Nesting, second installment

Above is an owl hanger from Ikea that I love. We hung it up behind Addie's door to hang her PJs during the day and her clothes during the night. There is even a little shelf for her bows. That way we get stuff off the bed so she can eventually sleep on it. We haven't tried again since our last attempt in which she opened all the doors and left her room. We value our alone time when she's sleeping too much.

Since my husband and I started dating, we have always had extremely generous people in our lives at well-placed moments who really show us God's love. That is the case of our friend who made us this diaper changer cover. I asked her for help, since I can't sew and she has a sewing machine, innocently thinking it would take an hour or two at most. It was a 9-5 work day for her. But they turned out beautifully. They are soft, match the diaper box on the wall and have matching cloths to put on top and change more frequently.

The same friend also helped me hem some cloth to make our spring/summer table runner. Now it is complete with our summer centerpiece, which includes actual sand and shells from the beach..

Thanks Helena! ;)

What is "socialization"?

I have been thinking a lot about socialization. Wait, that's an understatement. The thing that can most make me fall into a deep pit of depression on any given day is socialization. This is, Addie's socialization... friends or lack thereof... and ours, because I ultimately realize that our childrens' socialization flows from ours.

I have loved posts tagged on Penelope Trunk's blog with socialization. This is an issue that comes up a lot for homeschoolers, which is her case. I think here in Portugal this issue is even more acute and starts to come up even before school age, because society is set up differently than in the US. People don't associate as much by common interest, as Penelope mentions and as they do in the States. Honestly, I don't think people even associate as much. Penelope Trunk talks a lot about school preparing you for factory-type work and modern school being babysitting while parents are in factories. I would say there is more "factory mentality" in Portugal than in the US. People live for their jobs and associate with their coworkers. Or close family. And they assume if their baby is in daycare or their kid is in school, they will have friends and be happy. 

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but this is something I struggle with greatly as I try to set up playdates with our neighbors in a world where playdates don't really exist. And people obviously think I'm weird. And I presume it will only get worse because she is getting to the age (three) when EVERY PORTUGUESE CHILD MUST BE IN DAYCARE OR ELSE, as even our pediatrician has warned us about. "Medically" speaking, of course. And then no one will be interested in playdates anymore because "they have school".

Here are some of my favorite socialization quotes from the aforementioned blog:

"For example, Smith points out that 2.7 million kids are on medication for attention disorders, and this is largely the result of school needing to socialize kids (boys, mostly) who do not fit into the mold of what kids should be doing all day (to prepare for factory work, mostly, but that’s another story).
Also, Smith links to data about how homeschooled kids are more likely to vote and participate in community service. Which seem like fine indicators of whether someone is attached to society at large.
And then I started thinking that when people talk about socialization, they tend to talk about social skills. But we know from Asperger’s research that social skills are innate. Each of us is born knowing how to pick up social skills, and if you are not able to pick up social skills by osmosis then you have a brain disorder." (from here)

"In school, friends are a function of proximity (the social psychology term for this relationship is propinquity.) If you put kids in a classroom and then tell them they have to wait for recess, they have to be quiet for math, they have to line up, and so on, then the kids have shared problems: how to get through stuff that they don’t like.
The same is true of college: Kids are in a dorm spending most of their time not doing homework. They are hanging out together.
Then comes adult life with new cities for new jobs and they have no idea how to make a friend that is based on interests rather than proximity. They have no idea how to make a friend by appointment. But that is actually how people have friends in adult life. Which is most of their life.
So how homeschooled kids make friends is how people make friends in the real world: by common interest. First you have to identify your interests and then you have to identify someone who shares those interests. And then you do that special thing with that person. It’s fun and lucky if you can do a wide range of other things with that person as well. That is part of the process of discovering each other." (from here)

"We would not have been able to handle any of this if we had to navigate life around school. There are so many aspects to building a friendship. One aspect is proximity, which is what I think people think of when they think school is for making friends. But the other is space and time, which school consumes rather than provides.
If I had understood about how to grow and care for friendships, I probably would have understood sooner that homeschooling is better for socialization. It’s so obvious to me now, and I wish I could have had a small quiet space to find friends when I was young like my son has now." (from here)

Food for thought for stay-at-home-moms

I am sort of obsessed with Penelope Trunk's blog. Although we differ greatly in religious/family/sexuality views, everything else seems to express exactly what I was thinking.

I especially love how she defends staying at home with kids from a non-religious, common-sense and statistical point of view. Here are some of my favorite quotes.

From the article "Your family would be better off with a housewife (so would mine)":

"The conclusion, that marriages and families work better with a full-time housewife, is hard to swallow but hard to deny. It’s just that not every woman wants to take care of a family and marriage full time, and even fewer men do. And increasingly few people want to give up almost all child-rearing responsibilities in order to be a single breadwinner. So this is a piece of advice that’s useful to only the small percentage of households in the world. But still, the advice is good.

Many people will say they’d rather face the challenges of a dual-career marriage than the challenge of a stay-at-home-spousedom. Fine. Just know the statistics are not in your favor."

From the article "Get pregnant at 25 if you want a high-powered career":

"...She says, in the article, that she is taking much better care of them when she is not away from them.This shouldn’t be groundbreaking to say. But after twenty years of deafening feminist diatribe it is actually controversial to say that a mom is a better mom if she is home with her kids."

"It’s ridiculous that it’s controversial to say that most women want to parent differently than most men. It’s ridiculous because there is scientific basis for this and a social basis for this and the women who argue against it are always women who do not have school-aged kids and a high powered job."

"Men who have kids are in a great position to climb the ladder. They have wives at home. Women cannot go full speed ahead until the kids are grown up. Slaughter has great evidence for this. But you should be able just to look around and see that this truth. My favorite example: All the male Supreme Court Justices have families. Two of the three women do not. And the one who does, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did not start her career until her kids were grown."

From the article "Get married first, then focus on career":

"At any point when a woman has kids, statistically she will start to earn less money even if she takes no maternity leave whatsoever. There is no evidence to show that it’s easier to take time out of the workforce at a certain point in a career. People just plain don’t know."

"The good news here is that a large body of research shows that you will gain more happiness by being married than by having a good job. Yes, you should not have to choose between a good job and marriage. But this column is not about what is fair or what is just. It is about what is real."

From the article "How to plan a career in our 20s to stay at home with your kids in your 30s":

"Forbes just published a survey that shows that 84% of working women want to stay home with kids . The new job that everyone wants is stay-at-home mom. This makes sense to me. It’s clear that women don’t want to bust through the glass ceiling, or they’d have done it by now. And it’s clear that men are not pulled by kids in nearly the same way women are, because women’s careers tank when they have kids and mens’ careers don’t."

"Women are performing at a higher level at work than men are right now. So, statistically speaking, when you decide to stay home with kids, the people you were better than will start moving ahead of you. It will kill you. Prepare for this. It works best to think of your career as a time in your life. You were a high performer when you did it, but now it’s over. It’s like being the head cheerleader. You were great when you did it, but high school is over and you’re onto the next challenge."

I love that smile...

As NieNie is always talking about, I too like to build up family traditions that bring us together and make us happy. NieNie does things like watch Disney's Legend of Sleepy Hollow and eat pumpkin soup every October 1st with her husband and kids. Or make special birthday pancakes and party hats every time it's someone's birthday.

We are a very "young" family, but I'm always trying to build up traditions of our own. I haven't been successful with family night yet (there will be future attempts!), but my husband and I look forward to our Saturday date night all week. Lately we've just been renting movies at home, but it's still fun.

Making pancakes Sunday morning has also become routine. Not only do we all love eating them, and it's something warm and comforting, but that also means we don't have to buy bread at the bakery on Sundays (and give other people work when it should be their day of rest, too). Last Sunday we started our Sunday "hikes" up again. Even if it's just half an hour, seeing all the green trees and hearing the birds chirp is really, really good for the soul. Having these little moments of pleasure and fun, especially together, helps to endure the harder things we're called to do, and not feel drowned out by all the human misery we are called to shoulder.

That's why we seek love

This is Pioneer Woman's peanut butter cake. It's delicious. I've made it before, but this time it turned out better because I halved the recipe. I just realized that all my cake recipes need to be halved if I want to make them in round cake pans. That way, they don't take as long to bake (just the suggested time on the recipe) and the frosting/cake ratio is better. If making the full amounts in the recipe, then it needs to be in a rectangular cake pan, like Pioneer Woman always suggests.

I made this cake because we finally invited our parish priest over for lunch. I've been meaning to do so ever since we moved here. He is really young and pretty new at this parish priest business, but he does such a good job. Having him over made us realize how hard a parish priest's life is, at least in Portugal. If single people and families have a hard time socializing and building community because of the way society is set up nowadays, diocesan priests even more. Parishioners are very elderly, people don't look for community in their parishes and with their priest, and most people that are practicing Catholics find their community in movements. So running a parish can be lonely and hard. But it's amazing to see people like our priest, who do their daily work very, very well and with little or no recognition.

The Sunday, Sunday, Sunday podcast we listen to every week was especially touching yesterday:

"Why do we love? Because we come from love. Because God, who is love, loves us and that's why we have the desire to love, that's why we search for love, that's why we seek love, that's why if you're not in love you want to be in love. And if you were once in love and you had someone break your heart and you're out of love, now you're a country music artist and that's just how it works."