Spoiler alert! You will grow up to be the tooth fairy

Oh yes, we have all been here.

Playing the "tooth fairy" has to be one of the strangest parts of being a parent. Sneaking in at night to take your weird, bloody teeth? For money? Who thought this was a charming idea? I don't quite get it but we're playing along anyway

For the first tooth you lost - we were on it! New toothbrush and toothpastes, cute-as-heck note from the tooth fairy, Sacagawea coins, stealthy exchange under the cover of night. We could have been gold contenders if there were Tooth Fairy Olympics!

Fast forward to tooth #5 and I am carrying on my parents' tradition of making a half-hearted effort to conceal the truth, pretty much forgetting about it unless you remind me, and giving random gifts found around the house for your prizes.

Don't worry, you are making out like a bandit. The guilt from forgetting a night and not having any ready prize bumped your cash payment up to $5 - in the form of 1 dollar bill, 4 quarters, 10 dimes, 20 nickels, and a Thomas Jefferson dollar coin (pretty much what we could scrounge out of the change drawer last night at 11 pm).

What bounty!! I wish the tooth fairy had been so generous after I reminded my parents that my tooth had been under my pillow for a few days.

And now I can relate to this end of things.

Alas, Henry's first tooth should be coming out soon. We'll try to get back to our A-game for that special day.  Not sure this tooth fairy can promise anything beyond a linty sucker after that.

Love,
Mama

Work Party: Valentines for Vetrans, and Homeless Care Packets

We are getting ready to have a work party for Dad's birthday. We will be making valentines for veterans and homeless care packets like we did last year on MLK day. Several people have asked what we included so here are lists and photos.

Valentines for Veteran's included:

• Deck of cards
• Pen
• Rolled up sudoku and word puzzle
• Tissues
• Gum
• Candy and/or snack
• Packaged in valentines bag with personalized tag

Kids can make tags from plain paper or use stickers and labels that say "Happy Valentines Day Veteran. Thank you for serving our country!" The VA Hospital was happy to hand these out in their in-patient and out-patient facilities.

Homeless care packets included: 

• Water bottle 
• Tissues Snack 
• Gum 
• Socks and dental care tools as available 
• Packaged in gallon-sized ziplock bag, decorated with stickers

We bought most of the supplies from the dollar store and Oriental Trading Company. Lining them up in plastic bins made assembly go fast and easy. Kids and adults did a great job!

Reading's put a spell on you

Dear Lucy,

This year, you have quickly become a voracious reader. You favor fantasy series, especially ones that feature characters from fairytales or greek mythology. You have NO interest in books about typical kids; Ramona Quimby, Junie B, and the like do not capture your imagination or your interest for long.

But there is such a thing as being TOO EXCITED about a book you are reading. As in so excited that YOU CANNOT SLEEP! This has happened on and off with the Harry Potter books. You were falling asleep late, sneaking back up to read, and then waking back up at 2 pm ranting about the book and asking to listen to stories so you could get back to sleep.

So we created a new rule, NO reading anything new after 7:30 pm. If you've read it before, great. But if you don't know how it ends, you can't read it before bed! This works well if we remember to enforce it.

We forgot last night. And lo and behold,  Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban had you coming downstairs an hour past bedtime saying, "But I can't believe Sirius Black is..." I missed the rest as your dad steered you back to bed.

You're too funny girl. So happy that you love books. But we will be remembering to enforce our rule tonight.

Love you,
Mama

The Alien Game

In the "alien game," I pretend to be an alien from a distant planet, who doesn't know anything about anything. It is your job to be the ambassador conducting a tour, and introducing me to everything. I like that it is a good way to rest my brain. And it is interesting to see how you define and describe things.

Lucy is often very descriptive and specific.

Lucy: That is a cat.
Alien: What is "cat"?
Lucy: A cat is a cute little animal?
Alien: What is "cute"?
Lucy: Cute is something sweet to look at, or huggable.

Now, I have "sweet," "look," or "huggable" to ask about. Thus - without much thinking from me, we can go on forever.

Henry, on the other hand, is very concise, circular, AND fast. It is almost weird how you can define things in such easy terms.

Alien: What is "girl"?
Henry: A girl is a baby mom.
Alien: What is "mom"?
Henry: A mom is a grown girl.

Here, I'm only left with "grown." This kind of looping makes it harder for me to continue without paying careful attention. I have to work hard to keep it going.

I would say it has always been obvious that your brains work differently. But it is eerily strange how obvious it is after playing this game.

Seven gratitude exercises

"The heart that gives thanks is a happy one,
for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time.
The more we say thanks, the more we find to be thankful for.
And the more we find to be thankful for, the happier we become.
We don't give thanks because we're happy.
We are happy because we give thanks."
~ Douglas Wood in The Secret of Saying Thanks

I gave a talk on the science of gratitude this week. Being thankful is something that changes my life for the better every day. If there is anything I have a testimony of, it is gratitude.

One of my biggest goals as a parent is to help you develop habits of gratitude. Choosing to be grateful will help you learn to let got of disappointments and readily make the best of things.

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow."
~ Melody Beatti

Please, please, please learn to be grateful. There is nothing more uplifting, healing, inspiring, peaceful, and healthy for you to learn.

The following is from the handout:

Seven Gratitude Exercises

All seven exercises work, but you’re more likely to make it a habit if you pick what appeals most to you. If you already keep a gratitude journal, consider adding another strategy into the mix. Most take just a few extra minutes a week but offer disproportionately large benefits.

1. Gratitude Journal

At the end of each day, write down a few items for which you are grateful. A daily calendar can be a quick and easy one to carry around.

• The items you list must change and you must keep the activity interesting.
• The list does not have to be written. You can also say it out loud.

Resources:

• Happy Tapper, an iPhone and iPad gratitude app.
• Thnx4.org, a free, online, and social gratitude journal.

2. Positive prayer

Thank God for blessings. And/or thank the universe for lucky circumstances.

Resources:

• A beautiful prayer for all faiths, by Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the most revered Buddhists in the world:  Waking up this morning, I see the blue sky. I join my hands in thanks for the many wonders of life; for having twenty-four brand-new hours before me.
• A beautiful quote by G. K. Chesterton: You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

3. Negative Grace

On a regular basis, imagine some part of your life being worse than it actually is.  Example: before I shower I say thanks for not having to bathe in an ice-cold tundra. Before I sleep I sometimes say thanks for not having to sleep on the floor.

Resources:

• Spent (online game, life in the shoes of a poor person) It’s quick and free.
• 60 things that could be worse, from Tiny Buddha.

4. Write a thank you note

Thank anyone you know for anything they helped or shared with you. Take time to focus on sincere words, specific items to be grateful for, and the person you are grateful to.

5. Remember The Bad

Instead of visualizing something bad that could happen to your life, as with negative grace, visualize something bad that actually has happened, but that you overcame. Remembering the pain and difficulty with which we arrived at the present helps us to feel grateful.

Note: Don’t focus on unresolved bad – on choices not made or regrets left festering, but instead on challenges conquered and positives that could have been negative.

6. Gratitude Visualization

Picture in your mind someone for whom you are grateful. Now verbalize out loud or in your mind a few specific reasons for why you are grateful for them. The more specific the better. After a few minutes, switch to someone else.

Resources:

• An overview of loving-kindness (compassion) meditation. Compassion and gratitude are not the same thing, but increasing one has been shown to also increase the other.
• A comprehensive PDF of loving kindness meditation.
• A gratitude meditation by Deepak Chopra.

7. Sensory Appreciation

We are consciously aware of less than .01% of the sensory cells being activated each second. Usually this is a good thing – if we were suddenly aware of all of the different things touching our body, smells reaching our nose, tastes lingering on our tongue, sounds hitting our eardrums and light-rays entering our eyes all at once, we would go crazy and be unable to focus. But sometimes it’s good to turn off the filter.

• The next time you are eating delicious food, take a moment to close your eyes, focus on the pleasant sensations being generated in your mouth, and be grateful for 1) your tongue, 2) the food, or both. Doing this not only makes me grateful and happy – it makes my food taste much better!
• The next time you are listening to a favorite song, close your eyes, focus on the beautiful combination of sounds, and be grateful for 1) your ears, 2) the music, or both. Remember the sense of joy you experienced the first few times you listened to favorite song? This can help you reclaim that joy.
• This extends to enjoying special belongings in a way that brings you joy: wearing your favorite underwear, using your favorite mug, hanging up a painting you love, printing photos to put in an album within easy reach, and so on. I love fabric, always have. For years I kept all my fabric in tubs - but when I brought them out and found a place where I could line them up on a shelf, suddenly I felt joy just passing by and seeing them. I hang a quilt that your great grandmother made in our patio room. Yes, it would be better preserved in a box in the attic; but on display, it brightens our space and reminds me often of my grandma and all that she did for me.

Resources:

• A useful guide to mindful eating, from Zen Caffeine.
• Eat What You Love, a book about mindful eating.

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Recommended Books

• Taking Charge: Caring Discipline That Works at Home and at School(Fourth Edition) by JoAnne Nordling
• The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It by David Niven
• The Secret of Saying Thanks By Douglas Wood

Don't be mistaken, men do have a say

I was talking with someone yesterday about abortion and their complaint was that men should have just as much a say about whether a pregnancy is terminated as a woman. The thing is - men do have a say in the decision; they just need to be informed enough to use it.

For both genders, this is the bottom line: if you have engaged in unprotected sex without a plan, it means you either a) didn't care about having an abortion, or b) didn't have the information and preparation that you needed. Too many people (men and women) fall into that latter category. If you are even thinking about sex (yes, this includes EVERYONE), you need this information. Shame on us if you didn't have it. Early education does prevent abortion!

So here are the facts

Engaging in unprotected sex has a high pregnancy risk!! Take heed and be prepared if you are not ready to take that risk (including the risk of abortion)!!

Every man needs to know:
First: the second you put sperm in another woman's vagina, you let go of the decision on what happens to it. It. Is. Gone.

• If it impregnates that woman and she decides to abort, or to complete the pregnancy - YOU DON'T GET TO DECIDE. 
• If you really don't want to have an abortion, you cannot make that mistake.
• If you really don't want to have a baby right now, you cannot make that mistake.
• Take time to contemplate this decision and understand the exact laws in your state before you have sex.

Every woman needs to know:
First: even if you don't want to have an abortion, you might be pressured into it. While you should ultimately get to decide whether to abort: your parents, boyfriend, friends, boss, pastor, etc may push you one way or the other. The best way to take care of your baby is with the support of everyone in your life. Choosing to go against them in this decision may cost you your boyfriend, your family, your job, or your religion.

Everyone needs to know:
You can control your risk of pregnancy and abortion but you must understand how.

• You can abstain from sex all together.
• You can also choose sexual contact that doesn't risk a pregnancy such as oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation, etc.
• You can use birth control. Using two methods is probably a good idea if you are very apposed to the idea of an abortion. Any use of birth control requires an incredible amount of trust and agreement with your partner. And please make sure you are using it correctly.

Sorry if this is a rant, but I think it's important. I plan on trusting you and letting you use your own agency to make sexual decisions. THAT'S A BIG JOB FOR YOU. I'm working hard to prepare you to be ready for it. Making a mistake because you didn't have the right information is something I never want to happen for you.

Love you so much,

Mama

Nonna Bruna

At most houses, knocking on the door will only get you a treat one day out of the year.

But two doors down from our house, Bruna's house is open for every-day-of-the-year, trick-or-treating. Stop by with a flower or a smile and come in for homemade biscotti, cookies, or ripe fruit. Drink it down with delicious whole milk and head on home with a chocolate in your pocket for later.

I love the ritual you have created, taking her something and bringing something home. It is an exchange of friendship and love, and it comes with a lot of sweet hugs and greetings of "Ciao coco."

I've tried many and Bruna hugs are the very BEST

Bruna is a special woman with an amazing story. She moved here from Italy pregnant, not knowing English, having no family close by (other than her husband and son), and almost no possessions. "Ma-ga-ret, not even a spoon. I didn't have a spoon!" I imagine her first years here were beyond any difficulty I have lived through. She had to build a new life, care for her children, and nurse back to health a husband who had been nearly worked to death in a forced labor camp during World War II.

She and Victor were here when we moved in and I am very sad to say Victor died many years ago. It is obvious that she still misses him every day. Together, they radiated love and happiness. Knowing them as newlyweds no doubt helped us see the potential in marital unity.

Now, Bruna is 91! She still takes care of her garden and cooks almost constantly for her clan of sons and their families.

YUMMMMMMMMM

Today, the treats are for me. Fresh takings from Bruna's beautiful garden. AND, she told me I look like a teenager in my new dress!

Of course she is lying, but boy do I feel great!

I am so inspired by this woman. And grateful to have her living so nearby.

Martha Beck wrote about finding mothering beyond biological parents when and where you need it.

"Commit to finding people who can offer you acceptance, nourishment, instruction and empowerment...though all mothers are limited, the force of motherhood is not. It surrounds us every day, in all sorts of guises, some predictable and ordinary, some startling and extraordinary. If you allow yourself to embrace it, I guarantee you'll find it waiting to embrace you."

I liked the idea before I had children and even more now when I am a mother. I DO care passionately about mothering you and want to do my very best. But not everything I do will be good for you. Not everyone of your mothering needs will be met by me.

So, I wish you many Bruna's and Victor's. They are around and well worth seeking out. And if you are extremely lucky, one might just come with homemade biscotti!

Love you,
Mama