A Prayer Answered.

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It’s been a few good months now since I’ve decided to get serious about paving my way to an illustration career. And being that those few months have conveniently been the ones succeeding the birth of our third mouth to feed, it hasn’t been easy. Though it’s been very exciting.

Rest assured, though, we haven’t let this incredible weather go to waste. Not after the winter we’ve had… though blogwise, I know I haven’t had much to show for it. We have a neighbor down the street who’s pregnant with her second child -- a girl due this fall, who will be the lucky little sister of a boy who was born in February two years ago -- much like my little brood! Much as I love talking to her about all of the family-life things we have in common, I realize that because of our common timeline, I have a hard time keeping my big mouth shut about just how awful that first winter had been on the three of us. It really had been one of the most difficult experiences of my life -- and one that took me by complete surprise and hit me like a speeding train… especially because I enjoyed my pregnancy so much. It wasn’t because I was depressed postpartum, but just because no matter how hard I tried to enjoy being cooped up for so long with so much work and so much adjustment to cope with, with two kids who just never seemed to get a grip on happiness themselves, I couldn’t. Miserable, dead winter weather was easy to blame. It was hard to imagine that awful, drag-out season would ever end sometimes. By the end of it, I was banking on the hope that Spring would be our sanity's saving grace.

Needless to say, a little bit of sunshine was what all of us were more than ready for once March rolled around. And we didn’t take it for granted. Spring treated us well, but summer so far has been an unmatched source of joy for the little people in my life as well as for me. Of course it helps that Scarlett is learning how to enjoy life outside of my arms a little more each week, and that Matthew LOVES every aspect of being a big brother now. Loves, being a flagrant understatement. But the sunshine? That, in itself, has been an inimitable therapy in my life as their mom.

Though it’s hard sometimes to pry myself away from the sketchbook now that I’ve made drawing an everyday part of my life again, being outside with the kids is rightfully still the number one priority. Sometimes I think the only logical explanation for why I’ve been able to balance these two contradicting passions of mine -- drawing, which is a selfish indulgence that keeps me both out of the sunshine and temporarily uninvolved with my kids; and being outside with them, which allows me to focus on them completely -- is that God might have secretly answered a couple of prayers for sneaking a few extra hours in the day.

Illustration Friday: Launch

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In the mornings, Matthew wakes up early to watch me paint. It’s a new routine for us because it’s hung on the lower end of my priorities for so long. He steps quietly to my side in his bare feet and bed-head hair. I fold my arm around him as he tucks himself into me and lets me kiss his head. Then he grabs his paints and I hand him a piece of coldpress and together we wet the paper, talking about the happenings of yesterday and the people we met in our dreams.

By midmorning we have breakfast dishes in the sink and diapers in the pail and pajamas in the hamper. Books are out and blocks are tumbled across the living room floor. Mary, not being the early riser the rest of us are, makes her way out of bed looking like Russel Brand with blond hair from the way that she slept and joins the kids on the floor to play. Without missing a beat, Matthew tackles her to the ground with hugs and roars in the same rambunctious nature he’s been torturing the cat with all morning. Milo looks happy to escape at first, but decides against leaving. On second thought, he props himself on the top of the couch and watches everybody play, swishing his tail to the song of the 10:00 a.m. birds.

On the few days a week we don’t have errands to run, I revel in being able to hang out in our own front yard. The baby can sit in the grass now, happy just to chew on her own feet and watch the occasional butterfly zip past her head into the drying flowers. Matthew chases bumble bees with his butterfly net, stopping just short of getting stung all morning. He follows ants in their parades and pretends to aim for birds with an imaginary rifle, making the occasional deposit of caterpillars and rolly-polly bugs into my palm. He drops me off a couple of kisses on the way. Mary paints her nails and reads her books and talks to me about boys.

Our summer so far has not been full of adventure. It’s been plagued with strep throat and high fevers and sun-scorched flowers. It’s reeked too much of dish soap and laundry detergent and air conditioning run too long when all anyone would rather do is go outside and sweat. It’s been wrought with too many errands, weighed down by too many carseat buckles and a busted AC. Our easiest days have been some of the most exhausting of my life. The happiest I’ve felt has been in equal parts completely drained.

So on the days when we have little to do and nowhere to go and just each other for entertainment, these have become my favorite days of summer. Even without pool memberships and summer camp sign-ups and long hiking trips up nature trails happening four days a week, this summer has felt like one of the best I’ve ever had with my kids. One of the closest. One that we survive together on a day-to-day basis. Even though we aren’t even the only family on our street doing it, something about roasting hot dogs over a bonfire and a couple of beers while the sunset fizzles out behind the playing kids and the fireflies burn inside of their jars… feels like it belongs to us. It feels good to know that when all is said and done and this summer tucks itself away into the memory of their childhood experience, falling away from all of the temper tantrums and unending chores and things we couldn’t afford to do because we had too many mouths to feed and too little time in the day -- these are the parts they’ll hold onto. The parts with bare feet and fireflies. And painting them with Mommy.

At least I hope.

Illustration Friday: Swept

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Cruel as it is, I am convinced there is no sight more lethally adorable than handing an eager, high-spirited child a broom and watching as they battle it out with hopping dust bunnies half their size. Clearly these rascals have a healthy sense of humor. That, and reflexes evidently superior to broom-wielding children.


In the mornings and again in the afternoons Matthew and I collect our watering cans everyday, head to the faucet outside, and make our way around to all the plants in the yard. Matthew helps me out again later on when it’s time to come inside and cook, mash and store his sister’s baby food -- which is quickly growing into an almost daily occurrence around here, by the way. Along with learning how to feed the cat and fill the downstairs diaper supply when it gets low, which are chores he’s long-since learned to handle on his own, Matthew takes pride now in being the honorary recycling-can-puller every other Wednesday.

Mary’s become well schooled in laundering and putting away her own clothes this year, but this summer she becomes responsible for folding them too. She also empties the dish strainer twice a day, takes care of her fish, makes sure that Milo has water, vacuums and clears the table after dinner. For the past few weeks she’s shadowed me around the kitchen, interested in learning how to cook. This week Spencer gets her behind the blades of a lawn mower.

After years and years of patiently trying to teach Mary how to handle chores on her own without giving myself 3 messes to clean up afterward as a direct consequence -- I’ve learned that the key to successful chore administration is just letting them sidekick with me for a good while before passing down the torch.

Turns out, some of the very best one on one conversations I’ve ever had with my kids have been over the sprinkling of thirsty flowers with my three year old or the whisking of new sauces with my step-kid. I have a suspicion that much like the day Mary learned how to blow-dry her own hair or Matthew learned to wash his hands, this plan may prove to be a double-edges sword.

Illustration Friday: Shadows

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I’ve never been a big water-color gal, but after last week’s sketch (done up just that morning in some dollar-store watercolors the kids had lying around) turned out so gut-wrenchingly cute, I couldn’t resist taking a real shot at them this week. Good thing I had this awesome reference photo of my nieces and nephews to practice with. Could an ‘Aunt-Sheesha’ ask for a cooler brood of kids to paint, or what? I really tried to do that golden-halo-hair thing the girls have going on justice -- but honestly, I think I just love the hand-holding more than anything I could capture with color combinations and a paintbrush on this one.

*Real Shot, by the way, meaning that I splurged on a 4 dollar set of watercolors from Michaels on a gift card and finished in about an hour. Officially the best 4 dollars ever spent outside of Duncan Donuts.

Consider me a convert.

Stepping Stones Together: Final Review!

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One of Matthew's favorite activities is practicing random letters and numbers

on his (knock-off) dinosaur magna-doodle! :-P

(p.s. that is not a pear; it is a Q that had to make room for a nine.)

About a month before his third birthday, when Matthew started showing a real interest in learning to read, I signed the little guy up for the Stepping Stones Together reading program -- a program designed for parents to help get children reading, in some cases as early as three years of age. Five months later, we have officially completed the program!

The program familiarizes children, right from the start, with habits necessary to become strong readers for life -- it gets them using strategies like: predicting, then using picture clues and context to figure out text; then rereading and discussing to nurture what they’ve learned. It also uses repetitive phrases and high frequency words that make learning to read practically a walk in the park!

That’s really, hands down, my favorite feature of the program. The fact that it instills these habits and strategies so that they simply come naturally. For instance, because the child is relying mostly on memory early on (of what was read to them first, and of the repetitive rhythm of text), every sentence flows from their lips as they point to each word on the page. I love that this strategy familiarized Matthew with a strong fluency right out of the gate, and enabled him to tackle sentences without feeling intimidated by any number of words.

The program for us has been an incredible experience, and has taught Matthew in leaps and bounds. Though for us his age presented the occasional challenge. Even though Matthew fit the criteria for being ready (and excited!) to learn how to read: in hindsight, I don’t think he was always emotionally mature enough to take on some of the more challenging parts and stick with the them long enough to benefit from conquering the hurtle the way that an older child surely would. As a former nanny who spent many summer days teaching and reinforcing literary skills to children of three separate ages, I can tell you that this program is a must-have for kindergarteners (as the program is tailored especially well to that specific age), but that children both older and younger have a lot to gain from it as well.

While most days Matthew loved participating in the program, sometimes his willingness to participate definitely lagged, and I ended up having to kind of pull him through the best I could, putting an active effort into keeping him focused so as not to make him feel as though he were being forced to read theses books. Though in the end Matthew completed the program successfully and benefited from the experience, I think that a school-aged child would fare much, much better in this regard.

That being said, even on the days he wasn’t thrilled to participate, he knew what he was doing. With each and every story - and especially from one series of stories to the next - his comprehension escalated continually. When he was excited to read, his confidence really astounded. (And I do mean, astounded!)

When we went into the program, Matthew had a strong grasp of each alphabet letter and the sounds they made. He’d recently begun to ask for new letters after all 26 had been learned, which was when I started introducing him to letter combinations like sh, ch, and th -- beyond that, he’d never been given any instruction on how to read.

To date, Matthew has read fifty of the early reader books in the program. He isn’t confident enough yet to tackle a sentence completely on his own outside of the program steps -- but if given a sentence, he can virtually find any word inside of it, which tells me that it’s certainly an issue of confidence more than one of comprehension. There’s absolutely no doubt that this experience has been a priceless addition to our home pre-schooling activities, and that (with a total of 60 books at our disposal, even after completing the required number of stories for completion of the program) by the time Matthew hits kindergarten in two years, he’ll already be reading with the fluency and confidence of a very skilled reader.

I strongly encourage anyone with children to head over to the Stepping Stones Together website, and take a look at the program for yourself. It’s incredibly simple to begin, could not BE any more user-friendly, and is so affordable I swear you won’t believe it. After completing the program with so many unread books still at our disposal (stored neatly online, no less - so they aren’t taking up space in a closet somewhere) I can tell you, this is the kind of deal you’ll want to brag about.

And if you do give it a try, I’d personally love to hear about the experience - so let me know!

Kicking Her Out

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To get the most space out of our relatively small house as we could, when I was pregnant with Scarlett last year, we finished the basement and turned the whole den area down there into a new master bedroom. It was easily three times the size of our old bedroom, so we were really excited. One of the things I was personally most excited about was the fact that our new daughter’s bassinet would fit spaciously beside our bed for her first few weeks of life, without taking up half the room. Nightly newborn feedings would be such a breeze, I almost welcomed them!

And for the first time, like ever, I was right. I could be up to feed her at the first sign of a whimper, which was wonderful for Spencer who couldn’t afford to lose sleep with the demanding new job he’d just started. And I never even had to climb out of bed to get her; which made lying her down again after she’d fallen back to sleep just that much easier.

It was so easy, in fact, that the first few weeks of her life effortlessly unraveled into the first few months of it. Before we knew it, she was eight months old, and completely taking over our bedroom. Everything about our respective bedtime and morning routines revolved solely around getting her to sleep or keeping her there. We stopped being able to talk at night, because we didn’t want to wake her. Spencer - who has to get up at 3:00 a.m. for work - was absolutely not allowed to get dressed with anything but the bedside touch lamp on at it’s lowest possible setting, so as not to wake her. On the weekends we couldn’t watch movies without the remote in hand so that we could yo-yo the volume between being up just loud enough to catch the gist of most of the dialogue -- and then QUICKLY back down again in anticipation of any sudden, loud noise.

We wanted her in her own room… her very pretty own room that we put a lot of effort (not to mention money) into preparing just right for her during the nutso-nesting phase of my pregnancy…But there were a million mounting obstacles getting in the way of us making the actual transition. At this point, the books all warned, the transition was going to be a difficult one. A necessary evil for any family that didn’t plan to co-sleep. Her routine is so set at sleeping where she does that moving her now would spell certain disaster. Disheartening news to the mom of an eight month old who still wakes up at least twice in the night to eat. Luckily, they warned, it shouldn’t take much more than a week of crying-it-out for the new routine to torture her into submission. Yeah… lucky.

I kept thinking that I’d wait until she started sleeping through the night. With her bedroom being on a separate floor than ours, I didn’t want her to wake up hungry and have to scale a flight of stairs just to feed her. And I definitely didn’t want to have to make her adjust to being weaned off of night feedings at the same time I was making her deal with being banned from the only the place she’s ever slept at night. When she showed no signs of even beginning to sleep through the night I did a little research and learned that as long as it continues to be available, children might NEVER wean themselves from waking to eat in the middle of the night. NEVER. In fact toddlers who co-sleep with their parents may continue to wake up for nightly boob-age well into the age of FOUR.

Pardon my French, but F that.

Finally, two nights ago, it came down to an issue of safety. An issue I just couldn’t dodge this time. I woke up in the morning to the sight of her trying to pull her way over the edge of the bassinet, onto our bed. It was a primitive effort, but one that we couldn’t afford her the opportunity to improve on. Co-sleeping to us is not an option -- not only is it something that sounds nightmarishly suck-ish…but Mary has a friend who’s mother accidentally suffocated her own child co-sleeping. It’s just not happening around these parts -- not even at the consequence of crying-it-out in her own crib.

So last night was the night.
I couldn’t eat at dinnertime. I couldn’t listen to any of the work jargon Spencer was talking to me about. I just kept listening as she whimpered in her crib, then began to fall asleep, then woke back up to cry, then quieted down again… etc. etc. etc. all through dinner. She cried for ten minutes while we put Matthew to bed, so we went in to rock her a little. Then she cried for ten more minutes while we cleared the table and did the dishes. So we went in to rock her again. For the next twenty minutes after that, Spencer and I sat at the dinner table, waiting tolerantly for her to fall asleep on her own, fully expecting this to be just the first step in a very long process that would take place that night. We listened attentively to her cry off and on: first loudly and angrily, then softly and sadly; then almost as if she were just humming herself to sleep -- until finally, she was out.

We went to bed. And out she stayed for ten hours.

Let me repeat that for you: TEN MOTHER EFFING HOURS.

I of course woke up, like clockwork, the way that my body has become fully accustomed to: first at 1:00 a.m.
Then again at 2:00.
Then again at 3:30 with Spencer.
Each time staying up to listen for even the slightest suggestion of discomfort or restlessness from upstairs.
Spencer woke up to check on her. I woke up to check on her. She never budged an inch from the original position she’d fallen asleep in.

Spencer got dressed with every light in the bedroom on -- just because he could. We even listened to music, and get this: TALKED, before he left for work. I went back to bed and woke up at my own leisure around 6:00 without having to sneak around the bassinet like there were mines hidden in the mattress springs of the bed or floorboards of the stairs. I drank my coffee in blissful silence. Even made it outside to water the garden.

I woke my stretching, smiling girl up at 7:00 a.m., fed her as if she’d never missed a meal, changed her diaper, and then laid her back to bed. And this time, when I laid her in her crib, she didn’t make a sound before drifting back to sleep. Not a single peep of protest. I walked out of her room, I flicked her light, and I shut her door.

And that shit felt good.

Big Boys Don't Take Naps

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At least... they try not to.