1 Mother 2 Another

The past few weeks have seen a drastic
increase in Cora’s separation anxiety, and I keep wondering
– when’s it going to get better?


I mean, the girl’s twenty months now- that’s a year and
two-thirds. And separation anxiety is supposed to peak around
eighteen months, so wouldn’t we be maintaining or getting
better rather than going deeper into it?


I suspect that part of the cause is Cora’s nearly unending
stream of colds and teething and stomach viruses; there’s
nothing like not feeling good day in and day out to make you want
your mommy. So I get that, and give her extra snuggles and love and
patience. But even when she seems to feel good, she simply wants
me, and nothing else will do.

We had a modest ice storm pass through our
area over the past couple of days, and yesterday everything came to
a halt – schools closed, businesses allowing employees to
work from home, gymnastics and ballet lessons canceled. So of
course, we had to get outside and see for ourselves.


Late morning finally found us bundled up and walking cautiously
across the crunchy grass. Getting dressed for cold weather caused a
bit of a problem: we’d not bought any truly cold weather gear
for Maddie this year, and we’d lent out Cora’s size to
friends traveling northward over Christmas. But we patched together
too-big shoes and too-small boots and made do, and were delighting
in the cool air and beautiful sunny day.

We’ve been preschool shopping in
earnest the past couple of weeks, since registration’s begun
for September and we’ve admitted that Maddie absolutely needs
to go for a year before kindergarten. We narrowed it down to two
and took tours recently of both facilities, and have finally made a
decision.


The hard thing is that both schools are really good, and
Maddie’s got friends at each one. Ask her which school she
prefers and she’ll say, ‘Maxum’s school!”
simply because it’s where Maxum goes. Somehow I’m going
to have to break it to her that we’ve chosen the other
school.

We just passed our one-year anniversary of
moving to Texas, and I can’t figure out if the year’s
flown by or stretched out interminably.


In some ways I feel as if I’ve been here forever; at the same
time, I still feel startling pangs of homesickness for New York.
We’re certainly settled in here, roots firmly planted in the
ground, but in quiet moments my heart still wings eastward towards
the Big Apple. And knowing we’re in the right place for this
season of our family life doesn’t make the aches any easier
to bear.

We’ve had a week now with our new
potty training in place, and I can say this is the longest
we’ve gone with such forward progress.


After a disastrous weekend last week, in which Maddie pooped in
several pairs of panties and steadfastly refused to use the potty,
Brian and I hit on a new plan. Maddie now wears big-girl underpants
all the time, using the potty whenever she needs to. But any time
she feels the urge to poop, she tells one of us and gets to put on
a pair of pull-ups for the deed.

You know I love you all, but I've been
sick all week and have several hours of prime-time television to
catch up on.


Namely, I'm the only person left alive who hasn't seen the season
premiere of "Lost". It's sad, but true.


So while I've got some time to myself, I'm gonna plant my snotty
self on the couch and find out how Jack persuades everyone to go
back to the island.


But I leave you with this bon mot -


Maddie put on a new leotard for gymnastics today and apparently the
sparkles on the neck are too itchy. She hopped up from the
breakfast table pulling at the neck and saying, "Mommy, I have GOT
to change. This leotard is KIDDING me."


I think she meant KILLING me. But I snorted my way up the stairs to
change her, hearing an exchange in my head which began, "A leotard
walks into a barre . . . "

Can you believe it? We're all sick again.


Yep, we'd been limping along with another mild cold from last
week, when Cora up and threw up all over the back seat on our way
home from church Sunday. There was a bit of diarrhea that day, but
no more vomiting, and we all thought it was just one of those
things.


Then I got this stomach bug Monday night and was out of commission
all Tuesday, with my mother not far behind me. Brian held out until
Tuesday evening, but spent all Wednesday in bed. The girls have run
wild the past couple of days, with barely enough supervision
between us all to keep them from playing with matches. The house is
a wreck and Maddie and Cora have been living off of macaroni and
cheese.


Both girls' colds seem to have intensified, much to my chagrin,
and I came down with their cold on Wednesday. And I swear Cora's
eyes started weeping Wednesday afternoon, but so far nothing red or
pinkish about the eye. Maddie's been incredibly sweet, offering to
fix me all manner of her favorite treats, running down a list of
foods she thought might help me even as the descriptions sent me
running for the bathroom. And both girls brought Daddy crackers and
jell-o in bed and have tried to give him wide berth.


The good news is that both girls seem to be ok other than the
snotty colds; we're hoping Cora had it briefly on Sunday and that
it skips Maddie. We've got fresh sheets and clean-up towels piled
in the hallway just in case, though.


The bad news is that we may have to move, just to escape the war
zone of toys that is our house.


That, and after these few days of blue-box heaven, I may not ever
get a vegetable past their lips again.

As I write this, the nation’s in
final preparation for the inauguration, and I have to confess,
I’m so excited I can hardly stand it. This is history in a
way we’ve never seen before, and I wish I could get the girls
to understand the momentousness of the occasion.


There are certain points in our history that I remember with
complete clarity: where I was when the space shuttle Challenger
exploded (in school, watching all the teachers starting to weep);
when the tanks rolled through Tienamen Square (in Kentucky doing a
show – and staring with tears rolling down my face at the
lone protestor standing in front of the tank); when the Twin Towers
were hit (New York, and that’s a whole separate
conversation).

Ok, so that didn’t work.


This weekend I put Maddie in big-girl underpants and told her we
would no longer do diapers. I explained that if she pooped in her
panties, we’d have to throw her new Ariel underpants away. I
also told her there’d be no leaving the house – no gym,
no ballet, no playdates – until she was well on her way to a
perfect no-hitter – er, pooper.


Twenty-four hours and four trashed pairs of panties later, we had
to revisit our plan. Maddie was a nervous wreck, crying at the drop
of a hat and jumpy. She’d run off to hide to poop, then come
to us, shame-faced and crying.


Brian and I retreated, prayed, and came up with a new game
plan.

Maddie is once again peeing in her diaper,
and I’m at my wit’s end.


We’re a week out from her urinary tract infection, and all
symptoms are gone though she still takes her medicine. During the
first few days of her infection we allowed her to use her diaper
– the pain was too much for her to try to hold it in while
she got to a potty – but quickly saw that becoming a habit.
She’s declared a preference for peeing in her diaper –
something she hasn’t done for months – and would like
to go back to it full-time.

Maddie and Cora both love the game Cariboo
they received for Christmas, and as I’ve blogged about
previously, Maddie’s been learning the hard way the lesson of
how to lose graciously – or at least without dissolving into
a complete puddle of tears. Nearly a month since they first played,
both show no signs of a waning love for the game – if
anything, it’s intensified and we go through at least a
half-dozen games a day.

Coming down the stairs for breakfast in
the morning, Cora will spy the box and cry, “Play
Cariboo!” (though it sounds more like “Pay
Cah-Boo!”) I can persuade her away from it with a promise of
breakfast, her favorite meal and one that lasts almost an hour most
days – but that’s another blog. At any rate,
we’ll usually get in a couple rounds before lunch, another
one or two before naps, and then several hands after dinner.

I’ve got a girl obsessed with ballet, and it’s not even the one taking the classes.

For whatever reason, Cora simply adores all things ballet. Her favorite day of the week is Tuesday, when Maddie takes her ballet class. Cora now has her own “dance bag” with her own ballet shoes in them, because she sobbed uncontrollably when Maddie put her shoes on and Cora had none of her own. So every Tuesday Cora brings her bag to the studio, and the teacher generously allows Cora to play in an empty studio.

The husband of a good friend of mine
recently had a run-in with another friend – the kind that
leaves women in tears and analyzing it over cups of coffee for
months to come – and has been distraught over it ever since.
The effect of this on my friend has been no less painful, and she
finds herself unable to stop crying for no reason other than that
her husband is in pain.


And this got me to thinking about how often I go on emotional
rollercoasters on behalf of loved ones – how often I agonize
with a friend as she waits to become pregnant, or hold my breath as
a family member awaits medical test results. This, though, is
nothing compared to how vociferously my heart feels each elation,
each pang that runs through my girls’ hearts. Every time a
child snubs Maddie on the playground and she looks at me,
bewildered; every time Cora is ignored by her older sister
“just because” and she toddles to me in tears; every
time my child overcomes a new fear and breaks through into insane
happiness; I think, I can’t take much more of this. My heart
is not built for such abuse.

I did this concert Saturday night, and it
was the first time I’d been gone from the house at bedtime
since the night I delivered Cora, way back in May 2007. No one has
put Cora down for bedtime except me – first because of the
nursing thing, then because of her raging case of separation
anxiety. We’d been working on naps for a while and
she’s pretty good about that – she’ll happily
allow someone else to do naptime as long as I’m not in the
house. But we hadn’t done nighttime before, because
she’s such a difficult sleeper that we didn’t want to
create a possible “up all night” scenario until we
needed to.

The past two nights, Maddie’s
awakened complaining she needed to go pee. This from a child who
has not peed in the night, either in a diaper or a potty, for over
a year now. At first I thought this was a ploy to be up with Mommy
or Daddy, but last night Brian went in and she was crying, saying
she could already feel it coming out. Then this morning she had
such trouble going to the bathroom that she cried and sobbed on the
toilet.


Which is when I knew we needed to go to the doctor.

One of the “hit” gifts that
Maddie and Cora got for Christmas is the board game Cariboo. This
game is billed for ages 3-6, but Cora adores playing it since she
gets to use the key and drop the balls in the tunnels, and Maddie
helps her “read” the game cards.


This is not the first board game Maddie’s played – she
loves freakin’ Candyland, and really enjoys that
hugely-annoying-to-parents game Chutes and Ladders. But those have
always been played one-on-one with an adult, and Cariboo is the
first game Maddie’s had to play with Cora. And we’ve
noticed a disturbing trend.


Maddie hates to lose.

Today is open gym day, and we’re
about to head out there for our first gym play time in three weeks.
Both girls are screaming with excitement, not unlike that of
waiting for Christmas morning to come.


Try explaining school holidays to a toddler.


We had a wonderful two weeks hanging out with Daddy and gorging
ourselves on gifts and goodies – I’m not saying we
didn’t have a fantastic holiday. But it is a relief to be
back into our normal schedule.

This is usually the time of year when I do
a funny blog on new year’s resolutions: I see traditional
resolutions as a bunch of needless pressure, impossible standards
we’ll never fulfill, and often will blog about
“realistic” resolutions, such as giving ourselves a
break and accepting our parenting flaws. But this year I seem to
see many such articles around already; seems we’re a bunch of
highly stressed, pressured people who need lots of people to tell
us to take it easy and not put too much pressure on ourselves.


I predict that 2009, with its economic uncertainty and crazy stock
market, will be a year of paring down: living more simply,
de-cluttering, stripping away extraeneous activities and expenses
and getting back to the basics. And while new year’s
resolutions have always seemed a bit arbitrary to me, the flip of
the calendar is a convenient place to pause and take stock of your
life, seeing what worked and what didn’t and vowing to try
harder. So I tried to come up with some resolutions.

Ok, I was sitting here working on the blog
I’ve been mulling over for several days now –
it’s a doozy and hopefully you’ll get to read it
tomorrow.


You won’t read it today because I’ve been detoured by
babies.


My girlfriend Ingrid just delivered her second girl this morning.
Remember Maddie’s best friend Naomi from New York? Well,
Naomi just became a big sister. Give a shout out to baby Emily.


I’ve also found out that another friend from New York
delivered this morning, and yet another New York friend (must have
been in the water nine months ago) delivered just last week, and
let me tell ya, I love the name Ivy.