M is hard on pants. At this point in the year every single pair will have a rip in at least one knee. I never bother fixing them particularly well, since she’ll have outgrown them by the fall anyway, but I do some nominal patching whenever the rips get indecent.

She had two pairs of identical jeans, one with massive rips in both knees, one ripped in only one knee. She’s low on shorts and the jeans still fit, so we decided to turn the more-trashed pair into shorts. After pinning them at a good length and cutting them several inches lower, I turned up a hem and stitched it down with the sewing machine. The thread is purple because I was too lazy to reload the machine with navy thread, but oh well, purple is M’s favourite colour right now anyway. Then I turned it up again and tacked it down by hand (grumbling only a bit) and added some little ribbon flower decorations for, as Olivia the pig would say, extra beauty.

I’m pleased with how they turned out. My theory is that they may withstand the summer.

Then I had two jean-legs left over. This is the less-destroyed one.

A piece of the more-destroyed leg became a patch for the other pair of jeans. Again with the purple machine-sewed hem and the hand-applique (with more grumbling).

It’s totally noticeable, but they just have to last through the summer — camp, mucking about in barns, etc. — so who cares.

Then (having been called on to sew up a light flanellette skirt for M’s doll that same morning) it occurred to me that the leg of the jeans was probably about the right size for a doll skirt. I cut it off at an approximately suitable length, used the machine to sew a single rough hem and added a bit of elastic. Done! Pretty good for a five-minute project.

Sadly it’s a little too tight for Ms. Doll to wear while riding her horse, but she can wear it post-ride.

And there endeth the jeans.

Jane Siberry with k.d.lang – Calling All Angels

a man is placed upon the steps, a baby cries
and high above the church bells start to ring
and as the heaviness the body oh the heaviness settles in
somewhere you can hear a mother sing

then it’s one foot then the other as you step out onto the road
how much weight? how much weight?
then it’s how long? and how far?
and how many times before it’s too late?

calling all angels
calling all angels
walk me through this one
don’t leave me alone
calling all angels
calling all angels
we’re cryin’ and we’re hurtin’
and we’re not sure why…

and every day you gaze upon the sunset
with such love and intensity
it’s almost…it’s almost as if
if you could only crack the code
then you’d finally understand what this all means

but if you could…do you think you would
trade in all the pain and suffering?
ah, but then you’d miss
the beauty of the light upon this earth
and the sweetness of the leaving

calling all angels
calling all angels
walk me through this one
don’t leave me alone
callin’ all angels
callin’ all angels
we’re tryin’
we’re hopin’
we’re hurtin’
we’re lovin’
we’re cryin’
we’re callin’
’cause we’re not sure how this goes

M is very pleased with her newly-pierced ears. She chose studs with tiny pink pearls and tolerated the piercing with not even a squeak. I was a bit nervous that she’d get through the first ear and balk at the second, but I needn’t have worried.

It was oddly hard to find a place that was willing to take a child. The reputable and recommended piercing-and-tattoo places I called won’t touch anyone under thirteen, even with a parent present. If you’re an adult they’ll not only pierce pretty much any body part, they’ll brand you with a hot iron if you like. Such, I suppose, are the oddities of our current legal system.

I gave birth at Women’s College Hospital, and of all places I fully expected them to support my midwives. But they were unspeakably awful to them — rude, dismissive, demeaning, the whole gamut of bad behaviour. They topped it off by ignoring me (I was admitted unplanned, following a complication; midwifery patients usually go home shortly after the birth) as totally as they could, unless they were calling me by a name I don’t use and rolling their eyes at me. I was, to put it mildly, unimpressed that a hospital that purports to support women’s health behaved so badly to an entire profession that not only purports to, but does, support women’s health..

Nursing moms need more support: Toronto

A study by Toronto Public Health of 1, 500 first-time mothers in this city found that while most new moms try breastfeeding in the hospital, only about 63 per cent are still doing it exclusively by the time they’re discharged from hospital.

Six months down the road, only 17 and a half per cent of moms are not supplementing their child’s diet with formula, the study titled Breastfeeding in Toronto – Promoting Supportive Environments found.

Breastfeeding takes support. Serious support, from the new mom’s partner, family, and all health practitioners and support staff. If you have a hospital that cares so little about women that it rolls its eyes at midwives and ignores their patients, how well supported in breastfeeding do you suppose women who give birth there tend to feel? And that’s the hospital that’s theoretically most sensitive to womens’ needs.

Yeah. No surprise there. No wonder that only 63% are breastfeeding by the time they leave hospital — probably less than 36 hours after giving birth. Shame on the hospitals.

(For the record, with my midwives’ support, I breastfed my daughter for a year.)

For SK, fine, this is more-or-less appropriate: you’re five years old. You can practice reading and cutting and sticking and since it’s your first go-around with the Food Guide you might learn something. Grade 1… OK, maybe it’s a good review. Grade 2… WTF? This again? And now again in Grade 3, by which time the whole thing is just a waste of paper and gluesticks and everyone’s patience, even with the novel additions of “Good Tooth Care,” “Physical Activity” and “Safety Rules” to the assignment. This time the photocopied food pictures were so bad you could barely tell what they were, so we cast about for alternatives.

I thought it would be more interesting to do something a bit more active and connected to reality, as well as finding some way to inject some actual new learning in there somewhere.

First, we needed some pictures of food. Being lazy, I figured taking our own pictures would be faster and easier than doing a whole pile of image searches. We have a camera, we have food. Ta da! So I settled on having M explore the kitchen, pull out foods from each food group and stage a bunch of pictures. So far so good.

I have strong opinions about teaching kids to use technology appropriately — so how to work in some learning on that? I remembered I had a demo of Comic Life, which makes photo montages super-easy. M could learn how to use it in about three minutes (thus actually learning something), and then we could all escape the whole cut-and-stick part of the assignment which, by Grade 3, is neither fun nor appropriate. Excellent.

It took us about an hour to do the photos, since not only did M need to dig about in the fridge and cupboards but the various foods had (apparently) to be artistically arranged with some stuffed animal models (and we had the Physical Activity, Dental Care, etc. photos to do). I think searching for all the images we needed would have taken much longer.

It took M about another hour to put together her seven collage pages and get them all properly labelled in Comic Life.

My only involvement was to take the pictures I was told to take (I could’ve let M do it but my camera is new and I’m still a bit overprotective of it, and her own camera is not great) and to get M started on Comic Life — no helicoptering necessary. I’d share the final result but the 7-page PDF is 358Mb (oof).

Anyway. I thought I’d share the idea since this assignment seems to be issued annually to pretty much everyone and I think this version of it a) is super easy, b) is more active and less tedious than the usual cut-and-stick, c) helps the kids connect their own foods and activities to Food Guide concepts, and d) involves an appropriate bit of technology use.

Also: no effing gluesticks. Hallelujah!

Edited to add: here’s a screenshot of one page

D: Three.
Me: Nine.

Child: Nope, six hundred and sixty-six!

Me: How come you like that number?

Child: I dunno, I just do. (laughs slightly evilly)

Perhaps the problem needed to be approached from a different angle, she thought. What if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger and held overnight? How long would you have to leave him outside, and unattended for that to be likely to happen? When she asked people to take a guess, the most she ever heard was three months. Some people ventured a day, an hour, and even – implausibly – ten minutes.

…

The answer to Skenazy’s question was… 750,000 years. By reframing the way the risk was framed, she took the focus away from one, and placed it on what the chance was in real time – and 750,000 years is a far more arresting and reassuring number than one in 1.5 million.

…

“I haven’t seen horrible diseases sweeping the country as a result of any child rearing technique that we’ve been using, whether it’s drinking baby formula or using a sippy cup,“ she says. “So, rather than worry about these, I worry about cars. They are the number one way children are killed.”

There are lots of interesting statistics down the side of the article (because it is STATS, after all). I would’ve like to see similar “one in” and “x years” numbers for other forms of child mortality, particularly car crashes and injuries from toys. They do give either numbers or rates-per-million, but without numbers you can compare directly it’s hard to grasp how many orders of magnitude there are between the various risks. Some sort of graph or image, even, might help, since our brains are notoriously bad at relative risk analysis.

Anyway, great interview with Ms. Skenazy. Her blog Free Range Kids has much more.

• Unnumbered form about the Safe Arrival program, requiring my signature, the name, room and grade of my kid. Rendered useless by the need to return the form, thus removing any reminder of the Safe Arrival procedures from my house.
• Form 511H, Walking Excursion Form – Immediate Community. So they can take my kid outside the school fence. Requires kid’s name (twice), teacher’s name, my name and signature, date.
• Form 511K, Physical Education Information and Intramural Information/Permission. Two pages long; summary: sometimes kids get hurt. It’s not like gym is optional, so what is the earthly point of this form? Requires name (twice) and grade/class of my kid, my name (twice), signature (twice) and date (twice).
• Form 511E, Medical Information Form. Endless detail, mostly about allergies and Epipens. (Is it the school’s business if my child sleepwalks?). And yes, of course the school may call a doctor in an emergency. Sign, date.
• Unnumbered form lecturing us about lunch hour procedures (“Lunchroom supervision is provided only for those students from grades 1 to 8 who cannot go home or make other arrangements” [like what other arrangements??]). Oh, I’m so terribly sorry my kid is inconveniently present all day but you know what? The school day overlaps most people’s work days and watching the kids over lunch is a perfectly normal part of the school deal. Rather contradictorily they point out that if kids who do go home are late coming back they may be required to stay for lunch. Make up your mind, folks! Requires kid’s name, schedule, grade, teacher’s name and room number (surely one of these would do?), and my signature signifying that I’ve read their snarky lecture.
• Unnumbered Code of On-line Conduct form making me responsible for upholding the school’s policies, which are not provided for me to review. Sorry, but I am not signing this one. What my kid does during school hours on school computers under school supervision has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Also, it isn’t specified whether or not the kids are expected to follow these mysterious policies outside school, and what I let my kid do on our own computer is not the school’s business. I leave the line acknowledging that my kid will be using computers at school (like they need my permission for this) and cross out the rest.
• School year calendar listing PA days and holidays, separately.
• Class newsletter. In Comic Sans. WHY? Reiterates school hours (which seem to change every year) and which exits the kids use, as well as lecturing us about how to make a healthy lunch, lecturing us on the importance of reading, lecturing us on the importance of the mandatory ($6) planners, lecturing us about appropriate school supplies, and more. Lecture lecture lecture. Pthtththbbbbt.
• Another calendar, very hard to read. Oh good, the kids are on a 7-day cycle this year so things like gym and library are even harder to keep straight. Of course, gym and library are not marked on this calendar OR the other calendar. Eventually I find them hidden in a corner of the class newsletter. I foresee a boring half-hour with this calendar and some coloured pens.
• Unnumbered form requiring $6 for a planner. What, no signature required??
• Unnumbered general Contact Information Form, in case my name wasn’t clear enough from the previous five billion forms. Comic Sans again makes me wince. I yet again cross off Mom’s Name and Dad’s Name and replace them with Parent/Guardian 1 and Parent/Guardian 2, and add yet another short note pointing out that there may be kids in care or in gay families, and inclusion never hurts. I do this every year (I can’t possibly be the only one) and yet there Mom and Dad remain on the form. There’s just no excuse for schools to have Mom & Dad on their forms in 2009. For shame.

And that seems to be it for the moment. It seems choir hasn’t started yet so I don’t have the form for that — as if it’s any of my business if my kid wants to join a school program during school hours — and apparently the Pizza Day folks haven’t quite got things together yet, so we still have those forms to look forward to. Whee.

The thing that bugs me most? I fill out these forms every.single.year. So do the other 950 parents at M’s school and probably thousands and thousands more across the city. All this paper and all this wasted effort! What did they do with the other four years’ worth of forms I’ve filled out? Why on earth isn’t all this information kept in a database for the duration of my child’s stay at the school? At worst it should be printed and sent to me each year to initial or update, but really it ought to be online for me to review and update. Remind me what year it is again? Or maybe what century we’re in?

The thing that bugs me almost as much: These things are SO badly designed. Why do I have to fill out my name and my kid’s name twice on many forms? Why (at the very least) is this not all one multi-part form? If you’re going to send these things to hundreds or thousands of people, put some effort into effective design!

Thing that bugs me quite substantially: The tone. The patronizing condescension. The air of mistrust and hints of disapproval. Please. Talking to me as if I were both six and slightly prone to misbehave does not make me want to fill out your forms.

Another thing that bugs me quite substantially: The unnecessary jargon. A whole page describing a Safe Arrival Program, which I can sum up as: call the school if you’re kid’s going to be absent? Two pages for the Phys Ed/Intramural one, which is: kids sometimes fall down? And these are the people who are supposed to be teaching my child how to communicate? Gaaah! Speak like normal people already, and if you’ve forgotten do that, hire a plain-language specialist.

Thing that also bugs me: Comic Sans. Let’s ban it. Nobody over the age of ten or so should find Comic Sans even slightly acceptable for formal communications.

This pile of forms is due tomorrow, as at least three forms plus the class newsletter remind me. By now I am in such a cranky rebellious temper that I am sorely tempted to hold on to them until Tuesday, just because. But I suppose it’s a little early in the school year to be that openly antagonistic, so I shall dutifully send them off tomorrow.

And now I shall have a beer and blow off my antisocial crankiness with an extra-loud belch.