1 Mother 2 Another

God bless Texas.


I forgot when we moved back here that we were returning to the land
of competitive gymnastics; our area’s fostered several
Olympic gymnasts over the past decade or so, and there are four
huge training facilities within perhaps five miles of us.


What does this have to do with me and a bored two-year-old? I have
two words for you –


Open. Gym.

Since moving to Texas we’ve been
“church shopping” on Sundays – going to a
different church every week as we try to find our new parish home.
We’re enjoying seeing the different types of churches out
there, but it also means Maddie is in a new environment every week.
How’s she handling it?


It’s a bit mixed.

Our new playground has some features
Maddie hasn’t encountered before, and one is a covered spiral
slide. Madeleine’s been eyeing it since we moved here; she
loves going down the regular slide, and with the spiral slide being
the tallest of the five slides on our playground here, I think she
considers it the Mount Everest of the playground – to be
trained for and conquered.


The first couple of weeks Maddie eyed the slide but wouldn’t
go near it, deeming it too high and too fast. About two weeks ago,
though, her longing looks drew her ever nearer, until she was
staring wistfully into its open mouth. I could see she wished she
had the courage to go down but simply couldn’t talk herself
into it.


And then Elmo came to the park.

Cora’s finally settled on a lovey,
and unfortunately, it’s me.


Or, to be more precise, my hair.

As we drove to our new home from the
airport a few weeks ago, I gawked out the window at our new
neighborhood, trying to figure out where “our” spots
would be. Driving past a Starbucks, I did a double take, unable to
believe what I’d seen. A few moments later, I was
breathlessly telling my 17-year-old niece that our neighborhood had
“a Starbucks with a DRIVE-THROUGH! How amazing is
that???” I swear, my niece looked at me with a mixture of
contempt and pity and said only, “I’ve seen it.
It’s not the only one.”

Cora’s been a pickier eater than
Maddie was, and I think part of it is that I simply haven’t
had the time and energy to devote to the whole Starting Solid Foods
thing that I did the first time around. Our lives have been in such
upheaval that I haven’t exactly been the picture of
consistency about her meals, if you know what I mean; she
hasn’t had homemade baby food for several weeks, and I keep
forgetting to introduce new foods every four or five days, but the
worst is that I sometimes just forget I’ve got to feed the
poor kid!

If I had the guts, here’s an ad
I’d be placing in the local paper this week:


“Single white female seeks female of any ethnicity for good
times. I like play dates, swinging, cooking up yummy treats, and
going for long walks. YOU must love to laugh and sing, and at least
tolerate Elmo. If we hit it off, age is not an issue.”

For those of you who can’t wait
until tomorrow night’s American Idol to catch a glimpse of
all the starlets of tomorrow belting their hearts out, I give you
– Madeleine.

Since we’re still in the midst of
remodeling our new kitchen, the family is one tiny step above
dining out for every meal. We’ve finally got a refrigerator
so we’re not limited to the aptly-named mini fridge
we’ve been borrowing, but everything else is still
make-shift: no dishes have been unpacked since cabinets are still
unfinished, so we live with paper plates and plastic cutlery; and
while we have a microwave, it’s on the second floor and we
eat on the first floor, so we’re constantly running up and
down the stairs during a meal to “cook”.


When we first arrived we were doing every meal out, but as the
weeks go on I’ve been trying to save some money and inject
some health back into our diet. Which means I’m buying
rotisserie-cooked chicken from the supermarket along with a few
pints of those over-salted sides like potato salad or baked beans.
Or I’ll snatch up a couple frozen lasagnas and slave away
over a hot microwave as they cook before divvying them up onto our
paper plates.

Since today is Valentine’s Day (a
made-up holiday if I ever saw one, and one Brian and I don’t
really celebrate but can’t avoid hearing about on all the
media) I’ve been thinking about hearing those three little
words, and how satisfying they are. Sure, getting them from your
spouse is great, but in a way it’s even better when an
unsolicited “I love you, Mommy” floats up from your
toddler.


This was one of the more awkward things Brian and I had to teach
Maddie – how and when to say, “I love you!” I
mean, she hears it all the time from us, and eventually came to
understand what it meant to her, but she wasn’t able to put
words to those feelings in her little chest without our help.

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.