by specialneedmom2 | Dec 11, 2012 | Being Thankful, Canada, Child Care, Family, Home, Husband, Kids, Life Balance, Siblings, Special Needs, Working Mother, World Interviews, World Moms Blog Writer Interview, Writing, Younger Children
Where in the world do you live? And, are you from there?
I live in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. I love living here because it is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. There are countless shops and restaurants that reflect the many different people who live here. I can find food from Ethiopia, Korea, and Peru by just walking down the street or hopping on a streetcar. It is like traveling the globe without leaving your hometown.
What language(s) do you speak?
Embarrassingly, I only speak English. I’ve always wanted to learn new languages and have a smattering of French. I can ask for the washroom and count to ten, and that’s about it.
When did you first become a mother?
I first became a mother at the age of 32. My oldest son (now five years old) was born and my world changed completely. He was a jaundiced, colicky baby and I was head over heels in love with him.
I now have a three year old daughter and a one year old baby boy as well. Our home is very busy, but it’s wonderful to have the children playing together. Although it is challenging to have young children so close in age, I love (almost) every minute of it.
I was unprepared for how intense motherhood is, and I have made many changes in my life to spend more time with my children. Before children I was very career focused, and it took a couple years of trying to juggle my children’s and work schedules for me to realize it is not working for me. I now choose positions that compliment my family life. (more…)
Angela is a Special Education teacher who blogs about her super-powered special needs family. She has a 3 year old with Prader-Willi Syndrome and a 5 year old with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and Sensory Processing Disorder. The odds of these random genetic events occurring at the same time are astronomical. "When you add our typically developing one year old baby boy to the mix, you have a very busy household!", she explains.
Angela admits to having too many appointments, too many school problems, and being generally too busy as she tries to live life to the fullest. Please visit her family at Half Past Normal for more of their adventures! If you want to connect to chat, you can find her on Twitter @specialneedmom2
If you are interested in Special Education policies and procedures in Ontario – or just some excellent strategies and accommodations – please check out Angela's other site at Special Ed on the Bell Curve.
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by Natalia Rankine-Galloway (Morocco) | Dec 3, 2012 | 2012, Child Care, Cultural Differences, Morocco, Parenting, Tunisia, Uncategorized, World Moms Blog, World Motherhood
Photo by Elizabeth Atalay
It was too hot for October as I pushed the baby’s stroller towards the busy intersection, nervous about navigating the after school traffic.
As I approached the T junction, I could see a woman striking her arms out wildly from the driver’s seat of her car, stopped at the red light. She looked as though she was battling someone in the passenger seat with all the strength the confined space would allow.
I had been reading and thinking a lot about women and women’s rights in Morocco since my arrival a couple of weeks prior and in the split second it took me to walk from the trunk to beside the window, I had concluded she was an abused wife, fighting back.
Prone as I am to flights of fancy, I had her whole heroic back story firm in my mind as I walked level to the front window and realized that she was in fact landing punches on a boy; about 12 or 13 and looking utterly deflated as he half-heartedly held his arms up against his mother’s blows. (more…)
Natalia was born a stone's throw from the Queen's racetrack in Ascot, UK and has been trying to get a ticket to the races and a fabulous hat to go with it ever since. She was born to a Peruvian mother and an Irish father who kept her on her toes, moving her to Spain, Ireland and back to the UK before settling her in New York for the length of middle and high school. She is still uncertain of what she did to deserve that.
She fled to Boston for college and then Washington, D.C. to marry her wonderful husband, who she met in her freshman year at college. As a military man, he was able to keep her in the migratory lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. Within 5 months of marriage, they were off to Japan where they stayed for a wonderful 2 and one half years before coming home to roost. Baby Xavier was born in New York in 2011 and has not slept since.
A joy and an inspiration, it was Xavier who moved Natalia to entrepreneurship and the launch of CultureBaby. She has loved forging her own path and is excited for the next step for her family and CultureBaby.
Natalia believes in the potential for peace that all children carry within them and the importance of raising them as global citizens. She loves language, history, art and culture as well as Vietnamese Pho, Argentinian Malbec, English winters, Spanish summers and Japanese department stores...and she still hopes one day to catch the number 9 race with Queen Liz.
You can find her personal blog, The Culture Mum Chronicles.
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by Meredith (USA) | Nov 8, 2012 | Africa, Being Thankful, Child Care, Childhood, Eye on Culture, Family, Motherhood, Nigeria, World Motherhood
Asking for help has always been a problem for me. Even when I knew I didn’t really know how to do something, I never wanted people to think I didn’t know something. I know I am not perfect but to let others see it was one of my worst fears.
Before I moved to Nigeria, I tried to be one of those super moms. My children were 3 and 15 months, and I felt like I could do it all: grocery shopping, house cleaning, taking care of our dogs, cooking, play time, mother, sister, wife, friend. And, I could do all of those things, but I was exhausted all the time. At the end of each day, I could barely read one page of a great book because my eyes just would not stay open no matter how much I willed them to do so!
When my husband told me about the possibility of moving to Nigeria, a flood of anxiety and fear swept over me: What would the medical care be like over there? What was the time difference? Would it be safe? Where would my son go to school? Would we die of malaria? It never occurred to me that there would be such a pleasant surprise in store for me amid all the negativity and fears I had of going there.
(more…)
Meredith finds it difficult to tell anyone where she is from exactly! She grew up in several states, but mainly Illinois. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana which is also where she met her husband. She taught kindergarten for seven years before she adopted her son from Guatemala and then gave birth to her daughter two years leter. She moved to Lagos, Nigeria with her husband and two children in July 2009 for her husband's work. She and her family moved back to the U.S.this summer(August 2012) and are adjusting to life back in the U.S. You can read more about her life in Lagos and her adjustment to being back on her blog: We Found Happiness.
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by Carol (Canada) | Oct 24, 2012 | Babies, Canada, Child Care, Health, Parenting
Of all of my parenting decisions, my choice to use cloth diapers raises the most eyebrows.
People tend to treat it like an admirable but inconvenient decision that they would never seriously consider themselves, like converting your car to run on vegetable oil or biking everywhere instead of driving.
They see it as difficult, and a little weird.
This bothers me, because I think my choice is more convenient, not less.
I use a diaper service, Happy Nappy, and since they bring my diapers to my door and take them away from me on a weekly basis, you could argue that my choice is actually lazier than using disposables, since I never have to go shopping for diapers. I don’t deal with any more poop than a parent who uses disposables. In fact, since I find that disposables have a deplorable tendency to leak poop down my baby’s leg, I actually deal with more poop when he’s in disposables.
Their cost is comparable to disposables – around $25 a week – and service becomes free after you’ve been with them for 30 months, because kids usually potty train earlier in cloth diapers. So either my kid will be potty trained by 30 months, or I get free diapers. That makes it a cheaper choice, even with the convenience of a diaper service.
So here I am, making a cheaper and more convenient choice, but people respond as though I was hand-knitting my entire family’s wardrobe or something. (more…)
Carol from If By Yes has lived in four different Canadian provinces as well as the Caribbean. Now she lives in Vancouver, working a full time job at a vet clinic, training dogs on the side, and raising her son and daughter to be good citizens of the world.
Carol is known for wearing inside-out underwear, microwaving yoghurt, killing house plants, over-thinking the mundane, and pointing out grammatical errors in "Twilight". When not trying to wrestle her son down for a nap, Carol loves to read and write.
Carol can also be found on her blog, If By Yes, and on Twitter @IfByYesTweets
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by Carol (Canada) | Oct 8, 2012 | Canada, Child Care, Religion, Younger Children
“Canada severs ties with Iran…
…Iranian diplomats are no longer welcome in Canada…
…Will this lead to war? Prime Minister Harper is quoted as saying…”
I’m listening to the radio as I drive from work to my son’s daycare, and it’s full of the news about Canada and Iran. Canada has withdrawn their diplomats, kicked out the Iranian diplomats, and we’re basically on the brink of war with this Middle Eastern nation. And as I drive, I think about the warm, gentle, loving people who care for my son each day.
All of them are from Iran.
There are a lot of Iranian expats in Vancouver, and I wonder what they think of this news. Are they worried for their family back in Iran? No doubt. Are they upset with Canada for causing such problems? Are they fretting about how hard this will make it for them to go home? Or are they supportive of Canada’s decision?
It must be hard to live in a country that is on the brink of war with your own.
But then, many Iranians are living in Canada for a reason. The Islamist government, political turmoil…? Most of what I know about Iran I know from reading Persepolis, so I’m sure my perceptions are out of date. I know that they don’t call themselves Iranians – they call themselves Persians, so that’s what we call them, too.
Which makes it easy to forget that they are even from Iran. (more…)
Carol from If By Yes has lived in four different Canadian provinces as well as the Caribbean. Now she lives in Vancouver, working a full time job at a vet clinic, training dogs on the side, and raising her son and daughter to be good citizens of the world.
Carol is known for wearing inside-out underwear, microwaving yoghurt, killing house plants, over-thinking the mundane, and pointing out grammatical errors in "Twilight". When not trying to wrestle her son down for a nap, Carol loves to read and write.
Carol can also be found on her blog, If By Yes, and on Twitter @IfByYesTweets
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by Tina Santiago-Rodriguez (Philippines) | Sep 27, 2012 | 2012, Being Thankful, Breastfeeding, Child Care, Humanity, International, Motherhood, Natural Disaster, Nutrition, Philippines, Tina Santiago-Rodriguez, Tragedy, Womanhood, Working Mother, World Events, World Motherhood, Younger Children
Last week, a few breastfeeding advocate friends of mine alerted me and other moms to the fact that September 24th through the 30th of this year is World Milksharing Week. According to the official website, World Milksharing Week is held annually during the last week of September with this goal in mind: “to celebrate milksharing and to promote human milk as the biologically normal nourishment for babies and children.” You can read more about how the idea for this came about here. The theme for this year’s Milksharing Week is “Sharing Milk, Nurturing Community.”
Even though I consider myself pro-breastfeeding (I don’t think I can qualify as a true-blue advocate yet) and even have quite a number of blog posts about it, milksharing is something that I never really gave a serious thought about before. That was, until I read about breast milk donations, especially during times of emergencies. (You can read a bit about them here and here.) I realized that breastfeeding truly does save lives and formula milk donations could prove hazardous to the health of children affected by disasters such as typhoons and earthquakes.
Think about it: When people are stuck in evacuation centers or refugee camps, there is usually a shortage of food supplies and clean water. Diarrhea outbreaks are very common and spread easily due to the lack of proper health care and sanitation systems. According to this article on Protecting babies in emergencies: the role of the public, “babies who are not breastfed are very likely to contract diarrhea-causing illnesses from unclean water and, with a weakened immune system and limited treatment, many will die.” (more…)
Tina Santiago-Rodriguez is a wife and homeschool mom by vocation, a licensed
physical therapist by education and currently the managing editor of Mustard, a
Catholic children's magazine published by Shepherd's Voice
Publications in the Philippines, by profession. She has been writing
passionately since her primary school years in Brunei, and contributes
regularly to several Philippine and foreign-based online and print publications. She also does sideline editing and scriptwriting jobs, when she has the time. Find out more about Tina through her personal
blogs: Truly Rich Mom and Teacher Mama Tina.
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