Visions of Sugarplums

Christmas.  What a heck of a lot of pressure I put myself under every year.  It has to be "perfect".  The kind of perfect that Martha Stewart and Norman Rockwell would create if they had produced a holiday.  This is whole-heartedly my doing.  I do this to myself.  No one calls me on Thanksgiving night and says "Now get busy making every weekend memorable.  Pack your free time with cookie-making, decorating, kid crafts, and most of all, [drumroll]… MEMORIES YOUR CHILDREN WILL TREASURE FOREVER.

So, we have been on a crazy roller-coaster of Christmas joyfulness of my own making, resulting in this morning's cookie debacle.  Yes, I know that there are pre-made sugar cookies that I could have sliced or placed and baked.  Santa wouldn't know the difference.  Having been raised on black and white Hollywood visions of holiday perfection however, this simply wouldn't do.  Don we now our 50's style aprons, fa-la-la, la, la, la, LA, LA, LA.

Stand mixer at the ready, ingredients for a double batch of sugar cookies ready to roll, I have eggs, sugar and butter whizzing festively 'round the bowl when I say to my elf-y helper "Now we need two whole eggs…"  (Notice my wording…Do you see what's coming?)  With a groan heard at least two streets up, I watched as my four year old threw two WHOLE (i.e. in the shell) eggs into the bowl, right into the maw of the KitchenAid. 

CRACK, slop, crunchety-OH NO!

Round two went slightly more smoothly until Little One got into the mix, pinching up the dough every time I turned my back and gobbling sugar and raw eggs and butter in a ratio that fast out-paced  her body weight. 

This is where perfect came in and bit me.   The memories my children will have of this particular Christmas Eve morning, should they not repress them  fully, are of Mommy sobbing hysterically;  egg shells and butter on two cabinet doors; a few Santa cookies with bizarre two year old fingernail tracks across  the abdomen, looking something like a holiday attack by Wolverine, and finally, if I'm lucky, they'll remember that we did start a second batch and we did spend the morning baking together and we did sing Christmas carols before and after the crying jag.

Time always renders our memories more bright and shiny…right?

Merry Christmas my friends.  Happy Holidays.  Best wishes for a bright and healthy, happy and certainly imperfect New Year.

XO

License and Registration Please...

You know that old quote that goes something like "They make you pass a test to drive a car or adopt a dog, but any old idiot can have a baby..."? 

Well, Miss 4 is definitely the child who makes me think I should have had to prove I was up to the challenge before being allowed to take her home from the hospital.  Lately she is completely fascinated by a children's encyclopedia of the human body.  She refers to it as her "bone book".  She has been known to spend several detailed minutes drawing red blood cells and the oxygen they are absorbing in vivid, primary red and blue.  I don't know whether to be thrilled that she is inquisitive or worried that she's quirky...

Her interest has led her to all sorts of deep questions that require more intellect than I possess on any given day.  Most recently she wants to know where things go when they die.  What happens to their skin and eyeballs?  Having recently explained what the stones in cemeteries were all about, she is more than a little concerned at all of the faux headstones cropping up this last week of October in yards around our house and neighborhood.

This leads to this morning's adventure in parenting.  I found her with an early reader Bible, looking at the page of Jesus drawing the little children into his arms.  She was more than a little perturbed.  The following conversation took place.

Mama:  What's up Boo?
M4:  It's not fair that these kids got to meet Jesus and I wasn't there.
Mama: But this took place a really, really, really long time ago.  None of your family was alive.
M4: But I want to meet him too.  Is he still alive?
Mama:  Remember our conversation about spirits?...
M4:(interrupting) Jesus is dead?!?
Mama:  No! Wait!  Just...remember about spirits and heaven?
M4:  Well who has Jesus' skin and eyeballs and bones?
Mama:(breaking into a panicky sweat and way over my head)  Um...You don't need them in heaven, so his spirit...
M4:  If I'm bigger can I go looking for bones?  I only want to find one little one...Hey!  What happens to eyeballs?  How come you never find eyeballs in the ground?

This went on for several more minutes and never really resolved.  Finally, unsatisfied with my information Miss 4 went off to find something more interesting to focus on and left me feeling like I just am completely unprepared.  I mean, explaining death, spiritual beliefs, decomposition and burial practices is really just above and beyond me at the best of times. 

I remember years ago, in a previous job, fielding a phone call from a parent who was about to have a baby and wanted parenting support and a list of parenting classes.  In talking to her for a bit, she revealed that she had been watching Jeopardy and suddenly came to believe that she didn't personally know enough to teach her children all that they would need to know.  At the time, I didn't understand how daunting it is to be responsible for continually teaching a child and answering their questions. I hear you now Sister.  I get it.   Kaplan Test Prep has nothing out there for this kind of evaluation.

In the meantime, Miss 4 has learned that I often have to go to the computer and get the answer she needs; so yes, my child does occasionally say "Mama?  Can you Google it?"   It's a strange territory I have found myself in. 

I will love you...

A window into my reality…

I have bathed my two children and they are "jammied".  This is no mean feat in and of itself.  (During my recovery phase, one of my brave friends bathed my children, not once but twice.  She knows that washing Little One's  hair is something akin to water-boarding.)  I have brushed their hair and we are settling in with the last sippy cup of the evening. 

Miss 4 has settled behind me on the couch and is asking to brush my hair.  The following conversation/monologue takes place.

"Your hair is pretty. .. I like the gray part…  How come when you get old your hair turns gray?...I will love you even when you are as old as sixty-nine years old.  That's pretty old….  I'll probably be sixty-nine in about two hundred years. … I made a swirly curl in your hair.  I bet you wish it was like Auntie B….  Your hair is like the inside of my new boot.  It's all brown with shiny bits in it.  Like the stuff on the Christmas tree….What's that stuff?  You know,… tinfoil?....It's like that in my boot fur and on your head too…Your hair is having Christmas."

And that, my friends, is why I just can't take life that seriously.    Don't mind me, I'm just having a holiday on my head.

Free Therapy

Thank you for being my free therapy today. 

Admission:  I am at that stage of parenting where there are more challenges than not and more questions than answers.  In my house, we are on both ends of the toddler/preschool span; one turning two in a month and one almost five.  It all feels so terribly big and important; each decision is fraught with uncertainty.  I am stuck in a cycle of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Parenting is not for the faint of heart.   I am humbled daily.  

I am lucky enough to be surrounded by a cadre of strong parents who are at every different stage of parenting.  I cannot recommend highly enough having a cocktail of parenting ingredients that looks something like the following:

·         A sprinkle of new parents to remind you why you got into this game in the first place and to give you a laugh over where you yourself have been.

·         A dash of parents in the same stage of parenting.  Misery loves company.  They are in the same foxhole and sometimes give you the one piece of advice you haven't yet tried.   And at the very least you can take turns driving each other home from asylum.

·         A handful of parents who are ahead of you.  These are your light at the end of the tunnel friends.  They can give you tried and true advice, tell you which parenting books to abandon and which are worth your precious little reading time, and remind you that it is a phase*.  They are also the friends who will bring their children over to play and entertain your children.  These friends are priceless.  Cultivate this friendship and tend it well.  (Something I am not always as diligent at as I need to be.)  Also, this is where the best  hand-me-downs come from.  The best stroller and the coolest winter jacket came from friends who have a child a year older than our oldest.  Her best party dress came from another friend blessed with two daughters.  Our oldest daughter looks on these bags of treasure as a year-long Christmas event.

·         At least one "airy-fairy" friend who can tell you that the child's behavior is caused by gravitational pull, tides, phase of the moon, barometric pressure, astrological sign, etc.  I'm not saying these things aren't all possible, rather that sometimes you desperately need to feel that the craziness stems from something that well and truly is out of your control.

·         A good dose of parents who have grown children to remind you that this is fleeting.    As aggravating and crazy-making as this stage may be, you will one day look back with nostalgia.  You will actually miss this day that can't end soon enough.  These parents also remind you that even children who resist toilet-training, turn up their nose at dinner, have tantrums and tease their siblings grow up to be productive members of society.   This friend helps to balance you out in moments of sheer desperation that it will ever turn out okay.

*Please note, nobody really knows what a phase is.  It sounds good and it is reassuring, but there is no time frame attached.  Nonetheless, the one thing about phases is that they do eventually end.  This part is true.  I swear.

Thank you to my friends who have been at my back with words of encouragement, liberal doses of humor and patience, and glasses of wine when they are needed. 

Some Friday Wine, er Whine...

When parents of one child ask me "Is it very different with two children?" my answer is usually that it isn't really.  You are usually doing the same things, just in larger volume.   One diaper or two, not really different.  Brushing two sets of teeth, making two sandwiches, bathing two…completely not a big difference.

What I have failed to factor into this discussion is grocery shopping. 

I'm not referring to the cost of grocery shopping, but rather the sheer Herculean effort of managing my two children in the grocery store.  At the end of that hour we don't like each other very much. 

Not only am I a sweating, near-crying, shell of the person who walked into the store, but I have put on a public show of my parenting skills and deficits for a wide cross-section of the local population.  I have hissed under my breath, I have glared; I have raised eyebrows, verbally and physically redirected and bribed.  I have taken away privileges.  I have put my child in timeout in front of the meat case.  (Want to get really disgusted glares?  Try that sometime on a Friday morning.)  I have tried everything short of spanking.

And then when I get home I realize I bought none of item A and three of item B.  I have somehow missed the pint of must-be-gold-plated-based-on-the-price blackberries that my daughter snuck into the cart and all of the meat has finger-sized holes in the cellophane.  The bananas have been squeezed and whatever damages the children didn't do the bread, the bagger has completely finished off.

I miss the days when the girls lay in their bucket infant seat, cooing at passers-by, garnering admiring smiles from the grandparent-types and my groceries were unmolested and unprotested.  I miss putting something into the cart and not having to deflect the set of hands that "doesn't eat THAT!  EW!" and the other set who just wants to grab it and fling it on the floor.  (Hey kids, if you want the biggest bang for your flinging buck, try throwing angel hair pasta and a box of orzo!)

I would still tell any parent considering a second child to go for it, just don't take them to the grocery store.  Ever.

This wasn't in the handbook.

Miss 4 frequently asks me questions I can't answer.  My favorite was about two years ago when she fired off the following in rapid order, leaving me no time to answer; "Where do we go when we die?  Who is God?  Can I have chicken nuggets?"  I'll admit it, I let her have the nuggets.  But deep down, beyond that place that questioned the nutritional integrity of processed, compressed, chicken product, was this tiny flicker of fear that has been fanned into a roaring blaze over the last two years.  And it sounds something like the drums in a survivor tribal council ceremony, over which is the panicky thought of "Holy Crap.  They didn't teach me anything about this in school/at the hospital/ in that parenting book!" 

We have entered a phase of sassiness I am completely unprepared for.  In fact, it seems that Miss 4 asks me questions, for the sole purpose of being able to shake her head with pity and say with a slight amount of juvenile sarcasm, "nuh-uh!"  She will argue with me over anything.  And honestly, everything is negotiable in her mind.  Shoes?  Negotiable.  Dinner?  Negotiable.  Underwear?  Negotiable.  And she has a quick reason for why she wants or NEEDS to go around the imposed restriction etc.  Always.  I mean instantly at the ready.  At the drop of a hat.  She doesn't appear to think about it.  It's just there.  So, either she is already smarter than me, or she lies awake at night scripting these scenarios so that she'll be ready.

She has figured out how to outwit her little sister.  It pains me to watch her take her sister's trust and use it to her advantage.  I know that kids do it, and I know that olders trick the youngers.  I get it.  I'm an oldest and I'm sure I was equally evil and conniving.  But, the other day I watched Miss 4 eat the middle of an Oreo, stick the cookie sides together and sweetly offer to trade with her sister, who had barely made a dent in her cookie.  Trading is what we use to get a beloved toy back, or out of harm's way; a distraction that we taught Miss 4 for good, not evil.  I happened to be there that time, and intervened and expressed my displeasure, but I'm not sure my message was received the way I intended it. 

And this is the thing that will keep me awake.  Am I doing a good enough job with the moral education of my kids?  I can forgive the occasional nutritional slip-ups, the chipped fingernail polish I've been meaning to help her take off and haven't gotten to, the occasional snarly, uncombed hair.  How do I know that I'm raising them with heart and soul, goodness and intention?  Where is the rule-book on that little matter?  I don't have the answer...

Did you miss me?

About six weeks ago I had reconstructive surgery on my foot.  This meant a minimum of six weeks of being off my foot and at the mercy of those willing to care for a less-than-patient patient. 

It was both a blessing and a curse to be forced to step back and let someone else do those things that I firmly believed could only be done correctly by me.  (My husband will be the first to say we do it VERY differently, so this statement will not surprise him in any way.)

I learned:

• First and foremost, I don't like imposed growth opportunities.  I am not patient with slowing down and letting go.  In fact, some would say, I can't.
• My daughter who cannot hear me ask her to pick up her laundry and put it in the hamper, can hear me mutter under my breath and will repeat any criticism to the party in question.  Oops!  Another learning opportunity for me.
• "Making breakfast" is a very different thing to a Dad than to a Mom.  But, yes, in fact one can survive on toast and banana for six weeks.
• If my husband had to pack a suitcase for me without my assistance, he really has no idea what I wear on a daily basis.  This led to a few memorable fashion ensembles being presented to me without the slightest indication that they were jokes.
• My daughter will auto-correct daddy's fashion faux pas approximately 85% percent of the time.  This is not a bad percentage give her age.  However, we did learn the phrase "fashion refugee" during the time frame of Mama's recuperation.  (Refer to entry #2).

Perhaps one of the kindest and most humble moments in the six weeks came when my family got together to celebrate my mother's birthday.  I overheard my husband tell my father "I don't know how she gets it all done.  I didn't realize how much she does in a day." 

Our household is not completely traditional in its role assignment, but 90% of the time, if the lawn is mowed or the garbage taken out, it is done by the Mr., and 90% of the laundry, food prep, daily cleaning is done by Mama.  I'm sure there are millions of small details that go unnoticed by me in the chores Mr. takes on, and perhaps someday I will have the chance to be humbled by taking on his role as well.  Still, it was a silver lining in this LONG  recovery to know that he is far less likely to ask "What did you do all day?" when he comes home and finds the house in shambles and the kids dirty and clamoring for a sandwich and Mama having a bottle glass of wine and trying not to cry as dinner is still, STILL, not done!

Things my husband has learned:

• Kids will not tell you they are hungry until it is too late to feed them peacefully.  They are around the bend by the time they tell you they are hungry.
• Laundry piles up faster than you think it will.  Stay ahead of it.  You can't always wait until there is a full washer load of one color.  Sometimes a small/partial load, while not eco-friendly, will guarantee that the beloved blanket is dry by bedtime. 
• In relation to the above, if you are line-drying the blanket, HIDE IT BETWEEN OTHER CLOTHING, or buy earplugs and sedatives.  Give yourself time to guarantee that the little bugger is dry before naptime.  Trust me on this one.
• Do not start a non-negotiable request with "Do you want to...?"  You're sunk, pal.  Anything you say afterward is just more quicksand.
• We will be protecting Mama's foot like it is the Hope freakin' diamond.  There is no way any of us will survive another six-week stretch.