Archive for January, 2011
Jan 27 – Holocaust Remembrance Day
Author: utbt26 Jan 2011
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has detailed lesson plans for educators about Holocaust and the reason why children must learn about it. But for me this quote below is reason enough.
“There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself….
….and that is if the world forgets there WAS such a place.”
-Henry Appel, Survivor
I strongly believe that young children must not be exposed to meaning less violence like in movies, video games and graphic print media, so why introduce Holocaust to my four year old and six year old?
Well…. media violence is perceived as entertainment. It encourages the child to take a passive role and makes the child indifferent to what is going on. By introducing Holocaust to my children, I am trying to achieve the exact opposite effect – as quoted in USHMM website, ‘ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping in any society’, highlight the seriousness of the being indifferent and finally, speaking against what is unfair.
Considering the epic nature of Holocaust and the age of the target group, one has to tread carefully to achieve the desired goals.
Poppin’s Mom’s review of Brundibar was god sent! To a preschool child it is the story of Aninku and Pepicek, two poor siblings who are trying to defeat the town bully and get some milk for their ailing mother. While the adult is acutely aware that the town bully is Hitler and finds that every line is loaded with deep meaning, my six year old perceived it as a book about bullying and how one must stand up against bullies. My four year old requested the book to be read multiple times for the sheer pleasure of pronouncing the names Aninku and Pepicek. Over the past four months we borrowed the book from the library many times and after multiple readings and some discussions with my six year old, I felt that it was time to introduce the next book.
Terrible Things: An Allegory Of The Holocaust by Eve Bunting, was next in the natural progression. Eve Bunting seems to be inspired by Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous quotation, ‘First they came….’, for Terrible Things is a story in first person by a little rabbit about the forest in which he is living with various other animals. Little rabbit is first to see the ‘terrible things’ – vague shadowy shapes with no specifics. Every time the ‘terrible things’ return, they systematically take away and eradicate one species of animals. The other animals are quite indifferent to what is happening to their friends and one day find themselves being taken away by the terrible things.
Having read this book, I must say that the way the book is presented – the animals as characters, beautiful pencil illustrations, vagueness of the terrible things which creates the desired amount of terror, is awesome. Eve Bunting effectively addresses how hatred without any basis when combined with indifference can lead to monumental catastrophe. In our house it set the stage for many discussions with my six year old.
I am guessing that we will be content discussing and reading Terrible Things for few more years to come. But the next book I will introduce will be The Butterfly by Patricia Polacco.
The Butterfly by Polacco touched me because it is the personal story of the author’s aunt and grand aunt. Polacco’s aunt Monique is a young child living in Nazi occupied part of France during WWII. One day purely by accident Moniqure finds out that a jewish family is living in the basement of her house and that her mother is part of the underground movement that helps jewish people hide and move out to safety. Monique becomes friends with the little jewish girl Servine, living in her basement. Because Servine spends her day cooped up in the dark basement, Monique finds things from the outside that cheers up Servine. This is how for the girls and to the readers, a butterfly comes to signify freedom from oppression. One night the girls are playing in Monique’s bedroom and are spotted by Monique’s neighbor. Lives are in jeopardy and they have to act quickly to get Servine and her family far away from Nazi soldiers. We later find out that only Servine made it to safety. Polacco is very effective when she talks about how the little girls going to school are terrorized by Nazi soldiers marching on the road but have put up a merry facade in order to not attract any undue attention. Extremely touching book that I will read with my children when they are 7+, because I want the story to sink in proper.
New York Times in its controversial(and hastily concluded in my opinion) article about picture books, raises the question if we as a society are moving away from picture books. All I can say, from my personal experience is that picture books are not just for young children. The print + picture media must be an option while introducing any new subject, irrespective of the target audience. While broaching new and intense subjects like the Holocaust, picture books provide the desired impact without overwhelming the reader. Another excellent example is Morpurgo’s Mozart Question, reviewed by Choxbox, a picture book for all ages. Choxbox says, “the backdrop of the story is, like many of Morpurgo’s books, the Second World War. Though technically it is for a child between ages 8-12, even older folks will enjoy it”
Stay tuned to SaffronTree for more book recommendations.
Sitcom Parenting
Author: utbt19 Jan 2011
All the ruckus in the virtual world about one woman’s parenting style, made me think of the sitcoms I used to watch, the sitcom mommies and how they dealt with their kids.
Bewitched, Cheers, The Cosby show, Dharma and Greg, Family Matters, Frasier, Friends, Fresh prince of Bel-Air, Fullhouse, Family Matters The golden girls, I love Lucy, Matlock, Home Improvement, I dream of Jeannie, Seinfeld, Sister Sister….
These were my staple sitcoms during my pre-baby-non-career-woman days. Family Matters was the first sitcom I watched in the US. YaadaYaada having arrived in the US a year earlier than I, was my TV guide. She sang praises on the sitcom about the African American family, the doctor husband, the lawyer wife, their five children. She meant the Cosby Show. I channel surfed and ended up watching Family Matters. It took me a good three episodes to figure out that it was not the Cosby Show! But when I did watch the Cosby Show, the one person who captured my heart, the one and only Claire Huxtable. I knew I wanted to be a mother like her – loving, accommodating but no nonsense, poised and sensible. I am still working on poise people, but doing good over all, if I may say so myself.
So here is a fun survey. Choose from the list ( Claire Huxtable, Jill Taylor, Rosanne and Mrs.Beaver ) your favorite. It will be open till Jan 24, 4.00AM PST. Have a good one folks.
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Edited to add: Reults of survey here.
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Of Extra Classes, Pushing Kids And Parenting Styles
Author: utbt13 Jan 2011
Yesterday was Chula and Mieja’s first day taking swim lessons. I posted in the school’s parent yahoo groups, made couple of phone calls and registered them in a highly recommended swim school. They have classes once a week for 30 min. So I was fully aware that the money spent is for them to monkey around in water, which they did and had lots of fun. Well, I can dream that they freestyle across the Suez canal after these ten, once a week, thirty min classes, but again it will be just a dream.
Now I have to mention that of my M.A.N.Y pet peeves, one that will rank number one is my obsession towards maintaining a schedule and the other one that will be in the top ten is public water facilities.
My schedule goes like this:
- Swim class at 5.30PM = We have to leave home at 5.00PM.
-Leave home at 5.00PM = we must be ready dressed + kids’ back packs packed + their after swim snack ready + boots on + jackets on + customary potty round etc done by 4.55PM.
-Back pack ready at 4.55PM = start packing back pack at 4.30PM.
-They need to have a substantial snack before swim and it must be at least 90 min before the swim. So biggish snack/light early dinner at 4.00PM.
-Eat at 4.00PM = dinner, snack all done by 2.00PM. So I can go pick them up at 3.00PM. (Now if some one points out to me that we live exactly 1.8 miles away from school and it takes exactly 6 minutes one way even if all the four traffic lights are on, I will have to ask you to shut up and refer you to my pet peeve # 1. It has to be like this only.)
-I can hear the clock ticking, every second passes with an ominous thud, I am moving at warp speed, but the rest of family is not. So I feel this enormous pressure of carrying every one through my schedule in order to achieve the deliverable. Working on that folks…. might take a life time though.
Now to my next pet peeve about public water facilities. My most traumatic life experience so far, is that I had to dip in sea at Rameshwaram in order to ward off the ill effect of some planet in my husband’s birth chart. I consider it atrocious that I had to do it with him just because we are married. The very fact that I was forced to do it, created many ill effects for the husband that were not in his birth chart. Pity-huh?!
I see in water, things that no one can possibly see with their normal eye. I imagine one person swallowing water and coughing it out and their germs coming to me/my children crawling in slow motion with Jaws music playing inside my head. The funny thing is that I am not your typical Purell worshipper. Water just seems to enhance my out of the box thinking.
So after the swim class, I washed, dried, dressed, blow dried the girls’ hair once at the pool side. Brought them home, dumped them directly in to the tub, shampooed their hair, scrubbed the top layer of skin off, rinse, repeat, ditto at home. Then the usual smahan after hair bath, churanam to clear sinus, blow dry their hair, moisturize etc etc ritual followed. Of course, I have a target bed time, so all this scrubbing activities have to be reverse engineered and timed accordingly. You all get a fair idea of how things roll right?
By 8.00PM, I was a wreck. I felt like eating murukku….. chewing the crispy, fried, oily snack seems to be the perfect solution to get rid of all that stress. Unfortunately there was no murukku at home and so the husband was collateral damage to the process of de-stressing.
The bigger point to all this is……. (yes, however pointless all this seems there is a point peeps) taking the children to an activity that I am not comfortable in is ‘this’ hard for me. I usually stick to my comfort zone of art, dance and dabble a little bit in music. The rest is like pulling a huge stone uphill by tying it to my hair. So hats off to the parents, Chinese and others, who are very sure about their choices for their kids and go through the hassle of taking them to various classes and putting in the grueling hours of practice and such. Amy Chua might call me lazy, but it is like that only. I just want to choose my battles.
PS: My opinion about Amy Chua’s article:
I didn’t like the stereotyping. For example, Asian kids play video games, do sleep overs and have extra curricular activities that Amy Chua may not approve of. She just translated what she did at home to all Asians.
I admire her guts for telling out in the open what she believes in.
I agree that Asian parents have high expectations on their children, while some non-Asian parents might be afraid to have any kind of expectations on their children. It is not wrong to have expectations.
I also agree that children need to be presented the same activity many many times before they master it and are very comfortable in it. But every parent does ‘the presentation’ in different ways. Not all Asian parents yell and go on a war path.
God give me strength to not call my children garbage, however testing their behavior is.
Whatever you do, do it with conviction. Example, the worst will be a ‘typical’ Asian parent parenting the ‘typical’ western way and expecting the result of ‘typical’ Asian parenting and vice versa.
Overdose Of Political Correctness
Author: utbt8 Jan 2011
Some time in the past two years, in my Language and Literacy Development in Young Children class, the prof passed a Caldecott honor book and asked us to read it.
It was the story of the seven blind mice. The mice encounter something next to their pond and try figuring out what the object is. On Monday the red mouse touches a part of the object and says that it is nothing but a giant column of enormous girth. On Tuesday the next colored mouse touches a part of the object and says that it is just a fan. Monday through Saturday, the different colored mice touch only one part of the object and come to different conclusions. Finally on Sunday, the white mouse runs from one end of the object to the other end, pieces together the entire information and declares that the object in fact is an elephant.
This is a story we have all heard growing up. I love the moral behind the story, ‘by looking at just a part of the bigger picture, you distort the whole picture’. The reason this particular book was discussed in class is because the book was a controversial book and many classrooms do not use it.
Any guesses why? Well… I advice you to sit down while I give you the reason, because the mouse that comes out on Sunday and solves the riddle is a ‘white’ mouse. If you read between the lines, ignore the moral of the story, focus on a singular detail and decide based on one snippet of the whole big picture…. the books claims that white is superior to other colors, which can be further extended to people with white skin are superior. Ironic indeed.
Well, this unfortunately is not the only example. The most recent person caught in controversy is Mark Twain. You ain’t free even if you are dead Mr.Twain. The future will come back to get you. Just be thankful that it is not a Terminator coming back in time, but just a publishing company deciding to replace the word ‘nigger’ with the word ‘slave’.
The bigger questions are:
What exactly are people trying to accomplish here?
Does Mark Twain’s use of the word nigger make him a racist?
Should one look at the bigger picture, namely the story of friendship between Huck and Jim and the period the story was set in, or should be bogged down by just one word and shun away from the book?
If one word defines a book, the author, what about the fate of books like ‘To kill a mocking bird’, that have the same offensive word?
A book is the intellectual property of its author. In many ways, it the author’s baby. Can some one, without the author’s permission, decide to change the book, even if it is just one word?
By replacing one word, by rewriting old literature, can history be rewritten too?
Doesn’t the new generation deserve the actual history? Or do we give them a politically correct, glossed over version because it is easy for us to deal with demons from past history, because it removes a certain level of awkwardness in our current social life?
What do you think peeps?
LITTLE HOOT: Book Review
Author: utbt5 Jan 2011
Picture courtesy Amazon.com. Cross posted at Saffron Tree.
18 months is truly a milestone for children. That is when power struggles start and children learn by pushing their limits. Even at this young age, there are a few things the children have the ultimate control (and know that they have control, that is the fun part – eh?!) over the adult. The holy trinity are food, sleep and potty conditioning. These three can literally drive a fully grown adult to verge of insanity.
Let us focus on sleep. LITTLE HOOT is a children’s book that deals with bed time trouble. Tonnes of books, both parenting and children’s books, have been written on this topic. So what is new about LITTLE HOOT?
Children will find it absolutely absurd and funny. For the adults, it teaches that every parent is struggling with some kind of an issue, you are not alone, so take a chill pill.
Amy Krouse, always manages to find a different angle to pitch her story. In LITTLE PEA, she talks about food battles through a protagonist who likes to eat spinach for dessert and hates candy. In LITTLE HOOT she addresses bedtime struggles through LITTLE HOOT, an owlet who likes to go to bed at a decent hour. Staying up late is an absolute no-no for him. But his parents who want to instill in him ‘good owl values’, try keeping him up well past the time he wants to hit the bed. Oh! the ideas these two come up with…. a laugh riot for children as well as adults.
Jen Corace’s minimalistic ink and water color illustrations ups the cuteness factor of this charming story.
Some books on the same topic we enjoyed at home are I don’t want to go to bed, Llama Llama Red Pajama
F Is For Fasting On Fridays
Author: utbt1 Jan 2011
If there is one thing all my friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances know about me, it is that I fast every friday. Rain or shine, even when I am traveling, I fast without fail. Yet, I am not a religious person in the way my mother or my mother-in-law are. Lighting the lamp and offering prayers on a daily basis are not my strongest forte.
I started the fast on March 5th, 2004. At this age and stage, I have already started to classify all events, except for the girls’ birthday, by month and year, because the brain is becoming throughly incapable of remembering dates. Last year, I forgot R’s birthday and my birthday because I have already blurred over the date and have filed it in my head as ‘sometime in Oct’ and ‘sometime in Nov’. But I remember March 5th, 2004! Is it because one always remembers the days their life changed for ever?
The funny thing about days that change your life is that, many a times they are so irrelevant and hardly seem monumental when it is actually happening. In fact some time in middle of April 2004, I had to look up the calendar and think back to narrow the date to March 5th. Even then it did not seem so big. Over an extended period of time, one grows, develops associations and the before you know it something irrelevant has already been coined as ‘life changing’.
On March 5th, 2004, the friday I started the fast, to me, all was lost. The only request I had for the higher power I was calling out to was to help me find happiness. In some way, may be the time was right or may be because I stopped fighting or may be all I had was faith, it worked and I did find happiness.
The quest to bear a child was over. But I held on to the fast determined that I will stop fasting after I have a second one. Three years and two children later, I was still fasting and told myself that I will finish the fast when the children turn five…. or may be fifty five…. That is when the warning came from an unexpected source.
My amma, though we have different perspectives on many things, asked me, ‘What are you trying to do? Holding God on a bind? Is it a retainer of some sort? What are you demanding her to do? Fasts must have an ending, that way you stayed focused.When something goes on for indefinite period of time, it gets diluted and loses meaning’. That is when I realized how painful the Friday fasts have become for me. I was irritable, always craving for food, demanded special attention from R – because I was doing this sacrifice for his children, I wanted him to put me on a pedestal at least every Friday. Plus many get togethers, pot lucks at work, fancy lunches at work, corporate evenings out A.L.L happen on Fridays and obviously I haven’t been a part of it. As my amma pointed out there were days I accidentally did something that was not be a part of the fast. Those days I was not just miserable, I was in terror. I imagined that it was a sign that something was to go wrong with my children. Fear without any basis is probably the worst torture that the mind can come up with. I decided to reevaluate my fast.
I felt what had started as a quest for hope had changed direction so much that it was back firing. This was around the time Tharini recommended Eat, Pray, Love to me. Certain experiences Gilbert wrote about deeply resonated with me.
What did I do by fasting?
I was asking, like Elizabeth Gilbert would say, the universe for something.
Did I get it?
Yes.
When I started the fast, did I truly believe that the only thing that would bring me true happiness is to become a mother?
Yes.
So essentially I was asking for something and I got it. In fact I got more than what I asked for and I got it at the right time. I have a good thing going. May be I must celebrate that instead of being terrified by the future. After a lot of thought, I decided I must continue fasting every Friday, but not as a preventive mechanism, but as a celebration.
Today, as I tell any one who enquires, I fast because it is my thanks giving. As life goes on, there are new demands, expectations and disappointments. In this process I can possibly get thankless and greedy. Every Friday brings me back to reality, it grounds me to the very basic of my being, teaches me to be truly thankful, never to lose hope – no matter how tough things seem to be and to focus on what is truly important.
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