By Beck

I love this time of year - the changing leaves (well, any day now), the cooling temperatures (again, ANY day now), new pens and pencils and notebooks and bookbags and sweaters.  Only one of my kids actually goes to school, but the back-to-school feeling prevails nonetheless.

My oldest. I write about her a lot, I think, but she's quite the kid. I feel a pang that homeschooling wasn't the right fit for her, but nothing like the much bigger pang I'd feel if I'd forced her to homeschool when it wasn't working for her. She's happy and doing well and while it does make my life a little bit more hectic, her happiness and wellness is well worth the tiny, tiny price I pay. And that is that.

She's at the age where she's changing every day - her looks, her personality - this underwater shift that gradually takes her away from the brief, vanishing island of childhood. It's an interesting time and not at all the horrifying prospect we were warned about when we first had her ("Congratulations," said one horrible acquaintance. "It'll be the happiest ten years of your life."). Change is scary but it doesn't also follow that change is bad.

A friend told me that she spent some time with some friends from high school this weekend, and she was just shocked - they were still the same people. They lived in the same town, hung out with the SAME friends, dressed the same way, DATED the same people, did the same thing on weekends - as though the only thing that had changed over the past 20 years was their faces and the steady turning of the calendar's pages. It was as though they'd decided at 15 that life was awesome, and their group goal should be to keep their lives as much like 15 as possible forever.

Excuse me, I have to go shudder in a corner.

There's the funny opposite of that too, where someone feels the need to be better than their highschool self for the rest of their lives, but both groups are basing ONE four year stretch in LATE CHILDHOOD as the barometer for the rest of their lives, and whether it was a happy time or a  really REALLY awful time it's still only four short years and not forever.

The leaves are turning red and gold and she still slips her hand into mine when we walk, so much older, so much still my baby. My Girl is changing; my Girl is the same.

By Megan

We took the kids camping for the first time last weekend. I'd never really camped before, so it was all new to me, too. One thing I learned was that there is a LOT of zipping involved in camping.

And not much sleeping.

The first night in camp, Peabody'd been in bed for about 3 hours when Al and I quietly zipped into our fabric abode and attempted to sneak into "bed." Alas, a rubber air mattress in a 6-person tent is about as subtle as a whoopee cushion in a tin coffee can, so as we carefully squeaked and pooted our way into the sack, the boy woke up and stood to peer over the edge of his pack-n-play at us.

"Mama," he pointed out astutely, and then "Dada."

"Hi buddy. It's still night-night time. Lie down and go back to sleep."

And he lay back down. And we scrunched around as silently as possible and had just gotten settled into sleeping position when a curly little head rose up again over the side of the Graco and a little voice said, "Mama. Dada. Nigh-nigh."

"Yes," I whispered. "We're all going night-night now. Lie down, baby."

And he did. And I drifted slowly off to that pre-sleep dreamy state, floating towards oblivion under the stars, a fan quietly spilling cool air over me through the tent flap, crickets chirping peacefully, Al's breaths already slow and steady and,

"Mama? Yaya." (Yaya = Outside.) I looked at him and he was standing up pointing out his "window."

"Goodnight Peabody."

"CAH!" he pointed again, to our cars parked and glistening under a dim streetlight in the distance.

And I realized then: This was confusing. We don't sleep outside where you can see cars, normally.

And I thought to myself, Well, I'll just explain it to him. Then he'll get it and go to sleep.

"Yes, Matthew, we're outside. We're CAMPING. Camping means you sleep outside, where there are cars and trees and other outside things. But see, we're all in our beds and it's night-night time and Mama and Daddy are here sleeping, so you can sleep here too. Okay?"

"Nigh-nigh," he puzzled to himself.

"Yes. Night night. Lie down." And I climbed off the giant whoopee cushion to help him lie down, then covered him with his blanket.

I squelched back into bed and scrunched around, shooting Al up into the air a full foot with every motion as I tried to get comfortable again. Finally I dozed, briefly, but then woke with a start when I heard Peabody stand up again, and prop his arms on the side of his bed to look over at me, smiling.

"Mama!" he grinned. Fully awake now. Al snored beside me.

"Sigh. Go 'sleep, baby."

"Yaya."

"Sleeeeeeeep."

"Nooo," he decided. "Want yaya."

"Can't go outside. Night-night time. Lie down now and go to sleep."

And on and on it went. He'd talk, I'd ignore him for awhile then get up and settle him down and doze off myself, and he'd talk again. Lather, rinse, repeat for three and a half more hours, until 4 AM.

"Mama. Want eat. Want noo-noos." (noodles)

"SLEEEEEEEEEEP."

"NOOOOOO. Want noo-noos! Pweeeee?" (Please?)

"Sigh. Cracker?" I offered.

"YAY! GACKA!" (Whatever, lady, I'm hungry.)

So I grabbed a lantern and my flip-flops and unzipped/re-zipped my way out of two tent flaps (our tent has a "front porch" that is "screened in," which is very posh and very fancy and incidentally I will now hate zippers for the rest of my life.) and headed over to the "kitchen" where we had all of our non-perishable food hanging from a hook in a zippered "pantry" and I rooted around for what felt like an hour, knowing full well that everyone in camp was now awake and lying on their own respective whoopee cushions picturing the biggest raccoon in the world standing on its hind legs working a zipper around a 4 foot rectangular hanging "pantry" to get at the Cap'n Crunch we were supposed to be having for breakfast the next morning, and I finally found a package of graham crackers, which I loudly opened, because there's no other way to open graham crackers, and I re-zipped the "pantry" and stalked back with my lantern to the tent, whereupon I realized mother nature had begun her call, so I took a detour past my tent to the "Luggable Loo" (yes!), which is the girls' only latrine for our campsite, and I un-zipped/re-zipped myself in and sat down on the "can" and do what needed to be done.

All the while I could hear Peabody's faint calls over the crickets and the fan, "Mama? Maaaaa-maaaaa? Gacka?" (For the love of MIKE woman, how long does it take to get a boy a cracker?)

Finally I climbed back inside the tent after, wait, one-two-three-four, FOUR more zippers and I rattled out a graham cracker, pulled Peabody from his bed and lay him between Al and me on our bed, where I watched the child eat gacka after gacka, quietly humming and looking around at the inside of the tent and smiling charmingly at me. Finally, three gackas in, he started to go quiet and I could see him, his arm poised in mid-air, gacka in hand, begin to nod off.

Then I held pretty much my breath and didn't move a muscle for an hour until he I knew was good and asleep. And then the sun rose and everybody woke up at 6:30 and looked around for giant raccoon tracks, and that was that for sleeping - we were up for good. I get a little bit punchy just thinking about the rest of that day.

Needless to say, Peabody and I drove home from camp and slept in our own beds on Night 2 of camping and Al took him on Night 3. It was only 45 minutes to home, and totally worth the drive to sleep without interruption for 9 or 10 hours and go potty in a real flushing toilet.

Plus, NO ZIPPERS.

By Sarah

We won't be taking a holiday this summer. But one Saturday, my husband, Brian, decided to take the tinies camping anyway.

In our backyard.

He dug out our camping gear which includes a camping stove we bought on clearance at the outlets, sleeping bags, provisions and the tent we borrowed-but-never-gave-back from his parents. (Hi, Ed! Hi, Leona! Thanks for the tent!) The tinies were absolutely vibrating with excitement. Anne (4 years old), in particular, since she was the one who could stay out all night long (Not-quite-two Joe was running a temperature so Mean Ol' Mum decreed that he had to properly sleep inside when bedtime rolled around).

They packed up the cooler and we all roasted hot dogs on the camping stove, balancing our camping dishes on our laps. The boys ran around with their shirts off, referring to themselves as "Mountain Men" (never mind that we were still in the neighbourhood with only a hill behind the house - those are simply details).

They are allfarmer tans and bug bites and scraped knees and big smiles. They smell like sunscreen. Anne was so happy. "Daddy, I'm learning so much about camping!"

Then, when the night started to fade, Joseph and I went back inside. Anne had made it clear to me that this was her thing with her Dad so I took the hint. They sat outside and read her favourite stories. When it got dark, Brian made up stories about being a "good pirate" and saving kids and doing good. Then they played flashlight tag. He roasted marshmallows for them on the camping stove, introducing her to her very first s'more. They watched for our trio of owls to make an appearance.

It was 10 o'clock before she fell asleep, 2 hours past bedtime, on the air mattress beside her dad, snuggled into my sleeping bag that had been airing out all afternoon. Brian said she kept burrowing in all night long, going further and further. He woke up at 3 in the morning and couldn't see her. He panicked for a minute and then he opened the sleeping bag. She had stuffed herself right into the bottom of it and was sound asleep, toasty warm. He hauled her back to the air. They were up with the dawn.

They trooped inside at 7 AM, Brian complaining of camping coffee.

All morning, she was curled under his arm, gazing up at him with grateful, hero-worship eyes.

Of course, her eyes were also shadowed from lack of sleep but that's easily remedied. More easily remedied than a lack of happy memories with just-a-girl-and-her-dad.

Later that morning, while we scrubbed the house and did the laundry and got ready for another busy week, he informed me, quite seriously, that the tinies are not allowed to get married and leave him.

Ever.

Seriously.

Ever.

Sarah blogs at Emerging Mummy.

By Michael

I think she was four, possibly a precocious three. She was up on the chair, playing on the touchscreen, trying to win a matching game and then a ring toss of sorts. Her mom came by to help her, instruct her and cheer her on.

Of course, the chair was a bar stool and the touchscreen was a video gaming machine. It had lots of other games to amuse the idle drinker. I think the game was brought to you by the letters AA and the number 21, but I didn’t see Elmo or Barney anywhere.

The little girl was having fun and she was probably learning something about climbing and keeping her balance and matching numbers, oblivious to the location of those numbers on cards or dice or tiny stop signs. As an adult, I thought it a bit out of place, but I couldn’t tell you any way that the girl was actually being hurt by this exposure.

How important is the context for learning? If a child learns ratios at a race track, are the numbers tainted? If she learns to spell by texting instead of reading, is she harmed in the process?

Yes, she was learning to play video games in a saloon—I was only there to ask directions for a little old lady who couldn’t climb the stairs, of course—but she was learning something. People learn to gamble or drink or engage in all kinds of questionable behavior as teens or young adults, but I’m not quite convinced we develop all our vices from close proximity to a den of perversion.

Perhaps I should have pulled her mom aside and suggested to her that her daughter was on a death spiral to pole dancing and reality television, but I refrained. To tell the truth, I was thinking of giving the girl a quarter for another game.

As I thought about it, I really couldn’t see any harm.

Michael Rosenbaum is 5 Minutes for Parenting’s first dadblogger. He is a business consultant, playwright and author of Your Name Here: Guide to Life.

Michael blogs on life issues at Your Name Here Guide to Life and manages the Adult Conversation discussion group on Linked-In.

By Megan

Here in the Midwest, people suck the stinkin' marrow out of summer, because winter sucks the marrow out of our souls, except souls don't have marrow, bones do, but for the purposes of my clever opening sentence we're going to just set all that aside and nod our heads in agreement, right? Winter sucks the marrow out of souls. Yep.

So, that point established, Al and I are finally learnin', after five summers, that we have to grab summer and squeeze it all out as fast as we can and wring it hard - get our whole bodies into it - til it's bone dry and limp and there's nothing left of it.

And we've just about reached that point.

School starts in a little over a week and there's already beginning to be a little coolness in the air, so our budding Midwestern-ness has kicked into overdrive and all-of-a-sudden we're packing a camping trip and a big party in the back yard and bonfires and barbecues and a zoo visit and a million other things into two weekends like come September 1 we're all four going to turn back into pumpkins or sumpm. And I love it all and know it must be done because in two months the sidewalks of this neighborhood will roll up and we won't see another human soul until April so make hay while the sun shines and all that, but people? I AM TIRED. I try to stuff the tired down, or push it away to the side and KEEP GOING, deny deny deny. And Al's doin' his thing, we're dressing kids and packing cars and pulling wagons around corners on two wheels, and he keeps smiling and going and I wonder to myself, "Isn't HE tired?" but I don't have time to ask because he's out watering the grass and socializing with the neighbors between calendar commitments and we just brush past each other in the hall, both of us changing into clean shirts and looking! for! our! sunglasses!

Today though, I noticed something. I was simultaneously schlepping laundry around and uploading pictures and watering plants on the patio and I looked up at 4:30 PM and noticed that Al was feeding our kids dinner. At 4:30 PM. Then he got them up from the table and tossed them into the bathtub, scrubbed them clean with the fury and fervor of a soapy cyclone, dried, powdered, pajama'd and popcorn'd them in record speed and had them settled on the sofa watching a kid flick, all in about 14 seconds flat.

They look so happy and cozy and READY for the down time. And the best part is Al, sitting in the middle, a blanket over the three of them. I'm onto him — he's as tired as I am — why is that so comforting to me?

I can hear the washing machine churning and the air conditioner humming and these are the sounds of a peaceful Sunday afternoon, nowhere to be, nothing we've got to do, just us in a cool house with the blinds already drawn against the bright sun - on its way down but still quite vibrantly up - at 6:30, headed to bed early to wake up and start the last official (BUSY) week of summer.

Megan also blogs at FriedOkra.

by DeeDee

My husband took the kids away last Sunday so that I could tackle the garage.  A daunting task, to be sure.  But  the thought of having the place to myself so that I could sort, organize, toss, and generally FILE ALL MY JUNK filled me with a little giddiness.

The garage had become a catchall for everything we have been tripping over in the house.  It is the holding area for all the things that either need to get thrown out, or given away to charity.

Since the garage was a chilly 145 degrees, I decided it best to work in my sports bra and shorts.  And I defied any solicitor to come knocking at my door.  I think they’ve learned their lesson, since the last time someone came calling trying to sell me something I don’t need, I answered the door while dying my hair.  And giving myself a facial.

The local solicitors now give my property a rather wide berth when walking door to door.

I was about 4 minutes into the clean out, and had begun pulling things away from the one wall that I had been eying to place shelving.

I started with all the 4 foot white metal baby gates that use to make my house as secure as Fort Knox.  Until Jensen learned that he could disassemble them and use them as a battering ram against an antagonistic sister.

One by one I drug them so that I could file them in an organized fashion.  And I noticed something trailing behind one gate as I slid it along the floor.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the long trailing item had at one time housed a rather long snake.

I turned and ran into the house, slamming the garage door, then locking it.  Until I remembered that I had left my phone and iced tea out in the garage.

Slowly, I reopened the door, and tiptoed out to retrieve the needed items, and again ran inside to call the real estate agent in order to put the house up for sale.

I called my husband to tell him that all work had come to a full and complete halt.  He said something to the affect that I needed to toughen up.  After all, Sarah Palin can kill a wild boar.

I told HIM that Sarah Palin’s husband lets HER have a GUN.

And if you’re thinking, look Texas girl, just go out and get yourself a gun!  I’d be forced to respond, “Have you ever seen me shoot?”

I’d likely blow my own foot off.  And then what good would I be to these people?  It’s the same argument that my hsuband would use as to why I shouldn’t handle anything sharp.

Or flammable.

At this point I just got mad.  Mad at the stupid snake.  Mad at the stupid snake that had invaded my space and likely laid her stupid eggs in my garage.  Which I needed to organize.

So I put on my socks and combat boots.  And reluctantly donned a t-shirt.  In case the snake should seek me out and leave her venomous bite on my leg.  I most certainly would hate to be found dead wearing only a sports bra and ratty shorts.

I began my work again, making as much noise as humanly possible.  Banging gates around, and talking loudly to no one in particular.  It’s totally okay.  The neighbors already think I’m crazy.

I pulled out more gates.  And what luck, I found that the snake was even longer than I first suspected!  The tail end of the snake was attached to yet another gate.  I kept pulling at gate pieces.  OH FOR PETE’S SAKE, I found the head of the snake skin.  How did I know?  Because the snake skin was fully intact WITH THE MOUTH WIDE OPEN IN A SILENT SCREAM.

My scream wasn’t so silent.

When I regained consciousness, I kept on working. For hours, trying to rid my mind of that OPEN MOUTHED SNAKE SKIN.  I parked the gates against a wall, neatly filed, with the snake skin pieces still attached.

For show and tell later.

I relayed the information to my husband.  WHAT?  YOU LEFT THE SNAKE SKIN OUT THERE?

He must be new.  Like I would get close enough to extricate the nasty thing from the gate slats.  As if.

I must say that the discovery of the snake skin has curtailed my recurrent late night rendezvous with the garage freezer, to assess my snacking choices.  Thusly aiding in my weight loss.

So that snake skin indeed had a silver lining, after all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When she's not wrangling snakes, DeeDee can be found at Fiddledeedee.net

By Beck

So the other day I was casually reaching for the kitchen tap and nearly grabbed A GIGANTIC WOLF SPIDER THAT WAS LURKING ON IT. And I will immediately digress to say that wolf spiders are PERFECTLY named - they're so hairy and lulking and frightening! Good job, spider-naming person!

Anyhow. Giant spider, right near my hand. And I'm not frightened of spiders but that gave me the heebie-jeebies. Still, we have a Let's Be Kind To Our Mosquito-Eating Friend, The Spider policy in our house, so I gently herded him into a cup and The Boy scampered off to release him into the woods.

Fairy tales are funny things, those old stories. The woods are full of trolls and wolves, the flowers are full of brambles, and the candy house means danger. If you read the older fairy tales, they're horribly, disgustingly violent - The Little Mermaid kills herself and turns into foam, the ugly stepsisters chop off their toes. "Here is the world," they say to kids. "It's a scary place, but you can get through it if you're brave and tough." Or maybe they say "THE WORLD IS FREAKING INSANE", I dunno. I don't read the old versions to MY kids.

Ask any kid who lives near the woods, though, and they will tell you that the woods ARE full of danger. Most of the kids around here have taken multiple classes on how to survive being lost in the woods and my daughter's school has BEAR drills. And we're modern enough people with cell phones and ATVs, so imagine how scary the woods would have been in the days before street lights, in the time when the shadows were deeper and darker.

"Where did the spider go?" I asked my son, when he returned from the edge of the woods, glass in hand.
"It ran into the brush," he said, and the two of us stood and looked at the deep dark trees, where the spider was now in its place, in the mysterious, unknown heart of the world.

By Kelly

I will never forget the first time it happened.

It was around 7:00 PM on a sunny summer evening. I asked Natalie, then two years old, to call her Daddy inside for dinner. She went to the window, looked out toward the lake and yelled, “Coh-ee! Dinner ready!”

It was as startling as it was funny. Up to that point, she had never called us anything but Mommy and Daddy. We didn’t even know she knew our real names.

But in hindsight, it made sense. Natalie had listened to us call each other Kelly and Corey. She called her baby brother Connor. Why not venture into the adult world of names and call Daddy what everyone else called him?

I was reminded of that episode last week when my current two-year-old, Teyla, started to issue requests to “Keddy.” I took me a few minutes to figure out what she was saying (I have an infant; that’s my excuse), but when I did, I laughed and said, “I’m not Kelly. I’m Mommy.”

“No,” she furrowed her tiny eyebrows at me, hands on her hips. “You Keddy.”

Since then, it’s become a daily routine. She calls me Mommy or Momma most of the time. Then, suddenly, she whips out the new skills and says, “I Te-ya. You Keddy.”

“Kelly is my name,” I counter, “but you call me Mommy.”

“No Mommy. Keddy.” She says firmly and walks away.

It’s an odd thing, now that I think about it. Only parents and grandparents are offered these tender titles that bespeak their life role. We don’t call our siblings Brother and Sister (unless we want to annoy them), and no one outside of rural Kentucky says Cousin John or Cousin Julie.

I don’t care if my kids occasionally call me Kelly (or Keddy), because I know it’s just their way of reaffirming their place in the world.

As long as they always go back to calling me Mommy. Because as much as I like the name Kelly, the title of Mommy is sweeter still.

Mommy, er, Kelly blogs at Love Well.

By Michael

Parents are supposed to be a team, working together, presenting a consistently united front. As we all know, that's why parent and partner have exactly the same letters.

So I was reminded last week about a question that challenges all of us at one point or another. Is it ever okay to have a secret from your spouse when it comes to the children you share?

I'm not talking about one of those divide-and-conquer strategies the darlings devise from time to time, or a birthday surpise. Like the question about using torture when the bomb is about to go off, this is one that we can all answer in theory and would find troubling in practice.

So little Lindsey comes home and says she has a problem and she will only tell you, but you absolutely have to swear you won't tell your significant other. If you won't swear, you won't hear the truth and, of course, not hearing the truth could lead to disaster.

This was a rare occurrence for me, although I have no idea how rare it was for Jill. As I recall, I always had the same speech about how mom and I are a team and we don't have secrets from each other. So I couldn't promise not to say anything, but I could promise to think about it and make a good decision, but only if I knew what I was making a decision about. Yada. Yada. Yada.

Yada.

As I recall.

The quality of my memory notwithstanding, what's the right answer here? Is it a betrayal of a spouse to keep secrets about your child? Is it a betrayal of your obligation as a parent to reject a plea for help because the ground rules aren't according to your taste?

So where do you land on this one?

Michael Rosenbaum is 5 Minutes for Parenting’s first dadblogger. He is a business consultant, playwright and author of Your Name Here: Guide to Life.

Michael blogs on life issues at Your Name Here Guide to Life and manages the Adult Conversation discussion group on Linked-In.

By Gretchen

"Mom?' my child said in a small voice, 'I don't think you should eat the pie."

I was caught by surprise and asked why. My husband had bought the pie only minutes earlier, indulging one of my late-pregnancy cravings for something untimely and ridiculous. I was looking forward to strip-mining my key lime pie while lying in bed.

Tears began to flow. My child continued in a bashful whisper, clearly made uncomfortable by such an odd certainty. This child had never, ever, approached me with anything remotely like this.

"I just have a very strong feeling you shouldn't eat it." The tiny voice shook.

"Okay…" I answered, trying to understand, trying to formulate the wisest response.

I believe in gut feelings. I believe in the still small voice. I believe in instinct. I am also one of those people who sometimes likes to rationalize those mysterious promptings away in the name of common sense. Just as I was about to tell my child that it would be okay, I caught myself. It was less about self-preservation against a bad, potentially evil pie and more about demonstrating that it is important to listen to instincts.

Often, our first clue we are in a dangerous situation or hanging around the wrong people is a gut feeling of uneasiness.

If I brushed off my child's surety there was something wrong with the pie, I'd send the message I don't care for their opinion, that strong feelings are wrong, and that maybe next time they should not bother telling me if they have a mysterious but deeply held concern about something, anything.

I want my children to trust their instincts when they sense peril, small, large, or custard-based.

"I won't eat the pie," I assured my visibly relieved child. I asked if anyone else could have the pie. Nope, nobody, but I was the #1 target of concern because I have a baby brother riding around inside me.

We threw the pie away. I'll never know how it would have turned out if I ate the pie like a rational mom—if there is such a thing as a very pregnant mom rationally eating a big fat meringue-laden pie.

My instincts tell me I did the right thing.