by popular demand, pics o the dreds!

that feeling of dred

rather, a note to self, that on this night, dec 27th, 2006, i will be going to bed with a full head of dredlocks. those of you who know me oldschool, know that i have wanted to dred for the last 13 years. my first obstacle was my parents, and being 'under their roof' and such. i smoked weed instead. let that be a cautionary tale. ;) then i went to work. and i fell into the 'you'll shoot your eye out' trap of being fired for being dredy, and having that be scary enough to keep me from embarking on my knatty path. so, now i'm a mom. and i stay home, except when i'm out, which is lots. but i'm not exactly employed, by any rigid standards either. and both parenting and dreding are journeys in patience. both require some self knowledge, some self worth, a lot of love, and a genuine ability to be okay with looking like a fucktard now and then. both tend to make you think about spirituality, and your place in the world. i mean, nothing says human like the pain in your arms after palm rolling for an hour, and then lifting a 25 pound toddler to nurse. maybe it all comes together for a reason. as much as i love havin the peanut, i tend to get lost being 'peanuts mama' you know? i used to write phat poems and protest shit. i used to go clubbing, and get made fun of for being easy AND cheap. but like that commercial says, having a baby changes everything. and i freely admit that, because i was terrified that i wasn't up for this task of raising another human being in a responsible, non-serial killer sort of fashion, i might have thrown myself into it more voraciously than if it had been a planned event. and i don't regret one single second of my obsessive chart-reading, googling, nightsweat having self. i feel like that was just part of my trip to momdom. but there is more to me, than nursing, than diapers, than the astounding number of words my kid can say (todays? jalepeno. so cute.) and spending the last 2 days transforming myself into the vision of me that i've had for 13 years was essential to remembering that i am a person, apart from 'just' a mom. i write phat poems. i protest shit. i still can't hold my liquor. i have dredlocks. word.

yep

(stolen from the tiny revolution--welcome back!)
Kids don't get building blocks of learning from high-tech playBy Barbara F. Meltz, of the Boston Globe The year Nancy Carlsson-Paige’s first grandchild, Jack, was 22 months old, he got lots of presents at Christmastime, but what he most enjoyed was something of his own creation. He tossed a plastic ball in the air, and it landed in a nest created by a kitchen stool that was turned upside down, legs poking in the air.
‘‘Stuck! Stuck!’’ he cried excitedly to Nanny, who, like most other grandmothers, knew that her delight in his discovery and her tolerance to play it with him over and over would add to his pleasure. But there was something else about the interaction that buoyed Carlsson-Paige, an author and early childhood education professor at Lesley University.
‘‘He watched my face, read my signals,’’ she says. ‘‘If the ball hit me, he knew to be sad. We would experiment by throwing it harder and softer. If I picked up the ball and dropped it into the stool, we would laugh and laugh. It was a rich experience.’’
Jack was getting a crash course in human communication, with chapters on empathy and compassion. In a world where more and more toys have batteries, buttons, screens, or agendas, it’s a lesson early childhood educators worry too many children are missing. Wheelock College professor Diane Levin has even coined a term for children without it: compassion deficit disorder.
Unfortunately, parents unwittingly abet the process with the toys they buy.
‘‘The ability to relate to others builds slowly over time through many, many little everyday experiences,’’ Carlsson-Paige says. ‘‘The more we give them toys that take them out of relationships instead of putting them into them, the more, little by little, they are missing out on the slow construction of social skills.’’
Compassion deficit disorder is a metaphor, of course, not a literal condition, and it’s the concept behind the TRUCE Toy Action Guide, published for the 12th year by Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment (truceteachers.org), based in Somerville. Levin, a cofounder, says this year’s ‘‘Toys of Value’’ list focuses on open-ended toys such as blocks, easels, and props for dramatic play.
Contrast that with the Toys ‘‘R’’ Us 2006 Fabulous 15 Best of the Holiday list, which includes only two toys that don’t use batteries or a screen, or with Hasbro’s Something for Everyone 2006 Holiday list, which boasts the return of the Baby Alive Doll, whose updated version requires four batteries so she can ‘‘eat and poop, just like a real baby,’’ and Star Wars Force Action Lightsaber, ‘‘the most authentic lightsaber-playing experience ever,’’ batteries not included. Of the 26 toys included, all but four are electronic or require batteries.
In response to questions about its list, Hasbro issued a statement saying, ‘‘As technology has increased in our everyday lives, Hasbro has incorporated some of that technology to produce some wonderful products to enhance the play experiences of children, but only where it makes sense. ..... We encourage [parents and caregivers] to be involved in all aspects of their children’s day, including television viewing, computer time, reading, playing and just having fun.’’ Toys ‘‘R’’ Us declined to comment.
Levin and others who study the relationship between toys, play, and development say toys with electronics bypass the process by which young children learn about cause and effect, including cause and effect of the human kind, such as body language and nonverbal clues. The more high-tech toys a child has and the younger he or she is when they’re introduced, the bigger the potential problem. The first three toys on the TRUCE ‘‘Toys to Avoid’’ list, for instance, are a Baby Einstein video for 9-month-olds, and two electronic learning systems by Leap Frog and Jakks.‘‘These kinds of toys entice parents ..... but they undermine the process of being an active agent, of being a problem solver,’’ Levin says. That’s a major factor in compassion deficit disorder, she adds. (Levin and Carlsson-Paige are coauthors of ‘‘The War Play Dilemma.’’)
Educational psychologist Jane Healy of Vail, Colo., says what children need in the first two years of life is a responsive human being, not exposure to a screen or battery-operated toy.
‘‘There’s a critical part of the brain thought to be responsible for reading signals and feeling empathy and relating to other people, part of the orbital prefrontal cortex, that develops early on. But it needs input from real-life people,’’ says Healy, author of ‘‘Your Child’s Growing Mind.’’ ‘‘It’s appalling, the toys that talk in electronic voices to young children, to babies, at a time when what they need is the lilt of the human voice, its nuances and the facial expressions that go with it.’’
In a typically developing child, the process of reciprocity begins in infancy when parents coo, babble, and make silly faces at their baby. In the toddler and preschool years, it’s firsthand experience they have in the three-dimensional world — moving objects, pushing and pulling them, touching, smelling, and dropping them — that help them see cause and effect.
It’s open-ended toys — blocks, clay, puppetry, animal figures, sand, markers, chalk, paint — that preschool teacher Sarae Pacetta hopes parents choose this holiday season.
‘‘Parents think they aren’t doing a good enough job if they can’t provide toys that have buttons and make sounds. It’s just not true,’’ says Pacetta, who teaches at the Lee Academy Pilot School in Dorchester. ‘‘I’d rather see a child playing with empty cereal boxes and tubes from toilet and paper towel rolls than with electronic toys.’’
The TRUCE list reflects that sentiment. It includes ‘‘Shoe Box Gifts,’’ which involves taking an empty box of any size and decorating and filling it with open-ended items around a theme. A rescue/first aid ‘‘shoe box’’ might include a flashlight, bandages, eye patch, toy stethoscope, and surgical mask. Larger boxes can be recycled and decorated to create a car or spaceship, a house or a cave.
Tufts University professor David Elkind says there is no electronic toy on earth that compares favorably to a board game. ‘‘Here’s just one thing they process from it,’’ he says: ‘‘.‘Grandpa made the effort to spend time with me, to enjoy my company.’ There is no cost-benefit analysis to the sense of security that builds and the compassion it generates, and no mechanical game can provide it,’’ he says. His newest book, ‘‘The Power of Play,’’ is due out next month.
Carlsson-Paige, who is the mother of actor Matt Damon, has three other grandchildren now. This year, as always, she’s looking for unstructured, low-tech toys that are not tied to the media. Among her favorite gifts over the years: her homemade play-dough (for her recipe, visit boston.com/living), generic plastic animals, Bristle Blocks, fat chalk, oversize drawing paper, and markers of all kinds.
What will she give her newest granddaughter, Isabella, born five months ago to Damon and his wife, Lucy?
‘‘She’s just about at that stage where she loves to reach and touch things,’’ Carlsson-Paige says. ‘‘I’ll find a book that has a tactile experience on each page, some large [non-toxic] beads on a string that will be fun for her to push and pull, and a few rattles. Rattles are a wonderful gift because she can see how she makes the noise happen.’’LINK

pictures! all cameraphone, all the time!

ibbydibby pider

intarweb! i have missed thee! i've been blogless here for a bit because, i've been having whole entire conversations with peanut. and this has yet to lose it's novelty. what started out as simple declaritve statements (look mama, the moon!) has morphed into an astounding grasp of the english language and its legion of nuance. for instance, one morning, she woke me up by hollering BALL! i'm baffled, right, because we're in bed, and there is no ball. so i look at her, and say, what ball? and she says, complete with pointing gesture to clarify, 'the ball, over there.' and lo, there on the dresser, is the ball that i'd stashed in my cargo pants yesterday when she'd fallen asleep in the car. so i said, okay, i'll get the ball. /endscene. so then, the next day, or perhaps a few days later, it's all sort of hazy now, she wakes me up hollering BUNNY! and, again, in my sleepdrunk state, i'm like, what bunny? and she again, points in the direction of the object, and says, 'that bunny! over there!' and i said, oh, that bunny. which was on the nightstand. so then, she says 'i'' get it.' and hops off the bed, gets the bunny, and climbs back up. other complete sentences include

i dropped it
i'll do it
i want it
let me see it
i missed you
i love you
where's my -x-
i brush my teeth
i brush my hair

so, yeah. my kid is a lil blabbermouth. i dunno where she gets that from...

when she nurses, i will sometimes sing 'nurse nurse nurse, nurse nurse nurse, nurse the peanut' to the tune of shake your booty. so, the other day, i did the whole, nursex3 thing, and she went, nursey peanut, nursey peanut! in rhythm. i almost peed a lil, i laughed so hard. she can also do all the hand movements for the itsy bitsy spider. and she sings it too, altho her version is more the ibbydibby pider. which is more adorablness than should be legal. and she can sing twinkle twinkle little star, and the happy birthday song from sprout. of course, the bane of my existence, is trying to get this on camera. because each time i bust out the camera, she stops being adorable, and goes 'pictures! want to see pictures!'

those are the cutey peanut updates. in knitty news, i've got two hats on the needles for other peoples kids. despite my insistance that i rather enjoy knitting, they're paying me for the hats. i'm only charging them for materials. after i finish these, i think i'll brave a sweater. i feel like i've got increasing and decreasing down pat. it'll be a peanut sized sweater, so that it doesn't take forever.

so that's the updatey bits according to garp.