This Is Not the Story of My Swim Lesson

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Steph

“I am not so into my swim lesson. What I really want is to get a smoothie after,” June told me as we waited on the porch for Beth and Noah to pull into the driveway on Sunday afternoon. Beth needed to drop Noah off at the house and pick June and me up so we could go to the University of Maryland for June’s first swim lesson. Excitement and nervousness had been vying with each other all day and at the moment, I thought June’s nerves were winning. Despite this, she was the one who insisted on waiting outside on a chilly, rainy day.

She had been counting down the days since Tuesday, when we discovered that the Mallard Duck was having her first swim lesson, too. When I told June her lesson was on Sunday, she was surprised. She had not realized it was so close and after that she was constantly telling us how many days it would be until her lesson, never losing count.

On the morning of the lesson she drew a picture of herself in the swimming pool. At first it consisted of just a smiling face floating in a circular pool. “The rest of my body is underwater,” she explained. But eventually she filled in her torso, arms and legs and drew her swim teacher’s legs as well. Beth pointed out that the instructor would be in the pool with her and not standing next to the pool as June had drawn her. I think this was meant to be re-assuring, but at that moment, June seemed quite happy to imagine herself swimming alone in the pool.

We arrived early so we settled ourselves onto the bleachers and watched other lessons in progress. This was good for about ten minutes until June declared she was bored. We started to tell story-games, each of us contributing a few sentences to a story until it was finished. There was a story about a pool that magically emptied itself of water and one about a fish who forgot how to swim and needed to take lessons. One story, June introduced as being about a girl who “didn’t like anything” and was going to take swimming lessons. “This is not the story of my swim lesson,” she clarified. Our grumpy protagonist complained about having to walk from the car to the pool in the rain. She complained about getting undressed and into her suit. She complained about the water being too cold and then too warm. Finally, her mother told her to stop complaining and, miraculously, she did.

June had not complained while walking from the car to the pool in the pouring rain, even though her socks were soaking when we took them off and she had not complained in the locker room either, so it was pretty well established that this was not the story of her swim lesson. Hers would be much better.

The teacher, a college student, came over and introduced herself, complimented June on her suit and asked her to come with her. June had told us ahead of time she might be shy at first, but she climbed down over the bleachers and followed the young woman to the steps that lead into the water willingly enough. They sat on the steps and talked. I wished I could hear what they were saying. Then the teacher got a toy watering can and she and June took turns sprinkling water on each other’s heads. Beth and I speculated that the point of this exercise was to test June’s tolerance for getting her face wet. Then they practiced blowing bubbles in the water and kicking while still seated on the steps.

Next the instructor got out a kickboard and got June onto it. She held the end and walked backwards with it as June kicked. June was grinning as she moved through the water. I’m not sure how hard the teacher was pulling her along, but June was definitely under the impression she was moving herself through the water and she was quite clearly pleased. Next they tried a swimming noodle, threaded under her armpits. Most of the time the instructor was holding onto the noodle to steady June, but at one point she let go. The teacher had a little pink ball she put in front of June. She was supposed to reach for it. I think this prevented her from holding onto the noodle with her own hands and also mimicked the motion your arms make when you swim freestyle.

Every now and then June would glance over at us to make sure we were watching. Once she even flashed us the thumbs-up sign. She did get water up her nose one time and she had her I-am-going-to-cry face on for a few minutes, but she managed to recover. Toward the end of the lesson, the instructor had June practice jumping into the pool, At first she held both of June’s hands as she jumped, but eventually she held just one hand. (June later claimed that she went all the way under the water when that happened, but I was watching the whole time I didn’t see anything like that. I think she might have been so worried this would happen that she convinced herself that it did.)

When the lesson was over the instructor came by, saying June had done well and that she had “a good foundation.” She asked what our goals were for the remaining five lessons. Beth said other than comfort in the water and learning the basics, we didn’t have too many goals, but she added that June wants to be able to swim well enough to be able to be able to dive for pirate treasure. I don’t think this was the answer the teacher was expecting, but it is in fact June’s main motivation for wanting swim lessons in the first place. Every time she mentions this goal, she ends by saying “And then we’ll be rich.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if she does learn to scuba dive someday. She’s an adventurous soul, my June Bug, and I think that wherever her adventures take her, they will make very good stories indeed. Meanwhile, June says she’s “excited to go back there.” And I don’t think it’s just for the smoothies.

Look for a Lovely Thing

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Steph

“Mommy, I’m going to poop on the potty,” June announced late yesterday morning as she slipped off her chair, leaving her lunch half-eaten on the dining room table. June’s been using the potty for pee since October, with only occasional accidents, but she very rarely has a bowel movement there. I think the last time was in November. But the last time she did it was just like this, a casual announcement and then results. Sure enough, soon she was calling me into her bedroom to see the full potty. I praised her and hugged her. It was all sincere and heartfelt, but I thought it could well be another two months before I saw what I was seeing again, so I took a good look before emptying it into the toilet and flushing it.

Several hours later, as June and I walked home from preschool she mentioned that she’d been meaning to try to stay awake all through Quiet Time (something she rarely does these days—it has basically turned into a nap by another name) so she could hear the end of the CD of songs from Disney movies. She often chooses it for Quiet Time so she’s heard the beginning many times, but she can’t remember how it ends. However, she went on, she was not going to do it today because she had remembered that Noah’s concert was tonight and she needed to take a nap so she could go.

The orchestra and band winter concert was at seven, which had presented me with a babysitting challenge. If June napped, she’d be fine to go but if she didn’t it would not have been a good idea to take her, which meant I would not know whether I needed a sitter until roughly three hours before the concert. So a couple weeks ago, I contacted our main sitter, explained the situation and offered to pay her a ten-dollar reservation fee in advance to keep the evening clear. It seemed like a good solution, but I knew June really wanted to attend the concert and I wondered if the pressure of knowing she had to sleep in order to go would keep her awake. I was actually considering relenting and letting her go even if she didn’t nap but I didn’t say it aloud.

As I was walking and puzzling over this, I was humming “Hard Rock Blues.” It’s one of the songs Noah has been practicing for weeks for the concert. I didn’t realize I was humming it until June joined in. Then we got louder and started singing “Da da da da da DUM,” to its staccato beat.

We got home and June announced she was going to poop on the potty again. She tried but couldn’t go. Then she climbed into bed, pacifier in mouth, and pulled her Cinderella blanket over herself. I started a CD (not the Disney one so she would not be tempted to stay awake). I checked on her ten minutes later, found her sound asleep and called the sitter to let her know not to come.

Noah got home at 4:25, bringing the unwelcome news that he had more homework that could be completed in an hour, which was about how much time he’d have before our early supper, clothes change, and departure for his school at 6:15. I helped him prioritize. He’d do one last pre-concert practice session and his math next because his math teacher does not accept late work and then he’d move on to the illustrations for his examples of simile and metaphor. There was more, but I doubted he’d get further than that and he didn’t. He was still doing the first illustration while I set the table. (Normally this is his chore, but I decided to give him a break.)

Around five, as Noah was drawing and I was cooking dinner, June said, “I’m going to poop on the potty now.” And she did. Well, this was an interesting and unexpected turn of events, I thought. More hugs, more praise, and then I hurried back to the broccoli, cabbage and carrots I was chopping for vegetables with rice and peanut sauce.

By 6:35, we were in the school gym, which was rapidly filling with one hundred and forty young musicians, their parents, grandparents and siblings. I was glad we’d arrived early because we got seats near the percussion section. The students were arranged in an arc of rows nestled along one of the long sides of the rectangular room and both of the short sides. The drums and glockenspiels (or bells as they call them) were on the right side of the room. I could not see many of the musicians in the front (except the clarinets) and none of the players on the left, but we could see Noah, which was the important thing. Soon all the seats were gone and there were throngs of spectators standing along the back of the room.

The room was warm with the body heat of all those people and loud with the sounds of musicians tuning up their instruments. It was strange to hear little snatches of the very familiar music Noah’s been practicing played on different instruments. I saw one of the clarinetists looking distraught and mouthing to another, “I can’t do this.”

Noah was having some trouble setting up his instruments. He needed one of the tables on wheels for his bells but there wasn’t one at the place where he was supposed to stand. He sought out the band director, but he either forgot or was too busy with other crises to help and he never came back. Beth and I noticed an unused table but it looked as if it would be difficult to maneuver it to Noah what with all the kids, chairs and instrument stands in the way. Noah unsuccessfully tried to get the director’s attention by waving his drumsticks in the air and eventually went to get him again. He returned saying the director asked him to try to move the table himself. “I’ll help you,” Beth said and got up. They managed to squeeze the table over to Noah’s area and wedge it in front of his snare drum. He would have reach over the drum and stand further away from the bells than he was accustomed to play them, but it was the best they could do.

Meanwhile June was antsy with the long wait. She was hungry and thirsty and hot and bored, she told me at various times. The day before she had imagined being at the concert and the band leader coming over and asking who she was and Noah saying, “That’s my little sister, June.” It did not seem very likely that this fantasy of being an important personage at the concert was going to come true.

She studied the program and looked at the pictures of a bear ice-skating and people throwing snowballs inside. The cover featured two blindfolded polar bears dancing a tango (I assume it was a tango because one of them had a rose in its teeth) on a very small and cracking ice floe. I thought it was an odd illustration, although in some ways an apt one for a concert of nine- to eleven-year-old musicians. So much could go wrong. June pointed to the big words on the front of the program and wanted to know what they said, “Music to Warm a Winter’s Night,” I told her.

Finally the hubbub of set-up died down and the concert began. The advanced orchestra students played two songs and then it was time for the band. They had eight songs; Noah was in three of them. They started with “Lightly Row,” that elementary school band standard. After such a long and stressful wait to start, Noah missed his cue and did not begin to play the bells until a few notes into the song, but he played the rest of it and beamed at us when it was over. The next time he played was in “Robot Assembly Line,” a composition by his band teacher, meant to evoke the noise of robots building cars in a factory. I noted how different the song sounded with all its parts and not just Noah’s. It was fun to see all the pieces coming together. The last song was “Hard Rock Blues,” which Beth said was her favorite. Before the concert started and in between songs we noticed Noah grimacing, most likely unconsciously. The tics we hadn’t seen in months seemed to be re-surfacing temporarily under stress. But after each song was over, he flashed us a brilliant smile.

The orchestra was up next. Their section was called “Winter Poems Suite.” Each song was preceded by a poem, read by a different student. It was a good idea but I wish the kids had access to a microphone or that the text of the poems had been passed out with the programs because even though I closed my eyes and strained to hear I could only catch a few lines of each poem. The only exception was Sara Teasdale’s poem “Night,” which I could follow only because I have it almost by heart.

Stars over snow,
And in the west a planet
Swinging below a star—
Look for a lovely thing and you will find it,
It is not far—
It never will be far.

I love this poem. It was a treat to hear it. June was less delighted. She had been interested to see Noah play but now that he was finished she was ready to go home. She mentioned this a few times, and also asked me questions like “Where do seeds come from?” and then something about evolution as I repeatedly said, “We’re listening to the music now. We can talk about that later.”

When the advanced band came on, I told her “Three more songs,” and she counted them down as each song ended. I reminded her Noah would have to pack up his percussion kit before we could leave, but he was mercifully quick.

Once he was ready to go, I gave him a hug and a kiss on the forehead, which he tolerated better than usual (he likes hugs but not kisses). He even smiled at me. “Congratulations on your first concert,’ I said.

“Was it my first concert?” he asked. It was his first since he was three and played “Twinkle, Twinkle” at a Suzuki concert, I told him. Tonight was the first concert he was likely to remember, anyway, and it had been a success.

It was 8:40 by the time we got home, so we rushed through the kids’ bedtime routine. Noah was wound up and June was tired and they fell to squabbling with each other. I started to fret over his unfinished homework but I made myself stop. Look for a lovely thing, I told myself. There had been plenty this day. I could take my pick.

In the morning Noah finished some, though not all, of his undone homework and June did her new potty trick two more times and then once more in the afternoon.

It is not far. It will never be far.

All the Children Are Above Average

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Steph

Yesterday morning, Noah and June and I set out for the playground with two plastic newspaper sleeves. We had a dual goal, to get out of the house so Beth could have some quiet time to do computer support for an ongoing phone banking project her office is coordinating and to collect pebbles and twigs for Noah’s Crow Teepee diorama project. It was a lovely early fall day, sunny and in the high sixties–“the perfect temperature,” Noah opined as we walked.

The creek was low, as it often is this time of year, with more than half the creek bed exposed and a good selection of rocks lying there for the taking. Both kids concentrated on filling their bags. Noah carefully examined his, rejecting some as too big or too small, or too bumpy. June occasionally commented that her rocks were “more beautiful” than Noah’s. She finished rock collecting before he did and we headed to the swings.

While she was climbing one of the big play structures she befriended another little girl. They compared clothing: “I have a rainbow dress,” the other girl opened and June replied, “I have a pink pink dress,” by which she meant alternating stripes of dark and light pink. Next they exchanged ages: “I’m four and I just had my half-birthday,” June informed the other girl. “I’m five…well, almost five,” the girl returned. Once this conversation was complete they were fast friends. When Noah came over he wanted to join in their games, but they shut him out and he decided to go home on his own and get to work on the diorama. I felt a little sorry for him, getting dissed by four year olds, but rather than try to negotiate the situation I said that was a good idea because he really did have a lot of homework this weekend. He had 38 pages to read in Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive (http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/collateral.jsp?id=10829_type=Book_typeId=4669), he had to complete a worksheet on it, he needed to practice his drums and, of course, there was the diorama.

The diorama is part of a research project on the Crow tribe Noah’s been working on for several weeks and will be working on until sometime in November. Last month we visited the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, where a librarian in the research center helped him find more specific books on the Crow than we had been able to find at our public library. (And then by an amazing coincidence an actual Crow historian from Montana came by to do his own research and the librarian sent him over to chat with Noah for a while. It was one those moments I’m truly grateful for the unique cultural and educational opportunities we have living so close to Washington, D.C.) Noah has already completed his research and a poster about the Crow. After the diorama, there will be a model of an artifact, an oral presentation and a paper. Come November, we are all going to know a lot about the Crow tribe. (For instance, their civilization evolved from an agricultural one to a nomadic hunter-gatherer one, in a reversal of the usual pattern.)

We’ve also learned a lot about different kinds of graphs. Last week Noah turned in a collection of four graphs, a line graph, a bar graph, a pie chart and a stem and leaf graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemplot). That last one was a new one for Beth and me. He had to decided what each graph would measure, collect the data and write a paragraph explaining how he had avoided bias while selecting people to survey. He titled it “How I Was Random,” which I love.

Overall, we’ve been pleased with the curriculum at Noah’s new school. He’s doing sixth grade math, reading interesting books (they just finished Tuck Everlasting), doing fun science experiments (observing different kinds of life forms in their soda bottle “eco columns”) and going into topics in great depth. He’s definitely being challenged, and although he won’t get a report card until November, I think his days of straight As are over for now. He’s had some As, but he also got a 70% on a math quiz and a 75% on the map component of his Crow poster. He had a healthy indifference to grades, but I can tell he’s not at the top of his class anymore, which is probably a good thing. He will need to stretch himself. That’s what happens when, as in Lake Wobegon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon), all the children are above average.

He’s also started percussion lessons. He’s playing the drums and something called “the bells,” though to me it looked like a glockenspiel. (Then I looked it up and found out glockenspiel is German for “set of bells,” so there you go.) He’s had two lessons so far and he practices faithfully and with enthusiasm. It’s nice to see him enjoying music almost as much as he did when he was little and passionate about all things musical.

We decided against the after-school Spanish club, due to time restraints. I’m a little sad about that but the boy is busy. He doesn’t get home until 4:15 or 4:30 and he had a lot of homework. He watches a lot less television and plays on the computer a lot less than he did last year. We’ve also had to cut back on the books he and read together for fun, though since school started we finished the last two books in the Chronicles of Narnia, and then we read A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door. We’ve decided to hold off on starting A Swiftly Tilting Planet until next weekend so he can focus on his schoolwork.

Socially, there’s been some improvement, as well. He has not made any new friends at his school but he says he doesn’t feel as if people dislike him and he is not teased and ostracized as he was last year. Most days he does have playmates at recess, both kids he knows from his old school and new classmates. I do want him to keep in touch with his old friends. He still plays with Sasha and I’ve been meaning to make a play date with Elias soon. With luck, he’ll make some new friends as the school year progresses.

Saturday afternoon Beth and Noah went shopping for diorama materials and Noah spent a good bit of the weekend working on it. As of Sunday evening, he had printed out photographs of a grasslands landscape and used it to line in the inside and outside of the box. He constructed a teepee out of twigs and fabric he selected because it looked like buffalo skin using craft instructions he found online. He made a campfire out of a twig and yellow felt. He cut out the figures of adult and a baby out of cardboard and dressed them in red felt dresses decorated with tiny white buttons meant to represent elk teeth. He made food out of modeling clay that June graciously donated. Finally, he printed out labels for all the components of the diorama. So far only the teepee is glued in but it was a pretty good weekend’s work. To say he needed a lot of reminders to stay on task would be an understatement, but it was completely “student-crafted,” which I believe meant “Parents, please do not make your child’s diorama for him or her.” Not that there was any danger we would. When Noah needed a reminder to get back to work, Beth told him, “Go, student, craft!”

And I must say that despite the adjustments we’ve needed to make for his long commute and heavier workload, watching my young scholar craft these past six weeks has been a great pleasure.

The Most Beautifulist

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Steph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m peeing,” June whispered.

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

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

Improvising Monday

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Steph

Last week Noah attended Improv day camp. It’s run by Round House Theatre, where he’s been going to summer day camps and spring break camps since he was in kindergarten. This year he moved up to the middle age group (nine to twelve year olds) and had his choice of more specific topics in theater. Since he loves role-playing games, we knew Improv would be a natural fit for him and it was. He loved the camp. (Who knows, it could be a family tradition—my sister has acted in several improv troupes over the years.)

On Friday afternoon there was a performance, or as they called it a sharing. The kids demonstrated several of their favorites from the games they’d been playing all week. Noah was in a taxicab sketch. As each new passenger entered the cab the others had to adopt a character trait of the newcomer. Noah said later this was his second favorite game. The one he’d hoped to be in was called “You’re Late,” in which an employee has to explain his or her lateness to a boss with help from other kids who are pantomiming possible explanations. Apparently earlier in the week Noah had successfully communicated the concept “alien abduction” to one of his peers by sticking his pointer fingers by the sides of his head, antennae-style.

Written up on a big sheet of paper behind the actors were the five Rules of Improv. Apparently, these rules were a big deal at Improv camp because Noah had also written them in his journal and commented on them to me earlier in the week. He was interested that they were different from the Five Pillars of Improv he learned on the Improv episode of Fetch, With Ruff Ruffman (http://pbskids.org/fetch/games/luge/index.html). (In case you’re interested these were: Support, Trust, Risks, Confidence and Fun.)

The rules, according to Round House, are:

1) Work with the Team
2) Listen and Respond
3) Make and Accept Offers
4) Say Yes
5) Stay in the Present

In her introduction, the camp director noted that these were not only rules for Improv, but also for life. I had opportunity to think about this on Monday morning. Beth’s union is having its annual convention and political conference this week, which has meant long hours for her, both this past weekend and the first four days of this week. On Monday, she left the house at 7:10 a.m. and did not return until 9:35 p.m. It was also the first day of a week when Noah would be home all day, after three consecutive weeks of day camp, so I needed to adjust the weekday rhythm June and I had developed to include him. The kids started arguing almost immediately after Beth left and by 7:45 I had snapped at Noah. This wasn’t getting off to a good start. I took a deep breath and tried to re-center myself. Work with the team, I reminded myself. Listen and respond. Make and accept offers. Say yes. Stay in the present. Here’s how it went:

Listen and Respond:

The next time I heard crying, I came into the living room and calmly asked for both sides of the story. It turned out there was no dispute about the facts on the ground. June wanted to make a coloring page for Noah and have him color it and Noah thought it was a good idea except he wanted to make the coloring page and have her color it. I paused to make sure no one wanted to add any nuance. This one seemed too simple. “What if you both make coloring pages for each other?” I ventured.

“Mommy, that’s a great idea!” June exclaimed.

“I should have said that when I thought of it,” Noah said softly. I left the room, my work done. (Of course they got sidetracked and didn’t make the coloring pages until today, but whatever, the screaming stopped.)

Say Yes:

At naptime, June was unable to fall asleep. She’d had trouble the day before as well, taking forty minutes to drop off. This day, I made her lie down for an hour and twenty minutes, sometimes cuddling with her and sometimes leaving her alone. In the abstract, I welcome any sign that June’s naps may end spontaneously because in six weeks she will be attending school from noon to three in the afternoon and if she doesn’t stop napping on her own in the next few weeks, I am going to have to make her stop and that might not be pretty. But as for her skipping her nap on any actual, specific day, it’s harder to for me to accept. There’s always something I want to do or I am exhausted and want to sleep myself. But even giving up after an hour and twenty minutes represents some kind of progress for me. The summer Noah was four and was in at the napping some days and not others stage I used to drive us both crazy trying to insist he sleep when he just couldn’t do it. The struggle could drag on for hours. So far there’s been a lot less conflict about the issue this time around. It helps that June likes to nap, so she’s willing to give it a pretty long try herself.

Still, she was out of bed a few times, finding me in the garden, or on the couch reading Prince Caspian to Noah, to tell me she couldn’t sleep.

Finally, I asked her, “Would you like to have Quiet Time instead?”

“Yes!” she said, so I got a forty-minute long CD playing in her room, provided her with crayons and a stack of drawing paper, and left Noah to read on his own while I lay down on our bed next to the fan, resting until the music stopped. She said yes, but I did too, yes to change, and to what comes next.

Work With the Team:

Monday was the only day this week I had no outing planned so I was hoping to accomplish a lot at home and I did—mowing the lawn, doing a couple loads of laundry, tending to the compost, weeding in the garden and staking some plants that fell over in the storm we had Sunday afternoon. I also had work for Noah. In addition to taking out the recycling, which he’s supposed to do whenever it gets full (and it was overflowing) and setting the dinner table, which is a new daily chore for him, I wanted him to clean the kids’ room. I reminded him of this, after Quiet Time was over. He protested a little, because this is normally a first weekend of the month chore for him. I explained we’d be out of town next weekend and this was the only day this week we’d be home all day. Next he wanted to know why he had to pick up June’s toys. (She helps with this chore as well but on a more voluntary basis. Often she wanders off before the job is done.) I told him Beth and I pick up things that are not ours all the time and it’s just part of pitching in and being a member of the family. I was prepared to mention that as he was cleaning the room, I was in the next room folding clothes, most of which were not my own, but I paused and saw I didn’t need to do it. He’d gotten back to work.

Make and Accept Offers:

Of course, being Noah he soon got distracted and was in my room sitting on the bed and fiddling with the air-conditioner. He pulled out the filter and found it was full of dust. Could he clean it, he inquired. Feeling a bit like Tom Sawyer, I said, yes, he could, if he finished cleaning his room. And he actually went and did it, and then came back and cleaned the filter.

Stay in the Present:

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a completely napless June come evening, because this was the first day in her life she didn’t nap at all. Every other day I have resorted to Quiet Time (and it’s probably been less than five times) it was either because she took a very short nap (less than a half hour) and then couldn’t get back to sleep or she fell asleep during Quiet Time. That didn’t happen on Monday, but for the rest of the afternoon she was perfectly happy. She had no big meltdowns and didn’t even seem more tired than usual. After dinner, around seven, I asked her how she was feeling. Fine, she answered. Perhaps a little tired, I suggested. Yes, she thought she was. So I got her ready for bed and put her to bed around 7:25 instead of her usual 9:00. By 7:30, she was sound asleep.

Beth wasn’t home yet and wouldn’t be for hours still, so I had a free hour with Noah, which is a novelty. We decided to finish watching The Wizard of Oz, which we had started the night before. Our timing could not have been better, because while the first half of this movie was just about as much as June could take (she ran out of the room whenever the witch appeared and she appears much more often than I had remembered), the second half is pretty much non-stop menacing wizard, cackling witch and flying monkeys. We could not have watched it with her. It was nice to be able to relax and enjoy it without worrying about June’s emotional state. Noah liked it, too. When we got to the famous “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” line, he cracked up. While it’s a cliché to me, it was fresh for him and very funny and he made me see the humor in it all over again. I think it’s easier for kids to stay in the present, having so much less in their pasts, but sometimes being with kids helps us get back into that state of mind and that’s one of their best gifts to us.

By eight-thirty, Noah was in bed, too. I spent a little time online and then finished my improvised day in the bath, surrounded by sprigs of floating lemon balm and reading a collection of Victorian vampire stories Beth got me for our anniversary a couple weeks ago (http://www.walkerbooks.com/books/catalog.php?key=864).

Two more days have passed, long days, not without conflict, but not without fun either. We’ve been to June’s first-ever movie in a theater, which was a big hit, and attended an outdoor concert of kids’ music, which was not. June resumed napping. Now that we’re past the midpoint, my attention is turning to the end of the week, the kids’ long-overdue pediatrician appointments on Friday and packing for our upcoming trip to the beach. We’ll get through the rest of the week the same way everyone gets through every week, making it up as we go along.

Magic Wings

Posted on July 10, 2010 by Steph

“Do you know your lines?” Beth asked as we were getting the kids ready for bed on Thursday night. Noah and June attended drama camp at June’s school for four hours a day this week and it was the eve of the performance of their play, The Magic Wings. Noah was playing a crocus; June was a princess.

June’s answer was evasive, so Noah volunteered that he knew his lines and June could say hers when Lesley prompted her.

In the morning Noah suddenly regretted having worn his Hawaiian shirt with the flowers and skulls on it the day before since he was playing a flower and his costume consisted only of a construction paper flower crown, which meant his shirt would show. He wanted a flowery shirt. Never mind I’d suggested the day before that he save the shirt for performance day. He’d wanted to wear it to the dress rehearsal and now it was dirty. How about a green t-shirt, I said, pulling two from his drawer. It could look like a stem. He didn’t go for it. How about the colorful tie-dyed t-shirt? It looked kind of like a flower. Bingo. Noah paired it with green shorts and he was dressed. June’s costume was a long red robe that would cover all her clothes so getting her dressed was easier. She chose a t-shirt and a skirt and we were off.

Once I’d delivered the kids to camp and returned home, I tried to think strategically. Somehow three of the only four days this summer when both kids would be in camp at the same time had evaporated without much to show for it. Well, that’s not exactly true. I’d run a lot of errands (bank, post office, library, dropping off a present for a friend’s baby’s first birthday) and I’d been to Mayorga (http://mayorgacoffee.com/coffeetalk/) to read in blessed silence twice (once for a whole hour!) and I’d weeded and thinned the carrots in the garden and I’d mended a shirt of Noah’s and I’d even spent a total of about an hour on the exercise bike in short sessions, but my plans had been grander. I’d hoped to get some deep cleaning done around the house and I hadn’t done any housework at all.

I had two excuses. The week before had been draining. Both kids were home and for a lot of that time we’d been grounded, waiting for someone to come and repair our broken refrigerator. Every day from Monday to Wednesday the kids’ bickering marathons started earlier in the day until we hit a low point of eight a.m. (It got better on Thursday and Friday when we could get out of the house.) I tried to keep them occupied with play dates. June had a friend over and so did Noah and then we visited two more friends of June’s.

My second excuse was the heat. This past week we had three consecutive days of highs over 100 degrees, and we have no air conditioning aside from a window unit in our bedroom. When I wasn’t out running errands or weeding in the garden with water from the sprinkler coming down directly on me, or exercising in the basement, which is cooler than the rest of the house, all I wanted to do was curl up in front of the air conditioner and read.

It was a little cooler on Friday, mid-nineties, but I was still not that eager to leave the bedroom. So I went back to the much neglected mending pile and I cleaned out my closet. You can see the floor now and there’s a little more room now that I’ve rooted out a bunch of outgrown shoes of June’s and some things I never wear and bagged the clothes up to give away. So now there’s a visible benefit of having had the kids out of the house for a few half-days.

At 12:45 I headed over to the school. Camp let out at 1:30 and the performance was scheduled for 1:00. Kids in costumes were running around greeting their parents or sitting at a table drawing. June kept tripping over her long gown. Noah showed me a letter (Z or maybe it should be N he said) he was creating by drawing tiny squares in different colors for a mosaic effect.

I took a seat in Imagination Station, the room where the kids do dramatic play during the school year. The camp was attended mainly by current students and alumni so I knew a lot of the parents there, but not well, as most of their kids were a year or two years ahead of June. Noah was the oldest camper by a few years as far as I could tell, but he didn’t seem to mind playing with a mainly five and six-year-old crowd. In fact, he said the camp was a lot of fun.

After the kids and Lesley finished a brainstorming session about final kinks to work out in the performance, the show began. Here’s a rough summary of the plot. The story takes place in China. At the beginning a girl is driving her geese through a field of spring flowers. She wants to greet all the flowers but there are so many she can’t manage it. (The flowers greet her and say, “Spring is here.” This was Noah’s part.) The girl notices a goose flapping its wings and wishes for wings so she could fly and better see all the flowers. She wets her shoulders with water and flaps her arms in an attempt to grow wings. Then a series of female characters are inspired to do the same thing, each trying a different, and increasingly expensive, liquid. (June, the princess, uses perfume.) None of them are successful and once all the village’s women and girls are engaged in trying to grow wings, women’s work has come to a standstill. The village’s boys and men call upon a spirit for help. The spirit is able to grant wings to only person and chooses the goose girl.

All the kids did a great job. June did need to be prompted on the longest of her several lines and at least two occasions the two-year-old sister of one of players rushed the stage. He turned to her, gave her a little hug and said, “I have to do the play now,” as polite as could be. It was an adorable moment. The toddler ended up staying on stage flapping her arms with all the others for a long while.

Then it was over and we headed home. June wore her sparkly, purple construction paper crown as we walked. After a short nap and an episode of Super Why, I offered to take the kids to Starbucks. It was still hot, but I felt like celebrating their performance. Noah grabbed his scooter and June wanted to ride hers, too. In retrospect, this might be where I went wrong.

June’s had the scooter, a hand-me-down from Noah, since the fall, but she still has trouble getting it moving up even the slightest grade and it’s uphill (just barely but enough to make it hard for her) almost all the way to Starbucks. It took a lot of coaxing to keep her going and we got there much later than I intended. When I told the kids we’d be taking our treats home and not eating them there so Noah wouldn’t miss his television, he took it fine, but June burst into tears. Removed now from my own frustration, I can see her point of view. She had worked so hard to get here. She’d an exciting day and a short nap and it was hot out there. She wanted her raspberry pound cake and mango juice now, not later. I stopped, considered and made her a peace offering of the juice since I thought she could drink and walk at the same time and I’d already agreed to carry the scooter home. (It would have been downhill, but she was over it.) It seemed to work. She agreed to the plan and we left.

Our particular Starbucks is at the end of a shopping center. The other anchor store is a supermarket banked by a lower and upper sidewalk with a brick wall in between them. June loves to walk along this wall, but it’s interrupted frequently by poles so we have a policy that she can choose one stretch and I will lift her up and down one time. What happened next was unusual. She got spooked and wanted to be lifted down immediately. So I did, and then she wanted back up and almost without thinking, I said no, you’ve had your once up and once down. June did not see it my way at all. What she thought she was entitled to was one walk along the wall from one pole to the other and she had not had that. She sat down on the sidewalk and commenced to wail. Even Noah, who is often oblivious to her crying, doubled back on his scooter and asked, “What happened to her?” I think he might have been expecting me to say she’d fallen off the wall. She was crying that hard.

I asked her to get up. She kept crying. I tugged gently on one of her arms. She did not get up and she kept crying. I told her if I had to carry her through the parking lot there would be a consequence. She stayed put and kept crying.

“Okay, no computer for a week,” I said, and she managed to scream even louder than she had been as I lifted her up and struggled across the parking lot carrying my limp daughter under one arm and her scooter, her helmet, a bag of treats and my iced tea in the other arm. I set her down on the grass once we’d made it across the lot. I told her I could not carry her all the way home like that and I needed her to walk. I said there would be another consequence if she didn’t. I wasn’t at all sure what it would be because I had a nagging feeling I had already gone too far, but I didn’t have to think of one. She got up and walked home, crying, albeit softly, all the way.

I marveled at how such a nice day had gone downhill so quickly. Where were our magic wings when we needed them? Why couldn’t we see the flowers? By the time we got home, Noah’s show was half over so he elected not to watch it and to take a solo scooter ride instead. I led June back to the air-conditioned bedroom and told her I loved her even when she misbehaved. Then I asked her what part of what had happened she was crying about now. “Both parts,” she sniffed.

And what were they, I asked. Not getting to walk on the wall and losing her computer time, she said, which is what I would have guessed but I wanted to be sure. We talked it over some more and then she said she needed a snuggle and a story, so I read her a Curious George book. By the time it was over, she seemed to have recovered completely from the experience, but I was still stewing over it. Noah and I had a lot of episodes like this when he was four, although his were more intense. I wondered if I should have negotiated more at the wall or if she just needed to learn I have the final say. You’d think that by the second time around I would know the answers to these questions but I don’t.

That evening, as we were getting the kids ready for bed again, June got hold of the instructions for Beth’s arm exercises. (Beth hurt her right arm shoveling snow last winter then aggravated the injury while digging garden plots this spring and now she’s in physical therapy for it.) “I can read because I know what sounds the letters make,” June announced. I nodded absently.

She studied the instructions for a while and then said, “What does ‘duh-ooh’ mean?”

Beth and I peeked at the sheet to see the word where her finger lay. It was “do.” She didn’t quite recognize it but she’d sounded out a word. Beth and I looked at each other in amazement. June will be reading some day. Maybe in year, surely in two, but I felt as if we’d just seen the first step of that journey and it was thrilling. No less thrilling for being the second time around either.

I think the play was right in that sometimes it feels like some people get the magic wings and some people, the majority of them, don’t. It’s black and white–you’re rich, or talented, or lucky, or you’re not. But I think a deeper truth is that we all lack those wings sometimes (in shopping center parking lots, angry at our children and their tantrums) and sometimes in moments when we expect to and moments we don’t (watching them smile on stage in their paper crowns or seeing the inner workings of their growing minds) we have them and we soar.

Fab Four: A Birthday in Four Acts

Posted on March 28, 2010 by Steph

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

Act 1: The Weekend Before

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act 2: The Big Day: Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act 3: The Big Day: Afternoon and Evening

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

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

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

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

Intermission: The Day After

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

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

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

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

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

Act 4: The Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soccer Moms

Posted on September 19, 2009 by Steph

Today, on a sunny Saturday morning in the middle of September, Beth and I became soccer moms. In a way this seems overdue, because we’ve had a child of soccer-eligible age for five years now and we do, after all, live in the suburbs. I promised you a chronicle of suburban lesbian family life, and sometimes it seems like something’s missing here. Shouldn’t I be writing about ferrying the kids to their activities through killer rush hour traffic or agonizing about whether I’m finding the right balance between over scheduling them and failing to enrich them sufficiently so they can get into the colleges of their choice?

Don’t get me wrong. Noah has been in his share of extra curricular activities. Since I started writing two and a half years ago, at various times he’s been in after school science and after school drama and weekend swim lessons and he attends several day camps each summer. He’s just not interested in team sports though, so after a brief stint with t-ball the summer he was five, we have not been involved in any youth sports leagues.

But on the other hand, because it’s June we’re talking about, while our entry into kids’ sports seems overdue, it also seems premature. I used to think it was really funny that the soccer leagues around here start with three-year-old teams. But that was before I had a three year old who loves to run and kick balls and who answered with an enthusiastic “Yes!” when we asked her if she wanted to be on a soccer team with some of her friends from school. So we signed her up.

This morning as I was getting her dressed to go, I suggested to June that she wear her hair in a ponytail. It’s a look I think is cute on her but she almost always rejects it. When I told her soccer players often wear ponytails, she said no, then reconsidered and asked me to pull her hair into one.

“Now you look like a soccer player!” I said.

“Now I look like a soccer team!” she echoed.

We had decided to make June’s first practice a family outing. I expected some grumbling from Noah but he was genuinely enthusiastic about going and wanted to shoot a movie of it. He even took special care to dress in blue because June’s on the navy blue team and he wanted to look the part of the supportive fan.

We got to the field, where a half dozen or so 9 o’clock teams were disbanding and another half dozen 10 o’clock teams were assembling. There are fifteen kids on a team. This means that in a town of 17,000 people, approximately 180 three year olds are playing organized soccer on Saturday mornings. (There are four other time slots for preschoolers on Saturday afternoons and Sundays but some or all of those are teams for four year olds– http://www.takomasoccer.org/index.html). It’s kind of mind-blowing. I suddenly understood why those Takoma Park Soccer t-shirts are so ubiquitous on preschoolers and elementary-age kids. The league goes up to high school, but I rarely see older kids with the shirts. My guess is the serious players are on their school teams by that age. The field was so big and there were so many people on it that it was hard to find out team, but eventually we did. We were pleased to see both the Blue Gingko (aka Praying Mantis) and the Red Gingko. The Blue Gingko ran over to us yelling “June!” as if they were long-lost friends, instead of preschool classmates who last saw each other Wednesday morning.

The practice started. The coach explained they’d be doing stretches and then drills and games, with and without soccer balls. They practiced running across the field toward a goal (a line of parents). They practiced stopping and starting when the coach blew his whistle. They practiced dribbling a ball toward a goal while trying to avoid being tagged by some older kids who were helping out. They practiced kicking the ball between two cones.

June was alternately enthusiastic and unsure. When she was supposed to run away from us and into a crowd of strange kids she didn’t want to go and Beth had to run alongside her to get her going. Finally I decided to join the line of parents on the other side of the field so she could run back and forth between Beth and me and that worked better. Soon she was happily running up and down the field with her ball. Overall, she seemed to be having a pretty good time. Once while they were standing in line waiting to run, I saw June and the Red Gingko leaning in toward each other, deep in conversation.

Meanwhile, Noah shot this movie:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/tL19Ab8ltv0vl9d4nE4QJg?authkey=Gv1sRgCJXtkNr9h42qAQ&feat=directlink

He took all the footage except the introduction, when he’s narrating. Noah was running when he shot a lot of the deleted scenes, so they have a Blair Witch Project feel to them, but Beth found the workable footage and skillfully edited it down to the two and a half minutes you see here. (Noah is currently busy making his own, more extended, director’s cut.)

After a few really strong kicks during the goal-kicking exercise, June came over to me and said, “I’m done now, Mommy.”

“Okay,” I said and picked her up. It had been almost an hour of running around and she was tuckered out. She lay her head on my shoulder. The coach said it was about time to wrap up anyway.

In the car, she said, “It was fun running and kicking the ball fast.” Later, at home, she told me, “The next time we go play soccer I am going to win the soccer and when I’m tired I will stop.” Still later, she told Beth she had already won and demanded a star-shaped glass paperweight she recently unearthed in the basement as a prize. We will have to work with her on this emphasis on winning. At this level, it’s a non-competitive league. I’m not sure if her team will even play another team this season or if it will be all skill-building exercises. Either way, though, I think she’s off to a running start.

Five Summer Days and Four Summer Nights

Posted on August 16, 2009 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Tuesday evening after the kids were asleep, Beth and I lay in bed discussing her upcoming business trip to Pittsburgh. I told her I had more trepidation about it than usual, mostly because our summer schedule is so chaotic already. Some weeks Noah is at camp, others he isn’t and each camp is located somewhere different and has different drop off and pickup times. I try to keep June busy because it’s better for both of us to get out of the house but we have no regular scheduled events, other than Circle Time at the library on Tuesday mornings. On the occasional Wednesday she attends a drop-in music class, but not very often because it only meets in the morning three times this summer and afternoons don’t work for us because of Noah’s camp pickups. Most Friday mornings, but not all, she has Leaves playgroup, which meets at a different playground every week. Sometimes we go to story hours at a local children’s boutique (http://shop.thepajamasquid.com/) or the Co-op and she has play dates every now and then but not as many as I’d like because it can be hard to co-ordinate around everyone’s vacations. The point is that I am a creature of habit and easily discombobulated by this rotating schedule so the idea of parenting without backup for five summer days and four summer nights was a little overwhelming.

Here’s what happened in a nutshell: I dropped Noah off and picked him up on time more often than not. Pickups were more difficult because I needed to wake June from her nap to go get him so I tended to wait until the last possible minute and the bus we needed to catch when we left that late was not all that reliable. So I was five minutes late one day and ten minutes late another day, but that was the worst of it. I also managed to send Noah’s lunch with him every day, though one day I had my key in the front door before I realized that not only was it not in his backpack, it wasn’t even packed yet. On Friday he brought home his final projects from robot camp, a sound-activated walking robot he built from a kit and hand-decorated t-shirt that is meant to make him look like a robot when he wears it. This was the last day of his last camp. Third grade is only two weeks away. Where did the summer go?

June had a play date with the Dragonfly and attended her playgroup and made a birthday card for the Squash Bug, whose party is this afternoon. I folded a watercolor she’d painted in half and she dictated the following message for me to write in it: “Dear Squash Bug, I hope Squash Bug gets all her presents. Love, June.” She and I danced in the kitchen to some energetic fiddle music on A Prairie Home Companion. She wet five pairs of training pants in one afternoon after gorging on watermelon at playgroup that morning. I had to put her back into diapers until I got a chance to do laundry. She also got her first bee sting when we wandered into a swarm of angry bees on an evening walk Wednesday. They were swarming around a fire hydrant of all things. We all got stung, but, being three and never having experienced a bee sting before, June took it worst. The bright side is we now know she’s not allergic. Just after I finished applying ice and baking soda paste to Noah’s chest and my arm–June refused all suggested treatments–we were all locked into the back of the house when a doorknob fell out on the other side of the door. Noah was completely panicked, even though I kept telling him we’d find a way out. It was worse than the bee sting. Finally I sent him out his bedroom window to re-enter the house and free us.

Later Noah tripped on a ball in the yard and skinned his elbow and he tried to teach June to play hopscotch without much success. He finished book 7 in the Series of Unfortunate Events—The Vile Village—and started book 8—The Hostile Hospital. He told a lot of jokes— here’s my favorite: What’s faster hot or cold? Hot. You can never catch a hot. The kids argued with each other incessantly, taking occasional breaks to argue with me. Noah pushed my buttons over and over. June gave him a big hug after he had a timeout. All four of us splashed in the creek and toasted marshmallows on the stovetop to make s’mores. We ate kid-pleasing dinners every night—macaroni and cheese, fried tofu, frozen pizza and veggie chicken noodle soup, though they did have to eat their vegetables and drink their milk as well. And every night before bedtime, we talked to Beth on the phone, short, chaotic conversations with everyone trying to talk at once.

In between all this, I did a couple loads of laundry, did dishes –usually a whole day’s worth all at once, vacuumed, swept the porch, watered and weeded the garden, wrote a short article on the nutritional value of squash, rewrote said article and finally got caught up on the newsletters I clip for Sara – I didn’t work on the project while we were in West Virginia so I was pretty behind.

I think I did okay.

Saturday was the nicest day, despite the fact that June woke for the day at 5:35. This might have been because we didn’t have to be anywhere at any specific time so even though we were out the door for a two-hour walk by 9:00 the morning did not have the frantic tumult of the two previous mornings. I snuggled with June in bed and read to her until 6:50, then we got up and I put oatmeal, veggie sausage links and cantaloupe on the table instead of the cold cereal we eat most weekdays. I read the paper for a while the kids played and then we got dressed and left. The official purpose of the walk was to go to the post office and mail a package of hand-me-down Babybug magazines (http://www.cricketmag.com/ProductDetail.asp?pid=10) for my cousin’s baby, who just turned one, but it was a long, meandering sort of outing. I wanted to stop at Starbucks—sleep deprivation makes me crave coffee even though I usually drink it decaf– and we also swung by the 7-Eleven to buy chocolate bars for that evening’s s’mores.

On the way home June said she didn’t want to go home, she wanted to go somewhere else but she didn’t have any specific suggestions. We were near a path I thought lead to a playground, so we wandered down it. It actually went to a section of Long Branch creek we don’t often visit. The water was shallow but not stagnant, just perfect for wading and throwing rocks. Noah stood under a bridge and pretended to be the troll from The Three Billy Goats Gruff. We found a really cool spider’s web. The sun filtered through the leaves above, bringing out the highlights in Noah’s golden brown curls. A leaf fell into his hair and it reminded me of a garland. Playing in the sun-dappled water, he looked like a young faun. That was the very best moment, a beautiful summery moment I will cherish from this week long after I forget the stress and exhaustion and arguments and why I even sent him to that timeout.

Tag, You’re It, Part 1: Climbing to the Top

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Steph

I stood with my hands on the stroller handles at the bottom on the hill, sizing it up. I climb this hill every Wednesday morning on our way to Kindermusik. It’s long and steep, but I’m used to it. Unless I have a backpack full of hardback library books to return on the way home, or unless it’s a sweltering summer day and I have fifteen-month old in the front pack as I often did when Noah had music camp in the same building the summer before last, climbing it is routine.

But nothing is routine these days. I’ve been sick for about three weeks with a killer upper respiratory infection. I have a cough like no other I’ve ever had in my life. When a bad fit is upon me any of the following things might happen: I could gag, or wet myself, or feel shooting pains in my head or see stars, or any combination of these things.

I am also very short of breath. At the worst point, about a week ago, I could barely climb a flight of stairs without getting winded. During Thanksgiving weekend at my mom’s house, I was trying to carry June out of the bathroom after a bath and my mom said my breathing sounded like I was in labor. (She took my naked, towel-wrapped daughter from me and carried her upstairs.) I’m getting better. Yesterday I rode the exercise bike in the basement (albeit very slowly) for ten minutes and I raked leaves for another ten. Partly I was testing myself to see if going to music class this morning was even feasible. I thought it was.

There are speed bumps about one-third and two-thirds of the way up the hill. I told myself I’d stop at those spots and rest. I made it to the one-third mark, but the evil thing about this hill is it gets steeper as you go up it, so I ended up having to rest again well before the two-thirds mark. I lost track of how many times I stopped; I think it was at least a half dozen. I breathed hard; I coughed a lot. About three-quarters of the way up I stared at the last, steepest part of the hill in despair, wondering how hard June would cry if I gave up and we just went home. Pretty hard, I thought. We once tried to attend a make-up class that had been cancelled (unbeknownst to us) and when we got to the dark and empty little building in the park and then had to turn around to go home, June cried for fifteen minutes straight. So, remembering that, I pressed on.

And then I was at the top of the hill. I was so tired, I wasn’t even happy. I wondered grumpily why people climb mountains anyway. Why put yourself through something like this?

Soon we were inside. The familiar songs played. We danced and rang jingle bells. (I made sure to sanitize my and June’s hands before we touched the instruments.) I got to talk to grownups during class and afterward on the playground. It turns out a large proportion of the kids and adults present have the exact same cough. The teacher said her doctor says half of Takoma Park has it and that it lasts six weeks on average. We commiserated and swapped home remedies. It was nice. It was worth it.

Last month I was tagged twice by other bloggers, which means they invited me to write on a given prompt. Dana, of Luca Has Two Mommies (http://www.lucahas2mommies.blogspot.com), tagged me to post the fourth photo in the fourth photo folder on my computer and then tag four more bloggers. We have two computers with photos on them so I got to cherry-pick but I chose this one. It’s of Noah the summer he was five, inside the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (http://www.nps.gov/caha/).

Noah has loved lighthouses since he was three. He had a coloring book called Lighthouses of the Mid-Atlantic States and he memorized the names, locations and heights of the lighthouses in it before he could color inside the lines. He sat through a long multi-part documentary series about lighthouses with us and was probably the only preschooler in Takoma Park who knew what a Fresnel lens and could tell you all about how they work.

Noah’s interest in lighthouses has waned somewhat in recent years, but as a result of his fixation, we’ve climbed lighthouses up and down the East Coast, from Massachusetts to Florida. Some were easy climbs; others were more difficult. Noah’s a sturdy kid and always climbed uncomplainingly to the top even when he was very small (unless the stairs weren’t solid—if he could see through them sometimes he got scared).

On this occasion I stayed below. June was five months old and I didn’t want to lug her to the top. When I have climbed to the top, though, which has been almost every other time, I’ve never questioned if it was worth it. The view from a lighthouse is always sensational. You can see the ocean and the land for miles around. You are up in the sky. It’s a good reminder that there’s often a very good reason for pushing on to the top.

I tag: Tami, of On A Quiet Street (http://onaquietstreet.blogspot.com/), Tyfanny of Come What May (http://btmommy.blogspot.com/), Swistle of her own eponymous blog (http://www.swistle.blogspot.com/) and Holly of The Post Party (http://pushontildawn.blogspot.com/). Holly’s my cousin and the mother of Annabelle, who’s just about the most photogenic four-month-old baby on the planet. Annabelle also has spina bifida, so Holly and her husband Matt know more than most people about climbing to the top even when the hill gets steep.

To recap: Your mission, if you choose to accept it:

1) Choose the fourth picture folder on your computer
2) Choose the fourth picture
3) Explain the picture
4) Tag four other people

I look forward to seeing your pictures and hearing your stories.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Extracurricular Activities