It was just the kind of Mother’s Day I like best.

A tasty breakfast, homemade cards, a small and thoughtful gift (gluten-free licorice!) and an adventure in the woods. We hiked off the map and followed unknown trails, and made it back to our car before we ran out of snacks. Then naps and knitting on the sunny porch while drinking wine, and off to eat dinner at the seaside. There were daisy chains and the kite was sent airborne. The sun shone and we spent the whole day together. It was a beautiful treat, and one that I definitely savoured.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you amazing moms out there. And thank you to Tom, who cooked and cleaned and told me to go knit while he took care of it all.

Last week I wrote about what preschoolers are like, and I described some changes that kids will show as they grow from toddlers into preschoolers.  The preschool years can be very challenging, especially if you decided to take a less punitive or more attachment-based approach to parenting when your child was a newborn.  Toddlers and preschoolers need to see that you are an “alpha,” a person who is strong and in charge, but at the same time it’s important to be compassionate, empathetic and sensitive to a child’s feelings and needs as well.  Finding the balance takes some trial and error in practice, but here are some ideas that can help you find that sweet spot a little sooner.

1. Preschoolers need adult help

Yes, they seem big and capable.  Yes, they know what you’re saying and understand what you mean.  But that doesn’t mean they are able or should be expected to obey immediately without some adult guidance, especially if you’re helping them develop some new habits or your child is very distracted and excited.  If you child is jumping on the bed and you’ve asked them to stop, step in and physically lift them from the bed and guide them out of the room if they don’t stop when you ask them.  The trick to this is to be gentle and firm, and to help them get started with a safe activity right away.  If the sight of your child being openly defiant makes you see red and erupt in rage, that’s a sign that you need to attend to your own ability to manage your emotions.  Look to meditation, counselling or possible food intolerances for help developing a calm approach.

2. Expect a mess

Little people learning to do things by themselves make a tremendous mess along the way.  Having strategies and rules in place can help contain or minimize the mess, such as “soil stays in the garden,” or “bubbles stay in the sink,” but there will probably be times when you will all want to bend the rules in the name of fun and learning.  The best way to deal with the mess is by cleaning it up, as soon as you can.  Teach your kids to clean up one toy before another one comes out and you’ll be miles ahead of the game.  We’re still working on that one in our house.

3. Make ritual and routine work in your favour

The more you keep regular “anchors” in your day, such as meals at regular times, the more you can hang important tasks on either side of those meals and let the routine dictate when things are done.  You don’t have to schedule the day down to the half-hour, but having a regular, predictable flow of events with enough time to transition from one event into another makes the day go much more smoothly.

4. Avoid overscheduling

Three and four year olds are still well ensconced in the world of magic, make-believe and wonder, even though some may be learning skills like counting and identifying letters.  Don’t let these early skills dupe you into thinking that your three or four year old is ready for a highly structured, academically focused preschool.  Early childhood is a time for play-based learning, in the home and in the real world as much as possible.  If your child does attend preschool, make sure you plan to have some quiet downtime at home afterwards.  Rushing from one structured, highly social activity to another is a recipe for an overstimulated, overtired kid.  And that makes it so much harder for a child to behave well.

5. Remember the cuddles

Whether you’ve had a smooth day or a challenging one, a little kid still needs lots of cuddles, snuggles and one-on-one attention.  If you’ve got a newborn too, make sure you work some time to be alone with your older child into your daily routine.  It’s normal and healthy for preschoolers to test the boundaries of what they are capable of and what they’re allowed to do, so don’t take it too personally if you’ve had a difficult day.  Parents need to be cuddled and listened to also, so make sure you get support from the other adults in your life.

The preschool years can be some of the most magical, so try to step back and imagine yourself as a parent with an empty nest 15 or 20 years down the line.  This child will be in this stage of development for a relatively short time, so don’t wish it away while grudgingly picking up blocks.  Take charge of setting limits in a firm but gentle way, create healthy routines and offer lots of hugs.  Before you know it your child will be losing teeth, writing letters to grandma and doing math problems, and the preschool years will be behind you.

A few days ago Bea and I were sitting on the couch reading Farmer Boy together. We’d just read about Almanzo’s family sitting down to supper, with the schoolteacher there to be boarded for two weeks and a wealth of food on the table. In those times it was expected that children were seen and not heard at the table. Only the adults were allowed to talk.

“I think that’s WRONG!” Beatrice exclaimed. “Why would they have a rule like that?”

I explained about how our beliefs about what kind of behaviour is acceptable in children has changed over the years, and that in those times they believed that it was the adults’ right to talk without interruption over dinner because they had been hard at work all day and didn’t have any other time to talk about important things. I went on to say that adults in those days believed that the children would learn more by listening quietly to the adults’ conversations, because the adults had more experience and the children could learn from that.

“Do you think that could be true? That children can learn by listening to adults talk?” I asked.

“No.” Bea answered.

“How do you think children learn?”

“They figure things out for themselves!”

This is the essence of learning: people (of any age) figure things out for themselves when they’re motivated to.

But we’re not truly reinventing the wheel every time. Even though Beatrice doesn’t see how she is learning by listening to adults talk, she is unconsciously absorbing all kinds of information by spending time with adults. How to behave, how to communicate clearly, how to make decisions and maintain relationships with others.

I’m glad she is confident in her ability to learn by figuring things out for herself.  This kind of self-directed and interest-led learning was one of the things that attracted me to homeschooling, and I see many successful adults continuing to learn and grow this way through their entire lives.

In a week or two, Claire will be turning three.  Yes, three.  I can’t believe it’s been three years since she was born, but the way she is changing tells me it’s true.  She’s definitely not a baby anymore, and not really a toddler either.  At three she’s well into the realm of the preschooler, and with that comes all kinds of changes I wasn’t prepared for when Beatrice turned three.  What kind of changes?  Well…

1. Open defiance

Babies defy their parents wills all the time, but in an innocent, she-doesn’t-know-how-to-coordinate-her-hands-yet-so-she’s-off-the-hook kind of way.  Toddlers defy their parents wills too, but the indiscretions are usually fairly mild, and again, you can be pretty sure your toddler didn’t expect the entire tube of toothpaste to come out when she squeezed it for the very first time.  She was exploring and experimenting.  By three and four, many more acts of defiance are open expressions of will.  The kid KNOWS you’ve said “no jumping on the bed,” she has banged her head while jumping on the bed once already and THE KID IS STILL JUMPING ON THE BED.

2. Increasing independence

Previously attached-at-the-hip babies and toddlers can transform into kids who take off running when they are dropped off at a friend’s house and don’t come back for a goodbye kiss.  Sleep starts to consolidate and many kids who nursed through toddlerhood will wean now, either on their own or as a result of mom’s limit-setting.  Securely attached preschoolers will still want to reconnect with a trusted adult regularly through the day, but this increasing independence means more and more kids will be ready to go to preschool, art class or playdates without mom or dad at their side.

3. Blossoming skills

Scissors!  Pencils!  Colouring inside the lines!  Pedaling tricycles, swinging on big-kid swings, walking on balance beams and turning somersaults.  Some kids will start to enjoy recognizing letters at this age, especially the first letter of their name.  This is the phase in which you will find a million tiny pieces of paper hidden in every corner of your house as your preschooler learns to cut with scissors and use those bits of paper in imaginary play at the same time.

4. Choice and control

Preschoolers now know more of what they like and what they don’t like, and this will be reflected in the choices they want to make.  Clothing can become a Very Important Decision.  Same goes for food, and previously adventurous eaters may now start refusing to eat anything other than buttered toast and noodles.  Tasks like toothbrushing and handwashing are best handled in a regular routine, always done at certain times of day with no exceptions.  If there’s any uncertainty about the need to perform these tasks, be prepared for a battle of wills.

5. Repetition and ritual

We always sing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious while brushing our teeth.  Every night, it has to be exactly the same.  Before she’ll put on her pajamas, Claire wants to pretend to be trapped in Bea’s bunk bed, and I pretend to rescue her.  If I refuse, the meltdown takes longer to ride out than it would have taken to just play the “trapped” game in the first place.  I don’t know why three and four year olds love repetition and ritual so very much, but they do.  And if you can handle the Groundhog Day flashbacks, rituals can actually make the day flow more smoothly, even if it seems like it takes a long time to run through the games and rituals in the same way every day.

I’ve heard many parents say that they found the “terrible twos” much easier than they expected, it was age three and four that really challenged them as a parent.  I agree.  When Beatrice turned three, I had the added challenge of having a newborn to look after.  This skewed my perspective, making Bea seem much bigger and more capable than she really was.  After all, she used to be a tiny newborn and now she’s huge!  But three and four are still small in the bigger picture of an entire childhood, and the changes in wilfulness, independence, skill, ritual and choice are all normal, natural ways for a three and four year old to behave, as challenging as they may be from a parent’s perspective.

Today. I wake up at the same time as I did yesterday, make the same thing for breakfast and mediate the same disagreements between the hungry children waiting for their pancakes. I clean the same kitchen, sweep the same floor, read the same websites. I know time is passing because the cherry blossoms bud, blossom and burst in an explosion of pink snow, but at home each day seems very much like the one that came before.

Am I moving forwards at all? I work hard every day, but what exactly am I working at? Where do you see the proof of my labours?

I might point out the brand new, handmade purple spice shelf I made with Beatrice. We measured and sawed and hammered and sanded and painted and then I took the most difficult step of all, figuring out how and where to affix it to the wall and actually doing it. Creating physical objects is supremely satisfying to me. There it is, that thing that we made. Every time I look at it I am reminded of the entire process of creativity: conception, building, problem solving, perseverance, completion, evaluation.

It is so tempting to say that my life’s work is raising my children. In one sense it is true; it is my work to care and provide for them until they are mature enough to take care of themselves. But my work doesn’t make them grow. They grow themselves. And the work of tending to the growth of children isn’t quite the same as putting a purple shelf up on the wall. It’s ephemeral. It looks more like keeping house, making notes, reading books, brushing out tangles, listening to whispers at bedtime.

I want to feel like the work I do every day is building something worthwhile, something tangible. I want to be able to point to it later and say, “This is what I spent my life doing. Here is my positive contribution to the world.” Deep in my heart I believe in the value of raising children at home. But there are days when it feels like I work hard at knitting up something that is unraveling at the other end. And I don’t know how much credit a parent can really take when it comes to their child’s future success or failure. As a parent you do your best, but it’s not your life, it’s theirs.

In truth, I crave both kinds of creativity. It just takes a little more energy to make the tangible creativity happen with all the tending to the children and our environment that goes on around here. I think a few changes are in order to make it easier for the tangible creativity to happen spontaneously… Maybe it’s time to rearrange the furniture again.

What’s your creative process like? Do you feel like you are working at something important every day? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’ve been gluten-free for about a month now.  After the initial difficulty, we settled into a new food routine pretty quickly, and for Claire and I the results have been really positive.  Claire’s a happier kid, more outgoing and less likely to spend a whole playdate clinging to my lap.  She doesn’t have a bad tummy or fight with Beatrice as much.  And the only times she’s complained of hurting legs has been when it’s pretty likely she ate some gluten by mistake.

Last year I worked on developing my Playful Self-Discipline, and I practiced inviting challenges, staying calm under pressure and developing good habits.  I made some good progress in certain areas, but in others it was pretty darn near impossible to budge the status quo.  No matter how hard I tried, I still felt like snapping most of the day during the last week of my cycle.

Intellectually and emotionally I wanted to be calm and intentional, but I felt like my body wasn’t on board.  I thought this was just the way it had to be, I’d accepted it as normal.  Doesn’t every woman feel angry and short-tempered the week before her period?  It’s certainly a well-worn meme.

Turns out that wasn’t the normal I have to live with.  One of the biggest changes I noticed after going gluten-free is that my mind and body feel calm.  My anxiety levels have dropped.  I don’t feel twitchy, my head is clear and the brain fog that I thought was from parenting has lifted.

Amazingly, I’ve found it’s much easier for me to step back and pause for a moment before responding to something distressing.  PMS is now more about simply having lower energy levels and less about being angry.

Going gluten-free hasn’t been a panacaea, of course.  I need to keep up my efforts to maintain those good habits I had started, because they’ll slip if I don’t stay on top of them.  But I feel like I’m walking freely instead of wading through mud now.  I’m more calm and relaxed.

In fact, I’m so calm and relaxed that now other people are impatient with me for being so slow.  Drivers have started getting antsy behind me when I take my time choosing a gap in traffic to turn left.  I’m not generally stressed out or in a hurry, and I forget that other people are.

That anxious, revved up feeling can be kind of appealing; I know I liked that feeling, back when I was working in an office and feeling very important, or plowing through mountains of coursework in University.  It’s definitely the appeal of coffee, North America’s favourite drug.  And it could possibly be part of the appeal of gluten-containing foods for people who are gluten intolerant and don’t know it.

For me, I’m happy trading in revved-up for calm and peaceful.  Even if it means passing the bread basket without taking a piece for myself.

It’s a warm spring day and the girls are outside, wearing playsilks as bonnets and making mud pies. We’re just back from a long weekend road trip and I haven’t the heart or energy to tear them away from their play to do something more structured, but I wonder. Am I doing enough? Does this play “count” as learning?

So I research. I look up the government prescribed learning outcomes for kindergarten and start reading through them. And sure enough, acting out characters from Little House on the Prairie falls under PLO B2: “Respond to literature through a variety of activities (e.g., role playing, art, music, choral reading, talking)”

“You know what’s funny, Mom?” Bea asked. “We’re just like Laura and Mary because I have my bonnet up and Claire’s let hers fall down.”

“I was just thinking that.” I replied. And I mentally tick the box beside the suggested achievement indicator: “connect information and events in texts to self, personal experiences and other texts.”

This homeschooling adventure is a dance of trust and respect, guiding and following, teaching and learning. It’s really not necessary to have our learning validated by the powers that be, but it does help quell my fears sometimes.

I call my blog The Parent Vortex, but I work on and think about more than just my parenting skills.  I’ve been reading about the craft of writing, and reading well-written literature lately.  Because writers don’t just write, they also read, read and read some more.

The Elements of Style by Strunk & White.  I can’t believe it’s taken me this many years to read this small, very important book.  Generally accepted as the final word on literary style and correctness, the Elements of Style has illuminated many things I knew instinctively but couldn’t express about what constitutes good writing, and I’ve learned a few new strategies for editing my work.  I was going to enrol in a writing class, but decided to choose the frugal (and unschooly) option of researching and practising on my own.  This book is my guide.

Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilburs.  Another resource in my self-directed writing class, but not quite as compelling as Strunk & White.  It might improve as I get further into it, but it’s bigger and denser and wordier than The Elements of Style, and I find myself picking it up less.  I am reminded of Strunk’s Rule #17: Omit needless words.

On Writing by Stephen King.  I’m not much of a fan of Stephen King’s novels, but this non-fiction book was a very enjoyable read.  The first part of the book is a history of King’s early life as a child, teen and young man just starting a writing career and marriage.  The second section focuses on how to go about writing, from setting up a space and schedule to editing your work.  The short third part describes the life-threatening accident he had while writing the book (a crazy dude ran into him while he was walking along the side of the road.)  I appreciate King’s advice about becoming a writer – the only way to do it is to write.  No matter how many classes you take, the only way you’ll learn the craft is by doing.

When my creative energies ebb and flow, the ways I spend my time change too.  When the drive to write wanes, the pleasure of reading increases.  And so I’ve been reading a lot these days.  Want to peek onto my bookshelf?  Here’s some of the  books I’ve been immersed in.

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv.  Reading this one made me feel like getting everyone in the car and letting my kids loose with the tools and materials required to build a tree house in the woods.  When that feeling passed, I thought about ways I can increase the amount of unstructured time we all have in nature, and made plans to incorporate that into our weekly rhythm.  I learned a lot about urban design and new efforts to incorporate natural spaces into urban development.  Did you know that parts of America’s prairie are actually less populated now than when the frontier was declared officially over?  Lots of food for thought here.

Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.  I requested this book from the library on a recommendation from Rachael at The Variegated Life, and I found it an informative and intriguing read.  It’s well written and readable, but more academic than I’ve become accustomed to so it took me a while to switch gears and get into it.  I was also so slow reading it that I had to return it before I was finished.  Nevertheless, Hrdy makes a compelling argument for human’s cooperative childrearing being one of the critical differences that allowed prehistoric people to survive in challenging times.  Mothers and Others provides an alternative view of attachment parenting, in which a mother carrying her baby continually  is not seen as the most natural human way to raise babies.  Hrdy believes that shared care among the women of a tribe is how prehistoric families balanced the need to raise high-needs human babies and forage for food or tend to other needs.  This view is  in contrast with Jean Leidloff and The Continuum Concept, who describes tribes where the mother carries her baby all day while going about her daily life.  Mothers and Others is definitely a book that I’ll borrow again to finish.

Writing the Revolution by Michele Landsberg.  A summary of the history of feminism in Canada, told through the newspaper columns of writer Michele Landsberg.  Somehow I missed learning about feminist history in high school (hmmm) and so I really didn’t know much about how the feminist movement started here and when the key struggles took place.  I borrowed this from the library after hearing an interview with Michele on CBC radio, where she was talking about her experience as a writer going to interview these women who were rape survivors.  She didn’t want to go talk to them, which told her that this was something she needed to examine in herself, that she’d swallowed the story that there’s something inherently dirty or shameful about surviving rape.  At times this is a difficult book to read, but it’s very well written and the issues are still as important to women today as they were when Michele was writing her newspaper column in the 80s.

The Birth House by Ami McKay.  Loaned to me by my downstairs neighbour (Hi Kelsey!) this book sat on my bookshelf for a while, but when I picked it up for the first time I read a third of it in one sitting.  More Canadian history, set in a fictional story about a girl, a midwife and an isolated east coast community with a brand new maternity hospital.  I love it when I get totally sucked into a novel like that, flying through chapter after chapter.

Family Mathby Jean Kerr Stanmark, Virginia Thompson and Ruth Cossey.  We’ve been switching gears from a traditional boxed-set math curriculum to more hands-on, fun ways of practising math skills.  This book is organized by theme rather than difficulty, and many of the activities are suitable for a wide range of ages so it’s a great book to have around during the whole elementary and middle school ages.  We matched beans to dots, built a balance scale and arranged squares into different sized rectangles.  Every activity was easy to set up and not too intimidating.  Win!  I’ve ordered this one so I can have it around for a long time.

What are you reading these days?

Last week we went out wildcrafting nettles.  We walked along, gently pinching off a few fresh new tops in each cluster.  As we walked, we talked about gathering only what we needed, making sure we weren’t pulling up or trampling the plants.  We spotted dandelions, some pretty snails, and little hiding places in the bushes where small songbirds might have built their nests.  And when we got tired and hungry, we sat down on our raincoats and ate lunch.

We sat and ate and rested, and after a while I realized what a perfectly idyllic moment I was living.  Instead of sitting behind a desk in a cubicle, I was sitting in the warm spring sun, on the bank of a lazy river with my two lovely children, reading about giant horsetails from our field guide.  Here’s an excerpt:

 Horsetails are a very ancient group of plants that grew to the size of trees when dinosaurs roamed the earth.  Lying on the wet ground, and with a little imagination, one can view horsetail patches as ancient forests in miniature.  Look up through their dense foliage for a glimpse of pterodactyls!

Then we stopped reading and just watched the river for a while.  A handsome robin landed on a branch in front of us and sat there, watching us.  Another robin took a bath in the shallow part of the river opposite us, ruffling his wings and feathers, then dipping his head down to tip more water onto himself and ruffling again.  The breeze blew warm and gentle across our skin.  Busy wood bugs trundled across our jackets.  Chickadees sang and ducks sailed downstream.  The spot didn’t look like much at first, and my phone’s camera doesn’t do it any favours either, but there was plenty of beauty in that simple, unpretentious spring scene when we were still and quiet enough to see it.

For those who want to learn more about nettles and their many health benefits, check out Eating Weeds: Recipes for Nettles.  And for readers in the Pacific Northwest who are looking for a great field guide to bring along with them on nature walks, I highly recommend the Lone Pine guide, Plants of Coastal British Columbia.