She’s been in a country phase lately, and she asked me to put some Johnny Cash and John Denver on a cd for her very own self so I did. When she has a friend over, she listens to “Country Roads” and mournfully says, “My Grandma Marilyn moved in West Virginia! This song makes me miss her and Michigan so much,” while her friend pats her back and Maya suppresses a coy little smile.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htKjUcFkVy8

The best thing about the video, besides the adorable kid, is the fact that she’s standing on a bed that used to belong to her Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Aldrich, and among the hundreds of blankets are a blanket that Grandma Marilyn gave us, a little afghan made by her Great-Grandma Aldrich, a little afghan made by her Grandma Sheryl, a fleece blanket made by her Nana, and a little quilt made by my very first best friend, Julie. Priceless heirlooms, every one. That’s the way that country girl rolls.

Things I’ve been enjoying the heck out of lately:

• Season 3 of Big Love
• Making beans in the crockpot
• Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family by Ellyn Satter (I don’t ever read books like that, but Dawn’s First Guest Blog Series Ever introduced me to Katja Rowell M.D. and the Satter book. Life changing, for real. Check it.)
• My kids wrapped my birthday presents in a Twilight movie bag, knowing that I would love to opportunity to deface and destroy it. (We all hate Twilight for its abusive relationship marketed to young girls as romance). Smart and funny kids=best birthday present ever.
• Saying “heck” whenever I can, affecting Bill Henrickson’s look of confusion and/or horror:

I love that Bill would say, “My gosh, just what in the heck do you think you’re doing?” even if he were witnessing a murder.

What are you enjoying right now? Let’s get reacquainted!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNmizHYfvh4

*spoiler alert*
The reason the “oh me me” person wasn’t allowed to go along with the “come on” person is because the “oh me me” person is a gay and the “come on” person is a prominent church leader. At least, that’s what I gathered from Maya’s explanation that the “come on” person, “thinks mean is nice and nice is mean.” It’s clearly a metaphor for homophobic attitudes in the name of religion. I had to add “in the name of religion” because who else thinks mean is nice and nice is mean? They think it’s nice to try to convert homosexuals, and they think nice loving homosexual relationships are mean. The end.

There was one particular conference conversation that devolved into defensiveness on both sides and I’ve been thinking about that for days now. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say that it boiled down to one person saying, “I’d like my child to take his dirty oatmeal bowl to the kitchen instead of leaving it in the living room,” and the other side saying, “But that’s your need, not his so if it’s important to you, you take it to the kitchen.” What does that have to do with unschooling, you ask? Don’t ask. Just go with it. Don’t worry about it unless you are an unschooler. And if you are, join a yahoo group and ask them. It will be fun, I promise. Anyway…

One thing led to another and there was shouting. It wasn’t pretty. I can’t speak for the other people, but I know that my defensiveness can be attributed to my own baggage. Those two sentences up there are rife with subtext, depending on the baggage each listener carries. When some people hear, “That’s your need, you can take care of it,” they interpret that as, “The precious baby children never, ever, ever have to help clean up anything. Ever! And you’re a big fat meanie for telling them to.” As a recovering doormat, I have all kinds of that baggage for sure. When I hear that, I imagine scenarios in which I am called upon to do everything all the time with no option for anyone else in the family to pitch in. I look even more haggard than usual in those imaginary scenes. You guys, I can’t afford to look more haggard. For real.

On the flip side, when somebody in the audience at an unschooling conference says, “I think my child can clean up after himself,” some people interpret that as, “I think it’s okay if I scream at my child in order to get him to clean up his stupid crap that’s spread from one end of the house to the other.” I have maybe a carry-on size piece of that baggage, too. I imagine all sorts of scenarios with a shrew-like parent barking orders and belittling the kid. In those scenarios, I’m the wide-eyed little kid and I was a super cute little kid so those imaginary scenes are especially heartbreaking.

I know for sure that my sizable baggage collection and my knee-jerk defensiveness really don’t allow me to see the middle ground that might be there in both of those instances.

Maya (6) gave me a perfect example to show me where our middle ground is. She wanted some hot chocolate and she wanted to drink it in the living room. I said, “Sure, just bring your mug to the kitchen when you’re done.” A half hour later Maya was off doing something else in the kitchen and I walked through the living room on my way to the kitchen and I saw the half-empty hot chocolate mug on the coffee table. Here is where the middle ground came in. I had a choice. I could call Maya back out to the living room and say, “Young lady, I thought I told you to take care of this mug,” or I could just take it with me on my way out to the kitchen and not say anything. I did the latter and when she saw me bringing her mug to the kitchen she said, “Oops! I forgot!” and I said, “No big whoop, I was coming out here anyway,” with a smile and we both moved on because it’s not a big deal if my kid forgets to take her mug to the kitchen when she’s done with it. If I had been in the living room with her when she got up to go to the kitchen, I might have breezily said, “Grab your mug, Sweetie,” and she would have done it without a second thought. No big deal.

The situation playing out in just that way is what I strive for. Cleaning up is not a big deal. I didn’t take it as a personal attack that she didn’t pick up her mug. It had nothing to do with me. I didn’t need to shame her for forgetting and it’s not just because of her age. I don’t want to emotionally manipulate any of the members of my family in order to get them to do something for me. I don’t want to withhold affection until they do whatever I ask them to do. I also don’t want to just never ask them to do something like take care of their mug because it’s no big deal. It’s a big picture thing, not a nit-picking, point by point, make sure the scales are always balanced kind of thing.

I asked her to take it to the kitchen, knowing she would likely forget just like I sometimes forget my own mug because I get distracted by something. No big deal. Why did I say something, knowing she would likely forget about it? The same reason I say, “That’s a flower,” to a baby who can’t say “flower.” It’s part of the language of our family and it’s a skill that will be picked up and used and then put away and not used from time to time. Because cleaning up is no big deal and forgetting to clean up is also no big deal. This is not setting her up for failure, because I don’t consider forgetting to take care of a mug a  failure. We don’t treat it that way, so it’s not.

And now a fun thing from Maya. “The jaguar is stalking the hot dog.”

She likes to cut out pictures and make them do stuff together. This is what it looks like when she’s done:

And later I say, “Pick up the pictures that you want to save because I’m putting the scraps in the recyclables,” and she sorts them out and I scoop up the scraps and then she plays with the pictures again and it’s no big deal.

So if you miss me, you should check it out. It’s FREE!

Most nights, in the wee hours of  morning (you know, 12:10 am) this wee little one comes sneaking into our wee little bed. At first, she clings to the edge right next to me, but she slowly worms her way into a position that is more in keeping with her idea of her importance as the baby of the family. And we have a full size bed.

We are not reluctant family bedders by any means. It’s how we roll and we dig it. We used to have bigger beds, appropriate for all kinds of family bed configurations. We started with a queen, then a twin pushed up to the queen, then a full and a queen together, then back to just a queen when Lena and Liberty stopped coming in our bed every night, then we needed a new mattress and my in-laws were getting rid of a like-new full mattress, so we snatched it up thinking Maya’s just one kid, how much space can she take up? The answer is: As much as she wants.

We have always wanted a king size bed, but it has never worked out, what with being hopelessly cheap budget-minded and hopelessly afraid of having to move such a large bed. But now that we  have a house and that full size mattress is nearing the end of its life and we still have bedtime barnacles, it’s time to spring for a proper king size bed. Even Lena and Liberty like to have a turn sleeping in there once in a while, but that takes much planning and there just isn’t room for Bryan’s long arms and legs, plus either Lena’s or Liberty’s Bryan-in-miniature long arms and legs, plus me. Forget about princess wing-span joining in.

Also, evening family lounging is our favorite thing. It would be lovely if we could all cuddle up on the big bed and read books or watch movies or play games together like in the old queen plus full days. And it would be super lovely to not wake up with Maya’s elbow in my mouth.

Bryan blew some snow into a hill at the top of our regular hill this morning when he was gleefully (yes, gleefully) snowblowing the driveway, he strategically placed a snow pile at the top of our regular hill. He’s nice like that.

Look, here’s a video:

GAH! There would have been a lovely video with subtitles and whatnot if I hadn’t been enraged by our new Flip Ultra video thing. I tried to put the videos into Windows Movie Maker, but couldn’t find the files. I asked Flip to tell me where they hid my files and they said, “They’re in that folder over there, I swear!” And when I opened that folder over there, they weren’t there, so I asked them again where did you hide my files? And this time, I cocked the gun and put it at their temple. Then Flip said, “Okay, okay, okay! We hid your files in a special place so you wouldn’t accidentally delete them! Don’t shoot! They’re in a magical place. Somewhere nobody can ever find them. Have you read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? It’s like that. You have to go through a bunch of tests of strength and will to find them. We did it so you wouldn’t accidentally delete them! WE DID IT FOR YOU!”

Boom. (Don’t worry, I only shot him in the leg because I knew I might need more info.)

Let me tell you something, I have accidentally deleted so many important things over the years, I know exactly how to use the “restore” function on my computer, thank you very much.

Flip wants me to only use their software for editing and making movies, but guess what? They’re software is not what I want to use! I want to use my Windows Movie Maker! Turns out, it’s a Windows+Flip harmony issue, so I asked, “How do I get around your bullshit, Flip? Tell me now or I shoot you in the nut sack.” Do you want to know what he told me? Me, the person he thought was so techno-challenged that he had to hide my very own videos from my delete-happy fingers? These are the steps he expected me to follow (don’t read it, just look at the enormity of the thing and recognize that I don’t know what half those words are):

The 64-bit version of Windows Media Encoder has been updated so that you can install the encoder on the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. This updated version of the encoder includes the fixes that are described in this article. To obtain the updated version of the encoder, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx)

Note To apply this hotfix on a computer that is running Windows Vista, you must have elevated user rights. We recommend that you right-click the hotfix package executable file and then click Run as administrator. Alternatively, you can run the executable file through a console window that has elevated user rights.

Before and after you install the hotfix, check the version number of the Wmenc file and of the WMEncEng.dll file to make sure that these files are updated. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2. Double-click Programs and Features.
3. Remove Security Update for Windows Media Encoder (KB954156).
4. Remove the current installation of Windows Media Encoder 9 Series.
5. Restart the system. Do not install updates.
6. Reinstall the Windows Media Encoder 9 Series. To do this, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5691ba02-e496-465a-bba9-b2f1182cdf24&displaylang=en&Hash=Q7YOichtn5uaPziFse1ENeP0pr3Zm3uDvElbQn2p9UGArhz5hMZIta1wqWhKm7czKB%2bzqI%2fM7a20p1YBh%2fuqIg%3d%3d (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5691ba02-e496-465a-bba9-b2f1182cdf24&displaylang=en&Hash=Q7YOichtn5uaPziFse1ENeP0pr3Zm3uDvElbQn2p9UGArhz5hMZIta1wqWhKm7czKB%2bzqI%2fM7a20p1YBh%2fuqIg%3d%3d)
7. Verify that the version number for the Wmenc file and for theWMEncEng.dll file is 9.0.0.2980.
8. Install the hotfix that this article describes.
9. Verify that the version number for the Wmenc file and for theWMEncEng.dll file is 9.0.0.3352.
10. Use Windows Update to reinstall security updates.
11. Verify that the version number for the encoder files is still 9.0.0.3352.

Uh…I don’t think so. All of that made me nauseous and disgusted. So I decided to shoot the bastard dead and go elsewhere for info.
Enter Jess Totdfeld’s comment on this post at technologizer.com:

I think I found the best work-around for the new Flip software.

My problem was that I couldn’t edit Flip / AVI videos in XP Windows Movie Maker. They needed to be in WMV or WMA format. Also, I don’t like this business of not being able to find my files. That’s crazy.

Here’s what to do.

1) Attach the Flip and think of it as an external drive.
2) Open the file with the videos in it and drag them to a file on your computer. You’ve just emptied the Flip and now have files you can see on your computer.
3) Download picasa.google.com . It is Google’s photo viewer. It turns out it is great for viewing videos on your computer too.

4) View your videos in Picasa. There’s a feature to trim the videos if you want. You can upload right to YouTube if you want as well or… export to a file. When it exports, it saves as a WMA file and saves within a minute. It also doesn’t seem to decrease the quality which I’ve seen happen with some other programs as well.

Hope everyone finds this helpful.

Oh, I did, Jess. I did find that helpful. So, so helpful. Except, I just opened Movie Maker and dragged them into there instead of messing with Picasa. Thank you, Jess. Thank you, thank you! Why isn’t that Flip’s answer when we ask them to help us? WHY? It’s such a good answer.

By the time I got it all figured out, I was bored of the video thingamajig and I didn’t spend any time doing anything to the sledding video, but here it is anyway. It would have been way better if I hadn’t spent the preceding 2 hours yelling at the Flip guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0c_Ujl8BcU

ETA: OMFG IT’S NOT WORKING NOW. Are you effing kidding me? I know this is you, Flip. I will kill you again. It worked when I saved it. It worked when I uuploaded it to youtube. It worked when I posted it to my blog. It worked when I published my blog, and now it doesn’t work.

ETA: OMFG IT’S WORKING AGAIN! I have such mixed feelings about this. I know you’re screwing with me, FLIP!

For lazy, loungy holidays and the people I get to share them with in real life, on the phone, and on the internet. I love my people.

I had a better quality picture, but I love that it’s almost noon and they’re in their jammies, lounging all over each other, playing pretend together. I should probably get in the shower. I know everybody at dinner will be thankful for that.