Natural Attachment

March 17, 2011

unattended minors

Filed under: Life,Parental,Radical Unschooling — Tags: , , — michele james-parham @ 10:52 pm

Was I the only child who refused to go into a store when they were young? Was I the only child whose mum let me stay in the car from a very early age onward so I could avoid places like the grocery store, the post office & the bank? Was my mum the only mum who didn’t have the police called on her or have nebby people with nothing better to do than to wait by the car and then yell at her when she came back? I can’t imagine that I was the only one or that my mum was the only one…

Apparently, it’s just not okay to leave children unattended EVER – much less, in a car, in front of the house or post office. I’d really like to discuss my experiences with my own child being unattended at home and in the car, but I’m afraid that a ‘well-meaning’ friend or reader might decide to turn me in. What has this world come to?

End rant.

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February 22, 2011

hair cut & weekly blog schedule

Filed under: Life,Parental — Tags: , , , , , , , — michele james-parham @ 4:56 pm

So, I cut Elijah’s hair last night. Some of you know how crazy that is. See, Elijah doesn’t like his hair touched AT ALL and will only give me permission to cut it about once ever six or eight months. He’ll usually let me tend to it more frequently than that to split apart dreadlocks and find missing Legos (totally kidding!!!!). However, it’s been about a year since I’ve been allowed to touch his head. It’s been a little hard for me, but I respect my kiddo and his body – it’s not MY hair after all, you know.

We’ve been talking about cutting it for the last six months. I had envisioned it short, but not as short as it is. I had envisioned that he’d still have dreadlocks and everything, but that we’d just cut it short and separate everything out. The last three months had lots of talk of mohawks. Elijah has decided that he wanted to cut it, but that he wanted a mohawk down the middle and his two favorite dreadlocks in the front left uncut.

Apparently last night was the night. We sat down and started to cut. First, I got rid of the solid locked matting on the back of his neck, which had been giving him some pain – I think this is what finally led him to allow me to cut his hair. We talked about the mohawk and I sectioned his hair in such a away to make it happen. Once I got to the top of his head and was cutting the locks down for the mohawk, Elijah said, “I don’t want a mohawk anymore; just cut it all off except for Brother and Sister”. ‘Brother and Sister’ are what he named his two dreadlocks in the front – those are special to him and I doubt that they will ever be cut by anyone.

So, it all got cut off and then I went back over his head and cut the remaining stubs really short. He’s happy, looks about a year older and according to his ‘Uncle’ Taz, he looks like a Hebrew Lakota. I think he’s beautiful regardless of what’s going on, on his head :-)

Pictures of before and after can be found here.

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I wanted to make a note about how my week for blogging is shaping up. I think it’s going to look something like this:

Sunday – free association with ten words. it’s fun and gets my brain working. you should play along.
Monday – I’ll be posting 100 random things about myself for the next ten weeks and then after that we’ll see what happens…
Tuesday – Regular blogging about Life, the Universe and Everything.
Wednesday – Wordless Wednesdays has always intrigued me and will force me to use my camera at least once a week. Play along, please.
Thursday – Regular blogging about Life, the Universe and Everything.
Friday – Friday Fill-In.
Saturday – Is my day of gratitude blogging and I invite you to share what you are grateful for as well.

On days when there is a meme/meme-like thing planned, I might double post, as Life, the Universe and Everything does happen on those days as well. But, I’m employing the help of memes for the time being to aid in my desire to blog something every day.

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<3

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February 17, 2011

TED: vulnerability

Filed under: Parental,Politics,Religiosophy — Tags: , , , , — michele james-parham @ 11:18 pm

this post and several before it are fantastic pieces about the things in Egypt from someone actually living in Egypt.

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i always carried my son. in fact, i carried him a recently as about 8 months ago and he’s 7.5 years old now! i never understood the desire for confining a baby in a ‘bucket’ aka car seat for times other than when they are actually in a moving vehicle. kind of beyond me. this article is full of information that seemed logical to me at the time, speaks to my instincts and might help out some folks.

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The Power of Vulnerability — Yes! Yes! Yes!

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Wisdom Teeth

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February 11, 2011

have baby? no need for tv monitoring when you have arms & eyes.

Filed under: Parental,Religiosophy — Tags: , , , , — michele james-parham @ 2:59 pm

Video Baby Monitor Recall: Two Babies Strangled in Cords

First off, let me just say that it is truly terrible that two babies died because they strangled on a cord.

Now, if you need to distance yourself such a long distance or for such a long time from your completely dependent baby/small child that you decide you need to use a video baby monitor; then I believe that you might really need to:

a) reevaluate your priorities as a parent – did you have a child so that you could leave it in another room, across the house from you, so that you could sit on your rump and watch it from a small tv screen?

b) consider a nanny – if *you* don’t want to/can’t give constant physical/spacial attention to your child (for whatever reason), then hiring a nanny to fill in for you would seem a much more loving and warm option than spending $300 on a tiny tv whose cords could kill your child.

That is all.

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And yes, I realize that my thoughts are biased and coming from a point of view that doesn’t feel that creating and maintaining a distance from your children that necessitates a tv monitoring system is ‘right’ – biologically, logically, evolutionarily, instinctively or (on some level) ethically. Is that point of view insensitive to certain classes of people? Maybe. But, we’re not talking about a parent who can’t figure out how to not work or to work from home and must create and maintain a distance from their child via daycare or institutional daycare (school); we’re talking about people who are at home with their children, but insist on isolating their children from the rest of the family, then spending $300 (or more, actually) on technology that helps maintain this *unnecessary* isolation.

That is all.

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If you’ve got constructive things to say in your comment, go for it. If you just want to tell me how ‘pie-in-the-sky’ my stay-at-home status is and how lucky I am to be able to make such generalizations (no need to remind me of my luck), I don’t need your comment.

That is all.

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July 26, 2010

I’m That Mum

Filed under: Media,Parental,Radical Unschooling — Tags: , , , , — michele james-parham @ 8:42 pm

2008. Roll of adding machine paper. 5 year old boy. Wasteful? Not, when you can have this much fun with it.

Abominable Snowman Part 1

Abominable Snowman Part 2

Inspired by this blog post. And this one.

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March 4, 2010

‘Radical Parenting’ on Discovery Health

So, I just got done reading Heather Burditt’s review of the Radical Unschooling segment of the show on her blog here.

This is the reply I left her and how I felt about the segment in general:

“eh. It was alright. I highly agree that only portraying one radical unschooling family was a poor choice. While I am a fan (maybe that’s not the right word) of the ‘Clan of Parents’, seeing a variety of families, especially at least one with older or grown unschoolers, would have been better. I also didn’t like how the ‘experts’ didn’t have to support their (what seemed like) opinions with any research, statistics or examples. I also didn’t like that the Parents weren’t able to speak back to the experts or that there wasn’t a pro-radical unschooling ‘expert’ to offer counter arguments. In all, I didn’t see it as really balanced…not to mention that the way it was cut up seemed kind of staged and almost like it all happened in one day. An entire hour with equal time from both sides of the argument and at least two more families, might have made began to make a difference.”

Sarah Parent and her family were representing Radical Unschooling and I think they did a fine job, given how the footage was cut and the fact that they really didn’t get to speak to anything that the ‘experts’ said.

Did you watch it? What did you think? Did you write a review (leave me a link)? Were you one of the people mysteriously contacted by Discovery Health prior to the airing?

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"Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it." ~ Brene Brown