Jenyfer Matthews

This is what happens when mommy is too sick and tired to play with the children on a holiday weekend and allows them to play with her digital camera instead of taking them out.

They take pictures of the television.

They also took pictures of each other, but frankly, most of these were better.

See what I mean?

I’m going to need a reprieve on the new-recipe-a-month resolution thing. Pain and illness are both excellent appetite suppressants and no inspiration for cooking for others. I’ll try to do TWO in June as soon as I’m up to speed again. We’ll see how that works out…

My husband has been a vegetarian for 20+ years, but I am not. We’ve managed to merge quite well – we eat vegetarian at home and I eat what I like when I’m out and about. When we had children, my husband felt quite strongly that they should be raised vegetarian and since it didn’t matter to me one way or another, that’s what we’ve done. We both know that one day they will make the choice for themselves (and have already – my son sneaks pepperoni and hot dogs whenever he can!)

Last week I was chatting with one of the ladies I work with at the library about Thanksgiving and she asked what I was going to make for dinner. During the course of our conversation, she asked me why the children were vegetarian so I explained about my husband. She said so? What right does he have to make that choice for them?

It’s not the first time I’ve had someone try to argue with me on the point, and I find it fascinating really. Why should they care so much what my children eat or don’t eat? They are perfectly healthy and well developed so clearly they aren’t suffering for their diet. Parents make choices for their children all the time without waiting to see what the children might ultimately think on the topic – names, vaccinations, clothes, schools, and religion.

Since I thought it was a good analogy, I pointed out to her that parents don’t ask their children what religion they want to be, they just do it. I knew before I said it that it was going to be a tough sell – Egypt isn’t the sort of place where religion is thought of as a choice. Of course, she was adamant that it was not the same thing at all. Religion is spiritual, a tradition. I guess I wasn’t supposed to mention the fact that as an Orthodox Coptic Christian she follows the church fasting practices and essentially turns herself and her children into vegans for about 1/3 of every year. Because it’s not the same thing at all, right?

I had to give up on that line of argument and just suggest she think of my husband’s vegetarianism as his tradition. I wonder if she would have felt better if I were to have lied and said he is a Buddhist, to give his diet a religious context?

I hadn’t been out of the house a whole lot for any length of time while tending to the sick boy, so let me tell you it was a nice change of pace to go to my daughter’s tennis lesson Wednesday night. Only when I got home again I noticed a distinct smell. Not a rotten smell, just sort of musty. I am fairly sensitive to smells – I don’t like strong fragrances and avoid detergents and paper products with scents – so this smell, mild as it was, was disturbing to say the least.

I had been parked in front of my computer working on various writing tasks for most of the week, but yesterday I spent the morning cleaning. I had to get rid of the mysterious funk.

I went a bit above and beyond my norm. I changed my sheets and washed the shower curtain. I sprinkled baking soda on the carpets – and if you knew how much that stuff costs here, you would know how drastic a measure that was. I bring it back in my suitcases and hoard it. (I was really annoyed when I returned one summer and found that my former housekeeper had taken it upon herself to open a box in my spice cabinet to absorb odors. What odor? It’s a spice cabinet!)

I dusted and vacuumed and opened the windows briefly. Opening the windows in Cairo is a mixed bag. The air isn’t all that fresh and leaving them open for any length of time just undoes the dusting and vacuuming in record time. The last thing I did was light a scented candle – drastic measure indeed. I love candles but really can’t be trusted with them. I get distracted and leave them unattended. I’ve had a few minor fires start as a result of unattended pillar candles. This one was in a jar so it was less of a hazard.

Now it smells of “sweet pea” in here, which is a vast improvement. And my floors are clean, for now.

My children decided the time had come to make their Dear Santa Christmas lists. They were a few hours too late as I had already hit the “submit order” button at Amazon, but I left them to it to see what they came up with and whether anything on their list matched what I had chosen.

My Son:

-a pet turtle
-spiderman toy
-a big tent
-cannonbolt (ben 10)
-guitar
-”trumpit”
-sunglasses
-scooby doo 3 (does not exist!)
-a “bezuca”
-police sketchers (shoes)
-lego fire station
-lego star wars
-American football helmet and clothes

My Daughter:

-a big tent
-police sketchers
-a ds game
-a gameboy (why??? she just got a Nintendo DS for her birthday!)
-Shrek movies
-goal keeper gloves
-a gun
-a “trumpit”
-sunglasses
-Phineas and Ferb collection
-American football helmet and clothes

Okay, some of these I can work with, but in my house Santa does not give pets as presents and where exactly they thing they are each going to pitch a “big tent” is a mystery to me. And a bazooka? When I questioned that one, I got an eyeroll and the answer “just a toy one.” Like that was what I needed clarification on!

I have already done some shopping and gotten them some things they didn’t even know they wanted. Tell me – what kid wouldn’t want night vision binoculars???

Now I have to find a way to “post” the letters while secretly keeping them for posterity…

So I made the hat yesterday. It wasn’t really so difficult, though when the directions say “don’t iron velvet” it’s for a reason and you should just take it on faith! Many thanks to an old friend who once gave me a few yards of forest green velvet and said “you might need to make a costume one day.” How did she know? Then again, she was English

The hat pretty much looks like this. The only thing left is to track down a large plume. I’m going to the mall today to see if I can find something. Otherwise I may have to go to the zoo and mug an ostrich.

Ironically, I’m pretty sure I hat in a very similar style when I was about 20 years old, only it was black. I have no idea what might have become of that hat now, but it’s one of those times when you realize the advantage to not moving around so much and just saving old stuff for a dress-up trunk.

Since I’ve gone this far, I’m going to see about taking the remaining yardage into some sort of flowing robe / vest. It all reminds me a bit of Scarlett O’Hara making those old velvet curtains into a dress. This scrap of velvet has served as a Christmas tree skirt up til now!

Even though I let myself off the hook by not hosting a big “friend” party for my son’s 7th birthday, I still spent a lot of time running around on Saturday and Sunday preparing for his big day. As a compromise for not having a party, I sent cupcakes to his class which meant I spent much of Saturday afternoon baking them and then got up early on Sunday to frost them. Sunday there was more baking to be done.

Every year the little man asks me for a cake “with fruit on top.” One year I did a white cake with whipped cream and slices of kiwi and pomegranate seeds on top which was both lovely and tasty but he didn’t care for it. Turns out he doesn’t like whipped cream (little freak!) Last year I did a pineapple upside down cake – again lovely and tasty but he didn’t even try it! This year I decided to give him what he didn’t know he wanted: a pumpkin “donut” cake with cream cheese frosting. It was a big hit with everyone, and he was over the moon with his presents.

If I thought that this week was going to be calmer, I should have known better. It isn’t enough that in addition to Halloween this month, the school scheduled Victorian dress-up day last week – next week my daughter is doing Tudor dress-up day. I really should have seen this one coming. She has decided to be a boy rather than a girl, which I am totally in favor of because I have many of the basics already: she can wear a long sleeved white shirt with her baggy black soccer shorts (which I’ll gather with elastic bands at the bottom to make them puffy), and she can wear her long white soccer socks for tights. But it all comes down to the vest and the hat again. The cop-out in me who is tired of designing costumes is sort of thinking she can wear the vest I made last week and I’ll stick a long feather in the corduroy “Victorian” hat. But the overachiever in me found a pattern for an authentic Tudor style hat and I happen to have some green velvet in my fabric stash from which I could probably make both a hat AND a drapey vest / robe. I still don’t have a feather, but who would care if she were wearing velvet?

Tuck a pillow in her shirt and add a turkey leg as a prop and she could be Henry VIII for Halloween

It’s hot and dusty and miserable here at the moment and I have no water yet again so what else have I got to do but spend all my time making a hat, right?

I know it’s only hair and that it will grow back quickly enough – this time next month it will likely be fine – but wouldn’t it just figure that the haircut I would most like to forget my son ever sported would be the one he would get just before a series of photo events occur: his 7th birthday, school calendar photos, and soccer team pictures? It’ll probably show up in the school yearbook as well!

He was totally adorable dressed as a Victorian schoolboy yesterday, but a key costume detail was a floppy flat hat!

It’s an unfortunate fact that I’ve gotten so used to being patronized for being a stay at home mother (SAHM) that now when I meet anyone new and they ask me what I do, I tell them but immediately feel defensive. What is it about a woman deciding to stay home and raise her own children that weirds people out so much? Do they feel somehow that my decision not to work outside the home is an unspoken indictment of their own decisions to go out and have a job? Why else would they care so much about what I do with my time? You wouldn’t believe some of the passive aggressive condescending crap I’ve heard over the years. Now that the kids are in school much of the day, people seem to think I’m spending all my time lunching with the ladies and being groomed at the spa. Because isn’t that what all SAHMs do all day long??

Just because my children are in school all day doesn’t automatically mean I need to go back to work. I’ve been working a few days here and there in addition to everything else I do all day every day and let me tell you – I don’t know how working moms do it. And when the children get older they are going to require more of my attention, not less. Teenagers alone in the house several hours a day? I was a teenager once myself – sounds like a very bad idea to me!

Last week I was at a farewell party for some friends and was introduced to a woman there. She asked me what I did and I immediately felt my defenses rise. She surprised me however by saying how refreshing she found it to find women in the younger generation who were making the decision to stay home with their children while they were young. I was nearly speechless with shock, so rare is it to meet anyone who understands and appreciates what I do all day long. I only wish there were more people out there like her.

I made it through the toddler years without even a small scissor incident – any bad haircuts the children ever sported were entirely my fault. So why did my son, only days before his 7th birthday, decide that NOW was the time to try his hand at cutting his own hair? He cut his hair very short right across the front, at a slant. I thought I’d make him wear it that way for a few days, just to have the lesson sink in.

My husband had another plan: give him a buzz cut.

It looks awful. Even with the clipper set on the “tallest” setting, he’s still pretty well bald. And since he’s a very pale redhead, I fear for the skin of his scalp. I ordered him to wear his hat outside at school until his hair grows back. Between the (temporary) tattoo of a cobra on his bicep and the buzz cut, he looks a bit like a prisoner.

I’m only glad that I got some decent pictures of him on Sunday at his father’s birthday party…and that his hair grows really fast!

As a mother and an adult, there are few things that will push my buttons more effectively than a back-talking child. I’m not sure why exactly, because I myself am something of a smart-ass, but there is it. A quirk of human nature, do as I say not as I do. My own children seldom get away with it, but unfortunately I don’t have as much sway over other people’s children.

What I wonder is, why does anyone let a child get away with it? When I see the other children who participate in the tennis groups with my own children arguing with or talking back to the coach, it drives me crazy. Not only because it is generally disruptive to the atmosphere of the class but also because the mothers of these children are usually sitting there observing and not saying a word. Sometimes they are even smiling benevolently.

When I mentioned this phenomenon to an American acquaintance of mine, he sort of laughed and said that I was just used to the British system (since my children go to a British curriculum school). I was astonished by that comment – or was it an excuse? Why on earth would that have anything to do with anything? Does that imply that Americans expect and encourage bad behavior from children? That in trying to teach our children to be independent thinkers we are also encouraging them to be rude? I’m trying to raise my children to be independent thinkers AND good citizens. It’s not always an easy task, but I’m not super impressed with the sort of children that having lower standards produces.

I have been labeled a strict mother by more than one person, but I have also had glowing reports of my children’s behavior from both their schools and other parents when they go for a play date (home behavior is another story entirely) I guess if believing that my children are not my equal and that sometimes I do know better than they do and that exerting my authority over them when necessary makes me strict, so be it. At least I can send them out in the world and be (mostly) confident that they will behave themselves.

The home-schooling that is.

I greatly admire teachers for their patience in working with children – especially 20+ children at once. I know that children act differently at school but never has that been more apparent to me than now. Take the certificate my son brought home from school last week for “exemplary behavior” during carpet time? Where is that child now? Or does is his teacher some sort of child whisperer?

The homework that my son brought home isn’t all that difficult – he is only six. The most challenging part of his homework is getting him to focus and sit still to do it. My strategy is to get two pages a day done, first thing in the morning before he goes out to play. On the one hand, he’s as fresh and energetic as he’s going to be during the day. On the other hand, he’s fresh and energetic and sitting still and focusing is the last thing he is interested in doing.

The homework my daughter brought home will likely break me. A good friend of mine who has a son in the the same class was puzzled why I was freaking out so much about it. Until we figured out that 1) she thought that the work they sent covered the entire break (it doesn’t, it’s just the first few days) and 2) she was missing the instruction sheets for the two most involved assignments. I helpfully made copies for her and now she’s freaking out as well.

In addition to six math worksheets and three reading comprehension sheets, my daughters assignments include a reading book, daily mental math quizzes, writing a book report, and a research project on the life during the Tudor times. The research project will compare the rich and poor on seven points including housing, food, clothing, entertainment, women and children, and working life with each point being two pages of text and pictures and a minimum of 10 sentences each. Since she had a meltdown during one of the (EASY) reading comprehension sheets this morning, I can only imagine what happiness and joy will flow when we start on the research project.

I myself was a very good student but I’m not at all cut out for homeschooling. I’ve already told my husband that if the rumors are true and the schools remain closed until Christmas or beyond, I’m leaving and putting the kids in school in the US. It might sound extreme but I’m not the only mother here thinking the same thing!