1 Mother 2 Another

What do you get when you mix two kids with
excellent costumes and unlimited access to high fructose corn syrup
and artificial dye?


A couple of crabby, hung-over kids twelve hours later.

Here’s something you don’t
hear every day from a four-year-old: “Hey, Mommy, I want to
get up on that cow and drink some beer!”


Let me start from the beginning.

We had our first full day of Mommy being
back yesterday, and both girls did well – but also stayed
quite close to me all day long. Maddie, of course, had school, but
even then I came in to volunteer for half an hour and got plenty of
snuggles in that time. On a side note, what in the world am I going
to do when my daughter no longer wants to snuggle with me in front
of her friends?

I’m back, but I’m not back, if
you know what I mean.


I just had about the best five days of my life, eating my way
through every single ethnic food type there was in New York –
which is saying a lot – and sampled pretty much every
chocolatier’s offering. Which is also saying a lot. I walked
through EVERY major neighborhood in Manhattan, and had a grand time
reuniting with the city I love so much.


But most of all, I talked.

My amazing husband and incredibly
sacrificial mother have teamed up to give me an astonishing early
birthday present – a trip to New York to see my friends.


It’s been a whirlwind of planning and getting ready and
making all the big decisions, such as where to eat every delicious
meal in the city. But as ecstatic as I am about going there,
I’m not so thrilled about leaving here.

A few weeks ago, Maddie came to me,
troubled. “Mommy, I’m very frustrated with recess time
right now,” she said.


Fearing some sort of conflict with one of her friends, I cautiously
asked, “What’s going on?”


Maddie sighed. “It’s just that every single one of my
friends can do the monkey bars except me, and I feel really left
out. I feel bad that I can’t do it. And all my friends try to
help me and give me suggestions, but I just start to feel like
everyone’s telling me what to do and I get frustrated and
have to walk away.”


“So what do you want to do about it?” I asked.


Maddie looked at me determinedly. “I want to
practice.”

Cora’s been sick since Monday
afternoon, and a nightmare of a nighttime – think fretting
child not sleeping more than ten minutes at a time before waking to
either a) throw up or b) cry and cling to you – led to a
similar Tuesday. I held off taking her to the doctor in the
morning, thinking it was just a stomach virus. But when she began
to complain of aching all over, and had had a headache since Monday
afternoon, I bowed to the possibility of strep and took her in.


So I was glued to Cora’s side all morning – rubbing her
feet, just lying next to her, distracting her with stories,
whatever – and trying desperately to stay awake, then dragged
us out of the house to get to the doctor. I was carrying my poor
girl and her throw-up bowl through the doctor’s office, Cora
a limp little doll in my arms, still in her pjs with no shoes on.
The verdict was a virus, so all we can do is hang in there and hope
it’ll get better soon.

Cora started running a fever yesterday
after school, hitting close to 104 last evening. Maddie is still in
the midst of another round of nightmares/no sleeping/freaking out
due to our neverending cycle of fire/tornado/lock-down drills at
school.


And then the thunderstorm moved in.


Can you say "no sleep"?

In our house, our rewards system is jewels
– glass pieces bought in bulk at the local craft store. Girls
can earn them by doing extra chores, but they’re just as
often given one for performing an outstanding act of kindness or
going above and beyond on something. The jewels aren’t a
privilege, in that it’s not something they can lose by bad
behavior: once they get one, it’s theirs until they spend it.
I supposed it’s our precursor to an allowance.


There are a variety of ways the girls can spend their jewels, but
it’s roughly one jewel to one dollar. If Cora sees some tacky
plastic play phone or something, I’ll tell her she needs to
save her jewels for it, look at the price, and name an amount of
jewels. A week later Cora will come back to the store with her
jewels clutched in her hand, the magnificent piece of crap now
hers. So oftentimes the girls will say, “How many jewels does
this cost?” and I’ll throw out a quick number.

As part of a test program in our school
district here, I am helping out in Maddie’s classroom once a
week for six weeks. Pretty much every day of the week, a
student’s mom comes in to teach for half an hour; the teacher
wrote up a six-week lesson plan, then distributed it to the
volunteer moms (I’m Thursday) and set us loose. I’ve
been nervous, but I’m having a blast.


We’re studying fairy tales: we’ve taken a fairy tale
apart, talked about what makes a story a fairy tale, read a couple
of them and found the “fairy tale markers” in each one,
and brainstormed ideas for building our own kingdom – a first
step to writing our own fairy tale.

Yesterday we took both girls out of school
to hit our state fair – which, call us hicks, but we love.
Our state fair is the coolest one in the country (I say unbiasedly)
and we go every year. Who doesn’t want to see a sculpture
made out of two thousand pounds of butter?


The fair has its down side: everything costs an arm and a leg
(read: four dollars for a small bottle of water) and there’s
nary a vegetable to be found in the entire place. This is, after
all, the place that has deep-fried bubble gum, deep-fried oreos,
deep-fried butter, and even a deep-fried latte. But we spend
selectively and know going in we’re going to have tummy aches
the next day.

One of my favorite places in our big
metroplex here is our local arboretum – it’s really
excellent and a place I can always go to for a great day with my
kids. Every spring and fall they do Mommy and Me days; each Monday
and Tuesday, they have a face painter, a craft table, a story
teller, puppet shows, a petting zoo, and more.


For free.


Well, you pay to get in, but you don’t pay more for all the
extra stuff.


Cora and I have been craving some one-on-one time, so we hit the
arboretum yesterday for the first time this fall. When the girls
were younger, we were there a few times a month; we’d buy a
family membership that would more than pay for itself in the first
month. We’d pack a lunch and the red wagon in the car, then
explore all over the park: through the area set up like a frontier
village, all around the asian gardens and waterfalls, playing chase
through the big pecan grove, rolling down the huge hill towards the
lake – you name it, and we’d do it.

A couple weeks ago Cora went on an art
kick, and our budding Renoir is showing no signs of slowing down.


I got out the easel – I forget why – and set it up for
Cora in our kitchen, complete with drop cloth and washable paints.
We’ll do this every once in a while; the kitchen breakfast
counter is great for most crafts – gluing sequins and
stapling books together are no problem there, and of course markers
and crayons are used almost daily. But when we want to do some
serious painting in this house we get out the easel so the artiste
can stand and admire her work and she progresses.

One of my good friends from New York is a
stay-at-home dad, and I’ve long respected the way he handles
the questions and discomfort that invariably come up. In a previous
life, he was a financial consultant who left the money world to
become a New York City school teacher. When his daughter was born
right around the time my good friend– his wife – was to
start her medical residency, they made the decision for him to stay
home and her to go back to work.


Graham is one of the best dads I know, and is an excellent example
of deliberate parenting. He had a backpack stuffed with
non-battery-operated toys and flashcards to use while waiting for
the subway; he brought us a meal after Cora was born; he writes
thoughtful, illuminating articles on Christianity – the guy
is not just flying by the seat of his pants here. But no matter how
great he is, I’m sure he still wrestles with identity issues
– I imagine him going to some sort of hospital fundraiser
with his wife and having to field the inevitable “So what do
you do?” while watching the questioner’s eyes start
searching for someone more worthwhile to speak with when he answers
simply, “I’m a dad.”


But Graham has come to peace with this, and recently wrote an
article weighing in on href="http://www.qideas.org/blog/fatherhood-as-vocation.aspx"
target="_blank">Fatherhood As A Vocation – I
highly encourage you to read it. It makes me want to dig in even
more as a parent, myself.

In the years since Maddie and Cora have
been born, at least one – if not both of them – have
had all of the following:


Thrush

Whooping cough

Scarlet fever

A heart that spontaneously stops beating

Hand and mouth disease

Leukemia

Asperger syndrome

Hemophilia

Concussion

Brain tumor


Before you freak out and start sending condolence cards, no, my
children have not actually been diagnosed with any of these
diseases. But I can tell you that I spent at least one night on
each of these diseases: going the entire night absolutely CONVINCED
my child had (fill in the blank), and trying to figure out how I
would rearrange the rest of my life around this new
perspective.

Since we’ve been healthy for, oh, a
few weeks now, we’ve certainly been due for some germs around
our house.


And they’ve obligingly showed up.


I’ve had both a nasty cold and persistent, lingering
allergies over the past two weeks. A stomach bug was passed around
both girls’ schools and Cora obligingly picked it up and
spent Sunday puking. Thankfully, it was short-lived, but Brian came
home early Monday with a cold that’s knocked him on his
hiney. And Maddie’s saying her allergies are starting to feel
like a cold.


Thank heavens we’ve got that half-gallon of hand soap.

If you’re like us, you go through
about a gallon of hand soap a month. And now that cold-and-flu
season is upon us, it’s just going to get worse. We always
use liquid soap – I can’t remember the last time we
used bar soap in this family, since it’s so messy and is
harder for little hands to hold – but I’m not a big fan
of most liquid soaps; the artificial fragrances range from annoying
to carcinogenic, and most hand soaps now add an anti-bacterial
ingredient known as triclosan, which is a big no-no in this
household. (Side bar – triclosan is being reviewed by the FDA
over concerns that it is both harmful to humans and is actually
producing antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And it has been proven to
be no more effective than regular soap. Plus, all the triclosan
that gets washed into our water systems is literally killing entire
aqua eco-systems. )


But I digress.