Dealing With Fears

A few days before Independence Day we talked about fireworks. I mentioned that fireworks are rockets exploding in the sky and making pretty lights, and Anna immediately got worried. Her verbal skills and emerging imagination come with a flip side – dreaming up worst case scenarios and fearing things that she doesn’t understand or didn’t experience before. Fortunately, we haven’t had to deal with monsters under her bed in the middle of the night, at least not yet. At the rate we are going, I think we will arrive there as well, because yesterday suddenly she didn’t want to go play in her room by herself, because “maybe the ghosts are playing there without me“. This is another of her pet fears – occasionally ghosts figure in the books that we pick up from the library (for example, a book about Letter H had a Haunted House in it). So how do we deal with those fears?

• First of all, we acknowledge them. I read somewhere that it’s counter-productive to tell your toddler, Oh, you are not scared. She is, and minimizing her fears makes her question her own reality.
• We try to expose her to a scary experience in small doses and in safe environments. For example, she is not a big fan of fire trucks, because of the loud noises they make. We had fire trucks coming over during 4th of July Block Party. First, Anna absolutely refused to even approach one. Gradually, I enticed her to climb in it with me. Suddenly, her fear lifted, and she was all over it, climbing up and down and flirting with firemen.
• Explaining and reasoning. I admit that long-winded scientific explanations don’t usually work well. Even my simple assurances that fireworks are fun and she will be safe didn’t work. Anna quite liked the fireworks in the sky that were launched at a distance by someone, because she only heard a faint boom. However, the minute our ground fireworks started she buried her face in my chest and promptly went to sleep. She slept soundly through 15 minutes of ear-splitting noise, then woke up the moment silence fell and asked if we’re really truly done yet. She wasn’t pleased to still hear some fireworks in the distance and at home I had to use the last resort:
• “Magic”. After our return from the fireworks, we had the following exchange with Anna:

Anna: I am still scared of fireworks. Why are they still going?

Me: Some of our neighbors are still celebrating American birthday. It will be over soon.

Anna: I am worried that fireworks come into our house, into my room and burn my blankie.

Me (firmly): They cannot do it. We have a big sign on our house that says, “Fireworks are not allowed here”.

Anna (interested): Where is this sign?

Me: It’s written with an invisible paint that only the fireworks can see.

Anna (sleepily): OK. Tell them again not to come.

Here is a quick reference that I found on dealing with fears in toddlers. I would be interesting to hear about the fears your children have and how you help them to overcome them.

So Much Like Me

When I interact with Anna, sometimes I am blown away by how much she resembles me in so many ways. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I married someone who is not a carbon copy of me, but has a lot of the same interests and has the same personality traits – loves books, very talkative with friends and speaks fluently the second language of his second country, doesn’t blow up in anger, conservative in personal morals and liberal on social issues. Some people even told us that we look similar. Anna inherited the best features from her papa – blue eyes and curly hair, but otherwise she looks exactly like me, when I was a child. She also behaves a lot like me, when I was a child (at least, according to the family lore). Most of the time, she is in a good mood, cooperative and reserved. She prefers adults or older kids, and she doesn’t like to stray away from us. We never had the problem of her just disappearing to be close to some action. She is not fearful or shy, but she is not adventurous or gregarious either. I think I could describe her as “an observer” – she likes to watch something rather than participate herself. She prefers to play by herself, and has yet to ask for a playdate or for going outside to see her friends in the neighborhood. She is better with children when they are 1:1 than when she is in a bigger crowd. In other words, so far she appears to be a happy introvert – just like me. She got some character features from her father too, and it’s amusing to see them shine through. She has a very strong feeling of what is wrong and what is right. Yesterday we read a Disney spoof book called Little Red Writing Pooh. At some point Pooh starts eating honey meant for grandma. Anna jumped up and said, No, Pooh, stop! This is grandma’s honey! This made me laugh, because she clearly inherited this sense of rightness and ownership from her papa. She is also pretty neat and organized for a toddler – another trademark that didn’t come from me. I wonder if we will have a teenager who likes to keep her room clean. Well, remembering myself, I am not exactly holding my breath on this one

How about you? Does your child behave like you? How do you feel, when he/she doesn’t? I admit – I don’t know how I would deal if my child wouldn’t be so much like me. Would I be able to appreciate her uniqueness or would it feel like I have a stranger in my house? I guess I will not find out, since we don’t plan to go for more children.

Making of a Theater

I noticed that a lot of my posts lately have been about my husband and his activities with Anna. I am really proud of him and feel that our daughter is extremely lucky to have such a creative papa. On the other hand, he gets a chance to relive his childhood and do some of his favorite activities again. He was talking to me before about making a puppet theater for Anna. I happened to make one stick craft with her, and she brought a paper bag puppet from her preschool and clearly liked to play with both of them. So this weekend my husband got serious about his theater project. That’s how the theater looked in the beginning – a repurposed box from a  mini vacuum cleaner.

Anna was very excited to participate in making the theater. Here she is painting it:

Papa took over eventually and painted the rest of the theater. We let it out to dry while Anna “pretended” to take a nap (that didn’t work out, she was too excited about the theater. Papa also drew a background and let Anna add some stickers. He was so motivated that he already started making more stick puppets for the show. Here is a finished result:

And here is a funny picture of Anna enjoying her first puppet theater show. She was totally mesmerized. So much better than TV

Lego Creations

Both my husband and his older brother were big Lego fans when they were growing up. Their parents faithfully kept boxes of freestyle Lego in their basement for almost 40 years, but finally they saw the light of the day again. Last time my in-laws visited, one of their suitcases contained nothing but Legos, and it was only half of their collection.

Legos of today are more “specialized”. One can build an excavator using instructions on the box, but it’s not possible to build a rocket out of the same set. My husband’s Lego has a lot of wheels and some specialized parts (for example, connector for the truck’s cabin and the rest of the truck), but the rest of it is thousands and thousands small parts. Luckily, Anna is not a mouther, and so my husband opened her treasures to her. He has so much fun building things “with her” (mostly for her at this point), and she is very proud about her growing collection of toys made exclusively out of Lego. The good news is that they can always be rebuilt into something completely different, and that hopefully she will be able to build simpler things herself one day. Here is her collection at a glance:

An Ode to IKEA (and to my husband)

We love IKEA. Our house could be in IKEA catalog – about 80% of our furniture and decor came from there. Of course, we also buy smaller things there – kitchenware, linens, toys, etc. We live in a relatively small house (under 2000 sq feet), and we like to keep it ordered. That’s where IKEA shelving systems come very handy. A lot of people complain about IKEA furniture, because it requires assembly (and in some cases also painting or varnishing), but my husband enjoys the flexibility and the fact that he can wrestle the system in whatever way we need. I was bugging him for a while to find a solution for our small family room that also serves as an dine-in kitchen. I wanted to have Anna’s “working corner” where she can have her play kitchen supplies, workbooks and some crafts. We looked at so many systems trying to find the perfect solution for the space we had. Eventually we sat down with a pencil, paper and measuring tape and drew what we wanted. We went to IKEA, got the shelves that matched (sort of) the rest of our system, and my husband custom-built, by cutting and changing the shelves that we bought. I am very pleased with the results. For now the shelves are mostly filled with Anna’s play kitchen stuff (one of her favorite activities), but eventually I hope to implement more of a workbox system. I am reading some blogs about it, and think that it’s something that will benefit our daughter who clearly inherited our desire of order and structure.

And this is Anna’s Art Center that is also in our family room. It’s made out of IKEA IVAR shelves. My husband put a couple of cardboard pieces close to the top for the projects waiting to dry. It’s “strategically tall” – we place craft supplies that we don’t want her to use without supervision on higher shelves. Currently the boxes hold:

• Sticker arts (not on the shelf, Anna was playing with stickers at the moment),
• Collage materials including scissors, all magazines and school glue
• Play-doh
• Paint/Markers/Paper/Coloring books

Tot School, Preschool or Kindergarten?

When I started to troll the web in search of fun and educational activities with Anna, I was blown away with the number of great blogs I found. A lot of smart, crafty, spiritual women (sorry, I am yet to found even one blog on the topic written by a man ) put a lot of thought and passion into decisions on how to raise and educate their children. I found a lot of those blogs by stumbling on Tot School – where many families contribute every week and describe how they raise and educate their children under 4 years old. I participate with my other blog, but, honestly, I don’t have any method in my approach. Until very recently, I didn’t do any prep work for any of our “learning sessions”. I don’t have any curriculum or any theme of the week. To be honest, I believe that this finesse is mostly for parents who need structure to their days than for children.Young children learn best through play and attention from adults, and I think that Anna gets enough attention from both parents. In my “teaching” approach I rely most on observing her and following her interests. If she wants to continue to play with Legos while “it’s time to color”, I’ll let her. I am trying to pick books in the library on very different topics – animals, plants, travel, school life – to see what will catch her fancy. Again, it seems too early for her to have any real “passions” – everything is interesting to her.. for the first 10 minutes. The only continuing theme in her life is books – many-many-many books that she wants to read every day.

Unlike many of the blogging moms, I don’t plan to homeschool. Anna already goes to preschool for 2 mornings a week. We will extend it to three once she turns 3 in October. This year she was in the class with 3-5 year olds because of the size of the school and her great language skills. Her teachers were blown away that she was consistently the best in class in all activities that involved “academic subjects” – phonics and math. When I was trying to find suitable  software games for her, nothing under K-level caught her fancy – they were all too boring in their focus on shapes, colors, simple numbers and letters. The book that she is reading in the first picture is this post is Spectrum Math Grade K. I didn’t bring it from the library for her. I wanted to see for myself what is taught on K-level. She grabbed the book, went to her room and said that she wants to play by herself and teach her favorite kitty some numbers. She cannot do all the exercises in this book, but she is frighteningly close to the end of K-level in what she knows in math and language. At the same time – she is completely not interested in writing. Her motor skills were always a little behind, and I am blown away seeing tots under two holding their pencils or even scissors correctly. Anna still cannot do it, even at 32 months. That’s why we are focusing more on crafts now – while I will continue to encourage all her math and language activities (a lot of those are self-led nowadays), I want to bring out her artistic self more and let my intellectual curiosity combine with formidable creative thinking of my husband. Then she will be one very fine young lady indeed

Father’s Day

We are not “an average family”. My husband chose to put his career in tech industry on hold to be home full-time with his daughter. Why he and not me? I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mother at the time. I enjoyed my work and my coworkers more than he did. We had comparable incomes, so the loss would have been about the same in both cases. And I wasn’t working 12-14 hours a day like he was during never-ending cycles of yet another product launch.

It was the best decision for our family. My husband admits that he would never have spent so much time and bonded with Anna so strongly, had he been working full time. He has been with her every day since the day she was born – changing, burping, comforting, playing. reading, entertaining, disciplining. They have their own special games that they play and special songs (not to mention special German language that he speaks to her most of the time).

My husband is not like an average stay-at-home mom too. He doesn’t worry too much about Tot Schools, teaching her something in any formal way, art projects. He prefers to be out and about. From early days Anna had playdates, going on hikes, playground visits, going shopping as an important part of her daily routine. They still spend a lot of time by themselves – reading and free playing. He builds things for her and with her, and she really remembers every toy that he made himself. He can focus on her single-mindedly, while I try to multi-task way too often.

I am not jealous. My daughter is still very much a mama girl. I enjoy all the benefits of this close father-daughter relationship – knowing that my daughter is safe while I work, watching her learn physical skills that I might be too apprehensive to teach her, watching her develop interest in building things and trying to understand how things work. I just hope that one day my daughter will meet a man who will be just like her father. Than she will be a very lucky young woman indeed.

Where Is My Parachute? (Or Flying With Young Toddlers)

My favorite ABC and 123 Learning Cooperative has a picnic on the topic of traveling with children. A lot of people wrote about car trips. We are lucky in this respect. Anna is a good car traveler. As long as the trip is under an hour, she is quite content to look outside, listen to CDs of children songs and stories and talk/play word games. As we are a little obsessive in the area of cleanliness, we have a family rule of not eating in the car and drinking only water. We bring snacks, but eat them during rest stops. It makes the trip longer, but in my mind part of the pleasure of destination is in the journey to get there.

We live in the Silicon Valley while my parents are on the East Coast, and my husband’s family is in Germany. This makes flights unavoidable. A lot of my international friends are in the same boat, and when I talked to them about family visits, they shook their heads and said, Good luck! This is a sad reality of traveling with young children on long flights – a lot of things work… but each works only for about 10 minutes, at least in our case. Here are some lessons learned and things that worked well for a young toddler (our first flight was when Anna was 17 months, second one is at 20 months).

• Don’t fly on red eye flights. Instead try to arrive to your destination late in  day. When we flew to New Jersey, we decided to take a red eye thinking that we will just sleep through the flight and sleep some more while there (the flight arrives at 5 am). Well, Anna had other plans. She was extremely excited to be on a plane and also very tired and wired. She didn’t cry, but she didn’t sleep either. After 2 hours of requests for water, milk, more water, books, etc., I was exhausted. Finally she went asleep… for about 2 hours. When we arrived, she was excited again – to see her grandparents, their cat, the new house. Besides, it was morning. She absolutely refused to go to sleep, and there I was – at a wet playground at 7 am with a wild and unruly toddler trying to get her work off her energy and nod off. Good start of the vacation.
• Bring a lot of snacks and don’t expect that your little angel will eat something that she hasn’t tried before. Well, at least ours didn’t. We brought the milk that doesn’t require cooling (Horizon brand), and Anna was not amused with its taste and texture. She kept whining and asking for her milk. Unfortunately, airlines don’t carry milk nowadays – only creamers. Ugh.
• Don’t overwhelm your young toddler with novelty. Following the same line of thought, that I read in some other responses to the topic, we brought some new toys, books and coloring activities. But Anna was already really tired and overwhelmed with all other new things around her – the movement of an airplane, announcements from the cabin, smells, etc. She craved the comfort of something she knew. She was clinging to her blanket and her kitty for dear life the whole flight, and she wanted me to tell her familiar stories and sing her familiar songs.
• Bring Benadryl. I wouldn’t use it on the crowd under one – they sleep just fine without it. And, yes, I know that drugging your children is bad. But… this is the only thing that gave us much needed break on the way back from Germany after 5 hours of trying to get Anna to nap with conventional means. Our friends recommended to try it once at home, because in about 10% of cases it actually makes kids even more wired. We were not one of those 10% – it worked well, just not for too long, 2 hours later Anna was back desperately wanting to leave that plane now.
• When everything fails, remember that this too shall pass. Our worst moment on the plane happened during our return flight from Florida when Anna was 17 months. We ran out of food, and a “fasten seat belts” light was on. She wanted out, I said “No”. The worst tantrum ever ensued. She cried what felt like eternity. The watch showed that it was actually 10 minutes, then she grabbed her blanket, said, I am all done! and went to sleep for the remainder of the flight.
• Expect the worst and enjoy the rest. I have to admit – the experiences of international flight and time zone adjustments with a young toddler made me cancel our plans of yearly visits to Germany. I told my husband right after our flight last July that next year I am not going. After weighing pros and cons, we decided that we will wait with our next international flight until she is over 3 year old and better able to entertain herself. However, despite being cranky and sleep-deprived for most of the vacation, we did enjoy seeing our friends and family. Also, every time we travel, we see significant spurts in Anna’s language and cognitive abilities. My husband says that it’s because her brain is “rattled” by a new experience. That’s why this year we plan to fly cross-country again to visit my family. I am confident that barring some unforeseen complications (such as illness or bad turbulence), this trip cannot possibly be worse than the ones we took when she was under two.

Attachment Parenting vs… What?

A couple ago, I made some remarks regarding attachment parenting in my post on Raising an Optimistic Child book that an esteemed author of The Wonder Years replied in her comment. I thought that I will write a post with my views on attachment parenting, and now finally I have 30 min to do so.

Even before Anna was born, I read multitude of books on child development and raising young children. As I mentioned before, I like to know my theory before even attempting practice, and being an only child, I had very little exposure to babies before my own unexpectedly came along. As I was reading, it quickly became obvious that “the theme du jour” in parenting advice world is “attachment parenting”. It mostly applies to children in the first year of life and stresses physical closeness between a mother and her child – breastfeeding, babywearing and co-sleeping.

It’s not that I disagree with an importance of close relationship between a mother and her baby. What I disagree with is a sort of doomsday scenarios that some of these books and articles picture. It sounds sometimes that your children will be somewhat “damaged” unless you follow the gospel of attachment parenting. I know women that were depressed just because they didn’t have a perfect birth prescribed by attachment parenting and insisted that now they will be unable to bond with their infants properly.

I already profiled “Baby Whisperer” book earlier in my posts, and that was the book that really meshed with my own view of parenting. I think it can be described as “common sense parenting”. I followed the premise of that book – think of what you want and don’t start on the road where you don’t want to be. So, we never co-slept, because I wanted to still have a bed with my spouse, not a family bed. I never wore my baby – I have some back problems, and I couldn’t find anything that was comfortable both for me and for Anna (Interestingly, my husband loved Baby Bjorn, and Anna spent a lot of time there while he was running errands or hiking with her). I breastfed my daughter for the first 15 months of her life and didn’t mind the fact that she didn’t sleep through the night until 18 months. That was who she was, and I accepted that as part of her. I went back to work full time, when she was 3 months old, and my husband took full-time parenting responsibilities confidently and successfully. We never had to “sleep-train” her, to break her out of pacifier (never gave her a pacifier), to potty train her in three days (a subject of a separate post). We never baby-proofed our house. We just paid enough attention to our child and taught her not to touch things that were “not her toys”. So far I am happy with the results. Our daughter seems to be healthy and happy. She is introverted (not shy, just prefers to play by herself), but she interacts well with her peers in preschool, and she seems to be securely attached without all the “necessary” ingredients of attachment parenting. We just connected to who she is and responded to what she needed – love with firm boundaries.

Can craftiness be learned?

I am going to link this post up tomorrow to ABC and 123 discussion of arts and crafts. I am really looking forward to this discussion, exactly because I have very little to contribute and a lot of questions to ask. I have a confession to make – I am not crafty, and I mean at all. My father used to joke that, while God was giving away hands, I went in the opposite direction to be the first in line for brains. I am mostly a logical thinker. Ask me to solve a puzzle for you, and I consider it a challenge. But ask me to present you an answer to you in a visual form, and I will be lost. I think in words, not in images. That’s why I always loved reading. And I cannot claim that I didn’t have exposure to arts. I had plenty. As you probably know, what you call preschools here, were called kindergartens in the former Soviet Union. They were mandatory, free and state-run. They were also pretty good. I remember quite well  days filled with all kinds of crafts. I disliked most of them and longed to sit in the corner and read (I was an early reader). I envied my friends who could whip up interesting projects out of modeling clay or paper. The only thing I could do is to color, cut the pictures and then play long pretend games with my paper family – talking, adding objects, assigning roles. Later in school we had art classes, music classes and the class that is sort of like your Home Economics. We had all this through 8 years of school, and I was delighted when we finally dropped them in high school, because those were my most challenging subjects. I was taught to sew, knit, etc., but I had very little desire to do so on my own. All my adult life I read, exercised, traveled or wrote journals for pleasure and relaxation. I never had motivation to draw a picture (of course, I doddle during boring meetings) or knit a scarf.

Now I have a daughter, and things are different. I did well personally and professionally, but I would love to see her more creative than myself. My husband complements me in this – he is very creative. He can sew, does simple carpentry, loves Lego blocks and created his own board games in the past. He always draws birthday cards and calendars. But he is also very mess-averse. He always takes care to organize his working space just so and immediately cleans up. Doing any arts project with our toddler stresses him out. Luckily, Anna goes to preschool for 2 days a week, and her preschool teaches ABC through art. They have a lot of projects similar to those featured on my current favorite crafts blog – Our Crafts and Things. I am thinking of making more art projects with her at home, but a few things keep interfering with my best intentions:

• Time limitations – a lot of crafts require some preliminary assembly, work time and then clean-up time. Considering that we usually have about 2 hours together of time together between my arrival home and time for dinner/bedtime routine, I sort of prefer to spend this time in free play outside or doing activities that we both enjoy more – reading together or unstructured play of her choosing. Sadly, Anna rarely if ever chooses to do arts if she is not prompted to do so.
• Energy level – again, after getting up before 6 am and spending full day in the office, I am pretty tired in the evening. Since for me art is work, I often simply lack motivation to guide Anna in this direction
• Anna’s natural interests. Unfortunately, she appears to be my daughter, after all. She likes art projects when she gets into them, but she doesn’t spontaneously reach for them most of the time, even though she has free access to her play-doh box and to her cutting/sticker box. If she plays by herself (which is rare), she prefers puzzles, cars, or pretend cooking. Sometimes I question whether I should really “push” her into art, considering that I didn’t develop any interest in it despite enough exposure.
• Overwhelming number of choices. When I come to arts and crafts section of Target or any other store, I am blown away by options. What is the difference between tempura paint and finger paints? What is the glitter clue for? How to choose construction paper? That’s why I am really looking forward to entries that will give some ideas for the best art supplies for young children. I’ll be reading!