More Facebook Posts and a Promise To Do Better

From August:

[New Mama], in an effort to get her son to clean up his toys, asked him, "What will Daddy say when he gets home and sees a big disaster?" Henry's reply? "Daddy knows I like messes."

[New Mama] had the following exchange with her son at bedtime:

Henry: Jupiter has a red spot on it, right?
Me: Yes, that's right.
Henry: Is it a big hole?
Me: No, I think it's part of Jupiter's atmosphere. But I'm not sure. Daddy might know,... or we could look it up tomorrow.
Henry: Daddy could be wrong. The Internet will know.


From September:

[New Mama] attempted to play along with Henry's bad dream the other night. He was yelling, "Give that back to me!" so I said, "Okay, here it is." He clawed at me and then cried out, "Noooooo! That's a FAKE!"

[New Mama] thinks her four-year old needs to work on his middle-of-the-night comebacks.

Henry (in his sleep): Where is that train? Help me look for it!
Me: Sweetie, there is no train. You're dreaming.
Henry: No, I'm not! YOU'RE dreaming!

[New Mama] was helping her son put together an alphabet puzzle, and when she gave him the letter "I" to put down next, he said, "That's right! Good guess, Mom!"

[New Mama] should really correct her son, but "drinky fountain" is just too darn cute. (Oh, and he also pronounced "turquoise" as "turkey-wise.")

[New Mama's] son cried out, "I don't want this job anymore!" as he was waking up this morning. I have bad dreams about jobs I've had; he has them about jobs to come, apparently.


From October:

[New Mama] overheard this conversation between her teenage nephew and Henry the other day... Jack: Henry, do you want to hear a joke? Knock, knock. Henry: I already know that one.

[New Mama's] son was building with Lincoln Logs this morning when she heard him quietly chant, "It's a long way to the top if you want to rock & roll."


And an e-mail I sent to relatives recently:

Tonight as I was lying with Henry in the dark, waiting for him to fall asleep, he said to me, "Mommy, can I tell you a joke?" I said okay, figuring it would be something that made no sense, as is usual for his jokes.

He said, "Knock, knock." I replied, "Who's there?" and he said, in this sing-songy voice: "Someone too short to reach the doorbell."

I BURST out laughing, which made him burst out laughing, and I said, "Did you make that up?" and he said that Jack told him that one at Grandma's.

Then a few minutes later he asked if he could tell me another joke.

Henry: "Ding-dong."

Me: "Who is it?"

Henry: "Someone too tall to reach the knocker."

Letting It All Hang Out

Henry turned four on August third and I'm a bad Mommy blogger for not writing about this earlier. I'm not sure why my blogging has slowed to a virtual crawl, but it might have something to do with Facebook. Or with Henry being four.


He's changed a lot in the last six months or so. Remember the little boy who wouldn't talk to strangers? Somehow, this past summer, he morphed into a little boy who WILL NOT STOP TALKING TO STRANGERS. Seriously. I can't tell you how many times I've caught him stopping people on the sidewalk, asking who they are and where they're going. When we go to stores he wants to tell the cashiers all about his trains. He walks up to other parents at the park to tell them God-knows-what. He babbles. He prattles. HE WON'T STOP TALKING.

And this is good, mostly. It's nice to see him reaching out to others. I worry that he's bothering people, but for the most part people seem amused by Henry's exuberance. Or possibly they're just being polite.

Henry has also become more independent when he's playing outside. He likes to run around the perimeter of our house and our neighbors' houses, either with or without the neighbor kids. I'll often go in the house to get dinner started and come out a few minutes later to find Henry two doors down talking to our neighbor Don.

And speaking of my going in the house and leaving Henry outside -- last year I could not have conceived of letting him out of my sight. And I still wouldn't, say, go take a nap and leave him alone. But now if he's outside with the neighbor kids I'll sometimes stay inside and keep an ear and an eye out for him every few minutes. It scares me a little, to be honest. But his appetite for being outside is insatiable and sometimes I've got to get a few things done.

Another change this year has brought...aggression. Hoo boy. I read recently that boys have a surge of testosterone in utero that drops way down when they're a few months old. Then boys and girls are at about the same level until boys turn four, when they have a huge surge of testosterone again. I guess it drops again when they turn five and it stays low until they're about eleven.

And right on cue, a few days or a week before his fourth birthday, Henry started hitting. HITTING. My sweet baby boy, the one I always shielded from other children, was hitting. It was (and continues to be) mostly directed at me and his father, though he does have a tendency to grab things out of other kids' hands and do things like push other kids with his feet. But my husband and I have borne the brunt of Henry's aggressive behavior. One day it was so bad that I locked myself in the bathroom and cried because I didn't want to have a little boy who behaved like this.

Henry is still aggressive, but things aren't as bad as they were around his birthday. Now he's more apt to say, "If you don't get me the paints, I'll HIT you!" I hate hearing this from my baby boy. But I'm trying (though not always succeeding) to be aware of a few things. First of all, he could be dealing with a surge of testosterone. I do think that's real, judging from my conversations with other mothers of four-year old boys.

But also, I think this is such an age of changes. He sees his friends going off to kindergarten and he's more aware that the neighbor kids are at school all day, too. He's started riding a two-wheeler with training wheels (though he still mostly rides his tricycle). He's not potty-trained (yeah, I know) but he's aware that this is unusual and he's done some talking about it. He's separating from me but probably scared to be separating, at the same time. His brain is processing an incredible amount of information...he's constantly questioning and putting things together and just amazing me with his complex thinking skills.

So I'm guessing that he 1) has a lot of pent-up fears and frustrations that he's not sure how to handle and 2) wants to make sure we're still going to be there for him, no matter what changes he may undergo.

This is not to say I haven't done my share of screaming at him. I'm not proud of the way I've responded to some of his aggression. It's hard when someone is demanding your immediate attention and physically assaulting you and you're so tired that all you want to do is sit and flip though a catalog for FIVE MINUTES to be empathetic and react calmly. But I'm working on it.

In more positive news, Henry's personality is really shining through lately. He's taken to wearing one red Croc and one orange Croc, sometimes on the wrong feet, just because he can. He won't let us cut his hair because he wants to grow it long. He raids my jewelry box for necklaces to wear. He comes up with random scenarios to act out ("I'm a yellow-jacket and I'm nice but sometimes I accidentally sting. So when I sting you can go to the snake and he'll spit medicine in your mouth.") that must somehow help him process some information, though I can't always figure out what that might be. He used to say that he wanted to work for Walsh Piano Movers when he grew up, but now he says he'd like to be a train engineer -- "But don't worry, Mom, I'll come home again in time for dinner."

And although he almost always wipes off our kisses he lets me hug him many, many times a day. And the occasional kiss he allows is that much sweeter.

Facebook Status Updates

I've been reporting the cute and/or funny things Henry says on my Facebook account lately instead of here, so I thought I'd copy some of my posts over for posterity:

From May:

[New Mama]'s son's breadth of love for his mommy has expanded from "to the moon and back" to "to the moon and back and EVERYWHERE and back."


From June:

[New Mama]'s son told her at bedtime, "I don't want you to ever die, because I love you. So see what you can do."

[New Mama]'s son was watching the workers pouring a neighbor's new driveway when he suddenly said, "I've noticed that almost all the workers have tattoos."

[New Mama] had terrible insomnia last night, but she's still smiling because as Henry was falling asleep last night he buried his face in her hair, breathed deeply, and said, "Your hair smells pretty, Mommy."

[New Mama] inexplicably provoked this outburst from Henry in Target today: "You're making my life DIFFICULT!" (Update: I was telling the neighbors this anecdote in front of Henry and when I said, "I don't know what I said to provoke that outburst," Henry said, "You were kissin' me!")


From July:

[New Mama] is still amused. Yesterday I tried reading "The Monster at the End of this Book" for the first time to Henry. One page in and he silently grabbed the book out of my hands, closed it and threw it on the couch.

[New Mama] to her son: "How did you get so cute?" Henry: "I'm coot because you're coot." Awww...but wait... "No, I'm coot because Daddy's coot."

[New Mama] hears this constantly throughout the day (and sometimes in the night): Mom! (Yes, Henry?) I love you.

[New Mama] was trying to play along with Henry's pretending, like always, when Henry said, "NO! You're interruptin' my PLAYTIME!"


From August:

[New Mama] was with her family having dinner at Rio West Cantina when her son (loudly) asked, "Is this Mexican food made by real Mexicans?"

[New Mama]'s son just said, "I love you. SO much. More than anything else in the world."

[New Mama] just had the following conversation with her four-year old:

Henry: Where's the cat?
Me: I don't know. I haven't seen her since we got home.
Henry: Maybe she chewed on a cord and died or somethin'?"

(Yes, we got a cat recently. More on that later.)

Style Quest Update

Last year I wrote a blog entry about my plan to tackle the problems I had with my personal style (or lack thereof). It felt as though I were missing some sort of basic style knowledge that was obvious to other people. So I started to read fashion blogs, checked a few books on style out of the library and went through every item in my wardrobe.

And then I discovered Peak Oil and started freaking out about TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It). Dressing stylishly didn't seem that important anymore, at least not while I was busy planning for zombie attacks.

I've calmed down a bit, though, and decided that while I'm waiting for TEOTWAWKI I might as well be dressed decently.

This does not mean that I've become super stylish. In fact, I'm not sure if anyone who knows me IRL has noticed a difference in the way I dress, since I still mostly wear jeans and t-shirts. But I feel better about the way the jeans and t-shirts I wear now fit and look.

The biggest thing I learned was that most of my clothes fit me wrong. Once I noticed it I was kind of appalled that I'd been wearing them that way for so long.

For example, the problem with most of my shirts was that the armholes were too far from my torso. You would think that if I had the right size shirt that wouldn't be a problem, but I've found this to be true even with some extra-smalls.

I used to buy small shirts and if they fit loosely in the wrong places I'd think, Well, it's a small, which is my size, so the problem must be with me. (Yes, I have some lingering self-esteem issues.)

However, I began to realize that clothing is cut in all different ways, regardless of the size on the label. Now when I buy shirts I check to make sure the sleeves start just under my arm, and even if I love the item in every other way, if there's a big gap under the arm, I don't buy it.

Another issue I had was the length of my pants. I found a fashion blog written by a style consultant who says that the bottom of your pants need to skim the surface of the floor when you're standing up straight. Once I learned this I started noticing incorrect pants lengths everywhere, and saw that when pants almost touched the ground it just looked better.

Doesn't this:


look better than this?


The same stylist says that when you're wearing an untucked shirt with pants it should be 1 to 3 inches above the crotch.

So this:


and not this:


When you wear an untucked shirt with a skirt, however, the hemline should be on or just above the hipbone. And again, I started noticing this in my own wardrobe and others' and it makes a difference.

Oddly, I even found that many of my sandals were a size too large. I'm not sure how this happened, but once I replaced them with some that fit properly (with the ends of my toes almost to the tips of the shoes) they just looked better.

Learning how clothes should fit was huge (no pun intended). But I also found it helpful to learn what colors work for me and what colors don't. Remember the 1980's fad of having your colors "done"? I read the book that started that fad, Color Me Beautiful, and found it to be surprisingly helpful even twenty years later.

I'm a Summer, by the way:


I don't wear only the colors from my palette, but it's one more objective tool for me to use when I'm trying to decide whether or not an article of clothing is flattering on me.

Oh, and I did give my hair some highlights, and I did get bangs. I did not, however, get my nose pierced, though I came pretty close to it a few times. I started wearing jewelry more often, even buying a few funky pieces from Etsy, but I forget more often than I remember. And I continue to resist wearing the pretty sundresses I have in my closet because, let's face it, a t-shirt and shorts are more comfortable.

I still have some work to do.

Peak Oil

I first read about Peak Oil a year ago and I've been meaning to write about it here ever since. But it's such a difficult concept to understand -- not so much intellectually as emotionally -- that I was unable to really deal with it for a long time.

Peak Oil is defined as the point at which we are extracting the most petroleum we'll ever be able to extract from the earth, with the rate of production declining dramatically thereafter. There will still be oil in the ground, but it will be the harder-to-get, less viable oil. Eventually it will be too costly to try to extract it. Some experts say that we've already passed Peak Oil, while others say it's in the very near future.

Natural gas is following a similar trajectory.

So oil is a finite resource. James Howard Kunstler, the author of several books on the topic of Peak Oil (including The Long Emergency, the book that first scared the hell out of me) calls the suburbs "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." I agree with this, but I don't think any of us, urban-dwellers or otherwise, are innocent. We've been throwing one hell of a party for the last 150 years, but the party is almost over.

A common reaction to this news is, "Fine, we'll just replace all of our energy needs with alternative energy." The problem with this is that oil is required to make solar panels, to build electric cars, and to construct windmills. By the time we as a society realize that our way of life is about to change dramatically, it will be too late to build a brand-new infrastructure. Even if we were to begin now we wouldn't be able to replace all of our energy needs ("needs" being a questionable label) with alternative sources.

And oil isn't just needed for fuel -- almost everything in our lives is made from oil. Computers, medical supplies, clothing, glasses, roofing, bike helmets, crayons, house paint. It's an astounding list.

So what now? This is what I've been grappling with. The blogs, articles and books I've been reading suggest that things won't suddenly stop.

What will happen is that the economy will crash, maybe slowly, with seeming improvements and then repeated declines. Sharon Astyk, a Peak Oil author, wrote this in her book Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front:

Peak Energy will appear as an economic problem; that is, the way we are likely to experience Peak Oil is not in the sudden disappearance of oil from our lives, but in the steady rise of gas prices, food and goods prices, and job losses, along with shortages and disruptions.

Anyone reading this in 2009 doesn't need me to explain that this is happening right now. Someday I'll tell Henry how beloved Milwaukee institutions like Atomic Records, Schwartz Bookstores and Brady Street Pharmacy all succumbed to the economic "downturn." My mom says she doesn't remember the economy ever being this bad, and she's seventy-three years old.

The price of gas will become volatile. Remember $4.50/gallon here in the United States last year? Everyone freaked out about it then, but it seems to have been dismissed as an anomaly. It's just over $2.50/gallon now, but how long will that last?

Global conflict will escalate as countries jockey for the most advantageous position as far as petroleum is concerned. Last August, when Russia attacked Georgia, I did some research and discovered that valuable oil and natural gas pipelines run through Georgia, and many people think that's ultimately what Russia was after. It makes me wonder how many of the conflicts in the world have to do with oil, even while taking place under the guise of religion or territory. I'm guessing a lot of it.

Power outages will become more common, as well, like what happened during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Fifty million people lost power for up to two days -- in unseasonably hot August weather -- in the biggest blackout in North American history. At least eleven people died, and the overall financial cost was estimated to be $6 billion.

Food shortages are also possible, brought on by a combination of the death of the small-scale local farms and the rising cost of oil. What happens when it becomes too costly to ship food from across the country, or halfway across the world? What if gas prices spike again, higher this time, and for a longer period of time?

Violence could become common, as people struggle for survival. I think this is the part that scares me the most. I don't want to live in fear.

In fact, fear has pretty much paralyzed me since I first learned about this concept. It all makes sense to me, which scares me even more: I feel pretty confident that life as we know it is going to change a LOT. I think this past year was almost a time of grieving for me, when I thought about Peak Oil. Most of my sadness and fear is for Henry. What kind of world is he growing up in? What kind of world is he going to inherit? We've all fucked things up for our children and grandchildren, haven't we?

I had to stop reading about Peak Oil, because whenever I did I felt helpless and hopeless. But a funny thing happened a month or so ago. I started to think about what I could do, now, to prepare.

I've started gardening even more this year, though I have yet to turn our whole backyard into raised beds like I hope to do. But I'm learning a lot about seed starting and companion planting and organic growing practices.

I've begun a stockpile of food and hygiene items. It's all things that we eat and use anyway. But if something should happen and we'd need to live off what we have in our house for an extended period of time (interrupted service to grocery stores, unemployment, etc.), we'll be set. The recent "swine flu" outbreak, while not worrying me in and of itself, has made me think of another use for our stockpile: self- or government-imposed quarantine in the event of some kind of outbreak.

This summer I'm hoping to learn to preserve the food we're growing, too. I'm currently taking an online course on food preservation taught by Sharon Astyk. I've always wanted to learn to can, and now seems like the time to do so. Same with foraging for herbs and food.

I'm beginning to consider what we would do in any given situation: No heat. No food. No transportation. I don't have the answers yet, but I think it's promising that the questions are on the table.

I've also started to think about community more than ever. We love our immediate neighbors, and we have several friends in other parts of our village and surrounding area. But I'm starting to develop networks of people who are also familiar with the concept of Peak Oil and feel the same way about it that I do. The daughter of a friend of mine in the neighboring village had their board of trustees considering allowing backyard chickens (unfortunately, it was shot down). I think my village would be an even tougher sell, but now might be the time to start working on it.

I'm also hooking up with The Victory Garden Initiative, which has the tagline: "This is a grassroots movement. Move grass. Grow food." Last Saturday I participated in the VGI's blitz, where groups of people installed raised beds all across the city.

I've never been an activist, never one to get involved, but I am beginning to feel that it is necessary. The days of not knowing your neighbors, not participating in the growing and preserving of your own food, and throwing away and buying new things instead of fixing them are almost over. And while I still fear for the safety of my family and friends, and still feel unprepared for the future, I'm excited to be a part of the Transition Movement, which aims to build community in response to the challenges of peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis.

As one blogger put it, "People are starting to see peak oil as the Great Opportunity, the chance to build the world they always dreamt of."

Solving the Puzzle

As followers of this blog and/or followers of my life know, Henry has slept like shit since the day he was born. Never sleeping more than a few hours at a stretch, crying out, talking in his sleep, thrashing, clawing at his stomach, climbing on top of me, asking multiple times for drinks of water. Awful.

I had hoped that two years ago after I discovered he was gluten-intolerant and removed gluten from his diet his sleep would improve, but it never did. I even took dairy out at the same time, but after nothing changed I added it back in.

I wasn't sure what else to do, and in the back of my mind I wondered if this was just how Henry was wired. Maybe he simply needed more reassurance at night than other kids. If I would just hang in there, maybe eventually he'd sleep through the night.

But at the beginning of this year, when Henry was almost three-and-a-half, I decided to have him tested for food intolerances again. He'd had the IgG test done about two years prior but I'd read that the test wasn't very reliable until the subject was older than two years old.

The IgG test looks for food sensitivities or intolerances -- reactions that show up more slowly and in less obvious ways than an IgE reaction like a peanut allergy that can be immediately life-threatening.

This time dairy showed up again, practically off the charts -- as did eggs. (I had the same test done on myself with the same results.) I'd been eating a LOT of eggs, and although Henry had stopped eating them scrambled when I made them for breakfast I was putting them raw into our morning smoothie. They were also in the gluten-free rolls and cookies we got from a local bakery. And I had been making rolls out of egg whites and cream cheese.

So on February first I cut eggs and dairy out of our diet. I hit a few stumbling blocks as I discovered dairy in things I hadn't thought to check at first -- like the probiotic powder I put in Henry's daily water bottle.

Within the first week I noticed a positive difference in Henry's sleep. He started to sleep through the night for the first time in his three-and-a-half years. No more yelling, "No no no!" and getting agitated in his sleep. No more clawing at himself. It was amazing.

Henry's skin had also been a problem since he was a baby. He'd had patches of eczema that went away some time after we went gluten-free, and he continued to have what looked like goosebumps all over his body. And in the past year or so he started to get really dry patches on his torso.


I took him to a mainstream allergist shortly after we had the IgG test done (but before we got the results) and his advice was to lube Henry up with lots of cream before bed every night, and if that didn't help, to come back and get some steroid cream.

Henry would never have let me put lotion of any kind on him, and I was not about to slather him with steroids.

The allergist, not surprisingly, scoffed when I mentioned the IgG test. (It's controversial in mainstream medicine...but then so are most of the things I've come to believe about health.) He said it looked for raised levels of antibodies against certain foods, but since the body sees all food as an invader and creates antibodies against everything we eat, the test was worthless. I acknowledged that it wasn't perfect -- there were often false negatives, for instance -- but I thought it was a good starting point.

And now Henry's skin was clearing up within a matter of days, with no lotion and (thank God) no steroid cream. What makes me sad is that the nurse in the allergist's office said her daughter's skin looked exactly like Henry's, and because of where she works she'd probably never look into food sensitivities as a cause.

It's been almost three months since I took Henry off eggs and dairy, and while things aren't perfect, they are MUCH improved. He still has some interrupted sleep, and although his skin is a lot better he continues to have some goosebump-like patches. I'm looking into a pattern of possible reactions with other foods and also giving Henry some supplements to make up for years of nutrition compromised by a messed-up gut.

Our journey isn't over, but it's incredible to me that I've solved one piece of the puzzle after we all suffered at night for so long.

Always With the Questions

Henry has an insatiable thirst for knowledge, as I suppose nearly all young children do. He's moved past the "Why?" stage for the most part, thank God. At times I felt like I was being "why"-ed to death:

Why do we have to take the books back to the library?

Because we only get to borrow them for a little while and then we have to return them.

Why?

So other kids get the chance to check them out.

Why?

Because the library is for everyone who lives around here and not just us.

Why?

Because...you're killin' me here, kid.

I thought that was the most challenging stage, that when he moved on to actual questions of substance I'd be home free. Definitive questions call for definitive answers, right?

So now Henry asks things like:

Why don't people call the belly button 'The Tube to Nowhere'?

What happens when we die?

Can a man marry another man?

How does the baby get in the mommy's tummy?

What is Down syndrome?

Where does the sky start?

The most frustrating part is that he rarely accepts "I don't know" as an answer. He seems to think I know, or should know, everything. And when I try to explain that no one can know everything he falls back on that old standby, "Why?"

(At other times, though, he says to me, "How did you know that?" like he can't comprehend someone having such a vast scope of knowledge.)

What's interesting to me, beyond the intelligence of Henry's questions, is how he immediately applies the knowledge he acquires. For instance, he recently asked what the word "firm" meant and when I explained it, he said, "My trains are firm." (Okay, that particular definition may need some tweaking.)

He also play-acts new concepts, as when he learned about the way the American Indians were pushed out by white settlers and the role rail transportation played in this. Now he tells me, "Mommy, you're an American Indian hunting buffalo and I'm building a track." And I'm supposed to say, "I'm sad that you're bringing trains through the land I live and hunt on."

Of course he doesn't quite get it; he says that he'll move me to another area and I can hunt there (I'm not about to explain that level of cruelty to him yet). But I can practically see the gears turning in his little brain as new concepts are learned and assimilated.

Watching this progression in Henry is making me even more confident in my desire to unschool him. For those unfamiliar with this term, it means letting children decide their own education. Kids learn about whatever interests them.

I'm simply astounded by what Henry knows already at the age of three. A lot of it is fed by his love of trains, as evidenced by the previous anecdote. He can tell you how steam engines work (coal fuels the fire that heats the water in the boiler that makes steam that drives the pistons that push the rods that turn the wheels), what a lighthouse is for, what the different kinds of bridges are, what kinds of engines are in use today, how the first transcontinental tracks were laid in America and on and on.

I'm learning right along with him and facilitating his education by helping him find library books, following train tracks on Google maps and looking up information online when necessary (because no one can know everything). I'm also hoping to take him to a train museum and maybe on a real train ride this summer.

It's exciting to be around someone who is excited to learn, who doesn't see education as something you get at school (nine months out of the year, on weekdays, between the hours of eight-thirty and three). Education is just part of life.

Isn't that the way it should be?