More Than Four Sides

Category: Parenting

  • Leaving town…

    I’m going out of town for three whole days. This is the second time that I’ve left the boys since we brought them home, and J is not liking it at all (S is so independent, he minds less, although he did express the odd concern that I might be flying to somewhere unsafe, i.e.…

  • Africa! Ethiopia!!

    I’ve been immersed in the connection of our kids to the continent of Africa, for the past month or so. Of course, they are never not connected to their place of birth, but, in the same way that my own connection to Sri Lanka, the birthplace of my father, has ebbed and flowed in my…

  • The Idea of Him

    When I met him in the first few weeks of my freshman year of college in the depths of the rural midwest, he was wearing a dashiki shirt and sandals made from old tire rubber, I thought I’d met my soulmate. He was six and a half feet tall, with strawberry blond hair, and grew…

  • Switching seats

    For a long time now, S has claimed the passenger side seat, and J gets the seat right behind me. This arrangement allowed me to have conversations with S when J wasn’t yet talking, and S and I could make eye contact (or, at least, he could see part of my face while I was…

  • ‘Competitive Mindfulness’

    I’m smiling, as I read this article posted on FaceBook by a friend: Against ‘Competitive Mindfulness’ | Child Mind Institute. I reminds me of my first yoga teacher, who introduced me to Iyengar yoga when I was in college at University of California Santa Cruz (yes, the Banana Slug school, but we didn’t have the…

  • Individual attention

    The anniversary of our “gotcha day” for our boys is just around the corner, and it’s a great time for reflection on parenting. My first time around, as a mom, with one easy-going daughter, I never had to worry about dividing my time between siblings – all my parenting time was hers. Now, with two…

  • Spirit Week

    This week at S’s school is spirit week. Every day the kids are supposed to wear specific clothes, like: pajama day, wear a certain color and Tuesday was fancy clothes day. I loathed spirit week when I was growing up – and i don’t remember having such activities in elementary school. The most we had…

  • Mr Anxiety

    I’m sitting in a small room, watching my anxious 5-yr-old mixing up the batter for Chechebsa, a traditional Ethiopian pancake eaten for breakfast. Yesterday, Dad took it screaming child to participate in his age group’s (the Rabbits) activities, and he got stuck all morning, firmly glued by the hand to our son. This morning, it’s…

  • Providing an anchor, an invisible rope

    “…my eye beams a rope around her, because I will jump in—splash!—and rescue her the moment she’s in difficulty.  And then she’s twelve years old, self-conscious in a modest navy sports swimsuit, …[but] she’s still the little girl in the pink-and-orange flowery swimming costume to me, and I still have my invisible rope around her…

  • Reckless parenting

    Parenting in the 21st century (in the US) is full of caution, supervision and anxiety. No one could have imagined the term “helicopter parents” 50 years ago. My parents were both incredibly bright and gifted graduate students when they met, married, and started a family. My mother was very anxious and cautious in her parenting…