Why Frozen isnt that bad...

If your house is anything like mine, the “Frozen epidemic” has taken a firm hold on your daily existence. Sure, it’s a good movie and I enjoyed watching it. I even enjoyed it enough to justify buying the DVD and audio CD without resentment. I don’t even mind watching it multiple times when my children request it during the grumpy hour. (You know, post dinner and pre bedtime…)

The fact that my 5 year old children will listen exclusively to the “Frozen” CD in the car has caused minimal problems, but nothing too extreme. In fact, there are definitely some positives to the experience. Oh, and as a side note, am I REALLY the only one who noticed the connection between the release of a movie about eternal winter during our eternal winter? I should hope not…  As for the benefits, I’ll elaborate.

1-    The enhancement of memorization techniques:  My kids don’t always remember things well and lyrics to songs have never been their strong point. They know EVERY WORD to the Frozen songs, however.  And yes, I do mean every word. My daughter especially, although my son isn’t doing badly. They practice often enough, so they should know all the words. That’s got to have some academic benefits. Right?

2-   Pretty music: I haven’t’ conducted an extensive study, but I am willing to state that the quality of music in animated movies has improved recently. While the older movies included some pretty tunes, I would hesitate to say that their music was inspired. The Frozen music, however, is beautiful. It’s very well written and catchy.  It’s easy on the ears and classy. It’s not “kids’ music” despite its presence in a movie made at least partly for children. That something, right?

3-   Excellent lyrics: My daughter has reached a phase in her kid curiosity where she feels the need to understand the meaning of every word she hears. She thinks it’s hilarious that the word “noodle” can mean the food you eat or the bendy toy you play with in the pool. A word geek, myself, I think that’s kind of cool. I’ll tell you this, I love explaining the meaning of the lyrics in the Frozen songs. I love explaining that “isolation” means being alone, but implies much more than alone.  It’s the feeling of being lonely, as opposed to that wonderful moment when you finally get to be alone at the end of a busy and social day. And she gets that. I LOVE that she gets that. We talked about how “the past is in the past” means that her tantrums of yesterday are forgiven and today is a new day. That’s an important life lesson if you ask me.

4-   Excellent female roles: I like romance and love, so I don’t object to a happy romantic ending. That said, I found it refreshing that the “true love” at the end of Frozen was sisterly love, not romantic love. Ana saved Elsa, and then Elsa save Ana. Their bond was recreated. Joy and love was returned to the kingdom. The presence of a romantic relationship for Ana was the icing on the cake. A nice addition. A bonus. Family came first. Nice.

I empathize with parents and child care provider all over the world. I do. I understand how annoying the 7 millionth rendition of “Let it go” can be, especially at full voice in the middle of the supermarket. But hey, it could be worse. It could be the “Thong song”. Right?

Let go and enjoy the ride!

We took our kids to six flags yesterday. Beautiful day. Perfect weather, not too hot but not too chilly. Short lines, if any. Sunshine and no rain. And if that wasn’t enough, we had friends join us so the kids could run in a pack. It’s amazing, the power of positive peer pressure to persuade a young child to try that new kiddy ride. 

Awesome. 

My kids are not the most physically brave kids in the universe. Blame it on the genetics from their mom’s side of the family. We have been working on teaching them to be braver and more adventurous. So far, it seems to be working. 

At one point, we rode the tea cups. As a younger person, I could have ridden the tea cups all day. I had a stomach of steel. As an adult, however, one ride is my limit. My stomach can only handle the spinning for a finite amount of time and it appears that my limit is the length of one ride. 

If you have never ridden the tea cups, or perhaps if you have never really thought about the engineering of how they work, let me lay it out for you. You sit in a round seat, decorated like a tea cup. It spins on a pole that has a circle on the top. Teenagers can use this circle as a steering wheel of sorts to haul the cup around in even faster circles, should they so choose. The typical five year old child, however, does not have the strength to stop the spinning by holding on to that steering wheel. They are dragged uncomfortably around as they attempt unsuccessfully to slow it all down. It’s not a fun experience. 

When the ride began, and the spinning began, my daughter grabbed on to the steering wheel. She hadn’t anticipated how fast the spinning would feel to her and she wanted to slow it down. Her eyes got wider and wider in despair as her attempts to control the spinning failed. She looked and me and yelled (over the noise of the ride) “mommy, it’s going too fast!” Without thinking, I reached over to her, took her hand, smiled and yelled back. “Take my hand. Let go of the wheel. Sit back and enjoy the ride!”

And she did. Instantly. She took my hand and held it. Shockingly, she wasn’t even gripping it, just holding it comfortably. She sat back, tucked up her legs to get comfy and looked around. She smiled serenely as her hair blew around her face.  At that particular moment, all I could think about was how beautiful she looked, calmly content in amongst all the chaos and movement.

 It’s the same gorgeous look my son had on his face while on the swings. You know… where they put you in your own little seat and turn the center so that all the swings fly around the carousel like center.  Many kids grin and giggle on those rides, but not my son. He gets calm in a way that is uncommon for him. He gets still and he is almost never still while awake. His face finds this beautiful resting position. His eyes open and alert, sparkling. His gaze on the beautiful view. His gorgeous little lips formed in a tiny up curl. His adorable, skinny little legs swinging in the breeze, free of tension or intentional movement. Being a very active little dude, this state of stillness is a beautiful sight for me. I took a mental photograph and stored it in my heart. 

I have always struggled with calm in a storm. I wasn’t raised in a way that would have infused this skill by nurture and I doubt that my nature would have taken to it easily anyways. I’ve gotten better at it over the years with intentional hard work, but I still have a ways to go. 

My kids, however, are not going to have that struggle. They are only 5 years old and they are already learning to let go and let life take them on a ride. They are already somewhat able to sit back and give up control of the steering wheel from time to time.  As their mom, this gives me a sense of accomplishment. After all, isn’t it really our ultimate goal in life to NOT pass on our own struggles to our children? 

I can’t wait to see where this skill will take them in life.

Safety...

As a college student, I had a part time job giving campus tours. It was a fun way to fill free time and make some extra going out cash. I enjoyed it enormously and found it easy to provide animated tours, as I’ve always been an extrovert; comfortable making new friends. One particular tour included a father and his daughter. Approximately half way through the tour the father asked me the following question

“How safe is this campus?”

An excellent question, for the record. I plan to ask that very question when I take my kids on college tours in the distant future.

The daughter rolled her eyes dramatically. It was instantly clear that he asked this question on every tour. Or, at the very least, she found him to be overly safety cautious. Imagine that… a high school student wanting their parent to back off. How abnormal. 

I looked directly at dad and answered his question. I answered him honestly. 

I told him that it was an open campus, so there were no guarantees on safety or keeping out the public. I informed him that our security records did not indicate any problems or events whatsoever, but that I didn’t believe that statistic. With the sheer number of people on campus, it would be irrational to believe that absolutely nothing unsafe had occurred in that school year. I believed that those events (while probably relatively few) were most likely unreported.

Dad listened intently.

I then explained that I believed safety to be a result of wise decision making.  I told him that I avoided walking long distances alone in the dark and that I tried to make safe choices. And that I had never felt threatened.  I felt safe.

He smiled and thanked me for my honesty. He then looked meaningfully at his daughter. She rolled her eyes again.

Today, almost 20 years later, there was a shooting at our local mall. It’s a mall I take my children to regularly and I can honestly say that I have never felt threatened there. I don’t believe that my comfort was delusional. The event took place while my kids were in dance class, miles from the mall. I was sitting the lobby, chatting with the other parents when one of my fellow waiting parents received a text from an out of town friend, wanting confirmation that she was ok and hadn’t been at the mall. We all pulled out our phones, checked online for details and starting discussing. 

One of the parents, a dad, is a Baltimore city police officer. We learned this when he stated (with authority) that it sounded like a personal event instead of one of the more random gun events that have been occurring recently. 

But he wasn’t finished. 

Despite having sincere sympathy for those impacted by today’s events, he was more than mildly irritated by the media attention the event was receiving. He spoke about how events like these occur frequently in Baltimore city and those events never make the media. At least not the first page or top priority. When it occurs in the suburbs, however, it is life changing. Noteworthy. Newsworthy on a national level. I have sympathy for his perspective. I would resent it enormously, the world seeing my safety as lower priority than my neighbors’. 

That said, these types of events are rarer in the suburbs. The suburbs are perceived to be safer and statistically it’s probably true. My children are relatively isolated from true danger or true distress. They may think they are “starving” when our schedule overtakes snack time, but they have no concept of real hunger. They make think that their parents and other caretakers are mean at times, but they have no real concept of what it means to be mistreated or neglected. I don’t want them to understand but I do try to educate them on the reality that their life is blessed. Safe. Fortunate. They are now reaching the age where I can start to bring them to shelters to volunteer, so that they can see what real hunger or poverty looks like.  I won’t waste that opportunity. 

And yet, I still struggle with how to educate them on safety. I’d like to fill their heads with a reality that is consistent with my college reality, that if you make safe choices you will be safe. But is that true? The schools currently execute “intruder” drills, very much the way my parents were exposed to air raid drills and hiding under their desks. Our generation only had fire drills. 

What will my kids’ perspective on safety be? Will they see it the way I did or will they have to be educated on gun safety in a way I never was? 

I hope not.

How to use your free time well...

A long time ago, when the European colonists came to America, they landed with an agenda. They named it the “New World” because they were seeking a land to own, to expand upon. When they reached what we now call America, they were thrilled to have found it

Unused land.

Nobody was farming it or building on it, at least not to potential. Nobody was planning it. So the colonists took it upon themselves to educate the Native Americans. They “educated” them on how to use that land more effectively, more efficiently, more completely. Basically, they taught them to multi task, assuming that the slow paced solo tasking they were observing was an error to be fixed. A sign of lower awareness.

It never occurred to them. Maybe this solo tasking was on purpose and held wisdom.

Just maybe they were simply letting it BE land. They danced on it for celebration and sadness. They let their animals feed upon it to thrive. While I’ve never read about it specifically, I can only assume they let their children play upon it in their daily life. It would be consistent.

Today’s society is all about multitasking. We use our smart phones to check our email and text our friend to confirm tomorrow’s plans while food shopping. And then we wonder why we forgot half the items on our list or bought the decaf coffee by accident. We find a few hours of “free” time and we pack it to the brim with our essential “to do” lists, then feel frustrated with ourselves when we don’t complete our totally irrationally lengthy lists.

Yeah, that sounds like wisdom to me. Not. And yet we persevere, creating more and more technology to increase our chances of success. It’s like it has never occurred to us to cut our lists in half or to simply drop our expectations.

And don’t get me wrong. I’m not judging. Ok, maybe I am. But I’m judging myself as well, so I feel a little less judgmental.

The other day, I dropped my kids off at their afternoon preschool, like usual. Normally, this is followed by racing to my car so that I can use my “free” two hours as effectively as possible. I do laundry, clean the house, plan dinner, send a few emails, run errands and make those business calls that I just can’t complete with two kids in the house around my ankles. I even put these lists into my calendar in the absurd hopes that I will complete it.

I know. I’m insane.  But I’m in good company, if that makes it more forgivable.

That day, however, something happened. One of the other moms and I made a passing comment to each other at school drop off and a conversation developed. A really fun conversation, by the way. The daughter of this mom, a wonderful little girl, loves my daughter and my daughter loves her. They run squealing to hug each other when they see each other every day. It’s pretty cute.

And so we chatted. About kids. About life. About men. About shopping. You know… we just chatted. And we both cracked up more than once. Then, I went home and instead of going into my house, I went to my neighbor’s house. She just had a significant surgery and is housebound during the recovery period. I had just received an email from her that she was ready for visitors and that I should stop by whenever.

And so I did. I mentally dropped my VERY IMPORTANT “to do” list and chatted with my neighbor. It was great. By the time I left, she was laughing and I felt a thousand pounds lighter, despite not having been “productive”. My headache even went away. Imagine that.  

The laundry waited, it wasn’t going anywhere. The emails I hadn’t replied to weren’t going to delete themselves in the next 8 hours. Dinner could be a hodgepodge of leftovers and nobody would complain. My neighbor, however, was recovering RIGHT THEN. Not later. And we both needed some good, healthy socialization to feel more human.

Who says I didn’t use my time well? I think I used it perfectly.

The magic of Santa

Just before Halloween, we attended a campfire in our local state park. We arrived just as the sun was beginning to set and drove home in total darkness. The participants took a nature stroll through the woods, followed by a campfire complete with Halloween songs and s’mores. It was enormously fun.

In that moment before darkness settled in, my son looked up into the sky and triumphantly exclaimed, “Mommy, Daddy, I see Rudolph!” 

He was pointing at an airplane, of course. My husband, in his wicked wisdom, has told our twins that airplanes are Rudolph. That he and Santa are watching every move they make. It’s amazing how effectively it stabilizes behavior. The adults in the group cracked up. The children started searching the skies. Priceless moment. 

As an adult, I find it magnificent, this unshaken belief in Santa Clause.  I mean, seriously. The logic is beyond ridiculous. 

Let’s sum it up. Over the course of one night, one guy travels across the entire world and delivers presents to practically every boy and girl. He lands on their roof, slides down the chimney and delivers the exact presents that each and every kid drooled over in the local toy store. 

And his sleigh is only moderately sized, and pulled by reindeer. Oh, and his belly is way too big to fit in a chimney. 

Imagine that…

What is only slightly more insane is that kids believe it. For years. They behave well for fear of losing presents. They gaze adoringly at the random man dressed in a Santa suit at the local gym, or church, or supermarket… and they fail to notice that this one has blue eyes while the one last week was brown eyed.

Or perhaps they just don’t want to notice, because they want to believe and looking at the details will force them to face a reality they aren’t ready to face yet. They want to believe in magic because they are in love with the idea of Santa. They love the romance of flying reindeer and piles of presents. They love the music and the lights on the Christmas tree. They don’t care about logic. They crave magic and will suspend belief to maintain that feeling as long as possible. 

I understand why, because adults do it as well. 

My husband and I watched Avatar recently. We had seen it before, in the theater, but we bought the DVD when it came out. I love that movie, despite the fact that suspended mountains don’t exist. Neither do extra large blue people with reinforced bones, dragons or 6 legged horses. And yet, I love that movie. Watching the soul of a wheelchair bound body get transported into a strong and spirited body makes my heart light up with joy. I am entranced by the floating souls.  I can’t help but smile when the dragons soar through the air and I want to cheer when Jake changes side and takes his “true” form in his avatar body. 

And no, I don’t care that it’s not physically possible. Don’t remind me, ok? 

I just want to enjoy the magic.