Halloween 2011 - From Garage to Party Palace

In the week before Halloween we start to get serious about getting ready for the party. This year I tried something new and decided to host the celebration in our garage. The weather had been pretty "iffy" throughout October and I didn't relish the prospect of having dozens of sugared up children confined to the house if it should happen to rain on the night. Also I had decided to get a bounce house. As the kids get older it becomes a bit more challenging to entertain them - though sometimes as adults I think we over stress about that one and they really would have a ball of a time just being with their friends. Anyway - the only place a commercial bounce house will fit at my house is in the drive way - and that naturally led us to having the party in the garage so all the adults could be up the front of the house keeping an eye on the kids and making sure they were well back from the road etc. etc....

So - the garage had to be emptied (that was kind of cathartic and I so liked it when I got all the "junk" that lived there out of it that I haven't yet put the "junk" back and I'm really reconsidering just how much of it I actually need.) Anything that couldn't be moved had to be incorporated into the party decorations and the whole space had to take on a "spooky but not too scary" vibe.

Here's what I came up with......

The Christmas nutcracker got the mommy treatment.....and windows were covered with spooky curtains

 The bike which hangs upside down from the ceiling scored a skeleton "clown" as a rider with a Gymbo stuffed doll riding shotgun. Liam's little bike and his scooter went on top of the cabinet with a couple of other skeletons in clown outfits riding along....

 Hay bales for seating at the party table. Lots of netting hanging from the ceiling. A few chairs for the adults (and the kids that didn't want to sit on the hay bales - they were a little prickly.) Lots of decals and card board cutouts on the walls - some purple and orange twinkly lights to add some spooky atmosphere. Barrels always can be used as props and a good collection of dangling spiders, rubber mice, and decorated craft pumpkins....

Halloween 2011 - The Indoor Decorations

As the month of October progresses the decorations start to pop up everywhere throughout the house.

The powder room...

The entry foyer...

And all throughout the house.....

Liam loves playing with the decorations. For the entire month he has a whole houseful of special "toys" that are both familiar - because they come out every year - and special - because they only come out once a year. Each year you add a few new items and it doesn't take long before you have quite the collection! And I like it that it puts the focus of the holiday on something other than candy...

Halloween 2011 Outdoor Decorations

 Ok - now I finally have some time on my hands to get back to my daily blog practice I want to catch up on what we've been up to for the last couple of months. Our Big Halloween Bash was great fun - worth all the effort to see the kids having such a fun time. A great party is all in the details - and that means starting well in advance and being prepared to use your creativity to work around limitations in everything else - the budget, the location, the weather, etc. etc.

We start prepping for Halloween with our outdoor decorations - they go up in early October. When the summer flowers in the front garden bed are spent - it lies fallow for a while until it can become a spooky graveyard.

Then Helga - the witch - makes her appearance in our coconut tree...

A couple of unlikely characters take up residence at a cocktail party in the front entryway.

And pumpkins start appearing everywhere....

The emphasis is on fun - and so I try and incorporate the traditional spooky Halloween elements but in ways that elicit smiles from the Kindergarten set. Nothing too ghoulish and lots of touches of humor (look for the spook with the toothbrush!) As I said - it's all about the details and adding an original twist to those details.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Where is the line between not raising your child to be a selfish person and being one yourself?

I think it may be more a tightrope than a line and Liam and I seem to walk it every weekend and fall of it about 3 o’clock on Sunday. It’s our witching hour, the trough of our weekly cycle, our low point.

I know this – I don’t like it and yet somehow I rarely seem to be able to prevent us from ending up there, which just frustrates the hell out of me because I know that it should be the exact opposite. It should be Monday morning you dread, right? Not Sunday afternoon.

For the first eight months of Liam’s life my beautiful niece Dominique lived with us – and so Sunday’s were the kind of day I’ve always believed they should be – fewer responsibilities and more time for fun and relaxation. But when she left and it became just Liam and me on the weekends, the departure of his nanny on Friday afternoon began a 50 to 60 hour stretch when it really was just him and me. I once saw another mother’s Facebook post in which she admitted that she hated the weekends and I felt the kind of horror that you do when someone has given voice to an unspeakable truth. To say that the time you spend alone with your child is not the most precious time of all seems like violating a basic tenet of good mothering. But six years in to my single parent experience I can still say that by the time we are hitting 40+hours of each other’s company – things are getting tense.

I know that much of the problem is based in my personality. I’m a loner, who lives mostly in my head and who always has a long list of things on my ‘to do’ list. I push at life – and by the weekend there usually ain’t a whole lot of energy left. Now that I think back to what weekends were like before Liam came along I can see that they were time I gave to myself. More often than not I didn’t engage with the rest of the world and many times I didn’t even venture outside for at least one whole day. It was my time to unplug, to destress, to stop. To recharge.

Happy Halloween

Halloween's not till tomorrow - but already we've had so much fun - and too much candy!!

Next time you throw away a plastic bottle....

Next time you throw away a plastic bottle - pause for a moment and consider if there is something better that can be done with it.....

All I Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten

It's been an age since I posted. This is a busy time of year for me. That means the juggle is even more hectic than usual and you just don't get to do all the things you would like to do.

One of the things that I didn't get to do was attend Liam's kindergarten curriculum night last week. I was sorry to have missed it for a number of reasons. Last year (pre-K 4) I really didn't have any idea what curriculum night was supposed to do and I was very new to the whole issue of how I as a parent am supposed to relate to the school I send my child to. This year I have more complete views on both of those things and I have spent some time educating myself on the whole issue of what should be covered in a core curriculum. There is as little consensus on this as there is on the whole question of what environment children learn best in. If you're interested - I found the book "What Your Kindergartner Needs To Know" by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and John Holdren to be a great resource. It fits with my growing sense of how involved I need to be in Liam's education in order for it to be as fully rounded as I want it to be.

That doesn't mean I'm looking to front up at school and start double guessing the teacher. One of the most interesting aspects of last year was that Liam was put in a class with a teacher that was widely renowned as being God's gift to children - and for several months I didn't like her at all. On one of my first interactions with her I took Liam to class and watched as she told him his "sleep toy" was too big and he should have brought a smaller one that would fit in his cubby. He was so excited to bring that toy because it was a gift from someone special and her tone had his lip trembling and his eyes leaking within seconds. The next week I spent some time talking with the teacher's aide as I dropped Liam off, only to have her interupt and admonish the aide from the back of the room. She was altogether so unfriendly at drop off time that I stopped even trying to interact with her. At that point I thought "well she's certainly something that begins with B but it's not brilliant."

But as the year went on I saw what a wonderful teacher she was and how Liam was blossoming under her instruction and learning about things I never would have expected to see in a pre-K curriculum. Modern art, Greek mythology, French history. I also learned that my one on one interactions with my son are nothing like what a teacher who was 16 5-year olds in a class is dealing with. By most measures Liam is an extremely easy going kid - that's not true of all of them. A key aspect of what kids learn in school is how to operate effectively in group situations. And as a parent I learned that what I initially think of the teacher is far less important than I once thought.

But that doesn't mean the teacher is always right - or that you can abdicate responsibility for your child's education to any teacher or any school and then take the approach of criticizing when it is not what you want. Hence my greater interest in understanding exactly what the class will be covering in the pre-K curriculum. A few weeks back the mother of another child in Liam's class ran into me at a local store and asked what I thought about the educational content of an upcoming field trip. She clearly did not see the value of it and it overlaid a more general lack of comfort with the whole school approach to education. (Liam's school is at the crunchy granola, whole child, non-competitive end of the spectrum.) To be honest I hadn't even thought about the field trip but I am an advocate of the "learning through play" concept and the need for shcool to be fun and engaging for 5 year olds if it is to instill a lifelong love of learning.

And so I was happy when the following paper was included in the packet of information that Liam's teacher sent home because I missed curriculum night. It doesn't cover the content of the year's lessons - but I think it describes the approach pretty effectively. I like the distinction between wisdom and knowledge. Remember - knowledge is recognizing that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Wisdom is knowing you still don't put it in fruit salad.