1 Mother 2 Another

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


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


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

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


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


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


Thank heavens the Easter basket is still several weeks off.

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


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

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


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


Plenty of time for that later.

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


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

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


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


“What are you doing, Mommy?”


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


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


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

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


With commercials.


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


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

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


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


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


Nothing doing.

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


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


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


And then opened the car door, and climbed in.

Cora and Maddie have been hard at work
making Valentine cards for all their friends; for the past few days
our kitchen’s been a crafting disaster area, with stickers
and glitter glue and tissue paper scattered everywhere. For the
very special friends, both girls are painstakingly affixing a
Hershey kiss to the envelope, and Cora has laboriously written each
friend’s name on each and every envelope.


“There!” Cora said triumphantly yesterday morning.
“I just finished my last Valentine! I’m so
excited!”


“Good for you!” I said warmly. “Now you just need
to decorate a box for your Valentine mailbox and you’ll be
all ready for Valentine’s Day!”


Cora looked at me, confused. “Silly Mommy – I already
made a box last year! Can you get it out now?”


Um, about that.

The weather here in Texas has been eerily
spring-like: highs in the 60s and 70s have been persuading peach
trees to put forth buds and cardinals to start flying around like
mad. The gorgeous weather has also been beckoning to the girls,
tantalizing them with hints of spring. Just the other day Cora and
I were talking about how it’d soon be time to head back to
our local arboretum for their weekly Mommy and Me Tuesdays.


“Soon, Mommy,” Cora said excitedly, “the flower
park will have the special kids’ days up again, and
we’ll get to go for face-painting and the petting zoo and all
the beautiful flowers and picnics and everything!” Cora was
so happy she was wiggling.


“Yep,” I agreed, “It’s almost time for
another Mommy and Me season!” And then it hit me –


This is my last Mommy and Me season.

Maddie discovered jokes several months
ago; I know I’ve blogged about her sometimes funny, sometimes
painful forays into the world of comedy and joke-telling.
She’d buy a book of children’s jokes and read the
whole. Thing. Out. Loud.


A lot.


Then she brought home “The Adventures of Tin-Tin” from
our used bookstore last fall, and discovered the world of comics.
Unfortunately, Tin-Tin gets himself in some serious scrapes and
Maddie had to abandon the books out of fear and worry; the images
of men chasing people with guns were just too much for her. And
truthfully, I’m ok with that being too much for my
six-year-old.


But the Tin-Tin books did open Maddie’s eyes to comics, and
when she was hungrily patrolling through our family bookshelves
last month and came across Brian’s Calvin and Hobbes
collection, Maddie was intrigued and pulled a book off the shelf.


Half an hour later, she was hooked.

We’ve had a reasonably healthy
winter here so far (knock on wood), but we’ve had a couple
things come through our house – the croup, a cold –
that have reminded me just how un-fun it is to be sick. With a
virus. That no pill can cure.


Impatient to help my babies feel better but reluctant to pump them
full of chemicals that may-or-may-not help their cough (really? Why
exactly does cough syrup need food coloring in it?), I started
looking around for more natural ways to help us all get through
those miserable, can’t-sleep winter nights.


Here’s what I found.

Yesterday was a Mommy and Cora day, and
during the morning Cora suggested we play Light Sabers with our
pipecleaners. “Mommy, you be the bad guy and I’ll be
the good guy,” she said excitedly as she walked away from me,
followed by “I’m going to go looking for some bad guys
now!”


Our house has a continuous flow floor plan – you can walk
from one room to the next and eventually go in a big circle. So as
Cora started to circle around, I hid in the dining room behind the
china cabinet. I tucked myself in that alcove just as I heard Cora
come back around the corner.


“Mommy?” she said. I chuckled to myself.


“Muh-muh-muh-Mommy? I’m suh-suh-suh-scared!” she
said and I laughed, thinking she could fool me into coming out so
easily. I heard her get close to where I was hiding, and so –


“Ah-HAH!” I yelled, and jumped in front of her. Cora
screamed that awful, high-pitched child’s shriek of danger,
and on her face was the look that said she’d just realized
there actually does exist darkness and scary things in this world.


And then she burst into sobs.

It’s no secret that I am a bit of a,
um, fanatic about trying to eat organic and local foods. I have
several websites that I love and read regularly that inspire me and
give me great ideas.


I talk freely about how I shop with anyone who asks me (and even
people who don’t, if they look friendly and I’m bored)
and the number one reason people give me for not shopping more
healthily is that it’s “Too expensive. Waaaaaaaaaaay
too expensive.”


My friends, you have been proven wrong.


One of my favorite bloggers, Stephanie at href="http://www.keeperofthehome.org/">Keeper of the
Home posted a most excellent article yesterday on how
she’d plan and shop for her family on a really tight budget,
just to demonstrate that it could be done. Now, when I say tight, I
mean TIGHT. As in, she gave herself $250. Yes, $250. And she
didn’t use coupons, or go through an organic co-op, or any of
those things. And after she wrote out her shopping list and the
prices, she wrote out her meal planning for the month.


Yes, it means she’s cooking every. Single. Meal. And not
buying processed “helper” foods like
mixed-rice-in-a-bag. But seriously. $250? I can’t remember
the last time I spent $250 in one month. That is pretty dang
impressive.


href="http://www.keeperofthehome.org/2012/01/what-i-would-feed-my-family-on-a-monthly-budget-of-250.html">
Take a look for yourself. And be encouraged! It can be
done.

This weekend both girls were invited to a
friend’s birthday party. The theme? Superheroes. And the
girls were invited to dress up as a superhero, should they so
choose.


Dress up? My girls? Twist their arms.


Maddie was excited because she already had a Super Girl costume,
complete with go-go boots, from two Halloweens ago. I was doubtful
it would still fit, at least booty-wise, but she was pretty excited
about it. Cora, on the other hand, had no superhero costume, and I
tried to downplay that fact as I said enthusiastically,
“Cora, that means you get to make your own superhero
costume!”


Cora chewed her cereal contemplatively for a moment, then said,
“Heck, yeah!”

One of the blogs I myself read regularly
is Momastery; I love this woman's writing style and how she lets
her inner self hang out, warts and all. I wish I wrote half as well
as she does.


Anyway, she recently wrote a post that I've loved so much I've
emailed it to half a dozen people, and I finally decided I just
need to post the dang thing on my website and be done with it.


It's all about how every single kid is gifted and talented and
amazing, and how much our kids need to KNOW that when we look at
them. They NEED us to be their biggest fan club.


Seriously, just read href="http://momastery.com/blog/2012/01/13/on-gifts-and-talents-2/"
target="_blank">this already.

The past couple of days I’ve been
recounting Maddie’s first ever trip-as-customer to our local
bank, and how reluctant she was to surrender her hard-earned cash
to someone else. That is, until the kind teller let Maddie get a
glimpse of the inner workings of the coin-sorting machine, and then
persuaded Maddie to hand over her piggy bank and they began
calculating the coinage.


Oh, the fun. Oh, the joy. As she watched the cash total rise up and
up and up, Maddie’s eyes bugged out of her head. When the
machine finally rested – on a grand total of ten dollars and
eighty-eight cents – Maddie was almost faint at the idea of
that much wealth. Who knew she’d had that much lucre inside a
sow’s belly? In pennies and nickels?


As the receipt for her cash came up, Maddie said, “Why is
there a strip of green running down my receipt?” “Well,
that’s to let us know that the paper’s running low and
needs to be changed. Do you want to help me do it?”


Um, is Kermit still green?

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.