Life with Junior -- Archives
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Changes to Stanford Alumni Blogs
More >>Thank you for reading Stanford's alumni blogs. We want to notify our readers that we're taking our alumni writings in a new direction--forming one big community of bloggers rather than many blogs with specific topics. The blogs you've been reading continue to be available, but as archives only. All new posts will be on a single Alumni Blog (Click here to set up RSS notification). The bloggers whose writings you've enjoyed will, we hope, continue contributing on the Alumni Blog along with a whole new crop of bloggers writing about new topics. So jump in! Become a guest blogger, or simply read and comment on posts.
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Posted by Ms. Summer Moore Batte on Jun 21 2011 12:53PM | 0 comments
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Clearing out of the dorm
More >>The text comes in: "have to be out of dorm by 5 today. Any ideas where to stash stuff?"
Really???? Oh geeze. Love this procrastination, but no surprise. Afterall, from their perspective, they've been studying like crazy, writing papers, studying for finals, trying to cram the last quarter's worth of info. into their brains. Move? Not even a glimpse on their radar screen.
So...papers are in, finals are complete, sleep has happened (hopefully) and now they focus. NOW THEY FOCUS!?! How do I know where you should "stash stuff"??? BUT I don't say that. Instead, I think back to that wonderful advice given by the University of Colorado's psychologist during freshman orientation 2002, aka Parents' orientation, "re-phrase: I don't know!? Where are you going to store your stuff?"
That falls flat, needless to say, but you persevere with "is there storage where you're living next year?" "Maybe you should go online and f...
Posted by Mrs. Beppie Weintz Cerf on Jun 9 2011 8:31PM | 1 comments
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When Draw Groups Have Babies
More >>My best friends from my freshman dorm (okay, it's girls from that dorm plus a couple others we picked up along the way) have had a group email list since we graduated 12 years ago. Some weeks it's silent, and other weeks it's a flurry of nine-sided conversation. We're turning 34, and we're still a draw group, living the ups and downs of life together. One of the big "ups" (or downs, depending on the day) is parenthood.
Recently we gathered, virtually, in a hospital waiting room, emailing furiously as we waited for the sixth member of the group to announce the birth of her first child. As we jabbered back and forth about how long our friend had been in labor, when we'd get the announcement, if everything was okay, I had the most wonderful feeling: These are my people. Most of us met in 1995. And if you could have shown us then the emails we send today reminiscing about pre-labor cankles and sleepless infants, we'd have fallen over and died right there...Posted by Ms. Summer Moore Batte on Jun 9 2011 3:15PM | 0 comments
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Job Prospects 2011? Challenging!
More >>I've got a graduating senior this year ('11). What a difference from my last child graduating four years ago! Actually, two of our kids graduated in '06 and '07 and both were able to land jobs soon after graduation. This go 'round, fingers are crossed! According to the front page of the New York Times today, " many with new college degree find the job market humbling."
Here are the similarities in the job hunt with our kids: All used the resources offered on their respective campuses at their Career Placement and Planning Offices. Truth be known, some of these offices were better than others regarding resume writing assistance, job interview preparation, alumni networking, guidance or counseling services. No surprise. All were not shy in asking for our (the parents) help and assistance in their networking efforts, resume writing, cover letter writing, etc. But we've been out of the ma...
Posted by Mrs. Beppie Weintz Cerf on May 17 2011 1:38PM | 0 comments
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Wedding Season: How'd you meet?
More >>The Royal Wedding was a fairy tale come true! Truly wonderful!
I've got weddings on my mind! My eldest and only daughter got engaged this winter! It's our first marriage and what a fun ride this engagement has been (and I'm not even the bride!) You can read an engagement blog post I wrote as a guest of another blog here: Love and Lobster
The young man was her high school sweetheart, they attended the junior and senior prom together. They broke up fall of sophomore year in college, did their own things, dated others, lived life and a year ago (they're now 27) they reconnected! A nice story. That's what seems to resonnate with so many people when they hear it. People like hearing the story of marrying your "first love."
Princeton University boasts the most inter-alumni marriages of any college. Why? Well some say it's their "
Posted by Mrs. Beppie Weintz Cerf on Apr 29 2011 7:37AM | 0 comments
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Only Children Don't Have to be Lonely
More >>It’s getting near bedtime, and my son won’t leave our neighbor’s house. “I haven’t played enough,” he insists after spending an entire day with our neighbor’s kids.
An afternoon at the Exploratorium wasn’t enough. Alex had a grand time with Samma, sticking their hands in everything from fog machines and sand art spinners to enormous bubble blowers and beach balls suspended on a cannon of air. As the parent in tow, I felt like I was part of a giant Rube Goldberg machine, chasing my three-year-old and a kindergartener who have enough energy combined to power a steam train.
I got a chance to play Mom to more than one child, and my son had a taste of life with siblings for the day.
At the end of the day, the two hadn’t had enough of each other. The only moment of disagreement happened when Alex kept changing the channels while Samma listened to recordings of couples in conflict. Uh oh, I thought, the experi...
Posted by Ms. Li Miao Lovett on Apr 7 2011 4:22PM | 0 comments
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Watching out for our kids
More >>Nothing gets us parents more up in arms than the safety of our children. Okay, maybe that’s not the best metaphor, because there are threats that you can’t take a bat to – nuclear radiation, pollution, and the toxic substances that lurk in everything from baby bottles to bluefin tuna.
At my son’s new preschool, the adjacent parking lot will be torn up and replaced by a two-story structure for the VA hospital. I wasn’t too concerned at first, thinking it would shake things up for only a few weeks. VA personnel handled our questions at a parent meeting, allaying our concerns about the hassles of noise and lack of interim parking. Then the questions about safety came up. “I’m concerned about young children and babies being right next to the construction site. I have a nine-month-old,” said the dad to my left, a VA physician. It was reassuring to have several white-coated parents and engineers in the room. Would the barriers aro...
Posted by Ms. Li Miao Lovett on Mar 28 2011 1:19PM | 0 comments
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Village People
More >>Remember that old proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”? Somewhere along the line, we abandoned the village, coccooned into nuclear families, and decided we could raise our kids on our own. What the heck were we thinking?
With the prevalance of single-parent families and dual-working-parent families on the rise, it seems like more and more families are having to go it alone. I remember when I was growing up, if my mom got stuck at a client meeting, she would call my best friend’s mom to pick me up from school and watch me until she was done. Or one of my three aunts and uncles who lived with us would come fetch me instead. Those seem like improbable options in today’s world. How did we end up here?
For one thing, we tend to follow our job opportunities first before starting a family these days. Most of my friends embarked on their careers as soon as they finished college or grad schoo...
Posted by Ms. Eileen Hung-Kwong Tse on Mar 25 2011 12:03AM | 1 comments
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Under Pressure
More >>The documentary Race to Nowhere has been making the rounds in our communities, and all around me, parents are tsk-tsking the achievement-obsessed pressures put upon our kids today. In the Silicon Valley, where everyone is hustling to create the Next Big Thing that will Change Life As We Know It, the pressure is even greater as parents try to instill that drive to excel in their children at a very early age.
But it’s not just the kids who live in this pressure cooker. We parents are getting cooked right along with them. When my son started kindergarten, I was immediately approached by the PTA recruitment team, mostly comprised of the wives of the VP’s, CEO’s, and CIO’s that run companies like the one at which I work. They needed room mothers, fund raising task force members, traffic council volunteers (“traffic council” is a fancy word for being a crossing guard in the s...
Posted by Ms. Eileen Hung-Kwong Tse on Mar 4 2011 11:44PM | 3 comments
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Speak with, Um, Like Authority, OK?
More >>I spent the last couple of entries talking about my experiences with my daughter and language. It’s a topic that fascinates me. Why do we say things the way we do? How do we construct meaning out of words? Linguistics was one of my favorite parts of college and grad school, and I have gotten to interact with it every day for the last 18 years in my language classroom.
Recently, my colleagues and I have noticed a major shift in the way kids are speaking. It’s almost become a running joke to us how kids have lost the authority in their voices when they speak to us, to an audience, or to each other. Whether it’s the new trend of “up-speaking” where kids finish every sentence making it sound like a question even though it’s a declarative sentence, or the new practice of adding lots of “you know”-type words to what they say, many kids today are losing their ability to speak with conviction.
It’s pretty common in my ...
Posted by Mr. Alec MacKenzie on Feb 21 2011 5:37PM | 1 comments
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Just (Don't) Say, "No!"
More >>Our daughter was a dream baby. She slept through almost every night from the time she came home from the hospital, happily cooed and babbled in her bouncy chair at any event, and was just generally a calm, cool, collected little one. Of course, that all changed once she hit three.
There were no Terrible Twos at our house. Somehow those skipped us and turned themselves into the Threatening Threes. Not that we felt threatened by our daughter, mind you. It was the two of us who began the threatening. “If you don’t finish your carrots, there’s no dessert,” or, “If you don’t put your bike helmet back on, there’s no more bike riding today.” Our daughter had finally discovered that she could try to push limits, and we had finally become the official parental buzz-kills.
Of course we headed to the books and web sites that explained about how to deal with a belligerent child who didn’t want to do what her parents asked ...
Posted by Mr. Alec MacKenzie on Feb 14 2011 8:26PM | 0 comments
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The Kids' Speech
More >>I teach middle school English and Spanish, and it affords me the opportunity to hear some really great slang coming from kids’ mouths. For instance, I have learned that “shredding” is not only for Parmesan cheese or sensitive documents. My students also do it on the snowboarding slopes. And “sick” doesn’t mean a student has a fever or is sneezing. It means “cool”. Slang has come a long way from the “awesome”, “gnarly”, and “grody” words my peers and I used in middle school.
As the parent of a five-year-old and a language teacher fascinated with linguistics and how we speak, I find myself paying attention to the patterns of my five-year-old’s speech too. And while there are certain words and phrases that come out of her mouth that have no doubt been uttered since time immemorial (e.g. “But Daddy said…” or the ever-popular, “Why?”), my daughter seems to a...
Posted by Mr. Alec MacKenzie on Feb 7 2011 5:38PM | 2 comments
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On protests, and a mother's aversion to risk
More >>I think about my father’s past as I hear news from a distant continent about the Egyptian protests. At six, my father fled his native land for good, when the Communists took over all of China. He lived through a time of terror, the Japanese barrage of bombs from the east, the civil war between a growing Communist party that incited angry peasants to revolt and a corrupt Nationalist government desperately holding on to power. An all too familiar story for our times.
Ensconced in my life as mother, writer, and educator, I’m shielded from the gunfire, the shouts for justice, medicine, and mercy in Tahrir Square. Yet something keeps my gaze on these events. I’m not just a voyeur at the scene of a terrible accident.
In 1989, the protests in Tienanmen Square riveted my attention as an undergraduate at Stanford who had been divorced from political cares – until the trifecta of events that took place that year. We joined sympathizers in marching th...
Posted by Ms. Li Miao Lovett on Feb 7 2011 12:02PM | 0 comments
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Our Adoption Journey (The Conclusion -- for Now!)
More >>This is my last planned entry for “Our Adoption Journey”. I hope you found something along the way that connected with you whether you are adopted yourself, an adoptive parent, a birthparent, or just someone interested in the process. Of course, the one thing I have discovered going through our journey is that every experience is different. What was tough for us may have been easy for others, and vice versa. I don’t claim to be any sort of expert in adoption. I just know what I know through my own experiences, and I hope you learned something about adoption from them.
I know that only people who are registered with this blog are allowed to comment on it, but I also know from the moderators here that there are many others of you who stop by to read. If there are questions I haven’t answered or any other insight I can give you, please feel free to email me at [email protected]. Also, for anyone interested in the subject...
Posted by Mr. Alec MacKenzie on Feb 2 2011 5:24PM | 0 comments
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Stereotypes of Tiger Mom/Dad-parented Teenagers
More >>With the recent frenzy of debate on parenting caused by Amy Chua's "Tiger Mom" book and, perhaps, more notably, the published excerpt (for which, supposedly, Chua had no editorial input), many bloggers and other writers are chiming in with their own take on the issue. Of course, I would feel left out if I didn't jump on that bandwagon, too.
My son Cameron goes to a high school which has a majority of Asian students. Last year's valedictorian, a young man of Chinese descent, even quipped during his graduation speech that he had "enjoyed the diversity here. You know, 70% Asian...."
One of the hot issues related to the book and excerpt publication is that of stereotypes. Much of the discussion seems to hint that all Chinese (or even all Asian) parents take the Tiger Mom/Dad approach, creating an army of A-plus-earning, piano/violin-playing, socially vacant robots, certain to become estranged from their parents some day. I thought I would ask Cameron about some of the...
Posted by Mr. Marty Beene on Jan 31 2011 9:04AM | 0 comments
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Our Adoption Journey (Part 19)
More >>You may recall that when we waited for our daughter the first time around, we were contacted several times by women claiming to be pregnant birthmothers who ended up being fakes. They would call our home (the agency had suggested we get a toll-free 800 number and post it on the agency’s site so women could call us directly), or they would send us emails. Every one of them turned out to be a fake. And we’d always be left with the question: “Why even go through with contacting a waiting family, putting them through the emotional wringer by saying they had been chosen, and then disappearing?” Even though we had heard stories on the news about women like these asking for money from waiting parents, none of these women ever asked us for a cent. It was a complete mystery to us.
This second time around, we got smart. We decided not to put a contact phone number up on our agency’s site. Instead, we put up the agency’s toll-free number. That way...
Posted by Mr. Alec MacKenzie on Jan 27 2011 6:05PM | 0 comments
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Call me Slowpoke
More >>A week or so ago, Cameron finally caught up to me in height. Of course, I envisioned this as inevitable, and even wrote about it earlier, but, alas, I am now only tied for tallest in our household.
More importantly, I am no longer the fastest runner in our family.
This, too, was entirely expected, since we all slow down as we age, and Cameron has been steadily improving since he started running last year, but it hadn't actually happened until Thanksgiving.
He surpassed me on a technicality when I ran a "coaches race" at one of the invitationals the cross country team entered in October. My time was around a minute slower than the time he ran the previous y...
Posted by Mr. Marty Beene on Jan 24 2011 1:11PM | 1 comments
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A quiet voice in the storm over superior parenting
More >>After reading about Amy Chua’s ‘tiger mom’ parenting, I’ve been feeling a mixture of envy and indignation. I don’t need my child to excel at piano (he’s only three); I do marvel at her ability to sell books. What concerns me is how Chua doesn’t see beyond the blinders of her social class and privilege. That’s my beef with her philosophy, in an era where the middle and working class dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to, and - let’s face it - America isn’t the superpower it once was.
It’s easy to attribute this parenting style, Confucian in some ways, draconian in others, just to cultural background. Sure, I’m familiar with the truisms. My father (who was born in the year of the tiger) thought an A wasn’t good enough if the teacher could give an A+. I didn’t go to sleepovers or summer camp. Then again, growing up in an alleyway in Chinatown, I didn’t get to celebrate Christm...Posted by Ms. Li Miao Lovett on Jan 20 2011 8:54PM | 0 comments
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Our Adoption Journey (Part 18)
More >>Just as we had settled into a routine with our new little girl, the inevitable question from everyone began popping up: “When are you going to adopt another one?” We had always said we wanted to have two children, so it’s not like this inquiry was a surprise to us, but it made us realize that in order to start the process rolling for Baby #2, we’d need to partially take our focus off of Baby #1, at least at certain times. This proved too difficult at the time. How could I put my daughter down and miss her cooing or spitting up or smiling in favor of filling out adoption questionnaires? How could I miss one second of her?
We decided to wait a bit before we called the agency to start the ball rolling again. We reasoned that the process had to be smoother and shorter since they already had all of our paperwork filled out, T’s crossed, and I’s dotted. How wrong we were! We focused on our new little one, our jobs, and our family and friends....
Posted by Mr. Alec MacKenzie on Jan 16 2011 1:43PM | 0 comments
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"If You had Just Run Faster, You Would Have Won"*
More >>I tried something new this Fall: coaching.
Well, sure, I did the usual soccer and baseball coaching when Cameron was young, but that kind of coaching is primarily oriented toward participation and trying to find a way for even the klutziest kids to feel good about themselves, which I think is important for young kids.
But as kids get older, the focus does shift somewhat to be more competitive, largely, as I discovered, through their own goals and interests. If a coach has the "right" attitude, though, that more competitive focus can definitely be a fun thing. For me, I have always loved competing (I still do), and, while it's fun to win, I've never really given a rat's butt whether I win or lose.
In the Fall of 2009, I offered to be the "helpful parent" for the high school cross country team that Cameron had joined as a freshman. I did things like record the kids' times at interim miles during races, drive to workouts, etc. This past Fall, the coach asked ...
Posted by Mr. Marty Beene on Dec 28 2010 2:11PM | 2 comments
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