1 Mother 2 Another

Maddie entered the “why” phase
a few months ago, but Brian swears she has gotten significantly
worse – er, more intense – over the past few weeks.
Thankfully we haven’t hit too many of those really difficult
“why” questions, like, “Why is the sky blue? Why
is Daddy a boy?” but even the ones we can answer are
exhausting.


I try hard to follow her “why” lines of questioning all
the way to a satisfactory end, but they’re often thrown in
with several other tasks simultaneously and I have to confess my
patience runs thin. When I’m trying to wrestle a screaming
Cora into her clothes for the day, discussing it calmly with Maddie
isn’t always at the top of my “fun” list.

Last week we sleep-trained Cora. Again.
What with our family bout of food poisoning and colds, Cora had
been getting up every two hours to nurse again, and after everyone
was hale and hearty we spent a couple nights tough-loving it out
with her, finally convincing Cora to sleep without intervention
until around 5 a.m. With me falling into bed around midnight each
night, that gave me almost five hours straight of sleep for maybe
three nights in a row, and I guess I got a little spoiled.


Because, yes, once again, Cora’s up at night.

I’m a pretty big extrovert and can
make steady conversation with a tree stump, but I confess
I’ve been nervous for a while about finding some good
girlfriends here. While I know there will be people in the area
with children similar in ages to my kids, a good friendship goes
way beyond “How old are your kids?” And while
it’s helpful to find someone with similar opinions on issues
such as breastfeeding and discipline, add things like common
interests and a similar sense of humor and suddenly you’ve
got a list that no one person can hope to fill.

My poor Cora has been through a lot in the
past few weeks: she’s spent a lot of time being loosely
babysat by a variety of stuffed animals while Mommy packs or
unpacks, she’s dealt with a two-day loss of her milk supply
while I was sick, moved to strange surroundings, been taken out of
her daily routine, and tried to live with a very bad cold.
It’s enough to make any baby grumpy, and Cora’s not
been her happiest (I try not to take it personally). I knew her
renewed clinginess would pass, and that her droopiness and
moodiness would eventually lift and she’d become the
confident, happy baby I once knew.

We’ve been working on finding a
permanent bed for Maddie for about a year now, if you can believe
it. Maddie was nearly two when Cora was born last May, and we knew
we needed to think ahead to make the transition out of the crib
smooth for her. I didn’t think Maddie was quite ready for a
big bed, and also didn’t want to remove her from the crib
only to put Cora in it; I was afraid Maddie would feel replaced by
the “new” baby. So timing-wise, we decided to buy
Maddie a toddler-sized air mattress to sleep on in her room while
Cora occupied the bassinet in our room, reasoning that it’d
be perfect for traveling to visit family or to use for sleepovers
in the future. We made a big deal about Maddie’s new
“big-girl bed” and how exciting it was for her to
“finally” be old enough to use it.

Proving once again that no two siblings
are alike, Cora is going through a phase Maddie simply never
experienced – the Human Carpet Cleaner.


I don’t know what it is with this child, but I am convinced
that at least part of the reason Cora is crawling so early is that
she sees an attractive paint chip across the floor and simply must
have it in her mouth. ANYTHING on the floor is fair game, provided
it is 1) dangerous, and 2) not generally considered food to humans.
Meaning, that triple-A battery is fair game, but she’ll pass
right over a green bean.

One of Maddie’s biggest current
concerns is her inability to recognize our house from the outside;
every day when we walk to the (empty) park she’ll turn around
at the corner and say anxiously, “Which one is ours
again?” We count down from the end of the street, talk about
the “Welcome Home” banner strung up over the door, the
colors of the bushes, and so on. Once she’s got it in her
mind we head on off to the park for our play time. But then the
whole way back she’s scanning the street – “Is
this our street? Is that our house?” until she sees it.


A few days ago, we rounded the corner and our house came into view.
Once she identified it I could tell she was really looking it over
and she said, wide-eyed, “Our house is really big!” I
laughed, but know exactly what she means: we’ve been folding
ourselves into what in New York was considered a very luxurious 900
square feet for several years now, and living life, well, larger,
takes some getting used to.

We’ve officially been Texans for a week now and are slowly settling into the area. Not that we’re unpacked at all; I’ve estimated that if we unpack ten boxes a day we’ll be done in a month. (How’s that for depressing?) But we’re starting to find our way around our neighborhood and are working on getting into a groove here.

Yes, I missed a day blogging.

Wonder why?

Here I sit at a cardtable in an empty gameroom, typing my first blog from Texas.

I made it!  I'm alive!  Barely.

Here I sit at a card table in my gameroom, blogging for the first time from Texas.

I made it!  I'm alive!  Barely.

Yep, it’s time to pack up the ole
computer so I’m making this my last official entry as a New
Yorker. The movers come in Friday morning and sweep everything out,
and after spending a night in an empty house we’ll be heading
to Texas on Saturday to wait for the truck to show up.


How do I feel?


Exhausted.


I think I’d be grieving and weepy if I weren’t so dang
tired. And if it weren’t for my good pal Ingrid and all my
church friends rallying around to help watch kiddos and pack
I’d be even more of a basket case. I know this too shall
pass, but I think by the time I cross the finish line I’ll be
snoring loudly. I hope.


So I’m off to continue with the wrapping and stuffing and
labeling, and the next time you hear from me I’ll be a Texan
again and adjusting to life in the ‘burbs.


See you next week!

We’re leaving on Saturday for our
new life in Texas, and I’ve spent what feels like the past
month slowly saying goodbye to everyone, one painful scene at a
time.


I had a little party at the studio where I work(ed) to have a
chance to bid all my clients goodbye. This was sad and sentimental,
but not too much so since I’d never come back from maternity
leave and they’d all by and large moved on to some other
sadistic trainer. Then we’ve had little parties and
gatherings – a house church dinner, a brunch with good
friends, that sort of thing – that have been ways for us to
say farewell one piece at a time. This has by and large been good
for me, since I can always think, “Well at least I
haven’t yet said goodbye to (blank)!” But each scene
gets a bit tougher, each time feels a little harder, and a piece of
me wants to just rip the band-aid off already and get the pain over
with.

A couple months ago I mentioned that I
used a href="http://www.restorationhardware.com/rh/catalog/product/product.jsp?productId=prod1190002&navAction=jump"
target="_blank">lap duvet from Restoration Hardware for
Maddie’s bed; it’s the perfect size for toddler beds,
is lightweight but very warm, and totally washable. And as she gets
bigger, it’s a great nap blanket/lap blanket that I’m
sure she’ll even take with her to college. I had some people
email and ask when I thought they’d go on sale.


The time is now! For anyone who was interested, I’ve been
keeping an eye on Restoration Hardware’s site and they just
went on clearance; they’re down from $45 to $21.99. I picked
up one for Cora for next year; we’ve got one on
Maddie’s bed and one in the living room for snuggling on the
couch and they’re much used.


So if you’re thinking about it, think fast because once they
go on sale they clear out pretty fast.

We’re in our final week here in New
York City – we fly out on Saturday to Texas, though the
movers come on Friday to pick up all our stuff. Truthfully my state
of mind right now is two parts panic, one part shock, and seven
parts denial.


I’ve been packing for ages, it feels, though in truth
it’s only been a few months; we packed up some boxes when we
put the house on the market in July to “declutter” it,
then started packing in earnest after Thanksgiving and discovered
the clutter had crept right back in. I kept thinking a month and a
half would be enough time to get it all done, but I’m packing
maybe three boxes a day and at this rate will not be moving until
April.

Madeleine’s a girl who likes her
order, her routine, the sameness to her life. So she’s a bit
apprehensive about the upcoming move and we’ve been talking
extensively with her about it, explaining what will happen, and
getting her excited about the future.


In an attempt to make the transition easy for her we’re
working to have her new room as similar as possible to her current
room: same paint color, same curtains, same layout, everything. One
of Maddie’s favorite parts of her room is the light fixture
– it’s a pink chandelier that’s original to the
house and was made in the early 30’s. When we first moved in
here I noticed it languishing in the basement and carefully set it
aside, vowing to use it if we ever had kids. Then Madeleine came
along and we had the wiring updated and the lovely thing put up in
her pretty pink room.

A couple days ago Maddie found her
Halloween goodie bag from where I’d hidden it a few months
ago. It still had lots of candy in it that I’d intended to
eat as soon as I’d whisked it away, which I clearly forgot to
do. Madeleine was delighted to see all the candy to play with and
has spent a couple days simply unwrapping candies and smelling
them; she’s never eaten lollipops or hard candies (choking
fear on Mommy’s part) and is happy just to sniff them.


I thought the same was true for the chocolates.

At the risk of sounding like a broken
record going on and on about Cora’s (lack of) sleep habits:


MY KID WON’T SLEEP.


Honestly now. She’s approaching eight months old, and
I’m once again back to being up every one or two hours a
night. We’ll sleep-train her, letting her cry it out, for a
night and she’ll sleep maybe six hours in a row the next
night. My body will actually go into a deep enough sleep for
dreaming and I’ll begin to think those bags under my eyes
might go away.


And then she’s back to her old tricks again a couple nights
later.

Cora started crawling. I mean actual,
intentional, forward motion.


At the now-infamous brunch on Saturday I plunked Cora down onto the
hardwood floor, safely away from all toys with tiny pieces. Cora
spied a bin of train cars a few feet away and began rocking in
anticipation. Secure that she couldn’t get there, I turned
away to settle Maddie and chat with my friends. A few moments
later, I spied a chubby little body rolling happily on the floor,
chewing a toy train.


Thinking I’d misjudged the distance, I swept a new toy-free
perimeter and watched Cora.

So we went for brunch at our
friends’ house this weekend and were spending a few
wonderful, kid-free moments chatting while Maddie played with her
friends Will and Danny in their bedroom unsupervised. They know and
like each other and had gotten along well enough that we felt
comfortable walking back and assessing the situation periodically,
but in general leaving them to their own devices.


Suddenly I hear the fast patter of little feet scrambling down the
hallway. Peering around the corner, I spy my daughter –and
there’s no other way to describe this – fleeing the
bedroom with an oven mitt in her hand, yelling, “Just a
minute! Just a minute! Just a minute!” Since this was an oven
mitt that had earlier ignited animated conversation –
everyone wanted to use it to bake fake muffins at the same time
– I was immediately suspicious.

As we prepare to move to Texas and try to
whittle down the sheer volume of gear we’re taking with us,
I’ve been trying to eat down what’s in our pantry
rather than hit the grocery stores every week, and I think
I’m becoming a bit too successful.


My natural inclination is to over-shop and have a very deep pantry;
call it part organizational freak and part insatiable desire to be
able to whip up some exotic recipe without needing to run to the
store. So we’ve always had our second freezer packed to the
gills with extra casseroles, multiple bags of frozen chicken/ground
turkey/exotic sausages, dark chocolates of varying percentages (for
when the difference between “bittersweet” and
“semi-sweet” makes all the difference in that recipe),
and various bags of flour. Doesn’t everyone have whole wheat,
self-rising, cake, self-rising cake, and pastry flour in their
freezers? Is it just me?

Cora’s in the midst of a rather
intense bout of separation anxiety, as I may have mentioned one or
twelve times. If I can slip out unnoticed she’s fine, but as
soon as she spies me after a long absence – say, a
thirty-second pee break – she bursts into tears and begins
jabbering frantically, filling me in on all the woes that have been
heaped upon her head while I’ve been gone. Sometimes
she’s content to play happily on her playmat, surrounded by
stuffed animals and chew toys, while I work in an adjoining room.
Other times, she needs to be near me but will entertain herself,
say, on the kitchen floor, while I step over her and keep up a
stream of conversation. In those instances, as long as she can see
me, hear me, occasionally feel me, and believe that she’s got
my attention, she’s fine.


But then there’s the other 70% of my life, when nothing will
do but that she must be held. By mommy. (And in those moods, hand
her to my husband and she gets a look on her face that’s
positively French in its contemptible disdain: “What is zees
Daddy zing? Sacre dieu! ‘E steenks! Pieu! Removez-moi
rapidement, s’il-vous-plait!” It would be quite funny
if it weren’t for the hurt look on Brian’s face.) And
listen, with a child rounding the corner rapidly towards 8 months,
this holding thing gets old.

Maddie’s always had a good set of
ears on her, and began showing evidence a long time ago that
she’s got quite a memory to go with that sharp hearing. At
first it was a bit disconcerting to hear sophisticated phrases come
out of her mouth, but I’ve gotten used to it, and now find it
amusing to hear her use my words to describe something.


I remember one of the first times it happened: we were having lunch
the spring before Cora was born and Brian asked Maddie if it had
been cold at the park. “It was a little chilly,” she
replied judiciously, “but not too bad at all.” She was
maybe twenty months old at the time, and I wasn’t prepared to
hear her say such comparative statements; I was still in awe of
anything more elaborate than, “Mama, up!” coming out of
her mouth.

About a week ago, Cora started covering
her face with her arms and lovey blanket. She’d cloak her
face, then peep down, over and over. My mom was the first to figure
it out, and the next time Cora draped herself, Mom sang out,
“Where’s Cora?”


Down came the silky, with Cora’s face wreathed in a huge
smile. “There she is!” my mom crowed.

It’s as if Maddie sat down and read
yesterday’s blog, where I said she wasn’t ever really
jealous of Cora, and thought, “Hmm, never really thought of
that.”


Continuing with yesterday’s theme, both girls have been
extraordinarily needy today. Cora started early, getting up EVERY
HOUR last night. I nursed: she woke up an hour later. Gave her
Motrin: she woke up an hour later. NOTHING changed her, until she
fell into an exhausted sleep at 5:30 for about 3 hours.


At any rate, both girls have been loath to have me out of their
sight today, and Maddie finally hit major meltdown time this
evening. We were getting dinner ready and I told her
“no” to something really inconsequential, and she
couldn’t find a way to move past it. She cried and cried and
cried, and if I’d known it would have been such a big thing I
wouldn’t have said no, but I knew I couldn’t change my
mind after this big storm so stuck it out.

I realize that when I signed up for Mommy,
I was committing myself full-time to this gig. For eighteen years,
we all joke, but really for life. I knew that I’d become
intimate with Sleeplessness and Worry, that I’d finally
understand the definition of Sacrifice, and that my life would
never be the same.


What no one told me was that my kids would be so $#% needy.
Self-evident? Yes. Can you understand what needy means until
you’re a parent? Nope.

As everyone begins to scramble for that
pad of paper, intent on making the noble, self-improving list
needed to start your year off right, remind yourself of last
year’s list and how long it lasted. What does it say about
us, that we constantly feel the need to re-evaluate who we are and
how we’re doing and, deciding we’re lacking, come up
with some grand and totally unrealistic plan to completely change
ourselves, save a ton of money, and save the world all at the same
time? Are we really such a disappointment to ourselves? Or are we
simply mommies, and unable to resist the siren call of a
multi-tasking, impossibly-huge challenge?


Honestly, can you even keep a straight face as you write down,
“Go to the gym three times a week” one more time? Or
how about that classic, “Lose five pounds”? Or does
this one sound familiar: “Read an Important Book”? I
know we love those seemingly-insurmountable tasks, but
doesn’t the pile of laundry fill that quota already?
I’m telling you, we need a list that makes us feel better
about ourselves, not worse.

A couple days ago I was cooking in the
kitchen with Cora playing around my feet. I stepped away for a few
moments to get something out of the pantry and came back around the
corner to a sight most every Mommy dreads at this age –


A baby, on her hands and knees, rocking back and forth.

When Maddie woke up the day after
Christmas, her first words were, “I want to go see if my
trampoline is still here!” The day after that, she said,
“Let’s go look at my trampoline!” Madeleine jumps
on that thing fifty times a day, and I rejoice every time she does
so.

Ok, Christmas morning with a toddler old
enough to understand what’s happening but still young enough
to be wide-eyed and untouched by commercial greed is one of the
coolest things I’ve ever done.


Maddie was dancing in her pjs as she went to bed the night before,
awed by all the happenings: Church at night! How cool is that??
Then there was the careful deliberation for Santa’s treats:
What sort of cookies would Santa want? (She went with the chocolate
crinkles.) And don’t forget carrots for the reindeer, and a
piece of cheese for Santa Mouse. Madeleine took a long time
choosing where the plate went, the right glass for the milk,
everything. We decorated Jesus’ birthday cake for dinner the
next night. We got out our stockings and hung them up. We turned
out the lights and quietly sang “Silent Night” by the
tree, just like we had done hours earlier at church by candlelight.
Then Maddie sped off in her new pjs, our caution ringing in her
ears: “Remember, Santa knows if you’re only pretending
to sleep!”

As we stare into tomorrow’s open
space on the calendar, I find myself wishing I was Maddie, full of
anticipation and glee. She’s been looking at the stack of
presents piling higher and higher and wishing desperately, I can
tell, that she knew how to read so she could check out those gift
tags.


I, on the other hand, find myself worn to the bone with getting
Christmas ready and dealing with our home life –house buying
and selling, packing, and so on. Add to that my littlest one, who
is again getting up every hour or two at night which leaves me
sobbing helplessly at 4 a.m., and I wish I had my own Santa to
grant me a few of the things on my list. And you know what? It
turns out I’m not the only mom to feel that way.


My girlfriend Sandra passed this mom’s letter to Santa on to
me – I can’t find the author anywhere so my apologies
for not crediting you, Mom! But whoever you are, you captured
pretty perfectly some of the things I wish for. So here it is for
everyone else – enjoy! I’ll call you from my crisper
later on.

In keeping with my effort to be deliberate
about our traditions and what they teach our kids, I’ve
started a new one this year based on the typical Advent calendar
– you know, those paper things with windows to open and
pictures to see which help you count down to Christmas.


Last year I knew I wanted to find a permanent Advent calendar we
could re-use every year, becoming part of our family traditions. I
wanted a religious one, rather than a “hang a new present on
the Christmas tree” type of calendar or toy. I finally found
one that fit the bill at Constructive Playthings; with my
cheapskate patience, I waited until after Christmas and bought it
on sale for this year.

Mommyhood seems to move through two speeds
simultaneously – too fast, and interminably slow. On the one
hand, your kids seem to grow up so quickly – they’re
the same for months on end, until suddenly you really look at them
and you realize they’re a completely different person. Just
as you get used to the fact that you’ve got a baby, your baby
is a toddler and you wonder where your baby went. Blink, and time
has flown.


On the other hand, daily motherhood creeps by at a snail’s
pace, and I have to confess that this is wearing me down right now.
Yesterday was not a particularly bad day; no major meltdowns from
Maddie, no extra finicky-ness from Cora. No one needed a trip to
the doctor or popped a tooth or threw up or any of those happenings
that make you consider (briefly) committing a crime and turning
yourself in so you would have a nice quiet cell to yourself. But
still, by the time we got out the door and to the park I was nearly
in tears and looking speculatively around for someone to mug. Just
a little.

Cora’s an official seven-month-old,
and I’m entering this month with much trepidation – I
remember vividly when Maddie reached this age.


By seven months Madeleine was pretty much sleeping through the
night, but right at that age she began waking once or twice a night
and needing me to help her back to sleep. This signaled a huge
surge in developmental growth which lasted for three months, much
to my exhausted dismay. I remember those three months in a blur of
new skills, weird tricks, and little habits that almost drove me to
drink.

When Maddie was six months old and
experienced her first Christmas, Brian and I enjoyed the excuse to
shower our pride and joy with gifts but knew it didn’t really
mean much to her. Last year, we knew Maddie would walk wide-eyed
and awestruck through the Christmas season, and I reveled in every
second of watching her see everything for the first time ever: a
tree in our house! Lights on the bushes! A sock hanging in front of
the television! The experience reminded me of my own wide-eyed
early Christmases, and I truly learned what it’s like to see
with a child’s fresh eyes. This year, though not new and
fresh, is almost more exciting than any of the previous, though,
because for the first time we’re seeing Maddie remember
traditions and anticipate experiencing them again.

I haven’t been as diligent on
reading up on developmental milestones with Cora as I was with
Maddie. I’m pretty confident I can recognize if Cora’s
“normal” or not, and know how to stimulate a kid, if I
do say so myself. But I do periodically pick up a baby book and
read up on where Cora “should” be developmentally,
usually much to my husband’s dismay.


Because as practical and level-headed as I am, that all goes out
the window with a child. I think Cora’s doing great and am
perfectly happy with her status when the doctor casually mentions
she’d like to see Cora pushing up a bit better, which is the
point at which I freak out and fall apart. These things crop up
periodically and I try to simply get through them quickly with the
least amount of embarrassment (my own).

Cora has always had a mighty fine set of
lungs on her, but she’s now concentrating on putting those
lungs to a good (or at least better) use than the screaming
she’s been known for up until now.


Around five and a half months I noticed Cora moved from that
newborn infant gurgle talk to true babbling; she’d lie on the
floor and string vowels and consonants together in an obvious and
frustrated effort to communicate. I’d hear her experiment
with different letter pairings, constantly searching for the
“right” one that would get her message across. I could
see she was interested and trying to imitate everyone around her,
which I heartily encouraged.


And then she discovered singing.

Yesterday was our annual pilgrimage to see
the “real” Santa at Macy’s Herald Square. Brian
and I have been trekking for a photo with the big guy for almost
two decades now, having started when we were in high school
together, and have an ever-growing string of photos to look at and
see ourselves grow old before our very eyes. As fun as that is,
though, Maddie’s become just as enamored of the tradition as
we are and was really looking forward to a chat with the Man In
Red.


After informing kiddo that we’d be going to see Santa after
her nap, we spent the rest of lunch listening to Maddie practice
what she’d say to Santa, discoursing on desired toys while
simultaneously reflecting (in a very self-aware way, I thought) on
the very real possibility that she’d be too shy to speak to
him.

With almost seven hours of sleep under my
belt, I felt invincible yesterday. I wasn’t even phased by
the fact that Maddie went down for a nap and Cora refused to at
all; I simply took it in stride and got busy.


Throwing a cranky Cora in the sling, I let her snooze as I made
phone calls to realtors and got bills paid. Thirty minutes later, a
contented Cora woke up and we headed to the living room. As Cora
rolled happily on the floor I started cleaning up our wreck of a
house. We moved to the kitchen (me standing, Cora in bouncy seat)
where I prepped dinner and began work on our Christmas fudge;
it’s become Maddie and I’s habit to do some holiday
baking after her nap, and fudge was on the agenda for the day so I
did all the “boring” work so Maddie could step on up
for the fun stuff when she awoke. Since Madeleine was still not up
from her nap and Cora continued to beam, I boldly moved back to the
living room and began doing a bit of holiday decorating, stringing
up lights and opening boxes with Cora underfoot trying her best to
crawl.

Yes, we looked directly into the face of
the Beast and are still standing.


Barely.


With Cora at a healthy six-and-a-half months and still getting up
every couple of hours or more to nurse at night (several times on
vacation I nursed her four times in five hours), she has clearly
been needing to nurse to get herself back to sleep. Which means
it’s been time to teach her how to get herself to sleep
without nursing. Because frankly, the things I’m thinking as
I get up all night are not the kindest, and Cora really needs to
start sleeping through the night so we can have a better
relationship.


So we planned for the weekend, when Brian wouldn’t need to be
up early to work. And we set up a slumber party at Gamma’s
house for Maddie both nights so she wouldn’t hear Cora
crying. The house was empty, the stage was set, and right on cue
–


The baby was crying.

Nearly every day I find myself jotting
down something Maddie’s said, not wanting to forget that she
used to call grasshoppers “grasspoppers” or that she
sings “Crinkle Little Star”. I don’t always post
them because as fascinating as my child’s every utterance is
to me, I know it grows old for other people.


But (and you knew there was a “but”) recently
Maddie’s said a few hum-dingers, so here you go.

Preparing for an outing with a toddler is
a bit like organizing a shuttle launch; you hit a certain point
where it’s “Go/No Go” and once you run down that
checklist and make the decision to move forward, there’s no
going back. At a certain point, your child understands exactly
where she’s going and has built up a “taste for
it” in her mind, and if you’re going to change those
plans it’d better be for something even more fun. You are
committed, and God help you if you don’t follow through.

I have to admit that I have not been as
good with guarding Cora’s routine as I was with
Maddie’s when she was this age; when you’ve got more
than one kid, you simply don’t have the luxury of planning
your entire day around their circadian rhythms. But I do try to
give Cora her thrice-daily naps in some form, especially since we
all suffer if she doesn’t get them. Thankfully, I’ve
got a few options.

We’ve finally escaped from Texas
after several vacation extensions, and we almost didn’t make
it out this time. Bad weather here in New York caused several
flights around ours to be canceled, and our own flight was delayed
a couple of hours. Both girls held up well; though our flight
finally took off several hours after Maddie’s regular nap
time, she didn’t melt down beforehand and dozed off pretty
quickly on the plane. The sight of my sweet girl exhausted in her
car seat, Silky clutched in one hand with the other arm wrapped
around Elmo’s neck, is one I won’t soon forget. The
night was clear and cloudless, so the sparkle of city lights
thousands of miles below us out her window gave her a faint
illumination. Truthfully, I sat and stared at her for a long
time.

If there’s one thing this extended
“vacation” has given us, it’s a chance for Maddie
to spend more time with her family. Madeleine’s always been a
social person – she loves to play with others on the
playground and will spot a new persons and say, “I wonder if
she’d want to play with me”- but she’s not had so
much time around so many kids who, frankly, find Madeleine almost
as fascinating as she finds herself.


Maddie’s the youngest of the twelve cousins (except for Cora,
of course), with the next nearest being a year older and the oldest
right around 19. And since she’s not around most of the year,
she’s fresh entertainment to the other kids, so they all love
hanging around with her. But as much as they enjoy her company,
Maddie is in ecstasy in theirs.

What began as a long week visiting family
for Thanksgiving has turned into almost two weeks of house-hunting
and hanging around Texas. And though we’ve got a suite hotel
room with a mini-kitchen and more space than most, there’s
beginning to be a, well, smell.


One of the best parts of going on vacation is being able to suspend
all the drudgery of your everyday life; bill-paying, housekeeping,
laundry are all put on hold for a few glorious days. Sure,
there’s a mound of dirty clothes and a stack of unpaid bills
waiting for you when you return, but for that brief bit of time
beforehand there’s no such thing as chores.

Have I mentioned I’m an organization
freak? I’ve got three dry-erase boards on my refrigerator
alone (meal planning and leftovers board, contents of freezer
board, and Cora’s solid foods tracking board if you’re
interested); I own and frequently use a label maker; I wrote
letters to Container Store for six years begging them to come to
New York City (Notice that they did. I met the owner once and may
have actually squealed). So I am all for anything that will help me
organize our family life.


I’ve seen a lot of “mommy organizers” out there,
and have bought none of them; many seem to have fun blanks to fill
in but end up requiring more work, not less. So when I stumbled
acrossErin
Condren’s website touting her calendar and family
planner, I was skeptical but gave it a look.

When you live in New York City, your kids
don’t get a lot of experience riding in the car. In general,
Maddie and Cora get in the car every Sunday to go to church and
perhaps once a week more – heading to the mall, the zoo, or a
specific errand. But by and large, my girls travel a less
industrial way: we walk. Maddie gets in the stroller while Cora
rides on my chest, or Maddie walks while Cora reclines in her
car-seat stroller.

Being on vacation means everything gets
done a bit differently; you’re not exactly in your comfort
zone surrounded by all your parental aids (read: distractions and
toys). For example, most meals we eat as a family at our dining
table, with Maddie in her booster seat and Cora happily flailing in
her bouncy seat on the floor next to me. The bouncy seat is a great
place for Cora, since it affords her a bit more of a vertical view
than sprawling on the floor while not over-taxing her
“sitting upright” muscles.


While on vacation, though we’ve brought the bouncy seat with
us, we don’t cart it around everywhere we go and so often end
up at a meal without it. Which means that Cora now spends meal
times surfing laps, sitting at the “big girl” table.


All of this to say that I am getting plenty of chances to witness
Cora’s lethal arm “thing”.

We got our big travel day for Thanksgiving
out of the way, and I’ve been simply too exhausted to post.
Partly because the travel was tiring, but mostly because of how the
day started.


We arranged to wake up a good two hours before our car picked us up
for the airport; I assumed that would be enough time to pack our
last-minute things, get the kids ready, and so on. And it would
have been except that:


Ninety minutes before the car arrived, our upstairs tenant of our
two-family house knocked to tell us there was no hot water. Brian
staggered to the basement to re-light the pilot, only to be greeted
by four inches and rising of water in a flooded basement. Yes, the
hot water heater broke.

So I did something today that I’m
not necessarily proud of, and as I sent off an email to my dad
filling him in it occurred to me that I might not be the only one
who does this sort of thing.


We’re heading out tomorrow for the Lone Star State, embarking
on our annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage. I’ve been organizing
and making lists and packing for the last two weeks trying to get
this behemoth of a show on the road, but you know how it is with
kids; 90% of the stuff can’t be packed until you’re
about to walk out the door, so often do you use it all.

This is a complete off-topic blog, so if you’re looking for cute Maddie stories you’re out of luck.

This time last year I spent the first night ever away from Maddie. She was almost eighteen months old, and the occasion was my grandmother’s funeral over Thanksgiving week. I was very close to her and felt the loss enormously, though I knew my grief was completely selfish; she’d been in a fair amount of pain for a while, and was completely ready to literally meet her maker. My grandmother was never famous, but her impact on this Earth and on the lives around her is incalculable, and attention must be paid.

So here I go.

Yesterday us three girls took a trip to
the ole doctor once again. Cora had her six-month checkup, while
Maddie simply needed a blood draw and a flu shot. Now, the last
time we went to the doctor all together, Maddie had several
vaccines and was very traumatized: she refused to take her clothes
off and get weighed and measured, and cried for a long time during
the exam. So you can imagine how excited I was to repeat this whole
thing, but by myself instead of with Brian’s help.

When Maddie was around ten months old,
she’d occasionally wake in the night still, crying. I’d
go in to comfort her and would stand, rocking her and singing,
until she calmed down and could be put back down to sleep. She came
to have a few favorite songs (though there was no telling why one
would catch her fancy) and I quickly established a “Greatest
Hits” list.


Now that Madeleine’s older and able to sing songs herself,
she will often request a specific song of me at odd times of the
day, which she’ll then focus on intensely as she tries to
memorize it herself. She’ll have her own name for a song and
I’ll have to figure out which one she means before I can
deliver.


All of this is well and good, except that my precocious child
isn’t content simply to listen to the music, or even to sing
along herself. She is now digging into the lyrics and wrestling
with the meanings, trying to understand what she’s hearing
about. No big deal, except when you’re singing whatever weird
song happened to capture her attention as a ten-month-old at 3
a.m.

For all you parents who are getting a
start on your holiday shopping, href="http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/tplclick?lid=41000000010845593&pubid=21000000000082989"
target="_blank">One Step Ahead is offering free shipping
for the rest of the month on orders over $85; just enter
“VIXEN” in the coupon code when you check out. We order
a lot from them, so I may try to take the time to pull our order
together and take advantage of it.


I’ve been doing a lot of product testing recently, so
I’m going to let you know about a couple things I’ve
come across that I really like in the next couple weeks. I’ll
also take some time to spell out great gift suggestions for
age-appropriate toys for babies through toddlers. I’m
definitely not trying to move away from talking about Maddie and
Cora, and no one pays me to mention their products in my blog
– I’m just trying to give fellow parents a bit of help
as the hectic holiday season gears up. So keep your eyes open over
the next few weeks!


And by the way, remember me mentioning yesterday that Cora
couldn’t sleep more than a couple hours at a time every
night? Of course, as soon as I complained she slept last night
until 5 a.m. Unfortunately I didn’t get to bed until after
midnight, and was so used to getting up that I woke every 2 hours,
but it was still better than it had been. Here’s hoping that
continues and we’re over that bump.

Guess what’s on my mind.


Here’s Cora’s typical nighttime schedule right now:


9 p.m. Cora goes through her bedtime routine, with a nursing and
rocking to sleep. I usually escape around 9:45.

10:30 p.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

12:30 a.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

2:30 a.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

4:30 a.m. Cora wakes up and must eat again.

6:30 Cora wakes up and must eat again.

8:30 or 9 a.m. Cora gets up.

Yesterday we talked about traveling with
infants who are not yet mobile: babies who have not yet started
crawling, cruising, walking, etc.


In short, kids you can still muscle around and dominate relatively
easily.


Today we’re going to cover the munchkins who have, shall we
say, a will of their own and a way to go about exercising it.

With the holidays fast approaching
–especially that Family Gathering Marathon, Thanksgiving
– it’s time once more to start thinking about the
dreaded Holiday Traveling. Last year I wrote up some tips for
getting through it all and thought that they bear repeating, so
here they are. Much of this was passed on to me by my Mommy Focus
Group when I first started flying with Madeleine, but some of this
was learned the hard way. For the purposes of simplicity, I’m
splitting kids into two groups – babies who aren’t
mobile and toddlers who are. So I’d apply this article to
anyone just barely crawling or younger; tomorrow I’ll cover
getting around with mobile kids.


First, the good news. Traveling with a newborn, while daunting, is
actually easier than traveling with an older baby or toddler.
Newborns and young infants sleep a lot and you don’t have any
meal or snack planning to take into account.


The bad news, though, is that young infants are wildly
unpredictable, aren’t usually on a schedule yet that you can
plan around, and generally have the potential to make the trip a
nightmare for your whole family and a plane full of strangers.

One of the worst things about being
unemployed for so long (other than the obvious things, like the
possibility of losing your home) was how I had to curtail my
baking. I dearly love to heat up an oven and bake up a little
happiness, and Maddie has grown to really enjoy our times in the
kitchen as well; she’s probably the only two-year-old I know
who not only has all the ingredients for butter cake memorized, but
can identify Fiori di Sicilia by smell. So as the holiday season
started to rear its glittery, chocolate-filled head, I felt stabs
of longing even as I knew we wouldn’t be able to spend a lot
of money on my traditional whirlwind of baking and mailing out
boxes of holiday goodies.


Fortunately for me, my husband is gainfully employed and the
bakefest is back on. Scaled back, of course, as we recover from the
financial drain of eight months of no income. But back on it is.
With my recipe books piled high around the kitchen and my note
spiral open to my documentation of last year’s holiday baking
forays (yes, it’s sad but true), I’m now in hog
heaven.

As I mentioned yesterday, we’ve had
our house on the market for a while. We accepted an offer on it a
couple weeks ago and the reality of our leaving New York was
settling in for me that evening as we sat down to a delicious
dinner of leftovers.


“You ok?” Brian asked me.


“I’m just sad,” I replied softly. But apparently
not softly enough.


“What are you sad about, Mommy?” Maddie piped up.


Now, as I’ve said, I don’t believe in lying to our
kids, especially for convenience, but this was a burden I
wasn’t ready to share with her yet. We hadn’t even
discussed the possibility of her leaving the only life she knows
and never coming back yet. So I quickly scanned my mind for
something, and came up with what I thought was a harmless
answer.

As many of you know, my husband lost his
job the beginning of March, and we’ve spent the past eight
months in a desperate search for new work. Worrying about
unemployment and health benefits was no fun with a second baby on
the way, but it was even less fun five months later as our savings
dried up and we didn’t know what was going to happen next.
Realizing we were running out of money, we put our house on the
market with nowhere to go, trusting Brian would get a job somewhere
and reasoning it was better to sell our house than simply hand it
over to the bank.


So it is with great relief that I announce that Brian’s got a
new job. It’s for a company he’s interested in, and a
position he’s very excited about. Me, I’m very excited
about the whole paycheck thing.

We’ve had a luxuriously long Indian
summer here, with highs almost to 80 degrees just last week.
We’ll have a couple days of “cold” – maybe
55 or 60 for a high – before hanging around in the 70s again
a while. But these little forays into balmy weather are becoming
fewer and farther between, and as I look at our forecast with a
high of about 51 for the next week, I’m having to acknowledge
that the cold is settling in to stay.


Which means it’s time to get out the gear.

Yesterday Maddie went trick-or-treating for the first time ever, and spent several days beforehand in breathless anticipation. I’d picked up her costume a month ago and refused to let her see it, knowing she wouldn’t be able to refrain from begging to wear it and knowing that if she wore it she’d be bored with it by Halloween. But we’d talked about going trick-or-treating, and she was excited and keyed up when the big day arrived.

There are a couple reasons she was looking forward to it so much: first, my kid loves to dress up. We’ve got a big box of my old costumes in the playroom and she’ll dig into almost every day, dressing up herself and whoever else she can sucker into the game with her. Second, Maddie had never had candy and knew she was going to have some on Halloween. She didn’t know what it was, but had read about it enough in her Corduroy Halloween book to think she’d like it and couldn’t wait to try the stuff for herself.

Ever the bookworm, Maddie will get into a
rut for her bedtime readings; she’ll fixate on two specific
books and ask for them over and over and over again each time until
everyone except her is heartily sick of them. Sometimes
they’ll have nothing to do with each other –
they’ll simply be the two books she’s interested in
right now. Other times there will be a theme – both books
about birthdays, say, or two books with bunnies in them. But most
times they’ll be two books in the same series, such as the
Little Wombat books, or the Corduroy series.


Maddie’s Gamma brought home two new Corduroy books recently
– one about a beach trip, and one about Corduroy’s
Halloween party. Going into her typical obsession mode, Maddie
listened to them over and over and over until we all had them
memorized.


Including Maddie.

Cora’s now five and a half months,
and I think she’s pretty primed for solid foods.


She’s been eyeing family dinners for some time now, and is
moving from the silent observation to the begging stage. She
usually starts the meal out in her bouncy seat, where she keeps up
a persistent, nagging dialog until someone puts her on a lap. As
the meal goes on, her complaints become louder and more whiney
until she’s out-and-out stridently and piercingly saying,
“Feed me!” Ad that to the lunging towards the fork she
does every time it heads for my mouth, and I don’t need a
brick wall to fall on my head to figure out what’s going
on.

My girlfriend Renee surprised me with a
visit this weekend to help me celebrate a recent birthday.
Completely stunned, I saw my weekend go from one planned with
laundry and grocery shopping to a couple of days with brief little
stints running around the city shopping, gabbing, and eating good
food.


In the entire two days she was here, Brian only had to give Cora
one bottle – I was able to work my little forays into fun
around her schedule pretty well. But I clearly could not have done
all my fun stuff without a lot of sacrifice on the part of my mom
and husband, who both stepped up to the plate and generously
covered all childcare for the weekend. I felt rejuvenated,
refreshed, and recharged after a few simple fun outings and the
company of one of my best friends.


Which led me to think about how much my priorities have changed for
“downtime”. As Renee and I stood in Anthropologie
gleefully trying on delicate, pretty, dry-clean-only,
doesn’t-go-with-spit-up clothes, I tried to figure out the
last time I went fun shopping with a girlfriend. And other than a
few hectic trips to the outlet mall, either with Maddie in tow or
with a big belly, the last time I can come up with was another
shopping trip with Renee.


In 2003.

Cora’s over five months now and
still not sleeping all through the night: most nights she still
gets up at 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. for a nursing, rising finally around 9
a.m., though the past couple of nights she went until 4 or 5 a.m.
for her first feeding (which I much appreciated!).


It was right around this point that we sleep-trained Maddie, but
Cora’s clearly not ready for this. First and foremost,
Cora’s still being swaddled to sleep. I’m astonished
she still needs it; again, we started putting Maddie down
unswaddled before she was three months old. But Cora still flails
and startles quite a bit, which wakes her up at night unless
she’s wrapped.


A part of me has been impatient with the swaddling, wondering if
she really needs it; after all, I can’t convince myself to
sleep-train her until her hands are free to help her self-soothe,
and I’d like to get that show on the road soon. Plus, I worry
that she’ll become dependent on the swaddling and start to
need it to fall asleep, like a comfort object. So I decided to try
to wean her off the swaddling blanket, testing out the unwrapping
for nap times over the past few days.


The result? Disastrous.

I’ve always been the kind of girl
who enjoys her bedtime pampering; anytime I’d travel for a
show, you can bet my good down pillows were stuffed into my bags,
along with my down comforter if I could spare the space. Once
married, I quickly brought my husband around to my point of view
and now he’s as spoiled as I am, luxuriating in those
high-thread-count sheets that I score by religiously scouring the
clearance bins, and tucking himself under our yummy down blankets.


And I can already see Maddie following in the family footsteps. She
loves nothing more than to climb onto our big bed and snuggle
underneath the sheets, curling up on her side and stroking the
silky duvet cover. When she was younger, she’d happily pat
the fluffy, feather-filled bedding and you could see the
wistfulness in her eyes that one day she’d have a snuggly bed
like this herself.

Since I’ve been blogging for over
two years now, I often find myself stopping throughout the day and
writing a piece in my head. I’ll see Maddie do something cute
or use a favorite baby product and think, “I feel a blog
coming on!” And occasionally, I have a bad day.

There are levels to bad days, only one of
which is blogworthy. There are those mildly annoying happenings
which, if you blog about it, just sounds like whining. Then there
are those situations that are so horrific you can’t talk
about it: perhaps time and distance will enable you to put it down
on paper, but for right now it’s too much.

And then there are the bad days that are
not life-changing, but so much more than mildly annoying that you
find yourself reaching for the Haagen-Daz. And even as you’re
cracking open the spoon drawer, you know that at sometime in the
near future you’re going to laugh about this, and perhaps
even dine out on this story that, with distance, will become funny
and not hair-pullingly distressing.

Or maybe you’ll just blog about
it.

When Maddie first bonded with her Silky
and we saw how truly attached to that thing, I had a spurt of
foresight and ordered a second, “backup” Silky for her.
We try to keep them in regular rotation so they wear down at about
the same rate, rather than have one become tattered and ratty and
need to pull a shiny, pristine replacement out of the drawer.
We’ve gone to great pains to keep Maddie from seeing both
Silkies at once and have successfully kept up the illusion that
Silky is truly a one-of-a-kind.


One of the benefits of having two is that we can wash the thing,
and with all the “love” it gets showered on it, a
regular bath is very much in order. I try to swap them out every
couple of weeks, getting one clean and fresh and in the backup
drawer while she’s not looking. It’s important that
this is done somewhat frequently or the difference between
“clean” Silky and “dirty” Silky will be
very evident and the jig will be up.


Apparently.

Most people who know me would agree that
I’m borderline obsessive/compulsive. I use that term in the
cute way, as in “organizational freak” or “my
look at how well her spices are alphabetized” rather than in
the “I have to touch a doorknob five times before I can use
it” kind of way. The OCD tendencies I come by honestly in my
family – my grandmother frets when you don’t hand wash
a spoon the “right” way. And I’ve always
considered a little OCD to be a good thing in a mommy; Lord knows
you’re sunk without some method of organizing your life to
get through the multi-tasking days.


But I would never wish the real thing on anyone, much less my kids,
so I’m careful to never let my compulsions (like having to
count the stairs as I go down them. Always.) show in front of the
girls. Unfortunately, I’ve seen some signs in Maddie that at
the very least, she’s got a touch of the obsessive in
her.

Cora’s nearly five months now, and I
can’t believe the time’s gone so fast. I remember that
at this point with Maddie I felt as if I’d had her forever,
but right now it seems as though Cora just came home with us.


Part of this, I know, is that I’m not a new mom and
haven’t had to adjust to such a different life –
Cora’s sort of slipped into the family stream more easily
than Maddie, mostly because adjusting to two kids is way easier
than adjusting to having one in the first place. So we travel down
our day-to-day road enjoying each other, when suddenly I look up
and she’s not a newborn anymore!

Seems like this is the time of year when
the germs are back in force; Maddie has already had two colds this
year, one a summer cold picked up at a birthday party and one
simply from playing at our playground. This wouldn’t be such
a big deal, except that means that my baby Cora has also had two
colds. And she’s only 4 ½ months old. Contrast that
with Maddie, who had her first illness at almost fourteen months,
and you can get the gist of my frustration.


There’s a lot of misinformation out there on the Internet, as
well as some old wives’ tales that are simply incorrect. So
to save us all some precious sick days this season, here’s
some info on kids and germs – use it (to stay) in good
health!

Ever the reflecting pool that shines the
unvarnished face of my parenting skills back at me, my daughter has
come up with a new game – Elmo Disobeys.


A few days ago Maddie was happily putting Elmo to sleep in my room
– she often uses Cora’s bassinet for Elmo when
it’s empty, and will entertain herself for quite some time
getting his blanket, monitor, and so on, just right. I’d
already whispered night-night to Elmo and tiptoed out, even though
he was still awake and only to the pajama stage of the ritual; I
needed to use this time to get some things done in the kitchen and
figured Maddie could handle the rest on her own.


Suddenly, I hear: “No! No, Elmo! It’s time to go to
bed, RIGHT NOW!” And then, “Mommy! Elmo’s
disobeying!” floats down the hall at me.


This I’ve got to see.

A few weeks after Cora was born, Maddie
started waking up crying. Since she had just hit two years old, I
thought perhaps nightmares were beginning. But she wasn’t
waking up screaming – just crying, almost moaning. We’d
go in and talk to her and she’d tell us she was scared of the
monsters in her room. I chalked it up to the change of having a new
baby in the house – perhaps Cora’s cries were waking
her. So we consoled her and talked about it a bit, but didn’t
worry too much.

Cora’s nearly five months (!) now,
and as she becomes increasingly alert and aware of her
surroundings, it’s become increasingly difficult to get her
to concentrate on her meal.


I remember witnessing this stage for the first time with a friend
of mine: she brought her 4 ½ month-old over for a playdate
with then-8-week-old Maddie, and we chatted while the girls stared
at each other on the carpet. When Lily got hungry, my friend began
nursing. After only a few seconds into it, Lily began pulling off,
looking around and smiling at everyone; only when my friend put a
pillow up to block the baby’s view did she get down to eating
in earnestness. Since I had a 2-month-old who at as if she’d
never had breastmilk before and thought it was the best meal EVER,
I couldn’t imagine competing for her attention.


Then, of course, Maddie hit around 4 months and began acting the
same way, and now it’s Cora’s turn.

The second time around with pregnancy, you
think you’re prepared. You know what’s going to happen
afterwards – the fact that you’ll still look six months
pregnant even after the kid comes out, the fact that your ankles
will still be swollen a couple days later. You have a good idea of
how long it’ll take you to lose that post-partum weight, and
have already vowed not to cry when you’re wearing your
“fat pants” still four months later (I type as I eat a
Newman's Own Ginger-O's. Hey, they're organic!).


All of this experience and knowledge is a good thing, but
let’s face it – we still freak out. And for me,
it’s all about the hair.

Ok. So Maddie’s been at the terrible
two’s for a while now, and I felt pretty confident that
I’ve got the hang of it. I am patient. I am kind. I am
loving. I am firm. I demonstrate love and forgiveness, while giving
her boundaries and consequences.


And I am this close sometimes to knocking her skinny hiney
into next Tuesday.

Maddie has taken pretend mothering to a
whole new level, and I’m not sure where all this will end.


In addition to all the other things she does for Elmo, Maddie now
has an exact replica of her own nighttime routine that she
steadfastly performs for him. I mean, she’s always put her
dolls and Elmos to bed, in a sort of, “Here you go Elmo! Time
to get in your cradle! Here’s the covers! Night Night!”
kind of way. But over the past few days she’s been intensely
interested in making it as exactly like her own routine as
possible

A few days ago I was working in the
kitchen. Cora was grooving in the bouncy seat while Maddie
“cooked” in her own kitchen, and after several moments
Cora became restless and started whimpering. In the midst of
cutting up raw chicken, I opted not to touch her and began singing
soothingly to her, a trick that sometimes works. Hearing the music,
Maddie came into the kitchen to investigate.


“Why are you singing like that, Mom?” she asked.
We’re a big music household so there’s often someone
singing, but she was curious why I was singing a lullaby softly.


“Well kiddo, sometimes when Cora gets fussy, she feels better
if someone sings a soft song to her. Babies can often calm down
with a quiet, pretty tune.” Satisfied with the answer, Maddie
went back to her own play.

Cora is four and a half months now, and is
driving me crazy with the sleep thing.


I know that every kid is different, and you should never compare,
but Maddie was sleeping nine or ten hours at a stretch by this
time, nursing, and going back to sleep for another three.
She’d go through these phases when she hit developmental
growth spurts where she’d wake up a couple times a night for
a month or so, then settle back down again.


Cora, on the other hand, has yet to sleep through the night.

Maddie’s in the midst of a bad patch
discipline-wise; she seems to have a mini- (or maxi-) meltdown
several times a day. We’ve got a “routine” down
for handling the blowups, which is good, since we get plenty of
opportunities to practice it. I think the world’s a tough
place for her right now: she’s incredibly bright and is
learning at an astonishing pace, and sometimes it’s hard to
keep up with everything she’s being bombarded with. Feelings,
emotions, the appropriate way to express them, are all hard to get
under her own control and channel responsibly. I can’t
imagine what it must be like to be learning how to handle yourself
and function in society while still trying to make sense of your
own tiny day-to-day world.


But Maddie’s in luck – she’s not the only one
learning something valuable through all of this. Mommy and Daddy
are having to work something new into their emotional repertoire,
as well – instant forgiveness.

One of the benefits of blogging is that
it’s an easy way for family members to keep up with you;
rather than having to find time for a decent phone chat while kids
clamor for your attention, you can simply keep relatives updated
via the Internet on your child’s daily life. And for their
part, relatives are allowed a daily glimpse into a long-distance
life of a loved one, permitting them to feel that they’re not
totally missing out on everything.


So it’s no surprise to me that many of Maddie and
Cora’s grandparents read this daily (hi, y’all). And
last week one set of grandparents enjoyed my story of Maddie riding
her “borrowed” tricycle in Target so much that they
were moved to action.

Since the US Department of Health and
Human Services has declared October 1 to be “National Child
Health Day”, I thought I’d take the day to mention one
of my favorite websites – href="http://healthychild.org">Healthy Child Healthy
World.


Let’s face it – we’re not living in the same
world we grew up in. I’m not one of those people that long
for the good ole days when we didn’t have to use seatbelts,
much less car seats. Kids today stand a better chance of surviving
a car crash, avoiding SIDS, and skipping the lead paint snacks. At
the same time, our environment is more crowded with pollutants and
toxins than ever before; new plastics and chemicals not tested on
kids are making their way into our mainstream life in the shape of
toys, cleaners, and even furniture; and even as we come up with
anti-bacterial soap, bacteria come up with a way to be resistant to
it.

Maddie’s long had an independent
streak in her: as soon as she could walk, it was her preferred
method of transportation, and she’d eschew the stroller
whenever possible, her chubby little 14-month-old legs doing the
two-mile-roundtrip walk to the park with determination. I barely
had to show her how to hold a spoon before she was completely
feeding herself, so it’s no surprise that she hates to have
someone else brush her teeth for her, even though she still
hasn’t gotten it quite right.


I’ve long admired this independence (can’t imagine
where she gets it) and have even encouraged it, since the more she
does the less Mommy has to do. Hi, I’m Jennifer and I’m
lazy – remember me? But the more refined her motor skills
get, the more tasks she wants to take upon herself, and the longer
these tasks take.


Which makes Mommy’s life, um, less easy.

Maddie and I ran errands yesterday and
ended up at one of Maddie’s favorite places of all time
– Target.


Keep in mind that I’m not one of those moms who buys her kid
a toy every time they enter a store; Maddie has no guaranteed
“new thing” to look forward to each time she hits a
Toys R Us or anything. My kid simply likes to shop, whether
it’s perusing all the catalogs that come for her every day
(“Did I get any mail? Any catalogs? Oooh!” she squeals
at mail call each day) or running through a store. She’s got
a vivid imagination and loves playing with all the
“new” toys, and is (mostly) content to leave them on
the shelves when she heads home (a few memorable meltdowns not
withstanding).


Let me also say that I’m not one of those moms who allows her
kids to take all the toys off the shelves, create a huge mess, and
leave it for some poor teenager making five bucks an hour. But I do
let Maddie fondle the stuffed animals, poke at the displays through
a toy’s box, and in general explore in a tidy fashion.

Maddie’s in the midst of those
terrible twos, and has several meltdowns a day, almost as if
she’s got an allotment of them and feels obligated to use
them all. I’ve got the formula for dealing with them down
pat, but Maddie’s recently thrown a little wrench into my
pattern, the clever little monkey.


First, there’s me making every effort to avoid a meltdown.
I’ve learned she does really well with plenty of warning when
a transition’s coming up, so I run through a list of upcoming
events several times: “Maddie, we’re going to eat our
lunch, play for a few minutes, then read books and take a
nap.” The more foreknowledge she has the less she reacts as
if I’ve sprung something grossly unfair on her, so I’m
happy to oblige in this.

Have you seen the new TV show, “Kid
Nation”? The reality show takes forty children aged 8 to 15
and drops them in the middle of a ghost town in Nevada, with
instructions that they’re to form themselves into a working
society. They do all the cooking, cleaning, governing,
store-running, and so on. Adults are strictly taboo and the
children are left to figure things out (like how to boil water on a
wood-burning stove) by themselves.


I’ve only seen the first episode, but it’s enough for
me. I spent the whole time vacillating between trying to imagine a
set of circumstances wherein I’d allow Madeleine to go sleep
in the desert unsupervised for a month at 8 years old, and worrying
about the kids that I’m watching. They show the children
pulling wooden wagons down two miles of dirt road to their new
home, and I’m wondering if someone made them put on
sunscreen. I watch three boys blow off steam chasing a jackrabbit
through the desert brush and I worry aloud that the producers
didn’t clear the brush of rattlesnakes ahead of time. I
notice that, in a town with only ONE outhouse for forty kids, there
seems to be a conspicuous lack of places (and motivation) to brush
your teeth.

I took Cora in last week for her
four-month checkup, and I have to confess I was actually looking
forward to it. Being out and about in the city with only one child
– and the one who didn’t complain or whine or beg, at
that – felt positively vacation-like. Going through the
well-baby visits the second time around are much easier: you know
what you’re doing this time (ish) and your list of questions
is much shorter. So I cruised in, smugly anticipating smooth
sailing and a quick trip home.


The check-up went well for the most part – Cora’s in
perfect health, and is growing well, eating well, yadda yadda
yadda. But then the doctor started looking at Cora’s motor
skills, checking for the four-month milestones. She put Cora on her
tummy, helped her pull up to sitting, tried to encourage her to
standing, and so on.

If you’re a parent you’ve
probably noticed that all kids’ songs have one of two tunes
– the ABC tune (also Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Ba Ba Black
Sheep, and so on) and the Thumbkin tune (also known as Frere
Jacques). This can cause no small amount of confusion to a
2-year-old.


Maddie’s had a pretty easy time with the first tune –
she can belt her way through the ABCs ten times, then segue into
Twinkle Twinkle with no problem. But she’s having a harder
time understanding that the second tune goes with more than one
song, and it’s making for a very interesting chanson.

I’ve just realized that a few weeks
ago I promised you a third installment on what to expect when your
second child arrives, so here (belatedly) it is. This installment
is the truth behind the reality of life with two kids.


First off, your memory is gone. G-O-N-E, gone. As in, I was
supposed to write this third installment two weeks ago. Seriously,
I know mommies are supposed to be pros at the whole multitasking
thing, but it gets too much even for us. You forget which one just
got changed, you forget if your child already watched a video, you
forget all your crap all over the city. One good friend of mine
(admittedly, a dad, but still) has lost all of the following since
having a second child: a diaper bag, the family camera, and the
stroller. Yes, the stroller. As in, I pulled up to the minivan,
unloaded the kids from the stroller into the car, and drove off.
Without the stroller. Which was not, of course, still there five
minutes later when I went back to look for it.


I love that story. Makes me feel a positively mnemonic genius in
comparison.

Since Maddie turned 2 a few months ago
we’ve eased up on the sugar restriction – up to that
point, she’d never had dessert as we tried to develop in her
a love for all things growing and vitamin-laden. But not wanting to
make our child into the one who hides in her closet at midnight
eating Twinkies, we started introducing her to treats a few times a
month. Maddie definitely loves cookies and ice cream but
doesn’t yet ask for them daily, which is great.


Unfortunately, the fact that she now eats sweets has serious
ramifications for Mommy. One of our favorite things to do together
on a rainy day is bake: Maddie can spoon and level flour and sugar
like nobody’s business, and recognizes a stick of unsalted
butter from across the room. If she even hears the clink of the
measuring spoons she comes running to see what’s up, and any
sighting of ingredients will lead her to start dragging her
“helper” stool out of the corner so she can climb up
and work properly. And since ninety percent of my recipes start
with the words “Cream the butter and sugar together”,
she can pretty much tell at a glance how far into the recipe
I’ve gotten without her.


In the past I could bake to my heart’s content and simply
hide the cookies away to eat later, after she’d gone to bed.
Since she’d never tasted cookies or cupcakes, she
didn’t really care what happened to them after the fun of
baking was over.


Now, though, Maddie cares deeply.

Cora is in the midst of the most horrible
stage right now – for whatever reason, the kid can’t
sleep. Which means neither can I.


When we went for our two-month visit, I proudly told the doctor
Cora was often sleeping 10-5 uninterrupted. She was suitably
impressed, and I thought there was nowhere to go but up. As babies
get older, their sleep naturally deepens, and I foresaw a full
night’s sleep in the very near future.


Alas for me, Cora didn’t get the memo.

Continuing Maddie’s obsession with
all things Elmo, Brian and I downloaded (legally!) a CD of
Elmo’s greatest hits. Maddie and I have spent several
enjoyable (for one of us) hours dancing around to such
chart-toppers as “Elmo You Can Drive My Car” and
“Imagination”. Maddie loves to watch Sesame Street and
see the actual song performed live in front of her as she sings
along with gusto.


Not all of Elmo’s songs are on the CD (darn it), and one of
Maddie’s favorites that didn’t make the cut is
“Riding My Tricycle”. Fortunately, they seem to show
that “video” every other day on Sesame Street, so
we’ve got it Tivo’d for posterity and Maddie has tried
hard to memorize it in short spurts.

I knew going into our recent vacation that
a) it wasn’t going to be much of a vacation for Mommy; and b)
the amount of gear required would rival an Everest expedition. I
thought I was mentally prepared for that.


Alas, you can never really be prepared for that.


Here is a (partial!) list of what we brought with us for our
three-day vacation. Keep in mind that we were in a friend’s
house, so we had her toddler’s toys at our disposal but had
to fend for ourselves meal-wise:

Hi everyone – I’m back!


We went for a few days in a friend’s house on the Jersey
shore – family vacation, cheap style. I’d meant to warn
you all of this, and in fact wrote a blog right before I hopped in
the car to head out, figuring I could post once I got there. But I
arrived to find I had no way of posting, and so was out of touch
for a few days. Thanks to those who wrote making sure the girls
were ok – we were all getting some quality family time!


So coming up is what you should have read on Monday –
I’ll fill you in on how it went tomorrow.

A couple days ago I posted about how our
whole family gives Cora a bath. Since then, I’ve gotten a ton
of Google hits from new parents looking for help bathing a newborn.
So I thought I’d write a few tips here that you may not find
elsewhere.


I’m assuming you’ve got a baby book that’s told
you the basics – don’t ever leave baby alone, always
have a hand on him, don’t submerge baby until the
cord’s fallen off, that sort of stuff. If not, go out and
pick up a book like href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=1mother2anoth-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F1889392200%2Fqid%3D1139195724%2Fsr%3D2-1%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_b_2_1%3Fs%3Dbooks%26v%3Dglance%26n%3D283155">
Baby 411 or href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=1mother2anoth-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0316778001%2Fqid%3D1139195980%2Fsr%3D2-1%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_b_2_1%3Fs%3Dbooks%26v%3Dglance%26n%3D283155">
The Baby Book; you’re going to need it for
lots of stuff.

A couple weeks ago, Maddie and I were
playing one of our usual games in the park: Bake Stuff. Maddie
fills a cup with water from the sprinkler, then heads to the grassy
area to put in “ingredients” like grass, rocks, and
bark. She’ll stir it up and declare it a cupcake or banana
bread, pour it out, and start again. This particular day, I asked
Maddie what she was making. “Lemonade,” she
replied.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned
before, Maddie loves to help take care of Baby Sister. Feeding,
burping, dressing, rocking, all are special fun things to do in
Maddie’s mind. Nothing, however, is quite so fun as giving
Cora a bath.

I have a feeling this is one of the
entries that will get me in a lot of trouble when my
daughter’s old enough to be embarrassed –


All babies have gas; it’s a fact of life. As our pediatrician
says, “All that air babies swallow is going to come out one
end or the other!” I remember Maddie was a pretty decent
pooter, and we got so used to it that we hardly noticed when it
happened, until of course she let loose in public and all the
non-parents looked at us, startled and mortified.


But Cora is in another class altogether.