1 Mother 2 Another

What began as a long week visiting family
for Thanksgiving has turned into almost two weeks of house-hunting
and hanging around Texas. And though we’ve got a suite hotel
room with a mini-kitchen and more space than most, there’s
beginning to be a, well, smell.


One of the best parts of going on vacation is being able to suspend
all the drudgery of your everyday life; bill-paying, housekeeping,
laundry are all put on hold for a few glorious days. Sure,
there’s a mound of dirty clothes and a stack of unpaid bills
waiting for you when you return, but for that brief bit of time
beforehand there’s no such thing as chores.

Have I mentioned I’m an organization
freak? I’ve got three dry-erase boards on my refrigerator
alone (meal planning and leftovers board, contents of freezer
board, and Cora’s solid foods tracking board if you’re
interested); I own and frequently use a label maker; I wrote
letters to Container Store for six years begging them to come to
New York City (Notice that they did. I met the owner once and may
have actually squealed). So I am all for anything that will help me
organize our family life.


I’ve seen a lot of “mommy organizers” out there,
and have bought none of them; many seem to have fun blanks to fill
in but end up requiring more work, not less. So when I stumbled
acrossErin
Condren’s website touting her calendar and family
planner, I was skeptical but gave it a look.

When you live in New York City, your kids
don’t get a lot of experience riding in the car. In general,
Maddie and Cora get in the car every Sunday to go to church and
perhaps once a week more – heading to the mall, the zoo, or a
specific errand. But by and large, my girls travel a less
industrial way: we walk. Maddie gets in the stroller while Cora
rides on my chest, or Maddie walks while Cora reclines in her
car-seat stroller.

Being on vacation means everything gets
done a bit differently; you’re not exactly in your comfort
zone surrounded by all your parental aids (read: distractions and
toys). For example, most meals we eat as a family at our dining
table, with Maddie in her booster seat and Cora happily flailing in
her bouncy seat on the floor next to me. The bouncy seat is a great
place for Cora, since it affords her a bit more of a vertical view
than sprawling on the floor while not over-taxing her
“sitting upright” muscles.


While on vacation, though we’ve brought the bouncy seat with
us, we don’t cart it around everywhere we go and so often end
up at a meal without it. Which means that Cora now spends meal
times surfing laps, sitting at the “big girl” table.


All of this to say that I am getting plenty of chances to witness
Cora’s lethal arm “thing”.

We got our big travel day for Thanksgiving
out of the way, and I’ve been simply too exhausted to post.
Partly because the travel was tiring, but mostly because of how the
day started.


We arranged to wake up a good two hours before our car picked us up
for the airport; I assumed that would be enough time to pack our
last-minute things, get the kids ready, and so on. And it would
have been except that:


Ninety minutes before the car arrived, our upstairs tenant of our
two-family house knocked to tell us there was no hot water. Brian
staggered to the basement to re-light the pilot, only to be greeted
by four inches and rising of water in a flooded basement. Yes, the
hot water heater broke.

So I did something today that I’m
not necessarily proud of, and as I sent off an email to my dad
filling him in it occurred to me that I might not be the only one
who does this sort of thing.


We’re heading out tomorrow for the Lone Star State, embarking
on our annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage. I’ve been organizing
and making lists and packing for the last two weeks trying to get
this behemoth of a show on the road, but you know how it is with
kids; 90% of the stuff can’t be packed until you’re
about to walk out the door, so often do you use it all.

This is a complete off-topic blog, so if you’re looking for cute Maddie stories you’re out of luck.

This time last year I spent the first night ever away from Maddie. She was almost eighteen months old, and the occasion was my grandmother’s funeral over Thanksgiving week. I was very close to her and felt the loss enormously, though I knew my grief was completely selfish; she’d been in a fair amount of pain for a while, and was completely ready to literally meet her maker. My grandmother was never famous, but her impact on this Earth and on the lives around her is incalculable, and attention must be paid.

So here I go.

Yesterday us three girls took a trip to
the ole doctor once again. Cora had her six-month checkup, while
Maddie simply needed a blood draw and a flu shot. Now, the last
time we went to the doctor all together, Maddie had several
vaccines and was very traumatized: she refused to take her clothes
off and get weighed and measured, and cried for a long time during
the exam. So you can imagine how excited I was to repeat this whole
thing, but by myself instead of with Brian’s help.

When Maddie was around ten months old,
she’d occasionally wake in the night still, crying. I’d
go in to comfort her and would stand, rocking her and singing,
until she calmed down and could be put back down to sleep. She came
to have a few favorite songs (though there was no telling why one
would catch her fancy) and I quickly established a “Greatest
Hits” list.


Now that Madeleine’s older and able to sing songs herself,
she will often request a specific song of me at odd times of the
day, which she’ll then focus on intensely as she tries to
memorize it herself. She’ll have her own name for a song and
I’ll have to figure out which one she means before I can
deliver.


All of this is well and good, except that my precocious child
isn’t content simply to listen to the music, or even to sing
along herself. She is now digging into the lyrics and wrestling
with the meanings, trying to understand what she’s hearing
about. No big deal, except when you’re singing whatever weird
song happened to capture her attention as a ten-month-old at 3
a.m.

For all you parents who are getting a
start on your holiday shopping, href="http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/tplclick?lid=41000000010845593&pubid=21000000000082989"
target="_blank">One Step Ahead is offering free shipping
for the rest of the month on orders over $85; just enter
“VIXEN” in the coupon code when you check out. We order
a lot from them, so I may try to take the time to pull our order
together and take advantage of it.


I’ve been doing a lot of product testing recently, so
I’m going to let you know about a couple things I’ve
come across that I really like in the next couple weeks. I’ll
also take some time to spell out great gift suggestions for
age-appropriate toys for babies through toddlers. I’m
definitely not trying to move away from talking about Maddie and
Cora, and no one pays me to mention their products in my blog
– I’m just trying to give fellow parents a bit of help
as the hectic holiday season gears up. So keep your eyes open over
the next few weeks!


And by the way, remember me mentioning yesterday that Cora
couldn’t sleep more than a couple hours at a time every
night? Of course, as soon as I complained she slept last night
until 5 a.m. Unfortunately I didn’t get to bed until after
midnight, and was so used to getting up that I woke every 2 hours,
but it was still better than it had been. Here’s hoping that
continues and we’re over that bump.

Guess what’s on my mind.


Here’s Cora’s typical nighttime schedule right now:


9 p.m. Cora goes through her bedtime routine, with a nursing and
rocking to sleep. I usually escape around 9:45.

10:30 p.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

12:30 a.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

2:30 a.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

4:30 a.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

6:30 Cora wakes up and must eat again.

8:30 or 9 a.m. Cora gets up.

Yesterday we talked about traveling with
infants who are not yet mobile: babies who have not yet started
crawling, cruising, walking, etc.


In short, kids you can still muscle around and dominate relatively
easily.


Today we’re going to cover the munchkins who have, shall we
say, a will of their own and a way to go about exercising it.

With the holidays fast approaching
–especially that Family Gathering Marathon, Thanksgiving
– it’s time once more to start thinking about the
dreaded Holiday Traveling. Last year I wrote up some tips for
getting through it all and thought that they bear repeating, so
here they are. Much of this was passed on to me by my Mommy Focus
Group when I first started flying with Madeleine, but some of this
was learned the hard way. For the purposes of simplicity, I’m
splitting kids into two groups – babies who aren’t
mobile and toddlers who are. So I’d apply this article to
anyone just barely crawling or younger; tomorrow I’ll cover
getting around with mobile kids.


First, the good news. Traveling with a newborn, while daunting, is
actually easier than traveling with an older baby or toddler.
Newborns and young infants sleep a lot and you don’t have any
meal or snack planning to take into account.


The bad news, though, is that young infants are wildly
unpredictable, aren’t usually on a schedule yet that you can
plan around, and generally have the potential to make the trip a
nightmare for your whole family and a plane full of strangers.

One of the worst things about being
unemployed for so long (other than the obvious things, like the
possibility of losing your home) was how I had to curtail my
baking. I dearly love to heat up an oven and bake up a little
happiness, and Maddie has grown to really enjoy our times in the
kitchen as well; she’s probably the only two-year-old I know
who not only has all the ingredients for butter cake memorized, but
can identify Fiori di Sicilia by smell. So as the holiday season
started to rear its glittery, chocolate-filled head, I felt stabs
of longing even as I knew we wouldn’t be able to spend a lot
of money on my traditional whirlwind of baking and mailing out
boxes of holiday goodies.


Fortunately for me, my husband is gainfully employed and the
bakefest is back on. Scaled back, of course, as we recover from the
financial drain of eight months of no income. But back on it is.
With my recipe books piled high around the kitchen and my note
spiral open to my documentation of last year’s holiday baking
forays (yes, it’s sad but true), I’m now in hog
heaven.

As I mentioned yesterday, we’ve had
our house on the market for a while. We accepted an offer on it a
couple weeks ago and the reality of our leaving New York was
settling in for me that evening as we sat down to a delicious
dinner of leftovers.


“You ok?” Brian asked me.


“I’m just sad,” I replied softly. But apparently
not softly enough.


“What are you sad about, Mommy?” Maddie piped up.


Now, as I’ve said, I don’t believe in lying to our
kids, especially for convenience, but this was a burden I
wasn’t ready to share with her yet. We hadn’t even
discussed the possibility of her leaving the only life she knows
and never coming back yet. So I quickly scanned my mind for
something, and came up with what I thought was a harmless
answer.

As many of you know, my husband lost his
job the beginning of March, and we’ve spent the past eight
months in a desperate search for new work. Worrying about
unemployment and health benefits was no fun with a second baby on
the way, but it was even less fun five months later as our savings
dried up and we didn’t know what was going to happen next.
Realizing we were running out of money, we put our house on the
market with nowhere to go, trusting Brian would get a job somewhere
and reasoning it was better to sell our house than simply hand it
over to the bank.


So it is with great relief that I announce that Brian’s got a
new job. It’s for a company he’s interested in, and a
position he’s very excited about. Me, I’m very excited
about the whole paycheck thing.

We’ve had a luxuriously long Indian
summer here, with highs almost to 80 degrees just last week.
We’ll have a couple days of “cold” – maybe
55 or 60 for a high – before hanging around in the 70s again
a while. But these little forays into balmy weather are becoming
fewer and farther between, and as I look at our forecast with a
high of about 51 for the next week, I’m having to acknowledge
that the cold is settling in to stay.


Which means it’s time to get out the gear.