Half Past Three

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Steph

At half past three this afternoon, Noah was just off the school bus and settling into the sky chair to read the A Series of Unfortunate Events book #12 (The Penultimate Peril). This is his after school routine. Sometimes he will talk to me a little about his day, but more often he wants to dive straight into his book.

June was trying to pull the book away, wanting to look at its cover illustration. Thinking quickly to avert conflict, I asked her if she’d like me to bring Noah’s outgrown wooden scooter up from the basement to see if she was big enough to ride it. “”Yes!” she said, her face lighting up.

Noah got this scooter for his fourth birthday, when he was considerably bigger than June is now so I wasn’t sure she would be able to maneuver it. I thought it was worth a try, though, because she has been trying to ride his current, much bigger metal scooter and this 1) makes him mad and 2) doesn’t seem very safe since the handlebars are almost as tall as she is.

We went down to the basement and found the scooter, a little dusty and specked with rust. The bell is broken and the handlebars are out of alignment with the wheel. Undaunted, I brought it upstairs. “Am I big enough? Am I big enough?” June wanted to know. I told her we’d have to try it and see. I put her helmet on and took the scooter down to the sidewalk. I asked her if she’d rather practice in the driveway or go down the quiet side street that goes down the side of our yard. Being June, she wanted to go down the busy thoroughfare our house faces. I decided I’d just stay between her and the street and I said yes. We could go as far as the creek, I said. She wanted to go further but we hadn’t even told Noah where we were going so I didn’t want to be gone long. Based on the length of the chapter he was reading, I figured if we were back by four, he wouldn’t even notice we were gone.

She got the hang of it almost immediately on the level parts of the sidewalk. On even the slightest inclines, however, she struggled to make the scooter go forward. She sped down the downhill parts, singing a song of her own invention:

I am going!
I am going on my scooter!
I am the fastest little girl!

Then the scooter picked up speed and she got spooked and jumped off. I grabbed the handlebars so it wouldn’t roll away. “Maybe I’m going too fast,” she said, before climbing back on.

Our progress down the block was impeded by porcelain berries and dogwood berries and black walnuts and acorns, all of which needed to be collected. She tried to stuff them in my pockets as her dress had none. Finally we arrived at the bridge that spans the creek. I lifted her up so she could stand on the wall and look down at the stagnant water. We talked about how the water wasn’t moving and we need some rain so it can move again and then it won’t look so yucky.

The way home was mostly uphill so we pushed the scooter home, walking on either side of it.

June turned three and a half today. It does feel like we are suspended between two poles, sometimes careening down the sidewalk, sometimes briefly paused to gather nuts and berries, sometimes stagnant and stalled. She loves school and bubbles over every day with things to tell us about it. She had a great first day of soccer and can’t wait to go back. She picks up new skills (like the scooter) all the time.

But potty training is still going agonizingly slowly. She did agree to sit on the potty at school today for the first time there, I think, but Lesley said she wasn’t happy about it and she came home with different underwear and shorts under her dress than the ones in which she arrived. This is how it goes most days.

Even more discouraging: after a promising first two nights sharing a room with Noah, she started waking several times a night, asking me to come lay down in her bed, saying she was scared, and coming up with creative reasons she needed to leave the room. There wasn’t enough water in her sippy, there was too much water in her sippy. The glowing numbers on Noah’s digital clock disturbed her. (“He should not have a clock like that. He should have a clock that goes tick tock.”) One night she was out of bed nine times, though most nights it’s closer to two or three. It’s been about two and a half weeks and I am running on fumes. I regret moving her out of our room (we did it, after all, in hopes of getting more sleep), but we made such a big production of it, I don’t know how we’d ever get her out of our room if I crumble now. So I feel stuck.

Around 5:30, June was playing in the yard while I picked tomatoes and cilantro for black bean and avocado tacos. She didn’t want to come in when I’d finished, so I told her I needed to get dinner started so there would be time for cupcakes before Beth dashed off to her 7:30 meeting at June’s school. She came in reluctantly and then started insisting it wasn’t her half-birthday, she was still three. She seemed on the verge of getting seriously upset. I was surprised and asked if there was anything she thought would happen on her half-birthday she didn’t want to happen. She said no. Then I asked if there was anything she thought would happen before she was three and half that hadn’t happened yet.

“Yes,” she said emphatically, placing her hand just over her head. “I’m only this tall!”

“Did you think you’d be taller?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. Noah started explaining that she was small for her age and a lot of kids younger than her are bigger than her. It’s true, but I didn’t think this was the way to go. I shushed him.

“You’re just the right size for you,” I said, kneeling down on the kitchen floor to give her a hug. “We love you just the way you are.”

Noah either got it or lost interest in the question because he let it drop and June seemed satisfied.

After dinner, I set the cupcakes out on a plate. We’d picked them up at the bakery yesterday afternoon: vanilla with raspberry frosting for June, vanilla with vanilla frosting and salted caramel drizzle for Noah, German chocolate for me, chocolate with vanilla frosting for Beth. June helped me pick out the candles (two yellow, one pink and half a green one) and sang softly to herself.

Happy half-birthday to me!
Happy half-birthday to me!

I lit the candles and June blew them all out with one breath. I know we’re halfway between three and four, but there are a lot of other things I don’t know. Are we at the halfway point yet with potty training? With sleeping through the night? (And exactly how tall did she expect to be by now?) While I would certainly like to know, I don’t need to, to love her just the way she is.

Unexpected Gifts

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Steph

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“How old am I?” June wanted to know on Saturday morning.

“Three,” Beth answered.

“How old am I?” Noah chimed in.

“Eight,” Beth said.

“No, I’m 13.8 billion!” he said triumphantly. He and Beth had just been discussing the Big Bang and how all matter in the universe has been present since then.

I turned forty-two yesterday. Or maybe it was 13.8 billion. It feels that way sometimes.

We had a busy weekend before my birthday. The annual Garden Party at June’s school was Saturday afternoon and Noah had a play date with Sasha later in the afternoon and Elias’s birthday party Sunday afternoon. And then there was Mother’s Day.

We were invited to a Mom’s Night Out Mother’s Day Eve party thrown by the Stag Beetle’s moms. We almost never accept invitations for social events in the evenings. By the time the kids are in bed I am usually ready to collapse myself. Recently, though, I’ve found myself staying up a little later, most nights until ten or even beyond. I’m not sure if I’m better rested or just more in need of me-time, but I suspect it’s the latter. So anyway, after going back and forth in my mind about whether or not to go to the party by the time I finally decided to go for it I’d waited too long to find a sitter. I only had time to contact one (Elias’s older sister) and she wasn’t free. So we stayed home.

Possibly it was just as well because we were running around a lot as it was. Noah surprised us by coming home from school on Friday without Mother’s Day gifts for us. He has brought gifts home from school or daycare every year since he was two so we had no backup plan. (What’s up, Montgomery County Public Schools?) Add two Mother’s Day gifts to my birthday present and Elias’s birthday present and that’s a lot of shopping for one indecisive and easily distracted eight year old to accomplish in one weekend.

With only one gift to facilitate, I got off relatively easy. I took both kids to the Safeway on Saturday morning. June knew what she wanted to buy as soon as we crossed the threshold of the store. “Yellow flower balloon!” she began chanting. I wasn’t even planning on getting Beth something from June, because she’d brought home a very nice card with a water color on the front she made at school and the words “They play hide and seek with me. They climb trees with me” printed on rice paper inside. (This was a quote from June, but more a reflection of wishful thinking than reality, at least when it comes to tree-climbing.) Plus June had colored a Mother’s Day page we printed from the Ladybug website (http://www.ladybugmagkids.com) so I thought she was covered. She did not see it that way, however. “Yellow flower balloon!” she cried, becoming more insistent. I grabbed the balloon from the display and guided Noah over to the gift cards. After much deliberation, he selected a Starbucks card. It would have been a better present for me, since I’m the Starbucks fiend in the family, so I tried to steer him to Cold Stone (Beth loves ice cream) or iTunes, but he stuck to his decision. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t a completely inappropriate gift either, as I would come to appreciate later in the weekend.

Shortly after we returned, Beth left for yoga. The kids and I had lunch, then June and I napped while Noah did homework. Beth came back and picked him up to take him shopping again while June and I were still sequestered in the bedroom. I didn’t find out the details of this trip until later, but when they met us at the Garden Party, quite a bit later than expected, Beth seemed frazzled. She also reported that they didn’t have a gift for Elias yet so they would have to go out again the next day.

Meanwhile, June and I socialized and played on the Purple School playground and admired the children’s artwork hanging on the fence. June presented Andrea with a finger painting she’d made. I’d taped a paper onto the back that said:

Steph: What do you like about Andrea?
June: She paints with me.

It was for Teacher Appreciation Week, which had ended the day before, but Andrea was gracious and enthusiastic about the belated tribute.

Beth and Noah made a brief appearance at the party, long enough to say hello to a few people, enjoy some snacks and ooh and ahh over June’s collage of spring grass. Then we all piled into the car and took Noah to Sasha’s.

On Sunday morning, the Mother’s Day gifts came out. June had let the cat out of the bag regarding the balloon the day before, but Beth acted surprised anyway when Noah pulled it out of my closet. Beth had asked me the day before if it was okay if my gift from Noah was “not a very good gift.” Sure, I said, giving gifts is a learned skill; he’s still getting the hang of it, etc. Still, I was surprised and I will admit a little dismayed when he presented me with a pile of papers, crookedly stapled together with a cover sheet that said, “1,000 Page Book Report.” Noah himself has to read books totaling one thousand pages in the last six weeks of the school year and fill out a sheet about each one he reads. He replicated the assignment for me. Noah likes to do this, make homework for us and it’s usually based on his own homework. Generally, we play along, but nonetheless, one does not expect a homework assignment for a Mother’s Day present. For all my selfless sentiments about learning to give gifts, I secretly hoped he’d do better for my birthday the following day.

We went through our normal Sunday routines with the addition of more gift shopping and Elias’s party. The party was at a duckpin bowling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckpin_bowling) alley and it was a bit of a hike from Takoma, so Beth decided to stay in the general vicinity and hang out in Starbucks and use her gift card there. I don’t know why but I imagined her reading or otherwise enjoying herself there. This made it easier to accept that I’d have to miss my Sunday afternoon swim at Piney Branch Pool (http://www.takoma.com/parenting/2009/01/piney-branch-pool-lives-again.html). This is a new tradition I’ve had some trouble getting established. In fact I’ve only done it once, the weekend after Easter. Since then we’ve had other priorities most Sunday afternoons. The one other time I tried to go, I forgot my wallet with the $3.50 I’d need to get in and by the time I got home it was too late to set out again. So, when Beth brought Noah home and I saw her carrying her laptop out of the car I was disappointed. Not only did I miss my swim, but Beth had been working while I was not swimming.

I feel like we haven’t really gotten the hang of Mother’s Day despite eight years of practice. The first one we didn’t expect to celebrate as mothers because Noah arrived three weeks before his late May due date. We were so overwhelmed with new motherhood we agreed to just let the day go uncelebrated. There have been years when we went out for a meal or arranged to each give the other a scheduled break, time to read or leave the house unaccompanied or take an uninterrupted bath, but other years we just seem too busy to work it in. This year was like that. While my Facebook friends were posting upbeat Mother’s Day messages I posted a cranky one about how lesbian moms and straight single moms should be issued a “Dad for the Day” to co-ordinate a day of rest for them.

The next day was my birthday. We’d agreed to do presents in the evening, but Noah gave me a homemade card in the morning. It read: “Happy 42nd Birthday! You’re 42!! Whooooo! You’re 42! Dooooo! You’re 42! 42 is Awesome.” You can’t complain that the boy lacks enthusiasm.

June and I passed a pretty normal Monday. We watched Sesame Street. I did a couple loads of laundry and as we are experimenting with potty training this week, I spent much of the day encouraging June to sit on the potty, stripping off her wet training pants and saying, “It’s okay to have accidents. Everybody has accidents when they are learning to use to the potty” over and over and over.

Here are some presents I didn’t get: June peeing on the potty even once. Noah finishing his homework in a timely fashion so we’d all be ready to go out to dinner when Beth got home.

Here are some presents I did get: Two flowers on the iris that has not bloomed in several years and took me by surprise by putting out buds on Saturday. Beth coming home an hour early, as promised. A nice dinner at Macaroni Grill (http://www.macaronigrill.com/Home/Default.aspx). The exact red velvet strawberry ice cream cake I wanted. Some really fun looking books: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Strange_&_Mr_Norrell) and (http://vaultofevil.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/peter-haining-mammoth-book-of-haunted-house-stories). Socks. Tea. An Umbrella. A Beach Mat with a pillow attached. A gift card from Borders. Some of these things I asked for; some were surprises. Here was the most surprising one: A card from Beth that read: “The bearer of this card is entitled to one DAY OFF of her choosing.” I felt a bit churlish for complaining to the  Internet about my Mother’s Day and for my unexpressed grumpiness about Noah’s first gift. He got me the haunted house book “to read on your day off!” and he seemed genuinely excited about it. (Beth later told me she’d put quite a lot of effort into getting him to select a fitting book and that his original plan was more homework. So, thanks, Beth!)

I have the day off all planned out. Tuesday of next week I will leave the house shortly after breakfast, get a coffee (exactly where depends on the weather) and spend the morning reading (at Savory if it’s raining, somewhere outside if it’s sunny). I’ll return to the house for lunch and a nap, then leave again and go swimming, then return for dinner. This extended break was the most unexpected gift of our back-to-back mid-May celebrations and most definitely the best.

Two! Four! Six! Eight!

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Steph

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On Friday morning I flipped the calendar page to May. “Hey, it’s my birthday cake!” Noah said, looking at the picture. For Christmas Noah and Beth made me a calendar out of family photos using iPhoto. The picture for May is of Noah’s birthday cake from his fifth birthday. He was really into the Magic School Bus (http://www.scholastic.com/magicschoolbus/) books and videos back then and he was on the verge of starting kindergarten so it had a school bus on it. It was also the first year Noah expressed an opinion about the design of his cake, ushering Beth into the job of custom cake decorator. For Noah’s sixth birthday, she made a cloud cake (he was at the height of his meteorology phase then). On his seventh birthday it was a Club Penguin cake.

This year Noah put the theme of his birthday party up to a vote. He gave his guests two options: the human body or pirates. So in advance of invitations, I sent a save-the-date and please-vote-on-the-party-theme email to the parents of Noah’s guests. Pirates won by a large margin, though Noah had been hoping for human body. (He said he would vote only to break the tie if there was one.) I myself had a pirate chest birthday cake when I was ten so I suggested that to Noah. I was thinking it would be pretty easy—a rectangular cake with chocolate frosting and licorice bands across it and maybe a sprinkling of chocolate coins in gold foil. He was having none of it. He wanted his cake to look like a diamond, not only diamond-shaped, but also sparkly. Beth was a bit intimidated by the idea so she was glad when he changed his mind and settled on cupcakes with gold-colored frosting. They were to evoke gold coins. At one point he wanted her to carve faces into the frosting (he’d settled on some obscure nineteenth-century President—I can’t remember which one) but that idea fell by the wayside, much to Beth’s relief.

Like Noah, I’d been hoping for a human body victory. Who knows what kind of cake ideas he would have had for that one, but I’m not the birthday cake baker. I was thinking more of party activities. When Noah was in nursery school half his class was obsessed with pirates and it was all-pirates-all-the-time on the playground that year. I was often troubled by the violent nature of the play. I brainstormed with Noah about non-violent pirate games they could play at his party. (Is that an oxymoron? I think maybe it is.) He seemed most interested in a treasure hunt anyway so I was relieved about that.

Friday Beth stayed home from work to prepare for the party. She went out and bought black goody bags and a silver pen Noah could use to write his guests’ names on them. She got cardboard pirate hats and hooks for the guests to wear and pirate plates and napkins and a couple of skull-and-crossbones garlands for the fence and pirate chest-shaped containers of bubble soap with little pirate bubble wands. She even found a pirate-chest piñata. To fill the piñata she bought chocolate coins and gold Mardi-Gras beads. She also brought home blue cotton candy ice cream from Cold Stone (http://www.coldstonecreamery.com/), which Noah requested. The color was meant to suggest the ocean, Noah said.

After Noah got home from school, they baked the cupcakes. They were coconut, one of Noah’s favorite flavors. I don’t know if he had a tropical angle in mind or not. Beth was a little afraid his guests wouldn’t like them since a lot of kids don’t like coconut, but she went ahead and made them.

Meanwhile, I worked on an article for Sara, poured buckets of water onto the porch floor and swabbed the yellow-green film of pollen off of it, watched June and took her shopping at Now and Then so she could select a gift for Noah. She picked out a blue plastic fish, a small foam globe, and a candy necklace. “I would like one, too,” she said politely, so I bought two.

Friday night I let Noah open one present, a number eight t-shirt like June’s beloved number three shirt, in case he wanted to wear it at his party the next day. I also reminded him he does have a t-shirt with a dog dressed as a pirate on it that would also be appropriate for the occasion. In the end he decided on one of his Hawaiian shirts instead. He often wears these to spring and summer parties. (In fact when he was five he impressed my mom by telling her he liked Hawaiian shirts because they were “festive.”)

Saturday morning and early afternoon Beth and I cleaned house. I washed the dirt of the picnic table and chairs and Beth frosted the cupcakes and sprayed yellow coloring mist on them. (June was particularly interested in this part of the operation.) Beth hung the garlands and the piñata. Rain was forecast and it was overcast, but so far it had not rained. We crossed our fingers that it would hold off until five, the party’s ending time.

Noah stayed in pajamas for much of the day but when it was time to get dressed he decided the weather was too cool for his Hawaiian shirt. Much deliberation about which of his long-sleeved shirts was most pirate-like ensued. I suggested that his largest button-down shirt might create a rakish billowy effect. He paired it with jeans ripped out at one knee.

Sasha arrived at 2:55. Beth gave Noah and Sasha hats and hooks to play with. The hats kept falling off and were soon abandoned, but the hooks were a big hit. Within minutes of Sasha’s arrival, the two boys were dueling on the lawn. I considered my no-violent-play-at-the-pirate-party policy and almost immediately abandoned it as impossible to enforce. Even though it was intended as a duel, the way they had their hooks linked together made it look more like a dance. Or maybe that was just what I told myself.

The rest of the pirate lads and the one pirate lass arrived soon after Sasha did. Do any of you who are parents get Cookie magazine? It has this kids’ party feature with all menus and activities and everything planned out in fifteen-minute increments and all extremely organized. Have a look: (http://www.cookiemag.com/food/birthday_party. Our parties have never been remotely like these. After we took Noah’s guests on the D.C. Duck last year I thought that was it, our simple backyard parties were over, at least for Noah, but that’s exactly what Noah wanted this year: to invite five friends over (we told him he could have up to eight but he only wanted his close friends), to have a treasure hunt and a piñata and cupcakes and ice cream in the yard. Even with the complicated clues Noah wrote for the treasure hunt, the planned activities wouldn’t take even close to two hours so we let the pirates spend the first fifty minutes of the party tearing around the yard, leaping off the porch walls and staging intrigue. They divided into two teams of three and much to my relief, espionage turned out to be a bigger draw than battle. The pirates chased each other around the yard; they hid and spied on each other. Players occasionally switched teams and their new teammates had to decide if the new pirate was actually a double agent. I should have predicted this turn of events. Most of these kids are involved in a running spy game at recess. (Whenever I call it a game, Noah gets exasperated with me. “It’s not a game, Mommy” he will insist. “We’re really spies.”) We did put a stop to some swordplay with sticks. (You’re not really a parent until you’ve warned children about putting an eye out, right?) But overall, all Beth and I needed to do was watch and reassure June, who was a bit overwhelmed by the screaming horde of pirates tearing through her yard.

The piñata required a little more supervision. I asked Noah to let June have a turn and he agreed she could go first. Then he got the idea of going youngest to oldest and all the kids chimed in with their birthdays so they could figure out the order. They thought it was funny that the youngest of Noah’s friends was the second tallest and the oldest was the shortest. It took quite a few rounds to demolish the piñata, even though Sean and Maura both play baseball and have good swings. A container of bubble soap broke inside it and got the chocolate coins soapy. If you unwrapped the foil carefully it was possible to extract the candy soap-free, but not everyone was careful and some soap was consumed along with the chocolate. While Elias talked Beth into letting him taking home the smashed piñata for his collection of broken piñatas, the rest of the pirates sat on the porch and ate the booty until we called them to the treasure hunt. Noah had written a set of clues in the forms of riddles whose answers were colors. Colors corresponded to different areas in the house and yard, all given nautical names. The kitchen was the galley, the bathroom was the head, his room was the crew’s quarters, etc. As the group solved the riddles co-operatively they’d head off to room in question to find the next clue. The last clue led them to the study, where the gold coin/cupcakes were hidden.

Beth needn’t have worried about the cupcakes. Only one child didn’t care for coconut and the blue ice cream was a hit, too. Conversation around the picnic table centered on the how toxic the bubble soap might be and whether or not the pirates who ate the chocolate coins from the piñata might have been poisoned. Then Elias told a story, true, he insisted, about a butcher who killed homeless people and then sold them as meat. After he finished, there was a long considering silence and Maura said she didn’t think it was true. People would notice the disappearances, she said. People don’t care about the homeless, someone said. No, she said, she cared and if she did, others must, too. I knew I liked Maura. Noah followed up with a story from one of his ghost story books, about a set of old-fashioned cabin motor courts that had burned to the ground but re-appeared when travelers in need arrived.

As they finished eating, the pirates drifted away from the table until only Noah and June were still eating. (Peter was polite enough to stay until the end of Noah’s story.) The pirate spy game resumed pretty seamlessly. Soon all the big kids were tearing around the yard again. When their parents came, they hid. Elias’s mom seemed less than thrilled that he was bringing home a new piñata. Sasha’s dad wanted to know if they had raided any oil rigs. At last only Maura was left. Noah invited her to swing on the sky chair until her folks arrived.

When the guests had left we went out for Thai, a birthday eve tradition since the last meal I ate before giving birth to Noah was at a Thai restaurant. Then Noah came home and opened his gifts from his friends, many of them pirate-themed (a book about shipwrecks, a pirate Lego set, etc.). One of his friends got him a remote-control flying toy (imagine a helicopter without the part you ride in) which he enjoyed flying around the house and another friend got him Battleship (http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-4730-Battleship/dp/B00000DMBB). He and Beth played a game before bed, which I made them set aside to finish the next day because it was getting late. Beth was almost as reluctant to quit as Noah was. Then while I got Noah ready for bed Beth set up another present, the home planetarium that projects the constellations onto his ceiling, and he went to bed, but not to sleep for a long while. It had been an exciting day.

Noah’s actual birthday was Sunday. When he came into our room at 7:15, he announced, “I’m eight. I’m four plus four. I’m two times four.” I waited to see if he would say he was two the third power, but he didn’t. I guess they haven’t gotten up to exponents in his accelerated math class. (Although at the rate they are going it should be any day now. They’re already doing long division.) Later he decided he wouldn’t really be eight until 6:05 p.m. since that’s when he was born.

We had a much more relaxed day, waiting for 6:05 p.m.. We had leftover cupcakes for breakfast. He opened gifts from us and from family, read, played and did homework. We let him choose dinner and he decided to go out for Indian at Udupi Palace (http://www.udupipalace.com/). He doesn’t actually like most Indian food but he loves mango lassis and paratha so we let him have bread, rice and a beverage for dinner. (It’s not as bad as it sounds. The bread is whole-wheat and the drink has fruit and yogurt in it.) We didn’t actually notice when 6:05 came. It might have been while we were waiting for our food and Noah and Beth were making up a story about a knight and a frost dragon–it breathes ice instead of fire– making their way through a maze toward a cache of golden pearls. It might have been while we were eating or it might have when we were asking the waiter for a match to light Noah’s number eight candle. He had wanted to save it for his real birthday and since there was no cake at this meal he wanted to put it on the bread. The waiter surprised us with a complimentary dish of Indian sweets. The mango burfee was the best, Noah and I agreed. It’s like a bright yellow, fruity fudge. Beth opined that all three desserts were “okay but not chocolate.”

This morning Beth, June and I delivered Swedish fish to Noah’s classroom this for his class party, so now another birthday is behind us. Our boy is eight. It seems like yesterday he was two years old, playing in his new sandbox, or four and flashing me that angelic smile of his, or six and starting to navigate the shifting alliances of elementary school friendships. But I don’t mourn the passage of time or wish it would stand still. I appreciate so many things about my vibrant, creative son as he is now and I’m eager to see what kind of ten year old he will be.

When She Got Three

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Steph

June turned three on Monday. It was a long-awaited milestone. For months, June had been telling us what would happen “when I get three.” (Because she pronounces it “free,” it often sounded like she was planning a jailbreak.) Most notably, she was going to “get bigger and bigger and bigger.” We tried to break it to her gently that while she’s growing every day she wasn’t likely to be noticeably larger on her birthday. The day was agonizingly slow in arriving. Every now and then she would observe with a sigh, “I’m still two.”

Round One: Saturday and Sunday

Eventually, the big day was only two days away. At lunch on Saturday June asked, “Who is coming to celebrate my birthday?” It was understandable she was confused about the plans because they were complicated.

“Ya Ya and Aunt Carole will be here this afternoon and tomorrow we’ll have cake and presents with them. And then on Monday it will be your birthday and you’ll have more presents. And then on Thursday, Grandmom will be here and you’ll have more cake and presents,” I told her.

June beamed. This was sounding good.

Beth’s mom and her Aunt Carole arrived as promised shortly after June’s nap. We went to Pottery Barn (http://www.potterybarn.com/index.cfm?page=viewall&cm_pla=Brand&cm_ven=Google&cm_ite=pottery+barn&cm_cat=Search&bnrid=3360101) to look at a cabinet Ya Ya had seen in a catalog and was considering purchasing. Then we were off to our favorite vegetarian Chinese restaurant (http://www.thevegetablegarden.com/) for dinner. June was the only one in our party who wanted chopsticks. After a few unsuccessful attempts to pick her noodles up with them she settled on holding the chopsticks with one hand and pressing the noodles to it with the other hand as she guided them to her mouth. Noah proclaimed the effort “very good for her age.”

Sunday morning everyone went to the farmers’ market to shop and listen to Banjo Man and we picked up a Max and Ruby movie and The Very Hungry Caterpillar at the video store as a special treat for June. After a lunch of leftover Chinese and a nap, June went to the playground accompanied by Ya Ya and Carole. There they ran into the Praying Mantis and her mother and grandparents. We had Mexican takeout for dinner — Noah printed out place cards in fancy script for the meal — and then June opened her presents from Carole and Ya Ya. She got a glittery green t-shirt from Oglebay Park and a big pink doll stroller. I had a feeling she’d like it because when she was over at the Dragonfly’s house in January she spent quite a long time pushing a teddy bear around in her friend’s doll stroller. Well, she loves, loves, loves this toy. Her rag doll and Purple Bear have been traveling all over the house in it. They go to coffeehouses, and the post office and quite frequently, to the hospital. (They are prone to breaking their legs.) We’ve also taken the doll and the bear outside for a walk through the yard and down the block. The stroller even came to the corner to meet Noah’s bus on Monday and Tuesday. You get the picture.

After presents came the cake. Per June’s instructions, it was a vanilla cake with green frosting and cherries and a numeral three candle on top. June had been asking to see the candle several times a day for the past few days. When June saw Beth carry the cake out, she gasped with pleasure. But then she stopped and said, “But I didn’t get bigger.” Apparently, she did not feel sufficiently big for cake. She soon forgot this obstacle, however, and after everyone had sung “Happy Birthday” in Spanish and English, as the birthday girl requested, we all dug in.

Round Two: Monday

On the morning of June’s actual birthday, Ya Ya and Carole arrived at our house from their hotel at 7:35, all set to walk over to Noah’s school where he gave them a tour and introduced them to his morning and afternoon teachers. Back home, I gave June a bath and we had a pretty normal day. Just for the day I let June wear the still too-big size 7 red sneakers we bought for her awhile back when Noah needed a pair. (They’ve been in the closet for weeks and she’s been coveting them.) We took our weekly Monday morning stroll to Starbucks where we picked up some chocolate muffins to take home for an after-dinner birthday treat. (We’d frozen the remains of the cake to save for my mom’s visit and I felt like some kind of baked good was called for on the real anniversary of her birth.) We watched Sesame Street, and read and napped and played outside. I made buttered noodles with cheese and carrots for the kids’ dinner and Beth and I had pasta with spinach, chickpeas and garlic sauce. June opened her presents from us and from Auntie Sara after dinner (all except the remote-control water bug Noah picked out for her–it had yet to arrive). I think the first issue of her Ladybug magazine subscription (http://www.cricketmag.com/ProductDetail.asp?pid=5) was probably the biggest hit of the evening. We read it cover to cover twice. When Noah said to June, “You’re three!” she insisted she was still two. “If you’re waiting for a growth spurt, Juney, you’re going to be two a long time,” he predicted.

Interlude: Tuesday and Wednesday

On our way to the library Tuesday morning I explained to June that when Ms. Karen asked if there were any birthdays this week, I’d say yes and everyone would sing “Happy Birthday” to her. “Ms. Karen will sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me?” June exclaimed in astonishment, as if she doesn’t see this happen to other children nearly every Tuesday.

Ms. Karen did not disappoint. “Are there any birthdays this week?” she asked. I raised my hand, pointed down to June’s head and held up three fingers. “She’s three!” Ms. Karen said. “I’ve known her since she was very little. Three! That’s a big one.” June was grinning. Ms. Karen was talking about her in front of the whole Circle Time crowd! Then said crowd — probably at least seventy-five kids, parents and nannies– sang “Happy Birthday” to her. Two of June’s Purple School classmates and at least six kids from past and present sessions of music class were there. A pair of twins from music class came over with their nanny after Circle Time was over and, with some prodding from the nanny, offered more birthday greetings. Then we left with a Frog and Toad book and a Sandra Boynton board book. It was a highly satisfactory outing.

Tuesday night I presented June with some new (to her) pajamas. Most of hers are getting small, so I’d paid a visit to the magic box of hand-me-downs earlier this week and washed two pairs of stripy pajamas for her. I changed her into the blue, orange and white pair. Beth made a big deal out of how big June was getting and how she now needed some new pajamas. June wanted to see if they were “good for jumping on the bed.” She tried it. They were very good for jumping on the bed indeed. As we snuggled in her bed, before she fell asleep she told me, “I’m big like you, Mommy.”

Wednesday morning, June’s music teacher was sick and class was cancelled. We went to the playground instead. As we got ready to go, I caught June admiring her new numeral three t-shirt in the mirror. When I asked her if she’d like to walk there or ride in the stroller, she said she’d walk, “because I’m big.” At the playground she wanted to try the big kid swings. I usually steer her away from these, especially when there are bucket swings available, but I decided to say yes this time. I pushed her very slowly as she held tightly to the chains with her mittened hands. When she’d had enough, without any warning whatsoever, she leapt off, landing gracefully on the wood chips.

Later that morning June and I boarded a bus and went to the co-op in search of allergen-free treats to bring to school for her birthday celebration at school the next day. There are a lot of allergies in June’s class (eggs, dairy, and corn are the big ones) so this was no easy task. Finding something wasn’t the problem; there were plenty of vegan treats at the co-op. I kept picking up cookies and slices of cake in the bakery aisle and thinking, “Ooh, this looks good,” but there was never enough of any one item for everyone and I had a feeling that bringing in more than one flavor of something could be an invitation to discord. So we headed over to the boxed cookies aisle and picked up some vegan chocolate alphabet cookies. We also rounded up twelve lollipops as party favors to go in backpacks and headed home.

That evening, Beth was studying the ingredients on the box and said, “Steph, I hate to break this to you but there’s corn flour in these cookies.” I had completely forgotten about corn! So, we had to resort to popsicles, which were already in the freezer and made from 100% fruit juice, even though Thursday was supposed to be rainy and in the 40s, not really the kind of weather that makes people long for popsicles.

Round 3: Thursday

The morning was cold and rainy, as predicted. June and I set off for school. Her bright yellow backpack, full of popsicles and lollipops, swung from the stroller handles. It was my day to co-op, so I’d be there all morning. Beth was planning to swing by for circle and snack time, to participate in the festivities. (In the meanwhile, she stayed home to do a little housecleaning in preparation for my mother’s arrival later in the day.)

At school, I had parking lot duty and then I helped three of June’s classmates with their journals. (The child draws a picture and the co-oper transcribes what he or she says about it.) Beth arrived around 9:35. “Beth’s here!” June squealed when she came into the classroom. At circle time there was such an abundance of maternal laps, June didn’t know where to sit. She started in my lap, ran over to Beth’s for a while, and then she returned to me. After everyone speculated about what the Ant, who was out of town, might be doing that day, and before the teacher read The Night Kitchen, everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to June. I watched her smile and I thought — this just never gets old for her.

While the kids ate a snack of baby carrots, pretzel rods and strawberries, I slipped the lollipops into their backpacks and set to work slicing the popsicles in half. The box was contained seven grape popsicles and seven cherry ones. I figured if there were fourteen of each every child could have his or her first choice of flavor even if they all wanted the same one. No one seemed to find popsicles an inappropriate treat. Between the eleven kids and five adults, we came close to polishing off the whole box. Beth left at 10:25. The kids spent the rest of the school day at the play dough table and on the playground. As I was getting June into her stroller, the Cricket’s mom came by to inquire how June’s birthday celebrations had gone and then she sang “Happy Birthday” to her.

My mother arrived late in the afternoon. As I finished making beans and rice and quesadillas for dinner, she played with the kids. June was taking her doll to the store to buy a balloon (in the stroller of course). Noah was the sales clerk who sold her the smiley face “Happy Birthday” balloon that’s been floating around the house since Sunday.

After dinner, June opened her final round of presents (except for the remote-control bug that’s still missing in action). Along with some clothes, Mom and Jim got her a personalized CD. Noah has a similar one they got him a few years ago. Your child’s name is sprinkled liberally throughout each song. He got it out to play it recently and June was transfixed. “The CD is talking to Noah!” she exclaimed. Later she asked me to play it again while he was at school. She seemed a bit disappointed when it played. I think she was hoping that in his absence it would address her. Now she had her very own CD. We put it on and when a female voice said, “It’s a great day, June!” before starting to sing the first song, she cried, “It’s talking to me!” Then when male vocalist began the second song she said, “Now the man is talking to me.” Later in the CD there’s a song with animal sounds. “The duck is talking to me!” reported an astonished June. Let’s just say she’s very, very happy with this CD.

After presents, we watched a DVD and ate defrosted birthday cake. In bed, June had some trouble getting to sleep. Over and over her arm stretched up, trying to reach the balloon string, which was now tied to her bed frame. She has had a wonderful week getting three. I don’t think she wants to let go. But she’s got plans for next year. This morning she told me that on her fourth birthday, she wants to bring chocolate chip cookies to school.

Skip to the Love

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Steph

“Skip, skip, skip to the love!”

It was Saturday morning. Beth was making oatmeal for everyone except herself. (She’s our designated Saturday morning oatmeal-maker but she won’t touch the stuff herself.) I was dodging around her getting something for June to eat while we waited. Noah was dancing around the kitchen, singing and hugging people. He’s been quite lovey-dovey recently, full of hugs and “I love you”s for Beth, June and me. The other day he pulled Beth and me together so he can hug us at the same time. Of course, June rushed over and pretty soon we had a whole-family group hug going.

Sunday was the seventeenth anniversary of our commitment ceremony. Right after breakfast we exchanged gifts. Beth got me The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (http://www.afterellen.com/blog/thelinster/the-essential-dykes-to-watch-out-for-25-years-of-laughing-at-ourselves) a collection of Alison Bechdel’s epic lesbian soap opera/comic strip. The strips in the book span the years from 1987 to 2008. I’ve been reading it for three days now and it really brings back old times.

I started reading this strip sometime while we were in grad school at the University of Iowa from 1989 to 1991. I used to find it a newspaper at the university library (I no longer remember if it was a gay and lesbian newspaper or a feminist one—I read both). Sitting at the long tables in the sunny periodicals room and reading it was my favorite study break. The well-developed characters and dead-on observations about lesbian culture drew me right in. And it was funny, too. When we moved to D.C., I kept reading it in The Washington Blade, but sometime around Noah’s birth I stopped reading The Blade on a regular basis. Every now and then I’d pick up a copy and read the strip, or in recent years I’d log onto the DTWOF website (http://www.dykestowatchoutfor.com/index.php), but mostly I’d read the paperback anthologies that came out every couple of years. However, I found that without reading it regularly I kept losing the thread of the plot. I’d find myself constantly wondering, who’s that minor character? And who’s sleeping with whom now?

So now I have a chance to start over and follow the strip’s whole narrative arc. (It’s somewhat abridged, but most of the strips are there.) Even though it’s been nine to twenty years since I read these strips (I’m currently up to the year 2000), I remember them all so well, but I find some of my reactions are different now. As a mother, I found Raffi’s birth more touching than I did at the time. And I remember being truly upset when Mo and Harriet broke up but now it just seems like another twist in the constant romantic shuffling of the core group of characters. As admirably diverse as the characters are, there is a notable dearth of stable couples represented in DTWOF. (And no, Clarice and Toni don’t count. Too many affairs.)

I think my reactions show me in what a different place I am in my life and especially in my marriage. I feel very secure in my relationship with Beth. I don’t find myself imagining what our breakup would be like when two cartoon characters split up or in every sad Ferron song. I’m almost immune to imagining it. I also find myself a bit distanced from all the melodrama of DTWOF now because my life is just not like that and hasn’t been for a long time.

Sometime before Christmas my sister and I had a phone conversation about why I want to be married and why she doesn’t. I focused on the financial inequities Beth and I face because I knew she’d understand that. Of course, I would like for us to pay less in taxes and to have the peace of mind of knowing I’d have access to Beth’s Social Security benefits if she predeceases me. I also mentioned that we’d be more secure in having Beth’s adoption of the kids recognized if there was an emergency while we were traveling out of state to places that don’t grant second-parent adoptions. But there’s more to it than all that and I don’t think I adequately explained. Beyond all the rational reasons, in my heart I just want to be married, to be able to say “my wife” and to be understood and recognized.

We also talked about how you become sure of someone else. My sister and I are children of divorce and it was hard for me to get to that place of certainty. I wasn’t 100% there when I proposed to Beth. I just realized I was as close as I was going to get without taking the leap. Sara can’t quite imagine being able to say forever to someone and believing it wholeheartedly. (Having a marriage break up after two years probably had something to do with this.) I did get there, though. I can’t say when. There was no epiphany, no dramatic breakthrough. I just know Beth and I are a team now, more than we were before the commitment ceremony, more than we were before Noah was born, and that I can’t imagine my life without her.

On Sunday morning I made our traditional anniversary spice cake, using the recipe we used for our wedding cake. Beth took June grocery shopping and I cleaned house. During June’s nap, the babysitter arrived. Beth and I were going to a movie, our third in as many months. (I think this is a record for us, as parents.) We saw Milk over Thanksgiving and Doubt while we staying with Beth’s folks at Christmas. We wondered what to go see. Revolutionary Road and The Reader were on my list but a movie about a failed marriage didn’t seem right for an anniversary outing. And a film about the Holocaust didn’t really seem that celebratory either. So we ended up with Frost/Nixon. I know, not exactly a date flick, but there weren’t any romantic lesbian movies playing at our local theater. Go figure. We went to Border’s afterward and I used a gift card I got for Christmas to buy a book (Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction). Then we picked up a white chocolate mocha for Beth and a green tea latte for me and we were headed home. Beth made a delicious Mexican lasagna and we ate the cake. It was a really nice day.

This morning Noah wanted to know what would happen if Beth and I split up. Would he live with Beth or me? These are big questions. I really don’t know why some marriages last and other don’t so how could a seven year old begin to fathom it? I just know we’re all still skipping to the love. We are, as June observed at dinner tonight, “a whole family together” and I hope he feels it. I think he does.

An Ordinary Sunday

Posted on November 23, 2008 by Steph

Noah poked his head into our room about 7:15 on Beth’s birthday. “I took the red sock off and put a green sock on,” he said. “Pretty smart, huh?”

Noah is allowed to wake us at 7:10 on weekends. (The weekday time is 6:30.) The problem with this system is that he almost always forgets it’s a weekend on Saturday mornings and often on Sundays as well. I’d put a red sock of his on our doorknob the night before and explained to him that it was a stop sign to remind him to stop and think if it was time to come in yet. So, of course, before he came in, he needed to replace it with a green sock. He’s like that.

Since it was 7:15 when he came in, Beth’s first birthday present was five minutes extra sleep. Or it might have been more like ten because she appeared to sleep through our conversation about how he thought it would be fun to hide her presents. I don’t think she was faking it either. Noah ran off to hide his present and I slid my card under her pillow. When he came over to her side of the bed and woke her, she looked convincingly disoriented.

Soon Noah was leading her through the house, telling her when she was cold, warm or hot. Once she’d found his present, she came back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed near her pillow. “You couldn’t get much hotter,” I said.

“Thank you,” she grinned. I smiled back. And she reached under the pillow and retrieved the card.

Beth opened her presents. Noah had gotten her a twenty-five dollar gift certificate for iTunes. I gave him fifteen dollars to buy a present and he chipped in ten dollars of his own money, which I thought was pretty generous given that his allowance is two dollars a week. I’d renewed a magazine subscription for two years and Andrea had sent socks and shirts.

I made pancakes for breakfast. Since I cook dinner five nights a week, weekend breakfasts are usually Beth’s province. After we ate, we settled into a fairly normal Sunday routine. Beth went grocery shopping while I cleaned house. Later she did nursery school committee work, ran Noah over to Sasha’s house and raked some leaves. June made one of the piles into a nest and pretended to be a bird in it. I made the long-delayed pumpkin tureen soup.

Over the course of the day, my mom, Beth’s mom and Beth’s brother all called to wish her a happy birthday. Johnny had bad news. His wife Abby has lost her job at EMS (http://www.ems.com), due to the downturn in the economy. Beth’s mom actually called at least twice to discuss some other heavy family matters. I listened to Beth offer sympathy and advice. Beth is the kind of person other people rely on–me, the kids, her family, her colleagues at work, the other parents at nursery school. I often grumble (in my head, to myself mostly) that as a stay-at-home mom, I never get a break, but it’s just as true of her.

On Veteran’s day, Beth had the day off work and Noah did not have it off school, so we spent the morning watching 42 Up, the fifth in the British documentary series about the lives of a group of people who have been tracked every seven years since they were seven years old. I asked her if she chose this film because she was about to turn forty-two. She said no–it was a coincidence. Then I asked if she could identify with the stage in life in which the subjects find themselves. She said she hadn’t thought about it much. (Okay, so much for calling her birthday entry “42 Up,” I thought. Sometimes my loved ones refuse to be convenient blog-fodder.) Then she turned the question back on me. Did I? Yes and no, I said. Most of them had kids older than ours and a lot of them had already lost parents so in some ways they seemed older than us, but I did notice that the film series’ initial focus on social class seemed to have attenuated somewhat over time as the subjects’ stories became more centered around their home and family lives. That’s certainly where our focus is these days.

After dinner, I asked Beth if she wanted her cake right away or at the kids’ before bed snack-time. She said right away. I thought that was a good idea. We’d be less likely to be rushed that way. I got out the ice cream, stuck the numeral four and two candles in the cake and lit them. The cake was a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and peanut butter filling. I got it from Cake Love (http://www.cakelove.com/), a fancy bakery in Silver Spring. Beth got me a Cake Love cake for my birthday after I had June, to celebrate my release from gestational diabetes. She also got one for her mother one year when Andrea came to visit us on her birthday, but she’d never had one herself. I thought it was about time.

I picked the cake up on Friday night after supper at zPizza. As I walked back through the pedestrian mall to rejoin Beth and the kids, balancing the cake box and sipping a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream dusted with nutmeg, a light snow fell. Beth loves snow. I often view it with suspicion, as our school district plays pretty fast and loose with the snow days. In that moment, though, I silently hoped for a snowy winter.

Beth blew out the candles on the cake and Noah and I sang “Happy Birthday.” June loves the birthday song and her face lit up when we began to sing, although she did not sing along. Once she’d finished her cake and ice cream, she said, “Next time I will sing it.” We all assumed she meant the next time we were eating birthday cake, but after I got her out of the high chair she began to belt it out.

The kids were asleep by 8:45. Beth went back to the computer to work on nursery school tasks. I emptied the dishwasher, put away the dinner dishes and was in bed by 9:30. It would be almost two hours before Beth joined me.

Happy birthday, dear Beth. It was an ordinary Sunday in many ways, full of chores and responsibilities. But you are an extraordinary woman. I love you now and always.

At My House (For Sara and Dune)

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Steph

This is my house

At my house I can hear…BAM BAM
See saw see
Rap rap rap
Ssss Ssss
Zing-zing
Clunkety clunk clunk

At my house I can smell…Ooooo
Sniffy sniff sniff
Whiff
Mmmm Mmmm
Good
Yummy

At my house I can taste…Yum, yum
Sweet
Syrupy
Tangy
Buttery

At my house I can see…Up up up
Straight
Round
Down, down, down
Green, yellow, brown

At my house I can feel…Fluffy
Smooth
Warm
Fuzzy
Soft

This is my house

At My House
By Claire Clark and Susan James Frye

June got this book (along with a couple more books, a few cds and a pretty rosewood xylophone) in her take-home kit for the fall session of Kindermusik, which just started up again last week. The session theme is Milk & Cookies. It’s all about domestic routine. During the first class we pretended to be clothes in a washing machine and at one point we were all issued dust rags, which we pretended to use. I’m pretty sure she got what we were doing in the washing machine but that whole dusting thing might have been a bit perplexing to her. It’s possible she’s never seen anyone dust.

Anyway, this book really captivates June. I read it to her over and over and she delights in finding the stuffed kangaroo on each page. Extended exposure has gotten me to thinking about our own domestic routines. Here’s what that kangaroo might have seen (and smelled and tasted and heard and felt) at our house over the past few days.

Friday: At my house I can smell… Italian frosted cookies.

“Do you still want to make cookies this afternoon?” I asked Noah when he got off the school bus.

He nodded his head enthusiastically and did a Cookie Monster imitation, “Cookies!”

After we’d read a few chapters of Dragon Slayers’ Academy #13 (Beware! It’s Friday the 13th) and he’d watched his allotted hour of television, we got started. One of June’s Kindermusik books has recipes for cookies from around the world and Noah had been paging through the book and asked if we could make the Italian frosted cookies. I said sure, though I was a little dismayed to note it looked like the most complicated recipe of the lot. The dough has to be kneaded and shaped into rings, baked, glazed and sprinkled with candy.

I put one of June’s new Kindermusik cds on in the living room to keep her occupied while Noah and I measured and mixed the ingredients. I wanted to include her later in the process, but this looked like it would take longer than whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies and her attention span is about what you’d expect from a two and a half year old.

At one point she wandered into the kitchen and almost immediately, the kids were fighting over who would stand on the stool we use to reach high shelves. I folded it up and said no one could stand on it. Noah accepted this, but June sobbed and sobbed and I wondered if this was going to derail the whole baking project. Then, all of a sudden, she was finished crying and went back to playing.

By the next time she came in, we were rolling the dough out on a floured board on the dining room table. I gave her a lump of it to knead and she was a happy, happy girl. Both kids sank their fingers in the dough and poked and squished and giggled. We let June keep kneading an ever-diminishing ball as Noah and I formed the rings and placed them on the baking sheets. I wondered if she’d have trouble relinquishing that last little bit, but she gave it up readily when I let her (and Noah) have a taste. I realized that all the extra steps I had seen as a hassle were really the fun of the project.

Beth got home early, around six, because we were going out for pizza. I was proud of myself for having timed everything perfectly. She got home right as the cookies were coming out of the oven. Except when I checked on them they looked like dough, not cookies. Come to think of it, I’d never smelled them baking. The oven was not turned on. I must have turned it off inadvertently when I’d turned on the oven light early in the baking. I consulted quickly with Beth. Should we wait to heat up the oven and bake the cookies or just leave? We decided to go ahead and bake them.

Twenty minutes later, as I headed to the oven to retrieve the cookies, Beth said, “Now that smells like cookies.” The rich smell greeted us again when we came home from our dinner.

At my house I can smell…the sweet smell of an hour’s play.

Saturday: At my house I can taste…homemade pesto

Saturday was a busy day. I folded and put away three loads of laundry, mowed the back yard, glazed the cookies and sprinkled colored sugar on them, attended a meeting at June’s school, read more four more chapters of DSA #13 to Noah and The Tale of Peter Rabbit to June (at least six times) and made dinner.

Five o’clock found me in the garden, cool in the growing shade of a late September afternoon, snipping basil stems off near the ground and putting the leaves in a measuring cup. I’d read online that if you leave a little stem and a couple leaves the basil will keep growing. I wasn’t certain we had a cup’s worth of leaves and sure enough I came up a little short. I wondered if I should just pick everything, but in the end I left two leaves on almost every stem. I‘d surveyed the garden: the cilantro, cucumbers and spinach were finished; the second planting of lettuce was getting sparse and all but a couple carrots were gone. We had eight tomatoes in varying stages of ripeness on the vine, but there hadn’t been any new green ones in a long while. I wanted to stretch the bounty of the garden out a little longer if I could.

An hour and twenty minutes later I took my first bite of whole-wheat penne with pesto. It was just right. Even Beth, who had a cold, said she could taste it.

At my house I can taste… a rich, green, fleeting moment of summer.

Sunday: At my house I can hear…Noah reading.

Noah was sprawled out on our bed, his math worksheet in front of him. He was alternately staring into the middle distance and playing with his pencil. Beth and June were at the farmers’ market and I’d come into the room for a book. I checked his progress. Three problems left on the sheet plus one more page and he’d be done his ten pages of math homework for the week.

I decided to forget my book and said, “Do you want to take a break and read some DSA after you finish that page?” He agreed readily. It’s always more fun to read to him when June’s out of the house and not interrupting us every few minutes and he and I are so rarely alone when I don’t have pressing chores. I prodded him into finishing the last three addition problems and we got started. I read the last four chapters of the book. It took about twenty-five minutes, five more than he needed for his reading log. I was getting up when he said he wanted to read the DSA newsletter at the back of the book.

I hesitated, but then he offered to read it to me, so I said yes. Noah’s a good reader but he still prefers for us to read to him. He read the whole nine-page newsletter, occasionally misidentifying a word (“community” for “committee”), reading other hard words (“evidence”) with ease, and laughing over and over at the jokes: “Why was Cinderella so bad at sports? Because her coach was a pumpkin!”

At my house I can hear…the written word coming alive in my son’s voice.

Monday: At my house I can feel…sick

Beth and I have been trading a couple of separate illnesses back and forth. She had the stomach bug first and then the cold. I got the cold first and then yesterday morning around 4:15 I woke feeling decidedly queasy. I will spare you the details, but it was bad enough that Beth decided to stay home and watch June today so I could rest. The worst of it was over by 9:30 in the morning, but I spent a lot of the day on the couch, cuddling with June and watching Sesame Street, or in bed– sleeping, reading the most undemanding thing I could find in the house (http://www.cookiemag.com/) or reading to June.

I found my favorite white cotton long underwear bottoms I haven’t worn since spring and spent the day in them and I swiped the comfy fleece throw from Noah’s room. Beth bathed June, read to her, took her on a couple of outings and brought me back an almond latte. When Noah got home from school, she read to him.

At one point, June climbed into bed with me and said, “We’re cozy, aren’t we?”

Even though I did two loads of laundry and made a simple dinner while Beth supervised Noah’s homework, it still felt like staying home from school and having my mom watch over me.

At my house I can feel…nurtured.

Tuesday: At my house I can see…two and a half candles on a cupcake.

“How ‘bout we give her a half present?” Noah said on his way out the front door this morning. We’d been discussing plans to go to the supermarket after school and get cupcakes for June’s half-birthday.

June is two and a half today. Now that we’re at the halfway point, I can say her twos haven’t been terrible, at least so far. She can throw a decent tantrum (she threw one this afternoon at Starbucks as a matter of fact) and we hear “Give it back! It’s mine!” quite a lot (more often when the object is not in fact hers), but her fits, while intense, pass pretty quickly. She can usually be distracted or jollied out of them. They are nothing like the tantrums Noah had when he was three and half to four and a half (one of which led me to sit down next to him on the sidewalk outside the Takoma Metro stop and cry). Maybe she’s still warming up, but if not, I feel like we’ve gotten off pretty easy.

I know we did with her transition to school. She has loved it from day one, with no period of adjustment. On Thursday and Friday mornings she’s so excited to leave the house that more often than not we leave earlier than we need to. We’ve taken to walking instead of using the stroller. As I watch her run down the sidewalk, tiny behind her huge backpack, I wonder where my baby went and where this little girl came from, the one who calls Beth and me “You guys” and who sometimes says “No problem” (it comes out sounding more like “No pwobwem”) instead of “Yes.”

Beth called around 6:20 to say there were delays on the Red Line and that she’d be late getting home. We ate without her. June dug into her whole-wheat spaghetti with fresh tomatoes, cheese, olives and veggie meatballs. I didn’t make her a salad because she hasn’t been eating them recently but she asked for one when she saw mine and so I got her some spinach leaves and garbanzo beans and she ate those, too. After dinner she climbed up on the kitchen stool to peek at her cupcakes on the counter.

“What are my cupcakes doing?” she asked. I’d promised she could have one after dinner. I told her we were waiting for Beth to come home and eat her dinner first. June went to the living room and sat down in her rocker with a stuffed bunny in one arm and a copy of Babybug (http://www.cricketmag.com/ProductDetail.asp?pid=10) in the other.

When Beth walked in the door at 7:10, June informed her she was reading to the bunny and then told her we had cupcakes.

Finally, it was time to eat the cupcakes. We lit two and a half candles and sang “Happy Birthday” and “Feliz Cumpleaños.” I helped June blow out the candles and then I pulled them out. June attempted to count them. “One, two, three, four, five!” she said. June can count up to twelve or so, but when she’s counting actual objects she tends to go too fast and come up with an inflated total. She examined the sprinkles on the frosting carefully before she ate. “All different colors of my birthday!” she said.

After she’d finished, she said, “It’s not my half birthday, it’s my five birthday.”

“Some day,” I said, thinking she’s already halfway there.

At my house I can see…a girl who charges ahead and doesn’t look back.

This is my house.

Note: While all this was going on, my sister Sara and her gentleman friend Dune bought their first house. May it be full of yummy smells and tastes, joyful sounds and sights, and feelings of love and celebration.

The Very Merry Month of May

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Turning forty-one is anticlimactic. There’s no getting around it. This year it was especially so since we celebrated my birthday (along with Noah’s and my sister’s boyfriend’s and Mother’s Day) the day before my birthday at my mother and stepfather’s house in Pennsylvania. My sister and her beau Dune are visiting from Oregon and due to the convergence of early to mid-May birthdays and Mother’s Day, we decided to have one big celebration. Saturday ended up being more convenient than Sunday since we were planning to drive back home early Sunday afternoon so Noah could attend a birthday party.

The weekend was too short. Everyone knew it would be ahead of time, but we didn’t want to pull Noah out of school and he didn’t want to miss Elias’s party (they’ve been friends since nursery school) so we had a pretty short window of opportunity to see Sara and Dune. This was complicated by the fact that we go to bed and get up really early and they don’t, plus they were on West Coast time and June naps in the middle of the day so there were remarkably few hours when everyone was awake at the same time.

We arrived on Friday evening close to eight and headed straight for the kitchen to admire the beautiful and nearly finished renovation Jim has been working on for over a year. Then we let the kids stay up an hour past their bedtime to socialize a bit with Grandmom, Pop, Auntie Sara and Dune. Noah went to sleep pretty easily but June was so wound up it was another hour before she got to sleep. Then she was up three times during the night and Noah woke up for the day at 5:35, so none of us was what you’d call well rested for the big day. We would pay for this later.

In the morning, Mom and Noah played the Ungame (http://www.boardgames.com/ungame.html), a therapy tool she uses with her clients. It’s a board game in which you discuss different feelings depending on where you land. Noah loves this game. He plays it with her almost every time we visit. During the course of their game I learned that the Penguin Secret Agency dissolved this week, as the members quit one by one. It seems Noah had a very specific vision about how it was to operate and wouldn’t compromise with his fellow agents. He said he didn’t understand why people didn’t want to do what the club was for in the first place. In any case, the last member quit on Friday. Noah seemed not only disappointed about this but also a little mad. He even said Sasha wasn’t his best friend any more.

Sara and Dune got up around eleven. We hung out for a while until it was time for June to have lunch and take her nap. I elected to sleep with her since she was sleeping in a bed that was pretty high off the ground and I was exhausted. Sara wanted to take Noah to an arcade to play Dance Dance Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution). I thought it was going to be just the two of them, but she talked Mom and Beth into going along. Dune was taking his own nap and Jim was working outside so when June woke up she and I were on our own for a couple hours. When Dune woke up we talked politics for a while and June ran around the house insisting she was “the biggest most famous.” She must have been repeating something she heard somewhere but I can’t think what. When Dune asked, “Are you the biggest most famous?” she said, “Yes,” in a matter-of-fact tone.

When everyone returned I learned the plan had changed to miniature golf while they were out and that Noah had a huge meltdown at the seventeenth hole because he noticed the other course had a water hazard and he wished they were playing that one instead. Beth had to pick him to get him off the course and she says he was completely out of control. We can only guess it was frustration about the dissolution of his club coupled with a poor night’s sleep. He’s also got a mouthful of loose teeth, which feel funny and make it hard for him to eat sometimes. After a long talk with Beth and me, he agreed to apologize to Mom and Sara, though he could only bring himself to do it after piling sofa cushions around himself and delivering the words of the apology in scrambled order. (Mom had told him when it’s hard to say something you can start in the beginning, the middle or the end, whatever is easiest.)

Mom and I went out for coffee before coming home and starting dinner, an enchilada casserole that turned out quite well. It took longer than expected to assemble, however, so we decided to open presents while it baked instead of waiting until afterward. Mom, Beth and I had Mother’s Day presents and cards to open. Dune, Noah and I had birthday presents. Even Sara, whose birthday was in March, had a late present from Mom (a set of glasses), which Mom had held onto because they were too fragile to ship. Sara squealed when she saw her glassware—it was just like glasses she’d admired in Italy. Dune laughed with surprise when he opened the spirulina bars we bought him. “I love these! Sara must have told you.” Noah was very excited about his Snap Circuits Jr. kit (http://www.fatbraintoys.com/toy_companies/elenco_electronics_inc/snap_circuits_jr.cfm). I read the long and mushy message in the Mother’s Day card Noah picked out for me aloud. He’d signed it twice, so I’d know it was really from him. (And not from some imposter son? Kids can be mysterious.) Beth and I also had homemade Mother’s Day cards from school. He’d drawn our names in jellyfish tentacles just like the ones he had Beth draw on the goody bags for his party. Meanwhile, June busied herself with the paper and ribbons and didn’t seem to notice that nothing was for her.

Even with the schedule change, by the time we’d eaten dinner and cake and ice cream and gotten the kids ready for bed, it was nine o’clock again. This time, though, both kids dropped off right away and Beth and I got to sleep a little earlier as well. June slept through the night for the first time in a few weeks and Noah woke briefly at 5:40, only to go back to sleep and sleep in until 7:05.

We had a Mother’s Day brunch around ten, without Sara and Dune, who’d been out visiting friends until two in the morning and were still asleep. Noah had no trouble chewing the French toast and ate four slices. Mom finally roused Sara and Dune around eleven thirty, as we were packing to leave. Sara was sad about missing brunch and wished we’d woken her earlier. She sat on our bed, watching us get ready and said she finally realized who June reminded her of—Cindy Lou Who from The Grinch (http://jpbutler.com/images/cindy-lou-who.jpg). She’s the tiny little girl with blonde hair and big blue eyes. Beth said there’s no way the Grinch could have put one over on June like he did with Cindy Lou.

Driving home, we remembered we’d left a couple of June’s sippies in Mom and Jim’s fridge and that we’d also forgotten to take some of the cake with us. I was a little disappointed to think there would be no cake on my real birthday, but we stopped at Starbucks and I put a sizeable dent in the gift card Noah got me for my birthday, buying coffee and juice and pastries for everyone.

We got home in time for Noah to make Elias a birthday card on the computer and for me to plan some dinners for the next week and put ingredients on the shopping list. Beth took June shopping while Noah was at the party and I was left alone. This is my regular time to do housework, but I decided to read a book Beth got me for my birthday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Ghosts) instead. It felt rather decadent. I’d also told Beth to buy some Brie while she was out shopping. I’ve been trying to cut back on fat a little so this was a luxury, too. It started to rain pretty hard soon after Beth, Noah and June left. I curled up in bed with my book and read a story. When I finished it I felt too tired to keep reading so I decided to rest my eyes a bit and listen to the pelting rain. I woke up forty-five minutes later. I resolved to be a little bit useful and I unpacked everyone’s clothes, unloaded the dishwasher and watered the plants.

I opened my gift from Andrea when everyone came home and we had lentil soup, Brie and apricot jam on flatbread for dinner, followed by cupcakes Beth picked up at the grocery store. She asked me whether I wanted one with blue, pink or orange frosting. Remembering how my sister and I always fought over the pink cupcake whenever Mom bought the Sara Lee variety pack, I chose the pink one. Later that night my sister called to wish me a happy birthday, since she’d forgotten to earlier in the day.

It was a low-key birthday, a bit overshadowed by other celebrations but that’s because we have so much to celebrate in this merry, merry month: having and being a mother, having a wonderful partner to share my mothering, the birth of my eldest child and the man who makes my sister laugh like none of her other boyfriends ever did and Noah’s oldest friend. Plus I had over two hours to myself with minimal responsibilities and I got the pink cupcake. That sure doesn’t happen every day.

Lucky Duck

Posted on May 4, 2008 by Steph

“I’m seven,” Noah announced when he came into our bedroom at 6:50 yesterday morning. “It’s my birthday.”

“Happy Birthday,” I answered, stretching my arms out of the bed to give him his first seven-year-old hug. “It’s also a weekend,” I reminded him. “So you’ll have to go back to your room for a little while.”

We recently instituted a later wakeup time for weekends. Noah can still come into our room at 6:30 on weekdays, but on weekends, it’s 7:10. (We proposed 7:00 and when he offered us an extra ten minutes, we readily accepted.)

Soon I could hear the clicking of Magna-Tiles (http://www.magnatiles.com/) fitting together and Noah’s cheerful voice singing:

You woo-woo-woo-woo can do woo-woo-woo-woo a la la la la la lot under water
A You woo-woo-woo-woo can do woo-woo-woo-woo a la la la la la lot under water…

You can pretend you are mermaids or mermen
swimming deep beneath the sea
if you find lost treasure on the ocean floor
please bring it back up to me.

(http://www.milkshakemusic.com)

Apparently he was anticipating his party, which was going to have an “Under the Sea” theme. He’d picked an underwater scene he found online for the invitations. I’d bought gummy sharks and squids and other sea animals along with rubber ducks and water-squirters in the shapes of dolphins, sharks and alligators for the goody bags. Beth decorated the bags, drawing jellyfish on the girls’ bags and sharks on the boys’, per Noah’s instructions. The guests’ names were written in tentacles and teeth. She also fashioned him the “coral crown” he requested out of pink craft foam and baubles they found at a craft shop. Beth baked the cake and frosted it with a scuba-diving penguin on a blue background. (This, of course, was based on a design from Club Penguin.) The party itself was to be held partly on the D.C. Duck (http://www.dcducks.com/), an amphibious tour vehicle that takes you to see some of the monuments and other sights on your way to the Potomac, where you take a short cruise.

When Noah came into the room Beth (who had arisen at 6:20, showered and left the house) was already on her way to stand in line for tickets for the Duck, which are only available on a same-day basis.

When Beth returned around 8:45, with tickets in hand and laden with coffee and pastries from Union Station, Noah began to unwrap his first round of presents. Among the big hits were the tropical fish short pajama set Andrea sewed for him (he decided to wear the top to his party), Magic Tree House #39 (appropriately titled A Dark Day in the Deep Sea) and a six-month renewal of his Club Penguin membership.

When the presents were opened, he started telling us more about his recess club, the Penguin Secret Agency, or P.S.A. (It’s based on the secret agent program on Club Penguin. Noah recently qualified to be a secret agent on the site.) Right now the recess club seems to be splitting its time between solving mysteries and growing its membership. Peter’s job is to talk up the club on the playground, while Sasha writes its name in sidewalk chalk. They’ve had a recent coup: a second grader joined the previously all first-grade club. I asked Noah if there were any girls in the club and he said no, that he’d wanted to ask Maura, but he didn’t because “she has her own club she’s the boss of, like me.”

“You’re the boss of the club?” I asked. This was news.

“Yeah, because I started it,” he said. This heartened me, not because I think he needs to be the boss of everything, but because after playing almost exclusively with Sasha for the first two-thirds of first grade, he went through a bit of a recess rough patch when Sasha started playing basketball with Sean instead. He remained friendly with both boys and they invited him to join in, but he doesn’t care much for sports so he turned them down. For several weeks he played by himself at recess, trying to recreate the games he and Sasha had played in solo versions. He was a bit downcast about it and I felt helpless to offer advice. I’ve rarely made friends easily and I’ve gone through a few dry spells myself (truth be told I’m in one now). I did try though, making occasional suggestions about how to approach children and reminding him of kids he’s played with in the past. Then, gradually, he began mentioning playing with one child or another for a few days at a time until more often than not, he had a playmate at recess. Then suddenly he was printing out membership forms for his club and discussing its growth potential. He’s rebuilt his social network with admirable speed and panache.

The child development experts say seven can be a whiny, melancholy, self-pitying age. So far we haven’t seen much evidence of that. Granted, he’s only been seven for two days, but it seems to be a good age for him. He’s doing well academically. His teachers say he’s reading and doing math well above grade level and they have no serious complaints about his behavior. His print of the letter N was selected for an elementary and middle school art show at a nearby mall. And he’s overcome a challenging social situation. So far it seems more like lucky seven than sad seven.

Seven is the age when boys in ancient Sparta left home to begin their military training. In medieval times it was the age when sons of nobility moved to the castle to serve as pages in training to be squires and knights. It’s the age at which many Catholics take first Communion. It seems to be recognized in many cultural traditions as an age of increased competence and responsibility. Maybe that’s why, when Noah was a baby and my sister asked how old he’d have to be to fly out to the West Coast and spend a week with her, I said seven. Now that I have a seven year old, and a rather absent-minded one at that, the idea of putting him on a plane by himself frankly horrifies me. So we won’t be doing that, or sending him off to military school, but we did increase his allowance from a dollar a week to two dollars, and with the raise we gave him some new chores.

The party was to be a new experience, too, and logistically more challenging than any we’ve attempted so far. Birthdays up to now have been backyard affairs with grandparents and friends of the family (birthdays one to four) or with his own friends (birthdays five and six). The most recent two have had themes (the five senses and weather) and there were decorations and games related to the theme, but mostly the kids ran around like wild things in the yard and ate cake. It worked for us.

We’ve adhered to the one-guest-per-year-of-the-child’s age guideline for parties, so when it came time to start planning the party, we told Noah he could have seven guests. It so happened this was around the same time he was finding himself short on friends. He could only come up with three. I felt so sad about this I started trying to compensate by suggesting more elaborate parties than we usually throw. My first idea was to take Noah and his guests to tour a cavern. He liked the idea, but when we looked into it we couldn’t find anything closer than ninety minutes from the house and we’d have needed at least one parent and probably more to volunteer as extra drivers, so we nixed the idea. Meanwhile, Noah came up with his under the sea theme and we started working around that. Could we tour a submarine? The only one we could find was at a military museum. We didn’t feel great about that and it presented the same transportation problems as the cavern. How about the oceans exhibit at Natural History, easily accessible by Metro? Closed for renovations. How about a ride on the D.C. Duck, something he’s wanted to do for a while? It goes on the river and not the sea, but it was close enough.

While all this brainstorming was going on, Noah’s guest list kept growing until it hit seven. I wondered if we should have stuck to the cake-in-the-backyard model, but it was too late to turn back. Then right before we sent out the invitations, Noah struck one of the guests from the list and didn’t replace her. Maura, who had her own birthday party and the last soccer game of the season that weekend, sent her regrets. On the morning of the party, Maxine woke up with a stomach bug, and despite her energetic pleading, her mother decided it wasn’t a good idea to send her on a boat. We were down to four of the original guests, plus a late addition, Jill’s younger sister Sadie, whom Jill wanted to bring along. Sadie’s in kindergarten, only seven months younger than Noah and he’s played with both sisters so inviting her seemed like a good idea. The girls’ mother, Suzy, offered to help chaperone as well.

We met Elias, Sasha and Sean at the Metro station at 3:15. All four boys were immediately engaged in a game in which the train was a time machine, taking them back to the time of the dinosaurs. Suzy, Jill and Sadie met us at the Duck at 3:45. The vessel was called “Lucky Duck.” It was smaller than I imagined and our party made up almost half the passengers. We settled into our seats in the open-air vehicle, ready to take in the sights of Washington, D.C. on a warm, sunny spring day.

I’d wondered if Noah’s guests would behave on the Duck, but they were good as gold, requiring only the occasional reminder to keep their elbows inside and to refrain from talking while the tour guide was speaking. June, on the other hand, was a wild woman, restless and noisy and squirmy. I had my hands full trying to keep her from hurling herself, her sippy and her pacifier over the side of the vehicle. I managed to keep her quiet and still for short periods of time by feeding her everything edible I could find in the diaper bag (a stick of barbequed soy jerky and a baggie of mixed dry cereal was all I had). She ran back and forth between my seat and Beth’s every few minutes. I ended up paying more attention to June than to any of the monuments or statues we passed. When we hit the George Washington Parkway and the Duck reached its maximum driving speed of forty miles per hour, June’s hair was blowing all over and she was laughing in delight. Once we were on the water, June was even more intent of throwing herself overboard. Meanwhile, the low-flying airplanes landing and taking off from National Airport fascinated all the kids, big and little. Once we were back on land, the guide let Noah pass out the souvenir quackers (duck-bill shaped noisemakers) and instructed everyone to quack “Happy Birthday” to him. It wasn’t quite recognizable as “Happy Birthday” but it was impressively noisy.

Back at Union Station, we exited the Duck. After Noah and Sasha nearly gave us a heart attack running away from us in the parking lot, Suzy, Jill and Sadie got into their car and we got back on the Metro. Once we were back in Takoma, Beth took June and drove up to Summer Delights, the ice cream parlor where the rest of the party was to be held, while I herded the four boys the several blocks from the Metro to the ice cream place. Noah, Elias and Sasha were playing a game in which they earned points by stepping on certain kinds of materials and avoiding others. This slowed their progress considerably, so I had to keep calling them to catch up to Sean and me. Sean was a bit disdainful of the game and declined to join.

At Summer Delights, we met up with a couple moms and younger siblings for pizza, cake and ice cream in the patio. Beth simplified the ordering process by limiting the choices to vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles or chocolate with chocolate sprinkles. When it was time to sing “Happy Birthday,” the kids all spontaneously blew their quackers between the lines. They were all on the beat and it actually sounded pretty good.

As we left Summer Delights, June called out, “Noah, Sasha, C’mon!” (in a pretty good imitation of the impatient tone I’d used on the way over) even though Sasha had already left. On our way home, we swung by his house to return his quacker (confiscated by Beth for quacking in the train station, which she had forbidden). Then it was home for bath and opening the presents Noah received from his friends.

Today was a quieter day, full of errands and house cleaning. Noah got a haircut, wrote his thank-you notes and carried out his new chores of helping to clean his room and to assemble the recycling. In between, we found time to play the board game he got from Sadie and Jill and to read A Dark Day in the Deep Sea in its entirety. And tonight, Beth, Noah and June hailed the ice cream truck for the first time this season.

When I tucked Noah in, I left him with my usual litany: “Have a good night’s sleep. Sweet Dreams. See you in the morning. Mommy loves you very much.” Often I add something at the end about what will happen the next day, so I said, “Tomorrow will be your first day at school as a seven year old. “

“Yah!” Noah said, seeming genuinely excited about this.

Happy Birthday, sweet seven year old. Here’s to a lucky year.

You Have to Be Born, or You Don’t Get a Present

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Steph

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Thursday evening I made Noah’s favorite dinner—pancakes—to celebrate the beginning of his spring break. As I mixed the ingredients, Noah sat at the dining room table doing word puzzles in the latest issue of Ranger Rick. In between urging me to comfort a doll who was “very scared,” June was running in and out of the kitchen singing, “Who’s dat girl? Runnin’ around wif you?” in her best Annie Lennox imitation. Just around the time I reached the tricky part of the operation, spooning the batter onto the griddle and making sure none of the pancakes burned while I was distracted by something else, they both wanted my attention at once.

Noah had tired of his magazine and said, “What should I do?”

June wanted to know if I could “play train tracks?”

“Maybe Noah can play train tracks with you,” I suggested. I only gave this idea about a 25% chance of succeeding, but you have to try. Much to my surprise, Noah took June’s hand and they walked into the living room. He repaired a track I had built earlier in the day and they took turns running the trains over it, looking startlingly like two full-fledged kids playing together.

Who’s that girl, I wondered, playing with my son?

Beth had Good Friday off work, which was a good thing because I had an editing job due that day and Easter and June’s birthday were both today, so we had a lot to do. Over the course of Friday, Saturday and this morning we cleaned the house, wrapped presents and dyed Easter eggs. Beth went grocery shopping, made June’s cake and assembled her slide (her present from Andrea and John). Yesterday morning I took June on some errands to get her out of the house so Beth could clean. We stopped by the video store and I picked up a couple of DVDs for her.

When Noah was a toddler we followed the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation of no television for children under the age of two (http://www.pbs.org/parents/childrenandmedia/article-faq.html#prevalentTV). In fact, we went it one better. He didn’t really start to watch television until he was almost two and a half, when I realized if I let him watch Sesame Street once or twice a week I could get a little class prep or grading done during my at-home weekdays with him. We haven’t done as well with June. Noah watches PBS for an hour most weekday afternoons, plus a half-hour of so of DVDs in the evenings at least few nights a week, and June will usually watch what he’s watching. I could have taken her out of the room, but the temptation to get some research done or to get a jump on dinner, or to relax and watch television myself was just too great. Anyway, June being two means I feel a little less guilty about it now, so I was celebrating by getting something for her to watch, chosen expressly for her. We’d never done this before. We ended up with a Maisy DVD and a one of Maurice Sendak stories. June’s a big fan of all things Maisy and she loves Where the Wild Things Are and the whole Nutshell Library and the Sendak DVD has all of those stories. June didn’t really know what we were doing at the video store, but she was excited to see the slide in the children’s area and she insisted on getting out of the stroller to go down it.

Last night, Noah hid the Easter baskets (thoughtfully provided and beautifully assembled this year by my sister Sara). Since this is his first year not believing in the Bunny, Noah wanted a role in the hunt. This morning I led a clueless June to the baskets hidden in Beth’s bedroom closet and the kids dove into them, exclaiming over the candy, bubble bath, bunny ears and stuffed bunnies. “My own rabbit!” June declared in delight, as if she did not have at least a half dozen stuffed bunnies already. Before breakfast, we fed June a peanut butter egg. Like television, peanut butter is not recommended for the under two set; and as with television, it’s a bit harder to follow the guidelines with an older kid in the house leaving unfinished peanut butter cereal and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in reach. Let’s just say it wasn’t her first taste of peanut butter, but it was her first authorized taste.

After that it was time to get ready for the descent of the grandparents. My mother and stepfather were coming for June’s party at 1:30. It was hard to know how much of the day’s preparations June understood, but on one point she was very clear. When Beth told her she could pick out balloons at the grocery store and was starting to tell her why, she interrupted, “B’oons for my birfday!” They returned from the grocery store with a butterfly-shaped balloon and one with the Sesame St. characters eating birthday cake, which June called the “monster b’oon.”

June ate lunch and napped. She woke after about an hour. Usually if she sleeps less than an hour and a half and seems cranky (and these things generally go together), I try to put her back to sleep, but my mom and stepfather were due soon, so I kept her up by reading Dr. Seuss’s Happy Birthday to You to her, over her confused and sleepy protests:

If we didn’t have birthdays, you wouldn’t be you.
If you’d never been born, well then what would you do?
If you’d never been born, well then what would you be?
You might be a fish! Or a toad in a tree!
You might be a doorknob! Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes.
Or worse than all that…Why you might be a WASN’T!
A WASN’T has no fun at all. No, he doesn’t.
A WASN’T just isn’t. He just isn’t present.
But you… You ARE YOU! And, now isn’t that pleasant!

I thought how close June came to being a WASN’T. It took Beth and me a long time to decide whether or not to have a second child and then it took about me almost a year to get pregnant. I hadn’t really decided, but I was considering calling it quits if I didn’t get pregnant during the cycle in which she was conceived.

If you’d never been born, then you might be an ISN’T!
An Isn’t has no fun at all. No he disn’t.
He never has birthdays, and that isn’t pleasant.
You have to be born, or you don’t get a present.

Well, she was born and presents she got. After Mom and Jim arrived, we settled in to open the mounds of gifts. I didn’t think we’d gotten her all that much, but somehow once Noah piled up the packages on the living room floor, it did look like a lot. June picked out gifts one by one and brought them to me to open. The first gift was a set of training pants in red, green and blue. When I told her they were special underpants for when she used the potty and didn’t wear diapers, she gave me a deeply skeptical look. We continued to open gifts. There were clothes, and books and art supplies, but the big hit was the suspension bridge for the railroad tracks that Noah picked out for her. Once that was open it was hard to get her to pay attention to yet another dress or t-shirt, though she did want me to read each book after it was unwrapped. At last we took her to the back yard where her new slide awaited. “I want to slide!” she exclaimed, and she did just that, over and over. Only the promise of cake lured her back inside.

For the record, I need to say that the fresh strawberry frosting Beth made for the cake is the most delicious frosting ever in the entire history of frosting. Here’s the recipe (http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/dessert/cake_strawberry.html). Try it yourself.

After Mom and Jim had left, Beth retreated to our room to rest a little. I followed and crawled into bed next to her. “How long do you think we can lie here before they find us?” I asked.

“Not long,” Beth answered, hearing the sound of June’s footsteps in the hall.

“Cai have some more mana?” (“Can I have some more banana?”) she asked. I got up and went to the kitchen to get it for her. As I handed it to her, she said. “Cai have some more presents?”

Happy Birthday, dear June Bug. I am so glad you are you.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Anniversaries, Birthdays and Half-Birthdays

Half Past Three

Unexpected Gifts

Two! Four! Six! Eight!

When She Got Three

Skip to the Love

An Ordinary Sunday

At My House (For Sara and Dune)

The Very Merry Month of May

Lucky Duck

You Have to Be Born, or You Don’t Get a Present