Cherry Blossom Baby

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Steph

On Thursday morning I put June on the school bus with the instructions, “Have a good last day of school as a five year old,” and she flashed me a brilliant smile.

June is six now. She was born right before the cherries bloomed on the Tidal Basin. She was six weeks early, and developed a bad case of jaundice so she had to stay at the hospital three days after I was released. I hated being separated from her, even for those three days. We were constantly shuttling back and forth between the hospital and home, with bottles of pumped milk in tow.

The hospital was just around the corner from the Tidal Basin so one day either on the way to the hospital or on the way home, we made a drive-by visit. Beth dropped me and Noah and YaYa off to walk around a bit while she circled in the car (parking is often impossible when the cherries are in bloom). We were just a little too early, but we found a couple of blooming trees for a quick photo-op and then we hopped back in the car.

The trees bloomed in earnest soon after and I wanted to go back, but once we got June home, she had to be wrapped in a phototherapy blanket round the clock, allowed out only to nurse, and we just couldn’t make it. Even though we didn’t take her that first year, I still associate the cherry blossoms with the surprising, chaotic days after her birth. We call her our cherry blossom baby, just as Noah is our iris baby.

At 6:35 a.m. on Friday the phone rang. I wondered if it was a wrong number or an early-rising relative wishing June a happy birthday. Instead it was Baskin-Robbins, seeking advice of the frosting color of the ice-cream cake we’d ordered for June’s party. The whole cake-buying experience was bizarre. June had fallen in love with this cake because it had real half-sized ice cream cones on top but Beth had customer service challenges placing and picking up the order and in the end we got a cake that said “Happy June Birthday” instead of “Happy Birthday, June.” So, just a word of warning if you’re local and you don’t like receiving business calls before dawn or scrambled messages in icing–consider another vendor.

After Beth confirmed that pink frosting was fine, we all went to the living room where June’s wrapped presents were arrayed around her new two-wheeler. “A bike,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I like the bike.” Then she tore into the other presents. We got her a cat-themed math game, Rat-a-Tat Cat, partly because her party theme was cats and partly because it looked fun. Noah got her a bell for her bike and a pair of headphones (she uses headphones to watch television or play on the computer while he’s doing homework and he thought she’d like her own pair). Everything else was clothes. My aunt Peggy sent Hello Kitty pants, we got her a Hello Kitty t-shirt, a numeral six t-shirt and other summer clothes and pajamas. There were clothes from YaYa, too, including a pair of ladybug rain boots. It was only after all the presents were opened that June really focused on the bike and decided she wanted to ride it right then. I told her she needed to eat breakfast and get dressed and ready for school first. In the end, she had about five minutes practice in the driveway before I put her, clad in her number six t-shirt and new leggings, on the school bus. “Have a good day, six year old,” I told her. Again, she grinned at me.

When she got off the bus, she was holding a cardboard crown. Her teacher does not allow birthday treats to be sent in from home, but birthday celebrants get a crown and everyone sings “Feliz cumpleaños” to them. I’m used to more elaborate school celebrations, both at preschool and in elementary school, but June seemed satisfied. She wanted to practice riding her bike again–she’d do it three times before the day was out and she got a little better every time. (By Saturday morning she could pedal up a slight incline and her turns were impeccable.) She said she thought we could take the training wheels off. I counseled her to wait.

My mom arrived for a weekend visit around 4:15, and there were more presents to open. A pair of summer pajamas with cats on them had arrived during the day (“The cat’s pajamas” I told Beth—how could I resist that joke?), as had a rubber bracelet from Auntie Sara. It has holes in it and it has letters you can fit into the holes to spell words. It came bearing the words Junie Dell. (Dell is June’s middle name, and mine, too. I used to call her Junie Dell when she was a baby. It was one of those baby nicknames that didn’t stick except with Sara, but I like that Sara has a special nickname for her.) The next day, June changed the words to “I love you.” Mom brought all kinds of presents—a giant wooden Pinocchio marionette, a tiny vase with a purple ceramic cat attached to it, a paint-your-own tea set kit, and of course, clothes. June selected the belt from one outfit and decided to wear it with the other outfit (a hot pink t-shirt and leggings to go under a blue sundress with pink flowers) at her party the next day.

I gave June an early bath because we were going out for pizza at Roscoe’s and I wasn’t sure what time we’d be home. It was a warm evening so we sat on the patio, eating wild mushroom crostini, marinated olives (I let June go over her olive quota for the day), salad and pizza. They were out of gelato because their freezer was broken, so we headed over to Capital City Cheesecake for cheesecake and cannoli. When we got home, it was June’s bedtime and her big day was over.

But the next day was probably just as exciting because it was her birthday party. We spent the morning and early afternoon running birthday errands, cleaning the house, assembling gift bags and getting the porch ready for the pin-the-tail-on-the-cat game and the piñata. I’d originally envisioned these as front and back yard games, but rain was predicted, and sure enough it started drizzling around 11:30. Beth and June went out to pick up the “Happy June Birthday” cake and to buy yellow roses and six balloons in varying designs. One has a cat wearing a birthday hat and sunglasses. Another is the exact Dora balloon June got for her birthday last year. When you tap it, Dora sings “Happy Birthday” in English and Spanish. The sound of the song was still etched deeply into my brain, and Beth’s, too, so she set some strict ground rules about under what circumstances one might tap the balloon to hear the pint-sized bilingual songstress go at it.

The party was at 3:00 and her friends arrived between 2:50 and 3:15. Maggie, who is June’s only friend who attended both her preschool and her elementary school, made introductions, while the girls selected instruments from the bin and there was an impromptu concert (most of June’s parties seem to start this way). Once everyone had arrived, we gathered the guests onto the carpet to listen as Mom read them a story The Leprechaun Under the Bed. June remembered Mom reading at her party last year and wanted her to do it again. I’d suggested The Cat in the Hat, but she knew as soon as we checked this book out of the library and read it the first time that it was the one she wanted read at her party. (Spoiler: the leprechaun turns into a cat at the end of the story.)

Next we moved out to the porch for pin-the-tail-on-the-cat. Last spring June attended a classmate’s birthday party that had classic games as the theme–pin-the-tail-on-the donkey, sack races, etc, and it occurred to me that though you don’t see kids play them much any more, these games are classics for a reason. It was a really fun party. So I tucked that idea away in the back of my mind, and when June came up with the cat theme for her party I was all ready with pin-the-tail-on-the-cat. June was all over it, especially since she could make the cat and the tails herself. One by one, I blindfolded the guests and gently spun them around six times each and let them go, sometimes with a subtle correction if they left my hands going in the wrong direction. The kids laughed hysterically as the tails went onto the cat’s face or the air above its body. A couple of them got the tail on or pretty close to the cat’s rump—I think Talia’s was the best placed.

Back inside, it was time for games. We had two and let the girls divide into groups and choose which one they wanted to play. The first one was The Cat in the Hat, I Can Do That. In this game, you lay cards together to form instructions for a task to perform with props from the story and you get points if you complete it. June got this game for Christmas and was more interested in playing her new game and most of her guests followed her lead, but I supervised a game between Talia and Megan and then started another round with Talia, when Megan had lost interest and Talia wanted to keep playing. Beth says she wished she’d thought to get a picture of me trying to wriggle my way under a low foam arch, while balancing the fishbowl in one hand.

Mom and Noah had played Rat-a-Tat Cat with June earlier the in day so they could get the hang of the rules, and Emelia already knew them because she had the same game at home, so the card game went smoothly. Beth said they all seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly and enjoyed it. When the games were over, we set everyone up with paper and crayons and asked them to draw cats, as a souvenir. Some of them drew the Cat in the Hat, others drew Hello Kitty and others went with non-branded felines. Keller divided her paper into three sections and did one of each.

We had cake next. The kids thought “Happy June Birthday” was hilarious, an improvement on “Happy Birthday June” really, and as Beth divvied up the little cones they were agreeable about not all getting their first choices in ice cream (each cone was a different flavor). As we ate cake, Mom sat on the couch with Morgan’s mom and baby brother and got acquainted with her, finding out she went to Oberlin—Beth’s and my alma mater. She even lived in Noah Hall, the dorm where Beth and I met, and after which we named Noah.

I gathered up the goody bags so the guests could stash their piñata booty in them and we headed back out to the porch to smash it. All the kids had at least two turns. When a hole opened but no candy fell out, Megan tried to tilt the piñata (or maybe enlarge the hole) by poking her stick in the hole. It was Noah who finally sent the candy cascading to the floor with some mighty whacks. Morgan’s mom commented that older brothers have their uses.

June wanted to know if we could have some music while we waited for parents to come collect the guests. When Beth put on Blue Moo, June asked Talia quite formally, “Talia, will you dance with me?” and Talia did. They danced joyfully around the living room as June’s birthday party wound down to a close. It was cute to watch, especially since I am so very fond of Talia, whom I’ve known since she was not quite two.

After the guests left, June opened her presents–a book, three stuffed animals (including a cat of course), a mermaid magnet set, and a Lego café kit. June wanted to assemble the café right away, but we went out for Indian first, and then she set to work on it. It was hard to tear her away to go to bed. She finished it the next afternoon, following all thirty-three diagrams–less than twenty-four hours after receiving it, and impressing Mom with her small motor skills and her tenacity.

The final adventure of June’s birthday weekend was an expedition to the cherry blossoms and the new MLK memorial. The peak bloom period is short and notoriously difficult to predict. Mom has never caught it, though she often visits us around June’s birthday. For awhile the predicted four-day peak period spanned the weekend and we thought luck was with us, but then a few eighty-plus-degree days accelerated the blooming and the peak period moved back, ending Friday. I thought if we went Friday it would be too hard to get back by bedtime, and going on Saturday before the party would make for a stressfully jam-packed day, so we waited until Sunday.

Now I will say that given the choice between a few days before the peak period and a few days after I would choose after every time. There are drifts of petals on the ground and blizzards of them in the air with every breeze; there are petals in muddy puddles and on the rippling water of the Tidal Basin, and there are damp petals stuck to every horizontal and vertical surface. In its way, it’s almost as magic as the classic picture postcard puffy pink and white blooms. It looks like confetti strewn on the street after a particularly wild party. So in a way it was a fitting end to June’s birthday celebration, an after party of sorts. She got to christen her new boots in the puddles, eat hot edamame from a stand, admire the trees (solemnly telling us “all trees are beautiful”), run through the paths between the tulip beds at the Floral Library, take pictures with Beth’s phone, joke with her brother, give her grandmother countless hugs, hold hands with everyone and seize the joy and the beauty of the moment and of being six.

Queer, Queer Fun

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Steph

On Wednesday morning, the morning of the twentieth anniversary of our commitment ceremony, June crawled into bed with us at 6:40 a.m. We all dozed a bit longer and around 7:00 Beth got out of bed and was walking around my side of the bed on her way out of the bedroom when I put my arms up for a hug. The cue reminded her. “Happy anniversary,” she said.

The kids went to school and Beth went to work and the day unfolded like a normal weekday. I read a few chapters of Catch-22, which I’m reading for my book club, and I exercised and cleaned the refrigerator. I worked on a set of instructions for growing hydroponic green beans, cucumbers and lettuce. I found out I’d landed a job writing three grants for a group of D.C. public charter schools. Okay, that last part was not so routine. I haven’t written a grant since 1994, when I worked for Project Vote, so I greeted this development with a mix of excitement and trepidation. But I can’t even start until I attend a series of meetings with school officials in early February so I can put it out my mind for now.

That morning Beth posted a picture of the two of us at our commitment ceremony on Facebook, along with a copy of a newspaper story from the Philadelphia Gay News, about how our commitment ceremony announcement in the Philadelphia Inquirer was the first one ever for a gay or lesbian couple. (At the time my father was the managing editor of the Inquirer. He did not participate in the discussions about whether to publish the announcement but I imagine the fact that I was his daughter must have been a factor in people’s minds. If nepotism did help break down the door for other people behind us, I have no problem with that.)

One of the things I love about Facebook is all the positive feedback you get on milestone posts. All day long the congratulations poured in on both posts. It made me cheerful every time I checked it and gave the day a festive feel, even if I was at home alone, writing or doing chores for much of it.

Shortly after June got home I started cooking dinner. I wanted to get an early start on the eggplant-bulgur casserole because I was also making a cake, the spice cake with lemon glaze I make almost every year on our anniversary. It was our wedding cake. June helped pour the ingredients in the bowl, mix the batter, consulted with me on what shade of pink to dye the glaze (it was a very deep pink, almost red) and helped spread the glaze on the cake.

While we ate dinner, we listened to one of the three mix tapes we made for our ceremony. (Our ceremony was a very low-budget, DIY affair so we provided our own music.) I haven’t attempted the play the tapes in years and I wasn’t even sure if the one I’d selected would still play or if it would be warped, but it sounded fine after two decades (or almost two decades- a notation on the case indicated we’d re-made it in 1994. I don’t remember why). It was the one we played last, the most upbeat one. It starts with Prince’s “Let Pretend We’re Married” and the Eurhythmics “Would I Lie to You?” and goes on in that vein. It’s a fun tape and I only had to rush to the tape player to turn down the volume once so the kids would miss some not quite age-appropriate lyrics.

The music, familiar and yet from such a different time in our lives, and the photo of Beth with her early 90s trademark flattop really took me back. Sometimes it seems like it hasn’t been that long since we were in our mid-twenties and childless and new to living in the big city, and sometimes it seems like another life entirely.

After dinner and before cake, we exchanged gifts. Beth got me Stephen King’s latest—11/22/63— and I got her a gift certificate for Giovanni’s Room, a gay bookstore in Philadelphia. And why would I get her such a thing when we live in suburban Maryland? We had a kid-free weekend in Philly ahead of us, that’s why.

We drove everyone up to Mom and Jim’s house on Saturday afternoon after June’s basketball game, dropped the kids off and enjoyed two nights and one day to ourselves in the City of Brotherly Love. We had two very nice dinners at the Kyber Pass Pub and Cuba Libre. If you go to the first, the vegetarian meats (BBQ and fried chicken Po Boys) and the fried vegetables (okra and sweet potato fries) are very good. If you go to the second, you must order the buñuelos con espinaca. We visited Reading Terminal Market and had lunch there. I got a vegetarian cheesesteak at a stand where the service was so bad it crossed over from aggravating to comic, but the cheesesteak was not half bad once I finally got it. We browsed at Giovanni’s Room and came out with a few books. We spent a lot of time in our hotel room and in a local coffee shop reading. We saw a non-animated, R-rated movie, the lesbian coming-of-age film The Pariah, which was well acted and a good story, though there were some odd things going on with the camera work, probably meant to indicate the protagonist’s emotional state. Our room had a gas fireplace and a Jacuzzi and we employed them both.

We walked a lot on Sunday and made some serendipitous discoveries, stumbling upon the President’s House where the first two Presidents lived while the Capitol moved to Washington. The building is no longer there, but they have rebuilt parts of it, with low brick walls to show where walls went and some chimneys and doorways recreated. You can also look down into the ground to see the actual excavated foundations through glass. There is a lot of information posted on signs about the house and its inhabitants, including the nine slaves who lived there. It seemed a fitting place to visit during MLK weekend and we would have lingered longer and read more if it had not been so very cold (in the twenties most of the day and quite windy).

We also found the block where I lived from the ages of five and half to almost nine, quite by accident, and from there I remembered how to walk to my elementary school a few blocks away, so we did. I don’t think I’ve seen it since 1976 but other than new playground equipment (and what I believe to be an addition) the soaring one-hundred-year-old red brick building looks just as I remember it. It was odd, but not unpleasant to be walking around our old neighborhood on Sunday, because it was the second anniversary of my father’s death. As we walked along the blocks where he must have walked so many times, I imagined him in his thirties walking with a little-girl version of me, maybe headed to the playground, maybe going for ice cream or to peek inside antique stores.

On Monday morning we picked up the kids and heard all about their trip to the Franklin Institute. June loved the giant heart and veins you can tour (what kid doesn’t?) and the movie they saw in the planetarium about black holes and Noah liked the city that changed colors depending on environmental choices the citizens made. June left Mom and Jim’s house laden with necklaces, a jewelry box and a wicker doll high chair. (Mom is downsizing in preparation for her move). On our way out of the Philadelphia area, we made one last stop, for soft pretzels, and then we were homeward bound, arriving mid-afternoon, in time for undone homework and weekend chores. Our anniversary celebration was over.

But I still have one song from the commitment ceremony tape running through my head. It’s “The Queer Song,” by Two Nice Girls. It makes me think how much has changed, not just over the past twenty years, but maybe the past thirty. The speaker is re-assuring her love interest, who is still insecure in her sexual identity:

I’m gonna take you to queer bars
I’m gonna drive you in queer cars
You’re gonna meet all my queer friends
Our queer, queer fun it never ends
We’re gonna have a happy life
Both of us are gonna be the wife
I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be
It’s queer queer fun for you and me

(If you don’t know this song, it’s worth knowing that it’s sung partially to the tune of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”) I have to reach far back into my life to remember a time when the idea of my own happiness being possible would have produced a subversive, defiant thrill, but I do remember. I do. I would not say my life is a never-ending parade of queer, queer fun—it has as many disappointments and sorrows as anyone else’s—but there is happiness in it, too.

As the Presidential election will no doubt remind me on a more regular basis than I’d like, my family’s happiness is still a hard pill for some people to swallow. That’s why this was a commitment ceremony anniversary and not a wedding anniversary we just celebrated. I have faith we’ll get there, maybe soon. Gay marriage will be on the table again in Maryland this year, as it was last year and a few years before that. I try not to get my hopes up. I do want to be legally married for both symbolic and practical reasons, but on the deepest level, both of us already are the wife and we have been since that mid-January afternoon when we were twenty-four and twenty-five and stood before our friends and family and dared to imagine living a happy life together.

A Lousy Birthday

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Steph

Beth’s birthday is always the week of Thanksgiving, usually before the holiday. She often says she likes this because it seems to usher in the holiday season. The timing has a potential downside, though, of swallowing or overshadowing her birthday. I was determined that wouldn’t happen this year. The kids and I did our birthday shopping early just in case my first plan didn’t work. We were in good shape, even with a few crazy days before Beth’s birthday, but then things got even crazier.

To pick up where we left off, wasn’t I just telling you a story about how I was asked to bring June home from school early on a day when I had nothing urgent to do I and didn’t do it? Oh, the irony. Tuesday of last week I’d started work on a project that was much more difficult than I anticipated. By Thursday I was wondering how I was going to make the deadline, which was the day before Thanksgiving and co-incidentally Beth’s birthday. So of course in the wee hours of Friday morning, without any previous sign of illness, June woke up vomiting. Obviously, she’d need to stay home from school.

I did squeeze in several hours of work in between snuggling with her in bed, reading book after book to her and playing game after game of Chutes and Ladders, but it set me back. I told Beth I’d need to work over the weekend. I had a very productive day on Saturday until I started to feel queasy at the computer in the late afternoon. I’ll spare you the details but I spent the rest of the day and most of the following morning in bed. Noah fell sick a few hours after I did and he actually seemed worse off. I could hear him moaning in his bunk off and on all night. He slept most of the next afternoon. By that time I was recovered and back to work, probably running on adrenaline since I’d slept so poorly the night before. I was really glad I’d taken the kids to get Beth’s gifts the previous weekend because there was no time this weekend when all three of us would have been up for an outing at the same time and I don’t know when we would have managed to shop for her.

But luckily we’d already taken care of this errand. Beth had asked for some reusable cloth produce bags so I decided to buy two at the Co-op and let the kids fill them up with treats for her. I have to say it was possibly the most satisfying buying-gifts-for-other-people experience I’ve had with the kids. They accepted guidance readily but had enough of their own ideas that it didn’t feel like me making all the decisions and paying for it to boot and then saying, perversely, that the presents were from the kids, yet at the same time we didn’t buy anything completely random and inappropriate either. They each picked three items. Four out of the six contained chocolate (chocolate-covered pretzels, a dark chocolate bar, a black and white cookie and a box of chocolate toaster pastries). This is about the right ratio of chocolate to non-chocolate gifts to buy for Beth, I think. We also picked up a wedge of Brie and some rosemary crackers. I had renewed Beth’s subscription of Brain, Child (http://www.brainchildmag.com/) weeks earlier so her birthday gifts were in the bag, so to speak. Potential crisis averted.

By Monday everyone was well enough for school and work and it seemed like we were back on track. Except Tuesday morning, Noah was feeling poorly again and he stayed home. I worked and read him a few chapters of The Emerald Atlas and then around noon, heeding a nagging inner voice, I made a phone call to June’s school. June had been complaining about her head itching since mid-October. Lice had occurred to me immediately and I knew Lesley does lice checks periodically at preschool so after school on the very first day June mentioned the itching, I took her over to the Purple School for a visit and an impromptu lice check. Lesley didn’t see anything. I checked it off my mental list of possibilities and then for weeks we wondered why June’s head was itching/ We stopped using her detangling spray and considered trying all new hair care products. Finally, I started to think we should get her checked again, just in case.

You know where this is going, right? I must have taken June to Lesley before the lice really got settled in her hair because the nurse pulled June out of class to check her and called me back at 12:45 with the news that she did indeed have lice and I needed to come get her immediately. So, I brought her home and that was the end of the school week for both kids.

Later that afternoon, we had 504 meeting for Noah with the disappointing outcome that he did not qualify for any accommodations under his ADHD-NOS diagnosis but that might under his dysgrahpia diagnosis, but that will require input from an occupational therapist and possibly yet another meeting (our third this fall) to determine. I think we might have been more upset by this if not for the lice.

The rest of the afternoon and evening was a blur of activity. There was bedding to wash in hot water and dry at the highest setting, brushes and combs to soak in rubbing alcohol, and hair to rub with smelly lice-killing shampoo and then comb out with the nit pick. We spent hours on the kids’ hair but sometime during Noah’s, which surprisingly turned out to be much worse than June’s, we started to think we might need the services of a professional. I found a few companies online, made some calls, conferred with Beth and made an appointment.

So the next morning the kids stayed home from school and Beth stayed home from work and at nine a.m., a professional nit-picker walked in our door. Beth said making sure we were all properly deloused was her birthday present to herself. We all had our hair combed and picked (and we all did have lice, in varying degrees). It took about three hours for her to do all four of us. She said Noah was in the worst shape and had probably had them longest. Since he never itched (no-one did except June) who knows how many months he was walking around with lice? I don’t like to think about it.

I did four more loads of hot water laundry, and made Beth’s birthday cake (with some help from June) and some brandied sweet potatoes to take to YaYa’s for Thanksgiving. Beth made vegetarian stuffing and gravy. All day we ate well. Beth shared her chocolate toaster pastries at breakfast and her Brie and crackers at lunch. In the afternoon she ran some errands and got herself a free birthday cupcake at Cake Love (to save for later). For diner we got Burmese takeout and then ate cake and ice cream. The can of pink frosting I was using for accents turned out to be almost empty and created more of a graffiti paint splatter effect than the roses June and I were originally going for, but I liked it.

It was that kind of birthday, not what we expected, but with its own sweetness. We did get an extra day all together before the holiday weekend, so I hope it was lousy only in the most literal sense of the word.

A Half Older

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Steph

It’s just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
We push ourselves ahead.

From “The End of the Summer” by Dar Williams

Sunday: A Different Ball Game

On a cool, cloudy afternoon, the third Sunday in September, Beth, June and I stood on the playing field of the same middle school that hosts the folk festival. This time we weren’t there to hear a bluegrass band, however. We were there for June’s first-ever soccer scrimmage. She played soccer the fall she was three and a half and again the spring she was four, but she’d lost interest and skipped a year before deciding to give it another try. Kindergarten soccer is different than preschool soccer. There are games against other teams, like in t-ball, and this appealed to June. Also, she wants another medal to hang from the beams of the lower bunk bed.

Four or five of June’s preschool classmates are playing on a Saturday morning team but she wanted to do ballet this fall, too, and that conflicted with that team’s practice time, so we signed her up for a Sunday team. I think I was more disappointed about her not being on a team with friends than she was. It felt like all her friends being in the other kindergarten class all over again, like a missed opportunity. It’s sad to see them go their separate ways, knowing how easy it is for kids to drift apart and forget each other. Noah barely remembers any of his preschool classmates who didn’t go to elementary school with him.

But June was not indulging in any melancholy thoughts on the soccer field. She was happy and excited and ready to play. It took a while for us to locate the maroon team, but once we did the coach handed out their t-shirts and sat them down in a circle to talk about what was going to happen and then got them doing drills right away.

Beth and I watched from the sidelines. When the coach said they were going to play sharks and minnows, Beth said, “I hope she’s not still afraid of this.” June hated sharks and minnows in preschool soccer. The sight of the coach and other players pretending to be menacing sharks was just too much for her. This is how it works: All the players have a soccer ball they dribble around the field. The coach, who’s the original shark, tries to take their balls. Once a player’s ball is taken from him or her, the player becomes a shark too and goes after other kids’ balls, until all balls are out of play and everyone is a shark. June showed no signs of ever having been afraid of this game, but she did forget the rules. When a fellow player kicked her ball away from her, she said indignantly, “That’s mine!” and the coach had to come over and explain the game to her again. Once she understood she was right out there trying to kick other kids’ balls away from them.

For the next drill, the coach balanced a soccer ball on a cone and arranged the players in a circle around it. They were to kick their balls at it all at once and try to knock it down. On the first try no-one’s ball went anywhere near the cone, but on the second try one of the taller boys knocked it down. He knew it was his ball that did it, too, because he pumped his fist in the air.

After almost an hour of practice, it was time for the game. June’s team divided and half their players went over to play another team while half of the yellow team came over to our part of the field. The yellow Cheetahs looked a little more organized than our team. They had appeared to be well into practice before our team had even assembled and they had their names and numbers written in marker on the backs of their shirts. The coach was also more intent on diving them into offensive and defensive lines that ours was. “They’re going to get slaughtered,” I predicted to Beth.

But they didn’t. The Maroon Pumas won the match, 3-1. This was mainly because of the boy who knocked the soccer ball off the cone during practice. This kid has moves. He scored two out of the three goals, and made a few good saves when they ball was near our team’s goal, too. (There are no goalies at this level.)

Considering she was the second smallest kid on her team and has had no soccer instruction in the past year and a half, June did great. She had no fear of getting into the mix, ran after the ball, and usually remembered which direction to kick it when she got the chance. (This is a big issue with five and six-year-old players. At halftime our coach’s whole message was which direction to kick the ball.) She even kept control of the ball and moved it toward the right goal for at least five yards at one point.

Beth kept yelling, “Go, Junie!” whenever June had the ball and then said to me, “I really shouldn’t be so into this.” I was quieter but I was keeping score in my head. Even though I thought I’d keep score at June’s t-ball games, I never did. I don’t think anyone did. Because every player swung until he or she got a hit and the inning ended after everyone had a turn, and fielding was such that almost everyone advanced a base whenever anyone hit the ball, scores were high and kind of meaningless. This was a different ball game, however. And I saw in a way I never really had before why soccer is the game of choice for elementary-school age kids all over suburban America as well as much of the world. There aren’t as many rules to master and five-year-olds can play something more closely resembling the real thing. Play was unpredictable and fun to watch.

By the end of the game, June was flagging. She’d been running around for an hour and half and she was ready to be done. Every time play slowed or stopped, she plopped down on the grass and started to pick blades of it. She’d jump up every time the ball started to move again, though. When the game was over she was excited. “We scored a goal!” she said. I informed her they’d scored three. She was surprised. She’d missed that. She’d heard the other team cheering when they scored and thought maybe the Yellow Cheetahs had won. No, I told her, her team won. Even when she thought they’d lost, she was pleased with her performance, “It was like my brain just remembered—this is how you play soccer!” she said, all smiles.

Friday: The Half-Birthday Girl

June climbed into our bed at 6:50 on Friday morning. “It’s Friday!” she announced. She’d been looking forward to a classmate’s birthday party that afternoon all week. It felt funny, thinking about sending her to this party because I barely know the girl, having met her once at the Open House but I know she and June have been playing together and sitting with each other on the bus. June’s never been on a play date or to a party at the house of a kid I don’t know, but I guess there’s a lot of that in her future now that she’s in a big public elementary school and not a small co-operative preschool. I learned last weekend when we were all having pizza at Sasha’s house that June’s new friend lives next door to Sasha’s family. Somehow this made it a little easier to think about leaving her there.

“It’s also your half-birthday,” Beth reminded June and told her she’d picked up the cupcakes at the grocery store the night before, while June was in bed. June had selected them ahead of time. They were patriotic, with red and blue sprinkles on white frosting and topped with plastic flags and statutes of Liberty. They were in the frozen section so they might have been left over from September 11. (Would anyone buy or sell patriotic cupcakes for September 11? I’m really not sure, but I don’t want to think they’re left over from the Fourth of July.)

June wanted to go see them immediately. She thought she remembered there was only one with a flag. “And do you know who gets it when there’s only one?” she asked.

“The half-birthday girl,” Beth surmised, correctly.

Then June realized it was also the first day of fall. “I’ve waited so long for this day,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

Because after fall comes winter and then spring, she answered, and she can go sledding in winter and her real birthday is in the spring. “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” Beth sang. June is always looking several months ahead, wanting whatever it is that comes next. She is good at beginnings, pushing herself into new things. She loves kindergarten and gets on the bus each morning without a backward glance, even as I linger to watch her walk up the steps.

It was an odd afternoon and evening. A power line went down near our house and the power went out three times, staying out for all but an hour between 2:30 and 8:30. Later I joked on Facebook that the alternation between light and dark was an equinox-themed performance art piece by the power company. Our street was blocked off, too, so June’s bus was forty minutes late. I thought she’d be rattled because she was the last time the bus was (much less) late but she seemed to shrug it off. She now knows the bus is sometimes late. When she got home we had to hurry to the party, taking the long way because our most direct route was blocked to pedestrians as well as traffic.

She did balk a little at being left at Keller’s house. There was only one other guest she knew; the rest were Keller’s preschool friends. So I stayed until she felt comfortable and then left her with the rest of the cape and tiara-wearing five and six year olds. (It was a She-Ra themed party.) There was no power at Keller’s house either. I approved of her parents’ spirit of adventure in continuing with the party.

After I fetched June there was just enough time to heat up dinner from cans (luckily we have a gas stove) and to eat her half-birthday cupcakes before I put her to bed. She fell asleep by the light of the camping lantern in the hall, soon after commenting, “I’m a half older now.”

Saturday: Tiny Dancer

On the sidewalk outside the dance studio, June had a flash of nerves. Beth scooped her up into her arms and reminded her she often felt a little nervous before starting something new but it usually passed quickly. I wondered if it was just too many new things and too many new people in a short period of time. June’s friend Gabriella (a.k.a the Ground Beetle) is enrolled in the ballet class but was spending the weekend with her grandparents so she had to miss the first session.

“How old are you?” The receptionist wanted to know, as we were checking June in and ordering her ballet uniform.

“Five and a half,” June answered, after a pause.

The receptionist wanted to know why she had to think about it and we explained she had only been five and a half for a day.

Soon after this exchange, Talia (whom I will always secretly think of as the Mallard Duck) and her father and brother walked in the door. I knew her mom was thinking of signing her up for this ballet class but I hadn’t wanted to get June’s hopes up so I had not mentioned it to her. June was delighted. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here!” she exclaimed. And like that, all nervousness was gone.

Parents watched the lesson through a large window in the studio wall. We could see but not hear, so we had to guess what the teacher might be asking them as they sat in a circle and raised their hands in different combinations. Beth said it was like watching a silent movie, and Talia’s dad, Tom, laughed. We watched as the eight girls, mostly in pale pink or black leotards stood in a circle holding hands and standing on their toes and as they stood with their feet flat on the ground and bent their knees deeply. They walked in a line, watching themselves in the mirrored wall and mimicking the movements of the teacher. They practiced at the barre. June stood for an astonishingly long time on the toes of one foot with her other leg extended behind her. She only quit after her leg started to tremble visibly. A couple of the girls had trouble paying attention and wandered around the room instead, but June was all focus, sometimes smiling, but more often looking dead serious.

At one point I thought I heard the music to the Mexican Hat Dance but I wasn’t sure if it was coming from June’s studio or one of the other rooms. The two-to-four year old class was practicing nearby. June told me later they danced to a song from The Lion King and to “Penny Lane,” one of the few Beatles songs she can identify. When class was over, the girls got their hands stamped and then lined up to take a running leap toward the door.

June was not as elated as she was after the soccer game, but she was quietly satisfied. As we were on our way out, the receptionist asked her how it went and she gave her a thumbs up. “So you’ll be back next week?” she asked.

“Yeah,” June said in a matter-of-fact voice.

And she will be back, back to school, back to soccer, back to ballet. It should all be routine now that she’s gotten the last of the beginnings under her belt. After all, it’s just that time of year and she’s a half older.

Two Weekends

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Steph

I had a long week and Beth did, too. She had to work late on Thursday night and will be working this weekend, too. It seems like a good time to reflect on the past two weekends. They were very different from each other but each charming in its own way.

Two weekends ago, Beth and I dropped the kids off at my mother and stepfather’s house, had pizza with them, and then and headed for a hotel in nearby Chester County. The original plan was for Mom and Jim to take the kids to Sesame Place on Saturday but that weekend was during the heat wave so after Mom and I conferred, she decided to take them to the Please Touch Museum (http://www.pleasetouchmuseum.org/) instead.

Beth and I went out for ice cream at Friendly’s on our way to the hotel Friday night in order to establish a festive mood. Saturday we spent the morning at the Brandywine River Museum (http://www.brandywinemuseum.org/), a museum mostly dedicated the works of N.C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. I’ve been to this museum several times, mostly as a kid, but I’d never done the tour of N.C. Wyeth’s house and studio before (http://www.brandywinemuseum.org/ncstudio.html) probably because until 1994 there were Wyeths still living in the house, so that was fun. I especially liked seeing the studio. It’s a beautiful space with huge windows, a mural up on the wall and props all around. When you’re in there it feels as if N.C. has just stepped out, even though he died in 1945.

In the museum I was particularly charmed by “In a Dream I Meet General Washington” (http://brandywine.doetech.net/Detlobjps.cfm?ParentListID=81915&ObjectID=1409117&rec_num=5#42) in the N.C. Wyeth collection. Click on the thumbnail. It will enlarge. I also liked “Evening at Kuerners” in the Andrew Wyeth Gallery (http://www.swoyersart.com/andrew_wyeth/kuerners.htm). It was nice to stroll through a museum at my own pace, having time to look at the art and actually read the captions as well.

For lunch we headed to Kennet Square, mushroom capital of the world. We decided we’d have mushrooms at every lunch and dinner during our stay. We began fulfilling this pledge by ordering friend mushrooms and a Portobello salad, along with a Brie, pecan and blueberry plate. We browsed in a few shops, spending the most time in a used bookstore. I emerged with a book of Chester County ghost stories, for Noah (but I read it before I gave it to him) and a trio of Agatha Christie novels. After visiting an ice cream parlor, we headed back to the hotel, where we read without interruption for the rest of the afternoon. Before the weekend was out I had finished the ghost story book and started on one of the mysteries I was meaning to save for the beach. (Just for context, I should mention that I just last week finished a short story collection I started in May. It was a long one, but still, the point is I don’t get to read much in the summer.)

We dined at the Kennett Square Inn, a nineteenth-century inn that’s allegedly haunted (http://www.kennettinn.com/). I read about it in the book, but the ghost was also mentioned on the back of the menu. We didn’t see her (she’s a Colonial-era girl), but we did hear fellow diners wondering if they’d see her. Even without supernatural enhancement, we enjoyed our meal. (I had mushroom ravioli and crème brulee.)

The countryside around Chadd’s Ford is pretty (there’s a reason those Wyeths settled here) and there were a number of parks and gardens nearby but the heat was still withering, so we spent Sunday morning reading, first in the room, then at a Starbucks (the local coffeehouse I wanted to try was closed Sundays) and then we had an early lunch (mushroom quiche for me) and headed back to Mom’s to pick up the kids. June showed us the German porcelain doll Mom bought her on her recent trip to Europe. Noah looked up some German names for her online and June named her Ursula. Ursula has zipped right past Ella and Violet and is now June’s favorite doll.

We had a brief visit with my friend Pam before driving home. Pam and I went to high school together and now she lives in England and teaches at the University of Sussex. During the past year she has been living with her husband and two kids in her childhood home, and trying to sell it, as her parents have moved. We caught them a week before they were going to fly back to the U.K. We ate leftovers from the goodbye party they’d hosted the day before, chatted and watched the kids play in the sprinkler. And then we drove home.

The following weekend we set aside both afternoons to take each of the kids to a movie alone. On Saturday, Noah went over to Sasha’s while we took June to see Winnie the Pooh. She loved it. She loved going to the movies with both moms and no brother. “It’s my special day,” she kept announcing. And she loved being in a big theater with her own bag of popcorn (she ate the whole thing!) and she loved the film itself. She kept talking excitedly about what was going on and laughing at the jokes. Her favorite part was when Pooh’s stuffing was coming out, she said later. A week later she seems to remember the plot pretty well. Today she drew a series of pictures of Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Kanga, Roo and the Backson in various scenes from the movie and taped them together into a book.

It’s so hard to find an innocent kids’ movie that’s not too scary or full of snarky jokes these days that I really appreciated it. And I think a lot of parents did, too. Beth said it’s doing very well at the box office. Among my own circle of friends, the Mallard Duck’s mom recently wrote a blog post about seeing Winnie the Pooh with her daughter that’s worth reading. She captured exactly what I felt about it (http://mimi37.blogspot.com/). Also, I realize this is a bit meta, because she links to me in this post, but bear with me and read it.

Sunday, we left June with a sitter and went to see Time Bandits at AFI (http://www.afi.com/) with Noah. Noah didn’t exclaim about it being his special day, but still it was nice to have the chance to focus on him without the competing chatter of his little sister. I saw Time Bandits thirty years ago when it came out in theaters at least twice. I remembered loving it but not a lot of detail about the plot. I was just a little nervous about it for Noah because of the fuzziness of my memory and because I was fourteen, and not ten, when I saw it. It was rated PG, but it was made in the days before PG-13, when that rating covered a wider range of material.

As it turned out, it was just at his level in terms of action. The violence was comparable to the Chronicles of Narnia films we’ve watched at home and I think the very mild sexual innuendo probably went over his head. He loved most of the humor. I think he missed a few jokes, but the line “So that’s what an invisible barrier looks like,” made him guffaw and he also liked the part where Evil blows up a one of his minions for asking an impertinent question and then concedes, “Good question,” and goes on to answer it. I don’t think Noah’s ready for Monty Python yet ( it’s both racier and gorier) but it made me look forward to when he is.

As different as the weekends were, I think what I liked about them was the same thing. We were split up in unusual combinations. Beth and I don’t make enough time for dates and alone time, or rather, we resolve to and then we do and I really enjoy it and then we slip out of the habit. That’s the pattern, so a weekend alone was a nice luxury. Thanks, Mom and Jim! We also don’t have a lot of two-parent-one-child time with either of the kids and I think that’s important, too. As easy as it is to get bogged down in the hassles of day to day life, every so often I find myself thinking of the light coming through N.C. Wyeth’s studio windows and I know Winnie the Pooh’s adventure with the Backson is still reverberating in June’s imagination. I think these two weekends did us all good.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Steph

“Brown paper packages tied up with strings/These are a few of my favorite things,” June sang as she stepped out of the bathtub Thursday evening.

“You’re going to be great tomorrow,” I told her, wrapping her in a towel and kissing her on the nose.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because you’ve been practicing so hard,” I said.

Friday was the last day of the only week this summer when both kids had camp at the same time. As they were both in drama camps, we had two performances to attend. June was going to be Marta in a revue of songs from The Sound of Music and Noah was playing Simon in a scene from a stage adaptation of Lord of the Flies. And to top off our day of the performing arts, Beth and I had a date for dinner and a movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was playing at the American Film Institute (http://www.afi.com/). We were celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of our first date.

We’re about halfway through the two-week stretch of the summer I’ve been anticipating more than any other except our beach week in August. I’ve just had a week of kid-free mornings, which I split pretty satisfactorily between relaxation and working on abstracts. Next week is the only week this summer when June has camp (Music Tink—they will make their own instruments) and Noah doesn’t. I’ve been looking forward to this as much as the me-time of last week because while June and I have a lot of time alone together Noah and I don’t and he’s good company. Then next weekend, the kids are having their long-awaited weekend with Mom and Jim, while Beth and I stay in a B &B in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chadds_Ford_Township,_Delaware_County,_Pennsylvania).

Friday morning I heard one of the kids stirring just before six. I hoped it was Noah, who would read quietly until breakfast at 7:15, and not June, who would climb into bed with us and probably not go back to sleep or let me sleep. I was just about asleep again myself when June came into the room ten minutes later, announcing she’d wet the bed. Now I knew we were definitely not going back to sleep.

“Happy anniversary,” Beth mumbled sleepily as I instructed to June to take off her wet pajama bottoms and underwear and leave them in the sink, put on dry underpants and come to bed with us. Her bed could wait, I decided. We snuggled and read some books and eventually got up.

By the time we left for camp at 8:20, I’d started the dishwasher, as well as two loads of laundry, and carried the drying rack with June’s freshly laundered mattress cover to a sunny spot in the yard so it would be dry by Quiet Time, and packed June’s snack, a chore that involved actual cooking (well, boiling an egg). Even needing to go back to the house twice for forgotten items (including cucumbers from our garden, a thank you gift to the White-Tailed Deer’s dad for driving June home from camp this week), we were still early to camp. June was that excited and eager to get going. “It’s too bad Noah can’t come because this show is going to be awesome,” she predicted, though she also confessed to being “a little nervous.” I assured her Ms. Gretchen has a lot of experience with kids and shows and she would know how to put her at ease.

After I dropped June off I lingered in the rec center lobby, drinking bottled coffee and writing and listening to the children practice their songs in the nearby auditorium. I had decided to stay in the general area because I wanted to do laps at the public pool at the elementary school next door and it didn’t make sense in terms of time to go home after that. After a long swim, I returned to the rec center lobby and read the newspaper until parents (including Beth, who had a morning doctor’s appointment and had taken the whole day off) started trickling in. The drama teacher’s parents were there to watch their granddaughter in the show. They had two bouquets of pink carnations, one for Gretchen, I assumed, and one for her daughter. Gretchen’s daughter, we learned, was wearing an authentic Austrian dress, a brown jumper with embroidery (not precisely a dirndl because it lacked the apron, but it was close).

Three of June’s nursery school classmates (the Ghost Crab, Ground Beetle and White-Tailed Deer) and another Purple School alum from the class ahead of theirs, who June knew from science camp last summer, were all attending this camp, so I knew a lot of the parents. It was fun to see them and chat, though I was sorry to see the Ghost Crab’s mom, who is one week overdue with her third child, hasn’t had the baby yet. We all hope it will be soon.

Finally, it was show time. We all took our seats, and oh, the cuteness, I cannot adequately describe the cuteness. The children, all girls ages four to six, had all been cast as Von Trapp children and had been instructed to dress as they thought a Von Trapp child should. At first this was distressingly vague as I am not all that familiar with The Sound of Music. It’s possible I’ve never seen it. I’m not sure. But Google Images is my friend and I decided June’s yellow dress with the purple flowers and white bib was old school enough and even called the play clothes made of curtains to mind. The girls had interpreted Gretchen’s instructions in varying ways. A lot of them had braids and wore jumpers with blouses but a lot of them just went in the fancy dress direction. One girl was resplendent in a sparkly purple gown that looks nothing like what anyone in the film ever wears. June was probably somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of authenticity. I put her hair in pigtails because I have not yet learned to braid hair (although I suspect this may be in my future.)

The show consisted of a brief scene in which the Von Trapp children, played by campers (and one college-age assistant who played one of the boys) introduce themselves to Maria, played by Gretchen, followed by four songs, one of which was musical narration for a puppet show with sock puppets the kids had made. There was also a lot of choreography and I have to say the girls did a pretty good job knowing where on the stage they needed to sit, walk, run or dance. Because there were fifteen kids it was not imperative that they all know all the lyrics to all the songs as long as some of them were singing at any given time, which is more or less how it worked out. In the introduction scene they didn’t even need to say their lines alone as most of the Von Trapp children were played by two or three real children. June’s line was “I’m Marta. I’m turning seven on Tuesday and I want a pink parasol.” I couldn’t actually hear her over the other two Martas.

We took a video of the entire show for Noah, at his request. He’s in the process of editing the footage now. Let me know if you’d like a look when he and Beth have finished.

When the show was over, all the girls got a pink carnation from the bouquets. I’m not sure if that was the original idea, or if Gretchen decided to divvy the flowers her parents brought among all the performers. June’s is sitting in a glass of water on her bedside table now.

We went home for lunch and a nap and a little after three, we were heading out to Noah’s performance. Round House Theater (http://www.roundhousetheatre.org/) has four age groups this summer and Noah had the option to be in the nine-to-ten age group or the ten-to-thirteen group. He picked one camp in each category. This one, Acting for the Stage, was a two-week camp with older kids. They did the usual drama camp games he has loved for years and drew big pictures of how they imagined characters and settings. But they also spent a lot of time working with real scripts, which was a new thing for him. They did monologues and scenes from several plays. One day I figured out they’d been working on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from the following clues: “It was about two people with long names. I can’t remember them. There was a lot of word play. It had something to do with Hamlet.” He was amazed when I came up with the title of the play. A liberal arts education is good for parlor tricks like that.

At the performance, campers did scenes from Lord of the Flies, Winnie the Pooh, The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Diary of Anne Frank. My suspicion is Noah would have chosen The Phantom Tollbooth if they had not been assigned parts. He loves that book. Noah’s scene was from early in Lord of the Flies, while the boys are still fairly civilized and only just starting to bicker, so we didn’t see his character get mistaken for the beast and killed in the frenzy of a primal dance. Oh well. He remembered all his lines and performed well, even though in this particular scene Simon has a small part. June loved the Winnie the Pooh scene, which was done twice with different actors, and laughed both times. It made me decide to take her to see the new Pooh movie.

When the performance was over, we drove Marta and Simon home, delivering them to the care of the babysitter who was waiting for us on the front porch and then drove straight back to the same neighborhood we’d just left for a lovely dinner at Pacci’s (http://paccispizzeria.com/) and the movie. We were eating early so at the beginning of our meal we had the side patio all to ourselves, which was nice. Despite living so close for so long, we’ve never actually been to AFI. The theater is big and beautiful, just like movie theaters used to be and the movie was fun. We’re thinking of going back in a couple weeks to take Noah to see Time Bandits. (They’re doing a series of films from the 80s, which as Noah says are “really old movies.”) It felt appropriate to be seeing a movie for our anniversary, too, because not on our first date but on our second (which was the very next day–I know, very lesbian) we saw Raising Arizona at the theater in downtown Oberlin.

We don’t go out and participate in the arts as much as we used to when we were twenty (look at that photo—we were practically children!) and living in a college town or thirty and childless and living in a big city, but the arts are still important in our every day lives. The kids have both been to multiple drama and music classes and camps. We hear the sound of Noah’s snare drum and the mournful little ballads June composes all the time. I do miss having more of a cultural life and I look forward to seeing more concerts and plays and movies and museum exhibits as the kids get older, but I also have to say that watching my kids sing and act really is one of my favorite things.

More Than Cheese

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Steph

I’d give up provolone-y
If you would have it so
If you’d give me a kiss please, then swiss cheese I’d forgo
A Philadelphia cream, I need no longer dream
For I love you more than cheese.

From “I Love You More Than Cheese” by Sandra Boynton

On Sunday evening I was reading my email and noticed I had a message from the Grey Squirrel’s mom. We’d been talking about setting up a play date at the Squirrel’s house for a while and she was proposing Wednesday morning. She could pick June up, take her back to her house to play with the Squirrel, and then drop off both girls at school when she picked up her son (who’s in the morning class there).

“That would be perfect,” I replied. “Wednesday is my birthday!” All of a sudden I was looking at six hours of kid-free time. I wondered what to do with it. It occurred to me that I had a coupon for a free drink at Starbucks and that Cake Love (http://www.cakelove.com/locations_silverspring.php) will give you a free cupcake on your birthday and that there’s a Starbucks and a Cake Love right around the corner from each other in downtown Silver Spring. I’m usually nervous about getting too far away from home during June’s school day, afraid I might miss a bus, get stranded and miss pickup, but with six hours, I felt comfortable trying it.

Actually I felt comfortable with four and I wanted to be there around lunchtime, so I puttered around the house for two hours after the Squirrel’s mom fetched June, messing around online (a lot) and straightening up the house (a little). I was at the bus stop at eleven, and in Silver Spring by eleven-thirty. I picked up my cupcake (lemon swirl), and wandered into Border’s to look for a couple books I’d seen favorably reviewed on a blog I read, but despite the assistance of their computer system and a salesclerk, I couldn’t find either. (Digression: Doesn’t it drive you crazy when the computer at Border’s tells you the book you want is “likely in store” and then suggests a few possible sections where it might be shelved? If they’re going to bother with a computer tracking system, why can’t it direct you with certainty and precision? It’s like interacting with a cheerful, well-meaning passerby who doesn’t really know much about the store.)

My next stop was Lebanese Taverna (http://www.lebanesetaverna.com/), where I ordered an a la carte lunch (two pieces of falafel and two little pies, one spinach and one cheese). I think when June’s in kindergarten there’s a danger I will develop the habit of lunching out alone and spend all together too much money on it. There’s something deliciously decadent about reading a magazine while eating a meal someone else prepares for you.

From there I progressed to Starbucks. I still had the cupcake and I had every intention of getting an iced latte to go with it, but then the frappuchino poster spoke to me and I ended up with a coconut mocha frap. I put the cupcake in my backpack for later. I have a wicked sweet tooth, but even I wouldn’t have a cupcake and a milkshake by another name in one sitting. I sat outside, sipping the frap and reading Mark Twain short stories (I’d finished the Post magazine at lunch). I finished three stories, checked my watch (just after one) and headed for the bus stop, where I read one more story (they’re short) before the bus came. It was one-thirty when I got home. I messed around some more online, exercised and left to get June. It’s amazing how fast 8:50 to 2:45 can zip past you.

Noah got home around four-thirty, and to my relief, he had very little homework. I am liking the fourth quarter so far. The long-term project is a puppet show. The kids have to research the topic (Noah’s group is doing animals in a coral reef), write the show, make the puppets and scenery and perform it, but the best thing of all is that they are doing nearly all of the work at school. He still has math or writing homework to do every so often, but frequently he has nothing to do but practice percussion and this was one of those days. I’d been banking on that when I requested dinner out at Austin Grill (http://www.austingrill.com/silverspring.html). The last meeting of my book club was at 7:30 so going out was ambitious even without worrying about Noah’s homework.

When Beth got home early at 5:15, Noah was more or less ready for the festivities (except he’d forgotten to print my birthday card and his shoes were missing in action). I’d suggested taking the presents to the restaurant, but Noah wanted me to open my presents at home. The reason, it turned out, was that there was a song he wanted to play while I opened his present, “I Love You More Than Cheese,” from Sandra Boynton’s marvelous CD Rhinoceros Tap. Do you want to hear a cartoon mouse sing this song on YouTube? Of course you do. Go ahead, I’ll wait (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCgk3RhrKFI). It was a hint, as was the inside of his card, which featured a mouse, saying, “More cheese!” The gift was a duplicate set of the cheeses I received for Mother’s Day: Comté, Emmentaler, Gruyére and Rothkase, all imported from the Alps. (They were freebies, due to an error on the part of the catalog, but I’m a fan a cheese, so I’m not complaining.)

I also got two CDs (Paul Simon’s and k.d. lang’s latest ones), a pencil case, a shirt, a Starbucks gift card and a tree planted for me in a national park. Oh, and a bottle of cinnamon. That last one was from June and she was very insistent about it, according to Beth. She thinks I will sprinkle it on my tea, and I suppose I will, at least once, to make her happy, though cinnamon sticks might have worked better for this purpose.

Next we drove back to downtown Silver Spring and had dinner outside, near the fountain on a warm spring evening. There was a half moon up in the blue sky and Beth said it was “a beautiful evening” to spend with her “beautiful family.”

The strawberry lemonade at Austin Grill is downright addictive. When I took my first sip, I admitted to Beth, “This is why I wanted to come here.”

“Our work is done,” she said, but nonetheless we ate our dinner (PB&J, black beans and rice and corn on the cob for the kids, a corn and chili soup for me and a plate of spinach and cheese enchiladas that Beth and I split.) The soup was very tasty and both kids deigned to eat the corn, which came slightly blackened from the grill, much to their surprise. I praised them for being flexible at the end of the meal.

It was almost 7:15 when we got home, so we decided to eat birthday cake in shifts. The kids would have some at snack time and Beth and I would have ours when I got back from the book club. She drove me to the rec center and headed back home to put the kids through their evening routine while I discussed Bleak House with adults. They’re more than just adults actually—at least half the members of the book club are senior citizens, so forty-four was feeling pretty youthful. I have really enjoyed meeting with these folks every other week since the end of March to enter into the imaginative world of Dickens’ version of nineteenth-century England. Although my graduate training has stuck with me to the extent that I could probably never utter the phrase “universal truths” in earnest, I find the fact that they do a refreshing change.

After I finished the novel last week, I spent more time than I want to admit digging through piles of dusty old papers in the basement, looking for the essay I wrote on Bleak House my first semester of college. I found it and it was worth the search. I have to say I was impressed with my eighteen-year-old self and I half suspect she was smarter than I am now, or at the very least that she had the mental focus to read more carefully than I do now. In any event, though I listened more than I spoke at book club, I worked the thesis of the paper into the discussion and was possibly more gratified than a truly modest person would be to hear a little silence fall over the table, followed by a few people quietly saying, “Oh, yes” and “I hadn’t thought of that.”

I had to wait a while for a bus, so it was 9:25 when I got home, and Beth and I sat down to eat our slices of lemon-raspberry cake from the Firehook bakery near her office (http://www.firehook.com/e-com/index.cfm). It was a sweet ending to a lovely day, full of treats and a surprising amount of cheese. From the Lebanese cheese pie, to the imported European cheeses Noah got me, to the Tex-Mex enchiladas, I ate well. But more than all the desserts and all the cheese, I appreciated the nice mix of alone time, family time and adult time. That was probably the most nourishing aspect of my day.

Entering the Double Digits

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Steph

Leaving the Single Digits

The last weekend Noah was nine, Beth and June went on a camping trip with five other families from June’s preschool and he and I had the house to ourselves from Friday evening until early afternoon on Sunday. This was the longest I’ve ever been separated from June, and I did miss her, but the day and a half of one-on-one time with Noah was more than worth it. We read seven chapters of The Titan’s Curse, watched The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, worked in the yard together, played Yahtzee and had apple-cinnamon pancakes for dinner on Saturday. And I even had time to work for four hours in between all that. I got to sleep in until 7:30 on Saturday and 7:50 on Sunday. I wondered if it was a glimpse of what life would be like when my youngest child is in the upper elementary grades. If so, it was a cheering vision.

On Sunday morning, two college students came to mow the lawn. We often need someone to cut it short with a power mower this time of year so we can handle the rest of the quick growth season (May and June) with our push mover. Noah, who recently told me he’d like to learn to mow the lawn, watched from the kitchen window the whole time. It reminded me of the last day of his spring break. I’d taken the kids to Starbucks and they rode their scooters there. As Noah zipped circles around me and June on the shopping center sidewalk, a toddler boy stared at him with that same look. I could see the little boy’s longing to be big enough to dash around on a scooter and the medium-sized boy’s longing to be six feet tall and to move heavy things out of the way effortlessly.

Noah’s not a toddler any more, as close as those days seem, and he’s not a strapping young man who’s taller and stronger than his mothers. Not yet. He’s somewhere in between. He’s ten. The other day June commented, “When you’re ten, that’s a lot because you’re almost thirteen.” Now I wouldn’t go that far, but it does seem like a milestone, getting into the double digits. He’s had a good year, too. He’s doing well in a very challenging academic program and he’s much more in his element socially.

Entering the Double Digits: The Birthday

Tuesday was Noah’s birthday. He opened presents in the morning. He almost insisted on waiting until evening because he was born at 6:05 p.m. and he insisted he wouldn’t be ten until then. This would have fine on most days, but on this particular day Beth had to work late and wouldn’t be home until after the kids were in bed. He seriously considered waiting until the day after his birthday to open his presents, but when he woke up on Tuesday morning and I asked him if he wanted his presents, he decided he’d open them but he wouldn’t use anything until 6:05 p.m.

In his card we let him know that we’d renewed his Odyssey (http://www.odysseymagazine.com/) and Club Penguin (http://www.clubpenguin.com/) subscriptions and that his non-school night bedtime is now 9:15 (instead of 8:45). The card itself was a hit. It had an alien on the front and you could record parts of the message to personalize it. Noah can recite the message by heart. It starts “Greeting, Earthling Noah…” It goes on to say the aliens are visiting our street and town “to celebrate your tenth year of existence.” I had a hard time deciding whether to record “tenth” or “eleventh.” Are we celebrating the end of the tenth year of the beginning of the eleventh? I went with the more intuitive “tenth.” I’d set out to find a card with an alien or outer space theme because one of his presents was a story I wrote for him and it’s about a UFO. The past two Christmases Noah has written me a story as a present so I decided to return the favor.

He also got a pair of pirate summer pajamas, a tie-dyed t-shirt, a Wii ocean exploration game and a deck of cards with short mysteries to solve (and a little mirror to read the solutions, which are printed backwards). I got this because it seemed like fun and because he was having another detective party. YaYa sent a contribution toward his Lego robot fund. She called that afternoon when he got home from school and my mom called that evening to let him know that she’d renewed his subscription to Car and Driver and that the solar-powered car she got him was back-ordered and would arrive later this month.

He held true to his resolution about not using anything until evening. He liked the shirt but would not wear it. And he would not read the story until after dinner (buttered spinach linguine with broccoli and tofu at his request and mini cheesecakes as a surprise dessert). After he read it he smiled and said, “I could see me and June in it.” (The two main characters are based on Noah and June, four years in the future.) It so happened he had very little homework that night, so he played the Wii game after he read the story. He had some trouble figuring it out and got frustrated so I suggested he wait to play it until a time when Beth was home. He and June ended up watching Shaun the Sheep (http://www.shaunthesheep.com/) episodes until bedtime.

Entering the Double Digits: The Party

Noah’s party was the next Saturday and other than send out invitations we’d done almost nothing to prepare for it, plus Mother’s Day was coming up and we had a portfolio conference at June’s school so Friday was a busy day. It started with the conference at 8:30. We presented Lesley with a little cucumber vine for teacher appreciation week, and got to see a collection of June’s artwork and journal entries. She picked out the piece she wanted to display at the art show and then Beth, Noah and I all wrote her a little note about what we liked best in her work, and Lesley got all teary over pictures of June when she was two. I don’t know how she gets through the end of the year and the departure of another class every spring. Some days I don’t know how I will.

We left June’s school and Beth drove Noah to his school with three dozen doughnuts he was taking as a treat for his class party and June and I got on a bus headed for downtown Takoma Park where we bought Mother’s Day presents for Beth. June selected Gerber daisies at the florist and I picked up over a pound and a half of M&Ms (milk and dark chocolate), which Noah had asked me to buy. (Beth has an M&M dispenser on her desk at work. This should keep it filled for a while.)

Beth’s co-oped at June’s school that afternoon and afterwards she took Noah to the party store to buy balloons and cups, plates and napkins while June slept and I cleaned house. He selected a flag design because he’d decided the detectives at the party would work for the government. This detail made the whole narrative of the party– searching for bad guy with a cake filled with explosives–kind of eerie, given that Osama bin Laden was killed less than a week ago, but I decided not to think too hard about it. After dinner, the kids helped me give the porch its annual swabbing with soapy water and that evening, Noah used the first night of his new weekend bedtime to work on clues for the party.

Saturday morning, he continued to work on the clues while Beth shopped for cake ingredients and baked the cake and I continued to clean house, scrub the dirt off the glass patio table and set up chairs in the yard. For his eighth and ninth birthdays, Noah put the theme of his party up to a vote, but this year he wanted to go with detectives again because there had been some mix-ups with the clues that year and he wanted a do-over. I did a walk-though of the clues once he had them printed and hidden to make sure each clue was in the proper place and led to the next one. Everything seemed to be in order. This year there was a new twist in the game. He was dividing his guests into two teams, which would compete to find the bad guy, played by Beth, first.

On the morning of the party, only five out of Noah’s eight guests had RSVPed, which was complicating his efforts to assign people to teams but we got two last-minute calls from parents of guests so we knew there would be either seven or eight guests. He’d invited five boys and three girls. Two of the guests attend Noah’s old school, four go to his new school and two have attended both schools with him. I was encouraged that he has so many more friends than last year, which had been a social low point for him, and also curious to see how everyone would get along since they didn’t all know each other.

When it was party time, June and I waited out on the porch to greet the guests, collect their presents and tell them where to go. Beth was not supposed to be seen until the culmination of the game, and Noah was in the detective headquarters (the garage), waiting to give the detectives their instructions as they arrived. By 4:20 everyone but Calvin, who had a lacrosse game and we knew would arrive late and the girl who never RSVPed was there, so I told Noah to start the game. Soon kids were running all over the yard chasing clues and talking to each other on walkie-talkies. Despite our best efforts, there were some snafus. A clue hidden under a patio chair cushion was missing (I think it must have fallen out when I was moving furniture). Some clues were discovered out of order or by the wrong group. Noah was a little disgruntled, but overall, everyone seemed to be having a pretty good time. Even after one group had won, one of the kids on the other team wanted to decode one of the clues Noah had printed in code, so everyone else waited on the porch for him to finish so they could move on to the pizza and cake and ice cream portion of the festivities.

This was one of the most interesting parts of the party for me. Noah and David were huddled over the code, Noah watching David’s progress, while everyone else chatted. The kids still at Noah’s old school caught up the kids who’d moved to his new school on all the school gossip. Who’s friends with who now and who’s no longer friends, mostly. Then the kids who’d moved to Noah’s school gave reports on it which ranged from “awesome” to ‘I hate it.” But they also talked about a girl they suspect of having an eating disorder and compared notes on which middle and even high schools they want to attend. They sound so much older now than they did last year. Two of the guests (Elias and Samira) attended nursery school with Noah and two (Sasha and Maura) he met in kindergarten. I don’t understand how those four and five year olds turned into these lanky kids who can look into the future with such ease.

When David finished with the code, we moved to the backyard to eat pizza and cake and ice cream. The cake was one of Beth’s annual masterpieces. Noah wanted it to look like steel plates with screws and a stick of dynamite inside. She accomplished this by baking a separate layer of red-dyed cake and inserting it into the middle of the vanilla cake, covering the cake with graham crackers and frosting it with gray frosting with little swirls of black for the screws.

I’d arranged chairs in a circle on the lawn because I thought it would be too crowded to get everyone around the table. As soon as everyone was seated and eating, Sami launched into a very creepy ghost story about a haunted doll that kills the pets and brother of the girl who buys her, and eventually the girl herself. Hearing this, I tried to coax June out of the circle, but she wanted to stay right where she was and listen to the big kids so I let her. Then Eli told his favorite party story, about a butcher who kills people and sells their meat. Maura started talking about a book of ghost stories she has and it turned out Calvin has the same book, which led to a discussion of serial killers, real and fictional. The kids started deciding what they’d be called if they were serial killers: The Slaughterhouse (Eli) and the Stab (Sami) were popular. Around this time, David said the conversation was “getting out of hand” and left the circle. Soon after his twin brother Richard followed him and they started kicking a soccer ball around the yard. Then the rest of the kids drifted away from eating and starting running around the yard, throwing balls at each other, brandishing sticks and needing to be reminded not to kill each other before their parents came to pick them up. It was a long fifteen minutes, but finally, six o’clock rolled around the party was over.

Noah opened his presents after his guests left. Some of the gifts were crime or mystery-relaed: a lie detector kit, some books from the 39 Clues series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_39_Clues). My favorite card came from Maura. She drew a spaceship with an alien in it flying from one planet to another. One planet had a sign that said, “Leaving the single digits” and the other one said, “You are entering the double digits.”

After his presents were open, we played the game Auntie Sara got Noah, Imagineniff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginiff), until it was almost time for June to go to bed. Noah used his second night of extended bedtime to have us all listen to The Series of Unfortunate Events. We’re still on Book 10 (and have been for a few months). Our progress has slowed since I decided we really shouldn’t listen to it in front of June anymore, partly because it’s not age appropriate, and partly because I don’t want to spoil it for her when she is old enough to read it. I’m hoping the new bedtime arrangement means we can get back into listening to it on a more regular basis.

Today was Mother’s Day, which seemed like an appropriate way to mark the end of Noah’s birthday week, since he was the one who made us mothers a decade ago. I got fancy cheese and crackers from Noah, lemon tea and dark chocolate with dried blueberries and bouquet of pink carnations from June. We spent the day grocery shopping, mowing the lawn, and planting things in the garden. We’ve left the single digits of our mothering adventure behind. Now it’s time to see what the double digits hold.

A Whole Handful of Years

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Steph

Tuesday night, the night before June turned five, she and Beth were horsing around in our bed while they waited for me to come read a story. When I arrived, Beth was holding up all five fingers on one hand “because I’m going to be five,” June exclaimed.

“Yes, a whole handful of years,” Beth agreed.

Five seems momentous. Although kindergarten is still five months off, she’s the age she will be when she steps onto that bus and crosses the line from little kid to big kid. When that happens, for the first time in over ten years there will be no infants, toddlers or preschoolers in our household. I am more happy than sad about this. June is, too. She’s been telling us all the things five year olds can do, although she concedes that “even five year olds still need a mother,” so we’re not obsolete yet.

I. Wednesday: The Big Day

At 6:50 a.m. on the big day, June crawled into our bed. She’d been up late the night before, full of anticipation and unable to fall asleep, or even stay in bed. Finally, at 9:20, Beth told her if she didn’t stay in bed long enough to fall asleep she’d never turn five and she’d be four forever. That did it. The next time I checked on her, she was asleep.

“There’s a five year old in our bed!” Beth cried, but June is always slow to wake, even on her birthday, and she said she was not ready to open presents. Twenty minutes later, we all trooped out to the living room, where we spread out her presents. There were clothes and books but the biggest hits were the paint-it-yourself ceramic butterfly bank (allowances start at age five in our house) and the SmarTrip. I really did not expect June to be as thrilled about receiving her own bus and train fare card as Noah was at age five, but apparently being old enough to have to pay on public transportation is a big deal to my kids. A lot of the presents were bird or butterfly-related (Fancy Nancy’s Bonjour Butterfly, a hooded towel with an owl head on top and wings on the sides and a tail in back). That’s because the theme of her party was birds and butterflies, not that she knew it yet.

June requested a surprise party this year. A few people have remarked to me that organizing her own surprise party is quintessential June. At first I thought it was absolutely crazy, but then I realized it would give me a lot freedom to plan things to my own liking and it ended up being kind of fun, buying butterfly stickers and bird finger puppets for the gift bags in secret.

Despite the fact that she did not know when the party would be, or who would be invited or what the theme would be, she did set down some ground rules for us. It would be an at-home party, with five guests (she had to choose between this or renting a space, inviting the whole class and forgoing presents). The guests all had to be girls. And we simply had to buy the sun piñata she’d fallen in love with at the grocery store. I conceded, even though I’d found some nice bird ones online and butterfly piñatas are everywhere. This was the downside to the surprise element. She kept suggesting things that did not fit in with the theme. For instance a mere a week before the party she proposed it have princess theme (“and which princess could be the surprise”) but by that point we’d long ago settled on a theme, bought party favors and sent out invitations featuring her own artwork of, your guessed it, birds and butterflies. So there was no going back.

After lunch on her birthday June tried chewing gum for the first time. We’d been telling her she could try it when she was five for a long time, and then she just happened to get five pieces from the piñata at the Gray Squirrel’s birthday party last weekend. She liked it and did not swallow it, though she was unable to blow a bubble (even after sacrificing one piece of gum so I could demonstrate). I told her it might take a while to learn.

After that excitement was over we walked to school, bringing two dozen homemade mini-cupcakes, vanilla with pink icing, and I stayed for about half her school day so I could be there for all the festivities. At Circle Time she got to walk around an oblong rock-filled tray with five lit votive candles (a preschool tradition) and say what she did when she was one, two, three, four and what she will do when she’s five. When she was one, she learned to walk. When she was two, she learned to put things together (she may have been referring to train track pieces—there’s a photo she likes of her doing that on her second birthday). When she was three, she learned to ride a bike (not true incidentally). When she was four she started the Tracks class. When she was five, she was going to try not to hurt her feet when she stepped down hard. Lesley said, she’d never heard that one before and it turned out to be oddly prescient, but more on that later.

After school we opened Auntie Sara’s presents, which had arrived during the day. Among the many lovely gifts were Owl At Home (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Owl-at-Home/Arnold-Lobel/e/9780064440349), a book June loves, which is also a childhood favorite of Sara’s, and a very cute pair of pajamas with green and blue penguins. I’m not even sure if Mom or I told Sara about the bird theme or if this was a coincidence.

Shortly before dinner, June got a splinter in her big toe. It was large and deep and looked pretty easy to get out, but as I tried to pull it out, it broke off, leaving a good chunk inside her toe. I put June to soak in a warm bath in hopes that it would loosen it and when Beth got home she tried unsuccessfully to get it out. She used a needle and June was scared but very brave, holding perfectly still as Beth worked. We took a break for dinner and then I heated up some water on the stove to soak her foot again. This time, Beth was able to get it out and there was rejoicing all around. We ate some of the leftover cupcakes and put the kids to bed.

Somewhere in the middle of all that drama, June decided she would try pooping on the regular toilet instead of her potty and lo and behold, she did it, of the first time ever. We’ve had a real breakthrough in the past couple weeks. She’s having many fewer accidents and it looks like that lemonade stand we promised six months ago that she could have when she was fully potty trained might be set up in our drive way sometime soon. Unless it isn’t. This has not exactly been a linear process.

That night she decided to sleep in underwear instead of a diaper, also for the first time (on purpose anyway—there have been nights we forgot to change her into a diaper) and she was on the verge of agreeing to try sleeping without her pacifier, but at the last minute she backed out. I didn’t press the issue. There had been a lot of milestones in one day.

When it was all over, the presents, the gum, the school celebration, the splinter removal and toilet adventure, June was well satisfied with her day. “I feel so much like a five year old, I don’t even remember being four,” she said.

II. Thursday

The day after her birthday, June arrived at school wearing the pink and orange sundress and fuchsia tights Sara got for her with a coral long-sleeved t-shirt she already owned underneath. Between her birthday, some recent thrift store finds and a hand-me-down shirt, June practically has a whole new wardrobe and “the spring line” as the Bobcat’s mother dubbed it, has not gone unnoticed at preschool. June was also chewing gum and to my surprise when I asked Lesley if she needed to spit it out, Lesley said no. So I left her at school wearing her birthday finery and chewing her birthday spoils.

My mother arrived that afternoon. She has an annual conference that often coincides with June’s birthday, so she was staying for several days. June opened more presents, a lot of clothes and Fancy Nancy, Explorer Extraordinaire! (in which Nancy and friends go exploring and find both birds and butterflies). Mom read to June and we had dinner and the last of the cupcakes and put the kids to bed.

III. Friday

Two days before the party, the weather reports for Sunday were growing increasingly dire. Highs around 40 degrees (and the party was in the morning so we were looking at party-time temperatures in the 30s) and rain or possibly that other stuff, you know, the frozen stuff. I can’t even bring myself to type the word. It’s spring, for heaven’s sake! And we’d planned a walk around the neighborhood to look for birds! And we had a piñata! I briefly considered rescheduling, but the next weekend was the Ghost Crab’s birthday party (four girls in June’s class have mid-March to early April birthdays) and everyone we invited could come on the original date, so after consulting with Beth, we decided to plow ahead (no pun intended). They have outdoor recess at her school in all weather, so her friends are used to playing outside in the cold and wet.

IV. Saturday

One day before the party, Beth took June shopping for balloons and ice cream. June was going to the Cottontail Rabbit’s party in the afternoon and successfully lobbied to wear the flowered, ruffled, beribboned party dress and sparkly pink shoes my mother bought for her all day long. Beth says the shoes were much commented upon by passersby.

After the Rabbit’s very entertaining Let’s-Put-On-A-Show Cinderella party (June played one of the stepsisters), we arrived home to find Beth baking a cake. June took a nap and then went out with Beth to buy a replacement balloon for the Tinkerbell balloon Noah accidentally popped while we were out. They came back with a Dora balloon. (The balloons are an eclectic mix but Beth did manage to get a butterfly balloon into the group.)

That evening Noah vacuumed the living and dining room while all three adults straightened up the house. After the kids were in bed, Beth frosted the butterfly cake and Mom and I assembled the gift bags.

I emailed the parents of the guests, suggesting they send their daughters in boots, coats and mittens.

V. Sunday: Party Time

Despite predictions of one to five inches of the white stuff, we had only a dusting that fell overnight and during the early morning hours and melted by party time. It was very cold, but sunny. I could live with that. However, a new complicating factor was that I was really sick. Beth and Noah have been sick recently and I’d had just the mildest cold the day before that started to really wear my down by evening. I’d been up a good bit of the night, unable to breathe or sleep. But if I hadn’t backed down in the face of a predicted spring blizzard, I wasn’t going to let a head cold stop me either.

That morning, June put on a butterfly sweatshirt. I’d suggested it, and was shocked when she said yes. She generally doesn’t pay much attention to my fashion advice. Noah wore his owl shirt and I put on a pewter necklace with a mother bird feeding her baby.

Through a process of elimination, June had figured out that the party was on Sunday a couple days earlier. (We’d told her it would be a weekend day and she didn’t think it would be on the same day as the Rabbit’s party.) However, she still did not know what time it would be, and Beth came up with a very clever way to surprise her. At 9:40, twenty minutes before the party, Beth and June left the house, allegedly to go grocery shopping. Mom, and Noah and I made the final preparations and waited for the guests. Around 10:10, they had all arrived and I called Beth on her cell. Beth told June she’d forgotten her shopping list and they had to come home.

The look on June’s face when they came in the door and all her friends yelled “Surprise!” was priceless. After weeks of taking her suggestions and negotiating how much of this surprise party was going to be secret, we’d actually surprised her. For a moment she couldn’t even speak, and then she let out an excited, high-pitched squeal. Soon all six girls were talking animatedly with each other.

I told them to come sit on the living room rug for a story. I didn’t have much of a voice, so Mom and Noah took turns reading Fancy Nancy, Explorer Extraordinaire, to set the mood for our bird-watching walk. There was a lot of jostling to see the pictures and occasional side conversations broke out, but overall they paid attention pretty well.

When the story was over, we got everyone back into shoes and coats and set off on our big adventure. Noah had prepared bird identification sheets with images he’d found online of a blue jay, cardinal, crow, duck, robin and sparrow. He also included a parrot on the back as a joke. “We’re not going to see a parrot unless we go to a pet store or the rain forest,” the White-Tailed Deer commented. I said if I took them to the rain forest we would not be home when their parents came to fetch them at noon, so we’d have to stick to the neighborhood. Of course the first birds we saw were starlings and mourning doves, birds neither Noah nor I had thought to include. But eventually the kids were able to check crows, robins and sparrows off their lists. We went down to the creek to look for ducks, which we occasionally see there. The Mallard Duck said she saw one, but no one else did so it’s possible that was wishful thinking or some kind of duck solidarity. Or maybe she has a very sharp eye. Just as we were heading back to the house, I heard a woodpecker. It was hard to get everyone quieted down enough to hear it, but eventually, they all did.

When we got back to the house, Beth left to pick up the pizza and Mom and Noah and I distributed paper, pencils, crayons (and a marker for the Duck, who specially requested one) so they could draw the birds they saw, or a bird from their imaginations. June chose to draw a cardinal. This activity did not last quite long enough to bridge the time to pizza, so Noah organized the girls into a band with instruments from the instrument bin and when Beth came home, she walked in our their impromptu concert.

We had pizza and cake and ice cream. Parents started arriving during the cake so we gave them slices, too, and Beth’s moist and tasty strawberry cake was much appreciated. When everyone had finished eating, it was piñata time. All the little kids had a turn but it was the White-Tailed Deer’s older brother who demolished that thing. Noah didn’t even get a turn, but he didn’t seem to mind; he had been plenty involved in the party.

By 12:15 everyone had said their thank yous and left. June opened her presents, the games and the books, and she played with the Zhu Zhu pets (http://www.zhuniverse.com/) for a little while but around 12:45 she went to her room and came back with her pacifier. She wanted to know if she could have her Quiet Time. It was early but I said yes, being more than ready for a little Quiet Time of my own. Mom said goodbye to everyone and started her drive home and June and I both took long naps. Being alive a whole handful of years can really tucker out a kid, and her Mama, too.

Anniversaries, Part 1

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Steph

There are two notable anniversaries for me this week. Yesterday was the nineteenth anniversary of Beth’s and my commitment ceremony. Saturday will be the first anniversary of my father’s death. Let’s take them one at a time. We’ll start with the happy one.

“Beth will say this cake is so beautiful she doesn’t want to eat it,” June predicted as we finished decorating the cake. Every year on or around our anniversary, I bake a spice cake using the recipe from our wedding cake. Some years I decorate the frosting with pink and purple sprinkles (because the potted violets we gave away as favors were pink and purple) but this was the first year I ever colored the frosting itself. I did this on a whim because we had food dye on hand and our supply of purple sprinkles was running low. I hesitated as I wondered about whether lemon frosting should really be purple, but June seemed to think it was a surprisingly good idea to come from the likes of me and she was exasperated I was reconsidering. She helped me drop the red and blue dye into the frosting, spread it over the cake and sprinkle lots of pink sprinkles and a few purple ones onto the cake.

Shortly after we finished the cake it was time to take her to school, and in all the excitement of a field trip to The National Museum of Health and Medicine (http://nmhm.washingtondc.museum/) she forgot all about the excitement of having a babysitter that evening while Beth and I went out to dinner. She only remembered when she heard me telling Noah he would need to stay focused on his homework and not get distracted by June and the babysitter playing. By this time it was five o’ clock, an hour before the sitter and Beth were scheduled to arrive. I glanced outside. Snow was predicted for the late afternoon and evening and the sitter had emailed me earlier in the day to say she might bail if it was too heavy, but so far so good. It was drizzling a little but no snow.

I think it’s been six months or so since Beth and I have had a date, so I was eager for this one to work out. I made a checklist for Noah of homework he needed to complete before he could play on the computer or our new Wii. He had quite a lot of homework—several complicated math problems, putting the finishing touches on his report about modern Germany, studying for quiz on early American settlements, cursive practice and percussion practice. I had suggested to Beth that if the sitter didn’t show up and she felt okay about driving that we all four go out to dinner because I felt like celebrating and not cooking, but seeing all Noah had to get done, I was having second thoughts about the feasibility of that plan.

By 5:50, the rain had turned to freezing rain, but the sitter made it. I put noodles, broccoli, kidney beans and mozzarella cheese on the table for the kids to eat and instructed the sitter to keep June busy and out of Noah’s hair so he could work. Beth came home around six. June hurried to give us the anniversary cards she had made for us that afternoon. They had no words because she didn’t want to ask me how to spell anything for my own card, but each one had a picture of the cake on it inside and out. Then we took Beth into the kitchen to see the cake. “It’s so beautiful I don’t want to eat it,” she exclaimed. (Okay, I fed her that line by email earlier in the day.) June beamed but she didn’t seem too surprised. It was what she had predicted after all.

As we stepped carefully on the slippery driveway on our way to the car, I wondered how far down his list Noah would make it without me there to keep him on track and I told Beth I hoped I could forget about it and just enjoy the evening because it was out of my hands. She agreed; it was out of my hands.

I didn’t forget exactly but I didn’t worry much either. As we drove away from the house, I felt responsibility sliding off my shoulders. We had a really nice dinner at Roscoe’s (http://www.roscoespizzeria.com/), free because we had a gift certificate. I got an arugula salad with gorgonzola and wild mushroom crostini. Beth got marinated olives, an eggplant crostini and a small margherita pizza. We exchanged presents. I got her Lynda Barry’s new book (http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?st=art&art=a45a8141b837f5) and she got me some much needed new rain boots. We had an uninterrupted conversation and I felt happy that the sobbing preschooler at a nearby table was not ours. In the middle of our dinner, the rain changed over to snow, big beautiful flakes falling in light of the streetlights outside the restaurant.

When we got home around 7:40, June rushed to the door and said, “Do you remember about your anniversary cake?” We remembered, I assured her. I checked Noah’s to-do list. He had completed only the math and the report, but those were the most important items. We ate cake and then I quizzed him on facts about the Jamestown, Plymouth and St. Mary’s (that last one was the first English settlement in Maryland—Noah’s class took a field trip there in October) as I ran the water for his bath. He went to bed without having done the cursive practice or having practiced his percussion. I had a feeling there would be a two-hour delay or no school at all the next day. (There was in fact a two-hour delay and he did complete all his homework before he left for school, and got some sledding in, too). I was not too stressed about the unfinished homework, considerably less stressed than I would normally have been, in fact. It had done me good to get away, if just for an hour and a half, and to spend a little of 1/11/11 with my number one.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Anniversaries, Birthdays and Half-Birthdays

Cherry Blossom Baby

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Queer, Queer Fun

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A Lousy Birthday

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A Half Older

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Two Weekends

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A Few of My Favorite Things

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More Than Cheese

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Entering the Double Digits

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A Whole Handful of Years

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Anniversaries, Part 1

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