1 Mother 2 Another

Yes, you read it right. My girls came,
they saw, they kicked some dinosaur butt.


I honestly thought it would be a big deal, and both girls certainly
expressed concern at different times up until the moment we joined
the party. The host even rearranged the order in which the party
would run so the girls could skip walking the dinosaur trail with
as little humiliation as possible. But I kept them moving and tried
to make it not a big deal, just to see how far they’d go.


Apparently all the way.

You may recall that a couple months ago we
visited our local science museum’s exciting outdoor dinosaur
display, to disastrous effect. The life-sized, robotically animated
dinosaurs scared the poop out of both girls, and they swore
they’d never return to the museum again until the dinosaurs
were gone.


They’ve changed their minds – sort of.

Brian’s off work this week, and
we’re doing some holiday preparations of our own. Yesterday
we took the girls to a toy store for a meander through the aisles,
stirring the creative juices as the girls begin to ponder their
Christmas lists.


We’ve never done such things before, but truthfully
we’re having a hard time with Cora this year. What do you get
a two-year-old who already has all her sister’s old toys?
When Madeleine was two her big Christmas presents were the
trampoline, a dollhouse, and a baby care center replete with a
place to put the baby to sleep, bathe her, feed her, and more.
These things were all hits, but alas Cora already plays with
them!

As I’ve mentioned before,
we’re gradually stepping down off our recent ride on the
Refined Sugar Pony, and it’s been a little rough going. Cora
especially has developed quite a sweet tooth, and complains
vociferously – and vocally – when she doesn’t get
enough of the sweet stuff.


Fortunately, there’s Tic-Tacs.

Maddie’s been soaking up her school
lessons like a thirsty sponge, racing from new idea to new idea.
And nothing’s been embraced more heartily than her daily
encounters with the alphabet. She’s begun to make the mental
connection between what she sees on a page and words she hears out
loud, and you can tell she’s almost at that turning point to
become a reader.

So there everyone was, happily pirouetting
and leaping about, when strobe lights started flashing and an
INCREDIBLY loud siren began blaring. A dozen budding ballerinas
were herded out onto the street, more startled than scared at
first, as we waited for the fire engine to come turn the alarm off.
Cora was busy with her own “class” in other studio, and
after a brief freakout from the loud noise was happy to join the
other girls in their impromptu sidewalk ballet.

Last month was Safety Month at
Madeleine’s school, and she learned a lot. A fire truck
visited and Maddie got to climb all over, they did tornado drills,
they talked about policemen and more. The class even learned about
road safety, and gave “tickets” to all the staff at the
school.


I suppose this is the point at which Maddie became intensely
interested in all aspects of highway safety, because now
she’s a bigger worrier and more annoying back-seat driver
than my 91-year-old grandmother.

Everyone who knows me, knows that I
complain every year about Christmas’ ever-increasingly early
onslaught. I remember the good old days, when I’d crab about
the early Christmas as storekeepers decorated their aisles the day
after Thanksgiving. Ah, the good old days. Now it seems we
can’t even wait for Halloween to be over before the Yule
season takes hold; our craft store had Christmas trees and
ornaments up the beginning of OCTOBER.

Hard to believe, but many of us
penny-pinching parents are starting (or finishing if you're my
girlfriend Alison) our Christmas shopping, hoping to spread out the
cost and take advantage of early sales. So here's a heads up on a
fairly decent one.


If you happen to live near one of the half-dozen U.S. Toy stores in
the country, then this is your lucky month. For the entire month of
November, every Friday and Saturday you can take 40% off all Thomas
Wooden Railway items - cars, tracks, extra pieces, you name it. You
can also take 40% off Playmobil and 20% off Lego products.


If you don't live near a store, dig through the href="http://www.constplay.com/constplay.com/family/home/stores.htm"
target="_blank">website and see if they offer the dicount
online as well. Or find a friend that lives near a store. At the
cost of Thomas these days, it's well worth it.

When Maddie was just around five months
old and Brian and I were beginning to agonize over the whole
sleep-training thing, my best friend Abby uttered one of her wisest
sayings ever: “Welcome, my friend, to parenting. Every choice
you make will be ‘Do I pay now, or pay later?’ You have
to ask yourself: Do I do the work now and struggle through and reap
the rewards later, or do I take the easy way out now – say,
bringing the baby in bed with me – and pay for it later when
I have to sleep-train a three-year-old? Your whole life will be
making this choice, over and over again.”


Sleep-deprived as I was, I burst into tears, but Abby was
absolutely right and I’ve thought about it a lot in the past
few years as I make big and small decisions. I usually choose to
pay at that moment, grit my teeth and do something the long, hard
way so I only have to do it once; but sometimes I’ve made the
conscious decision to pay later, even though I knew the price would
be higher down the line. Holding fast when I tell a child
“no”, strictly limiting sugar and television, being
consistent in discipline, they’re all hard but make life
easier in the long run.

We took a trip last weekend to visit
relatives, and while most parts of the vacation went really well,
we did have a few small snafus. The airlines lost a bag of ours for
over twenty-four hours, the girls had a bit of difficulty adjusting
to sleeping in a room together, that sort of thing.


Oh, yes, and we discovered that Cora’s terrified of
flying.

Hold on to your hats - this is a big
recall.


Maclaren is recalling EVERY SINGLE STROLLER MADE between 1999 and
now. That's the Volo, the Techno XT, the Quest, the Twin Triumph,
and more. If it's made by Maclaren in the past ten years, it's
being recalled.


Apparently, there's a hinge that can actually amputate a kid's
fingers, and there have been twelve reported cases so far.
Naturally, they are urging everyone with a Maclaren to stop using
it immediately. The good news is that you don't have to send yours
in for a refund; simply contact Maclaren and they will send you a
free repair kit.


Call 877-688-2326 to speak with Maclaren, or visit their href="http://www.maclaren.us/recall"
target="_blank">website for more information.


Don't panic; simply get in touch with them and receive the free
fix.

Well, we’re back, and all in one
piece – though I’d say we had our share of close calls.
There was the lost luggage, which took over twenty-four hours to
find us and which, of course, contained the irreplaceable Pink
Purple Lovin’ Teddy, all the girls’ clothes, all of
Brian’s clothes, and our toiletries. On the up side, American
Airlines bought the girls new pajamas and fleece outfits.


We had our share of meltdowns and freakouts – more on
Cora’s fun with flying later – and of course the
obligatory Nap Skipping In Unfamiliar Surroundings. But Maddie and
Cora found the biggest. Leaf. Pile. Ever. And obviously took it for
a test drive. They reveled in the complimentary hotel breakfast,
where Maddie spied Fruit Loops for the first time and turned to me
wide-eyed and said, “Mommy, look at those beautiful
Cheerios!” We swam in the hotel pool and screamed with
laughter as Daddy pretended to boil himself in the hot tub like a
piece of pasta.

Well, we're just about on our way to
Wisconsin to visit family, and I'm worn out before the trip even
starts. For a four-day trip we're checking two bags - and though
I've weighed them in my bathroom, I don't think they'll care
much if I'm over the limit and I wail, "But it was under the limit
on my scale!"


We could probably have crammed everything into one checked bag with
a judicious use of carry-on allotments, since both girls get their
own tickets and hence are eligible for carry-ons and personal bags,
but I don't think we could have physically managed it. As it is,
we'll still have to navigate the airport with a stroller, a diaper
bag, a computer bag, a Britax car seat, a booster seat, and two
"real" carry-ons, not to mention the girls' own "personal bags" -
backpacks full of stuff to do. Guess who's going to wind up
carrying those. Add our big coats and purses and temper-tantrums
and, oh yes, a child who is still afraid to take her shoes off in
public, and you've got the family that makes everyone roll their
eyes in the security line.


So pray for us, for our journey there and our return trip on
Sunday. Pray our portable DVD player doesn't run out of battery
juice in the middle of the flight. Pray the girls nap on the plane.
Pray the supposedly heated pool at the hotel lives up to its hype.


And pray Mommy doesn't eat the whole hidden bag of Halloween candy
before the plane gets off the ground.

We’re going to be taking a long
weekend in a couple days to visit some family, and it’ll be
the first time we’ve really traveled with Cora – the
last time she got on a plane she was eight months old and moving to
Texas. We traveled fairly often with Maddie as a baby and toddler,
flying regularly to Texas to visit family, but now there’s
neither the need nor the cash and we’ve become quite the
homebodies. So it’ll be a new experience for the family, and
I’m just a tad worried.

We had a fantastic Halloween on Saturday
night, thanks to a couple things: first off, we threw our usual
sugar restrictions out the window and let the girls have probably a
half-dozen pieces of candy each. For us, that’s huge. Second,
we had the whole daylight savings thing, which meant we could allow
the girls to eat sugar and then stay up late until it wore off. The
girls were in amazingly good and obedient moods, and our Saturday
night, blessedly, had absolutely no meltdowns and no temper
tantrums.


Those were saved for Sunday morning.

Brian and the girls had a date last
Saturday carving their Halloween pumpkins. The girls were looking
forward to picking out the perfect faces for each of their pumpkins
before getting a bit messy with the whole emptying-and-carving
thing.


My husband is a big supporter of technology, and so he decided to
look for pumpkin stencils on the Internet. He sat a girl on either
knee and did a Google search – “pumpkin
stencils”. Brian clicked on each link, looking at all the
different stencil choices and debating with the girls the merits of
each face they saw.


He’d looked at maybe half a dozen sites when he clicked on
yet another under the search phrase “pumpkin stencils”
– and came upon a porn site. There on the computer sat row
after row of x-rated pictures, of apparently some pretty hard-core
stuff. I didn’t ask for details.


Horrified, Brian slammed his hands over the girls’ eyes and
shouted, “Don’t look! Don’t look at Daddy’s
computer, girls!” He was pretty sure that neither girl really
saw anything and quickly navigated away from the page. And then
Maddie said,


“Daddy, were those people hurting each other?”


Um, can’t we wait a few more years before this
conversation?