Part of my problem is that I am a bit of a perfectionist sometimes when it comes to writing. My university training has me thinking that I should not put my writing out there without careful thought as to argument, organization and proofreading. When it comes to parenting, however, I am a big fan of "good enough," as in, yeah the baby has cereal in his hair and his ear, but we have to get the other two to school so good-enough!
I am going to try to apply my good enough philosophy to my writing this evening in order to get down the quick and dirty version of all the potential blog posts floating around in my head these days...
1. For Amy's birthday party, we visited a local mega-theatre-plex for their birthday party special. You get a movie, popcorn, a drink, and a meal in the party room afterward. We wanted to see Fantastic Mr. Fox, but couldn't so we settled on Disney's A Christmas Carol.
This movie was TERRIFYING. Completely unsuitable for a group of sweet little six year old girls. I can't imagine who the marketers think will go and see this movie (besides morons like me). I get it that Dickens can be a little creepy, but the movie trailer we saw online was very "Disneyfied." The movie itself was so frightening that I marched them all out part way through and spent an extra hour in the party room trying to play Musical Chairs without music and Simon Says. I was looking for an easy birthday party, but truthfully it would have been easier to just host the thing at my house. Lesson learned.
2. Amy, poor Amy, is such a middle child that I didn't even remember to bring the camera to her birthday party that was a complete and total flop anyway. Nice parenting.
3. On a totally different subject, I'd like to know a whole lot more about the specifics around implementing all-day kindergarten in this province. I've read the BC Ministry of Education's stuff on the implementation process and I just don't see how this is going to work. It's EXPENSIVE to outfit a kindergarten classroom with all the developmentally appropriate learning materials and manipulatives. It's EXPENSIVE to provide all the additional human resources needed; theoretically we'll need twice as many Kindergarten teachers as we have now. The benefits to children at risk are well documented, but the benefits are minimal to so-called normal children. From a teacher's perspective, I am dubious as the government barely seems to want to fund education as it is (school closures, districts forced to make due with less...less specialty teachers, fewer teacher librarians, fewer education assistants, the list goes on). It seems like a vote getting grab to me, designed to suck up to parents who don't want to deal with the headache of arranging daycare around a half day of school; kindergarten is not daycare! As a parent, I would not have felt very good about putting my first two children in school all day at the ages of four and five. As it is, they were asleep on their feet for the first month of Grade One! I could go on and on about all this...let's just say that my knee-jerk reaction to this proposal is HUH?! and upon further consideration, I find myself seriously skeptical about the whole thing.
4. Had a baking exchange at my house this weekend. Yeah, this really deserves another blog post unto itself...tomorrow.
5. My mom recently had a milestone birthday so today we went to see Stuart McLean's Vinyl Cafe Christmas. It was excellent! Warm, funny, entertaining without the snark so prevalent in many comedians' shows these days. There was also wonderful music by Jill Barber and Matt Andersen. Man, that dude can SING! All in all a wonderful afternoon for my wonderful mother.
6. Some sort of stomach virus I have tagged "Random Malaise" struck at our house with a vengeance this past week. Here's a hot enviro-tip for you: those small plastic pails they serve the kids' popcorn in make perfect barf buckets. I hope you don't have occasion to try this out in your home, but file it away in your brain just in case.
7. Baby sleep. Look for this to be a recurring theme in upcoming blog posts. As in, Gavin, my previously perfectly easy baby, has suddenly developed separation anxiety and any type of sleep that doesn't involve rocking in my arms or nursing provokes screaming of the sort usually associated with banshees. So the whole "getting to sleep" process has become verrrry interesting. More on that later this week. Also, I can no longer type while nursing because Gavin wants in on the computer action; this is really cutting into my blog time. Gasp - what will happen when I go back to work?!
That's all for this evening. More tomorrow. IF I can get Gavin to nap.
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