1 Mother 2 Another

Ok, so that’s a new category that I
totally made up. And this will reveal me as uber-granola mom, but
so be it.


I probably make more items around our house than most people; I
make our own yogurt (we’ll talk about that another Monday
– it’s embarrassingly easy, and so much cheaper, that I
have to with the rate we go through yogurt!), my mom makes our
bread, we eat homemade breakfast bars, granola, and so on.
It’s partly the Martha Stewart in me, partly the cheapskate
in me, and partly the environmentally-friendly tree hugger in me.
But this is something anyone can make, regardless of your level of
cooking skills (even you, A. – you know who you are!) because
this requires no cooking, no measuring.


Moms and dads, it’s time to put down the store-bought glass
and surface cleaner.

I organized a neighborhood shop and swap
recently as part of my living a life of impact thing, and I have to
tell you, it was amazingly fun and astoundingly successful.


I emailed all the mommies in the various mom’s groups in my
neighborhood – and my community has several; our close-knit
groups are one of the things I love about my area. I told all the
moms I was organizing a morning to trade baby clothing and toys,
picked a date, and we were off!


The rules were simple: bring even one thing to give away, and you
could take home as much as you needed. Clothes had to be in good
condition, and toys needed all their parts. And everything was to
be free- no cash could change hands. Otherwise, there were no
rules. I heard lots of moms say it sounded like a good idea, but I
really had no idea if we’d have two people show up or
twenty.

I’ve successfully kept the Disney
princesses out of my house for over three years, but alas,
they’ve found their way in.


Yes, I know, they aren’t the end of the world. Setting aside
the whole issue of what sort of role model Snow White or Sleeping
Beauty is for our children, it’s not like they’re
peddling crack cocaine in the Disney Store.


Except that in a way, they are.

Day two of the strep throat in our
household yesterday, and the girls had a lovely cold on top of it
to make things really interesting. Cora vacillated between moments
of euphoria and dancing around, and crumpling into a sobbing mess
on the floor. That’s how I knew when the Motrin or Tylenol
was starting to wear off.


Now here’s the bad thing – Tuesday is ballet day in our
household. Right after lunch, we race to the ballet studio and
Maddie takes her class. This is just as big of a deal for Cora, if
you’ll remember; she brings her own ballet shoes and sets
herself up in “her” studio, alternating between dancing
by herself and watching Maddie’s class for inspiration.
Ballet class and open gym are the highlights of Cora’s week,
and when I told her yesterday morning that she wouldn’t be
going she absolutely freaked out. I’m talking a
Chernobyl-sized meltdown, lasting for many many minutes.

Maddie spiked a high fever late Thursday
night. A trip to the doctor the next morning ruled out strep throat
or the flu, and left us with one of those ambiguous viruses. A
couple rough nights and lots of Elmo videos followed.


Forty-eight hours later, Maddie felt much better, and we kept a
close eye on Cora, who seemed to have skipped the newest bug for
once. Then Sunday night Cora started running a fever, and we spent
the entire night sleepless: she’d wake every twenty minutes
crying, finally falling in an exhausted slumber around 4 a.m. I
steeled myself for the forty-eight hour thing and promised
I’d sleep when they get to high school.


But wait – there’s more.

For some reason, Maddie’s really
looking forward to Valentine’s day this year. I’m not
quite sure why; I’ve always looked on it as one of those
phony, Hallmark-induced holidays and Brian and I sort of avoid the
whole thing (I know, men everywhere love me right now). So
we’ve never really played it up, but regardless of the
reason, Maddie’s had a great time getting ready for the big
heart day.


A couple weeks ago we spent the morning doing a craft project-
making valentine cards for family and friends. Maddie did several
family ones, and only completed two friend-destined cards before
burning out. Nonetheless, she couldn’t wait until
Valentine’s day and had to walk to her friends’ houses
and hand-deliver the cards THAT VERY DAY. So after lunch we all
went for a stroll, Maddie and Cora both laden with bags carrying
their two cards, each replete with pom-poms and glitter glue and,
in Cora’s case, a three-dimensional sculpture of
stickers.

What’s that you say? Don’t
recognize the song? Imagine it to the tune of the opening bars of
the Sesame Street theme song, and you probably will.


For those of you who don’t get the Buckwheat reference in the
title (cultural cretins that you are!), Eddie Murphy did a famous
skit on Saturday Night Live in the early days where he pretended to
be Buckwheat from Li’l Rascals, all grown up and recording an
album of cover tunes. Eddie Murphy sang indecipherable song after
indecipherable song, and it was quite funny trying to figure out
what the actual song was.

A late night huddled in our storm closet
during yet another tornado warning (why do funnel clouds only
appear after we've put the girls down for bed?) has given me
cranky girls and no time to blog. Sorry. You'll have to wait until
tomorrow for a scintillating story about Cora's singing . . .

Remember the beginning of the year, when I
challenged you all to do one new thing a month that impacts people
outside your household? If not, click href="http://www.1mother2another.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=938&Itemid=46"
target="_blank">here to read the original post and get
caught up.


But if you do remember, and accepted my challenge, how’s it
going now that the righteous fervor of New Year’s resolutions
has worn off and we’re in the bleary month of February with
nary a vacation in sight for several months yet?


I’ll tell you, I’ve got huge, grand plans in the works
– always – but don’t seem to find time to get
everything orchestrated. I plot big, fun parties and elaborate play
dates in my head, yet can’t get that load of laundry folded.
So in the interest of keeping myself on track, I’m checking
in on this Life of Impact thing and hoping it’ll help you
stay motivated.

As a child and teenager, I never got used
to mornings. I truly believed that one of my parents’ best
attributes was their ability to not take my morning crabbiness
personally, and I’d even brag about how my mom and dad
understood I simply wasn’t a morning person and let me get
away with borderline rudeness on an almost daily basis. As I got
older, I often joked that the reason I went into a career in the
theatre was because it guaranteed me the right to sleep in, and
family and friends knew not to even attempt to call me before 10
a.m. Preferably 11.


As for my husband, while we were dating I’d often call his
house during school break around 11 a.m., only to be told he was
still asleep. So it’s safe to say he’s never been a
morning person, either. And when Maddie came along, she agreeably
exhibited the family tendency to love sleep, and would snooze a
good 12-13 hours a night, sleeping until 9 or 10 a.m. until she was
nearly three years old.


Which makes Cora’s attitude towards the early hours all the
more incomprehensible.

Ok, I’m going to make it official
here.


Maddie is potty trained.


Wait – did I just see a pig fly by?

Maddie’s been begging me to set up
playdates with a couple girls in her ballet class, so I’ve
spent the past few lessons coordinating calendars with parents of
her friends of choice. One friend has a stay-at-home dad, and as we
finally got the date and time hammered out, I gave him directions
to our house. “What time do you want here there?” he
asked, and I told him. “And what time do you want me to pick
her up?” he continued.


Um, what?


I was completely taken aback, but stuttered out an end time, to
which he nodded and made a note. Then I went back to my ballet
class observation seat and tried to figure this out.

We had friends over for a play date
yesterday morning, and gravitated towards the game room and all our
ballet costumes – much like we do without a friend over.
We’ve got stacks of ballet skirts and leotards and tutus, and
Maddie and Cora will dress up at least once a day to do ballet,
putting on their ballet shoes, grabbing a wand, and often bedecking
themselves in jewels before turning on the Mozart and
choreographing their masterpieces.


This activity is all the more exciting for Maddie because of her
recent milestone- dressing herself. She’s been
“assisting” for quite some time now, but the past
couple weeks have seen a complete takeover of dressing time. Maddie
has a “get dressed” magnet on her responsibility chart,
and she refuses to place it on her daily square until she’s
gotten herself into her pjs for the night, completely solo. Of
course, the dressing and undressing thing has been practiced much
recently as she’s made the transition to using the potty
full-time, and I think the chance to be a big girl and handle her
clothes by herself was at least part of the reason for her
new-found potty interest.


Unfortunately, with Maddie’s newly discovered skill –
getting dressed – comes another, less-wanted (by the adults)
skill:


Getting undressed.

Maddie has been pooping in the potty for
five (five!) days now. Dare I hope?


After last week’s promise to Maxum – “Maxum,
I’m working on pooping and peeing in the potty all the time
so I can go to school with you, I promise!”- Maddie really
got down to business. That very afternoon she asked to use the
potty instead of her pull-ups to poop, and grinned triumphantly at
her easy success.

The past few weeks have seen a drastic
increase in Cora’s separation anxiety, and I keep wondering
– when’s it going to get better?


I mean, the girl’s twenty months now- that’s a year and
two-thirds. And separation anxiety is supposed to peak around
eighteen months, so wouldn’t we be maintaining or getting
better rather than going deeper into it?


I suspect that part of the cause is Cora’s nearly unending
stream of colds and teething and stomach viruses; there’s
nothing like not feeling good day in and day out to make you want
your mommy. So I get that, and give her extra snuggles and love and
patience. But even when she seems to feel good, she simply wants
me, and nothing else will do.

We had a modest ice storm pass through our
area over the past couple of days, and yesterday everything came to
a halt – schools closed, businesses allowing employees to
work from home, gymnastics and ballet lessons canceled. So of
course, we had to get outside and see for ourselves.


Late morning finally found us bundled up and walking cautiously
across the crunchy grass. Getting dressed for cold weather caused a
bit of a problem: we’d not bought any truly cold weather gear
for Maddie this year, and we’d lent out Cora’s size to
friends traveling northward over Christmas. But we patched together
too-big shoes and too-small boots and made do, and were delighting
in the cool air and beautiful sunny day.

We’ve been preschool shopping in
earnest the past couple of weeks, since registration’s begun
for September and we’ve admitted that Maddie absolutely needs
to go for a year before kindergarten. We narrowed it down to two
and took tours recently of both facilities, and have finally made a
decision.


The hard thing is that both schools are really good, and
Maddie’s got friends at each one. Ask her which school she
prefers and she’ll say, ‘Maxum’s school!”
simply because it’s where Maxum goes. Somehow I’m going
to have to break it to her that we’ve chosen the other
school.

We just passed our one-year anniversary of
moving to Texas, and I can’t figure out if the year’s
flown by or stretched out interminably.


In some ways I feel as if I’ve been here forever; at the same
time, I still feel startling pangs of homesickness for New York.
We’re certainly settled in here, roots firmly planted in the
ground, but in quiet moments my heart still wings eastward towards
the Big Apple. And knowing we’re in the right place for this
season of our family life doesn’t make the aches any easier
to bear.

We’ve had a week now with our new
potty training in place, and I can say this is the longest
we’ve gone with such forward progress.


After a disastrous weekend last week, in which Maddie pooped in
several pairs of panties and steadfastly refused to use the potty,
Brian and I hit on a new plan. Maddie now wears big-girl underpants
all the time, using the potty whenever she needs to. But any time
she feels the urge to poop, she tells one of us and gets to put on
a pair of pull-ups for the deed.

You know I love you all, but I've been
sick all week and have several hours of prime-time television to
catch up on.


Namely, I'm the only person left alive who hasn't seen the season
premiere of "Lost". It's sad, but true.


So while I've got some time to myself, I'm gonna plant my snotty
self on the couch and find out how Jack persuades everyone to go
back to the island.


But I leave you with this bon mot -


Maddie put on a new leotard for gymnastics today and apparently the
sparkles on the neck are too itchy. She hopped up from the
breakfast table pulling at the neck and saying, "Mommy, I have GOT
to change. This leotard is KIDDING me."


I think she meant KILLING me. But I snorted my way up the stairs to
change her, hearing an exchange in my head which began, "A leotard
walks into a barre . . . "

Can you believe it? We're all sick again.


Yep, we'd been limping along with another mild cold from last
week, when Cora up and threw up all over the back seat on our way
home from church Sunday. There was a bit of diarrhea that day, but
no more vomiting, and we all thought it was just one of those
things.


Then I got this stomach bug Monday night and was out of commission
all Tuesday, with my mother not far behind me. Brian held out until
Tuesday evening, but spent all Wednesday in bed. The girls have run
wild the past couple of days, with barely enough supervision
between us all to keep them from playing with matches. The house is
a wreck and Maddie and Cora have been living off of macaroni and
cheese.


Both girls' colds seem to have intensified, much to my chagrin,
and I came down with their cold on Wednesday. And I swear Cora's
eyes started weeping Wednesday afternoon, but so far nothing red or
pinkish about the eye. Maddie's been incredibly sweet, offering to
fix me all manner of her favorite treats, running down a list of
foods she thought might help me even as the descriptions sent me
running for the bathroom. And both girls brought Daddy crackers and
jell-o in bed and have tried to give him wide berth.


The good news is that both girls seem to be ok other than the
snotty colds; we're hoping Cora had it briefly on Sunday and that
it skips Maddie. We've got fresh sheets and clean-up towels piled
in the hallway just in case, though.


The bad news is that we may have to move, just to escape the war
zone of toys that is our house.


That, and after these few days of blue-box heaven, I may not ever
get a vegetable past their lips again.

As I write this, the nation’s in
final preparation for the inauguration, and I have to confess,
I’m so excited I can hardly stand it. This is history in a
way we’ve never seen before, and I wish I could get the girls
to understand the momentousness of the occasion.


There are certain points in our history that I remember with
complete clarity: where I was when the space shuttle Challenger
exploded (in school, watching all the teachers starting to weep);
when the tanks rolled through Tienamen Square (in Kentucky doing a
show – and staring with tears rolling down my face at the
lone protestor standing in front of the tank); when the Twin Towers
were hit (New York, and that’s a whole separate
conversation).

Ok, so that didn’t work.


This weekend I put Maddie in big-girl underpants and told her we
would no longer do diapers. I explained that if she pooped in her
panties, we’d have to throw her new Ariel underpants away. I
also told her there’d be no leaving the house – no gym,
no ballet, no playdates – until she was well on her way to a
perfect no-hitter – er, pooper.


Twenty-four hours and four trashed pairs of panties later, we had
to revisit our plan. Maddie was a nervous wreck, crying at the drop
of a hat and jumpy. She’d run off to hide to poop, then come
to us, shame-faced and crying.


Brian and I retreated, prayed, and came up with a new game
plan.

Maddie is once again peeing in her diaper,
and I’m at my wit’s end.


We’re a week out from her urinary tract infection, and all
symptoms are gone though she still takes her medicine. During the
first few days of her infection we allowed her to use her diaper
– the pain was too much for her to try to hold it in while
she got to a potty – but quickly saw that becoming a habit.
She’s declared a preference for peeing in her diaper –
something she hasn’t done for months – and would like
to go back to it full-time.

Maddie and Cora both love the game Cariboo
they received for Christmas, and as I’ve blogged about
previously, Maddie’s been learning the hard way the lesson of
how to lose graciously – or at least without dissolving into
a complete puddle of tears. Nearly a month since they first played,
both show no signs of a waning love for the game – if
anything, it’s intensified and we go through at least a
half-dozen games a day.

Coming down the stairs for breakfast in
the morning, Cora will spy the box and cry, “Play
Cariboo!” (though it sounds more like “Pay
Cah-Boo!”) I can persuade her away from it with a promise of
breakfast, her favorite meal and one that lasts almost an hour most
days – but that’s another blog. At any rate,
we’ll usually get in a couple rounds before lunch, another
one or two before naps, and then several hands after dinner.

I’ve got a girl obsessed with ballet, and it’s not even the one taking the classes.

For whatever reason, Cora simply adores all things ballet. Her favorite day of the week is Tuesday, when Maddie takes her ballet class. Cora now has her own “dance bag” with her own ballet shoes in them, because she sobbed uncontrollably when Maddie put her shoes on and Cora had none of her own. So every Tuesday Cora brings her bag to the studio, and the teacher generously allows Cora to play in an empty studio.

The husband of a good friend of mine
recently had a run-in with another friend – the kind that
leaves women in tears and analyzing it over cups of coffee for
months to come – and has been distraught over it ever since.
The effect of this on my friend has been no less painful, and she
finds herself unable to stop crying for no reason other than that
her husband is in pain.


And this got me to thinking about how often I go on emotional
rollercoasters on behalf of loved ones – how often I agonize
with a friend as she waits to become pregnant, or hold my breath as
a family member awaits medical test results. This, though, is
nothing compared to how vociferously my heart feels each elation,
each pang that runs through my girls’ hearts. Every time a
child snubs Maddie on the playground and she looks at me,
bewildered; every time Cora is ignored by her older sister
“just because” and she toddles to me in tears; every
time my child overcomes a new fear and breaks through into insane
happiness; I think, I can’t take much more of this. My heart
is not built for such abuse.

I did this concert Saturday night, and it
was the first time I’d been gone from the house at bedtime
since the night I delivered Cora, way back in May 2007. No one has
put Cora down for bedtime except me – first because of the
nursing thing, then because of her raging case of separation
anxiety. We’d been working on naps for a while and
she’s pretty good about that – she’ll happily
allow someone else to do naptime as long as I’m not in the
house. But we hadn’t done nighttime before, because
she’s such a difficult sleeper that we didn’t want to
create a possible “up all night” scenario until we
needed to.

The past two nights, Maddie’s
awakened complaining she needed to go pee. This from a child who
has not peed in the night, either in a diaper or a potty, for over
a year now. At first I thought this was a ploy to be up with Mommy
or Daddy, but last night Brian went in and she was crying, saying
she could already feel it coming out. Then this morning she had
such trouble going to the bathroom that she cried and sobbed on the
toilet.


Which is when I knew we needed to go to the doctor.

One of the “hit” gifts that
Maddie and Cora got for Christmas is the board game Cariboo. This
game is billed for ages 3-6, but Cora adores playing it since she
gets to use the key and drop the balls in the tunnels, and Maddie
helps her “read” the game cards.


This is not the first board game Maddie’s played – she
loves freakin’ Candyland, and really enjoys that
hugely-annoying-to-parents game Chutes and Ladders. But those have
always been played one-on-one with an adult, and Cariboo is the
first game Maddie’s had to play with Cora. And we’ve
noticed a disturbing trend.


Maddie hates to lose.

Today is open gym day, and we’re
about to head out there for our first gym play time in three weeks.
Both girls are screaming with excitement, not unlike that of
waiting for Christmas morning to come.


Try explaining school holidays to a toddler.


We had a wonderful two weeks hanging out with Daddy and gorging
ourselves on gifts and goodies – I’m not saying we
didn’t have a fantastic holiday. But it is a relief to be
back into our normal schedule.

This is usually the time of year when I do
a funny blog on new year’s resolutions: I see traditional
resolutions as a bunch of needless pressure, impossible standards
we’ll never fulfill, and often will blog about
“realistic” resolutions, such as giving ourselves a
break and accepting our parenting flaws. But this year I seem to
see many such articles around already; seems we’re a bunch of
highly stressed, pressured people who need lots of people to tell
us to take it easy and not put too much pressure on ourselves.


I predict that 2009, with its economic uncertainty and crazy stock
market, will be a year of paring down: living more simply,
de-cluttering, stripping away extraeneous activities and expenses
and getting back to the basics. And while new year’s
resolutions have always seemed a bit arbitrary to me, the flip of
the calendar is a convenient place to pause and take stock of your
life, seeing what worked and what didn’t and vowing to try
harder. So I tried to come up with some resolutions.

Ok, I was sitting here working on the blog
I’ve been mulling over for several days now –
it’s a doozy and hopefully you’ll get to read it
tomorrow.


You won’t read it today because I’ve been detoured by
babies.


My girlfriend Ingrid just delivered her second girl this morning.
Remember Maddie’s best friend Naomi from New York? Well,
Naomi just became a big sister. Give a shout out to baby Emily.


I’ve also found out that another friend from New York
delivered this morning, and yet another New York friend (must have
been in the water nine months ago) delivered just last week, and
let me tell ya, I love the name Ivy.

I don’t know about anyone else, but
my house still looks as if Christmas exploded in it. I’m
trying to get a grip on the thing, but it’s not easy;
Brian’s on vacation this week and we’re trying to do
fun things as a family, so I hate to have him watch the kids while
I organize. And of course, housework waits for no one, so
I’ve piles of laundry to get to, grocery shopping to do,
meals to prepare – the usual list. So finding a place for all
the new toys keeps sliding down to the bottom of my
“to-do” list, much to the delight of my kids.


Yes, they’re thrilled that our living room floor looks like
the stock room of FAO Shwarz. Every morning they come downstairs
for breakfast, only to be reminded on sight of all their new toys,
which of course distracts them from eating and calls them to play.
I stand in the kitchen, ignored, until stomachs growl too loudly
and they look at me as if they can’t understand why their
breakfast isn’t waiting for them at the table.

I hope everyone’s holidays were
fabulous and low-key (I hear exhausted parents sniggering
everywhere at that – I myself was up to the wee hours
assembling Santa’s Thomas the Train set and table – but
that’s a different blog). We had a wonderful time, overall,
and I can’t wait to fill you in.


But before I do, I’ve got to share our Christmas Eve with
you, because it’s the story making the rounds of our family
table right now and I can’t keep this video to myself.

I'd love to stay and chat, but I've got
angel wings to attach to pageant costumes, sweet potato casseroles
to make, presents to wrap, train tables to sneak into the house,
and a birthday cake for Jesus to frost. So I'll see you on the
flip side of Christmas. I'll have lots to tell you; Maddie debuts
as an angel in her first pageant today, and Cora saw her first
"Nutcracker" last night - and that's all before the hullabaloo of
Christmas!


Have a joyous one, and we'll talk in a few days.

We’re still wrestling with the
potty-training issue and Maddie, but hopefully the end is in sight.


Maddie has peed in the potty for months now, never once using a
diaper. But she still insists on pooping in a diaper, and does so
deliberately. She’ll go through phases of pooping on the
potty – a day or two – then changing her mind
again.

We had our first party as a family this
weekend and survived to tell the tale.


The annual Christmas party Brian and I used to have was put on hold
when Maddie was born, and this was the first year we had the energy
to revive the thing. In years past it’s been an open house
starting around 9 p.m. and going to the wee hours, but this time we
kicked off at 10 a.m. and went right up to that immovable deadline
of naptime. Aside from the obvious problems, like re-thinking the
menu for brunch rather than Friday night nibbles, I was most
concerned with the logistics of having a party with little kids:
would our playgroup friends be comfortable around childless
co-workers, and vice-versa? Would the kids have a good time? Would
they wreck the house and leave it uninhabitable for adult
partygoers? Would Cora indulge herself in her current favorite
pastime – Taking Off the Pants?

We celebrated my sister-in-law’s
birthday recently by having her and her husband over for dinner.
Maddie and Cora both adore their aunt and uncle, and look forward
for any chance to hang out with them and show off all their tricks.
The minute they walk in the door the girls hang on them like
puppies, scampering around their feet and begging for attention.


Maddie’s been on a good streak with potty-training, using the
potty to pee all the time now and saving the diapers for “the
other stuff”. So when she said she needed to pee we hurried
off to the bathroom, leaving Aunt Nikkie and Uncle Daniel playing
with Cora. Maddie had been to gymnastics class that morning and had
refuse to take off her leotard and leggings, making the potty thing
a much more complicated affair than it had to be. Add to that the
fact that Maddie’s just learned how to put on her own leotard
and insists on doing it herself with laborious concentration, and
bathroom breaks were running a bit long that day.

We had our Angel Tree party volunteer
time, and I can say it was a success on many levels.


Our church offered to pull together gifts and a party for a local
Head Start class, and Maddie and I selected a little girl and got a
gift for her last week. When the party organizer told me we could
come volunteer at the event, I jumped at the chance for Maddie to
see charity and compassion at work – to see the face of the
little girl she’d “helped”.


I was only a little hesitant at going to the event; bringing an
18-month-old and a 3-year-old to a party is not always the wisest
course, especially when the party’s not for them. But Maddie
and I talked about the party, and I explained it was our chance to
give a fun party for other people and make other kids feel good for
a while. She seemed ok with that, so we went ahead. And I’m
really glad we did.

I haven’t talked much the past few
weeks about the Christmas-y things we’ve done as a family,
but we’ve done quite a few: Maddie and I went to see her
first “Nutcracker” ballet performance, the whole family
made our annual trip for a photo with Santa, our playgroup had
cookies with Santa one afternoon, and the girls and I have been
baking up a storm in preparation for our big annual holiday party
this weekend, just to name a few.


I worry that the whirlwind of the holiday season will leave the
girls jaded and bored once “real” life returns, and
there’s not something new and exciting involving sugar
cookies every day. At the same time, I see how excited Maddie is as
we go from event to event, and how magical the whole thing feels to
her. Every morning the girls discuss whose turn it is to open the
Advent calendar door at dinner that night, and they speculate on
what will be behind the door all day long. We listen to Christmas
music and dance around in our tutus for hours at a time, and
Maddie’s tried to teach Cora the Nutcracker story so Cora
will play the Rat King and Maddie can hit her with her shoe. The
girls are having a wonderful time this season, and I have to admit
it’s pretty darn fun for me to be along for the ride.

We went to a friend’s birthday party
over the weekend, which served as a stark reminder that I have
crossed that line and am now and will always be a Mommy. It also
pointed out to me that I spend waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time with
other mommies with kids, and need to get out into the
“other” world a little more often.


My friend is childless, as are pretty much all of her friends, but
she loves my kids and the girls wanted desperately to go to her
party, so we brought them along for a quick drop-in since the party
was in the evening and we have the whole toddler bedtime thing.
Since it was a surprise party, we were there ahead of my friend and
thus spent a good twenty minutes surrounded by strangers politely
staring and trying to figure out who would bring a one-year-old to
a twenty-something’s birthday party.

We went to Chick-Fil-A yesterday for
lunch, a reward for the girls’ patiently entertaining
themselves at home all morning while I did housework and failed to
lead them in fun games and craft projects. I like the relatively
healthy food choices, and Maddie loves the play area, so everyone
wins. Throw a guest appearance by Maddie’s best friend Maxum
into the mix and you’ve got a winning lunch time.


At any rate, the grown-ups were happily sitting on the shoe bench
chatting while the kids crawled and played over our heads in the
plastic observation cars and exploratory tubes, when I heard Maddie
start screaming and wailing. This was the close-to-panic,
I’m-freaking-out scream, and I launched into action, climbing
up those big twisty steps and squeezing myself into the tunnel.

Ok, so that’s probably not the most
flattering title, but it’s the best I could come up with.
Hopefully you know what I mean. I’m not talking about giving
gifts to people you don’t really care about – those are
gifts, to me, best left un-given, money and energy better directed
elsewhere. But that’s a blog for another day.


No, when I talk about peripheral gift-giving, I mean all the people
in your life that you want to recognize and honor in some small
way, but that you may not know well enough to come up with a truly
personal gift. I’m thinking of preschool teachers, Sunday
school volunteers, soccer coaches or ballet teachers, even mothers
you don’t know well in your large mom’s group.
I’ve polled (very unscientifically) several friends of mine
who are teachers, and found out what they like and what
doesn’t work so well.

So there Brian and I sat last night,
trying to catch up on our tiVo, when we suddenly hear the tornado
sirens going off. We check our bedroom and sure enough, our weather
radio’s come on with a tornado warning.


Hello??? Isn’t this December???

Last weekend Brian had tickets to the
hockey game – the Stars were playing in town, and he’d
gotten free tickets in a contest. For several weeks he’d been
carrying the tickets around in his work briefcase, checking
periodically to make sure they were there. Then the morning of the
game he went to get them out – and they were gone.


We tore the house apart, looking everywhere. All those little
stacks of paper miscellaney that I seem to collect, assiduously
sorted through. Every trash can, every nook and cranny, every toy
box. The tickets were simply gone.

So Maddie woke up yesterday morning
moaning and saying her stomach hurt. A few minutes later she cried
that she had to throw up, and I picked her up and ran her into the
bathroom. It turned out to be a false alarm, but as I tucked her
back into bed (after laying out several layers of waterproof pads
and towels underneath her) I also grabbed the kidney-shaped
hospital bowl you’re given when you need to puke in the
hospital. We snuggle under the covers and read books together until
Cora woke up and I went in to get her.

First off, if you haven’t read
yesterday’s blog, read that before going on.


So yesterday morning Maddie was admiring our Advent calendar,
looking at the scene and talking about Jesus’ birth and
speculating on what would be behind that night’s door (is it
a shepherd? A donkey? The suspense is killing me!). Maddie would go
take off the magnetic pieces we’d already put on the board,
which I allowed as long as she stayed at the board with them. I
also made sure she knew not to play with the doors, or try to move
the board itself since it was not firmly planted anywhere.

Every night I put Cora to bed; we read
books, say prayers, and rock together until she’s sleepy.
Sometimes this happens quickly, but sometimes it takes forever and
I’m in a crabby mood by the time I leave her room, thinking
of all I have still to do before I can go night-night myself.


First on that list is going in to see Maddie – once
Cora’s down I have to go snuggle and say goodnight to my
oldest. It’s a fairly recent development in the evening
routine and I’m not always very tolerant of it; on nights
when I’ve spent a long time getting Cora to sleep, the last
thing I want to do is get pinned down in another room, answering
endless questions and fulfilling neverending requests for back
scratches. I sometimes find myself hoping Maddie’s fallen
asleep waiting for me, though that only happens once a month or so
– she’s a determined kid, and will wait doggedly for me
to come in.

Yesterday was the start of December, and
to mark the occasion people all across the country cracked open
their Advent calendars. I grew up using one of the thin paper ones,
with little doors you pried open. A scripture verse was written on
the back of each door, and a picture from the nativity scene. I
used to love opening the Advent calendar, watching the days until
Christmas count down even as the scene of Christ’s birth was
revealed more fully each day.


The past few years have seen a huge resurgence of Advent calendars,
and those devices once the domain of Christians only have been
taken over by secular holiday celebrations as well. Now Pottery
Barn and Crate and Barrel sell wooden calendars, felt calendars,
metal ones, all with Christmas tree or Santa decorations. Each day
is another chocolate to eat, or a small treat to unwrap, as well as
another ornament to hang on the calendar “tree”. And
with my apologies to everyone out there who has one of those, these
calendars make me sad.

I’ve been proud of the fact that
Cora’s been saying her name for a few months now –
it’s so cute to see a toddler’s satisfaction at
pointing to herself and saying, “I Cora!” But just over
the last week or so, Cora’s adjusted her name slightly, much
to our first puzzlement, then embarrassment. Cora now calls
herself, “Oh Cora!”


The first time I heard her doing this I wasn’t sure I heard
her right. I tried to figure out what she was asking for –
“Go Cora”? “Show Cora”? But nothing fit. I
finally had to give in and acknowledge that she was saying
“Oh Cora!” I just couldn’t figure out why.

As we hover on the brink of the official
Christmas season (though I still can’t believe it’s now
considered “late” to start Christmas stuff the day
after Thanksgiving!) I’ve been working on my Christmas
shopping. Finances are tight everywhere this year, and for the past
several months I’ve been working the sales and buying a few
things at a time, spreading out the cost.


The problem with this approach is two-fold: first, you can end up
picking up several “little” gifts, and have spent your
budget without buying anything meaningful, since you don’t
see the overall picture as the gifts are smuggled into your house.
This can be at least partially solved by using a variation of my
famous gift spiral – see earlier blog on that. But second,
what you buy in September may not be what your kid is into come
December. And you may have amassed yourself a huge collection of
Barbie gear, only to find out your child is now in love with
Thomas. For example.

Cora’s been symptom-free for
twenty-four hours now, Glory Glory Hallelujah. And all my
rocking/cleaning-up time with Cora gave me an opportunity to think
about my day off on Saturday, and what I learned from it.


Basically, my beloved husband gave me Time Off for my birthday last
month – a stretch of time to be dictated by me, for purposes
to be chosen by me. His blank check (well, as blank as our finances
would allow) was one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever gotten.
The last time I’ve had more than a few hours to myself was
May of 2006, as a Mother’s Day gift. That time, I left Brian
with several bottles of pumped milk and an anxious 11-month-old
Maddie. I spent the day roaming around the city, reveling in my
freedom and falling back in love with New York.

Saturday I had my first full day off - no
strings attached, no running home for naptimes, no work, no errands
- since May of 2006. It was awesome and wonderful and I'd love to
tell you all about it, and the deep Mommy insights I gained with
twelve hours to myself.


Unfortunately, I don't have time to chat because Cora is sick.


Yes, Cora spent Sunday doing one of two things: puking, or sleeping
in someone's arms. So my back is aching from lying semi-prone on
the couch for two hours at a stretch, and there's a faint vomit
smell I suspect is coming from my hair, but I can't quite pin it
down. I got a makeover on Saturday and its remnants are smudged
under my eyes, a la heroin chic. We've been through a couple dozen
towels and two Silkies, and Cora now cries every time someone sits
with her and starts to wrap a "just in case" towel around his- or
herself.


Maddie's been amazingly patient and understanding, lashing out for
attention much less frequently than I'd have imagined. I'm afraid
I'm the one not handling it well; it seems we've been sick either
the whole month or the whole fall, depending on how you look at
things.


I'm hoping this is short-lived; Maddie spent Friday lounging on
the couch, saying her tummy felt "throw-up sick". She never hurled,
and seemed much better on Saturday so hopefully this will all be
behind us tomorrow.


But just in case, if you see me on the streets the next few days
and go in for a hug, hold your breath while your face is near my
hair. It's not a pretty smell.

I know, I usually do recipe talk on
Wednesday (“What’s For Dinner Wednesday” just
sounds better) but I made a new recipe yesterday and wanted to
share.


Before I share the recipe, you should know that I’m one of
those people who make lasagna from scratch. Yes, I’ve bought
frozen lasagna before – definitely not ashamed of that.
I’m just cheap, and like to add veggies to it. My stand-by
recipe is somewhat labor-intensive; I usually make a double batch,
which gives me two giant pans or two pans plus a small one, and
will spend a few hours doing the noodle-boiling and sauce-making
and so on. I love my lasagna recipe, but it is exhausting and takes
much planning.

Yeah, of course Maddie didn’t pee in
the potty yesterday. What else could I expect, since we went out
that morning and got a cool little toy? And since I was so sure she
had turned that corner, and was ready to move forward?


Honestly, I don’t get it. She used the potty once yesterday,
but deliberately chose to use her diaper every other time. At the
toy store, she said she didn’t think they had a bathroom, and
during the day at home she said it was just easier. I know
she’s not trying to be difficult or naughty; I just
can’t figure out the best way to help her over this hurdle. I
started asking her to sit on the potty every couple of hours, in
case she wasn’t planning ahead enough, and by the end of the
day she was crying every time I had her sit down on the toilet.
I’m making her miserable on this, and I know that’s not
helping the situation.

Yesterday, Maddie used the big-girl potty
the entire day.


Yes, we’re back to potty training. Maddie gave up using the
potty months ago after an accident, vowing to never again use the
big-girl potty. But about a week ago Maddie announced she’d
like to use the potty occasionally – “Just to go pee,
no poopy!” Then two days ago, Maddie pooped in the big potty.
Incredulous, she grinned triumphantly. “That was easy!
I’m going to poop in the potty all the time now!”

Apparently my two-week cold is actually a
sinus infection. Huh. That explains the migraines.


On the good news front, as a no-longer-breastfeeding mom, I have
two words:


Ny. Quil.

I’ve managed to keep Maddie away
from a few things that I know will eventually be a part of her food
repertoire, most noteably gum and soda. We introduced cookies and
cakes and candy at age 2, and have been slowly allowing her to have
a few things a month; I want to raise a healthy child who can make
healthy choices, but not one who is so sucrose-deprived that she
spends her girl scout dues on a Ding Dong, snarfing it guiltily in
the guest bathroom before announcing to her troop leader that Mommy
forgot to giver her cash this week, sorry. But the gum and soda
I’m holding out on for a while more. Daddy drinks diet Coke,
and Maddie accepts that she can’t have any. And no one in the
family really chews gum so that’s not a huge issue either.


But the one thing Maddie’s discovered that she considers
almost more of a treat than chocolate? Tic Tacs.

While Cora’s separation anxiety has
definitely gotten better, it’s certainly not a complete thing
of the past, and as the clinginess gets less and less frequent, I
find myself becoming more and more intolerant of it. I know that
sounds crazy, but she’s gotten so good at finding comfort in
other people that when she reverts back my patience just
isn’t as dominant as it used to be.


Cora’s Mommy need usually surfaces somewhere around a stretch
of sleep – right after she wakes up in the morning, or first
thing after her nap. There’s always a bit of re-entry time
required for her: sometimes snuggling and rocking in her chair for
a few minutes, sometimes just a quick quiet song hummed in her ear
as I carry her downstairs. Then more likely than not she’s
off and running, looking for trouble.

If you’re like me, you began your
Christmas shopping a few months ago. Incredibly organized and on
top of my life? Nope – just trying to spread out the
financial pain a bit, make Christmas not such a shock to the
checkbook come December and January. (Oh, January – that
painful month when the big credit card bill comes in and all the
toys it bought are already broken.) So I’ve been buying
things when I see good sales, and squeezing a bit of shopping in
each week. Thankfully, my girls are too young to realize they could
tear my bedroom apart and find all their gifts; in our comfy, large
house, there’s surprisingly little private space and Mommy
and Daddy’s bedroom closet is simply known as the place to go
play with the cat. I’m so glad they don’t look up and
see those poorly-concealed Little People boxes above their heads.


Anyway, as I try to spread the spending out, I’ve got a
couple tricks up my sleeve to make all this a little easier.

My being sick last week seriously depleted
my stores of frozen casseroles and back-up dinners (think Hamburger
Helper and the Blue Box – my children were in culinary
heaven) and I’ve got some lost ground to make up here. So
this week I’m bringing out one of my favorite staples, which
I discovered last spring – href="http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/nwsltr/recipeoftheday/stories/041508recipeofday_casserole_0416liv.State.Edition1.6a0a74fe.html"
target="_blank">Chicken Chili Casserole.

I remember when my girlfriend Abby’s
second son was right around 18 months, and began entering into the
whole testing-boundaries-and-starting-to-need-discipline thing.
Josh is four months younger than Maddie, so I’d just started
dealing with that myself, but of course Abby had an older son and
had already been through it, so she wasn’t quite as
blindsided and bewildered – who is this child and what have
you done with my good-natured, placid baby? – as I was.


All the same, Abby had a bit of baby shock when Josh hit that
stage, because he was so different than her older son Isaiah.
“I swear, Jen,” she’d gripe on the phone,
“Isaiah was never this rebellious. Josh will stand there,
stare right at you, and deliberately do something you know is wrong
– grinning this huge ‘ain’t I a stinker?’
grin the whole time.” I had this clear picture in my head of
the little stinker, and counted my blessings that Maddie was not
like that; she may have disobeyed and known it was wrong, but it
was always with this furtive, guilty look on her face – the
whole “I know it’s bad but I can’t help
myself” look.

I’m back, I think, though I speak
cautiously lest any unemployed germs hear of my new-found health
and decide to go hang out in my colon again.


Last week was truly fun, I tell ya. Five days almost completely in
bed, with a trip to the doctor providing me with a cold to pile on
top of it. And of course, Cora had to come down with said cold as
well, which produced an instantaneous ear infection. So I had to
drag her to the doctor on Thursday when her temperature remained
103 in spite of steady doses of Motrin and Tylenol, and I could
barely restrain myself from shoving Cora over on the examining
table and lying down next to her.

Well, day five of the stomach virus.


But it gets better -


I went to the doc on Tuesday to confirm it was, indeed, a virus and
thus impervious to antibiotics, and apparently brought a second
viral infection home with me. Cora and I both got hit with a sore
throat and fever late Wednesday night, and a trip to the doctor
confirmed it's not strep, just a second virus. So I'm recovering
from the first, though still sick, and Cora's running a 103 fever
in spite of the Motrin.


See ya next week.

I'm in Day Two of some nasty stomach
thing, so you'll have to wait one more day for the excruciatingly
cute pictures of Maddie trick-or-treating.


Sorry.

I know Halloween’s tonight, and
I’ll have lots of exciting photos and stories to share next
week, I’m sure. But first I have to share this –


Yesterday the family went to the King Tut exhibit currently in our
hometown; Brian took the day off and we went to celebrate my
birthday. I hadn’t specifically needed the girls to come, but
I dind’t want to make an adult miss the exhibit to stay home
with Maddie and Cora, so everyone came.

Two things –


First, there’s an email going around about a href="http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/coins.asp"
target="_blank">candy recall. Sherwood brand Pirate’s
Gold Milk Chocolate coins, sold in bulk in Costco and other stores,
are being recalled because of levels of melamine found in them, a
toxic chemical found recently in several Chinese exports.

I don’t know what I did to deserve
it, but the girls and I had a pretty fantastic day yesterday, all
things considered.


Cora’s still doing her imitation of an insomniac and getting
up waaaaaaaaaay too early, but I’m not hopping out of bed in
the middle of the night any more, and that seems an almost fair
trade. So I’m functioning on a bit more sleep, which always
helps my outlook considerably. Maddie woke up in a good mood, and
we all got ready relatively painlessly.


Monday was playgroup day, and at first Maddie was resistant to it,
begging instead to go someplace “fun” like the mall.
But once she realized playgroup was at a new house with new toys to
check out, she quickly came on board. We all bundled up against the
mild cool breeze, and strollered over to playgroup.

Play dates with Maddie’s good friend
Maxum have had an unintended –and, I’m afraid,
potentially expensive – side effect: namely, the girl’s
fallen in love with Thomas.


As Maddie entered toddlerhood and I saw all my girlfriends with
sons spending big bucks on Thomas the Tank Engine stuff, I smiled
smugly and thanked my stars I had a girl with no interest in those
big, endless sets with bin upon bin of pieces. Even when Maddie saw
a few trains at church in the nursery, she never seemed interested
and I thought myself safe. But when Maddie saw Maxum’s big
Thomas table, with bin after bin underneath it filled with trains
and tracks, she was intrigued. And after she checked out a Thomas
video from the library, she was hooked.

A friend of mine recently brought her new
son – born seven weeks early, and fresh from the NICU –
home amidst much joy and celebration. The celebration was
short-lived when she had to return to the hospital a few days later
because of blood in his stool. After a few tests, they determined
the cause: a dairy allergy.


Newborn food allergies are surprisingly common, though many people
don’t know about them. Babies subsist wholly on breastmilk or
formula, of course, but we all know how much can be passed through
breastmilk to a baby, and foods that may cause allergies are no
exception. Something like ninety percent of newborn
“colic” is caused by a food allergy, usually a reaction
to dairy or soy.

Cora’s learned a new word recently
that’s almost as bad as the “mine” she picked up
in recent months: “Cora”.


Yes, the child has learned her own name. And of course, she’s
known it for a long time – she responds when she hears her
name called, and so forth. But pronouns such as “she”
or “he” or “I” are still a little beyond
her, which is why Cora’s discovery of her own name has come
in handy.

My thanks to Fats Waller for the title -



As I mentioned earlier, I weaned Cora (sort of accidentally) over
the weekend, and there I was agonizing over my tender boobs and
getting all teary-eyed at that fact that my baby no longer needed
me. And then I realized –


Hey, I could have a margarita right now.

When I first began looking at motherhood
and making decisions, I knew I wanted to breastfeed. I decided
I’d nurse for a year, and then begin weaning naturally. By a
year, nursings had tapered off to snuggle times like early morning
or naps or bedtime, and both girls were getting most of their
nutrition from food.


With Maddie, I went easy on the weaning. I had a nebulous goal of
18 months, but didn’t want to force the issue since I
didn’t have to. At 15 months, I forced the nap weaning
because we had a big trip coming up, but otherwise let everything
end naturally. Right around the same time Maddie dropped her
morning nursing, and we were down to once a day by the time I was
pregnant with Cora.

As Maddie progresses to chapter books,
lowering herself deeper into the well of literature, Cora hurtles
headlong down the same path. She’s shown an interest in books
for a long time, but has begun to memorize her favorites and will
request specific books when she decides it’s time for a
snuggle and a read. And it should come as no surprise that her
current favorites have already been well broken-in by
Maddie’s toddler fingers.


In some ways, Cora has different taste in books than Maddie;
we’ve tried a few old favorites of Madeleine’s that
Cora simply isn’t interested in. But there are several places
where their tastes in books overlap, most notably in the animal
kingdom. Specifically, bears.

About a month ago we returned from a trip
to the library to discover we’d picked up a chapter book by
mistake; Maddie always grabs great piles of books and I try to sift
them down to something manageable, but somehow this one had escaped
me. Up to this point we’d brought home board books, picture
books, and easy reader books only, as I’d been concerned
Maddie wasn’t ready for a book without pages and pages of
pictures.


Silly Mommy.

I don’t know what’s happened,
really I don’t; one minute Maddie’s happy in any
kid’s company, and the next she’s saying she
doesn’t like boys and refuses to play with them on general
principle. Great.


Before everyone starts laughing and talking about the cootie thing,
let me tell ya, that ain’t it. Maddie’s become
genuinely fearful of boys, worried they’ll hurt her during
play or be mean to her on purpose. I see her cower and shrink a bit
every time we approach a park and there are multiple boys on the
equipment, then physically steel herself to “get through
it”. I think it all started a few weeks ago, when a couple of
older boys (seven or eight) were playing on the playground. Maddie
was in her own world, happily oblivious, until she tried to go down
the twisty slide the boys had commandeered for themselves.

I know most toddlers are explorative and
messy in general, but I think Cora’s going for an exhibition
at the MOMA – Mixed Media: Mud and Sand.


Seriously, this girl’s favorite thing to do is sit down and
dig. If we’re in the back yard playing for any length of
time, she rather quickly abandons the swingset and heads round the
corner to the side yard, with its hidden pile of wet sandy dirt,
and rapidly gets going. At the playground she’ll frolic on
the twisty slide for a few minutes before settling down with the
playground wood chips, trying to see just how far down that layer
goes before she hits dirt.

It’s State Fair time here in Texas,
and for those of you who don’t live here, it’s quite a
big deal. The Texas state fair is the biggest in the country, and
kids in town are given a free ticket and a day off of school to go.
Many companies hand out tickets to employees – everyone gets
in the spirit. Brian and I grew up going, and we were eager to go
again and introduce our girls to the coolness that is the state
fair. We picked a date, Brian took a vacation day, and last week,
off we went.


We’d been talking it up to Maddie for a long time, and so by
Fair Day she was at fever pitch. One of the famous things about the
fair is the statue of Big Tex; it’s a really large (think
stories tall, not feet) Texan dressed in a cowboy shirt and boots,
standing there greeting fairgoers at the main entrance. Every few
minutes Tex speaks, waving his hand at everyone. Maddie was
particularly keen to meet Big Tex, and on the morning of the fair
she picked a specific hair ribbon “so Big Tex will see
me!”

Yes, I'm still here - just comatose. The
girls have given me a break the past couple of nights and I'm
getting a good six or seven hours a night. Yeah! But I'm fighting
Cora's monster cold and sleeping every spare minute.


All that to say - see you Monday.

Well wouldn’t you know it –
after a day of nearly clawing the walls to get away from my girls,
I had a rather sweet and eminently manageable time with them.


You know the state of mind I was in as I approached Tuesday –
if you don’t, see yesterday’s sob story – er,
entry. And I was wary of Tuesday right off the bat since it was All
Mommy All Day – no Gamma, no play dates, nothing. Just me and
the Clingy Monsters.

Cora’s down with another cold, which
seemed to morph from bad allergies last week, which came on the
heels of a tooth, which . . . . and so on. In the past six weeks
Cora’s slept eight hours in a row approximately twice,
meaning in the past six weeks I’ve slept five hours in a row
approximately twice. Cora’s cold has ratcheted the clinginess
factor way back up, and she’s now firmly stuck to my hip any
time I’m in the vicinity. And of course, she’s up every
hour or two at night, whimpering and crying for Mama, and I either
go in and comfort her or lie there staring sleeplessly at the
monitor, second-guessing my tactics and browbeating my mothering
skills.


As if this weren’t enough, Maddie’s begun requesting
that I, rather than my mother, put her down for naptimes. So far
I’ve held strong and said no; she’s offered to wait for
her nap until I’m finished putting Cora down, or begged me to
put her down first, but I’ve refused. I could, of course, do
both girls by myself; when Mom’s out of town or working I
always do, and Maddie simply sits and plays quietly by herself
while I deal with Cora. But as I look at my oldest daughter,
clinging to my leg and refusing to let go, and my youngest
daughter, clinging to my hair and refusing to let go, I want to
scream, “Can’t SOMEONE in this house get to sleep
without me?” And since I haven’t weaned Cora from
naptime yet, Maddie’s always the odd-man-out, getting
shuttled off to Gamma instead. Cue the Mommy Guilt.

Is there anything cuter than a child
trying to master a new skill?


Maddie’s been working on skipping for a long time now;
probably six months easily have been spent in hard labor on the
whole skipping thing. And that doesn’t include the year
before that, when she would see skipping and demand an explanation,
a demonstration, and (yet another) lesson. The past several months,
though, she’s been really applying herself, and Sunday
afternoon it finally paid off.

With the cost of energy rising and the
state of the economy crashing, I’ve finally taken it upon
myself to get out there and actually shop for an energy plan.
I’m in one of those de-regulated areas and so am inundated
with electrical companies vying for my dollar, and as we prepared
to move from New York to Dallas I couldn’t cope and simply
picked a month-to-month plan with a popular provider.

This week, though, I forced myself to dig
through the pages and pages of different types of offers, finding a
way to comparison shop and figure out what everyone’s really
offering. And in the end we had it narrowed down to two plans: one
was with a solid company and probably the cheapest rate I’d
found anywhere; the second was with a smaller but still good
company, cost a half-cent per kilowatt hour more, and was
electricity generated from 100% renewable resources.


We’re trying to get our monthly bills down to the bone, but
Brian and I both agreed this was a prime place to put our money
where our family mouth is, and signed up for the
“clean” energy contract. And I gotta tell you,
it’s about eighty bucks a year more, but I’m jumping
around the house for joy at the thought of living coal-free, using
sustainable, low-pollution electricity for the next twelve
months.

October is Children’s Health Month,
and one of my favorite sites, target="_blank">Healthy Child, Healthy World, has created a
calendar of tips for the month. It’s full of
easy-to-implement suggestions like, “Have your kids try a new
dip like hummus or guacamole”, or “Turn down your
thermostat”. Just the sort of small things that don’t
seem like too much effort to tackle, but which, at the end of the
month, will make you realize you can really effect a change in your
lives with baby steps.


So check out their href="http://www.healthychild.org/uploads/file/calendar.pdf"
target="_blank">calendar - print it off and get started.
And if you’re really interested in learning more, buy their
book, href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHealthy-Child-World-Creating-Cleaner%2Fdp%2F0525950478%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1222917367%26sr%3D8-1&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325"
target="_blank">Healthy Child, Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner,
Greener, Safer Home, and delve deeper.


Think we can’t make start our kids our right from the
beginning? Every time I hand Maddie something to throw away, she
asks, “Trash can or recycling, Mama?” And every time I
clean our showers with baking soda and vinegar instead of the
strong chemical sprays for soap scum or mildew or whatever (you
know the kinds – you’ve got to wear a mask and keep a
window open) and notice that our house doesn’t smell like a
chemical lab when I’m finished, I know I’m making a
difference in my kids’ lives. For the better.


Just try the calendar – baby steps.

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.