Wall-e Review: Moses meets Wal-Mart

Going to the movie theater is a big deal in our house--we consider it a luxury or a special occassion. So the whole family was really pumped when we went to see Wall-e last night. My son was fascinated throughout. My husband and I were both intrigued by the social commentary that was going on. In the beginning of the movie you find out that planet earth was at one time taken over by one corporation, Buy-n-Large, that not only provided for every consumer need from electronics & groceries to gasoline & banks, but also was the reigning worldwide government. Obviously the similarities to Wal-Mart are undeniable, but it also sort of reminded me of the book of Revelation where one power rules the earth. Except in Wall-e all the humans escape earth via cruise spaceships that take them on what is supposed to be a five year vacation while the earth is cleaned up by droids, but it turns into a 700 year exile. Maybe it is a wierd combination of Revelation and Exodus, but heaven is place that humans go to become fatter and stupider and the promised land is a garbage dump.

After watching the movie, I read a few reviews on-line and was surprised to find that many critics thought the plot was lacking and that the only great thing about the film was the animation. I was also surprised that the creator said he had no agenda or message concerning taking care of the planet--please.

I don't normally review movies on my blog, but thought this one was worth mentioning and also worth watching with your kids. I like movies that are smart and unique. The fact that the girl got to rescue the boy in the end was pretty cool too :)

Simple Pleasures

Here is my beautiful, blonde-haired boy thoroughly enjoying himself by pushing his bubble mower through the grass while the sprinklers were going. He was soaking wet and smiling from ear to ear by the time he was done. I sat watching him and what I ended up wishing was that he will always find this much pleasure in doing things he loves throughout his life. I hope that his love of learning continues through elementary and high school and into college and that he finds joy in studying subjects that fascinate him. I want him to find sports or activities that he does purely for enjoyment. I also hope that he will still find pleasure in the simple things, like a summer evening or a sunset or the smile on his child's face.

Let Your Kids Take the Lead

Being a former teacher, I think I have the tendancy to want to plan things with my children as if I were planning a lesson for my students. I will have a great idea for an activity or project, but then when I present it to my son, he has no interest in doing it. In a classroom with 30 kids, at least some of the kids will be interested in an activity, so it is never a complete flop, but with one kid it is a little different.

I have had to work at letting him take the lead in areas where it is appropriate for hime to do so. I believe that giving kids as many choices where you can makes it easier for them to accept the times when they simply need to do what they are asked. One thing that has worked well for us lately, is for me to keep a bunch of items that aren't accepted in our city's recycling and would normally be throw away, like used yogurt cups, empty cereal boxes, egg cartons, etc. in a cardboard box at the bottom of our pantry. My son knows that he can use these materials to create whatever he wants. Mainly he makes boats and sees whether or not they will float. I helped him a little with this one by taping the sails to a skewer he found in a kitchen drawer. He cut the sails himself and poked the skewer through what I believe is an empty sour cream container.

My two nieces spend a lot of time with me during the summer since both their moms work full-time. The other day, the younger one was in the grocery store with me and asked if we could make fruit salad. It sounded like a geat idea to me and her and my son had lots of fun cutting the fruit themselves (they actually used cheese spreaders which are quite dull but can still cut soft fruit easily) and then adding it to plain yogurt.

I know these aren't revolutionary ideas for activities to do with kids, but they have been keeping my brood entertained. Please share any extraordinary or ordinary ideas you have, the teacher in me is always looking for ideas, of course just for those times when my kids don't come up with great ones of their own :)

You Say Tomato, I Say Tamoto

So there seems to be a buzz in the air lately about immigration, or at least in my ear. Yesterday I decided to listen to some am radio while I made dinner. When I turned on the radio the first thing I heard was Mike Savage from The Savage Nation ranting about how today's immigrants don't know how to use a toothbrush or know what toilet paper is for. Apprently Laura Bush's speech on World Refugee Day set him off. He went on to say that his grandfather was an immigrant, but his grandfather came here to work and started a business, instead of raising the next generation of gangbangers. Excuse me? Besides being offensive and racist, he is also ignorant to think that none of the immigrants of earlier generations ended up in a life of crime. Hasn't he ever heard of the Italian mafia?

Mondays are also the day that Time Magazine arrives in my mailbox and the cover story this week also happens to be about immigration, more specifically the very costly fence that is going up along the US/Mexican border. I had to laugh because the Time reporters were able to easily find people simply climbing over the fence, including a 10-year-old boy and a senior citizen. Seriously though, the fence has cut down on the number of illegal crossings in many areas, but only causes them to go up in areas where there is no fence. It makes me wonder though, why are we spending billions of dollars creating a fence that is not even impermeable, not to mention the cost of all the man-power needed to patrol it, when we could use that money to better the lives of our Mexican neighbors, thereby making it less appealing for them to try and cross the border in the first place. Another alternative would be to spend that money on our education and health care systems that illegal immigrants are supposedly overtaxing.

Then this morning I remembered a documentary I saw awhile back called A Day Without a Mexican. What I got from the film was that our country couldn't operate the way it does without Mexican Americans, legal or otherwise, and that many of them are filling jobs that others simply won't do. But to me, the issue of whether immigrants drive down wages or create challenges in our health care or education systems are really moot. This country was created by immigrants, it's who we are--a nation of immigrants and their decendants. So, who are we to say that our gates our now closed? I once heard that America is not so much a melting pot, but a tossed salad--so what's wrong with a few more tomatoes anyway?

Hodgepodge

Happy First Day of SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have been very spotty with my blog latley. I have been busy helping host the Little People On the Road Summer Swap, helping my husband with his business, and trying to make some friends in the community I actually live in (opposed to in the blogosphere). So, anyway, I thought I would give anyone who actually still visits my blog a few of the highlights of what I have been up to lately:

1) The other night I joined a group of moms at a local martini bar for our bi-monthly parenting book club. We discussed Practically Perfect In Every Way by Jennifer Niesslein, which was pretty disappointing to everyone, especially those of us who have read Brain, Child, which is edited by Niesslein. I think the general consensus was that Niesslein was just trying to be too cool for school, and while she was funny, she never let herself be vulnerable or dig too deep into anything. However, we did have a great time, and I was so impressed by all the amazing women I found myself sitting with--smart, funny and resilient women. I was sort of the baby of the group at 29 and was struck, and excited, by how much I still have to grow and how much I can learn from these women.

2) My daughter finally had her appointment at Shriners Hospital on Monday. She was seen by a pediatric orthopaedist and a general pediatrician. The orthopaedist said he was curious as to why she isn't walking yet, but not really worried. He said some babies just take longer to reach the finish line than others, but there is no reason to think she won't walk eventually and that once she crosses that line, there's no reason to believe she won't be fine. I wanted a quick fix like special shoes or braces to get her up and walking right now, already! The orthopaedist said that is an out-of-date practice because in the long run it won't solve anything--her feet would just turn outwards again as soon as they were off, and even her physical therapist said that they can actually weaken the muscles and cause more problems down the road. My friend Michelle was good at reminding me that my and my husband's intuition all along has been that our daughter is just a late bloomer, that she will be fine, and we should just never look at any developmental charts or pick up any parenting magazines.

3) Today was the official beginning of summer and I kicked it off by taking my two kids and my two nieces to the brand new aquatics center that was built a stone's throw from our house! It is sort of like a mini-waterpark with a big waterslide, a lazy river, and a water playground for younger kids complete with a waterslide that is their size. I plan on packing as many outdoor activities into the next 2.5 months as possible--park days, bike riding, swimming, camping, etc. I still think I am meant for living in a warmer climate, but I will make the best of what I have right now. As for this blog, I plan to keep things light over the summer and will probably post lots of ideas for crafts and activities to do with kids.

Extreme Parenting

Have you ever felt like parenting makes you a little crazy? Like maybe you obsessing too much over all the choices you have to make for your children? I feel much more sane after running across these two cases of Extreme Parenting, each from a totally different end of the parenting spectrum, I might add:

1. The Bumper Bonnet by One Step Ahead--a helmet for babies to wear while learning to crawl or walk. I'm all for baby gates and outlet covers, but seriously, are there really parents out there that are that overprotective? I don't feel too bad making fun of this, because I am planning on buying their embroidered swimming cover-ups for each of my children. I consider the sun a real threat, but on the other hand, I have been razzed for being a little too neurotic on that count.
2. Preschool Proms--I never knew such a thing existed until my friend Michelle from The Mama Chronicles was telling me about how there was one at her neighbor kid's preschool. I was shocked when I googled "preschool prom" at how many hits came up. I even found one site where it was mentioned that some of the preschoolers took a limo, and another that talked about the boyfriend troubles one little attendee had on the big night. I had heard of Baby Loves Disco before, but the the emphasis on those events seems to be children and their parents interacting and having fun together, not on forcing children to become mini-teens. My kids' preschool had an end-of-the-year ice cream social and all the kids performed songs like "5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed."

I realize I am coming off as a tad bit judgemental here, so I apologize if I offened anyone. If you have a different take on either of these items, feel free to let me know!

Love and Logic

Awhile back, my son's co-op preschool offered a seminar on Love and Logic. The speaker was Winfield Kline, the son of Foster Kline--one of the co-authors of the book, which I guess has morphed into a whole movement of sorts. I had read the book a few years ago and really liked the idea of having logical consequences and giving children the freedom to make choices and mistakes. The book talks about how the price of a mistake is much lower when your children are young, and how you don't want to wait until they are sixteen to give them their first experience with making decisions. The love part comes in by adding empathy to all your dealings with your children, even when enforcing a consequence. For example, you might say, "I'm really sad for you that you can't have your friend over because you didn't get your chores finished in time."

The seminar was a good refresher for me because it reminded me of the things I did like about the book and has gotten me thinking about how to use them more in my parenting. I feel like too often I slip into just yelling because that is the easiest thing to do. It makes me feel bad though and really doesn't set a very good example of how to act when you are frustrated. In the seminar, Winfield Kline said that when you show your frustration and anger, you are letting your children push your buttons and control the situation. So, I am trying to take a step back and instead of getting upset over things, giving my son a choice between doing what he is asked to do or receiving a consequence. The problems with this is that 1) I'm not giving him real choices--choosing between doing what you were told and being punished is not much of a choice at all, and 2) I'm having difficulty coming up with logical consequences. I usually end up threatening to take away his tv time, which works pretty well, but is not giving him a feel for what making poor decisions is like in the real world. So I decided to to check out the Love and Logic website for some tips. I found two articles there:

Love and Logic Generic Consequence

What To Do When an Appropriate Consequence is Hard to Find

Both of them basically said that you should use household chores in place of a more logical consequence. As much as I like the premise of this method of discipline, I don't think it will work for me all of the time or in every situation. But, I guess it is like that with most parenting books and techniques. There is no one magical solution that will work for everyone all of the time or else everyone would be using it. You have to take what works for you and create your own recipe for raising your kids.

I recently finished reading Practically Perfect In Every Way , and the author, Jennifer Neisslein, talks about how self-help books (she includes parenting books in that genre) don't really work for most people, but I think that is only true to a certain extent. They may not work if you try to follow the book, which amount to someone else's philosophy, to a T. However, I think that you can take bits and pieces of them and improve your life in a way that is meaningful to you. For me, approaching parenting like I would any other challenge in life, means educating myself as much as possible. I will continue to do that, not because I think I will find the parenting bible, but because I think the more I know, the better able I'll be to find my own style.

In related news:

1) I did find one really great article on the Love and Logic website (it is really more of a poster or reminder sheet): Self Concept Builder and Stealers.

2) Check out my book review of Practically Perfect on Meg and Mag's Bookshelf.