1 Mother 2 Another

Yes, I missed a day blogging.

Wonder why?

Here I sit at a cardtable in an empty gameroom, typing my first blog from Texas.

I made it!  I'm alive!  Barely.

Here I sit at a card table in my gameroom, blogging for the first time from Texas.

I made it!  I'm alive!  Barely.

Yep, it’s time to pack up the ole
computer so I’m making this my last official entry as a New
Yorker. The movers come in Friday morning and sweep everything out,
and after spending a night in an empty house we’ll be heading
to Texas on Saturday to wait for the truck to show up.


How do I feel?


Exhausted.


I think I’d be grieving and weepy if I weren’t so dang
tired. And if it weren’t for my good pal Ingrid and all my
church friends rallying around to help watch kiddos and pack
I’d be even more of a basket case. I know this too shall
pass, but I think by the time I cross the finish line I’ll be
snoring loudly. I hope.


So I’m off to continue with the wrapping and stuffing and
labeling, and the next time you hear from me I’ll be a Texan
again and adjusting to life in the ‘burbs.


See you next week!

We’re leaving on Saturday for our
new life in Texas, and I’ve spent what feels like the past
month slowly saying goodbye to everyone, one painful scene at a
time.


I had a little party at the studio where I work(ed) to have a
chance to bid all my clients goodbye. This was sad and sentimental,
but not too much so since I’d never come back from maternity
leave and they’d all by and large moved on to some other
sadistic trainer. Then we’ve had little parties and
gatherings – a house church dinner, a brunch with good
friends, that sort of thing – that have been ways for us to
say farewell one piece at a time. This has by and large been good
for me, since I can always think, “Well at least I
haven’t yet said goodbye to (blank)!” But each scene
gets a bit tougher, each time feels a little harder, and a piece of
me wants to just rip the band-aid off already and get the pain over
with.

A couple months ago I mentioned that I
used a href="http://www.restorationhardware.com/rh/catalog/product/product.jsp?productId=prod1190002&navAction=jump"
target="_blank">lap duvet from Restoration Hardware for
Maddie’s bed; it’s the perfect size for toddler beds,
is lightweight but very warm, and totally washable. And as she gets
bigger, it’s a great nap blanket/lap blanket that I’m
sure she’ll even take with her to college. I had some people
email and ask when I thought they’d go on sale.


The time is now! For anyone who was interested, I’ve been
keeping an eye on Restoration Hardware’s site and they just
went on clearance; they’re down from $45 to $21.99. I picked
up one for Cora for next year; we’ve got one on
Maddie’s bed and one in the living room for snuggling on the
couch and they’re much used.


So if you’re thinking about it, think fast because once they
go on sale they clear out pretty fast.

We’re in our final week here in New
York City – we fly out on Saturday to Texas, though the
movers come on Friday to pick up all our stuff. Truthfully my state
of mind right now is two parts panic, one part shock, and seven
parts denial.


I’ve been packing for ages, it feels, though in truth
it’s only been a few months; we packed up some boxes when we
put the house on the market in July to “declutter” it,
then started packing in earnest after Thanksgiving and discovered
the clutter had crept right back in. I kept thinking a month and a
half would be enough time to get it all done, but I’m packing
maybe three boxes a day and at this rate will not be moving until
April.

Madeleine’s a girl who likes her
order, her routine, the sameness to her life. So she’s a bit
apprehensive about the upcoming move and we’ve been talking
extensively with her about it, explaining what will happen, and
getting her excited about the future.


In an attempt to make the transition easy for her we’re
working to have her new room as similar as possible to her current
room: same paint color, same curtains, same layout, everything. One
of Maddie’s favorite parts of her room is the light fixture
– it’s a pink chandelier that’s original to the
house and was made in the early 30’s. When we first moved in
here I noticed it languishing in the basement and carefully set it
aside, vowing to use it if we ever had kids. Then Madeleine came
along and we had the wiring updated and the lovely thing put up in
her pretty pink room.

A couple days ago Maddie found her
Halloween goodie bag from where I’d hidden it a few months
ago. It still had lots of candy in it that I’d intended to
eat as soon as I’d whisked it away, which I clearly forgot to
do. Madeleine was delighted to see all the candy to play with and
has spent a couple days simply unwrapping candies and smelling
them; she’s never eaten lollipops or hard candies (choking
fear on Mommy’s part) and is happy just to sniff them.


I thought the same was true for the chocolates.

At the risk of sounding like a broken
record going on and on about Cora’s (lack of) sleep habits:


MY KID WON’T SLEEP.


Honestly now. She’s approaching eight months old, and
I’m once again back to being up every one or two hours a
night. We’ll sleep-train her, letting her cry it out, for a
night and she’ll sleep maybe six hours in a row the next
night. My body will actually go into a deep enough sleep for
dreaming and I’ll begin to think those bags under my eyes
might go away.


And then she’s back to her old tricks again a couple nights
later.

Cora started crawling. I mean actual,
intentional, forward motion.


At the now-infamous brunch on Saturday I plunked Cora down onto the
hardwood floor, safely away from all toys with tiny pieces. Cora
spied a bin of train cars a few feet away and began rocking in
anticipation. Secure that she couldn’t get there, I turned
away to settle Maddie and chat with my friends. A few moments
later, I spied a chubby little body rolling happily on the floor,
chewing a toy train.


Thinking I’d misjudged the distance, I swept a new toy-free
perimeter and watched Cora.

So we went for brunch at our
friends’ house this weekend and were spending a few
wonderful, kid-free moments chatting while Maddie played with her
friends Will and Danny in their bedroom unsupervised. They know and
like each other and had gotten along well enough that we felt
comfortable walking back and assessing the situation periodically,
but in general leaving them to their own devices.


Suddenly I hear the fast patter of little feet scrambling down the
hallway. Peering around the corner, I spy my daughter –and
there’s no other way to describe this – fleeing the
bedroom with an oven mitt in her hand, yelling, “Just a
minute! Just a minute! Just a minute!” Since this was an oven
mitt that had earlier ignited animated conversation –
everyone wanted to use it to bake fake muffins at the same time
– I was immediately suspicious.

As we prepare to move to Texas and try to
whittle down the sheer volume of gear we’re taking with us,
I’ve been trying to eat down what’s in our pantry
rather than hit the grocery stores every week, and I think
I’m becoming a bit too successful.


My natural inclination is to over-shop and have a very deep pantry;
call it part organizational freak and part insatiable desire to be
able to whip up some exotic recipe without needing to run to the
store. So we’ve always had our second freezer packed to the
gills with extra casseroles, multiple bags of frozen chicken/ground
turkey/exotic sausages, dark chocolates of varying percentages (for
when the difference between “bittersweet” and
“semi-sweet” makes all the difference in that recipe),
and various bags of flour. Doesn’t everyone have whole wheat,
self-rising, cake, self-rising cake, and pastry flour in their
freezers? Is it just me?

Cora’s in the midst of a rather
intense bout of separation anxiety, as I may have mentioned one or
twelve times. If I can slip out unnoticed she’s fine, but as
soon as she spies me after a long absence – say, a
thirty-second pee break – she bursts into tears and begins
jabbering frantically, filling me in on all the woes that have been
heaped upon her head while I’ve been gone. Sometimes
she’s content to play happily on her playmat, surrounded by
stuffed animals and chew toys, while I work in an adjoining room.
Other times, she needs to be near me but will entertain herself,
say, on the kitchen floor, while I step over her and keep up a
stream of conversation. In those instances, as long as she can see
me, hear me, occasionally feel me, and believe that she’s got
my attention, she’s fine.


But then there’s the other 70% of my life, when nothing will
do but that she must be held. By mommy. (And in those moods, hand
her to my husband and she gets a look on her face that’s
positively French in its contemptible disdain: “What is zees
Daddy zing? Sacre dieu! ‘E steenks! Pieu! Removez-moi
rapidement, s’il-vous-plait!” It would be quite funny
if it weren’t for the hurt look on Brian’s face.) And
listen, with a child rounding the corner rapidly towards 8 months,
this holding thing gets old.

Maddie’s always had a good set of
ears on her, and began showing evidence a long time ago that
she’s got quite a memory to go with that sharp hearing. At
first it was a bit disconcerting to hear sophisticated phrases come
out of her mouth, but I’ve gotten used to it, and now find it
amusing to hear her use my words to describe something.


I remember one of the first times it happened: we were having lunch
the spring before Cora was born and Brian asked Maddie if it had
been cold at the park. “It was a little chilly,” she
replied judiciously, “but not too bad at all.” She was
maybe twenty months old at the time, and I wasn’t prepared to
hear her say such comparative statements; I was still in awe of
anything more elaborate than, “Mama, up!” coming out of
her mouth.

About a week ago, Cora started covering
her face with her arms and lovey blanket. She’d cloak her
face, then peep down, over and over. My mom was the first to figure
it out, and the next time Cora draped herself, Mom sang out,
“Where’s Cora?”


Down came the silky, with Cora’s face wreathed in a huge
smile. “There she is!” my mom crowed.

It’s as if Maddie sat down and read
yesterday’s blog, where I said she wasn’t ever really
jealous of Cora, and thought, “Hmm, never really thought of
that.”


Continuing with yesterday’s theme, both girls have been
extraordinarily needy today. Cora started early, getting up EVERY
HOUR last night. I nursed: she woke up an hour later. Gave her
Motrin: she woke up an hour later. NOTHING changed her, until she
fell into an exhausted sleep at 5:30 for about 3 hours.


At any rate, both girls have been loath to have me out of their
sight today, and Maddie finally hit major meltdown time this
evening. We were getting dinner ready and I told her
“no” to something really inconsequential, and she
couldn’t find a way to move past it. She cried and cried and
cried, and if I’d known it would have been such a big thing I
wouldn’t have said no, but I knew I couldn’t change my
mind after this big storm so stuck it out.

I realize that when I signed up for Mommy,
I was committing myself full-time to this gig. For eighteen years,
we all joke, but really for life. I knew that I’d become
intimate with Sleeplessness and Worry, that I’d finally
understand the definition of Sacrifice, and that my life would
never be the same.


What no one told me was that my kids would be so $#% needy.
Self-evident? Yes. Can you understand what needy means until
you’re a parent? Nope.

As everyone begins to scramble for that
pad of paper, intent on making the noble, self-improving list
needed to start your year off right, remind yourself of last
year’s list and how long it lasted. What does it say about
us, that we constantly feel the need to re-evaluate who we are and
how we’re doing and, deciding we’re lacking, come up
with some grand and totally unrealistic plan to completely change
ourselves, save a ton of money, and save the world all at the same
time? Are we really such a disappointment to ourselves? Or are we
simply mommies, and unable to resist the siren call of a
multi-tasking, impossibly-huge challenge?


Honestly, can you even keep a straight face as you write down,
“Go to the gym three times a week” one more time? Or
how about that classic, “Lose five pounds”? Or does
this one sound familiar: “Read an Important Book”? I
know we love those seemingly-insurmountable tasks, but
doesn’t the pile of laundry fill that quota already?
I’m telling you, we need a list that makes us feel better
about ourselves, not worse.