Regression

I got up a little early this morning because I didn't have a lot of room in bed -- yes, DS made his way into our bed last night. And imagine my surprise when I took a step across my bedroom floor and spotted my daughter spread out across our bedroom (hardwood) floor in her Dora sleeping bag.

I replied to Sharon's comment that DD tried to bite someone at preschool yesterday. We are now over 6 weeks since DD has been in her new pre-K classroom, and the two-year-old-like behavior is still going on. I have already spoken with our pediatrician about this, and have read what seems like every parenting book out there on the subjectss of whining, hitting, biting, and fancifulness. DD's teacher absolutely shares our concern and has been trying a positive approach (rewarding when using words, when playing nicely with friends, etc). But the misbehavior continues. And now we seem to have regressed to sleeping in the sleeping bag in Mom and Dad's room.

I'm frankly not sure what the next step should be. *sigh*

Way too much rain

The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood warning for Taunton, near my hometown in Massachusetts. The Whittendon Pond Dam is on the verge of failing, and emergency management officials have evacuated 2,000 people as of last night. News reports state that the 100 year old dam was inspected two year ago and declared in fair condition.

As for here in our "new" home state, the roofers are almost done -- just the carport remaining. And yes, DS did wake up in the middle of the night again, so we do not have a trend for sleeping for 7 hours at a stretch. And I have a community association meeting tonight. *yawn*

Roofs

The roofers have started their work. *wump wump wump*

They have been a little delayed thanks to the rain in the area *wump wump wump* but managed to get about a third of the roof replaced on Friday *wump wump* and another third done yesterday. *wump wump wump* DS ended up with NO NAP due to the noise. *wump wump wump* So he had a late dinner *wump wump wump* and went to bed (with DH's help) in his big boy bed at 9 PM.

He slept until 4:20 AM.

This is the first time in 22 months that he has slept so long without needing "Mommy". Mommy got to SLEEP. What a GREAT concept.

And of course Mommy was so shocked by it all that I got up and posted it here. DH is getting DS back to sleep now.

Call me stumped

Yes, just call me stumped. Pass the Clueless Parent Award this way, please.

For the life of me I cannot figure out what is going on with my daughter. I thought we nipped the transitions issues, and now she is right back to her 2 year-old status, this time for teasing her best friend at preschool. My daughter is just plum MEAN right now. And she is hyper-sensitive about EVERYTHING.

I think I have read through at least a half-dozen parenting books, and I tell you, I think there is a book out there that gives the proverbial "there there" pat on the shoulder to every form of parent. But there are no SOLUTIONS.

The director from preschool offered to meet to talk some more. I told her I didn't know what to talk about because it is so darn frustrating. I don't know what to do at this point. I am seriously considering holding her back from Kindergarten next year, because this sort of stuff is NOT acceptable. (I sound like that Super Nanny lady!)

And on the toddler front, my son is still hitting children. At least he stopped biting, but now he is hitting. And getting him down to go to sleep takes HOURS. DH has been in with him for over 90 minutes now just to get him to go to sleep in his toddler bed.

Madness, I say -- absolute madness.

We now have a shed

Yes, the shed people/installers came today. The ground had dried up enough and our handy-dandy little "flags" held up in spite of A River Runs Through It going on in our backyard.

I had my minivan cleaned today -- as in detailed. Wow, does it look BEAUTIFUL! I took the double stroller out and the two car seats out, and the man worked his miracles! He started on it at 11 am and he finished at 4:15 PM! It really looks beautiful. I was anticipating having to buy new floor mats, which are pretty pricey in a minivan. But it really looks like a new car!

DH stayed home with the kids today as I don't get Columbus Day off as a holiday. The commute in today was SO LOVELY -- 15 minutes from my driveway to the elevator in my parking garage. If that is not an incentive to establish flextime, I don't know what is.

That's about it here -- heading to bed to catch up on some sleep...

Bring on the RAIN!!!!

Thanks to the remnant of Tropical Storm Tammy, the metro Washington DC area is forecast to get a whole lot of rain tomorrow and into the holiday weekend.

Thank goodness! Our new arborvitae need the rain -- they were just replanted by Merrifield Garden Center last Saturday. (In late June, we had Merrifield do a series of plantings and four of the trees were pretty brown at the beginning of September, despite a very regular watering schedule. Merrifield replaced the lot of the arborvitae at no charge.)

Of course our roof is scheduled to be replaced this weekend, too. Well, that isn't happening on schedule, that's for sure. DH just called the roofer to figure out what to do about the many pounds of roofing materials sitting on top of our house right now -- especially with 4+ inches of rain forecast for the area.

Homework

This has been a hectic week. All kinds of goings on at work, plus our community association meeting took lots of time last week, and that was AFTER our annual fall sale at my children's child development center.

I did manage to get some mums planted this weekend as well as some winter pansies in the windowbox. We have been having a running battle with a local trash contractor -- DH reported them to Fairfax County's consumer affairs department thanks to their handy dandy online form. We're now at 27 days without picking up yard debris -- and yet another supervisor "absolutely promised" it would be picked up tomorrow. We'll see -- just don't hold your breath!

We went to "curriculum night" at preschool tonight. The teachers did a great job describing how they are teaching children in the pre-K program. They also answered all of the parents' questions. VERY well done.

The shed installers rescheduled from today until Saturday. The roofers rescheduled from Thursday to Monday (Columbus Day). Sure glad I'm not a general contractor!

That is a quick summary -- I'll fill in more tomorrow!

More on the Yale women

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer compares the New York Times "Yale women" story to a 1980 story on the "career vs. motherhood" issue. The most intriguing part was his anecdotal follow-up to one of the women mentioned in the 1980 article:

One criticism of Story's article is that college students are poor predictors of what sorts of adults become. To test this idea I conducted some purely anecdotal research of my own: I Googled the lead character of the 1980 New York Times story, Mary Anne Citrino. Within minutes, I reached her at her New York City office at the Blackstone Group, an investment and advisory group, where she is a senior managing director.

Citrino laughed at this week's Times story when she read it, recalling her role in the similarly squishy Times story from a generation ago. She says the Times reporter misrepresented what she said, attributing to her sentiments that were "the exact opposite of what I meant."

"I never wanted to be a full-time mother," says Citrino. She says she was considered the most gung-ho career woman among her classmates, never stopped working after finishing school, has three children, and put in 20 years at Morgan Stanley before joining Blackstone a year ago.

"I never even considered giving up my career," Citrino says.

But that's just one anecdote, mind you.

Also...as shown over at Mediabistro, evidently at least one of the students interviewed in the article has a problem about how she was quoted/characterized. There are even more details over at Alas.

MIA

Sorry I haven't been around -- H's visit over the weekend ate all available free time so I couldn't post.

Here's a plug for a great pumpkin patch/fall festival in the DC area over at Cox Farms. We went yesterday and we had the BEST time! Loads of fun!

Yale women, continued...the survey methodology

Came across this over at Gelf Magazine and I just had to share -- everything you wanted to know about (cough cough) "survey methodology" as practiced by some at the New York Times. Quoting from David Goldenberg:

One likely reason that Louise Story came to the conclusion in her front page New York Times article Tuesday that many Ivy League women would rather be stay-at-home moms than part of the workforce: A skewed sample. She arrives at a conclusion about “women at the nation’s most elite colleges” based on spot interviews with students from a few Ivy League schools and then a survey with students at one school: her own. Last school year, Story sent out a 37-question survey to a group of freshman and senior women at Yale University, her (and my) alma mater. While it is indeed possible that 60% of those who replied said “they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely” when they had kids, as Story writes, it's doubtful that those who replied are representative of all Ivy League women.

So I take back what I said about Yale -- David gets it.

Transitions, continued...

My daughter moved over to the pre-K room right after Labor Day. She has been in the same daycare center (yes, it is a high quality one -- I'm sure some of the Yale women as described by Amber at Prettier Than Napoleon would bash me nonetheless) since she was 6 months old. She has ALWAYS had an easy transition. This one, though, is not going so well.

There is a girl in her pre-K class that she has known since she started at the daycare. (I'll call her B.) B is a little rough around the egdes. An example: my daughter and B were outside on Monday afternoon coloring with markers. Natalie was coloring on her paper, and she went to get up to leave with me, and B "snatched" the paper away from Natalie. Natalie -- at her super-sensitive best -- started bawling. To make a long story short, we managed to get out of there and over to the classroom to pick up my son, and we were all having fun together, and all was great. We made it out to the atrium of the building and my son was fascinated by a sculture in the atrium -- and who walks out to leave? B and her mom. B goes over to Natalie and says, "You'll never see that paper again!" and rips it up in front of her. Natalie bawls again. *sigh*

Well, this has been going on since the transition. Admittedly Natalie is hardly the "golden child" and she can whine with the best of the them. And she can be absolutely supersensitive to boot. Plus we are having all sorts of sleep issues right now -- this from my great napper. So I'm working with the teacher on this. Plus the curriculum director. Plus the center director. It's just REALLY hard.

And a totally unrelated note -- Hurricane Rita is currently a catageory 5 hurricane and has the third lowest pressure of any north Atlantic hurricane. Goodness, I hope ths thing weakens (at least a little) before landfall. And kudos to Max Mayfield for his great testimony before the Senate yesterday.

Required reading...NYT article on Women at Ivy League colleges planning for stay-at-home-mom-hood

I saw this article in this morning's New York Times and it became "the topic" of discussion on several moms lists that I'm on. It's all over the blogs, too. I especially like Ann Bartow's post about the article on Sivacracy.net. I would add to Ann's point that these women will be 30 year-old stay-at-home moms with $145,000 investments in law school that apparently will not have to be paid at all through students loans. So they plan to saddle their husbands with that debt? And this is all assuming that these women can "easily" have children be it through bearing their own child or through adoption. And, once they have their "insta-children recipe" fulfilled, they will have an easy path back to the workforce -- and a part-time one at that -- down the road.

Wow. Makes me glad that I did not go to an Ivy League college. At least I have some sense of the real world.

See RebelDad's post about the same article, too -- a great perspective from a dad.

Lengthen the school day?

Found a link to this report over at Half Changed World -- how to improve public schools, pubished by the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America's Future. I agree with the first recommendation on increasing the length of the school day, and also the school year. I haven't read the rest of the report yet (only skimmed it so far), but at first glance it seems like a great idea on both counts.

Have more to fill in on transitions but that will have to wait until tomorrow...bath time beckons.

The Birthday Party Circuit

Wow, the things they don't tell you in parenting books. They do NOT tell you about birthday parties. And how they come in waves. And sometimes, even in circuits.

This is a VERY hectic time right now. First off -- my daughter's godmother (H) is coming to visit next weekend. H lives in Ireland (after shedding that loser for a husband that she used to have) and has not seen us in just shy of 2 years. She has not even met my son yet. She arrives on Friday. Which means we have to find our guest bedroom as it is overtaken by toys and clothing that we need to sort through for our daycare center's fall sale. Which of course has to be done by next weekend, too.

But this weekend was The Birthday Circuit.

Yes, two children in the 4's class had their birthday parties this weekend. One had it at the National Zoo on Sunday morning. The other had it at a local rec center Sunday afternoon. Then we have our standing swim classes on Saturday mornings. And then of course is getting the laundry done.

I have gotten diddly done in the guest bedroom all weekend.

My saving grace is that this is "only" H, after all. We grew up together. We've seen each other in high school band uniforms. Can't get much worse than that!

Comments on Hewlett and Luce article

Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce's article in the Harvard Business Review (March 2005) elicited several Letters to the Editor now printed in the July/August issue of HBR. (The original Hewlett and Luce article made its way across several blogs, including Fast Company Now, Superfluous Sentiments, and Ripple of Hope.) It was nice to finally see some comments that did not focus solely on part-time work as the End All and Be All Solution.

Wendy Ward, Senior Business Development Manager for British Telecommunications in London, pointed out that most women have a higher load of household jobs to handle while also working their way up a career ladder. She wrote, "How many women have a husband prepared to iron their shirts, pick up their cleaning, manage the nanny, prepare the family dinners, and arrange social functions?" She also noted that age is a significant factor for women -- once you get "off" the ramp and you try to get back "on", women (and men) are less attractive as a potential employee.

Anne Mathias, Senior Vice President and Director of Research at Stanford Washington Research Group in Washington DC, pondered: "Why is it that no one ever asks the following question of women who have left the full-time corporate workforce: 'At the time you decided to leave, did your spouse make more money (or at least have a higher earning potential) than you?'"

Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It, commented that the issue is not that "corporations have adapted to men's needs. That misses the point. Men with children adapt to the corporation so that they can earn enough money to allow their offspring to have a better life than they've had."

Hewlett and Luce respond by stating, "The letters to the editor point to the unequal nature of the domestic burden. In a survey we conducted at the Center for Work-Life Policy in 2002, we examined the domestic division of labor and discovered a 'tilt' factor: Thirty-year-old professional men performed significantly more household chores than did 40-year-olds. This fact is directly linked to relative earning power. By age 40, many wives have experienced an off-ramp and taken a financial hit, and the widening earnings disparity between husbands and wives shifts the domestic division of labor in the wrong direction. Thus, if we want to do something about the unequal burden, we need to create new options on the work front as well as new collaborations on the home front."

Politics...Massachusetts style

Yes, the race for mayor of my hometown continues to get even hotter.

As you might recall from my earlier post, the teams are starting to line up for candidates. All this will mean is that they will split all the "opponents" every which way, and the incumbent will walk away with the prize in the preliminary election (October 4).

Latest news is that Scott Lang, the last of the candidates to toss a hat into the ring, was endorsed by the city's firefighters union. Yes, the classic saga of who supports the police and the fire fighters continues for yet another year/cycle/decade. And the charges go back and forth:

Responding to constant criticism from challenger Scott W. Lang on the city's crime problems, Mayor Frederick M. Kalisz Jr. has accused Mr. Lang of running for mayor to ensure that the city's police and fire unions receive their pay raises.

"Mr. Lang, the police union and the fire union are working together to put out wrong and distorted information in the hopes that the public will not understand their true motive -- which is not public safety but unjustifiable compensation for police and fire fighters," wrote Mayor Kalisz in a prepared release. Mayor Kalisz was asked whether laptops in police cruisers are working as they should.

"What is more outrageous is that an attorney in Mr. Lang's private law office represents the New Bedford firefighters in their contract negotiations with the city and now that same union has endorsed Mr. Lang," Mayor Kalisz wrote.

After a while, voters get sick of this crap and just decide to stay home because it doesn't matter who gets elected. Tsk tsk tsk, dear mayoral candidates.

Transitions and behavior

We have survived the first week of transition into pre-K. And it was just that -- survival.

This has been a bit of a hectic week to begin with because it started off with us on vacation for the Labor Day holiday. Then the pre-K teacher (Miss J) was on vacation for two days, so the first "real" day for my daughter to be with her teacher was on Thursday. Work was a bit hectic this week due to a project I was working on, and on Thursday I arrived to pick up the kids with maybe 1 minute to spare.

The director was waiting for me as she had to talk to me about something that happened.

Evidently, my daughter, the very imaginative one, is very fanciful with everyone. She had told the director (who is mom to one of my daughter's pre-K classmates) that something occurred in the classroom, with lots of "ums" thrown in, and that a certain person did something to her (keeping names out of this for this blog), and then when the director asked if it really was that person, my daughter changed the name to another person. So, the director told me about it, because "you never know" if it is really true or if it is the whole imagination thing going on.

I talked to my daughter about it several time on Thursday night -- no pressure, just a few minutes here and a few minutes there, over a few hours, and I tried to get a sense of what she had told the director AND what had happened during the day.

It was a whole new set of people doing a whole new set of things.

So -- I spoke with Miss J Friday morning at drop-off and asked her to talk to the director and then give me a call sometime during the day when she had a few minutes. Miss J called me in the afternoon -- she told me the set of events that happened both yesterday AND today. Yes, a whole new set of people. She also said that the entire CLASS is doing this sort of thing right now -- and it is like the entire CLASS has regressed to the stuff of 2 year olds; i.e. hitting, kicking, etc. Miss J and I had a good conversation about all this (20 minutes or so) and we're going to borrow some books from the library (that we have read before, actually) on feelings and playing with others, etc.

The "lying" part is actually less a problem for me right now because I think that 4 year-olds don't quite get it yet. (And the experts at ParentCenter seem to agree!) The behavior stuff, though, concerns me. We have been working with my son on not kicking, not hitting, etc. -- all the stuff burgeoning 2 year-olds do. So I guess we'll read the books together as a family as they both can benefit.

Ass Miss J said to me yesterday -- if the children won't behave, she can't teach them anything in the classroom. And if parents do not keep up the consistency at home, they won't behave during the day.

School picture day

Tomorrow is school picture day. Yes, the annual event even takes place for infants! Lucky me, I get to somehow get both children up, dressed, fed, faces washed, and in good enough condition to arrive at school WITHOUT a yogurt stain across their new fall outfit -- and do this all by myself. Why? Because DH has a hearing that he must attend early so he has to leave the house at 6:45 am. Lucky me!!!

On a lighter note, my daughter is doing GREAT in her 4's class. She seems so grown up all of a sudden. *sniff sniff* Just wait until next year when she starts Kindergarten -- I'll be a puddle on the floor.

First day of pre-K school

Yes, my daughter's first day in the "4s" is today. The classroom curriculum has more of a pre-K focus. She is SO excited to finally be in the "speckled frogs" room. She picked out a new backpack on Saturday (Cinderella, of course) and happily put that in her cubby this morning.

Over the weekend, plans rapidly switched around. It all started on Friday. There was an in-service day at daycare and DH was to have "children duty" -- but then the House convened for the supplemental funding for FEMA. His boss actually flew in from California -- no one would have predicted that -- so both children were with me at work Friday morning, and then DH picked them up at my office at noon time.

So our plans for the weekend were dramatically altered at the last minute.

I did some online hotel hunting and found a deal at the Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg. So we stayed there Sunday night and came back home yesterday. We all had a great time!

We have been doing our best to follow what's going on with the post-Katrina recovery while not letting the children see things on the news and such. Dave Farber has been posting lots of updates through his Interesting People list.

One great post was by Stephen Poe -- I really liked his two point summary of You Can't Fund Everything and Our Risks are Increasing. My only commentary to his excellent "policy analysis critique" is this -- what concerns me is the lack of planning on how to deal with the disaster that everyone knew would happen since the infrastructure was not in place for anything beyond a Category 4 hurricane.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

I have been a "weather junkie" for years. It's just part of being in my family. During hurricane season, I remember sitting in the living room with my mother, my brother, and my grandmother (when I was about 6 years old) listening to the radio to get the latest "lat/lon pair" from the National Weather Service. I learned my Atlantic Coast geography thanks to Hurricane Gerda, Hurricane Belle, Hurricane David, and a few tropical storms thrown into the mix. Hurricane Gloria taught me some appreciation for what the NWS went through in terms of "hype" about a storm. By the time Gloria reached us, she was a tropical storm, and I saw lots of news coverage about "the weather folks always say it is going to be bad, but it never is". But my mother was a child when the Great '38 hurricane hit New England. She witnessed what happened after Hurricane Carol and Hurricane Hazel hit in rapid succession. Then Hurricane Diane hit the following year. My mother and my father and my grandparents taught my brother and I how we had to respect hurricanes -- in spite of what others might say about "hype".

Then came Hurricane Bob.

Hurricane Bob hit the year that my husband and I got married. We were true newlyweds -- 4 months into our marriage -- and we were doing all our hurricane preparations -- storing water, gathering canned goods, buying candles, etc. Bob hit as a Category 2 storm and we watched as satellite dishes blew up the street. A tree fell down in our backyard and took the electric meter right off our house. We made it through fine, and yes, it was a pain not having power for a week, but we did not have flooding, we still had a house to live in, and we muddled through okay. But many friends were not as lucky. Friends that lived near the bay did have flooding. They did lose the roof of their house and had to gather their belongings quickly to move out of their house for a long while. Bob showed me how all this stuff is "real".

We moved to the DC area in 1994, and Hurricane Bertha paid a visit in 1996. I got to see the DC area's version of "they just hyped the storm" complaining. But I did not get forget what I learned in Bob. When Hurricane Isabel hit the DC area in 2003 as a tropical storm, I saw friends once again suffer major losses thanks to a "just a tropical storm". But people still talked about "all the hype".

Now we see what Hurricane Katrina has destroyed.

I hear about the devastation at work, and it just breaks my heart. Then I come home and, after the kids are in bed, I watch the news coverage and have to kiss my kids another time. My heart goes out to all the families.

I just hope that people -- not only residents, but also elected officials and emergency management personnel and the like -- will learn a little from this and have a healthy respect for the weather. Sure, it costs a lot of money to do mandatory evacuations 48 hours out from a storm. But you can save some lives in the process, too.

I think one of the posters on the Eastern US Weather forum said it best -- this was posted the morning of landfall (Aug 29 2005, 09:14 AM):

I am very sad this morning... deeply moved by the disaster unfolding before our eyes. I have been in two cat 1 hurricanes in my life.... and it take a lot to scare ME with weather...

I cannot imagine what a cat 4 is like... the wobble to the west here which has placed New Orleans right in the western Eye wall is just so unbelievably bad.... the words fail me.

2004 .... 4 canes in 44 days in FL.... now this 3rd massive cane in the gulf....

From this day forward these persons and families.... even those not directly in the path of Katrina... and those families who have relatives in other parts of the country watching this disaster unfold... KNOW that today is one of those life-changing days that we love and also fear. Imagine leaving your home on another seemingly senseless evacuation.... just like the last time... kidding with friends and neighbors and family members that this time again nothing is going to happen but secretly having that fear that it just might... then as we watch the media coverage knowing that this time it's different. This time the place that you call home is in serious trouble... this time the luck isn't going to hold .

And as you come home you find your home smashed wedding albums and family pictures scattered about ... the kitchen destroyed... and your entire life strewn about as if you and your family were insignificant nothing. When you are in a category 3 4 or 5 hurricane EVERY days in your life will be post-Katrina.... post 8/29/05... everyday gets viewed as before and after... everything that happened to these persons and these families lives... from 1776 to now get put into one compartment or mindset... and everything that happens from August 30, 2005 until... well until whenever... is viewed as AFTER Katrina.

Yet the greatest power of humanity is that we know deep down the lives are not insignificant and we make our stand against the forces of nature as we rebuild sometimes a rather seemingly senseless act of the defiance but always in a very human matter.

In general Humans are at the best when things are at their worst... and no place is that more true than in United States of America.