I have mentioned in previous posts that we have become middle aged bird watchers. We have stepped up our game and have multiple seed types and jelly and oranges and hummingbird feeders. I pretty religiously fill up the bird bath and I may even trim our evergreen bushes so they have places to perch. We were super excited a few weeks ago when a house wren and his wife moved into a mostly decorative bird house on our deck. Baby Girl and I sat on the bench super quiet and watched them fly back and forth building their nest. Apparently, male wrens build multiple half-ass nests around an area to try and lure several females to come mate with him. The nest is supposed to impress her - like he is a good provider. So when he lures one, his new wife immediately throws all his sticks and twigs out and makes him help her find smaller twigs and fuzz and stuff to build a softer, better nest to have babies in. That sounds slightly familiar....
So this week, we upped our game and gave our birds names. It seemed the practical thing to do. After all, we are already talking to them all the time anyway - and 'hey birdie' seems so impersonal for a creature that lives in our yard and we talk to daily. In addition to our wren family on the deck, we have a colony of sparrows that live above the treehouse in what was supposed to be a purple martin house, but instead has become sparrow condos. As far as we know, these are the only birds residing in our yard specifically...although the neighborhood is home to a pair of finches and a pair of blue jays that frequent our feeders, as well a collection of teeny, tiny chickadees that will practically sit in my lap.
Baby Girl named the sparrows "Cheesy Potatoes". I am still not completely sure if she intentionally calls ALL sparrows Cheesy Potatoes or if she believes she continually sees the exact same sparrow over and over again. I am not going to ask. Today she said "Hi, Cheesy Potatoes!" to a sparrow in my dad's backyard, apparently believing he followed us to Grandpa's for the afternoon. So all of the sparrow colony is Cheesy Potatoes. I got to name the wren husband. He is Mo. Baby Boy names the wren wife Rose. So Mo and Rose live together on the deck by the house and Cheesy Potatoes 1-6 live about 30 feet away on top of the tree house. They remind me of cranky old neighbors that have been living side by side for forty years. They sit on their porches and squawk at each other all day..."Get off my grass!". They scold me when I go out to weed the pepper plants or harvest salad. Cheesy Potatoes keeps dropping sunflower seeds in my pea teepee and I have a bazillion baby sunflowers sprouting that are not strong enough to ever grow, but are just strong enough to choke out my pretty purple pees. "Get off my peas!" Crazy birds.
We are quite the ecosystem.
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
The Day We Hugged People
So I am not really going to be quick to jump into regular life, even though things are opening up. However, we are loosening up a bit and expanding our circle. We decided that any immediate family member that feels the same as us is welcome to be part of our circle - which means our kids get their cousins back. And their aunts and uncles. And their grandparents. Baby Girl was so incredibly excited to hug Busia and Grandma. She very sweetly asked them both if she could hug them - not so shockingly, they both said yes. So began a few days of her asking me who she could hug, what she could touch, where she could go...it is a little heartbreaking to see how much it really affected my kids - especially Baby Girl who is, by far, the most social of us all. Our bigger kids get a few select friends back, our Graduate gets her boyfriend back and our Sophomore gets his dude pack back. Our little kids don't get friends back quite yet, but we are thinking of trying a few outdoor playdates in the next week or two.
I know that we can't live cooped up in quarantine all summer, fearing what the fall may or may not bring. I struggle with this. I struggle with handing this anxiety and unease and NOT KNOWING over to God and just living our best lives over here. What if....what if....what if. Not my strong suit. I believe that there will be a second wave and navigating this middle part is tricky. I just don't want to make a bad decision while waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Soooooo...we are just going to work on better behaviors for the things we CAN control. Washing our hands before we sit down to eat anything. Washing our hands properly, not just getting them wet for a second. Using antibac when we are out in the world and wearing masks if we go inside anywhere. Sanitizing things that venture out in the world with us - phones, purses, car door handles. Not touching our freaking faces. Ugh. We are a family of nail biting nose pickers apparently. How did I never see this??? Work in progress...don't shake hands with my kids.
Next week I am going to try going physically into work for a few hours. I miss my partners and our staff and my desk with the snack drawer and my office with no kids in it. I miss participating in adult conversations without having to hide in a dark closet or barricade myself in the bedroom. I typically work from home most of the time in the summers anyway, so this isn't a huge obstacle for me but it will be nice to get to the point where I can run into the office and pick up what I need and have face to face conversations with the people I plan with. While it is a giant blessing to work from home, it is also a little isolating. I am pretty geeked up to head back in when I can.
All in all, we are well. We survived school at home, we are all healthy and mostly sane, Husband is totally back to work and I am creeping slowly back into work. Our kids have at least some of their tribe back in their lives and some places they can go for a change of scenery. And perhaps most importantly...we have grandmas to hug.
I know that we can't live cooped up in quarantine all summer, fearing what the fall may or may not bring. I struggle with this. I struggle with handing this anxiety and unease and NOT KNOWING over to God and just living our best lives over here. What if....what if....what if. Not my strong suit. I believe that there will be a second wave and navigating this middle part is tricky. I just don't want to make a bad decision while waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Soooooo...we are just going to work on better behaviors for the things we CAN control. Washing our hands before we sit down to eat anything. Washing our hands properly, not just getting them wet for a second. Using antibac when we are out in the world and wearing masks if we go inside anywhere. Sanitizing things that venture out in the world with us - phones, purses, car door handles. Not touching our freaking faces. Ugh. We are a family of nail biting nose pickers apparently. How did I never see this??? Work in progress...don't shake hands with my kids.
Next week I am going to try going physically into work for a few hours. I miss my partners and our staff and my desk with the snack drawer and my office with no kids in it. I miss participating in adult conversations without having to hide in a dark closet or barricade myself in the bedroom. I typically work from home most of the time in the summers anyway, so this isn't a huge obstacle for me but it will be nice to get to the point where I can run into the office and pick up what I need and have face to face conversations with the people I plan with. While it is a giant blessing to work from home, it is also a little isolating. I am pretty geeked up to head back in when I can.
All in all, we are well. We survived school at home, we are all healthy and mostly sane, Husband is totally back to work and I am creeping slowly back into work. Our kids have at least some of their tribe back in their lives and some places they can go for a change of scenery. And perhaps most importantly...we have grandmas to hug.
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
The Day We Practiced Empathy
I have thought about this post, letting the thoughts about it ramble around my brain a bit - hoping if the things that I want to say will be better if they marinate first, like a good steak or pot of stew. I don't know if that really works, but it is my process...
I couldn't be more white. I did an Ancestry DNA and the most southern part of my DNA is from....Michigan. I am highly Slavic, Scottish, Eastern European, French....I am blue eyed and fair haired...I grew up in an entirely white family, in a mostly white town, going to a church where it is rare to see a person of color and going to school in the middle of corn fields with another group of white kids. I don't know if most families handled the issue of race like mine did back then, but it followed the school of thought that we don't see race. Everyone is equal, everyone is made by God exactly the way he wanted them to be, and skin is just a characteristic like hair color. As a kid in school, black history was a week or so of information that never really sunk in. It was awful, but so far removed from what I knew that it was impossible to sink in. I 100% grew up believing race was not an issue anymore, that everyone felt like I did. I had no clue of the bigotry and the hatred and the bias that permeated our country - and still does.
As I grew up, my world expanded. I met and shared conversations and experiences with people of many backgrounds and ethnicities and color. I followed current events and traveled to other cities much more worldly than my humble beginnings. It shifted my lens that I saw race through - showed me that while actual plantation slavery is a thing of the past, many other awful things followed from then up to where we are now. Fear of someone different, fear of something unknown, prejudice that is taught through careless words or racist jokes....so many little things that are woven into our psyche. Some that we know of and some that we just assimilated somewhere along the way.
As a parent, I have never HAD to think about talking about race to my kids. My kids don't face any danger from not having had a race talk. I packaged my race talk in with my be-kind-to-others and God-makes-us-all-different talks, thinking that was enough. We talk a lot about inclusion, about never leaving anyone out. But before this May, I had never sat down and shared so much truth about race in America as I did yesterday. I thought about it for a while. How much is too much for a 6 and 7 year old to understand? As their mom, I want to shield them as long as I possibly can from losing their innocence and trust in people. But if I were a black mom, with black kids...this conversation wouldn't be optional, right? It would be necessary. And if these kids have to lose their innocence, how can I say I stand with them if I continue to hide the truth of this from my own children? I want my kid to be the one on a playground standing by a kid getting picked on - for race or funny clothes or crazy hair or whatever...so my kid has to be armed with the knowledge of why some kids have it harder than others. He has to know his own privilege and use that platform that he has to help stand up for those that are marginalized.
So I did what I always do when I need to undertake something. I bought books.
I researched online and sought recommendations and bought myself four kids books on diversity and inclusion and kids that live in different cultures. We skipped all our regular home school yesterday and got cozy on the couch and read through all of them. It took a long time. My kids had lots of questions. There were things I never realized they had never seen - like a Muslim woman in a hijab. They thought I was joking that cows were sacred in India. We read this really beautiful book called "The Color of Us" that had a young artist going out into her community to see all the different shades of brown in her neighbors. It was gorgeous. We learned what the word 'diversity' means. And then I told them that in America, a black man had been killed by a white man just because of the color of his skin. I explained that even though it was wrong, there are still people out there that believe they are better than others. My kids were utterly confused - my son summed it up best by saying, "if we know this already as kids how can there be adults that don't know?" We talked about how this prejudice makes it harder for kids of color - and how we need to be the best partners that we can be to make the world a place where everyone feels heard. It was a hard conversation, where my mind was just whirring to hopefully say the right words to all these questions.
I hope that I made the right choices and said the right things, but even if I made a mistake - I am sure that starting the conversation and widening their world view was the right way to begin. And if my kids start talking to you about race - whether you are black or white or any shade in between - I hope that you appreciate their curiosity and help me encourage them to ask questions and hear the answers and continue to make this a moment of real change. A change that I truly believe we all have a share in making in whatever way we can.
I couldn't be more white. I did an Ancestry DNA and the most southern part of my DNA is from....Michigan. I am highly Slavic, Scottish, Eastern European, French....I am blue eyed and fair haired...I grew up in an entirely white family, in a mostly white town, going to a church where it is rare to see a person of color and going to school in the middle of corn fields with another group of white kids. I don't know if most families handled the issue of race like mine did back then, but it followed the school of thought that we don't see race. Everyone is equal, everyone is made by God exactly the way he wanted them to be, and skin is just a characteristic like hair color. As a kid in school, black history was a week or so of information that never really sunk in. It was awful, but so far removed from what I knew that it was impossible to sink in. I 100% grew up believing race was not an issue anymore, that everyone felt like I did. I had no clue of the bigotry and the hatred and the bias that permeated our country - and still does.
As I grew up, my world expanded. I met and shared conversations and experiences with people of many backgrounds and ethnicities and color. I followed current events and traveled to other cities much more worldly than my humble beginnings. It shifted my lens that I saw race through - showed me that while actual plantation slavery is a thing of the past, many other awful things followed from then up to where we are now. Fear of someone different, fear of something unknown, prejudice that is taught through careless words or racist jokes....so many little things that are woven into our psyche. Some that we know of and some that we just assimilated somewhere along the way.
As a parent, I have never HAD to think about talking about race to my kids. My kids don't face any danger from not having had a race talk. I packaged my race talk in with my be-kind-to-others and God-makes-us-all-different talks, thinking that was enough. We talk a lot about inclusion, about never leaving anyone out. But before this May, I had never sat down and shared so much truth about race in America as I did yesterday. I thought about it for a while. How much is too much for a 6 and 7 year old to understand? As their mom, I want to shield them as long as I possibly can from losing their innocence and trust in people. But if I were a black mom, with black kids...this conversation wouldn't be optional, right? It would be necessary. And if these kids have to lose their innocence, how can I say I stand with them if I continue to hide the truth of this from my own children? I want my kid to be the one on a playground standing by a kid getting picked on - for race or funny clothes or crazy hair or whatever...so my kid has to be armed with the knowledge of why some kids have it harder than others. He has to know his own privilege and use that platform that he has to help stand up for those that are marginalized.
So I did what I always do when I need to undertake something. I bought books.
I researched online and sought recommendations and bought myself four kids books on diversity and inclusion and kids that live in different cultures. We skipped all our regular home school yesterday and got cozy on the couch and read through all of them. It took a long time. My kids had lots of questions. There were things I never realized they had never seen - like a Muslim woman in a hijab. They thought I was joking that cows were sacred in India. We read this really beautiful book called "The Color of Us" that had a young artist going out into her community to see all the different shades of brown in her neighbors. It was gorgeous. We learned what the word 'diversity' means. And then I told them that in America, a black man had been killed by a white man just because of the color of his skin. I explained that even though it was wrong, there are still people out there that believe they are better than others. My kids were utterly confused - my son summed it up best by saying, "if we know this already as kids how can there be adults that don't know?" We talked about how this prejudice makes it harder for kids of color - and how we need to be the best partners that we can be to make the world a place where everyone feels heard. It was a hard conversation, where my mind was just whirring to hopefully say the right words to all these questions.
I hope that I made the right choices and said the right things, but even if I made a mistake - I am sure that starting the conversation and widening their world view was the right way to begin. And if my kids start talking to you about race - whether you are black or white or any shade in between - I hope that you appreciate their curiosity and help me encourage them to ask questions and hear the answers and continue to make this a moment of real change. A change that I truly believe we all have a share in making in whatever way we can.
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