Myette.org

The park district sponsored an event with perhaps the best concept ever.  They called it Touch a Truck and invited all the local businesses, fire departments etc. to park trucks in the big parking lot and let kids climb on them for a day.  Here are a few of the fun photos.  Click on the photo for full-size versions.  

These are photos from our recent trip to Florida.  It was a jam packed weekend with mother’s day, my mom’s birthday, my sisters graduation with her MSW, my goddaughter’s baptism and a full fledged family party.  Here are a few of the best photos but there are of course a million more here.

This video was part of the program at the Ounce’s annual luncheon last week.

If you can’t see the embedded video click here to go to the Youtube version.  

 I feel like every few months I write with news that I’m either changing jobs or we’re having another baby.  Well this e-mail is of the job variety not the baby variety.  My time at ISPCAN was short, but I have moved on to another opportunity that will challenge me and help me to grow while having the greatest impact possible.  On Wednesday I started my new position as a program associate with the Ounce of Prevention Fund. 

The Ounce invests in the healthy development of at-risk infants, toddlers, preschools and their families.  We use an innovative cycle of family-focused programs, research, training, policy analysis and advocacy to help young children succeed in school and throughout life.  The essential theory of change is that early interventions are cheaper and more effective.  Simple interventions like getting parents to read to their children in the first two years of life have a multiplier effect and pay dividends for a lifetime.  

The division I will be working in is called the Bounce Learning Network.  In 2000 the Ounce started a model early education center on the South Side of Chicago.  Since then they’ve researched the heck out of it and developed a research based practice model that is replicable in other places.  The job of the Bounce Learning Network is to work with partners to replicate the model.  There are now 9 centers all over the country (from Miami to Seattle) established through public-private partnerships and the division is expanding rapidly.  My role in all of this is as the Program Associate to the Senior Vice President who leads the division.  I’ll function essentially as a senior aide to her.  Her job is to to do the high-level strategic thinking as she goes from meeting to meeting, while my role is to take the outcomes of those meetings and make sure whatever was decided at those meetings gets implemented.         

There are so many positives about this job that they’re hard to enumerate.  I’ll be working downtown which means I can take the train to work (our house is a 5 minute walk from the commuter rail).  The Ounce is one of the leading agencies in Chicago and well known nationally for it’s work in early childhood intervention.  It’s staffed by smart, driven people in a fast paced environment.  The complexity of the work is amazing and interesting.  It will push me to be the best I can be and I will learn a ton.

I’m sorry to go on and on, but I’m very excited about this opportunity.  I feel very lucky not only to have gotten a job (or several in fact) in this difficult time for the economy, but to have found essentially my dream job at a place that will be a good match for me long term.  In case you haven’t heard enough, here are the websites of the organization where there is even more information about what I’ll be doing:

When we lived in Tegus last year I was at home alone with the kids and someone rang our doorbell.  I went down to answer the door and looking through the gate I could see it was three people with vests, official looking badges and clipboards.  It’s important to note here that when I say I went down to answer “the door” I mean the hefty reinfored gate in the middle of a 15 foot high wall topped with razor wire.  We lived in a big nice house in a very dangerous city and these precautions weren’t just for show.  You don’t just open the door for random visitors.

So I cautiously talked to the people with clipboards through the gate.  They said they were from the Honduran census bureau and were conducting a national census.  I hesitantly agreed to answer their questions, but after a few minutes the questions got too personal with questions like income and work details.  I started to feel uncomfortable so I ended the conversation, apologized and went upstairs into the house.  To this day I have no idea if they really were official census workers (for those of you who know Honduras you know how un-Honduran a census sounds). 

I thought of that experience this morning when I was listening to a report on NPR about the challenges of getting an accurate count in the U.S. census that is about to occur in 2010.  Minorities and immigrants are typcially undercounted while white males are sometimes counted twice or at least counted once accurately.  Homeless, fear of deportation, people living in motels and a general fear of authority are just a few of the variables that lead to the poor and minorities being undercounted.

It’s easy to dismiss this fear and can be difficult to relate to how someone might feel threatened by someone with a clipboard and an official census I.D.  But that day in Honduras I was scared.   I was operating in my second language, couldn’t tell if the badges were real or made at the local equivalent of Kinko’s and was worried they might be casing my house to rob it or worse.  As I listened to the NPR story I could easily put myself in the position of a mentally ill person in a homeless shelter or an immigrant (legal or illegal) from Guatemala who isn’t quite sure why this person is asking all these questions and fearful of their motivations.  

The troubling thing about the undercounting is that the poor, transient and vulnerable who are so difficult to count are also among those most hurt by undercounting.  The census helps planners determine public services from mental health to road and public transportation.  Addressing illegal immigration is a daunting task made more difficult by a lack of accurate data.  The census sounds so straightforward and simple but in practice it is so very difficult and at the same time so very important.  

The NPR report talked about a wide variety of efforts to encourage participation in the census, including the Spanish television station Telemundo working the census into the story lines of their telenovelas (Spanish soap operas).  So for the rest of my drive I daydreamed - imagining myself behind my gate in Tegus in a Honduran soap opera where I thought the census workers were spies for my sister’s lover’s uncle’s psychic who was trying to get more information so he could take over my hacienda through hynposis and superior population data sampling.  In the end though my cousin Betio convinces me that the census is important and I should participate so that city planners can better plan for the future of our ciudad.

One commitment we made when we moved back to Chicago was to take advantage of the millions of activities that are part of the benefit of living near a big city.  It’s nice to talk about the world class museums and summer festivals, but unless you actually get out and go you might as well live in Iowa.   Our new house is about 45 minutes away from downtown, but we’ve been determined to make the effort and enjoy the benefits of being so near Chicago. 

A big help in keeping that commitment has been the museums commitment to having free days and kids activities.  Most of the museums have at least one free day a month.  The Museum of Science and Industry was free the whole month of January and the Art Institute was free in February.  Michael had been learning about Claude Monet in Kindergarten so he and I took the train downtown to see the Impressionist collection and see the real Monets.  What a treat for him to get to stand so close to the Monets that he could see the texture of the paint.  We did a kids’ tour and did a children themed program where you get to draw some of the sculptures.  All free.

Surprisingly though, by far the biggest hit has been the Museum of Contemporary Art.  I don’t generally think kid-friendly when I think of modern art, but the MCA puts on such a great program.  One Saturday a month Target sponsors a family day.  Admission is free for families and they set up themed activity stations.  The February day was on Valentine’s Day so there were Valentine’s themed activities.  Yesterday’s activities were based on the artist/futurist Buckminster Fuller so the activities were geometric themed.  And the activities aren’t your typcial color and paint, but are high concept projects like building a geodesic dome, making a map or your heart, or a movement activity that creates dance from shapes and colors.  Every month there’s an art scavenger hunt so the kids get to know the art in the museum.   

It’s so wonderful to visit a museum with hundreds of kids actively engaged, doing art scavenger hunts and loving every minute of it.  They even have a room with snacks (juice boxes and gold fish) for a break.  As we walked out of the MCA yesterday with the portfolios they had made to hold their art, Michael and Jacob wanted to know when the April family day was and wanted to make sure we could go back.  It’s amazing to me that the Museum of Contemporary art has rapidly become one of the favorite places for a 3-year old and a 6-year old.  I’m glad they love it and I have a few more tricks up my sleeve.  Summer is near with weekends filled with the Jazz Fest, Blues Fest and Gospel Music Festival.  All free and a wonderland for children who love music. 

The photos in this post are from last month’s Valentine’s Day trip to the MCA.  Click here for a few more museum themed photos.     

Yesterday in church Jacob and I really were not getting along.  He was whining, wiggling all around and just generally being disagreeable and difficult to deal with.  I tried being comforting and letting him sit on my lap.  I tried being stern and threatening to take him out to the hall.  Nothing was working.  Towards the end of mass he looked at me and said, “Daddy, I’m having a hard time.”  

As a parent I’m often struck by how often I need my children to help show me how to be a good parent and how grateful I am when it works.  With those few words Jacob was able to help me shift my focus from being upset with him to trying to figure out how to help him.  It was also an admission on his part that he needed the help and was willing and ready to accept it.  We shifted from adversaries to partners and from that point on we were able to figure out a way to make it through mass together.  

We’ve worked really hard to help the kids understand what is going on in their brains and bodies and to tell us so that we can figure out how best to help them and so that eventually they can figure out strategies to work through it themselves.  ”I’m having a hard time,” “I’m tired,” “I’m hungry,” “I was really angry,” and “I just couldn’t control my brain” are a few of the things I’ve heard from the kids lately.  

It’s not rocket science of course and seems obvious that to help kids (or adults for that matter) deal with their emotions the first step is recognizing and verbalizing that.  But when it happens, like it did yesterday, it feels so good.  It helps me be a better parent and for that I am grateful.  I’m hoping that this trend will continue, but I know that the coming years (particularly those that end “een”) will present some serious challenges to the kids being able to recognize and share what’s going on inside of them.  But for now, I’ll take comfort in the small success of yesterday and hope that because he was able to verbalize how he was feeling and we worked through it together it made Jacob’s “hard time” a little easier for him to bear.

I mentioned in my post yesterday that music being a central part of our life is due in large part to some choices we made about how we set up our house.  Since 2006 when we moved back from Honduras (the first time) Erika and I have had a running conversation where I propose getting rid of our TV and Erika says no.  Not really much of a conversation I suppose.  

When we moved to the house in New Lenox we had some hard choices to make about how we set up the house.  It’s a small house (much as Erika doesn’t like me to say that) and furniture arrangements make all the difference in it feeling small versus tiny.  The living space is really just one medium sized room with a combined living room/dining room.  No matter how we arranged it, if we oriented the living room around a TV the room shrank.  This was my moment to propose ditching the TV all together.    

So we put the TV in the garage and arranged the furniture around the perimeter of the room to open up the space as much as possible.  It worked.  The kids now have a space in the middle of the room to play (and pile toys for safe keeping while they’re not playing).  Aside from the pile though, the space is much more open and makes the room feel like a place to live.  

As for TV - worry not, we haven’t gone off the grid completely.  I had bought a TV tuner for my laptop before we left for Honduras so we can watch TV on the laptop.  It’s small, but a side benefit is that we can use it as a DVR/Tivo for free and it records shows right to the laptop.  Our desk is right next to the couch so it’s easy to just pull it over on the coffee table when we watch TV together in the evenings.  We also got rid of cable.  Most of what we watch is on the networks (easily accessible with a cheap antenna stuck under the desk) and the rest we can watch online.  Hulu has changed our lives along with the networks’ habit of putting full length versions of their shows on their website.  I can watch the Daily Show, 30 Rock and House on Hulu, Lost and Scrubs on ABC.com and Notre Dame basketball on ESPN360.  What more so I need?   

So my “throw away the television” pitch isn’t exactly as radical as it sounds.  It has, however, changed the way we watch TV.  There’s an intentionality about what we watch and when we watch it.  We watch less TV and tend to watch better quality stuff (with the obvious exception of the Grey’s Anatomy/Private Practice embarassment that I’m loathe to admit to).  The kids watch things we’ve taped from PBS with Sid the Science Kid being the latest favorite.  In general we are much more likely to watch TV because we want to, not because it’s on.     

And the music?  Those load speakers I talked about yesterday are plugged into the laptop which is much more likely to be used as a very expensive radio than as a computer or a TV.  We have great speakers in the living room and some wireless speakers in the kitchen which are very important to my nightly dishes routine.  

The combination of all of these choices has resulted in a great environment where our living room truly is a place to live.  Where TV is something that is great in moderation, where there is space to play, where music is an integral part of our daily lives and most importantly where my reward for doing the dishes is a little Ryan Adams.

Note:  For those of you that get the e-mail version of the blog, I’m not sure why but the photos have a tendency to show up in the wrong place in the e-mail.  It shouldn’t be a big deal, the layout just doesn’t look as nice.  Remember you can always click through to the actual post to see the original version.