I was talking with a new friend last week, and during the conversation, she asked me how I tell Nicholas about his Daddy Mark. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, pretty much since the moment that Mark died.

Right after Mark died, I was a little manic about memory. I was so afraid I was going to forget everything. Everything about Mark, about our lives together, about his childhood stories, about the few months that he got to have with Nicholas. These thoughts calmed down after a while, but they were really intense in the first several months after Mark’s death.

To answer her question, I told her that I’m scrapbooking about Mark for Nicholas; but mostly, I’m telling him stories about his Daddy Mark.

I don’t want these talks with Nicholas about Mark to be artificial. I want them to be natural and meaningful, I don’t want to sit down to dinner every night and have “story time” about Mark. Instead, I tell him stories about Mark when one of Mark’s favorite songs come on the radio. When Mark’s favorite television show comes on. My favorite stories are when Nicholas makes a face or a gesture that looks like his Daddy Mark. I jump on those moments to tell Nicholas about his Daddy Mark.

I know too, that Nicholas is getting a lot of stories about Mark through his grandpa and his aunt and uncle.

So, how do you keep memories alive? How do you tell your kids or your spouses about friends, family, loved ones who have passed on (or even just have passed out of your life)? What do you do to try to help them know those people?

I was really excited to see this book come up for a review opportunity on TMG. I had just been talking with my fiance about my urge and our family’s need to start being better stewards of our natural resources. Right now, we do pretty much nothing to leave the world in a better environmental state when we leave than when we got here. I have all kinds of excuses for us not being more responsible, but I won’t bore you with them here.

The full title of this book is Eco-Friendly Familes~ Guide your family to greener living with activities that engage and inspire…from toddlers to teens, by Helen Coronato. Final verdict? It’s a really helpful, engaging, interesting book… and it doesn’t make you feel like you are solely responsible for destroying the world.

Four great things about this book:

1. No pressure to become completely green overnight,
2. Not overwhelmed with statistics,
3. A Chapter Checklist at the end of each chapter that goes over what you just read in bullet-point form, and
4. 5-minute makeovers in each chapter.

1. No pressure to become completely green overnight. Coronato is very practical and doesn’t ask for (or want) you to throw out everything you have that isn’t green and start over. She advises slowly integrating green products and practices into your life.

2. Not overwhelemed with statistics. I like statistics as much as the next person, and Coronato uses them well; but, they reinforce her point without cramming stats down your throat, very useful.

3. Chapter Checklist. This checklist is great for both reading before you get into the chapter (especially so you can watch for the parts that really catch your eye), and for making sure you didn’t miss anything when you are done with the chapter.

4. 5-minute makeovers. These are great and practical tips that you can quickly put into place in your home. They include everything from putting a brick in your toilet tank so you use less water to having people take their shoes off at the door so you don’t have as much need for cleaning.

Coronato has done a really good job keeping the topic interesting as well as practical. The book includes recipes (for food and cleaning products), holiday gift ideas, definitions, and great explanations of really complicated concepts for both toddlers and teenagers. My favorite language for toddlers is telling them it’s important to turn off water while you brush your teeth so that there is always enough water for the trees and plants to drink.

If you’re at all interested in simple, common-sense tips for helping your family go green, you should get this book. You can slowly make changes in your lives that will make a difference and teach your children about the responsibility we all have to be good stewards of our resources.

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.

My wonderful, beautiful, wicked smart son has a great imagination. And he uses it. Often. As a parent, how do *you* differentiate between exaggeration/story telling/imagination and plain ol’ lying?

N is starting to tell stories, and when I try to get to the truth, I try as hard as I can not to lead the witness. For instance, the other day, his Daddy told me that a little boy in N’s daycare had been hitting N in the head. William was really worried because N said he’d told his teacher and she didn’t stop the hitting. As William and I talked about it some more, and tried to figure out what was going on (his class is really small and highly supervised, but hitting is a fact of life at school); it came out that it was “Jacob” who was hitting N. Umm, there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class…or even in his school. When we told N that there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class, he looked at us like we were nut jobs and said, “Nobody is hitting me at school.” Apparently, *we* had made the whole thing up.

Sometimes the stories are a little easier to identify. He came home with a pretty good bruise Wednesday. When I asked where it came from, he said he’d been hit by a car. Yep, hit by a car. I got to hear this fantastic story about how he’d been in his classroom when a giant car came flying into the building and smashed into his leg. On Thursday, when his Aunt was babysitting him, N changed the story to one where I had hit him with a car.

Obviously, I can discern the really outrageous ones, but how do you figure out which ones are real and which ones are Memorex? [Does anyone younger than 30 know that tag line?]

I would love to know what you guys do. How do you interrogate your kids without making them suspicious or worried or any of the other 457 emotions you can feel when someone is questioning you?

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.

Sometimes the choice of daycare is hard. Not the choice of daycare facility, because that’s an entirely different conversation, but having to use daycare at all.

Difficult Choices

I’m reminded this week, of that difficult choice, as my friend goes back to work and leaves her new baby. She’s a first-time mom, and wants to extend her materinity leave, but doesn’t have the financial resources to do it. She’s lucky, though, and gets to leave her daughter with her in laws (yes, she really is lucky). The difficult part is that my friend’s mother just died, and she ran a home daycare forever. She helped raise dozens of children, and was supposed to help with her new grandbaby. My friend and her husband had the great option of having his parents take care of their daughter, but it “should” have been my friend’s mom doing it.

Making the Call

I can distinctly remember the feeling when I realized that I needed to find daycare for my son. It felt like I was falling down a very deep hole. Nicholas’ Daddy Mark was a stay-at-home dad. He had been taking care of N, and that was supposed to be his role until N went to school. Instead, I had to find a place or a person to take care of our boy. Even as Mark lay in a coma, and knowing from the doctors that the outlook was poor, I told myself it was just until Mark got better and stronger and could resume taking care of our son.

I called the first daycare for an appointment from Mark’s hospital room. I sat and held Mark’s hand while I talked with the facility. I guess I wanted to feel like he was part of the decision, and not just a victim of circumstance. It was one of the hardest calls I’ve ever made. Making that call was admitting that Mark might never come home. Might never leave that room, that bed.

We were lucky, and found a wonderful woman who stayed with N in our apartment every day. She was caring, funny, and loved Nicholas. But, she wasn’t his Daddy. And N wasn’t “supposed” to be taken care of by anyone but Mark.

I’ve never understood the judgement that some people dish out because others have children in daycare. That judgement is especially confusing to me because you may never know *why* someone has their child there and not at home where they are “supposed” to be. Sometimes the choice of daycare isn’t much of a choice after all.

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here

When I was growing up, living with my Grandmother, we got up every Saturday morning and cleaned the house. You did your chores before you got to do anything else. No exceptions. If you just did it and didn’t gripe too much, the cleaning took maybe an hour (it wasn’t a big house, and there were a couple of us doing the work). For me, it was a big lesson in “just suck it up and do it and it will be done quickly.” It took me a while to figure it out though. When I first started living with Grandma, I tried a lot of bargaining to get out of the cleaning. I never won that debate.

My little guy turned 3 in June and I think it’s time to start the Saturday morning cleanup. He picks up his toys, takes his dishes to the sink after meals, and helps me water the plants. He’s pretty good about doing those things without too much griping. That’s all fine and good. My challenges come in two forms: (1) I’m impatient when it comes to cleaning, and (2) I’m lazy.

Impatience Anyone?

I don’t know if it’s a hold-over from my childhood, but I just want the cleaning done and to get on with the rest of my day. That wouldn’t be a big deal except that I often take over the tasks I’ve asked my son to do so that they’ll get done quickly. I don’t know how much Nicholas has caught onto that yet (probably completely, he’s smart), but I’ve got to put a stop to it. Do you find yourself doing that? When a task will go a lot faster and be done better if you do it, you just take over for your child? I know this tendancy isn’t good for either of us, but I seem to have fallen into that pattern.

Lazy!

I’m lazy. Or overly tired. I can’t decide which is more accurate. When we wake up on Saturday mornings, I just want to be lazy and snuggle in bed with my Fella and my boy. Who wants to get up and clean and organize when there are two warm bodies waiting for hugs and a cozy bed to snuggle in? The problem is, that if I don’t do the cleaning and get it done pretty early in the morning, I tend not to do it. And then I spend the next week griping about how I should have cleaned Saturday morning :). Stupid, I know. The more important issue when I don’t clean is that Nicholas has allergy-induced asthma, and I feel like he does better if the house is fairly dust-free. That means dusting and vaccuming. Yuck.

How do you do it?

What is your family’s routine for cleaning and other chores? How much do you put your kids to work? Are you often tempted to do it yourself? How do you stop yourself from taking over?

I’m interested to see how you all manage the work in your families.

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.

I like words. I like reading them, I like writing them, I’m bothered by people who don’t want to use them. One of my favorite quotes is from Mark Twain, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.” I think words can be a powerful tool and weapon. I try to be careful with my words.

My son likes to talk. He’s been verbal from the moment he was born and, geez, is he a talker. He identifies when he’s said something cute, and will often point it out to me. The other day he said something funny in the car, and before we could laugh, he said, “That was cute, right?” Nicholas is starting to understand the power of words.

Our next challenge is to teach him how much words can hurt. The other night, my fiance was giving Nicholas a bath and N wasn’t behaving very well. When William got after him, Nicholas used the big hammer, “Daddy, I don’t love you.” Yes, I know that kids say that stuff; but, Nicholas had never used it before, and his and William’s relationship is just new enough, that it really hurt William. So, the three of us sat down and talked about how words can hurt just as much as hitting or biting or falling down. Later that night, William and I had a conversation about N not fully understanding what his words mean yet.

William and I have also had conversations about talking with N about his Daddy Mark. I talk about his Daddy Mark whenever it makes sense (”Your Daddy Mark liked this song.” “Your Daddy Mark’s favorite veggie was asparagus”), and I try to talk about him every day. William is worried that Nicholas may have a tendancy to put Mark on a pedastal and that William will never be as “good” a Dad as Mark in N’s eyes. He’s very worried about the day when Nicholas says, “You’re not my real Dad!”

I’m worried about that day too. Because words hurt. But I also reminded William that kids, teenagers especially, will use whatever amunition they have against their parents, and I’m sure he will use that one against William. Just as I’m equally sure that my sweet, loving, beatuiful son will one day say the words, “I wish you weren’t my Mother!” And man, those words will hurt. 

Sherry Carr Deer is Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.

I am having a great time planning our wedding. William is such a great fiance, shares his opinions, but has for the most part let me go with my feelings. Nicholas was recently ring barer in his cousin’s wedding, so every time we talk about our wedding with him, he asks if he’ll get to wear a tuxedo.

In the course of the planning, I’ve been thinking a lot about my name…and Nicholas’ name…and William’s name. Specifically whether or not to change mine when we get married.

When Mark and I married, it was important to me to keep my name (Carr) and add his (Deer). All my introductions with new people sound like this, “No, that’s two last names with no hyphen. Right. Carr with 2 “r’s” and Deer like the animal. No, no “e” on the end of Deer. Like the animal. D-E-E-R.” Despite warnings from married female professors at the time, I didn’t just keep my name. But, it’s a name that once people get it, don’t usually forget it. I think it’s something about the imagery of a car hitting a deer.

Well, my fella’s last name isn’t quite so distinctive, and it will make me one of many with the same name. And if I take his name and drop mine altogether, I won’t have a common name with Nicholas at all. But if I don’t take his name in some form, I won’t have a common name with potential children I have with William.

For those of you who have remarried (or have siblings because of blended families), how big a deal is it to have a household full of different last names? Is it strange? Hard to navigate? Would it be difficult for Nicholas to be the only one in our family with his name?

I do have to admit that it would be nice to never have to spell my last name and to always know where my last name should fall in the alphabitized list at a doctor’s office. My introductions to new people would sound like this, “That’s Sherry with two r’s. Last name Smith.” Simple. Elegant.

What do you think? How does “Sherry Smith” sound? Do any of you have a different professional name from your personal name?

Sherry Carr Deer-Smith?

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.  

Before we were even pregnant with our son, my late husband and I talked about manners and how we would teach them to any children we had. One of my pet peeves is rude people. There is just no reason for it, and it bugs me to no end.

After Mark died, I had many occasions when I wondered if he didn’t know that he wouldn’t be here to help raise Nicholas. One of those occasions was a list Mark made of things he wanted Nicholas to know or do or love. One of those items was to be respectful of people and have good manners (we both thought that was the point of having good manners, to show people you respect them).

So, I’ve been noticing lately that the manners are starting to kick in with Nicholas. He’s been saying, “Please” and “Thank You” for a while now after William and I have asked him to. But, now I’ve been seeing him making the connection. When someone does something for Nicholas, or he needs something, he says thank you and asks nicely. After his 3rd birthday party a few weeks ago, after he opened his gifts, he shouted, “Thank you for my presents and for coming to my party!” We are having to tell him, though, that just because he asks nicely for things, doesn’t mean he’ll get them.

Nicholas recently started daycare after having been with a Nanny his first year and his grandparents his second year. The staff at the daycare comments on not only what a nice boy he is, but also how polite he is. He’s aware of the need to share (even if he doesn’t want to), and is appreciative of people (as much as a 3 year old is).

Yes, it’s a point of pride for me that my son is well mannered. But it’s also a lot of work. We were talking at work the other day about some family visiting a coworker. She was bothered by having to tell her nephew to greet his grandmother when she walked in the house and having to tell him to help his grandmother to the car. We all talked about the constant vigilance it takes to make sure that your child is aware of the many ways you are polite and respectful to people. My co-workers with teenagers talked about how, often, those manner don’t show up as consistantly at home, but that they are told how good their children are by other people. There could be worse things people could say about your kids!

Last night when I gave Nicholas his vitamin, he looked at me with his sweet smile and said, “Mommy, thank you for buying me Scooby Doo bone vitamins.” I will have to remember these sweet manners when he’s a teenager who is a jerk at home, but well-mannered toward other people.