My Mom's Here

I can see the frustration settle into my 7 month old daughter's head trickling through tears and her whole self when she cannot pull some sort of large object into her mouth to test it out. I can see the frustration settle into my husband's head trickling through clenched jaw and empty stare and his whole self when he gets an answer wrong. This could be answers to tiny questions, such as, "was it right to play the queen of diamonds in the card game last night?" all the way over to life saving questions he experiences on a daily basis as a cardiology fellow. I am so not a doctor. Success to me does not equal winning or getting things right. I play games for fun, happen to be very good at games with trump thanks to my Uncle Billy's teachings, and would rather loose than win b/c if my husband, the doctor, looses, he gets upset. His dad said that that is competitiveness. I think it is only one reaction to competitive situation and only one form of evidence of competit...

I was contemplating how Naomi will be when she is in that resistant-to-parents teenage phase, which nowadays is happening in tweens, so by the time culture catches up with itself, she'll be 7 when this all explodes, but I won't change my title yet. What are some practical practices that we could implement, which at the time she may dislike us for doing them, but when she is married and has her own children, she will look back at these practices and see them as valuable. How about a "Family Blackout" where cell phones, beepers (who knows if they'll exist), computer chips in the fingertips, mini computers, and all electronics are shut off for a said amount of family time. Maybe every night during dinner? I remember when I was about 16, I wrote a list in my journal: "Things I'll remember that my parents did that I hated." I wrote this list so that when I had children of my own, I would remember how "imposing" on my life they were, those beings...