The Four Moms are: Kimberly at Raising Olives; Connie, at Smockity Frocks ; Kim at Life in a Shoe and Me.
Because I am a Charlotte Mason educator, I get these sorts of questions a lot:
Q. How did you find time to read when you just had littles?
Sometimes, I didn’t. More often, I simply neglected household chores that other people consider necessities and I did not (and neither did my husband). People laugh when I say that, but it’s true. There are some things I wish I had done better, but by and large I do not regret reading good books when I could have been ironing, sweeping, dusting, or washing windows instead. I do wish I had done dishes more regularly, and that I had worked harder at putting things away instead of putting them down (likewise, I wish I’d done better at teaching these habits to the children). But I figure it takes about the same amount of time to dust the house whether I do it once a week or once very six months- plus, if you wait long enough, you can use the vacuum cleaner.
I usually had one thoroughly childproofed room where I read while the babies played on and around me Fortunately, my husband didn’t mind. I also had a head-start on a lot of reading because I read voraciously from childhood on, and my parents did introduce me to good books, art, and music.
If you are familiar with Librivox, they have a lot of good books as audio files. I did do some ‘reading’ by listening to audio books. One place we lived in particular, the library had an outstanding audio selection. I took very long showers while listening to Bleak House by Dickens.=) My kids still remember that.
Q. Don’t you think Miss Mason would have used movies had they been available to her?
No, I don’t. One reason is because movies were very much available to her. They weren’t talkies, it’s true, but nobody much cared at the time, the general public was very much enamored with this new form of entertainment. The Motion picture industry was so large that ten years before Miss Mason’s death there were multiple fan magazines, and ‘picture palaces’ or motion picture theatres/theaters, and cinemas all over the world. The Gish sisters,Tom Mix, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, and Fatty Arbuckle were famous a decade before Miss Mason died. Stories from the pens of Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens, and even a Bible story or two had already been immortalized on screen.
And this is what she had to say about them:
See volume six,somewhere around page 56 or so (this passage also speaks to what we have been discussing about the uses of imagination):
Imagination may become like that cave Ezekiel tells of wherein were all manner of unseemly and evil things; it may be a temple wherein self is glorified; it may be a chamber of horrors and dangers; but it may also be a House Beautiful. It is enough for us to remember that imagination is stored with those images supplied day by day whether by the cinema, the penny dreadful, by Homer or Shakespeare, by the great picture or the flaming ‘shocker.’ We have heard of the imaginative man who conceived a passion for the Sphinx!
Page 79 of volume 6:
What we have reason to deplore is that after some eight or twelve years’ brilliant teaching in school, the cinema show and the football field, polo or golf, satisfy the needs of our former pupils to whatever class they belong. We are filled with compassion when we detect the lifeless hand or leg, the artificial nose or jaw, that many a man has brought home as a consequence of the War. But many of our young men and women go about more seriously maimed than these. They are devoid of intellectual interests, history and poetry are without charm for them, the scientific work of the day is only slightly interesting, their ‘job’ and the social amenities they can secure are all that their life has for them.
The maimed existence in which a man goes on from day to day without either nourishing or using his intellect, is causing anxiety to those interested in education, who know that after religion it is our chief concern, is, indeed, the necessary handmaid of religion.
Page 116 of volume 6, where she is speaking of the folly of unit studies:
. . . The whole thing must be highly amusing to the teacher, as ingenious amplifications self-produced always are: that the children too were entertained, one does not doubt. The teacher was probably at her best in getting by sheer force much out of little: she was, in fact, acting a part and the children were entertained as at a show, cinema or other… (emphasis added)
So she was familiar with movies, and yet, never recommends them or mentions them in any context but that of passive entertainment (which she generally deplores).
Somewhere around the middle of volume 6 (page 157-160 or so?) Charlotte says that she does not think pictures helpful in learning geography or models helpful in learning anything. She says that these ‘aids’ to the understanding actually stultify and hinder the understanding. I think she means they hinder our imagination, the ability to picture for ourselves based on verbal descriptions because we rely too much on them rather than on our own application to the topic, just like repeating a reading more than once makes it easier and easier not to pay attention to it.
Furthermore, her objections to pictures for learning are based on the lack of application the student has to make to obtain the information- how much more true this is of a movie! On page 340 of volume 6, she says that:
“We trust much to pictures, lantern slides, cinematography displays; but without labour there is no profit, and probably the pictures which remain with us are those which we have first conceived through the medium of words; pictures may help us to correct our notions, but the imagination does not work upon a visual presentation.” (emphasis added)
I will have more on the use of movies and television as educational tools another day. It’s not that we don’t watch them ourselves, however, it’s just that I don’t think they are ideal, and specifically, they aren’t really ‘Charlotte Mason.’ You don’t have to be a purist- I am not, at least not in that way. But I do like accuracy. It’s okay to do things differently from CM, just don’t call them ‘CM.’
Q. How did you handle potty training?
To be honest, it’s not my favorite part of parenting. I thought it was way easier to teach kids how to read.
I preferred to wait until a child was old enough for me to point at the toilet and say, “Go here from now on,” and the child would say ‘Okay,’ and we were done. Okay, that is mostly kidding. Although that is kind of what happened with one child who didn’t come to us until she was nearly 4. After months of gentle attempts at potty training I simply told her outright that I thought changing diapers was a gross job, and she was surprised. Go figure. For the rest, I used a very relaxed version of the ideas I found in this book:
Toilet Training in Less Than A Day
I did not expect it to work in a day, and that’s a good thing.
I stocked up on gummy bears and M&Ms- I actually started with carob chips and raisins because I was a totally crunchy mom, but we got nowheresville fast with those ‘treats.’
I let the potty training child pretty much go nude (unless we lived where we had carpeting. I hate carpeting). I rewarded them regularly for being dry. I let them choose which colour of gummy bear or M8M they wanted (my kids all learned their colors while toilet training- at least the colours that M&Ms and gummy bears come in). After a bit I chose the color if they were only being rewarded for still being dry and clean, and they only got to choose when they had successfully used the toilet. For all my kids this was highly motivational, maybe because we were otherwise so crunchy and sugar free in the diet.
Of course we cheered and did huge victory dances for successful toileting in the toilet.
As time went on when there were accidents that came from simply playing too long and not going to the bathroom in time, I had the children help with the clean up- it wasn’t a punishment so much as it was a consequence. I had one who refused to use the toilet for number 2, and after a while it was clearly a discipline issue and not a learning issue and we handled it that way- and when I say clearly, I mean, very, very clearly. And that’s all I am going to say about that.
One of my married daughters is interested in trying elimination training or diaper free baby now that they are in their own house, and I don’t know much about that. I hope it goes well for them and then she can share the details.
I will only add one other thing, and that is about boys. This is a delicate matter but I am not going to be delicate. I am going to be blunt and forthright. Boys do NOT have to pee on your floor. Really. My husband trained our son, he did it before the Boy was 2, before he was talking, even. I don’t really know what he did, but he did a great job. And he taught him from the start that it is not somehow ‘manly’ to go to the bathroom on the floor (or seat) and leave it for others to clean up. If your aim is really that pathetic, then you clean up your own mess, was and is my husband’s philosophy. I love that man for many reasons, and honestly, this is far from the least of them- I have often been subjected to listening to other wives complaining about their husband’s bathroom habits and I do so fervently thank God for mine. In fact, years ago when we were still in our twenties and I had been listening to one such gabfest from about a dozen of my friends, I came home and said, “I just have to ask. Apparently I am the only wife I know who doesn’t have to clean up her husband’s toileting accidents. Is your aim that good or do you just clean up after yourself?” He was a little indignant that I would question his perfect aim.
There is nothing remotely masculine or inevitable about leaving your own waste products on the floor for others to clean up, not in your own house and certainly not at somebody else’s home.
Understand the two parts of the above soapbox- for reasons I do not know and do not (I promise you) want to know, ever, it may be true that perfect aim is a familial trait to which the males in your family cannot attain. That’s fine. But there is absolutely no excuse for not learning to clean up after themselves. And if they won’t do it at home, then please, when you go to somebody else’s home, follow your men-folk after they go to the bathroom at your hostess’s house and clean up after them. Nobody else should have to do this.
Q. What’s that noise?
That is the combined groans of my Progeny as they collectively say, “MOTHER!” in that shocked and disapproving tone only the Progeny can muster, and the scuffling noises are probably their attempt to wrestle the keyboard away from me so I can’t embarrass them any further.
16 Comments
At home, my husband sits down to go to the bathroom, and that is what our sons do as well. Saves a lot of messes. Standing up is only for public urinals, and boys don’t learn that until they are much older. Little ones go into the stall and sit.
I am blessed that my father and my husband always sit to pee, at least at home, so that seems normal to me and they never miss. When my SIL was living with us, she brought a date home. I went in the bathroom a little after him and found he had not only missed a little, he had made a big puddle of pee on the flat part behind the seat. I was completely disgusted but didn’t want to mortify my SIL by saying anything while he was there. Cleaning up a big puddle of a strange man’s pee was not how I wanted to end my night. Thank goodness she stopped dating him.
Dido on the boys cleaning up after thamselves and peeing straight. Everytime my mom visits with her husbamd I end up cleaning up large puddles omn the floor ad I thank God for a tidy husband who has taught our sons ( 2 and 3) to be considerate. I don’ t think they needed to be told twice either? Maybe I should have my mom follow him to the bathroom from now on, I like that idea….
Amen, sister! (And it’s funny to see that this toilet training has garnered more responses than the books or movies
Also, they don’t have to leave the lid up. I have 8 fellas in my house, so I can attest to that one as well. Just sayin’. Loved the insight on dusting with the vacuum 
I know, Andrea- I think the responses are funny, too. Clearly, I have struck a nerve and am not the only woman in America who thinks it is ridiculous to have to clean up toileting messes made by people old enough to toilet by themselves.;-D
At the risk of indelicacy, sometimes the issue is not one of aim but of scatter, which in turn is affected by anatomical variation more than behavior. Yes, sitting down is the easiest solution in that case. On the other hand, I see no excuse for private homes to not have proper urinals just like public restrooms.
As I said, there are some excuses for lack of perfect aim (which my spouse has even when standing), but there are no excuses for not cleaning up after oneself.
The reason private homes do not have urinals have to do with cost and space. Not everybody can afford them. Everybody can, however, afford to wipe up their own messes.
After a few years of marriage and a week of a male friend visiting, I wanted to go kiss my mother-in-law’s feet! I hadn’t realized (I grew up in a house full of girls) how well she had trained my husband…and how blessed I was for it!
Jess
So I clearly need something to occupy my grasping-at-straws-of-things-to-think-about brain, but I’ve wondered from time to time why seat down is the “proper” position for the toilet when not in use? Particularly in households that are more than 50% male, doesn’t it make just as much sense to keep the seat up as down? (This is all theoretical, of course, as the seat belongs down.)
Also, I love your answer about reading when one has small children. One of the best realizations of my life was several years back when it dawned on me that I’m not a bad person because I prefer to read rather than clean, because I don’t keep my house in perfect order, and because I have company over while my house exists in that state of less-than-perfect order. It’s so much better to be able to enjoy books for the delight that they are instead of feeling guilty and almost sinful every time I chose to read rather than performing some small chore that isn’t even really necessary.
At our house the seat goes down to keep small children from falling in.
I laughed out loud at your husband’s reaction to your question about his aim. I’ve wanted to ask my husband the same thing, but I would hate to offend his ego. I never find yellow drips anywhere when I clean the toilet! He either aims well, or cleans up. Which it is… I really don’t care.
When we got married, he would leave the lid up. This was annoying when I would go in the middle of night, lifting what I thought was the lid, only to sit on the rim of the bowl! What cured him? We had a cat for a few months. We caught him drinking from the potty, and I informed my husband that he wouldn’t he able to if the lid was down. It’s been down ever since!
I’m still working on aim with my recently potty-trained son. He’s 3 and refuses to sit. I figured getting him out of diapers before his brother is born (due in 5 weeks) was more important than fighting over position. Usually he is pretty good now, but I do try to get him to “make bubbles,” which is what his pee usually does if it hits the water.
I am curious at what point you would consider not going poo in the potty a discipline issue. He’s almost 3 1/2, has been pee trained for several weeks (3 or 4), and doesn’t seem to care if he poos in his pants or not. I’ve tried promises of jelly beans, washed him off in the tub with cold water, told him how much Thomas or whatever character is on his undies doesn’t like to get poop on it, but nothing seems to motivate him. Anyone have any ideas?
It doesn’t sound like he’s been trained long enough for it to be a discipline issue. Also it sounds like he’s still going in his pants. For me it became a discipline issue when my child clearly had total control of where and when she went and chose to deposit little gifts behind the bathroom door, or on the floor beside the potty chair.
One thing a friend of mine did was give her children psyllium seed, which made them very regular. She said she knew the girls (she had twins) would have a bowel movement just about thirty minutes after lunch, and so she put them on their potty chairs 25 minutes after lunch and read stories to them until they went.
Yes, that’s what I thought too–that it wasn’t a discipline issue yet. However, last night my husband, as he was cleaning up after another poop-in-the-pants episode, asked me with a slight tone of reproach in his voice (at least, that’s what it sounded like to me), “Are you ever going to train him for #2? Or are you going to let him grow up for the rest of his life pooping in his pants?” No pressure, right?!
The thing is, what I didn’t mention is that it did take one or two swats to get the potty training thing going. He knew how to hold it–I could tell, because he would either hold it entirely or spot just a tiny bit, so I knew he was stopping it. He knew how to tell me–and even when he didn’t use words, his body language had become very obvious. I knew he knew how to relax and go–I mean, if you can stop it, you can start it again, right? But I would get him to the potty, under protest of “I no wike go potty,” and he would stand there for 2 seconds, say he couldn’t go, and fight and struggle and resist and throw a fit. So finally I decided to discipline his attitude, told him so (“I’m going to give you a swat for your attitude”), and delivered a swat. I only had to do it once or twice, and suddenly he quit resisting, relaxed, went, and everything was great. That was on day 3. Day 4 he stayed with a friend and only had one accident. Day 8 we took him to church and he did fine–except for #2.
But he goes standing up. I can’t get him to sit. When we were in the middle of training (the first 3 days), once I caught the signal that he needed to poop (usually he just goes and hardly gives a signal at all, but he was doing a dance, up and down, hips going forward and backwards, and really trying not to go). I dragged myself off the couch and rushed him to the potty. But he didn’t want to sit on either the big or the little one. He just wouldn’t sit. Finally I got him to, but he would sit for 2 seconds, say “I can’t do it,” and get up again. After trying for maybe 5 or more minutes to get him to sit, he did sit for 2 or 3 minutes, but he didn’t go. I finally let him go. Five minutes later, his pants were full. And I haven’t caught any signals since then. So I know he knows when he goes and when he needs to go. But he won’t tell me and he refuses to sit and makes a big deal out of it. I’m willing to deal with the poop-in-the-undies thing for a while longer, but my husband is getting irritated at it. Especially since I find it very difficult to take care of when we are at church (there’s no tub edge to sit on, and I’m in the last month of my pregnancy), so he ends up having to deal with it. So I can understand his frustration with a half-potty-trained child. But I’ve only got so much energy in a day, and some days less than others, and there are certain things that must be done to keep the home running (not necessarily smoothly, but running), and my oldest is 5, so I can’t rely on her for much. So I’m wondering how much of his “I don’t want to sit on the potty” is a discipline issue, and how much of it is too closely tied with going potty to make it a discipline issue. Anyone have any thoughts?
Um, move to Asia, where they squat over the toilet, which is level with the ground? Build him a little bench with a hole in the center which you place over the potty chair? It really sounds like he’d be happier squatting, which is also more sensible and sanitary (I miss Asian toilets).
It’s further complicated in your case by the fact that whatever you do, he will probably regress once the baby’s born, and that’s coming so soon, I’m thinking I would ask my husband if he could just please stand it until the new baby is 6 weeks old, when you might be ready to face the training with more energy.
Meanwhile- maybe switch back to diapers just for church?
Perhaps see if you can adjust his diet to make his bowel movements totally predictable (flax seeds help), so you can maybe help him squat over the toilet?
I have often wondered if there is a hole in the toilet seat, and a man’s aim is good, the need to lift it ever. Obviously both sexes sit to defecate, and women sit to urinate, so this is already a more than 50% down usage in a house with both sexes. If a man doesn’t have splatter, why lift the seat at all? Of course, I am not close enough to any men to ask if they splatter, so I don’t know how common or uncommon it is, but I did ask my stepdad out of curiosity once why a bigger hole was necessary and he said it was just easier that way.
Oh, my friend, I mean to say — the men toilet thing. Amen and amen, and all God’s daughters say amen. I nearly wet my own pants…