parents' voice

My daughter is afflicted with some sort of horrible rash.

These rashes are actually fairly regular occurences, she seems to have rather sensitive skin. Not only does she freak out if her shirt is too scratchy, she gets contact dermatitis more often than anyone I'm been familiar with.

Last night, she was just beside herself with near panic about being itchy, literally writhing and crying out for long periods of time. While we could have gone to the ER, it didn't seem like they would have anything quicker acting than the tube of whatever stuff that we had from last time.

So it seemed to me that the best thing to do is to help her master her reaction to the itchiness. For the first time since I've started meditation, she allowed my imprecations to take big belly breaths and to count them to enter into her sphere of potential actions. And she took to the "imagine you are in a forest and it is safe and warm and you are being held up by the ground" visualization/calming thing quite well. She was laying on a cloud that could not itch her skin. A bit later, she even could calm her response to the itchiness, feeling the itchiness just as sensation, not as a cause to panic (thank you Gordon R. Dickson). She did need a gentle hand on her belly to actually slip into sleep, but still, she had a good bit of rehearsal of the "It hurts, but it's ok, I am in charge of my reaction" stuff (though she was un-impressed with my prayer: "Please help her to feel better, or to be able to feel better about not feeling better.").

But then we parents figure out that the laundry this week was washed in a new detergent - extra softening oils and fragrance oils! We've since rewashed a bunch of school clothes and are hoping that the redness, itchiness and swelling will soon be gone.

I find myself, in this rather strange but pleasant state to which I've located, without any small children. Somewhere along the line, we became parents of middling children. My daughter is now awesomely close to an adult - a bright sparkling mind which alternately delights me and keeps me honest (the other day a nun was asking her about Zen, and she said, "I know how to sit still and calm my heart"). My son, while still in the "sort of terrible, not quite reasonable 2-3-4-5"s, is having the sort of emoting that 5 year olds do, which is definitely a step away from the atavistic lifestyle that 2s and 3s bring with them. And he can assemble the complex modern legos by himself! And, heck, the two of them together cleaned our bathrooms out with fairly minimal supervision recently! It doesn't make sense really.

California is distinctly less self-consciously liberal than our home town. Folks have a dislike of politics and a certain reserve, a certain tendency to allow people to make their own way or not. Our grocery store doesn't come with an active listserv. We can't email our neighbors that we've put a book shelf into the street, or complain about the water pressure. School social events seem like the closest thing to 1950s style cock-tail hours that I've experienced. It's hard to compare fairly a place we've lived in for 4 seasons (cool, cooler & rainy, warm, often foggy) to a place where I couldn't walk outside without running into several people that had held my kids as babies, but in California there seem to be calmer and less argumentative people, and perhaps a bit less willingness to argue about selling meat products in the co-op or about how to arrange pick up to be as safe as possible.

My daughter has the plan to move back to Maryland when she's 18 (she also still has the plan to live with us always) and misses her roots there, but is finally making enough friends to get by with. My son describes things as being like in Maryland or as being after Maryland.

They are both so tall now, and they both listen attentively to the sort of sciency things that for so many years were something I had to squelch (or simplify past my ability to simplify effectively). They can get all of their own clothes on (and sometimes do!) They can get into petty squables about plastic toys, and then resolve them! When there is a need, they rally themselves into helping - setting the table, breaking into our neighbors house who locked herself out, helping with baking, all that sort of stuff.

Seeing them grow is a most joyous sort of grief - as I stand amazed by these new children ("Yes Dad, I know what igneous rocks are, you tell me that all the time" or "Daaad, I can transform that one by myself!" or "Thank you for holding my rocks"), I'm still prone to lapse into musing about holding babies or holding 18 month old hands with a sort of whistfulness.

Not much time for that, though. The transition from "staying at home" to working for pay full time is just as wrenching as anyone that's tasted the bliss of following natural rhythms and honoring ancient priorities would expect - for months, my whole body protested when I left home "But you left the kids behind!" I now have thrown myself again into the esoteric art of networked software as my primary occupation. I do little bits of parenting here and there, glad to have had the time to build up a strong connection and base of knowledge, but I'm the classic weekend dad, pushing the kids to go to every fun or beautiful place in California Saturday by Saturday. My daughter finally has learned to negotiate the odd Saturday of no travel (when we have swimming, walks to the ice cream store, and fires in the fire place, plus an art project or long game of Uno), but we've been up and down the amazing topography here. And if it's too foggy and dank for the beach to be fun, well "too bad, today's the day."

For instance, last Saturday, we went to the beach around Monterey Bay and then went to a movie and then went back to the beach and then went to Mission San Juan de Bautista (apparently every school child here knows about the Missions) where we saw some old California history, stood on the San Andreas fault, captured a dog owned by a nun, and then heard the nun's stories about Caesar Chavez back in the day

I miss you, Takoma Park, and hope that this finds each one of you very well. Please keep on hassling the people that need hassling - we'll be in the hottub relaxing.

by Emory Luce Baldwin

by Emory Luce Baldwin

School Scene

by Sue Katz Miller

A Montgomery County Public Schools teacher admitted to her class recently that she dreads March. This month features an unusual stretch of four straight weeks with no holiday interruptions, punctuated only by the bleak days of Maryland School Assessments (MSAs). For parents, this is often the time of year when we finally get a handle on what is going on in the school system, and there is a corresponding rise in outrage about lack of transparency and lack of what staff refer to as "parent stakeholder input."
Budget transparency

New school board member Laura Berthiaume had the guts to cast a dissenting vote on the school budget. She objected to the fact that the Board appears to simply rubber stamp the budget drawn up by MCPS and pass it on to the County Council, only making changes at the end of the process in the spring, when the budget is basically set. Berthiaume ran on a platform of greater school budget transparency. She explained her renegade vote this way: "If the Board will not do its job, then I will cast my vote against the budget because I believe we have a job to do." Of course, insiders are calling her naïve. The citizens who elected her in November are thrilled and gratified.

Q & A with Paul Weckstein

by Sue Katz Miller

photo by Julie Wiatt

Under the Obama administration, will there be substantive changes to the powerful federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB)?

As Co-Director of the Center for Law and Education, Takoma Park resident Paul Weckstein helped to mold that law. His work has involved mild-mannered policy wonking, but also acting up and suing the government. Weckstein sat down with Voice columnist Sue Katz Miller to discuss the benefits and flaws of NCLB.

How did you end up as a lawyer working in education?

I started law school as an activist in 1969, but without a notion of being a lawyer in any traditional sense. In fact, after my first year I left and went to work in a mental hospital and was all set to go into a clinical psych program, when I thought of synthesizing law and education and returned for joint degrees in the two. I started working at the Center for Law and Education as an intern while still in school. I moved here in 1981 to open a DC office to give the Center a presence on federal policy.

by Emory Luce Baldwin

I have read a lot of biography and often
people wrote sentences like: "my parents never let me go into their room after some point, figuring I was too old to really need comfort any more. That was the end of the protected world of childhood."

I have read a lot of parenting essays and often people wrote sentences like: "we thought we would never get them out of our room, but we just said one night, 'you have to sleep in your bed now' and after two nights, they stayed."

I have read a lot of childhood abuse memoir where people tell their parents about horrific experiences and the parents say "why didn't you tell me? I had no idea!"

I have had a lot of conversations with people from large families who sung praises to benign neglect, and who were quite certain that our labor intensive parenting styles will make it far harder for our children to know themselves realistically.

You cannot win. The balance lies before us but staying balanced between Scylla and Charibdis is difficult even with enough sleep and a supportive society.

All you can do is pay your money, make your choices and watch your kids grow into the fullness of their specific humanity. Life is imperfect, dangerous, has an unhappy ending in the best case, and is such an impossibly wondrerous experience to share with your successors.

My daughter has recently started to opt out of my evening reading sessions, preferring to read to herself. Was I proud? No. I was annoyed. I haven't finished my list of important things to read to her. But I have transmitted my own prickly independent style of learning, for better or for worse not being an issue. She is herself. I am myself. She is my kid. She also gets in half trouble for staying up late reading, as I did from my book loving mother. I can't wait to see what happens tonight when the trolley ride is over.

Rffff

-- Posted from a Cell Phone

Two Blair students are blogging for the Voice.

Pete Volk began writing about the Thunderbolts this past summer and has continued to follow the Blazers during the school year. If you want to find out the latest game stats and read expert analysis, go to http://www.silverspringvoice/takomasilversports.

Pete is a Blair senior, currently puzzling over which college has the best program for a budding sports reporter.


Gemma D'Eustachio has taken over "Inside Blair," the column that has been a franchise of the Kohn and Wolf families--until now. You can read Gemma's thoughts on high school and beyond at http://www.takoma.com/insideblair.

Gemma is a junior at Montgomery Blair High School. In her sophomore year, she joined the Voice team and has filed several impressive articles already. We look forward to reading her blog.

So I just got off of the phone from the other three members of the family. Big sis states we erred in creating little bro. Little bro asks if I wondered where my Power Rangerish bike helmet, last seen in his arms this morning, went. My beloved life partner wondering if I was wearing some helmet at least and perhaps a bit of query as to my arrival time. Being an inflexible 60 minutes away I can only listen to the various yelled disputes and work out how I can walk in and save the lot of them with a few heroic acts and some calm words of acknowledgement and encouragement. Then the pasta. At least that is my current plan.

It is so odd to walk in, a bit tired between the new job and the rushed tho fun bike rides, and have no idea what the day has been like. How does everyone do this?

-- Posted from a Cell Phone

Report from (the other) bay by Chris Austin Lane We are settled in to the West Coast, and the adventure of parenting goes on. I won't be able to share any new spots on the Potomac, nor how to deal with the cold weather or the inauguration madness (which we read about wistfully). California is very different from Maryland, and the ex-urbs are very different than Takoma Park. For instance, I bike by a yard of sheep on the way to the Metro, which is called the trolley. I have transformed into one of those Dads that are gone for like 60 hours a week and is all peppy and enthusiastic on our Saturday expeditions to the many wonderful places we have found in the Bay area. We have moved twice and the kids compare everything to Maryland, as do I.

by Emory Luce Baldwin

Teaching children basic good manners and courtesy is not that different from teaching a child how to ride a bike or how to make their own sandwich. Children learn very well from the consequences of "what works" and "what doesn't work" in social situations inside, and outside, of the home.

Most parents I know would like their child to "be good," but what is good behavior exactly? Is it responsibility? Is it acting thoughtfully? Or is it cooperation? In general, most parents consider children well behaved when their behavior does not create problems for family members or interfere with the family's ability to live well together. Any one person's act of rudeness or selfishness, for instance, may be directed at only one other member of the family. But, the whole family is going to suffer when a member of the family consistently behaves in a rude or selfish way.

Extraordinary cooperation brings back hidden gem

School Scene

by Sue Katz Miller

School Scene

by Sue Katz Miller

A few weeks before we elected Barack Obama as President, I happen to be walking the empty downtown streets of Birmingham, Alabama, with my husband, teenage daughter, and 11-year-old son, en route to the Civil Rights Institute. We are in town for a wedding, and my son is complaining about having to spend a sunny afternoon in a dark museum. I explain that he needs to understand more deeply the history of race in America, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and the ghosts that haunt Birmingham. Then my son turns to me and asks, "What's the Ku Klux Klan?"

by Emory Luce Baldwin

School Scene

by Sue Katz Miller

A nightmare budget is looming, and a long shadow creeps over our school system. Unions may have to renegotiate their contracts and accept smaller increases. We may have to fight to keep transportation for our kids to get to school. We will certainly have to fight for smaller class sizes, parent outreach services, special education programming, gifted programming, greener schools, healthier school lunches, and anything else that might cost money.

In the meantime, here are a few quick fixes to improve our schools without necessarily spending more money. All of these strategies are being used at some, but not all, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). We need the Board of Education and MCPS to make sure these affordable innovations are reaching all of our students. We can and must keep improving our schools, even in lean times.

These kids need yoga! ...after lugging around such heavy backpacks all day.

by Emory Luce Baldwin

by Emory Luce Baldwin 

I have read that true voyage is return but I what is arriving home when you have never been there and do not know anything? If you have been on the road for so long and are tired of driving,it is pretty sweet. We drove all the way from Tahoe to San Jose via the Golden Gate bridge. We got awesome mileage -52 MPG going 82 miles per hour. We shed 5000 or so feet of altitude in 40 miles . We had to rush because the GPS
said that we would get there 20 minutes before the picnic at the kids' school; sadll
Y the GPS forgot that humans need to eat and use the potty, so we arrived just after the thlend of the picnic. That probably was to the best for the kids as their teachers were STOL l so they could see the classrooms and teachers and not have to deal with the other kiss. Please pardon any bizarre typos. what my. Son calls this hotel but is our new home lacks wifi so I am writing this on my cell phone. More later when we know more.

We crossed over into California at about 6 pm to much yelling, outside voice screaming, honking, high fiving and whooping. And at least for me, much relief that driving is almost done (he wrote as he prepared to take up residence in California). We ate dinner at a very family friendly little restaurant on Lake Tahoe and then my beloved life partner and I, in a pattern that dates back to our undergrad days together, decided to halt our plan to drive late and "get up early and finish it in the morning."

I am actually writing this the next morning, in the tub as I attempt to make myself presentable enough to meet for the first time the parents, teachers and students in the kids new school at a picnic today.

We drove through Utah which really is a lovely place in the northern bits - absoluetly stunning mountains surrounding green valleys with picture perfect rocky rivers. As we left the stripy cliffs, we had to say good bye to the easy access to the layers of rocks that we've enjoyed ever since the Rockies stuck up out of the plain at Denver. As we drove north through Utah, the rates of erosion and plant life visibly increased making the mountains more like the eastern mountains, more round and covered in dirt or rubble and plants.

We stopped at the Salt Lake in the midst of some of the very little rain we've seen so far. I did go out and get some of the water and we all verified that it is indeed a salty lake. We hopped back in the car and drove through these amazing salt flats. They were very impressively odd plains with no signs of living things except for a bunch of elaborately arranged beer bottles spelling out various messages and signs on the side of the road. We gathered a small tupperware of the salt. We drove by a Morton salt factory with huge piles of salt sitting outside, uncovered, in the rain; but there was so much salt it didn't much dissolve and wash away.

We got to Nevada as our impatience started to reach epic levels. My son had to be more or less co-erced into the car after each stop, as he trustingly but futilely used words to tell us that he did not want to get into the car again. My sentiments exactly. Still, he and my daughter both spent several hours napping.

I'm not a good rider on really curvy high mountainous roads, and at some point my beloved life partner was approaching a slow moving truck in the passing lane, and I started in with my hand waving and twitching. She said, "I guess I should slow down" and I was able to quip, "Or I could assume the crash position." We laughed for several minutes at that one, giddy or mad with the anticipated finishing of this great transition between our old life and our new life in California.

It has been feeling like this drive is an appropriate transition - big enough to sever our daily bonds to life in Takoma Park, long enough to explain bodily to each of us why things will be different on the West Coast, and uncomfortable enough to make it easy to find things we like in the new living quarters. A Prius is a bit small to live in for so many hours (when we have to get back in, I mutter to myself, "Initiate Folding Procedure" as I fold my stiff limbs back into the twisted shape they need to fit) but it did only cost us about $300 in gas. And we have seen how interestingly varied this continent is. And we are definietly the four Austin-Lanes now - no home but the shifting platforms we provide one another. Hua!

The reality of that isn't so grand of course - we are at that point of giddiness where pretty much each fart or burp is discussed. When we get into the car, not only is the 3 year old protesting, and the limbs are protesting, the nose protests as well. Whew, this car needs airing out. And of course, we are all cranky enough that it's clear that our new life so close at hand has not left the problems of our old life behind; I can act out my pettiness, stubbornness and inflexibility in the mountains with little humidity and no mosquitoes.

Well, off for what looks like a fairly undramatic drive across California and then our grand entrance accross the Golden Gate bridge (a dramatic florish my beloved life partner has generously allowed me) and then down to Almaden valley to our new lives, filled with all of our old stuff carried along.