Note to Self: Remember This

Ribbon Toys

One of Rowan's favorite things is to dance around the house while listening to music, with great flair. Her newest obsession is trying to dance like a ballerina- she tells me, "I need to do my ballerinas now Mommy." As I was watching her prance about the other day I remembered a simple ribbon toy that I loved as a girl-- a long pink ribbon attached to a wand, to use for dancing. I bought 2 yards of shiny pink ribbon and a yard each of two different shades of purple, and hot glued the long pink ribbon around the end of a wooden dowel. I then glued and wrapped one color of purple around the dowel until it was covered, and then criss-crossed the pattern on the wand with a darker purple ribbon. She LOVES this simple toy, and uses it not only for dancing, but as a pretend fishing pole, and her "talking stick." Here are some pictures of her testing it out on the beach.

A few days later she got her latest issue of High Five magazine in the mail, and the craft project for this month's issue was to make a ribbon dancing toy using the lid of a canning jar, with different colored pieces of ribbon tied around the ring. This toy is also a hit- and little Retta likes to play with this one too!

Rock People

Rowan's rock family: her, me, daddy, and some sort of Babushka-esqe figure

This is a really simple but fun project. I found this idea on the internet a while back and decided to start making Rowan her own set of rock people to play with outside. We are having fun making different characters- they live in a basket on the screen porch and she likes to take them outside and play with them in her sandbox, or build them little stick houses in our flower gardens. All you need are some smooth stones and a sharpie marker!

Mother Daughter Date

Rowan ready to sail her boat

Last night I took Rowan on a long-overdue, much-anticipated mother daughter date. This was our first official one, but I hope it will become a monthly tradition. She's done a great job with adjusting to her new role of big sister, but she still is clearly missing all that one-on-one time we used to share. When she was the only, we used to fill our days with craft projects, lots of imaginary play and cooking. Lately we are doing well to all get dressed, make it to a beach and maybe get some groceries on the way home. A couple of weeks ago when I asked her if she would like to spend a night just her and I while her daddy watched Retta she said, "YES!!! We can pretend we are in a rocketship, then we can climb trees, climb the house, climb a cloud, make a fairy house, look for animals in the woods, and go to the playground!" Over the past week, her itinerary for us grew substantially: we also needed to fly a kite, do ballet together, play dress up, and of course, eat cupcakes!!! 

Tree climbing

So last night after dinner we packed an adventure bag, said goodbye to Aaron and Retta, and set off for the playground. We had great fun singing to Raffi in the car, sailing our boat we made together on the stream, eating cupcakes, having playground time and flying kites. On the way home we talked about Winnebagos and how they are like houses on wheels which she found mystifying. All in all, it was a top-notch, very memorable evening. It's funny how setting aside a time and making it something special can turn what would otherwise be normal activities for us into something really grand. I've been to that playground a million times, but I'll always remember going there with her last night and watching her run around squealing, "Mother daughter date!!" over and over.

Cupcakes!!

The Way of Wondering

Welcome! Let me explain a little about the purpose of this blog. I'm a mom to two amazing daughters, Rowan, who is 3 years old, and Retta, who is currently 3 months old. I'm also lucky enough to have a wonderfully supportive husband named Aaron, and we live together in a small house with a big yard just outside of a coastal town in Maine. For a long time I've been thinking it would be nice to start doing a better job of documenting our family life- I bought a baby scrapbook when Rowan was born that is empty and collecting dust in our closet, but I like the idea of blogging about what's going on at our home. 

Us on vacation in Hawaii at Makaha Beach, June 2012

As to why I've chosen to call the blog "Wonder Parenting," I’ve been reading the book Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith F. Small, and she discusses the idea of “parental goals,” which I found interesting, because I had never really stopped to consider my specific goals as I raise my children:

 “Parents today, in the more modern anthropological view, are seen not as passive translators of culture but as active participants, making choices about this or that pattern in bringing up a particular kind of adult citizen. These themes are often referred to by child development scholars as “parental goals,” wherein parents have conscious or unconscious objectives that influence every action with their offspring. Parents implement these goals in layers of ways as they go through the day. The goals are usually unconscious, although at times parents are very clear about what they are doing.”

What were my parental goals? I must have some! Then I realized that the very name I had wanted to give my blog was actually my major, overarching parental goal: something I’ve decided to call “wonder parenting.” My goal as a parent is to instill a sense of wonder in my girls. To give them the tools they need to approach every situation in life open-mindedly, with curiosity, to hold their discoveries and new experiences up to the light and see what each has to offer. In my experience thus far, life is what you make of it. I’m not sure what the point of life is, other than to enjoy the time you have as best you can, and to do that to the fullest, you must be able to find the good in your surroundings…the whole attitude of gratitude thing. When I see Rowan squeal with excitement each time she finds a worm while digging in the dirt, or laugh from the bottom of her toes with complete kid joy over something simple like being told she can get chocolate milk at a restaurant, I think, “God, I hope you can hang onto that ability to find joy in simplicity, and to unabashedly express your happiness and share it with the world.” How sad it is that as we grow out of childhood we often forget how to really have fun, or feel self conscious about expressing our true feelings. I hope that my girls will always have hope, believe that anything is possible, see the world as an amazing, awe-inspiring place, feeling free to be themselves, doing what makes them happy. Of course they will experience many failures and disappointments along the way, but I hope they will approach those experiences with the attitude that you can always pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and use those life lessons to start anew.

So, to that end, I am going to make my best effort to imbue our days together with adventures, explorations, lots of marveling, and creativity. I want to use this blog as a place to collect my thoughts and record my experiences as a parent in this oh-so-sweet time of life, use it as a place to organize photos of our adventures, craft projects, recipes, etc., and possibly inspire or start a conversation with some of my readers along the way. 

There's the old adage that "the days are long, but the years are short" and I try to keep that in mind each day as a parent. I can gush on and on about the warm fuzzy feelings I have for my daughters but there are also times when I feel like I'm going to pull my hair out, and I wistfully long to inhabit my past life in the days before children, even just for an hour. We have blissful days, and then we have those days where 20 minutes feels like 20 hours and I'm calling Aaron leaving passive-aggressive messages about getting out of work early to come home quickly to help manage a "situation." My house is often so messy that I can't walk barefoot across the kitchen floor without feeling the sticky squish of a raisin attaching itself to my foot, most days I leave the house with a hefty deposit of baby vomit on my shoulder, and I have plenty of moments where I wish I'd handled a situation differently and could have a do-over. Let's be clear that I'm not trying to imply that I'm any kind of "Wonder Woman" when I refer to "wonder parenting." I am using the term to remind me of the over-arching theme I hope to achieve in our days together, because someday I want my daughters to look back on their childhood with nostalgia for all the fun we had, and all that we learned from each other. Because in addition to teaching them to see the world with a sense of wonder, I truly am in wonder each day at all that they have to teach me. They keep me in check with all that is good and important in life, and I want to put our experiences in writing so that I can remember them some day when I emerge from the multi-year sleep-deprived fog in which most new parents live. So if you want to follow me, I'll be flattered, and maybe we can figure out this parenting thing together as we go. Regardless, thanks for taking a peek!