Tiger Cub Roars!

I just found out that Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, eldest daughter of the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (which I blogged about here a few days ago) has her own blog - New Tiger in Town. Her blog shows the backstage aftermath of having your childhood written up in a bestseller (I'm reminded of the Catherine Light and Dark story from Six Feet Under). But what I like best about it is that Sophia is really funny, and a very good writer herself. I've been immune to the reality TV trend, but apparently, I can't resist reality text. Now, if only LuLu would be more like her sister and start a blog too, we could really get a three dimensional view of their family....

Bento Quest

This post is a cry for help. For the past couple of months, I have been on a quest for the perfect bento box. If you do not know what a bento box is, look here. Normally, I am immune to this sort of Martha Mom activity. Normally, I don't even make lunch for my daughter. Hot lunch is $1.75 at the cafeteria, and if not nutritionally ideal, probably not much worse than the PB&J she'd end up with everyday if I packed her lunch.
But poor Rose Red is tired of living with the stigma of hot lunch. While all of her friends with moms who love them get to sit down and eat right away, she has to stand in line for food. By the time she gets her food, her friends' table is full, so she has to sit with, gasp, strangers. Then her friends finish their food about the time she sits down. She must choose between eating hot food among strangers or tossing said hot food and going out to play with her friends, hungry. Every day, Rose Red comes home starving and eats a snack the size of dinner.
So now I try to pack a lunch sometimes. And for some reason, I believe this will be easier if I have the perfect bento box. She already has a phthalate leaching vinyl lunchbox, and a tiny, single compartment bento I bought at Daiso, in the International District. But these are not perfect. I want a perfect bento box.
What is a perfect bento? It is many things:
1. More than one compartment so juicy things don't make dry things soggy.
2. Has a place to store silverware (chopstick holders are cute, but impractical for my Americanized first grader.)
3. Has a seal that won't leak. This is surprisingly uncommon. Most bento just have lids that lift right off. I have adjusted my requirements to allow one of this kind if it comes with a band to keep it shut. But I'd rather have the same kind of click lock that her undivided Daiso box has.
4. Is dishwasher safe.
5. Ideally, has a place to put a water bottle. I might be able to ignore this one, if all other requirements were met.
6. Is cute. This is not unimportant.
Of course, my first thought was Hello Kitty (ok, actually BatzMaru) but they were pricey at Uwajimaya and not quite right.
I have found cute, impractical bento. I found a couple of nearly perfect, boring American bento. (I'm still tempted on this one. The whiteboard nearly makes up for the lack of cute.) So close!
I know that I will never create bento masterpieces or master the art of cute food, despite the helpful how-to instructions from folks like Bento for Kidlet. But especially now that I'm working again, I really like the idea of Rose Red sitting down with her friends at lunch, hours since she's seen me and hours before we'll meet again, and opening up her lunch box to find something special that I made just for her. Something cute, and sweet, and tasty, that says I love you like a hug in the middle of the day.
So, if anyone stumbles onto the Perfect Bento Box, please send me the link. Thanks.

You Know You're Sleep-Deprived When...

I realized that although I originally started this blog years ago as a genuine web log of our sleep troubles, and the title still refers to our sleepless household, I haven't really posted on sleep issues. I think this overarching problem in my family has become to me what the musical Satan was to Nathan Lane's character in Jeffrey - boring, one note, blah. Rather than bore the web-surfing reader as I am bored with my sleepytime woes, I thought I would compile a list. It may not be as entertaining as You Might Be a Redneck Jedi, but it does contain recent examples from my life.

You Know You're Sleep-Deprived When...
1. You put water in the microwave to boil so that you can make Sleepytime Tea for your kids' bedtime snack. While waiting, you steep the tea in your coffee.

2. You spend fifteen minutes desperately searching for your missing wedding ring, and finally find it on your ring finger.

3.  You have a dream that you can't fall asleep.

4.  One of your boots feels uncomfortable all morning. You take it off under your desk to give your foot a break and find out that foot doesn't have a sock on. The other foot is fine.

5.  You leave work on  Friday and are already on the bus when you realize you left your cell phone sitting on your office desk.

6. Your mug of coffee gets cold while you are busy trying to get your kids to actually put their breakfast in their mouths. You put it in the microwave to reheat, then spend the next ten minutes wandering the house, looking for your coffee mug.

Tiger Moms to Your Battle Stations

Ever since Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother came out, I've had a hold on it at the library. I was something like #350 in line. But fortunately, it's a fast read, and I got my hands on it this week. It's gotten so much buzz, everyone has an opinion whether they've read it or not. Anyone with an interest in parenting, books, or books on parenting has printed some kind of a rebuttal. There is much to rebut.

If this book was a birthday card, I would reject it; which is to say, I don't think this is her best work. As a law professor with two previously published scholarly books, I would expect even her memoir to include some kind of research. But no, it is strictly personal essay. She does not cite any statistics to support her impressions (which are widely shared) of generational decline in immigrant families or of the disproportionate success of Asian children in academics and classical music. This is unfortunate, because she has a few valid points that get lost in all the inflammatory stories.

Chua has been criticized for sounding insincere about her "conversion" to Western style parenting. She sounds proud of her hard-driving parenting even though she claims to have given it up. At the end of the book, she and her daughters have a conversation in which they agree that forcing perfection in music, Mandarin and academics was the right thing to do. The only thing Chua seems to have changed is her style. She's not so bitchy to her kids anymore. The change comes from realizing that obedience is not actually that Chinese (she attended the college of her choice instead of the one chosen by her father; her father left home for college and never went back, cutting himself off from his overbearing family forever). She also finally realizes her methods are not terribly effective. Throughout the book she sprinkles examples of occasions where her daughters are only able to perform when she is removed from the situation. Other, kinder people are able to draw more out of them than she is.

Since rebuttals are thick on the ground, I think I'll talk about what Chua gets right. She maintains her expectation that her daughters get perfect grades, study Mandarin and music. That doesn't seem so wrong to me. She and her husband are both Ivy League professors. Short of congenital defects, their daughters should perform to pretty high standards. They probably would even with Chua screaming herself hoarse at them every day. Which is what she finally figures out, and is supposedly what the book is about. When she defends her values (rather than her methods) she has a pretty good point.

Her point, and I think she is right, is that children are capable of more than we give them credit for. Her point, and I think she is right, is that parents need to prepare their children for the adult world, with a strong knowledge base and marketable skills. Her point, and I think she is right, is that effort, hard work and self control should be instilled at an early age because they are more important to success than talent and passion.

It's too bad her definition of success is so vague. For someone who claims to be comfortable being the bad guy, she seems to measure success more by prestige than by straightforward measures like financial security or happiness. Even when trying to defend the Tiger Mom, it's hard not to poke holes in her arguments. Chua relates several instances of her daughters doing exactly that in their arguments with her. The point is, Chua is not quite the bad guy everyone wants her to be. Nor is she the perfect Chinese mother she set out to be. Like the rest of us, she is a mom – trying her hardest and not always doing a very good job.

The Jonny Quest Dilemma

We recently rented a disc of the old Jonny Quest cartoons, and wasted an entire afternoon watching them with our daughter. I was appalled at the way the brilliant Dr. Banner referred to the subjects of his research in the Amazon as "savages." The fake accents of superstitious natives in Central America/India/Egypt made me squirm. At the end of each episode I held my breath, fearful that they would travel to China in the next one.

But the trick is I still loved them. Watching their improbable adventures as they traveled around the world solving crimes and archaeological mysteries with a mixture of pluck and sci-fi technology I felt the same excitement I felt watching them as a six year old. There was such a sense of mystery and possibility. Their world was full of adventure and science and discovery. I could see the root of my Itchy Feet Syndrome in those childish stories. When I was kid, I didn't see the cultural inaccuracies (why does the Hindu boy wear a turban?) and racial stereotypes. I saw a world full of people and stories beyond what was imaginable in my limited American experience, and I saw them as accessible to anyone who was smart and brave enough to go explore.

I watched Rose Red carefully, but she seemed to take the cartoons the same way I did when I was a kid. She had no need for logical sequences or rational explanations. She never questioned how two little boys could outmaneuver soldiers in a motorcycle chase or how their CIA bodyguard knew more about the properties of rare Amazon berries than the indigenous tribe they were trying to hoodwink. Her take home messages were "motorcycles are cool," and "cool plants grow in the Amazon." I like those messages.

So I decided to relax. I put PC Mom back in the box and watched old cartoons. When the evil Indian scientist locked the Quests in a cave and lit a trail of gunpowder to blow them to smithereens, and then their dog peed on the gunpowder and put the flame out just before it reached the dynamite, I laughed right along with Red. Because it doesn't matter if pee could really extinguish gunpowder. But you should be nice to your dog – he'd save you if he had a chance.

I might have a harder time with that once they go to China, though.

Glutton for Punishment, or, No Cure for Itchy Feet

After the disaster that was our trip to Japan, we agreed that the door had shut on our dreams of being a world-traveling family. The gain was not worth the pain. Never again, we swore, would we leave home for destinations requiring a passport. But after a few months, we realized that was a pretty melodramatic response. After all, the last four days of the trip, when no one was sick, had mostly been enjoyable. We began to think that a three week international trip had been too ambitious, but that we could try smaller trips and build up. I remembered how impossible grocery shopping felt when the girls were six months and five years. It was a completely different experience by the time they were one and five and a half. Traveling could be the same way.

So, about a year after Japan, we visited relatives in Arizona. Three of us came down with the stomach flu the week we were scheduled to go. I was still vomiting 12 hours before our flight. Only one of our suitcases arrived with us, our six year old impaled herself on a splinter of wood she broke off her grandmother's antique dining chair and had to go to the emergency room, and the two year old came down with a 103 F fever that lasted until after we got home. It was a three day trip.

That should have taught us our lesson. (Actually, I'm pretty sure it did teach my husband. He's not the one visiting mommy travel blogs.) But here I am only two months later, reading the aforementioned blogs and signing up for fare alerts at AirfareWatchdog and Vayama. I know better, but I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment. I can't stop researching exciting new places to visit and imagining family trips that previous experience indicates just might kill me. Even though my brain knows I'm not supposed to, I just can't seem to resist scratching my Itchy Feet.

DIY Travel Advice

After reading My Little Nomads, I stumbled on another site about traveling with children. Then another and another and - who knew there was a travel-mommy blogging subgenre? How could I have missed that when I was painstakingly researching our disastrous Japan trip last year? At the time, I thought I was entering, if not unexplored, then at least uncharted, territory. Before that disastrous Japan trip, travel-mommy blogging would have sounded like a dream job. Actually, it still does. Imagine being able to travel with your small children and write about it. I am wildly jealous of families who make travel work.

I really want to know more about how they do it. First, how do they log (and pay for) enough travel time to keep a blog active? I can see how a young singleton could spend three months on the road, then throw in a couple long weekends and philosophical musings. But who can spend three months on the road with kids? Three weeks almost killed me. Closer inspection revealed that some sites, like Ciao Bambino, are curated collections. The year-old site My Little Nomads accepts reader submissions and mines nearly a decade of past trips for material.

And then there’s WanderMom. This woman is documenting a year-long, round-the-world trip with her two kids. She even has a sponsors page! I’m dying to know if sponsorship is limited to gear or if it actually subsidizes her trip. If I could get paid to travel (or even get travel paid for) I don’t think I would care if it was hell to bring my kids.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a blog with much practical advice about how to take the hell out of “Hello, World, here we come.” Many posts talked about how to keep kids occupied on the plane. Only one addressed what to do when you use up all your tricks while your delayed plane sits two hours on the runway. I saw one post about dealing with illness on a trip. It suggested taking a day to rest. It didn’t address what to do when your toddler has been running a fever for a week and you haven’t left your hostel in six days. Nor what to do when your same toddler has a different raging fever and your flight home leaves tomorrow but you’ve been on hold over an hour and can’t talk to a live person about changing your flight. (Answer: airport security will let you carry on a bottle of Children’s Tylenol exceeding 3oz when your miserable toddler hangs like a sack of sweaty potatoes on your shoulder as you go through security.)

I love to travel. I miss traveling. I miss enjoying traveling. I want someone to tell me how to make it work. But I guess I’ll just have to do it myself.

Shut the Front Door

The other day, I stumbled upon this website – My Little Nomads, about Travel. With. Kids. A centerpiece of the site is an article called "Why you should do it, and do it now." Author David Robert Hogg claims that in 3 minutes he can convince you that you should not waste another moment before booking those tickets to explore the world on a journey of discovery with your precious little ones. You have a window of opportunity that is closing every minute. Soon enough, the window will close and your opportunity will be lost and your kids will be off discovering without you.

I say, "Hurry up, shut the window. And while you're at it, shut the front door. And lock it. But whatever you do – stay home!" I have never before been so inclined to comment on a web page with a rebuttal. Let me explain why.

Before I had kids, travel was my greatest joy in life. On the plane home from a trip, I would be thinking about where I wanted to go next. When we were saving money to adopt Rose Red, I stayed home for two years and became depressed. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, took a chunk of adoption money and spent 10 days in Costa Rica. All better.

Before I had kids, I had an idea about the kind of family I wanted to have. I dreamed of exploring the world together, sharing my love of discovering new places and trying new foods with my kids. I imagined watching them play on tropical beaches with local children with no spoken language in common; I imagined playgrounds on foreign continents and recklessly indulging in street food treats. I imagined disposable cameras filled with pictures of things only a kid would notice.

The first time I traveled with Rose Red was the second day we knew her. She was traumatized and scared and wanted her foster mom. She had never been on an airplane before, or in a seat belt, and when the stewardess buckled her in, she knew she wasn't going on vacation. She screamed hysterically for most of the three hour flight to Guangzhou. But that trip in China wasn't like regular travel. No one was expected to have any fun that time.

 I've only taken two trips with my girls since Snow White was born, but we've been to two emergency rooms while traveling.  I searched all over My Little Nomads, and found that Hogg's family had made two trips to the emergency room in all their many travels.
Hogg recommends that families traveling with infants request the bassinet when flying internationally. He said that his younger son slept 8 hours in the bassinet on the way to Asia. We got the bassinet when we took our trip to Japan. We had to split up the family to do it, because the bassinet seats are clustered together and it was a full flight. So although Rose and my husband were on the plane, I flew to Japan alone with Snow White, who refused to go anywhere near the bassinet. She screamed in my arms for the first 7 hours (no Benadryl didn't work) and finally fell asleep nursing. The bassinet blocked the armrest-mounted movie screen, so I spent the last three hours of the flight nursing, staring at the bulkhead, afraid to go asleep because I'd drop the baby.
During our two trips we've had lost luggage and flights delayed over 2 hours on the tarmac. We've had jetlagged kids who dragged us out to breakfast so early that 24hours Denny's was still serving dinner but at least that way we weren't waking up everyone in the hostel. We've fallen asleep standing on subways carrying sleeping children in our arms while baby backpacks hung empty on our shoulders. We've paid hundreds of dollars to mail suitcases home rather than carry them on one more train. We've run out of diapers and bibs and lost sippies and snacks everywhere we've gone. We've had heat rash, diaper rash, face plants, food reactions, and reactions to cigarette smoke in restaurants. What we have not had is fun. Our vacations are straight out of Band of Brothers.

I almost posted this as a rebuttal to Hogg and his perfect little nomads. But then I thought, maybe that isn't fair. For whatever reason, ours seems to be a hard way kind of family. It's true at home, so it shouldn't be a surprise that it's true abroad. But Hogg's premise isn't that everyone should make a lifestyle of travel. It's that everyone should try it. You never know until you try, and the rewards, if it works out, are as priceless as Hogg says they are.  That's why Hogg wants everyone to try it. He wants everyone to take a trip.

Before I had kids, I agreed completely with Hogg's philosophy. And even though it hasn't really worked out for me personally, I guess that ultimately I still agree with him.

The Laundry Load of Awesomeness

In follow up to the earlier post "Blog On" I would like to add another reason to blog. When someone has an experience like I did today, the blogs of others can provide both practical assistance and moral support. Sometimes the knowledge that you are not alone is really not that comforting. At other times, like today, it actually is. Here is what happened. (Cue flashback visuals here.)

I suddenly remembered the laundry I had started earlier in the day. I ran downstairs to switch it over. There was a load in the dryer that I couldn't remember having started, so I pulled it into the basket to take upstairs. It was all things that can be wrinkled anyway. Then I pulled the mesh bag out of the washer and started hanging underwear on the rack to dry. I noticed some small balls of what looked like gel on some of the underwear. I wondered, "Did I buy a molded bra and not realize that it had gel inserts?" Then I started to switch clothes into the dryer. I noticed more, and larger, balls of gel. Instead of tossing heaps of clothes from one side to the other, I carefully removed each item, hoping to find the strange toy or treasure that had exploded in someone's pocket. Then I saw bits of fluff.

With a sinking feeling of horror, I realized what I was looking for. Piece by piece, I reluctantly removed each article of gelatinous clothing from the washer until at the very bottom of the load, I found it - the disposable diaper. Fully absorbed, and nearly completely intact, except for the millions of globules of absorbent gel coating an entire load of laundry. I threw the soggy, three-pound diaper in the trash. Then (does this count as appropriate use of the word?) ironically, I grabbed a cloth diaper and wiped out the washing machine.

When that didn't work, I got online and googled "what to do if you wash a disposable diaper." The number of results was heartening. I was far from alone. Among them, I found this blog of awesomeness to be particularly enjoyable. I didn't follow her advice about the salt, but the Jack Black referencing mommy blogger with an interest in North Korea (hey, my washing machine is Korean) was a refreshing read. Plus, she gets her hair done about as often as I do!

I love that she thought to take a picture of the offending diaper. I need to start using pictures.

To conclude my story, I shook out each piece of clothing to minimize the strain on my lovely newish Korean appliances. Now my floor looks like it snowed indoors, and it is very slippery. I should probably try that thing they call sweeping. I put the clothes in the drier, as recommended on many sites. And then I ran a quick empty load in the washer without soap or OxyClean. The washing machine looks fine now, so no harm appears to have been done by my ridiculous awesome laundry adventure.