Graceful Parenting in Austin

I’m not a gadget person and I don’t like to change phones, but I dream of having one set of contacts on-line and in my phone and the iPhone is so handsome, that I’m tempted, which is why Blue Eyes and I were at the AT&T store a few nights ago.Then, last night, Blue Eyes was teasing me about not turning my cell phone on because I had missed a call, while at the same time I was moving the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer and I came across, of all things, my cell phone…. Blue Eyes has an iPhone and he loves it, it’s like they are married. Well, not married, but if he were to date different electronics for awhile, and he had to pick one to stick with forever, it would be the iPhone. He loves the simplicity of the design, the minimalism of one device for many uses and having the Internet at any time. It can be annoying really, to say something casual, like “I wonder who won the UT game,” and in an instant, the answer appears.

I had enough of books about babies written by men who haven’t taken care of a baby full-time, around-the-clock (Sears, Ezzo and Weissbluth). Not that there isn’t a lot that I can learn from experts who have worked with a million babies, but I find that the get authoritative and absolute in a way that a Mom (or Dad) who has really been there doesn’t. So, in my search for another perspective, I found “Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom” in which Brett Paesel writes about real-life, ordinary-Mom troubles like how to do cocaine with your girlfriends and still get your toddler to pre-school the next morning…

Well, at least everything I wanted on January 1, 2006. As part of a church service, I wrote a note to myself about what I wanted for the year 2007:

to have a child
to find a balance
to write
to love my family…

Just every now and then, like today at Target, I’ll be feeling good and wearing a little makeup and my skinny jeans and people I don’t know will smile at me and I’ll smile back. I must be looking really good today, I’ll think. Then I’ll remember I’m wearing Baby Girl in her Baby Bjorn, facing out so she can see everything, and these smiles aren’t meant for me, they are for her. Oh, well, I still smile back.

Thanks for the Helen update, you might say, but what about the raccoons?Kurt Vonnegut introduces the idea of a karas in “Cat’s Cradle” (Kurt Vonnegut), a group of people you are linked to by fate throughout your life. This doesn’t include fake karases like Dallas Cowboy fans or Mommy Bloggers, but people who repeatedly show up in your life for no apparent reason. Like Darin Murphy, who I used to see play cover songs at the Gingerman in Houston fifteen years ago, who I interviewed on college radio when I moved to Austin, who sang at Grace’s service this past fall. Raccoons are also in my karas. I didn’t know from Cat’s Cradle that animals, or really, a kind of animal, could be in a karas, but my personal experience says it is true.

Baby Girl and I went to visit Helen yesterday (see original Helen and Helen update). Our visits are right out of the movie Groundhog Day, when the same day happens the same over and over…

Sometimes I think the only parenting advice I need for Baby Girl is One Hundred Kisses…

This title isn’t mind, it’s a friend of a friend’s who sent me the link to an article in The New York TImes explaining why it is bad to praise your kids too much. There are times when it is pretty obvious I’m making a parenting mistake, but now when I think I’m doing it right, I’m messing up again?The experts are funny and they don’t all agree and they change their mind and sometimes I just decide to disagree, but I read the article to see what they had to say and I think they might be right…

Jaime Lynn Spears, star of Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101 TV show and younger sister of Britney Spears, is pregnant at sixteen. Everyone has an opinion, mostly that this is ridiculous and her Mother should be shot. But my opinion is different. I may be the only Mom who is going to encourage my daughters to get knocked up when they are young…

My post Dear CWL, I’m Sorry We Missed Appelflappen Again was featured by Mir Kamin on BlogHer, a community of women bloggers. Check out the post to get a taste of some other Mom and family blogs she recommends.

She highlighted the part about making a date with my anger. I was thinking more about that. I’d like to make a date with my Joy more often. To think about it and ponder it and analyze it and nurture it so that it grows and gets stronger. (The same things I do when I’m on a date with my anger.) I want to give that kind of energy to the people I love and the parts of my life that are going well. Maybe we can even go steady in 2008.