HippieMommy

posted by amanda on Jun 21

Colorado - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is something that has been driving me nuts for as long as we’ve lived here. What is with this state’s pronunciation? Everyone says it different! After a few long, heated debates with fellow Coloradans, I decided to look it up.

For all of you people out there who are as confused as I am, apparently the appropriate pronunciation is “Call-uh-rad-oh” That sounds so dorky. I’m a “Call-oh-rod-oh” girl myself, which apparently means I pronounce it like a Canadian

Apparently Nevada had the same problem and altered their license plates to set people straight. They say “Nevăda”.

posted by amanda on Jun 21

My dd has recently hit the “disequilibrium” that we’ve all heard so much about. She is almost two-and-a-half, and she has been teaching me so much in the past few months.

I was talking to a friend on the phone, and she mentioned that this should be easy because I’ve already been through this with ds. In reality, I’ve never been through this. Ds has a completely different kind of personality and never had anything anywhere close to “terrible” twos. As a matter of fact, at this age he didn’t even say “no” yet. He still just said “Sure!”

I saw a few weeks ago that Crystal recommended Your Two-Year-Old as a good book for this age (go figure), so I picked it up from the library. The library version is really old - it was published in 1980 just days after I was born So there are some outdated aspects, like a discussion on whether or not to put a car seat in the front or back I’m assuming that those references have been removed in the latest version of the book. Then again, maybe they just changed the cover - I don’t know.

Back to my point though: despite the age of the book, its been a very nice read. It has really reminded me that everything that my dd is dealing with is totally normal and has given me a few new tools It has also given me a wonderful peek inside of the two-year-old brain and how it is developing and working. Its really been lovely

As for my problem though… Yesterday and today have been plagued with instances where she requests something, then I acknowledge her request, and then she gets upset even though we’re agreeing. She’s not mad, she’s obviously having a problem communicating, but I have been trying to figure out the best way to validate her feelings and let her know that she is heard. Today’s example was (her) “I’m hungry.” (me) “We’re going to go get something to eat right now.” “No! I’m hungry!” “I know, we’re going to go get some food.” “But I’m hungry!” ??? I ended up distracting her and she was SO happy when we stopped and ate. She kept thanking me for the meal. She really was hungry and really wanted food, but she was still upset. As I was pondering a good response to that today, I read this quote

…he doesn’t want to stay, but he doesn’t want to go ( and this, of course, is often the case when he isn’t in a bad mood) — some simple suggestion such as “But where are your shoes?” can shift his attention, with good results. Also, don’t give him more than once or two chances to make up his mind. If it becomes clear, and it often will, that he is not going to be satisfied with either of two alternatives, just pick him up and remove him from the scene, or otherwise terminate the situation. He may cry and scream, but this is preferable to continuing on and on with a fruitless, frustrating, and rather ridiculous, “Do you want to go home now?” “No.” “Do you want to stay?” “No.” If nothing pleases, so be it!

Yesterday the same thing happened with her shoes. She had her shoes on and was crying because she wanted to wear her shoes. I thought maybe she wanted them off, but then she was crying even harder. I put them on and she just kept crying and saying “I want my shoes on!” Its tricky. I’m telling you…

Distraction does seem to help a whole lot. I’m glad that I was able to get a little pat on the back today though. The book really helped

posted by amanda on Jun 19

Thanks for all of your support and patience. So far so good

posted by amanda on Jun 14

For those of you who are looking for GCM answers, here ya go

GCM has been taken offline by the company that co-locates their shared server. GCM has gotten too big and was using other people’s resources. That’s what has been causing the errors. The co-locating company finally got fed up with it and shut off our permissions to the site until we can find a solution.

Basically the only solution is for GCM to get its own server, but that is going to cost money. Jeri has set up a fund for us to donate so that she can afford to move GCM to its own server. We saw that this day was coming, but were hoping that it had a little more time.

So if you want to donate, here’s the link. Jeri is looking at a cost of about $100 a month plus a one-time setup fee of $40. My husband and I talked about it, and we want to set up to give monthly. I’ve talked to a bunch of other GCMers and we’re thinking that if we can just get 50 people to do $2/month, then that’d cover it. That’s just the cost of a 2-liter of soda and when you work out the price per hour… well, its a good deal!

We’re also planning on doing a larger one-time donation just to get everything going

I’ll keep ya’ posted if there is any new news.

PS NO DATA HAS BEEN LOST FROM GCM. Don’t worry about that - its all there, we just need a new server that can handle all of us accessing it at once.

posted by amanda on Jun 11

Chore Buster - Organize your family’s chores

I’m still playing with it, but this is a prety cool site You sign up and then enter the members of your family, how much (if any) they should do, and then set up all of your chores. Each day (or week) it emails you your chore chart. It picks chores for everyone based on how much you say they can handle and the difficulty of the chore. Cool, eh?

posted by amanda on Jun 11

I think this is a good book to start after reading about the MySpace story, although I must admit that I’m a bit freaked out after reading it. I’ll explain as I go.

Mr. De Becker starts his book with a story of a mother and her 8-year-old daughter on a girls night out to dinner and a movie. Without giving away the story, the mom senses danger and doesn’t listen to her intuition. The man who originally made her uncomfortable later attempts to assault them. She fights back and protects herself. And so the book starts…

To tap into this resource, to reinvest in our intuition, to know how to avoid danger, to know, for example, whom to keep our children away from, we must listen to internal warnings while they are still whispers. The voice that knows all about how to protect children may not always be the loudest, but it is the wisest.

This hit me immediately. There is only 1 time that I really recall that feeling. It was at the Christmas Eve service this past year at our church, and the man who was watching my daughter’s class creeped me out. There’s no walls in there, and all of the other classes could hear everything, so I decided to let her stay. It was the first time that she stayed the whole way through. I went in and checked on her a few times without him seeing me, and she seemed fine, but I still had that uneasy feeling. I thought I was doing the right thing by checking on her, but now I wonder…

…when it comes to predicting violence and protecting children, I submit that you already know most of what you need to know. You have the wisdom of the species, and the expert voice that matters most is yours. Yet, society has trained us to believe that we don’t know the answers, that professionals know what’s best and that good parents listen to them. As a result, we have come to believe that we can find certainty outside ourselves. We won’t, of course, but we can find the illusion of certainty, particularly if that’s what we’re willing to settle for.

This is a bit of a theme around here, eh? I couldn’t agree any more!

He then talks about how adults know dangers before they have children, but after children are born, we end up with a list so long it needs an index. Things that used to seem safe like doors, yarn, and pencils are now dangerous indeed. Young parents recognize them and can scan a room for these dangers. Its a natural instinct.

As our kids get older, it can seem more difficult to know what is safe and what is not.

The search for certainty starts and ends within yourself–for example, every time you are open to receive information about your daughter’s new boyfriend, conclude he’s okay, and then don’t torture yourself while she’s out on a date.

Ooh, I know that’ll be tough for me. I’m a big second guesser. As I type this, I’m still wondering about that man who taught the Christmas Eve 2-year-old class, and I don’t even attend that church anymore.

So Gavin (which is easier to write than “Mr. De Becker”) goes on to say that if we meet with a parent and decide to allow our son to stay at their house, then we should trust our instincts that they won’t drive our kids home drunk, for example.

If you think the dad might drive drunk, there’s probably a reason you think it, and it’s worth exploring for a moment. If you think there might be a collection of unsecured guns at their home, your hesitation makes sense. You see, it’s one thing to never get a warning about some risk to our children; it’s quite another to get a signal and then ignore it… You may conclude on further consideration that your hesitation wasn’t called for–but you can give at least a brief consideration to every signal…

Its so hard to know which ones to listen to and which ones to let go! Especially if you’re like me and border on the anxious side

Then we get the first of our difficult-to-swallow-but-good-to-know statistics:

…throughout history, half of all children failed to reach adulthood. Half. The odds are far better for children in America today, but the truth remains that childhood is safe only when adults make it so.

If you are a woman with a young child, you’ll learn in these pages that it is you and not your child who is most often the predatory prize, you who are more likely to attract violence, and you must know what it looks like.

I know that feeling. I had it just yesterday. Please note, I am not at all saying in this story that how a woman dresses means that men will attack her!

Yesterday I had to run to the supermarket. We needed a few quick things. I spent the day cleaning and painting, and we live in a town where most people do not have air conditioning. We don’t have central A/C. I had on a hippie top that criss-crosses in the back (so its an open back) and a while tiered skirt that borders on see-through. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, but I didn’t feel sleazy either.

So I went to the store, felt fine, and as I was walking out there was a man who walked out behind me. I could feel him looking at me. I started walking faster and he did too. He made a bit of a whistle, so I sped up some more. He made another sound and I reached my car and he had turned another direction. That was the first time in a few months that I had felt that feeling - a feeling that I often felt in my teens - and I was a bit shaken by it.

I get the same feeling on this one section of trail if I go jogging, and as a result I’ve stopped jogging there. Its heavily wooded and below a highway, so no one would hear if something went wrong. I understand the need to listen to that inner voice, but sometimes I ignore it. And now I’m feeling guilty about that guy on Christmas Eve again

So then, just in time, Gavin talks about how worrying is bad. Worry keeps you focused on the wrong things and then you end up missing the real thing. OK, OK, I hear ya…

Then he talks about an example of a conversation with the kind of person who likes to deny things

“You’re so right,” the denier says, “sexual abuse is an enormous problem, particularly for young teens. Thank God mine aren’t there yet.”
No, sorry, says reality, the most common age at which sexual abuse begins is three.

WHAT?!

“Well, sure, if you have homosexuals around small children, there’s a risk.”
No, sorry, says reality, nearly 100 percent of sexual abuse is committed by heterosexual males.
“Yeah, but that kind of pervert isn’t living in our neighborhood.”
Sorry, says reality, but that kind of pervert is living in your neighborhood. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that on average, there is one child molester per square mile.
“Well, at least the police know who those people are.”
Not likely, says reality, since the average child molester victimizes between thirty and sixty children before he is ever arrested.

Now I want to throw up. Seriously. I want to throw up. 3?! 30 to 60 kids?! I’m glad I know this, but it makes me feel sick to my stomach. I’ve known that the stats were 1-in-3 women and 1-in-6 men who are molested or raped, and this is something I’ve thought about. I’ve thought about the odds. I’m a numbers kind of girl, y’know? I was a math major. If I have 4 kids, that makes it highly likely that someone would be assaulted. If not, then some family is getting a larger-than-average amount of abuse, which also saddens me. I don’t know. Numbers can be bad sometimes.

I like what he says next though

…the solution to violence in America is not more laws, more guns, more police, or more prisons. The solution to violence is acceptance of reality.
From there, you can hear the messengers of intuition. From there, you can evaluate risk and organize defenses. Reality is the highest ground you can find–and the safest–because from there you can see what’s coming.

…Taking deep breaths… OK.

He closes the chapter with great thoughts about our society and how we respond in fear. I really recommend reading it.

As I go to bed tonight, I might need to pray a little extra. I always prefer knowledge to denial, but sometimes it takes me a little while to process. Candice and I were talking about something similar the other day. I had listened to the Compassionate Cooks podcast on dairy farming and we talked about the horrors that those animals live through. She had no idea and didn’t really want to know. The fact is that it happens whether you know or not. If you know, then you can act. That is truly living.

posted by amanda on Jun 10

FOXNews.com - MySpace Teen Returns From Middle East

This story really caught my eye. My kids are only 2 and 4, but my dh and I have already had some pretty heated discussions about what we will or won’t allow our kids to do on the Internet. Its tough to plan too much, since we have no idea what the technology will be like by then, but its still good to think about.

So this 16-year-old “tricked” her parents into getting a passport and tried to fly to Israel to meet a man she met on myspace. His profile claims that he is 25 years old. The FBI traced her to a flight on its way to Jordan and convinced her to return home.

I have a lot of questions here, and I really want to learn from her parents mistakes.

When I was a teenager, I had several adult men who met me online. I was foolish and gave out too much information (my work, my high school, my name) and some of them found me. One started stalking me at work and around town. He’d email me about what I was wearing, and I had no idea what he looked like. I ended up meeting him because we had a common friend, and he was almost 30 when I was 17. It was stupid.

I had another online friend in college, and another one who was a youth pastor (near 30). I met the youth pastor at a concert by chance, and I sent pictures to the college student. I don’t know what (if anything) my parents should’ve done. The internet was very new, but they did most things right - the computer was in the family room, they checked my email they asked who I was talking to. I wonder what I can do to protect my children so something similar doesn’t happen to them.

I know my parents never would’ve gone for getting me a passport at 16 I was a high-school graduate and in college by that point, but they still wouldn’t have done that. I did get my passport at 17, just before my junior year of college, to go to Ireland on a mission trip, but I think that’s different since I had already been living on my own.

Even though it made me mad when I was a teen, I think I’ll probably snoop on my kids like my parents snooped on me I’m about to read (and hopefully discuss on here) Protecting the Gift by Gavin De Becker, so I hope it’ll help me flesh out my ideas

posted by amanda on Jun 8

In case you just crawled out from under your rock
ABC News: Senate Rejects Amendment on Gay Marriage

My recent reading of Dumbing Us Down has really shaped my thoughts on this ban. The whole book has changed the way that I look at legislation, but the last chapter was what really made me start thinking.

As I shared yesterday, Gatto asserts that when you order change in behavior then what actually happens it that people appear to change and yet they harbor a huge amount of resentment and end up exacting vengence in a way far worse than if you had allowed the community to change outside of legislation. He backs this up with data about racism, patriarchy, drug use, and alcoholism.

I was thinking back on his theory today as my dh and I talked about the gay marriage ban, and I couldn’t help but agree with Mr. Gatto. Any way that I played out the scenario, it still wouldn’t really accomplish its set “goal”.

So here are my thoughts. I am assuming one big thing here: that it is almost exclusively (or at least a majority of) Christians who are in favor of this ban. My responses are what I would say to any fellow Christian.

1. If the ban were to pass and gay marriage was banned.
Would anything really change? Gay families would still be living together. The sin would still be happening. Even if the ban were somehow able to stop homosexual behavior (which is pretty ridiculous to even assume) then it is still a “bass-ackwards” way to solve the problem of sin. How many times do Christians tell people that they don’t need to be perfect to come to Christ? How many times are we told in the Bible that we can’t expect people of the world to live sinless lives? We all need God’s grace, and we are given it “while we were still sinners.” The change in life comes after salvation, not before.

What about Christians who are homosexual and would wish to get married?
I don’t think this would change anything either. As the band Hangnail says in their song “No Name Yet” (a song about abortion, btw)

Those man-made laws don’t mean a thing

It doesn’t matter what man says - what matters is what God says. If Christians are already choosing to sin in this area, do you think a man made law will change it?

2. If the ban doesn’t pass
Is marriage really threatened because there isn’t a ban on gay marriage? If you want to protect marriage, maybe we should have a ban on living together. Maybe a ban on sex outside of marriage would help. Some Christians would probably like a ban on hand holding. That leads to sex… don’t you know?

So really I think this ban is irrelevant no matter what eventually happens. We can’t change people’s hearts by force, and if we want to ban sins, then we’ve got a long list to get going on…

posted by amanda on Jun 6

Well, we’ve made it to the final chapter in Dumbing Us Down, and I have really enjoyed this book I really encourage everyone to read it!

So let’s dive in, shall we? It seems like this chapter has come up in most of my conversations this week. It really is excellent.

Gatto starts the chapter by exploring a bit of a case study into the Colonial New England town of Dedham. He talks about the church there and how rigid they were when they first started. In town, only Congregationalists were welcome, and anyone else risked being “shunned, persecuted, or even burned at the stake”. He tells stories of Unitarians being treated like invaders when they came through the city. Needless to say, Dedham was not a place that welcomed new thoughts and ideas.

Even though this seems like a sea of conformity, Gatto shows how, ironically, their way of life actually demanded individuality. Their church services were free of liturgy, and emphasized local preaching on local issues. This means that there was a constant struggle as each person acted as their own priest and expert. This leads to a “progress toward truth.” This is also called “the dialectic.”

Central planners of any period despise the dialectic because it gets in the way of efficiently broadcasting “one right way” to do things. Half a century ago Bertrand Russell remarked that the United States was the only major country on earth that deliberately avoided teaching its children to think dialectically. He was talking about twentieth-century America, of course, the land of compulsory government schooling, not the New England of Congregational distinction… Roger Williams saw as clearly as any person of his time and recognized the inevitable connection between dissonance and quality of life. You can’t have one without the other.

Gatto is not referring to discipline here, but this topic came up in our “Young Parents” Bible study that we lead. We are going through Families Where Grace is in Place, and we came upon the part where VanVonderen addresses how part of what 2-year-olds have to learn is to disagree. Some parents feel that their children should never say “no”, never disagree, and only blindly accept, but that doesn’t teach children to grow up and make responsible decisions for themselves. That only raises robots who are paralyzed when they come to a decision point. You have to let your children practice in a safe environment where its ok to make mistakes. That will enable them to succeed once they are out in the real world.

But, back to Gatto’s point…. Each city in Colonial New England was able to set their own rules and there was no “one right way” of doing things. Some cities worked like a commune and shared their work, while others favored private ownership and individual choice. This allowed cities to work as they wished, and allowed for creativity and individual choice as opposed to forced compliance.

Something else that was special about those Colonial towns:

I think it hides a secret of great power, which social engineers who built and maintain our government monopoly schools are forced to overlook: Each town was able to exclude people it didn’t like! People were able to choose whom they wanted to work with, to sort themselves into a living curriculum that worked for them. The words of the first Dedham charter catch this feeling perfectly; the original settlers wanted to (and did) shut out “people whose dispositions do not suit us, whose very society will be hurtful to us.”

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of the politically correct culture, eh?

…these early towns functioned like selective clubs… narrowing human differences down to a range that could be managed by them humanely. If you consider the tremendous stresses the dialectical process sets up anyway — where all people are their own priests, their own final masters — it’s hard to see how a congregational society can do otherwise. If you have to accept everyone, no matter how hostile they may be to your own personality, philosophy, or mission, then an oganization would quickly become paralyzed by fatal disagreement.

The point is that there is not one perfect choice for everyone. Every town didn’t fit every person’s needs, so they needed to find a new town. The Greeks had a story about a man who tried to make everyone uniform

…his name was Procustes. He cut or stretched travellers to fit his guest bed. The system worked perfectly, but it played havoc with the traveller.

So the Greeks understood what we cannot.

These New Englanders invented a system where people who wanted to live and work together could do so… It was almost as if by taking care of your own business you succeeded in some magical fashion in taking care of public business too…

This catches a piece of what’s wrong with compulsory schools as large as New England towns, schools that don’t allow any choice of curricula, philosophy, or companions.

Its not that those were perfect times though. The citizens of Dedham whipped Quaker women out of town and did the same to Presbyterians. They were not exactly model citizens… And yet, Massachusetts has gone from being some of the most intolerant people in our nation’s history to being the most liberal state in the Union. So how did they manage to teach themselves to reform without government intervention? What made them change?

Something mysterious inside the structure of Congregationalism worked to have them abandon some of the exclusivity that adherence to Biblical elite dogma had taught them.
I am certain that “something” was nearly unconditional local choice. And it was self-correcting! Because the town churches did not team up to present an institutional orthodoxy that made each town just like another — as government monopoly schools do today — error in one church could be countered by its correction in another. As long as people had the choice to vote with their feet, the free market pushed severe errors by leaving a congregation empty, just as it could reward a good place by filling it up.

My friend was telling me the other day about a blog post that she read that addressed a similar issue. It was talking about choice on both ends. It describes a ridiculous scenario where you would be forced to grocery shop in a certain store based on your home location. The grocery store would not compete because it already had your business. They would stop stocking the shelves and soon you’d have to lie and cheat to find a grocery store that was satisfactory. This is the same idea that Gatto is presenting in this chapter.

But maybe you feel it takes too long for people to naturally correct, so we need to force it. Does forcing it really work?

…things legislated out of existence, like alcohol and drug abuse or racism, don’t seem to go away as religious exclusivity went away naturally in New England under a regime of local choice; instead, law appears to give bad habits an injection of virulent new life…

He then talks about the changes that have come around since the “women’s revolution”

…if sharply accelerated rates of suicide, heart disease, emotional illness, sterility, and other pathological conditions are an indicator, the admission of women en masse to the unisex workplace is not an unmixed blessing. Further, some disturbing evidence exists that the income of working couples in 1990 has only slightly more purchasing power than the income of the average working man did in 1910. In effect, two laborers are now being purchased for the price of one — an outcome Adam Smith or David Ricardo might have predicted. And an unseen social cost of all of this has been the destruction of family life, the loss of home as sanctuary or haven, and the bewilderment of children who, since infancy, have been raised by strangers.

Whoa. I’ll have to research that one and get back to you

Still, the point exists that Dedham changed without legislation.

But if they had been ordered to change, ordered, as other immmigrants were, to change their behavior and to abandon their culture to compulsory schools set up for that purpose, I think what would have happened is this: some of them would have seemed to change but would have harbored such powerful resentments at being deprived of choice that some way to exact vegence would have evolved.

OK, now I see where he was going with his examples of women (he also talks about “Black Americans” (as he says it) and drug policies…) He’s saying that if you force people to change, then they end up resentful and passive aggressively choosing the old way. Interesting.

Back to the free market in education though

By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling — teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, and others — has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.

We have no choice of schools. Gatto believes that our students are simply waiting to be fed. We need people to tell us every step of the way what should be done. We, on a whole, have problems doing tasks with creativity and instead wait for instructions.

I think we’ve all seen on tv when students are asked simple questions and they can’t answer them, but apparently this is not a new issue.

… in 1951, a survey made of 30,000 Los Angeles school children discovered that seventy-five percent of eighth graders couldn’t find the Atlantic Ocean on a map and most of them couldn’t calculate fifty percent of thirty-six. From my personal experiences, I stand witness that the situation is certainly not better today.

Yowsa. My 4 year old can find it on a globe

So Gatto wraps up the book and the chapter by suggesting several things:

1. Turn your back on national solutions and toward communities of families… Turn inward until we master “knowing thyself.”
2. Encourage and underwrite experimentation; trust children and families to know what is best for themselves; stop the segregation of children and the aged in walled compounds; involve everyone in every community in the education of the young: businesses, institutions, old people, whole families
3. Don’t be panicked by scare tactics into surrendering your children to experts. There is abundant evidence that less than a hundred hours is sufficient for a person to become totally literate and a self-teacher.
4. Give tax money back to families and let them choose their schools. Allow a free-market model to exist. Far better ideas will come out of a free market than could ever come from an institution

So, in the end, I really enjoyed this book. Thanks for kinda sorta reading along with me It helped to work through my feelings this way!

posted by amanda on Jun 6

Wolf, Feminists and Breastfeeding

I don’t have time to do a commentary right now, but I really enjoyed this article. I shared it with Candice, and she was horrified at how the formula companies have been able to alter breastfeeding campaigns.

With all of the benefits for women and children, why hasn’t the feminist movement jumped on the breastfeeding bandwagon? Why let big business bully women around?

Its long, but a good read, and very AP-friendly!