In Which I Make It Clear That I Agree with RationalJenn About Baby Eating

Jenn, friend of my heart and partner in crime, being the kind person that she is, would never eat a baby. Just so you know. Here is her statement that the Atlanta Objectivist Society would also never condone the eating of babies.

To Whom It May Concern:

The principal members of the Atlanta Objectivist Society (ATLOS) would like you to be aware that we do not advocate the eating of babies, even deliciously adorable ones with smooth skin and squeezable cheeks and beautiful smiles.

We would also like to make it plain that we do not automatically sanction every utterance someone makes at any of our events. We expect those who hear something they do not like or disagree with to seek out the individual in question and gather more information as necessary and sufficient to support making an independent decision about that individual's claims or character. We especially expect people to do that because we pride ourselves on our crazy senses of humor and are as likely as not to make outrageous and inappropriate jokes on a regular basis. 

Sincerely, 

The Management


I would like to echo her sentiment that baby eating is definitely not something we advocate. We also do not advocate the following:

• selling children to the gypsies
• beating people to death with jars of peanut butter
• going to hell
• strangling your loved ones with pet anacondas
• pinching people's heads off
• keeping lions in closets in order to have people who contradict you eaten up

However, these are all things that I have said, right out loud. Since I must publicly disavow all crazy things that people may flippantly say, I thought I better tell you all that I do not actually advocate any of the above. In fact, I think that people who actually do them should either go to jail or return to the myths they came out of (yes, I'm talking to you, Orpheus!). 

For future reference, if I say anything really outlandish involving cartoon-like violence, especially if I do this funny guttural utterance from my diaphragm while saying them (known as a laugh to those of us who have a sense of humor - you can google it) or if I say them with a flourish and then leave the room in a huff, you can say in your head, "Wow, I think that's this thing I heard of called sarcasm or hyperbole or a joke. It's so cool to see an example in real life. I am going to notice them every time they happen, and one day, with much study, I will have a sense of humor like a real, grown-up boy!" 

Here is what I do advocate: Get a fucking life, people. And fast, before your seriousness, like natron on a mummy, sucks all the life juices out of you and dries you out like a humor-less, fun-less, wrinkled-up old prune.

Canterbury, the Final Day: Day 21

(written yesterday)

Today was my last day in England. Tomorrow we fly home. I amready to go home; I miss Livy, our friends, and my home. I am also really readyto get back to work and school next week.

But I’m sad to be leaving, too. This is the longest tripI’ve ever taken, and, though I was afraid I would get sick of being away after3 weeks, I loved being away this long. I feel like I got really settled intotraveling. I got over the frenzied feeling of needing to see everything andrelaxed into a pace that works for me. Aaron and I had lots of time togetheralone, which was awesome, and we also stayed long enough to want some timealone. Time alone in England ROCKS.

So today, I went to Canterbury on the train by myself. Iwalked to the cathedral and toured it with a guide. The highlights for me werethe tombs of Edward the Black Prince and Henry IV. It was funny to me that theywere buried right there next to each other when Henry IV, dreadful usurper thathe was, killed off Edward’s son, Richard II, to get the throne. But I guesspeople don’t care who they end up hanging out with when they are dead.

It was cool to see the place where Thomas Beckett wasmurdered, but thanks to that douchebag Henry VIII, may harpies plague hisspirit, the tomb, Beckett’s body, and everything to do with him was destroyed.Henry even dared to wear a jewel off of Beckett’s tomb on a ring. And guess whoalso wore it before it disappeared? Blasted Mary Tudor.

Speaking of Mary Tudor, have I blogged about our householdgods? We have a space on the mantle where we keep images of historical figureswe love. Right now, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Einstein are up there. I’vebeen looking for Isaac Newton for a long time; somewhere on the internet is afinger puppet of him, which would be perfect, but I can’t find a way to orderone. On this trip, I bought a Darwin bust to add.

I also started a new tradition associated with our householdgods. I bought too hated figures to put up there as voodoo dolls, with pinsthrough their vitals. First, Mary Freaking Tudor, of course. When I stick her,I will think of Thomas Cranmer, an Anglican priest she burned (among the manypeople she burned) who wrote the beautiful Bookof Common Prayer. I also got William the Conqueror, who will get a pin inhonor of my beloved Anglo-Saxons. If you ever find that you need to buy me apresent, here are the other figures I want: Newton, Asimov, Keats, Henry VIII(able to be either stuck with a pin or beheaded), E.M. Forster, Gerard ManleyHopkins, Chaucer, and Werner Von Braun, who needs to be hit with a V-1, but apin will have to do.

Back to Canterbury.

After the cathedral, I went to the super-cheesy andoh-so-wonderful Canterbury Tales “Museum.” Basically, you get an audio guideand walk through scenes from the tales, while Chaucer tells you basic contextabout pilgrimages to Canterbury and retells some of the most famous tales. Itwas dark and the mannequins were creepy! I would not take small children therebecause they would be terrified. The Wife of Bath mannequin in particular wasghastly. As the audio guide tells the tales, lights shine on different parts ofthe scenes. You start in the tavern, move through the Knight’s Tale (withstained glass window projections of the brothers), the Miller’s Tale (withmoving wooden butt that hangs out of the window at the right time), the Wife ofBath’s Tale (more stained glass looking projections), the Pardoner’s Tale (withcreepy silhouette of the friend’s funeral that the 3 dudes see), and the Nun’sPriest’s Tale (with a movable Chanticleer that goes up a tree).

If you can imagine the animatronics of the Rainforest Café,combined with a wax museum, combined with the Canterbury Tales, you’ve got theright idea. After the stories, you see a scene of Beckett’s tomb in theCathedral. This place was just awesome, and I wouldn’t have missed it for allthe dignity in the world (which I had to check at the door and one other timewhen I had to ask for directions to the “museum”). It was the world’s biggestball of twine for English majors.

In the afternoon, I took a walk through Canterbury, by theNorman castle, along the river, and back to the city center. I had hotchocolate and read for a while and then went to Evensong at the cathedral. Thechoir was very good, and I liked the arrangements better than any I’ve heard onthis trip.

Now I am stuck on a delayed train somewhere betweenCanterbury and London, and these train people need to know that they aredelaying my birthday dinner of Chicken Balti!!

Parenting Toolbox: 3 Rs of Recovery

When I pulled out this card* today, looking for a tool to write about, I knew it was the right one. I love the cards that tell me how to behave because often, that's all it takes for Livy to behave. Amazing how big an effect it has on her when I act like the responsible, mature adult I should be. This card also explains a tool that I can pass on to Livy as a life skill, and I love those too. And last, but not least, I had to use the steps on this card recently in my daily life.

The card reads:

"Making mistakes isn't as important as what you do about them. Use these steps after you have had a chance to cool off.

"1. Recognize the mistake with a feeling of responsibility instead of blame.

"2. Reconcile by apologizing. Children are so forgiving.

"3. Resolve the problem by working together on a respectful solution."

So, in case you guys were not aware of this, I mess up all the time. I set limits that are unnecessary. I yell at Livy. I boss her when I ought to mind my own business. I treat her unkindly or like I'm superior or like she is a bother. I hurry her up when I don't have anything in particular to do. I let lesser priorities get ahead of her.

And, in case you guys were not aware of this, if you generally treat your child with respect and allow her to voice her opinions, she will let you know immediately when you do any of the bad things above. :)

I try to always keep in mind that I am forging a new path, parenting in a new way (not the way I was parented), and mistakes are to be expected. Not only expected, but welcomed as new chances to learn how to behave myself. Not that I want to yell at her. But when I do, instead of kicking myself (mentally or physically), I can be glad that I have seen a flaw in my behavior or thinking and that I have a chance to work on it.

Therefore, my motto: YIPPEE MISTAKES!!

But what to do when you make a mistake with your kids? Here's a list of some of the ways I have seen parents handle mistakes.

1. Hide them. After all, if we want our kids to respect us, we had better appear to be infallible. Everyone who has ever worked for a jackass boss knows that we don't respect people who cannot admit that they are wrong and make amends. We see them as insecure and rigid and dishonest, and they are.

2. Don't even acknowledge the mistake to yourself. They are only kids, anyway, and we can treat them any way we want. We are the adults; we must be right. This is even worse than the first one. At least if you only hide your mistakes you can improve secretly. If you don't even allow that you could be wrong, there is no possibility of change.

3. Blame them on the kid. "Well, I may have yelled, but you shouldn't do that and make me so mad." Also the M.O. of spousal abusers, though at least their victims can leave. Once again, dishonest, but also just mean. And what a terrible lesson to teach, that a child is responsible for other people's feelings and behavior. This means he is his brother's keeper, and even his mom's.

So, as usual, positive discipline has another approach: the three Rs. When we screw up, we can accept responsibility, apologize to the wronged person, and make a plan (ideally, involving the wronged person in the planning) for working on this problem in the future.

Here's an example of how this might work with me and Livy. I can't think of a recent situation when I've used this with her, so I'm making one up, but it could easily happen this way for us.

Imagine Livy happily playing in her room, absorbed in some important and yet invisible (to me) project. I walk in and say, "Okay, I need some help with the dishes." She says, "I'm busy. I'll help later." I say, "Look, I cooked dinner and grew these vegetables and the least you can do is come and help me clean." We end up in a fight because she doesn't want to disengage from her work, and I am stubbornly refusing to butt out. When I realize that I didn't take her work into account or try to be at all flexible about the help I needed (everything had to be on my time schedule), here's what I would do.

1. Recognize the mistake. Thinking in my head, "I hate to be interrupted and bossed too. Her work is just as important to her as mine is to me, and there was no reason those dishes could not have waited 10 or 15 minutes. I should have been more respectful of her time."

2. Reconcile by apologizing. To Livy: "I'm sorry that I just came in here and demanded that you stop what you were doing and help me RIGHT NOW. I should have told you that I needed help and then worked out a time for doing it that was good for both of us." After this, Livy would definitely need to talk with me about it and probably cry a little bit, if it was an intense fight. I wouldn't move on to step 3 until we were actually reconciled, and she felt heard.

3. Resolve by problem solving. Me: "I don't want to act like that in the future, so I'll need to work on it. Any ideas?" Livy: "Don't boss me anymore." Me: "That's my goal, but I need a plan to help me practice and remember. What if you hold up your hand if I start rudely interrupting you so that I can remember not to?" Livy: "Or I could close my door if I am working on something important." Me: "Okay, that sounds good. Then, when I stop to knock, that will help me remember to respect your time. I'll still want to tell you I need help and work out a plan for when you can take a break and help me." Livy: "That's fine. Now can I get back to my project?" Me: "Sure. When can you help me with the dishes?" Livy: "10 minutes?" Me: "Okay, I'll set the timer."

Now, what did I get out of this? First, I got to make amends for a mistake and repair the relationship with a person I value very much. I got to show her that I want to treat her well, which makes her feel better and makes me feel better too. I got to be virtuous; I used honesty (because looking a mistake square in the face is looking at reality), integrity (because I chose to act in accordance with my values), productivity (because parenting is a career and this is the kind of work I want to do in my parenting), and pride (because I was looking back over my behavior to see if it was virtuous). I also got to teach Livy some important lessons, and that is a big goal of mine.

Here's what I think she got out of it: She learned that adults make mistakes, even parents, and that when she is an adult, she will make mistakes as well. She learned what to do when she makes a mistake. She learned that when we bring a mistake to the forefront instead of evading it, both people (the mistake-maker and the victim of the mistake) get to feel better. She learned about how to be virtuous by watching me use honesty, integrity, productivity, and pride, even if she doesn't know their names yet. She learned that it is not okay to boss people around and to misuse power. And she learned that I love her and don't want to treat her badly, even when I sometimes do it by mistake. That's quite a lot from one little mistake from me and a conversation.

Because it is so applicable to every single person in the world, I think that this tool should be considered a life tool or a people tool, rather than just a parenting tool. I used it myself recently with another adult.

I lost my temper and wrote an unfair blog post. Once I cooled down and realized what I did, I used these 3 steps to handle the situation. They took a long time because it was a big confusing mistake, but in the end, they worked in the same way they do with kids.

First, I acknowledged to myself the mistake I had made. And not just that I had made a mistake, but exactly what I had done and why. This first step is really a kind of introspection, where we figure out what happened and admit, to ourselves, exactly what the error was. Next, I apologized to the person I went off on. I explained my mistake to him and told him how sorry I was.

Finally, I made a plan (This time, I did the problem solving alone, since the victim of my mistake was a stranger and not someone I was likely to go off on again.) for how I was going to cool off before publishing blog posts in the future. I thought of what I could do to made amends to him (apologizing publicly and taking down the post) and of what I could do to prevent these kinds of mistakes in the future.

By dealing with my mistake this way instead of one of the other ways I mentioned, I got to be virtuous and feel better and work for my future improvement. My victim got some justice and acknowledgment from me and got the feeling of reconciliation too. This way of handling the mistake was a win for both of us.

Admitting mistakes openly makes some people feel embarrassed and humbled, but I don't think we have to see it that way. When I behaved so badly, I was not acting virtuously. Nothing else I could do afterward would erase that. My choice was in how to handle the aftermath of the mistake, virtuously or not. When we use these 3 Rs, since we are acting virtuously, we can feel the dignity and honor that virtuous action brings us. I may have been a jackass on the day I wrote the post, but I can be proud of the way I handled it afterward, at least.

This is a big lesson I want Livy to take into adulthood: when we handle mistakes rationally, using these 3 Rs, we help ourselves (the virtues lead to happiness, after all), and we maintain healthy relationships (treating our loved ones with respect). And I think owning up when I make mistakes is the best way for her to learn it.

*You can see Jane Nelson's Positive Discipline Tool Cards here.

Angel of Contrition?

Okay, so I totally over-reacted. I may have lots of bad qualities (which you guys have seen plenty of lately), but I hope being unable to say when I am wrong is not one of them. So, I wrote an email to the injured party, and since I injured in public, I thought it seemed only fair to apologize in public as well. Here's my email:

Dear person of the allergy comments,

I wanted to write to you because now that I have cooled off, I can see that I really overreacted. I should not have gone off on you in such a vitriolic way, even couched humorously, especially so publicly. I am sorry that I lost my temper and vented that anger on you. Here is what I should have said, hopefully written in the mature way I should have said it, instead of behaving like a child. And it should have been private, cause that would be a ton less trailer trash.

"I was upset by your refusal to look at facts and to reevaluate your claims. But, the more important part was how insensitive you were to the mom's feelings. Can you imagine the terror of living every day worried that your child might eat something perfectly normal and then die? Can you imagine the guilt a mom might feel for the time before she was aware of the child's allergy when she ate peanuts? Even though there is no reason to believe that a mom can CAUSE an allergy by eating peanuts, she almost certainly made her child's babyhood more difficult by doing that, though she didn't know. The sorrow for that, coupled with knowing the limitations the child will always face, is immense. So when approaching that mom, one that you know to be passionately devoted to the care of her children and especially that allergy, you should take her feelings into account. You should have made it clear that you were not attacking her personally, and you should have been more willing to listen to the things she was telling you. It makes me incredibly angry to see a person holding onto wrongheaded ideas in the face of facts, but especially to see that person hurting someone I hold very dear with his insensitivity."

That would have expressed my anger without being so mean. That would have been a better thing to do, both for making you understand my point better and for my own character. I would rather be a kinder person who gives people the benefit of the doubt, or at least the respect of criticizing privately and without over-harshness. I wish I had handled it that way from the beginning and found something else to be funny about.

I wanted to tell you why your comments made me so mad, just so you understand better where all that anger came from. Not to excuse what I did at all, since emotionalism can have no excuse. Since being friends with that mom, I have seen people blame her and other allergy moms for their children's illnesses so many times. "You ate peanuts." "Your house is too clean." "You shouldn't have used anti-bacterial soap." I have seen the allergy science that we have completely dismissed. "You have made this all up to get attention." "You are just trying to keep your child close to you with this fake allergy thing." "If he had been exposed to peanuts, he might not be allergic." "If you had kept him away from peanuts, he might not be allergic." This illness is not treated like other illnesses. If a child gets cancer, people say how sorry they are and are interested in new research and treatments. If a child has a life threatening allergy, people are annoyed and believe it's fake and use old wives' tales to talk about the way it should be handled. I have seen people who actually know peanut allergic children be unwilling to forgo bringing unsafe food to the child's house; I have seen moms who are pissed because they can't send peanut butter to their child's school. It kills me how little support these families get and how ready uninformed people are to tell them why it happened and what they should do about it.

None of those things were your fault. In once conversation you said things that I considered ignorant and insensitive. All the other stuff was not your fault at all, and I should not have let my huge amount of anger toward the whole situation be vented on you. I don't expect you to actually answer any of the things I said above. I'm sure you are ready to be done with this and to not hear from me again. But I wanted you to know that I regret losing my temper and I regret not telling you what I thought in a more mature and respectful way. I want you to know that I sincerely apologize, and I will use what I learned from this debacle to keep my temper in better check in the future. I'm making this public on my blog as well, since it seems only fair that since I freaked out on you in public, I should apologize in public too.

I'm sorry.

Kelly

The Angel of Vengeance Quits

Dude, it's hard to be an angel of vengeance. Some people love you; some people hate you!

Anyway, first a retraction: The second part of the email about Mini-Con needs to be formally taken back. The persons who annoyed me so very much have made some explanations, and I, being the delightfully flexible angel of vengeance that I am, choose to believe them. The conversation which seemed to be attacking both Mini-Con for not being OCON (which we never claimed to be) and the love of my life for being Stephen Speicher (who he definitely is not) has been explained as just promoting our Mini-Con and asking for some clarification. I am perfectly willing to believe this is the case. So, the persons involved in that conversation need not worry about peanut butter jar bludgeoning.

As for the main accusations of the angel of vengeance toward food allergy conversation, they still stand. However, in the interest of world peace and people chilling the freak out, I am removing said ripping from the blog. Turns out that I don't have the stomach for vengeance after all. Just short living white hot anger flashes that burn down to an attitude of not wanting to make people all mad.

So, I officially retire. The Angel of Vengeance is going to go have some nummy breakfast and try not to say anything inflammatory for a whole 30 minutes.