So, Kim, have you moved into your house yet?

Friends, I know you've stopped asking. What began as a charming occasional inquiry and encouragement to continue working has become an awkward situation of no longer asking to stave off hearing the same answer. What HAS Kim been doing that took this long? Well I'm sure it's not enough to have dragged on this long, sadly the amount of time I could mess with it has been limited. Also there was an entire month in there spent going back and forth with an awful contractor and his even more awful recommendation for a structural engineer who took 4 weeks to eek out the 2-4 hours worth of work necessary for me to get an estimate from said contractor. That fiasco aside, I thought it might be interesting to line up all the things I can think of that have been done.

Outside
window washin', cleaned out and rerouted gutters, cleared out the back gardens, pruned the back trees and cleared out the wilderness that had swallowed the back of the yard in wild grape vines, brush and saplings growing up from under the fence.

Basement (the utility side)
Removed the moldy wall board on the south side, completely removed a dividing wall and the false wall along the north side, revealing back to the outer stone of the basement and scrubbed out the scum on the floors. Disconnected a dangerous gas water-heater setup so the gas company would let me turn on heat to the house :) More recently, the east half of the south wall was removed (the main floor is supported by steal pipes, the wall was "cosmetic") creating a larger opening into the finished side of the basement.

Basement (the finished side)
The horribly moldy carpet was removed, along with the equally awful drop ceiling exposing the floor joists of the house. The north wall into what used to be an old closet/recording studio was removed, opening to the utility side of the basement. The stairs from the basement to the main floor were reversed and rebuilt (so instead of the stairs starting towards the west side of the room, they start towards the east)

Kitchen
Removed all cabinets, removed the doorway for the pantry revealing the original arched refridge nook that used to be there, removed the cracked and sagging kitchen ceiling, removed the plaster rock-lath along two walls that was crumbling, replaced the south wall between the kitchen and the breakfast nook with a cross beam, rewired, reinsulated, resheetrocked, removed 3-4 layers of linoleum on the kitchen floor, then scrubbed off the old tar-paper adhesive from the pine floors (by far the most painful thing I've done on the house), painted all the walls a fresh, slightly creamy white, primed all the cabinets.

The former Breakfast nook thingy, now sitting area
Little more than a glorified closet about 4 feet wide, walls on both sides were removed and the stairs going up to the second floor were rebuilt and flipped around to now open into this area.

Dining Room
Not a whole lot other than the wall between it and the breakfast nook was removed. Now it is one longish corridor (my house isn't really all that big :) from the dining room into the kitchen, slightly punctuated by cross beams in the middle.

Misc
Bathroom walls were primed to get away from the awful pastel pink/white tile with soft blue walls combo that was in there. Now it's just pink and white. The bedroom closet was gutted and is to have it's entry way widened out.

Out of the 798+ photos of my house and grounds (I'm not joking) I have chosen two that I feel encapsulates a little something of all of the above. Bonus question! True or false, are these photos of more or less the same area?

A Life in the Clouds

Tag clouds, that is. It all started at Powell's (as so many of the best stories begin), when I snatched Domino Decorating Room-by-Room off the shelf. Step number 2 of the Getting Started chapter suggested you ponder for a moment just exactly what your design style is. It kindly gave you permission to be a blending between different styles, and had something like a tag cloud on the bottom of the page with various descriptives like "traditional," "elegant," "sentimental," "punk." It gave me the enormously charming idea of seeing my own personal preferences in a similar style - I could barely wait to explore myself! Ego-centrism aside, tag clouds really are clever little beasts. It's such a clear and visual way to express what can be a little hard to nail down sometimes. We all know we change over time, but if you have only a vague idea of what you enjoy about an aesthetic, you can run into some pretty practical problems in the here-and-now. For instance, If you don't realize that you have a severe allergy to traditional, you face either fleeing in terror from such stores (potentially missing a great find buried somewhere amongst the damask and tassels) or you might end up in a depressed puddle in the middle of the showroom floor, surrounded by a sea of perfectly matching, symmetrically arranged livingroom sets. Vowing never to meddle with "interior design" again, you could even backlash into biggie sizing a McDonald's quarter-pounder and picking up some particle board on the way home. The stakes are high, my friend.

Fortunately, my instincts had encouraged me to stockpile digital pictures of rooms that I liked, putting me a long way down the road for my project. Next step was to flip through these pictures, and in a little text window, type out a few words to describe what I liked about them. Is it clean, bright, airy and inviting? Dark, dramatic and intimate? Modern? Vintage?? COZY?? You get the idea. Do this for every room, even if you just end up repeating your words (perhaps especially if you repeat your words). Next comes the fun part: find a tag-cloud-generating website (I used wordle for the ability to tweak the style of the tag cloud and not at all because it has a cute name), paste in everything you typed out, and voila! It makes words that appear more often in your list larger, letting you see the landscape of what seems to be most important to you.

Some pretty interesting things came out for me. It was pretty easy to tell even writing out the words that some of them were popping up pretty often, but what was cool to me was how the pattern shifted if I was looking at a bedroom or a den, rather than a kitchen or living room. Once I started noticing that, I decided I'd do one tag cloud for "public" rooms, one for the more personal rooms, and another for all of them together. A veritable thunderhead of self expression. Hahahah! hehe. Having them all lined up was pretty interesting. Even though both types of rooms had more or less the same words, the emphasis seemed to almost completely reverse itself. Neat. Without further ado, here they all are (cleverly, though inadvertently, demonstrating my inconsistent use of style):

(public rooms)	(private rooms)
(overall)

Joking aside, it actually is pretty helpful for me to see this laid out. I suppose I could have guessed that I like things that bring the outside in, things that feel fresh, maybe a little dash of contemporary - but seeing this really made it concrete for me that rooms that I really feel drawn to are heavy on the natural, organic and friendly side. Going overboard on some of the other things, like contemporary or dramatic, may be fun for a moment, but might not end up being something I'd really feel at home in without it being softened and relaxed a bit.

Such happy little clouds of positivity deserve one little burst of negativity, eh? Exactly. So while I wrote down words about rooms I liked, I also wrote down words describing rooms that I hated (flipping through the book gave plenty examples of both). Behold! My hate-cloud!


(patterny: technical term for lots of jumbled
random patterns on textiles)

In this day and age giant rifts in relationships have been started over far less, so I suppose I should put a disclaimer down about my little storm cloud. It's not that I necessarily completely hate these kinds of styles and perspectives, it seems to fit other people and their homes and I find them quite intriguing rooms to visit. In a very hands-off no-mirth-please sort of way, but in a way none the less - like visiting a city you find fascinating but would never want to live in.

I hope that this trip into the clouds prompts all of the rest of you to go out and make your own, be they related to design, food, movies, love letters, hate mail - be creative! I wonder if one day I could credit myself with starting a tag-cloud fad. The Cumulus Craze, they might call it. Sky's the limit really.

Facebook's TOS and YOU.

I'm pretty intrigued by facebook's tweaks to their terms of service agreement and this write-up on it: http://mashable.com/2009/02/16/facebook-tos-privacy/

I've been pretty fascinated lately by how different media affect people, with one author in particular, Marshall Mcluhan, taking center stage there. He writes that all media is an extension of ourselves in some way or other: television is an extension of our imaginations, a photograph is an extension of our eye, the massive amount of online information and how we search for it is an extension of our minds. One of his major ideas is that all media have certain advantages and qualities, but when taken to an extreme will reverse on themselves, shattering what they originally increased (his point being: be open, but be cautious, in how far you take a media). Too much tv will actually kill off your ability to think creatively, someone or something that is over-publicized will begin to loose their identity, networks with such an overwhelming amount of information can paralyze someone's ability to make a decision.

This man who died in the early 80s predicted that the final frontier, that of extending our consciousness, wasn't far away. I'm no expert on his thought, but social networking websites seem to eerily fulfill this prophecy. Your likes, dislikes, thoughts, relationships, conversations - all get expressed online in a handily searchable and watchable format. Good stuff, but it doesn't take much to see we've long since gone overboard with this idea. Relationships were the first to reverse (just how much does "friends" mean anymore?), now our personal information and conversations are no longer ours to show/remove as we please. I don't really blame FB, it's costly to build systems to properly cull out old information and put security in place to enforce it's protection. When you have millions of users that don't (and won't) pay you a red cent, can you be surprised that a service would begin to do this? What I find interesting though is we have lost all control over our own information, which happens to be our own selves. Something about you gets posted on facebook or youtube and, accurate or not, done by you or not - it doesn't matter. That information can't be taken back and now begins to define YOU, rather than you defining it. Your reputation is now being dictated by what someone finds attached to your name on flickr or myspace.

Caffeine induced rambling? Possible. Likely. It sounds gloomy reading back through it. :) I'm really not in the camp of someone who hates social networking websites or the idea of letting your possessions express some part of your personality, but just as we had an industrial age and an information age, these are the days of self-expression. Yea, people have always found ways to try and express themselves through something they have or do, but I think an argument can be made that this natural impulse is on hyperdrive right now. The marketing machinery certainly isn't overlooking the opportunity to play on this craze (thereby driving it further, imho). On my profile, in my food choices, my blog, the books I read, the phone I use, the brand of purse I carry - it's all about how that thing succeeds or fails at communicating some part of who I am (or who I want people to see). We've seen so many great things come from this emphasis on the personal, but hopefully we can also acknowledge the dark side of our fixation on this topic as well. The exhaustion of the industrial age may be little compared to the loss of identity of the personalization age.

Guerilla-ing

Seeing this book on the shelves was really the first moment I had heard of the movement, and it seemed fantastically appealing. I have always craved bringing life and use to neglected spaces, houses, objects. Potential is irresistible to me, and I took the book home with all the excitement of someone who felt that so many nebulous ideas were about to be solidified. This movement is based around gardening on property that is not your own, out of a love of beauty and a desire to fight neglect, misuse, and abuse (which seems to be the primary driving force for the author himself) - though occasionally the battle is more political and against perceived waste, proprietary ownership and capitalist industrialization. In all of the cases I found an interesting tension.

To clean and improve the spaces around us I find to be only human - and a glorious part of being human at that. In most cases the projects do seem to start out here, with a bit of adventure in late night gardening on someone's abandoned lot or traffic median. A delicious idea, and a triumph over more than just trashy ground. Often these spaces are haunts for drug addicts and alcoholics, with hypodermics and shattered bottles littering the space. But it seems that it doesn't take long for edges to blur, lines to shift - and suddenly what was a gift becomes a right. This is our garden now. And we will fight to keep it. Murky battles rage that are (occasionally) hard to choose a side for. I found it interesting that those who rage over their property rights could have so little concern for the property itself, and that those who clearly close one eye to property rights could then be so proprietary.

The very nature of this type of work almost dictates it's eventual dissolution. Improving space increases value and draws attention, prompting the original owner to take notice of the changes - whether it's with displeasure or pleasure, they tend to step in. Isn't the likely transience of the garden a risk you need to be prepared to take? It seems that is easier said than done. In the beginning you half expect it, but a few years later when you have grown attached to your seedlings and the garden is established - it would seem to require saint-like mentalities to watch the land be bulldozed for a new condo. It's a particularly interesting situation for renters - who, by improving the land, improve property values and may well be increasing their own rent!

These tensions I find particularly interesting considering the evident respect the author has for Che Geuvara, and the obvious parallels between guerilla warfare and guerilla gardening are drawn throughout the book. Some of this is done with tongue in cheek, but it's clear that there is much respect and study of Che. This prompted me to learn more of him, and I was struck by another slight parallel between Che and factions of the GG movement. Che represents to me what can happen to a human being when you become so entrenched in an ideal that you loose all sight of the original promptings of that goal and become obsessed with the ideal itself. The man who sets out to fight the worst of capitalist oppression and exploitation becomes the worst of socialist oppressors, destroying any man who dared to breathe of disagreement. He was an incredibly heroic, idealistic and terrible man, who seemed to embody the extremes of all that was beautiful and hideous in masculine nature. The goodness of his original desires to help the exploited lower classes, combined with the tragedy of how vicious and despotic he became seems ridiculous to line up with a topic like gardening, nevertheless I was struck by how people could be so focused on a goal that they can't see the goal anymore. How it stops being about a neglected space that you gave a use for (and perhaps now the owner has another use for it) - and becomes about the garden. My garden.

Because not every post can be about cooking.

It's important that I talk about other things on my blog so that my activities seem more exciting than the occasional perfectly cooked meal. In the spirit of this, I wanted to run through the current exhibit out at the Frist Center, Color As Field.

Through the Frist newsletter I heard about a few free lectures on the current exhibition, and resolved to give them a try before seeing the art itself. The lecture did well in setting the stage, though some of the most interesting things came from follow-up googling about some of the artists. The Color As Field movement raises eyebrows from the more traditional mindset, coming straight out of the 50s/60s with a dedication to intuition, lack of form, and... well... color. These are the artists who poured paint on rather than brushed it. Who did giant works composed of vivid or overlapping blobs and rivers of acrylics. Who used squeegees, putty knives, gravity, their hands - pretty much anything but a traditional paint brush to create something. Call it all nonsense if you like, say that its notoriety came entirely from one lone art critic's flight of fancy, but it does help to understand where they were coming from and what they were trying to achieve.

From the rejection of form to the limits of formlessness.
Previous Abstraction styles had moved away from work that directly represented real life, but it still held to an altruistic need for some kind of recognizable form, be it human or otherwise. A sort of hyper emotionalism could be felt in their works. Color as Field was one of the movements that craved something more austere and shrugged off the last vestiges of desire to be representational of something else. A description from the catalog for the exhibit put it nicely: "While scrupulously avoiding anything resembling psychological symbolism, the ‘post-painterly’ [Color Field] conception of ‘cool’ included the belief that a painting, no matter how apparently restrained, could address the viewer’s whole being — emotions, intellect, and all — through the eye."

This gives us a clue to what all these works were getting at. Obviously, there was a large emphasis on figuring out just how much color alone can convey - but the underlying goal for these artists was escaping all preconceived notions and exploring the limits of the bare essentials of a painting (two dimensional space and color). How far can those two essentials take you until it just doesn't work anymore? How big can a painting be until it's no longer a painting? How many colors? How few? They were very into the idea of "all-overness," of paintings that seem bigger than the canvas that holds them. More than one of them donned blindfolds in an effort to break themselves of conventions and to retrain into relying entirely upon subconscious instinct. The painters often borrowed language from the musical realm, painting "in the key of green," and their work was likened to jazz improv sessions (interesting how musical and artistic movements seem to coincide). The results range from vivid and powerful to murky (literally) and difficult to connect with. One painter in particular had works that hit both ends of the spectrum for me. Jules Olitski, who turns out to be a very fascinating and charming man. A tragic younger life led him to a deep depression and insecurity where he rarely spoke and even attempted suicide, yet he gradually emerged to become one of the more well-spoken artists with an honesty and sense of humor about himself and his profession.

As you know, it's not cool these days to acknowledge any connection with previous art. What a hunger for immaculate conceptions among some of our artists. When did this begin? I remember reading a piece by one of the eminences of Minimalism in which he appeared to be claiming that he and his co-Minimalists had given birth by themselves to themselves: their art owed nothing to the past or present, nothing to no one. For shame; even the Holy Virgin admitted some contact from some source. Of course tradition can be intimidating; we can influence ourselves right into academic paralysis, which is probably what Emerson was warning his contemporaries against: "Carry not the corpses of yesteryear on your back..." Take what you can use from the past and throw out the rest. Keep going back and you'll find more and more to take and maybe more and more to get rid of. It seems the tradition that fathers you is the one you most want to transform; it's the one you bounce off against time and again until you made something of your own. This creation (call it your vision) may not look at all related to its father, and the more different it looks the more likely it will get put down, especially if it's good.
~ Jules Olitski

What to say to a nice neighbour of mine, a man who hasn't the foggiest notion as to why Rembrandt is in a different league than Ben Shahn, but who feels free to jeer and go on about "that phony Jackson Pollock and the rest of them fakes"? ... I was foolish enough to point out to him that Rembrandt painted some of the most original paintings of his time, but if he were alive today he would not be painting Rembrandts as we know them.
~ Jules Olitski

There is value in long years of obscurity, if one doesn't go insane or suicidal, in that, simply because nobody is looking, the habit of fooling around and trying things out gets ingrained.
~ Jules Olitski

It's time for a few Color-As-Field heavy hitters (click on their pictures to go to a slide show of some of their other works - not all of which are at the Frist mind you).

Helen Frankenthaler
Generally acknowledged to be the source of the movement, when Noland and Louis went to her studio and saw Mountains and Sea they left full of ideas. Louis famously called her work "the bridge between Pollock and what was possible." Color as Field (or if you really want to impress someone you can use it's awful synonym - Post-Painterly Abstraction) was born.


Mountains and Sea - the face that launched a thousand ships, as it were.


Morris Louis
It's hard unless you've seen them, but it's necessary to really get the scale of his work. The one below (similar to my favorite of his at the Frist) is about 10' by 20' or so. Louis went through droughts with his painting, destroying many works that he created and struggling with painter's-block, for lack of a better term. He always seemed to emerge from them and ultimately gave Color-Field some of it's most defining paintings. Unfortunately Louis, much like his paintings, took a bath in the world's first acrylic paint - Magna. His longterm high-level exposure to this rather toxic paint is thought to be the reason he died fairly young of lung cancer.


Alpha Pi


Jules Olitski
Remember my pal Jules?


Julius and Friends - this one lended some credibility in my mind to how riveting color alone can be. I felt completely blown away by this huge piece (as tall as me). His oft' quoted craving in painting was to capture color. "I want to spray color in the air and have it stay there."

For those who have seen the exhibit (or haven't, but still have an opinion), I'd be curious to know your thoughts on it. Knowing they held that art made sheerly "for the eye" is capable of grabbing you intellectually and emotionally - did you find any painting that did that? Did they fall off the edge of the limits they were exploring, to the point that their works no longer qualify as "paintings" to you?

The museum flyer says: "The Color Field painters believed that the source of creativity was the unconscious and that the artist's role was to make the unseen visible, rather than to depict what could be seen." I was struck by this quote and the similarity it held to what some theologians claim is the reason for humanity - to make the unseen visible.

Culinary Arts

Before you confidently build yourself up with excitement thinking this is yet another total-catastrophe blog regarding my domesticity, I must inform you that this entry has an almost unwavering tone of triumph all the way through it. The secret to my success (and, let's be honest, to my even attempting anything at all), is the CSA program I signed up for this spring with Avalon Acres. The idea itself was completely irresistible to me - a quarter bushel of vegetables every week of whatever was currently in season from local farmers. Though not 100% organic their focus is on sustainable family-owned farms which is exactly the type of thing I want to support. Apart from checking off all the buzz-words, I was also delighted by the idea of a surprise every week. You never knew what was going to be in that box! Surprises aside, and apart from the charming and oh-so-trendy idea of cooking within the season, there was also the attraction of the challenge. You have thirty radishes, one head of cabbage, five thousand strawberries and four days until rot. GO!

That was the idea, at least. And in practice it did work out to be true most of the time. I'll confess right now that many a veg has met my trash can because I couldn't think of anything in time, but I chalk it up as healthy organic matter being contributed to our trash piles and a contribution to education. For, much like any sensible predator sizing up an unknown quarry, I usually have a phase where I must stalk the vegetable. What exactly are you? What do you do? Ah. It seems you are an enormous scallion. What do people do with scallions? And then I attack! Or I continue stalking, it all depends on how daunting the preparation seems to be.

Thats where the cookbook comes in. Beautiful, delicious meals built on high quality ingredients where the recipe doesn't go on for miles. It's really a perfect balance for me: good enough that I don't chuck it all and order take-out from fido (I have to say I'm pretty spoiled to really well done restaurant food), and simple enough that I feel like I can really learn the flavors that go in to making food. Right now the spice rack is just so many odd looking powders. I toss them in not because I know what they do to food, but because the recipe says so. Or because it seems like it might be fun and more chef-like to sprinkle something on something, and so I embellish the recipe. Regardless - there's certainly no method to my madness.



Veggie Burgers
This was a defining moment for me. It was week 2 and I had lettuce and radishes coming out of my ears, couldn't go through the strawberries and the bread was getting dried out (I was getting a loaf of fresh bread every week). It was a sink or swim crossroads, and I remembered I had wanted to try a veggie burger recipe I had seen (which she happens to have on her website as well). I scanned through the ingredient list. Gasp! Onions! I already had them in the form of our new friend the scallion! And bread crumbs! I could use my drying leftover bread and make breadcrumbs with my brand new blender! Now I know it may not sound like much to you, but this was a big deal to me. To actually have some of the ingredients and equipment on hand without having to buy everything from scratch at the store? To find a use for a food-stuff that extends beyond a single menu? To not have to throw something away because you couldn't think of what to do with it? Such things were utterly unheard of in my world. I was thrilled to make them, loved eating them, and loved that they made individual patties so that I could put them in the fridge and pop one out whenever I felt like a sandwich. Ah Mazing.




Roasted New Potatoes and Beans
This is where I met the scape. I diced it very thinly and mixed it in the olive oil as a replacement for garlic (which I didn't have). Roasting definitely brought out a deep flavor in the veggies, but I think I want to try steaming the beans next. Must. Purchase. Steamer.




Strawberry Popsicles
For as much as I put it off, this one was super easy and completely delicious. It pains me to think of how many bins of strawberries were consumed by mold rather than me before the discovery of puree! A handful of pureed strawberries mixed with french vanilla yogurt, capped off in the molds with straight vanilla yogurt - beautiful and very tastey.



And for the leftover puree mixture? It made an amazing smoothie.

allow me to tell you about parenting.

[note: This was written ages ago, it just got left in my drafts section. I stumbled across it and decided to post it along with another related item farther down below. Get all the parenting advice out in one giant post, I say.]

I'm the curious type who enjoys listening to knowledgeable people talk about their favorite subjects - particularly when that subject is a departure from my normal day-to-day experience. Ergo, a family therapist giving a free lecture on his rendition of "The 10 Commandments of Parenting" hit both the "expert" and the "completely outside of my realm" marks nicely. I also happen to believe that adults aren't as different from children as they'd like to think, so a lecture on the needs of children may have insights into our own weaknesses that we don't like to consider. Naturally, I took no notes at all during his presentation. This allows me to rehash the lecture in my own words without the invasion of clarity or accuracy bogging down the process - thus you will see below a blending of the lecturer's words and my own thoughts added to his words. Not everything he says I entirely agreed with, but such as it is and as I remember it, here it is.

1) Slow down.
Multi-tasking is teaching people how not to be present to any one thing they are doing. This mentality spreads to the young ones, resulting in anxiety filled children who are good at doing but terrible at being. They absorb your example - what lessons do you teach when you pick them up from school while talking on the cell phone? Teach your children by example how to focus and live in the moment.

2) Let your child go to school
Remember that this is their experience, not yours.

3) Make sure your child has a bad teacher.
It's an opportunity for your child to learn resilience. It's also an opportunity for them to have a window into the frustrations and sufferings of others. Social intelligence is the capacity for resilience and the capacity for empathy - bad teachers can be very good teachers of these two skills.

4) Teach them how to loose.
Children who don't know how to loose are unable to celebrate the victories of their friends. Don't be so quick to comfort when they suffer a defeat - suffering is a part of life that they need to learn how to cope with. Jumping in to smother them with comfort also implies that you don't trust them to work through things. Give them a moment to sort through it, and then go in with a comforting word. Don't over-validate their pain when they lose, they must learn perspective and to bounce back. Don't underestimate their ability to cope, either. As an adult you are no longer used to the intense emotional highs and lows children move through. They may feel tragic, and then be on to something else in a short while - don't take their defeats so much to heart that you are left hurting long after they have recovered.

5) Stay curious
The question should be "What did you learn today?" not "How well did you do?" Your curiosity about life and learning is subtly felt by a child - and so is your lack of it. What affect do you have to say to children "these are the best years of your life." What a great way to reinforce a child/teen's idea that adults are irrelevant and boring - they simply believed you when you said that childhood is the height of living. If you are bored and uninterested with your own life you will be boring to others, and children will certainly pick up on this. As an adult you need to have your own interests, hobbies and goals. Keep your own life... alive.

Also, who wouldn't want to remain in their adolescent years when someone else pays all the bills, when you kicked back at the pool with friends, when you were going on class trips to exotic places. Don't give your child so many experiences in childhood that they have nothing left to look forward to - "Why be excited about being independent and doing things for myself when Mom and Dad pay for me to go on exotic class trips right now?" If there is something positive for you to look forward to in the future, you will make better choices in the present.

6) Model Respect - and insist on it.
Sibling rivalry is not okay. There are indeed families without it. Don't validate it, and don't be so quick to separate the children when there is conflict. Learning how to resolve it and tolerate others is necessary. In looking at large families, there is an added encouragement for the children to find a way to work things out with each other. If you have to bed down with that person at night, you'll try to be a bit nicer to them. There is a respect and obedience that has been lost - previous generations of parents didn't care as much whether their kids *liked* them. If your constant goal is trying to maintain warm fuzzy happiness in the home, you will do your children a disservice by not allowing them to learn how to resolve conflict.

You need to ask yourself: what is the culture of this home? What tone is set by the parents? Note that depression is the 2nd most contagious emotion and anxiety is the first.

7) Stay in the adult world
Our primary emotional and social security should be met by peers, not by the generation beneath or above. Desiring to have a relationship where your children tell you everything is not healthy.

8) Own your own home
In a study done of affluent families, the least entitled kids were the ones who were required to clean their own room. It's your home. You pay the mortgage. They are allowed to use some of the space, but there should be no mistake in their minds about who owns it, and that part of their responsibility in order to use that space is to maintain it.

Other "less entitled" kids were those from families that eat together or do community service projects together.

9) Give Less
Make sure that the kids have to create something themselves. They should have had a job by the time they graduate from high school.

10) Live like a blessed person
The best antidote to anxiety and entitlement is gratitude. Brain studies were done (please don't imagine I remember where) showing that those who write down things that they are grateful for each day have an increase in focus and creativity.

Use structure in your day, but try to keep it so that it gives example. For instance, if there is a time for homework, let that be the time for the entire family to do their "homework." Everyone is at the table, working on something during this time. It allows the child to borrow "ego strength" from the adults working on a task.

Aaaaaand... thats all I can remember. There was more to the lecture though.

----

Corollary! I was listening to npr a couple of months ago (npr is a recent phenomena for me) on my way in to work and heard some Experts talking about child's play and how it went terribly wrong over the last 20 years - giving us yet another trend to regret that started out so innocently. Doesn't it seem to be the fashion these days to look back on the last 50 years and say "If only they were enlightened like us!" It's the only politically correct demographic to pick on these days. Anyways, I digress. Their argument was pretty compelling I thought, and not far from common sense which always lends more credibility to the opinions of Experts.

It all began, they say, one fateful day in the 50s. Children gathered around a strange boxy contraption called a television and watched the mickey mouse show. Thats not the only thing that debuted in the 50s - toy commercials. The pundits were saying that this caused a dramatic shift in children from play being free make-believe to play being focused on the object. Gotta have that toy. The toy on the commercial. The exact one. Must. Have. It. Generation X'ers had another grand idea (it seemed plausible) - why not cut out more of that make believe babble children do and make sure that we sneak in some learning into those playtime hours! Thus children began to be shuttled about from one adult led class/activity to another - learning karate and ballet and piano and soccer and.

What's the big deal about moving away from make-believe? I'm sure you could think of a few reasons you wouldn't want to loose make-believe entirely, maybe related to fostering free creativity and imagination, but they brought up one that I wasn't expecting. Have you ever heard a child playing make-believe? Especially little toddlers? In make believe the child creates their own rules for play and follows them. You'll even hear them telling themselves what they will do and how they will do it. True, these games and rules seem bizarre to us, and a child has been known to change their own rules in order to secure the intended outcome, but it's surprising how detailed they will be with themselves (and you). "You will sit in this chair and I will hide behind the couch like this so you won't know I'm there and you will say 'Where is Mark?' and I won't say anything and then you will ask again and then I will pop out and you'll be so surprised!" You will also play this game exactly as instructed over and over until you distract the small child with the idea of a snack (yet another habit we've now come to regret, but desperate times...). What are they learning? Self-regulation. What were they learning, I should say. It seems we've cut out so much of the time that children historically used for make-believe (where they essentially taught themselves how to control themselves and act inside of a set of rules) that it's really starting to show through.

Whats the point of talking about anything these days without vaguely referencing a study?? A study was done at [don't remember], asking 3, 5, and 7 year olds to stand still as long as they could. 30-40 years ago [blanking on the timeline] the 3 year old just couldn't do it, a 5 year old could do it for 3 minutes, and a 7 year old could do it for as long as the studiers asked them to. Nowadays? They are even better! Just kidding. You knew this wouldn't end well. 3 and 5 year olds failed spectacularly and 7 year olds barely approached the level 5 year olds used to be at.

Could they be wrong in their connection? Could it be related to diet? TV? Lack of parental discipline and involvement? Could the statute of limitations be way up on trying to remember something I heard on the radio? Very, very possible. But it makes one wonder, doesn't it!