And February Was So Long That It Lasted Into March: A Photo Essay

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Steph

And February was so long that it lasted into March
And found us walking a path alone together.
You stopped and pointed and you said, “That’s a crocus,”
And I said, “What’s a crocus?” and you said, “It’s a flower,”
I tried to remember, but I said, “What’s a flower?”

From “February,” by Dar Williams
http://www.poplyrics.net/waiguo/darwilliams/006.htm

So we had this…weather yesterday I don’t even want to talk about, but here are some pictures. Noah measured seven and a half inches on the picnic table out back, the most accumulation we’ve had at once in June’s life. Our crocuses are buried.

Beth took a personal day. Sasha came over at ten and stayed most of the day. Beth took them sledding on the hill behind the hospital. (Noah’s verdict: “Going down that super steep hill really rocked.”) I took an almost two hour walk with June. She alternated riding in her sled and stomping along in her boots and only did a full face plant into the white stuff once. Beth and June were out playing in the yard until well after dark. Hot chocolate and homemade potato-parsnip soup and chocolate chip cookies were made. Noah’s back in school after a two-hour delay this morning. It’s frigid today, 14 degrees right now so I don’t expect much to melt right away.

On Sunday, in anticipation of the storm, Beth bought me some yellow daffodils (my favorite flower) to cheer me up. I’m making spaghetti with asparagus for dinner tonight. Seventeen days until spring…

Good Sledding

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Steph

The second snow day is always harder than the first one. I considered this fact this morning as I stumbled out of the bedroom at 6:40, bound for the bathroom, and Beth said, “School’s cancelled again.” It wasn’t exactly unexpected. An ice storm had been predicted, ice on top of the inch of snow that cancelled school yesterday. Since Monday was a teacher grading and planning day (there’s one at the end of every marking period), this was Noah’s third consecutive day off school and my third day of trying to figure out how to entertain both kids all day.

Tuesday was pretty easy. Both kids were thrilled to see our first significant snowfall since last winter. “There’s snow on the ground today!” June kept saying and running to the windows to check and make sure it was still there. We played in the yard. Noah and I pulled June around in her sled and I pushed her down the hill over and over. We made snowballs and threw them at the fence. (Noah devised a complicated scoring system depending on where they landed. He had some trouble deciding if the one that soared over the fence counted as landing between the pillars and over the crossbar, the prime target. In the end, he decided it did. “Well, it did go over the bar,” he reasoned.) We went to the library’s Circle Time where Noah was good-natured about doing the hoky-poky and playing Ring Around the Rosie with a bunch of toddlers, preschoolers and their out-of-school older siblings. Then we walked home in the snow. After Mr. Rogers, lunch and a nap, June was eager to go outside and play in the snow all over again, so Noah watched her while I shoveled as much of the walk as I could. It had gotten packed down and heavy in places so I only managed the front sidewalk. (We have a corner lot.) Then we came in and had hot chocolate. In between, I clipped newsletters, folded laundry and made squash risotto for dinner. The only thing I hoped to do and didn’t was make cookies.

This morning when I went outside for the paper (which had not arrived), I found the yard slick with ice. I wondered how feasible outside play would be, but I decided to give it a try. June’s music class was cancelled so we had nowhere to go. Also, June was running around the house beside herself with excitement that there was still snow on the ground and wanting to know when she could go outside. I gave her a bath, then unloaded the dishwasher and did the breakfast dishes while I waited for her hair to dry. This was a nearly unbearable delay for June, who kept letting me know she was ready to “go outside and take a walk in the snow.” I decided a walk was a good idea. It would be pretty down by the creek. It always is after an ice storm. June also expressed interest in riding in her sled instead of the stroller. If the sidewalks were unshoveled, as the path by the creek surely would be, it might actually be easier, I thought.

I took a peek down the block. Some of our neighbors had managed to shovel, but mostly I saw ice. As I fetched June’s sled and tried to chip the ice off it, the kids had fun walking around in the yard, delighting in its new texture and stomping their boots to crack the ice and sink into the snow underneath. I ran back inside for a towel so June wouldn’t be sitting directly on the ice I couldn’t remove from the sled and off we went. I pulled, June rode and Noah alternately darted ahead and fell behind. He had a yellow plastic baseball bat with which he was shattering the ice on every surface that captured his attention.

We didn’t make it very far down the creek path. We kept finding fun places to play, like the stand of bamboo weighted down with ice and leaning over the path to form a green, leafy cave. Then Noah found a leaf frozen into a chunk of ice and decided it was the fossil of an ancient plant. For a while after that we were archaeologists excavating gemstones (creek rocks) from the ice. We found a snowman someone must have made yesterday and Noah donated his leaf-in-ice, which was now a feathered hat for it. We threw rocks into the creek. Landing in open water was good if the splash was big enough; cracking the thin ice rimming the creek was better. I ran down the path in short bursts, pulling the sled while June called out for me to go “faster and faster.” Around 9:45 I declared it was time to turn around and head home, much to both kids’ dismay. It’s always hard to pick the going-home time that won’t result in chilled and tired kids whining all the way and I thought this was it.

As we neared home, we passed a man walking down the cleared street in the opposite direction. He wanted to know if was very slippery on the sidewalk. I nodded. “Good sledding,” I replied. On getting back inside the house, June and I watched Sesame Street. Noah stayed outside whacking ice with the bat for another ten minutes before joining us. I made hot chocolate for everyone again. Noah passed the rest of the morning playing on one computer while June and I looked at photo albums on the other one. Then Noah started whining because he was having trouble with the animation on the Power Point presentation about the evolution of language that he’s working on for a school project so I suggested he break for lunch.

After lunch I was trying to sneak in a little work time while the kids played in the living room, but on hearing both of them screaming, I came in and scooped June up without asking either of them what had happened. “It sounds like nap time to me,” I told her. She wailed even louder, but after a story and a brief cuddle, she was sound asleep. I read Noah part of a chapter of Me and My Little Brain and left him to finish it on his own. Noah reads a few years above grade level, but he’s always preferred adults to read to him. We have a new system for reading now in which he reads ten pages of each chapter on his own. Yesterday, he got so engrossed he went ahead and read an entire extra chapter on his own.

After nap I’d hoped to play outside again or maybe shovel part of the sidewalk I hadn’t done yesterday, but a cold rain was falling so I just cleared the parts of the front sidewalk that had iced over again. (Beth salted the walk before leaving for work and that helped a little.) I went back inside. The kids had started fighting again in the five minutes I’d been outside.

“Who wants to make cookies?” I asked. This was my ace in the hole, but Noah was uninterested. June wanted to help, though, so she sat on the kitchen floor and mixed the dough for Lebanese sesame seed biscuits and then stacked dominos into towers while I rolled the balls of dough into strips, twisted them into spirals, glazed them with milk and sprinkled them with seeds.

Around 5:15, June was asking to “go and take a walk on the ice.” I told her it was raining and cold and “yucky” outside. “You don’t want to go out there,” I said.

“Is it really, really yucky?” she asked, skeptically. I promised she could play outside again tomorrow. I don’t think it will all melt by then. I hope not. When the sun went down this afternoon, it stained our white yard all pink. It looked like strawberry yogurt, or frosting on a birthday cake. We really don’t see that particular sight often enough.

I do hope there’s school tomorrow, though. The kids are getting on each other’s nerves and I’d welcome a return to our normal routine. It hasn’t been all rough sledding, though. Some of it was pretty good.

44 Centimeters – Postscript

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Steph

Shortly after we got completely cleaned up from the ice storm another one was predicted, but instead we got four and a half inches of fluffy, wet snow, perfect snowman snow. It fell on a Sunday so Beth got a chance to play with Noah in it and construct their snow-Beth (his idea) after we all took a walk down by the creek. While they worked on it, I nursed June to warm her up from our walk, and then made grilled cheese, soup and hot chocolate for everyone else. Later on, Noah and Beth made oatmeal cookies. I fully expected a snow day on Monday, but we got off with a two-hour delay. That morning before school, Noah and I repaired the melting snow-woman, removing the glasses and giving her long hair made of sticks, turning it into a snow-Steph. Noah sledded a bit and I dragged a beaming June around the yard in circles in the little pink sled. Winter does have its pleasures, but two days later when June and I were on our way to pick Noah up at school, I glanced at the path by the creek and saw a forest of purple crocuses, growing where there had been none the day before. I was so happy I gasped out loud.

44 Centimeters, or Back to Normal

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Steph

Miracle of miracles, the bus came and Noah got on it, with his backpack full of overdue valentines and his feet protected from the slush only by a pair of canvas sneakers. It was a gym day so he needed the sneakers and we decided if we sent him in boots carrying his sneakers it would be the last we’d see of either the boots or the sneakers. He’s like that. Already this year he has lost his lunch box more times than I can count and his winter coat as well. We got the coat back from the lost and found, but not before we’d bought him a new one. He drives his kindergarten teacher to distraction losing his crayons. One recent morning he lost his sock between getting it out of his sock drawer and getting it onto his foot. I have to accept some genetic blame for this. I am much the same way.

A couple hours after Noah left, June and I needed to get on our own bus, headed downtown to the pediatrician to get her head measured. At her nine-month appointment, the doctor noticed her soft spot had closed early and asked us to come by in mid-February to make sure her skull was growing properly. This had created a subtle but steady undercurrent of worry for me ever since. Beth researched early fontanel closure on the Internet and came back with worst-case scenarios of brain damage and brain surgery. Even though I knew chances were she’d be fine, believed it even, throughout January and February, every now and then I kissed the top of June’s head, feeling the softness of her baby-fine strawberry blonde hair and the warmth of her skull beneath my lips and I hoped no-one would have to cut it open.

We were ready early because instead of taking her usual hour-plus morning nap, June slept only twenty minutes, then drowsed for another ten while I held her and sang and tried to get her back to sleep. Once it was clear neither of us was getting any more sleep, I got up and folded some laundry. Then we went outside and I tried to shovel the sidewalk. It’s a point of honor with Beth (both of us really) to keep the walks clear in inclement weather, and while she got the walk in front of the house finished before everything froze solid, we didn’t get to the walk on the side of the house in time and it was covered in thick ice for a week. In the warmer weather we’d had for the past twenty-four hours, it had begun to thaw. I chipped away at it for ten minutes, clearing less than a quarter of it. By then my arms were sore and June (parked in the stroller next to me) was whining and it was almost time to catch the bus so I called it quits, resolving to finish the next day after it got softer. I was pleased to see even that short stretch of clear cement. It seemed like a step in the right direction, back toward normalcy.

At the pediatrician, the nurse called June’s name only twenty minutes after our appointment time. I am so used to marathon waits there I didn’t even hear her the first time and she had to call again. Once we were settled in the examination room, she asked why we were there and I said for a head measurement. The nurse called out to another nurse outside the room, asking if she should do it or wait for the doctor. The second nurse told the first one, rather sharply, that Dr. Ariza would do it. I wasn’t surprised. Dr. Ariza had been quite insistent at June’s nine-month appointment that the head measurement was to be done by a doctor. We waited another ten minutes for Dr. Ariza. I held June and read her an assortment of board books that were lying around. When the doctor came in, she asked how June was doing. I reported she’d learned to crawl since her last appointment and was standing unassisted. She nodded approvingly. I mentioned she’d had a cold for almost two months and I thought she might have an ear infection. She said she’d take a look in her ears after she measured her head. She looked around for a tape measure, couldn’t find one, left and came back. Then she wrapped it around June’s head. It looked like a crown or a garland, I told myself, not like the bearer of bad news. June’s blue eyes peeked out from underneath, alert and curious about the proceedings.

“Forty four centimeters,” Dr. Ariza said. She flipped back through June’s chart. “It was forty three last time.” She seemed pleased. Then she got out the growth chart to plot the number. “How old is she?” she asked.

“Eleven months in three days,” I answered.

Dr. Ariza made a little dot on the chart. “Twenty-fifth percentile for eleven months,” she announced. Even better news. At nine months, she’d been between the fifth and tenth percentile. I asked if wanted to get her weight and length to put it in context, but she said it wasn’t necessary, that the growth and the jump in percentiles was good enough. “She’s never going to have a big head,” Dr. Ariza predicted, and she cautioned that she still wants to monitor her head growth, but for now everything seems fine. She checked June’s lungs and ears and found both clear. Then she flashed a flashlight into her mouth and found two new teeth, her third and fourth, the top front ones, just poking through. I could just barely see a sliver of white on each gum in the beam of light. “That’s probably what’s been bothering her,” she said and recommended Tylenol for the pain. Meanwhile, she ran through the symptoms of intracranial pressure, just in case, and soon we were on our way home. June was in the front pack, where she’s been feeling heavy recently, but walking to the Metro, she felt lighter than she had on the trip out.

After a couple hours at home, we headed over to Noah’s school to pick him up from his after-school science class. I trudged through the slush on the path through woods, his boots swinging in one hand, June strapped to my chest, and observed the water level in the creek. It looked higher than usual but not too high. The snow was melting slowly, a good thing since it meant the basement was probably in no danger of flooding.

We waited in the lobby for the five, six and seven-year-old scientists to emerge. Noah always straggles out toward the back the pack and today was no different. I noticed he was only wearing one sneaker.

He flashed me a smile when he saw me. “We made glue!” he announced. I let him chatter on excitedly for a few minutes without mentioning his shoe. He showed me a construction paper spider with one leg and seven white dots where other legs had been. Apparently, the Hands-On Science program is not going to be a threat to Elmer’s any time soon.

Finally, I said. “Noah, you’re only wearing one shoe.”

He looked down and laughed. “I have one shoe and the spider has one leg. If it had eight legs, I’d have eight shoes!”

“Hmm.” I said. “Noah, where do you think your other shoe is?”

He considered the question and answered, “Probably in the science room.” I had him take me back there and sure enough, under one of the low tables was his size 13 blue Converse low top with the orange tongue. He climbed under the table to get it.

“Don’t put it on,” I said. “We’re going to put on your boots.” Back in the lobby I helped him into his boots and we headed home.

Later that evening, after we ate dinner and everyone had cuddled on the couch watching The Electric Company (Noah’s new favorite DVD choice) and after Noah was in bed, I nursed June to sleep on our bed. She slept snuggled up against Beth, who was reading The New Yorker. I lay there watching them, thinking about the exuberance of small children in school doing experiments, neatly shoveled walks and my daughter’s growing head. I wondered what dreams fit in forty-four centimeters.

Snow Day – Postscript

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Steph

It turned out that snow day was just the beginning, a warning shot across the bow. Last week we had an ice storm, which led to an early dismissal and three snow days. June was still sick and not sleeping any better. The less said about the week the better, though by the end I wasn’t keeping track or caring how much time Noah spent on the computer. Playing outside was a bit of a challenge due to the slippery ice. Noah fell and cut his chin just walking around the yard and I knocked down a section of our backyard fence in a sledding mishap. Beth took Noah to work one day to get him out of the house. We baked a lot. Noah and I made molasses cookies, triple fudge brownies, carrot cake, and chocolate-peppermint chocolate chip cookies over the course of a week. Over the weekend, Noah and Beth made pancakes and biscuits. We haven’t been able to get the car out of our ice-rink of a driveway for a week so we’ve been making daily trips for groceries on the bus for the past few days. Today is President’s Day and school is supposed to start back up tomorrow, but I’m not believing it until I see Noah get on that bus.

Snow Day

Posted on February 7, 2007 by Steph

June’s first nursing of the day was at 12:30 a.m. After she was asleep again, I went to the bathroom and looked out the window. Snow was falling heavily in the light of the streetlight. By the next nursing, at 2:30 a.m., it had stopped. It wasn’t much, just about an inch, and at 3:30 and 4:30, no more seemed to have fallen. There’s been plenty of time to clear it away, I thought. Maybe there won’t be a snow day. Just before 6:00 a.m., June woke me for the last time and after she nursed, I considered getting up and turning on the radio to check for school closings, but Beth beat me to it. She came back into the bedroom and reported, “Snow day.”

I groaned. “Where I come from” (she comes from West Virginia) “we’d call this a dusting,” she said. “It wouldn’t close school.” She started get dressed to shovel the walk. She had her gallbladder out nine days ago. I really shouldn’t have let her do it by herself, but I was wrecked from my night with June and didn’t have the energy to argue with her about it. Noah was up before she made it out the door, so she got him into his snow pants and coat and took him with her. He, too, likes to shovel, and even more, to sprinkle salt on the sidewalk. As he slept through it the only other time shoveling and salting has been called for this winter, he was delighted.

Beth usually gets Noah ready for school and takes him to the bus stop before getting on her own bus, but today this was unnecessary, so she left earlier than usual, around 8:00 a.m. It would be ten and a half hours before she returned. The last time it snowed, about two weeks ago, was a teacher in-service day at Noah’s school. Surrounding counties closed schools, but Montgomery schools didn’t need to because they were already closed. We had a lovely, almost charmed day. Noah was well behaved; June in good spirits. Her naps were well timed. I got to spend some rare one-on-one time with Noah. We watched Sesame St. together, a bit of a nostalgic treat, since he mostly watches television aimed at older kids now. Later the three of us had a blast sledding in the yard, Noah cruising down the icy slope on his orange plastic sled, me towing June around the yard in her little pink one. I made lasagna for dinner and a chocolate cake from scratch, with Noah’s help. I thought, why is it I dread snow days so much? This would have been a fine one. All I forgot to do to was make him hot chocolate. I believe providing hot chocolate after sledding to be one of the solemn duties of motherhood.

Lying in bed and snuggling with June while Beth and Noah cleared the walk, I strove to recapture the spirit of that day. I tried to will myself into a good attitude. We’d have fun. I’d remember the hot chocolate. I got up.

“What should I do?” Noah’s whining started moments after Beth walked out the door, free as a bird. Okay, that’s not fair. She was probably in pain from overdoing it with the shovel and headed for a long, stressful day at a job she doesn’t love. Still, I felt a stab of jealousy, which I suppressed. Good attitude! Fun! Hot chocolate!

“Go do your halfa-halfa,” I said. (Translation: play computer games. When Noah first started playing computer games he was limited to two fifteen-minute sessions a day, a limit we quickly abandoned when June was born. Still, remembering those half-of-a half-an-hour playtimes, he calls it halfa-halfa.) June was playing on the living room floor and I was down there with her reading the newspaper and occasionally looking up to comment on her play or hand her a new toy. It was a little too early for her first nap of the morning and I wanted her to sleep while Noah played on the computer, so I could lie down with her and get some rest. Given that, I probably should have waited to let him on the computer until we were ready to nap, but the chance to read the paper with interruptions from only one child was too tempting, so I sent him packing off to the study. Two hours later, when I came in with a freshly napped, changed and dressed baby, he was still there.

It was baby story hour at the library in a half hour. I recently resolved to do more free or cheap organized activities with June (i.e. take her somewhere other than the playground and Starbucks), admittedly more for my own sanity than her enrichment. This story hour doesn’t happen very often so I really wanted to go, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to drag Noah along to an event aimed at babies. I also wasn’t sure it was even happening, given our region’s tendency to panic at the sight of a few snowflakes. I decided to call the library. No one answered. It was only a few minutes after the library was supposed to open so maybe no one was answering the phones yet, but we needed to leave right away if we were going, and Noah was still in pajamas, so I decided to forget it.

“Halfa-halfa’s up,” I said. “Let’s go play in the yard.” We got Noah back into his snow pants, coat, hat and mittens, and June and I similarly bundled and ventured into the back yard. Noah dragged the sled up the slope and crept slowly down it. The snow was dry and powdery, useless for snowballs or snowmen, and just barely serviceable for sledding. He went down the hill a few more times, then bored of it. We took turns dragging June around the yard. She was tranquil, but not as enamored with it as the last time.

“Can we go inside?” Noah asked. I checked my watch. We’d been outside fifteen minutes. It had taken longer than that to get dressed.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I suggested, unwilling to let our outside time for the day consist of fifteen minutes of dispirited sledding. Talking him into this was a chore, but eventually we settled on a walk to the 7-Eleven with the promise of a treat. When we got home, I made the hot chocolate, and we watched a video. Afterwards we had lunch.

The afternoon dragged on. Noah whined, June got crankier and crankier, pulling at her ears occasionally, other times chewing on her fingers. Was it an ear infection or teething? She slept long enough for Noah and I to read a little and build a marble run out of duplos, but he spent a lot of time watching television, playing computer games and listening to a cd of fairy stories while I tried to calm his increasingly hysterical sister. His total media time for the day was a shocking five hours, forty minutes. We don’t always manage to keep it to our goal of two hours a day, but this was a new high (or low). I ditched my planned dinner menu of homemade asparagus soup and instead heated up vegetarian chicken patties and made some spaghetti and a salad. After dinner, Beth and I discussed whether I should take June to the walk-in hours at the pediatrician the next morning to see if she had an ear infection. We decided to see how she slept and decide in the morning.

Then right before bedtime, we had a bittersweet moment. As I tried to coax June into eating a little, Noah sang and danced around the dining room behind the high chair. She stood up in the chair and swiveled around to watch him, her face shining with adoration. This is how she looks at him as a matter of course, but I realized she had barely smiled all day.

I went to bed soon after Noah did, leaving Beth to work at the computer. June did not nurse to sleep as expected, so I turned out the light, pulled her small body close to mine and hoped for sleep. I am thinking spring.