How To Talk To Kids.

She's only six, but it's already starting.

"So, how was your day?"

"Good."

"What did you learn today?"

"I don't know."

"What did you do today?"

"Nothing."

Really? You just spent 4 hours with a 29 other kids and 4 adults (teacher, student teacher, and parent volunteers) and you have absolutely nothing to say about it. Really?!

I know that I am not the only parent who is experiencing this. There are tons of articles written about it. Various tips for how to get your kid to talk to you. I was fully aware that this day would come. But it wasn't supposed to arrive so soon.

AB went on a field trip today. She talked about The Field Trip for weeks beforehand. She counted down the days until this oh so important day, March 29, 2012, when she would be going on The Field Trip. I was expecting to pick her up and find a kid who couldn't way to tell me about all the fun, amazing, unbelievable things that had happened on The Field Trip.

Instead, it was like pulling teeth. I was lucky that she even told me the names of her bus seat buddies. Hours later, during dinner, she finally shared some highlights of The Field Trip.

This is not supposed to be so hard. She's in kindergarten for heavens sake. When I pick her up, she should be excited, right? Bursting at the seams, ready to share all the awesome stuff that happens in the magical world of kindergarten. I shouldn't need use an arsenal of tactics that are meant for parents of tweens and teens.

I know that this is not a result of her school or her teacher, both of which are amazing. My frustration will most likely be alleviated by finding a different way to engage with her.

But I can't help but think, "This would so not be an issue if I were homeschooling."

Empowering Video: Thandie Newton

On Wednesdays I share a video that facilitates empowerment; because when you know better, you do better.

Actress Thandie Newton speaking about her journey of accepting her "otherness" at TEDGlobal 2011.

Why Are We Afraid To Be Creative?

{image via Holstee}

A few summers ago, a  friend admired a pair of cuffed denim bermuda shorts that AB was wearing and asked if I had made them. I was flattered, but decided to be honest and scoffed, "I wish I were that crafty! No, actually I got them at Target."

In that moment a little seed was planted. No, it was not that far-fetched that I would be able  to change an old pair of AB's jeans into shorts. It was not that crazy to think that I could make something with my own two hands that AB could wear and others could would admire. It was not that off-the-wall that my creativity need not be limited to words upon a page.

However, I was scared.  Scared that any truly artsy-craftsy endeavors would look ridiculous. So I did what any rational parent would do. I used my child as a crutch.

Coloring. Drawing. Painting. These are just things that kids do. It is something that they do every single day...with no fear. So, I started having Creative Dates with AB where I would truly focus on being in that creative moment with her, whether we were playing with Play-Doh or painting with water colors. I wouldn't worry about school or work or any of the multiple things waiting on my to-do list. I would just create with my kid.

Over time this evolved into art journaling and collaging by myself. I began reading all of the Stampington & Company publications and Cloth, Paper, Scissors, while avidly following artist blogs. Art supply stores became heaven to me. I was in a really good creative place as my confidence grew, but I still had that desire to be able to wear my art. I still really wanted for someone to compliment something that AB was wearing and be able to smile and say, "Yes, I made that." I loved seeing those women knitting on the train. I loved scrolling through Etsy and looking at all those beautiful handmade items.

Then one day, enough was enough. I bought a skein of yarn, a pair of needles and a crochet hook, watched a You Tube video and started making things. Since then I have crocheted hats and knit scarves and bags. I have an insanely long list of projects I'd like to make and books filled with post-it notes marking stitches I'd like try.

Knitting has become like reading for me. It is something that is done every day, without fail. It is an activity that I can lose myself in. An hour seems like 5 minutes. AB will ask me to help her with something and I find myself saying, "Just one more row," as I often say, "Just one more page."

In reality, there was nothing to be afraid of. Why are we afraid to be creative? Because someone else might think that it's ugly. Because someone else might actually say that it's ugly. Because someone else might not even notice. Because someone else might sneer at you for pursuing a passion. Because someone else might laugh at you for trying something new.

But here's the thing: Just because they might, doesn't mean they will. And even if they do it doesn't matter.

It. Does. Not. Matter.

What matters is that you like it. What matters is that you felt good while you were creating. What matters is that for every person that doesn't like your creative product there are 5 more people out there who do. What matters is that you are living the life that you want to live, with no regrets.


Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain

AB Pic of the Week.

This face.

This pout.

This arched eyebrow.

This particular expression. 

This exact face.

It is impossible to resist.

Book Review: Oddfellow's Orphanage

Oddfellow's Orphanage by Emily Winfield Martin

I am a fan of The Black Apple, so I was quite excited when I saw that Emily Martin had written a children's book. When I read, "With artwork gracing every spread, this book is truly a delight to read - or to read aloud," I couldn't wait to read it aloud to AB at bedtime. But after a couple of nights, I found myself disappointed. It seemed to lack a clear story line. There was no villain. I thought that the newest child to the orphanage, Delia, would be the main character, but it began to appear that there was no main character at all. While AB was quite happy with the book (granted, I could read the papers of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce aloud to her at bedtime and she would be content), I began to get frustrated as a reader, so I abandoned it.

A few days ago, I decided to give it another chance, but on my own. After reading that the book came about from a series of portraits the author created, I looked at the novel through fresh eyes. I realized that it is more a collection of character vignettes. Oddfellow's Orphanage is a peek into a fantasy world where unusual orphans are loved and accepted. Delia is the main character because we get to see her transformation from outsider to belonging to a family. However, she is not the main focus. She is simply a conduit through which we get to meet all the delightfully strange, yet normal, new members of her family.

It goes without saying that the illustrations are wonderful. The portraits, and their accompanying stories, are the highlight of the book. In addition, there are some really stellar sentences that just make your heart happy. Sentences that are full of imagery, but still simple enough for young readers to understand. Miss Martin has created a beautiful imaginary world where all are welcome.

Reading Oddfellow's Orphanage served as a reminder that for a book to be interesting, it doesn't always need to involve fighting evil or battling against the end of the world. Sometimes, all it takes is the simplicity of friendships and family.

Single Parents Day.

Apparently, today was Single Parents Day. A whole day to honor the hard work of single parents.

As a single parent, I find it to be unncessary as a way to bring awareness to the challenges and triumphs of parenting. Two reasons:

1. It's rather obvious that parenting is hard, and even harder without a partner.
2. Mother's Day and Father's Day cover both categories of single parents (or caregivers) quite well, I believe.

However, I think that it should be day to bring awareness to single parents about acknowledging the good things we do, instead of bemoaning the things that our kids don't have or the people who are not in their lives. Stop, take a moment and pat yourself on the back for the damn fine job you are doing as a parent.

A handful of personal kudos:

• I tell AB "I love you" & give her kisses and hugs upon her multiple times a day.
• Without prompting, AB tells me "I love you" gives me kisses and hugs multiple times a day.
• I get compliments on how she carries herself when I am not around.
• We read together every day.
• We laugh together every day.

As the day draws to a close, I am grateful to continue on this journey with such an awesome kid.

Book Review: The Unruly Queen

AB picked up this gem at the library. She came over to me and said, "Mom, I know you're really going to like this one." She held up The Unruly Queen by E. S. Redmond. The cover alone had me. She's like a punky blend of Eloise and Fancy Nancy. AB and I love quality illustrations, but we have a special place in our hearts for quirkier illustrations of the Tim Burton variety. (Who knew that a preschooler would become so smitten with The Corpse Bride?)

Minerva is an only child of wealthy globetrotting parents. She is a spoiled brat who goes through a nanny a week. However, the 53rd nanny is different. She whips Minerva into shape with some cunning reverse psychology, crowning her the Unruly Queen for being "the single most difficult child to control." Minerva is presented with a beautiful purple crown. She is informed that with this title she is able to live far away on Petulant Peak where her royal subjects will be beasts and monsters who are loud and noisy. Her subjects will, of course, misbehave, just like the Unruly Queen herself. Minerva is none to happy to hear the perks of Petulant Peak and sets out to prove the 53rd nanny wrong about Petulant Peak being the perfect place for Minerva. So, she behaves. She even goes so far as to take a bath and brush her hair. Eventually, she gives up her Unruly Queen crown for her current comforts of butlers and pink satin pajamas.

Aside from the great illustrations and funny story line (written in rhyme!), AB loved that The Unruly Queen is a book about manners. She gravitates toward books of this sort because she enjoys admonishing the characters. Thankfully, she does not act that way with her friends. Yet, I do wish that it translated into a perfectly well-behaved AB. Well, a mother can dream, can't she?

AB Pic of the Week.

She shrieks with delight the moment she lays eyes a playground.

She speeds off to jump onto the first thing she sees, trusting that I will follow.

She performs seemingly death-defying leaps from varying heights. 

"Look at me, Mom!" 

She successfully completes a circuit of every single thing the playground has to offer.

She runs back to me with a mischievous gap-toothed grin on her face, asking,

 "Wanna watch me do it again?"

Yes, indeed, I do.

Forever.

Empowering Video: 2012 Women in the World Summit.

On Wednesdays I share a video that facilitates empowerment; because when you know better, you do better.

Go forth and do awesome things.

Be A Mother, Not A Friend.

{image via weheartit}

As you all know, I love my kid. I adore my kid. I think that she is the best thing since sliced bread.

However, I am not her friend. And I surely do not want her to think that she is mine. Nor do I want her to describe me as her "best friend" when she is older. 

Do I want us to have an open and supportive relationship? Absolutely. But will I be sharing everything with my daughter? No.

I think the "friendship trap" is something that a lot of single mothers fall into. The dynamic between a single mother and her daughter is bound to be different. However, the boundaries must be established. Whenever I hear a mother-daughter relationship described as "best friends", I always cringe a little inside. I want for AB to know that while I love her dearly, she is not my partner or my equal. There will be no clubbing or bar hopping nights in our future. I will not be crying on her shoulder about any future heartbreaks. I'm her mother. Not her friend.

As mothers, I believe we do our daughters a disservice if we blur those lines. Our daughters should see us as their rocks. This is not to say that we should be entirely devoid of feeling or a complete stick in the mud. However, I believe that we should not be sharing all of our lives with our daughters. Our daughters do not need to meet every gentleman who takes us out on a date. Our daughters do not need to hear about how much their fathers hurt us or how badly they screwed up. Our daughters deserve to have mothers who provide stability, authority and structure.

Be her protector, her confidante, her role model. Be her mother, not her friend.

In The Absence of Kinks.

AB's  hair is chestnut brown with streaks of auburn that only show up when in the right amount of light. Her curls are loose yet defined. They are the curls that the kinks of my hair long to be. Her hair can be brushed into subtle waves. When wet it will spring back into its natural curl but longer.  Thankfully, she will never experience the burn of the hot comb, curling iron or relaxer. I live vicariously through her and let it lie as she flips it back out of her face with a grown up flair that it is apparently inherent in those with blessed with long hair. My mother worries that AB will become vain about her hair, while I worry that I will become (or have already become) vain about her hair.

While pregnant, I wondered incessantly about what she would look like. What would her coloring be? Would she have her father's blue eyes and my kinky 'fro? Would she be a beautiful mix of the two of us, or would the concoction of the two of us come out all wrong, uneven, a sign of our failed relationship?

I gave birth to white baby with straight hair and big brown eyes. I deconstructed her parts into mine and his until she was no longer a baby but simply another belonging to be divided. I got the eyes, the nose, the smile. He got the ears, the eyelashes, the feet, the build. We split the hair - the curls from me, the texture (or lack thereof) from him. Her complexion has darkened thanks to sun and age; however she is still, and forever shall remain, darker than him but lighter than me.

Despite finding these elements of me in her, I still fail to see the resemblance. But then, I think about how I don't really look like either of my parents. There are no "spitting images" in my family. There are glimpses and fragments that  appear and disappear. Wispy ghosts of resemblances.

This hair gives her anonymity. I like that she can slide through cultures with an ease that I cannot. She has been mistaken for a Latina (Dominican, Spanish, Mexican, you name it), an Indian (her surname, apparently, is quite common in India), and a Native American ("Oh, she's got that Cherokee blood, right?").

This mixture of African, Irish and Italian has given her a worldwide hue. I imagine her with her long multicultural hair tied up in a knot at the nape of her neck, backpack filled to the brim, notebook and pen in one hand and a camera in the other, traveling the world. I imagine that I have presented her with a key that will allow her to traverse this globe and be accepted by all. I picture her slipping in and out of cultural identities as she currently slips in and out of imaginary play  worlds.

She is the physical manifestion of what I wanted to experience in my youth. There is no pressure upon her to be black. There is no pressure on her to be white. She can be a chameleon and choose whatever she wants to be. This is my unintentional gift to her. This freedom that stems from the absence of kinks.

{Originally posted on Black Girl Investing}

AB Pic of the Week

International Women's Day

In honor of International Women's Day, check out these inspiring and thought-provoking stories:

• 10 Suggestions for how to commemorate International Women's Day {The Washington Post} 

• Vital Voices Global Partnership honored 6 women from around the world who are protecting and empowering women in their communities. {Marie Claire}

• "Symbols and Strength": Tina Brown's editorial letter for the Women in the World issue of Newsweek. {The Daily Beast}

• The Top 100 Women in the World {The Guardian}

• "So where do we go from here? As a development practitioner overseeing the gender portfolio at the World Bank, I can tell you that International Women's Day on March 8th should always serve as a reminder of this vitally important issue. But there are another 364 days of the year where we have to take action -- both at work and at home, both men and women, fathers and mothers. This is not the time to be complacent; this is a time for us all to be concerned. Only if we can lead by example and 'engender' the attitudes of our children, will boys and girls become equal partners in the future. " -Otaviano Canuto {Huffington Post}

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes." They will say, "Women don't have what it takes." - Clare Booth Luce

The Program of Serious Reading.

{image via weheartit}

One of my resolutions for 2012 was to read books of a more "serious" nature. (And by "serious", I mean more literary and more difficult. The kinds of books that you would find on a college syllabus, shortlisted for literary awards, and/or written about in The New Yorker.) I started off the year wanting to read harder books. Books that challenged me. Books that I was not able to finish in two days. Granted there is something quite satisfying about the easy books that you can finish in a day. They have a predictable story line written in a rather simple style. While, I do enjoy those books, I found that I read too many of those books. Simply for the fact that I wanted to add yet another title to the books that I read that year. Looking back on that list, I was rather disappointed in myself and The Program of Serious Reading (PSR) was born.

Unfortunately, of the 17 books that I had read so far in 2012, I would only consider two of those books to meet the qualifications of PSR. As a result, I decided that I need to be more structured if this resolution is going to actually be successful. I created a list of books that I intend to read in 2012 (in no particular order)*:

1. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot
3. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
4. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
5. A Room With A View by E. M. Forster
6. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
7. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
9. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
10. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Wish me luck.

*As I reviewed this list I realized that I had only one female author and no authors of color. PSR fail. However, this is not an exhaustive list. It is simply a list of books that I have always wanted to read in their entirety and needed to document for personal accountability . I reserve the right to add/remove titles, of course. :-)

Book Review: Extra Yarn.

AB and I love knitting and we also love to find our names as characters in books. (i.e. The Doll People by Ann M. Martin with main characters named Tiffany and Annabelle.)

So, it comes as no surprise that we are in love with the picture book Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett. It is a book about knitting and the heroine is named Annabelle. What more could you ask for?

There are many reasons to love this book. First, Jon Klassen's illustrations are fantastic. Second, the villain is an archduke. My kid now know the word "archduke" and uses it while playing. Score. It's just such a fun word. Third, it features yarn bombing. That's right, adorable little Annabelle becomes a guerilla knitter thanks to her extra yarn and desire to prove a naysayer teacher wrong. Last, but definitely not least, it teaches a great lesson about honoring your gifts. You may look at someone else's talents and envy them. It may seem that their process is simple and ordinary.  You may attempt to imitate, but it just doesn't work. It doesn't look right. It doesn't feel right. Why? Because it's not your. Like the archduke,  you have stolen the extra yarn only to wind up staring into an empty box. Instead, find what makes you truly happy  and you have found your own gift that looks right, that feels right, that works.

Knitting + heroine named Annabelle + happy ending = a favorite book.