parenting

Portrait of the Young Art Appreciator

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 6 Comments

I brought my baby to an art museum last weekend. Specifically, it was the Van Gogh exhibition at the Phillips Collection, which was excellent. And it wasn’t even the first time he had been to an art museum – that was our visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. photography exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery when he was about four months old. (Admittedly, he slept through most of that trip.)

We went in part because I love museums and have since I was a little girl. I was obsessed with the New York State Museum when I was young, but my interest has expanded dramatically since then. In terms of the art world, I’m quite fond of the Impressionists, so I was excited about this exhibit. As Sprout is a quiet, calm baby, I didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t bring him. As it turned out, we weren’t the only parents with the same idea. We saw a number of babies in strollers and carriers. It felt very French, with babies being in a place that was definitely not kid-centric. To me, it demonstrated that our children are an essential part of our lives, but not everything we do is centered around their specific desires. While he’s too little notice it now, I think this is an important lesson for kids to learn. I vividly remember being on a trip as a kid and being bored silly on the day my parents did a wine tour. Even though the other activities were things that we mostly visited for my benefit, that stuck out because I realized that it wasn’t all about me. Although I was annoyed at the time, I’m glad in retrospect that my parents took that day for themselves. There’s something to be said for building character.

Beyond my individual preferences, I do think that visiting the art museum benefitted Sprout. I think he enjoyed seeing all of the colors and swirly patterns in Van Gogh’s work. Visual stimulation is very important early on in childhood and why not use stuff that’s appealing to adults as well? We don’t need Baby Van Gogh if we can see the real thing in person. I may have been imagining things, but he seemed particularly interested in the paintings Van Gogh did of a baby, which happened to be much less cute than him. In another exhibit, he also seemed drawn to a large photograph of a woman breastfeeding a baby and staring fiercely at the camera. I’m not sure if it reminded him of me or just made him hungry.

In terms of the big picture, I want to share a love of learning and museums with Sprout. In my opinion, the best way to build this love is leading by example and visiting these places as a normal part of our everyday lives. We live in the Land of Museums – they should be as much part of his childhood landscape as they are of DC’s geographical one. In fact, a story from a random lady at the museum illustrates the power of this attitude. Smiling at the baby, she said, “I’m 70 now and my mother brought me to my first art exhibit when I was 3 months old. The Rodin exhibit!” Now that’s quite a long-term influence!

Overall, the visit was a really positive experience. No one seemed put off by his presence and people generally seemed charmed that he was there. One even commented, “A little art critic!”

Based on the day, a few recommendations if you’re interested in bringing a baby to a non-kids museum:
1) Leave the stroller at home. We actually brought both the carrier and stroller, hoping to check the stroller at the coat check and put him in the carrier. (He’ll only tolerate the carrier for about an hour, substantially shorter than we planned to be out.) Unfortunately, they didn’t have space for the stroller, so we ended up having to push it around. While the exhibit was spacious enough for it not to be an issue, I still felt bad taking up so much space.
2) Anticipate only being able to see a small part of the museum. I can be a museum completist, but that’s not an option with a small child. We were able to see the entire exhibit because Sprout is observant and doesn’t mind getting pushed around, but the Phillips recommends not trying to see more than five pieces of art with a small child.
3) Keep an eye on the clock. I tend to lose any sense of time, so when Sprout finally started getting a little fussy, it took me a second to realize that he hadn’t eaten for quite a while.

Have you ever brought a baby or very young child to a non-kids museum?

To Schedule or Not to Schedule?

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

My mother-in-law recently commented that she was surprised at how “regimented” my husband’s and my parenting style is. I blinked and responded, “Really?” I tend to associate that word more with military school than our relatively laid-back life. While her use of that word was strong, I now understand after hearing her contrast her and our approach. Basically, we have a schedule for feeding him and sleeping (especially bedtime), while she did not. But it’s an strategy that works for us and I hope will continue to serve us well when Sprout grows older.

Currently, Sprout’s schedule is much more about providing discipline for us as parents than him as a child. If we didn’t maintain some sort of schedule, he’d hardly nap and turn into a very cranky baby. Similarly, he won’t tell us when it’s time for him to eat solid foods, so having an approximately scheduled time helps us remember. His schedule also keeps me honest as a mom. Having his bedtime routine start around 7 PM forces me to leave work promptly. The schedule creates time for play as much as it does the “essentials.”

Besides helping us as parents, I think having a structure will benefit him when he gets older. I’m a fan of the book Simplicity Parenting, which promotes creating a “rhythm” in your household. The author asserts that a schedule provides children with a home base they can return to when other areas of their lives are chaotic. For example, they know that whatever challenges they face at school, they can find comfort in having dinner with their parents.

But we’ll need to prevent ourselves from going too far in the other direction too. If Sprout follows my over-achiever tendencies, he’ll have a whole list of extracurricular activities. When there’s so much going on, it’s easy to overlook the most valuable time that occurs in-between organized pursuits. When I was in sixth grade, we had a lesson on study habits where the homework was to write out a schedule for your night. I wrote out my schedule to the minute, with activities even planned for the 10 minutes spent in the car. Did I, conscientious to the point of being a little obsessive, follow this schedule? No way. Because I didn’t schedule in any “non-scheduled” time to rest my mind or talk to my parents about my day. A schedule should be a coat that keeps you warm and enables you to explore the world, not a straightjacket that won’t let you leave the house.

Based on my philosophies and life experiences, I’m taking the same approach towards scheduling my parenting as I do my travel – being prepared for the “required” elements while making space for lots of free time and exploration. If you don’t prepare at all for your vacation, you spend half of your time trying to find a hostel or arguing about what to do next. You miss out on the best museum because you didn’t know about it or failed to make reservations. On the other hand, if you schedule every minute of the day, you miss out on unexpected pleasures not mentioned in guidebooks, like back-alleyways in Barcelona or ruined abbeys in Ireland.

Like everything else in parenting, it seems like scheduling is a matter of flexibility, finding a way to raft the river by working with the ebb and flow of our family, not against it.

Reading Where the Wild Things Are as a Parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 8 Comments

"Re-Reading Where the Wild Things Are as a Parent" Some books resonate with you as a child and then again in a totally different way as an adult. (Photo: Young man reading Where the Wild Things Are to a baby under a baby gym.)

When my husband was three, my mother-in-law was convinced he could read. After all, he flipped through the pages of Where the Wild Things Are as he spoke the words out loud with perfect timing. But it just happened that he loved it so much that he memorized the entire thing, word for word.

While I never memorized it myself, Where the Wild Things Are too holds a special place in my literary canon. As a teenager, I remembered it fondly, along with Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland.

But then a series of events illuminated how much the book still speaks to me, especially since I’ve become a parent.

Continue reading →

And you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Title from Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

Sometimes, I feel like a fraud. While I walk around pretending to be an adult, I am unqualified to hold the title. I have a good job, own a house, am married, and am a mother, but it’s all a facade. Lately, I’ve forgotten to do important errands at work, lost the thread of conversations, and even left my wallet at home during a week-long vacation. I feel scatterbrained, navigating my way through my messy house and life.

This feeling particularly scratches at the back of my mind when I think about my parenting skills. How on earth could they trust me with such a precious life? (I’m not sure who “they” are – perhaps a mysterious cabal of tsk-tsking old ladies that write parenting manuals.)

That voice is especially loud when I’ve made some dopey but innocent mistake. One such example happened at my sister-in-laws’ wedding last weekend, held at her fiancee’s family’s house. The plan was to have Sprout at the ceremony, then put him to sleep in an upstairs bedroom. With the baby monitor in-hand, we would be able to rejoin the party and celebrate. While I was fairly confident in this plan, I checked on Sprout about an hour after I put him to bed. Opening the door, I was startled to find the hostess of the party cradling my baby! She explained that her oldest son had heard him screaming and failed to calm him down. She then took Sprout from her son and rocked him back to sleep. Horrified that I didn’t hear him, I swallowed back tears, thanked her, and then almost grabbed him from her arms. Even though I knew that no long-term harm had been done, the drum-beat of failure pounded in my ears.

When an incident like that happens and Chris tells me, “You’re a great mother,” part of me can’t accept it. It feels like he and the rest of my family are trying to allay my insecurity, just saying it to make me feel better, regardless of the reality.

So it was reassuring to overhear my mom bragging about my parenting skills to my in-laws over Christmas dinner. I took Sprout to the living room to put him to sleep while everyone else stayed in the dining room. I don’t know how the subject came up, but I caught pieces of a conversation about our parenting. In it, I overheard my mom say, “She’s so selfless” referring to me more than once. Hearing it second-hand made it so much more real than if she said it to me directly. There’s a parenting technique of “gossiping” to your spouse or children’s toys where you tell them how great the kid is so that they overhear you but you aren’t directly addressing them. I doubt my mom was doing that on purpose – I’m not three years old – but it had the same effect. Hearing that my little slip-ups haven’t tarnished my overall parenting was a relief.

Now, when I screw up – which is of course, inevitable – I’m going to try to hear my mom’s proud tone instead my judgmental one. I would never say the things I think to myself to someone else, so why do I judge myself that way? Instead, I need to approach my failings with the same grace and patience I try to extend to others.

I also need to remember that parenting – and life in general – is a learning experience, which inherently involves failing. Last week, I said to Chris, “I don’t feel at all like an adult. I certainly didn’t graduate adult school.” To which he responded, “Well, yeah. Do you know what happens when you graduate adult school?” After a brief pause, I replied, “You die?” Considering the alternative, I don’t want to graduate quite yet – I still have plenty of learning to do.

A Child Shivers in the Cold

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

There’s an old joke that posits if Three Wise Women visited baby Jesus, they would ask for directions and bring practical gifts. (Or as my friend Deb said earlier this week, “Let us bring him silver and gold? What were they thinking?”) While the joke plays off of harmful sexist stereotypes, it does have a grain of reality – most portrayals of the infant Jesus miss a fundamental truth. They capture his innocence, but completely ignore his inherent messiness.

As I learned from the very first day as a mom, babies are gross. They are beautiful and amazing and disgusting. They come into the world in a rush of blood and other bodily fluids. They poop early and often, if everything goes well. They are capable of spitting up the entire contents of their stomach and appear to enjoy demonstrating this skill. Beyond showing the wide range of bodily functions, newborns have almost zero motor control. They hit themselves in the face, they hit you in the face, they scratch you while nursing.

As I believe Jesus was fully and completely human, I also believe he was fully and completely baby. Beyond the fact that they made babies look like shrunken adults, medieval portraits don’t capture the chaos of being a new mother, even if it is of “Immanuel.” Even the more naturalistic ones of Mary nursing Jesus express only the peace that can come with that, not the struggle or frustration so many mothers experience. It’s clear that the men that painted these were never “Daddies” (even if they were fathers) or had a theology that excluded that perspective. In contrast, I prefer the painting on the front of the book 4 AM Madonnas, which my pastor kindly gave me as a gift. Mary looks exhausted and overwhelmed, while Jesus looks happy and ready to play at goodness knows what hour.

Besides aesthetics, this portrayal of Jesus sanitizes him and his story right from the beginning. It elevates him to someone inhuman, removing the parts of being a physical being that people prefer not to think about. This perspective also eliminates the role of Mary and Joseph as parents. It fails to acknowledge that someone had to change the Holy Diapers and get up with him in the middle of the night when he was teething. While my personal theology doesn’t emphasize Mary as much as some Catholic churches, I think the Protestant church gives her short shrift. Too often, we think of Jesus as having been born and then parenting himself. Acknowledging all of these aspects – especially the “unseemly” ones – is fundamental to connecting with Jesus in all of his human-God essence. If we deny those things in Jesus, we deny them in us as well.

Lastly, this attitude towards baby Jesus as a miniature version of Christ on the cross influences how we parent, both as individuals and as a society. Thankfully, most people don’t go so far as (major trigger warning on the link) the child abuse-level “discipline” that the Pearls advocate, but we too often expect children to act like small adults. It’s so easy to forget how much babies and kids have to learn about the world and how little perspective they have. During the times when I have been tired and frustrated because Sprout won’t fall asleep or just keeps crying, I have to remind myself – “He doesn’t know any better. He’s just a baby.”

If Christians can remember that even Jesus was a helpless, smelly, gross, amazing baby, perhaps we as parents and society can treat our own children more like we would treat him, shining in that manger. That would be a true Christmas celebration.

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If you are looking for somewhere to visit in the Advent season, I invite you to my church, which practices “radical welcome.” For other thoughts on Christmas, check out my Christmas post last year, which linked my religion and my passion for social justice.