1 Mother 2 Another

We're headed back to the dentist this
morning - Maddie was found to have two cavities a couple weeks ago
at her regular teeth cleaning, so Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to fill
we go. We've been reading about visits to the dentist and talking
through it, but my nervous kid is, well, nervous about it. And
let's face it, when it comes to going to the dentist, those nerves
are sort of justified.


In a huge ironic twist of fate, Maddie's school Halloween party is
this afternoon, so we're filling those holes up so she can tear
them back out again with sugar. Or something like that. Anyway,
wish us luck and lots of laughing gas.

The New York Times reported last week that
Disney, who owns the Baby Einstein franchise, is offering a refund
to all their consumers. Apparently, they received a threatening
letter from a collection of public-health lawyers who are
considering a possible “deceptive advertising” lawsuit
against the franchise. They’ve got studies on their side
which show links between early childhood television-watching and
poor attention spans later down the line, and of course the
American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that there be no
television at all for children under the age of two years, for the
same reason.

So Cora, Maddie and I were driving home
from preschool pick-up on Friday and all was quiet in the car until
Cora said, “Hey, Mommy, I’ve got that green thing stuck
up my nose.”


Excuse me, what??

A couple weekends ago, we had a beautiful
Saturday morning and went on a family walk through the
neighborhood. A few streets over we walked into a garage sale and
began browsing lazily through the items. One table was devoted to
the owner’s rather large, um, collectibles collection –
several dozen Hallmark Christmas ornaments, as well as three or
four Barbies in their boxes. Brian had a firm grip on Cora, so I
began sorting through a pile of children’s clothing.


Sixty seconds later, a fellow shopper came over to me.
“Ma’am?” she said apologetically. “Your
daughter just broke that ornament over there.” I looked up,
and Maddie was running to me, tears already streaming down her
face, as the garage sale owner stood holding a Barbie ornament.

Cora wants to be exactly like her big
sister Maddie in every way, and dreams of the day she can go to
school, just like Maddie. Madeleine has explained to Cora that one
can’t go to school until one is potty-trained, which is not
exactly true, but is sort of what I led Maddie to believe in the
midst of our potty-training throes. Regardless, though, I’ve
no intention of placing Cora in school right now – especially
since my money would probably be wasted and I’d be picking
Cora up the minute she realized Mommy’s not allowed to stay
in school with her.


But Cora still wants to be like Maddie and do some sort of school,
so on the days Maddie goes to her preschool class, Cora does
schoolwork at home.

Can't talk here - too busy putting the
last touches on B Bear's journal. It goes back to Maddie's class
today as she ends her week-long possession of B Bear, as well as
her week-long extra homework assignments. The final one: keeping a
daily journal of all of B Bear (and Maddie's) activities, with
pictures glue-sticked in to go with it. I won't even pretend that
Maddie helped me with it, except to pose for the pictures.


Maddie ends her week with B Bear having spent several days in the
spotlight amongst her fellow classmates, and extremely sad that B
Bear is leaving. She's already begging me to ask the teachers
where they got him so she can buy her own exactly like him. Giving
the whole "No two bears are exactly alike, just as no two people
are exactly alike! Isn't God amazing?" speech has had no effect.
Guess what's going on her Christmas list.


I have enjoyed having the bear around, and having Maddie see her
life through his "eyes" and seeing how much fun she has. B Bear,
I'll miss you, kid.


The homework thing, not so much.

There’s a really excellent natural
science museum and wildlife refuge not far from us, and our family
membership allows us to enjoy their many miles of hiking trails
through protected wetlands, as well as their great indoors natural
science exhibits. They recently opened a limited-engagement outdoor
exhibit: nine life-size, realistic dinosaurs, complete with
animation and sound, stationed all along a hiking loop. Maddie and
Cora both enjoy dinosaur books as well as the Little Mermaid t.v.
episode where Ariel reawakens the dinosaurs from their frozen sleep
(sigh), so we decided to take in the exhibit.

At the end of last week, Maddie brought
home B Bear, the class bear. He came in his own backpack, with a
full set of clothes and a journal. Maddie is the Beary Special
Student this week, and gets the honor of taking care of B Bear all
week and carrying him everywhere. The week also serves as a
spotlight on Maddie, and every day she gets to reveal a little bit
about herself to the rest of the class. One day she turns in her
journal of her week with B Bear – complete with diary entries
and photos – and one day it’s show and tell time just
for her. On Monday, she had to bring in a poster covered with
pictures of herself, her family and friends.


Let me say in advance that I totally appreciate teachers and what
they do. I heart them in a big way, and consider them professionals
of the highest order – which is why I don’t homeschool
my kids, but leave it up to said professionals. But this poster
thing stressed me out on many levels.

I know I didn’t write anything on
Friday, and you were all waiting to hear how the bike-a-thon went.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go just absolutely superbly, and I
wasn’t really in the mood to blog about it, so sorry to leave
you hanging.


But here’s the story.

Maddie’s got a fundraiser for her
preschool today – a bike-a-thon. The school is setting the
parking lot up with cones to make a circular track, and each class
comes outside at recess time to ride laps around the track –
scooter, trike, bicycle, whatever. The children are supposed to
receive pledges for their ride – so many dollars for each
lap, that kind of thing – and try to go around as many times
as possible. The school suggests aiming for one lap for each year
of a child’s age, so Maddie should be shooting for four laps.


She stated yesterday that she feels confident she’ll reach
somewhere between ten and twenty.

This is part of my series, Staying On Top
of Family Meals. We’ve covered Planning Ahead, Cooking Ahead,
and Breakfast, and now we’re moving up the timeline to Lunch
and Snacks. You will quickly realize that everything comes back to
Planning Ahead and Cooking Ahead, but let’s get going.


Lunch. This is probably my least favorite meal, for a couple of
reasons. First, it’s the time of day when I’m fast
approaching my frazzle limit, and as I start to make lunch and the
little monkeys are dancing around my legs I feel as if I
can’t make that stupid peanut butter and jelly fast enough.
Second, I often make lunch early in the morning: packing school
lunches, packing picnics for the arboretum, packing poolside
lunches for swim time. I am heartily sick of slapping together a
huge assembly line of sandwiches, and I am even more heartily sick
of said sandwiches.

Yesterday we went to our local arboretum,
where they make every Monday a Mommy and Me Day. Because yesterday
was a holiday, they added a bonus – a local musician to come
do a kids’ concert that morning at no cost to us. We’d
been to hear this singer before and the girls liked him, so we were
excited about going back.


So we went to the park, and the time came for the concert.
It’d been raining so the park had moved the concert inside,
and we ended up spread out on the carpeted floor eating our picnic
lunches and pretending there weren’t two hundred kids all
around us doing the same thing. It’s one thing outside with
the sun shining and the grass tickling our feet, listening to music
in a big stone amphitheatre; it’s another thing when
it’s in a conference room – some of the charm is
lost.

Yes, we’re one step closer to Cora
being permanently ensconced in a big-girl bed!


So she’s been sleeping on a toddler air mattress next to her
crib for a couple weeks, and she’s handling it like a pro.
We’ve had some emotional wrestling matches over naptime
– she’s starting to give it up, and would just get up
and walk out of the room. But we’ve finally worked it out,
and now she knows she has to stay in the room and take “quiet
time” until I come get her. She usually cries and demands,
“Mommy! Come. In. Here. Right. Now!” for the entire
forty-five minutes, but at least she doesn’t leave her bed.


Other than naptime, though, it’s been smooth sailing, so
Thursday we took one more step – we went mattress
shopping.

Cora is, like any two-year-old, insanely
delicious to kiss on. We’ve come up with several different
ways of loving on her, and started saying things like,
“I’m just going to take a little nibble!” or
“I’m going to yum on you!” While this was fun and
cute for a while, Cora has declared that enough is enough.


Apparently, her legalistic two-year-old brain has decided that
“nibbling on you” means we are actually taking some
part of herself away, and she’s begun freaking out at the
thought of all her “nums” and “nibbles”
being eaten by other people. So when my mom says, “I’m
just coming in for a little nibble!” and kisses Cora’s
neck as she walks by, Cora now shrieks, “No! No! No! Put it
back! Put my nibble back on!”

Today’s blog is part of a series I
started a few weeks ago – Staying On Top of Family Meals.
We’ve already looked at Planning Ahead and Cooking Ahead, and
now we’re getting down to the nuts and bolts of each meal,
starting with breakfast.


Breakfast was never a big deal to me until Maddie started school.
Suddenly we were on a time crunch and everyone was tired; I’d
rarely awakened the girls before school started, preferring to let
them sleep until they were ready to wake up. But school waits for
no child, so we had to adapt to a schedule. And since I’m a
big believer in breakfast (and you are too, RIGHT?) I knew I had to
get organized.

Last weekend the girls and I went to see a
ballet of Peter and the Wolf. It’s one of our favorite pieces
of music, we’ve got a story of it in one of our fairy tale
books, and we’ve even found a video version of the story at
the library, so the girls know the tale inside and out. The ballet
was only twenty minutes long, and I knew it was the perfect sort of
thing for a cultural evening out.


The night went pretty predictably: the girls were entranced, only
slightly critical of the performance itself, and Cora was scared of
the wolf. She’d seen the wolf portrayed as a cartoon, and
drawn out in the book, and knew he wasn’t real, but
c’mon – that music’s pretty ominous and scary all
by itself. As we sat in the audience before the show started, Cora
told herself over and over again, “The wolf’s not
coming out here. He’s only going on stage. The wolf’s
not coming out here. He’s only going on stage.” I could
see real nerves in the white knuckles clutching my knee, but I
could also see the excitement and anticipation coming across her
face – the excitement that draws us into those
“Don’t go into that dark creepy room!” films time
after time.

When Maddie was a toddler in New York,
we’d hit our local playground every day. Every morning
– and some evenings as well – we’d be swinging
and sliding for a good hour or two. I’d chase Maddie all over
the playground, going down slides with her and hanging from bars
together. We’d kick the soccer ball and make water balloons,
and even when I was heavily pregnant with Cora I still got my daily
workout on the jungle gym.


I’d see the moms and nannies sitting on benches on the side
while their kids played and swear I’d never be THAT person
– how could I teach my child how to interact with other kids
if I wasn’t there to correct her, teach her manners and how
to behave in society? And wasn’t it, um, my job to play with
her? I mean, Maddie had her friend Naomi that she played with, but
Naomi’s mom and I still followed around and participated in
tea parties and climbed through tunnels with them. Play time
wasn’t time for Mommy to check out.

In church yesterday our pastor talked
about healing and prayer. During his kids’ sermon he started
off discussing all the ways we can prevent getting sick, or the
things we can do ourselves when we get sick to make ourselves feel
better, like taking medicine. Maddie was sitting right at his feet,
and she got excited and yelled out, “My mommy makes really
good cough syrup!” “I’m sure she does,” he
smiled indulgently, before turning to move on. Maddie pressed
forward. “No, I mean she makes REALLY good syrup,” she
insisted, causing him to look at my slightly askance.

This is the second in my series, “Staying On Top of Family Meals”. Last week I talked about the importance of planning ahead, and today we’re going to look at cooking ahead.

Now, the phrase “cooking ahead” implies there will be actual cooking involved, but even if you’re not that kind of girl, you can do the sous chef work that we all do – dicing up fruit, packaging the goldfish into small containers or Ziplocs – ahead of time, so that life doesn’t overwhelm you when you’re running late and trying to get out the door. So even if you’re a Stouffer’s or Pizza Hut kind of girl, you should keep reading this article.