1 Mother 2 Another

Maddie’s a Daisy this year –
the level below Brownies in the Girl Scout hierarchy – and
we’ve been introduced to Girl Scout cookies from the selling
side of the desk for the first time. I have dim memories of my own
years selling Girl Scout cookies, which consisted primarily of
handing my order form to my daddy and having him take it to work
and come back with a couple hundred orders. Good times.


I, apparently, am not as nice as my old man, so Maddie’s
cookie sales were considerably less grandiose in scale. As in, she
sold to her relatives, a few church friends, and the people on our
block. Maddie has been surprisingly un-driven about wanting to get
out there and sell! Sell! Sell! She was content to put on her
uniform, hit our cul-de-sac, make a few phone calls, and call it a
day.


This has been incredibly fine with me.

A few months ago, I was chatting with the
mom of one of the girls in Maddie’s ballet class about how
busy our lives had become recently; Maddie had ballet class once a
week and then rehearsal every Saturday for the Nutcracker, and I
was resenting having to be at the studio twice a week.


“I know what you mean,” the other mom lamented.
“My girls’ schedule feels so busy we don’t have
time to turn around! She’s got ballet on Thursdays with
rehearsals Saturday afternoon, gymnastics on Wednesdays, soccer on
Tuesdays and Saturday mornings, and of course karate on Mondays.
Plus her piano lessons at home Friday afternoons!”


Her daughter was six.


And suddenly my twice-a-week commitment didn’t look so
bad.

Brian’s work recently gave out
tickets to a local hockey game and he snagged enough for the whole
family to go, plus the girls’ gal pal Elise. It was a rare
matinee game (I know that’s not what you call it, but you get
what I mean) so I said yes, with hesitations.


Maddie is, shall we say, an introvert who doesn’t know
she’s an introvert. So she loves to hang out with friends and
do stuff in a crowd – in theory. But surrounded by a ton of
sound and stimulation she’ll often hit a wall and a meltdown
is usually inevitable – after we leave and are heading home.
I wasn’t sure if we’d even be able to stay for the
whole game. But free is free and we gave it a try.


I should not have worried. The girls had a fantastic time, and for
two main reasons:

Yesterday I felt a tap upon my shoulder
and turned around to see my daughter Cora standing there, hands
clasped solemnly together.


“What’s up, Li’l Bit?” I asked her.


Cora looked at my gravely. “Mommy, my groove thing is
itchy.”


I’m sorry, what?


I stared at her a moment, then said, “And what exactly is
your groove thing?” Because I? Really wanted to hear the
answer to that question; to my knowledge, we hadn’t been
walking around with episodes of Disco Fever playing in the
background.


Cora huffed impatiently, then leaned in and whispered,
“Mommy, your groove thing is your hiney. I was just trying to
use a more polite term for it.”


And apparently “groove thing” is more acceptable in
mixed company than “hiney”. Who knew?

I try – most of the time – to
feed my family relatively healthy meals. At the same time, I teach
two nights a week – meaning I have to have the food ready or
almost-ready when I leave the house at 3:30. Add in after-school
activities like ballet class that runs right up to dinner time, and
a hot, nutritious, home-cooked meal gets a little more complicated.


I know how easy it can be to drive through somewhere – grab
some fast food to go. And there are days when everything’s
exploded all around you and good enough – in the shape of a
big mac and a happy meal – is good enough. I do not judge
those instances, because I have them myself. But I try to keep
those for truly Code Red days and with a little planning –
and a new definition of the phrase “fast food” –
I by and large succeed.


Wanna know how?

Yesterday was a school holiday and with
both girls at home, I needed a game plan. Looking for something
that would get us moving and be cheap, I told the girls we were
heading to the park for the morning.


Sure, it was a bit windy and overcast part of the time. But once
there we quickly got in the swing of things and had a fantastic
time for almost two hours. The first part of our time there was
spent on the playground equipment, but the lion’s share of
our outdoor time was taken up with my girls’ favorite
activity – Doing Stuff With Nature.

For my birthday last fall, my friends put
href="http://www.1mother2another.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1541&Itemid=46"
target="_blank">a life-size plexi-glass cow in my front
yard. Since then, it’s made the rounds to a couple other
houses for birthdays, and now it’s such a tradition that we
couldn’t stop that rolling stone if we tried. So Friday night
we all made plans to “cow” another friend’s house
–w e had the “costume” all ready, the birthday
sign, and a bag full of emergency supplies like tape and a
flashlight. We were organized, we had a plan – easy in, easy
out, right?


I am solemnly swearing to you that everything you are about to read
is true. As I often say in this blog, I couldn’t make this
stuff up if I tried.


My friend’s house was only a block away so at 9 p.m., our
designated meet time, I swung my backpack on my shoulder and headed
out through my back alley. As I walked along the sidewalk I saw the
psychedelic cow pass me by in a pick-up truck, tailgate down to
accommodate her udders. I gave a friendly wave and checked off our
first to-do: get the cow to the scene. I crossed over my
friend’s lawn just after the cow had been dropped off by a
weary husband , and I greeted two sisters-in-crime who’d
already arrived and patted Heidi (the cow’s) flank fondly,
thinking of the fun we were going to have.


Then the police showed up.

Thursday morning Maddie and Cora were both
fighting over some toy or some such before school; Maddie had
something and Cora was trying desperately to do the right thing and
thus kept saying, “Please, Maddie, PLEASE may I have
it?” And Maddie pulled one of her specialties –
prevaricating – and kept up a constant stream of “Well,
let me think . .” and “Well, it’s just that . .
.” until I was about to pop a vein.


Finally, I abruptly said, “Right. Ok, I officially declare
today a ‘yes’ day. That means that any time someone
asks you for something or asks you to do something you have to say
‘yes’. OK?”


The girls looked at me warily, turning the edict over in their
minds for loopholes or potential land mines. “You, mean,
ANYTHING we ask of you, you have to agree to?” Maddie asked
hopefully.

Let's just say that the day is over and
leave it at that.


There were some lovely moments, some wonderful cards and sentiments
given.


There were also some bloodbaths, screams, and cries of anguish.


Thank heavens the Easter basket is still several weeks off.

A couple weeks ago during Cora and Mommy
time, we built a small zoo in the living room out of our
mini-trampoline, a chair, an ice chest, and some blankets.
Apparently I’d adopted a kitty cat named Shine –
Cora’s feline alter-ego – and needed a nice zoo cage
for it to live in. Shine took over the back corner of the living
room and set up quite a nice little house for herself, with books
to read, a dolly tucked into a blanket, and some jewels “in
case Shine’s owner forgets to feed her and she needs to buy
food.”


For the record, I’ve never forgotten to feed my children.

I don’t know about you, my
friends-across-the-globe, but my house began preparing for
Valentines Day around, oh, the middle of January. For whatever
reason, it’s one of my daughters’ favorite holidays;
I’d like to think it’s because of their passionate love
for their fellow men, but I suspect it has more to do with the
abundance of chocolate being handed out. For a household that shops
pretty exclusively at farmers’ markets and Whole Foods, the
glut of Hershey kisses and Sweethearts falling from the sky must
seem not unlike manna from heaven all those thousands of years ago,
and Valentines Day rivals only Halloween in its possibility –
nay, promise – of high fructose corn syrup for everyone.


To be fair, my daughters have just as much fun preparing and giving
gifts as they do receiving them, and they’ve been painting
and drawing and writing and crafting lo these many weeks now. And I
try hard to act like most other moms and not wrinkle my nose at the
Sweet Tarts or the weird-tasting little hearts with words on them,
because I don’t want my kids to be complete outcasts at such
a young age.


Plenty of time for that later.

Our family uses the discipline method set
forth by Turansky and Miller; their seminal book, target="_blank"
href="http://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Heart-Work-Scott-Turansky/dp/0781441528/?_encoding=UTF8&s=books&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1328846432&camp=1789&sr=1-1&creative=9325">
Parenting Is Heart Work, is the book that set us off on
our original path as Brian and I tried to figure out how to raise
these girls. My two hands-on favorites, though, are target="_blank"
href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Angry-Exchanging-Frustration-Character/dp/0877880301/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">
Good and Angry and href="http://www.amazon.com/Home-Improvement-Eight-Effective-Parenting/dp/078144151X/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">
Home Improvement, two nuts-and-bolts, Biblically-based
books that have given us concrete ideas for helping to shape Maddie
and Cora’s hearts for the long run.


Recently a friend of mine gave me one of their newest books,
href="http://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Shifts-Heart-Based-Strategies-ebook/dp/B004Y76VNA/?_encoding=UTF8&s=books&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1328845558&camp=1789&sr=1-6&creative=9325">
Parenting Shifts: 50 Heart- Based Strategies to Keep You Growing In
Your Parenting and I have to tell you, it’s a
handy little book to have around. It’s a slim volume with
fifty (FIFTY!) different chapters. Each chapter is self-contained,
only a few pages long, and targets one specific area of parenting.
So you get chapters about complaining, or resisting discipline, or
ignoring you, and so on. I love that I can pick this book up when
we hit a new (and painful) growth spurt in one of the girls and I
can study up really quickly in my Cliffs Notes version of how to be
a good parent in whatever area we’re currently experiencing
difficulty.

The other night I made chicken enchiladas
for dinner. It’s a reasonably long process, involving
steaming several chicken breasts, shredding them, making a sauce,
rolling the enchiladas, and so forth. Since it’s a somewhat
complicated process I often double the recipe so I can have a pan
to freeze for later.


So I was standing at the counter shredding a mound of chicken
breasts with two forks when Maddie wandered over.


“What are you doing, Mommy?”


“I’m shredding chicken for dinner, baby,” I said
breathlessly as I hacked mercilessly away at those breasts.


“Hey, Mommy, I have a question! What does chicken come
from?”


Uh-oh. Now? We have to have this talk now?

We dutifully tuned in Sunday night to
watch the Superbowl, though neither team was particularly appealing
to us. The girls were excited about the game, sure, but mostly they
were overjoyed at the chance to sit down and watch some live
television.


With commercials.


This household skips commercials whenever possible, so a chance to
stare at our nation’s great advertising machine on its
holiest day of the year was simply too much for the girls to
resist. We still paused the commercials whenever something violent
or completely sexual came on, but we tried to let the girls catch
their entertainment where they could.


And in return, my entertainment was watching the girls watch the
commercials.

Maddie’s had a loose tooth for
around three months now, and we’ve watched her wiggle it for
so long it’s become a permanent fixture in our family –
Maddie’s Loose Tooth. It started to annoy the poor girl and I
tentatively broached the subject of giving it a little, ahem,
artificial aid in falling out, but Brian asserted that it’d
come out when it was good and ready.


This was all well and fine for a couple of months, but for the last
week or two the wiggly thing’s really been bothering Maddie,
to the point that she’d complain almost daily about it. So
Brian finally caved and we began tentative measures to remove the
thing.


Using a Kleenex, Brian held onto the tooth and wiggled it in every
direction for a couple minutes before giving it a good tug.
Nothing. I tried. Nothing. I pointed out timidly that
Maddie’s friend had tied her tooth to a doorknob and slammed
the door.


Nothing doing.

I love our neighborhood: I know most of
the people who live around us, and we all kind of keep an eye out
for each other and our kids. My next-door neighbor, for example,
called me at the beginning of the school year and asked me to watch
for her children coming home every day. She’s a school
teacher in another district and gets home a bit later, and her
husband is a fire fighter with sporadic off days; so most days she
allows her second-grader and fourth-grader to walk home by
themselves. I’m happy to keep them in the back of my brain as
I go about my business, living in this friendly little
neighborhood.


The other day I drove to pick up Maddie instead of my usual
walking, and as we were driving home I saw our neighbor kids
walking down the sidewalk. In front of me I noticed a red jeep
driving slowly towards them; our mailman actually drives a red jeep
rather than a regulation mail car (long story) so I assumed it was
his jeep and he was going slow to be careful.


But then the jeep pulled up alongside the kids, and the two
children walked over and leaned in. And talked to the unknown
driver.


And then opened the car door, and climbed in.