A Long Overdue Letter to Someone Other Than The Baby.

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Dear Matthew Spencer and Mary Morgan Stucky,

Matthew, I remember sitting down to write the first letter to you I ever addressed with your name, and thinking that this was something I wanted to remember forever. Every month leading up to that of your birth, I could hardly wait to address your letters with a name that belonged specifically to you. Up until then it was always a very heartfelt, but arbitrary “Dear baby,”. I hated having to write something so impersonal to the very individual who was supposed to be my firstborn son. It only brought to my attention more that at the end of the day, as much as I felt like I loved you, I really didn’t even know you yet. And that made me worry that maybe what I was feeling for you wasn’t really love at all. Maybe it was just excitement. Maybe once you were born, I thought, and you had a name, all of it would feel more authentic, and then I would know that what I was loving was truly you and not just the idea of having a child.

So on the afternoon that you arrived home from the hospital, just days after your name was branded on the certificate of your birth, and moments after you’d fallen asleep to the taste of my milk, I eagerly opened a journal to the first empty page I could find, and I very readily wrote the header, “Dear Matthew Spencer,” as if I had such an epic tale to tell you that I couldn’t even wait to begin.

But then I stopped. I tapped the book with my pen, and I looked at you for inspiration. And I had nothing.

For months, I would write pages upon pages to you, going on and on and ON at the pen about how I couldn’t wait for you to be here so that I could finally see who it was I’d been speaking to all of these months through the terms of endearment I put on pages like the blank one in front of me that day. But instead of feeling like I knew you more now that you were here, I only felt like I knew you so much less. I realized that when I was pregnant with you, it was like you were 9/10ths imaginary, and that made writing to you - a baby - somehow less absurd. There were bits and pieces of evidence that you existed, but in order to write to you, I had to believe that you were there, and imagine who you were. Once you were real, I couldn’t do that anymore.

I couldn’t get past the idea that you were a baby, and that essentially, you were a stranger.

In true female form, I’ve always written to sort through my thoughts. But honestly, I didn’t want you to know how badly in need of sorting my thoughts about you were. I half expected motherhood to come with some vast understanding of the Universe or something. That was always what people were saying, weren’t they? “Oh, yesterday I had my baby, and suddenly, it was like I’d found the meaning of life!” You were delightful and all, (Oh God, so delightful!) but when I looked at you on the day you were born and then again that day leaning over my journal, I felt more confused than ever about big picture questions like that. You didn’t bring with you any honorary enlightenment. Instead, it felt like the only thing you brought with you into my world was a disheveled mess of nervousness and uncertainty.

As hard as I tried to write the kind of letters to you I always dreamed of putting in your hands someday, I couldn’t find my voice. Whatever voice it was that I did have at the time was certainly not the kind you always imagine, radiating motherly wisdom and inimitable council.

You might notice that when Scarlett was born, I had no such hang-ups. I knew from the charming, effortless way that loving you unfolded itself onto my life like a dearly missed blanket from home -- that something extraordinary and perfect was waiting for me at the other end of her infancy. It didn’t matter to me anymore that I didn’t know exactly who she was from the moment I first started loving her. If she was anything like either of you, she was bound to be magnificent beyond anything I could have understood before then anyway.

For so long, I relished the opportunity to write as effortlessly to her as I’d always longed to be able to write to you, but couldn’t. In a way, it was almost like I was writing to all of you through the letters I wrote to her, because so much of the love that I have for all of you: you guys and your father, make the love I have for Scarlett what it is. Without you guys, I wouldn’t understand it the way that I do now. It’s like I was a rookie at love when I first met both of you, whereas now, because of you, I am a veteran. I may not know all there is to know about being the perfect mom, but mark my words, I know how to love you.

I wanted to remember how hard it was to write to you that day, Matthew, because I knew that that would change. I knew that someday I’d know every in and out of your personality; from the preeminent way to still your deepest fears, to your favorite color sprinkle to put on ice cream. And I loved the idea of being able to juxtaposition that kind of intense familiarity with where we started -- a moment in time when the love I had for you, however real, was so modest that it preceded even my ability to describe how or why it even existed. Being elbow deep into the lessons I was about step-motherhood (and all of the vast panic that that entails) I took immense solace in that.

Someday, you guys wouldn’t bewilder and overawe me so much. Someday, the idea of confidently parenting you wouldn’t feel like some far off ambition. Someday, I’d be a mother who could write to you about love, and impart wisdom unto you in relation to every facet of the subject. Today, I feel like that mother.

I’ve spent the past year of my life writing letters your baby sister, recording the firsts of her life and lacing every utterance to her with words of love and adulation. The first year just flies by so fast. But in that time you guys did a lot of growing, yourselves.

Matthew, you learned to pedal a bike and swim independently with a pair of water-wings over the summer. You developed an interest in farming (everything from modern-day cowboys to learning the ins and outs of growing crops and raising animals to utilize for food) and space. Your crowd of friends rivals that of your very popular eleven year old sister already, and you’ve already been caught trying to kiss a girl twice your age, you told me was your girlfriend. In fact some of Mary’s younger friends come to the door now, asking for you! (Boy are we in trouble.) You know how to roll the garbage can up from the curb after trash day, how to dress yourself, and how to feed the cat without spilling food from the bowl. You even helped me to rake up the leaves you jumped in this fall. You’ve read a whole slew of books at this point, and you even have a favorite author: Mo Willems. You memorized your address, your birthday, and how to respond in any number of emergency situations, including a house fire, getting lost, or coming face to face with Stranger Danger. You still like to fall asleep to music playing (although now, it’s country music or classic rock radio as apposed to a Mozart lullaby) and you’ve been binky-free for more than six months! Your number one favorite movie of all time is Tangled right now, and your biggest fear is a zombie invasion. Also, you peed outside for the first time, and you LOVED it.

Mary, you’ve experienced your very first taste of a romantic relationship with a real, live, idiot boy this year! Who you “broke up” with just two weeks later… (but then continue to talk about all the time with your friends). You ventured into a new school this fall and, brave as you are, took to it like a fish to water, and are trying your hand at cheerleading this term. You also went to your first school dance, and last week your aunt and I took you to get a second piercing in your ears. Your favorite author is Lauren Myracle. Your favorite movie trilogy is the Twilight saga. And though you have great taste in such a variety of real foods, your favorite is still Velveeta shells and cheese -- just like it was when you were six. (Do you remember when you had that project in first grade where you had to describe yourself and you butchered the spelling of macaroni and cheese in such an adorable way that Daddy and I hung it up on the wall of the kitchen? Not the refrigerator, but the actual wall! :-P ) You’re getting back into writing again and even keep a blog on a website called Figment.com, which is totally exciting for me, not just because you’ve always had a real gift for it (seriously, all of your teachers as far back as second grade have made note of it), but because our interest in writing is genuinely one of the ONLY personality traits that you and I can actually relate to each other about. Learning about you over that past year especially has been a little like learning a foreign language. FUCKING CONFUSING. But always really interesting, and definitely a lot of fun. I don’t have to tell you that the two of us are lucky to have the kind of relationship that we do, even if we had to go through a lot of un-fun crap to get to the comfortable place we’re at in this family… because I think we’re both pretty good at letting one another know how much the other means. But you and I bond over the fact that our lives didn’t turn out exactly how we expected. (After all, no one plans for their parents to divorce, or aspires to be a step-mom when they grow up.) But life has landed us here, and I honestly feel today like I couldn’t know you, or understand you, or love you any more if you were biologically my kid to call “daughter.” It might be kind of selfish, but this year one of the coolest things you’ve learned to do is call me mom -- something a part of me never expected you to do. You’ve almost always referred to me as mom. But this year, even after years of calling me by my first name, you’ve started calling “hey, mom!” downstairs to me when you need to ask a question or a favor, or exasperatedly huffing, “Mom! Please!” when you roll your eyes at some decision I’ve made that you shockingly object to. (I.E. every decision I make.) I could probably gush for an hour about how much this means to me, but I won’t only because I know enough about you to know that you’ll get all embarrassed. But it does, kiddo. It really, really, really, really does.

Basically, I just want you to know that you guys are goddamned awesome. When I think back to the days when I was little more than a stranger in your guys’ life, I just feel sad for the person I used to be. Not because I was less of a person, or because I was ever at all unhappy with my life as it was before you. But because you guys just have the power to do that. To make even the thought of not having you impossible to live with. Now that Scarlett’s more than a year, I’m going to write more letters to you guys too. Be warned ahead of time. There are many more words of love and adulation and things that will generally make you roll your eyes -- your gorgeous, handsome, perfect eyes -- where that came from.

Love you lots, guys,
Momma.

Flamingo Number Two.

Pin It On Learning That Scarlett Is Gifted.



Truth be told, I would have loved to do a program like Your Baby Can Read with Matthew, but we could have never afforded it at the time. Once we could, the idea of setting our second child in front of a DVD at the tender age of three to fifteen months, made me cringe. I picked up the first set of DVD’s from the program once on kind of an impulse to see where it took me, because on it’s own it only cost seventeen dollars at Barnes and Noble and it came with some word cards that looked like they’d be fun to play with, if nothing else.

Having the knowledge now that Matthew actually was the type of gifted baby all of the researchers/parents on the infomercials for the program said the children reading in the commercials weren’t -- I wondered how not buying the DVDs affected the way he turned out. One thing I know for sure that kind of scares me, is that if I had purchased them for him as an infant, I’d be crediting the program for his ability to read at three, and I’d have no idea still that he were gifted. Which brought me to a crossroads with Scarlett.

If Matthew actually were gifted, there was a good probability Scarlett is too -- but no guarantee. So do I buy the DVDs for her in hopes of stimulating a natural gift that may already exist? Or do I buy the DVDs in hopes of giving her a leg up she wouldn’t otherwise have at keeping pace with her brother, who was an early reader without the aid of DVDs? Do I not buy the DVDs because of the difficulty they’ll add to detecting giftedness in her? Or do I not buy the DVDs because deep down I can’t help but feel like plopping my kid in front of a DVD at six or nine or twelve months old in the hopes of turning them into a genius is lazy parenting.

I learned that Matthew was probably gifted when he was two and started pretending to teach me how to write letters and recite the sounds that they make -- by actually doing it, and doing it correctly. I learned that Scarlett was gifted when before she ever even had the chance to familiarize herself the words taught in volumes one and two of the Your Baby Can Read program, she began pointing out some of her favorite letters and chanting the sounds that they made, everywhere we went. Something that was never taught to her. Not by means of me, or any DVD. (The DVDs teach sight-word memorization, not phonics, and at most were only ever on as background noise while she wrestled with brother on a busy afternoon, and only after she learned to get around to ensure I wasn’t force-feeding it to her.)

At first, even thought we’ve been keeping our eyes peeled for signs of giftedness we never knew to look for with Matthew, we wrote it off as coincidence. It makes sense that she’d point out words she sees out and about -- she watches Matthew do it all day long. The fact that she was actually making the same sound as the particular letter in the word she was singling out had to be chance. Matthew did nothing like this at her age.

After she’d done it about a dozen times with seemingly random letters, I started bringing one or two foam alphabet shapes at a time into the bathtub with her at night. They’re colorful, they float, and when they’re wet, they can stick to any surface of the shower. Within a week of doing that, she mastered all six of the ones I’d formally “taught” to her. A, S, T, B, D and P. Sounds she made all day anyway, amidst her pre-talking gibberish. Having a hard time believing it even myself, her father and I spent a good portion of the weekend holding her in front of any words we could find with large enough print and any of the aforementioned capital letters, watching her point them out and say their sounds through a big, wet, two-toothed, grin. Not once was she unable to do it. Not even once.

So we’re packing up the DVDs, and we’re giving them away. After the first two times Matthew sat still long enough to watch a sizable portion of the program, he memorized the words, because that’s how he’s always learned -- simply by memorizing the sight of fully-formed words -- so I can’t say that I don’t think they may work for some families. But Scarlett has more of an interest in phonics at thirteen months old than Matthew’s ever shown in his life. Clearly, she’ll be going in a different direction with the way she learns, and is in need of no leg up. I am excited to continue on providing learning opportunities for her, just like I do for Matthew, but I think we’ll forgo the involvement of DVDs in our “regimen”, and we’ll see where that takes us instead. Something tells me I’ll be keeping you updated.

As for the title of this post… it’s inspired by this article, “I Never Wanted To Be One of THOSE Moms”, written by Barbara Cooper, who is the mother of a gifted child herself. In it Barbara writes of realizing her child is gifted, “I can’t explain the feeling I had. It was like I was this nice placid cow that had suddenly given birth to a flamingo.” Her words resonated with me in a way my writing ability limits me from doing any justice at all. If ever a phrase could sum up the experience I’ve had learning to parent my son, this was indisputably it. Last week Spencer and I went with some friends to the Philadelphia Zoo, and when I saw the flamingos, I thought of this article. This morning, when I thought of Scarlett, and how to describe to the world how extraordinary I’m beginning to learn that she is, I thought of pink flamingos.

Kids Say The Most Incredible Things.

Pin It Then again, I'm pretty easily impressed.



Of all the things I looked forward to about becoming a parent, the number one thing for me was always the thought of being able to talk to my own children someday. It sounds so simple put into words like that, but that was it, really. Before I started to show in my pregnancies, I would lay in bed and hold my tummy for hours, trying so hard to put my head around the concept that this wonderful thing causing me to swell and pee a few more times a day was actually a human. And when I would lay there, thinking about this parasitic cluster of cells, no bigger than a sesame seed at the time, floating around my insides, trying to reach for anything that would make it feel real… it was always the thought of someday being able to talk to them about real-life things - toys, homework, friends, poop - that got me there.


I thought about the people my children would grow to become endlessly during both of my pregnancies and during the short time my husband and I dated before then, toting around his six year old daughter, too. I thought about little things: like the color their eyes would be, and the clothes that they’d wear to their first day of school. I thought about big things: like college funds, and who they’d marry someday. But more than anything, when I visualized my life as a mother, I daydreamed about the things they would say to me. I dreamt at night about the conversations we would have.

Even in the most primitive form, I knew that every thought they had would enchant me, if only because it was theirs. And in just as big a way as I always imagined, I was right.

On the day Matthew was born, I will never forget the way that the first sound out of his tiny mouth stole my breath away. I remember how small I felt in the presence of what just happened within the inconceivably colossal moments leading up to him crying in my arms, and thinking that of all of it, the noise coming out of him was the part that resonated with me in the biggest way. Even handicapped by the inability to use language, he was translating thought to me -- the very first of his life. They were raw, of course, the way that everything else about him was in the moment: that shrill cry; his stark nakedness; the blood from my insides still collected within the cavity of his ears. But they were his, and that made them divine.

Cold.
Panic.
Confusion.
I don’t know what I need, but I need it now right now.

Of course, once the drugs wore off it probably sounded a lot more like what it actually was: you know, crying. But the way I remember it, even the way he did that, made me delirious with love.

And since then, as much as the vocabulary, and then the grammar, and then the level of enunciation has changed, that fundamental aspect of the way we communicate has not. He still talks out of his ass most of the time because, let’s face it, in the scheme of things he’s still a pretty crude version of himself, and of course, I still think that every piece of it is solid gold, simply because it came from him. That same little cluster of cells floating around my tummy four years ago, who so eluded my sense of actuality.

The other day Mary and I made a date to sit down and watch Cyberbully after dinner. Afterward we talked for about an hour about everything in her life that even remotely correlated to the plot of the film. At which point I realized that even my step-child is not immune. I find myself, even with her, trailing off while she’s trying to make a point to me, in thought about how many ways her body language has evolved from what it was when she was just an overzealous six year old in pigtails and a big, pink coat. And suddenly every thought she has seems so extraordinary, so impossibly mature.

And then there is Scarlett, who is only just learning to talk in a way anyone else can understand. She learned early to make so many different vowel-consonant combinations and added such an inflection to the sounds that she made, that at a month and a half I could tell for certain she’d be the earliest of all my children to talk. Alas, at thirteen months, even though she can make just about every sound necessary to call things what they actually are, most everything is DAT or BA!

I have videos of Matthew at the same age, walking around the living room on bowlegs, saying ‘scuse-ee’ as he walked by and ‘kank-oo’ when he took a toy from my hand. She, on the other hand, communicates much differently. She babbles with an emotional variation you wouldn’t believe comes from a baby; she listens and responds to anything a person says at her; and she’ll keep a mock conversation going for as long as the other person involved cares to engage her. She can even point to letters and mimic the sounds that they make. But if the child starts pointing feverishly to something she wants you to notice the way that babies do, you can bet your bottom dollar she will chant either one of two sounds to make it happen: DAT! or BA!

Only very recently, she started to expand ever so slightly. Not to naming objects, but to saying phrases. Two of them, actually: STOP! which she delivers with an intolerant, upward flick of her wrist and a silencing finger pointed to the sky. DUS. STOP! …and SHUDDUP! which Dear Girl has learned need not be accompanied by any body language at all to achieve just as stifling an effect, even to people so much bigger than her they could almost fit her inside of their pocket.

You’d think that the conversations one is capable of carrying with a person who’s entire vocabulary consists of the words, Dada, baby, cat, stop and shut-up would be pretty hard to feign interest in. But you’d be drastically underestimating the absurdity of the pedestal I put this child on if you did, because the sad, sad truth is: I could probably talk about babies and cats and people shutting-up with her for the rest of my life, and never lose interest in what she has to say, or how she has to say it.

Once in a while when my hand is on one of my children; combing their bangs to one side with my fingers, or pulling them in for a hug, I find myself in the familiar spot of trying to wrap my head around the people they’re all fast on their way to becoming. They may be more than a cluster of cells these days, but they are still so many transformations away from being the people I’ll know twenty years from now, when they are grown. It can be hard to imagine that someday I’ll be helping them to do real-life things, like weather a storm with their spouse, or to choose the perfect shoes for graduation, or to welcome their children home for the very first time. So when I find myself searching for a way to comprehend it, I dream about the conversations that we’ll have, to make it real.

And even though it’s still such an impossible thing to appreciate completely, and to grasp all the way, one thing I’m willing to bet is that every thought they have about the things that we’ll discuss, will enchant me… if only because it came from them. And for these people, I will always be delirious with love.

I Promise To Let You Run Wild.

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Whenever I can, I let Matthew run a little wild. I encourage him to run far and fast whenever we have free range of the outside world, even when sometimes there are natural dangers lurking at every corner. I don’t always make him come back in to get a pair of shoes when he’s hit by the whim to bolt out the back door in bare feet. I help him climb trees that are probably too big for a kid his size even when sometimes he comes down with bee stings or splinters, and I let him get stuck when he wants to climb into something I know is probably too small -- which is exactly what happened to him one day at the doctor’s office about six months ago.

Sometimes it ends well, and he learns how to climb a new height, or to do a new trick. Sometimes it doesn’t, and all he gets out of it is a few new band-aids. Still, I’ve always encouraged him to explore within the confines of what I deem reasonably safe, and although he tests the fence a lot more now that he’s older, I still resign to that school of thought. Which means that sometimes, he ends up sticking his head into places that he can’t get them back out of… you know, like Winnie the Pooh.

Once I was in the waiting area of our doctor’s office, where in the center of a semi-circle of adult chairs, there was a miniature toddler-sized table of crayons and puzzles. I always bring Matthew’s dry-erase board built specifically for travel to keep him occupied quietly, but as long as he isn’t disrupting anyone’s peaceful waiting experience, I don’t restrict him the whole time to sitting with it in his seat. A woman touched my shoulder on this particular afternoon and said in a polite but cautionary tone, “My nephew once tried to climb through the rungs of a chair like that, and got stuck. I wouldn’t let my kids do that.”

I looked at Matthew, and I relayed the message to him. “This woman’s nephew once got his head stuck in a chair just like that Matthew. I hate to break it to you, bud, but your head is about as big as they come. Do you still think it’s a good idea to try to get through it yourself?”

He thought about it for a second, and then he said, “Umm. Yes! I do.” Sure enough, he got stuck. He cried out laughingly for help at first, but I diplomatically refused. I told him that it was against his better judgment that he got himself into such a pickle, and that that meant that it was his job to get himself out of it.

In secret, I wondered if he’d be able to. I visualized what a tool I’d look like if he got himself so badly stuck trying to get out, that they had to call the fire department or something. I smiled knowingly at the lady, acting as though there were great purpose to the lesson I was teaching my kid. She smiled back, and I wondered if it was her way of calling my bluff. He started to whimper a little, but in a minute or two, he was out. He sat down next to me, and he announced, “Welp. You guys were right,” slapping the armrests of the chair the way a judge might slam a gavel. “That hole is definitely too small for my head.” He grabbed his dry erase board and he spent the rest of the time tracing words that I wrote out for him in dotted lines. He tricked every patient who came in after that moment into gushing over what a model citizen he was… the lady to our left being the only one any wiser, and looking a little like she might actually consider ratting him out to the misguided public.

She looked at her own kid after studying mine, and she told them that she was proud of them for acting their age, more (at least it felt) to us than to the kid she said it to. I never forgot that day; not because it stung which would usually be the case for me, but because it was the first time I can ever remember feeling (and really believing) like I’d made the right choice for my child, even when someone was telling me that I hadn’t.

~~~~ Fast forward to present day chaos back at home.

With outstretched arms and unsure legs, Scarlett took her first feeble steps yesterday. It was a one step, two step, grab -- Success! Spencer and I were both there to watch it happen, which I can’t help but regard a Godwink in more ways than one. My camera is broken, so I snapped a picture with my phone and I spread the news in a mass text message to everyone in the family.

I realized yesterday when I sent the text message (a habit I started when Scarlett was in the hospital, in order to update the family in a quiet way all at once) that with these first few steps, any signs of a developmental delay in any form, are officially in the past. She’s doing so well now that it’s beginning to feel ludicrous even, to think of the milestones she passes anymore in relative terms to the condition she used to have. Like it was a lifetime ago.

It always gives me a hard jolt to remember it was only three short months ago that she wouldn’t even sit up. I worry about it happening again, only because I don’t think one could ever fully turn off the residual effect that’s bound to ensue after an experience like the one we had… But I don’t worry about her anything like I did before.

I remember telling my mom just a few days before Scarlett was admitted into the hospital that I was afraid to lay her down for a nap. Too big a part of me didn’t know if she’d have the strength in an hour to ever wake up. It was either that conversation or the one right after that I asked my mom to come over, just to spend an afternoon at our house with Scarlett to see for herself. “At the very least,” I said, “I’m afraid she’ll never walk. And if that’s the case, then I can accept it completely. But I can’t keep wondering anymore. I just want to know what whatever this is means for the rest of her childhood.”

Now that she can walk, I wonder what this means for the rest of her childhood. In light of fearing for her life, and in light of coming very, very close to losing her father all within the same few months, a very big part of me wants to wrap every member of my family in a plastic bubble, so that no harm can ever befall them on my watch. I thought that when she learned to walk, I’d lose all sanity to keeping her from ever getting hurt. But now that she can walk, I find myself running like a fugitive in exactly the opposite direction. I don’t want to teach my children to live in fear, just to stay alive. Instead I want them to live everyday as if it’s one worth living to absolute and maximum capacity.

Now that she can walk, it means that whenever I can, I will let her run a little wild. I will encourage her to crawl far and fast whenever we have free range of any floor space at all. I will let her toddle through unkempt grass and murky puddles in rainboots and her best dress if that’s what she wants on a wet, summer day. I will stand behind her when she scales a staircase much too steep for a girl her size. And I will watch her walk into a dozen pickles I see coming a mile away, just to let her find the way back out.

Because to me, even in the name of keeping them safe, one of the biggest disservices I can do for my children is to teach them that the world they live in is too dangerous a one for them to explore. Or that the life they live is too fragile a one for them to relish unyieldingly -- even if in secret, I have to fight the urge to tell them it is.

And at the end of the day, when I wash the dirt out from underneath of my kids’ fingernails and I tend to the tears they’ve made in their skin from the mountains they’ve climbed in their respective days - be it a skyscraper of construction paper and glue; or a stunt failed with friends perched on the pegs of their bike; or simply Scarlett climbing through an obstacle course of chairs in the waiting room of a doctor’s office - I will feel wholly satisfied with the job that I’ve done, teaching them to act their age.

In fact, the dirtier they are, the happier I’ll be.

Halloween Makes Me Want To Have, Like, A Zillion Children...

Pin It JUST so I can take them all Trick or Treating.



A month before Halloween.
As usual this year Mary started talking about what she wanted to be for Halloween two months before the first autumn leaf fell. It’s always something generic, but she gets excited about it anyway. Until mid-October actually arrives, that is. Then, she doesn’t like any outfit in any store and we end up spending forty dollars on a costume she makes no qualms about announcing to us she’s not even that thrilled with wearing, four seconds out of the parking lot. This part of Halloween with her is always the same, except that every year she comes a little closer to being a teenager, and so if anything, it gets worse. That’s basically how we’ve found ourselves gauging her maturity now. Not by how far from birth she’s come, but how close she is to teen-hood. I wonder if it’s like that for everybody, or if it’s just like that for us with her because she’s been threatening to become one since she was seven.

Matthew is still pretty easy to get pumped up about being something we want him to be. A cowboy this year. Actually, I wanted him to be a country singer this year since his favorite song in the UNIVERSE is That’s how country boys roll by Billy Currington. But when he saw some of the other cowboy costumes with plastic guns and his dad told him he could opt out of the guitar if he wanted… my cool little Country Boy turned into a totally blasé, overdone cowboy with a bandana around his neck and a holster on his hip, popping off orange cap guns. It wasn’t what I envisioned, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my preteen daughter, it’s to appreciate the voluntary enthusiasm while I can. So I did. He wore that cowboy hat and holster everyday for two weeks, and I got some pretty hilarious pictures out of the deal.

Scarlett is kind of an afterthought this year. She stole the show last Halloween being a newborn dressed as a kitten, so we try to focus more on the other two. Plus her costume is second-hand, so there wasn’t a lot of fuss that went into choosing what she was going to be. She is very distraught over the lack of attention, as you can imagine.



Halloween Week.
Mary always suckers me into getting pumped up about holiday preparations with her because she used to love them so much. A part of me is always hoping I can reignite it again. She’s always been an awful complainer, though, so I’ve learned to take her initial enthusiasm with a grain of salt… to accept early on that it could, and probably will, turn on a dime. I still hope that I can make it fun for her, and I still try, but I don’t count on it, and for the sake of the younger ones I’ve stopped letting it get me down when every attempt to entertain her flounders miserably.

This year, a lot of her friends aren’t trick-or-treating. She wasn’t going to let it stop her though, which, when I heard, I secretly celebrated, though I only showed her a quick nod and a “Good for you.” I try to applaud absolutely any attempt she makes at all to think for herself, because the opportunities come so few and far between anymore. I do it discreetly, though because I’ve learned to take a delicate approach to responding to situations like this with her. She’s looking for assurance, but if she thinks for a second I’m a little too happy with what she’s just confided in me about, she’ll run as fast she can in the other direction like a deer in the woods. I can’t afford to step on any branches, but I can’t afford not to tell her I’m proud.

I print out some colorful Halloween worksheets on which Matthew adds up pumpkins and makes patterns out of black cats and witches’ hats. We string necklaces with Halloween colored beads and pumpkin charms. I’ve stopped asking Mary if she wants to craft with us, because frankly, if I don’t, she’s more likely to actually do it. She makes a cool thing we hang on the fridge. I have a lot more planned but things get busy. The newlyweds next door decorate their yard really awesomely, and as always Spencer and I are a little covetous of how much time and disposable income they have to do things like that without kids. We make solid plans to do those things when we’re old, and we try to enjoy the chaos as it is for us now.

Spencer and I take the younger two to a Halloween Festival set up at our neighborhood park while Mary’s at a sleepover. Matthew decorates a pumpkin and participates in races and contests for prizes. He dominates the moon bounce obstacle course and we push Scarlett on the swing and talk to neighbors, mostly about the accident and how the baby’s growing into such a happy girl.

The day before Halloween the kids’ aunt and I plan to take Matthew and Scarlett to a Costume party at the roller rink. Only, Scarlett’s second-hand costume doesn’t fit, and Mary decides she wants to go at the last minute. We have to warn her there are going to be mostly kids her brother’s age there, and that if she goes we aren’t going to listen to a bunch of bitching about it. Scarlett stays behind with Daddy and Uncle Joe, Mary bitches the whole time anyway, and Matthew has a blast. Mary eventually comes around, and Matthew actually leaves without being pulled away kicking and screaming, so I deem the outing a huge success.

Halloween…

Is totally worth all of the bullshit leading up to it. A gazillion-fold.

The house is a good kind of chaos at 5:45. Clothes are being flung to the floor. Feet are barreling in and out of fifteen rooms at once, searching for hair ties and tights and mascara. Mary’s pumped about being able to wear make-up outside of the house. Her friends start knocking on the door to ask if she’s ready, and the kids panic that it’s almost time. They laugh at each other’s get-ups. Matthew is freaking PSYCHED like it’s Christmas morning. He’s actually ASKING me to take pictures of him posing with his gun or doing tricks with his hat. Spencer, who is a gun enthusiast, is having every bit as much fun showing Matthew how to wield it correctly as Matthew is, being shown. Every 2.5 seconds, someone stops to gasp at how mind-blowingly ADORABLE the baby is, pretending to be an owl, cooperatively repeating the sound “whooo, whooo!” and laughing when it makes us lose our heads.

Outside, everyone is laughing into the cold, dark air. Matthew can actually keep up this year with his sister who’s showing a lot of gratitude for not being held back, by actually being nice to him in front of her friends! Once in a while Matthew holds my hand and asks me to come up with him, for what I can only assume must be old times sake, because it is painfully evident this year that he does not need me the way he once did twelve months ago. Our neighborhood doesn’t have streetlamps, so the houses with illuminated porch lights and strands of orange, glowing bulbs burn bright against the pitch black. Still, he manages to pick me twelve dandelions while we’re out, and when another parent sees him hand me one, they melt. The baby swats at the houses with scary soundtracks playing on the front step and is completely captivated by the spot lights and smoke machines and ten foot, inflatable ghosts in the front of others. When we reach a house that isn’t drenched in décor, she tilts her giant, hooded head and lets out an, “ahhh..” of relief. We spend a third of the night giggling into Scarlett’s cheeks; another third high-fiving Matthew over what he got at the door; and another third laughing with Mary about how she should make a HUGE show of eating her candy in front of all the kids at school who were too cool to trick-or-treat this year.

We finish off the night by going out to eat way past everyone’s bedtime, where our meal is half off because we show up sweaty, tired and dressed like idiots. Mary and Matthew both say about a hundred times that this was the best Halloween, ever… which, of course, they say every year. And which, of course, I love hearing like it’s the first and only time I ever have, every time.

Pulling off another successful Halloween this year was a lot of work, and in the midst of it my husband and I said to each other more than once that if either one of us ever wants to have any more kids EVER, that the other one better remind of us what that will mean during holidays like this… But then, sometimes I look at pictures of my children like the ones that came off my camera on the first day of November, and Lord Help Me, I think I wouldn’t mind making sixteen more.

Thank God for IUD’s, and the fact that costumes are REALLY expensive.

Just A Little Thing He Said I Thought Was Cute.

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One of the most noticeable differences about raising a gifted two year old and raising a gifted three year old is that what once was a child who couldn’t wait to share with you EVERYTHING HE KNEW ABOUT EVERYTHING, is now a child that knows even more, but has no idea that what he knows is even interesting enough to share.

Last night we watched a movie, and one of the logos that popped on screen before it started was the Milky Way with the name of some kind of production company or something. It popped on screen and I wondered if Matthew would notice. The logo came and went, and it wasn’t until a third of the way through the movie that Matthew tucked his hands behind his head to get comfortable and asked out loud to no one in particular - almost under his breath, “What the heck is the Milky Way doing on this movie, anyway? This movie isn’t about galaxies.”

I may have mentioned it on here once or twice before, but holey moley I love this kid.