Watch Out Spielberg...

The boys have decided they want to make a movie. So last night, Steph started telling them what they would need to do to begin, like write a story, come up with storyboards etc. So Chas asked me to go buy them storyboards. We clarified and today, after playing in the snow, Eddie got some paper and drew out the storyboards for their first feature. The working title is "Sea Flux." It is heavily influenced by "Finding Nemo." I am now going to have to find a way to film this. Which is going to be a neat trick, since I had to get Eddie to confirm for me which side is up. Anyway, at the risk of having a studio steal their movie, here is the storyboard for the epic "Sea Flux!"

SNOW DAY!!!!!

So the downside to being president of the boys' preschool is getting a call at 7 a.m. about the snow. Followed by roughly 300 additional calls in and out to make sure everyone knew we were closed. The upside is that I was up, so when the boys stirred about an hour later I could whisper "Go look outside." I've never seen them strip off their pajamas so fast.

After grudgingly eating bowls of oatmeal, they put on their snow pants, hats and coats and headed out. We made a snowman, pictured here. They tried for snow angels, but it was kinda iffy. (Eddie initially wanted me to cover his eyes because he doesn't like to look at the sky when he's lying on his back -- because it's so far away it's kind of scary. I guess the opposite of a fear of heights?) They threw snowballs at each other and at the older neighbor boys who were genuinely impressed with their packing skills. Then they took their jeep out for a spin to watch it make tracks. When they got stuck with too much snow on the tires, the older girls converged on them (see below), clucking over them and generally battling to be the most helpful. Too bad the feminine attention is wasted on 4-year-olds.

The only tragedy of the day is that Eddie bogarted the whipped cream for the hot chocolate, leaving Chas bereft and highly suspicious of the mothering skills of anyone who would have a single, nearly empty can of whipped cream and a pantry devoid of any marshmallows. I gotta say, he's onto something.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day from a 4-year-old perspective

According to Eddie, we celebrate MLK Jr. because before him, dark-haired people had to sit at the back of the bus and there were different schools for dark-haired people and light-haired people and he said you should be able to go to school and ride the bus together because it doesn't matter what color your hair is.

As I tried to figure this out, I realized they had read a book about King in preschool. And skin color means absolutely nothing to my boys. But, with one of them a blondie and the other with "black" hair, (brown, but don't tell Chas) hair color differences they get. In fact, it defines them in some ways, as Chas more than once has called himself "the black boy" because he has black (again, not really) hair.

I wonder when skin color will be a part of the equation for them. Not for a long, long, long time, I hope. And I can only hope that segregation based on race will always seem as foreign and absurd to them as segregation by hair color.

The thing about Moms ...

According to Chas, the thing about Moms is that they have boobs and jay jays. Oy.

My son the potty-mouth

Today when I picked the boys up from preschool, their teacher pulled me aside to explain an "incident" during circle time. (It was all I could do not to say "Oh, shit," when she said she wanted to talk to me.) It seems one of their little friends was absent, and after sending her good thoughts, Chas raised his hand to elaborate. "I thought poop," he told the teacher, or something to that effect. Wisely recognizing that this was going to set off a veritable poop-storm of such utterances from the whole class (as "poop" is just about the funniest word in the English language when you are in preschool), she told him it was bathroom talk and inappropriate. He apparently got quite red-faced, teary-eyed and she said she was pretty sure he cried.

I tried to be sensitive and reassuring, prompting him to tell me all about school, hoping he would volunteer and thus give me an opening to talk about it. The closest he came to 'fessing up was to blurt out "I didn't cry" when I asked if anything upsetting happened during circle time. So I just told him I knew the story, which probably wasn't the coolest thing in the world, reminding him of what must have been a mortifying moment and worse, letting him know that someone told his mom about it. Anyway, I told him about how we all make mistakes and that he wasn't the only kid in his class who has done this. I also told him the truth: that I was as much to blame for it as he was because it's my job to teach him when words aren't appropriate and that I've just laughed along at the poop jokes for too long. We then agreed we would try to help each other clean up our vocabularies.

I figure this is just practice for dealing with the inevitable F-bombs that are in his future.

Is this a symptom...

of having to stretch a story about a nondescript building to 2,000 words as I recently had to??? That last post was a long one. Sheesh.

Happy Anniversary to Me!

As of now (well, yesterday actually) it has been five years since I left my home in the morning and trudged off to work. Five years ago the sainted Dr. Dashow put me on bedrest for the duration of my pregnancy and I never went back.

Do I miss "working outside the home?" Not really. I thought I would and, truth be told, once in a while I get nostalgic for the newsroom atmosphere. Outside of home, that's probably the environment I'm most comfortable in. I do still get to stretch my writing muscles with freelance work. And, honestly, one of my favorite things about working in a newsroom (aside from the bad jokes and worse wardrobes of almost everyone in the room) was always reading the wires. Imagine, just sitting at your desk and being able to click and read hundreds and hundreds of AP news stories at will! Why, it's almost like having an internet connection! Since that little thrill is now available at home, why leave?

Ahhh. Friends and colleagues. Yes, I miss seeing some of them more regularly. But many of them have moved on -- waaaay on -- and I wouldn't see them anyway. The ones I really care about, I'm still in touch with -- albeit irratically. And now that the boys are in preschool, I have a whole new set of friends who are mostly younger than I am but still in the same "stage" of life as me. They aren't newsies -- most don't even follow the news. But, I like them and we have a lot of fun on our "girls night out."

I hear people say that being a stay at home parent is the hardest job in the world. I disagree. Parenting the most important job in the world, but it's not harder just because you stay home to do it. It's easier -- at least for me. I can't imagine the chaos of trying to get boys, Steph and me out the door on time every morning. Heck, they're late for preschool more than half the time, an it doesn't start until after noon. Speaking of which ....)

So, I'm happy staying home. I think it makes me a better mother. I don't think it makes anyone else a better or worse mother to make a different choice or even the same one. I'm not a martyr for doing it. (Good God when I hear mothers talking about how much they are sacrificing on the altar of their children by staying home, I want to scream: "GET A JOB!" Because I think if you are unhappy, unfulfilled and full of resentment, you probably aren't doing your kids any favors.) To the contrary, I do it because it's much, much easier for me. I know I am going to pay for it in things like career growth, future savings etc. (Note to some "feminist" scholars who like to opine about women fooling themselves into thinking they can take time off from the workforce without paying a price: "Stay-at-Home" is not a synonym for "brain dead.") But it's a trade-off I'm happy to make.

In other words, even after the boys are in kindergarten next year (gasp, sob) don't be expecting to see my resume popping up in your inbox...

Cherish is the word ...

We were driving back from Chuck E. Cheese this evening with my nephew Gavin and his friend Gibson in the back seat. They are 9. Eddie and Chas are 4. Gibson quite seriously offered Eddie and Chas this nugget of wisdom: "Eddie, Chas, cherish this time in preschool. And next year, cherish the time you are in kindergarten. Because in first, second, third grade, you'll have homework. And that's baaaad."