Turning Into My Mother

After I waved the boys off this morning (“have fun storming the castle!”) I turned my attention to the garden, specifially my vegetable plot.

I’ve been nursing some seedlings along for the past wee while. Sadly I lost the cucumbers (apparently they REALLY mean it when they say cucumbers don’t like to be transplanted) and have already put out some of the lettuce and mesculun (salad mix). My zucchini/courgettes though, were calling to me. Some of them were starting to fade in their little plastic pots and, since the weather here is turning warmer, I decided it was time to transplant a few.

I built a trellis out of electrical conduit and trellis netting, pounded some rebar into the ground and slid the trellis on top. (I have it on good authority that this will do the job. I’m skeptical and will be ready with the guy wires assuming my vines ever grow up the thing).

I then fetched my beloved, long-nursed zucchini seedlings out in to the garden. I gently up-ended the pot and eased them out….and promptly snapped the stems on three of them. I had actually started a lot more plants than I thought I would need, thinking I could share some with the neighbours, but it looks like the neighbours will have to fend for themselves, because, as I put the plants in the ground I managed to snap the stem on one more. Of the six plants I handled this morning, two are now in the ground and still attached to their roots. (I put the others in the ground anyway, and covered them with dirt, just in case they felt like growing new roots along their stems, but I’m not optimistic.) I still have one back-up plant hiding out here with me in the office, so if tragedy befalls the two that made it, all is not lost. Yet.

After that, and a bit of general weeding, I made some wire cages for the seedlings, put a shade cloth on the trellis since the sun decided to make an  unscheduled appearance, elected to wait until later to put out the pepper and (more) salad seedlings, tidied up, swept the deck and decided to take a well-earned sit down in the still morning-shady corner of said deck.

At which exact moment a squad of workies pulled up across the street and started to do this.

At the risk of sounding like my mother…oh, too late.

Boys and Brains

Some hiccoughs in the Kindergartner’s progress recently have had my antennae tingling every time I come across any information about boys and schools and intelligence. I”ve discovered a few really interesting things recently.
This podcast of a recent Voices In The Family radio show was quite fascinating. The guests were a writer who has gathered all kinds of statistics and studies together to find out why boys are doing so poorly in school compared to girls (and there has been  a decline in boys’ performance in recent years) and a psychologist who studies these kinds of things.

Peg Tyre, the writer on the show has a book called The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do which is chock full of examples, studies and conclusions on the topic of boys and formal education. The thing I really like about it is that, although she does present conclusions, they are offered alongside the stats, which means that parents and educators can take that information and weigh it in the context of their own boys and their own situations.

The next podcast I listened to was a recent episode of Radio Times, also from my local NPR station. The guest was Richard Nisbett, who has written a book called Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Apparently the whole question of intelligence and what it is, is quite fraught and political and I get the impression that the experts all disagree with each other quite vehemntly. However, I liked this guy’s thesis (that intelligence is largely affected by environment). It just makes sense to me. The podcast starts off with a discussion of intelligence and IQ scores and brain size and racial differenes that you might find a bit dry (but which I found fascinating), but it warms up a bit once they start talking about schools and once the callers start calling in (a pretty intelligent bunch of callers, if you ask me. Sometimes you get runts, but this show attracted some interesting and concise callers).

I’d recommend both of these shows, and possibly the accompanying books, to parents of young children, who are concerned about how to help their kids negotiate the world of school and learning.

You Know You’re A Stay At Home Mom When…

I love that I get to stay at home with my children, but there are, as in any career, downsides to the job. Sometimes they strike me as funny, so I’ve started compiling a list.

You know you’re a Stay-At-Home-Mom (SAHM)  when:

…You really amuse yourself by writing both ‘ketchup’ and ‘catsup’ on the shopping list and deliberately leaving it in the cart for someone else to find.

…You put on make-up because you’re Going Out! (To your annual OB/GYN check-up).

…You actually look forward to going somewhere that requires you to wear tights/panyhose.

More to come, as they occur.
What would you add to the list?

Best Job In The World

The news is full of the guy who won the contest for the “Best Job In The World” – as a caretaker of a tropical island, which was a brilliant PR campaign by the Queensland Tourist Board, by the way.

Talk of the Nation, on NPR, is doing a call-in show, asking people what their ‘best job in the world’ would be.

I know what my dream job is. And it doesn’t take a huge investment of money or equipment. The only barrier to entry is to carve out time and energy and discipline and self-confidence.

Off I go, then…