The Mom Crowd

It’s that time again: the start of school.  For many of us moms, it’s the start of pre-school.  My kids have been in pre-school for about four weeks now (and my mental health is the better for it!)  Lucy is in the 2-year old class, so she brings artwork or little projects home twice a week.  Eli, 1, goes once a week, and doesn’t bring anything home yet.

I love that the kids get to do fun projects at pre-school.  I love seeing how proud Lucy is when she shows me what she did, and listening to her cute voice describe it: “What did you make, Lucy?”  “A col-LAGE!”  Another new word in her ever-expanding vocabulary.

So this is just the beginning.  Soon, artwork is going to start piling up all around us if we don’t have a plan of action for what to do with it.  I’m sure lots of you moms know what I’m talking about.  What happens when there’s no more room on the fridge?

Thanks to ideas I’ve read in various magazines over the past couple of years, I’ve acquired some helpful tips for this issue.  I don’t really take credit for these ideas – except for #1 and #3, which I just thought of as I was writing this post.  I hope this helps you prevent mountains of construction paper from forming in your house & car!

1. Turn your laundry room or spare wall into a gallery.  As I mentioned last week, my house has out-of-date wallpaper.  In our laundry room – a place where I spend a fair amount of time each week, and also the room we walk through to get to the garage – the wallpaper is pretty busy.  So I started taping up the kids’ artwork and projects.  Every day that Lucy brings home something new, she helps me pick out a spot on the wall, and up it goes.  It’s her artwork-central.  She loves it.  I get to appreciate it, and the less of that wallpaper I see, the better.
2. Take pictures of the artwork as it comes in, and save them in a special folder on your computer.   Then the opportunities are endless:  use the pictures for your screensaver, or make a photo year book for each school year!
3. Create a blog just for their artwork.  Give the address to family members and friends so they can comment.  The kids will love the praise on their own special webpage!
4. Mail pieces of artwork to distant relatives.  Not only does this get it out of your house, it gives Grandma a special surprise amid her bills!
5. Keep a special portfolio, box or file for each of your childrens’ work.   At the end of each quarter or semester (or any time you feel is necessary), sit down with your child and the artwork, and do a cleanout.  Have them choose their 5 best pieces, and save them in the portfolio with the dates and their signature.  Then decide what you will do with the rest.  Tell your child that any of options 2-4 are acceptable, but it’s time to make room in the portfolio for new things that come in.  Not only does this whittle down the amount of paper you’ve got at home, it gives your child ownership in what is kept, and even helps develop a critically-thinking mind.
6. Frame your favorite pieces to be hung on the walls.  I saw a picture of this in the latest Real Simple; the decorator created a collage on the wall of framed family pictures and artwork.  It was really cool and colorful.

Surely there are other ideas and tips out there for cherishing the work of each of our little Picassos, Monets, or better yet, Dalis.    What have you done?

I am obsessed with the Olympics! I am having so much fun watching the best in the world compete against one another. I am also amazed at how many moms are competing in Beijing right now. I had the privilege to meet Olympian and Mom, Liza Hunter-Galvan from New Zealand last month. She is joined by many moms in Beijing right now. Jennie Finch, Melanie Roach, Lisa Leslie, Lindsay Davenport, Kate Markgraf, and Tina Thompson are some of the other moms competing in Beijing while their little ones cheer them on.My very favorite Olympic mom is Dara Torres. Not only do I love her name, she has overcome that battle all moms fight in “losing the baby weight!” I actually went for a swim at the gym this week and have decided to add swimming to my work-outs because I want a body like hers. With her two year old, Tessa Grace cheering her on, she has won three silver medals in Beijing, bringing her total Olympic medal count to 12! How many people can say they’ve competed in FIVE Olympics? She’s an amazing athlete!!

Here’s some sites I’ve found talking about the Olympian Moms:

Olympic Moms Head to Beijing Slideshow

NBC’s Olympic Mothers Slideshow

ESPN-Athletes Balancing Motherhood and Olympic Dreams

Plenty of Olympic Moms in Beijing

Who is your favorite Olympic Mom? What has been your favorite Olympic moment?

Some of you moms scrapbook, others dabble in photography, others lead book clubs, others garden for your “me-time.” My “me-time” is spent in a classroom as a college student and I love it!

When I became pregnant with my first child, both myself and my husband were college students and working full time. I was majoring in education and my husband was a business major. During my nine month pregnancy, all of our energy was poured into getting my husband finished with school so I could stay at home when our child was born.

When my daughter was born, I was able to become a stay-at-home-mom like we hoped for. However, our lives were not filled with play dates, breastfeeding, library visits and pajama days as I expected. They were filled with physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy, doctor appointments, and tube feedings. Her health issues and developmental delays opened my eyes to a world I never knew existed! Before her arrival, my knowledge of speech therapy was for people who stuttered or had lisps, or elderly people who suffered from strokes. Through first hand experience, I learned that speech therapists not only help with language delays, but they also are big time players in children who have feeding disorders like my child did. As my daughter grew and developed, we walked through some major feeding difficulties. We also introduced sign language to her to help her be able to communicate and are still working very diligently on verbal language. After the birth of my son, it became very clear to me that I wanted to be a Speech and Language Pathologist. Through talking with new moms going through similar feeding difficulties and sharing our experience and watching my child’s language develop, I have developed a passion for child development, specifically language and feeding development. I spoke to my husband about going back to school and received an enormous amount of support and encouragement from him. Darah’s speech pathologist, Angela was so sweet to give me all the nitty gritty details of the education program, tell me what speech pathologists were paid, and has cheered me as I have dived into finishing my degree!

Going back to school has been important to me for many reasons. One reason being that I really don’t like leaving things unfinished. I started college and it’s very important for me to finish it. I also want to set a good example to both of my children. I expect both of them to go to college (Darah too!) and I want to make sure they know that I do as I say. Another reason this specific degree is important to me is I really feel like it will help me parent Darah. Her speech is one of the most important things to me and I really want to give her every opportunity to be well spoken. It’s also important for me to be able to work if I ever needed to. I am watching my mom have to enter the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom for 25 years and have been sad at the difficulty she is having. She doesn’t have the option to stay home anymore, but finding a job that will balance out child care costs for my very young siblings still living at home has proven to be nearly impossible.

It’s amazing how much better of a student I am now that I have some age, wisdom, discipline, and experience on me that I didn’t have as an 18 and 19 year old!

Here’s some tips that have helped me as I finish my degree:

• You’re a mom first! Just like with any extra curricular activity, I have had to make a conscious effort to not allow my school to take over my responsibility and privilege of parenting Darah and Connor.
• Online! Online! Online! I had about 38 hours that I needed before I could start my true speech pathology courses. I took all but 8 hours of these online in a span of a year. Unfortunately, of the 14 classes I have left, I can only take 2 of these online now. However, there are plenty of degrees that you can finish completely online!
• RateMyProfessors.com! By going to this website, you can type in any school in the country, the teachers name and find out the nitty-gritty of the teacher by student reviews. If you need to take a hard course, you can use this tool to know which teacher will be the easiest! Way valuable!
• Sleep when you’re dead! I’m kidding. Make sure that you don’t push yourself too hard and you recognize your limits. I’m an “all-or-nothing” kind of gal, and have had to try to pace myself. I’m really not good at pacing myself, but have a husband who has said “slow down” when I’ve needed it. If you have been out of school for a long time, or are just starting college, start out by taking one course online and start gaging what you can handle
• Apply for financial aid! Even if you will not qualify for free assistance, a lot of schools use the government’s FAFSA to determine scholarships that are based on academic merit and not financial need. Hunt for local and national scholarship opportunities!
• Be careful about loans. We are having to get loans to pay for my college, and while I believe that college debt can be a smart investment, do not take more than you absolutely need. If you cannot afford to go back to school without taking out lots of loans, then maybe you should take less courses at a time and pay cash for them. The luxury of being a stay-at-home-mom college student, is there really isn’t a hurry for me to finish, other than the rush I have placed on myself.
• Recruit some cheerleaders! My husband has been my biggest cheerleader through this process. I also have some amazing friends who have been cheering me on as I take finals and check off more courses necessary to finish my degree. Without my support team, I think it would be very easy to give up.
• Just do it! I talked about going back to school for two years before I finally did it. I had valid excuses, however it took that first trip to the counselor’s office to really get me to start. Making that decision was the hardest step of this whole process.

You may recall that I am pretty sentimental and highly detail-oriented.  I’m all about saving ticket stubs and programs from events, and I carry my camera with me everywhere I go (funnest example: after my son was born, I had my baby and my camera on my lap when I was being wheeled from the delivery room to my recovery room.  How many moms take pictures from their gurneys? See picture below.) My children are 2 and 1, respectively, and that means f or the past couple of years, I have been deliberately keeping up with their first-year baby books.  I received both books as gifts when I was pregnant with each child. 

It was fun to have the baby books while I was pregnant, because they contained pages about life before the baby was born.  So I already had a lot that I got to “fill in”.  (Are any of you out there giddy “filler-inner-types”?)  There are also lots of spaces for pictures and clippings, scrapbook-style.  So I spent a bit of time at the computer, printing out different-sized pictures to include in our family’s stories.

Then, in order to make sure I didn’t forget any details, I took the books with me to the hospital for each birth experience.   When I wasn’t spending time with my new baby, I had lots of down time to fill in information about the nurses and doctors who helped bring my child into the world.  I got to share how I felt in those moments, which I’m convinced I captured with more clarity than if I tried to remember when I got home.  And the excitement and emotion in my words is palpable.

Throughout the baby’s first year, I filled in pages about each month of their lives, and took pictures on their one-month birthdays.  Like most baby books, there are also pages that help me keep records of important firsts, doctor visits, teeth, etc.

I was also vigilant about keeping important momentos for the pockets: church announcements, baby announcements of our friends/family, wedding invitations, newspaper articles (ie. the Harry Potter phenomenon when the 7th book released happened right around my son’s birth), stickers, and notes.

Looking back on this exercise, I feel it was very valuable.  If I didn’t already enjoy doing this kind of thing so much, I would have found it tedious or time-consuming at times, but worth it, for sure.  It is something I know the kids & I will treasure for years to come.

If you are looking for a way to capture your baby’s first year, here are some resources on the topic:

• Hallmark products (both of my books are Hallmark)
• Blog books from blurb.com (turns your blog into a published book!)
• More cute baby books at BabySakes.com

Are you a “giddy filler-inner type”?  Do you keep up with baby books on a consistent basis?  What are some tips or ideas you have read about or done with your own children?

Today has been very busy! Late last week, I learned about this new movie, Tropic Blunder Thunder. It’s full of big name celebrities including Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey, Jr., Matthew McConaughey, Tom Cruise, etc… The movie is a comedy making fun of actors. The main characters are actors in the movie, so there are “movies-within-the movie.” Tropic Thunder used one of these “movies-within-the-movie,” titled “Simple Jack” for a promotional campaign. Simple Jack was about a person with an intellectual disability and used hateful language and depicted his character in cruel ways. The promotional campaign included posters stating “Once upon a time, there was a retard” and a trailer for viewing which has Christine Taylor’s voice saying “I’ll talk to any retard I like.” During the production of the film, the cast discussed their concern about some of the racial slurs and wanted to make sure they didn’t cross the line with the racial banter, however they did nothing to protect anyone from the cruelty shown toward individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Major disability rights organizations discovered this and met with DreamWorks to discuss their concern and outrage over “Simple Jack.” The promotional campaign was pulled, however there were no changes to the movie made. In the movie, Tropic Thunder, Ben Stiller’s character discusses his role as Simple Jack with Robert Downey, Jr. They discuss how Stiller stated that while making the film, he actually felt retarded. The two characters exchange cruel banter filled with derogatory terms toward people with intellectual disabilities and ends with Downey, Jr. telling Stiller to “never go full retard.” You can read the script HERE and watch parts of this scene on the trailer HERE. Shortly after this script leaked, t-shirts were found on the internet with the slogan, “Never Go Full Retard.” There are many more issues with the movie and those who have previewed it, such as representatives of the National Down Syndrome Congress say that after watching the film, they felt “assaulted” and it is actually worse than the internet activists have been able to show.

The creators and cast of “Tropic Thunder” have chosen to continue on with the release of the movie on Wednesday, August 13th without making any changes or cuts to the film. They claim that the film is satire and “the movie’s humor was aimed not at the disabled but at the foolishness of actors who will go to any length in advancing their careers.” Ha! There’s some irony for ya!

Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, wrote the most wonderful article in the Washington Post today. He describes the cruelty that is shown in our society toward people with intellectual disabilities. I was startled to learn that “Gallup found that more than 60 percent of Americans don’t want a person with an intellectual disability at their child’s school. ” We’ve come so far and I’m so happy we are not the society of 50 years ago, but in a society that aborts over 90% of prenatally diagnosed babies with Down syndrome it’s hard to say that we’ve arrived to the place of acceptance toward people with intellectual differences.

While freedom of speech is one of our greatest gifts, I am hoping that we as a society can make the word “retard” and the abuse of the word “retarded” taboo. I hope that we can teach our children that it is never ok to make fun of someone with intellectual disabilities, whether it is direct or indirect. I hope that we can choose to not do the “PC eyeroll” at people fighting the abuse of the words “mental retardation.” I hope that we will tell Hollywood what is funny and what is not funny. This is not about being “politically correct” this is about dignity and respect.

What am I doing about it?

• Blogging about this has been a way for me to create awareness and vent my frustration about this film and the abuse of my daughter’s medical diagnosis of mental retardation.
• Online forums and communities have also been an area I have been making a strong presence in. This has been a great way to get more up-to-date information and get ideas on how to make some changes. There is power in numbers!
• Boycotting the film. While this may or may not keep a large number of people from seeing this film, it will keep those who love my daughter from watching it. For every 1 person who is interested in this film because of the negative attention it is receiving, I hope that 5 people will be turned off of the movie.
• I am waiting to see what The ARC and my local Down Syndrome Association recommends regarding physically protesting at the movie theater. If I make a public appearance, I plan on having information handy (and will be calling our news station that did the interview again!)
• Contacting every local news source has proven to be successful as well!

I expect a lot of people to think I’m being extreme, oversensitive, and time-wasting. However, most people that would think that don’t have a little girl who is going to come home from the playground someday crying because she was called a retard. Most people don’t have typical sons who are going to come home crying because someone called their sister a retard. Although, the name-calling that is bound to ensue my children’s future is the “best case scenario” for my kids. Most people are unaware at the cruel, hateful, violent, dangerous acts that are committed against people with intellectual differences all the time. According to The Arc’s Q&A on abuse of children with intellectual disabilities, the statistics are that children with intellectual disabilites are 4-10 times more likely than non-disabled peers to be victims of crime and twice as likely to be victims of physically and sexual abuse.

The bottom line is this. My beautiful daughter, Darah who has an intellectual disability IS NOT a “retard.” That word has no place in any of our vocabulary, and Hollywood needs to understand that while my daughter does not yet have a voice to stand up for herself, she has a Mamma! And this Mamma is not going to sit back and allow her baby girl to be the butt of the joke!