Category Archives: life

Two parenting hacks and one instance of just plain good luck

Hack: Amelia is reluctant to read aloud to me/us. Today she brought me her 18″ doll Bella and asked me to brush Bella’s hair. (Amelia isn’t persistent and careful enough to do a good job and brushing hair is one of the few things I ever liked about playing with dolls.) I told her I’d brush it as long as Amelia read to me while I worked. She read me a whole picture book and the time passed very happily for the both of us.  

Snuggle buttons and covers buttons are ON
 
Hack: A family we’re friends with taught us about “the tickle button,” an undefined spot on your body, which if “On,” means you are interested in being tickled, and if “Off,” means you do not want to be tickled. This has helped with Baxter’s mania for tickling people without asking first, yay! 

It’s also spawned other questions, like “Is your snuggle button on?” and “Is your hugging button on?” In case you were wondering, Baxter’s snuggle button is always on. 

Luck: I told Amelia we might ask her to take a nap today because she’s been getting to bed so late he last couple of nights. She decided to “play” rest time in the morning — I think in order to get out of taking a nap — and played it so convincingly that she fell asleep and napped for almost 90m, a good 30m longer than I would have asked her to stay in bed. Naps without fights? I’ll take two! 

So-far book review: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

 Got this at the used bookstore yesterday, hoping to read it to Amelia. It’s set in Texas in 1899, and the protagonist is a girl who identifies herself as a naturalist despite her school teaching her:

Reading, Spelling, Arithmetic, and Penmanship. oh, and Deportment. I got an ‘acceptable’ for Posture but an ‘unsatisfactory’ for Use of Hankie and Thimble.

Her granddaddy is horrified by this, and starts allowing her to shadow him in his own experiments and (local) expeditions. 

If she tolerates it, I think this would be a fun book to read with Amelia. It does deal with topics of racism on top of sexism, but I think we could talk about both constructively. I’ll read through to the end before I lay it on her 6yo brain, though. Liking it a lot so far. 

  

Just don’t do it

“Instead of focusing on what we’re saying, we’re distracted by anxieties about the way we sound to others. ‘Am I being too apologetic?’ and ‘Is my voice too high?’ are linguistic analogues of ‘is my nail polish chipped?’ and ‘do I look fat in this?’”

This article about critiques of women’s speech was highly insightful.

debuk's avatarlanguage: a feminist guide

This week everyone’s been talking about an article in the Economist explaining how men’s use of language undermines their authority. According to the author, a senior manager at Microsoft, men have a bad habit of punctuating everything they say with sentence adverbs like ‘actually’, ‘obviously’, ‘seriously’ and ‘frankly’. This verbal tic makes them sound like pompous bullshitters, so that people switch off and stop listening to what they’re saying. If they want to be successful, this is something men need to address.

OK, people haven’t been talking about that article—mainly because I made it up. No one writes articles telling men how they’re damaging their career prospects by using the wrong words. With women, on the other hand, it’s a regular occurrence. This post was inspired by a case in point: a piece published last month in Business Insider, in which a former Google executive named Ellen Petry Leanse…

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Hiking Multnomah Falls

 

the falls in all their glory: 671 feet
  
amelia and kennedy before the hike
  
baxter shayed with daddy and grandpa
the view from the bridge
  
smallest cave ever
  
one switchback from the crest
  
we made it to the top!
  
sweaty trio selfie
  
i love this picture
  
the falls before the FALLS
  
looking over the cliff
  
the columbia river, from the top of the crest
  
kennedy rests before we walk down
  
amelia rests too
 

“You can never have a happy ending at the end of an unhappy journey; it just doesn’t work out that way. The way you’re feeling, along the way, is the way you’re continuing to pre-pave your journey, and it’s the way it’s going to continue to turn out until you do something about the way you are feeling.”

— Abraham Hicks, excerpted from West Los Angeles, CA – August 6th, 2005

I’m not a devotee of “The Secret” and all that, necessarily, but I do agree with this quote. 

I adulted so hard tonight.

Put kids to bed.

Emptied dishwasher; filled dishwasher.

Set up bread machine to have fresh  bread done by 5:40am.

Folded laundry.

Emailed school parents a reminder about end of year gifts.

Filled out emergency contact and photo release forms for summer camp.
Emailed summer camp with filled out forms. 

Mended kid shirt.

Humbleblogged.

Bed.

The cool before the warm

It’s supposed to get into the 90s today, which is crazy-hot for Portland in June, so we’re enjoying the cool morning air on the back patio while Amelia and I write in our journals. Baxter occupied himself with picking me clover blossoms from the lawn. I love seeing the sun streaming through the trees onto the grass.

   

clover gleanings
  
A blend of color, texture, and height