1 Mother 2 Another

Hey everyone - have a wonderful holiday
weekend, and see you next year!

I feel like such a cliché, but
I’m absolutely astonished at the fact that another year has
gone past. I find myself leaping from event to event –
birthday, Easter, swim lessons, school time, Halloween, school
fundraiser, Thanksgiving, and so on – much more than I ever
did as an adult responsible solely for myself.

Yes, it's time for the required Cute Kid Christmas Morning video.

Cora received a Thomas train that plays "Jingle Bells", and she now carries it around like her own personal karaoke machine, pressing "play" and singing along every time, most times into a microphone. Here I captured the debut performance - Cora, still sleepy and in her Christmas pjs, as she sings along with gusto and enthusiasm.

Press "play" and enjoy.

Sorry to have left you in suspense over
the long weekend, but what kind of writer would I be without
employing a little good old fashioned cliff-hanger? Plus, of
course, there was the whole Christmas thing.


But since I know you were all worried, rest easy: baby Jesus made
it through the pageant unmolested – er, attended to. Was it
incident-free?


Ish.

Last night a friend of mine had a brief
conversation with Cora that went like this:


“Cora, are you going to be in the Christmas pageant?”


“Yep.”


“What are you going to be?”


“An angel.”


“What do the angels do?”

Cora’s big into playing with baby
dolls right now, and in fact Santa’s bringing her a cradle to
set next to her bed so her dolly can sleep near her. She takes care
of her and dresses her and rocks her, and in fact has legally
changed dolly’s name to Baby Jesus. When I say legally, I
mean she stood in the middle of the room and said, “Listen
up, guys, dolly’s name is Baby Jesus now, ok? I mean it, ok,
guys?” (And yes, she really does talk like a wise guy.) So
Baby Jesus now goes with her to the park, gets put night-night, and
so on. Cora’s quite protective of the doll.


As I mentioned yesterday, Cora’s going to be in the Christmas
pageant this year, as an angel. (Stick with me – I promise
I’m tying all this together soon). She’s quite excited
and can’t wait to do it for an audience on Thursday, and in
fact was talking to her grandfather about the big night yesterday
at lunch.


“Yep, so Papa, I’m going to dance and sing, and maybe
I’ll get to hold the baby Jesus afterwards.”

It’s Christmas pageant time, and
Maddie is once again preparing for her role as an angel in our
church’s Christmas eve service. You may recall that last year
Maddie approached the event with great trepidation, only to find
the spotlight so enchanting she broke into an impromptu dance solo
in the middle of the nativity scene, complete with curtsey at the
end. Got it on video, dontcha know.


This year, Maddie is calm and confident and ready to reprise her
role. And this year, it’ll be a family act.

The girls have had their Santa requests
down for some time now, and as I mentioned in an earlier blog
they’re not the easiest – Cora wants a real live tree,
at least partly red, and Maddie wants a specific ballet barre that
is apparently one of the hot tickets this year. I finally tracked
it down on Craig’s List and have it hidden in a bedroom,
while Cora’s real live Christmas tree is tucked around the
corner of our side yard, waiting to be decorated with the red bows
and battery-powered (!) red lights I found. I thought we had all
this wrapped up.


I thought wrong.

Both girls are walking around belting out
Christmas carols at the top of their lungs, and certainly
don’t let anything so petty as not understanding all the
words get in the way of their singing. Here recorded for posterity
are a few of my favorite malaproprisms – let’s just
call them fresh takes on classic songs.

I’m pretty strict on television for
the girls; they get one television show a day, sometime after their
naps, and only if they don’t lose the privilege due to bad
behavior. I’m similarly picky about which shows they watch,
and have a pretty narrow definition of what I consider appropriate.


I should also say here that I didn’t grow up watching
claymation shows the way my husband did, so I was a stranger to the
whole Rudolph/Santa Claus Is Coming To Town line of shows when we
had kids. The Christmas after Maddie turned two, though, I saw them
each over and over as Maddie joyfully picked one out of the lineup
each night for her “bideo”. Last year saw a fond
reunion between Girl and her Claymation Collection, and I knew this
year would be no different. In fact, this year would be even bigger
because Maddie would get to introduce Cora to the wonderful world
of singing reindeer.

I always swore I would never be the parent
who spends a ridiculous amount of money on a toy worth a fraction
of the price, just to satisfy a child’s Christmas wish.
There’s no such thing as “irreplaceable” or
“one-of-a-kind”, and I could easily find a substitute
rather than pay exorbitant prices because of high demand and low
supply. I drew a line in the sand and declared myself firmly on the
side of common sense, of right versus consumerism.


Then Maddie made up her wish list.

We had our big Christmas party this
weekend, a tradition going back years before we had kids.
We’ve always thrown open our doors and invited a big crowd,
spending weeks leading up to the event furiously cooking and
cleaning and decorating. Since having kids, though,
something’s had to give, so I finally threw in the towel and
admitted I need professional help.


No, I didn’t hire someone to bake for me. Bite your tongue.


I hired a cleaning lady.

Maddie woke up yesterday morning with a
sore throat. No big deal, except that there’d been rumors of
strep running through her preschool, and we’re having our big
Christmas party here on Saturday. So it’d probably be better
if we weren’t all contagious. I usually leave these things to
develop or go away on their own, but with those extenuating
circumstances weighing on my mind, I mentioned we might need to go
get a strep test for her.


“If I get a strep swab, will I get a lollipop?” Maddie
asked.


“Yes, of course, hon,” I answered absentmindedly,
knowing how icky those strep swabs are.

Most of you know I’m big into the
whole environmental stewardship thing, and I know I’ve
brought this up before, but I’m telling you, you gotta check
out target="_blank">Freecycle.


It’s a national network of local groups who simply give stuff
away that they no longer need. Rather than see a perfectly good
bike end up in a landfill, someone will list it on freecycle and
the first person to respond will get it. For free. The people who
participate seem to be honest and try to only take what they need,
so the greed thing stays out of it.

Maddie’s preschool presented their
annual Christmas concert last night, and I swore walking in there I
wouldn’t be one of THOSE parents – I’d sit there
and savor the moment rather than racing frantically to record it,
thus missing the actual moment itself.


Yeah, not so much.

Our church offers free donut holes and
coffee at the end of every service, and believe you me, it’s
the highlight of the girls’ weekly worship experience.
They’ll tear out of the service and stand salivating on the
table until I come up and give them the A-OK. Somehow I descended
down that slippery slope, and now they expect the donut hole every
Sunday.


Unless, of course, their behavior is less than exemplary during the
service. We operate on the choices-and-consequences discipline
plan, and they know that the consequence of bad choices Sunday
morning will most likely result in the loss of one of their most
precious privileges – the donut hole, the sugary light at the
end of the preaching tunnel. So usually, they try to be patient and
attentive and obedient during and around the service, and in return
they get a little bite of heaven.

I'm burning the candle at both ends -
heck, at about three or four ends right now. I'm throwing together
a show that opens Thursday night, stepping in at the last minute as
a personal favor for a friend. So I'm at rehearsal until 11 p.m.
most nights, teaching afternoons and evenings, and of course trying
to mother my kids as best I can.


Oh, and getting ready for the whole Christmas thing.


So I'm a bit tired and fighting hard to keep my time with the
girls really focused on them and not completely devoted to laundry
and errands and paperwork. Which is a long-ish way of explaining
why I may be a bit absent the next night or two.


The girls are hanging in there, but before I started this a couple
weeks ago Cora had been put down at night by someone other than me
exactly five times. Now it's almost fifteen times. Not
surprisingly, both girls are clingy and needy during the day and
I'm trying my best to be there for them.


I can't believe this sort of schedule used to be consider "fun" in
college.

As many of you know, over the past several
months we’ve been moving Cora from a crib to a big-girl bed.
We went from a toddler mattress on the floor beside the crib to a
full-sized mattress on the floor, and as the final step put
together her bed frame and raised the mattress up off the floor
this weekend.


I’m a big fan of Craig’s List and never know when what
I want will come up, so I started looking for a bed frame for her
about eight months ago. I discovered a lovely old full frame in our
price range last spring, and it’s been sitting in the garage
ever since, waiting for Cora to be old enough to climb into it.


Judging by what we’ve seen since we put the bed together,
it’s going be a really long time before Cora’s old
enough to climb into it.