One day I made turkey for dinner. With potatoes and squash, cranberry sauce and salad.

The 4yo wants to know what we’re having for dinner.

“But I don’t like turkey! And I don’t like squash!”

I’m not in the mood to deal with the varying responses that are required as part of my parently duties during a situation like this, so I open the fridge, notice some leftover pasta, and heat it up for him.

We sit down at the table. On the table is a large platter full of turkey, potatoes, squash and cranberry sauce.

Everyone helps themselves.

The 4yo sits down, looks at the plate of pasta in front of him, looks at the toddler’s pasta-less plate in front of her, and then looks at the platter of food.

Tears well up in his eyes.

“But, but, I want to try some of THAT too”, he wails.

I hand him a serving spoon.

He has two plates full of everything except the squash.

Sigh.

Many books today talk about real food (Animal Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver). There is much doom and gloom in some of those books. And despite their harsh realities, I still recommend you read them (anything by Michael Pollan, especially In Defense of Food, and An Omnivore’s Dilemma, also Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation).

But there is a book that is not about the doom and gloom of the food industry. At least, it’s not the prevalent theme…not in my opinion. This book, Trauma Farm by Brian Brett, has snippets of the doom-and-gloom reality, but the basis of the book is about the small farmer. The joys, the beauty, the work, the animals, the weeds, always the weeds. But it’s also about cooking, and eating, and friends, and family, it’s about communities, and tractors, kids and health. It’s about life on a farm, debt and money (or lack of), and it’s about many humorous observations about the farm animals and their behaviour.

It is a wonderful read. It will make you happy, it will make you sad, it will make you shake your head in dismay, and it will make you burst out in laughter. The way the author describes the relationship between one of the geese and his horse….or the rambunctiousness of the puppy, the issues he has with the ram, there are many, many anecdotes about these animals, their life, their function and their death.

If you like food, if you care about where your food comes from, then I recommend you read this book.

… everyone is watching you. Especially insurance companies…

There are many versions of Santa Claus that exist in today’s western societies.

In North America, this one is the one that most people identify with:

He is fat and jolly, flies a reindeer-pulled sleigh full of beautifully wrapped present, jumps down chimneys, and eats cookies and drinks Coca Cola.

In Switzerland, he’s called “Samichlaus” and he does not arrive on Christmas Day (December 25). He arrives on December 6, has a helper, and a donkey to haul the loot.

The loot, as it were, consists of a potato sack filled with mostly nuts, oranges, apples, clementines, and maybe a few chocolates wrapped in glittery foil.

We, as a multi-cultural family (Swiss and Italian on my side, Latvian and Russian on his side, Canadian for the second and third generations (which is predominantly North American), do not really buy into the whole commercialization of the Christmas season (pun intended).

Well, we do, sort of.

But not excessively.

It’s all been very confusing.

There’s that thing about religion. We do not observe a specific religion, but face it, the real meaning of Christmas has nothing to do with the shopping-days countdown.

We adhere very loosely to the Christian, mostly Protestant mentality, in terms of the more superficial Christmas, um, items. You know, the Christmas tree, the decorations, the presents, the family feast.

Some of the confusion I find myself trying to weed through intelligently has to do with the expectation of young children to write wish-lists, including the letter they write to Santa Claus (and then expect a response from him).

Wish lists and letters to Santa…that’s just marketing. Since mid-November we have received a Toys R Us flyer with every local paper delivery, twice a week, rather than just one every few months or so.

That’s a lot of advertising on behalf of Santa Claus.

On the topic of Santa Claus, the confusion is only just beginning. For instance, there is a heavily advertised Santa Claus parade that happened last weekend, six weeks prior to Christmas Day. Santa Claus arrived in this big metropolitan city on November 13.

The 4yo wanted to know why we didn’t go to the Santa Claus parade. I said “we’re going to the local one in two weeks”. He said “but they said at Kindergarten that it was last week”.

I can’t remember how I responded, but there you have it. Santa Claus already arrived, as per his friends at school who attended that parade, and here is mommy telling him another parade, with another Santa Claus, is going to happen again at a later date.

But then something happened that made me realize the confusion is just about to get much more complicated. A well-meaning relative asked Benjamin what he wants Santa to bring him on Christmas.

And we’re back to the wish list. Even at the tender age of 4, the child has been marketed to at every opportunity.

Let it be known that I do not disapprove of the gift giving at Christmas. Of course the children want presents. Of course we’re going to have a tree and lights and decorations and a feast (and drama and crisis and hyperactivity, but I’m getting ahead of myself here).

Upon a quick chat with the husband, we came to the conclusion that we will allow the relatives to spoil the children to their hearts’ content. Most ask me personally for ideas ahead of time which gives me an opportunity to keep the incoming stuff under control to a degree, avoid duplication, and have some say in the matter of what we find inappropriate (no Barbie for the toddler, for example).

But I did make one stipulation:

Please label the present with your name so that the child can acknowledge and personally thank you for it.

I’m not sure how we’re going to handle this whole Santa Claus issue yet, but at least this way, I can teach them about gratitude, appreciation, and maybe even enforce some manners.

Today, the garage door fell on my head.

Correction: (I exaggerate, as usual).

The “garage door” is actually a shed-like garage that, at one time, during the 1950s, housed a tiny car. The “door” is one that you push open up above your head and it’s ancient. Today, the shed-garage houses our unpacked boxes of stuff and crap and kids’ outdoor toys and gardening equipment and bikes and probably mice and raccoons and spiders.

When I say “it fell on my head” I actually don’t mean that the door touched my head, or any other body part. I managed to step aside before the one side derailed. I left if hanging precariously and called for DH to take care of it. (He was not impressed).

(He also did not appreciate the rope that was attached to the door that the 4yo tied there in order to help him close the door.)

(I thought it was ingenious, DH thought it was stupid and the reason why the door was crooked and derailed in the first place.)

(Oh, and also it was my fault for not supervising the child and noticing that his ingenuity is actually dangerous and could potentially kill someone, like it almost did me today.)

(I’m done using brackets now.)

But it sounds more dramatic to say “the door fell on my head”, and hopefully induces some kind of sympathy from some people, about how “haaaaard” my life is today.

* * *

In this part of Canada, the month of November is typically described as gloomy, dark, cold and miserable.

Not one of those terms is accurate this November. We are enjoying cool, sunny and mostly dry weather, allowing me to sit on the front step while watching the children play together on the driveway. And sip wine with the kind neighbour whose kids are here too.

There is no reason to complain about the weather right now.

And this is hard for Canadians, I’ll have you know!

I have great kids. That is, when I don’t feel like decapitating them. And I don’t right now, because they are great kids.

So instead of typing out the reasons why they are fantastic, wonderful children,  I will abandon the internet to enjoy the peaceful quietness of a small boy and a tiny girl playing together oh so nicely and finish cleaning up the crap around me that never seems to remain in the place I put it.

And sip a nice glass of wine while doing so.

GREAT! KIDS!!

Not a real, water-type well, but the blog-post word-well in my brain. The one that is supposed to have correctly spelled words and grammatically correct sentences floating in it.

Lately my word-well is not exactly dry, it’s more like, um….blah. Void of completed ideas. There are lots of unfinished ideas saved in the draft folder but during a moment of the dry-well phase, they all suck.

It’s not like I don’t feel the urge to type out something coherent and interesting, but then I stumble over the coherent part. And it really depresses me when I discover that if I don’t find my incoherent sentences interesting, why would anyone else find them interesting?

Occasionally I visit other blogs who may have encountered this phenomenon. Some of them solve this problem by simply importing, or copying, a  twitter or email conversation they’ve had with some friend. It may be something that appears hilarious to them (and may be only mildly funny to their blog readers), or it could be something that has them in some passionate fury. This always stumps me.Why would they do that? Or maybe I should be thinking this way: why would I not be doing that?

My one friend in Europe and I send upteen emails back and forth on a daily basis. We are talking, brainstorming, planning, supporting, and don’t forget bitching and complaining to our hearts’ content. Especially the bitching and complaining part can get kind of interesting…and when you throw in some nice PMS or some diet-induced misery, those emails could have some real meat on them as far as publishing them on the internet is concerned.

She once asked me why we don’t place those kinds of conversations into a blog. She figures, being the social media expert that she is, that there would be all kinds of traffic on a blog like that where people come to feel less alone. Less isolated. And feel validated that their misery is in fact real. And allowed. “Go ahead and wallow”…we would say. “We HEAR you.”

I save the emails between my friend and I. I believe she does the same. Going back months or years and re-reading some of our more, shall we say, passionate emails between us, it occurs to me that it really is kind of amusing to read about it after the fact. You can usually recall the events of the time that caused us the grief while reading over the phrases.  And the lashing out at, oh, the husbands, the kids, the family, the government, everyone and their grandmother’s dog brings back all kinds of emotion. That lashing out always feels therapeutic. Especially since I know that she is not taking it personally, unlike if I were to lash out verbally at the next-door neighbour, the offspring, or a parent or whomever.

I recall vividly, before both she and I even knew what a blog was, an email she typed out to me in anger. She was mad at her spouse. They were on their first of five babies and there was some situation with him doing something wrong with the stroller. I don’t recall the story exactly, but what is ingrained in my brain is how she physically typed out that she was pounding the keys really hard in her anger while typing her grief to me.

Who needs expensive therapists when there is email? And more importantly, a sympathetic and supportive reader receiving, and responding to, the email at the other end?

But I don’t know if I could put those conversations on a blog. I have to think about it some more.

What I can do however is talk about it in a post when my well runs dry.

My 4yo is interested in reading. He had some exposure to phonetics at his Montessori* daycare, and I picked up on that method at home with him.

He left that daycare when he joined the public school system in September and entered Junior Kindergarten. And he likes it there…but he is not interested in sitting at a table with some of the other kids and learn to read and write. He’d rather play with blocks.

Which is fine by me. And by his teacher too.

But I observe my child all the time. He loves books, he visits the library weekly, and he often points to a word at the side of a truck, or on a street sign and asks me what it says. So naturally, I try to teach him to read it himself.

It’s not hard. If he knows what sound the letter makes, and strings the sounds together, he can read the word.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work with the English language since there are so many exceptions. But it’s not impossible, and since he’s already familiar with this method, we just keep it up.

One of the things they do in Kindergarten each day is look at a calendar and talk about the day of the week, the month, and other related information. I figured, why not do this at home too?

Like most households, we have a box full of magnetic letters. These are great tools for letter naming, phonetics, and reading and writing exercises. Since Benjamin knows the phonetic sounds of most letters, I use that as my starting point.

Let’s say we’re talking about Tuesday. Since each day of the week ends with the word “day”, I scramble up the remaining letters on the board and ask him to write it out for me. If he simply guesses which letter he should use first, I ask him to tell me what sound the letter makes. This is when I see it click in his brain. Oops, that’s not the ‘t’ for Tuesday, that’s the ‘u’ for umbrella, he’s thinking.

Since he is still mostly comfortable with the phonetics though, I make a point of telling him the name of the letter as well.

Yes, that’s the ‘t’ for Tuesday, or Tyler, or Tiger. This is called the letter Tee.

He likes doing this with me.

One thing I have noticed however is that if he does put the letters in the correct sequence, he sometimes puts them backwards, or upside down. Not sure if that is just a common mistake amongst pre-readers, or if it’s because he’s left-handed, but I’m not going to worry about it right now.

The fact that he’s interested in reading at this age is enough for the moment.

*For further information on phonetics and the Montessori methods, there are some great resources available here and here, and in this blog.

Our 4yo Benjamin is constantly playing with fire. PRETEND fire, that is. That’s because he’s a fire fighter. Or, err…a fire CHIEF.

So a few weeks ago we went to the Fire Department Open House, located at their training facility, and watched the fire fighters demonstrate all things fire safety related.

Needless to say, he was very impressed.

Even our little toddler stopped squirming when they demonstrated a live fire extinguishing exercise! Click here for the 35 second movie.

There were other demonstrations as well, including one guy who, with the help of all the pint-sized fire fighters in the audience, dressed himself in his protective gear. The kids got a real kick out of it since not only did they get to speak up, but they also learned some neat terminology.

For anyone interested in all things fire related, the Kids Firefighter Blog has a collection of fantastic fire related pictures, movies, and games. Which is why we linked to there for this post…hope you enjoyed.

What this post is not:

A scientific, statistically proven, expert-driven, academic or otherwise opinionated analysis of why tv shows with commercials are not recommended for small children.

What this post is:

A personal observation of how the continuous interruption of tv commercials affected my children’s behaviour.

My kids watch some tv. They watch  a commercial-free children’s station called Treehouse (although they do sneak in the odd tv commercial), and they watch dvds.

In principle, they do not have much exposure to commercials, advertisements, or brand pushing. They are not immune to it; they are limited to it.

One evening, one of us adults flipped around looking for something to watch on tv. We came across a station called YTV, which was playing the classic movie The Wizard of Oz.

We thought…hey, this is a movie our small children might enjoy? Let’s try and sit down with them and watch it for a bit. See how they react to it.

So we did.

Generally speaking, our kids are not movie people. They do not have a lot of experience with movies, and previous attempts to show them a movie didn’t always turn out successfully (as in, the 4yo would get bored or scared or both and start playing with his Lego, or something to that effect).

This movie however appeared to have some appeal. At least initially, until the scarier parts came up. Unfortunately for us, we realized that the movie was about halfway through by the time we noticed it was on, so the wicket witch and the flying monkeys made somewhat of a negative impression on Benjamin.

But not so negative as those irritating tv commercials that intercepted the movie every 7 minutes or so.

During the first commercial break, the kids sat entranced, watching the endless parade of toy advertisement. I watched their faces, and I noticed some confusion on the older child’s face. Was this part of the movie? Where did that scary witch go? He realized quickly enough though that it wasn’t part of the movie, yet he remained fixated on the screen.

By the time the second series of commercials interrupted the movie, both kids started getting active on the couch. There was some kicking of the feet, some fighting over the blanket, and some annoying noise-making.

Javadad just looked at me and said “look how the commercials are affecting them”.

And this is not even a comment directed at the commercial content!

Honestly, by the time the third series of  toy commercials finished, I was feeling rather annoyed, even violent, myself. The amount of absolute crap that these sponsors are encouraging their viewers to purchase is criminal, if you ask me.

There was about an 40 minutes left of the movie. Each 7 or 8 minutes, there was a commercial break. Each new commercial break produced more, not less, activity in the kids. Activity in the form of fidgeting, whining, or jumping around.

This is not what I call relaxed family time.

Must I mention it was evening and down-time, also known as quiet-time? Watching this movie on this tv station was obviously a mistake.

It leaves me to ponder things. How is it possible that so many children are allowed to watch tv before bedtime? Or anytime, for that matter? Do other people’s children react to commercials the way my kids do?  How is this handled by the parents? Or do the kids (and parents) eventually get completely desensitized?

It’s sad. But it’s also eye-opening. The commercials do succeed in selling their products. Almost all birthday parties I have taken my kids to prove this point. The bulk of toys these children receive are identical to the advertisements on tv, and are mirrored on mainstream, chain and big-box toy store shelves.

And with this thought, we enter what is known in North America as the holiday shopping season.