Tag Archive family

ByGD

Perfect Princess Party

Books by Shannon Hale are autobuys in my family. My youngest child was exactly the right age for The Princess in Black when that series began, so we picked it as the theme for their birthday party. It was in December, so we couldn’t hold it outside. Instead, we used my husband’s martial arts dojo, which had a conveniently padded floor.

Guests were encouraged to dress for the event and we got a nearly even mix of fabulous gowns, Disney costumes, and ninja suits. We served tea and cake, and let the kids run around. When the only boy at the party ended up at the bottom of pig pile, risking the integrity of his plastic armor and I think getting a little frightened, we moved on to more organized activities.

My husband pulled out the punching bag and let kids hit it with sticks. Then he taught them three evasive maneuvers and lined them up to take turns dodging swings from a padded stick.

It was a perfect princess (martial arts) tea party.

ByGD

Boonie Bears

When my oldest daughter was ten, she and I visited her birth city, Qingdao. Every day, we woke up early and gorged ourselves on the breakfast buffet in the hotel before venturing out to explore the city.

Most days, we ran out of steam midafternoon and headed back to the hotel for a rest before venturing back out to find dinner. Once my daughter discovered Boonie Bears, a two-hour block of every day belonged to local TV.

Neither of us spoke Chinese, and there were no subtitles, but the story was easy to understand. An inept Elmer Fudd-type character was trying to log a forest, but the clever bears who lived there kept outsmarting him.

For all the Looney Tunes silliness and cartoonish violence, there were some intriguing subtleties that I don’t think an American cartoon would have offered. The “evil logger” often gets chewed out on the phone by a boss or his father. He also cries when his mother calls him. In one episode, the forest animals help him get home to the city – not, I think, because they want him out of the woods, but because he needs to see his mother.

Once we got home, internet research told me the name of the cartoon, and I found out they made a movie of it in 2014. But so far, none of the streaming services seem to offer the tv show or the movie. I’d love to see it again with subtitles. To this day, my daughter still talks about the forest cartoon she used to watch in China.

ByGD

Just a Moment

 

Photo from Gratisography.com

Photo from Gratisography.com

I am not a morning person. I do my best work at night, after the kids have gone to bed. I have to get up early to get my kids to school, but I do it in a fog, and my kids know not to expect more from me than transportation. This morning, I dropped my seventh grader off at school, and as she walked away, noticed for the first time what she was wearing. Athletic shorts and cowboy boots, an outfit almost guaranteed to generate teasing, even at her liberal, be yourself, everyone’s a snowflake school. Read More

ByGD

Perfectly Safe

In the white, liberal, upper middle-class circles I usually inhabit, safety trumps all other values. Helicopter parenting has become the standard for responsible parenting, despite data to the contrary. Schools and parents are increasingly making decisions based on the fear of lawsuits or the fear of disapproval from more safety-conscious parents instead of their own best judgement. So this quote from Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book struck me as particularly meaningful.

“I wanted to keep you perfectly safe,” said Silas. “But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter anymore.”

We should not seek perfect safety for our children, or for anyone we care about.

ByGD

Former Life With Oscar

FormerOscar

So much of family life is caught in this picture. A preschooler reaching for a cat; a cat standing on a laptop; cold medicine cluttering the counter. So much has changed in the years since my life was encapsulated this shot.