A Recommendation for Parents of Preschoolers and Future Preschoolers

Something I haven’t read in a while, and want to re-read… There are tons of advice books out there, and some are great, and some will fit your children, and some won’t. But getting to assist amazing teachers in a co-operative preschool has taught me almost everything I know about handling pre-schoolers. If you don’t have a preschool teacher to follow around and take notes on, though, I highly recommend anything written by Vivian Gussin Paley, a preschool teacher who has published these amazing memoirs of her expereinces in the classroom. The thing that really gets me is her tremendous humility — she’s quiet and listens to the kids, instead of just imposing all the things she knows on them because she’s big and...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 21, 2003 | 2 comments

Night Work, by Laurie King

Sometimes my brain needs a vacation. I realized that I hadn’t read anything just FUN in a while so Sunday I hit Half Price Books , the acre-sized used book store closest to our house, and was lucky enough to find a paperback by my favorite mystery writer, Laurie King, that I hadn’t read before. Not that having read it before would necessarily make any difference, I’m really good at forgetting critical details… but just like some people don’t like to make the same mistake twice… well. It was fun anyway. The problem is I don’t want to do anything else until I’m done reading a good mystery, so I have to only indulge occasionally and make sure I’ve got no major commitments the next...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 21, 2003 | 0 comments

We Have Achieved Locomotion!

Describing Søren’s latest accomplishment. In weariness I put a quilt down for Søren on the floor next to the desk… so he scoots a bit until his head hits the bookcase. He looks annoyed. He rolls over *TWICE* (front to back to front to back to front) to get away from the bookcase and is back playing with the fringe of the rug which seemed to be what he wanted in the first place. I never observed either of his brothers using rolling as a means of getting somewhere, only ever just changing position. But then he watches us closely and may realize that getting yourself to the place you want to be is one of the hallmarks of human achievement. Actually my theory on why the last week of parenting Søren has seemed unusually challenging...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 21, 2003 | 0 comments

Why I haven’t written in a few days

Hint: He’s 21 lbs, refuses to nap, and likes grabbing at keyboards from my lap A famous line from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness… Sophia Raday, in an essay, Mirror, Mirror on the booksandbabies web zine uses the phrase “astonishing joy and profound deprivation.” I thought I was given to extreme mood swings before having children: this was before experiencing a scene of near-domestic bliss, a home-made lasagna in the oven, a sudsy sink full of dishes that one child stands on a step stool to...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 20, 2003 | 0 comments

Too Cool for Disney

On the responsibilities of giving my children culture. We would, I have concluded, had to have relocated to a remote South Pacific Island to protect our children from the influence of the Power Rangers and Pokémon . Our Tivo means that I can provide the boys with more educational television than they can watch in a day, or even, thanks to the joys of cable television, particularly the station, Noggin , that I could bring them up entirely on children’s shows that I watched in the 1970′s — the Electric Company, 3-2-1-Contact, Ghostwriter, Flipper, Little House on the Prairie… But without ever having seen an episode of Power Rangers or Pokémon, I’m sure both boys could explain the major plot points and characters of...

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Posted by Mara Collins on May 19, 2003 | 0 comments