The Sea-Side for Easter

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Steph

“He explained why he was paying his visit so early in the season; the family had gone to the seaside for Easter; the cook was doing spring-cleaning, on board wages, with special instructions to clear out the mice.”

From “The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse” by Beatrix Potter

The last time we went to the library, I checked out a Beatrix Potter collection for June. She loves these stories, even though the language is old-fashioned and goes right over her head. The appeal might be the detailed illustrations of little animals doing all matter of interesting things. Anyway, you probably know “The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse” even if you think you don’t. It’s Potter’s take on the City Mouse and the Country Mouse story. The country mouse accidentally travels to the town in a hamper of vegetables and is miserable there. He manages to return home and then one of his town acquaintances comes to visit him via the hamper, and he too is miserable and returns to town as soon as he can. The moral is “One place suits one person, another place suits another person.” Though we’ve lived in the Washington metropolitan area for going on eighteen years now, Beth sometimes refers to herself as “a country mouse” (albeit less frequently than she used to) because she grew up in a smaller town.

I’m not really a country mouse or a city mouse. I am a beach mouse. When I am not at the beach, which is, alas, most of the time, I am often fantasizing about the next time we will go. We spent Easter weekend in Rehoboth. We wanted a get-away during Noah’s spring break and Beth had Good Friday off work so it was convenient. We also wanted to tour houses and pick one to rent for our beach week in mid-July.

Rehoboth was all decked out for Easter. At the boardwalk Grotto Pizza (http://www.grottopizza.com/) where we had dinner on Friday there were garlands of bunnies and chicks across the windows. The store windows were filled with more bunnies, chicks and eggs. The most elaborate display was probably at Dolles (http://www.dolles-ibachs.com/) where a two-foot tall mechanical chick kept hatching out of its egg, along with other mobile, fuzzy, Easter-themed statuary.

Saturday morning we toured houses. I’d emailed our requirements to the realtor earlier in the week and she’d found two houses that met them. After viewing the houses online, Beth decided we could spend a little more money to get closer to the beach and to get a house with wireless internet. We found two more properties we wanted to see. Only two of the four houses were available for viewing as the other two had off-season tenants. The house I’d liked best in the online pictures seemed less charming in person. The other one was has soaring ceilings in the living and dining area, a lot of windows, a very open, inviting design and two screened porches. It was bit more than we wanted to spend and only had three bedrooms (we’re expecting my mom, Beth’s mom and her Aunt Carole for part or all the week) but we figured out where we could sleep everyone and it was closer to the beach (which appealed to me) and had wireless internet (which appealed to Beth), so our choice seemed clear. I was glad to have the decision made and to find such a nice house because we’ve usually taken care of this earlier in the year and I was a little afraid everything would be booked.

It was rainy and cold most of the day Saturday and clear but windy and even colder on Sunday, so we didn’t spend as much time on the beach as I would have liked. I got in several five to ten minute stints, however, with one or both kids. We made the most of these short trips: we built and destroyed sand castles and pressed the duck mold into the wet sand to make a duck family and filled and dumped the dump truck. June removed beach-grass splinters from the paws of imaginary kittens and Noah and I waded into the water in our rubber boots.

I also took June for a long stroll on the boardwalk, where it was less windy, and I enjoyed an almost hour-long solo walk on the beach late Saturday afternoon. It had stopped raining by this time but dark clouds hung over the sea and the wind whipped my hair around my face. The surf was rough and dramatic, especially around the rock jetties where I stood, as far out as I dared, with the water churning around my ankles. As I was leaving the beach, I picked up a little peach-colored spiral shell fragment and tucked it into my pocket. When I came back to the hotel room, Beth asked how the beach was and I told her it was glorious.

The rest of the time we wandered around town, ate out, swam in the hotel pool and hung out in our room, which was on the fifth floor of the hotel and had a very decent side view of the beach. I spent a lot of time staring out the window while Beth worked on her laptop, Noah read and June played with the wide variety of plastic toys we were issued at check-in.

This morning, Easter morning, we were awoken at 6:25 by what sounded like a chorus and organ music. It was sunrise service at the Bandstand (http://www.rehobothbandstand.com/) on Rehoboth Avenue one block over. There were breaks between the music, first short ones, then a longer one, probably for the sermon, but just when we thought it was over, the music started up again. After this had been going on for a while, I got up and peered out our window. We were high up enough to have a pretty good view of the crowd, which spilled over onto the sidewalks. I can’t say any of us were thrilled about this wake-up call, especially since someone in a nearby room had a television blaring until 1:00 a.m. But I wasn’t too cranky either, since Noah was already awake when it started and he probably would have woken us soon and it was a joyful noise. Even though I am not a Christian, I do find the Easter story moving. I also feel like if we are going to dye eggs and buy chocolate in bunny and egg shapes—celebrating the pagan-derived spring-and-fertility aspects of the holiday– we need to be tolerant of more conventional celebrations, even if they take place at the crack of dawn. That’s my take anyway. I think Beth may have felt differently.

During the sermon break, we tried to get back to sleep but it was useless, so when June noticed the two chocolate bunnies sitting up on the table around 6:55, I brought them over and read the note Beth had penned the night before:

Dear Noah and June,

Hoppy Easter!

These are for you. Glad I found you! Xander and Matthew [our cats] told me you were here. I also hid some baskets of goodies at your house.

Love,
The E.B.

Soon the kids were snuggling in bed eating their Easter bunnies, a white chocolate one for Noah and milk chocolate for June. After breakfast we left Beth at Café a Go-Go (http://delaware.metromix.com/restaurants/american/cafe-a-go-go-rehoboth-beach/121443/content) with a café con leche, a copy of The New Yorker and strict instructions to stay at least a half hour. (I think she violated the spirit of the agreement by checking her voice mail and discovering a work crisis in progress but she was gone long enough that I believe she did read her magazine for the specified time. At least that is what I am choosing to believe.)

The kids and I spent a little time on the beach while she was at the coffee shop. The sun was brilliant on the water, turning different parts of it blue, green and golden brown. After ten minutes June needed a diaper change and wanted to go back to the hotel. As we left the boardwalk, June, apparently having forgotten she wanted to leave, asked, “Why are we leaving the beach and boardwalk?” Why indeed, I wondered.

Driving home, en route to our egg hunt and the mad coming-home rush of unpacking and housecleaning and grocery shopping and our egg salad dinner, we made a quick stop on Route 1 for Beth to buy herself a new pair of Crocs. Noah noticed the miniature golf course attached to the store and wanted to play. I told him maybe someone would take him this summer. We’ll have plenty of adults. “Why don’t we live near the beach?” he asked. I think he was more motivated by mini-golf than the grandeur of nature because he’d greeted my statement on the beach earlier that day that “This is the best place in the world” with skepticism. In fact, he replied that in front of a computer is the best place in the world. Alas, I am raising a Philistine child.

Anyway, I replied, “I don’t know. It’s sad, isn’t it?” Takoma Park is home and I love many, many things about it. But I’ve never been at the beach long enough to pine for home and wait with anticipation for the next vegetable hamper to transport me there. I suspect I never will.

Friday the 13th

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Steph

I’d really been looking forward to Friday the 13th. Not because I hoped to have my son drown in a lake at summer camp, then to seek gory vengeance for his death on the counselors of that camp and be decapitated by one of my intended victims, only to have said son’s ghost rise out of the lake and terrorize the camp for decades and almost a dozen sequels to come, as fun as that might be. No, I was just looking forward to a couple free hours while June would be at school and I wouldn’t be co-oping there or tutoring at Noah’s school. I only get a morning like that once a week on average, so it didn’t seem that unlucky to me. I’m not a superstitious person. If I were, we probably wouldn’t have two black cats (including one with a white splotch on his chest, just like the cat in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” one of my all-time favorite short stories.)

The day didn’t start out great, though. I went to bed a little past ten the night before and had trouble falling asleep. I felt like I hadn’t slept long when Beth came to bed at 10:55. June was up crying at 2:15 so I brought her to our bed and she was up again at 4:15, wanting a diaper change. At 5:35, Noah wandered into our room, thinking it was 6:35. I followed him back to his room, switched out the light and said, “No lights on until 6:00.” He might have gone back to sleep because I didn’t see the light creep under our door until 6:15.

By then I was awake for good, though I stayed in bed until 6:50 when June sat up and mumbled sleepily, “Get up and have breaxtfast?”

That was easier said than done, however. Beth has been insanely busy recently, as the peak of nursery school fundraising season has coincided with a contract negotiation at work. As a result when we finally had the Caterpillar and his moms over for homemade strawberry coffeecake, pleasant conversation and peaceable parallel play between the two little ones last Sunday morning, it pushed grocery shopping down so far on Beth’s to-do list that it never happened and we are out of almost everything, or rather almost everything the kids love.

June requested a cereal bar, but we were out of all but two objectionable flavors. A banana? Out. String cheese (or “stick cheese,” as she calls it)? Nope. She finally consented to eat a few bites of toast with black currant jam, one and a half slices of vegetarian bacon, and most of the white of a fried egg. Meanwhile, Noah demolished four slices of toast with jam and two slices of the bacon. Clearly, they won’t starve before Beth makes it to Safeway.

After breakfast, I hustled June off to her bath and dressed her. A few months ago I found a little cardigan with white, red and pink hearts all over it in a box of free clothes in front of our neighbors’ house and I brought it home, thinking it would be perfect for the nursery school Valentine’s Day party. The party was replaced by a President’s Day swim party this year, though, so I’d decided to have June wear it on the last school day before Valentine’s Day instead. It’s a little small and has some holes in the weave, but it was serviceable enough for one day. She loved it the instant I showed it to her. “I want to wear that!” she cried. Soon after I got her dressed, Noah rushed out the door with the freshly printed valentines he’d designed for his classmates the day before and was gone.

At nine I dropped June off at school, where her sweater was much admired. The Dragonfly’s mom, as she always does when she sees me at the bus stop, kindly offered me a ride downtown, where I deposited a paycheck from Sara and strolled up to Savory. Sara recently steered a big editing job my way, a one hundred-page document about medicinal mushrooms. I’m still in negotiations with the client so it’s not quite a sure thing yet. If it were, I’d have brought it with me, but as it was I was forced to sit and read Oscar Wilde short stories while I enjoyed my almond latte and warm-from-the-oven lemon-poppy seed muffin. Life is so hard sometimes.

I picked June up at school at 11:30 and brought her home. I surveyed the wreckage of breakfast all over the dining room table and kitchen counters. While June ate lunch, I did the breakfast dishes, got the dishwasher running and ate my own lunch. We went down to the basement and she helped me load the washing machine. Once we had it going too, I read her some stories and put her down for her nap. I split her naptime between newsletter work, exercise and rest.

When June woke up she watched me wrap Beth’s Valentine’s present with great interest. She wanted to know what she would get for Valentine’s Day. I realized with dismay I hadn’t gotten the kids anything and I thought it was pretty unlikely that Beth had either, as frazzled as she’s been. (On top of everything else, she had a colonoscopy on Wednesday.) I called her later in the afternoon and we decided to delay the giving of gifts until evening and pick up something for the kids during our date tomorrow afternoon.

Noah leaped off the bus at 3:15. “I got a lot of candy!” he exclaimed. “In my morning class, my afternoon class and on the bus!” He had a little brown paper bag with his loot. He’d left most of his valentines at school by accident, but he described his favorite one to me: “It had a picture of a lion on it and it said, ‘I’m not lyin’,” he reported. He didn’t remember who gave it to him. I admired a handmade card with the letter N in yellow crayon on the front and Noah mentioned he’d forgotten that boy when he made up his list of classmates the night before. I felt a stab of guilt. Noah had decided to make valentines at the last minute and we didn’t have a class list for his afternoon class. We thought we’d gotten everyone. I suggested he print a new one and take it to school Monday with some diplomatically phrased explanation– “Not ‘I forgot you were in my class,’” I counseled.

Noah dug around in his bag and pulled out a card. “Here,” he said, handing me the funniest valentine I’ve ever received. There’s a snowman lying on its side on the front with the words “Love you to death!” written in crayon. Inside it says, “OOPS! I guess I loved you to much!” Like mother, like son is all I have to say about that. Also this — it was the perfect Friday the 13th valentine.

The whole day was like that. A mix of bad luck (well, the mildly bad luck of the poor night’s sleep, no decent cereal bars, shoddy Valentine’s day preparation and Beth not coming home until eight o’ clock variety) and the sweetness of my daughter dressed in cheery hearts, coffee drunk in solitude, June demonstrating her newfound bubble-blowing prowess on the porch and Noah showing me a Now and Later from his candy bag and asking me, “Should I eat it now or later?” then cracking up laughing. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Beth and I have hired a babysitter for the afternoon. We’re going to see The Reader (‘cause nothing says “I love you” like a film about the Holocaust). I hope you all had only the mildest of misfortune today and enjoy the fullness of love tomorrow.

A Visit With Saint Nicholas

Posted on December 18, 2008 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

From “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” by Clement C. Moore

“I don’t need Santa,” June declared in a determined tone as we walked down the corridor of the hotel on our way to breakfast.

“You don’t?” I questioned.

She sighed. “I’m feeling a little sad,” she admitted.

“Do you feel sad because you have to wait until this afternoon to see Santa?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

It was eight-thirty on Saturday morning. We’d arrived in Rehoboth around seven the previous evening and from June’s perspective all we had done was wait. She’d been promised sand castles on the beach, gummy butterflies at Candy Kitchen and a visit with Santa, but when we arrived in Rehoboth after a three-hour drive, we perversely insisted on going to dinner and then checking into the hotel and going to bed before any of the good stuff happened. (She was consoled by a short walk along the boardwalk to see the lights.)

Santa was the biggest attraction and since he would not be in his little house on the boardwalk until three in the afternoon, she still had a six-and-a-half-hour wait. This is June’s first year of having any idea who Santa is. Because last year was Noah’s final year of believing in Santa, we’ve had a seamless transition from pretending for one child to pretending for the other. Noah has gotten in on the fun, playing along and telling June all about Santa.

After breakfast I took June down to the beach and we made sand castles (and sand snowballs and sand monsters and sand people menaced by sand monsters). Then she wanted to take a walk on the boardwalk. I soon realized she was steering us toward Candy Kitchen. I didn’t have my wallet with me but it was only nine thirty and I didn’t think they’d be open yet so I let her walk over to the door. I thought we could peek in and I’d promise her we’d come back. But the lights were on and soon we found ourselves inside. I told June we were just looking to decide what we’d get, but we couldn’t buy anything right now. She made a beeline for the case where the gummy candy is displayed. We affirmed that they do indeed still sell gummy butterflies. When I tried to leave, her face crumpled. “But I want gummy butterflies!” she cried on the verge of tears. The cashier rescued me, offering a free sample. We left happy.

After some Christmas shopping (the alleged purpose of the trip), a lunch of leftover pizza in the hotel room and a nap, June was ready to see Santa. We headed down to the boardwalk. There were a few people ahead of us in line. June watched them go into the little house and talk to Santa. Noah offered to go before her to show her how it was done. He chatted with Santa about school and finally said he wanted “anything with a remote control.” (My mom’s got that covered.) Then he collected a reindeer hat from Santa’s bin of prizes and stepped outside.

Now it was June’s turn. She hesitated at the threshold. I lifted her over it, set her down gently inside the house, and then followed her inside. (I’d promised ahead of time I’d go in with her.) June stood a couple feet away from Santa who held out his hands and asked if she’d like to sit on his lap. I said she’d be more comfortable standing. He asked what she’d like for Christmas. June just stood there silently, looking half-awed and half-terrified. She eyed the doorway and seemed close to bolting. Santa called out to Noah, who was just outside the house, and asked him what June wanted for Christmas.

“A cake,” he answered. She’s been saying this a lot. None of us knows why.

Once June’s request was successfully transmitted, Santa offered her a reindeer hat. Out of the house with her hat in her hands, June was giddy with relief. She’d done it, she’d seen Santa and it was over. She looked at the hat proudly and said, “Santa gave it to me.” Pretty soon, she was engaging in some revisionist history, claiming, “I talked to Santa.” No one corrected her.

The rest of the weekend sped by. We returned to Candy Kitchen, shopped some more and I played a couple more times on the beach with both kids. I also got to take a long solitary walk on the beach at dusk. We enjoyed the hot tub and the ocean view in our room and watched Santa Claus is Coming to Town on the big screen television while eating Thai take-out. There was a gorgeous blood-red moon rising over the ocean on Saturday and later that evening June and I took a second tour of the boardwalk lights.

At lunchtime on Sunday we encountered Santa again at a restaurant where he was roaming through the dining room. As we were the only ones eating there at the time, he came by our table several times. Noah was talkative, but June cringed. Apparently she didn’t expect to have to screw up her courage to see Santa all over again and this time right before naptime when she can be emotionally fragile. The waitress brought paper and crayons and asked if the kids would like to write letters to Santa. We thought this might be easier to handle than face-to-face conversation. Noah said he’d already talked to him on the boardwalk, so he and Beth collaborated on a drawing of a Christmas tree instead. I asked June what she’d like from Santa. She didn’t answer right away so Beth suggested books. June agreed, and then she remembered about the cake. I wrote it all down in red and green crayon and we left the drawing and the letter in the stocking on the wall where Santa was collecting letters. The waitress gave us candy canes and we soon we were driving back to Maryland.

It was a good weekend. I made a decent start on my shopping. I felt the sand in my fingers, the water rushing over my rubber boot tops and the sun on my face. June got her sand castles, gummy butterflies and a visit with Santa.

We’ve been home several days, but she’s still processing the trip. She often mentions how big Santa is, asks when he is coming and claims she can hear him laughing. Then she demonstrates: “Ho ho ho.” At school this morning she made a drawing “for Santa” and later she asked me, “Why does Santa bring presents for children?” Then tonight at dinner she told us a story in which she was Santa and got into her sleigh and flew away. She made a large sweeping motion with her arms as she said this. Imagining being Santa seemed to make her joyous and expansive.

I don’t know if she needs Santa, strictly speaking, but he fascinates her and I hope that as time passes, her fascination grows into comfort and she realizes she has nothing to dread.

Tag, You’re It, Part 2: Christmas is Coming

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Steph

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.

Traditional Christmas Carol
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Is_Coming)

We’ve been watching a lot of Christmas specials these days—Frosty, the Snowman; Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer; How the Grinch Stole Christmas; The Year Without a Santa Claus and A Charlie Brown Christmas so far. As you can see, we mainly stick to the classics from our childhood. Beth, Noah and June did watch Frosty Returns, but I opted out to fold laundry during that one. Why should Frosty return? The original is perfect as is.

This is hardly an original observation, but watching these specials so close together always brings back to me how, aside from Frosty, they all have the same plot. Something endangers Christmas—a big snowstorm, a green monster whose heart is two sizes too small, the indifference of the world’s children and Santa’s bad cold, materialism and the ennui of small children who talk like adults. Something saves Christmas—Rudolph’s shiny nose, the green monster’s redemption on hearing Christmas music, the children’s discovery of the power of faith and generosity, Bible verses and a scrawny Christmas tree that magically grows healthy branches once decorated. But all this begs the question, why does Christmas need so much saving in the first place? Why is it so perennially endangered?

The easy answer is that it creates a problem to solve, and that creates a story to tell. But why is it always the same story? Why is it so often Christmas itself that teeters on the brink? I can’t really say, but to me it feels like there’s some emotional truth in it. Expectations are so high for Christmas, that if you don’t feel joyous for whatever reason, it can be easy to end up feeling let down. And even though I love Christmas, it’s often hard for me to get into the spirit.

This year it would be easy to blame the economy, but I don’t think that’s it, even though like most people, we probably should be cutting back. We’ve lost a good bit of the money we’d invested to build an addition to the house so that June can have her own room someday. But other than that, we’re not really feeling the pinch. Others have it much worse. So, as I said, it’s not really money. Partly it’s being so worn down from being sick. Shopping, decorating, and baking all seem like extra work and it’s hard to get interested in extra work right now. I’m even thinking of skipping or scaling back the annual Christmas letter I write. I’ve done a little shopping. I have Beth’s present taken care of and a few days ago I ordered The Complete Adventures of Curious George for June since she has fallen so completely in love with the little monkey over the past few months. I was spurred to do this by my mom calling for gift ideas for June last week. “Christmas is coming,” she reminded me on the answering machine.

It is, I know. We’ve been listening to Christmas music and watching our Christmas specials, as I mentioned. We have a nice wreath on the door that Noah picked out at the farmers’ market yesterday. I’m just not feeling enthusiastic about Christmas. It’s not really a surprise either. It’s been this way a long time.

One possibility is that even though I’m in my fourth year out of academia I still miss the rhythm of the academic calendar that I used to measure time for most of my adult life. It just doesn’t seem like Christmas without the adrenaline rush of papers and exams to write or grade beforehand. I miss being surrounded by eighteen and nineteen year olds proud of their semester’s accomplishments and excited by the upcoming break. (What I don’t miss is the inevitable outbreak of end-of-semester plagiarism cases.) I’ve even wondered if I should re-read The Hobbit this time of year since it was the last book on my fall semester Genre Fiction syllabus for the last few years I was teaching. I don’t think it would help, though, unless I could coax a local teenager to come to the house and discuss it with me several times for fifty minutes and then write me a five to seven page paper on the quest motif in it. This doesn’t seem very likely.

But even while I was teaching, a lot of Christmases got spoiled by the fact that the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (http://www.mla.org/), a huge gathering of academics in English and foreign languages, is held right after Christmas. The convention is where many colleges and universities hold their first-round interviews for jobs. More years than I care to admit during my long, fruitless job search I spent Christmas mourning the fact that I hadn’t gotten any interviews or nervous about interviews I did have.

So, the Christmas spirit is often elusive for me. Yet it almost always comes. It might be while making gingerbread with my sister or the kids, or helping decorate the tree, or watching someone’s face light up as he or she opens the perfect gift.

Last year it was on Christmas Eve. We were at my mother and stepfather’s house. Home renovations had filled their living room with yet-to-be installed kitchen cabinets and there wasn’t much room for Mom’s traditional decorations. We thought we could squeeze a tree into one corner, but in the end we decided against it. Mom was upset about the lack of Christmas feeling in the house. And then we went to Longwood Gardens (http://www.longwoodgardens.org/) on Christmas Eve to see the lights and fountain display and the elaborately decorated greenhouses. It was a lovely, magical evening. We think we might make it a tradition.

I know that feeling will come sooner or later. On Friday I’ll be tutoring at Noah’s school, watching his class’s holiday program and dropping off June’s outgrown buntings at his school’s winter coat drive. When he gets out of school we’re leaving on our annual weekend Christmas shopping trip to Rehoboth. Service, seven and eight year olds singing songs and reciting speeches in Spanish, some family time away from the distractions of home and a chance to take a long walk on the beach sounds like a good way to get in the spirit to me.

Meanwhile, Tyfanny of Come What May (http://www.btmommy.blogspot.com/) tagged me with this Christmas quiz so I have filled it out. Here goes.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Usually paper, sometimes bags.
2. Real tree or Artificial? We never have our own tree because we always travel to the grandparents’ houses, but I prefer real trees.
3. When do you put up the tree? See above.
4. When do you take the tree down? See above.
5. Do you like eggnog? Yes, and I love eggnog lattes.
6. Favorite gift received as a child? A bike, when I was nine. I loved it because I could ride all over town by myself, so it represented freedom to me.
7. Hardest person to buy for? My stepfather.
8. Easiest person to buy for? Beth and the kids.
9. Do you have a nativity scene? No.
10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? Leg warmers from my grandmother when I was a kid. They were in style then, but I was never into them. My sister and I each got a pair and we ended up using them to block the drafts in our bedroom window at my dad’s house, so I guess they did come in handy.
11. Favorite Christmas Movie? I like the Christmas specials I watched as a kid, especially Frosty and The Grinch, but as for real films—It’s Wonderful Life. In my twenties and early thirties I watched it every year on television, but I’ve gotten out of the habit.
12. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Too late usually. I’ve barely started now.
13. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? I don’t think so.
14. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Just one? Hard to narrow it down between gingerbread, fudge, buckeyes and ribbon candy.
15. Lights on the tree? Yes.
16. Favorite Christmas song? “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” which is kind of an odd choice because it’s religious and I’m not and there‘s plenty of secular Christmas music. I just think it’s pretty, though.
17. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Travel to my mother and stepfather’s or Beth’s parents’ houses on alternate years. This is Beth’s folks’ year.
18. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeers? Let’s try: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen. (And Rudolph.) I probably couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been reading “The Night Before Christmas” to June today.
19. Angel on the tree top or a star? Angels at both grandparents’ houses.
20. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? We usually open presents from the grandparents we aren’t visiting early so we don’t have to pack them. We either do it on the night before we leave or on the Solstice. The rest we open on Christmas morning.
21. Most annoying thing about this time of the year? Decorations up too early in stores. This drives me crazy.
22. Favorite ornament theme or color? I like a mix of things.
23. Favorite for Christmas dinner? Sweet potatoes, cranberries and pumpkin pie.
24. What do you want for Christmas this year? For my kids to have a magical day. For Beth to have a white Christmas. To have a good book and time to read it. To enjoy the company of loved ones. For none of us to be sick.

I think that would be enough for any year.

Let Freedom Ring

Posted on November 28, 2008 by Steph

The morning after Thanksgiving we took Noah to see the Liberty Bell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Bell). Last year in first grade they studied symbols of our country. That’s why we went to see the Statue of Liberty when we were in New York City to visit my dad last December. Then when we visited my mom last May for Mother’s Day, he wanted to go see the Liberty Bell, but we didn’t have time. First grade is long gone, but Noah was still interested, so on Friday morning, we left June with Mom and drove into the City of Brotherly Love.

Even with increased security, the lines were not as long as I remembered from my childhood when every out-of-town visitor and his brother wanted to go see the Bell. Either I was less patient then, or the Bell is less popular now, or we hit a lull. Once inside its spiffy new digs (http://www.nps.gov/inde/liberty-bell-center.htm), we went straight to the Bell. We took some pictures and Noah asked a ranger about the rivets at the top and bottom of the crack. Then we watched a movie about the significance the Bell has had to different people over time.

People active in a lot of liberation movements—abolitionists, suffragettes, and members of the civil rights movement—have all claimed the Bell as a symbol. I wondered briefly if the gay rights movement ever has, but if so, I’m not aware of it. (Before HRC adopted the equal sign as its logo—back when it was still HRCF—their torch logo was probably meant to evoke the Statue of Liberty. I still have a couple t-shirts that date back to those days.) My thoughts were interrupted by a clip of Martin Luther King giving the “I Have a Dream” speech; they showed the very end:

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

http://www.mlkonline.net/dream.html

I’ve seen this speech so many times I expected to watch it with respect for its importance in American history and with admiration for the oratory, but not with much emotion any more, so I was surprised to find myself crying. Not just getting a little teary-eyed either, but with lines of tears streaming down both cheeks. I guess it’s going to be like this for a while. Until the reality of our first African-American President really sinks in (and who knows how long that will take?), these sudden flashes of astonishment and gratitude are just going to keep taking my by surprise.

We came back to Mom and Jim’s house for lunch and June’s nap. I lay down with her and slept deeply for forty-five minutes of her hour-long nap. (We’ve all been clobbered by an evil upper respiratory infection over the past couple weeks. It’s just the latest installment in our family’s Autumn of Infirmity. Anyway, it’s really wiped me out.) Fortified by the nap, I had the energy to leave the house again. Beth and I went to see Milk. If you exclude Wall-E, which Beth saw with Noah, and Horton Hears a Who, which I saw with him, Beth and I haven’t seen a movie in a theater since Brokeback Mountain (or was it Rent?). Either way, it’s been a long time. This was an event.

We got a bit turned around and missed the 4:30 showing. Beth was unsure about staying for the 5:40 one as it meant an extra hour of babysitting for Mom and Jim, plus putting the kids to bed, which wasn’t in the original deal. But I couldn’t get this close to seeing an actual movie in an actual theater and not do it so I called Mom and left a message with the kids’ bedtime instructions. I figured they were out at the video store. They had big plans involving making caramel apples, and getting movies and takeout pizza. I thought they’d be fine.

It has to be a coincidence, but the timing of the release of this film, which builds up to the defeat of a particularly virulent anti-gay proposition in California couldn’t be more poignant, coming so close on the heels of our recent loss of marriage rights in California after the passage of Proposition 8. On the one hand, it all seems so familiar, the long string of defeats, the raw anger, the frustration. On the other hand, the thought that we even had marriage rights in the first place would have seemed unimaginable to many of the 70s-era activists in the film. (Perhaps not to Milk, though. He was a visionary after all.) Gays and lesbians all over the United States did take to the streets again after the passage of Proposition 8, just as they did time after time in the movie. Beth’s and my days of attending every gay protest/rally/candlelight vigil have long passed, but we were planning to attend this one, even though it was at 1:30, smack dab in the middle of June’s nap. But when a cold hard rain fell that day, we reconsidered. Depriving a two-year-old of her nap and hoping she will drowse in the stroller is one thing. Expecting her to put up with all this and get drenched in the bargain seemed cruel and unusual, so we stayed home.

When we got home at 8:40, Mom and Jim had just finished putting the kids to bed. It was the first time anyone other than Beth or me has successfully put June to bed at night. She was again up at 9:50, but I had an hour and ten minutes to heat up and eat a couple slices of pizza and take a shower before I had to go lie down with her. This was an unexpected bit of freedom as well.

The inauguration is a noon on January 20, another nap disaster in the making and Montgomery County schools do not have the day off (at the time of writing—it’s become an issue of hot debate here in the ‘burbs). Beth and I attended the first Clinton inauguration so we know unless you have tickets, you don’t see anything but Jumbotron screens and the parade. Still, we are seriously considering pulling Noah out of school and June from her nap to take them down to the mall, to stand with our fellow Americans as history is made. When they’re grown up I’d like them to be able to say they heard freedom ring that January day when they were seven and a half and almost three. They may never have another opportunity like it.

Out of the Haunted House

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Steph

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Three days before the election, we drove out of Obama territory into McCain country. Noah had a four-day weekend, thanks to a teacher grading and planning day on Monday and the election on Tuesday. (His school is a polling place.) The kids hadn’t seen Andrea since our visit to Wheeling at the beginning of Noah’s summer break so it seemed like a good opportunity to meet up with her. We chose to stay at the Wisp ski resort (http://www.wispresort.com/wisp/index.aspx) in Western Maryland, which is located in the scenic Laurel Highlands somewhere between our neck of the woods and Andrea’s. Andrea insisted on paying for everyone and said she didn’t want “to hear any backtalk.” So, I’ll just say thanks.

The transition from Obama-land to McCain-land was not subtle. Either that or I missed it while I dozed briefly as June napped in her car seat and Noah watched downloaded episodes of his favorite shows on Beth’s phone. Before I closed my eyes there were Obama-Biden signs everywhere. When I opened them it was nothing but McCain-Palin as far as the eye could see, including those annoying ones that say “Country First.”

When I commented on the shift, Noah looked out the window long enough to spot one. “That’s the first McCain sign I’ve seen in my whole life,” he noted. He wanted to know why it is that people who support one candidate or the other tend to live clustered together. We didn’t have a good answer for him.

Sometimes Noah has seemed indifferent to the election. He told us a few weeks ago he didn’t care who won. Other times, he was interested in how the electoral college worked and how voters make their choices. When his morning class had an election recently, he considered running for office, though he ended up deciding against it. (Sasha was elected class secretary.) For a while, he was pretending to run for President of the United States against Beth. They both wrote a stump speech. His was remarkably civil and even-handed, perhaps because he was running against his mother. Here it is:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43673&l=4e704&id=508407876

I think we might be better off as a country if all candidates for elected office were half as generous.

It was late Saturday afternoon by the time we got to the hotel. We socialized in Andrea’s room for a bit, then we ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. Noah was impatient to tour the haunted house set up on the hotel grounds near the ski slopes. (There was also a haunted coaster going down the slope, but he had not interest in that.)

We asked at the front desk if the haunted house was appropriate for a seven year old. The clerk said she hadn’t been through it herself but she’d heard it was more family-friendly in the opening seven to eight hour of each evening. We were encouraged by this, but we asked again at the ticket counter. The man with the chainsaw directing traffic in the parking lot had given us pause. One young staffer with a simulated bullet hole in her forehead said her four-year-old sister had been through both before and after eight and did fine.

In retrospect, we were asking the wrong question. It should have been– is this appropriate for a seven year old who has been sheltered, who only watches PBS kids’ shows and who has never seen a PG-rated movie and whose reading material is monitored? Then again, maybe we didn’t really need to ask at all. One look at Mr. Chainsaw and Ms. Head Wound probably should have told us all we needed to know.

I overrode my gut feeling because Noah really wanted to go and because I’ve played the heavy a few times recently about things like this, most notably when I refused to buy him the blood-spattered zombie costume he saw in a catalogue and wanted for Halloween. Beth thought it was ironic I am the stricter parent here because I am a horror fan and she isn’t. But it’s because I’ve read and seen and taught so much horror that I take it seriously as a meditation on the nature of good and evil. (When it isn’t, it’s mostly just exploitation.) I think it’s wrong, and possibly even dangerous to let kids get desensitized to violence at a young age. But on the other hand, I also think facing and conquering fears through encounters with fictional, symbolic monsters in various forms can be empowering for kids. It’s all a matter of timing and temperament. Maybe it was time to let Noah test his limits. After all, we’ve read him the unvarnished versions of fairy tales since he was a preschooler and he’s on a spooky story kick right now. He’s always gotten a thrill from stories that are just scary enough. I do, too.

I asked him one last time if he was sure he wanted to do it. He said yes and Beth bought two tickets, one for him and one for me. We agreed on a code word he would use if he wanted me to take him out of the house early. It was “volcano.” We boarded the shuttle bus. The windows were draped with heavy fabric and the interior of the bus was lit with red light bulbs. The driver gave warnings about how we might not make it back. Noah giggled. He was just scared enough. But I was noticing with unease that our group consisted entirely of adults, teens and Noah.

A man in a torn and bloody shirt divided us into smaller groups and ushered us into the maze in front of the house. I made sure Noah and I stayed behind the two other people in our group so nothing would jump out at us first. There was nothing in the maze except a wrecked car with a dummy in the driver’s seat at the very end. It wasn’t a very realistic dummy and Noah seemed unfazed by it.

We walked through the door into the house itself. Immediately, a light flashed on and a man in a cage came forward brandishing some kind of power tool and shaking the bars. I didn’t get a good look at him because I was hurrying Noah away from the cage.

We climbed a narrow staircase, holding hands. The interior of the house was lit with more flickering red light. The staircase twisted and turned. Nothing jumped out at us. There were no spooky noises.

I think in the end it was the suspense that got to Noah. He forgot all about his code word. “Let’s go,” he said suddenly and urgently. “I don’t like this place! Let’s get out of here!”

“Okay,” I said in what I hoped was a calm and reassuring voice. “We’ll just go back the way we came. It’s not very far and we know what we’ll see since we’ve seen it already.”

We turned and headed down the stairs. “Let’s go,” he kept saying in a panicky voice. I squeezed his hand and kept talking. When we passed people on their way up the stairs, they made way for us. The man in the cage was silent and still as we passed.

We passed the wrecked car and wound backwards through the maze. Noah was worried we wouldn’t be able to find our way out but it wasn’t hard.

The empty shuttle bus was parked outside the house. “Are you going back?” I asked the driver. He said yes, took one look at Noah and flipped on the bus’s interior lights. It looked like a normal bus again. He spoke kindly to Noah, calling him “Buddy” and confiding to him that he didn’t make it through the house either. I have no idea if it was the truth, but it was a nice thing to say.

We rejoined Andrea, Beth and June who were waiting for us by a bonfire, drove back to the hotel and got the kids ready for bed. As I lay down with Noah he said he thought he might have nightmares about the haunted house. I told him if he did he could come into our room. (We had a suite and Noah was sleeping on a Murphy bed in the living area.) I almost never make this offer. It took Noah so long to learn to sleep through the night and June doesn’t do it more than once in a blue moon so I’m protective of my sleep. But I led him into the haunted house, so it was up to me to get him out if any little part of him was still in there.

Noah did wake up around ten-thirty, feeling sick to his stomach and calling for Beth. She got up with him (he seems to prefer her when he’s sick) and she kept him company while he vomited. I’m not sure if it was the lingering effects of the illness we’ve all had or if it came from overeating at dinner and his subsequent scare, but afterwards he went back to his bed and slept the rest of the night with no nightmares.

On Sunday we took a walk by the lovely shore of Deep Creek Lake (http://www.deepcreekhospitality.com/fr_deep_creek_state_park.asp) in the morning and swam in the hotel pool in the afternoon. Sometime in between I told Beth that she was either being very sneaky or quite restrained about checking the polls on her phone. Over the past couple weeks I’d gotten into the habit of checking the Washington Post tracking poll as soon as I picked up the paper in the morning, but I didn’t follow any other polls. Too much information can be confusing and crazy-making. Beth was unable to resist temptation, however. Sometimes she stayed up late checking poll after poll online, Now, though, she was trying to be on vacation. As we drove from one place to another, I told Beth all the McCain-Palin signs were scarier than the haunted house. I thought better of the comment once it was out of my mouth, though. As strongly as I feel about the election, I know that the supporters of each candidate are sincere about their choices. Given the demographics of the area, it’s likely the kindly bus driver was a McCain voter. We’re all trying to put country first in our own way, as we think best.

Monday morning at breakfast, Noah was telling Andrea about Mrs. E, the retired teacher who volunteers in his afternoon class on Wednesdays. “She’s older than you,” he told her. Here he paused for dramatic emphasis. “She’s older than John McCain,” he said, sounding as if it was a wonder Mrs. E managed to get out of bed in the morning and go about her business. And that did make me chuckle.

Later that day we took a short hike to Muddy Falls in Swallow Falls State park (http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/western/swallowfalls.html). June was entranced by the roaring, falling water. “The water is slipping down,” she kept saying. After a lunch of leftovers from our dinner the previous night, we ate Noah’s half-birthday cupcakes. They were marked-down Halloween cupcakes we found at the grocery store, decorated with plastic spiders and spider webs on top. He composed the following song about them:

Happy Half-Birthday to Me
My age is over three
I love my cupcakes
‘Cause they’re so creepy

Monday afternoon we drove home and Tuesday morning, we voted. Before we left the house, Noah was singing “Barack Obama” over and over again to a tune I didn’t recognize. We had some trouble getting him out of the house. It was unseasonably warm and he wanted to wear shorts. Beth compromised with him and let him wear short sleeves and crocs with no socks provided he took a jacket along. At 8:35, we walked out the front door. “Let’s go vote for Barack Obama!” Beth said.

The lines weren’t too long and we were finished in plenty of time to hit Circle Time at the library at ten. That night after dinner, we ventured out into the rainy night to get our free Election Day ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s. During the drive over, Noah asked us to explain again how the “electrical college” worked and wanted to know why in Nebraska and “New Hamster” they didn’t use a winner-take-all system for their electoral votes.

The line at Ben and Jerry’s was out the door but it was a warm night and we were under an awning, so we didn’t get wet. The line moved quickly and within fifteen minutes we were seated and eating our ice cream. It was a festive scene inside. The crowd was diverse–black, white and Asian, young and old, gay and straight. An Orthodox Jewish family discussed which flavors might be kosher. A woman pushed an infant with Downs’ Syndrome in a stroller.

After the kids were in bed, Beth and I settled in front of the television to watch the election results come in. I folded laundry and read the Health section of the Post and clipped relevant articles for Sara during the lulls in coverage. When I started watching around nine o’clock Obama had one hundred seventy electoral votes already. I considered staying up until he went over the top, but by 10:15, he was only a little over two hundred. June had been up a few times the night before with croup and I was exhausted so I gave up on seeing history made and went to bed.

At 12:40, I woke and noticed Beth wasn’t in bed yet. I stumbled out to the living room to see if it was all over yet. It was, but Beth was still sitting on the couch, searching for Proposition 8 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008) ) results on her phone. It didn’t look good.

We woke up to different country today. June’s music teacher ended class this morning by talking about how full of hope she was for all the children in the room. Sometimes I feel that hope, too, though sometimes I wonder if we’re expecting far more than any one person can accomplish from our charismatic new President. I guess we’ll find out. I have to say I don’t envy President-elect Obama. (However much I like typing that phrase.) He didn’t lead the country into the haunted house where we’re currently lost, but he’s the one we’re asking to gather us all up and lead us out.

Trick or Treat, Postscript

Posted on October 31, 2008 by Steph

Two-thirty a.m. Tuesday found me in the bathroom, listening the pelting rain of an unpredicted storm on the windows and combing June’s wet hair. There’s only one reason to bathe a toddler in the middle of the night. She was, in fact, still sick. We had to skip the special wear-your-costume Circle Time at the library the next day, much to my disappointment. We’ve been going to Circle Time for less than a year so we’ve never been to the Halloween one, but I’m sure the sight of that many infants, toddlers and preschoolers in costume is something to behold. I thought it might be adequate compensation for missing the parade on Saturday.

At two-thirty on Wednesday morning, June was sick again. This time it wasn’t so bad that she needed a bath, but we sat out Kindermusik the next day. I was starting to wonder if she was ever going to get better, and then she did. It’s been a gradual thing. She’s still easily fatigued, but she has kept down everything she’s eaten since Wednesday breakfast and she’s able to play. (Since she started playing again there’s been an outbreak of stomach illnesses among her stuffed animals and rubber ducks and she’s been busy taking care of them.) We sent her to school yesterday and today.

It was because she’d missed so many fun things this week that I decided to let her go trick-or-treating. Before she got sick, I’d been undecided. She’s shy around new people and I thought going to house after house of new people might be overwhelming for her. In the end, we decided to give it a try and if she wasn’t enjoying it, I’d bring her back to the house where Beth was giving out candy and Noah and I could continue without her.

We explained how trick-or-treating worked to June. She seemed alternately concerned, saying she was “too shy” (I think she must have heard us talking about whether or not she was) and game, but she grew more confident the longer she thought about it. All day long today she kept asking to “go to Halloween.” I told her it would be later– after school and lunch and nap and after Noah came home and after dinner, when it was dark. Gradually, the list of things that had to happen first got shorter and shorter and then it was time to go.

I changed June into her ladybug costume while Beth pinned the seaweed boa to Noah’s arms. She examined herself in the mirror with satisfaction. “I’m a cute wittle wadybug,” she said.

I needn’t have worried about June. She did fine. She was too shy to say “Trick or Treat” or “thank you,” (though I kept trying to prompt her to say that last one), but she held out her bag and by the end she was brave enough to reach into the proffered candy bowls herself. Noah was chatty enough to make up for her silence. (He explained his costume over and over–he was seaweed, not a fish–and he told one of our neighbors, “You have a fancy house” after surveying the antique-filled living room.) Both kids posed for photographs at two or three houses.

We went up and down the length of one long block. It took almost an hour and for the last quarter or so of our route I was carrying June from house to house. (One side of the block is built into a hill and the houses all have steep steps up to their porches so there was a lot of climbing.) Then we came home and sat on the porch, watched the skull of our half-buried skeleton flash in the darkness and ate candy.

It was a sweet ending to June’s first trick-or-treat.

Trick or Treat

Posted on October 26, 2008 by Steph

“Well, this wasn’t how we expected today to go,” I said as Beth turned out the light Saturday night and we lay in bed, considering the day.

We had big plans for the weekend before Halloween. On Saturday morning, we’d drive out to Potomac Vegetable Farms (http://www.potomacvegetablefarms.com), our traditional source for pumpkins. It’s an organic farm operated by the family of a friend of ours from college. We’ve been going there since before Noah was born. We have pumpkin patch pictures of him there from every fall since he was five months old.

In the afternoon, we’d decorate the dogwood tree with the plastic ghosts that have graced it every year since we moved to Takoma and we’d set up our new decorations, too. Noah was of the strongly held opinion this year that the ghost tree and the jack o’ lanterns we nice, but not enough, so we bought a string of ghost lights for the porch, a skeleton whose arms, legs and head seem to emerge from the ground and a ceramic Frankenstein’s monster head candy bowl. The candy goes in his mouth. (I picked that last one. I taught the Shelley novel, the 1930s films and Young Frankenstein for six years in a horror class and I have a soft spot for the monster in all his incarnations.)

Next, Beth would put the finishing touches on Noah’s costume. He’s going as seaweed this year. He has a fish on his head, which causes most people who see the costume to perceive it as a fish costume with seaweed, but he insists he’s seaweed with a fish. Beth needed to attach the seaweed boa and the green strips of fabric to the shirt and pajama bottoms he’s wearing underneath and to cover his crocs with gray fabric meant to suggest rocks on the sea floor.

At five, we’d all march in the Takoma Park Halloween parade, one of the biggest community events of the year. I love this parade. It’s a fun, festive, just barely organized march from downtown Takoma to a local elementary school gym, where snacks are served, music played and prizes for costumes awarded. We’ve been every year since 2003. (In 2002, our first fall in Takoma Park, the parade was cancelled because of the snipers terrorizing suburban Maryland and Virginia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks)).

Sunday we’d invited a friend of Beth’s and her son over to carve pumpkins and eat pumpkin soup. I have a special recipe I like to make every year when we get pumpkins. The soup cooks in a hollowed out pumpkin shell. (http://www.astray.com/recipes/?show=Pumpkin%20tureen). It’s about as showy as my cooking gets these days.

Somewhere in between all these activities, Noah would complete eight pages of math homework and finish his 3D model of the habitat and life stages of the butterfly, Beth would grocery shop and she and I would both clean house. June would be co-operative enough to let us complete all these tasks.

Ambitious plans, but fate, in the form of a stomach bug and weather, intervened. June woke up vomiting on Friday morning. She stayed home from school and I spent most of the day holding her, reading book after book, cuddling on the couch while we watched the same Sesame St. dvd over and over, and taking the occasional break to change her clothes yet again and do the mounds of laundry her illness entailed. The low point of the day came when I was carrying her out the bus stop to wait for Noah’s bus and she threw up all over both of us just as I stepped out onto the front porch. I took her back into the house and left her in the bathroom while I ran outside to ask a waiting dad to get Noah off the bus for me, then I ran back inside to change us both into clean clothes.

We were hoping for a quick recovery and in the morning June did seem marginally better, but by then I’d come down with the bug so we quickly re-arranged our plans. We’d go to the pumpkin patch on Sunday morning before our guests arrived. The rest of Saturday’s plans could go on without June and me. If we were well enough by late afternoon, she could change into her ladybug costume and ride the parade route in her stroller. Otherwise, Beth and Noah would go and I’d stay home with her.

So I spent another day cuddling with a lethargic toddler while Beth and Noah passed a busy day shopping, and working on his homework and his costume. The costume was ready by parade time. June, however, was not ready, having woken up from her afternoon nap vomiting again, and as it turned out, the parade wasn’t ready either. Rain moved it inside the school in a much-abbreviated form. Beth and Noah made the best of it. Noah’s seaweed costume was admired, if misperceived, by other marchers, though as he mentioned when he got home, he didn’t win a prize or get his picture in the paper as he did last year. I told him that probably wouldn’t happen every year and he said he and Beth had talked about that. He added in a charitable tone that other people needed to have their turns, too.

Saturday night June spent much of the night waking, dry heaving and then screaming in rage. (She’s not a docile patient.) In the morning Beth and Noah weren’t feeling too hot either, so we decided, with some regret, to call off the trip to the pumpkin patch and to warn our guests away from our house of contagion. Beth picked up pumpkins and some more groceries at the Co-op, the farmers’ market and the supermarket. By late afternoon Noah’s homework was finished, and everyone had perked up enough to think about finishing decorating the yard. Beth had strung up the ghost lights the night before and she and Noah had arranged the skeleton that morning. While Beth rummaged around in the basement, looking for the tree ghosts, June suggested we take a little walk to the holly tree at the end of the block and back. Beth had said the day before that June was like a “slow-motion version” of herself and this was evident during our walk. She didn’t run ahead of me and displayed no interest whatsoever in dashing into the street. She even held my hand without objection. Halfway, there, though, she stopped and said, “Carry me.”

I picked her up and said we’d better go back home. She protested, but without force. I took her back to the porch and settled her into the sky chair. She asked for some pretzels and ate them in the chair while she watched Beth and Noah decorate the tree, commenting occasionally but never making a move to join the action. I stayed with her on the porch, happy to watch, too. It was good to be outside after being cooped up inside all weekend. It was a beautiful late October afternoon. Cool, but not cold, and suffused with golden light.

Next we moved inside to carve our jack o’ lanterns, or in Beth’s and my case, our Barack o’ lanterns (http://yeswecarve.com). Noah used a stencil of a spider (with a good deal of assistance from Beth) and I carved a happy face for June’s pumpkin. It was almost the kids’ bedtime when we finished so we fed them a quick dinner (Beth and were both queasy again and skipped dinner—it was just as well we’d abandoned the idea the rather time-intensive pumpkin soup earlier in the day when Beth was unable to find a baking pumpkin) and we sent them off to bed. By now Noah was complaining of a stomachache again.

It took an hour to get June settled, but once she was finally asleep, and once I’d showered and boiled the pumpkins seeds and gotten them about half roasted before deciding to turn off the oven and finish the next day, Beth and I dropped back into bed. “It’s amazing how much we got done this weekend,” she said. I’d just been thinking silently about the cleaning we hadn’t done. The living room, dining room and kitchen were all a mess, but she was right. It was a lot: Noah’s costume, his butterfly project, the parade, and the decorating and carving, not to mention all the extra laundry. Beth had also done the grocery shopping and I’d cleaned the bathroom. All while sick and tending sick kids.

Fate played us some mean tricks this weekend, but there were treats as well, the sight of our son dressed as kelp, our spooky yard, and the smell of roasted pumpkin seeds wafting into the bedroom as we drifted, exhausted, off to sleep.

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

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love Is

Posted on February 14, 2008 by Steph

Although I speak in tongues
Of men and angels
I’m just sounding brass
And tinkling cymbals without love–

Love suffers long–
Love is kind!–
Enduring all things–
Love has no evil in mind

If I had the gift of prophecy–
And all the knowledge–
And the faith to move the mountains
Even if I understood all of the mysteries–
If I didn’t have love
I’d be nothing

Love–never looks for love–
Love’s not puffed up–
Or envious–
Or touchy–
Because it rejoices in the truth
Not in iniquity
Love sees like a child sees

As a child I spoke as a child–
I thought and I understood as a child–
But when I became a woman–
I put away childish things
And began to see through a glass darkly

Where, as a child, I saw it face to face
Now, I only know it in part
Fractions in me
Of faith and hope and love
And of these great three
Love’s the greatest beauty
Love
Love
Love

Joni Mitchell, “Love (Corinthians II:13)”

http://www.lyrics007.com/Joni%20Mitchell%20Lyrics/LOVE%20(CORINTHIANS%20II:13)%20Lyrics.html

Monday Afternoon: Love Speaks as a Child

Three days before Valentine’s Day, on a cold and dreary day when both June and I were tired and out of sorts and a little under the weather, she flung her arms around my neck and said, “Mommy good” about a half dozen times. It was the bright spot in an endless, exhausting day.

That evening I was telling Beth about it. Noah overheard and corrected, “She should have said, ‘Mommy great!’”

Monday Evening: Love Endures All Things

Noah picked a photo album up off the living room floor and started to open it. June saw it in his hands and grabbed it away from him. He made no move to reclaim it. We made no move to correct her. Often we do, but we just didn’t have the energy and he didn’t seem upset.

“That was nice of you, Noah, to let her have it,” Beth said. “It’s not easy to have a almost two-year-old little sister sometimes, is it? She’s not very polite.”

“No,” Noah said, but he was smiling.

Tuesday Morning: Love’s Not Puffed Up

“They want me to go out to dinner, but I don’t think I have to,” Beth said, two days before Valentine’s Day, when I inquired when she’d be home from the third day of her conference in Baltimore. She’d been attending it during the day, leaving earlier than usual in the mornings, and returning home at night, later than usual, sometimes after everyone was in bed.

“You’d rather eat chili out of a can with me?” I said.

She smiled. “Instead of eating in a nice Italian restaurant in Baltimore? That’s how much I love you, Baby,” she joked. Now in our childless days, she would have gone, but she wanted to see the kids before they went to bed, and she knew after a twelve-hour plus day alone with them (Noah was off school for Election Day) that I would need a break. So she was opting out.

“Well, maybe I’ll make the roasted vegetables then,” I said.

Later Tuesday Morning: Love is Kind

I was at the dining room table eating breakfast when I heard Noah scream. He’d hurt his finger with a staple. My first reaction was annoyance. “I told you to stay away from the stapler,” I said, as he approached. (Actually, what I told him was “Don’t chew on the stapler.” You find yourself uttering the oddest things after giving birth.) But then I saw the staple was still in his finger and he was panicking. I stopped myself mid-scold and took his hand in one of mine, quickly plucking the staple from his finger with the other hand. Blood welled around the small wound. There was blood on the next finger as well.

We went to the bathroom to wash it off. I started to run the water in the sink and he said, “No! It will hurt less if you get a paper towel wet.” I dampened some toilet paper, which would be softer, and gently dabbed both fingers. When the blood was washed away, I could see the small cut on his pointer finger. I checked the middle finger. No mark. The wounded finger must have dripped on it. He didn’t want any disinfectant and I decided it was a minor enough cut not to need it.

“Do you want a band-aid?” I asked. He did. I got out the Blue’s Clues band-aids and started to wrap up the hurt finger.

“No, Mommy, it’s the other one,” he protested. It wasn’t, but I bandaged that finger anyway.

Still Later Tuesday Morning: Love Sees it Face to Face

As we were getting ready to leave the house to go vote later that morning, I found Noah and June in a spontaneous embrace. “Hug!” June announced.

“Take a picture, Mommy!” Noah suggested.

I went for the camera, thinking it likely June would have wriggled out of his arms before I got back. But when I returned, they were still at it.

They have trouble sometimes, not being envious, or touchy with each other, but often, they do see face to face and I love glimpsing those moments.

Tuesday Afternoon: Love Suffers Long

Noah was at the computer making Valentines for his classmates. Over the weekend, he had started this project, lost all his work somehow and became too upset to continue. Today we were starting over. I was sitting on the study floor reading a book to June, staying close by Noah so I could trouble-shoot if need be. June walked away and returned with Duckie’s Splash (http://www.amazon.com/Duckies-Splash-Frances-Barry/dp/0763628972).
We’ve had this book out of the library for four weeks. I have read it so many times June has it memorized. When I read it, she recites the words along with me. Sometimes I think I can’t possibly read it again without going crazy. “Hear again Duckie Splash?” she asked.

And I read it six times.

Wednesday Morning: Love Rejoices in the Truth

June woke to nurse at 5:50 a.m. on the day before Valentine’s Day. I was hoping to get back to sleep after she did, but I couldn’t. I lay awake listening to the sounds of freezing rain on the windows and cars driving on the wet roads outside.

An ice storm the day before had slicked the roads. It took Beth about twice as long as usual to get home from Baltimore; she saw some scary-looking accidents on the way and got home just in time to help put the kids to bed. Now I was hoping for safe driving conditions for her fourth and final trek to Baltimore. Meanwhile, I tried to plan three different days in my mind. Would school open on schedule, late or not at all? How could I best spend each potential day? I’d planned some Valentine’s-related errands for the morning. It would be easiest to run them without Noah, since I was intending to buy his present. Still, he’d been quite pleasant and well behaved the day before. Another day with him home could be cozy affair. Maybe we could make cookies with the dried cherries we’d bought at the co-op the day before. I would just have to figure out a way to trick him about the present while we were out. It was the late opening that would pose the trickiest choice. Shop with Noah or without? If June and I didn’t leave until his bus came around 10:30, she would surely fall asleep in the stroller and I might miss my chance to work in the afternoon. And if we waited until after her afternoon nap, she might sleep too late and we’d miss our chance to go shopping at all.

Noah came to fetch Beth at 6:35. “It’s time for van,” he announced. In the mornings they are pretending to take a long road trip across the Americas in a van. He consults his atlas to select their destinations. That day it was Brazil. She got up and checked her iPhone while she was in his room. “Woo hoo! Two more hours!” I heard him yell.

Okay, a two-hour delay it was. That was the truth. Now I had to find a way to rejoice in it. I got up and went outside for the paper. The walk was slick and I slipped and almost fell. The grass was crunchy with ice and the dogwood was covered with little pearls of half-frozen water. I went back inside, made breakfast for myself and for June, gave her a bath and started a load of laundry. I decided to take Noah to the grocery store before his bus came. I was going to buy candy. I could either tell him the truth, that it was a present for him to share with June and try to generate some excitement about knowing a secret and not telling, or I could tell him it was for Beth and surprise him tomorrow with the fact that it was really for him. I decided he’d enjoy the surprise more so I settled on that plan.

Noah was unusually agreeable about taking a walk in the cold rain. He even submitted to wearing gloves and keeping the hood of his coat on his head. On the way, he slid on the icy patches of the sideway and he delighted in spotting and snapping off the icicles from cars, bushes, and the cart corral of the shopping center parking lot. He left a trail of them behind himself, so we could find our way home, he said.

The Safeway was like a fairy palace of pink, red and silver balloons. They were floating everywhere, more than I would have imagined could fit in the store. One checkout aisle had a bower of wire covered with red and white gauze and was marked “Cupid’s Lane.” “Wow!” Noah said when he caught his first glimpse of the store’s interior. He wanted to buy balloons, and some flowers, too, but I said no, and he accepted it.

We went over the candy display. I picked up a Whitman’s sampler. “Hey, I need to get something for Beth,” he said. It took him a long time to pick out just the right bag of chocolate hearts, but he finally settled on one. In the card aisle, he had an even harder time. He wanted to get cards for Beth and June. His first pick for Beth was addressed to “My Better Half,” and I explained it was more for boyfriends and girlfriends, or spouses. He finally chose one with a bouquet of roses on it that said, “Together” on the front and “I love being ‘us’ with you” inside. I decided the sentiment was appropriate even if it was probably intended for a romantic partner. (I’d just grabbed one that started “Let’s get naked” out of his hands, so I wanted to get out of the card aisle as soon as possible.) For June he got a card with a winged pig carrying a bow and arrow, marked “Cupig.” This made him laugh for a long time, once I explained it. Once we’d made our purchases, we ducked into Starbucks where I got a mocha and he and June got some vanilla milk and we split a vanilla cupcake three ways. We got home just in time for the bus. While we waited for it we pretended we were in outer space, the passing cars were asteroids and the rain was a shower of meteors.

It’s amazing how fun a walk in the freezing rain can be when your heart is open to the joy of it.

Thursday Morning: Love’s the Greatest Beauty

At 6:37 a.m. on Valentine’s Day, Noah stood in the doorway of our room, wearing his cloud pajamas. “It is time for presents,” he intoned in a solemn voice. We made him eat breakfast, feed the cats, brush his teeth and get dressed first, but then we opened our cards and presents. We now have three kinds of candy and a collection of roasted garlic products (crackers, mustard, onion jam and salad dressing). Garlic is a passion of Beth’s. I have the new Stephen King book to read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duma_Key). Horror is a passion of mine. Good presents, but of course, we already had the greatest one of all.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Holidays

The Sea-Side for Easter

Friday the 13th

A Visit With Saint Nicholas

Tag, You’re It, Part 2: Christmas is Coming

Let Freedom Ring

Out of the Haunted House

Trick or Treat, Postscript

Trick or Treat

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

Love Is