business, arts, and pretty much convinced me.

So, what’s wrong with praise?  The issue is that outcome-based praise generally reinforces the fixed mindset.  Dweck thus recommends praising kids for their effort rather than their good grades.

So, what bugged me about the articles?  First, they focused on the "right" way to praise.   But kids aren’t stupid — if you don’t mean it, they’ll see right through you. And if you praise their effort when they didn’t work hard, but got good grades anyway, they’ll know that you’re really praising the results, even if you use different words.  As Andrea argued, you need to actually believe in the growth mindset, or the change in how you praise will be totally superficial.

Second, the articles seemed to take a fixed approach to mindsets.  They seemed to suggest that if you praised your kids the wrong way, they’d never overcome the damage.  But Dweck argues that among the things that you can change is your mindset.  So even if you have a fixed mindset, you can work on developing a growth mindset.

Shortly before I read Mindset, I read Jennifer Niesslein’s book, Practically Perfect in Every Way: My Misadventures Through The World of Self-Help. It’s a funny exploration of what happens if you try to listen to ALL of the advice that’s out there, in short order.  Of course, it’s impossible.  For one thing, much of it is contradictory.  For another, there are still only 24 hours in a day and even if a plan only requires 15 minutes a day to follow, when you’re trying to follow 4 different plans at once, that adds up.  Of course, you could probably have figured that out without Niesslein’s book, but she’s enough fun to spend time with that it’s worth reading anyway.

The combination of books made me think about self-help books from the perspective of mindsets.  The good news is that self-help books are premised in the idea that improvement is possible.  The bad news is that almost all the books claim it’s going to be easy.  It’s obvious why — who wants to buy a book that promises them pain and frustration?  But when the going gets hard, it’s easy to fall back into a fixed mindset of: "See, I tried and I couldn’t do it, so obviously I’m just not the kind of person who loses 30 pounds/has an always clean house/has enough saved for retirement/quits smoking/whatever the goal is." Niesslein wanders into that territory occasionally, but she does ultimately conclude that she’s probably better off for the improvements that the books led her too, even if she doesn’t follow them religiously.

I’m interested in the various blog posts about The Dangerous Book for Boys.  The ones I’ve read seem to be divided by the ones like Moxie that are enthusiastic about the neat things that are included in it — how to tie knots and build fires and do coin tricks and use codes — and the ones like Jody and Phantom Scribbler who can’t get past their frustration at the title.

I admit that I got a review copy of the book, but never wrote about it precisely because I fell so squarely between the camps that I couldn’t figure out what to say.  It does have a lot of interesting stuff in it (along with some things that I can’t imagine my boys ever being interested in — grammar and rugby rules and historical lists of baseball MVPs).  And it does annoy me that it’s being marketed just for boys.  And if it’s true that the companion book focuses on daisy chains and sewing, that’s pretty sad/funny.

For what it’s worth, my sons are a bit young for the book, but they expressed only mild interest.  My husband scanned through it a bit, and then wanted to know how they could have a chapter of great battles in history and not include Agincourt.  The guy inspecting our old house for the buyers was fascinated by it.

I generally agree with Jody and Phantom Scribbler that words matter.  And yet…  I read my brother’s Boys’ Life, and when he stopped getting it, I asked for a subscription for myself and read it for years.  (I mostly wanted to find out what happened in the Tripods story, although I read the whole magazine as long as it was there.)  The "boys" part of the title never bothered me in the least.  Maybe it would have been more of an issue if my brother had actually been into scouting, but he didn’t.  (We lived in New York City.  I’m not sure how he wound up with the subscription in the first place, to be honest.)  The organization is exclusionary, but words are free to all.

I guess my feelings about the book are actually quite comparable to my thoughts about the Boy Scouts.  I really dislike several things about the organization.  But I may still sign the boys up when they get to the right age, if they’re interested.  And I’m probably going to keep this book.

I’m trying to get back into the pattern of posting a book review on Tuesdays.  This week’s book is The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver.  The book begins with a woman in a long-term relationship having dinner with another man to celebrate his birthday, an acquaintance more than a friend.  The chapter ends with them on the verge of kissing.  The rest of the book plays out, in alternating chapters, what would happen over the next several years if they did or did not kiss.

I remember being flabbergasted by the alternate endings when I first read The French Lieutenant’s Woman in high school, but the novelty of the concept has worn off.  Shriver carries it off anyway because she spins out the alternate paths with such skill and nuance.  One of the major characters in the book is a professional snooker player (snooker is the more complicated British cousin of pool) and snooker is the implicit metaphor behind the entire book, with the three main characters bouncing off of each other and the world around them and recombining in unexpected ways.   Minor changes have huge impacts, but not always in the direction that you’d have predicted.

It’s interesting to compare this to the last book I wrote about, Arlington Park.  None of Shriver’s sentences are as elegant as Cusk’s — in fact, they tend to disappear into the woodwork.  The only individual sentence in the book I can remember is one that didn’t ring true to me, a description of the collapsing World Trade Center as resembling a deflating accordion.   But I kept reading because I wanted to see how Shriver was going to play out the game.

The Post-Birthday World isn’t as stunning, or as horrifying, as Shriver’s last book, We Need to Talk About Kevin.   But it is quite compelling in its own way.

We’re in the new house.  We don’t have very much furniture at the moment — a lot of it is still in the storage pods, and we also got rid of some things that were just too beat up to be worth moving (e.g. the 10 year old couch that the cat had destroyed).  Add the increased size of the new house, and the built in bookcases that we had in the old place, and you can see that we don’t have a lot of room to put things.  But we’re starting to feel slightly less discombobulated, and to only open an average of two cabinet doors before finding the things we’re looking for in the kitchen.

The boys are doing pretty well with the transition, although D is grumpy about having to go to school instead of being able to hang out and explore all day.  (But he was fairly grumpy about going to school before the move, too.)  We clearly made a strategic error in talking about the move, though, because we kept telling them that they’d get all their toys and stuff back after we moved.  So we’ve moved, and they want it all right away.

Two months ago I wrote about my frustrating customer service experience with buy.com.  Several people suggested that I should take it up with my credit card company, and I probably should have, but I just didn’t have the energy to deal with it on top of the chaos of moving.  (Buying and selling houses also does funny things to your sense of what’s
a lot of money.)  So I didn’t do anything.  But much to my surprise, I got an email today from Google checkout saying that buy.com was returning my money. 

In another customer service report, back in February, when I wrote about how I liked our trunkis, but they didn’t stay latched, I also emailed the company.  They promptly wrote back asking what colors we needed.  I replied, and then didn’t hear anything further from them.  And then last week, replacement latches arrived, direct from England.  And the new ones do stay shut.  So, now the endorsement is unqualified.