First Class
Asher and I had our first Mommy & Baby class today.
It’s really called Parent Child class, but I suspect it will be all mommies. Only one other pair was there as the class is still forming, but Peggy and Willow seem nice. The teacher is called Teacher Marie. She is intense, warm, strong, experienced, and has a lovely singing voice. I think we are going to enjoy our Tuesday mornings in the class. The babies played. The mommies and teacher chatted. We had a snack. We sang songs. We walked to the farm and visited the sheep and the llama. On the way, we watched the 3rd and 4th graders playing on recess. Asher liked the new toys in the classroom—all wooden and beautiful, many handmade. He liked the rattles and the dollies and the wooden animals and gnomes. He really liked a surprising item: metal disks from the ends of frozen juice tubes. They made a fantastic sound when they crashed into each other. The teacher said, “Yeah. I know. Funny, eh? These are some of the most popular items in the whole classroom.” Which, I gotta tell ya, was full of thousands of dollars worth of heirloom-quality toys. Kids are weird, and yet, I understand completely why these metal disks were so interesting to him.
He really loved Willow, a six-month-old. He wanted to touch her face, especially her nose. Asher can be a bit rough because he doesn’t know better, so I spent a lot of time right next to him trying to keep him from bopping her in the head. One of the things Asher loves to do at home is look at his books full of pictures of babies. And here was Willow—a real baby in the flesh!
One of the things that mommies do, especially when they get together, is to share tricks of the trade, and figure out where each one stands on the GREAT PARENTING SPECTRUM, which basically goes from Attachment Parenting/EC/Waldorf/Organic/Raw/No TV/Hippy/Drives-a-Horse-and-Buggy on the far left and Traditional/Authoritative/Pro-spanking/TV/Junk Food/Republican/Drives-a-Hummer on the far right. So conversation meanders gradually through all these areas of choice. “If you do organic or all organic …”; “Well, I stay home …”; “He has been using the potty since …”; “We have a family bed …”; “I try to carry my baby …”; “These cloth diapers are so nice because …”; “I really have a problem with soy …”; “Back when I was raising my kids, I nursed ….”; “My poor husband was fed solids so early ….”; “This product is so good because …”; “I sew her clothing myself …”; “My mother made …”; “We avoid plastic …”; “Isn’t silk the most vibrant, warm fabric…”; “The infant and baby woolens are best…”; “Are you aware that you can get this here?” “It’s easy to make it yourself at home…” “We grew spelt…” ect., etc.
This exercise is tedious because it happens among all moms that I’ve ever met. In one sense, it’s a competition: Who is the Best Mommy? Who is the Best “Natural Parent”? Which is extreme bullshit. But in another sense, it’s a way of feeling each other out so that you don’t say the wrong thing to someone or hurt someone’s feelings and possibly undermine their confidence as a parent. It’s a way to learn about new things that you’ve never tried or never heard of before. It’s also a way of vetting potential friends. Weird.
If we hadn’t done this sort of thing this morning, I might not have learned that the teacher lived on The Farm in Tennessee (and a sister community in Kentucky) during the 1970s and worked as a nurse in the clinic—with Ina May Gaskin. Interesting times, indeed.
January 15, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Cute! Ah, the abstract foreign object is always more fun than the toy! I remember drawing windows and rockets on my large school erasers and having space battles. The broken-off pencil erasers were escape pods…*pew pew* =p
January 16, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Child care in Seattle is extremely competitive. (For example, infant care has a two year waiting list in most places. I’m not sure how exactly that can work, but there you go.) So, as soon as we get our infant care sorted out, we’re going to start looking at preschools, assuming they also have substantial waiting lists.
I understand you have Lucas enrolled in a Waldorf school. What do you think of it? Do you think you’ll keep your kids enrolled in the Waldorf school system throughout their entire education? Any information is greatly appreciated! =)
January 17, 2008 at 12:56 pm
We LOVE Waldorf. We are very, very happy with it, for about a thousand reasons. We are committed to doing Waldorf for pre-K through 8th grade for both children, barring a financial disaster that would make it impossible. We are undecided about high school, but we have a number of years to ponder that question and research. It may largely depend on the aptitudes of our kids, for example arts versus engineering interests. I’ll be happy to talk to you about it whenever. If you care to brouse through posts about our experiences with Waldorf, one of my tags on LJ is “Waldorf,” and others are “preschool” and “kindergarten.”