By Michael

I was watching a hummingbird feeding its young and I wondered when the clock would run out. At what point would the mamabird stop bringing nectar or nits or whatever to her brood and force them out on their own? Would she actually kick them out of their very tiny nest and hope they figured out how to fly before some snake ate them?

Parenthood is like that. From holding their own cups to dressing themselves, from riding a two-wheeler to driving and buying their own insurance, our continual vocation is kicking them out of the nest. People are lots dumber than hummingbirds, it appears, so it takes us 18 or 22 or 30 years to finally get them flying on their own, but we hope to make progress every day.

Push and pull. Hover and ignore. Hold and let go. Even with two grown women, I see the process as unchanging. Both girls can drink without sippy cups now and they can dress themselves, so there’s no need to help on that front.

So, what do they still need from a parent? What is the parental role that’s constant, even after they’re out of the nest and flying just fine on their own?

My sister relates a story from her childhood. “Dad told me,” she says, “'right or wrong, I’m always on your side.'”

And maybe it’s that simple: the parental constant, the factor that never changes and shouldn’t as all of us grow up or raise our own children. Somewhere, everyone needs to know that there’s someone on their side. Rooting for them. Wanting them to succeed. Hoping for them to come out in one piece, on top, wiser and not-too-badly singed from the experience.

Always on their side. Even when we’re kicking their tiny little butts out of the nest.

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

I cleaned out and organized my desk on Saturday, unearthing, among many other long lost treasures, my dog-eared copy of Paul Weissbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Bean gaped over my shoulder at it, as if she were looking at the Ghost of Christmas Past, and then she looked up at me with a smile and said, "Guess we don't need THAT anymore, Mama."

"We really don't, huh? We've don't have a non-sleepin' baby anymore, do we?"

"Nope," she said with conviction, "We've got ourselves a good-sleepin' boy."

And we do. We've got a nearly two-year-old little ball of cuteness who knows when he's tired and will even ASK to be put to bed on occasion. A boy who cuddles peacefully in my arms for a while each night and then happily gets into his crib, snuggles his car and his stuffed blue puppy close, smiles, whispers Nigh-nigh, and goes to sleep without complaint. He sleeps all night and wakes in the morning calling "Mama? Dada? CAR!" and then greets us with well-rested smiles and giggles.

All of this is in stark contrast to where we HAVE been with Peabody, sleep-wise. We struggled with him, and he with us, for many long and painful (and exhausting) months; that's when I came to own the Weissbluth book and several others. But while I won't discount the wisdom and information I've gleaned from these expert authors, I do have to admit that the huge amount of progress we've made with Peabody and his sleep comes mostly from putting down the books and other sources of advice and using my own instincts and abilities to make sleeping GOOD for my son. Honestly, I'd read and tried just about every popular "method" out there to get him sleeping enough and sleeping well, when finally I just got tired of being twisted in knots over it and put everything aside except my baby and me.

Miraculously, the less I researched and worried and tried to manipulate the situation into "perfection," the more and better my boy slept. It's amazing how letting go and following my own instincts and routines almost resolved 95% of the problems I'd been consumed with since Peabody was born. And this is probably the most important lesson I've learned so far as a parent: Relax and connect with YOUR child and the answers will show themselves to you over time. Stressing and obsessing won't solve anything, and more often than not they'll make issues worse. Advice from the experts can be extremely helpful, but they don't know your baby as you do, so always make room for your own instinct as the guiding force over every other source.

Can you think of some examples where you've struggled with a tough parenting situation and solved it by putting down the books and picking up your child?

By Melodee

This afternoon, my husband drove our mini-van past a beige house with a tall evergreen tree crowding the front lawn.

"You should take a picture," he said.

"I can't take a picture.  The people living there would think we are so weird!"  I said.  Besides, I don't need a picture to remind me of that house, the place where I spent the longest stretch of my childhood.  When I was only twelve, I walked through that house before the drywall was hung.  I gave the reaI-estate agent the keys when we sold it in 1991.  (We'd inherited the house after my dad died.)

I can picture the long hallway with four bedrooms lined up, the sunken living room, the long kitchen island where I cut out the taffeta to sew my wedding dress.

I can never walk through that front door again.  The house doesn't belong to me.  Those endless adolescent days vaporized into hazy memories.

Weirder yet is the fact that the only child riding in our mini-van was our youngest child, a seven-year old girl who is eager to be thirteen.  We were on our way home.  We'd just spent the weekend with friends at their lakeside house where our daughter jumped from the roof of the boathouse into the frigid water below without pause.  She frolicked in the lake, clung to a raft as the speedboat raced across the rippled water, and rode the Wave-Runner with my husband.

Our other children were absent.

The teenagers were at a music festival for four days.

Our twelve-year old stayed behind to celebrate his friend's birthday at a slumber party.

I glimpsed our future, a future with a quiet backseat, a future where the children are grown, a future where our paths diverge and grow distant.

One day, some other family will live in this house.  Our kids might drive by, staring, remembering, just as I drove by my childhood house.  They will move on.

And maybe they will wonder where the time went and marvel how things are never the same again, just as I do today.

By Sarah

On that afternoon, I was going to be productive.

You know those days….eight times more on your "to-do" list than you could possibly accomplish even if you didn't have two tinies, one of whom is potty training and the other, just 11 days old. But, full of good intentions and a little self-delusion, you decide to embark on it anyway. Or at least, I did.

I pulled out the vacuum. I poured water into my bucket to scrub my kitchen floor. I had my eye on the bookshelves, covered as they were in dust an inch thick. And a vague hope of maybe getting to the washroom before the night was over. And then there were the thank-you cards and the filing cabinet to organise and the laundry to fold, the dishwasher to empty, supper to cook.

"Game on," said my tinies to each other. "Game on."

The smallest tiny decided that now was as good a time as any for a nursing marathon. So he latched onto me, non-stop, for about 5 hours. He refused to go to sleep even though he was exhausted. He didn't want the sling. He didn't want to be laid down. He wouldn't tolerate being in the bassinette. No, Mumma. It's the boob or nothing. And he shrieked until it was so.

And the bigger tiny was pulling crackers out the cupboard because she thought her Mummy was hungry. She took her clothes off because she wanted to "dance naykid". She made soap bubbles in the bathroom sink and then decorated the mirror with them because they are so "pwetty."  And then tripped over the toy piano in the middle of the floor and burst into tears because of the "wowie."

Balance, balance. Tightrope, tightrope. Careful….steady now!

So then the tiniest one was settled in his bassinette, tummy full, happily filling his diaper and off in dreamland - FINALLY. I have a moment. What to do? Finish the chores or…

Two favourite stories, Goodnight Moon and Two Little Gardeners, were read out loud to the girl and her Pooh bear. She was snuggled and kissed and tucked in for sleep. I left her in the middle of her blankets and we blew kisses to each other all the way out of the door.

Then I collapsed in the living room and surveyed the damage. Toys strewn everywhere. A kitchen that is messier than it was even beforehand. A half-vacuumed floor.  A splitting headache and a sore back. Nothing accomplished. If anything, more to do.

You know, in my mother's bedroom was an embroidered picture, a verse from the poem, "Song for a Fifth Child" by Ruth Hulbert Hamilton, that read:

Cleaning and scrubbing can wait til tomorrow

For babies grow up, we've learned to our sorrow.

So quiet down cobwebs, dust go to sleep

I'm rocking my baby for babies don't keep.

So I picked up my wee laddie, already losing that freshie-look, and now we're rocking in our rocking chair, his head against my neck, our heartbeats against each other, my mouth buried into his neck, just to breathe him in, to smell him when he's 11 days old. I decided to worry about the apartment tomorrow. Or the next day.

Sarah blogs at Emerging Mummy.

By Beck

Almost a year ago exactly, she was born. And that is the way with other people's babies, who grow up in sudden startling lurches - one minute, someone is a sleepy little baby, and the next finds them shoving exuberant handfuls of birthday cake into their mouths.

She was born after a hard, scary pregnancy, and the first photographs of her were wrenching. She was so small, so new, with tubes going into her nose, doll-sized in people's arms. The pictures showed my brother (suddenly changed into a father), tenderly cradling her, tenderly holding his tiny child. And I worried and worried over my brother, my sister-in-law, their tiny, unknown child.

I met her a month and a half later. She was home and safe and sound and was placed in my arms and she was so small - far smaller than my big, big babies - and I looked into her smoky grey eyes and instantly loved her. And I was shocked. I am not a baby person, really, and I'm not someone who normally gushes over other people's children, but there was an instant family feeling, this instant place for her. I can't articulate how moving I found this, this uncomplicated love, free of responsibilies. I had thought that my three children were my stopping point, were my finish line, and I had felt for some time a grim finality about this. But it turns out there are miles left to go, still.

My youngest child - who I call The Baby on my blog, for lack of a better nickname - is having a mighty growing streak this summer. She woke up this morning and strode lankily into the living room, visibly taller than she was when we put her to bed last night. The babyish contours of her face are disappearing, becoming cheekbones and knowledge.  And it's funny for me, funny how this far-away love for her wee cousin helps with the wistfullness that washes over me at times like this: there will be more babies, always. They won't be mine, anymore.

My niece - my first niece - is turning one this weekend. She is someone else's child, lives several hours away from me, and I will pretty much always be just a visiting aunt, someone who brings presents and loud older cousins and then will be gone again from her day to day life. I will see her on holidays and summer trips, just one of many people who love her. There will always be people to love, it turns out, old people and brand new people and people just about to taste the sweetness of birthday cake for the very first time.

By Kelly

My Mom is a genius.

All my life, she’s had one phrase that covers every childhood problem.

She would simply say, “You’re tired.”

Fighting with a sibling? “You must be tired.”

Cranky the day after a sleepover? “You sound tired.”

Whining about having nothing to wear? “Someone’s tired.”

Broken arm? “You must be tired.”

I’m kidding about that last one. I think.

But sometimes, that’s how it felt. Tiredness was to blame for everything. I wondered if the world would end and my Mom would blame it on exhaustion.

And I hated hearing it, honestly. I hated that she had a calm answer when I wanted a dramatic reaction. I hated that she didn’t seem to care about my life-altering problems. I hated that she acted like she knew me better than I knew myself. (“Like I wouldn’t know if I was tired,” I would snort to my teenage self.)

But now that I’m the parent, I see the genius in that phrase. Because my Mom wasn’t just diagnosing a condition.

She was showing us grace.

She was saying, in essence, “I believe you know how to get along with your siblings and stay kind even after a late-night party and be content with the clothing you have. I believe you can do better than this. Surely, it’s the tiredness that’s making you act this way. You must be tired.”

I understand this now, because I watch my two-year-old after a week of not taking naps, and I see how she melts down when I tell her no, she can’t have marshmallows for breakfast. And I know she can do better than that. I’ve seen her have better reactions.

She must be tired.

And I watch my older son and daughter bicker and pick at each other all day after a weekend of swimming and late night ice cream cones and extra reading time before bed. I know they can treat each other with kindness. This isn’t like them.

They must be tired.

It’s a beautiful thing, really, to believe my children can do better if they just had a little more sleep. It’s a way for me to give them the benefit of the doubt. I believe in them. They just need more rest.

And now, it’s time for me to go to bed. Because tonight, I found myself getting annoyed when my toddler wanted to hold my hand while she was falling asleep.

I must be tired.

Kelly blogs at Love Well, when she's not too tired.

By Michael

This morning, Susan dropped off her souvenirs from yesterday's family adventure:: three $5 chips from the Indian casino down the road from our place in Arizona.  Jill and the girls were in town to visit a high-school friend of Susan's who just had a baby. i was here on a business trip.

For the past few days, we've shared the same home and enjoyed the easy flow of conversations and laughter that make Stephanie and Susan the kind of people we'd want to spend time with even if they weren't ours. Last night, we were a nuclear family again, without those icky boys to get in the middle of things. I like the boys, but sometimes I miss the four of us as a group.

We went for dinner at a new restaurant at the casino and then spent a few hours together at a blackjack table. The hours drifted into the morning and we didn't roll into the garage until 3:15. Today, we went shopping together to harvest tonight's dinner and there's a wild evening of Scattergories or Uno in our late-night plans.

Tomorrow, I head off on the next leg of my business trip and the girls return to their independent lives in Chicago. Today, though, is just like the old days. Susan brought home some red chips instead of a Disney hat, of course. Other than that, though, nothing has changed.

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 DeeDee

I have the honor of acting as monitor on a parenting message board.  One discussion that comes up more frequently than any other, is the subject of bullying.  Most of the time, parents are concerned with a situation their child is experiencing in a school setting.  And more often than not, it is when the child has moved to a new school.

My heart breaks for these parents and the feeling of helplessness.  Especially when they cannot get any help from the school system.  I remember well when I moved to a new 8th grade public school, after many years of attending a parochial school.  The school I finally landed in was the 3rd one in the span of 3 months of constant moving due to my dad's job.

My dad worked under contract as an engineer for the government, and since I didn't understand what all that meant, I just told people he was a spy.

Which always helped when making new friends.

Anyhoo, the school I settled in was a rather rough school.  A girl with beady eyes who went by the name of Bertha, took an immediate dislike to me on the school bus on my first day of school.   She made my life a living hell every single day, as she and her little minions threatened to beat me up.  Simply for breathing.

I pulled a Body Guard move, and made friends with a quiet, fearless girl who sat in the back of the bus.  It should be noted that she stood a good two heads taller than Bertha.  My new friend finally had enough of watching Bertha wreak havoc on the school bus, and she got down in her face one morning and whispered menacingly, "If you ever touch my friend, I will kill you."

I believed her.  And Bertha must have believed her, since she never bothered me again.  In fact, she and her little army gave me a rather wide berth whenever I walked by.

I never told my parents about the bullying.  And I really don't know why.  Other than I thought they had enough to worry about, what with my dad being a spy and all.  And possibly I feared even more retaliation should I get an adult involved.

Bullying among children is nothing new.  But, because of media coverage, we are so much more aware of some of the tragic consequences that befall the victims.

I've been merrily going about raising my children thinking that I've spared them from bullies since we homeschool.  I know all of my kid's friends, and I know their parents, and when the children are all playing, we moms are usually within earshot.

But a while back, I witnessed my 10 year old teasing my 5 year old.  Which was not out of the ordinary.  Of course I put a stop to it and chalked it up to sibling rivalry.  But as I watched how my 5 year old began reacting in fear and anger to his older sibling, I realized that what she was doing was a form of bullying.  I've had to really open up a dialogue with her about bullying and how to treat other people, ESPECIALLY a sensitive little brother.

As a parent, I'm not as immune to bullying as I had hoped.  I just thought I'd never witness it under my own roof.

The question posed by my parents on the message board usually is along the lines of, "Should I step in?  Or wait to see if the authorities will handle the situation?"

I'm of the "step in because I'm the mama bear" variety.  Which is always my knee-jerk reaction.  And in some cases may not be the best thing.

So my question to you all is: If faced with a bullying situation, do you step in, or stand back and see if it can be resolved on its own?

DeeDee

guest post by Sarah Bessey (Emerging Mummy)

I’m looking out of the window above my kitchen sink but all I see is my own tired reflection and a warm room behind me. The house is a disaster after a day of three meals, a sick preschooler, a busy toddler and baking. When I take a step, crumbs stick to my feet. I momentarily wish for a dog so that he would lick the floor clean. Today, I've administered medicine and organised naps. I've tried to return important emails for my work with a non-profit because we need to fundraise. But my head isn't there by this time of day, even though my heart is.  I chase the tinies downstairs with my husband to play because sometimes, it’s a gift is to clean my kitchen up alone.

I'm humming quietly under my breath, working in the light of candles, straightening and picking up, cleaning and wiping, sweeping and setting to rights, restoring.

Sometimes I don't feel swept up in a grand love story. I feel like I am underestimated, like all I do is pick up. Does anyone else in this house know how to unload a dishwasher? The day feels long. I didn’t get as much time to work as part of my work-from-home job. I play second fiddle. I grapple with mundane details and wonder if I paid that bill on time.

I don't really want my life story to be about how I paid off my mortgage or got another nice car. I don't need my kids to say they could eat off my floor. (It would be nice but that doesn't inspire anyone.)
I have prayed for the big words, for the best nouns to be at work in my life - words like peace, goodness, generosity, love, joy and justice. (I also like the words “a little weird now and then.”) And I have prayed that my life would be an expression of the very best verbs - forgiving, peace-giving, joyful, merciful, creative, just and loving.

But sometimes I miss it, walk right by, and disregard it when those prayers are answered. It's in the tiniest of moments, easy to miss like new snowflakes. But the moments are creating an avalanche. I see imagination and love, tenderness and gentleness in them. Her hand is in his hair, they are quiet together, then he burrows into her stomach to tickle, they shriek with laughter and somehow, they have my mother’s eyes, blue as a summer sky.

Parenting - the greatest act of service of my life, this having and being a tightly knit family together – is writing a story with the biggest nouns and the verbs of my life so far.

By Beck

The Girl has wanted a loom for several years now, despite never having actually seen a loom in person. It was one of those strange, fleeting childhood passions, we thought, and not something that was necessary for us to fulfill. Looms are too expensive and too big to be mere whims.

So she recently started a summertime weaving class, and her teacher confided in my husband last night that The Girl is a natural at weaving - while the other girls fumbled, leaden-handed, with their lulking metal looms, The Girl deftly wove a scarf of gold and fuchsia and sharp green, her hands flying, her face calm.

She is nothing like me, this calm blond person with her dexterous hands, with her talents as seemingly random as a fairy's gifts. My imagined daughter was dark-haired like me, was sharp tongued and bookish - a person for long winters, a person who could take the chill - and instead I have this child like a gentle summer's day. I am certainly not disappointed, but I seem to spend my parenthood in a state of pleased surprise. Who are you, I think, and where did you come from?

She is working on a borrowed loom right now. It is very very old - it belonged originally to her teacher's grandmother-in-law - and it still does its job, without beauty but not without a certain angular elegance. She is coming home arms loaded with blue wool, the blue of cornflowers, of July skies, blues for the scarf she is weaving for a friend, this pretty thing that will grace our house for a moment and then go on. She is bent over the loom, this miniature Fate, this girl in the process of becoming something new, making sheer beauty with her hands.