Part Two: Rules

In a thread over at MDC on weird rules other families have, I came across such "inexplicable" rules as:

• No sitting on the bench. Kids should be up and playing at the park, not sitting.
• No singing at the dinner table.
• Use proper grammar.
• Don't dump all the crayons out of the box.
• Don't pour sand on the slide.
• No painting yourself.
• No running in the house.
• No jumping on the furniture.
• Don't put your feet on the dinner table.

Now, do I have all these rules? No. But each one of them makes sense to me. (Especially the third one. How could using proper grammar be bad?)

The really shocking thing was how many folks claimed to have few or no rules. Either they're lying through their teeth, or their kids are the little brats that are always terrorizing my kids (and the sort who made my own childhood miserable).

I understand the concept of nurturing your child, okay. I sort of understand the concept of gentle discipline, although not the practice. (I'm the same way with liberalism.)

I don't understand not having rules, or thinking that rules such as the ones above, which basically deal with self-respect and consideration for others, are "weird."

There was another thread on the same site which I didn't read, as well as one about the thread on another site I did read and participate in, wherein the discussion was all about opening packages in grocery stores to feed your kids out of (or feeding them from the produce section). I said in my response that I'd opened a package once, but now that I look back on it--this was back when my eldest was maybe a year old, so I don't remember it too well--I think what happened was she'd been playing with the box and chewed through it.

I've never fed my kids from food packages I haven't paid for. It's never been necessary, and of course necessary when it comes to this is a matter of perception. I am always cognizant of the fact that, until I pay for it, it isn't mine. Basic, right? I'm hearing, "Well, if it will keep my kid from flipping out." OK, if your kid is flipping out in the grocery store over food, either you didn't feed him before hand or he knows full well that starting to be a little brat will get him his way.

Even my 3.5-year-old understands "wait," and if my 21-month-old doesn't she certainly acts as if she does. They really like gummy worms, and if I grab a package during our shopping trip they're liable to want them right then. I tell them to wait. They wait. This works even when they're hungry. It's not rocket science, folks.



Of course, these are the some of the same women that come down on other mamas for claiming parenting success, because apparently it's not anything you do that dictates how your child behaves.

Yeah, right.

I don't really like John McCain, but this is still funny...

I don't fit in anywhere, really. (Part One.)

How often do you hear that politically? I've managed to define myself well in the political spectrum. I am a Conservative with strong libertarian leanings (but not Libertarian; their "drugs and abortions for everybody" platform isn't something I can get behind). There are a lot of us out there who believe in economic freedom and gay rights, thankyouverymuch.

I'm talking parenting here. I actually suspect I have kindred spirits in this arena as well, but I'm having a much harder time finding them.

Generally speaking, I define myself as practicing "attachment parenting," which is to say I breastfeed for a long time (I'm nursing my two youngest right now), my kids sleep with me when they're babies/toddlers, and, basically, I treat my children as little people deserving of respect, but not monarchs to whom I bow. (It's kind of saddening how often I see kids treated as either ornaments or their parents' boss, neither of which is healthy.)

I'm a member at MotheringDotCommune, which I enjoy by & large even though it's infested with liberals. My parenting & theirs tends to be pretty similar, and it's a good place to go relax when I'm starting to weird out the folks I know in real life or on other message boards.

But I am Not One of Them, and that's brought home to me again & again.

Two categories of examples:

Car safety. Rob & I were at Valero the other day and walked past a car that had one woman and five kids in it. None of the kids were over seven, and at least three of them weren't 0ver five, and not a damn one was in a seatbelt, much less a car seat or booster. Unrestrained kids = projectiles in a crash.

When I was 8 or so, I hit a windshield because my father didn't believe in seatbelts. It was at a low rate of speed and I was actually mostly OK (though it's been posited that my spinal deformity isn't so much scoliosis as the result of a traumatic accident, & that's the only incident that fits), but it was a distinctly unpleasant experience and so I am anal about seatbelts. After that accident I flat-out refused to get into another car without seatbelts, and so every classic car my father restored after that was retrofitted with seatbelts. (And he was an abusive SOB, so really no one else gets a by from me on this issue.)

Anyhow...I have a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old, and a 21-month-old. My eldest and middle daughters are in belt-positioning boosters. (Linda is too heavy for her carseat, and Bobbie is too tall for hers, & it was expiring anyway.) Esther is in a car seat with a 5-point harness. This is more than the law requires for Bobbie at least; she's old enough by State law to be in nothing more than a seatbelt. But she's not big enough for seatbelts to fit her properly, so she's in a booster, and will be until she is tall enough to go without. I really wanted to find a booster that converts from 5-point harness to belt-positioning, but my car's not the proper type.

When we first moved here, Bobbie and her cousin Jon Jr were both 4. We loaned Margaret our van (until it quit working). She babysits on occasion, and owned one backless booster that she used occasionally. When I found her driving around with the little girl she was babysitting in the booster & Jon in nothing but the van's belt, I went to Wal-Mart and bought another (backless, as it was all I could afford) booster seat for her to use. I think this worked well for about a month before she 'lost' them both.

She does respect my safety concerns, for the most part, and when she uses my station wagon Jon Jr and Cheyenne, who is about the size of a 5-year-old even though she's 8, go into the booster seats unless we're all going somewhere, & then my girls go in them & the other two are buckled into seatbelts. I've given up on converting her to full-time booster use.

I don't think anyone in my family really understands me on this, except my husband and my mother. My mother-in-law drives a PT Cruiser, which is theoretically a 5-seater but not really (most cars realistically seat one less person than they claim to). She volunteered to pick us up from the airport when we flew back from Hawaii. Now, there are five of us without adding her in, and at the time all three were in car seats, two of which are quite large. The numbers just don't work (and that's leaving aside the fact that she is a terrible driver). She thought we could just put the car seats for the older two in the back and drive holding two of them in our laps.

Um, no.

So here I am, committed to doing more than the bare minimum required by law (which, frankly, is more than probably half the people in my family do anyway). I think that taking reasonable safety precautions is only good sense. IE, I don't turn my kids around at six months, though I do turn them around at a year old.

But most of the people I talk to online seem to think I am careless with my children's safety. Before we put her in the booster seat, Bobbie was in a convertible car seat that was an overhead shield model (the kind that has the plastic you pull down to sit in front of them). It's a convertible car seat, and she was in it from birth (which, looking back, was probably less than ideal as she was a scrawny baby). It was never recalled--one reason I didn't buy an infant car seat is because of the number of recalls on them I saw where the seat would detach from the base & go airborne--and all car seats on the market meet certain safety standards. But I was told that I had to go out and buy a new one because they were death traps when compared to 5-point harness models, and by way of proof I was sent to a website that said (and I swear I am not making this up), "You wouldn't dream of buying anything less than a Toyota Sienna, would you?" and went on to compare overhead shield car seats to the "bottom-of-the-line" GMC minivan. (Nevermind that this horrible vehicle had an overall 4-star crash test rating, and better numbers in the chest area than the Sienna.)

But wait, there's more! There is the Cult of Britax. These are the folks who will tell you that having your child in anything less than a $400 car seat is tantamount to child endangerment. I can't count the number of times I've come across message board threads where mamas are told they must buy the Britax Regent, and hurled all sorts of invective at me for pointing out that my $120 Evenflo Triumph is actually rated higher in testing by Consumer Reports than their sacred Britax seats. (It is apparently heresy that the seats were tested both with & without the LATCH system being used to secure them, because of course no one drives a vehicle that predates this system. No one. And if you do, go out and get it installed, you baby killer!)

Even those folks have been one-upped, though. There's a video floating around the internet purportedly done by a mother whose son died in a car crash. His death, of course, was caused by being in a belt positioning booster seat rather than a Britax Regent, which is the only car seat that is a 5-point harness up to 100lbs. That's right, his booster seat killed him. This video, of course, was posted at every single parenting site I go to, and set all the hens a-twitter. Ohmigod, we have to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on this car seat right now because it is the only thing that will save my kid's life!

Meanwhile, here I am taking reasonable safety precautions, as recommended by the NHTSA. (Do the folks who let their kidlets bounce around totally unrestrained think they're being safe? Or do they not think at all?) I'd have my children in Regents if I could afford them, but the unfortunate truth is that they won't fit in my car. I mean, there is seriously no way I could fit three large car seats abreast in my station wagon. I barely fit two medium-sized car seats & one smallish one.

Then again, if I could afford to drop $1200 on car seats, I could probably afford a nicer vehicle. Catch-22, I suppose.

Part two will be later on; this is a very long post. I don't like long posts unless they're broken up with pictures. I'm not going to go back and slap 'em in willy-nilly, but I will leave y'all with another Random Kid Picture:
(This is Esther, whom the fine folks at Beech-Nut think might need to lose weight.)

Is Esther at a healthy weight?

That was the title of an e-mail I received from Beech-Nut. The baby food folks, not the chewing tobacco folks. I got on their mailing list when I signed up for one of their free sample things, which in this case was a cute little bowl I got last week.

This is a partial text:

Tips for your 21-Month-Old

What is Esther getting in to today?
As a 21-month-old toddler, your little one is probably expressing
lots of curiosity and many opinions about food. The most
important thing to remember is that they're getting all the
vitamins and nutrients they need to grow strong, but not too many
calories. As childhood obesity becomes an issue, you'll want to
be mindful of serving sizes and what you're serving.


FOCUS ON FEEDING
Is Your Toddler Tipping the Scale?
If your toddler is already overweight, you shouldn't
automatically think "diet." There are some alternative ways to
bring the scale back within a normal range.

Ah, thanks but no thanks. My baby is 21 months old. There's no such thing as overweight for a 21 month old, in my experience.

Oh, I am certain that there is an "ideal" weight range for Esther, the same as there is for me. But I have no reason to think that baby weight ranges are any more connected to reality than the same thing for adults. In fact, I have a pretty good reason to think they're bupkis. See, for the longest time pediatricians have been using growth charts provided by the formula companies. These growth charts were formulated using size & growth rates of white, middle class formula-fed babies in the 1950s.

Breastfed babies have a different growth pattern than formula fed babies. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that breastfed babies are fed to hunger, & formula fed babies are typically given a set amount in a bottle. These growth charts, which bear no connection to a breastfed baby's reality, have been used to "prove" to more than one mama that she wasn't adequately able to feed her baby, but I digress.

My point isn't so much these growth charts as it is how offensive I find even the suggestion that my baby might be fat and need to lose weight. Oh, they are careful to avoid the word diet, but let's not be coy. This is nothing more than introducing paranoia about being the "right" size at a very early age. It is mind-boggling. OK, it isn't, but it should be. I should be surprised that someone thinks it's a good idea to e-mail God only knows how many people and encourage them to obsess about what their toddler--most of these kids aren't even potty trained yet--weighs.

This isn't going to help anyone. This isn't going to make one single person healthier. All it's going to do is help make parenting even more shallow, and more likely than not add to girls' obsession about weighing little enough.

I refuse to be a part of this.

Just a thought

When you are dark-haired and -skinned, and wearing black clothes, perhaps walking down the center of the road in the middle of the night is not a good thing. Even if you are wearing silver athletic shoes.

That probably wasn't someone from the trailer park, but someone from the projects behind the trailer park.

True story:

Last summer, when we were new here, I was being driven crazy by very loud music coming from somewhere. We ruled out its genesis being here in the trailer park, and so we brilliantly decided to go for a drive to try to find out where it was coming from.

We wound up in the subdivision behind where we live. We are deceptively close to one of the nicest suburbs of San Antonio; it's very hard to tell where it ends and the projects begin. It was late at night and there were virtually no streetlights, so we got very lost, but we eventually found that one of the townhouses had a live band in the back yard. Seriously. There was a party complete with live band in the projects. I don't get it (but I'm thinking some folks are worse at money management than I!).

Anyhow, we went home & Rob called the sheriff's department to complain about the party & see if anything could be done. See, there's a noise ordinance in San Antonio, but we're right outside the city limits. Literally across the street is SA, but we're just Bexar county. No noise ordinance here, but they'll go out & say something to folks if it's a party getting rowdy (and we discovered, by the by, that several other folks had apparently called to make the same complaint).

Well, Rob told the fellow who answered that we'd gone driving around to try to find an address, but the best we'd been able to come up with was a street name. The response shocked us. "Oh, you went back into _____? You're brave. Don't do that again."

Um, yes, Deputy. We'll be taking your advice.

I love financial gurus.

I suck with money. I'll admit that right from the start. If I didn't suck with money, this blog would be called Country Living Paradise, or Windcrest Paradise, not Trailer Park Paradise. (Everyone else living here sucks with money too. No one wants to live in a trailer park. No one sane, anyhow.)

I'm smart enough, however, to realize I need to reform my ways. Spend less on Diet Pepsi, quit eating out, etc. Stretch dimes into dollars like my aunt did. (Not like my mom did. My mom spent the money on nonessentials and got the utilities turned off & us kicked out of wherever we were living for nonpayment of the rent.) Being a bookworm by nature, I turn to books to get financial advice.

Let's just say I haven't been impressed yet.

Probably my favorite is Dave Ramsey. He's the Grand High Poobah of financial independence. He's got a website, you know. His website has a store. He'll sell you lots of stuff to help you not spend money. Think about that for a second. Think really hard.

Then think some more. Ramsey's big thing is an envelope system. Apparently, he doesn't trust banks. You're supposed to take all your money and divide it up into different envelopes and then spend only what's in that envelope for stuff. A smart idea, perhaps, if you leave aside the fact that there are not a lot of rich people who stuff all their cash in envelopes. But this is what bugs me about Dave Ramsey:
This is his Designer Envelope System, which you can buy from his online store for only twenty dollars plus shipping.

Perhaps it's just me, but I think that if you're going out and buying a Designer Envelope System, you're sort of missing the point of frugality.

It is because of things like this, as well as the relatively high cost of his products (I cannot, frankly, afford $259 for his at-home Financial Peace study system--I didn't pay that damned much for my Weight Watchers kit back in the day), that I mistrust Dave Ramsey as a personal finance guru. I'm all for capitalism, but damn. Be honest about making money off the backs of the stupid, will you? Don't pretend you're helping folks cure poor spending habits and then encourage them to spend money on stupid shit like fancy "envelopes."

By and large, I've had issues with some or all of the frugal living advice I've come across. I remember one website that was filled with frugal ways to make your own dryer sheets. Nowhere was it mentioned that it's one hell of a lot cheaper to string a clothesline. (You don't need fabric softener for line dried clothes.)

Years ago, when reading a copy of The Complete Tightwad Gazette I'd checked out of the library, I came across an article by the Frugal Zealot herself, Amy Dacyczyn, wherein she said she'd received many tips over the years for homemade baby formula. She refused to print any of them because a) they weren't adequately nutritious (which could be said for commercial formula, but I digress) and b) it doesn't get any cheaper than breastfeeding.

There are a lot of people out there as dumb with money as I. The difference is that I'm not out there dictating to other folks how they should save money. I'm just trying to find my way. I need to make $167 to pay for the background check and admission fee for the nursing school I'm trying to get into. I have $59.22 in my PayPal account. That means I've got $107.78 to go. I'll let you know how I progress, and how I make any money I make. (I'm still looking for a job.)

I'll leave you with one final thought:

I hate dogs.

I'd say that it's equivalent to telling people I'm Hitler, but I've heard tell Hitler loved dogs.

Anyway, I hate dogs. I used to merely dislike them, but after more than a year of living in Hawaii next to folks who'd throw their dog outside whenever it started barking (and it barked a lot), thereby waking my sick and pregnant self up at all hours of the morning, I grew to hate them. It's gotten worse in the trailer park, as for a long time there the folks on both sides of us had dogs. Now the pit bulls I mentioned in my first post seem to be gone, but the three mutts on the other side are still there, and still filling my nights with barking at least three times a week.

There is one thing I hate more than dogs, though, and that is irresponsible dog owners. Do I really need to tell you that we've got more than our fair share of those in the trailer park?

There's a family catty-corner to us that are the nominal owners of a very stupid brown dog. Their ownership doesn't seem to extend towards actually feeding this dog, given how often she steals the food we put out for the cat that's sort of ours (I say sort of as he really belongs to someone else, but we feed him much more often than they do).

Anyway, this beloved family pet had a litter of puppies under the abandoned trailer next door. Nine puppies. Which sometime yesterday she moved under my station wagon, apparently, as Maggie told me she pulled them out into the open. They were back under there today.

Ah, but her owners, her owners love her. They put a Bill Miller's tea bucket filled with water under the back of my car for her. How wonderful of them to realize that my car, which I drive multiple times on the average day, is the perfect, safest place for ten dogs.

I hate people.

I, Maggie, and her two older sons pulled the puppies out from under my car and moved them to underneath our van, which is a big green lawn ornament until we replace the oil pump (c'mon, this is a trailer park, of course we have a nonworking vehicle as a lawn ornament). Hopefully the mama will leave them there.

A Big Thank-You to San Antonio's Finest

I done went today and paid my property taxes. Thanks so much, y'all, for not stopping me and giving me a ticket. I really appreciate that. I know there was a time when folks were regularly ticketed for expired registration. I'm not surprised that those days are gone, considering that folks now break the noise ordinance with impunity and I have to be careful not to get hit by drivers using the shoulder of the road as a right turn lane. I'm just glad I benefited from your lowered standards.

I'm really glad we no longer have our stickers on our license plates. When we lived in Connecticut, we had our license plates stolen off the car while we were in a restaurant eating lunch (Blimpie's, & we never went back). I know someone in the trailer park would lift our plates if they'd get anything out of it.

I still owe retribution to the folks who stole my baby swing.

I don't think they come here.

I was just about to post a comment over on Matt G's blog (by the way, I'll say right off the bat that every time I read the address bar over there I automatically respond, "And also with you") about how I haven't seen Mormon missionaries, except from a distance, in years.

I was going to say, "I don't think they come into this trailer park," but then I realized I'd have to explain the trailer park, and that's not the sort of thing you can really do in the comments area of someone else's blog.

It's true, though. They don't come into this trailer park. I know that because I saw some of them biking by as I was driving towards the street the other day, and I don't think it was my imagination that they pedaled a little faster to go by.

I can't blame 'em. If it wasn't for the fact that I live here, I'd never come into this trailer park either.

The trailer right next door to ours has black plastic over two different big roof holes. One front, one back, so at least it has a uniform sort of appearance. No one lives there anymore, but they left their pit bulls behind to guard it, or at least they did for a while. (I haven't heard any barking from them lately.) I stepped out my door last week to see a black female pit bull standing at the bottom of my stairs and growling; I'm pretty sure it was theirs.

Nor is she the trailer park's only pit bull. Not by far. There's some folks up near the front who have three or four, including one former fighting dog that was bulked up on steroids. When the male gets loose they have to go after him with a BB gun to get him back in the yard. It's joyous.

(And, of course, this doesn't even touch on the swamp that used to be our front yard...)

***

Random kid pic: