Geekamama

Author Archives: Jessica Wallace


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So smart, and shiny too!

Just before Christmas I got a new phone, the HTC HD7.  Every cell phone I’ve had before now has been a tool for making phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and occasionally taking pictures.  I’d been content with this for years, and my iPod Touch filled the gap for when I needed a quick Sudoku game or email check.  But sometime last summer I started thinking that when my current phone wore out, it might be time to join the era of the smartphone.

I chose the HD7 for two reasons: my service provider (T-Mobile) carried it, and my workplace reimbursed its purchase.  I didn’t comparison-shop for the best plan or try out lots of different models, so I’m not the person to say whether this particular smartphone is definitively better than any other.  What I am is a brand new smartphone user, one who often doesn’t have both hands free to do things on the phone because I’m carrying multiple bags, or managing a small child, or driving to work.  (PSA: Washington State law prohibits driving while texting on a cell phone or talking without the use of a hands-free system.  So, y’know, don’t do that.)  I am merely someone switching from a “dumb” phone to a device that has the fancy bells and ringtones and requires a data plan.

So far? I’m loving it.

For the first couple of days I simply enjoyed the new-toy aspect of it.  But during our Christmas travels, I had a few “wow” moments that really drove home for me how a smartphone can make my life easier.

The first was just after we’d left the driveway.  My husband and I realized that we’d forgotten to call our hotel to reserve a crib reserved for that night.  We’d also forgotten to write down their phone number.  I launched Bing on my phone and typed in the hotel name.  I expected that I’d get a standard page of links, and that I’d have to scroll and click to find the phone number.  Instead, Bing popped up a contact card for the hotel, including a one-touch hotlink to dial the number directly from the contact page!  I was delighted.

Another neat moment happened on our return trip.  Kiddo was cranky after two days of car riding, and ripe for a diaper change.  I knew there was a rest area not too far ahead, but couldn’t remember whether it was twenty miles or forty.  With the Maps app I was able to pinpoint our position, search for “rest area” (it found three close by, including the one I was looking for) and check the distance from our current location.  Sure, our Garmin probably could have told us the same thing… if we could have remembered how to pull up that information on it without losing our current route data.

The ads for the Windows Phone 7 talk about how this OS was designed to make it easier to “glance and go,” so that you spend less time interacting with the device and more time interacting with the real world. While I can’t compare to the other smartphones they’re positioning themselves against, I have found that it’s much faster for me to triage new text messages and missed calls with this phone than it was with my old phone.  Dialing my frequent calls feels a little slower–I think it takes one click more than I’d like it to.  And I kept hanging up on people accidentally when I press the phone against my cheek, but that would be a hazard of any touchscreen phone.  Reviews and commentators have mentioned a few of the items this phone is missing, like the ability to view Flash websites (which I’m told is coming sometime this year) and basic cut-copy-paste functionality.  But in spite of those holes, I’ve found the HD7 to be extremely easy to use.  I don’t think I’ve looked at the manual or any how-to website since the day I bought it.

There’s plenty that I like about my new phone, but what I really love are the ways in which it brings useful things together like electronic chocolate and peanut butter.  Web search plus one-touch dialing.  GPS location plus directions lookup.  And my current favorite?  Well, that would be the one I had to use the other night.  We’d been out doing some evening errands, and on our way to pick up Kiddo from the babysitter I realized I’d misplaced my phone.  Crisis!  I revisited our stops after we collected the boy, but no one had seen it.  It might have been a miserable night, except that I’d added a Windows Live ID to the phone when I was setting up email accounts.  Once I got home I logged on to the Windows Phone website with that LiveID.  And sure enough…

Screenshot of Map it: See your phone's approximate location on a map

If only the rest of my life came with such guidance!


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An oink oink here, a moo moo there…

Kiddo has long been a fan of farm animals.  The book Moo, Baa, La La La was one of his first favorites, and he’s been pointing out tractors since before he could walk.  For Christmas, Santa brought him the Fisher-Price Little People Farm and Kiddo went straight for it as soon as he laid eyes on it.

Kiddo plays with his new farm

Now his love of all things Barnyard has spilled into his musical taste.  I don’t know when he first heard the song “Old McDonald Had a Farm” but he’s been requesting it by name–or rather, by chorus–every time the opportunity for a song arises.  No matter which other tune I start singing, I can barely get a line in before he interrupts with a stern “NO NO NO.”  If I pretend I don’t know which one he’s really after, he will eventually tell me “yah-yah-yo,”  which is his version of “E-I-E-I-O.”  Heaven help me if I try to get away with just one verse, because unless something really nifty distracts him, he’ll keep requesting it until either my voice or my collection of animals is exhausted.

This, I’m told, is normal for toddlers.  In a world that’s still very unpredictable to them, putting a familiar story or song on repeat is comforting for them because they know what’s coming next.  They feel confident when they can predict what’s on the next page.  (Which mean, I suppose, that I should pick a canonical order for those barn animals and their sounds.)

So I’ve been singing a lot of Old McDonald lately.  In the car on the way to and from daycare.  At night, to help him fall asleep.  On the weekends when we’re playing with his new See ‘n Say.  Here, there, everywhere.  But just when it was starting to get tedious, I figured out how to leverage it.  Yep, I’m not above bribing my son with a rendition of his favorite song.  “Sit down in your car seat, Kiddo, and we’ll sing Old McDonald!”  It works almost as well as goldfish crackers.


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I’m still here

It’s been almost two weeks since I last wrote in this blog.  Since that last post, I’ve had a birthday, spent a weekend puzzling, enjoyed some time with visiting family, and oh yeah, worked worked worked.  This has been a very busy month at my job and I’ve been having a hard time finding any spare moments to write.  I’ve got plenty of ideas brewing that pull from both my “geek” side and my “mama” side; now all I need is time to make those ideas into complete sentences.

So far, I think I’ve done all right with my resolution to be less self-critical.  (I almost added “but we’re only a couple of weeks into the year, after all.”  See how automatic it is for me to take myself down?  Still needs work.)  I’ve also made some good progress on a couple personal projects, and even managed to keep the house tidier than it has been in a long while.  I’ll talk about the projects and organization in another post, because I’m really pleased with how some of it has come out.

I started this writing project as an outlet for myself, and maybe a little bit because I read friends’ blogs and thought, “Hey, I could do that too!”  I had grand ideas about how often I would write, and what kinds of topics I would cover.  Most of those grand ideas went out the window before this blog was a month old.  But maybe that’s for the best.  In the past few weeks I’ve heard from some unexpected sources that they’ve been reading and really enjoying my writing, and it’s been such a boost, right when I really needed one.

So, in spite of my recent reticence, I really am still here, and plan to be here for quite some time.  Thank you, family and friends, for still being here too.


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A shortcut to an easier choice

As parents, the options available to us can be almost physically smothering.  How many blankets or cute little onesies will we need?  How much should we hang onto when he outgrows this size?  What should we offer for dinner tonight to ensure the correct balance of nutrition, variety, and recipient approval?  If you don’t find out what all the options are, you might overlook an important one, but spend too much time trying to gather all the facts and you end up drowning in research.  No wonder some of us feel overwhelmed.

Take the problem of coming up with a name.  When you think about it, naming a child is a huge responsibility.  You’re hanging a sign on this tiny little person that’s going to stamp their interactions with everyone they meet.  Every time they say “Hi, I’m –” they’re putting your selection on display.  And the range of options!  One book I had offered more than 40,000 possible names.  How on earth could we pick the right one?

Clearly, if we were going to have to live with ourselves and our son, my husband and I needed some way to narrow down the possibilities.  And so we came up with a rather arbitrary rule.  Both of our full names share a quirky characteristic.  We decided to restrict the potential name pool for our son to those names that would fit the same pattern.  And just that easily, our options dropped to a mere couple dozen.  Yes, we did end up taking a “short list” of 30 names to the hospital with us, but it was a lot shorter than it could have been, and the morning after our baby was born, he had a name–one that we’re all still quite happy with, a year and a half later.

Studies* have found that people are more satisfied with their choices when they have a smaller set of items from which to choose.  More options means a greater likelihood of buyer’s remorse, and of second-guessing yourself.  But sometimes there isn’t an easy or clear-cut way to reduce your options.  When faced with this problem, we occasionally have to fall back on the time-honored solution of simply Making Something Up.

I faced a similar quandary when I was sorting through outgrown baby clothes.  I wanted to hang on to some of them for sentimental or practical reasons, but we don’t have space for all the ones I had cute memories for.  My arbitrary rule was that I couldn’t keep more of any one size than would fit in the smallest of the storage boxes I’d picked out.  They aren’t very big boxes, but with that rule firmly in mind, I was able to cull down to only my favorite “keepers” and pass the rest along lightheartedly to friends with younger and smaller babies.

It’s actually rather freeing to realize that you don’t have to have a solid reason for deciding one way or the other–that it’s OK to pick something just because it’s more aesthetically pleasing to you somehow.  And if you’re the one making the rule, then you get to be the one who decides how close you need to come to the letter of the law.  I’ll confess, there were some clothing sizes where I exceeded my self-imposed quota, but since I had other boxes with extra space, I was ultimately able to make everything fit in the total space I’d allotted to myself.

When it comes down to it, the important things in the life of a baby are that he or she is getting the necessary food, warmth, sleep, and love.  Years from now, it probably won’t matter which brand of car seat young Junior rode around in, or whether you started solids with avocado, banana, or simple rice cereal.  I’ve found the time spent analyzing minute differences between options could also be spent playing with my Kiddo… and that’s one choice that’s not hard to make.

* Here are some sources describing this phenomenon:


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They don’t all have to be home runs

I’m very critical of myself and the work I do.  The bar I set to determine my own success is ten times higher than I’d ever expect from anyone else.  I know that setting this kind of expectation for myself is silly and can be self-defeating, yet I do it anyway.  At least I’m aware of it, right?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer.  Even back then I knew my strengths (some of them, anyway) and I knew this was something I was good at.  Maybe it came from all the reading I did as a kid, and being exposed to vocabulary and wordsmithery well above my grade level.  But I knew this: I was a good writer, and I had a good imagination.  At the same time, I was practical enough to know that you have to be really, really, REALLY good to make a living as a novelist.  (As an adult, having read plenty of books by certain authors who I won’t name, I’ll add “or really, really, really prolific.”)

When I realized that there was another way to earn a living by writing, I got very excited, and I embraced the idea of becoming a journalist–specifically, a newspaper reporter.  My enthusiasm carried me through high school and through most of my undergraduate degree, except that somewhere in there I got the idea that reporters have to be on call at all hours of the day and night, not unlike doctors and firefighters.  Not to mention the fact that the journalism world, at that time, was a) highly competitive, and b) not highly paying.  In high school I’d been a big fish in a small pond; in college, I was discovering that I was not the only big fish around, and that in fact there were several who were much bigger than me, and justifiably so.

I was saved from having to wrestle with the realities of doing what I loved versus doing what paid the bills, because my senior year of college was 1994-95, and this thing called the World Wide Web was really starting to become a Big Thing, and a couple of my good friends from my hometown were working on their computer science degrees.  The year after I graduated with my journalism degree, I found myself going back to college for a few non-degree graduate courses.  Before long, my professor had talked me into studying for a master’s degree.  Apparently writing wasn’t the only thing that I was good at.  So that’s how I ended up here, at this job, rather than somewhere in a newsroom.  I’m grateful, because this path led me to many other happy things as well, such as Husband and Kiddo.

But I never lost that passion for writing, and I really enjoy putting words together to make something interesting, something that means something to me and hopefully to others as well.  Most of my blog entries take me a long time to write, and most of them don’t get published right after I finish composing them.  I like to put a composition away for a little while and then come back and see if there’s anything I can tweak to make it just a little tighter.  Any typos or miswordings that need to be fixed.  Any long sentences (I do have an unfortunate tendency to write too-long sentences) that could be shortened or broken in half for easier reading.  Any parenthetical asides that would be better left out (because I use too many of those, too.)  In short, anything that could be made better… and that’s where I get into trouble.  That intense self-critical-ness (is that even a word?) and the constant striving for perfection tend to make me very nit-picky about what I write, and sometimes will hinder me from actually publishing whatever I’ve produced.

Last night, for example, I worked on a post for quite a while.  I’d actually written most of it last month, but was trying to find a way to tie it all together and wrap everything up with a neat conclusion, and finally get the darn thing out of my drafts folder.  It just wasn’t happening, and I was getting frustrated.  This morning I got to work, re-read it, and decided I didn’t like what I’d settled on last night.  But then I spent a little of my wake-up time (that period of adjustment where I mentally change gears from being a mom to being a software tester) reading other blogs, and something I’ve been hearing for years finally worked its way through to my full attention.

They don’t all have to be home runs.  They don’t even all have to be triples, or doubles, or hell, even be hits at all.  They don’t all have to be 750-word essays full of insights, illustrated with a cute and well-framed photo, and neatly wrapped up with a witty yet thoughtful conclusion.  They should all be good efforts, and they shouldn’t be anything that I’m ashamed to attach my name to, but they don’t all have to be perfect.

(My husband would be applauding me right now, if he were reading over my shoulder, because he’s been trying to get that through to me for years.)

It’s been years since I’ve made real New Year’s resolutions, and longer since I actually published them for others to see.  But I’ll put a stake into the ground this year.  For 2011, I’m going to try to be less self-critical, and less worried about how others see me.  I don’t know how to measure that, and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to stick to it.  I do know that when I lighten up, I have more fun with what I’m doing, and feel better about the results regardless of whether they fall short of my bar.  So here’s to a new year, and a new chance, and not waiting when I have something to say, and not always looking for the perfect words to leave the proper lasting impression.  Sometimes, imperfect is an okay thing to be.


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A step back in time

Last month, we celebrated Christmas by driving to Montana to visit my parents and siblings.  When we returned to Redmond, my husband and I took the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve off from work.  However, Kiddo’s daycare was still open and we decided to take advantage of the opportunity for a few kid-free days to get things done around the house.

The past few days have been a reminder of the first couple months of our marriage, before Kiddo came along.  They highlighted the little changes and adjustments we’ve made over the past 18 months, in some cases adaptions that we hadn’t even noticed until we didn’t need to do them.

Sleeping, for one.  I had to wake up to drop Kiddo off, but I crawled back between the covers when I got home.  I’d forgotten what it’s like to sleep until I woke up naturally, rather than being woken up by an alarm or a crying child.

Leaving the house later that afternoon was another big change.  It took us less than five minutes to transition from sitting on the couch to backing out of the garage.  I was almost amazed at how quickly we managed something that had become a fifteen-to-twenty minute process once a baby joined the party.

Eating at a restaurant was also a change.  I didn’t have to drag in a bunch of Kiddo’s accessories.  I could pay full attention to what my husband was saying, rather than dividing my attention between him and the management of a rookie eater.  We were even able to order dessert!

The house was a little more peaceful for a few hours of the day, and I was able to get more work done than usual.  It was a nice change.

All the same, at the end of the day when we picked up Kiddo from daycare, we remembered why we chose to give up that ease and freedom.  There are plenty of ways that our life has changed for the less convenient, but there are also plenty of ways it’s changed for the better.


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Intersect: a fresh way to say you’ve been where and done what

Last month a friend of mine pointed me to Intersect, a new web site for sharing stories.  After I spent a little time surfing around the site, reading stories and FAQs and getting a feel for the general vibe, I posted my first story.  And just like that, I was hooked.

The idea behind Intersect is straightforward: wouldn’t it be neat to share what happened at a specific time and/or location, without needing to know who else was there or make arrangements in advance?  Stories posted are tagged with a date and time.  The ones you post are added to your storyline; if you find someone else’s story about an event that you attended, like a concert or sporting event, you can borrow that story with a click of a button and incorporate it in your own timeline.  The site makes it easy to search for stories from an intersection of place and time, as well as to create your own from text, photos, videos, or any combination of the above.

I love Intersect CEO Peter Rinearson’s description of how the concept came about:

The idea for Intersect came to me while watching my daughter play lacrosse. I was among several parents shooting photos on the sidelines, and it struck me that other parents were getting shots of my daughter that I’d never see and I was capturing images that other parents might want. Wouldn’t it be great if we could trade photos in some really easy way, even with strangers, and without prearrangement?

It was May 10, 2007 at 4 p.m. The location was Mercer Lid Park, built above Interstate 90 on Mercer Island, a suburb of Seattle. Shouldn’t that be enough information to let me share with other people who were at that same intersection of time and place?

Intersect was born that day.

Stories can be shared with the general public, restricted to circles of Intersect members that you define, or kept private.  While they do require a place, you can be as specific or as vague as you are comfortable with sharing.  As they are posted, they are added to your storyline in correct chronological order, so you don’t need to go back later and juggle dates to make them all line up correctly.  Unlike Foursquare or Facebook Places, which tell people where you are right now, Intersect lets you say that you were somewhere last week, or last year; you don’t need to reveal your current location to people who might take advantage of the fact that you’re away from home.  The Intersect staff offer some tips for walking the line between keeping personal information private and sharing stories with an interested public.  On the other hand, if you don’t mind sharing events simultaneously as they unfold, there’s an app for that too.

With an abundance of websites where we can share media and personal news, why choose Intersect?  There are a number of features that I find really appealing.

I like how it’s easy to upload photos to your photo pool and create a story from them.  I also like the flexibility around how long a story can be.  Sometimes you want to write a longer story to accompany a photo; sometimes a sentence or two will suffice.  Facebook is pretty strong in the photo sharing department, but writing anything longer than a short caption feels clunky, and most of it ends up hidden.  Intersect provides a cleaner-feeling combination of story and exposition.  You can even assign different profile pictures to different points in time, and then see how you’ve changed over the years.

The way stories can connect across time and place is a neat concept to me, and Intersect makes this happen transparently.  No need to hope your Twitter hashtag catches on, or to set up a shared folder and rely on word of mouth to get everyone invited to it.

Scanning back through a friend’s storyline is easy to do.  One thing I enjoy doing when I start following a new blog or Twitter feed is skimming back over the past several dozen entries to get some background for what’s been going on in that person’s world.  With Twitter it’s hard to get to a specific point in time.  With Intersect, it’s trivial.

Initial view of a storyline's time selector

Time selector set to a specific range

The Intersect community so far has a welcoming, friendly feel, which is also a big draw for me.  People have commented on stories I’ve posted, sharing memories of their own about the event or place.  This really helps to foster a feeling of connection, underlining the core idea behind Intersect: we are connected to many people in many ways.

Here’s a fun video by cartoonist David Horsey summarizing what Intersect is all about:


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The penny finally drops

I was standing in line at the grocery store one night recently when Dennis DeYoung’s “Desert Moon” started playing. That album has the dubious honor of being the very first album I ever bought with my own money, at the tender age of 12. I brought it home and popped it in the tape deck of the living room stereo, and then went into the kitchen with my mom and tried to act all nonchalant, oh, we’re just listening to some music that I picked out, no big deal, not going to act like it’s important to me that anyone likes my musical tastes… I don’t remember anymore how my mom actually did react to it–I think I was trying hard not to see her reaction because I didn’t want to know if she disapproved.

For most of my growing-up years, the primary motivator behind my choices was whether Other People would approve of them.  I was a chunky kid with brains, glasses, and braces. I didn’t know how to do my hair or makeup and I had no sense of style.  Junior high girls can be some of the most insecure creatures on this planet, and often the only way we know how to build ourselves up is to pull down others.  We do things that make no sense to adults because we think those actions will make us look cooler to the boys we want to impress and the girls we want to surpass.

In my struggle to not be at the bottom of the social ladder, I had this idea that anything and everything I did during non-school hours was going to get back to the popular kids and give them fodder for talking behind my back.  It wasn’t supposed to be cool to have a close family life, so I tried to push it away.  I scowled in family photos, and I sequestered myself away from my parents and sisters rather than risk someone catching me actually having fun with them.  Heaven forbid!  I’d be ostracized forever.

Yet, at the same time that I wanted my classmates to approve of me, I also wanted my parents to approve of me, and that was a tricky tightrope to walk. I wanted to be the kid who could come home and talk with her mom about what happened in school and what this boy said and what it all meant.  But I always felt awkward doing so, because what if she thought my worries were dumb?  So I damped it down, tried to pretend it was No Big Thing, just something I was casually wondering about.  Even now I sometimes reflexively hold back a bit when talking about my life, because it’s crushing to be told that something you’re passionate about is stupid, or worse, uninteresting.

With the birth of my son, it was as if the lens through which I viewed my childhood was twisted ninety degrees. I gazed adoringly at my tiny newborn, thinking Oh my god, this little boy is less than a day old and I already love him so much that I can’t believe my heart can actually hold all that love.

Followed by Oh my god, THIS is how my mother feels about ME!

And then Oh my god, I was such a little shit!

I used to cringe when I looked back at my younger years because of all the ridiculous things I did. Now I cringe as I look back and realize how I unintentionally hurt people.

When I was in fifth grade, my mom made a maroon blazer for me to wear for school picture day. She bought the pattern and the fabric and stayed up late nights sewing it.  The night before pictures, the blazer wasn’t quite finished when I went to bed, but when I woke up, it was hanging on my bedroom door.  What were my first words?  Not “Yay, Mom, you finshed it, thank you!”  They were  “…but it doesn’t have any buttons on it.”

Someday I’m going to get my own time machine, and one of the first things I’m going to do is jump back to ten-year-old me and smack myself upside the head.

I don’t know where that blazer is now, but I might dig up one of the old school pictures and keep it on my dresser as a reminder.  Because one day, I’ll be on the other side of that conversation.  I’ll be the mom who just wants to make sure that her child is doing OK. He’ll be the one balancing peer approval with parental approval and unthinkingly saying things that hurt my feelings.

We are the product of our accumulated experiences, and if I hadn’t had all the twists and turns that I did, I wouldn’t be who I am today.  I like the person I’ve become, but I wish there was a way I could tell fifth-grade or eighth-grade or eleventh-grade me to worry less about what my classmates thought.  It’s OK to love and be loved by your family.  They’ll keep doing it, even if it’s uncool, so you might as well love them back.


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Taming my inner toddler

It’s started.  Kiddo’s easygoing first couple months of being a one-year-old are giving way to tantrums.  At the moment they’re kind of amusing, but I don’t expect I’ll see them that way forever.

For now, it seems to be little things that set him off, and there’s even some logic behind them.  The other night, he was playing with his shape sorter.  The circle and star are easy for him to fit through the holes, but that darn square!  There are only four ways to orient it, compared to the FIVE ways the star can be positioned!  And don’t even start about the triangle!  After a couple of unsuccessful tries I could see that he was getting upset, until finally he shoved aside all the remaining shapes and stormed off.  I tried to coax him back to work on it together with me, but he wouldn’t be consoled.  If he couldn’t get it easily, he’d rather do something else–anything else.

Suddenly I flashed back to earlier that week when I’d been struggling with a coding problem at work.  I knew what I needed to do to address it, but I could tell it was going to be a lot of work and I wasn’t sure my approach was the best way.  I was tired of scouring web pages, searching for a clearer explanation of how to do it.  Again and again I’d try something, only to find it not working the way I thought it would.  In frustration, I kept turning to something shinier and less stressful.  I got a lot of internet surfing done that afternoon, but not a lot of the work I was supposed to be doing.  I thought I’d long since grown out of tantrums, but it seems there’s a toddler lurking inside just waiting for a reason to throw a hissy fit.

Now that I’m an adult, I know how to get on top of my emotions, and most of the time when I get upset I can stop the feelings from overwhelming me.  But Kiddo is still very young and his coping skills are very immature (as expected at this age).  Some of the ways he deals with frustration are amusing to watch.  I try to stifle my giggles, because even worse than being frustrated is when you’re frustrated and others don’t take you seriously.  But sometimes, it’s hard to keep a straight face.

The other morning he was playing with his stuffed seahorse that plays music when you press on its belly.  Kiddo has gotten it to work before, but that morning he wasn’t pressing in the right place, and the music wouldn’t turn on.  In frustration he pushed the toy away and stood up, crying.  I tried to fix the problem by turning the music on and handing it back to him.  No luck; he was mad at the seahorse now and didn’t want to play with it.  In fact, he’d show that seahorse who was boss!  He grabbed it and threw in down into his toy basket.  Unfortunately, it bounced out of the basket and fell behind it, out of reach.

He stopped crying.  He turned to me with an inquisitive look, and calmly pointed to the toy, asking me to get it back for him.  Aha, I thought, he’s ready to play nicely again.  I retrieved it and handed it back.  Whereupon Kiddo picked up his tantrum right where he’d left off!

Then it clicked for me.  He didn’t want it back so he could play with it.  He wanted it back because he was trying to deal with these emotions, and the only way he could do so was to physically work them out.  Like when his push wagon got stuck and he couldn’t take it out on the wagon itself, so he started flinging around a nearby pile of shoes instead.  Or when he was upset about having to wait for his breakfast, and he wandered around the kitchen until he finally had to settle for just throwing himself down on the floor.

While I no longer hurl things (including myself) around anymore when I’m upset, I do understand how sometimes it’s not enough to sit down and get over it.  Sometime I too have to do something physical to bleed off the frustration and adrenaline that has built up in response to a situation.  Usually my husband bears the brunt of my verbal ranting, and that’s all it  takes for me to calm down again.  But I’ve got coping skills Kiddo doesn’t, including the ability to speak my feelings or type furiously in a chat window.

I fully expected that we would get to the tantrum stage eventually, and I figured we’d learn ways to cope with it.  What I didn’t expect was that my son’s tantrums would show me a few things about how I handle my own frustrations.


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Back away from the bubble wrap

One thing that’s been really hard for me as a new parent is trying not to be overprotective of my Precious Little Angelkins.  He’s still a little unstable on his feet, he’s young enough that he doesn’t really know how to share or play cooperatively with other kids, and all his emotions are right there on the surface barely under control.  All developmentally normal for a one-year-old, but something that seems ripe for disaster when slightly older kids get into the mix.

The first time we visited the play area at the mall, I followed Kiddo around, teetering between wanting to protect him from danger and wanting him to explore at his own pace.  To me it felt like the older kids were running around with no regard for smaller or slower kids.  I was sure he’d get pushed or trampled or picked on, or worse.  But none of that happened.  Sure, he got bumped a couple times, and he fell down once or twice, and I did have to assert when it was our turn on the slide.  I had a few moments of alarm, but Kiddo?  He had a great time.  He couldn’t wait to go back.

I had similar feelings of trepidation as we prepared for a week with relatives in California.  We would be spending most of our time at the home of Kiddo’s three older cousins, and all I could picture was a four-year-old and a pair of two-year-olds zooming around excitedly, not realizing that Kiddo wasn’t as agile as them, not understanding that he doesn’t understand all the social niceties yet.

Boy, was I mistaken!  There were only a couple incidents where a parent had to step in, and in general all the kids got along well and had fun together.  Kiddo was happy to toddle around after them and play with all their toys, and they were great about sharing them.  I’d definitely underestimated how the interactions would go.

Being around the older kids helped both Kiddo and I learn some new things.  He learned how to get up on his feet all by himself, he picked up several new words, and he’s gotten much better at eating with a spoon.  I discovered that reading bedtime stories is even more fun when the recipient can talk about the pictures with you, and that you never get too big for snuggles (thank goodness!)  And I might have learned to relax a bit and tone down the hovering.

My niece and nephews are living proof that kids can and do survive the falls and pushes and knocks on the head.  They’re also a reminder to me that the majority of the world really isn’t out to harm my little boy.  I may not be ready for total free-range motherhood, but I can at least stop trying to cushion every blow and smooth out every anticipated frustration.