1 Mother 2 Another

Many of you know I subscribe to target="_blank"
href="http://www.marthastewart.com/everyday-food?src=footer">“Everyday
Food” magazine, the quick-and-easy cousin of Martha
Stewart Living. Every month when it arrives I go through and
dog-ear several pages, then go back over it throughout the month as
I do my meal-planning so my new recipes don’t languish
untried.


There’s only so many things you can do with a chicken in
under half an hour, so you occasionally despair of finding a good
“new” recipe. And I do a fair amount of stir-frying,
and often find that “Everyday Foods” stir-fry recipes
aren’t quite up to snuff; their chicken ends up dry or sheds
in the sauce or something along those lines. All the “Orange
Chicken” or “Sweet and Sour Chicken” recipes seem
to be poor stand-ins for the real thing, mostly because these poor
editors are trying to make those deep-fried meals a bit more
heart-healthy, and taste gets lost. But hope springs eternal, so I
often give their recipes a go.

When Maddie was first born, Brian and I
did all the new parent research on How To Make An Infant Sleep. We
read up on the whole “routine” thing and dutifully came
up with what we considered a sure-fire hit for inducing slumber: a
soothing massage with “night-night” lotion, a home-made
lullaby mix, rocking, nursing, prayers, and then to bed. It’s
a routine we’ve never varied, and has served us well as we
traveled; we got Maddie so used to the smell of the lotion and the
sound of the music that as long as we had those two things we could
put her to sleep in any room, anywhere.


Of course, her nighttime routine evolved, most noticeably when she
stopped nursing. We’d begun reading books while nursing, and
I was able to (somewhat) easily drop that last nursing without her
noticing. And then just before Cora came we began expanding
Maddie’s world, having Gamma or Daddy put Maddie down without
Mommy there to do the rocking, which went well. I tell you, we were
a night-night machine.

Cora’s vocabulary has been growing
leaps and bounds the past month or so. True, you can only
understand her if you’re around her pretty regularly, but
those few of us in her daily orbit can see a clear effort on her
part to learn the language and make herself understood.
“Yogurt,” “cereal,” “snack,”
“milk,” “finished,” “outside,”
“socks,” “shoes,” “stroller”,
and “Elmo” are amongst her favorite words – and
it should come as no surprise, by the way, that her two favorite
things to do are eat (most notably breakfast) and play outside.


But there’s one word she learned about a week ago
that’s touched all of us – “Cora.”

I may have mentioned that my mom’s
also a performer, and right now she’s doing a
children’s play based on Kevin Hencke’s Lily And the
Purple Plastic Purse. Since it’s geared for kids and
features the famous Gamma, we thought this would be the perfect
venue for Maddie’s first visit to live theatre.


To make things even better, Maddie got to go not with boring old
mom, but with her other grandparents, turning it into a full day
out for the big girl. Mom spent the week talking to Maddie, telling
her about the story and preparing her for things like the fact that
the theatre would get dark before the show started, or that Maddie
couldn’t stand up in her seat and yell, “GAMMA!”
during the show. We prepped Maddie on what the day would look like
– grandparents’ pick-up, show, lunch, home – and
covered all our bases. Maddie’s never even gone to see a
movie, so this would be a big deal for her, and we wanted her
excited and ready.


The morning of the show, Maddie woke up nearly an hour before her
usual rising time. As I stumbled blearily into her room, hoping
she’d yell, “Just kidding!” and go back to sleep,
I saw Maddie with her sheet pulled up to her nose, body vibrating
with excitement. “Mommy, is it time to get up to go see the
show? Last night Gamma said I’d have to get up a bit early in
order to get to the show on time. Has it started already? Am I
missing it?”

Since I’ve now nursed almost three
continuous years, stopping for a few brief glorious months while I
was pregnant with Cora and Maddie was weaned, I’ve got the
nursing thing down – no fumbling hands, no tired arms,
nothing. I can get into position in seconds – I’m
telling you, I’m a machine. I’ve got it down to a
science.


And let me say before I go any further that Cora is, for all
intents and purposes, weaned: she’s only nursing a couple
times a day, all snuggle or sleep-related. She’s got the
early morning nursing, which usually (hopefully) gets her back to
sleep for another precious hour; she has a nursing at nap time; and
finally a nursing for bedtime. I settle in the chair, draw the
boppy around my waist, nestle Cora on my lap, and pick up my
library book. My routine’s a well-worn groove, and apparently
I’m not the only one who’s got it down cold.


It seems Cora’s on to me, and knows exactly what I do while
nursing, because she’s been a bit clingy and needy the past
few weeks and wanting to nurse for comfort. How do I know this, you
might ask?


She brings me my library book.

I've had many of you email in response to
my posting yesterday about my friend's new website href="http://tumblon.com" target="_blank">Tumblon. You've
all expressed interest, and many have asked additional questions.
So rather than hear my interpretation of it, see what my friend
Graham, the co-founder, of Tumblon, has to say about why he started
the site and what he hopes you gain from it. Click below to read
his article on why parenting matters, and I'll see you all again
tomorrow -


Jen

So as I’ve mentioned, I’ve
been stressing over not having Maddie in preschool yet -and thanks,
by the way, to everyone who wrote in after yesterday’s blog
with encouragement! I really appreciate it. Anyway, a few weeks ago
I decided to introduce some more structured, age-appropriate
learning play into Maddie’s life to make up for the preschool
thing. I mean, we do lots of letters and sounds and colors and
such, but I wanted to challenge her a bit more, start getting her
ready for “real” learning. And I wasn’t sure
which products out there were helpful, which products were a waste
of money, and so on. Where’s a girl to turn?


Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to go far. I’ve got
my trusty Mommy Focus Group and I cracked open my address book. And
top of the list for me is my guy pal and fellow parent Graham, the
perfect person to turn to with this kind of question. Why? Because
Graham is a former high-finance guy who gave it all up to become a
public school elementary teacher, who gave that up to become a
stay-at-home dad. So he’s got some unique insight into
helping raise a child from an educational background.


Oh yes, and his wife, my friend Rebecca, is a pediatric fellows in
developmental pediatrics.

“Mommy, why haven’t I seen
Hannah at playgroup for a while?”


“Hannah’s in school now, honey, so she can’t come
to playgroup.”


“Well, Mommy, where’s Maxum?”


“He’s in school, too. So is Cody, and so is Maya.
That’s why you don’t see them at playgroup
anymore.”


Silence, then –


“Mommy, why don’t I get to go to school?”

Maddie woke up from a nap recently and,
upon my arrival into her room, launched right into the following
conversation with absolutely no preamble:


“Well, Mama, in the middle of my nap-nap I decided I needed
to get my monster socks on.” (I should explain here that
Maddie’s monster socks are special fuzzy socks with nonskid
bottoms that her Auntie Pat gave her two years ago for Christmas.
Maddie hit a point soon afterwards where she’d refuse to take
her dirty, wet, snow-crusted socks off at bedtime, convinced that
in her bare feet she’d be fair game for the monsters. Thus
the invention of the monster socks, which safely protect the feet
from said monsters, and which were deemed an acceptable alternative
to her grungy day socks. They come out every fall and heaven help
us when she can no longer stretch them over her feet. But I
digress.)

I’ve been wandering the house
listlessly, looking for something to stuff in my mouth. It’s
the whole feed-a-cold thing; when I’ve got a cold nothing
sounds good, and I lean towards bland foods like biscuits and plain
noodles. At the same time, I realize I have two kids to feed and
they’re not so interested in having pancakes for dinner. Ok,
maybe they are, but as a good mommy I can’t very well say,
“Pile in the car! We’re going to IHOP for
dinner!”


Ok, well, maybe I can, and maybe last night I was just too
exhausted from the cold to contemplate a toddler hopped up on
syrup, and settle for pretending to eat chicken with her for
dinner.


Anyway, I do some bland grazing during the day while the girls
aren’t around to see my bad eating habits and sit through
meals with token fruits and veggies on the plate. Which means that
after they go to bed I’m hungry and still looking for
something inoffensive to eat.


And last night, I found the answer.

I was speaking over the weekend with a
relative I haven’t seen for several weeks, and she said,
“The last time we talked Cora had just started sleeping a bit
more reliably at night. That has to feel good, right? Now that
you’re getting more sleep?”


I stared at her blearily and tried to remember when we’d last
spoken. This taxing mental calculation was made even more difficult
by the fact that Cora had been up fussing every TWENTY OR THIRTY
MINUTES the night before, and though I hadn’t gone in for
several hours, listening to that on the monitor is no lullaby. But
I finally managed to come up with a time in the past when Cora had
actually been sleeping nine hours in a row for a week or two, and I
figured out how long ago it had been by adding up all our recent
woes:

It seems fall has once again sneaked up on
me while I’ve been busy trying to not look too far into the
future and enjoying every minute of summer. Maddie’s friends
are all in preschool, open gym’s back in full swing, and
Madeleine’s started all her new fall projects, like ballet
class. I always think I’ll mark the passing of a season with
at least a wry little nod as I rush between diaper changes and play
dates, but when I look up from meal planning and laundry and
endless repetitions of “Brown Bear”, I see my chance at
a small salute has passed me by without so much as a backward
glance.


Since Maddie’s not in school the start of the fall
season’s not such a big deal in this household; no huge
change to our schedule, no new morning routine to be assimilated by
a cranky 3-year-old. But I seem to always see the onset of summer
as something to be both celebrated and planned: what will we
accomplish over the next three months? What do we hope to do with
those long days stretched out like jewels to admire? And since
summer’s officially over – I think they’ve even
padlocked the pool – it seems like now’s a good time to
look back and see just what we’ve done for the past three
months.

So over this past week I’ve
commented on how Maddie has given up on using the potty, and how
Cora seems to be through the worst of the poison ivy and sleepless
nights.


Me and my big mouth.


First, the good news – Maddie spontaneously decided to give
the potty a try again yesterday, using it with great success twice
in a row.


I’m sure my repeated mention of cookies had nothing to do
with it.

Before you get excited by that title, get
out the noisemakers and balloons, and throw me a cyber-potty party,
let me explain. What I mean by “no potty training” is
that there’s no potty, no training. At all.


About two weeks ago Maddie woke up one morning and, as had become
her custom, went to go potty. She sat on the training potty for a
few minutes, half-awake, and decided she didn’t need to go
after all. At which time she stood up and peed all over the
floor.

Remember how I said that Cora had poison
ivy? And was teething at the same time? Guess how she expressed her
displeasure with these two situations.


Cora went on a sleep strike.

About a week ago we were walking out of
the house after dinner, headed towards the park for our evening
romp. Maddie began walking down the front walk with Daddy as I held
Cora and tried to the get the front door locked. Cora began to fuss
and squirm, struggling to get down – she’s at that
stage where she hates to be carried and would rather keel over from
exhaustion than ask for help – and I said, “Hang on,
Cora, you need a hand getting down off the front step.”
Maddie heard me and ran back saying, “I’ll help Cora
down the step. Here, Cora, take my hand – see? Good! Good
job! Now do you want me to hold your hand while you walk? You do?
Ok!” And the two of them walked off happily, hand in
hand.

Ok, so I’m a bit behind here –
doing an article on ways to pack lunches that are a little more
environmentally friendly, when chances are you’ve already got
day care or preschool well under way. And you’re probably
muttering under your breath right now, something to the tune of,
“Where was this article two weeks ago when I was buying all
my school supplies?”


To that I can only say, it was rattling around in my head with
about a thousand other things and this is the first time I’ve
remembered it while sitting in front of a computer. So sorry, but
better late than never.

There are many things I miss about New
York, and you’ve heard me list most of them numerous times.
The friends, my church, the museums, the food, Central Park –
it’s a long list. I even miss our sweet little house; after
all, it’s the first house we ever bought, the house where
both girls were born. We had a handkerchief-sized back yard where
we learned how to grow (and kill) things, and enjoyed spending much
of our down time.


One thing I don’t miss about New York, though, is one of the
lovely plants that grew in our back yard – poison ivy. Our
back neighbors had a huge arboretum of poison ivy and it cascaded
down our back wall, dropping its poisonous leaves over half the
back lawn. As someone deathly allergic to poison ivy – I
start to break out, and I have to run to the doctor for a cortisone
injection – the back part of our yard was a serious source of
agita for me, and we never were able to eradicate it completely. As
Maddie grew and began walking I kept her from going back there,
petrified she’d catch it and spend the next couple of weeks
in torment.


So when we sold our house I bid an enthusiastic farewell to the
poison ivy, happy to move several thousand miles away from it and
know my children would be safe. I’d spent my whole childhood
in Texas and never once saw the stuff here.

As I cross each milestone off my Maddie
list, my parental smugness grows: eating solid foods – check!
Walking – check! Not screaming when she sees the doctor with
a needle – check! Ok, yes, my child is over three and shows
no inclination to give up the diaper (more on that later), but all
in all I’m doing pretty well moving her forward.


There’s been one big milestone, though, that I’ve been
dreading ever since Maddie turned two – going to the dentist
for the first time. I didn’t wake up on her birthday dreading
it – believe me, the dentist wasn’t even on my radar
screen. But then Maddie unwrapped a present from my girlfriend
Abby: a book on going to the dentist, and an Elmo DVD where
Elmo’s thinking about the dentist that day. The enclosed note
– “Because you’re a big girl now, Maddie, and
will be going to the dentist soon!” – struck fear in my
heart.

Well, we knew this had to happen some
time. I mean, with a family like this one, it was only a matter of
time, and now there’s no going back.


Yes, Cora’s started singing.