This weekend we became Friends of Trees. I think we were already pretty close with trees and loved meeting them at the park to play, or nodding hello as we passed on the street but today we solidified the friendship. We aren’t just Facebook friends that quietly stalk each other online and occasionally LIKE a funny status update Trees  makes about birds and the frustration of getting poop stains off birch bark. This weekend we became such good friends of trees that we helped nine of them move to new homes around North East Portland. Everyone knows that’s a true friend right there: one that helps you move.

Beautiful, the boys, and I rallied with a couple hundred other friends to get instructions and break into groups. We were group X, which pleased the boys to no end as they referred to themselves as X-men the rest of the day. What a couple of dorks. We drove to the first house and learned how to plant a tree from our team leader. While others stood by to observe the process the boys got in and got their hands dirty exposing the roots and scarring the hole for maximum success. Sure they were in the way at times but mostly they were the ones leading the charge to get the tree planted.

After planting seven trees and having another group plant our other two trees, we met back up at the rally point and shared a meal with all our new friends. Not the trees of course, they had to stay and unpack at the their new homes and enjoyed some cold water while we ate our warm soups. It was a great community building event and we felt so “Portland” for taking part. I was proud of the boys and the way they dug right in and worked hard while others seemed to be there to bring some karmic balance for past sins against nature. I would recommend getting out and volunteering together as a family adventure, we had a great time on ours and felt like we did some good as well.

A couple of weeks ago I was followed on Twitter by Lori Henriques and since her bio said she made music I headed over to her website and listened to that music. It was a rough day here in daddy land and the boys were being “powerful” to borrow a term from our previous exchange student. I brought up the music page on the site and started getting lunch ready to the soothing piano and I realized the boys had calmed down and were playing with each other without fighting. I’m not sure if Lori’s music is akin to snake charming for kids but it had a profound effect on all three of us that afternoon. I tweeted about our experience and Lori Henriques responded by sending not just her new album Outside My Door, but also a collection of lullabies called Lullaby Piano. Now we have the CD’s in the car and all of us have been enjoying her music. Primo loves the song “It’s Hard to Wait For Your Birthday” while Segundo is partial to “Enough Is Enough” I think because it has the lyric about goat turds being awkward. I highly recommend Lori’s music even though I can’t guarantee that it will have the same soothing effect on you or your kids as it did to mine.

Tower built with kids on my helper day at pre-school

I am on the board of Segundo’s Co-Op Preschool and one of my jobs is being the schools representative to the PCPO ( Parent Child Preschool of Oregon). The PCPO is a non-profit umbrella organization for more than 65 Co-operative Preschools in the North West and every year they have a conference for parents and teachers with workshops like Early Math Concepts, Positive discipline, and Enhance you Marriage, Improve you Parenting. You can see a full list of the workshops available this year by checking out the Conference Brochure.

This years conference is Saturday March 3, 2012 at Athey Creek Middle School in West Linn, OR. The day is broken down into three workshops, two in the morning and then one after lunch. For each of the workshop times there are a number of options to choose from and something there for everyone. The goal is to build lifelong learners with us as parents and with our kids. The Co-op model works on the principle that we learn as much as the kids do by participating in the class room and taking that out into our days.

If you are a parent or teacher with preschool to first grade age kids in the Portland area then I highly recommend this conference. The price of $50 if registered by February 24, or $60 at the door is an incredible deal for the wealth of knowledge in each of the workshops. Modeling lifelong learning starts with us as parents, and the opportunity to tap into all of these great sessions will keep us on that journey.

This weekend we were up by the sound in Gig Harbor visiting Beautiful’s parents as they visit their first grand-daughter courtesy of their eldest daughter and her husband. After five boys, girls finally got on the board in the McGrail clan and she is a cutie. Their two boys and our two boys love being together but the sheer force of the four boys together keeps us on our toes. I find myself trying to mediate silly skirmishes over which of our boys sits next to their cousin, or who had the giant green ball first. The other big issue I run into is the vanishing of manners when my boys get together with other playmates.

“PLEASE!” I shout at Segundo when he cries for the same juice his cousin got, or when he demands the toy his brother is playing with. “What do you say?” is another big one as Primo gets more grapes at lunch and ignores his aunt. Teaching the kids to have manners is important to us so the repetition is just part of the process but I realized something this weekend as we were all together: I don’t have very good manners in communicating with them.

Maybe it’s the stress I feel having all the boys together, or maybe it’s a response to their powerful presence but either way I find myself barking commands at the boys instead of communicating with manners. I know that modeling behavior is much more effective than shouting orders but for some reason I forget that in their situations. It reminds of me of that great 80’s PSA about the dad who finds his teenage sons weed and yells “Where did you learn to do this?” “I learned it from watching you dad!” For some reason this PSA always makes me laugh but it’s true. They do what I do and conversely I can’t expect them to do what I’m not doing.

I know that the boys are inherently selfish and won’t just mimic manners because I use them but that doesn’t mean that I am not part of the equation. Modeling along with communicating our expectation with the boys still requires near constant reinforcement for the boys to learn good manners. Lately I feel like I am skipping the first step and I need to fix that before trying to hold my boys to higher standard then I hold myself.

Last year, as a birthday present, I was given the board game Ticket To Ride by my Sister and Brother in Law. We played the European version while on summer vacation the year before and I loved the game. It is an easy to learn strategy game that can be played with two to five people and depending on the way the cards fall anyone can win. Those with the better strategies do better in the long run but the same person doesn’t win every game. After getting the game for my birthday we hadn’t had a chance to play it until this Christmas when we dusted off the box and taught my family how to play. Over the week that my brother and his family were here we played ten to fifteen games. Beautiful won more than anyone else but everyone had at least one win to call their own. After the holidays ended Primo asked to play the game that we were all having so much fun with so I set up a modified version of the game to play with both boys.

Segundo does not have the patience to play even a toddlered down version of the game so we let him do his own thing, placing trains down willy nilly. Primo on the other hand took to the game like daddy takes to a fresh hop IPA. He was quickly able to figure out where he needed to go to get his trains from Duluth to El Paso, and after a couple of games even started to pick up some secondary strategy. He knew to grab cards he would need later if the card he needed now wasn’t available. Ticket To Ride turns out to be a great game, with some minor rule changes, for a five and half-year old to pick up some critical thinking in a fun environment. I worked it so he won his first couple of games but as he got better I started to play it straight up, trying to win. There are still times when he comes out on top but we no longer let him win. He threw a fit last night when I beat him pretty bad but we took the opportunity to talk about sportsmanship, winning and losing, and playing the game for the fun of it and not just to win. He rallied and we played again today he was much better when he lost. He told me that he knew that my Seattle to New york route is what won the game for me and he was right. I’m under no misgivings that my kid is super smart but I love seeing these clear signs of his development as he picks up strategy and cause and effect. Soon I will get him working on card counting and keeping a poker face for our father son trips to the casino.

There’s a story that my family tells about when I was a little girl and we were at a campground with my mom’s whole family and I threw an epic tantrum. The details vary based on who’s telling the story; sometimes it’s about the bubblegum I was chewing that dropped in the dirt or about not wanting to take a picture. But the fact is, I threw a big giant fit–one of many in my childhood–in front of everyone. And I didn’t care.

I used to be sort of proud of this story and others about tantrums I threw, like I was some defiant imp, a strong-willed child on my way to becoming a true blue strong woman who spoke her mind. But the truth is I was a brat–an irrational, short fused kid.

I can see this clearly today, one day after my three-year old threw an epic tantrum of his own. My sister, my mom, my brother-in-law, my two stunned nephews, my brand new baby niece and my oldest son watched as a difference of opinion progressed from reasoning to warnings to threats to yelling insults to physically pinning my youngest into a car seat while attempting to buckle the five point harness around him. His writhing, screaming body would not be buckled. 25 minutes later, we left. He had won.

I felt like throwing a tantrum myself. I had engaged in a war of wills with a three-year old in front of half my family and lost.  Sitting in the car, driving back to Portland, I listened to his sniffling, half-sobbing breaths regulate to normal. I felt bad for my mom those years ago.

I’m sure looking back now, she knows that there’s no winning with an irrational three-year old in the throes of a tantrum, that giving in doesn’t make you a terrible parent, that her kid wouldn’t turn out to be a horrible irrational adult, that everyone else knew exactly how she felt and had been there themselves with their own kids.

I’m sure I’ll know that too. For now, I feel like a terrible parent who has no control over my kid.

Frank has had a good effect on all of us early in the New year. We have been getting out and exercising a bit more that we normally do in the dead of Portland winter. That may have more to do with the unseasonably sunny days than his relentless passion for lifting things over his head and chanting at us, but either way it has been a nice winter. I write this  sitting in a coffee shop with a miserable cold sideways rain that makes umbrellas and previous plans silly, but the last week has been lovely. We have done the bike rides to the library, the play dates outside at friend’s houses, and explored some parks off the beaten trail while bundled against the cold but dry. It is almost disorienting how nice it has been here in Portland this winter. I feel like I don’t enough seasonal reasoning for my mild depression and might have to look into the issue as personal thing and not a reaction to outside forces. That’s just silly, we all know I’m the picture of confidence and mental health so it must be the boys that are causing it.

Now that the weather looks to be returning to normal I wondering how well our goal to get out and about is going to go. We have rain gear and the mud puddles have their own allure so it’s just a matter of overcoming the initial inertia and getting out of the house. These things seem to go much better when planned instead of being left to day of decision-making. Making plans with others make the problem of getting started a bit easier since it is harder to let someone else down then it is for me to just spin it with the boys. So anyone in Portland want to schedule a play date next week where we explore a trail or jump in some puddles?

3/12/12 is the official start of the Timbers season but there are preseason games starting in mid February and for the boys and I those games can’t come soon enough. I am far more excited for the season to start than the boys are but I know that they want to get back to the afternoon games of the Reserve league. We have been singing songs all winter to help us through the dark days and the EPL games over the computer have helped soothe the wound.

Apart from the fanaticism I have for the Portland Timbers I am most looking forward to the time to get away for reasons that have nothing to do with they boys. Lately my time away from home has been Pre-school Board meetings, PTA nights, and volunteering at the school to raise money. It is time away from the boys but it isn’t exactly time doing something that is refreshing and renewing to my psyche. I need some “other” time and I need it soon.

Guess which one is Frank

I wrote about the creative ailments that Segundo has suffered through and his story telling prowess but in the last couple of days he has come up with a whole new schtick that raises the bar of three-year old comedy. He no longer wants to be called his given name and would instead like to be called Frank. “Daddy my name is Frank now so that’s what you should call me!” He informed us of the name change on Sunday and since then he has really been fleshing out this new character. When we dropped Primo off at school on Monday morning he was still Segundo but once we got home he informed me that he was now Frank and needed to go change. He put on a t-shirt and shorts and came running out  of his room to pose in an action shot stance and tell me that “Frank loves to exercise!” He then started running laps around the house and asked me to keep track of them. We got up to twenty before he took a break and told me that Frank needs some water in order to exercise more. Then he went around the house picking up the things he could and lifting them up over his head chanting “Ex-er-cise, ex-er-cise, ex-er-cise”

I was nearly wetting my pants from laughter watching him transform into this crazy character apparently channeling the ghost Jack Lalane. His whole face changes into this new person and the glint in his eye is hilarious. He has put on a show for Beautiful and my Dad when they both got home for work and had them cracking up too. We learned that Frank has the same parents but is not the same person as Segundo, the way you can tell them apart is that “Frank just loves to exercise, and Segundo just likes to play.” I don’t know how we continue to encourage this creative expression but I want to make sure that I do everything I can. Right now he good for a post a week on this blog and I can always use the content.