1 Mother 2 Another

As I mentioned yesterday, Maddie’s
finally arrived at a place where she’s ready to trust a
financial institution with her hard-earned cash, so on Friday after
school Maddie, her piggy bank, and I took a trip to our
neighborhood bank to make a deposit.


I’d mentioned Maddie’s concern – namely, turning
her money over and never getting it back – to one of my
favorite tellers recently, and she promised to give Maddie a grand
experience at the bank. And boy, did she deliver.


Maddie and I walked in at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, me
clutching Maddie’s hand and her clutching her plastic piggy
bank suspiciously. She’d agreed to come because I promised to
match anything she put in the bank and my girl is shaping up to be
quite the financial whiz. So she was there, but still rather
reluctant.


Our first stop was the coin counting machine: you place your coins
on a metal tray, then shove them into the open slot
slowly-but-rhythmically as the machine counts your cash before
giving you a receipt you can take to the teller window for either
cash or a deposit. I laid Maddie’s coins out on the tray in
preparation for sliding.

Recently Maddie asked if she could start
receiving an allowance – she read a book where the heroine
got one and her interest was piqued.


Stupid literacy.


Anyway, Brian and I talked about it and took a straw poll in our
neighborhood, and began giving Maddie the magnificent sum of one
dollar a week. She’s quite content with this, for which we
are thankful. And we decided not to tie it to chores around the
house; chores are a part of being in a family, and she’s not
going to be rewarded for doing her part, so an allowance is outside
of that. She will, however, be allowed to request extra chores to
earn extra cash.

As most of you know, I’m a
reasonably crunchy person : I make my own yogurt and cleaning
supplies, and I wash my face with honey. (Yes, just honey. You
should try it sometime – you’ll never go back.) Believe
it or not, there are other people out there even crunchier than
myself, and I read their blogs somewhat regularly to find ideas and
encouragement.


Last December, I was reading a few of my favorites looking for new
and usual (and cheap!) ideas for homemade gifts, and I stumbled
uponhref="http://www.crunchybetty.com/diy-picture-tiles-you-will-never-buy-a-photo-frame-again">
this article at href="http://www.crunchybetty.com">Crunchy Betty
(doesn’t the name say it all?) on how to make lovely pictures
on tiles – think ditch the frame and have a cool piece of
photo art to hang on your wall. I loved the idea but couldn’t
think of anyone appropriate for the gift, so I bookmarked it to
come back to later.


Yesterday, I came back and I am LOVING the results.

St. Augustine once said, “Hope has
two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger
at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain
the way they are.”


I think sometimes that he must be describing my own daughters.

The other night it was pretty cold and
Cora wanted to wear footie pajamas to bed. We went through her
pajama drawer only to discover that every pair of footie pajamas -
size four for a four-year-old - was too small. Doubtful, I opened
the size five tub and drew out a pair of fleece footies for her.


They fit.


There she stood in her size five pajamas, my baby, looking
impossibly big and impossibly babyish at the same time.


How does this always happen when my back is turned?

I blogged yesterday about my pursuit of
finding moments of grace – of gratefulness – in each
day. Of appreciating my life more, and teaching my girls to do the
same. As I said yesterday, it’s helped me be a more patient,
more compassionate parent.


But I’m not saying I’m perfect.


One of the reasons I started this website six years ago was because
having a baby is REALLY FREAKIN’ HARD, and I wanted to make
sure other parents didn’t feel alone in this big thing.
I’d hear mom s gush about how it was “love at first
sight” and “I’ve never wished I didn’t have
kids” and I’d think Really? Because I have wished that.
Mostly when I’m just trying to find thirty seconds to poop in
peace.

I spent the past few months reading href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Thousand-Gifts-Fully-Right/dp/0310321913/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326074261&sr=1-3"
target="_blank">One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp
– a dare to live life fully right where you are. It’s
been a game-changer for me as a parent and as a person. I’ve
been purposefully trying to slow down and really see
God’s goodness every day, to drink in my kids and wallow in
their awesomeness. At some point in the book Ann says, “Every
breath is a battle between gratitude and grudgery,” and I
totally know where she’s coming from.


As I use this book to change how I parent, I’ve been trying
to teach the idea to Maddie and Cora as well. The truth is,
there’s only room in our hearts for one emotion at a time,
and it could be jealousy or anger or annoyance – or
gratitude, or happiness, or joy. When the girls are driving me
RIGHT UP TO THE EDGE of my sanity, I stop and take a breath and
find something that I’m truly grateful for at that
moment – not the whole “I’m glad I’m
healthy” or “I’m grateful we have a roof over our
heads” tossed off in a dismissive way, but something I can
truly be emotionally grateful for right then. Sometimes I’m
grateful I have another room to go to while I cool off; sometimes
I’m grateful my daughters have no trouble expressing
themselves – LOUDLY. But I find something and latch on, and
sooner or later find myself calm – and grateful to have the
chance to help my girls learn how to deal with life.

The holidays are finally behind us, but
their effects are still reverberating throughout our family.


And our family’s digestive tract.


Maddie’s always had difficulty pooping – see, oh, about
a thousand of my blogs – and I warned her that eating a lot
of sugar over the holidays would have adverse affects on her
bowels. But she’s in charge of her own eating these days, and
she’s six, so I’m reasonably certain the
vegetable-to-candy ratio was reversed for the past couple of weeks.


And now Maddie’s paying the price.


My poor girl struggled to poop for three solid (no pun intended)
days, each day getting a progressively more painful stomach ache.
She’s never been a poop-a-day girl, but her last elimination
was last Thursday or Friday.


Yeah, ouch.

There are very few beings bossier than a
young girl. Which is why it may have been a mistake to tell some
new year’s resolutions to Maddie.


Every year we talk as a family about new year’s resolutions,
discussing what they are – something you’d like to
change about yourself or the world – and ways to implement
them. Last year, I told the girls I was going to work on being more
patient with them, and when I asked Maddie how she thought
I’d done with that she said thoughtfully, “Well,
you’ve gotten a bit better about it. But perhaps you should
choose that one again this year.”

We have had a fantastic holiday vacation
and truly excellent Christmas. We stayed put the entire two weeks,
save for a two-day trip to a hotel about 20 miles away – yes,
our children begged for an overnight in a hotel for their big
Christmas present this year. We were happy to oblige.


And speaking of Christmas presents, I’m going to brag here
and say that there was not a single Disney Princess nor even, I say
truthfully, any type of licensed character under our tree this
year. We had a pretty toy-free Christmas, and I could not be
happier.

Yep, that's me you hear being dragged
kicking and screaming back into our family routine.


Let me ask you something - is homeschooling just so you don't have
to set your alarm in the morning and pack a lunch every day really
such a bad reason to do it?


Seriously grumpy here. Seriously.


And the girls aren't even awake yet.

Maddie’s deep into her first
Nutcracker experience, and all I can say is – help. Is it
over yet?


I help out backstage in the holding room for Maddie and about
twenty (20!) other girls her age. Try controlling two dozen
six-year-olds in white (white!) dresses and red (red!) lipstick.
They’re bored, they don’t want to pee when you tell
them to, they only want to eat a snack after they put on their
costumes – they’re natural divas.

School finished up on Friday, and we've
got two blissful weeks of just family ahead of us. No big trips
planned, no house full of guests, just local family and some great
cocooning time.


Of course, we have a few Nutcrackers still to get through with
Maddie, but that's it, I promise.


Oh, and Maddie's pinkeye came back Saturday night.


No one said it would be completely clear sailing the next two weeks
. . .

Yep, I get that question every day –
and every day it seems my answer’s not good enough. And I
have to admit, they have a point.


We’ve been working our hineys off here, making gifts and
getting them boxed up and sent out to friends and family. Tuesday
Cora and I spent most of the morning putting all the baked goods
we’ve been working on into tubs to be shipped off across the
globe. We were a veritable machine of Dessert Boxes, me cutting the
brownie pans up and Cora doing all the plating. And to her credit,
she never once licked her fingers. Moving from treat to treat to
treat, making sure each tub had an equal sampling of all the
goodies we’d made, Cora worked fast and efficiently and was
rightfully proud when we were finished and saw all the stuffed
plastic tubs lined up.


Yesterday I got ten – TEN! – boxes mailed off to
friends and family, full of gifts and goodies. Shopping is mostly
done, homemade gifts for friends are just about finished, the house
is decorated – so what’s the hold-up?


I know we’ve been working feverishly and I know the days will
rush past between now and December 25, but honestly I’m glad
we’ve gotten so much accomplished; that just means
we’ve got all of next week to do fun holiday stuff, like see
Santa and ice skate and hit the half-price bookstore and order the
Christmas ham and wrap presents and –


Wait, I think we need a little more time.

As Maddie and I walked home from school
the other day, we chatted about what she’d done during school
time. I knew it was library day for her, so I asked what books she
checked out for the week. “I checked out three true books
about fish,” she replied.


What?


“That’s an interesting topic,” I said cautiously.
“What made you want to check out three different books about
fish?”


Maddie skipped along. “Because I plan on reading up on lots
of interesting facts about fish, and then using them to convince
you to let me have a fish for a pet.”


Wow. Don’t know whether to be proud or scared of her
long-term scheming.


“Well, a girl can always try, and I’ll always listen to
a well-reasoned argument,” I said equably. “But what
makes you want a fish so much suddenly?”


“Because I think they’re cool to watch and,” she
continued nonchalantly, “Elise has fish and her kittens are
always trying to eat them and I think it would be funny to watch my
cat try to get the fish out of the fishbowl.”


Ah. At least she’s honest.

Both girls are looking forward to
Christmas with unbridled glee. I always love watching them as the
holidays approach, and each year seems to get better for me; the
older they are, the more they seem to “get” Christmas.
This year, they’re not just excited about receiving gifts,
but about giving them as well.


Maddie, especially, has become aware of gift-giving in the family.
She made her gift for Cora – a real treasure box filled with
real plastic gems – several weeks ago, but still
couldn’t resist when she was out working a craft fair
recently and found a beautiful doll made from recycled neckties. So
she had to buy that, too. Then the girls and I were out recently
and they discovered the perfect gift for Daddy, which I won’t
print here because he dutifully – I mean, eagerly –
reads this blog daily. But it was their idea and they are quite
excited.

We’ve hit the ground running for the
holiday season, and we’re zigging and zagging from event to
event. Completely in a fun way: I’ve learned to turn down
stuff we’re not going to enjoy, and to try to build some
moments of calm into our entertainment schedule. But we’ve
got a lot going on fun-wise, and I fear the meltdown consequences.


Yesterday a friend hosted a cookie exchange right after school. All
of Cora and Maddie’s best friends got together to gorge on
cookies and candy canes, put together a few crafts, and gleefully
tear up my friend’s house in a sugar-induced frenzy. The
girls were excited (duh) and couldn’t wait to dig in –
er, go to the party.

Cora’s classroom has daily helpers,
chosen by table seating: red table “helps” on Mondays,
green table on Wednesdays, and so on. There’s about five
“helper” jobs for each day, and though the whole table
will get a job, they won’t all get the job they want.


High on Cora’s list is the job of “calendar
helper”. This job involves standing in front of the class and
assisting the teacher with the felt board calendar, naming the day
of the week and month, and so on. Cora had the job once this year
and has spent the past several months since then yearning to be
assigned the spot again. She dresses a bit nicer on Wednesdays
“just in case” and chats excitedly the whole way to
school: “Maybe today’s the day I’ll be calendar
helper again!”


Completely coincidentally, Cora loves being in front of an
audience.

Is there anything sweeter than your
four-year-old in her preschool Christmas concert, angelically
singing "Silent Night" on a cozy Monday night?


Is there anything worse than your four-year-old an hour later, two
hours past her bedtime and hopped up on cake and food dye,
helplessly spiraling out of control and taking you down with her?


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .

Recently an initiative was introduced to
the California State’s Attorney General’s office: the
California Right To Know Genetically Engineered Food Act. This
initiative, which will most likely be sent to voters in 2012, would
require all genetically modified food to be clearly labeled so
consumers can make informed choices.


Numerous other laws requiring better food labels have been
introduced to legislatures around the country and in D.C.;
unfortunately, big agriculture and chemical companies have great
lobbies and have gotten each bill shot down. The California
measure’s the first one that will be taken directly to
voters, and polls right now show that 93% of Americans believe
genetically-modified foods, or GMOs, should be labeled.


What’s the big deal, though? So they’ve cross-bred two
tomatoes to get a superior, juicier, redder tomato? Where’s
the cause for alarm, huh? That’s not what GMOs are, though. A
genetically-modified vegetable or animal – and yes, cloned
animals have been permitted in our food supply (unlabeled, of
course) by the FDA since early 2008 – is something that has
been altered at its molecular level: we’re talking
introducing foreign DNA from another substance, not another strain
of the same plant. So instead of cross-breeding a tomato with
another tomato, we’re talking about a tomato cross-bred with
a scorpion (true story, by the way). THAT kind of modification.

Maddie stayed home one more day yesterday;
though her eye looked significantly better in the morning, it was a
bit runny and I don’t want to be the mom who passes it on to
the rest of first grade. So Maddie had one more day of following me
around on errands, with a bit of fun thrown in.


I toned down yesterday’s fun day, and sure enough by
mid-afternoon Maddie was saying how much she missed her school
friends and was ready to go back. We still did some fun things,
though, and I still had a great time with my eldest to myself.

Maddie stayed home yesterday with an
unexpected case of pinkeye (No one ever expects pinkeye! I say in
my best Monty Python voice -) and we had one of those nonexistent
days when everyone’s gone but me and Maddie. Now usually,
I’d try to make the day boring and blah so she wouldn’t
be mad that she’s usually in school when all this fun is
going on, but she was home through no fault of her own while not
really sick – as in, she felt fine – so I figured,
let’s have a bit of fun.

The day felt like a holiday right away
simply because we got to sleep in an extra hour later than usual,
since Cora’s school doesn’t start until 9. I made a big
batch of pancakes and Maddie and Cora played for quite a while as
we leisurely got ready for the day.

Yep, if you've got a kid in the house,
you probably guessed right.


Maddie's got pinkeye.


Just after lunch today I received a harried phone call from the
school nurse: "Your daughter has pinkeye! You need to come pick her
up right away!" I swear she had absolutely no symptoms when she
left the house in the morning, but I still felt guilty, like I'd
tried to pass her off to give myself some more time to sit at home
and eat bon-bons.


Her eye doesn't look bad at all; pink and glazed, but not hugely
swollen or anything. It's been running rampant in the school so I
can't say I'm completely surprised, especially when most people
aren't clear how long they should keep their kid home with said
pinkeye.


"Now how long does Maddie need to stay home from school?" I asked
the doctor yesterday.


"Until she's been using the medicine for twenty-four hours," she
said cheerfully.


I looked at her. "Really? Because isn't she still contagious if
her eye is running and crusting, even if she's on drugs?"


The doctor stopped. "Well, yes, she is still contagious, and she
should stay home until her eye stops running. But we get so much
pressure from parents and schools that it's a pretty standard
'24-hour' line now. But yes, she'll be contagious until it stops
running."


So rest assured, folks - you won't see Maddie until she's pretty
darn cleared up. And as for Maddie, well, I guess she's about to
find out what Mommy does all day while she and Cora are at school.
Hope she likes doing chores, 'cause I got a list that won't
wait.

Today is one of Cora’s non-school
days, and so for Cora and Mommy Day we’re having a Craft-In.
Cora recently made some clay ornaments – almost a dozen of
them – and we’ll get the tempera paints out and
she’s going to go to town. We also have pinecone birdfeeders
to make – got the peanut butter and bird seed all lined up
– and candles to decorate. We’ve got a full schedule.


Cora’s in hog heaven, and I have to admit I’m not far
behind. Sometimes, I really love my job.

Over Thanksgiving break we found ourselves
at a certain pizza chain famous for its all-you-can-eat buffet and
extremely cheap prices. For whatever reason, the girls ADORE this
pizza which makes me, as a New Yorker, cringe in embarrassment. So
whenever we’re on staycation or doing something to celebrate,
you can bet it’ll involve a trip to this place.


Anway, we were there one night and preparing for the girls’
favorite part of the night – the dessert bar. They make
brownies, cinnamon rolls, and some sort of pizza-shaped pudding
thing. Don’t ask. But the girls scarf up the brownies and
cinnamon rolls, and this particular night they were drooling in
anticipation.


It’s not a free-for-all, of course; I do set limitations. So
when Cora asked, “Mommy, can I have some of the brownie and
cinnamon rolls both?” I went into Mommy Mode and made a snap
judgment based on the theory, Never Say “Yes” to A
Whole Lotta Sugar Before Bedtime. “Cora, you can have half a
brownie and a whole cinnamon roll, or half a cinnamon roll and a
whole brownie,” I said, only partly paying attention.


Cora looked at me and crumpled into tears.

Another day of vacation, and already
it’s going by too fast! Monday we spent the morning at our
favorite half-price bookstore after feasting at the Original
Pancake house, then played games together the rest of the day.
Tuesday was declared a Pajama Day, and we lay on the floor and
watched movies, made cookies, played games, and did dress-up.


This vacation is rockin’ it. Big time.

My week-long cold took its toll on my
voice, and when I woke up Friday morning I didn’t have one.
Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.


Nothing.


I was apprehensive about how I’d get through the day with the
girls and no voice: what’s a mommy without her ability to
coach, encourage, cajole, direct? But I have to admit, I was quite
surprised at the results.

What do these jokes have in common:


“What’s a zoologist’s favorite food?
Zucchini.”


“What do you call a relative that lazes all around the house?
A NAP-kin.”


“Why did the baby stop eating? Because he was fed up.”


Wondering what the common theme is here? They were all written by
Maddie.


And then explained exhaustively to us.

Every day this week, I think the next day
is Friday. Perhaps because the girls are both off all week next
week; perhaps because I’ve been sick with a cold; perhaps
because everyone’s already decorated for CHRISTMAS: whatever
the reason, I keep thinking it’s later than it is.


Make that wishing, not thinking.


I’m so ready for next week’s staycation with the girls.
I’ve been working on the game plan, writing a list of fun
things to do, and plan on tricking out the Staycation Poster
tomorrow while they’re in school. My time of pure,
uninterrupted fun with them is more and more limited these days,
and I’m ready to get to it, already.


Is it just me?

This week both Cora and Maddie have
Thanksgiving feasts in their schools, and I have a teeny(ish) issue
with both of them.


Maddie’s feast is today, and to be fair, I’m not sure
of a good solution to what I perceive as the problem. For the
school’s feast day, family members are invited to come in and
partake of the special meal with the students, so everyone goes
through the hot line in the cafeteria for what I am sure is a meal
that’s had a lot of work put into it. And they have to
process hundreds of people in a very short amount of time, so I
know it can get crazy.

Yep, we seem to have gone straight from
most of us (except me) getting the croup to first Brian, then me
coming down with a lovely cold. Brian was asleep the entire weekend
and still bears an uncanny resemblance to the walking dead, and I
feel just bad enough to want to sleep all day without being so sick
I can justify hibernating from my kiddos and job.


Sigh. It’s going to be a long fall.

It’s not even halfway through
November and my calendar for the REST OF THE YEAR is crammed. How
did this happen?


Oh, right. I had kids.

Maddie has been working on her fairy tale
unit in school for six weeks now – I know I’ve blogged
about this before – and we finished filming it Wednesday and
had the big “movie premiere” yesterday.


And can I say, our kids are darn cute.


Make that freakin’ awesome.

There’s that time of day in our
family life when my children’s lives become a little less of
a sure thing, and more of an “eh, we’ll see if I let
them live until tomorrow” sort of thing. When my girls were
babies a friend of mine called it the “arsenic hour”
– the time of day when you’re pacing back and forth
with the baby bawling its eyes out, strapped to your chest while
you bawl your eyes out, staring out the window counting down the
seconds until your spouse comes home and gives you some relief.

Cora and I have been enjoying our
twice-weekly Mommy and Cora Days: the days when Maddie’s in
school and Cora is not are set aside for fun only, and I work hard
to get my chores and errands done on other days so we can wallow in
each other’s company.


Most weeks this works well, but sometimes a wrench gets thrown in.
This week, I needed to be at Maddie’s school for half an hour
in the morning yesterday, and then had to spend time throughout the
morning getting chores done – food that needed to be cooked
before going bad, preparing a bag of games to bring with me to work
(Cora had to tag along because of tricky babysitting), that kind of
thing. Cora and I did have some great moments: we made banana bread
together – one of her all-time favorite things to do –
and went out to lunch and read books and snuggled a lot.

Maddie’s almost to the end of a
six-week class project – the study of fairy tales. They read
a few different stories, talked about elements of a fairy tale,
then set about writing their own with the intent of performing it.
The kids created a make-believe kingdom complete with laws and a
coat of arms; designed the village and castle out of paper bags and
crafting paper; and wrote the story themselves.


I’d been told that at the end of the project they’d be
performing it for their peers, and had visions of a first-grade
“stand in front of your class and say some lines” type
of thing. But as the date got closer, the steering teacher
suggested filming it instead – less pressure to memorize,
more chances to fix mistakes, and so on – and that’s
where we ended up.

I know that Christmas comes earlier every
year; on November first Maddie and I saw a blow-up Santa outside of
the local Home Depot. November 1 is the new day-after-Thanksgiving.
I get that. But I still have a hard time with people putting up
trees in November (I say as all my local friends smirk, since most
of them do) so I am steadfastly ignoring this new, artificial
green-light to Jollywood.

I’ve mentioned in the past that
I’m a fan of the whole Love Languages theory – that
there are five “languages” of love you might speak, and
each person “hears” better in one or two languages. For
the record, my languages are “acts of service” and
“gifts”, and Brian’s are “quality
time” and “physical affection”.


Notice there’s no overlap.


From what I’ve read, children don’t really start to
solidify their love languages until they’re around five or
so, which means it’s important to tell your child you love
her in more than just your own language. So while I might think
it’s important to show my child I love her by cleaning her
room, she might “hear” that better by getting some
small gift from me.

Cora and I had a glorious day outdoors
yesterday, enjoying our beautiful fall weather and having a
fantastic time playing together. We spent the morning at a nature
preserve, and there’s a corner that has a couple baby
dinosaurs you can climb on.


Cora tried very hard to climb onto the slick raptor by herself, and
was clearly struggling. Undaunted, she kept trying, refusing my
help. At some point she realized it was futile, which is when it
became fun for her.


Cora threw a knee into a crevice, flung a leg over the
raptor’s back so that she was practically in the splits, and
began struggling with faux earnestness to pull herself up. She
began shouting, “I got it! I got it! I got it!” and
then slid off into a heap at the bottom.


At which point she looked up at me, winked, and said with an impish
smile, “I don’t got it.”


I love that my child can quote Mel Brooks movies. Well.

What do you get when you mix two kids with
excellent costumes and unlimited access to high fructose corn syrup
and artificial dye?


A couple of crabby, hung-over kids twelve hours later.

Here’s something you don’t
hear every day from a four-year-old: “Hey, Mommy, I want to
get up on that cow and drink some beer!”


Let me start from the beginning.

We had our first full day of Mommy being
back yesterday, and both girls did well – but also stayed
quite close to me all day long. Maddie, of course, had school, but
even then I came in to volunteer for half an hour and got plenty of
snuggles in that time. On a side note, what in the world am I going
to do when my daughter no longer wants to snuggle with me in front
of her friends?

I’m back, but I’m not back, if
you know what I mean.


I just had about the best five days of my life, eating my way
through every single ethnic food type there was in New York –
which is saying a lot – and sampled pretty much every
chocolatier’s offering. Which is also saying a lot. I walked
through EVERY major neighborhood in Manhattan, and had a grand time
reuniting with the city I love so much.


But most of all, I talked.

My amazing husband and incredibly
sacrificial mother have teamed up to give me an astonishing early
birthday present – a trip to New York to see my friends.


It’s been a whirlwind of planning and getting ready and
making all the big decisions, such as where to eat every delicious
meal in the city. But as ecstatic as I am about going there,
I’m not so thrilled about leaving here.

A few weeks ago, Maddie came to me,
troubled. “Mommy, I’m very frustrated with recess time
right now,” she said.


Fearing some sort of conflict with one of her friends, I cautiously
asked, “What’s going on?”


Maddie sighed. “It’s just that every single one of my
friends can do the monkey bars except me, and I feel really left
out. I feel bad that I can’t do it. And all my friends try to
help me and give me suggestions, but I just start to feel like
everyone’s telling me what to do and I get frustrated and
have to walk away.”


“So what do you want to do about it?” I asked.


Maddie looked at me determinedly. “I want to
practice.”

Cora’s been sick since Monday
afternoon, and a nightmare of a nighttime – think fretting
child not sleeping more than ten minutes at a time before waking to
either a) throw up or b) cry and cling to you – led to a
similar Tuesday. I held off taking her to the doctor in the
morning, thinking it was just a stomach virus. But when she began
to complain of aching all over, and had had a headache since Monday
afternoon, I bowed to the possibility of strep and took her in.


So I was glued to Cora’s side all morning – rubbing her
feet, just lying next to her, distracting her with stories,
whatever – and trying desperately to stay awake, then dragged
us out of the house to get to the doctor. I was carrying my poor
girl and her throw-up bowl through the doctor’s office, Cora
a limp little doll in my arms, still in her pjs with no shoes on.
The verdict was a virus, so all we can do is hang in there and hope
it’ll get better soon.

Cora started running a fever yesterday
after school, hitting close to 104 last evening. Maddie is still in
the midst of another round of nightmares/no sleeping/freaking out
due to our neverending cycle of fire/tornado/lock-down drills at
school.


And then the thunderstorm moved in.


Can you say "no sleep"?

In our house, our rewards system is jewels
– glass pieces bought in bulk at the local craft store. Girls
can earn them by doing extra chores, but they’re just as
often given one for performing an outstanding act of kindness or
going above and beyond on something. The jewels aren’t a
privilege, in that it’s not something they can lose by bad
behavior: once they get one, it’s theirs until they spend it.
I supposed it’s our precursor to an allowance.


There are a variety of ways the girls can spend their jewels, but
it’s roughly one jewel to one dollar. If Cora sees some tacky
plastic play phone or something, I’ll tell her she needs to
save her jewels for it, look at the price, and name an amount of
jewels. A week later Cora will come back to the store with her
jewels clutched in her hand, the magnificent piece of crap now
hers. So oftentimes the girls will say, “How many jewels does
this cost?” and I’ll throw out a quick number.

As part of a test program in our school
district here, I am helping out in Maddie’s classroom once a
week for six weeks. Pretty much every day of the week, a
student’s mom comes in to teach for half an hour; the teacher
wrote up a six-week lesson plan, then distributed it to the
volunteer moms (I’m Thursday) and set us loose. I’ve
been nervous, but I’m having a blast.


We’re studying fairy tales: we’ve taken a fairy tale
apart, talked about what makes a story a fairy tale, read a couple
of them and found the “fairy tale markers” in each one,
and brainstormed ideas for building our own kingdom – a first
step to writing our own fairy tale.

Yesterday we took both girls out of school
to hit our state fair – which, call us hicks, but we love.
Our state fair is the coolest one in the country (I say unbiasedly)
and we go every year. Who doesn’t want to see a sculpture
made out of two thousand pounds of butter?


The fair has its down side: everything costs an arm and a leg
(read: four dollars for a small bottle of water) and there’s
nary a vegetable to be found in the entire place. This is, after
all, the place that has deep-fried bubble gum, deep-fried oreos,
deep-fried butter, and even a deep-fried latte. But we spend
selectively and know going in we’re going to have tummy aches
the next day.

One of my favorite places in our big
metroplex here is our local arboretum – it’s really
excellent and a place I can always go to for a great day with my
kids. Every spring and fall they do Mommy and Me days; each Monday
and Tuesday, they have a face painter, a craft table, a story
teller, puppet shows, a petting zoo, and more.


For free.


Well, you pay to get in, but you don’t pay more for all the
extra stuff.


Cora and I have been craving some one-on-one time, so we hit the
arboretum yesterday for the first time this fall. When the girls
were younger, we were there a few times a month; we’d buy a
family membership that would more than pay for itself in the first
month. We’d pack a lunch and the red wagon in the car, then
explore all over the park: through the area set up like a frontier
village, all around the asian gardens and waterfalls, playing chase
through the big pecan grove, rolling down the huge hill towards the
lake – you name it, and we’d do it.

A couple weeks ago Cora went on an art
kick, and our budding Renoir is showing no signs of slowing down.


I got out the easel – I forget why – and set it up for
Cora in our kitchen, complete with drop cloth and washable paints.
We’ll do this every once in a while; the kitchen breakfast
counter is great for most crafts – gluing sequins and
stapling books together are no problem there, and of course markers
and crayons are used almost daily. But when we want to do some
serious painting in this house we get out the easel so the artiste
can stand and admire her work and she progresses.

One of my good friends from New York is a
stay-at-home dad, and I’ve long respected the way he handles
the questions and discomfort that invariably come up. In a previous
life, he was a financial consultant who left the money world to
become a New York City school teacher. When his daughter was born
right around the time my good friend– his wife – was to
start her medical residency, they made the decision for him to stay
home and her to go back to work.


Graham is one of the best dads I know, and is an excellent example
of deliberate parenting. He had a backpack stuffed with
non-battery-operated toys and flashcards to use while waiting for
the subway; he brought us a meal after Cora was born; he writes
thoughtful, illuminating articles on Christianity – the guy
is not just flying by the seat of his pants here. But no matter how
great he is, I’m sure he still wrestles with identity issues
– I imagine him going to some sort of hospital fundraiser
with his wife and having to field the inevitable “So what do
you do?” while watching the questioner’s eyes start
searching for someone more worthwhile to speak with when he answers
simply, “I’m a dad.”


But Graham has come to peace with this, and recently wrote an
article weighing in on href="http://www.qideas.org/blog/fatherhood-as-vocation.aspx"
target="_blank">Fatherhood As A Vocation – I
highly encourage you to read it. It makes me want to dig in even
more as a parent, myself.

In the years since Maddie and Cora have
been born, at least one – if not both of them – have
had all of the following:


Thrush

Whooping cough

Scarlet fever

A heart that spontaneously stops beating

Hand and mouth disease

Leukemia

Asperger syndrome

Hemophilia

Concussion

Brain tumor


Before you freak out and start sending condolence cards, no, my
children have not actually been diagnosed with any of these
diseases. But I can tell you that I spent at least one night on
each of these diseases: going the entire night absolutely CONVINCED
my child had (fill in the blank), and trying to figure out how I
would rearrange the rest of my life around this new
perspective.

Since we’ve been healthy for, oh, a
few weeks now, we’ve certainly been due for some germs around
our house.


And they’ve obligingly showed up.


I’ve had both a nasty cold and persistent, lingering
allergies over the past two weeks. A stomach bug was passed around
both girls’ schools and Cora obligingly picked it up and
spent Sunday puking. Thankfully, it was short-lived, but Brian came
home early Monday with a cold that’s knocked him on his
hiney. And Maddie’s saying her allergies are starting to feel
like a cold.


Thank heavens we’ve got that half-gallon of hand soap.

If you’re like us, you go through
about a gallon of hand soap a month. And now that cold-and-flu
season is upon us, it’s just going to get worse. We always
use liquid soap – I can’t remember the last time we
used bar soap in this family, since it’s so messy and is
harder for little hands to hold – but I’m not a big fan
of most liquid soaps; the artificial fragrances range from annoying
to carcinogenic, and most hand soaps now add an anti-bacterial
ingredient known as triclosan, which is a big no-no in this
household. (Side bar – triclosan is being reviewed by the FDA
over concerns that it is both harmful to humans and is actually
producing antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And it has been proven to
be no more effective than regular soap. Plus, all the triclosan
that gets washed into our water systems is literally killing entire
aqua eco-systems. )


But I digress.

Sung to the tune of “The Farmer in
the Dell”:


“Stop, drop and roll!

Stop, drop and roll!

If your clothes catch on fire,

Stop, drop and roll!”


This is what my four-year-old has been lustily singing all
afternoon. Apparently it was fire safety day at preschool, and she
has no problem singing about the possibility of her catching on
fire. This is very different than my older child.


But here’s the best part –

Yesterday was the annual fundraiser at
Maddie’s school: the children all run laps which people
(thanks, grandparents!) have pledged to sponsor. The kids love it
and our fundraising is done for the year. I enjoy going because the
kids run around a track set up on the grass outside of school;
there’s energetic music and a high-octane dj who encourages
the kids and dances along with it. The kids have a great time
boogying around the track with their friends, high-fiving their
parents.


And their parents’ friends.

In case you ever have a cat jump onto a
paper plate acting containing a rainbow of washable paint, then run
across your carpeted living room, then sit on your NEW COUCH and
stare at you, I thought you might like to know that while the title
“washable” is stretching the truth a bit, a 50/50
solution of water and rubbing alcohol neatly does the trick of
getting it out of your carpet. And new couch.


Don’t ask me how I know this.

Last week we bought a new car – our
first car purchase in fifteen years, and the very first new car
I’ve ever driven. And suddenly, the fact that we only park
one car in our two-car garage – the other side being taken up
with stuff and more stuff – seemed not the smartest idea. We
thought about Texas hailstorms and decided it was time to clean out
the garage.


As I started poking through our stored stuff on Friday, I realized
we were keeping many big toys that the girls simply don’t use
any more; I’d often put “seldom used” toys out in
the garage to bring in on a rainy day or the tail end of some
house-binding virus. But I knew it was time to clean out, so I
talked with the girls a bit and they agreed to let a couple things
go.


We only have three big items getting ready to head on to other
homes right now, but as I began to dust them off I realized
I’d used all three at once on more than one occasion.


Cue the misty-eyed Mommy reminiscence.

Cora will periodically head upstairs to
our dress-up area and come back with boxes full of costume jewelry.
She’ll then proceed to deck out the living room with
necklaces, rings, earrings, and bracelets in preparation of some
game. In months past, she’s clipped earrings on pillows,
given every member of the family a plastic bag, and told us we have
five minutes to find all the “presents”. When Cora
called “time”, whoever had the most
“presents” won a prize, usually a hug from Cora.


For the past few days, it’s been “Christmas”:
Cora has draped necklaces all over the room – fireplace set,
chair legs, anything you can think of. Bracelets and necklaces are
stretched strategically out on the coffee table, and we’re
each assigned a spot at the table. When it’s
“Christmas” time, we rush to discover our presents all
over the room, then gather at our particular spot for our regular
“gifts”. And of course, the pillows are all festooned
for the holidays with clip-on earrings.

Yesterday Cora sat on her snack stool at
our breakfast counter, happily drawing a card for a friend while I
cleaned up the kitchen. She had her paper and crayons and a pencil
and was humming a cheerful tune, drawing an elaborate story to
color in.


Cora’s pretty good about only drawing on paper –
she’s not one of those kids who will happily write all over
the wall just for the fun of it. At the same time, she’s got
an independent spirit and if she decides to do something, by golly
she’s going to do it and no consequence is going to stop her.
I have on one memorable occasion caught her cutting up her shirt
and taping it back together: she wanted to see how well the
scissors worked on fabric, and when she discovered their sharpness
(by cutting a large hole in her shirt while still wearing it) she
attempted to patch it with scotch tape so I wouldn’t notice
it.


All this to say that Cora has a bit of a history of doing something
wrong – and knowing it’s wrong – and then trying
to cover it up because she knows she’ll get in trouble.

So as Maddie and I were walking home from
school yesterday, we chatted about the different things she’d
done during the school day. The subject of recess came up –
one of the favorite times of the day, naturally – and I asked
after Maddie’s long-term project, digging to China.


“Oh,” Maddie sighed, “we aren’t doing that
any more. We had to stop.”


“Why is that?” I asked, assuming the story would have
something to do with a gentle-but-firm teacher and a lack of a
desire on said teacher’s part to have a large,
liability-laden hole in the school yard.

Remember the
fire-drill-that-wasn’t-a-drill last week? Remember Maddie not
wanting to go to school?


She came out of class with the biggest smile on her face at the end
of the day. She’d been named Student of the Week in her
classroom – and not for an academic achievement, but for
being brave during the fire “incident”. Maddie was so
proud her teacher had recognized how hard it had been for her, it
was better than ice cream.

While I was at Maddie’s school
yesterday for a volunteer meeting, the fire alarm started going
off. Startled, the teacher ushered us out of the room, cheerfully
saying something about a “surprise fire drill”. Three
minutes later we realized it wasn’t a drill when we heard
sirens and saw a fire truck pull up out front.


I scanned the parking lot for Maddie’s class, but she’d
apparently evacuated to the other side of the building and was
nowhere to be found. I told myself that she’d be fine: sure,
drills worry her to no end, but she’s bigger this year and
doing much better with her worries. Unable to do anything but worry
(yes, I see the irony), I waited out my sentence on the black
top.

I spent yesterday morning making
individual muffin-sized breakfast casseroles for school mornings.
Somewhat time-consuming, but a good use of some leftover ham and
extra white bread slices, so I knew it was time to buckle down and
knock them out.


More importantly, though, we’ve hit that wall of
school-morning breakfast ennui. Maddie takes a good ten minutes
coming up with something she’s willing to eat for breakfast:
cereal rarely interests her any more, and yogurt-and-granola is hit
or miss right now. I have a big batch of breakfast cookies in the
freezer and I’ll happily defrost one for her, which works a
couple times a week; but many mornings she just doesn’t seem
interested in breakfast.

Maddie has a vivid imagination. And I
don’t mean that in the “Oh, I just made up a whole
pretend kingdom replete with its own monetary system and
multi-tiered governing body” kind of way. No, I mean it in a
“Give me a thumbnail sketch of a natural disaster and I can
inflate it into a play-by-play in graphic, unending detail in my
head” kind of way. Mix that quirk of her personality with her
penchant for worry over things she cannot control, and you’ve
got a recipe for some long nights.

Maddie's been cast in her very first
production of "The Nutcracker", as a Sugar Plum Fairy Attendant.
She plays a tiny fairy who never leaves the Sugar Plums side,
wearing a tiny little tutu with tiny little flowers in her hair and
lots of glitter sprayed all over her.


Translation: A way to sell a dozen more tickets.


I can't help but realize that the very first time I was in a
ballet of any kind - Christmas or otherwise - was when I was ten.
Yes, ten. I can't quite believe they start them this young these
days. Saying "no" was, of course, an option; but not a very
palatable one, since she's got this pesky habit called "reading"
and read the casting call for herself, seeing that girls age 6 and
up could audition. It's not going to be too bad at this age - a
few Saturday afternoon rehearsals and four shows. Plus I've got my
ace up my sleeve - my mom plays the grandmother in the ballet every
year, so I have a built-in carpooler and backstage babysitter (hi
mom! Love you!) for this thing.


And who am I kidding - I'm going to take more photos that day than
the papparazzi on Oscar night.

Brian and I were supposed to go away
Saturday night as a sort of anniversary celebration/hide-from-Sept
11 sort of thing. But with the credible threat going on in NYC and
all the tenth anniversary footage I couldn’t seem to get away
from, I found myself short of breath as I contemplated leaving my
mom and girls home by themselves on Sunday.


So we changed our plans.

Sixteen years ago today, I married the boy
I'd been chasing since high school.


One of the best days of my life.


Ten years ago on Sunday, my husband unexpectedly came home early
from work. If he'd lingered longer in his office after the planes
hit - if he'd made a different decision as he was walking away
from the World Trade Center - but he showed up exhausted on our
front door step after no phone calls on his side and too much news
watching on my side.


Also one of the best days of my life.

Last night I lay snuggling with Cora in
her bed when she rolled towards me, her face troubled.
“Mommy,” she said, “I don’t want to go to
preschool any more.”


What?

Last spring I mentioned that Maddie and a
couple friends had started the Green Team – a group of
environmentally “aware” kindergarteners who spent their
recesses combing the playground for trash and pushed to get
recycling cans in different parts of the school. The movement was
cute and, I thought, came out of the whole Earth Day teaching time
in April.


Then last week Maddie told me that the Green Team had been
resurrected, and they needed t-shirts. So she’d invited the
team over to our house to make shirts.


Okey dokey.

Cora, Maddie and I have all been suffering
from the season’s first cold, and as it lingered over the
weekend I found us doing just enough to stay a bit exhausted and
craving some true down time. So on Sunday night, I declared that
Monday would be a No-Labor Day: we would make it an official Pajama
Day Staycation. Pajamas all day long, with plenty of lounging
around. The girls were, um, enthusiastic.


Monday morning the girls awoke to find the living room had been
rearranged; the coffee table was moved and several blankets piled
on one another to make a picnic-blanket-like spot right in front of
our couch, with lots of big pillows lined up to lean against during
television-watching. I’d also posted the following
notice:

Wednesday night my throat began to feel a
suspicious sharpness, right about the time my shoulders began
aching. By Thursday morning, it was confirmed: I had a cold coming
on.


Now, this is not (thus far) a whopper of a cold, but it’s
clearly something non-allergy-related, and it’s just annoying
enough as it continues to come on that I got out of bed Thursday
morning dreading the day. When you’re not soooooooo sick that
you can lock yourself miserably in your bedroom, you are still
expected by your kids to perform all your Mommy Duties, and with
the same amount of good cheer and grace. Grumble, grumble.


So I got out of bed, cheered Maddie through her morning routine,
and walked her to school with little difficulty. Then I turned
around, came home, and repeated the process with Cora: finish up
breakfast, snuggle and read books, then head to preschool. I
dropped Cora off, got in the car, and sighed as I ran through my
mental to-do list, exhausted just by the thought of it: make
several mini breakfast casseroles to freeze for the girls; hit the
eye doctor; chat with a new client; return some stuff; make more
granola; clean the desk; and more.


And then I realized –


I could take a nap right now, and no one would be put out by
it.

As I was walking Maddie home from school
one of the first days of school, I asked her what she did during
recess. Recess time, I have learned, is a little window into her
day: if something good happens at recess, she’s had a good
day, and if something bad happens there, chances are her entire day
tanked. It’s become a rather good barometer of her
post-school mood.


This day, Maddie was in a good mood, and she said, “I played
with a couple of my friends, but not on the playground – on
the dirt near it. We’re digging a hole.”


“What kind of hole?” I wondered aloud, bemused.


“We’re digging a hole to China.”

I’ve been filled with optimism these
first few days of school; Maddie seems to be handling it well, and
we’ve had a virtual absence of meltdowns after school, so
I’ve been enjoying seeing my sunny, lighthearted girl from
the summer continue on into the school year.


Yesterday, unfortunately, we did seem to hit a bit of a speed bump.
Nothing major; a boy teasing her during gym class, and a point in
class when she almost got in trouble for something she didn’t
do. On their own, nothing major, completely doable.

Well, it’s official. I now have two
girls in school.


And I’m still alive.


Cora started preschool yesterday – pre-kindergarten, three
days a week – and she loved every single minute of it.
She’s in the purple room, and so was decked out in a purple
dress, as was her flamingo named Cinderella. She had her Monday
underwear on when she went to bed Sunday night so she
wouldn’t forget. Her bag was packed.


She was ready with a capital “Read”.

Do not. Talk to me.

Cora starts preschool on Monday –
pre-kindergarten, three days a week. To say that she is ready is an
understatement.


Cora cried – tears of rage, not sadness – when she
learned that Maddie would be starting school a whole week before
she would. “Not FAIR!” she screamed, and stormed off to
take a break. I do believe she’s the only kid who’s
asking for MORE days of school.

I’ve been apprehensive about Maddie
starting school back up again this year; as I’ve mentioned
before, last year was hard on her emotionally and I was bracing
myself to witness my happy, sunny girl shrink back into her shell
for another nine months. Now, I know this is only the first week,
and perhaps I’m just looking a bit too hard, but I am
starting to feel hope that she’ll handle this year
better.

So Monday morning Cora and I got through
the whole taking-Maddie-to-school thing, and then immersed
ourselves in work. We made jam with all the berries we’ve
been saving up over the summer, and while the jars cooled on the
racks we went out and drowned our sorrows with shopping.


Cora starts pre-school – and heck, for that matter, ANY kind
of school – next Monday, and I told her we’d hit the
Container Store and buy some more small, kid-friendly containers
for her lunch boxes. Cora was standing in the midst of the kitchen
department, earnestly trying out snapping lids and plastic covers
and debating between a couple different kinds, and let me tell you,
she was looking so adorable I couldn’t help myself.


“Cora,” I said playfully as I scooped her up in my
arms, “I have to tell you something.”
“What?” she asked, looking directly at me.
“I’ve decided that you’re not going to school
next week. I’m going to keep you home with me and
you’re never going to school.”

Maddie’s heading off to first grade
this morning, and I am, if it’s possible, more freaked out
about this first day of school than I was last year with
kindergarten. Sure, she’s much more relaxed this year and
even eager to start school; sure, we are pros at this; sure,
I’ve been there before and know what to expect.


That’s the problem.

Last week I asked the girls to make a list
of all the things they wanted to be sure we did before school
started. I told them they could each pick one restaurant to go, as
well as any other activities. Cora dictated, Maddie wrote, and
we’ve been working on our Summer Bucket List ever since.


Have a movie night at home – check. Breakfast at our favorite
Original Pancake House – check. Pool – check. Pool
again – check. (That one’s on the list twice more!)
We’re tearing gleefully through the list, and I seem to be
the only one misting over occasionally as we work on it.

I am now staring at the prospect of having
to pack two (TWO!) lunches and two (TWO!) snacks every day. Well,
not every day with Cora, but it sounds more dramatic to say it that
way. And Cora’s quite excited about getting a big-girl lunch
packed for her, having picked out a very nice princess lunch box
from the eco-friendly Crocodile Creek company, while Maddie has
said she wants to use her old backpack and lunch bag again this
year: “No use buying another one when we’ve got a
perfectly good one for me.”


Sometimes my kids make me quite happy.

Yesterday morning I returned home from
dropping Brian off at the train station to see Maddie’s cat
tearing down the stairs as if running from a room full of rocking
chairs. Maddie followed after her, shaking her head forgivingly and
saying, “Surely there is an adventurous spirit within that
cat this morning. I speak this with certainty.”


Coincidentally, Maddie is hard-pressed to be found without a book
within her hands.

Saturday morning Cora woke up late,
staggered to the couch, and lay there looking wan.


Sure enough, about half an hour later she began throwing up on an
empty stomach.


Cora cried weakly and Brian snuggled down next to her, where she
curled up like a baby bunny. And that’s how he spent most of
the rest of the day.

My apologies for stealing my title from
Mr. Sanburg, but it’s such a delicious line.


So I’ve been peripherally aware that fall – and all the
hectic scheduling and harried life-pace with which it’s
invested – has been fast approaching. But I keep trying to
ignore it, choosing to do the bare minimum to keep us on track:
buying a backpack and lunch bag for my youngest as she prepares to
go to school for the first time. Hitting the outlet mall to pick up
first-day-of-school outfits. This sort of thing.

So I had my Green Night the other night
(it was fabulous, by the way) and for a couple days leading up to
it the girls and I were baking yummy treats to set out for my
guests. We made banana bread and zucchini bread and chocolate chip
cookies and creamsicle cookies (yes they’re as good as they
sound) and it was a feast for the eyes.


I’d warned the girls that we were baking for Mommy’s
friends and I’d allow them to have one of everything, but the
rest would be for that night. Our final bit of baking was the
zucchini bread; it dries out quickly, so we were putting it in the
oven about two hours before my “party” was supposed to
begin, and Cora helped me every step of the way.


I closed the oven door and Cora stood there contemplatively,
staring into the oven from which yummy smells were already
beginning to emerge.

Every summer my church organizes several
fun nights for the women at my church; different people are asked
to “host” an event that they’re interested in. So
one woman might offer a one-night class about how to get the most
out of clipping coupons, while another one might host an ongoing
weekly early-morning walking club.


I was asked to host a night about living green.

Friday afternoon we stopped in at our
local Borders Bookstore, where we’ve spent many happy hours
hanging out and sampling books and generally wasting the morning
away. Maddie wanted to know what all the big signs in the windows
were for, and I explained that the store was going out of business.


Maddie was heartbroken.


“But where will I buy my Junie B. Jones books?” she
wailed, looking around the store in desolation. “I need to
buy all the rest of them NOW!”

I try to feed my family in a pretty
healthy way while not making them feel like the weird hippie kids,
and one of the hardest areas for me to make health merge with taste
(and what’s in fashion at friends’ houses) has been
cheese. We generally buy Tillamook cheese out of Vermont;
it’s a great company that, while not certified organic, does
not use bovine growth hormones on its cows. This turns out a
relatively cost-friendly yet delicious and nutritious cheese.


Unfortunately, it can’t hold a candle to Velveeta.

Last week Maddie and Cora participated in
a theatre camp with a Princesses and Pirates theme, and they
learned most of the “theme songs” for the Disney
princesses. Yesterday they were lustily belting out Snow
White’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come” when they
stopped to ponder the storyline.


“Mommy, how did the stepmother in Snow White die
again?” Maddie asked.


“I’m not sure – I haven’t seen it for a
long time,” I answered. I should say here that Snow White,
with her passive approach to life and her
I’ll-sit-around-and-wait-for-a-man-to-help-me attitude, has
never been my favorite princess, and the girls have never actually
seen the movie.


Speaking of –


“Mommy, when are we going to get to see Snow White, anyway?
Is it really that scary?” Maddie asked, assuming I was
keeping her from the movie to avoid nightmares. I realized the time
had come for “the talk” and I took a deep breath.

I’m hosting a night soon for some
friends from my church; a group of about thirty people are coming
over to talk about small steps you can take to “green”
your life and move towards more sustainable living. Being the OCD
person I am, I’m writing up a small(ish) handout about the
whole thing, and am including links to lots of helpful sites.


One of the sites I’m referencing is the Story of Stuff, a
website revolving around a twenty-minute documentary about, well,
all our stuff – how it’s made, where it goes, and so
on. I just sat down and watched it again and even though it’s
been out for a while and even though I’ve seen it before,
it’s impacted me. Again.


So target="_blank">here’s the link – seriously, if
you’ve never watched this, now’s the time. It’s
only twenty minutes.

Yesterday afternoon Cora came out of her
room after quiet time begging to play with her rock collection. She
and Maddie both have a jar of polished rocks they’ve bought
at various museums and tourist sites, and their glass jars are a
rainbow of smooth polished rocks.


I laid down some ground rules – keep the rocks in the living
room, don’t feed them to the cat, etc. – and opened the
jar. Then I made my big mistake – I disappeared into the
office to catch up on some emails.


Ten minutes later, I heard an ear-splitting crash followed by an
even more ear-splitting “NOOOOOOOOO!” from Cora.
Rushing out, I saw Cora and Maddie standing in our wood-floored
kitchen, Cora wailing and Maddie looking shocked. At their bare
feet was the shattered glass jar, splintered all over the kitchen,
rocks scattered everywhere.

As I mentioned earlier, both girls are at
theatre camp every morning this week and amazingly enough it marks
the first time since they’ve been born that I’ve been
home by myself – barring being ill, I suppose.


I’ve already got grand plans for the fall when Cora’s
in pre-kindergarten three days a week: one day of chores and
errands, one day of teaching, and one day available to volunteer in
both schools. I picture having all this time to do my home-work
unfettered: grocery shopping, bill paying, toilet cleaning,
vacuuming, sifting through young-child detritus that’s
accumulated under a bed – the possibilities seem endless. And
as weird and sick as it sounds, I’m looking forward to it; I
don’t heart doing laundry in any big way, but I am truly
anticipating getting all the grunt work done whilst childless, so
my time with the kids can truly be quality time with the kids as
opposed to “time doing errands while dragging children
unhappily after me.”

As I’ve written recently, I’m
in full smoothie swing this summer and have been pulverizing fruit
left and right. Recently, though, a mid-afternoon crabby episode
drove me to experiment with, um, other ingredients, and I’ve
hit on the absolute best smoothie ever.


If you like chocolate, of course.


One caveat here – I use a half can (about six to eight
ounces) of coconut milk – the thick stuff that’s full
of fat but oh-so-good. So you should like the taste of coconut
before you make this. I personally love the ice cream made with
coconut milk, so this is, to me, like a chocolate milkshake. Of
course, if you’re not dairy-allergic like I am, you can use
cow’s milk instead, but make sure it’s got some fat in
there for some delicious oomph.


Here ‘tis –

Maddie and Cora started a week-long
theatre camp yesterday at the performing arts school where I work,
and I think I may have created a two-headed monster. Or two
monsters. Or something.


The camp itself isn’t anything career-making; it’s 9 -1
every day, with some singing and dancing and acting, and a small
show on our stage at the end of the week. It’s four-year-olds
through eight-year-olds, so we’re not talking anything
incredibly complicated. My main reason for putting them into it was
really to give the girls a chance to have a week of structure and
getting up somewhat early before school gets started. Cora’s
never done school at all, and this week will be the most time
she’s ever had to concentrate in her life. Add to that things
like learning to get her own lunch in and out of a bag, and taking
care of her own potty needs, and I figured the camp would be a
great testing ground for Cora before pre-k.


I forgot how much the girls just like to perform.

So yes, we went horseback riding, and yes,
Maddie loved it.


Not LOVED loved it, as in, “Mummy, sign me up NOW! I must do
it! I want horsie curtains and horsie sheets on my bed!
NEEIIGHHH!” But loved it as in, I saw that slow smile spread
across her face as the ride began and, in spite of her fears and
challenges along the way, that smile never left.

Maddie’s had trouble with her lovey
being at school; if she brings it, she has a tendency to want to
take it out and snuggle with it. During class time. And when
Maddie’s got Silky in her hands, she goes into a coma-like
trance, only barely able to listen to the outside world. I find
that the days Maddie would leave Silky at home, she’d finish
the day much more alert and attentive, and I tried for a long time
to get her to leave it alone.


Finally I went with the tried-and-true parenting method of
bribery.