Soon It Will Be Christmas Day

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Steph

I’ve had an unusual amount of work in the past few weeks: I’ve written a booklet about ten herbs, a brochure for a calcium supplement and right now I’m in the middle of another brochure about a digestive aide. Plus, I edited a short academic paper. We also had a houseguest, a college friend who was in town to sing in a concert (the Bill of Rights set to music!) and we had a brief but fun visit with him. So it would have been easier to skip the Holiday Sing at June’s school on Friday morning, but I went anyway. Part of how I justify working part-time at home is that it makes me available for this sort of thing, so it seems I ought to go in the busy weeks as well as the not so busy ones. Plus I love this event. I went every year Noah attended this school.

The first year I went it was not really what I was expecting. No real information was sent home other than the date and time. I knew Noah had been practicing songs in music class for a few weeks so I expected all the kids to get up on stage or bleachers or something, though I wasn’t sure how so many kids would fit because the whole school is there in two shifts and some kids go twice, as I will explain. But in fact only the fourth and fifth graders perform in a visible way. Back in Noah’s day it used to be the choir, but sadly, the choir fell victim to an expanding school population with no money for an extra music teacher, and it is no more.

The program now starts with the advanced strings and wind sections of the school band. Then all the kids in the fourth and fifth grade are divided into three groups of a few classes each and they either play the recorder or sing for the rest of the first half of the program. Meanwhile the younger kids sit on the floor facing the stage while parents sit on folding chairs at the back of the room. In the second half of the program, the younger kids on the floor sing the songs they’ve practiced in music class along with the older kids up on stage. (In a way it’s nice because it’s more inclusive than the old way of doing it, but knowing how important being in the band is to Noah, I’m sad the more talented singers at June’s school don’t have that creative outlet any more.)

The room was festive. There was a fifteen-foot high inflatable Santa with a spinning present on one hand on one side of the stage and a Nutcracker on the other side. Paper snowflakes decorated the walls near the stage and more hung from the ceiling of the stage. I caught sight of June as her class filed in but she didn’t see me. Her blonde pigtails and red Nordic pattern sweater made her easy to find in the crowd. (It was the same sweater Noah wore to the Holiday Sing when he was in kindergarten. Don’t ask me why I remember. I just do and the idea of having June wear it appealed to me. It was surprisingly easy to convince her. I just suggested it and she said yes.)

There were Kwanzaa songs and Christmas songs and Hanukah songs. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was the crowd favorite, but I walked home with “Feliz Navidad” and “In the Window,” a very pretty Hanukah song in my head. Also this one, which the kids didn’t sing: “War is over/If you want it/War is over now” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Xmas_(War_Is_Over)) because as strange as it seems, the war in Iraq is over, our part in it anyway. This is more a solemn than a joyous thing to contemplate, but it’s a good thing nonetheless.

When the songs were over, the kids on the floor were allowed to get up and turn around and wave at their parents. June saw me and beamed and I smiled and waved back and then slipped out of the room to hurry back to home and work.

The next day was Saturday. I worked a little and June had her last ballet class (they danced to some songs from The Nutcracker) and she and Talia and Gabriella followed it up with a free tap/jazz class because the first ballet class of the year had been cancelled and the students were allowed to make up the missed class by attending another one. Afterward all three ballerinas went to lunch at Eggspectations (http://www.eggspectations.com/usa/index.html) with assorted parents and siblings to celebrate the end of class.

That night Beth and I went to a birthday party for Lesley. It was a surprise party, made surprising, I think, by the fact that she’d already had a party two weeks earlier. (We went to that one, too.) When a preschool teacher as beloved as Lesley turns fifty, people go all out. One party is not enough. The parties were thrown by different people, with different guest lists, so we got to see a lot of people, including several parents from Noah’s class we hadn’t seen years and Becky, the nursery school music teacher, whom we miss a lot. It was a fun evening.

Sunday I worked some more and in the afternoon we went to see The Nutcracker at Onley Theatre (http://www.olneytheatre.org/). Before the show I bought June a little nutcracker figure (given that she broke, not one, but two Nutcracker snow globes last year it seemed like a better bet than another snow globe). June tested how wide each nutcracker could open its mouth before settling on one in a white and gold outfit. She angled for a second souvenir (a book with a CD) and I considered it, but it was a bit pricy. The sales clerk warned her to be careful with the little wooden doll because it was really a decoration and not a toy.

The theater space was medium-sized and kind of rustic, with wooden beams decorated with evergreen garlands and big ribbons. We piled up all our coats on June’s seat so she’d been tall enough to see, and it worked, but only because there was a child in front on her and a child in front of that child. June perched on her elevated seat and watched the first act with close attention. She applauded a lot and every so often put her arms up in the air in the same poses as the ballerinas. Noah paid close attention and applauded a lot, too. It was a nice production, somewhat more elaborate than the one we saw last year, though not a really fancy one. (I do hope to splurge on a top-notch one some day. My kids have never seen a version where all the children coming running out from under the giant mother’s skirts in the second act. That was my favorite part when I was a kid.)

At intermission, Beth and June went to the bathroom while I went in search of snacks, since June said she was hungry. By the time we found each other she only had time to eat a few of the pretzels I bought before it was time to go back to the theater, so she was still hungry. She was also tired and kind of antsy by this point. The people in front of us had re-grouped so three out of the four seats in front of us had adults in them and June’s view was now blocked. Rather than ask Noah to take an obstructed view, I moved June onto my lap, which meant I needed to crane my neck to see around her. Sometimes she sat up straight, sometimes she slumped against me, sometimes she stood in front of my seat, a few times she slid to the floor and sat there. I think she actually paid better attention last year when she was four, but this might have been a longer production. She was watching when Clara appears back in her living room at the very end. “It was all a dream,” June announced loudly. She seemed happy to have figured this out on her own. (I’d read her the synopsis of the first act before it started, but the lights went down before I could finish reading the synopsis of the second act so she was on her own piecing together the action.)

As we walked back to overflow parking lot, the kids argued over the remaining pretzels and Beth said anyone who continued arguing would not get anything at Starbucks, and lo there was peace. The sword had already broken off June’s nutcracker, but we decided this was appropriate because the nutcracker gets broken in the ballet, too. Also, Beth promised to glue it back together once we got home.

We came home. Noah and I bagged three bags of leaves I’d raked earlier and Beth made Vietnamese spring rolls for dinner. We ate in front of the television, something we hardly ever do, so we could watch The Year Without a Santa Claus before it was time to put our sleepy daughter to bed.

The new week has started and I am knee-deep in things to do, but I am wondering if I can somehow manage to make gingerbread cookie dough to take to my mom’s house to bake there. It will be a hectic week, but soon it will be Christmas day and I want to arrive with something sweet for the many relatives who will be there.

The June Club

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Steph

On Saturday morning we were having breakfast at the Galleria Espresso in Rehoboth Beach. There’s a place in the restaurant where two mirrored walls come together. The kids love this corner because if you sit there you can see multiple images of yourself. They call these assemblies of images, “The Noah Club” and “The June Club.” Noah had his turn first and June was impatient for hers, so she ended up with a much longer turn while the rest of us ate our pancakes and crepes. At one point all the members of the June Club were exclaiming over how funny it was that they all looked exactly alike. June’s self-amusing like that.

We were in Rehoboth for our annual Christmas shopping weekend, a family tradition that has multiple benefits: we get away from the distractions of home and chores and focus on our shopping while supporting actual brick and mortar stores and a local economy (if not our own), June gets to visit the one true Santa in his house on the boardwalk, and I get a little much needed off-season beach time to tide me over until spring break.

So I walked on the beach at night and the kids and I built whole villages of sand castles during the cold, windy days. June decorated hers with carefully chosen pebbles and shells and Noah smashed his with the bottom of his bucket as soon as they were built. When they tired of this, they buried treasure (more shells and pebbles) and marked the spot with an X. June cried when Noah buried what she claims were prettier shells than she’ll ever be able to find again and they couldn’t find them, but then she got over it and they were burying treasure again. On Saturday June and I were on the beach at 7:35 with the last pink of the sunrise and both kids and I were there at 4:25 with the first pink of the sunset. We got a good bit of shopping done, too.

The weekend was pleasant, but unremarkable to the point that I don’t have much more to say about it. I think this has a lot to do with June being in the Santa sweet spot. She’s old enough not to be afraid to sit in his lap any more (having conquered that fear last year) and too young to be skeptical and full of angst about it like Noah was in first grade (see 12/10/07). So there wasn’t much Santa-related drama. After breakfast on Saturday June found a mermaid doll at Browse About Books (http://www.browseaboutbooks.com/), fell in love with it and insisted Beth take a picture on her phone in case Santa needed photographic evidence, but he didn’t. That afternoon, she clambered happily into his lap and told him she wanted the “McKenna Mermaid doll” (http://www.amazon.com/Groovy-Girl-122080-MacKenna-Mermaid/dp/B001R59PX0) and he seemed to know what she meant. It was all very satisfactory.

Life is pretty satisfactory for June these days. She loves kindergarten, loves riding the bus, loves the rhythms and routines of school. She looks forward to her turns as line leader and door closer, and keeps careful count of her tiger paws. She’s learning to read and working very hard at it. Because Spanish is more phonetic than English she can sound words out better in Spanish, but she’s more likely to know what they mean in English. I’ve watched her switching back and forth from English to Spanish books and back again as she struggles to find something she can read by herself. She is this close, able to read quite of a lot of words, but not quite fluent enough to sit down and really read a book. The contrast with Noah at this age is striking. He learned to read in kindergarten, too, a little later in the year, but seemingly without effort. One day he couldn’t read and the next day he could. June’s more of a step-by-step learner. That’s why Noah was a sight words reader and she’s a phonics-based reader. Either way, it’s a joy to watch, even if we do have to read a lot of words as she points to them, over and over and asks what they say. Do you know how many words there are out there in the world? There never seem to be quite as many as when you have a child who’s on the verge of reading.

I volunteered in June’s class on Tuesday. When I came in the door her face lit up and for a while she had trouble concentrating on her work because she kept glancing up at me, at the table where I sat date-stamping homework papers and putting them in the kids’ folders and cubbies and folding and stapling coloring sheets into little booklets. Of course that’s why I go, to see her excitement at having me there, and also for the chance to spy on a bit of her school day as I relieve the teacher of some of her clerical duties. Señora T read two books, and gave a short lesson on ordinal numbers (the kids had to line up, five to a line and then the remaining children had to say who was primero, segundo, tercero—first, second, third, etc.) First they did it in order, and then she started mixing it up. There was also a short grammar lesson on the topic of “¿Que es una oración?” (“What is a sentence?”) and a free play period. June was at the stencil table, filling in a sprinkling of stars at the top of her page for a night scene. Other kids drew (one of June’s friends presented her with a drawing of a Christmas tree) or painted, or did puzzles, or played with blocks or toy cars or pretend food in the supermarket area. There was an injury when food went flying and I had to escort a girl to the nurse’s office with a scratch on her nose.

When school let out June asked if we could play on the playground before walking home and she showed me how she can go all the way across the monkey bars now. She’s been working on this all year, devoting many of her recess periods to mastering this particular piece of playground equipment. At the beginning of the year she tried the bigger set (the one she fell off) but she has since switched over to the smaller set, which is more her size, and she can indeed go all the way across. I watched her do it again and again.

It reminded me of something that happened over Thanksgiving weekend. We were at a playground in Wheeling, with Beth’s mom, three of her aunts and two of her cousins. This playground is well known to both kids, but they had a new piece of equipment June had never encountered before. It consisted of four chains, strung on a wooden frame. There were plastic handles on the sides, but June wanted to walk all the way across without falling and without holding on. Over and over she tried, and over and over she fell.

“I am going to keep on doing this until I don’t fall,” she told me, and I thought, oh no, how are we going to leave this playground because I didn’t think she could really do it. Well, you know how this story ends, right? She kept on doing it until she didn’t fall, and then she did it a few more times for good measure.

Five pushing six is a magical age, full of challenges to master, words to read and monkey bar and chain bridges to cross. It’s a good time to be a member of the June Club.

The Curse of the Mummy’s Hand

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

I. The Curse of the Mummy’s Hand: Thursday and Friday

On Thursday morning I reached into the toaster over to retrieve June’s toast. It was way in the back, behind Noah’s waffle. I don’t know why I did it with my bare hand but I did and I brushed the back of my hand against the heating element, giving myself a second-degree burn. As a result, I spent much of the next two days traveling to doctor’s offices, sitting around in doctor’s offices filling out paperwork and getting my hand cleaned and wrapped in gauze by one doctor and then checked by a burn specialist the next day. I sported a very seasonal mummy look until the dressing was deemed unnecessary by the burn specialist. I lost the better part of two working days to this misadventure, though I did manage to get to June’s school to see the Vocabulary Parade on Friday morning.

Now this was more fun. All the kids chose a word to represent. Some classes went with posters, others with costumes, and others with a combination. June’s class had posters with their words, illustrations of the words and sentences containing the word. June’s word was “ardilla,” the Spanish word for squirrel. She needed to walk across the stage holding her poster and say her word. She’d confided in me the night before that she had stage fright.

I was surprised. “But you’ve been to drama camp,” I said. “You’ve been in plays.”

“But it was only the parents watching,” she said. She was right, both the play she was in at her nursery school drama camp the summer she was four and the Sound of Music revue last summer had very small audiences consisting of a dozen or so parents. This audience would be hundreds of students in her school from Head Start to second grade, plus their teachers and a couple rows of parents in the back. So even though she had no lines or songs or dance routines to memorize, this seemed more daunting to her.

I watched her class file in and saw her glance at the parents’ area, with the set look she gets when she’s nervous about something. As soon as she caught sight of me her face relaxed and she gave me a huge smile and I knew it was worth the time on a busy day to be there.

The parade was predictably cute. The preschoolers either had their word announced by their teacher or said them together in groups of three to four kids who all had the same word. (They focused on vegetables and farm animals.) Starting with the kindergarteners the kids had to say their words individually, into a microphone. June’s class had the theme of school and fall-related words. Even with the microphone I could only make out the words about half the time and since the kids had not been coached to hold the posters facing the audience (or if they had the instructions didn’t stick), only about 10% of the posters were visible. Despite these obstacles, it was just about the most sincere vocabulary parade I’ve ever seen. It’s a wonder the Great Pumpkin did not show up on the spot.

When it was June’s turn she spoke her word clearly into the microphone and I could hear her from the back of the room. I never did get to see her poster, but I saw her look of relief as she crossed the stage and went back to sit with her class. I slipped out of the multi-purpose room once her grade was finished so I could go to my appointment at the Washington Hospital Center Burn Center.

By the time I got back, it was almost time for Noah to come home. Maggie’s dad had picked June up at school because I was afraid I wouldn’t make it home in time for her bus (and I didn’t). I was frustrated to have barely worked the past two days because I had a new project, a white paper on vitamin E and prostate cancer due Monday that I’d just started on Wednesday afternoon, the day before I burned my hand. All I’d done was spend a couple hours reading and marking up the background research. Not a word was written and we had big plans for the weekend. We normally spread out our Halloween preparations over two weekends but with June at Mom and Jim’s last weekend, we were planning to do all our baking and decorating and pumpkin carving and costume making in one weekend. Plus we were intending to march in the Halloween parade and Noah’s twin friends were having a party and he had a school dance and June had ballet and soccer, and well, you get the point. It wasn’t a great weekend to work.

It was also supposed to snow. Yes, snow in October. If you don’t live in or anywhere near Maryland and you’re wondering if that’s normal the answer is no–no, it’s not. Beth found out via a neighborhood listserv on Friday night that the parade (scheduled for Saturday afternoon) was cancelled. The Halloween costume contest would go on inside the school where the after-parade party usually takes place instead. So, I had to work and no parade. Also, no party for Noah’s friends on Saturday. Almost no one could come so they cancelled. June went to bed early on Friday night with a severe headache, making me worry she was sick. I wondered if the whole weekend was going to collapse. “It’s the curse of the mummy’s hand,” I half-joked to Beth.

But a little later she picked Noah up from his dance. He’d had fun and he even won an iTunes gift card in a raffle so maybe we weren’t cursed after all.

II. The Curse Lifted: Saturday and Sunday

On Saturday morning June woke up “all better” and wanted me to read her In A Dark, Dark Room, a book of scary stories we have out of the library. “And this time,” she announced, “I want to see the ghost.” There’s a page with an illustration of a ghost she’s been making me skip ever since we checked this book out of the library almost five weeks ago. But this morning she was ready for it.

Beth and Noah dropped June off at ballet and went to buy costume supplies. I had the house to myself for a few hours and I banged out an introduction, conclusion and the easier parts of the body of the white paper, leaving the most information-dense parts for later.

After lunch, June and I cut sugar cookies. We’d made the dough and frozen it earlier in the week so I thawed it and rolled it out and we set to work with the Halloween cookie cutters, making bats, cats, skull and crossbones, tombstones, witches’ hats and other scary shapes. Noah was doing homework, reading a biography of Langston Hughes for a school project, but we saved some dough for him so he could do the last few cookies. Then we made frosting but we set aside the rest of the cookie-making project for the next day so we could attend to more pressing matters.

June and I turned to decorating the porch. Usually we have our porch and yard decorated a week or two before Halloween but we’d just started. I’d been doing it piecemeal with the kids over the past couple days. We’d put up the tombstone in the yard and the skeleton emerging from the ground in front of it and set up the spider web with the enormous spider already. June and I attached the little gummy spiders, spider webs and the word “Yikes” to the front door window panes. We would have hung the ghosts from the tree next but it had been raining all morning and it had just turned over to sleet, which was not inviting weather for standing out in the yard on a step ladder, so I deferred. I think June might have been game.

Beth and Noah spent most of the afternoon working on his newspaper costume. They’d bought a sheer orange tablecloth to be the plastic sleeve and they used a spray adhesive to attach newspapers to the inside. You can see the newsprint through the plastic. Beth cut a hole out for his face, reinforced the inside of the costume with cardboard and wire so it would stand up and traced the words The Noah Post and recycling instructions onto the sleeve with a marker. It’s a thing of beauty, but it made me wish I could send my dad, who was a print journalist for decades, a photo of his grandson dressed as a newspaper. He would have gotten a kick out of it.

June’s and my next project was scooping out the jack-o-lanterns. There wouldn’t be time to carve them before the parade, but I wanted to have them all ready to go on Sunday. June was a big help. She kept saying, “This is a really messy job,” but she didn’t quit.

When the pumpkins were scooped, I made bean and spinach tacos and we ate a hurried dinner before painting June’s face green, getting her into her witch costume and heading out into the wet snow to drive to the rec center for the Halloween party. June changed her mind about what she wanted to be for Halloween many times between August when she declared she was going to be an alien, and her final decision a few weeks ago to be a witch. Witches are one of her biggest fears so we think she might have been trying to work through that by dressing up as one.

At the school, June made a beeline for the art table and started coloring a picture of a vampire while Noah and I guessed the weight of a pumpkin and sized up the costume competition. There was a boy about his age dressed as a slice of watermelon who I thought had a good chance at a prize in the eight to ten bracket. I should explain here that Noah has wanted to win this contest forever. He’s had some very creative costumes over the years, starting with the year he was three and dressed as a violin. The year he was six a picture of him in his storm cloud costume appeared in the Gazette, but he’s never won the contest. While they were working on the costume that afternoon, Noah had mentioned he’d want to save it “if anything important happens.” Beth and I glanced at each other. We both knew what he was thinking.

Earlier in the day June had said she was not going to be in the contest, but when it was time for the five to seven year olds to cross the stage, she hopped right up to have her second moment on stage in as many days. There were several other witches in her age group, along with a very elaborate mummy, a werewolf, a haunted house and the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus. That last one caused a lot of comment in the crowd.

Noah’s group was next. I was still escorting June back from the stage so I didn’t really get a good look at his group, but the watermelon boy was in it. After Noah was out of costume and the next group was up, a contest official came and asked his name. That was a good sign. After all the groups had finished there was a brief musical interlude while the judges conferred. Winners were announced, starting with the two and under group. Noah and I were talking when Beth poked Noah and said, “You won!” Neither of us had even heard it. He had to scramble back into his costume and go collect his prize, a cloth pumpkin full of trinkets, such as a little toy skateboard, a Frankenstein’s Monster rubber duck, a pencil, play dough, etc.

Noah could not believe he’d won. “I thought I was under a curse,” he said in the car on the way home. If he was, the curse had been lifted, no doubt about it. Beth and I were thrilled, too. He’s wanted this so long and has been such a good sport every year, we were glad it finally happened. It was definitely “something important.”

June couldn’t believe it either. “I thought it was just a party. I didn’t know it was a creative costume contest,” she said in an exasperated tone. “And anyway, everyone who participated got a glow stick whether they won or not.” She was sounding a little sulky now. Beth asked her to let Noah have his moment but she kept it up all the way home. She was green with envy, and it wasn’t just the face paint.

But she did not ruin Noah’s mood. He was ebullient and when I put him to bed instead of his normal “Good nighty noodles,” he said to me, “Good nighty newspaper.” Meanwhile, his sister has decided she needs to take an entirely new approach to Halloween costumes. Next year she is going to be something more unusual than a witch, so chances are Beth will have two elaborate costumes to make.

Sunday Noah plowed through two more chapters of his Langston Hughes biography and five vocabulary exercises and practiced percussion and typing. In between that I read two chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to him (we read seven over the course of the weekend), we all carved pumpkins (Noah did his own this year and he did a great job), June and I put the ghosts up in the dogwood tree, Beth and the kids colored the frosting and frosted the cookies, and Beth and June strung the ghost lights on the porch. June speculated that passersby would be afraid to approach our house because “We are really scarying it up.” Soccer was cancelled because the field was too muddy to play, which was a shame because it was a beautiful fall day, clear if cool, but on the other hand, who knows how we would have fit everything in if there had been a game.

After dinner we watched It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. At bedtime, June was so exhausted she said she didn’t want a story and she was asleep before the second song on her lullaby CD was over. It had been a very busy two days.

III. Zombie Zone: Monday

The kids had Halloween off school, not because it was Halloween but because they always get a day off in between marking periods and Friday was the last day of the first quarter. I sent June over to Merichel’s (aka the Toad’s) house so I could work some more on the vitamin E piece. I couldn’t resist using some of the time she was out of the house to read Harry Potter to Noah, though, because it’s so much easier when she’s gone. Also, Sara had told me I could take until Tuesday with the paper if need be, so I wasn’t feeling too much time pressure.

After I brought June home, I made grilled cheese for lunch and June decided she wanted to try to nap so she could stay out later trick-or-treating but she couldn’t fall asleep. While she was trying, though, I worked some more on the white paper and by returning to it little by little throughout the afternoon, I finished it.

Also that afternoon Noah worked some more on his middle school application essays, I made pumpkin soup and we put the finishing touches on our decorations. Beth came home from work early to help. Noah strung “Caution: Zombie Zone” tape across the doorway and between the porch columns and found an extension cord so he could play his spooky sounds CD on the porch. We lit the jack-o-lanterns, filled up the Frankenstein’s monster head with candy, set up the coffin with colored mist rising from it and put a strobe light under the raven. Beth made some adjustments to Noah’s costume so he could carry his candy and at 6:15 Noah set off for Sasha’s house. This year for the first time he was trick-or-treating without adult accompaniment. We reminded him to come home by 8:15 and to say thank you at every house. Beth got June into her witch costume and they were out the door by 6:25.

I stayed behind to hand out candy to the two-headed monster, ghost. Smurf, hippy girl, ladybug, bee, angel, and other trick-or-treaters who came to our door. Many people admired our decorations. Somewhere in the past couple years we’ve crossed over from people who put up a few seasonal touches in the yard to people who go all out for Halloween. The added element of sound this year made a big difference in the atmosphere, I think.

Beth and June came home around 7:20. June showed me her candy and trinkets (and Beth showed me the jar of curried green tomatoes she’d received as a grownup treat) and then she opened the gift my mom sent, a Halloween story with a built-in recording of her voice and my stepfather’s reading the story, and she ate her biggest piece of candy, a chocolate owl lollipop before we washed the green paint off her face and sent her to bed.

Noah and Sasha came up the walk at 8:00. If I was standing on the porch fifteen minutes before he was due looking down the sidewalk in the direction of Sasha’s house, it was only because I was looking for trick-or-treaters.

Sasha was dressed like the villain from Scream and Noah had an auxiliary bag of candy because he’d filled up his little pumpkin. He must have had at least three times the candy June got. She wasn’t going to be happy when she saw it, I thought. When I asked him how it was trick-or-treating with no adults he said, “Fun!” He said he was taken for a carrot, a pumpkin, an orange and a rocket ship and that he and Sasha had seen a boy they knew and temporarily joined up with him. He looked exhausted but happy. He also had gifts to open from Grandmom and Pop, including glowsticks, face paint, toy skulls and a brain. Instead of saying goodnight to me when I put him to bed, he howled.

Another Halloween was over. The curse of the mummy’s hand was lifted. And all was well in the Zombie Zone.

If You Dare

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Steph

Noah and I were eating oatmeal and reading the Saturday paper when Noah piped up that there was a haunted train and carousel at Wheaton Regional Park and he wanted to go. He’d just finished reading the review in Kids Post and he thought it sounded fun. I considered and realized that it was the best day between now and Halloween to do it because June was spending the weekend at my mother and stepfather’s house–they were finally going to Sesame Place (http://www.sesameplace.com/sesame2/) after their planned July trip to the park got scotched by three-digit heat. Anyway, the haunted train was recommended for kids eight and up and June’s easily spooked, so doing it while she was still out of town seemed like the best idea.

In the morning Beth picked up supplies for the kids’ costumes (June is going as a witch, and Noah will be a newspaper) and she went to get the tickets that afternoon. After a delicious dinner at Asian Bistro (http://asianbistrocafe.com), we drove out to the park. We arrived at 7:20, twenty minutes before our train (we had timed tickets). It was a dark night, and cold. I had on a fleece jacket and I pulled my hands inside the sleeves.

“Hay mucha linea,” we heard a Spanish-speaking boy warn his family but the line was not too long. It was however, menaced by a man in a hockey mask wielding a chainsaw, sort of a Friday the 13th/Texas Chainsaw Massacre mashup. He walked up and down the line, jabbing the saw toward people, many of whom squealed or jumped away. I started to feel uneasy, remembering the man with the chainsaw who directed traffic at the much too mature haunted house where I took Noah when he was seven (see my 11/5/08 post). Was this a mistake? But the Post said eight and up, I thought, and the crowd seemed to consist mainly of kids eight to twelve and their parents, though here and there I saw much younger children, including a boy with his face painted like a skull who couldn’t have been older than four.

Someone called out, “Hey, Jason, can we get your picture?” and the man with the chainsaw broke out of character and said, “Sure. Why not?” and then proceeded to pose for pictures. This will be okay, I thought. Even the serial killers are friendly.

Many of the train passengers were in their Halloween costumes and the line was full of nervous tween energy. We wound past inflatable ghosts emerging from a pumpkin, a wooden figure of Dracula, and a graveyard with names on the tombs like “Dee Composing.” My favorite one said, “Felix the Cat,” and had nine dates of death underneath. We watched the train before ours pull into the station and the passengers disembarked. Some of them took off running with Chainsaw Man in hot pursuit, while others waited in their seats until everyone who wanted to run had gotten past. It seemed quite civil, with everyone having the choice of whether to be chased off the train platform or not.

Finally we got on the train, Noah and I were in one row with Beth ahead of us. Behind us sat two park employees who’d been working as actors along the tracks and wanted to see the show from the passengers’ perspective. They kept discussing what was coming next, but apparently the routine is varied enough so that they were wrong at least as often as they were right.

The train was strung with little red lights that would go off during suspenseful moments. I actually thought the scariest part was once when the lights went out and the train stopped for a full minute. I don’t even remember what, if anything, happened next. As is so often the case, the anticipation was better. There were a lot of props along the way, another graveyard, coffins, a dummy in a guillotine, but there were also live actors. The clown with the bloody scythe was the most memorable for me. The train went over a bridge that was draped with caution tape to make it look unstable and then near the end, through a tunnel with strobe lights. Chainsaw Man turned up here, and as Beth later pointed out, the lights made his actions look jerky and unpredictable.

The whole experience was just about right for Noah (and Beth, who’s really not a fan of this sort of thing). Being contained in the train, helped, I think, because nothing and no one ever crossed the boundary between inside and out.

And then the train pulled into the station. Noah had said earlier he wanted to wait and not be chased, but changed his mind at the very last minute. But there were people running down the platform in front of our seats and I couldn’t get out before Chainsaw Man had already run past. Noah ran up the path anyway. He was keyed up and proud of having ridden the train, just as he was last summer at the Haunted Mansion on the boardwalk (8/22/11).

Because we were late off the train, we didn’t make it into the first group to enter the Haunted Carousel. This was just as well because Beth, Noah and I ended up being the entire second group. The carousel is housed in a metal building with sides that normally roll up while it is in use, but they were left down. To enter we had to walk past a coffin with a corpse reaching out and some other decorations. It was dark and misty inside and instead of music, there was a recording of sound effects—a cackling laugh, a cat meowing, clanking chains, a church bell tolling. It was odd and spooky to ride a carousel alone in the dark, without the usual cheerful music. I thought actors might appear, but after a while it was clear it would just be Beth, and Noah and me riding our horses and zebra (Noah’s mount) around and around in eerie, but strangely peaceful circles. It was a nice end to the evening.

On Sunday Beth and Noah fetched June from my mom at a rest stop in Delaware. Noah had purchased what he believed to be the exact recording of Halloween sound effects from the carousel from iTunes that morning and they played it in the car, making it a haunted Ford Focus, I suppose. In between that five-hour drive and June’s soccer game, we squeezed in a trip to the pumpkin patch to buy four jack-o-lantern pumpkins, a soup pumpkin and a tiny decorative pumpkin for my computer desk. That evening, at Noah’s insistence, we ordered some last minute Halloween decorations for our ever-growing collection. We are now the proud owners of a tombstone with a winged death’s head and caution tape with the words, “Haunted: Keep Out,” “Caution: Zombie Zone,” and “Enter If You Dare.”

Because haunted or not, be there zombies or ghosts or vampires, we dare.

Spring Break Trilogy: Part III, After the Beach

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Steph

Day 8: Saturday

Saturday afternoon we went to the National Portrait Gallery café to meet up with another tourist family. (Washington D.C. is a popular spring break destination.) Mary and Karen used to work with Beth at HRC (http://www.hrc.org/) back in the 90s and now they live in Northampton and have two daughters, ages four and six.

June and I had been at the Portrait Gallery about two months earlier when her preschool class took a field trip there and I volunteered to chaperone. She was eager to show Beth and Noah her favorite painting, the portrait of John Brown (http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonandloisphotos/2967613827/) so we went to go see it while waiting for it to be time to meet Mary, Karen, Sadie and Lily. On the way I also caught glimpses of paintings of Ann Landers, Allen Ginsburg and other famous and not so famous folk.

We met our friends in an atrium adjacent to the café, which made a perfect large, enclosed place for the girls to run around, inspect the plantings, climb on the marble benches and pretend to be ballerinas while the grown ups talked. At one point Lily, the younger girl, brought her moms a botanical sign for a lily because she had noticed her name on it. Her alarmed mothers told her to return it. Overall, the girls seemed to have a great time. I was sorry there was no one Noah’s age, but he sat with us, and listened to our conversation and surfed in the Internet on Beth’s phone.

Back at home, after June’s nap, we boiled eggs for dyeing and hit the garden. About a week and a half ago, Beth and June started cucumbers, watermelon and various flowers in little pots. Saturday they planted basil, edamame, okra and more flowers in more pots and Beth started breaking ground and expanding last year’s main garden plot in preparation for planning lettuce, carrots and broccoli. We decided to dig up the patch of lemon balm that comes back on its own every year and move it into a big pot so it doesn’t overrun the garden. I weeded some of the grass and dandelions out of it in preparation for transplanting it.

June kept filling various containers with muddy water and pretending to be a philanthropist/dairy farmer, distributing milk to the poor. Beth and I were the poor. June had the most patrician-sounding accent when she spoke to us in character. We have no idea where she could have heard it. She next set to work picking the leaves off a weed that looks like rhubarb so she could make a milk and rhubarb pie for the poor. Apparently she thinks it’s the leaves and not the stalks you use in pie and that this is a treat the poor particularly appreciate.

After dinner, it was time to dye eggs. We chose a variety of decorating strategies. Beth and Noah tried drawing on the eggs with the white “magic crayon” that came with the kit, creating a batik effect. The kids and I did some two-tone eggs, dipping the halves of the eggs in different colors. June created an egg that had three bands of color. We also had stickers (bunnies, flowers and eggs). I was amused by the idea of attaching the simulacrum of the egg to the real thing so I did stickers on both my eggs. June was predictably drawn to the glitter glue. And then there were the hats. In an Easter egg kit we got years ago, there was a selection of stickers of facial features and little felt hats. We’ve been re-using the hats ever since but this year we ran out of eyes, nose and mouth stickers so I elected not to make any egg people.

It was only when we got out the egg decorating materials that June realized Easter was imminent. She had all kinds of questions. Would the Easter Bunny bring jellybeans? (Probably, he usually does.) Why does the Easter Bunny come at night when children are asleep? (He’s shy.) We always call the Easter Bunny “he”, but do we know he’s really a boy? (No, we don’t.) Maybe it’s “half-boy, half-girl.” (Maybe.) Had any of us ever seen the Easter Bunny? (Noah claimed he had, then said the Bunny was invisible and then declined to clear up the resulting confusion.)

This conversation spilled over past bed time, but the kids quieted down and went to sleep surprisingly quickly after Beth reminded them that the Easter Bunny would not come until they were asleep.

Day 9: Sunday

“Look what I got!” June exclaimed as soon as the search for the Easter baskets successfully culminated in the closet in the kids’ room. She was so entranced with the stuffed unicorn that she barely looked at the candy. She needed the doll hairbrush immediately so she could brush it. There was another volley of Bunny-related questions. How did he know? (Maternal shrugs.) Did he buy it at Candy Kitchen? (Probably.)

Noah was happy with the big bottle of bubble soap in his basket (the kind that works best in his bubble rocket). He also appreciated his chocolate bunny driving a classic car, though he lamented the fact that it was hollow. He ate the whole thing right away and didn’t want breakfast, even though I made French toast.

We are not churchgoers so the rest of the day unfolded like a normal busy Sunday in the middle of spring. June had a swim lesson; Noah finished his homework (after a protracted negotiation about which homework not due Tuesday needed to be completed); Beth went grocery shopping, worked in the garden and did some housecleaning and I finished the abstracts and cleaned. I made egg salad sandwiches for dinner and as a small Easter observance, I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar while I did the dinner dishes and mopped the kitchen floor.

Day 10: Monday

Being a teetotaler, I don’t have much experience being hung over, but I think that must be how I felt Monday morning. All the time with the kids over break had been really nice, don’t get me wrong, but it was as if I’d had too much of a good thing and now I was tired and irritable. (It didn’t help that June had been up during the night and it had taken me an hour to get back to sleep.) I snapped at the kids more than once. I had a simple, straightforward editing job I’d volunteered to do for June’s school and I just wasn’t getting it done. Even after awarding June an extra half hour of television on top of her normal hour (“because you’re doing such a good job on the potty”), between breaking up fights and fetching snacks, I only managed to get through about five pages of the fourteen-page document in ninety minutes.

Once I gave up and decided the work would get done when it got done, the day got much better. We took a walk (the kids rode their scooters) to Starbucks and we had an early picnic lunch of veggie hot dogs, broccoli and pineapple on beach blankets in the back yard. While we were outside, we noticed the first two zinnia sprouts poking out of their pots. (By this morning there were be nine zinnia and two cucumber sprouts.)

Lunch was early because June needed her Quiet Time early so we could get to the White-Tailed Deer’s birthday party at two o’clock. While she was in her room listening to a CD of folktales (it was too early for her to sleep) and Noah was practicing his percussion, I sailed through the rest of the document and even enjoyed the work of figuring out how to make the organization clearer. I had just needed forty-five minutes of uninterrupted time. When I finished, I even had time to lie down with my eyes closed for fifteen minutes.

I wondered if Lesley would be free to go over the document in person so I called her and she was. We made an appointment for right after the party, which was being held at a playground five minutes from school.

The party was huge, at least twenty-five kids and probably more than half that many adults. It was nice to socialize with June’s school friends and their parents whom we hadn’t seen in what felt like a long time. The theme of the party was butterflies and June got a butterfly painted on her face. There were butterfly (and other) decorations for the kids to stick onto their goody bags and cupcakes with butterfly wings made of pretzels and a butterfly piñata that eventually spewed candy, gum and trinkets. (June got two plastic butterfly necklaces and a butterfly fan.)

Much of the two hours however, the kids spent racing around the playground and splashing in the creek. The weather was lovely, sunny and in the eighties again. There were a few older siblings there and Noah spent a lot of time mucking about in the creek with the Deer’s older brother, who’s in second grade.

I twisted my ankle early in the party (I stepped in a hole), but the Deer’s dad lent me a Ziploc bag full of ice from the cooler and after I’d rested a while and iced it, it felt okay.

We headed over to school, and the kids played, peaceably for the most part, while Lesley and I went over the edits. I was glad to do it in person because we could talk through my reasons for changes and I think that was helpful for both of us.

During the walk home, my ankle started to hurt again, but not too badly. I made dinner and we put June to bed early because she hadn’t napped. She was reeling with exhaustion by 7:00 and crying over every little thing. She actually fell asleep during the poems section of the bedtime routine and by the time I got her into bed at 7:45, she was asleep in three minutes flat.

Once June was asleep, I read to Noah from The Titan’s Curse for forty-five minutes, probably for the last time until next weekend, put him to bed and break was over.

While June’s at school this afternoon, I plan to sit on the porch, elevate and ice my ankle, which is feeling a bit stiff and sore today, and read Bleak House, which I have not picked up in almost two weeks. I enjoyed having the kids off school for ten days, but today I will enjoy having them go back.

A Little Bit Fancy

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Steph

“Will I be the fanciest one there?” June wanted to know about the tea party at our friends Jim and Kevin’s house on Sunday afternoon. June had selected a pink and white and green dress with a daisy print and a lot of pink ribbon on the bodice. It’s a sundress so she was wearing a white shrug over it and pale green tights under it. I thought she would be, I said, provided there were no other four or five-year-old girls present.

Jim had said there would be two additional guests besides our family, but he had not specified beyond that. They turned out to be two lesbians, neighbors of theirs, and June did not have much competition in the fancy department. Everyone else was in pants, including me, although I had considered a skirt, mainly to placate June. Beth did change out of her crocs into closed shoes before she left the house and I was wearing a black cardigan over a tan turtleneck, an outfit June told me encouragingly was “a little bit fancy.”

June had also managed to convince Beth to buy a Valentine’s bouquet at the Co-op earlier in the day. This was not an impulse purchase. June had secured a promise for flowers for Valentine’s Day at least a week in advance and had reminded Beth of her pledge many times in the interim. They ended up with a half dozen pink roses. The roses sat in a vase on the dining room table; June was wearing a new dress and heading to a real, grown-up tea party; and there was Valentine’s Day the next day to anticipate. In June’s opinion this was shaping up to be quite a satisfactory day.

We had a very pleasant three hours at Jim and Kevin’s place. They set out croissants, ginger cookies, and an apple tart along with a wide variety of teas. Noah loves croissants and ate both his and June’s. She kept asking for more cookies and I kept fetching them for her without keeping a strict count of how many she had eaten. It was very relaxing to eat and drink and talk for what felt like protracted periods of time, even though to the four childless adults there it probably seemed like I was jumping up constantly to get food for June or to entertain her. (Noah was fairly self-sufficient. I brought homework for him, but mostly he sat and listened to the grownups talk.)

I had paper and crayons for June and set up a valentine workstation for her on the stairs. She sat on the landing with her paper one step up and extra materials two steps up. She made a Valentine for the Field Cricket featuring a police officer and a police car. (The Cricket has a strong interest in law enforcement.) Then she made one for Noah and one for Beth. Finally, she made one for Jim and Kevin. I took her down to their basement where Kevin grows orchids so she could draw one. Fortunately, there was one in bloom. We’d also brought along some Fancy Nancy books (http://www.fancynancyworld.com/) and I read a couple of those to her.

When both kids started to get antsy, we got them into their coats and sent them out into the yard to play Hide-and-Seek. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of June’s purple coat streaking by through the trellis on the screened porch. After awhile they came to the door to report that some neighbor kids had invited them into their yard to play. This was startling, as in my almost ten years of parenting this has never happened, except at the beach when families sit in close proximity and the adults can watch their kids playing together from their separate towels. I thought about how although we live in a neighborhood full of kids, no one ever comes over to play without it being vetted and scheduled ahead of time. Seeing us hesitate, Jim said he knew their mother a little bit.

Beth said yes, but don’t go into the house. Every now and then I got up and looked out the window. I could often see Noah’s orange and brown coat, always in motion. June was a bit too short to be seen over the low fences that separated the yards. I could also see the other mother coming to her own doorway to watch her kids and mine every now and then. Whatever they were playing seemed to involve a lot of running around.

It was close to six when we left and we had a half-hour drive home. This made dinner and baths a bit of a rush, but it was worth it. It was the fanciest afternoon I’ve had in a while.

We were expecting another big outing on Valentine’s morning. Noah’s class was going to present their Day-in-the-Life projects. As part of their second quarter research project, they had to write a story demonstrating what daily life is like for a contemporary child in another culture. Noah’s child was German. He had worked hard on it and we were looking forward to seeing him and his classmates present. The class Valentine’s Day party was scheduled for later in the day, after the parents left. Noah had been anticipating both events and exclaiming over how fun it would be to have them on the same day for weeks.

So of course he woke up at 4:40 a.m. sick to his stomach and was violently ill for the next nine hours. It’s often really hard to tell whether or not Noah is sick because he has trouble reading his body’s signals but there was no ambiguity here. He could not go to school. I think he was just as disappointed not to be able to make his oral presentation as he was to miss the party. He’s that kind of kid. I emailed his teacher and asked if it would be possible for him to read the story to the class at a later date and if so, if we could come. She answered no, that it wasn’t a graded part of the assignment so he would not be able to do it. Even though I understand, as a former teacher, how important staying on schedule can be, I was a bit annoyed with her. It would have only taken five minutes and it would have made him happy. So we’ll do it at home when he gets his story back, but it’s not the same.

To cheer him up and because we would not be rushing him out the door to catch the bus, we agreed to exchange Valentine cards and presents in the morning instead of in the evening as we’d planned. There were a great many cards and presents to exchange and it was kind of chaotic with everyone running to get their things out of hiding and sign cards, etc. In fact, we forgot a few presents that did not reach their recipients until Beth got home that night. Mostly it was candy, though I got tangerine marmalade and lemon-pear marmalade from Stonewall Kitchen (http://www.stonewallkitchen.com/) and Beth got a book (http://www.amazon.com/What-Lynda-Barry/dp/1897299354), or rather the promise of one, as it’s backordered. Noah’s valentine to me was three pieces of paper taped together that read: “Who ever said a Valentine card has to be small?” in small text and then “Why can’t it be BIG” in bigger text, and then “Wishing you a LARGELY happy, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and pnuemonooultramicroscopicsilicovolancanoconiosis-free Valentine’s Day! (With many more LARGE words!!!) love, Noah.” Once that was finished, Beth stepped out the door, wishing me good luck.

If there was a silver lining to Noah being home, I thought, it was that he could get a jump on the first assignment in his author study project, which was due on Friday. Over the course of February and March, he had to pick an author and read four of his or her books, plus a biography or autobiography, and then do a series of assignments on the author. Noah chose Gary Paulsen (http://www.randomhouse.com/features/garypaulsen/) and over the weekend he’d finished his fourth novel, leaving only weekday evenings to complete the first assignment. This had been making me nervous.

Noah was not really up for working at the moment, though, so he watched Curious George and The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That with June. He laughed as hard as she did at the funny parts. When her shows were over, he climbed into my bed with a copy of Car and Driver and June and I went out for a walk. This was partly to get them out of each other’s hair because he wasn’t too weak to argue with her and she was not sufficiently sympathetic to refrain from arguing with him. We set out, June wearing the burgundy jumper she had chosen as an appropriate Valentine’s dress, after much thought and negotiation about appropriate school wear. When we returned an hour later, Noah was still in bed, but now he was reading The Lightening Thief. It was ten-thirty.

I asked if he felt well enough to work and he thought he might, but he accomplished very little over the next two hours. June finished her last valentine, a cityscape for the Mallard Duck (who recently traveled to California, which as it turns out June thinks is a large city). June worked on her valentines over the course of several weeks and they were quite eclectic in style. Most were hand-drawn but one was printed out from a free web site and colored and a few more were cut out from Ladybug magazine. These were all bugs—a grasshopper saying “Bug Me” or a bee saying “Bee Mine.” You get the idea.
As June drew and ate lunch at got ready to leave for school, Noah sat at the dining room table, occasionally paging through the books he was trying to take notes on, but mostly staring out into space.

By the time I returned from dropping June off at school, he’d left his post and hadn’t taken any notes. He was still not feeling well and I wondered if he was just too sick to get anything done, but once we were alone in the house and able to talk through the steps of such a project—deciding which assignment to complete, skimming the novels he’d read, taking notes, selecting quotes for the poster he was going to make and sketching out how the poster would look, things started to move along, if slowly. I’d leave him to ride the exercise bike, or to attend to the laundry and then come back and check on him and give advice. His project is on literary devices (foreshadowing, flashbacks, imagery and figurative language) and we even had some fun conversations. What unemployed English professor would not want to have someone ask her, “Why do authors use flashbacks anyway?” So we talked about literary devices and he had some good insights. It was a conversation we might not have had time to let take its full course on a normal day, with his little sister vying for my attention.

By the end of the day he had most of his quotes identified and typed into a document and he had written explanations of how most of the literary devices furthered his understanding of the novels. If he doesn’t have much other homework this week he should be able to pull it all together by Friday.

Meanwhile, I went back to nursery school to fetch June, who had a handful of valentines from her friends and a homemade sugar cookie the Painted Turtle and his mother baked. She insisted on carrying the Cottontail Rabbit’s card home in her hand and after I read her the text printed on the card (“so glad we’re friends”) she insisted it said “so glad we’re best friends.” June’s got a bit of girl-crush on the Cottontail Rabbit right now.

After her nap, June helped me make orange scones, half with raisins (because she likes them) and half with dried cranberries (because Noah likes those). At around two-thirty Noah had started eating again, consuming a banana, an English muffin and a container of yogurt over the course of three hours, so I thought he could have a little dinner. All he wanted was the scones, so that’s what he had. Beth and I had spinach and goat cheese omelets and vegetarian sausage with ours, and June had sausage and broccoli with hers.

Before bed, Noah, who had been surrounded by Valentines sweets he could not eat all day, politely asked if he could try a little candy, so I said one piece and he had a hazelnut truffle and pronounced it good. I was glad there was a little sweetness in his day. There was some in mine, too, even though it was not the Valentine’s Day any of us expected. I got chocolate and yummy jam and the pleasure of discussing literature with an intelligent student. That’s at least a little bit fancy.

Groundhog’s Day

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Steph

“Doesn’t cloudy on Groundhog’s Day mean an early spring?” I called to Beth from the kitchen. It was a wet, gray morning. Surely the groundhog would not be seeing his shadow.

Beth looked up from the paper and her breakfast long enough to say yes, that’s what it meant.

It was my second reason to be happy about the weather and it was only seven a.m. A predicted ice storm had failed to materialize and both kids had school. The night before another ice storm had produced only the thinnest coating of ice and Noah had a two-hour delay and June’s school day proceeded as scheduled. This nearly normal three days was a welcome respite from the disruption of the past two weeks when five inches of snow cancelled school for three days in a row last week and something (ice, snow, who remembers?) cancelled it for another day the week before.

I have never been a fan of snow days (in my adult life, that is). Even before I had kids I disliked having my syllabus thrown off by unexpected university closures and once there were kids in the mix, I became even less enthusiastic. Nevertheless, I could still take pleasure in snow once I got over the jolt of a change in plans. I could appreciate its quiet beauty and share the kids’ enthusiasm in sledding and throwing snowballs and making snow angels and snowmen.

Then came last winter. We had so much snow school was cancelled for almost two weeks. Sidewalks were impassable for several weeks after the biggest snow, which made it tough for me to get anywhere, since I don’t drive. We spent a lot of time stuck in the house, getting on each other’s nerves. To add insult to injury, the school district applied and received for a waiver from the state and so the five days we’d gone over our built-in snow days were not made up. I’d been comforting myself with the idea of an extended school year and once that was yanked away I felt as if some important part of the social contract had been violated.

Now that we are up to our (alleged) limit of snow days for the year again, I am all done with snow. In fact, if it didn’t snow at all for the next couple years I don’t think I’d miss it. Unsurprisingly, I have not been a particularly fun snow day mom this year. I encourage the kids to go out and play in it, help them get their snow clothes on and off, time and tally their sled runs from the kitchen window, make hot chocolate, etc., but I stay in the house, and if they don’t feel like going out, I let them stay inside and spend too much time on the Wii. I do read to them and consent to playing Chutes and Ladders or dominoes when requested and when my mom came for a visit last weekend she and I took June on a snowy walk along the creek to the playground. I also bake, so I am not completely inadequate as winter mother.

But this is what I sounded like on Facebook the past week or so:

1/25/11
Steph is not emotionally ready for snow.

1/26/11
Steph is hosting her third play date in as many days, baking coconut-pecan-lemon bars, watching the quickening snow with an increasing sense of desperation and wondering in the back of her head what it would even mean to “win the future.”

1/28/11
Steph’s house looks as if the kids have been home six out of past seven days. Wait, that’s because they have. Too bad her mother’s coming tomorrow and she can’t just ignore it.

1/29/11
Steph, after two days of Beth at home, her mother’s arrival, Thai green curry and baked coconut custard, and a puppet show by N & J, is starting to emerge from her funk. But chances are, if it snows next week, she will slide right back into it.

1/30/11
Steph & crew have gone on a dominoes spree the past few days. Current tally: June, three wins; Steph, Noah & Grandmom: two wins each.

1/31/11
Steph is brewing tea and thinking how to best spend the next two hours and fifteen minutes, just in case it’s the only day the kids go to school this week.

2/1/11
Steph is waiting for the ice, baking apple crisp, listening to NPR’s coverage of Egypt and hoping for the best.

2/2/11
Steph is really happy with that groundhog right now.

And I was happy yesterday. Not only did Punxsutawney Phil (http://www.groundhog.org/) emerge from his hole or his box, or wherever they keep him and see no shadow, it was unseasonably warm. It was supposed to get up to 54 degrees in the afternoon and I think it did. It felt so liberating to walk outside into the balmy air. When we went to Co-op story time I allowed June to wear the purple coat we bought for her at the consignment shop last year. It’s not as warm as the blue and green one she inherited from Noah and usually wears, but she prefers it. I told her at the beginning of the winter she could wear the purple coat on “not so cold days.” It’s been so cold this winter she has barely worn it. I eschewed my winter coats all together and put on a fleece jacket with no scarf or gloves. We both wore boots, of course, and June wore snow pants over her tights to protect her legs from the slushy snow. I was wearing long underwear under my corduroys, but purely out of habit. Once I was outside I realized I didn’t need them.

“The snow is really soft today,” June observed as we walked from the bus stop to the Co-op. She pressed a hand down in it and was delighted at how easily it gave. I could see her individual fingers clearly delineated in the print even though her hand was encased in a mitten. She made more handprints and more. Before we entered the Co-op, I plucked the sodden mittens from her hands and wrung them out onto the parking lot.

Later that morning as we walked to preschool I could hear water everywhere. It dripped from wet tree branches, poured from gutter spouts and slid down the streets in sheets before tumbling into the storm drains. Swathes of grass were emerging here and there and in some lawns we saw standing water an inch deep. June tripped on the sidewalk and fell right into a muddy puddle, drenching her snow pants.

While June was at school, I went out into the yard to fetch something from the garage and I was startled to see sunlight. I looked up and saw patches of blue sky. I felt the sun, ever so faintly, on my face. It felt good.

It was clouding up again when I picked June up from school, but in the parking lot I saw long chalk outlines of the children’s shadows traced in different colors, a groundhog’s day project.

Today is “quite an icy day,” according to June. It’s cold again, in the thirties, and a lot of what was slush yesterday is ice all over again. Nonetheless, I know spring is coming. Maybe early, maybe late, but it will come. We started talking about our garden this morning, what we might plant, where things might go. And at the library I checked out a bilingual book of garden words for June.

But meanwhile, if you want to read gloomy status updates every time the meteorologists predict snow, you know whom to friend.

Fear Not

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Steph

Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

Luke 2:10

On Saturday afternoon, around 3:45, Beth and I were walking along the boardwalk; Noah and June raced ahead. Every now and then he would tug on her arm or grab her coat to slow her down, telling her she couldn’t go inside Santa’s house until the adults caught up with them.

“Let go of her hood,” I yelled as Beth yelled almost identical words. It’s not like she’d actually go inside without any of us, we joked to each other. June’s always been shy around Santa. In years past it has taken all the courage she can muster to walk into the little house with Noah at her side and stand in Santa’s general proximity while Noah relays her requests. We weren’t expecting anything different this year.

But before we got to the house, a woman dressed as an elf peered around the corner and asked if it was okay for the kids to come in. We indicated it was and hurried up a little.

When we got to the doorway, June was already sitting on Santa’s lap and he was asking her what she wanted for Christmas. She had her answer all ready: “A princess book and a princess doll.” Santa told her to go to bed early on Christmas Eve so he would have time to deliver her gifts. We barely had time to snap a picture before it was Noah’s turn. As the kids came out, admiring their flashing necklaces–hers was in the shape of a stocking and his was a Christmas tree- Beth and kept looking at each other and exclaiming over June’s unexpected bravery.

I’ve been somewhat afraid of Christmas this year, or rather I’ve been afraid of the emotions it might stir up, as my father died in mid-January last year and my last visit to him started on the day after Christmas. But so far, it hasn’t been too bad. I mean, I’m thinking about him a lot, and I even had a dream recently about going to visit him but being unable to find him because I was supposed to meet him at his new office, which was on a street with completely random street numbers. But Christmas music and decorations and sweets seem the same as ever, more comforting than sad. When I am hit with sadness it comes unexpectedly. A few weeks ago the kids and I went to a marionette show at a nearby community college with the Toad and her mother. One of the puppeteers looked a bit like my father. It wasn’t even a very close resemblance, but it was still hard to watch him up there on stage. I think grief is like that–you don’t get to decide or even predict when it will come to you. So I’ve realized it does me no good to go in fear of eggnog lattes or Christmas carols.

And the Christmas story itself is, at least in part, about overcoming fear. How would the shepherds have felt, seeing the angels swoop down on their field at night? How would Mary have received the news about her impending unwed motherhood? I imagine they all would have been sore afraid indeed, at least at first.

After we left Santa, we did some Christmas shopping (this being the ostensible reason for our annual December weekend in Rehoboth—but if you know me at all you know the real reason). Beth and I split up and bought many of June’s Christmas gifts right under her nose, including a princess book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Bag_Princess) and a princess doll. I will not say what, if anything, we bought for Noah because he reads my blog now. Sorry, Noah Bear.

Then we headed to Grotto’s to order a pizza to take back to our hotel room. June had slept poorly the night before and then skipped her nap that afternoon and she was clearly exhausted so our evening plan was pizza and a movie in the room. I was expecting her to conk out on the bed pretty early in the feature presentation so we bathed both kids and got them into their pajamas before starting the movie.

We were watching Christmas Is Here Again (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUpxgaH4F4g&feature=related), which is one of the stranger Christmas films I’ve ever seen. We found it at a video store two Christmases ago and it’s become one of the movies in our regular Christmas rotation. It’s a rather dark tale about an orphan girl who sets out to find Santa’s stolen sack, which has been missing for over thirty years and without which Christmas can no longer celebrated. The girl is accompanied by an elf, a baby reindeer, a polar bear and a fox, one of whom is a double agent, but I won’t give away that part. They have to journey down into the mines of the devilish villain where child slaves toil to extract coal and precious stones. And it goes on like that. The villain, Crad, is very creepy, a shrouded fellow with crooked teeth and red eyes. He scares the pants off June every time. In fact, sometimes Noah only has to sing “I stole Santa’s sack/The sack he carried on his back./I stole Santa’s sack/And I’ll never give it back!” to send June running out of the room.

Nevertheless, she insists on watching this movie, and we let her. I struggle a lot with what’s too scary for the kids to watch, especially June because she’s both younger and more sensitive to on-screen scariness than Noah was at her age. (Interestingly, some of the books that spooked him when he was a preschooler do nothing for her.) But if it’s rated G, I will usually let her watch it, as long as we’re not at a movie theater where the screens are bigger and her habit of running of the room at the scary parts would be more inconvenient for everyone involved.

And she did run out of the room at least twice, even though she declared several times before we started watching that “This is not a scary movie for me.” I accompanied her to the bathroom and we waited for her to be ready to come back. After a while she decided she could just hide under the covers whenever Crad came on screen, and that’s what she did. Much to my surprise, she did not fall asleep during the hour and fifteen minute film, though when I put her to bed soon after, she fell asleep quickly and slept an impressive ten fours and forty minutes (from 8:05 to 6:45). She may not have made it through the entire movie without hiding, but some year she will. She’d already overcome one long-standing fear and that’s plenty for one day.

Once June was asleep, I took Noah down to the hotel lobby where we could read and then I brought him back up and put him to bed at 8:45. Beth had gone to bed herself and seemed to be asleep. I sat on the bathroom floor with the light on and read for twenty minutes until Noah was asleep and then I got into my warm socks, rubber boots, coat and woolen scarf. It was raining out but it’s not every evening I have the chance to walk on the beach and I’m not afraid of a little rain.

Everything We Have

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Steph

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At Thanksgiving dinner my mom asked everyone to go around the table and say what made us feel thankful. Noah said computers, being at his new school, and “Mommy and Beth.” June’s answer was simpler: “Everything I have,” she said. When Mom pressed her for specifics she said her toys, but I liked her first answer better.

We drove to my mom and stepfather’s house on Thanksgiving so on that day we pretty much traveled and ate and went to bed. Friday was an eventful, or in June’s words “a giant day.” Beth and the kids and I drove out to the Main Line, where we lived when I was in high school, and had lunch at Hymie’s deli (http://www.hymies.com/hymiesMarion.html), an important hangout spot during my eleventh grade year and the establishment where I learned to appreciate cheese fries. It also has a “World Famous Pickle Bar” and given that pickles are one of June’s favorite foods, it seemed like a natural choice. In fact, I wondered why I had never suggested we go before. We didn’t count on the Black Friday lunch crowds, however, and had to wait a half hour for a table in a crowded waiting area. Service was fast after that, though, and from our first course of pickles to the black and white cookies and poppy seed hamantash we picked up for later in the carryout bakery corner, everyone was satisfied. (And yes, I did have cheese fries, with a salad.) As we left the restaurant, I thought I saw snowflakes swirling in the wind, but no one else did.

We came home and June and I napped. (She’d been up during the night and awakened for the day at 5:45 so we were both done in.) While we slept, Mom and Beth and Noah played Monopoly. When I woke June at close to four and carried her half-asleep and scowling downstairs, Mom was nearly bankrupt, Beth was rolling in money and properties, and Noah was somewhere in the middle. They suspended the game so we could leave for the Christmas light show (http://www.wanamakerorgan.com/xmas.php) at the Wannamaker’s building, which now houses a Macy’s. This show is a Philadelphia tradition I find somewhat daunting to describe, but imagine yourself seated on a red carpet in an atrium, craning your neck to look upward at a screen, several stories high, consisting of light bulbs (an enormous Lite-Brite, if you will) with a big lighted Christmas tree and an ornate organ in front of it. As the organ plays Christmas music and Julie Andrews’ recorded voice narrates, the lights come on in different patterns to depict scenes from The Nutcracker, Frosty the Snowman, etc. Noah liked it, but June loved it. She was rapt the whole time, a few times laughing out loud with pleasure. She must be exactly the right age to receive it all with wonder and delight.

From here, we proceeded to the Dickens Christmas village on the third floor of Macy’s (http://philadelphia.about.com/od/photo_galleries/ig/dickens_village/). You walk through a winding passageway lined with little houses and outdoor scenes from A Christmas Carol. The figures were mechanized mannequins of the sort one used to see in department store display windows at Christmastime, about half life-size. The first one stood at a podium reading the opening passage of the novella. On the walls were plaques with more passages, at least one for each scene. Some of the mannequins moved and some spoke. We made our way through the display very slowly because Noah was reading all the text. (His interest made me wonder if we could read this book together sometime next month.) Noah’s slow progress wasn’t much of a problem because June wanted to linger in some rooms. She loved the ghost of Jacob Marley and concluded it was a leftover Halloween decoration. When we encountered the ghost of Christmas Future, however, she exclaimed, “Too scary! Too scary!” and fled the room. A few minutes later, though, she was tugging on my hand, wanting to go back, so we did.

After we’d had our fill of Dickens we went out for a very tasty dinner at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant and got home well past the kids’ bedtime. Beth says I did a very good job pretending not be panicking about how late we were out.

The next morning Mom, Beth and Noah finished their Monopoly game. (As expected, Beth won.) In the afternoon we met up with a friend of mine from high school at the Tyler Arboretum in Media (http://www.tylerarboretum.org/). What I haven’t mentioned up to now is that my twenty-fifth high school reunion was Friday night and I skipped it. I’ve actually never been to any of my high school reunions. In fact, until recently I wasn’t even sure if my high school had them—I have Facebook to thank for learning it does. Now that I knew, it felt strange to know it was happening, so close, and I wasn’t there. High school was not a very good time for me, especially the first two years and a lot of the friends I did make when I was in eleventh grade were seniors so there didn’t seem to be much point in going. Facebook has brought me back in touch with a lot of acquaintances from my class and I have gotten to know a few of them better than I did back in the day, which has been rewarding. Maybe in another five years I’ll be up for mingling with them in person, but this year it just seemed too overwhelming.

I did want to make an effort to reconnect, though, so I contacted two friends from the class ahead of mine, John, who still lives in the area and Pam, who is back for a year. Only John was free. We decided to meet at the arboretum so the kids (his two and our two) could run around while the adults talked. What we didn’t know and what made the place magical was that there was a series of tree houses and child-sized cottages scattered along the path. Many had plaques explaining what kind of creatures lived there (fairies, pixies, wizards, green men, etc.). There was a sand sculpture of an ogre leaning against a castle with pumpkins at his feet, slowly eroding away. There was a meadow maze, its grass brown but still mowed into shape with several huge straw people in the center. I said it looked like something people who were planning on making a sacrifice to the harvest gods might make. There was a door set into a hill with the question “What Lies Beneath?” posted. Visitors were invited to write a story about it and submit it to the arboretum’s web site. Some houses were too small to enter, but the kids clambered up every ladder they saw and explored every kid-sized building. (June got stuck in one particularly tall tree house when she lost her nerve about coming back down the ladder so John went up and carried her down.)

I think what the kids liked best, though, was the amphitheater. There was a dress-up area with a costume bin and pretty soon John’s nine-year-old daughter and Noah and June were putting on a show for the grownups and John’s just turned four-year-old son, who was too shy to perform. June was a fairy who had gotten lost, John’s daughter was a knight and Noah started off as a wizard but suffered an allergic reaction that turned him into an alligator. Attempts to kill the alligator failed so the knight adopted it instead and then they helped the fairy find her way home. It was a cloudy, chilly day and we had the arboretum nearly to ourselves. It was like our own enchanted kingdom.

As we walked through the woods and fields with the kids racing ahead to find out what came next, the four grownups talked. The feeling was friendly and relaxed; conversation felt easy. John was just as I remembered him, except decades older and with a family if that makes sense. We agreed we should get together again. About an hour into the visit, around 4:40, we told the kids we needed to turn around because the gates closed at 5:00 and as we’d been walking in a circuitous path we weren’t sure how far we were from the exit. The two older kids wanted to keep going, because we hadn’t seen everything, but we persuaded them they didn’t want to get locked into the arboretum for the night (it really was quite cold).

As it turned out the gates did shut while we were still in the parking lot but they’re motion-activated from the inside, so we were able to drive out. (When Beth told this story to my mother and stepfather over pizza that night she said she rammed the car through the gate and my mom almost believed her.)

Sunday we drove home, stopping at the Starbucks closest to my mom’s house for the traditional first holiday drinks of the season. I got an eggnog latte; Beth got gingerbread. We listened to The Austere Academy (Series of Unfortunate Events #5) on the way home. I was glad June slept through a good bit of it, as it’s not really age-appropriate.

Today we’re back in our regular routine–Beth went to work; the kids went to school. Beth was unenthused about going back to her office and I can’t blame her, but I’ve been happy today and full of thankfulness for time with my family and an old friend met anew and deli food and low-tech light displays and Charles Dickens and eggnog lattes and the timeless story of everything we have.

Days of the Dead

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Steph

Halloween has come and gone. Today is the Day of the Dead, and I am thinking more about the dead than usual, for obvious reasons. I’m wondering if Halloween will be the last of the fall and winter holidays I really enjoy this year since the closer we get to winter, the more I feel my grief for my father returning. My mom and I were talking about this on Saturday. I told her how I feel it approaching, a presentiment of sorrow.

She’d come to visit for the weekend. When she arrived on Saturday afternoon, Beth, Noah and June were at a potluck for the two fourth-grade gifted classes at his school so Mom and I went to Capital Cheesecake (http://www.capitalcitycheesecakes.com/) where she had lunch and I had iced tea and a mini pumpkin cheesecake. We got to have a more leisurely conversation than is usually possible with the kids vying for her attention. She brought me up to date on relatives and told me about the European river tour she and my stepfather are planning. I told her it was good she was doing the things she wanted to do. I was thinking of my father, who surely had things he wanted to do before cancer took him so ferociously and so suddenly last winter.

Mom and I came back to the house and we got the kids into their costumes for the Halloween parade. I thought June would protest against having to wear leggings and a long-sleeve t-shirt under her sleeveless Tiana gown, plus a cardigan over it, but she didn’t. Mom snapped pictures of Tiana and the question mark and we were off.

As we had last year, we ran into the White-Tailed Deer, who was dressed like a witch, and we marched with her in the first short loop of the parade, when the judging takes place. I took a picture of the two girls together and the Deer’s mom said she could tell this was going to be a Halloween tradition for them. There was a big turnout from June’s class. Over the course of the evening we also saw the Red Fox (dressed as a bat), the Racoon (dressed very creatively as a S’more) and the Field Cricket (dressed as a police officer). This last one was no surprise as there were several months last year when the Cricket came to school dressed as a police officer every day. He even had a set of handcuffs he wore at his waist. I used to joke it was like going to preschool with the Village People. This year his mom got into the spirit and was also dressed as a police officer and his baby sister was a Hell’s Angel.

After the 3-4 year olds had marched the judging route but before the 8-10 year olds did, June announced, “I have to go potty,” so we ducked into a nearby video store. June’s doing really well on the potty recently. As of about a week and a half ago, she’s completely trained for pee. She’s still having a lot of the other kind of accident, but we are using so few diapers, I thought it made sense to use the few cloth diapers we bought for night use when Noah was at this stage, wash them myself and cancel the service. So today, I did just that.

Along the long part of the route, from downtown to the elementary school where the party is held, other marchers and people on the sidelines kept calling out to Noah, saying either, “What’s the question?” or “What’s the answer?” My favorite question, though, came from the mom of one of his old nursery school classmates: “Are you questioning authority?” The reasoning behind his costume, by the way, is that the unknown is the scariest thing. The question mark is “the scariest punctuation,” he told us earnestly.

There was a vivid, deep pink sunset as we approached the school. Once inside, we ate cookies and drank apple juice and listened to Noah’s favorite local band, The Grandsons (http://www.grandsons.com/gigs/), play live. He saw them at the folk festival in September and liked them so much that Beth bought their CD. We talked to more people we knew and finally, the kids collected their goody bags and we got into the car to drive home.

When June came into our room at 5:55 a.m. the next morning I thought she was too excited about it being Halloween to sleep, as she usually sleeps until 6:30 or later. I sent her back to her room, but she was back at 6:05 and I let her crawl into bed with us. She didn’t go back to sleep and neither did I, what with all the tossing and turning, but she was quiet at least. When Beth woke around seven, and said, “Happy Halloween!” June sucked in her breath and exclaimed, “It’s Halloween!” So, I guess I was wrong about the reason for the early wake-up.

June wanted to go trick-or-treating right away, but Beth explained she had to wait until dark or people would not be ready with their candy. This argument seemed to work, as it had about a week ago when June said she had “made a plan” to be “the Halloween maker” so she could decide for herself when Halloween would be. The specter of closed doors and empty candy bowls was effective in putting the kibosh on that plan.

June’s impatience was soon forgotten, though, because she had Grandmom’s undivided attention for much of the morning. They played out in the backyard—tag, soccer, imaginative games about going to the beach and berry-picking. June made a bouquet of fall leaves and brought it inside. Then Mom took both kids to the playground (after a long and convoluted negotiation about which playground). I love grandmother visits.

Sunday afternoon, after Mom had left, we ate popcorn as we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and carved replacement pumpkins. We’d had unusually warm weather the past week, with highs in the seventies three days, and one by one, our pumpkins succumbed to mold and began to collapse. When I carried the last of them out to the compost on the afternoon of Halloween, they were soft and dripping and a beetle even scuttled out of one of them when I lifted it. We couldn’t be without jack-o-lanterns on Halloween, so Beth bought pumpkins we made two more. June wanted a cat, and Noah did a face. He designed it himself. Instead of carving out the eyes, he carved the outline of them. “Instead of carving the eyes out, I carved them in!” he declared. June reminded everyone that when it got dark and “creepy” out (here she held out her hands and wiggled her fingers), it would be time for trick-or-treating. She mentioned this in case anyone was tempted to leave before then, I suppose.

Beth made chili for the grownups’ dinner and noodles and broccoli and cheese for the kids and then we put the finishing touches on our porch and yard. Beth lit the pumpkins, and then placed another votive candle in front of the cement gargoyle to illuminate it. She turned on the light in the skull of the skeleton and hung the ghost lights over the door and got the coffin-fog machine running. Noah set the cawing, red-eyed raven on the porch column opposite the gargoyle and June filled the Frankenstein’s monster head bowl with candy.

Finally, it was time to go. June was in her costume in no time, and kept haranguing Noah to get into his. Since I’ve gone out trick or treating with the kids the past couple years, I offered to stay home and give out candy instead so Beth could go. I was busier re-lighting candles and refilling the fog machine with water than handing out treats. We got about a half dozen groups over the course of the evening, but most of them came after the kids returned at 8:00. We rarely get big crowds coming to the door, but we’re always prepared.

It’s a good thing, too. As we walked through our neighborhood this week, on our way to school or the library or drama class, June would appraise each house. “Those people are ready for Halloween,” she would say approvingly at the more decorated ones. “Those people are not ready for Halloween,” she’d declare scornfully at the undecorated ones. If there was some token effort, say an uncarved pumpkin or a wreath of fall leaves, she’d say, “Those people are almost ready for Halloween” in the tone of one attempting to be generous and encouraging. Lucky for us, we were among the ready.

Beth and the kids got back after an hour of trick-or-treating. They covered more ground than they usually do, including our block and two nearby streets that intersect it. Several people remembered Noah, commenting on his creativity with costumes. (Some even recalled his rain cloud costume of three years ago.) Beth said June skipped along the sidewalk between each house saying, ‘I’m trick-or-treating!” or “Let’s go to the next house!” At the houses where people opened the door but had no candy, she exclaimed loudly, “I don’t know that could have happened!” At one house they told Noah to take two candies and then told June to take three because she was “so cute.” Even our easy-going boy was annoyed by that, although he didn’t grumble until the door was closed. Beth said both kids were polite and said thank you at each house.

We let the kids choose three candies each to eat and got them off to bed. We continued to watch for trick-or-treaters and to check on the water level in the coffin and the flames on all of our candles until around 9:35, when we brought in the candy and called it a night.

Underneath the black turtleneck I wore on Halloween, I wore a t-shirt from a restaurant in Key West. It used to belong to my father. I’m not Mexican, so I don’t celebrate the Day of the Dead by visiting cemeteries or eating sugar skulls to honor my deceased relatives. I’m not a pagan or a Wiccan either. I don’t believe the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is any thinner in these few days when the lingering warmth of October slips away into November’s chill. Sometimes, though, I wish I did.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Holidays