I don't look down on you, I pity you

 "I Look Down on Young Women with Husbands and Kids and I'm not Sorry". 

Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself? There’s no way those two things are the same. 
No, they are not on equal footing. It is much easier to go to work, shut the door on the chaos and the mess and the unpredictability that comes with running a household with multiple people, and embrace the orderly world on cubicles and punch cards. A woman at work has a boss to take care of her tasks and goals; a stay-at-home mom has to set those goals herself and then handle them on an unpredictable schedule. You might be shocked to find out that there are stay-at-home moms who run businesses out of their homes. There are moms who work on the side, and volunteer. There are moms who not only take care of themselves, they manage to take care of others.

We have baby showers and wedding parties as if it’s a huge accomplishment and cause for celebration to be able to get knocked up or find someone to walk down the aisle with. These aren’t accomplishments, they are actually super easy tasks, literally anyone can do them.
When there is a baby shower or a wedding, the celebration is of the potential, not of the actual accomplishment. It is easy to get married; it is hard staying married. (Cue the divorce statistics). It is easy to have a baby; it is hard to raise a decent human being.

I want to have a shower for a woman when she backpacks on her own through Asia, gets a promotion, or lands a dream job not when she stays inside the box and does the house and kids thing which is the path of least resistance.
Wait a second, I am missing something here. The reward for all the accomplishments you mention should be experiences along the way, the learning and wisdom it took to get there. The end result should be  a sense of personal satisfaction. Why do you need external recognition and additional party? Are you so desperate for approval of others? Or is it not an accomplishment if the world does not recognize it?

You will never have the time, energy, freedom or mobility to be exceptional if you have a husband and kids.
Well, not to brag, but I feel exceptional. I will play your game of external accomplishment here. I came to the States as a foreign student. I got a degree in college despite lack of financial resources. I got into a top graduate program. Heck, I got accepted into two graduate programs immediately, so that I cancelled my interviews at other schools. Oh, and I managed to get married, too. I got a paper published of my research. I did a liver donor search for my father. I landed a dream job working from home. I landed a teaching position without asking. I took courses in an area far from my expertise, for the sake of intellectual stimulation. I drove by myself up and down the country. I hike in great parks. I volunteer through my shul. Oh, and I managed to have four kids. I stay at home and homeschool them.
And if you really want to know what makes me exceptional, it's the learning of who I am that happened along the way. I thought I am Type A personality, but I discovered that I can function as Type B. I thought of myself as a brainy science-y type, but I discovered that looking at nature as an artist is extremely enjoyable. I thought I will suck at household chores (ask my mother), but instead I got the hang of them and even a certain rhythm. I thought I will end up a vegetarian, and here I am, stuffing birds' cavities upon occasion. I am flexible like that. I am not boxed in. You, on the other hand, are stuck being a career woman, out to prove something...

Women will be equal with men when we stop demanding that it be considered equally important to do housework and real work. They are not equal. Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business. 
It's ironic that as I am blogging this (me, a stay-at-home mom without real accomplishments), my doctor husband (with a real job) is doing housework: picking up toys, wiping the counters, gathering laundry. I guess your parents still do your laundry since it is just so not important. I went to college with your ilk, carting laundry bags home on the weekends. 

So, dear Amy, I pity you. You obviously do not have a husband or kids. You obviously never spent more than five minutes thinking that the world cannot go on if women decide that accomplishments deserving external praise are more important than having kids. We would be dead in a generation in your version of liberated feminism.

Would you like a challenge? Find a person to engage in meaningful relationship with. It could be a friend. Then, once, give up a bit of an ambition for the sake of the relationship. Maybe you will find some meaning in life.

when life gives you snow...

 When life gives you snow in the South, and you will probably not see snow for the next four years, and your husband still did not make it home, make maple snow candy!

We boiled maple syrup for close to an hour, The snow we collected yesterday, and it spent the night on the porch.

We poured syrup onto the snow, and it hardened.

The tacky candy was delicious! The boys' teeth stuck together and we talked about the pig from "Farmer Boy" who also could not open its mouth full of tacky candy.

another day

I've got an assistant.
I am still undertaking too much.
4 yo got her shots today and was very unhappy about it.
When I got home, I had three kids yelling at the same time, despite having another adult in the house.
7 yo managed to throw a fit even in my absence and refuse to do his work. And he locked himself in the laundry room.
It snowed a whole freaking inch and the traffic came to a standstill. My husband is stranded in the hospital. Of course, today he is not on call...
9 yo asked to have a crab stick with his sushi ( kosher fake DynaSea crab for those who are wondering). I found it later half-chewed on the windowsill.

I lost it.

4 yo refused to take a bath since she is worried about Band-Aids from her shots coming off.

The baby cut another tooth.

I hope my pipes will not freeze tonight, a pine tree will not fall on my house, and a workshop that we are supposed to attend tomorrow will get cancelled ( it is STILL on). I hope taekwondo will get cancelled too. I hope my husband makes it home safely.

And I hope that a Krispy Kreme donut goes well with mulled white wine, cause that's what I'm having!

mastery

On Tuesday, I had a whole grand plan for the day laid out. Both boys chose to start with math. 9 yo was in the throes of long division. He did a page, and then another, and then he asked me to give him any long division problem that I wanted, and then he made up his own problem and kept adding digits to the dividend until he could finish dividing without remainder.

He mastered long division and he could not wait to get more problems to prove his mastery.

Meanwhile 7 yo had a pre-multiplication unit. It mostly involved skip-counting, and he did page after page of math, probably 10 pages in all, till he was done with the unit. He understood the concept, and each page was another opportunity to apply it.

I thought math would be quick that day; instead it took over an hour. Both boys engaged in learning out of their own free will, and did not want to stop.

That same day a friend posted this post about unschooling math. I agree with some: kids will take lead in their learning, you will learn the math that you need to function, curiosity about math will go a long way. What I have a problem with is the blank assumption that math is hard, abstract and impenetrable subject, to which only people with a special aptitude take a liking. And the first thing that bugged me is the assertion that long division is useless.

People roll eyes at long division (and at fractions). They think nobody uses it. They also never memorized times table, so long division becomes tedious. Whenever I had any problem come up in kids' presence that required long division, I always grabbed a paper and did it out, the long way. They saw it, and even if they did not understand what I was doing, they saw that it is useful, and accessible. Oh, and I spent quite a few hours working with 9 yo on times table. We drilled it from Math Mammoth. I got flashcards and tested him. I hung up two multiplication tables. I asked questions which required multiplication. He does not know it super well (he HATES memorization), but he came around once he saw how useful it was to just know the product for 2- and 3-digit multiplication rather than work it out every time. Now that we hit long division, he saw that it is simply applying that multiplication and, voila, it works! Moreover, he can check himself by multiplying.

At dinner that night, out of the blue, 9 yo asked: "Is fifty divided by 6 equal to 8, remainder 2?"
"Yes."
"So to go on a five hundred mile trip, we need 8 hours and 20 minutes."

Before you think this is trivial, watch this:

of men and dolphins

The most recent story that seems to get posted time and again is a story about dolphins, stuck in a Japanese harbor, awaiting slaughter. Mothers will be separated from the babies, there is blood. How sad.

Are we for real?

Do you know how many people died in Hiroshima? 45,000 civilians wiped out in a blink. Do you know that there is a civil war going on in South Sudan, and human mothers are being separated and killed along with human babies? As the most true line from "Hotel Rwanda" goes: you are not white, you are not even black, you are Afrikaans, and that's why the world does not care.

It is Martin Luther King Jr.'s day. I'm sure there are speeches about how far we've come, and yet I wonder. In Pollyanna, there is an orphan boy looking for "folks". He is willing to work, he does not want to be a free-loader. Yet none of the Ladies' Aiders take him in, as that will cut into the bottom line of the report on saving heathen souls of India children. When are we going to stop caring about those noble causes far away, and not human causes, and when we will start caring about people right under our noses?

In the meanwhile, show indignation for the slaughter of dolphins.

letting him own his learning

Friday morning. 9 yo is reading on the couch about the Battle of Gettysburg. He is excitedly telling me who was where and what they did, and who won and how and what losses were on each side. I call him to have breakfast. Since it's Friday (and I still have to finish cooking for Shabbos), we are debating whether he should start on long division in math, a new topic. He is wary of it. I ask whether he knows divisibility rules, and he tells me the one for 5. I tell him the one for 3, and he is trying it out. He has seen me do long division, and since I'm feeding the baby, I am more telling him which numbers to put where rather than making him do it. He is very excited by this new rule, and he has to try it out on some numbers from his head. I am watching as he is doing long division on his own, and then he checks it through multiplication. Then, as I am writing down the rest of the list, he starts figuring out gemmatrias of the names of all people in our family. He discovers that 7 yo has the biggest one, and aba (daddy) is the smallest.

After all this, it is kind of silly to say "nu, get started on your learning already".

He is enjoying learning. He is on his own schedule, and he has his own agenda. As the years go by, I know that his agenda will totally overtake my agenda. If I am any good, his agenda will include subjects which are important to me (Torah learning, for instance), and subjects which he is passionate about (history categorization; Pokemon/video games; imaginary world maps). If I am very lucky, his subjects will help him figure out a path in life. And, with G-d's help, he will be happily pursuing that path.

It's so simple that  I am hyperventilating: what about higher math? English grammar and composition? Gemara? What if he ends up living on my couch in the basement? What if he will be ill-prepared for life?

But what if he got his experimentation and bumps on the road early on, instead of waiting till college? What if he has a head start to figure out who he is? What if he gets a chance to listen to himself and figure out what makes him tick instead of marching to someone else's beat? What if he learns that challenges are surmountable? What if he learns to think instead of waiting for someone else to tell him what to do? This sounds like acquisition of life skills.

I am oscillating between structured learning and unschooling. Towards highschool years, unschooling has to take an upper hand.

a great day

Today was such a good day, that it would be a disservice not to share it. There were almost tantrums, and almost meltdowns, and, as I am typing this, my kitchen is a mess and I have not made anything for shabbos, and my husband is dealing with ectopic (translation: reinforcements not arriving any time soon), but the day was lovely.

We did schoolwork in the morning. 9 yo did division with remainders, a story from S'fateinu about Tu BShvat, mishna with his rebbi and chumash. We are reviewing Vayetze, and we are almost done. 7 yo did math (review of addition with regrouping), chumash (Bright Beginnings), spelling ( copy the names of seven types of fruit from Israel both in English and in Hebrew) and S'fateinu.

Then we had friends over for Tu B'Shvat party. The kids made pine cone bird feeders, planted parsley seeds for karpas to use on Pesach, made a few brachot and ate all different fruits. Mostly, they just played, hung out, and had a good time.


After the party was over, 4 yo got out the vacuum cleaner and started cleaning up. She was really trying, and even dragged it from room to room, looking for more things to vacuum. I praised her efforts, even though I knew that I will have to sweep up later. I learned that this sense of doing something useful is more important than critiquing a final result. She will have the rest of her life to learn how to vacuum properly. Now she is learning that vacuuming is fun.











Then the baby went for a nap and I made chocolate chip cookies with 7 yo. He has been asking me for a long time to cook something with him, but every time something came up. Yesterday, when he asked to make a dessert together, I decided to commit firmly. I did not allow other kids join him unless he was interested. Onto the shabbos menu went the cookies. So when it was finally quiet, it was cookie-making time.

This boy really did everything by himself. He read the recipe, collected the necessary ingredients, found measuring cups and spoons and followed the steps. I did not help unless I was asked, and that happened rarely. I helped with the flour, but mostly I kept my mouth shut and just watched. He cracked the eggs. I did not say anything when one of them missed the mixing bowl. He cheerfully cleaned it up and got another. He figured out that three teaspoons make a tablespoon. He molded the first batch, called the beater for licking, and I just marveled at how much he knows about cooking. My 9 yo is still not sure where I keep everything in the kitchen, but this kid knows his way around.

When I saw him reading later on, I gently reminded about Read to Succeed, and how he might want to keep track. He dissolved on the spot: I do not want to go to Six Flags, I cannot read for 6 hours, I cannot write this all down... I calmly suggested keeping track of how long he is reading now, and just write down this little bit. It turned out that he read for 40 minutes (I let him do the calculations), and he had no issues writing this down.

For dinner I had a crockpot stew with quinoa and kale chips. These tend to be touch-and-go, but everyone found some part of dinner that they liked.

After everyone got into pajamas, I sent 7 yo and 4 yo downstairs to clean up the basement. I heard the vacuum cleaner go on, and when they came up, they said it looked good. I reviewed mishna with 9 yo.  Then I put the baby down for the night.

They boys asked to sew. 9 yo saw a design for kimono in one of his history-comes-alive books, so he has been after me to make one. I suggested that he starts with making a doll-sized one, but he was not having it. This time I said that we will start with sewing on a button. It's a skill worth having even if he kimono ambitions do not actualize. I found old shirts of mine and I was planning to cut them into scraps for each kid, when they called the sleeves. I cut the sleeves off and then the boys said that they will sew on the buttons as eyes. Everyone was able to thread their needle. I had to make the knots for them. I showed each one how to sew on a button, and how to make a stem under it. They both sewed on two, and then sewed the ends of the sleeve shut. 7 yo, while sewing said that this is what he wants to learn how to do: to sew and to cook. I have a budding "husband of the year." But the real secret is that my husband sews and cooks, so my boys do not see it as woman's work. 4 yo picked out her buttons, and I sewed them onto her sleeve. It was idyllic, almost out of scene: kids sitting around the table, busily sewing...

When they finished, they showed off their sleeve puppets. All of a sudden they turned into sleeve eels.

Next thing I know, they are night caps.