Is this a life on hold or am I holding on to life?

Everything needed to stop.

“Stop talking!”, my toddler vented, “stop talking!”

“Don’t do that.”

“That’s not for you. That for papi!” (in reference to the computer)

“Come here. You need come here!”

Everything needed to stop. Laundry would sit. Food would get stuck. The mess would get messier. It all had to stop. I had to stop moving.

A cry for help? Is she insecure in my love for her?

I needed to stop. No sewing. No talking on the phone.

No judgment. No expectations. No useless praise. No corrections.

Play her games. Her way. Don’t make suggestions on how to make the game “better”. Just follow her lead.

Stop doing that. To myself.

How could I be so deaf? I have needs, too. Why can’t she see them? “She’ll never learn to _______ if I do things this way”, I hear some voice saying to me. “Tell her to be gentle.” “You need to punish her so she doesn’t think she can get away with that.” “She’s never gonna learn.” “She’s manipulating you.”

Believing those voices made me angry.

Believing those voices, I felt stupid and unable to be the mother I want to grow to be.

Believing those voices I can’t connect.

Believing those voices I feel estranged from her.

Now I’m the one telling those voices: Stop talking!

It’ll still take some time but I’m getting the hang of it.

Translation, please…

I have a theory that one of the reasons I am so tired by the end of the day is that I’m trying to understand my 2.5 year old’s language. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s trickier. If you heard:

eye wan wif mabolsop

would you know exactly what bilingual baby was talking about? Yay for you if you figured it out. I’ve seen quite a number of people learning another language through immersion (both here in the United States and in Colombia) and I have to say that I always see the same thing. By the end of the day, you’re exhausted. Your entire day was spent trying to assemble sense into what others were saying. Sometimes all you get is ONE word. The rest you put together through context. With a kid learning to speak, you don’t necessarily get the help you may need to decifer what they mean. In this context, you are all on your own. Plus, most of the time, when you’re in a country that does not follow the same linguistic rules you’re used to, you can still usually find a couple of people who can help you piece things together.

No conclusions here.

Teeccino & an updated page

I just tried Teeccino’s Maya Mocha and, although I’ve been sipping it colder than I would hope, I really did like it. I even used he french press to make it. I’m going to have to get some more because it. It’s caffeine-free, too- not that coffee hasn’t played a part in my life lately.

Also, I updated my books page and have added some more parenting books- parenting stuff is toward the bottom so you’ll have to scroll down. Suggest a book for me to read!

Pio Pio etsy

Ever since embroidering this little chick onto a onesie for baby brother and his cousin, I’ve been meaning to get more embroidered and up on my etsy shop. Before I had a good excuse… I didn’t have an etsy shop. Now, I don’t have an excuse. Therefore, I’ve made it a goal to embroider some more onesies with the chickie.

While gathering some more onesies, I started sewing up a chick out of an unused sweater. I’ll fill it with some wool and embroider some eyes. (I don’t mean to make this a theme…)

I love canela.

Our bilingual baby is showing her bilingual chops. She’s two and a half today and it’s really cool to see what words she uses in Spanish and what words she uses in English. I checked out a book from our library on raising a bilingual child (by Barbara Zurer Pearson) and I thought I’d be fighting their theories but the book actually is giving me words to use when explaining our bilingual household. Well… mostly.

There are different ways you can approach a bilingual lifestyle, all pretty self-explanatory.

One Person, One Language (OPOL)

Minority Language at Home (ML@H)

Time and Place

Mixed Language Policy

When I talk to my dad, I always use Spanish and my mom always gets English from me- no matter what language they start in. Funny, since both my parents are completely bilingual (read, write, speak perfectly). When we lived in Colombia, I feel like we heard more English being spoken at home and when we lived in the States, more Spanish seemed to be around. In our school in Colombia, they used the Time and Place approach. For example, my geometry teacher was American so he taught his class in English. The physics teacher was Colombian so you’d get physics in Spanish. Algebra was taught by a British teacher so we had it in English. So, depending on the time of day and/or the class you were in, the language was changed.

I don’t like the fact that I switch languages so often- tho most people think it’s cool when they hear it. I wish I knew more ways to say things in both languages. I get tripped up in each language and frequent dictionaries and thesauri all the time. At the same time, I get a little freaked out when I hear that some of my bilingual friends had parents who would refuse to talk to them or pretend they couldn’t understand if they didn’t use the correct language. Phif! That’s too much for me… but will I end up with kids who sprinkle in Spanish and figure that’s all they need to do to be bilingual? Bilingual, to me, doesn’t mean you sprinkle. It means you can communicate in a single language without switching. Writing this all down is helping me see why I’m getting ansy about bilingual baby’s lack of Spanish. I mean, she sprinkles. She’ll say things like: I love canela (cinammon). This is what is called: Spanglish. Spanglish is what I use with my sisters when we’re talking really fast and I can’t find a word in Spanish, so I use the word in English. Not for words like pan (bread) or libro (book) but for things like snowshoes- words I don’t know (or am too lazy to know) in Spanish.

Navigating in two cultures is also a part of my life being bilingual. Though being bilingual and bicultural has made me feel, on many accounts, like I don’t belong in either culture. I’m too American to be Colombian and in the U.S. I’m seen as an anomaly. No accent in either language and looks that make me blend into a Caucasian crowd.

One of the things that I fear from living in an English dominant community is that my kids aren’t exposed to Spanish. We sing songs, prayers and read some books in Spanish but they hear me speak it to them only- unless we have friends over who I think would be weird about it. I have a couple of friends who also speak Spanish but there is little in the way of a culture here that speaks Spanish. “Why then did you move here?”, a little voice asks. That’s economic in nature and social in context and I may delve into it some other day. For now, let me get back to the task at hand: trying to come up with some viable solution to our limited Spanish.

At home, I speak to my kids in Spanish. Sometimes, in order to figure out what bilingual baby is saying, I repeat back to her (in English) what she has said and then work from there in Spanish. I’ve also noticed when I’m getting impatient with a situation, I use English. In thinking about it, I find that English is much more controlled for me than Spanish. I was just browsing a blog whose author and husband use Spanish-only on 3 days of the week.

This is getting long-winded and mind-boggling so I’ll stop even though I’ve got some more thoughts brewing. I can see my interests shifting into this whole bilingual/bicultural world and there isn’t that much out there, so I can see that my blogging will get heavy into that topic. Wish me luck.

my etsy store is up!

After a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally posted my first item for sale on my etsy store. I’ve posted one of the pods I made. Check it out:

www.bilingualbaby.etsy.com

In other news, I do have sewing shoulder! Aagh! I went to the chiropractor on Saturday and that helped a lot. She’s awesome! She does Network Spinal Analysis which is a more holistic approach to chiropractic care. There’s no cracking but rather gentle precise touch, as this site explains.

I won’t be sewing for a while, just so I can recuperate. However, having browsed etsy a while (and with a friend asking me if I make purses) I don’t think I’ll be away long. I do have a pattern for one of Amy Butler’s bags- the weekender. I got the pattern back in August, before I had two kids. In the last 4 months, I’ve looked online and just haven’t found the right fabric for this bag. Maybe I need to think outside the box and really create my own thing here.

I bought a cute quilting book called Quilts, Baby! by Linda Kopp. Her designs will get you back to your machine in no time! They are so cute and modern and get me thinking that I should do more embroidery. Not all by hand, though. This other book that I checked out from the library, the Amy Karol one, is really not going to help my sewing hiatus. So inspiring.

I’ve got a list of things I want to do. Not like laundry or clean up my mess. No! It’s got things like get etsy store up… well, let me just show you my list:

1. tiny mouse designs podeagis

2. babywearing class (I scheduled it but haven’t received any interest)

3. babywearing group (This week we’re finishing up the back health series so I’m working on getting the next serise booked)

4. translating (there’s a chance I could do some translating of children’s books)

5. Spanish group for toddlers (still in the brainstorming and could-I-do-it-and-not-go-nuts stage)

6. Blog for mamasays (a local thing- just posted my first entry)

7. Modern dance class

The Full Moon Tea Party

I had such a good time. We saw a bunch of friends there and most of them were involved in making this shin dig happen. So much fun. It was such the perfect event after a winter full of illness and snow bound life.

I didn’t sell anything but that’s okay. I’m going to keep this short because, well, the weekend and all. It’s not over.

I’ve put the sewing machine away (which really just means I’ve taken it off the dining room table and put it back upstairs) and I’m in the process of clearing the table of all the fabric, notions and scraps of paper that held all my notes from the last month or so. While trying to organize my fabric, I found some pieces that I want to use soon.

For now, I need to take care of my sewing shoulder. It actually is muscular… from all the sewing (sitting in a slouched position- not recommended) that I did. I guess I was sewing a lot. There are a couple of my podeagis at Bebop Baby Shop in Essex Jct but the others I’m going to put up on etsy. The brown pod got a lot of attention; as did the big pink flowery one.

I’m reading a couple of books:

Raising a bilingual child

Amy Karol’s (The Angry Chicken) sewing book which I may have to buy for a couple of friends

A book of essays by Mario Vargas Llosa (one of my favorite authors)

another book by Jose Saramago- I just couldn’t finish Ensayo sobre la lucidez.. maybe someday.

…and why can’t I make up my mind?

I suppose that’s what I have this blog for: the back and forth. I talked again with the friend whom I ‘made the costume for and she made some suggestions that make me change my plan for tonight. She suggested that if I was going to change the price after tonight that I should leave the price change at no more than $20. She agreed that $85 was a fit price and, in unison with another friend (we were having our sewing circle), suggested that I have a month-long sale. In essence, the pods will be $65 for all of June. People might not be too quick to decide if they want a podeagi tonight and I shouldn’t have a price so low that they feel pressured either way.

The other piece of advice from my other friend was that whatever I got for the podeagi’s should be enough to deal with parting with it. In my case, I’m loving every single pod I’ve made and I want to keep each one. That’s what she did when she sold quilts, which I can imagine getting pretty attached to.

So, any other suggestions I should consider? I should talk to my mil who has been in marketing for a long time… she’d probably have some pointers.

After tonight, I’m resting! I think I’ve got sewing shoulder, if there is such a thing. My shoulder was hurting yesterday and I think I slept on it funky the other night. I changed which side baby brother was on and that’s been helping. If you’re wondering whether it’s all the babywearing, I’ll offer you two thing: 1. yes. I’ve considered that it might be due in part to the babywearing but I’m not convinced; 2. bilingual papi already asked that question. The one thing that has been different in the last couple of weeks is that I’ve had deadlines. Again, after tonight, I’m resting. I’m also going to have a professional take a look at my arm and help me out.

I’ll keep you all posted on how tonight goes. I’ve got my how-to brochures and my business cards, the toys, and the podeagis I’m going to sell. Wish me luck!

Well, I feel like I’m at the beginning of my rope again…

Over the last two (or maybe even three) months, I’ve been barely holding my head above water. That was one of the reasons to take the costume gig. I wanted to have something else to do other than intuit my kids’ needs. I’ll now enter a parenthesis on our EC’ing, which I will approach from my perspective and what it entails for me, not my baby, but will return to my main theme in a second. Skim if you must.

Baby brother is 9 months. He crawls on hands and knees, is saying things like mama (when in desperate need) and papa (for fun times) and has a “call” that means he wants his big sister’s attention and wants to play. I’m also starting to introduce some table food. He doesn’t eat it every day, much less three meals a day, but it does allow for a calmer child when we’re all at the table eating our meals. He’s included. I don’t take him to the potty every time he’s gotta go. I don’t actually know every time he’s gotta go- but every other time I freak myself out, I’m good. He is getting to a point where he knows when he’s gone, which is when he starts calling for me and if I am involved in something (say, a kid’s costume) he’ll crawl over to me and give me the look which tells me that he’s got a need I’m going to meet. I’ve also started taking him in the morning (bilingual Papi takes him if it’s too early for me) and he seems to prefer it to diapering. I got him some 2T training pants and they actually fit pretty well. It’s perfect being outdoors so much (or having that ability) because he can then wander around in the fresh air.

My parenthesis is now closed. The theme of exhaustion will now be explored.

A week ago, I was using G-diapers to rid my sweet child of what didn’t turn out to be such a nasty diaper rash (go breastmilk!) and I mentioned to bilingual papi that on days when I’m overtired I should just use the G’s and not change baby brother so often (I change him anytime the diaper is wet or soiled). I lasted that one day with the G’s. Though I think they’re the closest I’ll get to a disposable diaper (it’s biodegradable) I didn’t start back with the cloth the next day out of pride. It was just the cycle of things.

One day, I was feeling burnt out and the next I was magically sleeping in with my two kids. The last two or three months were sort of leading to this burn out. I was going non-stop with the kids. Neither of them was sleeping very much and I wasn’t getting any time to just sit and stare off into space- which I love to do! We had 11pm bedtimes and 6am wake up calls one week and cranky kids, teething baby, and one frustrated mom feeling like she (me) was the worst parent available.

Well, I’m beyond that tunnel and I can see now what I couldn’t see before: it’s not my fault that they were grumpy. It was not my fault that I couldn’t console them each and every time. And the partial weaning continues. So, now that I’ve gotten some much needed sleep and my kids are going to bed  and having a decent night and I’m now able to get out of bed after putting them both to sleep, get up and sew while watching tv, I’m feeling the effects of R&R. I’ll also be catching my breath after Friday (my podeagi sewing deadline, sort of) and perhaps starting on a new venture: modern dance class: Saturday mornings…

Pricing my work or How I learned what things are worth

I got paid for the costume I made last week. The costume turned out pretty nice. Now, I have to say that living in a Wal-Mart world, I don’t actually know what things (and the people that make those things) are really worth. The friend I made the costume for does. She offered me more than she had intended to offer because she liked my work. Then, she insisted that she wasn’t offering me enough. Before talking price, I thought I’d just ask for the cost of materials. I don’t sew costumes professionally and the costume was for a friend, so why ask for more. My friend thinks differently. She made the point that she valued my time and wanted to compensate me accordingly. To make a long story short, I learned a valuable lesson and have come away with many a question.

This lesson made me rethink what I should charge for my podeagis. Of course, there are start-up costs and a lot of the costs will go unnoticed but the price I was telling friends was barely going to give me enough for materials. I started reading up on how to price your work and one of the things I read was that when you set a price much lower than your competitors you are devaluing your work and your worth. I mean, if you go to craft fairs and price something so low it looks like a big box store price, people might wonder about how good your work is and may not even buy what you’re selling. Plus, at a craft fair, the bargains are sought at the end of the day and through barganing and most people go there looking for a quality hand made one of a kind item. After doing some calculations and finding (read: searching for) some peace of mind, I can see how a podeagi can go for $100 on etsy. In talking with a couple of trusted friends, I have come to think more about what my time is worth. Basically, that my time is worth something and that there are ways to quantify it into a numerical value.

Let’s do some fun (and sad) calculations to see what a mothering wage might be for me. The minimum wage here in Vermont is currently:

$8.06

and I am alone with the kids for 9.5 hours

then, if the government respected the work mothers do, I’d get $76.57 a day.

$382.85 a week

roughly $1,531 a month

and roughly $16,845 a year, with a month worth unpaid, just cos my employer would be the gov.

Now, I’m only talking minimum wage here and I’m not counting all the havoc that reeks at 5 o’clock or 7 or even 2am. I’m not counting that. I’d still be happy with this compensation. What about a single mother? She may or may not get help from someone every single day at around the same time.

I’ve heard of people paying their childcare provider $10-12 an hour. It does depend on where you live but let’s look at that figure for a minute. At $10 an hour I’d be paid:

$95 per day

$475 per week

$1900 per month

$20,900 per year

The stark truth is that when I get my social security summary, it keeps telling me that I have made $0 since bilingual baby was born. In a capitalist world, this means I am worth nothing. I have no value to society because I can’t make a dime. Obviously, I don’t agree with that, but the way mothers are treated one might change one’s mind.

So then you look at a stay-at-home mom who wants to make a dime (enter Leila). Perhaps for the feeling of being a part of a world that considers people valuable (mothering children does not provide the immediate rewards that crafting does). Perhaps it’s simply because the cost of living is such and layoffs continue (bilingual papi still has a job, thankfully) all around. You find work-at-home moms who are practically giving things away when they could charge a tiny bit more for their handiwork. But they don’t. Is it humility? Or that it’s hard to charge what something is actually worth? Are we really so far removed from the person who crafted what we buy that we can’t seem to figure out what their time and effort are worth?

Enter the podeagis and toys I’m making. I can now see that my time and effort are worth something. In effect, I could now sell a pod for what other sellers are charging and not feel bad. Ellaroo sells their pods for $70, Zidee pods on etsy are $90 and TwilliePie pods on esty are $105. My price will be $85 but for the Full Moon Tea Party this Friday I’m doing an introductory rate of $55. One night only!