Five things I wish I could tell my kids teacher

Over on the yummy mummy club a teacher "dished" about five things he/she would like to tell parents but can't. Here are five things I'd like to tell my kid's teacher,(Keep in mind she's only going into Grade 1 and some of it is for L's teacher next year when she starts.):

1. Can we stop with the head gear and costumes?
Every year, multiple times a year, we get the bulletin from school saying some kids have lice. We all know it's not a personal hygiene issue. But you know what doesn't help? Having headgear and costumes kids share. What's the point of my tormenting my kid with tea tree oil, back combing her hair, and drilling her about not sharing brushes and hats if you make it part of class?

2. Just because my kid is smart doesn't mean she can be overlooked
R was too smart for SK. So she spent a lot of time waving her hand in the air only to be overlooked for another child to give the answer. All the time. Every kid needs encouragement and opportunity. It's defeating to see her not bother to try anymore after being ignored too many times.
Oh and while we are talking about it, please give your attention to the "not cute" kids and direct your teaching assistants and student volunteers to do the same. Drives me crazy!

3.Your coffee breath stinks and it's rude
This is in retaliation to a teacher's comment (online not to my kid!) about kids not bringing smelly lunches like garlic or fish. Besides the obvious racism, it seems hypocritical given the stale burnt coffee many teachers sip throughout the day. Which is also rude because my kid can't have a cup of milk sitting in her desk all day!

4. I'm not interested in your scheduled breaks.
I'm so tired of the archaic practice of rushing kids through lunch then shoving them out the door to play so that teachers can get a break. Listen, I couldn't spend all day with 28 kids without breaks but for lunch hour to be forty minutes after morning recess and only consist of 20 minutes to get,consume, and put away lunch. That's an unreasonable request and you would go on strike if it was demanded of you. Oh and by the by, how about actually paying attention to what's going on in the school yard when you are on duty? I don't get to ignore my kid until they are bleeding or crying, you shouldn't either.

5.Stop
Stop parking in the spots closest to the doors. Stop trying to put together the best concert ever and just relax and have fun with the kids! Stop sending the kids outside when it's -30 or +35. Stop assuming every kid has a mom and a dad to make gifts for. Stop scheduling shows at the last minute during the day because we work too. Stop assuming there is extra money for all of the "extras. But most importantly, stop forgetting that this is more than a job, it's a vocation.

I have a much more extensive rant on the horrors of the full day kindergarten program R was in for SK but I'm trying to move on. Stay tuned to see if it goes up.

What do you wish you could tell the teacher?

Taking a moment

For a brief moment today I started to feel pressed for time. It was a bit of a surprise to me, this feeling that has been absent since I finished my last course in school back in December. During the school term I felt pressed for time constantly. Mark was on full time parent duty two or three days a week while he worked more then full time hours. And I had to do all the full time mama stuff while balancing two very intense courses and growing a baby. It would be an understatement to say that I felt like I was barely getting by. I don't think I spoke to a single non-school friend; and I struggled to find time to get everything I wanted to do done. And ended up learning to just get what I had to done!

So this afternoon as the long weekend started to draw to an end I was caught off guard at my feelings of frustration. I was trying to look for work online; I was checking my calendar for class registration info; I still needed to finish editing a paper and finally start an intimidating reading list for a certificate I am hoping to pursue. But Baby C had other ideas. Her next set of teeth are coming through and she is in a lot of pain. I can tell because her little mouth is pulled so tightly and she's biting everything! L and R wanted to tell me about everything they were doing or thinking and Mark was getting some much needed gardening done. I wanted my time!

But as I stroked my baby's hair,applied ointment to L's latest scraped knee and listened to R rave about how nice daddy had been to let her go swimming again making it the best holiday Monday ever!!- I knew that it wasn't resentment for not being able to find time that I was feeling. It was in fact, resentment for needing to do all of those things that were crowding out my enjoyment of my girls.

And so I give you three magical mama moments that I was truly blessed to have experienced this weekend:

I want to cherish forever that moment when Baby C startled in her sleep, eyes flying open and then a soft smile lit up her face when she saw I was still there and she settled into sleep again. All the while I listened to my big girls laugh and chase each other outside playing the most non-sensical games.

I want to never ever forget the pure bliss I experienced waking up from a rare Sunday afternoon nap with two girls still asleep wrapped around me, my biggest girl reading at my feet-her long legs resting in mine, and Mark squeezed into the last few spare inches in the bed also reading.

I want to remember splashing in the pool with Mark holding Baby C;R and L squealing with laughter as we chased each other in the water with squeaky spray toys. And their cheers of encouragement as I swam without a flotation device to the ladder in the deep end.

The long weekend is over and I have all week to try to get to my to-do list. But more importantly I am truly blessed to have all week to spend with my girls because Mark goes to work for us. I am a lucky lady!

Summer Holiday Hooray!

"I love my family. Summer holiday hooray. " Thats what R wrote on our unofficial summer schedule on Tuesday. Since then she's popped up in the kitchen to consult the schedule, make suggestions for changes, discuss alternatives with her sister, and request permission to create a graph based on it so she can chart her activities. Yes, she truly is my child.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, we are hoping to have a very relaxed summer.

At the same time, I'm worried that my girls won't have a great summer. But honestly, that's only when I compare myself to other mamas-real or imagined. I worry that all the other kids out there going to fabulous day camps, travelling seaside, riding their bikes to raise money for a cause and visiting every tourist attraction in the GTA plus building a treehouse.

My girls get a mama who whipped up a science experiment at 7am, face painted them, and churned homemade balsamic strawberry ice cream!! And those exclamation points are theirs because those are the things we love to do together that don't always fit in the weekends. So could I do more? Sure. Would more be exhausting and so not us? Definitely.

And that's why the thing to keep in mind is that "great" is all about perspective. I don't spend the rest of the year comparing myself to other mamas -I might borrow or learn from them so I shouldn't now. And some of that learning is recognizing that I do a pretty good job and what I do fits us!

Mark asked me if it was going to be too much for me to entertain the girls all summer. My genuine answer was twofold. One, we aren't raising kids who need to be entertained all summer And two, I'm quite possibly more excited than R that she's home for two months. In her words, " I love my family. Summer holiday hooray!"

How do you plan on spending the summer?

The Rise and Fall of the School Routine. Is it summer yet?

R is an awesome kid.  She loves her sisters (and us!).  She loves to read.  She loves school.  But she is not a morning person (like both her parents), and has a hard time falling asleep at night (despite a screen-free, sugar –free, relaxed bedtime routine).  R has always needed a plan.  From as young as two, we would lie in bed and determine what our plan for the day was going to be.  So it’s somewhat surprising to me that she has become such a layabout in the mornings and completely scatterbrained after school.

Two weeks before school started in August, we started waking up, getting dressed, having breakfast and walking to/from school.  One week before school we started doing the same thing, but at a school-appropriate time.  It was a slow build to get into a good routine where no one was crying from hunger, frustration or fatigue at the end of the day but we did it.  Christmas break was a small blip.  Baby C’s birth another one, and March break a bigger blip.  But we always managed to rebound.  Until now.

Disaster struck once it started to stay full light well past 8pm.  We hung black curtains in their room.  We closed the door to prevent the light from the hallway coming in.   L still had boundless energy and was keeping her big sister awake so we tried separate  bedtimes, but that lead to tears.  So we started taking walks after dinner; that backfired as it lead to a second wind for both of them and a longer more drawn out getting for bed routine with mandatory showers as opposed to baths after school.  We are sticking strong to an 8pm bedtime but often R is awake until almost 9pm.  (Later if we allow some extra reading time for her because our sympathy as night owls kicks in.)  With the later and later falling asleep time, comes the harder to wake up R.  And when I do get her awake, she is grumpy. 

Lately, the routine has started to crumble:  Alarm goes off, I call into R’s room.  I gently pull sheet off her, I cajole and then firmly peel her out of bed.  She wanders around like she is suffering from a slight hangover and comes to me with a barrette but no comb, with hairspray but no pony-o.  This goes one for a while.   While I ensure the two other girls are ready to go downstairs, she is supposed to finish her upstairs routine.  But when I check in on her silently, she is usually sitting half dressed on her bedroom floor reading a book.  Am I the only parent on the planet that has to tell her kid to stop reading?  Probably.  I proceed with my morning and eventually R makes an appearance in the kitchen, sometimes with a prompt.  She then notices that she hasn’t packed her snacks and is very sweet, sincere, and apologetic about it and gets started on that, taking up to ten minutes to actually get a yogurt from the fridge into her lunch bag.  I just don’t have it in me to send her to school without a snack because she forgot or to let her go with messy hair.  But, at this point we’ve moved to “Fine, be late, lollygag if you must but you are still walking to school not driving.” 

I'm not going to stress out about it, or stress her out about it.  I grew up in a household where more often than not you went to school having cried.  I'm talking daily.  And while we all know that my mother thinks I'm the child from hell, I have very distinct memories of her yelling at my youngest sister every morning before school too. So it wasn't just me.  And while I've been know to raise my voice on more than one occasion, I generally keep things quiet and efficient in the morning with room or flexibility because I don't ever want to send my daughter to school all wound up from a stressful morning. 

Some of the ways we do this is that after many chats, Mark and I have a very distinct set of chores we need to get done by 6am.  Some of it may seem like catering to our girls i.e., setting the table for breakfast, but they are only just 3 and 6.  Also, if we don't get around to it, they will do it and will just as easily empty the dishwasher.  Having it done already, just makes things go smoother. I'm not making excuses for their age - they both have a lot of responsibility every morning and evening.  Things they need to do to get themselves ready and to help me out not the least of which is getting themselves ready, and getting their own cereal.  I also wake up much earlier than I would like in order to be dressed, and have caffeine in my system before the two older girls wake up.  But these are the things that need to happen to keep things as low stress for my girls as I can.  I really, really, really, don't want any of us to get upset in the morning and while I can't control every variable, and there are mornings when I lose my temper, or one of them loses theirs, or things just fall apart, the good mornings, the mornings where we listen to music, do "knee ups" while the eggs are cooking, R makes me breakfast, L runs around dancing, and baby C sits in her chair laughing far outweigh the hard ones.  

Three more weeks of school until we can take a break from the routine.  But come mid-August, I need a new plan on how to convince my child that she needs to get all her stuff done before she picks up a book to read or stops to play with her sisters from September all the way to the end of June.  I’ll ask for advice in the summer but for now, I want to know:  Do your kids fall off the school routine bandwagon?  Were they never on it?  Do they stick to for the duration?

I locked myself in my car yesterday and it wasn't for some "me" time.

When baby C was born I started picking R up from school 30 minutes before the end of the school day.  This allowed me to pull up to the front of the  school, grab her and go.  It meant  I didn’t have to wrestle baby C out of her car seat, into the carrier and then navigate L through crazed parental parking attempts.  After March break we returned to regular pick-up time as we started walking instead of driving with C cozily nursing or sleeping in the carrier and L bouncing all the way there and back.  

But it was cold yesterday so we drove and parked in a prime spot.  It was quite early and C was starting to fuss at a low but ever increasing rumble.  So, I climbed into the back seat to nurse her and tell stories to L.  I obviously turned the car off and closed the door. After settling baby C back into her car seat I opened the door to go get R (who’s classroom was directly in front of my parked car, so I could see the parked car at all times.)  

Oh, wait, scratch that – I attempted to open the door but it wouldn’t open.  I clicked on the button on my key fob and pulled on the handle again.  “Ok, breathe.”  I thought.  :Just lean forward and press the unlock button from the driver’s door.”  I yanked,  I swore under my breath.  By this time, L could sense something was wrong and inquired as to why I was still in the car.  Panic actually started to set in.  It got worse when I turned to look at the back of the car (it’s a cross-over, to help with imagery) to see if that provided a way out, and dropped my phone.  Now remember also, the windows are up fully and tinted so even if panic overtook me and I started yelling and banging on them, at full dismissal time, parents and kids are trying to get home and not looking for a crazy mama who locked herself in her own car.  I realized I was going to have to climb into the front seat.  Now, while I am short, I am not small.  I am also the opposite of graceful and agile.  So while the exit strategy may seem obvious to you, it required me to:

a)stop panicking

b)grab the booster seat I’d tossed in the front and put it in the very back

c)unlock C’s baby seat and slide it towards me

d)climb over the base of C’s seat and between the two front seats (narrow space!)without getting tangled in the gear shift, front mirror etc.

e)explain my crazy antics to L

ALL while keeping my outstretched, stretchy jeans from falling off my ass that I was in grave danger of landing on!

Go ahead, you can pee yourself laughing now.

Needless to say, the first thing I did once free from the car, was re-set the back door locks from "child-lock" to standard. (Just on R's side because she would never try to open it without explicit permission)

Have you ever found yourself trapped in an odd location? Has a child-safety feature ever trapped or foiled you to this extreme?