Snow War Games

Hooray! We finally have our first real snow. The weather that has turned Minnesota into the icebox of the universe has the happy side-effect of bringing the cold far enough south to make our usual icy slush into fluffy, white, wonderful snow.

You know what that means -- it's playtime!

Now, I know that a large portion of the country has been under snow for some time now. So, I thought it would be helpful to share a few of our favorite things to do in the snow. Maybe it'll give you some ideas of something a little different to do with your crew.

• First, the usual -- sledding. We have a small hill in our back yard, but when you are a flatlander (like most of us in the Midwest) you will find that there are certain places where most of the kids congregate when the ground gets white. Here, it's Harrison Park Golf Course. The entire population under age 16 (toting parents when appropriate) shows up to Harrison Park for the sledding. There is no doubt that we will be there later today. The grade is about 60 degrees in places, with sled runs that would rival Tuckerman's Ravine, were they but a little longer. (Well, at least that's how it seems to my five-year-old.) We use Harrison Park as a sledding hill only, but there are aspiring snowboarders here in town who, despite the fact that the hill isn't even big enough for a J-bar, magically transform into Shaun White whenever the snow is deeper than three inches.



• For the preschool set, the most basic activity is making snow angels. My crew are as experienced in the art of the snow angel as any trio on the planet. They routinely walk up the block, blessing each household with an angel or two until all are covered. We have occasionally tried to vary the position of the arms and legs, making snow runners, snow horses, snow kokopelli, and many many snow blobs. Maybe they're snow amoeba. At any rate, the basic idea is to lay on one's back in fresh snow, with arms and legs straight out, keep your body still and move your arms up and down and your legs open and closed until you have made an angel-shape in the snow. For the amoeba, the instructions are similar, although less, shall we say, rigid. The trick for both is to get to the standing position without ruining the angel you just made. Here, your options are threefold: super-ninja flip-kick to a standing position, levitate, or have a friend give you a hand. (We use option #3.)



• Of course, there is the snow-ball fight, which my boys have elevated to a fine art form. They put as much planning into an (inevitably failing) snowball attack on my husband as the US armed forces put into the landing at Normandy. As though they had read Sun Tsu's Art of War from cover to cover, my boys amass a stunning array of snow-ammunition to be thrown from no less than seven vantage points throughout the yard. They create a secret hide-out (every year, no less) underneath the snow-laden branches of our evergreens (forgetting, apparently, that their Dad just has to walk close to the branches and shake them to A. completely bury the boys in snow and B. completely destroy the hide-out.) Well, I'm sure they'll fake him out this year.



• We also play a variety of outdoor games modified for the snow. That includes snow hide-and-seek, snowball tag, ring around the rosie (made fun by falling in the snow), and snow duck duck goose. We also love snow football! It is especially good when the entire family gets together and you get to see Uncle Matt (6 foot 4) completely bury his older brothers in a snowbank. Can you say 'revenge'?



• Which brings me to the next fun idea... victimizing your family members when they least expect it. This is what all outdoor snow play eventually degenerates into in a family where there is more than one child. At some point, the kid who got stuck on the slower sled or had to ride with his sister or kept falling down during snow duck duck goose is going to yearn for revenge. He'll stuff snow down the neck of someone's coat or accidentally-on-purpose give his sister a 'flat tire' making her boot come off (wet socks, yuck). She will tackle her little brother as he puts the finishing touches on the meticulously-crafted snowbear he was making, knocking the head of said bear clean off while shoving her brother's face in the snow. He will dump an entire shovel full of snow onto his mother's head as she's walking up the sidewalk with the mail in her hand (having noticed both that she's not shoveling snow or wearing a hat today).



• And then, all pandemonium will break loose. No matter how old the group of playmates in question (even when they are -ahem- older than thirty), everyone will behave with the maturity level of someone approximately one-third their actual age. A three year old will lay down in the snow and cry because he can't get up again in this puffy snowsuit. A nine year old will start calling people doody-head and start flinging snow with wild abandon. A thirty-six year old will discover that neat snow hide-out you can make under the evergreen bushes. His wife, however, will remember the shake-the-branches trick and run for her life. This can/should continue until approximately 51% of the participants are in tears.



• Then, it's back indoors for dry clothes and hot, dark chocolate cocoa with marshmallows and/or a dash of cayenne pepper (at least that's how *we* like it.)

I hope this list gives you and your family a place to begin when you're getting ready for some winter fun of your own. As for a place to end, that I can't promise you.

I only know how it works at our house.

- Midwest Mom

Be Careful What You Leave Behind

You know, graffiti is a wonderful thing. Anytime I see interesting graffiti, I try to push back any sense of annoyance at the defacement of property and just appreciate the art of it.

The thinker in me believes that what a person chooses to write for all to see says something about him or her. Maybe Midwest Moms is my own, carefully crafted form of graffiti.

Years ago, I lived in Washington, D.C. I was a carless college student. My job was far from campus, so I had to take the metro and a couple of buses to get there. Any bus or traincar I rode in always had graffiti from someone called "Cool Disco Dan."

Cool Disco Dan's mark could be seen anywhere the public transit system went. It was scrawled in the traincars or spray painted on the concrete barriers outside the train windows. It was on one or more of the seats of any bus I ever rode in the District. I always wondered about Cool Disco Dan -- who he was and why the heck he was riding the bus all the time? What was his day job? All I knew was that he was cool and he really dug disco. Maybe that's all I needed to know.

I like to think that graffiti says something about the person who writes it. My parents tell a story about when my oldest sister was in kindergarten. They noticed one day that she was in the bathroom for a long time. They checked on her a few times and she said she was fine -- she just needed more time to 'finish up'. When she finally emerged, apparently, she was grinning from ear to ear. My mother thought nothing of it.

Later that day, my mother went into the bathroom to clean and what did she find? My sister's name scratched deep into the toilet seat. From the way it was facing, it had to have been written by the, shall we say, toilet sitter. My sister may have blamed it on her younger siblings at first. But she was cornered into admitting the truth by the fact that, well, they couldn't write yet. And it was her name.

Which brings me to something else I've noticed about graffiti: often, it is truth-telling, even when you don't want it to be.

If you're wondering why I'm exploring this idea right now, I'll tell you. We've been renovating our children's bedroom this month. This weekend was spent cleaning up the mess from some of the renovation, including cleaning my boys cherry bunk beds. The beds were made by my husband's grandfather and first slept in by his dad. My husband and his brother slept in them as children, and now our boys do. As a way to honor the wonderful heritage of this particular piece of furniture, I thought I would give them a good washing.

I removed remnants of fossilized bubble gum and old adhesive from countless stickers. I washed and washed, and when the washing was done, I rubbed down the wood with linseed oil. The beds were beautiful.

As I started to move them back into their place, I thought, "Why just wash the beds? I should clean up the slats, too. After all, whoever is in the bottom bunk has to look at them all the time."

It was then that I found it -- a treasure-trove of graffiti from my husband's boyhood. Apparently, he had been the bottom bunk kid for a while and enjoyed writing from time to time.

He had drawn in pencil and crayon, and much of it was undecipherable. But one particularly prominent item stood out.

It explains a lot -- especially about my boys and what they get from their father.

In dark crayon in large capital letters was a word my husband, apparently, valued so highly that he wanted to look at it before bed every single night. As his lasting gift to future generations of our family that might sleep in the bed where he once slept as a boy, he wrote the word...






FARTS!




Yes, we had a hearty laugh at it and I couldn't bring myself to wash it off. Certain things should be kept sacred, especially those things 'passed on' from father to son.

Don't you agree?


- Midwest Mom

Raise the Curtain on Drama

They say as a toddler I was fairly dramatic.

They say their nickname for me was Sarah Bernhardt.

They say they used that nickname often.

I should feel complimented, really. She's quite beautiful.

"They" are my parents.

I wonder what they would say about my daughter and her recent discovery of the gamut and depth of human emotion.

My daughter, as you may know, is three. Much of the time, she is a dear, delightful child. But during the past month, a new part of her brain seems to have awoken. It is the part that helps her to feel all emotions -- from joy to the deepest sorrow -- with frightening strength.

I'm afraid she doesn't know what to do with those feelings yet. To be honest, neither do I.

I have been amazed to see the transformation of my mild little girl into a wailing banshee of fury in a matter of seconds. Her godfather, upon witnessing one of her rare outbursts (I think sparked by the denial of candy before supper) looked bemused as she arched her back and opened her mouth to eight times its usual size for an ear-splitting NOOOOOooooo! "Well, I'm happy to know that nobody can push my god-daughter around! That girl's got some power!" he accurately observed.

Because her transformation happened so publicly (at our family Christmas celebration), I had to remove her from the watchful eyes of the relatives and give her a time-out in a separate room. I let her spend time alone until she was calm enough to rejoin the group. What worked? Whispering in her ear that every person in the house could hear her yelling, and that they all knew the noise was coming from her. She looked at me with surprise. "They do?" Fairly soon afterward, we rejoined the family.

Looking back, I'd say I was lucky.

To be honest, seeing her careen out of control frightens me a little bit. I have always known that parenting girls would be somehow different. It made me nervous (still does) because I want to do it well. I want to help her control her reaction to the strength of her feelings without teaching her that feelings themselves are bad. When I look back at my own upbringing and the way I was taught to hold feelings inside and when I think about how much I kept hidden from my parents, especially as a young woman, I am hopeful that I can find another way. Maybe there is a way to parent my children through emotional times and lead them to understanding. Maybe not. Maybe that's just supposed to come later. At this point, I'm not sure.

This morning, on the way home from dropping her brothers off at school, my daughter had another angry outburst. She wanted to go into the building to visit with "her friends" (the teachers and secretaries and her brothers' classmates). But we had other errands to run, so I kept her in the car and said goodbye to the boys and drove away. I was treated to about 8 minutes of abuse that seemed more like 40.

At first, my reaction was strong, telling her that children who behave that way have no business going into a school and that yelling at me was not appropriate. But the more she flew off the handle, the more detached I became. I realized she wasn't yelling at me. She was trying to remake reality and was frustrated that things weren't turning out as she had expected. I turned on the radio and let her process that we were driving home instead of back to the school.

"We ARE going in to school! I AM NOT GOING HOME!" she stated loudly and with power.

I let her wind down as we drove. I could tell she was starting to accept that I was not giving in. Early in the drive (when I was still in 'reactive mode') I told her that she was going to have to accept that there were some things she couldn't control. No one enjoys hearing that, no matter how true it is. I know I sure don't.

About three-fourths of the way home, she started saying, "Mommy?" But she was still so wound up, I didn't respond. I needed to feel like I was cool enough to not react harshly. I waited until we were all the way home, until she was played out completely, to respond. And even then, I waited until I had turned off the car, had a moment of quiet, and got out to unbuckle her. When we were face-to-face, she asked, "Mommy? Is today my playgroup day?" I was able to speak to her and calmly say yes.

Then came her request for a hug. It is something she does at the end of almost every outburst and sometimes right in the middle of one.

When she is still angry or crying, though, I don't hug her. I wait until she has regained control. Sometimes I feel conflicted about that, especially if she is both crying and begging for a hug. But I don't want her to start relying on me to get her emotions under control -- I want her to learn to do it herself. Then we can re-establish our bond. It may be over-analyzing, but I think sometimes she is starting to realize that she is having far different feelings than I am, that we won't agree all the time, and that we are, in fact, different people. Maybe that's scary, especially since she has been my little princess and constant companion since she was tiny.

Oh, through all of this, I worry. It is a tough time for me as a Mom because I want to help her, but I understand that she has to discover the answers for herself, even though she is only three. Maybe the best I can do is keep her safe and talk about things once the crying is done.

Wish me luck. I know this is only the beginning of her journey, and I want it to be a good one. At this point, parenting through this is tough.

Maybe now I'm the one who needs a hug.

- Midwest Mom

Pee Wee Design Squad

Run for the hills! My children (with some help from us) are redecorating their room!

It's a project we've been working on for a few weeks, making our winter vacation less of a vacation for my husband than he probably would have liked. But the drywall work finished on Sunday. Yesterday we adults primed the walls and painted the ceiling. And today it begins.

My children are going to paint their own room.

Yes, they are 3, 5, and 7. And yes, I plan on taking plenty of pictures and having plastic drop cloths on the floor -- and on myself, come to think of it. (Would a rain poncho work, do you think?)

Messiness aside, I'm actually excited about it.

We have involved the children at every stage of this project. My boys put on their work clothes during the drywalling and helped their Dad hold and cut the wallboard to size. They held it steady while he screwed it in place.

My youngest supervised periodically. Her contribution has primarily consisted of cheerleading the project and asking her Daddy, at least daily, when the room would finally be ready. (So helpful, really.)

Then came the difficult part. We had to negotiate paint colors with them. My oldest wanted a black room with glowing planets and stars painted on the ceiling. (Conceptually interesting, but a black room? I said 'no.') My five year old wanted a "rainbow" room where every wall, the ceiling and the closet would all be different colors. (Slightly too Punky Brewster for me. Besides, in one year, when his school supply list contains a box of 24 crayons instead of 8, I had an odd feeling he would want to repaint.) And of course, my girly girl wanted pink and purple stripes at first. When we told her that her brothers wouldn't appreciate that color scheme, she said green and white stripes would be fine with her. How considerate.

We decided a visit to the hardware store paint aisle was in order. "Maybe we could look at wallpaper borders to get ideas," my husband helpfully suggested. We ventured out only to find that our local big-box hardware store is discontinuing all their wallpaper.

sigh

"You can go look at the cart at the front of the store," the clerk helpfully suggested. My mind flashed images of what could possibly be on the closeout cart... perhaps desert wallpaper with the sunbleached skulls of dead livestock. Perhaps we could find a suitable wallpaper border -- with my luck it would be black with glowing planets on it -- but surely not in a suitable quantity. I trudged to the front of the store with my overenthusiastic tribe leading the way. The stench of disappointment hung in the air (or maybe that was turpentine?)

My husband and children descended on the clearance rack, hooting wildly. I stood back, listening for the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth that comes with dashed expectations.

It didn't come.

Instead, my crew found -gasp- something they all liked -- a wallpaper border with brightly colored tree frogs hidden among the leaves of a rainforest! My oldest was thrilled to find that there were bugs hidden there, too. My five year old excitedly counted the vivid colors. My daughter pointed out that one of the flowers in the picture was bright pink, and one of the frogs had purple legs.

I was flabbergasted... in a good way.

So, coordinating paint and discontinued wallpaper in hand (which, for a dollar a roll, there's no complaining about) we happily left the store.

Which brings us to today. After school, the plan is to don the latest in shabby painting clothes and baseball caps and arm them with green paint and rollers of their own.

Did I mention tonight was also bath night?

- Midwest Mom

Welcome to the Midwest!

If you're new to the Midwest, especially small-town Midwest, here are a few things you should know...

• You can always tell where you are by reading the name on the nearest water tower.
  
  
• All roads intersect at right angles. As a result, directions are always given in cardinal directions [go north 2.4 miles, turn east…] Funny thing, though, a road named 2800 East is actually a north-south road.
  
  
• A town actually can have more miles of road to maintain than it has residents.
  
  
• Don't trust the Governor as far as you can throw him... especially if he has more hair than your Aunt Matilda's persian cat.
  
  
• The land here is so flat you can actually see the curvature of the earth as you look at the horizon… as long as you can see past the grain elevators.
  
  
• Housing bubble? What housing bubble?
  
  
• Where we live, there are three donut shops but no Starbucks. We manage just fine.
  
  
• Yes you may let your dog ride in the front seat... Heck, you can let him drive if you want.
  
  
• December music programs at school actually can still contain the word “Christmas”.
  
  
• It’s okay to play with your food. Dried corn is a great substitute for sand in the sandbox. (Castles are tough to make with it, though.) And corn mazes are an essential part of fall fun.
  
  
• It can be just as thrilling to see $3.60 corn prices as it can be to see gas prices go down below $2.00 (we heat with corn, by the way… another Midwest reality. It’s nice to know that my energy dollar is going to a local farmer instead of a conglomerate.)
  
  
• Here, sunsets and storms help you understand just how small you really are. And a little perspective can be a good thing.

So, welcome to the Midwest... and welcome to a new year of Midwest Moms.

- Midwest Mom