13 April 2016
Fuck Tolerance
14 February 2016
Safe
01 October 2015
I Had An Abortion and it Wasn't Through Planned Parenthood
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| Our first son! |
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| Baby boy #2! |
19 July 2015
Rock on
He fell asleep gently rocking out in the sunshine with the breezy ceiling fan keeping him cool right beside my desk. 20...
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Sunday, July 19, 2015
01 July 2015
I Don't Have To Be A One Track Activist
I don't have to be a one-track activist. I actually feel compassion for all the disenfranchised and subjugated peoples...
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Wednesday, July 1, 2015
29 June 2015
Distractions
Distractions. Some of y'all keep talking about distractions. Right now I see a lot of people saying that talking about...
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Monday, June 29, 2015
Baby's First Selfie
Baby's first #selfie! #newbie #smiles #love
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Monday, June 29, 2015
07 May 2015
It's the little things
It's the little things. #BirthofBabyBump #teenytinybaby #boppy #Boys #LOVEPS. Say hello to Aman Asad, our Peaceful Lion! #HeHasAName!!
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Clipping the World's Tiniest Fingernails
Today I also add to my résumé the ability to clip the world's tiniest fingernails without waking the baby or nicking a fingertip! #superpowers #motherhood #BirthofBabyBump
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Thursday, May 7, 2015
03 May 2015
WHEW!! So, yea, we had another baby!
WHEW!! So, yea, we had another baby!! I'm doing good and baby boy is doing great! We're still in the hospital but...
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Saturday, May 2, 2015
02 May 2015
Introducing Sir Fuss A Lot
Introducing Sir Fuss A Lot!! LOL! We're still working on the name. He's the cutest, fussiest little thing in town, and looks just like our big boy did at birth. I'm totally in love! #birthofBabyBump #thenewbie
Posted by Rashida Braxton Simmons on Saturday, May 2, 2015
04 April 2015
Nighttime Shenanigans
4am, Mar has to go to work, he comes to kiss me goodbye, opens the bedroom door, and accidentally blasts me with the hallway light dead in the eye.
5am, the kiddo has a nightmare and comes and climbs in bed with me, toting his bear, his water cup, and his phone with his Winnie the Pooh audiobook playing, wide awake, and compelled to relay every detail of said nightmare.
7:34am, four minutes after the 'do not disturb' on my phone turns off, I get a text.
8:30am, the kiddo wakes up and, as if he never fell asleep at all, immediately resumes his animated discussion about last night's dream.
I am SO ready for life with a newborn. Good morning, y'all.
29 January 2015
26 January 2015
Why We Homeschool
Well, when I got pregnant with our son I was already working from home, writing articles and essays for various websites and maintaining their social media presence. This made the initial decision to stay home with him not really a decision at all, just a progression of what I was already doing. However, in the months following the birth, I experienced several months of post partum depression that made my writing work almost impossible to keep up with, so I quit my writing jobs. One day I pulled myself together just enough to reach out to some very good friends who had also just had a baby. Actually, we had gone through our pregnancies together, even seeing the same midwives, and their baby was born two days before ours in the same hospital. They own a business and were looking for childcare, so I stepped in, having not only done childcare for years before, but it gave me an income and a way to stay home with my baby. This is how it started.
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| Playtime with friends. |
We realized very early that our boy was thoroughly fascinated with the alphabet! He still is! He loved songs, books, toys, videos, ANYTHING dealing with the alphabet, so we fed that love. By age 2 he was trying to write the letters but getting very frustrated that he couldn't do it yet so we got him a Leapfrog Scribble and Write toy and that did the trick for him.
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| Leapfrog Scribble and Write Tablet |
One day, when he was 2 1/2, he brought me a piece of paper with the most delighted look on his face, he had written his name all by himself! I cried! He was so proud of himself!
At this time we still didn't consider what we were doing to be 'homeschooling'. When people asked what daycare program he was in we said we keep him home and that he wasn't ready for preschool yet, even though it looked like it. We often have to explain that he is younger than he looks or acts. This leads me into another pertinent aspect of our lives.
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| Mommy's Helper Contoured Cushie Step Up |
I was so confused and frustrated for months, trying to stretch size 6 diapers to fit on our big boy while forcing potty training. We were saved by Pampers introducing a size 7 diaper! That bought us a good 6 months and time for him to potty train naturally at his own pace.
Now, at age 6, he's typically mistaken for a 9 or 10 year old. Believe it or not, this is a big reason why we homeschool, but I'll elaborate further in a bit.
As I said, at this time we still didn't consider what we were doing to be homeschooling necessarily, we just weren't putting him in daycare and providing a learning environment at home for him and any other kids I happen to be caring for, and after a while there were others. Then when he was 3 we briefly relocated to New Jersey and I attempted to continue my small in-home childcare business there, but our move to NJ very quickly turned into a disaster on so many levels (housing, jobs for my husband, childcare work for me, etc.) so within months our savings was gone and we were forced to move back to Baltimore and spent the next 2 years in chaos, staying with family and friends and trying to settle and rebuild our lives. At one point we lost almost everything we owned except the bags we were carrying with us, including all of our vital documents. We were literally days away from living in our car.
Through all of this, we continued to teach our son in ways that came naturally to us and him. Trips to the grocery store, running errands, or even neighborhood walks gave us a chance to learn counting and money, to play I Spy and find words and numbers, to read signs, to answer questions, anything to keep his brain stimulated. I never thought to put him in preschool since we didn't even know where we were going to live. But he was ALWAYS with us. He never had a babysitter or even spent time away from us with family. This was a very decided choice because my husband and I realized very early that even though we were surrounded by family and friends and thus had a 'support system', much of our support system didn't actually support our parenting methods and were very open about it. Therein lies another reason we've become homeschoolers and quite protective of our son.
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| Cooking lessons with Daddy. |
Second, we consider ourselves to be peaceful parents, meaning no spanking or shaming as punishment. Again, our support system didn't support this philosophy. We were surrounded by folks who fell into the typical 'it was good enough for me' mindset and thought we were just spoiling him by not spanking him if he did something wrong. That was a deal-breaker for us, anyone who even indicated that they were spankers were not options for watching our boy.
Third, we have always been selective about what we exposed our son to. He was allowed to watch videos but almost exclusively Sprout and PBS kids shows. Sesame Street, Word World, and Word Girl were his favorites. We only let him watch educational shows (it's the reason we don't have a television now). This, too, was not accepted by our support system. I was once asked to drop him off at a family member's house who was watching some of his cousins that day, and told, "I just give them kids some cookies and SpongeBob videos and they're fine for hours." Absolutely NOT!
For all those reasons, our son stayed in our presence and thus in our learning environment. It was just a product of circumstances.
Two years ago we finally stabilized and rented a home of our own and were able to get back to our version of a normal life. We immediately set up his learning environment and I began my small childcare business again. Because I was still blogging and maintaining friendships through social media, I was amazed to find lots of parents who appreciated how we were raising our son and wanted their children in my care. Many of these parents were low income, so it hasn't necessarily been a prosperous business financially, but we've been able to help a lot of families and our son has made lots of friends of all ages. Last year he asked about school for the first time, he wanted to go to kindergarten. I was not happy about this at all, but after a lot of discussion we decided to give it a shot. He's such a sociable boy, he LOVES making new friends, so we wanted him to have a chance to make some friends.
We intentionally chose a public charter school based on their philosophy of learning through play and arts integration. We wanted him to play and he really enjoys art! I thought he was advanced for kindergarten 'learning' but we just really wanted him to play and make friends. This both worked for him and against him.
He made lots of friends, in his class and in others. A parent and friend once sent me an email about just how social he was, saying that in the mornings when they had community breakfast (parents were welcome to stay and have breakfast with their kids, which we loved) our boy would go from table to table personally saying hi to all the kids he knew by name, no matter what grade they were in, and they all said hi right back! He's always been that type of kid.
What worked against him was he didn't get enough play for his energy level. He was used to us going to the playground for 2 hours at a time daily to run and play, but the time he was given in school for recess and physical education wasn't enough to burn off his energy. He stayed wired most of the day.
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| Almost 4ft tall at 4 yrs old. |
Which leads me to the another thing that worked against him (you see how this all connects?). This is oddly something else I find it difficult to discuss because I think it makes me sound obnoxious or like a braggart and that's not my intention. School worked against our son because he's really, really smart. Really. I mentioned that he first wrote his name by himself when he was 2 1/2. Well he was already beginning to read independently then. By age 3 he was able to read a lot on his own.
By the time he started kindergarten he was fully an independent reader. During our orientation day, he eagerly ran over to the bookshelf in his classroom and was slightly bummed that there were only a handful of books he hadn't already read, and he finished those before the end of that day. The kids in his class were on a typical kindergarten level, which is just fine, but he was already at the stage of being able to look words up in an adult dictionary if he needed to. One of his favorite 'toys' at the time was his digital pocket dictionary. We never forced education on him, just provided a constant learning environment no matter where we were or what we were doing. We never thought this would put him at a disadvantage but in a classroom setting it did. He was bored out of his mind! He began to find other things to focus on and the main thing that caught his attention were the kids in his class who were more disruptive. He came home daily and when I asked what happened in school he told me hour-long stories about how kids were misbehaving. When I asked what he learned he rarely had anything to say. Then his behavior started to change and our otherwise 'obedient' child started exhibiting lots of the behaviors he found amusing in the kids that were more disruptive. And he came home with way too much energy to burn, so the combination made for a very chaotic child.
I couldn't take it, that was the end of his kindergarten adventure. We pulled him out of school and filed the paperwork to register with the homeschool program in the city. There were also countless problems with transportation and our healthy boy all of a sudden being constantly sick, we couldn't even let him have school breakfast or lunch because more often than not it wasn't the type of food we felt comfortable feeding him, so all-in-all it didn't work for my family.
WHEW!!
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| Practicing his photography skills. |
Many would consider our actual teaching methods now to be more like unschooling, since we only stick to a curriculum enough to meet Baltimore City requirements, but it's mostly child-led learning. We take lots of photos of our activities, trips, home projects, etc. to document his learning, supplemented with worksheets from books or that I print out from the internet, and with technology like websites and iOS apps (we're an Apple household with Mac computers, an iPad, and iPhones). For a look at some of our photos of our homeschooling adventures, CLICK HERE! Basically, I document everything we do with our son and compile it into a portfolio and twice a year we meet with a Baltimore City homeschool reviewer who examines it all according to a checklist for his grade level to tell us if we're on the right track. So far, so good.
Still we've had people asking us when we'll put him in 'real school', always with the reasoning that we won't be able to teach him calculus or chemistry. I always want to ask how much calculus or chemistry do they remember or use in their lives today, but instead I just ask, "Why not?" Isn't that what teacher's manuals, the library, and the internet are for? Isn't that what co-ops are for? Plus, I know many parents now that aren't scientists or mathematicians who successfully homeschooled their children straight through high school. Basically, I refuse to allow the limitations of others to become ours. I have no doubt that I can fully educate my child and prepare him for college, if he chooses to go, or to start a business, or to become an artist, or to do whatever his dreams entail with success and most importantly, happiness. With his father's help, we got this thing covered.And now, we have another child on the way and I'm excited to start all over, changing some things and continuing others. Our son has been tracking the entire pregnancy with joy and excitement, learning each week about the baby's progress, going to our midwife apppointments with us, and even learning how the baby came to be. That means yes, I had a very detailed sex talk with a very curious six year old, it was awkward and stilted but truthful and, in the end, pretty funny. My husband and I are very happy about our choice to homeschool and no matter how skeptical or critical our family and friends may be, we wouldn't have it any other way.
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22 January 2015
Healing Can Come from Releasing
In light of that, I decided to revisit some unpleasant conversations I had with someone whom I consider emotionally abusive to me. I can do this because the relationship eventually became so abusive and precarious that I began recording conversations with them. I honestly wanted to be able to do just this, listen to these conversations at a later date, when I was distanced from the relationship and felt no further obligation. I was told so many times that I was overreacting, or being too emotional, or just that I was wrong.
| Emotional Abuse - by marcgosselin - image found on DeviantArt |
In the end, the lesson for me is to trust my heart, my gut, my instincts. No one but me knows how a person makes me feel and no one but me has to cope with those feelings, so no one but me can decide if that relationship is worth mending or releasing. I'm secure in my decision to release that relationship and I accept that. I feel that releasing this relationship is the only way to heal this relationship and heal myself at the same time. I can't force others to accept it or even understand it, and that's okay as well, because no one else has to live my life but me.
09 January 2015
07 January 2015
06 January 2015
31 December 2014
27 December 2014
My Soundtrack - The Music of Me
These are some of my favorite songs, some of the songs that define me, delight me, and bring me home. This is the music that feeds my soul and keeps me whole. There's so much more so check back frequently, I'll keep adding and sharing! Enjoy!















