1 Mother 2 Another

I know I’ve written before about
both girls’ love for collecting and organizing things,
whether it be in purses or boxes or little piles on the floor.
I’m used to one girl or the other starting a collection of
something random – shoes that all have black in them, or
rocks with an uneven number of sides, for example. But
Maddie’s latest obsession leaves even me scratching my head.


Maddie has a small stuffed dog – I mean almost dollhouse
small, like three inches tall tops. And even though she’s got
a Fisher Price dollhouse crammed with rooms full of furniture and
accessories, she’s on a mission to collect as many
“useful” things as she can for her dog.

Both Cora and Maddie are avid gardeners.
They come by their green thumbs honestly on both sides of their
family tree: my family has a long history of tending to the earth,
and Brian absolutely adores working outside and seeing things grow.
So we’ve spent the spring growing things from seeds,
transplanting them to outside, and watching them grow into flowers.
Cora especially enjoys puttering in our side garden many mornings;
our side garden is our herb and vegetable space, and she loves
sniffing the rosemary or checking on the basil or watching our
raspberry bush (which alas succumbed to Texas heat last week). She
and Maddie both can spend an hour out there, arranging rocks or
checking the rain gauge or checking out the hummingbird feeder. And
just last week, we got a new addition to the side garden
that’s got them all atwitter:


We got a rain barrel.

My articles on sunscreen from last week
have prompted some posts and emails with further questions, asking
about other chemicals or “what if . . .” or “what
about . . .” and I see that the sunscreen thing is just the
tip of the ice berg.


Now I know I’m way more hippie or crunchy or whatever-y than
a lot of you, and I’m not going to preach at you to get rid
of your air conditioners and dryers and go back to wood-burning
stoves (they emit too many pollutants to be a viable main cook
source anyway). But I am getting questions from girlfriends and
readers, and thought I’d direct you to a couple different
articles to get you started.

I’m sure you’ve all see the
waves of crib recalls going on for the past couple of years.
Drop-side cribs, which are in nearly every baby home I’ve
been in, are being demonstrated to be risky to say the least.
Unclear directions, drop-side mechanisms that can wear down and
fail, poor construction, and more have led several watchdog
agencies to press for the ban of drop-side cribs.


Yesterday another wave of recalls was announced – a total of
nine manufacturers, I believe, recalling cribs made within the past
ten years – and the total number of cribs recalled now totals
9 million.

For the past three years, we’ve seen
slow but steady progress in Maddie’s relationship with the
water: she loves being in it, but is fearful of new experiences, so
progresses very slowly on the swimming front. She’s been
taking swim lessons since she was three, but even this year has had
significant meltdowns and mental walls that she’s run into.
We seem to hit that wall, stay there, inch our way forward, then
have a lovely breakthrough.


I’m happy to say that right now we’re in the
breakthrough stage.

Yesterday evening I was taking out the
trash in our driveway when I discovered, upon moving the trash can,
a very large, fat, fuzzy black caterpillar. Without even thinking,
I yelled, “Cora, Maddie! Come and look, quick!” The
girls came scrambling out and stopped, awestruck, at the sight of
the fat guy. My mom came out with them and wrapped him around a
stick to move him out of harm’s way; the girls followed like
puppies and watched contemplatively as he worked his way down into
some vegetation. They debated where he was in the “Hungry
Caterpillar” timeline – Monday or Saturday? – and
then began digging through the dirt, happily collecting small bits
of flora for their own stuffed animals to eat for supper. And
suddenly we’d gone from two girls sitting desultorily around
the house after dinner to two intrepid nature explorers, busy at
work.

My last entry was an introduction to
sunscreen – so if you haven’t read that, please read it
first.


Today we’re getting into the nitty-gritty: specific
ingredients to watch out for, all the sunscreens I’ve tested
so you don’t have to, and my top picks.


Hey, no fair trying to skip to the end.

It’s summertime, which in my
household means extended periods – and I’m talking
three or four hours at a pop – at our neighborhood pool.
Being the pasty white girl that I am, I worry about skin protection
– and with good reason. We’re burning faster than ever
before, and those freckles suddenly aren’t as cute as they
were when we were nine.


There’s a lot of confusing information out there about
sunscreen, and I’ve spent hours digging through internet
research trying to find out what’s best for my family. I
already make the girls wear the long SPF-material swimsuits that
cover their arms and legs – I call them the Amish Sporty look
– when we go during the day, but we’ve still got faces
and forearms and legs to cover. And while I often wear a rash guard
myself, I don’t particularly want the farmer tan that brings
two-tone biceps with it, so I want the absolute best sunscreen I
can find. Add to all of this my concerns about chemical absorption
in the girls and trying to use eco-friendly options, and suddenly
picking the right sunscreen seems a pretty tall order.

After a few months in a holding pattern,
Cora’s begun showing a renewed interest in potty training.
And I can’t decide if it’s simply maturity – or
devious cunning.


Cora’s been doing most of her pooping in the potty for a
while now. She’s discovered that a poopy diaper is rather
uncomfortable, and nine times out of ten she’ll tell me when
she needs to poop so as to avoid having that happen. Sometimes
she’ll be in the middle of a game or a social situation and
not want to stop and simply use her diaper, but by and large
she’s got the pooping down.

Almost a year ago, Maddie started asking
me when she’d be old enough to wear glasses. Not sunglasses,
just regular glasses. Since I, my husband, and my mother all wear
glasses, she sees all the grownups in her house with them and
assumes it’s a level of adulthood to be sought after and
attained.


Maddie was so wistful about them that I bought her a pair of
clear-glass stylish frames from Claire’s in the mall for
Christmas. Maddie ended up revising her list at the last minute
(see: Necklace Crisis) and I tucked them away for another time,
thinking she’d forget about them.


My friend, she did not forget. For the past six months
they’ve come up off and on, and I finally gave in and pulled
the trigger for her birthday last week. Maddie unwrapped her bright
pink, rectangular frames and squealed with delight.


And has worn them pretty much non-stop.

It’s time once again to start making
that list and checking it twice.


The list for ways to entertain the kids during long summer days,
that is.


And in case you’ve forgotten, href="http://www.kidsbowlfree.com" target="_blank">Kids Bowl
Free is a national program, so give it a look. Head to
their website and see if there’s a participating bowling
alley near you. If there is, simply sign up each child and once
registered, your child will get two free games a day for the summer
to bowl. And for a mere twenty-five bucks, you can purchase a
family pass that allows the grown-ups to bowl all summer as well.


Now, strictly speaking, it’s not totally free. You’ve
got to rent the shoes each time (unless you’ve got your own
and you’re hard-core). But it does cut down on the cost, and
provides you an air-conditioned, fun place to head that’s not
covered in Disney princesses or Thomas stuff on a hot summer day.


For me, having an alternative to yet another six hours at the pool
is always a good thing.

Maddie had a fantastic birthday and I
didn’t shed a single tear. I did watch, misty-eyed, a few
times. I’m telling you, this kid grows like a weed and it
seems only last week that she was trying to run, stumbling on her
coltish legs and skinning her knee on the sidewalk.


Oh, wait, that was last week.

Dear Maddie:


The clock’s really starting to fly now, kiddo, and I’m
afraid we’ve got a big birthday here.


So you’re turning five. Wow. At this point, I can no longer
pretend that you’re anywhere near the babyhood stage.
You’ve passed babyhood, toddlerhood, even pre-schoolerhood,
and are firmly entrenched in kid land now. At five years old,
you’re moving to big-kid school in a few months and are truly
becoming your own person. Yikes.

I consider myself to be fairly
knowledgeable about clothing. I used to be a personal shopper, and
am definitely expert in that area. And while I do enjoy dressing
nicely and putting together a good outfit, I’m not a
clotheshorse, following those youtube clothing bloggers religiously
or waxing lyrical about a Prada shoe sale.


So I’m not quite sure where Cora gets this positive passion
for changing her clothes. Several times a day. And having complete
artistic control over the outfit.


I’ve always known she’s concerned about her look and
interested in clothing. When I’ll go shopping with her in
tow, I usually have a list in hand – jeans for Maddie, dress
for Cora, and so on. Cora will begin “shopping” on her
own, fingering materials and holding up outfits, frowning: does
that shirt really match those pants? Will that bubble suit be
flattering on me? By the time I’ve found a few necessaries,
Cora’s got an armful of “necessaries” of her own,
and it’s quite a process to talk her down off that ledge.

Maddie started out enjoying her swim
lessons, but last week they went right into the crapper. Come
Wednesday, the instructor tried to push Maddie too far outside her
comfort zone, and Maddie hit a wall. Thinking a little tough love
was in order, the instructor lovingly tried to push Maddie on. She
gave Madeleine two options, neither of which was appealing, and
stood firm on it until Maddie chose the lesser of two
“evils”.


The instructor thought this would be a break-through for Maddie;
she thought Maddie would see she survived the “ordeal”
and not be fearful any more. Instead, Madeleine was so overcome
with fear and worry that she cried uncontrollably the rest of the
lesson, even as she went through the motions of trying to please
the teacher.


For the next two days, Maddie worried almost hourly about her final
lesson on Friday. Thursday night she couldn’t go to sleep, so
concerned was she about the lesson the next day. She cried and
begged to not have to go, and I went to bed with a heavy heart.
Should I allow her to stay home, and not end the swim lessons on a
sour note? Should I give in to her, and avoid a life-long scarring?
Or should I force her to go even though she was scared, and not
allow her fear to overcome her?

Our family reads a lot, and we’re
always bringing home a bag full of books from the library. You want
to watch the girls go crazy? Give them a gift card to Half-Price
Books and stand back as they agonize over which book to pick. I
guess I’m saying we go through a lot of books.


I have a long list of go-to favorites that I’d gladly give
out as birthday or Christmas presents, and we just recently added a
new one to the list – href="http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Goldfish-Devin-Scillian/dp/1585365076/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275530719&sr=8-1"
target="_blank">Memoirs of a Goldfish.

Could someone please tell me exactly what
I was smoking when I agreed yesterday to allow Maddie to bring home
a cartoon biography DVD about Helen Keller from the library.


I didn’t think much of it, except to make sure it
wasn’t too long. I vaguely remember thinking, “Well,
it’s inspirational, and it’s better than Bob the
Builder!” And that was the extent of my Mommy Alarm sounding.


I’ve got to get the batteries in that thing checked.