The Feminist Cookie Baker

Watching Makers on PBS really got things turning in my head for awhile. It brought up a lot of issues I thought I had resolved. Well they are resolved, just as resolved as they will ever be. Which is to say that they will never be fully resolved. Why? Because I am a feminist cookie baker. I am! And I like it damnit. I don't want to be president. I don't want to wear pantyhose every day and blouses and go to work. I don't want a powerful, important job and have nannies raise my children and then send them off to private school. Honestly, what I want most of all is to run off to some perfect, imaginary island with my family and raise goats. Or something... What my hearts true desire, in all honesty is to do as little as possible. They don't call my generation the slacker generation for nothing. Hey, I'm hip to this world of power players. I don't want any part of it. All I've ever wanted was to have a nice family and to DO AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. Seriously. I am however a feminist. I was raised by a feminist housewife. She went to college to get her MRS degree. It worked. She worked various part-time jobs over the years, never really embracing her role as mother. I didn't decide that it was of utmost importance to me to stay home with my babies because my mother shipped me off to some kind of horrible Lord of the Flies daycare. Truth be told my feelings about my mother are mixed at best. I just knew that I didn't want to raise my kids that way. It just wasn't for me. In my mind I saw myself doing some kind of part time kid juggle with my partner. In my fantasies we were broke but in a totally crunchy, romantic kind of way. We made a lot of lentil soup in my fantasies. Like Neil from the Young Ones. We made it work. In reality I'm not a trustafarian and I'm not accustomed to living in trailers. So I needed a real income. After screwing around in my twenties after college and working crap jobs, I decided to go get a master's degree, so I might actually make a salary I could live off of. I being the key word here. Unlike my future spouse I did not think about some day supporting a family of five. Or even supporting two. I just thought about supporting myself. Now I find myself in a somewhat comical situation of my own choosing. I am a feminist stay-at-home mom cookie baker. I.e. a 50's housewife. Housefrau. What ever you want to call it. My job is to stay home with young children, do laundry, do dishes, pack lunches, go grocery shopping, make meals, take kids to doctor's appointments, and generally cart them around. And for the most part I like it. Sure there's times when the monotony makes me want to empty the bank accounts and run off to Bermuda and pretend like I never had children... but those moments are usually only temporary. My husband is a bit burned out from his corporate whorish mid-level management job and I can't step up and say, "honey, you just pack those lunches and let me run off and bring home the bacon". Which, honestly, makes me feel like a big, fat failure as a feminist. Who do I blame for this? Do I blame Gloria Steinem? Is it Hilary Clinton's Do I blame that gosh-darn Free To Be You and Me special? It told me I could be any thing... any thing. I just had NO idea what I wanted to be. I also did not choose very wisely. Because in all honesty I couldn't be anything. I had no legacy and no outstanding intelligence, grades or bank account, so no, I could not go to some high faluting ivy league school. I went to community college and then state college. And then another state's university for my Master's degree. I have no great ambition to go out and make the world a wonderful place. If I did have any of that having babies wiped that right out of me. I want what the majority of the world wants, what the normal people want. The plebs. The un-extraordinary people. I want a house in a nice neighborhood with good schools. A decent paying, interesting part-time job. A spouse who also doesn't have to work very hard and comes home happy and ready to lend a hand making dinner and double checking homework. I want healthy, happy children. I want to watch them grow up in a world free of gun violence, poverty and rape. I want to some day, in the far, far decent future have grandchildren... and I want those same things for them. I want my girls to be able to choose what they want to do with their lives. But I want them to realize that if they some day plan on having a family. And let's face it, most of us do eventually come to this conclusion even if we were staunchly against it in our twenties. I want them to realize that it's not enough to "follow your dreams" and "follow your bliss" because they, like me, will not have a trust fund to fall back on. They will need to make enough money to have a nice house, in a nice neighborhood with good schools. And they shouldn't count on someone else making this happen for them. This will be my feminist stay-at-home mom cookie baking message to my daughters.

The Seven Days of Solstice- A Family Tradition.

Okay, so we created our own holiday. Much like Seinfeld and Festivus. We call it the Seven Days of Solstice. Solstice for the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice and seven days because we wanted to drag it out a bit. What we usually do is give smallish presents to the kids every evening leading up to their big present on Solstice morning. This year we told the kids we are going to do things a little differently. Since coming up with seven gifts for three kids (that's 21 gifts!) is a lot of stuff. I do try for things like art projects, books, clothes, etc... so it's not 21 toys but it's still just too much. So this year we told the kids the week before solstice is going to be about experiences rather than gifts. So now I have to come up with a weeks worth of experiences to share as a family. Good challenge. Of course some of them are easy because there are things we already do that are usually disguised as a present to one of the kids. One thing we normally do is make candles. We keep it simple by getting a beeswax candle rolling kit This always proves to be a fun activity for every one. So that's one night. Five nights to go... Another thing we normally do is make gingerbread houses! That takes two nights, one night of baking and one night of decorating, that's two more down, three nights to go... I was thinking of some house decorating... but I have not come up with a firm idea yet. Here's a good idea for egg carton bells and twig stars that looks like fun. I definitely have plenty of these supplies around! So that could be one night, two more to go. Another idea I had was to make snow globes! How cute are these? So that only leaves one more thing and I was thinking maybe of some kind of an outing experience? Or on solstice we usually do a lantern walk around our neighborhood, we could invite another family to join us, make a pot of soup and try to have an outdoor fire afterwards and roast marshmellows or something... or we could all go see a movie or a play together or...? I'll have to keep thinking about this one but I think I'm off to a pretty good start. There's a chance we might go on a family vacation to California. So we would have to put all these things off until after Solstice if this comes together. (Edited to add) Other ideas: Game night. A new family board game... or something super cool like a foosball table. (disclaimer: I really just kind of want a Foosball table...) or something more creative/ less expensive. How about a house scavenger hunt, or some kind of riddle solving... hmmmmmm.... that could be fun. Also wanted to add that with the candle making we usually make some for us and some to give away as gifts. I'm sure I'll think of more. Happy Winter Solstice!

Why We Don't "Do" Barbies

The Holidays are coming around again and I know my extended family is going to start thinking about gifts for the kids. This has always been a sticky subject for me because let's face it, I want some control over the toys my kids have and by receiving gifts you have to give up that control. Or do you? One friend suggested "pre-screening" gifts by known offenders. Of course this only works if they mail the gift. In the past I've handled the birthday party dilemma by avoiding the gift scene altogether. I've come up with some pretty creative ideas over the years: book exchanges, puzzles exchanges, flat out requesting no gifts and giving the birthday kid the option of picking out something they want at a toys store instead (hint, not a big box store)...Margo picked a stuffed dog one year!) If you Google it there's a whole slew of ideas out there. Including bringing food to collect for a food bank, pet food to collect for an animal shelter, flat out donations to collect for a charity. I love these ideas but they only work for older kids. The concept of collecting for some unknown charity is a little too abstract for younger children- or sensitive children. So you definitely need to know your kid when picking a gift alternative. It does feel a little bossy and ungrateful to me and I worry about offending people. But I want that control because our family has certain values we try to maintain. Less is more is definitely a big one! It's not about getting "stuff" just to get "stuff". Getting gifts is fun! Giving gifts is *usually* fun. But getting 20 gifts is just overwhelming for every one, especially the kid. I've never liked the idea of forcing people to feel obligated to run out and get "something" anything... because they have to have a gift. Nine times out of ten in this situation that gift will probably be going in a bag to go to the thrift store in the near future or it will break and end up in the garbage and then the landfill. Okay maybe not nine out of ten but you get my drift. So that person stressed themselves out and spent money on two seconds of joy. (the opening the present part). To me that's not worth it and there's other ways to create that two seconds of happiness. Or hopefully something a little more fulfilling and durable. So the holidays... I look forward to and dread the Holidays just like most people but probably for different reasons. As a family we actually don't celebrate Christmas. We are not religious. We chose to celebrate the Winter Solstice instead. And no, that doesn't make us Pagens or Devil worshippers. We chose the Winter Solstice simply because it is the shortest day of the year and most winter holidays are all about the lack of light and the returning of the light. Here's a good link if you liked more info. There's also books written about the subject. So lack of light, celebrating the light returning and spending time with family and being grateful for a warm house to live in during the dark, cold months. These are the aspects that we chose to emphasize. Of course as with all things parenting this has been a work in process. Not only do we wish to de-emphasize the entire gift thing. Which by the way is another reason we don't "do" cable television with young kids in the house. The toy advertising this time of year is obscene and if you don't know it doesn't exist you can't lust for it... right? So that really does solve a ton. In general our children are not begging for ginormous lists of stuff. But back to the title of this and the values around the types of toys. So yes in a perfect world all of my children's toys would be open-ended, high quality and hand crafted by local artisans. But obviously I had to relax about that. However there are certain things I can't relax about and yes sweet, loveable, nostalgia inducing Barbie is one of them. Why do I have it in for Barbie you ask? Well first of all let's start with Barbie's body and no I'm not even talking about the distortion of the body proportions. I'm just talking about a developed adult body that you're giving a child to play with. To me this hardly seems appropriate. Not to mention that Barbie's body is sexualized and deformed! So no, just no. If you give my child a Barbie I will be sending it back. If you give my child any toy that *I feel* sexualizes childhood I will be sending it back. And you may not agree with this at all or you may agree with me about Barbie and not another decision. But as a parent and one of the heads of this particular family I reserve the right to make these decisions for my children and our family. Barbie is my line in the sand. Cheap garbage that will break in a week. I won't be thrilled but I'll deal. Annoyingly noisey one hit wonder toys.... I will be annoyed but I'll let the kids play with them until they don't any more (which is usually a day) and then I'll quietly stick it in a box and send it on it's way to the thrift store. But Barbie, sorry, my kids have been warned. You have been warned. No to Barbie, no to sexualizing childhood in any way shape or form. Just no. These are our family's values. Please respect them. And Happy Holidays!!!!! My hope is that this time of a year can be a magical time for every one old and young and that it's what YOU want it to be. If that means a giant gift fest with a hundred presents under the tree, then that is my wish for your family. If it means celebrating your particular religious beliefs than that is my wish for your family. May you find balance in these Winter Holidays and truly enjoy them. Peace and Love, The Sprenke/Bradberrys

If I Only Knew Then...

I've been doing this Stay At Home Mom job for a little over 9 years now. Every once in awhile I think... if I could go back I would do this differently. Here's a few of the ones I can remember now. 1. Don't sweat the small years. What ever it may be. Sitting around and nursing constantly... I wish! Always wants to be held... again... I miss that! I just saw on a mom's support group someone asking for a sleep therapist recommendation for their 20 month old. It seems said 20 month old is having trouble staying in their bed and settling themselves to sleep. My advice? Don't sweat it. This kid is only... (fill in the blank) months old! Time is going to zoom by so fast you won't even remember that you had difficulty getting them to stay in their big kid bed Really, trust me! And so what if they want to crawl back in bed with you. Enjoy it. Pretty soon they will be ginormous and a wee bit stinky and for the most part want very little to do with you. This will all happen in the blink of an eye. You don't believe me, I can tell... but it will. Trust me. 2. Play rooms are great but they should all come with a wall to wall, floor to ceiling lockable cabinet. You need this to store all the toys, so that you can get a few out at a time. If you only have three things out at any given time, they will: like it more because it's novel and it will be easier for you to pick it all up... all the damn time. One thing I didn't know when I had kids is that I would spend literally hours of my life picking up and organizing a damn play room. It's truly amazing how a couple of kids can turn a nice, organized play space into a swirling pile of chaos in minutes. I don't look at toys the same any longer. I look at how many pieces it has and the likelihood these pieces will stay together for more than a minute. Also the durability to withstand being on the floor with all the other pieces of things in the playroom and getting stepped on a regular basis because on the floor in the swirling abyss of chaos is where they will be a lot. Unless you enjoy staying up late every night after you've finally gotten all the kids to sleep, cleaned the kitchen for the tenth time, picked up all the stuff they've left lying on the floor in the rest of the house and folded all the laundry and you really just haven't had enough so you go and clean the play room for the fun of it. 3. Small sinks and potties. Okay, a weird one yes. But I've often thought if I had to do it all over again and I owned my own home and there was a separate kid bathroom I would have a special little potty and sink plumbed right in. Why not? Especially if you plan to have more than one, it will go to good use and they are darn cute. (Disclaimer, I have not actually priced this out, so it may well be ridiculously expensive and cost prohibitive). 4. Along the same lines as the first one but a completely different bent: Nursery smersery. Don't bother. Unless you really get off on that kind of thing. They will be a baby for ONE lousy year. ONE. It will zoom by. Again unless you plan to have more than one and you keep the same room as a nursery for all of your kids, then it might make sense. But I know I'm in the minority here and other women get off on decorating a nursery. I'm not one of them. My kids didn't want anything to do with any sinkin' cribs any way and they certainly weren't interested in sleeping in a completely different room! A changing table for a newborn/baby is rather handy but it's really better placed in the living room. 5. When you're pregnant with your third and exhausted and at the end of the pregnancy and you consider hiring a "Mother's Helper" for two afternoons a week to give you a break but you don't because you're too proud and cheap... well ... yea, that's just stupid. Do it. Don't be proud and cheap, get the help. You're not super woman. Making a baby is exhausting, especially if you have a few other kids to take care of at the same time. 6. If you can figure out a way to afford it, just buy the one you want. What ever it is. Explanation: I went through so many Craigslist strollers before I bought the big, expensive jogging stroller. First we had the Graco Citi Lite. It cost around $80. Not a bad purchase really, it was a handy stroller but really not up to the job of the every day long city walk. I'm a walker, I walk every where I can. If I can walk there and not get in my car, I do. I find it much more enjoyable. The next purchase was the used Sit and Stand. I thought this would be great for two kids. It was AWFUL. Awful for me. It does not go over curbs well. Neither did the Citi Lite once my kid got over a certain weight. Then I broke down and bought a used Schwinn jogging stroller. I fell in love with blow up tire jogging strollers! Oh the curbs, you go over them with ease! The joy of walking long distances! Only this one had a major design flaw. The arched metal bar seat support. Once your kid reached a certain height their head started to hit a big metal bar. FAIL. I checked to see if the newer models had improved on this horrible design. They had not. I finally broke down and bought a brand new "BOB". Such a cliche now. They are every where! Every other YUPPY mama is walking around with one. And they are ridiculously expensive! BUT... I use that sucker every day. I use it more than my car. It has saved my sanity more than once. It was worth it. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble and money if I would have just bought one in the first place. Of course they didn't have them when my first was a baby... but you know what I mean. So it's something you plan to use for a long time, nearly every day... just go for the nice one. You'll be glad you did : )

Baby Addict!

I have a problem. I may need a twelve step program. I'm a baby addict. There, I said it! My youngest turned three in March, she's sleeping in her own room, in her own bed (most of the night). She recently weaned. She's working on potty training. This year she started preschool at our local co-op preschool in the 2's class. She's an independent little miss. And she's not a baby any more. I read this post the other day and it made me want to cry! It summed up exactly how I feel. Particularly the bit about "rewind the tape with each newborn, to relive that particular kind of falling in love." Yes, that is IT exactly, that is why I feel the way I do right now that my youngest has hit this milestone and there are no more babies coming. Let's face it, you fall in love with your partner and it's great, it's fabulous, it's frightening because it's all consuming. But it only happens the one time. I know, I know, there was an elderly couple in the paper and they've been married for a hundred years and they fall more in love with each other every single day and they screw every single day... and yadda yadda yadda. Well, yeah, I don't buy it. You only get the great big rush once, it last for awhile, it's awesome but then the hormones die down and the dust settles and you have to actually put work into the relationship and talk and make compromises and stuff and sometimes it's just enough already and you just want to get some sleep... But with a baby... a sweet baby. You get to fall in love again! AND remain monogamous! How cool is that? AND it gets better... you both get to fall in love at the same time! There's even a name for it, it's called a "babymoon". And it's awesome, at least it is until your hormones go all wacky and you get anxious and depressed. That sucks but that only happened the one time and it didn't last, thankfully! Ahhhhh, babies. I loved giving birth. I really did. I loved the surprise of finding out the sex and gazing into their little faces that I'd been trying to picture in my head for months. I had a client once when I worked in social work. She had had over 10 children and most of them had been taken away from her by the state because of neglect. Her I.Q. was borderline, meaning she was not so smart. Nice, but didn't make the greatest decisions. I looked at the ages of her children once and figure out that when they hit about three, that's when she got pregnant again. She was a baby addict but she didn't know how to stop. I'm thankful that I've named and recognized my problem and I shall seek out other ways of getting my baby fix. I've said it before and I mean it. If I had started having my own earlier I would rock the surrogate mom thing. Although falling in love and handing them over would be difficult, so I would have to be allowed to be around, to be Aunt Kassi. But those days are over. I started too late. I'd get slapped with that high risk label now. Bummer. I'll just have to watch my birth videos and look at the photos of those newborns and kiss and squeeze the delicious big kids they've turned into and wait until I get to be a grandma!

Baby Wearing Grandpas!

I saw a man today walking down the street with a baby strapped to his front in an Ergo type carrier. Her/His little chubby legs dangling out. He was fully grey, looked like grandpa but this is Seattle, so it could have just as likely been dad too. Grandpa or Dad it got me thinking about when Jon and all the other babywearing dads become grandfathers. Seeing an older grandfatherly person walking around wearing a baby will become a more common sight.... and what a WONDERFUL sight it will be!

(Nearly) Ten Years!

Well, I think this is it! I think Mira has weaned. Much like her siblings it has been a very gradual and easy experience. She turned three recently and was usually nursing once a day, before bed. She started to not nurse before bed every night. Some nights she would want a back rub or a "rub back" and then would fall asleep before asking to nurse. This has gone on for a couple of months now. But she hasn't asked to nurse in over a week! She has done this before and then asked that night when I thought she was weaned, so I'm not 100% certain yet but she's definitely close.
I remember buying our house in Tacoma and a couple months later, I remember it being June and think that adds up correctly, finding out we were expecting. So it would exactly ten years ago this June. Thus began my journey of pregnancy, babies, nursing.... for TEN years! I was not expecting it to go on that long. We originally thought we would have one. One would be good and then we could scratch that itch and move on with our lives. I was just about to finish graduate school. Due to graduate a year from that June I found out I was pregnant, so we jumped the gun by a few months but some how I managed to pull off the last three months in the baby fog I was in and finish my last classes along with my final paper, which had to be given back to me to redo a few times...
I was to go back to work after a couple of years and get on with my life, being the feminist that I am, I never thought that I would be completely dependent on another person's income. But some time after Solomon was born we became a "family" and it didn't seem to matter any more. I had my job, Jon had his and we had ourselves a family. I found that I actually liked my job, preferred it to my past job. Then we both figured out we didn't want to stop with one, so we had Margo. Margo was a lovely baby- really very easy in comparison to Solomon. I don't want to make it sound like the first year of being a wife and a mother was easy, it was not. It was a rocky, rocky road. But we came out on the other side a family. And then we grew... and grew.
Now I find myself ten years later looking back. Ten years. Ten years of being pregnant and/or breastfeeding! Ten years! It's amazing. Much more amazing to me than being married for ten years. I'm not surprised at all by that. When Jon and I re-met and fell in love we both knew it was right and where we were supposed to be. Not that having a baby wasn't similar, it's just that I didn't expect to have three and to be nursing for so long!
When Solomon was a baby I remember visiting family and my niece very innocently asking me how long I planned on nursing. I hadn't really thought about it but when a year came there didn't seem any reason to wean him and he had no intention of weaning and then two came and still, every thing felt right and natural and I found myself becoming more of an advocate of breastfeeding and especially "extended" breastfeeding because nursing past a year isn't exactly widely socially accepted. Even though, it felt so normal and natural I couldn't imagine forcing him to stop. So we kept going. And I'm so glad we did. He got busier and busier and nursing became less and less important and right around his third birthday, much like Mira, he was only nursing before bed and not every night. He also wanted back rubs and he wanted Dada to lie down with him more and more and I had to be with baby Margo a lot at that time, so the gradual weaning happened so quiet and peacefully that we barely even noticed until one day I realized it had been a couple of weeks! And I asked him if he wanted to have a "weaning party" and we did! We invited a few friends over, friends who's kids also were "extended" nursers. And we celebrated the fact that he was so big he no longer needed "mamas". Or "more mamas" as he liked to call them.
With Margo it went much the same, so nursed until about a month before her third birthday. Then we had a end of summer camping trip and all slept in a tent together and she didn't ask to nurse before bed, so when we got home I asked her if she wanted to keep doing what we did in the tent, which was to hold hands and talk until she fell asleep and she said yes. And then a few days later she asked to nurse again, I said yes, she did briefly and that was that. She was done. I was early pregnant with Mira at that time and enjoyed a brief moment of being able to wear dresses with no boob access! And then Mira.... and almost identical story. She turned three the end of March, was nursing before bed and not really any other time, except on the rare occasion she would asked to nurse during the day, usually if she was tired or not feeling well. She's been nursing before bed but wants back rubs first, then often falls asleep and then doesn't ask to nurse the next day but will ask the next, and so on like this until now and it's been over a week and she's not asking or bringing it up... and I'm pretty sure she's done and then so is my ten year stint of being pregnant and/or breastfeeding. I can wear dresses again with no boob access, I can go buy some new bras that aren't breastfeeding bras! I can go on a diet... well, okay I already started that a little over a month ago since she was so infrequently nursing and I really needed to drop a few pounds. (explanation, I was a little worried to "diet" while nursing, don't exactly want my body to be "flushing" any toxins or anything while dieting). Maybe the dieting had something to do with her weaning, even though she was already heading in that direction but maybe the calorie counting/ cutting impacted my supply? I can't really say, but it was time. She's three and I don't put numbers before her and her needs but she was ready, is ready and so am I. Time to move on to our next big adventure. Still, WOW! Almost an entire DECADE of pregnancy/babies/breastfeeding... who would have guessed. : O