Category Archives: Anniversaries, Birthdays and Half-Birthdays

A Whole Handful of Years

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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

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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.

No Surprise

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There were no surprises on Beth’s birthday yesterday. I renewed her subscription to Brain Child (http://www.brainchildmag.com/), which I do every year on her birthday unless I got a two-year subscription the year before. Noah selected and helped pay for a two-bowl baking set to replace Beth’s favorite mixing bowl, which he broke last month. We got it from a Fiesta Ware factory in West Virginia (http://www.fiestafactorydirect.com/) to support the economy of her home state and because the other bowl was made by a West Virginian potter. I suggested blue, which is Beth’s favorite color, or red or orange because those are fall colors and it might remind her of getting them on her birthday, but Noah thought the bowls should be brown, because the original one was brown so we got chocolate brown.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty good gift idea and it might have even stayed a surprise if I hadn’t let June pick out her gift at the same time. She saw us browsing through the website and wanted to pick something, too and I thought it would be a good opportunity for both kids to have Beth’s birthday covered. I gave her some choices, including a mug with fall leaves on it and she went with a purple mug (I couldn’t get anyone on board with the fall colors theme). Soon after June told Beth she was going to give her some hints about her present. The hints went something like this: “It’s purple and it has a handle and you can drink out of it and it’s called a mug.” Somehow, Beth put two and two together on that one, and as a result, she also realized what Noah and I must have been up to on a ceramics website. Later June regretted having given away so much, and Beth said she’d probably forget what the gifts were anyway.

Then, just so there would be at least a little surprise, because I do like surprises, I picked up a dark chocolate and espresso candy bar at the Co-op, which I accidentally left on the kitchen counter in its bag. Beth found it while she was clearing off the counter a few days before her birthday. After that, I gave up. I even left the cookbook open to her birthday cake recipe (chocolate with coffee frosting) while I was putting ingredients for it on the shopping list.

So, no surprises. But that’s okay. June and I spent a pleasant morning yesterday wrapping gifts and baking the cake. I let her pick out the wrapping paper (an animal print for the mug and branches with red berries for the bowls). She helped measure ingredients and mix the batter and the frosting.

I went to the library while June was at school to get a book Noah needed for a research project on Germany and when I got off the bus in front of our house I smelled smoke. I had a moment’s panic, thinking I had not turned off the oven before we left and that the cake I’d left in there to cool would be burned into a brick and the house filled with smoke. But when I crossed the street and opened the front door, all I smelled was chocolate. Sometimes it’s good not to be surprised.

I had enough time for lunch and a longer than usual ride on the exercise bike since I didn’t expect to have much time to exercise over the holiday weekend. Then I headed back to school to collect June. In the parking lot, she told the Ground Beetle’s dad, “It’s my other mommy’s birthday!” He asked what she got for Beth. “A mug,” she answered. He said he was sure it would be precious to her.

Back at home, June had Quiet Time, and then Noah came home and we all frosted the cake. You may wonder how three people can frost a cake. I poured the contents of the frosting bowl onto the cake and let them take turns with the spatula. I thought it was finished then. After all, it was a chocolate cake with coffee frosting and those are two of Beth’s favorite flavors, so what more did it need? But neither of the kids saw it my way. June wanted me to write on the cake with black frosting from a spray can. I was game, but I found the frosting kept coming out of the can for longer after I stopped pressing the tip than I expected, so the letters were longer and shakier than I intended. With room running out, I had to shorten the message from “Happy Birthday” to “”Happy B-day,” though there was room for 44 as well. I also agreed to triangles, meant to represent birthday hats in the top corners. Both the kids wanted sprinkles but they immediately started to argue about what color so I said no sprinkles. We didn’t have two numeral four candles so I decided to use the one we had for the tens place and four regular candles for the ones place.

Noah didn’t have much homework, so I let him watch television for an hour and June watched, too, and I made dinner. I had asked Beth to pick out a recipe and she found one for breaded eggplant slices stuffed with provolone cheese and baked. They came out quite nicely. I also sautéed some spinach with garlic and dinner was ready.

After his television, Noah made a card for Beth, with the following poem:

Happy 44th Birthday!
While I write this card I’m thankful door
Come through not you of 44
I just finished watching Cyberchase
And you’re not here—
You’re som’ere else in space.
(Of course you’re here now)

He said he scrambled the words so it would be somewhat hard to understand, and thus “more poetic” and also so it would rhyme. I assume the apostrophe in the place of missing letters in the middle of a word is also a poetic touch.

Meanwhile, June decided her handmade card was not sufficient, and she needed a Clifford card, too, so we designed and printed one on the Clifford web site.

Beth got home around 6:45 and we ate dinner. When it was time to open presents June inquired if Beth had indeed forgotten what she’d gotten her and Beth dutifully said she had. She opened her presents and we had cake and ice cream. Noah said the cake looked like “a funeral cake.” Because of the drab colors and spooky handwriting, I suppose. “But you’re forty-four, not dead,” he added cheerfully. I said I was glad about that, and I am so very glad she was born and is alive and with us. Even when I fail to surprise her, I do love her very much.

The Most Beautifulist

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Autumn arrived yesterday but you’d never know it from the thermometer. It was the second of three straight days of highs in the 90s, at a time of year when it should be ten or fifteen degrees cooler. I didn’t write much about it but we had a crazy hot summer this year, nearly record-breaking, and I guess it just doesn’t want to quit. It will, though, and soon. I can tell because the dogwood tree in our front yard has a few red leaves along with the berries that appear on it every September. It’s always the first tree to change colors and it’s right on schedule.

More importantly, to us anyway, it was also June’s half-birthday yesterday. She’s four and a half now, as she will be happy to inform you. She told her drama teacher pretty much as soon as we entered the Rec Center auditorium, even though as we walked to class, she had started to get cold feet. I reminded her that she took the same class last winter and loved it, and that the teacher told me she was looking forward to seeing her again.

“I used to be excited, but now I’m nervous,” she persisted.

“It’s okay to be nervous,” I told her. “People feel that way when they start things sometimes. You just have to get used to it again.” Then I asked if she’d like me to tell the teacher she was feeling a little shy. June said yes and it seemed to make her feel better.

So I told the teacher and then June pretty much chatted her up nonstop for ten or fifteen minutes while we waited for other children to arrive. The class had been advertised with one starting time in the online catalog of activities and another in the print version so most of the class arrived late.

Once we got started, it was the familiar routine. The children did warm-up exercises, they sang a song (“Doe, a Deer”), which they will be learning along with an accompanying dance over the next eight weeks, and then the teacher read a story. It was Caps for Sale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caps_for_Sale). After she’d read it, they reenacted it. If you’ve seen anything cuter than a bunch of two to five year olds all walking across a stage balancing multiple hats on their heads, I want to know what it is. A few times I caught sight of June’s face during the class and she was just radiantly happy.

We came home and ate lunch and then we got ready to leave for school. When I changed her from a diaper into a pair of thick, purple training pants I was unnerved to realize that the diaper was dry and it had been dry since at least 8:00 a.m. There was no way she would last until we got home at 3:30 and she never pees on the potty at school so she was pretty much guaranteed to have an accident. Not that this would surprise anyone. After making it through the school day dry most days the first two weeks of school, June had been wetting her pants at school all week. The only day she didn’t was Wednesday when I sent her to school in a pull-up because they were taking a field trip. On Tuesday she went through two outfits and came home in the Toad’s spare pants (pastel plaid capris, “very cool,” June said, not at all fazed by the multiple accidents).

Sure enough when the children came around to the front of the school to sit on the porch steps and wait for dismissal, June was in her spare clothes, but at least they were her own spare clothes. At home, I asked her if she’d like to sit on the potty. She complied. She had become more interested in using the potty since Wednesday, when I promised her if she learned to use the potty, she could set up a lemonade stand in the driveway. This has been a long-standing goal of hers, made more urgent by a recently viewed episode of Curious George. Like George, she wants to buy a soccer ball with the proceeds. This despite the fact that she has two soccer balls already—including a pink one—and she’s not even playing soccer this fall. (Silently, I was planning to suggest a hot chocolate stand if she didn’t train until the dead of winter.)

Anyway, back to the point. We had some potty momentum and it came just as I was planning a two-week experiment of underwear all the time except at night and while out of the house at places other than school. The pediatrician suggested this over the summer and I was lukewarm, given June’s sorry potty record over the past two years. But kindergarten’s only eleven months away and we had to start trying again at some point, so I decided on her half-birthday as a starting date. I thought I could make a big deal about how big she’s getting, four and a half, my goodness. It must be time to start using the potty, etc.

So, she’s willing now. She didn’t go when she tried after school and around 5:00, just as I was thinking I should have her try again, she had an accident. The next accident was around 7:40, again moments after I thought I should have her try sitting on the potty. Well, I thought. She’s not trained, but maybe I’m getting close to it.

In between the accidents, we had dinner. I made sesame noodles with broccoli and tofu (the kids ate plain udon noodles with tofu and broccoli). I chose this meal because while I was flipping through a cookbook last weekend, I read that long noodles symbolize long life in China and are traditionally served on birthdays. It was also something I knew the kids would enjoy. On the side, we each had a quarter of a softball-sized but perfectly ripe watermelon from the garden and there were cupcakes for dessert. June picked out the Spiderman cupcakes at the supermarket on Sunday and they had been waiting in the freezer ever since. She surprised Beth, by spurning the Dora cupcakes and butterfly cupcakes she had originally examined. She said the Spiderman cupcakes were the “most beautifulest.” They were vanilla with white frosting tinted red and blue and they had plastic Spiderman face rings and spider rings set into the frosting.

Noah remembered that his snap circuits kit (http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-SC-100-Snap-Circuits-Jr/dp/B00008BFZH) could be set up to play “Happy Birthday” and he let June help him connect the circuits in the proper configuration. He played the music, and then we sang the song ourselves and then we all blew out the candles and ate the cupcakes.

Later that evening I was in bed with June, singing her a lullaby when she interrupted me. “Mommy, I need to use the potty,” she said. I hesitated just slightly. Was the remote chance she would actually produce anything worth getting her out of bed? But in the spirit of staying positive, I got up and she did, too. She trotted off to the potty and I helped her get settled. A few moments later I heard the sound of liquid hitting plastic, a lot of liquid from the sound of it.

“I’m peeing,” June whispered.

“I know,” I said, laying a hand on her thigh. “Don’t get up in case there’s more.” I called Beth and she came in from the study to exclaim over June’s potty victory. After a few moments June said she was done and she got up and we all looked into the potty.

I saw many beautiful things yesterday. The red leaves scattered among the green of our dogwood, promising cooler days ahead; my daughter’s beaming face as she lost herself in imagination; one of summer’s last, sweet parting gifts from the garden, and colorful grocery store cupcakes seen through a preschooler’s appreciative eyes. But that full potty was, without question, the most beautufulest.

The Birthday Girl

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I entered my mid-forties yesterday on a cold, drizzly Tuesday. It was Beth’s day to co-op at June’s school, which is my very favorite kind of weekday. I’m on my own from the time Noah’s bus comes at 8:20 until around noon when Beth and June return, and then Beth usually works from home in the afternoon. There was work I could have done, but it was my birthday so I decided to read instead. A couple years ago I asked Beth to look for a social history of the beach for some gift-giving occasion and she bought me The Beach: A History of Paradise on Earth (http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-5584915_ITM). It looked really interesting and I never read it. While it’s definitely popular history and not an academic tome, it’s still a bit denser than what I usually read these days (causing me to fret about what has happened to my mind in my five years as a stay-at-home mom). But more importantly, the chapters are discouragingly long. I can read the longest books—twelve hundred page novels don’t faze me—but only if the chapters are short. I like to feel confident I’m going be able to finish a chapter before I’m willing to start one. So anyway, with the end of June’s school year rapidly approaching, I thought I should seize the day and the book. I started reading on the porch, decided it was too cold and moved to the bed, decided I should really be getting some exercise if I was going to read inside and moved to the exercise bike. I spent over two hours reading and went from less than a quarter of the way through the book to almost halfway done. The book is full of interesting tidbits (I liked learning more about Victorian bathing machines—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathing_machine) but spending over two hours reading about the beach did cause me to wonder why it was again I was not there right then.

After lunch and June’s nap, we all headed over to Noah’s school for our meeting with Señor S because a parent-teacher meeting is what every middle-aged mom wants to do on her birthday. No, really we did it because Beth was home for the afternoon and it was convenient. It was a challenging meeting because time was short and what Señor S wanted to talk about was not exactly what we wanted to talk about, but we did learn some valuable things. First, that he’s not as strict about the papers on the desk as Noah thought he was. He said he only discards student work if he finds it on the floor with no name and then he said Noah’s been better about turning in his papers this week. Of course, Noah has his focused days and his unfocused days—like everyone, but more so—so I wasn’t sure a few days of remembering meant much. Anyway, he didn’t seem as concerned as we thought he would be, so we were able to tell Noah later it was important to keep trying to remember to turn in his work, but not to be anxious about it if he didn’t. I suggested taping a checklist to Noah’s desk to remind him of what he needed to do, but Señor S seemed to think it would make Noah feel singled out, so I don’t know if he’ll do it. When we turned the conversation to the aggressive behavior we found out he did mean Noah bumping into people and stepping on their feet. I tried to explain he probably didn’t mean to do it, but I’m not sure Señor S believed me. I’m not sure I’d believe myself in his shoes—I thought I sounded like one of those parents who think their kids can do no wrong. But we did suggest that pointing his behavior out to him, “You are leaning on So-and-So,” or “You have stepped on So-and-So’s feet,” and asking him to apologize might help make him more aware of his impact on others and help him become more considerate of their feelings. Señor S agreed to try it.

What Señor S mostly wanted to talk about is how brilliant Noah is. I think he used that word at least three times. We learned Noah actually figured out the formula for the area of a right triangle all by himself last week, which Noah failed to mention when he was telling us about it, and that now he’s eager to learn how to calculate the area of a cylinder. Now any parent would like to bask in these kinds of anecdotes, and I will admit they were nice to hear, but knowing our son, we know that being smart won’t necessarily help him to act in socially acceptable ways and remember to turn in his schoolwork. I think I was more satisfied with the meeting than Beth was, but in any event we did get some take-home messages for Noah on both issues and I felt that was important.

We got home and I opened my presents—a gift card to Border’s, a t-shirt and a book, a new backpack and metal water bottle, a promise to get my Birkenstocks resoled, candy and a framed picture of June frowning (she selected the photo herself). My sister’s presents came in a box addressed to The Birthday Girl, which I found amusing because her business —Word Girl—has the same name as the PBS cartoon (http://pbskids.org/wordgirl/) and The Birthday Girl is a character on the show, but I don’t think Sara actually knows this. Or I hope not, because the Birthday Girl is one of the villains. She insists every day is her birthday and expects to get her way all the time because of this. When she’s crossed, she turns green and grows as big as a house and starts trashing things. In one of my favorite Birthday Girl episodes she is upset about having to share her so-called birthday with the Earth on Earth Day and starts uprooting trees. Sometimes when the children are being too insistent on getting their own way or refusing to share, I tell them not to be like The Birthday Girl. Here’s a clip from the show if you want to see her in action. It’s five minutes long, but the first scene, the one in the park, is all you really need to watch– http://kidstube.com/play.php?vid=5008.

After presents, I got Noah started on his homework. My aunt Peggy, my mother’s youngest sister, had a conference in D.C. and we were meeting her for dinner at America (http://photohome.com/photos/washington-dc-pictures/america-restaurant-dc-1.html) in Union Station. This meant leaving the house at 5:00 and it was 3:20. Noah managed to read the last three chapters of The Westing Game, play “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” on the recorder five times and do three long division problems in an hour and five minutes. I was impressed and relieved he was so quick. There would have been more math, he said, but the copier was broken. Normally, I feel for the teachers who have been struggling with this balky copier for years, but for once I thought it was just as well. Noah was able to have a little downtime—he watched Word Girl—and we left.

I don’t know if it was because we skipped the kids’ normal outside playtime so Noah could finish his homework early or what, but both kids were really badly behaved just before we left. They were fighting over a toy and when we hustled them into the car they were both sobbing. I wondered how long they would keep it up but the answer was not long. We passed a graveyard on the drive over and June wanted to know what it was, which led Beth and Noah into a long conversation about burial versus cremation. I almost put in that Grandpa Steve was cremated, but then I decided against it, not sure I wanted to deal with the inevitable follow up questions.

At the restaurant, the kids were both a bit antsy and needed to be taken away from the table for walks twice, but we had time to eat—I got baked macaroni and cheese with some steamed vegetables to dip in the sauce—and time to chat with my aunt and for her to update us on her daughter Emily, son Blake and grandson Josiah. She said June and Josiah could be siblings, they looked so much alike. We hadn’t seen Peggy in a couple of years so it was nice to catch up.

At home we had cake and ice cream and put the kids to bed. When we went to bed, Beth asked me if I had a good birthday. I said yes, but I was also a little sad because I’d moved on, gotten a year older, and my Dad never will. I thought about this on the kids’ birthdays, too, but their excitement about turning four and nine pretty much swept me along and overrode any melancholy. I guess forty-three is not as thrilling.

So, I’m still sad today, but I’m not planning to rage against the universe, demand special treatment or uproot any trees. Yesterday I had some time to myself, a good book, a good meal, time with family including a visit with a member of my far-flung extended family. Life goes on; we all get older. That’s how it should be. It’s better than the alternative anyway.

Half-Grown

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The First Half: Being Nine, or The Best Part of All

When Noah got off the school bus on the last Friday in April, I asked him, “How was your last day of school as an eight year old?” He looked surprised. Because his party was over a week away, his actual birthday kind of snuck up on him. He hadn’t realized it was only three days away. (This despite June’s complaints that everyone was “always” talking about Noah’s birthday and it was “very ‘nnoying”).

The next few nights he had trouble getting to sleep at night. He’d call me back into his room to ask birthday-related questions, and one night he was up past ten. (His bedtime is eight-thirty.) He’s also been experiencing pain in his ankles at night, growing pains, I assume and that coupled with his excitement made it hard for him to fall asleep.

Over the weekend, he came up with the idea of opening his presents early so it wouldn’t have to be fit into the bustle of a school day. I tried to put the kibosh on this plan. His class party was the day after his birthday and his home party was the following weekend. If he opened his presents before his birthday there would be nothing special about the day, I argued. “But I’ll be nine,” he protested. “Isn’t that the best part of all?”

In the end, he agreed to wait, but when he woke up on Monday morning, there was a new complication. He felt sick, he said. Noah’s sensory issues can make it difficult for him to distinguish between different kinds of bodily sensations. It’s easy for him to mix up feeling sick, needing to go to the bathroom and being hungry. I asked him to go back to bed and try to really listen to what his body was telling him but he was having trouble getting a handle on it. He thought he was too sick to go to school– no, he wasn’t– yes, he was–well, maybe not.

We tabled the issue and by 6:55 we were all assembled in the living room for “the opening ceremony” as he dubbed the present opening. There were many car-related presents. June got him a little yellow metal VW Bug with a friction motor, my mom got him a subscription to Car and Driver, my sister got him a copy of the movie Cars (I asked her to do it so we can return the Netflix copy he’s been watching over and over since March). He also got books and t-shirts and pajamas, a Bananagram word game (http://bananagrams-intl.com/checkcountry.asp?page=index.asp), an Extreme Bubble Making Kit, and a new scooter to replace his old one (the brake fell off and we’ve been unable to get it repaired). It was a pretty good haul. He decided to wear the green t-shirt with a classic car on it to school, if he was going, which was still up in the air. He wanted to know if he could go for a ride on the new scooter and I said, “If you’re well enough to ride the scooter, you’re well enough to go to school.” It was one of those moments when I heard Mom-speak just coming out of my mouth without any warning. I wonder if that ever happened to our moms when we were kids.

As June and I left the house to walk to nursery school around 8:00, I heard Noah and Beth seeming to come to the conclusion that he would go to school, but I wasn’t completely sure whether I’d find him there or not when I got back. I came home to an empty house with a note on the front door. “Noah went to school,” it said.

At 11:05 the phone rang and I got off the exercise bike to answer it. It was someone from Noah’s school. He was throwing up, she said, and I needed to come get him. It was about five minutes before I needed to leave for June’s school, and to complicate matters, I had agreed to walk the Yellow Tulip home that day, to spare her very pregnant babysitter the walk. I told the woman I’d be there at 11:45. This turned out to be an optimistic estimate.

I left for June’s school right away, hoping to get there early enough to arrange for someone else to take the Yellow Tulip home. I was too flustered to realize I should call her parents or the school before I left to facilitate this, and once I got there it took a while to straighten everything out. The Blue Maple’s mom graciously agreed to take the Yellow Tulip and we left June’s school around 11:35. By myself I could have made it to Noah’s school in ten minutes, but I had June with me, and she was tired and distraught. When I explained the situation to her she realized almost immediately that this meant that we’d get home late and she’d miss Dragon Tales. She began to cry and kept it up pretty much non-stop for the next hour. Initially, I felt sorry for her. She’s tired that time of day and her after-school routine is very important to her. It’s why I never accept invitations to go to the playground after school, even for a half hour. Eventually, I stopped trying to comfort her, as nothing I said—appeals to compassion for her sick brother, promises of different television later in the day– seemed to have any effect. I just held her hand as we walked along the trail by the creek. We arrived at Noah’s school at 11:55. I went to the office to sign Noah out and then to the Health Office where the nurse said he didn’t have a fever and we left. June was still sobbing.

The birthday boy, however, didn’t seem too upset. They had an interesting book about horses to read at the Health Office, he reported.

“I guess we shouldn’t have sent you to school,” I said.

“But if I hadn’t gone to school, I wouldn’t know how to find the area of a triangle,” he said. Then he told me how to find the area of a right triangle (they haven’t covered other kinds yet) with great enthusiasm. He’d asked Señor S how to find the area of a circle, but he said they weren’t covering that this year. This happens to Noah more often than I’d like, that teachers don’t satisfy his curiosity and tell him he has to wait. He’s been waiting to study negative numbers since kindergarten. I wished then that he’d gotten into the gifted school, but he’s waitlisted. He could get in over the summer or during his fourth grade year or the summer before fifth grade, or never, so we could be in limbo for a while. But to avoid fretting, we’re assuming he won’t be going and we’re trying to figure out how to advocate for him more effectively at school so his fourth and fifth grade years are more satisfying academically than this year has been.

We got home around 12:25. Noah changed into clean clothes and June insisted she needed a change of clothes, too, because she’d gotten paint on her shirt at school. (I don’t remember her ever caring about this before.) So they both got changed and June had lunch (she stopped crying as soon as I put the food in front of her) and she napped. We’d planned to go out to dinner and get cupcakes at Cake Love afterward, but Noah was still complaining of stomach pain on and off all afternoon, so we didn’t go. By 6:00, though, he was feeling well enough to try out his new scooter and he ate a small bowl of plain udon noodles with tofu and broccoli for dinner. Around 6:40 he glanced at the clock and said, “Hey, I’ve been nine for over a half hour.”

“I’m glad you were born,” I told him. “You’re my best boy.”

And he is.

The next day he woke up feeling well and chipper, so we sent him to school. June and I delivered two trays of mini-cupcakes to his afternoon class. I had to wake her up from her nap to get there at the appointed time, and it was more like a forced march than a walk to his school. For the second day in a row, I walked into the main office, with my weeping daughter trailing me. She cheered up though, once we were in his classroom and cupcakes were imminent. On the way home we stopped to wade in the creek. More presents had arrived in the mail that day, and he opened them. One of them was a book of science experiments he’s eager to try. And that night he had his belated birthday dinner at Asian Bistro (http://www.asianbistrocafe.com/) and his cupcake. The festive ceramic panda cups in which the children’s drinks arrived were a high point of the evening. While we waited for the food to arrive, Noah decoded the secret message in the birthday card my mom sent and Beth looked up the formula for determining the area of a circle on her phone. At Cake Love (http://www.cakelove.com/locations_silverspring.php), Noah selected a banana split cupcake, an appropriately complicated confection. The cake was banana-flavored and the frosting had vanilla and strawberry layers. It wasn’t a bad day, as make-up birthdays go.

Interlude:

At dinner on Wednesday night, Noah said something was bothering him. I asked him what it was. He said he leaves papers he’s supposed to turn in on the desktop and Señor S has threatened to start throwing them out if he does it again. Noah wasn’t sure if he’d have to do the work over or if he’d get no credit, but either option was upsetting and he didn’t think he could always remember to turn in the work. So Beth and I decided to have a meeting with Señor S next week to discuss more positive ways of helping Noah stay organized. It’s no easy task. I supervise his homework most weekday afternoons so I know. But neither of us thought punishment was the way to go. In addition, Noah’s last report card hinted that some of the aggressive-seeming behavior he had in kindergarten might be re-surfacing. I asked Noah what he thought Señor S meant and he said he’s been bumping into people in line a lot, by accident, he insisted. So we want to talk about that, too. Oddly, Noah’s at-school behavior often seems to deteriorate in the spring. I don’t know if he get worn out and the end of the school year or if it’s something else. He even has a set of facial tics that surface each spring and then disappear in the summer. Beth calls it his “seasonal Tourette’s.”

Noah is such a puzzle to many people. He seems simultaneously older and younger than his years. He reads at least two years above grade level, but he still sucks his thumb and he calls me Mommy, while many of his peers have switched over to calling their mothers Mom. He charms many adults with his cheerful demeanor and intelligent conversation, but in the past couple of years he’s had trouble making and keeping friends. He often plays alone at recess (or does yoga). And a lot of adults are just baffled by him. He’s so smart, that his absent-mindedness, his social awkwardness and even his physical clumsiness seem like things he should be able to overcome if he just put his mind to it. But Beth and I suspect there might be more to it than that, possibly even more than his sensory issues can explain. We’ve been considering having him tested for Asperger’s syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome). When I read the descriptions I go back and forth between thinking, that sounds like Noah all right and, wait, he’s not nearly that impaired. So it might be good to find out, so we can have more guidance on how to be better parents to him for the next nine years.

The Second Half: The Party

Friday night, the night before Noah’s party, both kids were wound up and having trouble getting to sleep again. Around 9:30, after June had finally dropped off, Noah came out of their room and told Beth he was worried about something and couldn’t sleep. It turned out he’d told Sasha that his Solve-the-Mystery party would culminate in a chase scene and Sasha started to brag about his karate skills so Noah was worried Sasha thought there would be real fighting at the party and that someone might get hurt. Beth assured him we’d set out clear guidelines before the party started and he went back to bed. Soon he was up again, but Beth talked him until he was calm and we didn’t hear from him again.

After an already busy day of soccer practice for June and swimming practice for Noah, June and I took our positions on the front porch at 2:55 Saturday afternoon. Noah’s guests were due to arrive at 3:00. I was to explain the party rules to them and escort them one by one to the garage where they would receive their instructions and their initial clues from Noah, who was already in character as the detective agency representative who would hire the three agents to find the stolen diamond and apprehend the thief.

As he did last year, Noah put his party theme up to a vote. The choices were Castles, Human Body, Mystery or a secret theme guest would find out at the party. Human Body was a leftover theme from last year and no one voted for it, but after the first round of voting, it was a three-way tie for the other options. As Noah was trying to figure out how to break the tie, he told us that the secret theme was mold. This was a surprise. I wondered what kind of decorations, activities and cake he would want for a mold party, but it wasn’t to be because one of his guests changed his vote and soon we were planning a mystery party. Not that much actual planning was involved. This year Noah didn’t want any decorations or goody bags for the guests and he designed the invitations and devised all the clues for the game himself. I took care of calling his friends’ parents in advance of sending out the invitations to determine a date and time all three of his guests could attend (he had such a small guest list I didn’t want anyone to miss the party) and Beth made the cake—a fancy cake, Noah said; it was a vanilla layer cake with coconut frosting and crossed forks and knives in black piping. (The cake was supposed to be disguised as something you might find on a table.) It was half a relief and half a letdown to have so little to do.

One thing I could have done was to double-check his preparations because there were a number of snafus during the mystery-solving portion of the party. The guests, working as a team, were looking for clues in envelopes hidden throughout the yard and the house. Each clue was written in symbols that had to be decoded using a key Noah provided and which would tell the players where to look for the next clue. In theory it was all very well thought out, but two of the clue envelopes were empty and one had the wrong directions in it, which caused some chaos. (June also contributed some of her own clues she made by cutting up Noah’s rough drafts—but these were marked as “June’s Clues” and they boys knew to disregard them.) It took almost an hour for the detectives to find the construction paper diamond hidden in the laundry basket and they only did after I advised them that the treasure hunt was “good, clean fun,” which sent them running to the laundry room, and advised them that “small people often have great wisdom” shortly after June started rummaging through the laundry basket on her own. Elias was the only one listening to that gem, so he found the diamond.

Once the diamond was located the boys had to chase the thief (Beth) through the back yard until they tackled her– relatively gently–and brought her to justice. Noah declared that her punishment would be to pay a fine of buying pizza for the detectives. She made the call and while they waited for the pizza to come, the boys played outside. The first thing that occurred to them was a sword fight–it might have been Elias’s idea; he voted for castles–so they grabbed the foam building tubes from June’s fort-building kit. Unfortunately, the tubes have metal tips where they snap together and almost immediately Sasha got hit in the mouth and ended up with a swollen lip. I confiscated the swords and they argued for a while over whether to play tag, hide and seek, cops and robbers or vampires and vampire slayers. I’m not sure why it mattered what they called it because all the games they played basically consisted of leaping off the porch walls and chasing each other through the yard and driveway. They were nice enough to include June in the game of tag. Whenever she was it I let her tag me and then I’d take off after one of the boys.

Then it was inside for pizza, cake and a brief game of online Monopoly. Sasha stayed over for a post-party play date and they continued the game and then watched about half of Cars. After Sasha left, around six, Beth asked Noah how he’d like his party. “Thumbs up?” she asked.

“Yeah, you didn’t get killed,” he observed.

“Success!” Beth said. I think it was, mixed up clues and all.

Today is Mother’s Day. We celebrated with cards and gifts and breakfast at IHOP. Then Noah and I watched a PG-rated movie (Shorts— http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1100119/) while Beth and June went grocery shopping. He was very excited about seeing a movie with me and without June and may have lorded it over her a bit too much. “We should do this every week,” he said. After June’s nap, we took an afternoon stroll in the National Arboretum (http://www.usna.usda.gov/) and had dinner at Plato’s Diner (http://www.platosdiner.com/). It was a very nice day.

In the bathroom this morning I was telling Beth how June told me recently she couldn’t decide whether to be a construction worker or a Mommy and I told her she could be both, either at the same time, or she could be a construction worker before and after she was a Mommy. “There’s no after,” Beth corrected. “Once you’re a Mommy, you’re always a Mommy.” I suppose she’s right. Noah made me a mother nine years ago, and although he’s halfway to being a man, I am not nearly half done being his Mom. That’s forever.

Fab Four: A Birthday in Four Acts

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June turned four on Tuesday and as Vice President Biden would say, it was a big… well you know what he would say, right? And it was.

Act 1: The Weekend Before

My mom came to spend the weekend and we had a nice, low-key visit. We went out for pizza at Roscoe’s on Friday night and on Saturday morning we went to June’s first soccer practice of the spring season. The Red Gingko is playing on her team again and the Yellow Gingko is joining the fun this time, too. The three of them spent a lot of time before practice huddled together discussing who knows what. Two of June’s other classmates are on a different team for a total of one third of the Leaves class playing soccer at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings. (So when did we schedule her party? At 10:30 a.m. the Saturday after her birthday, which also happened to be during the first weekend of spring break when two of her best friends were going to be out of town, but I’m getting ahead of myself here…)

I had wondered if June would pick up where she left off at the end of last season or if she’d be shy all over again, but she jumped right in and was soon dribbling her pink soccer ball all over the field while I got to stand on the sidelines and watch and chat with my mom and other parents. Plus the weather was gorgeous. You couldn’t have asked for a nicer first day of spring.

After June’s nap, she opened her presents from Mom—two beautifully illustrated hard cover books about a fairy born without wings (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316590789/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk & http://www.amazon.com/review/R2C4R3KAJZVO6P) and the fanciest dress June has ever owned. The bodice is a white satiny material and the skirt is white with green vines and coral-colored flowers and it has underskirts that make it poof out. She loves it and I am terrified to let her wear it anywhere.

Next, Mom and I took the kids to the playground and they spent most of their time there splashing in the creek (Noah) or climbing on the boulders nearby (June). Mom and June and I played an extended game in which June stood behind a tree and Mom and I took turns knocking on her door and pretending to be UPS delivery people, the Big Bad Wolf, the Three Little Pigs and Red Riding Hood, all of whom needed help locating each other, all that is except the UPS woman- she delivered the wolf in a box at the beginning of the game, which set the rest of the game in motion. June kept pretending to be completely exasperated with these interruptions, but then she’d instruct us to knock again.

We saw Sasha there but he has recently decided he’s going to be in the Tour de France by the time he’s sixteen and was too intent on riding his bike to play with Noah. There was also a girl there who was in Noah’s second grade class and informed Mom she didn’t like Noah because he once tried to kiss her. I asked him later if he’d ever tried to kiss her and the look of utter shock on his face was comic. “No!” he spluttered once he could speak. I have concluded that either a) she is a pathological liar, or b) She misremembered which boy had amorous designs on her last year, or c) Noah crashed into her once—he’s always crashing into people—and she misread his intentions.

We came home and Mom played with the kids while I made pasta with asparagus and a strawberry sauce for cheesecake to celebrate the Equinox. Then we watched about half of Pippi Longstocking and it was time for bed.

Sunday morning we went to a different playground and then Mom and Noah continued the game of online Monopoly they’d started the day before until it was time for her to go home. Before I put June down for her nap I asked her to thank Grandmom again for the books and the dress and she said, “But I already did!” in an indignant tone, because, you know, thank yous are strictly rationed around here.

Act 2: The Big Day: Morning

“Happy Birthday,” Beth whispered to June when she crawled into our bed around 6:10 on Tuesday. June was too sleepy to respond at once, but eventually she said it wouldn’t be her birthday until it was light outside. June’s not a morning person, even on her birthday.

Once everyone was up and about we let June open three birthday cards, one from YaYa, one from Beth, Noah and myself, and one from Ladybug. Ladybug is the eponymous character of her own magazine, published by the same company as Cricket, but for a younger audience. Because I was renewing the subscription I bought a card with a ladybug on it and wrote her a message from the point of view of Ladybug telling June she was so happy she liked the magazine and that it would keep coming for another year. June did not buy it. “But how could Ladybug send me a card when she is not in our world?” she wanted to know. “ So I had to cop to having written it myself. It made me wonder if she will make it to first grade believing in Santa as Noah did. She did like the ladybug tattoo that came in the card, though and wanted it applied to her hand right away. And another of the cards had a sticker in it that said, “Yah! I’m 4!” which had to go on her shirt and the one from YaYa folded out into a castle with little paper doll princesses and a horse that could be punched out to inhabit the castle.

Between June playing with the paper castle and me trying to gather up the birthday treats we were bringing to school, the birthday card I needed to get in the mail for my sister, and the hand-me-down baby clothes I was bringing to school for the Red Dogwood’s new baby sister, we got a late start leaving the house and I was almost ten minutes late for my co-op shift.

The Blue Holly’s mom was doing the yellow team’s journals and she asked June if she wanted to do a special birthday entry. While June drew and the co-oper transcribed her story, the Blue Holly herself sat nearby and set to work making a long series of birthday cards for June. Soon the Blue Maple joined in. They kept bringing the cards to me as I read to a small group of kids. Put them in her backpack, I told them. When I examined them at home I found them covered with a multitude of random letters, or maybe not exactly random. They favor Hs. Os and Ts, just like June does when she writes. It’s amazing how close they all are developmentally sometimes. There were also balloons all over the Blue Holly’s cards.

During Circle Time, Lesley got out a dark, oblong wooden tray filled with polished stones and five votive candles and called June up front. The class discussed how many candles Lesley would need to take away to make four. There was general agreement that the answer was one. Lesley took away one candle and lit the rest. June walked around the lit candles four times and each time Lesley asked her to tell one thing about when she was one, two and three years old and one thing about what she would do when she was four. June replied that when she was one she was “learning to chew” and that when she was two she learned to ride her little bike and that when she was three she played with her mommy a lot. She didn’t have a clear goal for four—so Lesley suggested learning to swim.

The kids proceeded to snack, and after they’d had their fill of oranges, strawberries and popcorn, I handed out the sugar cookies with pink and blue sugar on top that June and I had made the day before. She initially wanted pink sugar for the girls and blue sugar for the boys but I put the kibosh on that plan, saying we could do some of each and let kids chose their own cookies, at which point June suggested we put both colors on each cookie and that’s what we did. As the kids were dividing up into groups for music, the Blue Gingko told me in a very grown up tone, “Steph, the cookies were delicious.”

Just before playground time, as the kids were all milling about in the coat room, June informed me in a panic that I forgot to put the lollipop favors into backpacks. So I rushed to get them in as the kids were shouldering their packs. I hope I got everyone, but it was kind of chaotic. If you’re a Leaf parent and you haven’t found one yet, check all little compartments of your child’s backpack.

On the way home, I let June walk on a brick retaining wall I have never let her on before because it’s high off the ground and it tilts out at an alarming angle. “You said I could do it when I was four,” June said. What I’d actually said was she could do it when she was a Track, which is another five months off, but it sometimes resistance is futile and I sensed this was one of those times.

“Do four year olds take naps?” she wanted to know after lunch. Yes, they do, I told her, and she did.

Act 3: The Big Day: Afternoon and Evening

By a strange coincidence, June’s birthday fell on free pastry day at Starbucks and free cone day at Ben and Jerry’s. Plus, you can get always get a free cupcake at Cake Love on your birthday. We were saving June’s birthday cake for her party so it seemed incumbent on us to take advantage of at least one of these opportunities. Beth came home early so we could go to dinner at Noodles and Company, followed by dessert.

But first June opened her presents from us and from YaYa. There was soccer net and ball, a big box of modeling clay, two outfits (both quite pink) and a tiara with pink ribbons that Noah picked out for her at Port Discovery. She immediately decided she wanted to wear the pink and green striped dress to school the next day and the tiara to dinner. So she did. We ended up getting both ice cream and cupcakes in the same evening, even though June only picked at her dinner. She did eat a fair amount of broccoli, and it was her birthday, so I set the bar low.

All evening she was full of proclamations: “I can do it myself. I’m four!” or “I know how to do everything. I’m four!” or Beth’s favorite, “I don’t have to hold hands in the elevator. I’m four!” Then she would add, “You guys can sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me again if you want,” as if she were conferring a favor.

As I was cuddling with her in bed that night, she told me “The night I was three and I was going to be four the next day, it felt different going to bed.” Maybe that’s why she was out of bed six or seven times with sippy cup and stuffed animal related problems before she finally fell asleep close to quarter to ten that night. But this night, her first night as a four year old, she dropped right off to sleep.

Intermission: The Day After

On Wednesday, soon after waking, June informed me, “It’s my second day of being four.” On the way home from school she asked, “Do four year olds wear diapers a lot?”

I pounced. “Not really,” I told her. “Actually I was thinking you would sit on the potty and wear underwear a lot this week. What do you think of that?”

She said “No!” about a dozen times quite firmly. So much for that opening, I thought.

In the afternoon, she played with her soccer net and made letters out of the modeling clay. I showed her how to make the letters of her name. Later Noah called me over, saying he’d added a word. I expected to find “Noah” under “June” but instead he’d written “Rocks.”

That evening we opened Auntie Sara’s presents, which had arrived that day. There was pink kimono-style dress, a necklace with interchangeable magnetic pendants (ladybug and rainbow) and a beading kit (the same beading kit June got Sara for Christmas actually—she regifted it). June put on the necklace with the ladybug attachment and with Noah’s help soon got to work making bead necklaces. It was hard to convince her to take them all off to go to bed.

Act 4: The Party

Friday morning, the day before the party, June and I were in the Langley Park shopping center and on a whim, I decided to go inside the Expo Mart and see if they had cakes. June wanted a supermarket cake instead of a homemade one and she and Beth were scheduled to get one that evening. I thought if we could find one, I’d save her a trip.

We went in and there was a bakery section, but no cakes. The Expo Mart, a small supermarket that serves the neighborhood’s Latino population, just opened in December and it’s a work in progress. Almost every time I’ve gone in looking for something specific, I can’t find it. However, what they did have, and what I really should have expected, given the demographic, was an impressive selection of piñatas. June gasped when she saw the princess in the gold dress. She wanted it. Could she have, please, please, please?

Let’s look at all of them, I suggested. June’s party was loosely organized around a coloring theme. We got coloring books and crayons for all the guests. There were crayons on the invitations that Noah designed for her and I’d picked out some multicolored foods (rainbow goldfish crackers and rainbow sherbet). I’d been half-hoping to find a rainbow cake or at least a very colorful one. And while June picked the party theme, her interest in sticking to it in any consistent manner was tepid and somehow princesses kept creeping in. She picked Disney princess plates and napkins and there was a random picture of Pocahontas on the invitations she forced Noah to include, despite his protests that it had nothing to do with the theme. (At one point I’d thought he’d found the perfect clip art—a princess that looked like it had been drawn by a child—princesses and coloring! Of course, June rejected it.) Anyway, I was wondering if I could steer her away from the princess and toward something more multi-hued. I found a star-shaped piñata with stripes in various colors and there was the traditional burro, also striped. She was having none of it because she had spied something even better than a gold princess. There was a pink princess! I knew I was beat then and asked a salesclerk how much it cost. It took three or four staff members and two languages to get someone to take it down. I paid five dollars over the price I told myself was the absolute ceiling of what I would pay as I was waiting to find out “cuanto cuesta la princesa rosa.” What can I say? I fell victim to “please, Mommy, please?”

Our evening plans involved going to Noah’s friend Joseph’s house where Noah had spent the afternoon and joining his family for pizza. But Beth discovered she had a flat tire as we drove down the driveway. So June and I went to Joseph’s house and Beth went to the service station. When we got there we found they hadn’t ordered enough vegetarian pizza and Noah had already eaten the last slice. So June and I had some cheese and crackers and we hung out for a while and walked home where I fixed dinner for June. By the time Beth got home I was getting the kids ready for bed. But Beth had brought home takeout falafel from the organic falafel cart in the gas station parking lot. (What? You don’t have an organic falafel cart in your Citgo parking lot? You need to move to Takoma Park.) The cake would have to wait until the next morning.

Saturday morning Beth took June to pick out a cake while I finishing cleaning the house. I had set up several play areas in the back yard the day before and Noah made signs for all of them (Bubble Zone on the table with the bubble soap, Sand Zone by the sandbox, Soccer Zone by the soccer net and balls, etc.) He also made a welcome sign with a circus ringmaster we taped to the front door.

Beth and June came back with a white-frosted cake with pink roses and a bunch of balloons and after some more tidying inside and out, the guests started arriving. I was reading to June in her room to calm her down when I heard The Yellow Ginkgo’s voice. We came into the living room and soon Blue Gingko and Blue Maple were there too, all busily exploring the array of toys in our living room.

In retrospect, the party was structured a lot like a school day. There was free play in the living room for about twenty minutes after arrival (the musical instruments were especially popular); there was an art project (coloring in the living room); there was outside play in the back yard (the sandbox and slide were big hits as was running in and out of the fairy princess tent which had been temporarily relocated outside); and there was snack (in the form of pizza, cake and sherbet). The only thing I missed was Circle Time and the funny thing was I had considered reading Harold and the Purple Crayon to the guests, but I completely forgot about it. (I also forgot to serve the goldfish crackers). We finished up with the piñata. I had been afraid June would cry when it was smashed, but the damage was not too bad, just enough to cause her to rain candy from the bottom of her tattered gown and Beth had to deliver the final blow after all the kids, including Noah and the Yellow Holly’s little sister, had taken several turns. The pink princess turned out to be one tough broad.

Overall everything went very smoothly. The girls all played nicely together and no one threw a fit or cried. Although she had very specific plans about all the activities and what she wanted her guest to wear (sunglasses, party hats) she was satisfied as long as she had partial participation with each part of the plan. I got a little nervous when the Blue Maple found June’s new tiara in the dress up bin and wore it for a while, but June either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Several moms stayed and the party was calm enough that we could actually sit and talk with the adults from time to time, which was an unexpected bonus. Noah helped with the piñata and the Blue Gingko, who knows from experience what older brothers are good for, drafted him to help her and June with the stickers in their coloring books. (The Blue Gingko also demonstrated her high level Disney skills while we ate, matching the princesses on the napkins to the castles on the plates.)

By twelve twenty the last guest had left and we let June open her presents. I thought she might be too wound up to nap, but she fell right asleep when I put her down around one o’ clock. She spent much of the afternoon coloring in the coloring book, listening to her new book, playing her new harmonica, turning her Tinkerbell lantern on and off and begging to fly her new kite. Beth had dinner out in Virginia with her high school friend Sue who had a layover at Dulles airport so I made quesadillas and the kids and I watched Cars. After they were in bed, I did the dishes and licked the frosting off the numeral four candle that was first used on Noah’s fourth birthday cake. Then I washed it and put it away to wait for my forty-third birthday come May.

Today June has been making signs announcing a party for her imaginary friend Gaspard and taping them to the walls and furniture. They are covered with hearts and lots of Hs and Os. With June organizing it, I’m sure it will be a fabulous event.

In Memoriam

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My father died at 4:15 on Friday afternoon. He passed peacefully in his sleep at his vacation home in Key West. His wife and two close friends were in the room with him. My sister and I did not make it down to Florida in time to see him before he died. I wish we had, but I am relieved that he died without pain, in a place he loved, and surrounded by people who loved him.

I am not going to write an obituary. The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked as an editor from 1972 to 1996, published a fine one (http://www.philly.com/inquirer/obituaries/20100116_Steven_Lovelady__ex-Inquirer_editor__dies.html). It’s mostly about his professional achievements, which were many and far-reaching. But of course, when I think of him, I don’t think of him primarily as a brilliant editor—I think of him as my father.

One of the difficult things about his death is that it happened so fast. He was only diagnosed with cancer last summer and after a seven-week regimen of radiation and chemotherapy that ended in early October, it seemed he was in the clear. He died about four weeks after finding out the cancer was back in mid-December.

When I went to see him in New York right after Christmas we talked about the fact that we had not been close. We exchanged apologies and I told him I wanted him to know the kids better. The last time he saw them was over two years ago and he only met June twice—once at two months and once at twenty-one months. (I wrote about that last visit in my 12//27/07 entry.) He said he wanted that too and he invited us to come visit him in Key West, but then his condition deteriorated with such astonishing rapidity that he never did see them. When I was planning my trip to Florida, I kept changing the dates in my mind, pushing them forward from late February to late January to this week and
I considered various groups of us going—all of us, just Noah and me, just Beth and me, and just me. In the end we settled on just me. He wasn’t going to get to know the kids better and they wouldn’t get to know him. It was too late. He was too sick. It just wasn’t going to happen. Even my last-minute plans to have Noah interview Dad about his life or at least to write him a letter never came to fruition. This is the part that really tears me up.

“He got out of the god-damned ice cream line again. That’s what he did,” I told Beth on Friday evening after the kids were finally in bed. My father loved ice cream and I have many fond memories of him taking my sister and me out for ice cream. On one occasion, however—I don’t have any idea how old we were—he got impatient in a long, slow-moving line for soft-serve and we got out of the line and went home. I made a solemn vow to myself at the time that if I ever had kids I would never, ever get out of an ice cream line. I just wouldn’t do it. And I never do. I even use the phrase as shorthand when I’ve made a promise to the kids and something arises to make that promise inconvenient and I fulfill it anyway. To do otherwise would be to get out of the ice cream line. But this time, he didn’t decide to walk away. He was pushed out of that line.

I do find myself angry at times. Why did he smoke for forty-seven years, I wonder? Why didn’t he quit when my sister was seven and left collages of photographs of healthy and diseased lung tissue lying around the house and made him a offer that she’d stop sucking her thumb if he would quit smoking? (I feel compelled to note that she held up her end of the bargain.) And then I find myself irrationally angry at anyone over the age of sixty-six, anyone who has had cancer and beaten it, anyone who smoked and never got cancer. While I was feeling this way on Friday night, I made Noah promise me he would never take up smoking. I didn’t do it in a dramatic way. I just said to him as I was tucking him into bed, “Don’t ever smoke. Just don’t ever do it.” He gave me a solemn, wide-eyed nod.

But these angry feelings are short-lived flashes. Mostly I feel sad. And I have the most unoriginal thoughts sometimes. I eat something, or read a newspaper story and I think he’s never going to eat anything again. He’s never going to read the newspaper again. But why should I have original thoughts about death? Isn’t death the great universal?

So I find myself wondering what it’s okay to do. I was planning to bake a cake on Saturday morning—the spice cake from the recipe we used for our wedding cake. I make it on or around our anniversary every year. But should I? And Beth and I had a date scheduled for Saturday afternoon, our first date in almost a year. Was it wrong to go out and see a movie the day after my father died?

I thought about it and I made the cake. It could even be a sort of tribute to him because of all of our parents, he was the one who was most on board with Beth’s and my relationship in the beginning. His support around the time of the commitment ceremony marked a high point in our relationship. And we went to the movie, too. A few hours away from the kids and alone with Beth seemed like just what I needed. We saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and then grabbed a quick dinner at an eco-friendly combination salad bar/frozen yogurt place in Bethesda (http://www.sweetgreen.com/). It might seem like seeing a movie about a father-daughter relationship on the day after one’s father has died might be a spectacularly bad idea, but it wasn’t. Parnassus and Valentina did not remind me much of my father or myself. My father never, for instance, made a deal with the devil regarding my soul.

And he left me with some good memories. One of the best ones I already shared on this blog last summer. It was in one of those long beach entries you may just skim through because who but me could possibly want to read so much about the beach? Here it is: “I remember being small, older than June but not by much, riding on my father’s shoulders in the ocean, so deep in that the water sometimes went over his head. He was holding on tight, though, and it never occurred to me to be afraid.”

So now he’s gone, and the condolences are pouring in, and whatever remained undone between us will remain that way forever. I am very glad I got to see him in New York, though, and that we got to make our peace. He told my sister you really find out who loves you when you have cancer and on questioning him further, she found he meant me, among others. It’s something. It has to be enough.

A House Without Heat

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This wasn’t going to be another post about my father. It was going to be a post about Beth’s and my anniversary and I guess it is, but it’s about my father, too. That’s just how it turned out.

On Sunday night, as I was getting ready for bed, and Beth was lying in bed with her eyes closed, I slipped an anniversary card into a zippered compartment on the front of her suitcase. She was leaving for Sacramento in the morning on a three-day business trip, the first day of which was the eighteenth anniversary of our commitment ceremony.

“I’m not as grumpy about it as I was the last time this happened,” I’d told her at dinner. I was referring to the fact that she’d been out of town on the twentieth anniversary of our first date. We have two anniversaries and she travels a lot, so it happens. Although possibly I shouldn’t have let on that I didn’t mind so much because the last time she took me to the beach for the weekend to make up for being gone on the actual day. Anyway, we decided to celebrate the following weekend. I got a babysitter for four hours on Saturday, enough time for a movie and dinner out. It was what I meant to do for her birthday back in November.

June woke me around two in the morning and I noticed it seemed cold in the house. I was too sleepy to give it much thought, however. When she woke me again around five, though, I realized it really was quite cold. I put my hand on the radiator in our room and found it stone cold. I decided I’d tell Beth about it when she woke, but she got up and checked the furnace before her usual 6:30 wake-up time and before I was awake enough to tell her. She placed a phone call to the emergency number for our heating oil company and was told the message would be forwarded to the local office when it opened at 7:30. Beth and I conferred about what to do if the heat could not be restored quickly. We’ve been having unusually cold weather for the past week or two. It’s in the twenties at night, with daytime temperatures in the thirties. (The snow that fell in mid-December is still lingering in patches here and there on our lawn. It’s still deep enough in places to make snowballs, which we do on occasion.) I thought with the use of a space heater in the kids’ bedroom we could probably stay in the house for at least another night. The house has thick walls and holds its heat pretty well. Beth was out the door on her way to the airport by 7:20, agitated about leaving us behind with no heat. I put my arms around her shortly before she left and joked, “An anniversary without you is like a house without heat.”

I took advantage of the fact that Monday is the one day of the week I pick June’s clothes to bundle her into corduroys over her pajama bottoms and a heavy sweater over a turtleneck. She’d been spending the morning at school but I wanted her to be prepared for a chilly afternoon. I decided if we had no heat tomorrow, I’d institute a no-short-dresses-with-tights rule until the heat was back on, but I didn’t tell her. No point in having an argument before its time.

I carried my cell phone with me (which I almost never do) on our way to school. Usually Beth waits for Noah’s 8:20 bus with him while I take June to school since she needs to be there at 8:30 and it’s a fifteen to twenty minute walk depending on how many acorns need to be picked up or how many frozen puddles need to be slid across. When Beth is out of town, Noah walks with us and we try to catch his bus as it passes a different stop. This usually works, and it did this day, too, but just barely. As we were approaching the busy street where the bus stops, nearly a block away, I saw it pulling up. “Run, but don’t cross the street!” I yelled to Noah, hoping the bus driver would see him waiting on the wrong side of the street. I grabbed June off the ground and ran with her. I don’t think we would have made it if it hadn’t been for other bus stop parents who saw us coming and asked the bus driver to wait. I thought that was nice of them, given that it’s not our normal stop and they don’t know us. By the time the bus pulled away, with Noah on it, I was coughing hard and struggling for breath. It turns out running uphill while sick and carrying a three year old winds me pretty quickly. I didn’t mention I’m sick on top of all this? Well, I am. I’ve had this cold for close to two weeks, and it’s moved down into my chest. It seems to happen all the time now when I get sick. It’s a disturbing pattern.

Anyway, my cell phone didn’t ring on the way to school or on the way back home. The message somehow got lost between the answering service and the local office so it was 1:00 p.m. before I was able to get anyone to tell me when someone would be coming to look at the furnace. Fortunately, they acted quickly once that was straightened out and the repairperson arrived at 2:30 and at 2:50 the furnace roared back to life. By this time the temperature in the house had dropped to 53 degrees. (We usually keep it at 64 degrees.) But soon it was climbing again and I thought the day was finally looking up.

Noah came home from school. We played out in the yard, and then he came in to do his daily reading. He’s reading my old copies of mysteries by Wylly Folk St. John. I got the idea to introduce him to them because he liked the A-Z mystery series so much and those are really formulaic and much too easy for him. I wanted to provide him with some better written mysteries. He started with The Christmas Tree Mystery last month, since it was seasonal and from then on he was hooked. He’s on his fifth one now. He watched some television and snacked and did some homework (more than half his math packet for the week actually). My only clue that something was wrong with him came right before he started to read. He and June were playing with Lincoln Logs and he was trying to make a large house with an unstable floor plan. It kept falling over. Then one of the little houses I made for June got knocked over and both kids were crying, Noah as hard as June.

I shrugged it off, since he does get like that sometimes and he calmed down pretty quickly, but when it was time for dinner he said he didn’t feel well. I was surprised because he’d seemed fine up to then. He wasn’t feverish, but he said he had a headache and a stomachache and he didn’t know if he should eat. I’d made macaroni and cheese with broccoli, a standard Beth’s-out-of-town dinner and one of the kids’ favorites. I said it was up to him. He should do what felt right. He wondered if he was hungry or sick. Or maybe he needed to go to the bathroom. (All these states can feel very similar to him because of his sensory confusion.) So he tried going to the bathroom and then he ate a little of his dinner. Go slowly, I advised him and see if it makes you feel better or worse. Worse was the answer. He left the table, went to rest in my room and was asleep on my bed by 7:00. I tried to rouse him so I could move him to his own bed and maybe get him into pajamas, but after opening his eyes, he just closed them and rolled away from me so I decided to leave him there.

Now June does not like to go to sleep in a room by herself, so she wanted to sleep in the toddler bed that’s still in the corner of our room and I let her. Then I had to decide where I would sleep. There was room in my bed, since Beth was gone, but I thought if he’s contagious maybe I’d be better off in the kids’ room. It seemed like a different illness than what I have and I didn’t want two illnesses at once, so I slept in June’s bunk.

Beth and I had been exchanging phone calls and emails all day, about the heat situation and Noah’s illness. I’d told her to look in her suitcase for her card and she couldn’t find it. Eventually, we realized I’d put it in the wrong suitcase. I checked and there it was still in her closet. “This day just keeps getting crappier,” I wrote her, before turning in.

June woke me at 2:00 and again at 3:30, and then Noah was up at 4:30, feeling fine and wanting to know if he could get up for the day. The answer was no. So I was completely exhausted when I got up for the day and read my stepmother’s email.

Once I did, none of it mattered, not missing our anniversary, not the cold house, not Noah’s passing illness. My father’s cancer is progressing much more quickly than we thought it would. He’s close to the end. It could be in as little as a month.

It was my morning to co-op at June’s school. I’d put out a call for a substitute on the class listserv the night before but it since no-one was able to sub on short notice and Noah was feeling better, I put him on a bus and hoped for the best. He does bounce back from illness with amazing rapidity most of the time and he wanted to go. He was even mad at me for not taking him to the before-school Geo-Bowl practice. (He’s participating in a geography contest for third to fifth graders next month. It’s a big deal at his school.) I didn’t think we could make it to the 8:00 a.m. practice in time, though.

I drifted through my co-oping duties, not feeling entirely there. I didn’t want to co-op that day, but once I was there it felt like a good thing to be in a busy, cheerful place full of three and four year olds. When June and I came home, we ate lunch and napped. I fell asleep quickly and slept deeply.

June’s school provided our dinner that night. It was something the membership co-ordinator had been meaning to do for us sometime to thank Beth for her work on the board and the fundraising committee, but when she’d heard about our heat troubles and Noah being sick she decided this was the day. She didn’t even know anything about my father. I can’t even really call it dinner, it was a feast: a baguette, a salad, two kinds of pasta salad, kale, beets, green beans, three kinds of candy, including a big dark chocolate bar with almonds. We could eat off this for days, and I think we will. Thanks, Jill!

That night was tidying up a little while Noah was in the bath and I realized I hadn’t gotten past the front page of the newspaper and I hadn’t ridden the exercise bike that day. It wasn’t that I hadn’t gotten around to those things or I’d decided I was too overwhelmed to do them. I’d just forgotten two of the most ingrained parts of my weekday routine. I decided I needed to be finished with this day, so soon after both kids were asleep, around 9:35, I was in bed myself. June let me sleep until almost six, for which I was deeply grateful.

I think I’m going to Florida soon. I’ve been exchanging email with my sister and stepmother about it, but I need to wait until I can talk to Beth in person to figure out what makes the most sense. And depending on when I go and for how long, she’ll need to make arrangements for childcare, either taking time off work or inviting her mother to come stay and watch the kids while I’m gone. It’s all up in the air right now. I can’t wait for her to get home this afternoon so I talk to her in person and not be alone with this grief.

But I’m also wishing I could go back to Monday when my biggest problems were a sick child and a house without heat.

Birthday in a Box

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June and I stumbled into to the living room around 6:55 this morning. Beth and Noah were sitting on the couch discussing an upcoming sale at their imaginary car dealership. It’s a morning ritual. “Do you want to sing ‘Happy Birthday’?” I coached her.

June shook her head. It was too early for singing. “Happy Birthday,” I said, leaning over to kiss Beth’s cheek. “Everything after work,” I added. I was under-prepared for Beth’s birthday. I had wanted to take her on a date and I was holding out hope that I’d find a babysitter until the very last minute, but it was not to be. I did have a back-up plan, but I’d need a little time to implement it. Noah didn’t have a present on hand either. Over the weekend I’d suggested he contribute to the iTunes gift cards I was planning to get for her (this was the backup plan), but he didn’t like that idea and wanted to get her a cup holder for the car. We ordered it on Saturday, so there wasn’t much chance of it arriving today. I was planning to have June paint a watercolor (Beth had requested one) but she hadn’t done it yet.

Beth and her mother and brother all have their birthdays in a cluster from mid-November to early December. Last year they decided that so many gift-giving occasions so close to Christmas was too much and they now just exchange cards. These have been trickling in all week. I’d spoken to my sister recently so I knew what she was getting Beth and I also knew it would not arrive on time. My mom’s gift (a Border’s gift card) wasn’t here yet either, but I thought it would probably arrive in today’s mail.

So as of this morning, other than cards from her parents and brother, we had nothing. No presents, no cards, no cake. What I did have was plans.

I dropped June off at school at 8:30 and accepted a ride home from the mother of the Yellow Gingko (aka Squash Bug). I told her about the failed attempt the secure babysitting and the dearth of presents. She waved a hand, “You have hours,” she said. I agreed. I knew what I was doing and I had enough time to pull everything together.

I stayed home long enough to do the breakfast dishes and put in a load of laundry, and then I hit the bus stop. My first thought was to conduct the iTunes transaction online, but the lack of physical objects to give Beth was bothering me, so I decided to see if they carried gift cards at the Rite Aid where I’d gone in search of a birthday card. I was in luck. They were only available in relatively small denominations so I picked up a few. Once I got to the counter, my luck ran out. There were all kinds of problems with the gift cards. Almost half of them wouldn’t scan (I kept going back to the rack for more and finally ended up grabbing the whole stack). Then for some reason they could only be charged to my debit card as individual transactions. By the time I left, I had a stack of receipts for purchases and refunds. I will need to check my statement carefully when it comes. The whole experience was made more annoying by the fact that the sales clerk seemed to have taken a vow of silence. So I had to keep asking, “Is it a problem with my card or the iTunes card? Should I go get some more to try?“ and so forth. He never even apologized for the inconvenience, which would have gone a long way with me. I thought about asking for the manager but then I noticed that his badge pronounced he was the manager. Then to make matters worse I remembered we’re boycotting Rite Aid for some reason (something about anti-gay discrimination and not customer service). At least now when I am suffering through horrible service at CVS, I won’t have to think, oh if only I could go to Rite Aid. I know better.

I stopped at Starbucks to buy a cup of coffee. This was actually for the cake, a mocha cake with cream cheese frosting. We have coffee and a coffee maker at home for houseguests, but since I rarely drink brewed coffee, I have no idea how to use it. Buying some ready made seemed the easiest thing to do, especially since Starbucks was right there. I got myself a green tea latte and paused long enough to read a little while I drank it. (I’m still reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which Beth bought me for my birthday in May. It’s over one thousand pages long and at one point I lost the thread of the plot and had to start all over. I am enjoying it immensely and am dreading finishing it, which should happen in about two weeks at my current rate of reading.)

I walked home, found my mom’s card for Beth in the mail, moved the laundry to the dryer and put a second load into the washer and then left to get June at school. While June watched Dragon Tales and ate her lunch, I started mixing cake batter. When her show was over, she wandered into the kitchen and helped stir. I slid the cake into the oven, read her a book and put her down for her nap. While June napped, the house started to smell pleasantly of chocolate. I collected birthday items in a clementine box so I wouldn’t forget anything. I tossed in Mom’s card first. Before putting my card in, I decided to dress it up a bit by putting a bow on the envelope and sticking it in a gift bag with some tissue paper. Now things were looking more festive.

After June’s nap, we went to the Clifford web site (http://pbskids.org/clifford/index-brd-flash.html) and she designed a card. I printed it and she colored it. Next she painted her watercolor. I reminded her to include some blue in it because that’s Beth’s favorite color. She finished just as Noah’s bus arrived. After he had completed his half hour of reading for the day, I got him to work making his own card. Into the box went the kids’ cards and the now-dry painting.

Noah’s card has the following poem in it:

Happy last wishes to the bee
Unlike you she’s not 43
Happy birthday to you,
For you’re no zombie.

(He used a rhyming dictionary to compose these timeless verses.)

While Noah was at work on his card, I frosted the cake. June thought it needed pink sprinkles, so I let her shake them on. She applied them with a liberal hand.

I made an okra gumbo soup for dinner because Beth’s a fan of okra. I was just getting dinner on the table when she got home around 6:30. June dashed to meet her at the door. “Bef, we have a surprise for you!” she exclaimed, tugging on Beth’s arm and pulling her into the kitchen where we showed her the cake. Then June grabbed her Clifford card from the box on the dining room table. Then out came Noah’s card and June’s watercolor and a bonus drawing of all of us, plus a “lion made of gold,” and a mouse. I meant for presents to go with cake, but we had present momentum, so Beth opened Mom’s gift and mine, too. I asked her what her colleagues did for her and she said they got her a card and a cupcake. Beth tasted the frosting left on the sides of the mixing bowl and said, “So that’s what the cream cheese was for.”

We ate dinner and Beth wanted to know if there was ice cream to go with the cake. There was not. She proposed a trip to the supermarket to get some. There was a lot of indecision and back and forth about who exactly would go with her, but in the end June went and Noah stayed so he’d have time to watch an episode of Fraggle Rock. It ended just around the time they came back. I lit the candles, we sang “Happy Birthday” in English and Spanish and then we ate. (Noah licked all the frosting off his piece, left the cake untouched and asked for seconds. Beth and I said “No” in unison.)

We got the kids ready for bed, but before she climbed into bed, June wanted to say one last “Happy Birthday” to Beth, so she and I went into the study where Beth was already deep in nursery school committee work.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You do it,” she said.

“Happy Birthday, “ I said, giving Beth a kiss. So the day ended as it began with me giving Beth birthday greetings on June’s behalf. Her presents may have fit in a little box, but my love and appreciation for her do not.

Happy Birthday, my love. I’m ever so glad you were born.