Left to right: William, Owen and their cousin Jack. Adoring the heck out of a tree and each other.
(sorry for poor quality; iPhone is useful for a lot of things, but taking good pics isn’t one of them.)

I was just going through some pictures from our trip to the Minnesota Ren Fest last fall, and got a kick out of the differences between the boys’ attitudes. Look at these pictures of William, who was 3-almost-4, with his jousting partner:

See the enthusiasm? The sweet, pure pleasure on his face?

By contrast, look at the two olders (7 and 9 at the time):

Everything about their body language and expression says “Mom, this dweeb is totally TOUCHING us.”

Look how Isaac, on the right, is leaning away, and looking to the ground as though he’s embarrassed. Jacob, on the left, is stony-faced, refusing to smile.

But once Good Sir Costumer moved away, the boys lit into each other with their swords, dueling bitterly to the last pop. I could almost see Ren Faire Employee in the cards for one of them, seven or eight years down the road.

Maybe Isaac. He was especially impressed by the pie-eating contest.

In case you didn’t figure it out from the link in my previous post, here’s my little (currently “about the size of a peanut”) surprise: Yep, I’m pregnant. Pretty soon we’ll be thinking in odd numbers again: Five kids. Seven family members. Three carseats in the Caravan. Etc.

It’ll be my first-ever spring baby (my kids currently have September, October, November and December birthdays), the first time I’ll be pregnant on Christmas or New Year’s, and so far (crossing my fingers–I’m 11 weeks) the first time I’ve made it all the way through the first trimester without throwing up.

It feels funny to announce this since as late as May we were still waffling on whether or not we wanted more kids at all. Though my life is full with four, I enjoyed adding the fourth to our family so much that it really opened me to the possibility of more. I love the noise, the chaos and the bustling feeling of a house full of kids. And when it came down to it, my two most sticky reasons for not having another were: 1) I didn’t feel like being pregnant/giving birth again and 2) As it stood, my last child would be 18 when I was 46. That felt so young and I really clung to that number in my mind as some kind of trophy. But while I think those are generally both very valid reasons to stop, for me, they just weren’t compelling enough (after all, pregnancy is over in a blink — heck, I’m almost 1/3 of the way through already and I’m still adjusting to the idea! — and labor/birth, if you’re me, is just a few hours, and relatively easy hours at that. And 49 isn’t that much older than 46, anyway.)

Once we made up our minds to give it another go, we figured the faster the better, since neither of us are getting any younger, and I like having kids relatively close together (didn’t want to have to have a sixth just to give #5 his/her own buddy) And wouldn’t you know it…I’m just as crazy-fertile as I was four years ago.

I’m just barely showing (to me, anyway–others swear that you could never tell unless you already knew) and am bracing myself for the onslaught of “What? FIVE? Are you NUTS?” But I had plenty of practice with #4, so I’ll be in a much better place to just laugh and let it slide off my back…and as much as I was dreading the preggo part, I’m quite enjoying being pregnant this time around. As with anything else, it seems experience makes pregnancy–and dealing with silly comments–that much easier. Now let’s just hope the same can be said for the fifth birth, too.

I have an article in the current (September 08) issue of Natural Health magazine–it’s on the back page, called “Learn to Listen”.

I’m also quoted in a story in the September 08 issue of Fit Pregnancy magazine about what to expect during your postpartum hospital stay. It’s their 15th anniversary issue and packed with great content–definitely worth a read!

It recently came to my attention that a lot of my old columns (I’ve been writing it for four + years….there are a LOT of old columns!) are no longer available online, so from time to time, I’m going to re-post some of my favorites. Here’s one I wrote when Owen was a baby:

When I was pregnant with my youngest son, Owen, I signed up for a yoga class, but quickly dropped out. I love yoga, but something about the nausea and lightheadedness I felt pretty much every time I tried to bend my enormous body in half took the joy out of it for me. So I looked forward to the class with moms and new babies under two months old with great anticipation. What could be better than spending an hour and a half in blissful yogic union with six other mothers and their babies?

I don’t know what I was thinking.

Before we were even sitting on the mat, Owen decided he didn’t like this new place, and began to protest—loudly. Other babies followed suit. Some whimpered, some cried, and some outright screamed their little heads off. Other babies decided this was as good a time as any to pass loud gas and fill their pants. Some moms walked their babies around, some changed diapers, and some retreated to the feeding stations set up along the walls. By the time the instructor invited the class to join her in the sound of “Om”, the room had filled instead with the sounds of cries, flatulence, grunts, and gulps—as well as an unmistakable odor. It sounded something like this:

Instructor: And now, I would like you to go inward and find that still, quiet place…

Baby # 1: Pbbbbbbbbbbttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

Instructor: …for it is from this quiet place inside us…

Babies #2 and 3: WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Instructor: …that we begin our practice of Yoga.

Chorus of babies: BURP! GURGLE! WAHHH!

I looked around the room, but couldn’t tell if the other moms were enjoying themselves or not. Everybody seemed to have on her best poker face: if any of my classmates were close to breaking out into hysterical laughter or running screaming from the room, I couldn’t tell. They all looked serene and calm—certainly a lot calmer than I felt. Yes, you’d think that by the time I was on kid #4 I’d have a clue: babies are unpredictable. They cry and poop, and they do it when you want them to do it the least. I get it. But darn it, I wanted to do yoga, not walk the floor and listen to the same crying I get at home, only in stereo.

After I went home, I debated whether or not to return to class the following week. Suddenly it dawned on me that while I might not have had a lot of opportunity to stretch my body during the class, it had been a perfect opportunity to exercise my ability to quiet my mind, which is a big part of what yoga is all about. So I decided to return to the class—after tweaking my expectations a little.

The following week, Owen surprised me by happily lying on the mat through about half the class, while I got to move my cramped muscles in a way I hadn’t in months. Of course, he cried plenty, too. The seven babies in the class kept up their constant symphony of bodily noises and shrieking, but I just reminded myself to breathe, grabbed a stretch or two when I could, and tried to spend the rest of the time enjoying my baby, who I noticed had already changed dramatically from just a week before.

This is motherhood. Babies don’t care that you would really rather be in downward-facing-dog; they just want to be held and fed. They don’t care if you’ve eaten yet today or that you haven’t had a chance to go to the bathroom in hours. Babies are egocentric by design: ultimate self-centeredness is their entire means of survival. It can be frustrating. It can be boring. But it will pass.

I’m taking a lesson from my yoga class. I’m not always going to be able to have exactly the day I’d planned, and many of the details of my day-to-day life are now out of my hands. All I can do is adjust my expectations, do the best I can, and try very hard to access that still, quiet place within me.

For I have discovered that when I am in that place, I can remain calm even when a not-so-fresh-smelling baby is screaming in my ear. And that’s a coping skill worth having.

I first got online in the early 90s, when my aunt signed up for America Online (probably at a rate of about $3/minute). I was fascinated by the chat rooms, but encountered my fair share of nasty personalities. In my naivete, I believed they were all real, if cranky, racist, or just plain delusional. But after I got my own connection to the WWW in 1995, it didn’t take me long to realize that it’s a good idea to be very, very wary online. Well-meaning message board users were taken advantage of by posters claiming to be in financial need or claiming to have lost a child. I personally engaged in a three-month instant-message “friendship” with a young mother who one day told me that she was just a bored teenager who enjoyed yanking my chain. I realized at that moment how obvious her fakery had been–I was just trusting enough to give her the benefit of the doubt. Though I always wondered–how could any teenager be so bored that they’d actually want to chat with a married stay-at-home mother for hours under false pretenses?

This NYT article about internet trolls is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a long time. I thought it was a fine piece of reporting, but then in the comments, it was suggested that the reporter himself had been trolled by the trollers (they made themselves look crazy, the argument went, to get publicity for their “movement”.) However, if that’s true, I’d say they’re even more morally empty than the article suggests.

Looks like I might need to engage in a little “trolling 101″ discussion with my kids. First talking point? If you’re feeling bored or revolutionary, come talk to me before you start playing around with false identities online. I promise, I can give you something a lot more constructive to do.

This week I’ve stumbled across a few different conversations about raising large families–two of them in relation to Katie Allison Granju’s Babble.com essay about why she wants a big family (both at Babble and also in the comments section on her blog post about it), and one in a discussion about the Ionce family with 18 children over at the Womb Within blog.

Now, as somebody who’s written a book on raising larger families, you might think I just love debating the topic. But I often regret getting involved in these conversations, where the assumption often seems to be that large families automatically become a drain on the system and (of course) that parents of many and their children are miserable, attention-starved people. Inevitably, somewhere along the line, somebody makes an assumption like this based on: a family they once knew. A TV show they watched a few times. The complaints they heard from an adult who grew up in a big family. Their income taxes, which they feel are too high and imagine are all the fault of poor, uneducated people having too many babies.

Now, I don’t mind anyone’s having or expressing an opinion–I’ve got plenty of them, and I don’t always have solid research to back them up–but what always amuses and amazes me is how vehemently some people will argue against something that they themselves have no direct experience with.

The only real fact-driven, legitimate arguments I’ve seen coming out of these debates center around environmental issues. I don’t agree that the small number of American families who choose to have bigger families is a threat (fertility levels in the US hover right around replacement rates; we really do have enough resources for everyone if our culture–big and small families alike–would take some steps to quit wasting them; overpopulation in other countries has little to do with how many children Americans have; and wait a sec, how come I never see anyone criticizing dog breeders?), but even though I don’t agree, I can still understand the argument. What I can’t understand is passionate, disgust-ridden arguments (I especially love when they use words like “litter!”) against what life must be like in a big family. Unless you’ve experienced it–and not just in your own family, but a few others, too, for comparison–how can you know what it’s like?

I don’t want 14 or 16 or 18 kids. But it only takes a little imagination to see that a home with 14 or 16 or 18 kids could very well be a happy one. It may not look like MY house or YOUR house or the typical American household, but holy canoli, whoever said we typical American parents are getting it right, anyway?

I could rail against having huge families, but what do I have to base it on? A half-hour TLC special? And even if you think the Duggar family is “creepy”, a word I’ve heard thrown about quite a bit in relation to them, how does that apply to other big families? What about all the miserable people in smaller familes…for instance, the Hogan family isn’t doing so hot; does that mean nobody should have two kids? And I know a lot of people who have complaints about their families: they didn’t get along with their siblings, felt they had too much responsibility, felt they didn’t have enough. What does it prove, except for whatever reason, the dynamics in their particular family led to an unhappy childhood?

I have experience with raising a family of four kids. My family of four kids, not anyone else’s. But I spoke to dozens and dozens of parents and kids with between four and eleven children while writing my book. Yes, a few of the interviews made me cringe, and had I had a bias against big families, I guess I could have filed them away as ammo. But the vast majority of the responses came from what seemed like loving, attentive, responsible parents in functional and happy homes. I bet I’d get a similar ratio if I surveyed a group of smaller families, too.

As for what it’s like to grow up in a family of 18 kids? I imagine it could be awful. I imagine it could be wonderful. Just like growing up with no siblings, or one, or two, there are a lot of factors at play that shape a family’s life. Truly, though? I don’t know. And unless you are one of a very, very small number of people who’ve experienced living in a very large family firsthand? Neither do you.

A few months ago, I received an invitation from a PR person to take my family on a trip to a popular Midwestern family destination. I wasn’t sure how the PR firm had found me; they mentioned liking my blog, but I assumed that they had also seen that I have written about midwestern travel and lifestyle for magazines like Midwest Living, Michigan BLUE and AAA Living and the e-mail was worded similarly to other press trips I’ve been invited on.

When we got to the destination, I picked up my meal vouchers and press pass, and that’s where I saw it: below my name, on the line that would usually read “Freelance Travel Writer” or list the name of the publication I was writing for, it said “MOMMY BLOGGER.”

I cringed, then felt indignant. Mommy blogger? That’s what I am? Not a published writer, not a blogger who happens to cover motherhood in addition to other topics. Just…mommy blogger. For one thing, I don’t even LIKE the word “mommy”…it’s always felt kind of smarmy and whiny to me, and it’s more of an affectionate title used by young children than a descriptive term. Used in conjunction with “blogger”–and written on the line that would usually indicate my credentials–it felt almost like an insult.

I know that Mommy Blogger seems to be the title of choice for many moms who blog. At BlogHer, after all, there was an entire track of MommyBlogging panels; and a lot of women use the title proudly or at least readily. And maybe some use it ironically, sort of like re-claiming the word “bitch” or “queer”…a way to take a title that somebody might try to use to diminish us as a whole, and instead find power in it.

I can understand that, I guess, but I still don’t like it, because no matter how proudly we may use the title, the fact is that, at least to me, MommyBlogger still sounds kind of silly and trivial. While I know not everyone shares my distaste for the word “mommy”–and I definitely don’t stand in judgment of people who like that word–I don’t appreciate how it’s applied across the board to mothers who blog. And as much as I’d like to think they are, I don’t imagine that the non-bloggers people using and hearing the term are doing it as some kind of pro-mom-blogger political statement.

The sound of the title aside, I feel like my writing and blogging stands on its own without having to be linked with my maternal status–yes, I am a mother even when I write, but I come to the page as a complex individual, not just a “mommy”. Also, I spend my whole life being a mom; writing is something I do for myself, even when I am writing about my kids; and even though I don’t completely remove my “mom hat” when I write–I just kinda slide it over and make room for the “writer” hat–I write as a writer, not a mommy.

And what about those of us who blog, and are mothers, but don’t write solely about our kids, primarily about our kids, or at all about our kids? Would you call Guy Kawasaki, who also has four children, a “DaddyBlogger” if he mentioned his kids from time to time? Does the term “daddyblogger” regularly get used to describe men who, just like we mothers, write about their kids in addition to their lives and their jobs and their interests?

I’m not generally one to get my knickers in a knot over terminology. Though I can see why it might bother some, I really don’t care if somebody calls me “hon” or “girl”. But “mommyblogger” gets me fired up, maybe partly because it just seems to be used so unquestioningly. I wonder why we accept this term so readily and why there doesn’t seem to be more debate over it (maybe there already was and I missed it?)

I have yet to refer to myself as a “mommyblogger”, but more and more, other people are referring to me as one. I know it’s done with positive intent, but the fact is, I just don’t like it. I’m a mother who blogs. I’m a writer with children. I write about my husband sometimes, but you don’t call me a “Wifeblogger”, do you? The title of “mommy” is only appropriate in the context of my relationship with my kids. In other words, my sons can call me Mommy. The rest of the world, on the other hand? I’d rather they didn’t.

This is my latest column, but it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately so I wanted to re-post it here.

When my 8- and 10-year olds were 3 and 1, we lived on the third floor of an apartment complex. That meant that every time we wanted to go outside, I had to schlep two kids up and down two flights of stairs, plus another flight of stairs on the outside of the building.

If we were going to the pool, I also had to carry towels, floaties and other water gear. If we were going for a walk, I had to get the stroller down those same stairs.

And I did this several times a day, every day, because my kids wanted so desperately to be outside. They’d stand with their noses pressed against the sliding-glass door overlooking the courtyard, looking depressed. Or they’d go out onto our little balcony until they made me too nervous because they seemed to be plotting a way to jump over the edge.

Something has definitely changed. As my kids have gotten older, they seem to have lost the drive to go outside. Not only does it almost never occur to them to go out of their own accord, but they frequently act as though I’m torturing them when I boot them out the door.

I know I’m not alone. Think back to your childhood: like me, I’m guessing a lot of you ran out (or were thrown out) the door shortly after breakfast on a sunny summer morning, not to return until lunch (or for a Popsicle break or to beg for ice cream money). Then you were back out until dinner.

After dinner you might get a couple more hours of play, finally turning in when your parents called you at dusk. Mosquito-bitten, scabby-kneed and filthy, you’d stumble home just to start it all again the next day. And if you were like me, you loved it that way.

But plenty of research has shown that not only do kids not play outdoors nearly as much as they used to, that that lack of physical activity and connection with nature is having a negative effect on their physical and mental health.

So what’s happened to kids? Why don’t they want to play outside?

A few theories have been thrown around. Kids are less likely to be at home during the day now, and are more likely to be in child care or after-school activities. When they are with their parents, their time is likely to be scheduled with sports, lessons and tutoring. That leaves less free time for riding bikes or playing kickball.

And you can’t underestimate the pull of the screen. Sure, when we were kids, there were cartoons on Saturday mornings and after-school specials to watch, and the occasional Disney movie that would keep you in on a Sunday night. But there were no 24-hour kids’ channels, no Internet, and not quite such an extensive array of game systems to keep you glued to a screen for most of the day.

The truth is, we parents are to blame for a lot of this. We let the kids zone out because it’s an easy way for us to keep tabs on them, we don’t want to argue with them. And it feels “safer” than letting them roam around outside.

We let them stay in because that’s where WE want to be - glued to our laptops and favorite programs. Kids aren’t just naturally losing the drive and desire to be outside. They’re learning it from us.

What’s the answer? There are a lot of little changes I’ve been implementing in our house to get the kids back into the great outdoors, but I’ve discovered that though I can lead the children to the yard, I can’t make them enjoy it when there’s nobody out there sharing it with them. The only way to do that is to get other kids playing outside, too, and make it seem like the happening place to be rather than in front of the computer or TV.

And the only way to do that might mean unplugging MYSELF, heading into the front yard with them, getting to know the parents in my community, and helping to create the kind of neighborhood I want my kids to grow up in.

It might mean going more than an hour without checking my e-mail sometimes, but I think I can deal. Our kids don’t know what they’re missing, but we do - and we may be the only ones who can help them discover it again.

What do you think? Are your kids playing outside less than you’d like? Have you come up with any creative ways to get them out the door again?