Every year, I always kick myself for forgetting all about Advent until about halfway through December, by which time it’s too late and I’m too busy to put anything together to celebrate a full Advent season. Not this year! This year I came prepared. Advent is a great way to keep the season focused on the real meaning of Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, and Shorty and I both really want to focus more on that this year than the material, glitzy, commercialized aspect of Christmas. We want this season to be a joyous cap to a very eventful year that will draw us both closer to the Lord. We are excited!

I’m keeping it simple. I printed out this free amazing family-friendly all-ages study for Advent – one workbook for each of us:

I bought four little blue votives and set it around a vanilla and apple cinnamon Glade candle for a simple advent wreath. I figure if we only light them for a few minutes each day, the candles will probably make it all the way to Christms. LOL. I tried to find purple and pink votives instead, the more traditional colors, but after looking in five different stores, I gave up and went with blue. Blue is fine; the Advent police won’t be arresting me for having blue instead of purple.

I then made a matchbook advent calendar.  I liked the one Martha Stewart had, but I had seen someone make theirs in the shape of a Christmas tree, with each level wrapped in Christmas paper, and I wanted to try that. Unfortunately, it came out a little flimsy and leaning-tower-of-Pisa-ish, but it’s still very pretty. Here’s to hoping it makes it through the holidays and no one spills anything major on it!! Picture of the advent wreath and the advent calendar is below. If anyone needs instructions, I’ll type them up, but it’s pretty self-explanatory: glue the matchbooks in rows, wrap them in paper, and then glue the rows together and put stuff in them!

Finally, I printed out little slips of paper with verses on them to read each day and left space beneath them to write a little idea or fun activity for each day of the season. This included:

Plus a few other ideas. These were LOOSELY based on Hubbard’s Cupboard advent page (lots of other good Advent ideas and printables there!). I’m including in PDF form the page I used to print out and cut out, both with and without the verses, so that you can print them out for your family as well if you’re doing a matcbhook Advent calendar too. They’re roughly matchbook sized.  December 25 has Luke 2:1-20 printed out and folded into tiny matchbook size with instructions to read it to our family over Christmas dinner. I have printed the verses out in Spanish, too, so that Shorty and my grandmother can take turns reading it out loud.  But I can’t sit around here blogging any more – I have to finish Christmas-ifying the house! Expect pictures. And the pictures from Thanksgiving! Still gotta post those – it was a GREAT holiday. Hope everyone reading this who celebrates can say the same!

The subject line is the short answer to the following question that was posted on one of my homeschooling mailing lists:

Here is my long answer:

You can find statistics that say anything you want them to, but I personally love TV and don’t think it’s harmful even in occasional large quantities. As part of my work as a freelance writer, I freelance writing TV reviews and analyses on various web sites and columns. This grew out of writing Star Trek fan fiction adventure stories as a teenager – it helped me hone my writing skills and develop an interest in writing about TV and put me in touch with other writers online. I’ve made a living very nicely this way, and I’ve made a lot of great, intelligent friends on TV forums discussing TV, some of whom I’ve later met in real life. Some of them are even famous. :)

I’m not talking the History Channel or the Discovery Channel – though those are great, too – I’m talking House, Bones, American Idol, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica. Aside from being my preferred background noise while working, and a good way to unwind after a long day, I think I’ve learned a whole lot from TV shows. You pick up all kinds of tidbits about science, civics, law & government, history, music, health, finances, literature, art, and many other subjects. The stuff that’s distasteful to me hasn’t really influenced me to live a distasteful life, it just makes me glad I’m not like that and makes me more aware of what the consequences of harmful choices look like. And, yes, PBS, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel have GREAT content on a daily basis. I’ve even learned a ton about one of my pet subjects – interior decorating and home organization - from TV shows on the Style Channel like “Clean House” and “Dress My Nest.”

I’m not saying that you should let your kids watch Law & Order marathons all day; children don’t have the perspective or experience to know that they’re liable to see something that’s harmful or traumatizing to them on shows with intense violence or sexuality, or even adult situations like on “House,” which has little of the first 2 things but often shows open heart surgery and things like that. (I find this fascinating, but I won’t lie and say some of it is hard to watch.) Your kids don’t want to be traumatized, so it’s up to you to help them remain untraumatized and inform them of what’s on the show so they can make an informed decision. I’ve never controlled or restricted what my son watches, so he trusts that when I say, “This show has a lot of violence and an upsetting theme,” I’m not trying to tell hiim what to do or what to watch, but I’m legitimately looking out for him, and skips it. In this way, also, he has learned what is too intense for him, too.

He also knows that he can watch TV whenever he wants in his free time, so he… doesn’t actually watch that much TV. I think like with anything else, if a child knows he has access to something, it loses some of its mystique. In homes where I’ve seen “screentime” tightly regulated, TV is like a precious gem to those kids. It’s all they think about all day long! They do their schoolwork with their eye on the clock. They will harangue their mother with “is it time yet?” and argue about every last minute they have and it’s just sad. My kid just knows it’s there for fun and sometimes chooses to watch it, but mostly not. It doesn’t cast a shadow over all his free time. It’s just one of many things we can do for fun.

That’s a sticking point, of course – if there’s nothing to do in your house, then you can’t blame the kids for wanting to watch TV, vs. sitting down with a worthy novel or something.  If you’re worried your kids watch too much TV, try providing them with tons of alternatives that THEY love (not that you find worthwhile – stuff THEY enjoy and THEY think is cool.)  If you’re having too much fun to remember to watch TV, you’re not going to turn into a couch potato.

I’m saying that if your kids and husband really love watching television, maybe instead of trying to control that love, you could try to watch with them and see what it is they love so much about it and try to share it with them. I watch a lot of Disney channel shows with my son and we’ve shared a lot of laughs and had a lot of good talks with him about many issues thanks to what we see.

What we watch doesn’t always reflect my values, but when it doesn’t, I talk about it with him or mention it briefly with him, and sometimes he asks me to expound, so that’s lead to a lot of good discussions about how our values differ from the world’s. And watching “American Idol” tryouts together is a joy for four generations of my family every year.

Part of it is trusting what your kids’ idea of fun is, and part of it is also trusting that they’re smart enough to understand that just because Hannah Montana said it, doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to say it, too. It’s never been a problem for us.

Your husband, I’m afraid, can’t be “made” to do anything he doesn’t want to do. Unlike children, who CAN be controlled (for now), husbands are adults who get to make their own choices. Trying to take that away is likely to breed resentment, even with good intentions. How would you feel if your husband tried to make you read less, and watch more TV? It would probably just breed resentment then, too. For the peace of the household and peaceful relationships with family members, I think it’s better to just embrace what family members enjoy doing rather than try to make them conform to what my idea of “good” and “worthwhile” is. I’m trying this with my son’s video games, too, and whaddaya know, those are also turning out to be fun and educational.

To answer the original question, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no direct, concrete proof that watching TV is harmful in any way. There are anecdotal opinions, and there is a lot of fear-mongering and a lot of slanted conclusions based on loaded studies, but there’s no established causal correlation between TV and any kind of physical or emotional harm to kids.

I hope this post is taken in the loving, encouraging spirit it’s intended.

This past year or so, I’ve had something of a renaissance of my parenting perspective. I have focused a lot on being as sweet as possible to my son, as good a listener as possible, as respectful of his feelings and desires as possible. I have been working hard to always say yes or a form of yes instead of always being a naysayer and control freak authoritarian. For each “rule” I previously had, I have now reevaluated why we have that rule.  Almost always, I have found that my rules are a) arbitrary b) largely for my convenience and c) are rigid in unnecessary ways. Almost always, I have found that I can get rid of the rule and meet my son’s needs instead in some way.

Sleep is a good example. Since he turned 10, he has had to be in bed by 11 – why? Because I work nights. But his body clock is that of a night owl (mine too!) and it made him toss and turn until 1 or 2 every single night. This resulted in huge meltdowns when I would find him still up at 1AM and ”catch” him doing something “wrong” (i.e., being awake) and start lecturing, punishing and nagging. So I thought to myself – what do I need to work? Peace and quiet and the ability to concentrate without interruptions. So now we have an if-then agreement that gives us both what he wants, instead of a rigid rule that comes only from me: he can be up as late as he wants as long as he’s quiet and lets me concentrate. The instant he starts making noise, the agreement is off and it’s lights out.

The first few nights, he was up until 3 or 4 in the morning and grouchy from lack of sleep the next day. It was SO HARD, but I bit my tongue. He tried very hard to be quiet, so I didn’t go in and nag him to go to sleep. I knew he was gorging on a previously forbidden activity, the way one might binge on a bag of candy you’re not normally allowed to eat.  I knew eventually his body would regulate itself according to its needs, which, yes, apparently, is a lot less sleep than most kids.  These days he stays up an hour or two after 11 and reads or plays his Nintendo DS or listens to his iPod, but he usually turns off the light and falls asleep somewhere between 12 and 1 all on his own. Just like before – his body clock hasn’t changed – but with no meltdowns and no stress or guilt. Just peace and good, relaxing memories of bedtime. He valiantly tries to be very quiet in his nighttime activities; he knows Mom needs to work for real. And he is aware that no sleep = grouchy tired feelings, so when we have to be up early the next day, he turns the lights off earlier. Lesson I learned: you can’t actually force anyone to sleep. Lesson he learned: figuring out how much sleep his body needs to get by and feel good.

This is all well and good,, but there are still things that make him – and me – angry. I have been reading the WONDERFUL book, How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk.  The book describes how parents can make space for free expression of children’s feelings in such a way that will validate them and put them into a context everyone can handle, including the child. There is a scene described in the book where a mother tries drawing feelings with her tantrum-prone 3-year-old. “Hold everything!” she says, just as he’s about to have a meltdown and grabs some paper and crayons. She draws angry zig-zags on her paper and asks, “Are you that mad?” And the kid goes “no!!” and draws angry circles all over 4 or 5 pages. “You’re THAT mad!” she says. “NO!” he says, and tears the pages up. “You’re really mad!” the mom says. The kid then kind of gets over it and says “Now I’ll draw how happy I am.” Hee. I liked this story that I kept it in mind for the next time my son seemed to be heading into tantrum territory. It was worth a shot. He’s 11, not 3, but who knows?

My son likes to lean on things. Specifically, he leans/hangs on the shower curtain as he brushes his teeth. This has resulted in breaking the shower curtain rod 3 times in the last 2 years. Prior to that, he broke the sink entirely and the landlord had to replace it with a cabinet instead of a free-hanging sink. He’s also broken a few doors just from leaning/hanging. We have talked and talked about it, but he did it again. Of course, I was startled that he might have hurt himself, and we ended up yelling at each other a little bit.  “I FEEL SO ANGRY I COULD BREAK THINGS,” he announced. He wasn’t kidding; he sometimes does break things in extreme anger.

In the past, I might have yelled some more and guilt tripped him about what a mean, inconsiderate thing that was to say, but from all the rethinking I’ve been doing, I saw this as a communication attempt from him. He was telling me his feelings. This was good! Better than breaking things is being told he’s mad.  I said, “You’re REALLY angry.”  “Yeah!!!” he agreed.  “HOLD IT,” I cried, and ran to the printer and got some blank paper and some crayons. Angry zigzags. “Are you that mad?”  He shook his head and drew broad stripes across the page, right off onto the table. A year ago I would have complained that I was going to have to clean that up and criticized his “imperfect” efforts at expressing himself. On this day, I thought, “Eh, I wipe the table down every day anyway” and didn’t even acknowledge it.  “I’m so mad the paper isn’t enough to…”  he faltered.

“To hold it all!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah!” He drew a few more furious lines that all extended off the page.  “I MIGHT NEED MORE PAPER.” I hurriedly got him more paper, and got some for myself.

“I’m mad like this,” I said, and drew some angry spirals on my page. He watched with interest.

“I’m mad like THIS,” he said, except he was not mad anymore. Glint of laughter starting to burgeon in his eye. He drew huge zig zags in a different color. Suddenly the crayon broke and he looked at me anxiously, awaiting a reprimand.

“You’re so mad you broke the crayon!!!” I said in amazement. “That’s, like, SUPER SUPER MAD.”

“YEAH!” he drew a few more lines, grinning now. “I’m so mad it’s off the PAGE.”

“Off the CHARTS!” I offered.

“OFF THE CHARTS!!” he cried, crumpling his paper and gleefully throwing it up in the air, like confetti,  all while giggling. I was laughing too by then.  No tantrum in sight. Just a happy face of a little boy who had been allowed to express how he felt and was grateful to be taken seriously.  Then I was able to smooch his cheek and tell him that I was very worried he could hurt himself if he kept hanging on the shower curtain when he was in the bathroom, and what could I do to help him be more safe in the bathroom?

“I feel bad that I broke the curtain,” he admitted, now totally calm. In the past, he might have spent hours ranting he hadn’t done anything wrong. “I wasn’t hanging. Just pulling while I was leaning. I guess I’ll try to remember I can’t pull on it because it breaks and falls on my head if I do that. I’ll lean on the counter instead if I feel like I need to lean.”  He figured it out all by himself, without me telling him what to do, without nagging or berating or lecturing.  He ambled off, muttering “off the CHARTS!” and still giggling.

Since that happened, “off the charts” has become our new family inside joke meaning “that made me blindly furious!” It’s a gauge. “That didn’t make me feel quite off the charts. But it did make me want to scribble a little.”  Or “I would have crumpled my paper, that made me so mad!” It’s silly and it makes sense only to us, but it’s a way to give voice to feelings. It has been a “lightbulb” moment for him. He knows there are ways to talk about your feelings now, and that he has someone who is willing to listen, even to the “bad” ones, judgment-free. He hasn’t had a tantrum in months.

That, to me, is worth a thousand intact shower curtain rods.

Today we had a long productive day in which we did very little that looked like schoolwork.  

We were up late talking and reading the night before, so today we both slept in. Over breakfast, we watched a music documentary, then we watched and discussed an episode of Mythbusters (topic: combustion and kitchen safety), then it was time for our weekly park playdate. After that, which took 3 hours and during which Shorty got happily muddied, we went to the grocery store and challenged each other to pick out the weirdest fruit in the produce department. That was the most fun we’ve had doing the groceries in a long time. We decided we were going to buy our finds and take them home and chop them open and see how they’re prepared (“But not necessarily eat them,” Shorty clarified, hedging his bets against a fruit that might look cool but taste disgusting. Agreed.)

Initially we were going to buy a pomelo. This thing basically looked like a ginormous grapefruit. I’ve never seen anything like it – it was bigger than my head! The Wikipedia link says that they tend to be between 2 and 4 lbs., but this one was closer to 7!  They sound like they’d be tasty, but I wasn’t about to spend $9 on one piece of fruit, so we decided to just look it up online and buy our second choices. There were quite a few to pick from, because our local Publix has a pretty awesome produce section, but ultimately, he picked a persimmon and I picked a pomegranate. They’re waiting on our table to be discovred tomorrow morning. And maybe, maybe be eaten.

Then we read a little before bed/ quiet time. Shorty doesn’t really have a bedtime – I have figured out it’s pretty useless to try to “make” someone go to sleep – but since I have to work nights, I do insist that he stay quiet somewhere other than my workspace, and he usually goes to sleep between 12AM-1AM, but we do like to read together each night.  Right now, we’re working our way through the historical fiction novel Viking Adventures since he is currently way into Vikings, and after that, Shorty felt like reading a few more pages in ”Much Ado About Nothing” from Tales from Shakespeare (“It’s full of LOTS OF DRAMA!” which apparently is appealing to a preteenager, lol).

Then we read in our 50-state atlas. We’re trying to read about one state per week, since he is intensely interested in geography. Typically this tends to be an excursion in rabbit trails when we discover all kinds of interesting things about each state, and today was no different – we had New York state for the day and obviously NY is one of the most interesting states in the nation. Shorty surprised me by recalling some historical fact about Henry Hudson he’d read – over 2 years ago.  Aside from learning the surprising fact that NY is mostly rural and that the Empire State Building is named after the state’s nickname, we read a little about the Erie Canal, and I mentioned that there was a song that had been written about it. 

Eyes lit up. Time to break out the YouTube. 

First we found this brief documentary and discussion about the original folk song and its provenance, which didn’t have the whole song (a fact about which I expressed disappointment) but Shorty insisted the documentary was ”very historical and interesting.”

Then we listened to this surprisingly traditional and fun version by folk singer Suzanne Vega, with whom Shorty is somewhat familiar, as I’m a fan of her music.

Then we listened to the much grittier country-folk version by Bruce Springsteen, which didn’t have as clean a melody line, but had a LOT more emotion.

And a couple of other versions we didn’t like as much.

What we didn’t have much success in finding, however, was the state song, “I Love New York.”  YouTube was difficult to search on, because there’s a trashy reality show by the same name, and that comprised the entirety of the search results no matter what we tried. So if anyone has a link to (legally!) listen to the New York state song, please do send it my way!

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about unschooling/ natural parenting. What I’ve found is that the more I read, the more I have to unsubscribe from homeschooling list/ discussion/ message forum I’ve been reading, because I find it so toxic to deal with so many people’s overwhelming control issues.

One of the main ways in which people perpetuate control issues is through their controlling their kids’ food. Whether it be through a special diet or through vegetarianism or limiting sweets or SOMETHING. I guess since it’s such a basic need, it’s a basic starting point for control. For me this has been very evident in online and RL circles of parents with special needs kids. It seems like everyone who homeschools a kid with autism is obsessed with controlling the autism (or more accurately, the autistic child) via controlling their kids’ food. 

When my son was very small, I tried the Gluten Free, Casein Free diet prescribed to many parents of autistic kids. I saw my son suffering, and connected it to his being different from other kids; I didn’t blame it on the fact that *I* was the one struggling because his personality and needs don’t fall in line with cliche child development expectations but because he was autistic and hyper and I was convinced THAT NEEDED FIXING and this diet claimed to help me do that.

I tried the GFCF for 9 months. It was sincerely all 31 flavors of hell.

It’s expensive. I am a single parent who works from home and though Dad is supportive and contributes, we are on a very tight budget and I have limited amounts of time, so the cheaper alternative – make every single item of food from scratch – was just out unrealistic. GFCF cooking and eating was expensive and time consuming.

The food is gross. All the GFCF substitutes for the real things are gross, y’all. Fake bread and pasta and cookies – all gross. Real Oreos are good, GFCF “oreos” are nasty (my son and I have a joke now – any food whose name includes quotes is probably inedible). Some things are edible, but edible isn’t the same as enjoyable. And I’m not going to pay $7 for a marginally edible loaf of bread that takes me 3 hours to make, when $1.59 buys me a really good normal loaf from Publix.

It’s incredibly stressful to maintain. I hated the diet the whole time we adhered to it. I felt like a horrible person, snatching cookies out of my kid’s hands at birthday parties, naysaying all his food preferences, nagging him to drink soymilk (which neither of us, we can now admit, really likes) instead of cow’s milk, etc etc. etc. It was socially limiting and restrictive to my child, and very depressing.

It’s never-ending. The more you find out about this way of eating, the longer the list of foods you cannot eat gets. Your food world gets narrower and narrower.

It is pseudoscience. When I really started questioning and reading the scant research there is out there, I discovered there is almost NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF that it helps make autistic kids happier.

And yet there are autism treatment centers who won’t even see you for a consultation if you are unwilling to absolutely control everything your kid eats.

I am not saying there is no such thing as a gluten intolerance or allergy to artificial ingredients or whatever. Obviously there are. There are tests for that. I now tell parents, if you think your kid is celiac, or allergic to anything else, this is a serious thing that is permanently and radically life-altering. Get him tested and make sure there are solid medical reasons for controlling his food to that degree. Don’t start eliminating all your kids’ preferred food just because you hope, based on frantic Internet anecdotes, that it’ll make your 5yo less hyper. (God forbid a 5yo should be hyper.) That is a recipe for sure-fire misery all around and probably won’t do anything but perpetuate misery.

I now think it’s easier to blame a slice of bread for your unhappy but otherwise perfectly normal-for-him 5yo than it is to blame your own parenting. I’m not saying that to be unkind to other parents; I’m saying that out of my own experiences. It was easier for me to blame wheat and milk for the unhappiness in our home than it was for me to blame my attempts at control and my lack of understanding toward my son.

I read so much about autism and diets now and parents’ massive control issues and pain seem so transparent, it hurts me to read it. “You’ve heard apples cause problems? My son loves apples. He eats apples every day. Maybe it’s making him more autistic. What about apples is bad? Maybe I should throw out all his apples.” And I just hurt for that poor little child who already takes so little joy in eating, and now he won’t get his apples either!

In fact, a big part of the GFCF autism cult is the idea that if a child strongly prefers a food, it is because they’re “addicted” to it and causes serotonin levels to spike “like an opiate” (again, adherents will freely concede there is no scientific basis for this at all, it is almost entirely anecdotal) and that preferred food should automatically be SUSPECT and possibly eliminated in a radical way.  It seems so obvious now to me where this all stems from. I feel like thousands of autistic kids must be living lives of quiet food-related desperation because of this, because they are told that what they love to eat makes them SICK. And sadly, SICK mostly means “more authentically themselves”.

About 9 months into the GFCF diet, I gave up and announced we we would start eating whatever we wanted. My kid is now 11 and eats whatever he wants, whenever he wants it.  I am a single mom on a limited budget and can’t afford EVERYTHING, so each week we make a list of stuff we feel like eating, way more than we could eat that week. We include stuff I like and stuff he likes – they don’t always overlap, but neither of us censor ourselves. Then we check on the local grocery ads and, being fiscally responsible sorts, we try to buy food for the week based on what’s on sale from our list.

We then have a list of stuff we can make from what we bought posted on our fridge. It’s a list of about 25 different meal ideas. They are suggestions. Every mealtime, he checks out the list and picks out what he wants and I make it. Sometimes we have breakfast for dinner or vice versa. Sometimes I make new things as “sides;” sometimes he tries them and sometimes he doesn’t. He’s incredibly healthy; he hasn’t been sick in forever and he’s shooting up like a weed, so I don’t worry.

Annnnd. Guess what. He’s still “hyper” and high-energy (when did we decide this was an illness?). He’s also still autistic. But taking ice cream and chocolate milk away isn’t going to change that for him. So if he wants ice cream, he eats ice cream. And so do I! It is interesting to me that despite his school-psychologist diagnosis of “worst case scenario ADHD” my son has a great capacity for attention – to things in which he is interested. I just no longer classify his interests as dysfunctional and no longer try to coercively change them with food.

Of course I cannot say this on any autism-homeschool list without being flayed alive. When I expressed doubts about the GFCF racket (it is a racket, there are whole companies devoted to marketing vitamins, nasty bread substitutes, etc. to adherents of the diet) on these lists, I was told I was a bad parent who didn’t try hard enough and who sought after my own convenience over the “needs” of my child. I have even been called abusive because people believe giving wheat to a kid with autism is the same as giving sugar by the spoonfuls to a child with diabetes. But the reality is that my child didn’t “need” to have cookies snatched out of his hand at birthday parties to be happy.

My child just needs to be loved and encouraged exactly as he is.

Today we attended a beautiful marionette show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, FL.  It featured a Greek-myth inspired play populated by stunningly detailed and charming marionette puppets made from found objects (aka trash!) by the incredibly talented Miami-based artist, Pablo Cano. You can see many of his beautiful and very moving pieces and find out more about this unique artist on his web site.

The show, an original libretto by the artist’s friend, told a tale of Cavaletti, a Renaissance knight who longs to make a name for himself, but falls asleep in the forest and dreams of interacting with Odysseus and many members of the Greek pantheon, including Athena, Aphrodite, the Chimera (made from a lady’s purse, a headboard and some LED lights, it’s the red creature puppet seen in the pictures), the Cyclops, the Pegasus and much more.

The stage was hand-crafted for the show, and had empty doorways on either side of the backdrop as stage wings, instead of the traditional perpendicular theater entrances. The actors stepped right on and off the stage in front of us. In this way, the stage mimicked the mechanics of a German cuckoo clock!  The show was absolutely fantastic, and afterwards the artist, Mr. Cano, directly interacted with the children and was happy to answer all their questions. Much to my surprise, he didn’t chastise the children who got so curious and fascinated with his pieces that they couldn’t resist reaching out and touching. He even let our friend Simon work the wings on the Pegasus! He was very kind, and is obviously very, very talented. What a great experience for everyone! Below are the pictures.