1 Mother 2 Another

Last night Cora was working at our
breakfast counter, doing her homework. The assignment was to
“write five words with a short vowel sound”, and Cora
was tired, at the end of a long day, and very frustrated.


Finally, she said, “This is too hard! I can’t think of
anything good!”


Trying to be helpful I began throwing words out. “Um, how
about ‘cat’? Or ‘pet’? Or
‘cup’? Do you see how they have short vowel sounds? Or
what about –“


“Mommy,” Cora said, exasperated, “Can you please
be QUIET? I can’t concentrate!”


Meek silence.


Then, a few moments later, Cora asked while busily writing,
“Does ‘octopus’ have a ‘k’ or a
‘c’ in it?”


Clearly I was aiming too low.

I do enjoy cooking, but I don’t love
the weekly rut of meal-planning, shopping, and making
“do” in the kitchen. In a dream world, we’d hire
a personal chef to make dinners (and pack school lunches!) for us.
The only catch? I would get to tell the chef exactly what to make,
and be insanely micro-managing on the whole shopping/organic/good
produce thing.


I know, I can dream, right?


Weeknight dinners are always a little catchy: some nights I’m
teaching and leaving my mom to feed my kids – not exactly
cool to leave her with the whole “hey, what’s for
dinner? I don’t know, I’m leaving, you figure it
out” taste in her mouth. So on those nights I need to cook
the meal in advance. Then on nights I’m home I can make a
meal from scratch – but I’d much rather have extra time
for hanging with my kids.


So I’m a big fan of make-ahead meals; I usually try to double
one meal each week and freeze one for future use. I own several
great cook-and-freeze cookbooks, but I find myself returning to one
over and over – href="http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Make-Ahead-Freeze-Cookbook-Series/dp/1558327568/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&keywords=not%20your%20mother%27s%20make%20ahead%20and%20freeze&linkCode=ur2&qid=1362022929&sr=8-1&tag=1mother2anoth-20"
target="_blank">Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead And Freeze
Meals Cookbook.

Dear Maddie:


This weekend, my baby, you looked one of your worst fears in the
face. And you kicked its butt


Last week, reasonably out of the blue, you decided to dust off your
bicycle – not ridden in almost four years because of a
one-time fall – and give it another shot. You spent the
weekend joyfully rediscovering what it feels like to put the pedal
to the metal and truly enjoyed riding that bike – though
it’s too small for you and your nearly-eight-year-old legs.


You rode the bike to school one day, having thought about what it
would look like for a second-grader to ride a bike with training
wheels but deciding to do it anyway. I don’t know if anyone
teased you about it, but I know the training wheels have weighed
heavy on your mind all week; by Wednesday you asked me if I could
raise the wheels up a bit so you could start practicing riding on
just two wheels.


And then came Friday.

When Maddie was four years old, she fell
off her bike. She was riding in a bike-a-thon and a couple boys her
age came whizzing around the corner, skimming too close to my
slow-and-steady girl, and tipped her over. Ever since then
Maddie’s refused to ride her bike. At all. Every once in a
while I’d bring it up and suggest giving it a try and Maddie
would say, “I am too scared to. Remember the time I was
riding my bike and I fell off it?”


Yes. Yes, I do. I’ve remembered it for the past three and a
half years.

Last week Maddie came home from school and
announced, “In two days we get to go to school dressed like
our cultural heritage! So I’m going to dress Hawaiian!”


Yeah, ‘cause we look so darn Hawaiian.


Actually my mom grew up there and I was born there, so TECHNICALLY
Maddie’s descended from a Hawaiian, I guess, but we’re
the white Hawaiians. The ones that actual Polynesian Hawaiians
don’t so much like.


So I set out to put Maddie straight on our heritage and explained
why she really couldn’t dress Hawaiian. “Well,”
she pouted, “Then what can I dress up as?”


Ah, now we see. It’s called Maddie Gets To Wear A Costume To
School Day.

We had a long week last week, mostly from
anticipating- and then wallowing in – Valentine’s Day,
and by the time the girls got home on Friday we were pretty fried.
I was facing a reasonably hectic weekend, an incredibly filthy
house, and the prospect of two exhausted, bickering children.


I was not looking forward to it.


But for whatever reason, we had one of those golden afternoons,
where you hit that sweet spot and simply coast from one happiness
to the next. Not in any huge, life-changing, trip-to-Paris kind of
way, but in a sweet contentment kind of way.

No, the house hasn’t been visited by
a plague – just a crazy week this week and no time to vent
– er, blog.


But in case you were wondering how our Valentine’s Day went
yesterday, this about sums it up:


At 4:30 in the afternoon, after a long day of parties and sugar,
Maddie was up in her room asleep – crashed out after an
exhausting emotional battle over math homework that was “too
HARD!” (the equation in question: 14-2=?).


And as for Cora? Well, she was lying in a sobbing – I mean
crying-so-hard-she’s-losing-her-voice sobbing – heap on
the couch because it wasn’t her day to pick which video the
girls watched.


Yep, that about sums up our Valentines Day.

Dear Maddie:


We had a bit of a rough morning recently, didn’t we? School
mornings are never easy, but this one seemed to start out pretty
well and I had reasonably high hopes for getting you to school
relatively incident-free.


Then it came time to brush your hair.


As I approached you with the brush, you raised your arms up and
blocked me from your hair. And then I said, “Honey, you need
to let me brush your hair – and not fight me – or you
need to brush it yourself.”


I then lifted my arm up to brush again – and you pushed my
arms away.

Today our school is celebrating all the
kids’ 100th day of school. Kindergarten in particular has a
rip-roaring good time with lots of extra activities, like making a
necklace of 100 Fruit Loops or counting out 100 pieces of snack;
but the grand finale of the nearly week-long festivities is
today’s big excitement: the 100 Days Shirt.


Each kindergartener is supposed to make a shirt with 100 –
SOMETHING – on it. 100 stamps, or buttons, or stickers, or
pom-poms, whatever. And when I say a kindergartener is supposed to
make it, I mean his MOM is supposed to make it.

Last night I came in after work to snuggle
Cora after she’d already been in bed for a while. I found her
propped up on a pillow, studiously studying an open book;
she’s been “reading” very simple books for a
couple months or so – simple as in, “I sat on the mat.
The rat sat on the mat” with lots of accompanying pictures
– and she is straining hard to start deciphering more
difficult books.


“Mommy,” she said, gesturing me over, “what is
this word?”


I looked at the page.


“That word is ‘glad’,” I said. “The
‘g’ makes the hard sound, I know it can be
tricky.”


Cora huffed impatiently. “No, not that word, THAT word
–“ and she pointed more specifically.


“Oh, um, that word? That word is
‘whisker’,” I stammered.


Cora nodded thoughtfully. “Ah, the ‘h’ is kind of
silent, like in ‘whisper’. Well, not silent, more like
breathy.”


And she continued reading.


Yeah, I’m calling it – she’s officially reading.
Apparently.

The other day Maddie and I were walking to
school, Cora scootering on ahead. Maddie was holding my hand,
pausing every once and a while to give me a brief, affectionate
hug. As we neared the school Maddie grew quiet, clearly thinking
about something.


“Hey, kiddo, what’cha thinking about?” I asked
lightly.

Every Sunday Maddie brings her personal
Bible to church; her second grade class is encouraged to do so,
trying to build the kids up to actually use their Bibles and become
comfortable with them. Yesterday when Maddie ran to grab hers
before getting in the car, Cora said, “Oh! I want to bring
mine today, too!” and ran off to pick hers up – her
new-for-Christmas, very lovely but perhaps
intimidating-to-a-five-year-old grown-up Bible. I wasn’t sure
why, but was happy to go along with it.


I dropped Maddie off at her Sunday school room before walking Cora
to hers, and when Cora walked through her door she made a beeline
for the teacher, clutching her Bible to her chest. Wanting to find
out what was up, I did what any respectable parent would do: I
eavesdropped.


“Hey, teacher, do you want to know something really
interesting?” Cora peered owlishly up at her instructor.


Her teacher, of course, nodded yes.