The tooth fairy already?

Melina just informed me that one of her teeth is loose. She says "I think that means I'm getting older." I think it does. It also means I have to get over the willies I get whenever I think of loose teeth. Guess I'm going to be seeing a lot of them (twenty, to be exact) over the next few years.

A visit to the farm

Today we went down to Woodburn with our friends Rafaela, Maya and baby Tobias to visit the farm where our beef came from last year. The farmer, Karen, grew up on a farm in Australia. She buys grass-fed cows from local farmers and then raises them for a while on her farm before selling the beef to people like us. We arrived at her farm on a rainy day and slogged across the pasture to the cow barn, admiring the chickens on the way. (Black sex-link hens are really striking... maybe I'll have to get one of those next). It was very muddy - I was glad I had tall rubber boots on. Melina was definitely not into the mud so I ended up carrying her over the worst parts. We met the two cows, Opal - and I can't remember the other one's name. Opal is very affectionate. (And she is not destined for anyone's freezer... at least not in the near future). She's pregnant (the father is a German bull) and due next month. We rubbed Opal's back for a while, checked out the milking barn and the hay bales, visited a calf named Lollipop and went back to the house to drink some Australian tea. All in all a fun adventure, although Melina hasn't taken to the farming life quite like I was hoping she would. Maybe when I start my goat farm...

Melina and Josie

Melina and her friend Josie love digging around in the costume trunk. They came up with these costumes completely by themselves.

About the Twitter feed

I just added the Twitter feed to my blog. I do a fair amount of Twittering for work, but I also have my own personal Twitter account. Often I accidentally post work Tweets on my personal account (it's too easy to do using the program I use) but I try to use my personal account mainly for articles that interest me - usually about backyard chickens, climate change, gardening, honeybees, and getting kids outdoors.

Free Range Kids

I just finished reading the book Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. This is the mom who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone from Bloomingdales home, and was subsquently skewered by the press for being "America's Worst Mom." Needless to say I loved the book. I remember spending hours and hours playing in the woods when I was a kid - there was an empty lot across the street that connected to some woods which connected to a cemetary (even cooler), and we used to climb around back there for hours with no parents hovering over us. I don't remember exactly how old I was at that point, but probably about seven. It bothers me that there's no equivalent place for Melina to play here - no wild places within walking distance.

But even if there were local wild places, times have changed. Pedophiles are hovering behind every other tree, right? Well, actually, they're not. Skenazy uses well-researched data to show that things are about as safe now for kids as they were when I was a kid roaming in the woods. (And guess what? There *were* pedophiles back then, but we didn't hear about them 24 hours a day on Fox news, and we didn't get alarmist emails from our aunts warning us to never park next to white vans...)

One statistic presented by Skenazy stood out for me: According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (the very same ones who put those scary pictures on milk cartons), the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are .00007 percent. If you *wanted* your child to be kidnapped, you would have to keep them outside unattended for - get this - about 750,000 years. A child is 40 times more likely to be in a fatal auto accident (not that that is particularly comforting, but how much do we worry about driving the car?).

And another interesting fact: people in other countries - even countries that are less safe - are not nearly as paranoid as we are. Kids in most countries walk to school - even without parents along! How's that for revolutionary? Playgrounds are unsupervised! And in Denmark, people routinely leave their kids in strollers outside restaurants while they eat. A Danish woman tried that in New York and almost got arrested.

Skenazy also presents well-reasoned arguments for letting your kids encounter germs, eat raw cookie dough, trick-or-treat on Halloween, play in the woods, and do other normal childhood activities that our culture regards with excessive paranoia.

All in all, this book was a huge breath of fresh air for me (the other women in my book club loved it as well). The only thing I didn't like about the book was that sometimes Skanazy seemed to pick worst-case examples as counterpoints to her arguments - examples that are too easy to dismiss if you don't know people who match them. I got the feeling that most of her examples came from wealthy Connecticut suburbs - definitely not Portland, where people tend to be slightly more laid back. I don't know anybody who won't let their kid walk three houses down to a neighbor's. However, I still got a lot out of this book. (And yes, I can hear my mom worrying that I'm going to let Melina walk across Portland alone or go on a three-day solo vision quest in the wilderness. Don't worry, mom. I know there are still bad people out there. And Melina is only four... the vision quest can wait until at least 12.)

To learn more about Free Range Kids and the movement it has inspired, check out their website.

But first, an update

Melina is all of four-and-three-quarters now. She seems to have grown beyond her scared-of-everything phase, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what phase she's in now. She pretty much wants to be playing with her friends *all the time,* which can be exhausting. When she has friends over I tend to do a lot of refereeing, although I generally try to keep out of the minor squabbles. She still wants to be with her friend Quin all the time, although Quin seems to be entering a sort of "girl germs" phase and would rather play with boys. That is, unless Melina wants to stand in as Princess Leia - that's always acceptable. Melina also likes to play with her eternal friend and sparring partner Amanda, as well as several cute little girls from preschool, and our neighbors across the street.

When Melina's not playing with friends we are frequently doing out door activities. It's been an incredibly warm winter, but we've managed to go skiing several times (often with other families with kids). Last weekend we went with 20 other friends to a "cabin" in Sunriver (a very large, sprawling cabin), with very high hopes of skiing every day, but unfortunately I was attacked by some sort of intestinal bug and spent most of the weekend a) lying on the couch reading b) lying on the couch watching the Olympics c) lying on the bed sleeping and d) lying on the bed bemoaning my fate. Jeff got a nice day of skiing in, and Melina got a trip to the High Desert Museum with some friends, but neither Melina or I saw any white stuff to speak of.

Melina is getting to be a pretty good skiier, though. Like everything else, it all depends on her mood. When she's in a good mood she's a great skiier. She falls, and she doesn't complain; she tackles the "backcountry" with gusto (she likes to ski through the trees instead of on the groomed trail); and she can go down minor hills without mishap. When she's in a bad mood, she spends most of the time in the sled complaining bitterly about the cold. That's why we've been going skiing with other families lately - it seems to improve the mood. (Are all four-year-olds this moody and fragile?)

In February we went to a different rental cabin with a different group of friends. It was beautiful, rustic, and quite a bit more relaxing than the Sunriver trip would prove to be. We had about 4 inches of new snow while we were there (the first photo is of Jeff and Melina standing in front of our car when we got back to the sno-park). Melina had a lot of fun playing in the snow with the other kids.

I usually take advantage of the long car trips to Mt. Hood to knit. I've knit several hats lately and I knit the one in the second photo for Melina. I also knit a ridiculously complicated scarf for a friend... maybe I'll post a photo before I give it away.

On the chicken front, today I finished siding the chicken coop with cedar shingles. It looks pretty random - shingling in a neat yet random way is a lot harder than it looks - but it's a vast improvement over the last look, which was a combination of tarpaper and red-painted plywood. I don't think the chickens appreciate it much (we haven't been getting many eggs lately) but the rest of us do.

Another month, another pledge to do better

So my friend Becky informed me that she missed my blog posts, which finally pushed me far enough over the cliff of procrastination to actually post something here. I won't go into all of the details about why I haven't posted; nothing major, just distracted by life in general. I realized that I do have some pretty strong feelings about parenting stuff lately so maybe I will try to express some real opinions here instead of just reporting on what's happening in our lives.