Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Four entries for the price of one

It's been a good long while, in bloggerworld, since I have posted here. And it's not for a shortage of things to discuss or ruminate over. Au contraire! The truth is, I've been rather busy with a number of projects/activities/responsibilities. And I've written at least half a dozen blog entries... in my head. Here's the abbreviated version of some:

It seems that so many people around here take child care for granted. By around here, I'm saying Montreal, but perhaps Quebec in general. Our daycare is currently in upheaval (long story) and some families have chosen to leave. Some complain of the supplemental $5 per day we have to pay, for a grand total of $12 per day for high-quality child care. Those same families have chosen to put their children in very expensive preschool programs that cost upwards of $500 per month, for half days (if you're counting, that's about four times more than the daycare system). Why is it that we, as humans, are willing to pay through the nose (if our nose is sufficiently filled, that is) for something that is expensive but balk at paying more for something that is already very cheap. It seems the cheaper something is — like child care — the less we think it's worth. Maïa's experience at this daycare has been invaluable, and I can't believe that her educators, who are so competent and loving and resourceful, get paid somewhere around ten bucks an hour. It's robbery.

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Snow, snow, the beautiful snow. Its arrival this year was a little less dramatic than last year's but exciting nevertheless. Solanne and Maïa stick out their little tongues to catch snowflakes, they put on their snowpants long before it's time to go out, and they squeal with delight to see their little world, which consists of our house, yard, and street, transformed into a magical land right before their eyes. I used to hate to see the snow arrive. Now I love it.

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I always used to hear parents talk about how much they had learned about themselves since they became parents, and I thought they were likely exaggerating. I mean really, did they not know themselves before? Well, I guess I didn't really know myself because these little girls make me visit and revisit my assumptions almost on a daily basis. One example: I've become militantly francophone. Rather, I've realised that I'm a militant francophone. It breaks my heart when Solanne only speaks English and that her French words, when I insist she use them, they come out with an English accent. Je suis franco-ontarienne! Et mes enfants le seront aussi! The craziest part of it all is that my French isn't all that great. My accent is fine and my vocab is okay, but my speech is littered with Anglicisms, and I'm often enough at a loss for certain French words. And I'm ashamed of myself. And I realise that I wanted my children to be French-speakers. Not bilingual, but uniligually Francophones. That way, their language would be pure and right... not like mine. I've learned that I am caught between two worlds, in a sense: far more comfortable speaking and writing in English, but wanting to distance myself from the English-speaking world.

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Before I became a parent, I had a lot of opinions on how children should be raised. One of them involved nightlights. I thought that they were a convenient invention by parents who had scared their children with monster stories and then who had to expiate their sins by putting a light in their children's rooms to keep them "safe." I figured that if a newborn can sleep in a dark room, then surely a toddler, who had never been introduced to the idea of a night light, would simply grow accustomed to the dark. And Maïa proved me right. She was never afraid of the dark. We never talked about monsters, and we never made the night seem frightening to her in any way. We kept it all very neutral. And she never needed a night light or for us to keep the door to her room open. Leave it to the second child to prove mom wrong. Solanne has had a completely different experience. About a two months ago, she started hating bedtime. She would fight with us when it was time to put her in her crib and turn out the light. This was strange because at nap time, she was great, and she had always liked bedtime (I know: we're pretty lucky!). But out of the blue, she changed. She would scream, ask for a drink, ask me to hold her hand or to leave the door open, anything to keep me in the room with her. And she would have night terrors, waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, terrified. I finally clued in one night a couple of weeks ago. I put in a night light. And now, we're all getting a whole lot more sleep. Turns out I was wrong. humph.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Samantha is discovering snow also. She tries to exclaim 'snow!' but it comes out more like "'no'". So now when she's having one of her 'no! no! no!" fits, I just pretend she's excited about the snow. *grin*