Filed under: Pregnant celebrities, Celebrity babies, Celebrity parents

Actor Ethan Hawke and his girlfriend/former nanny, Ryan Shawhughes are expecting a baby together.

"I can confirm and they are thrilled," says Hawke's rep Mara Buxbaum. "No further details will be made available."

Hawke has two children from his six year marriage to actress Uma Thurman: daughter Maya Ray and son Levon Roan.

I wonder why so many men hook up with their children's caregivers: is it a primitive instinct that makes someone who cares for your offspring highly attractive or just because you are around each other so much?

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Filed under: Nursery decor, Child's room decor

Just because you have a little one doesn't mean you need to ransack the local Pottery Barn Kids to decorate their room. Why would you want a room that looks like everyone else in your neighborhood? How about using unique prints and colors for a look all your own?

When decorating the walls, JennSki's Etsy Shop offers all types of bright and colorful prints, ranging from $25 to $40 dollars. She makes fun collage-type prints of birds, modern unisex designs, as well as simple, serene prints.

Browse all of her work at her Etsy shop.

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Filed under: Family togetherness, Doctor's office

In early December I was diagnosed with one of the earliest forms of skin cancer on my face. This came as no surprise because my nose had been peeling for over 18 months despite the fact that I haven't been in the sun for years. I had a few nasty sunburns on my face when I was younger and that, plus genetics, lead to the demise of my facial skin. The dermatologist spent less than 30 seconds looking at my face before he said, "Uh-huh. Yep. Here's a prescription to help prevent this from advancing to a more serious stage. the process will hurt but it will be much better than full blown skin cancer, especially at your age." He wrote me a prescription and sent me on my way.

On January 1 I began the four week treatment,vowing to stick it out no matter how much it hurt. And hurt it has. Not only does my face feel as though it is on fire, I also look absolutely hideous. From my hairline to my collar bone I am covered with angry red splotches and crusty pustules. But what I find to be the most interesting part of this process, other than the fact that I will not expire from skin cancer, is my children's reactions to this diagnosis. My red headed daughter, Cassidy, nearly always wears sunscreen without having to be told so there is no new development there. However, she now peppers me with questions in her free time. She wants to know how I could have let myself get so badly burned that I am now suffering this treatment. She is curious about sun proof clothing and how she can avoid the same fate. My oldest son, Loren, is constantly concerned for my comfort and is even angry that my earlier sins have lead to my current pain. He has shunned sunblock in his more recent years but now vows to wear it when he is out snowboarding this winter. My youngest son, Devon, does not understand at the age of three exactly why his mommy hurts. He can see my red face and knows that I am in pain but he seems to think I have fallen and scraped my cheeks, nose and forehead. He holds my face in his small hands and worries whether or not he can find enough band-aids to help me.

Aside from the obvious medical benefits of my current treatment I am tickled pink, bad pun, that my children are learning from this experience. To have something hit so close to home about a concept as simple as applying sunblock is, I believe, a true gift. I know it is one they are now understanding and I can only hope it is a lesson they will carry with them always.

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Filed under: Teenager, 15-19 years, Making a Difference, Environmental

Auto shop was not an option at my high school, which is probably for the best. Bad things happen when I try to do anything more complicated than check the oil on a car. That isn't the case, apparently, for Andrew Angelloti who, at the tender age of sixteen, has converted his pickup truck to run solely on electric power.

Working part time as a life guard, Andrew saved up $6,000 to buy parts for the conversion including twenty batteries and a 60hp electric motor. The 1988 Mazda pickup now runs silently and cleanly, with a top speed of 55mph and a range of 40 miles -- enough to get Andrew to work and back.

As if that weren't enough of an accomplishment, Andrew is already working on another conversion, a Toyota Tercel. Like many teenagers, Andrew seems to be feeling the need for speed -- the new conversion will have a 120hp motor in order to get the top speed up to 80mph. (Not that he would ever go that fast, nu-uh, no way, that would be illegal.)

Back before I had kids, I was rather into electric vehicles, with plans to convert -- or, more accurately, have converted -- an older Land Rover, so I know how much work and planning goes into a project like this. This really is a notable accomplishment, especially for someone barely old enough to have a driver's license. Good work Andrew!

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Filed under: A Little More

"It's a miracle!" Bennett says when he sees the new plastic juice container in the bathtub. I'd rinsed it out earlier in the day and added it to his growing collection. To me, they look like so much advertising and used-up packaging, with the name-brand of the juice spelled out across a basket of fruit and banners promising "100% Juice!" and "Vitamin-C!"

Briefly, I wonder where he learned the phrase, "It's a miracle!" Miracles, for me, are like the 11 on a scale of 1-10. I save the term in reserve for the extra-special.

Bennett lifts one of the containers, looking at the words. Lately, he's begun noticing that letters are everywhere. He knows they mean something, but he's not sure what. He points and guesses, "O? M? H?" and then his fallback, "B?" Each time I shake my head no, he gets a little more crestfallen. I hug him and suggest we work together to learn the words, but he wriggles out of my arms and says seriously, "No, mommy, no letters, no."

I know how he feels: drawn to something, and yet ambiguous about what that something might mean to your life; uncertain about all the changes that are sure to follow, if you embrace it. Like now, in our new, old house with it's creaky floorboards and the loud, surprising swoosh! as the snow slides in great sheets from the metal roof.

It's all new territory to me--I can't immediately remember which kitchen drawer holds the spoons and forks, or which cupboard has the salt and pepper. The cupboards are handmade of pine, smoothed with age and use. There are shallow cups scooped out behind each drawer-pull from dozens of years of fingers touching the same spot, over and over. The drawer-pulls themselves, made from wrought iron, are shiny silver where they've been used most often.

Inside the cupboards, each face of the shelf-front has been decorated with meticulous cut-outs of paper pictures of fruit in a pattern: apples, grapes, strawberries, raspberries, plums. Someone loved this kitchen, once. A woman who saved old kids' jeans and buttons and flannel shirts, who kept a giant quilting loop hanging from a bent clothes hanger in the cellar. A woman who cut out each tiny apple, each bunch of grapes, then glued them to her cupboards where no one but her would see them. Who was she, and could she be me?

I keep circling it, just as Bennett circles the idea of learning to read--the feeling that if I embrace this life, I will become someone different, another kind of woman. And I wonder, will I like her better, or worse, than who I am now?

Later in the day, Bennett returns to his questions. He asks about the letters on the blanket across the back of the couch. I remember them only vaguely; my mind is tired and wandering. Pendleton, maybe, or Woolrich, but I can't make them out, because we are too close. I tell Bennett we're too close to see what they mean.

As I say it aloud, I realize that's exactly how I feel about my life, these days. I'm only able to see the moment; only able to see the black curve bumping up against itself, then looping back around the way it came, which leaves me thinking, Where are we going? It's only later that I can say, Ah, now I see it. It was there all along: lowercase e!

And I remember other instances when my children and I stood on the threshold of change, uncertain of the outcome. Nights of broken sleep, tears over the wrong kind of jam on the toast or the red mittens instead of the blue, like it was with potty training, or before that, talking. Even earlier, walking. So many changes, all of them now a comfortable part of the fabric of our lives. No wonder I sometimes forget that in the beginning, each step forward feels like a new frontier.

I try again to see Bennett's life through his 4-year-old eyes. To him, a plastic juice container is a miracle, with its bright colors and the pretty shapes of the kiwis and strawberries, the grapes and apples and raspberries. And there is the usefulness of a plastic container, especially in a bathtub full of water. It wasn't so long ago, really, that he mastered the art of pouring.

Maybe Bennett is right. I shouldn't hold it in reserve for special occasions: I should say it often and freely about the thousand things that occur every day that I've been too close to see. It's all miraculous; there are miracles all around us.

(This post is dedicated to Claudia, who faces her own new frontier, and who has always been good at recognizing miracles.)

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Filed under: Eating, Whining and Dining

Yesterday, ParentDish received a rather disturbing email from the Humane Society of the United States. They suspected we might be interested in an undercover study they'd recently conducted that resulted in extremely disturbing footage of a slaughter house in California. The footage shows workers at the plant abusing weak cattle with prods, jabbing them in the eyes, shackling and dragging them, and spraying high-pressure water up their noses and into their mouths in an attempt to get the weak animals to their feet.

The company featured in the video is the Hallmark Meat Packing Co,, a major supplier of the US National School Lunch program. The Humane Society wants you to know about the abuse that takes place there not only because it's sickening, but it's dangerous. By processing downed cattle, the slaughterhouse is endangering the health of people who end up eating its meat, as the link between downed cattle and mad cow disease has been confirmed.

The Humane society is now demanding tighter regulations on the slaughter of down cattle, but if I were a parent of a meat-eating kid in the school system, I think I'd be doing more than that: writing letters, finding out about "humane" meat processing companies and buying from them, and making changes to ensure my family didn't ever eat meat that came out of such horror. Shudder.

There is video footage available here, but a warning to all those of you who like to eat meat and who have children who do,too: this video is horrifically disturbing. if I weren't already a vegetarian, this video would have converted me.

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Filed under: Sleep, 2 years, Toddler

Riley's current nap schedule has him going to sleep around 12:30-1 PM, and staying down for a good two hours. This is when I typically contemplate the various chores I need to do, before eating half a bag of Cheetos and passing out in a pile of cheez-scented drool.

For that visual, you are welcome.

He's pretty consistent with the amount of time he sleeps -- it's almost always two hours exactly -- but every now and then I'll look at the clock (from my prone, saliva-laden position on the couch) and think, hmmmm. If it's been two and a half hours, I start thinking about whether or not I need to go in there. If it's creeping up on three hours, I get the ultimate Mother's Conundrum: wake the peacefully slumbering toddler, or enjoy every last second of blissful silence?

I suppose there are two schools of thought about a kid who takes a longer nap than normal (all other things being equal, meaning no illnesses at hand or extra-vigorous physical activity): 1) for whatever reason, his internal wakeup alarm failed and letting him sleep is going to screw up his bedtime, or 2) he's more tired than usual and needs the rest.

I tend to get paranoid about messing up his bedtime, so on those rare occasions when he stays crashed out much past that two hour mark, I go in and wake him. But man, I always feel kind of like a jackass doing it. You know that saying, let sleeping dogs lie? Yeah.

What do you do in those situations? Let your kid sleep as long as they like, or go in and wake them up?

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Filed under: Elementary school, 8-9 years, Internet, Child Custody, Emotions, Parental relationships, Divorce

Is it ethical for your child's psychologist not to tell you something to do with the other parent, even if it affects you?

My son began seeing a child psychologist when he was 8 and was diagnosed with ADHD. I was blogging on a site that is now non-existent and discussing some of the challenges I was facing as a mother. I did not know that my son's stepmother had discovered my blog and was saving all the entries and printing them out. She sent those entries to my son's therapist, who did not tell me she was actively reading my blog. I found out while sitting in the courtroom that my son's therapist had been reading my blog and had not told me.

After the trial was over, I asked her why she had not told me that they were all reading my blog. She claimed it was not her place to betray that confidence and that she had stressed to my son's father to tell me he was reading. What I did not understand was that my blog entries were causing my son's father to exhibit a lot of hostile behavior and negative feelings towards me. I was unaware of why there was constant tension, and I now feel like if I had known my entries were basically pouring gasoline on a forest fire, I would have stopped blogging.

It bothered me a great deal that this professional who was working to help my son was not telling me that she was aware of something I was doing to make the problem worse. In my opinion, she should have told me she was reading my blog and that it was causing a problem, but she felt like she was ethically unable to do so. I still disagree, because she was hired to treat my son, not his parents, so I feel like she owed no confidentiality to either one of us, only to my son. We were going to her for family counseling to try to learn to work together, cooperate, and co-parent. That was not possible when my son's father was reading the things I wrote in my blog about him and my personal feelings about the situation. I wish I had known so that I could have removed something that was making an impossible situation worse.

What do you think? Should a therapist treating your child tell you if you are doing something that might be causing problems with the other parent to the point of negatively affecting your child? Is that therapist bound by confidentiality and ethics if it is told to her by the other parent?

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Filed under: Lifestyle, High school, Public school

The trustees of the Toronto District School Board recently approved an "operational model" for an afrocentric school, intended to help black students having difficulty in school. In a press release, John Campbell, the board chair said that "The strategies developed by our staff following consultation with our communities, will hopefully more effectively address the needs of youth who have historically struggled in TDSB schools."

The actual school won't open for more than a year but the plan also calls for setting up a pilot program in three existing schools that would expand the curriculum to include the "histories, cultures, experiences and contributions of people of African descent and other racialized groups." The school and, presumably, the pilot programs would be open to all students.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I understand that this seems a little racist -- imagine the outrage there would be if they were promoting white culture instead -- but I also understand that there are cultural issues that can make school more challenging for African-American students. So, I don't know what to think about this. What do you think?

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Filed under: Pregnancy and Birth, Newborn, Infant / First year

Even though I have been through this whole newborn business once before, I find that I can barely remember anything about those first few weeks. How did we cope? What tricks did we rely on? It's all a blur, and as we count down the final days before our second son is born all I can hope is that it comes flooding back in some handy muscle-memory sort of way.

I do however vividly remember quite a few less-than-perfect parenting moments, which I'm hoping to avoid this time around. Here's just a partial list of baby bloopers I committed in my first year of motherhood:

o. Pulled too hard on a stuck diaper wipe, bringing the poorly-located box of wipes (FULL, by the way, and HEAVY) directly onto his still-squishy newborn head

o. Spilled some powder on the changing table and tried to clean it up by briskly smacking the fabric, sending clouds of talcum into his dismayed face

o. Snipped part of his finger while wielding the nail clippers, resulting in BLOOD

o. Fed him a Cheerio only to watch in slow-motion horror as he choked on it, then half-gagged him to death by digging my fingers in his mouth to remove it

o. Discovered MOLD in the top of his juice cup, AFTER he'd been drinking out of it

o. Gave him a tiny smidge of peanut butter before remembering everything about allergies, then spent the rest of the evening in a full-body sweat while examining him for symptoms of anaphylactic shock

I'd like to think that having at least a partial parenting resume this time will ensure a smoother application of Baby Handling Skills on our part, but something tells me that experience is no guarantee against committing more screwups.

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