The Christmas Rundown!

Pin It Christmas Eve was a little bit different this year.

We normally spend the majority of it making cookies for Santa and wrapping gifts for all the cousins. But this time around, it was really important to me that the kids put some kind of legitimate effort into the gifts we gave as a family. So this year, we made jarred gingerbread ingredients as a gift. Mary cut and pasted the baking directions into little gift tags and signed everyone’s names. She also bagged up red and green candies to go inside the gift bags for the gingerbread men, and she helped measure out some of the ingredients. Matthew helped to pour the ingredients into the jars and to pack them down as tightly as they could go. He also helped to scoop some of the candy into goodie bags, to cut ribbon, and to bag the jars up with the accessories we got to go with them (cookie cutters, candy, and a special gingerbread/Christmas tree shaped spatula -- all of which were 70% off at the craft store because I bought them Christmas week!).

It was a lot work, but it drove the point home. Especially for Mary, who a number of times got so frustrated with all the effort that went into making these jars that she walked away calling the whole thing stupid, and refusing to lift another finger. It was the perfect opportunity for me to remind her of all the hard work everyone else puts into earning enough money to buy her all the expensive gifts she’s always filling her list with, year after year. You know, LIKE UGG BOOTS. After that, she didn’t have much to say, and she continued to help a little less begrudgingly. Matthew added a Christmas craft to each of his grandparents’ bags and an ornament we’d made with Scarlett’s handprint and a wallet-sized picture of her from her birthday portraits.

In the end, they turned out so freaking cute I kind of wished I’d made a few more to give to out to the neighbors. Since we put so much time and effort into the jars, we didn’t have time (or eggs) to bake cookies for the Big Guy, so instead, we used some of the leftover materials to make a cute little jar of holiday M&M’s for Santa (which made for a nice decoration to boot!) and laid out a carrot stick for each reindeer. SO much easier, and just as cute as the cookie thing we’ve always done before.

The kids opened their new Christmas Eve pajamas, each wrote a note to Santa before bed, and dad and I went to work.

…

Christmas morning at our house starts, like a year before dawn.

This year, in a sleepless daze from getting everything together the night before, Spencer and I came up for coffee at around 5:30 a.m., and it actually took us starting the Christmas music and jingling some bells outside of the kids’ doors to wake them. Matthew was so tired he wanted Mary to carry him out, and even though I assumed the baby would be left to sleep through it all, we heard her singing to us from her crib, excited to see what all the fuss was about.

Scarlett roamed the living room, pretending to talk on Spencer’s cell phone like it was any other day while the other two unwrapped gifts. Mary blew through hers like a hurricane, immediately put on all of her new clothes, and found the perfect places in her room for all her new stuff. Matthew had a hard time prying himself away from each gift he opened long enough to make it to the next. Every gift to him was like hitting the lottery, which is awesome because each one is like a goldmine to me of educational experience. He’d have been totally psyched with like, four gifts, which will make scaling down for him even more next year that much easier. Scarlett actually only had about four gifts, and one of them filled her stocking so she didn’t have to open it. We slowly unwrapped the others for her over the course of the following few days. If this kid could talk, I think she’d tell you that Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, the oversized board book version, changed her life. She pretty-much goes bat-shit crazy over every turning page. Best. Gift. Ever.

　

I fell in love with my parents' tree this year. My parents are notorious for their huge, extravagant Christmas trees, always decorated with a trillion beautiful ornaments. Being empty-nesters this year, they downsized to this little guy. Is it not the most adorable thing, ever? Scarly's ornament is up toward the top!

　

My mom is an extravagant gifter. Always has been, and I imagine at this point, always will be. So the kids, of course, were excited for mom-mom and pop-pop C. to be their first stop this year. Matt’s big gift was a Lightning McQueen bike, which was the first thing you could see from the front door sitting out in front of the Christmas tree. Scarlett had some help opening her gifts on the best seat in the house -- pop-pop’s lap. All of her cousins chipped in the effort - and somewhat surprisingly, she totally got into it. Her reactions to all of them were picture perfect. Before the wrapping paper was even entirely off, she was oohing and aahing and pressing all kinds of light up, noise-making buttons. (One of them even has a Spanish option, which I thought was totally neat!) Mary’s was a gift-card to American Eagle and Aeropostal - which basically made her gift list (short of a pair of Ugg boots) about as perfect as it could possibly get. It’s hilarious to me that these two women in my life - my mom and my daughter - are not actually blood related because they have so much in common it scares me a little bit. (In fact, my mom already owns a pair of Uggs…) So she always seems to know instinctively just what to get Mary for any occasion.

The Stucky’s won me over when they had banana cream pie with breakfast. BANANA CREAM PIE. WITH BREASFAST. Delicious! The kids got more cool stuff. I got to take awesome pictures. Oh, and Mary’s head exploded because under the tree, next to a few other gifts she’d been looking forward to, were a pair of Uggs she had no idea she was getting. Scarlett didn’t open many of her gifts, but was a total anomaly when it came to the standard of being over stimulated as a baby on Christmas. She only took one small nap before heading out to my parents, and was still just a joy all day long. She showered everyone with big, smiley kisses, and fell in love with her very first baby-doll! Just like her birthday, I don’t think the child stopped smiling once amidst all the commotion. Seriously, the kid is like a dream to take anywhere. (I wish I could say the same for the other two!)
 :-P

We made another stop to my parents to have dinner with my aunt who made it there around one, and we all drove home pleasantly exhausted.

The end!

An Old Acoustic Guitar.

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He has no idea what he’s doing, mind you.

But he carries it across the living room with all the coordination he can muster. He pulls it up onto his lap. Placing a hand underneath of the neck and another over the body, he makes up words and he plays the house a song. This is an everyday occurrence around here. And one that I love.

My dad plays guitar, and when I was growing up I used to love whenever he would take it out and sing. He even wrote a song once about me and my brothers when we were small and I can still remember sitting cross-legged on the floor once while he played it for me, singing out the lyrics written on a page I held in my hand. On my wedding day, before my dad and I danced beside Spencer and Mary to a father-daughter song the DJ played, my dad sat in a chair across from my husband and I on the dance floor with that old guitar strung across his knees, and he sang a song called “I loved her first.”

Spencer and I both played for a little bit -- him longer than I, but between the two of us we have like four guitars lying around the house, hard at work collecting dust now. I never really tried to teach myself specific songs, but I took lessons for a while in high school, and I used to love the feeling of getting an exercise down, playing it faster and faster, and letting my fingers get hard on the end the better I got. I learned the chords and I learned how to read simple music, and I learned to love the guitar from a whole new angle. Then I met Spencer, and even better than playing it myself, was falling in love with him over an electric blue guitar he used to play when we hung out.

When our little boy decided on his own one day to drag this old acoustic dinosaur out of the storage room, and start howling out a tune about the kind of things only a four-year-old would sing about, we were both a little love-struck. We’ve been keeping it upstairs ever since, right in the living room where he can play it everyday if he wants to. And everyday he has. I’m not sure he’s learning anything worthwhile when he does it, or if it’ll lead to any future pursuit of music, but what I do know is that every time he pulls that thing up onto his lap and sings to me about non-sense crap like racecars and things he doesn’t understand about love from other songs he’s heard on the radio, I fall a little more in love with the guitar.

And of course, the man of my heart behind it.

 

Beautiful, Blurry. Just Like Her.

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In between twelve and fifteen months, Scarlett has become a blur of her formal self. Physically, she’s only mildly longer, a little more plump, and her hair has only grown from the length of her eyes to the length of her lips if it isn’t back in a clip. But personality-wise, it’s as if she’s become unlocked.

And has proceeded to go ape-shit wild on the world.

When she’s happy, she sticks her tongue out to the side and laughs like there’s no tomorrow. Her two front teeth are coming in strong at the top now, but those two little suckers on the bottom are all you can see. Her eyes fall away behind happy, moon-shaped lids. Her hair, uncommonly long in the front for a baby her age, is perpetually falling over her face, and in all of the movement of her little doings, every small detail of her is a blur.

When I look back on these past few months, I know that this is what I’ll remember. A hundred blurry photos I can’t bring myself to delete off of my computer, and a thousand more stashed away inside my mind, like photos that move and disappear into one another, the way she’s always doing around the house. One minute here, and happy. Another minute there and falling apart over the twelfth crisis faced in three hours. A second later, laughing again, squealing and chasing after a whim.

I have pictures on my new camera of her that are so crisp and so clear that you can count the sparkles in her eye. But these somehow seem more like her. Just crazed with happy, adorable, baby-ness.

This is Christmas.

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Christmas is two days away. Right now I have grocery bags of gingerbread ingredients occupying essential real estate in our tiny kitchen, spatulas shaped like gingerbread men out to bake them with, and bags of red and green M&M’s in front of the coffee pot. I’m putting the finishing touches on a painting I’ve agreed to do for my sister-in-law, who’s counting on it to be a gift for her sister. Because of this, I haven’t even started making gifts with the kids to give out to family. Or wrapping. There are so many gifts to wrap.

This year, we’ve scaled down our gift giving significantly.
This year was a good time to do it. We literally have lived with no income for months, and have still managed to pay every bill on time. But even without money being an issue, the kids are all just at an ideal age to learn that Christmas isn’t measured in the number of gifts they receive. We will always exchange gifts on Christmas. We’re traditionalists that way. But much more consideration this year went into each one. (Literally everything that we got for Matthew holds some level of educational, or developmental substance. For instance, instead of loading him up on remote controlled cars, we bought him an easy-to-assemble kit to build his own “eco-friendly” wooden ones, whose wheels light up when they spin, involving science to boot.)

We’re having the kids help to make all of the gifts we’re giving out to family this year, and we made a big deal of learning about the less fortunate. Generosity is a big part of the Christmas tradition that’s always been lost on my kids by only ever being at the receiving end of the trade. Or, at best, spending our money and taking the credit. We always donate our old toys to my mom’s daycare, but when we packed them all up this year, we talked about children who don’t even have socks to wear on their feet at Christmas, much less new pajamas each Christmas Eve and a living room full of toys. Doing it while packing up boxfuls of toys he’s played with all year really drove the point home for Matthew. In a bigger way than I expected it to, actually. Everyday when we put on his socks now he says something to me about how he sure is lucky to have nice, warm feet at Christmas time.

We’ve also crafted the hell out of this season, and although we’ve done “bible-time” in the mornings the same as always, (a song, a story, and a quick prayer) we have made sure to reference the meaning of Christmas at every natural opportunity. We want the focus of the holiday to be around Christmas’s true meaning, without the focus feeling like a sobering obligation. We are Santa enthusiasts here, but we’ve put an active effort into mentioning Jesus more often than the Big Guy in Red who delivers all the loot.

On that note, I think it’s interesting to mention that although Matthew gets as pumped up about all the holiday hoopla as the next kid, there have already been several notes of good-natured skepticism detected this year. We’ve been teaching Matthew recently that prayers don’t have to be recited the way he’s been taught to all his life -- in fact, it’s even better to pray straight from the heart; which just means talking to God about whatever’s on your mind, and in your soul, the same way he’d talk to us about it. So the other night, as you would expect a three-year-old with total freedom of expression to do, Matthew prayed out loud that it would be really good if maybe Santa could bring him a Spiderman pencil, and the “Cars-theatre-2 CD”, and if maybe mommy could get him some of the cool stuff like what Mary gets for Christmas, cause Mary always gets such cool stuff. So at the end, Spencer asked why he wanted Mommy to get him the stuff Mary gets, instead of Santa Clause doing it. To which his reply was that Mary’s “electronic-al” stuff seems way too hard for Santa to make. “THAT kind of stuff has to come from the mall. Or Wal-mart.”

Is he adorable, or what?



We stayed away from getting Matthew and the baby anything really big this year, so that they wouldn’t come to expect such a thing every time. (In fact I almost got him the smart cycle, and I put it back.) But some of the big-deal gifts I’m excited for him to get are: a real telescope, a dinosaur fossil excavation kit, and a “Hot Wheels” designed CD player, with, of course, the Cars2 soundtrack, since he’s really beginning to get into music and instruments. (We like that all the instruments he already has to play around with are old and don’t need to be handled like glass, even if they are really big for him, so we purposely stayed away from over-priced instruments we could have gotten in his size). We knew that if we got him the movie, he’d sit like a drone in front of it for days -- but whenever there’s music going, he’ll take out Spencer’s old guitar and spend hours trying to play along. (Spencer is DYING to get him lessons in the next year or two. I know, right? NOW who’s the overzealous parent? HM?) :-P. Scarlett got a few number/letter puzzles, a really pretty growth chart to hang in her room, and a stuffed animal. We were more generous with Mary, but at this age most of what they want is relatively practical anyway.

…

The next two days are gonna be awesome. The Christmas lights are going to stay on longer than they usually do. The kitchen is gonna be a clumsy mess of ginger-powdered counters and sticky bowls. The kids are gonna have tape and wrapping paper everywhere, and Matthew will take a really long time doing what Mary will be annoyed at knowing she could have accomplished eight times over, but they’ll be working together. The baby will fuss, or get into something she shouldn’t at every least-convenient interval. (I consider myself lucky she has yet to eat an ornament. But we still have two days…) Each one of us will dance at some point with her little hands in ours to silly music about grandma’s getting run over by reindeer or Mommies kissing Santa Clause. We’ll celebrate Spencer’s 30^th birthday at Stuart’s tonight, and maybe head to a friend’s house for a holiday party. The kids will open their Christmas Eve pajamas in front of the tree tomorrow night. And that will all be before the festivities even, really begin.

Don’t you just love Christmas?

I love hearing all the different ways people think to spend the holiday. What is Christmas to you and your family? How are you celebrating this year?

A Year In Formula, Fireflies and Making Fun of Sixth Grade Boys.

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 Eggies for breakfast. Mm.

 
My Kids, 2011.


Last year, Scarlett wore a pair of reindeer foot-y pajamas for Christmas, and still having never tasted anything but breast milk, she filled them out perfectly. She was a wriggly, vocal infant with a wide, inviting grin, and dark, dark eyes I was sure, even after four months of refusing to change, would ultimately get it over with and just turn brown. They are still as blue as they ever were.

This year was a difficult one for me to look back on because I knew that it meant thumbing through photographs of a time when she was frail and unhealthy -- which until now I have not been able to stomach without feeling sick and having to turn away. I can openly say it’s harder to face what happened to her now that it’s over than it ever was to accept while it was actually occurring. But it was good that I did. I was able to notice other things, like how insanely long her hair has gotten (wow!), and the way that it doesn’t get as oily as it once did anymore on the days that we skip a bath. This year the big event for Scarlett was her hospitalization, although in truth, I think it was a bigger event for the rest of the family than it actually was for her. It was a hard, hard time on everyone, and Scarlett by no means worked through the experience unscathed by fear and pain, but for better or worse, a great deal of the experiences that have shaped our relationship the most occurred in that awful place; That place I feel at once so fortunate, and still so very, very cheated ever to have had to know. Her first laugh, and the very first effort she ever made to crawl were experiences I was right on hand at the hospital to devote my every focus on, and to pour over her with uninterrupted affection over. And those are experiences I cherish to my core, that I wouldn’t know if it weren’t for that place.

Afterward, Scarlett recovered in leaps and bounds and then some! For starters, she plumped up something fierce. She learned to walk (and even to run if she has something she badly enough wants to keep you from taking away!). She popped four teeth in the span of little over a month, although they all took until clear after her first birthday to arrive. Speaking of -- she celebrated her first birthday on the coldest early-October day in Delaware history under a park pavillion in a little beanie with mouse ears and a pink tutu. She learned to recognize many letters, and although she doesn’t say a whole lot that’s actually discernable, she has learned very recently to say short phrase like, “Who’s that?” when she points to a picture on the wall. Or “hello?” when she picks up a toy telephone.

…

Looking at pictures of Matthew from last year is seriously less like looking at my own son and going “aww…” as it is like looking at a photo of a distant cousin or something and going, “Oh, that kid! Yeah, I remember him…”. Almost-four-year-old Matthew is like 40% more awesome in pretty much every category than the almost-three-year-old one was. At the start of this year, for example, I thought we’d never kick the bink. But if I hadn’t stumbled onto photos from eight months ago with that unexpected thing plastered between his cheeks to remind me, I might have forgot to mention it at all.

　

This year Matthew and I made crafts on every single holiday that came up (and in-between!), which has been one of the neatest ways to capture his developing motor skills through the shifting seasons. Right now I can pretty much just let him go to town on a few sheets of paper with some crafting supplies and more or less supervise him just by popping my head in the room once in a while. Better yet, I can do this and have him turn out something bizarrely cool entirely on his own, that actually half-resembles what he set out to make. A year ago that would have probably resulted in a gaping injury and a call to the fire department.

This year he learned to:

A.) ride a bike.
B.) swim with a pair of water-wings.
C.) legitimately skate from one end of the rink to the other without falling down.
D.) Catch a jarful of fireflies.
E.) Read fluently.

The amount of healthy food we can get him to agree to eat has increased considerably, and his behavior has just shown one breakthrough after another. He can still generally be very defiant with other people, but he can be reasoned with, which has made all the difference.

…

Mary is very simply a boy-crazed lunatic right now. The End.

(Just kidding.) (Kind of.)
Last year Mary and her friend went to the first school dance they’d ever been to that parents weren’tsupposed to stay for. When the boy she liked “dumped” her for the friend she was with, they laughed about it the whole way home. Clearly, the word boyfriend meant about as much to her then as the word bologna in Swahili. It was just fun to say. This year, I’ve heard one, specific idiot boy’s name mentioned at least once every minute and a half since they met; probably somewhere around 843 billion times. AND COUNTING. They only went out for maybe a week and a half in the beginning of the school year before they broke up just to stay friends. But evidently that one week of being labeled somebody’s GF packed a little more punch this time around.

She started sixth grade this year and is playing the clarinet completely against her will at this point. (The result of my not allowing her to quit after she requested to play it again over the summer. MOST FICKLE CHILD EVER.) But she is getting so good that her latest recital actually held her one and three-year-old siblings’ attention. Her birthday party this year was a Twilight themed sleep-over, wherein we baked devil’s food cupcakes that bled cherry-pie filling when you bit into them, and ate them with her friends at one in the morning. Speaking of eating cupcakes, Mary could probably eat an entire horse for dinner every night and still look like she is never fed, but according to her pediatrician she is right at the fiftieth percentile for both height and weight. Kaitlyn, who lives down the street is still her BFF, and they are closer than ever now that they’re actually going to the same school for the first time in their lives. They laugh about boys at lengths that would exhaust you for me to even describe. She’s not allowed to have a face book, so she spends most of her time at home on you tube and writing on her blog, although she can still once in a while be found curled up in a quiet corner with a book, which helps to make me feel better about the amount of time we let her have on the computer. After Spencer’s accident, he promptly vowed to start scheduling at least once-a-month, father-daughter date nights with her, which both of them have been really psyched to start.

…

Somewhere between huddling together and crying in the corridors of a hospital, and wanting to gouge each other’s eyeballs out with their bare thumbs over possession of the last yogurt, Matthew and Mary’s relationship turned into something real this year. Something sacred. I know that this year has had it’s hurtles, but when I look back on it, recounts of hardship aren’t what I feel like I’m walking away with.

It’s these guys. Holding hands through a crowd of people toward an ice cream truck. Splashing closer to each other in a pool, next to a big, wet dog, shouting rules to a game with goggles on their faces. Sitting cross-legged on the roof of the car under a cascade of fireworks, Matthew leaning slightly on her shoulder. Getting both of their kites stuck in a tree at exactly the same time, thirty feet up. Building lopsided marshmallow snowmen and glitter-glued, cotton ball Santa Clauses for the Christmas tree after Thanksgiving, and howling over how terrible the other’s looks. Chasing their sister down for the things she stole from their rooms and laughing in maniacal coalition when she tries to run, and falls. Only to sooner or later make their way over to her together, and fight over who gets to help her back up. It’s strange how everything else, no matter what scale of emergency it may have been at the time… That stuff barely makes the radar.

In recent months, Scarlett and Matthew have started bickering so clearly together that the other day Matthew actually said to her: “Scarlett, that’s enough! I’m not fighting with you about this anymore! End of discussion!” In the coming years I know that Scarlett is only going to add vinegar to the mix with her own third party, hot-headed, female opinions. But in all honesty, I’m welcoming it. Because if a little sibling rivalry is what it takes to wind up in as special a relationship as there has been between my son and his big sister this year, than their little sister will be a luckier kid for it.


So, tell me about your year!

Developmental Quirks and A Total Lack of Stranger Anxiety.

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Developmentally, she’s all over the place.

Her vocabulary, for starters, is almost non-existent. A pacifier is a “bleep-blop.” Her bottle is still affectionately referred to as “ba-ba,” which is incidentally what she also calls about a hundred other things. And really, outside of a few other small words she’s said a few times, she’s only very recently even shown an interest in trying to talk besides to say the names of letters. And as Matthew would so derisively put it: Really? Who does that?

Scarlett is a tough nut to crack, for sure. She’s slower than other babies on the whole saying words thing, but she’ll chirp letters of the alphabet like she’s been talking for a year and a half. She’s an infectiously happy kid. But she literally lacks stranger anxiety on even the most basic level. Seriously. After the third or fourth time she gleefully leapt from our arms to hug a total stranger who no more than gave her a passing glance, I had to look it up. Basically, Google told me she was definitively autistic. Either that, or she’s been neglected -- which, considering the fact that she’s had not only me, but also her father here at her literal beck and call 24/7 for the past three months, I think is a pretty safe assumption to take off the table. Her attachment to us is fantastic. It’s just that her attachment to people she’s never met in her life is too.

She reliably gets what she wants, when she wants it, how she wants it just by pointing and gesturing at crap she wants, and pairing it with the kind of calculated facial expression that very effectually make a person see her point. She’s basically a glorified caveman in that respect. She actually communicates so efficiently with this whole system she’s got down now that I’m beginning to think that she’ll never speak because of it. In fact that’s always been our reasoning for not teaching our children to sign in the first place. After all, if you can communicate effectively already - what’s the point? Turns out, though, she would have been the perfect candidate for something like that. It’s basically what she’s ended up doing to spite us.

…

Within the first few weeks of her life, Scarlett had the world convinced she’d be speaking in full sentences by like, six months. I’d never before seen a baby in more of a hurry to communicate than she. She’d lie in my arms during the day and noise would just bubble out of her mouth in all directions for as long as she was conscious. She’d sing to herself, she’d whisper to us, she’d coo at the wall, she’d squelch at the cat, and she’d even roar like a lion at creepy-looking things. She’d often keep herself up at night, just making sounds at the ceiling.

Then somewhere around the time she got sick, she just stopped. She made no noise at all one day, and that’s the way that it’s stayed. Her first night on an all night feeding regimen with the nasogastric tube, she woke up laughing for the first time in her life; making noises again for the first time in months. I’ll never forget it. The silly, little racket coming from her tiny, ten-month aged lips were better than music, even with all of the tubes and hospital bars between us. And over the months, the sounds have come back, little by little. A sound here, a noise there at something in particular. Never like they were before though, as if she just liked the way it felt to make a constant string of noise.

But recently, Scarlett has started to take her baby-babble onto a whole new level. Suddenly, as soon as she sees someone to direct it at -- even if that someone is nothing more than an imaginary friend on the other end of a toy telephone, the girl just yaps it up, trapping you in a conversation you almost start to believe you can understand after a minute. It’s nothing distinguishable. But it’s a string of noise I’ve really, really missed having around.

When Child Development Watch did an evaluation of Scarlett back in August-? they said that a likely reason for her communicative skills being as advanced as they were at the time is because when she lacked the energy it took to verbally communicate (and even, toward the end, cry), she learned to communicate her wants and needs in other ways, like yanking at people and motioning toward things.

　

That made sense. But about, maybe, a month later she started the whole letter thing, and when it turned out not to just be coincidence that she could name so many of them correctly, I started to second-guess canceling her follow-up developmental evaluation. (which I did because her health just blossomed so rapidly at that point from where it was, there seemed to be no room left for concern.) But even when she would say nothing else, she was pointing out letters. And, I mean, that’s just weird.

Whenever she comes across it in her travels around the house, he holds her letter A high in the air, squealing it’s name and it’s sound and bee-bopping up and down when she does it, like just holding it is something to celebrate. She loves to pick up her purple P and “Puh! Puh! Puh!” up and down the hall with it tucked under her arm, as if she and that letter have big plans for the day. She loves to huff her H’s up from way down deep in the back of her throat whenever she catches one jump from a page. And she likes to make like a snake whenever we pass the big, white S framed on our kitchen wall that stands for our last name.

When Spencer comes home from work, the very first thing out of her mouth short of a kiss is the sound of any letter she can find on the nametag of his uniform. She leans back in his arm and tucks her chin into her chest so as to get a clearer view, and then points out random-ass characters with a distinctly situated finger. “Tuh, tuh, tuh!” she says at the T in Waste Management. Then “Ssssss….” she says at the S sandwiched inside of the word Joseph.

I figure it’s gotta be from watching Matthew learn to read and sound out words, but it’s more peculiar to me that she gets so wildly excited over them. Matthew likes to read and all, but he’s never danced at the sight of a written word. Even at three, and three-year-olds dance at everything. This girl will point them out from half a room away, and she only just turned one.

Letters aren’t the only thing she has an eye for, either. When our Elf of the Shelf is in a new spot each morning, she’s often the first to find him and squeal. When I take out a new top for her to wear from the next size up of second-hand clothes, she has to inspect every inch of it with furrowed brow before she’ll let me put it over her head. When Spencer installed a peep-hole, half the diameter of a penny, in our front door while she was napping, she noticed from clear across the living room -- leaping toward it from my arms until I brought her over to the door, having no idea why she’d want to go there, until she started curiously trying to stick her finger through the alteration.

When I called my mom and I told her that the internet pegged Scarlett autistic because of the way she is with strangers she got a little exasperated with me. She said that it seems like I’m taking all of the worry people normally have with their first child and applying it to Scarlett -- which might be true because I can admit that I worry about her a lot. Maybe it’s just that she’s had health issues before, and so it’s hard for me to put my guard down with her. Or maybe it’s that age has simply intensified my maternal instincts. Or maybe it’s that I’m a nut job.

But I just don’t remember Matthew being this unusual. And really? We’re talking about Matthew.

　

I’m really curious about the stranger anxiety thing. Of course, it’s endearing that she’s so open and affectionate to people, but she literally crawls into the laps of strangers to cuddle with them if I let her roam three feet from me at the library. Or tries to leap happily into the arms of strange men from off my hip. She’ll even cry into my shoulder sometimes when she reaches for a stranger and they politely walk away. I plan to bring it up to her doctor this week, but I’m curious: What experiences did your children have with stranger anxiety?

On A Small Day In December.

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The baby lays on the sofa next to her brother, gripping a warm bottle latched between her lips. Matthew digs his heels into the sofa, trying to get comfortable, somewhere between feeling antsy and still wanting to cuddle. His head is on my shoulder. Her leg is draped lazily over my lap. They are three and one year perfect on an unparticular day in December, just before the turn of 2012.

To start the day, we sing a bible song together to the tune of twinkle, twinkle little star over the drinking baby, blinking daylight out of her eyes. Her hair is getting so long, but we can’t figure out if we should cut it now or let it grow on for a little while. We sing a nursery rhyme I ask him to help me think of, and then a couple of funny songs that help us learn to count by skipping numbers or subtract silly animals from a barnyard. It’s something upbeat and happy that we can clap for when we’re done. Something to get us pumped up for the day, and something to make the baby feel included. Down By The Bay is one of our last choices, and without planning it, we spend the rest of the day thinking of words that rhyme.

We read a story that tells us about God and teaches us about tolerance, love and forgiveness; big ideas in a package that is short, sweet, and unpretentiously illustrated. Something easy, and fun to talk about when it’s over. As the baby finishes her bottle, tossing it with satiation to the side, I hold their growing hands in mine and teach them to say an easy morning prayer.

The sun is up and I am too.

Be with me God, the whole day through!

Amen!

And with a clap, we’re off to get our fill of oatmeal and yogurt mixed with an apricot, pineapple puree I only tell him is “jam.”

Once we’re cleaned up from breakfast, it’s time to help momma gather the supplies we’ll need for today’s project. Today, it’s a Christmas tree out of a drawn triangle we’ll fill with green handprints, so that the fingertips stick out like branches. We decorate pom-poms and old pop-corn with glitter glue for adorning our tree once it dries. At her high-chair, Scarlett tries her best to battle over control of a purple crayon, making little more than accidental chafes of color onto the recycled paper underneath. She is unmistakably aware of how inept her coloring is compared to Matthew’s, and it pisses her off. She likes to hand him the crayons and watch him do it, then snatch it back and try again. She groans at her own fumblings, and repeats the whole process again, holding the crayon out for him to take back more begrudgingly each time.

Crafts are messy. We wait until they’re done to get dressed.

Then it’s floor-time, while I attend to some of my less appealing responsibilities. Floor time means that Scarlett gets pretty much free-range of the main floor of the house. She has a basket of toys tucked under the side table where she can reach and a basket of books at her disposal to explore at will, without management from mom and big brother constantly cramping her investigative style. I sit down from time to time to stand in as the human jungle gym we Mommies are a built to be between my own chores. Though sometimes, if I’m running behind, it’s just to lift her up for a big, noisy smooch and a quick pat on the butt. She wears herself out, and naps like a dream the moment I lay her down.

Matthew has a choice everyday at this time of reading aloud to me on the sofa, or playing computer games online with me that teach him kindergarten and first grade level reading or math skills. Today we match words to their word families, help a superhero climb the rungs of a ladder by spelling words out, beat the clock at reading 20 sight words in under a minute and a half, and rack up one hundred and forty four golden eggs on his game. We use them to buy a soda-can head and a black cowboy hat for his avatar (to match the real one he likes to wear), and a red couch shaped like a racecar for his avatar’s home. It goes between the arcade machine and the fish tank shaped like a television.

　

We use a USB cable to hook the laptop to the t.v. screen hanging on the wall, so that he isn’t stationed sedimentary in a chair the whole time. He can - if he wants to - shout answers to puzzles, riddles, and games in between back flips and other acrobatics three year old boys like to do on an open area of carpet. Backward as it might come off, it keeps his head in the game for much longer than he’d ever be able to stay focused for if he were asked to sit still.

When I can tell that he has had enough, though, he fights me on pulling him away. At such a tender age, it’s essential to me that reading not even have the chance to get boring. So I let him help choose from the free print-outs section of the website, and that snaps him out of his fuss. He races over the printer to snatch it up. “I’ll get it Mommy! I’ll get it! Don’t worry, I got it!!” he shouts over the beep and click of the printer coming to a halt.

He sits down at the table with it, his left palm open wide, holding the paper down while he draws something the directions he read told him to. I can’t believe how self-sufficient he’s becoming. He’s supposed to draw a man standing on a mat. The man has no belly today, but he has eye brows, pupils, irises, “rosy” cheeks, a nose, hands, fingers, a mustache, hair, a cowboy hat, and very long toenails on great big bubble feet. He is holding a rock, standing on the mat -- “and the mat belongs to his mom-mom,” Matthew tells me. “The rock was a present from her. It made her think of him.”

　

　

The baby stirs about in the blankets of her crib. And in a second, she’ll sit up to turn a lullaby on for herself. I come in with a fresh bottle of whole milk. And she sucks it down, studying her brother from across the changing mat with waking eyes, while I fasten her diaper, and Matthew asks if babies need tampons for their vaginas like Mommies do.

We read four stories while lunch bakes and some water boils for a side.

A little while after lunch we pack up the pear slices he never ate (that I’ll have to continue to pester him to eat), some veggie straws, a cup of water for the baby, and we head out for a short stroll. In the thick of a Delaware winter sometimes that’s all we can manage. It starts to drizzle halfway around the block and I forgot the umbrella. Matthew is downright angry with me for not taking the turn that leads up to the park. His arms are crossed exaggeratedly and his eyebrows are just as low down on his little face as they could possibly be. I ask him to help me collect some worms on the way back, and as if erased by magic words, all is forgotten.

Matthew points out a Christmas decoration in a neighbor’s front yard and calls out, “Rojo, Mommy! That Santa is Rojo!” We make a game of finding everything rojo!, rojo!, rojo! we can at the first few houses, then verde, then blanco. And when we get back to the house we dance to Feliz Navidad!, and let the rest of the Christmas songs play on.

Matthew asks me to pull a math game down from the closet. He asks me about the story of Moses we read earlier, and I’m so proud of him for taking an interest. At the end of the game, he needs a time-out for shouting over me when I put my foot down about it being time to clean up.

The rest of the day is his to do with what he wants. He picks up an old, beat guitar that we’ve let him stake claim of. He holds it like a cello and makes up songs for over an hour, thumping away at the bigger strings he likes best. Not everything rhymes, but a lot of it does. His song is about the things he sees around him, and what we’ve done today. I resist that strong urge I have to grab my camera and I reach for his harmonica instead, pretending as well as he does that I know how to carry a tune on it. Scarlett picks up an old toilet paper roll I had sitting on the stool for tomorrow’s craft, and she’s toddling up to us, humming into it’s side. She’s rendered it useless to us for tomorrow, squishing it between her gums and making it dark with saliva, but this is a better use for it I think. It’s killing me not to have the camera.

Five minutes into Mary walking in the door from school they’re fighting over the guitar. She shoves it back at Matthew, shouting, “I was just holding it for a second, GOD!!” and has to apologize for hurting him, while he tattles on her for saying GOD instead of GOSH. Her homework buddy is in tow, as usual, and they both tell me something about a boy on the wrestling team beating a kid from another school “in her honor.” She says she did pretty good on the DCAS test today and that I have a paper to sign for a field trip. She kisses Scarlett and yells at Matthew to stay out of her room while they work.

For the rest of the afternoon, Scarlett empties all unlocked cabinets of their contents. Someone left the diaper bag unzipped and I chase her down for a pack of Bubble Tape. There are diapers littering the carpet around it but they aren’t a priority. Neither are the bottles of distilled vinegar, and lemon juice or the box of cereal bars on the kitchen floor; the box of new checks in the middle of the hallway; or the abandoned book jackets blanketing a portion of the living room -- I have to start dinner. I’m at the mercy of the kids while my hands are dirty, so I dread doing it. By the time it’s in the oven, I have to clean up at least a portion of every room of the house.

Mary helps but not before groaning and rolling her eyes and getting bitched at for it.

Matthew pulls me into his room every five minutes to study the things he just built with his bright, chunky lego blocks, while I fight with the clock over how much to get done before Spencer comes home. He’s built four different structures and positioned them around his bedroom in various locations, spaced equally apart. It takes him a minute and a half to give me a rundown of each one and I feel like I’m counting the seconds; He tells me it’s function, how he built it, and why it had to be built that way. He’ll tear them all down the second I leave, build four or five new ones and then call me in again to give critique of his architecture - which, as far as he can tell, I take very seriously. A lot of things I will readily admit to doing out of sheer obligation. But this? Even as it pulls me away from other things I’d rather do in peace, I do because I truly love to see what the kid can do with a monotonous old pile of pegged plastic. Believe it or not, they are actually really cool, and he gets so into them. They have elevators and diving boards and fleets of rescue boats attached to their sides like the titanic. I am taken aback by how much I love him right now, even though he’s the chief culprit for my running behind on dinner.

When Spencer gets home the kids are in their pajamas, dinner is finishing up and I feel pretty satisfied. Scarlett’s happy to see him, but already rubbing at her face, knotting up her hair, and battling a hard sleep. She needs a bath, but it’ll have to wait one more day if she’s to get any time at all with Daddy before bed.

Matthew can’t wait to show him all of his artwork, and to tell him what he learned today about space and word families and tampons. At dinnertime we all say, “Thank you God for this yummy food. Amen!” He begs us to let him stay up to watch the Harry Potter movie, but the answer has to be no. Spencer’s already struggling to stay awake and it’s getting late. They take a shower together, and then Spencer lays in bed with Matthew and reads him Scooby-Doo while Mary wraps her hair in front of the bathroom mirror before bed so that she can wake up with curls tomorrow for school.

From down the hall, over a fresh ten cups of water for the coffee tomorrow, I hear them say in their big and little voices:

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the lord my soul to keep.

And If I die before I wake,

I pray the lord my soul to take.

They’re caught up in conversation for a minute, Matthew and Spencer, and I realize it’s the first time all day I’ve thought of him as a baby. Something about hearing his voice, I guess -- so comparatively small, wrapping itself into his father’s like that. It takes me back to the reality that in the grand scheme of our life as a family, this is all still so new.

The things they’ll shape around them. The connections we’ll make with them. The nuances of their personalities we’ll learn to navigate. And the places we’ll take in their day-to-day growth -- at times being all they consider, and other times blending farther into the background, just one small part of a bigger noise. Every year the experience will be a different one.

Someday every facet of this day, which was so huge on the day that it happened, will all just blur together with a hundred more small, December days just like it. It’s enough to make a person feel kind of torn. Torn between feelings of fortune that so many days just as happy as this are waiting for me to reach them somewhere else in my life too, and feeling sad that every subtlety of this one can’t be held onto forever. Eventually, almost every fine distinction will be lost.

And that'll be a real shame. Because there are so many pieces of this one, right here, right now, worth never letting go.  

But then, I suspect that will probably pretty often be the case.

You Might ACTUALLY Learn Something.

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We are always saying to Matthew, "Just listen once in a while. You might learn something."
After, like, eight skating lessons, he finally followed along with the class yesterday and -- by golly, the little shit learned to skate!

The last few times we’d been, he’d gotten way too ahead of himself. He saw the older children whipping past on orange wheels and high-laced rentals, and decided at once that he needed to be like them. But all he knew of skating was marching on locked wheels with the other three year olds. He insisted with all the politeness he could muster when impassioned about something, that I get his wheels loosened like the older kids’. Always too prideful to take direction, he flailed his feet about the way they seemed to be doing, bearing all of his weight down on my arm while I tried my best to maintain some level of stability between us. Knowing my son better than to choose a battle like this, I played the part of the patient martyr while he put all he could into forcing my shoulder out of socket for hours on end, every time -- only once in a while throwing out the idle suggestion that maybe he try something else. Someday, I thought, even if I lose an arm over it, this will be worth it. He really wants to learn how to do this.

We haven’t been in a while, and I wondered how it would go this time. For all of the effort I put into disciplining Matthew while I’ve had him at home, Spencer had spoiled him to his very core over the course of the past three months, and then disciplined him in ways that were inconsistent with how I always had. And he didn’t listen for shit before this, so how was this going to work, now? Would he moan aloud at story time that no one likes Madeline, or would he tell the teacher that what she was trying to teach was wrong? Would he reach for my hand and then tell me it was my fault when he fell?

I asked the woman at the counter, who’s familiar with us at this point, to make the wheels a little looser than she usually does for him today. If we were going to do this, at least maybe we’d get some progress out of it.

He looked like his sister, maneuvering herself on foot next to him with the same uneasiness he was on wheels. He was smiling, but given the chance to hold onto something or not, he wasn’t about to let go before he had to. He gripped the rental counter, catching himself every few steps; the grab machines; and then my hand, yanking me into a jolt every time his feet got away from him. The moment we hit the rink, and his skate rolled from it’s place on the flat of the carpet to the slick gloss of the rink floor, both legs, in succession, flew out in front of him, and I was sure once he hit the ground and made that face, that his wrist was sprained. But he recovered.

I had to put him up against the wall to get his sister out of the stroller, knowing that this was going to be a long lesson. But not caring too much, because he never gives even the slightest time of day to Ms. B, the skating instructor anyway. He’s always, always the one off at the other end of the rink, doing his own thing while the others form a line, making airplane arms together and then practicing their stops by doing “yellow light position,” and then red, without touching the wall to aid their break. I always hope he will, and I always try to get him involved, but I knew better than to get my hopes up today.

But!…

From story-time at the beginning where they read something that couldn’t have been less interesting to him if it were a dictionary, all the way through to the Hokey Pokey an hour and a half later -- Matthew, MY MATTHEW, was the picture of perfect obedience. Matthew got up and down four times in the time it took everyone else to learn to do it once. He went to the directed spots each and every last time the class was directed to, and in absolutely no time at all, he wouldn’t have even noticed if I’d left. But more importantly, the teacher wouldn’t have either! He skated so well that he even learned all on his own that if he started to lose balance, he could duck down into the “super-skater” position to even himself out, and then without stopping at all, raise himself back up and keep going. It was incredible! At one point in the class Ms. B even used him as an example! An EXAMPLE, people! MY kid! At listening!

On an unrelated note, Scarlett had so much fun walking around the rink,
she swatted at my arms when I tried to pick her up. Talk about a first!

Three quarters of the way through the class, Matthew was racing with a five year old from one of the designated spots to the other, where they were instructed to skate the length of the rink and then practice stopping the correct way. Matthew kept shouting, “LOOK, MOMMA! I’M WINNING THIS KID IN THE RACE! DO YOU SEE ME!?” I apologized to the boy’s mom next to me and tried to say, “Uh, yeah, bud. You’re doing great, but it’s not a race. You guys are both doing it…” just as he reached the wall with an exemplary break, and proceeded to dance like he’d just scored a touchdown at the Superbowl. From that wall to the next stopping point, though, Matthew lost control and couldn’t get up in time to beat the kid a second time. But all he did was look up at me and the other mom from the floor of the rink and say with a good-natured beam I rarely have the pleasure of seeing outside of the house, that: “Dang-it! That other boy won me this time! He sure is fast!”

At the limbo game, where the children have to duck into their “super-skater” pose to make it under the limbo stick, and then back to the end of the line again, Matthew took turns without reservation every time, even when presented with the opportunity to slip in front of kids who weren’t paying attention. And, just to show off, after making it under the stick, he’d jump! And then land with an intentional roll, as if maybe trying to break dance, or act like an action hero narrowly escaping explosion or something.

At the end of the lesson, when all of the children were grabbing their take-home treats, Ms. B said fondly to another mom entirely that, “That one’s a little fire-cracker, isn’t he?” To which the mom agreed, smiling down at him.

“My word! He was just a star, wasn’t he?” a little girl’s grandmother added.

“--And so well behaved!” a third chimed in.

At that, I had to laugh. I’m pretty sure Ms. B did something like a scoff. And Matthew just popped the treat between his cheeks.

For so long, I have worried about how he’ll fare in school with things like obedience and submission to others destined to play such a tall part in his everyday. But once in a while there is a small sign of chance. That maybe, Matthew, -- even my Matthew, firecracker that he is -- will do just fine.

And it will have all been worth it.

Today He Went Back To Work.

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It’s been a long three months.


At first, he couldn’t do much, and he needed unnatural quantities of rest. It took a great effort to keep the kids quiet for him. I had to cut what chores that I could afford to out of my schedule to make time for uncharacteristically tranquil activities around the house, so that I was nearby to care for him too. Matthew learned to play Chutes and Ladders. Scarlett learned to do chunky, block puzzles. Mary couldn’t bring friends over for a while and she had to help take Matthew to visit his friends down the street after school. I asked her not to do chores that would make a lot of clatter, like cleaning out her closet or emptying the dish strainer.

When Matthew was emotional and intolerant, (as is what could only be expected to happen when you put a three year old through the kind of trauma he’s endured this year, poor child) I didn’t have the luxury of being patient. Handling the stress it caused him to hear Matthew purposely act out, or me let Matthew blow off the steam he needed to in his room until he calmed down -- was physically painful for Spencer, and putting him in danger. My mother-in-law tenderly urged us to let Spencer stay there for a while, which we almost had to do. It was rough and sorely unfair on every person involved. I felt like I couldn’t take adequate care of anybody, and Spencer wasn’t in a place to be able to pamper my feelings.



By the second month, life started to take on a new kind of a normal. A better kind. Spencer was making his way out of the bedroom with more and more frequency, and even getting dressed once in a while. He’d come out with us to places if there wasn’t a lot of walking involved. And Matthew learned to be careful around the World’s Greatest Wrestling Buddy, in a way he never could have dreamt having to before. We watched a perverted number of crappy movies together after the kids went to sleep (which was later and later every night) and he came down with insomnia pretty badly from lying in bed at such length through the day. We stayed up all night talking like high school sweethearts, which was something I knew even then that I would miss. By the end of the month, we started taking real trips together and, keeping them short, but packing them with a lot of fun. Apple picking. Museum perusing. Park going. He joined us for a night at the roller rink once (although he didn’t skate) and by the time the holidays rolled around, he was just fine gathering with neighbors for some of the community events and staying out with us later than we ever have before on Halloween.

By the third month, he was up on his feet again and only home mainly to get his body’s threshold for strenuous work back to where it needed to be. We took grave advantage of the time we had left to be together. He organized his garage. He moved furniture, spackled, and fixed both a serious sewage issue with the house, and the hot water heater. And yes, he started putting both sweat, time and an intense devotion into fixing his bike. (Not to mention, converting that son of a bitch into a permanent one-seater, thankyouverymuch!) Our parents baby-sat often; we went drinking and dancing and we even took a trip with some friends and without the kids, to the Philadelphia Zoo. We took the kids to visit Santa Clause without standing in any lines! We cooked big, bacon and sausage breakfasts together in the middle of the week; had long, trivial conversations with our kids over treats we baked with them for no good reason; and made out like teenagers in the luster of perfectly irrelevant mid-afternoons. Parts of it were some of the most fun we’ve ever had together before.

But parts of it weren’t. We bickered more often and fought more intensely than we ever have. And about substantial things, too: things like money, appreciation, and how to discipline the kids. Especially considering that the most we’ve ever disagreed about was maybe, maybe how far to take a joke. Money got tight. Christmas closed in. There was nothing left of a respectable schedule regarding housework, or the children. Guilt from both sides, for a myriad of reasons were weighing with ever-growing intensity on our moods. And we were plucking away at each other’s nerves in a way that made us both understand how winning the lottery and retiring early the way everyone dreams, could easily ruin otherwise perfectly happy lives. Try to imagine, if you will, being conflicted by the simultaneous emotion of being so thrilled that someone was alive that you could kiss the ground they walked on, and also wanting very much to strangle them a little bit. That’ll give you a pretty good idea of where our joint emotional sanity was rounding by the end of month three.  I may have even thrown celery at him once.

If there's one thing we agreed on through it all though, it was that this experience was still definitely going to be missed when it was gone. Especially if we ended up killing eachother.

Annnnd on Thursday, when he got the go-ahead from his neurosurgeon to head back to work, the two of us were heart-broken in the totally foreseeable, almost mockingly bittersweet way we knew we would be when the ride was finally over. Back to packing lunches, breaking eggs and crackling Tabasco over a dim-lit burner at 3:00 a.m., and back to towing three-to-four antsy, tired children to clarinet recitals alone at night, with no help. For him it's back to five hours of sleep, sweating while his knuckles blister from the cold, and being lucky to see the baby (who he was an emotional wreck about leaving after the way they've bonded over this time) for ten collective minutes outside of the weekend.

But it is also, for me, back to a trusted schedule, discipline my own way, and having a chance to miss the man of the house so much we all but throw a party the nanosecond his key shimmies in the back door. For him, it's back to feeling fulfilled and secure in the cushion he allocates us to have with his long hours and hard work. Back to being freed of effeminate duties, like being the designated diaper-fetcher, tampon-run-runner, or bubble-bath-giver. But most of all, just back to being the man and the woman of the house, respectively, in the sense we’ve both come to love, even for all of their inconveniences and difficulties.


Back to work we go.

But for what it's worth, I thouroughly enjoyed having him alive these past three, very long months. :-)

Tell Me Honestly.

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Have you ever seen anything so adorable?

'Cause I haven't.

This is from a website called Readingeggs.com. I only plan to utilize it for the extent of the free 14 days trial, but Matthew is PSYCHOPATHICALLY addicted to this website -- even though it is almost psychopathically hard at times. We were able to take a reading test at the beginning to determine what “reading age” he starts at, and even with the test being compromised because Scarlett made noise over a few of the prompts so that we couldn’t hear them - and there was no way to have the question repeated -- he landed at a reading age of five. He breezes through 90% of it, but once in a while he has to read and match twenty sight words to their correct spot in under so many seconds -- I think two minutes or so. It. Is. Though! But prying him away is much tougher! (And I haven’t even shown him any of the rewards he’s racked up on the game yet!) His reading just in the past few days has phenomenally improved. He read Go, Dog. Go! last night like it was nothing. But because I already talked Spencer into letting me buy the membership on Starfall, we’re gonna have to be done with Reading Eggs in eleven days… :-/

Meanwhile, I want to stock up on all of the great print-outs. Matt loves them! And if they all turn out this freaking cute, I love them, too!

Because Toddlerhood Is Getting The Better Of Someone.

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Except for the fact that she is still pretty much a mute, Scarlett has embraced this whole toddler phase heart and soul. She would still prefer to be held over anything else, but we have on our hands, ladies and gentleman, a bonafide walker.

Albeit a pretty rickety commencement, the girl puts a resolve into each and every cautious step she takes on -- that I have to say, for her, is surprising. For a kid who typically whimpers at even the slightest discomfort, she puts an impressive tenacity into keeping upright to get around. Last night I counted somewhere around forty bottom-crashing thumps to the floor in between the time she woke up from her second nap, and bed. She must average somewhere close to seventy in any given day. Still, time and time again she gets back up to teeter on those two, little thunder-thigh legs scarcely long enough to make it just another few steps.

It is adorable.

It’s not her fault that she doesn’t get far. If it weren’t for Matthew thundering through the house with wild-eyed inhibition like only three years of testosterone can, she’d probably be just fine getting around at the slow and steady pace she likes to keep. But, much to her chagrin sometimes, Matthew exists. And therefore, her getting very far does not.

He doesn’t usually (USUALLY) bump into her, but all it really takes to knock her off course is getting close enough to send her long, thin lashes flickering nervously over her eyes. And that, he does pretty often.

Sunday night we put almost all of our living room furniture out on the curb to make room for the new suit we’re getting handed down from my in-laws today. It ended up raining for the past few days which stopped us from being able to get it sooner, so our living room -- except for a Christmas tree, a fireplace, a set of end, and coffee tables, and a basket of books that’ll sit on the floor next to our new reading chair -- is pretty barren. I.e. perfect stomping grounds for a girl like Scarlett! And when we put her down in the newly emptied room, that’s what her thoughts were, exactly. She immediately squealed, and went scampering off (at least as fast as she possibly could) into the vacant space wielding a great big, bunny-toothed grin.

And for about three and a half minutes she played in a rapture of independence, turning in all different directions just to see how it feels to walk a little bit over here compared to over there, or over there compared to by the window, taking eight, nine, even ten steps at a time without being knocked to the ground!… Before he came in… running, as per usual, at a reckless, absurd speed in her direction. He threw himself headfirst into the pile of throw pillows left in the center of the area rug, leaving the rest of his body to flip heels over head. He didn’t touch Scarlett, but a pillow did. And so she fell to the floor, and she looked up at me, and she cried.

“Lovey,” I said, pulling her together; Matthew apologizing sincerely in the background. “You are gonna have to grow some gonads if you are ever to survive siblinghood with a brother like him and a sister like Mary. I don’t know what else to tell you. You’re kind of stuck with them at this point.”



Well, I guess I can assume that for once, my words did not fall on deaf ears. Because yesterday, when I left my children’s side to grab a load of laundry, I was called back (AS PER USUAL) by a shrill, blood-curdling shriek that sounded like it was coming from my daughter -- and my son? Not half a second later, I turn the corner just in time to find them yowling battle cries at top volume, and running directly at each other on a frantic blur of hands and knees as fast as they can -- before, BOOM! Scarlett lowers her head, Matthew raises himself up just a bit, and the two of them plow into each other like a couple of drunk motorists playing chicken, falling to the floor in a heap and bubbling with laughter.

It was adorable.

Matthew helped her up and made sure she was okay before running a few feet away, meeting her with a mischievous gaze, and doing it all over again. Scarlett shrieked, feigning terror, but smiling so wide her eyes disappeared behind bulging cheeks. She tossed her head barbarically from side to side and charged at him just as fast as he charged at her.

They did it a good four or five times before I finally pulled them apart, and even though they both took with them a few good bumps, not once did either one of them stop to cry.


“Well look who’s come out of her shell!” I said, scooping her up with a playful swing and suspending her over my head. “Letting our hair down a bit, are we?”

But all she said was: “RAAAWR!!”

So About That Preschooling Stuff...

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I haven’t been writing much on what Matthew’s learning about these days. Reason being, it’s a little all-over-the-place. It’s important to me that everything be child-led, which I’ve found makes it a little difficult to always organize into a neatly-presented, not too horribly drawn-out blog post. Here in lies my best shot at recapping our focus activities over the past few months. Alternatively titled: Literally The Longest Blog Post Ever, Even For Me.

Discipline is number one right now. Not the most fun thing to write about, but necessary for my very bull-headed little bug.

A strong sense of urgency. Intolerance for being interrupted. Impatience, even with adults. Disregard for authority. High motor activity, (not to be confused with hyperactivity). Need for significantly less sleep. Fascination with organizing, or seeking patterns. Perfectionism to the point of becoming depressed by disappointed idealism. Frequent, vivid nightmares and dreams. Hyperactive imagination, usually accompanied by a network of imaginary friends. Tendencies of OCD, and sometimes even Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Commonly misjudged as spoiled and impertinent.


These are the behavioral characteristics of a child who’s IQ falls within the gifted range, which is just anything at or above 130. Clearly Matthew's not the kind of child who’s ever read the newspaper on a park bench just to pass the time, but I do think he’s ahead of his age. We’ve never had reason to test his IQ, but as hard as I try not to get ahead of myself here, it’s hard to consider that in conjunction with having so many personality traits consistent with giftedness, he’s almost mastered every kindergarten skill including reading at a six-year-old level before the age of four, without coming to that conclusion. At this point, at the suggestions of people who know more about this than we do, we’re running off of the assumption that he probably is. (Although we don’t talk about but on this blog and in my and my husband’s own private conversations.) In any case, there are a number of disciplinary issues that need to be carefully addressed if Matthew’s to have any future success in school at all. Mainly, a completely disregard for the authority of just about anyone besides us, and my parents.

Our saving grace this month has been that Matthew is very into fairness these days. Shockingly, not just what’s fair for him, either. We started working on equals a few months back; equal fractions, equal weight on his My First Scale toy, and symmetry. And when I introduced weight and fractions, a lot of times I would use a pretend scenario where he and I or he and a few specific friends needed to have equal parts/amounts/sizes of something to make the situation fair. Ever since he’s been on a fairness kick.

This has faired me well in the discipline department, which because of the difficulties Matthew has with certain intolerances, makes up a solid fifty percent of what we spend “home-schooling” time working on.

Simple as it sounds, it took one time of me explaining to him that isn’t "fair" for him to react rudely to people who weren’t rude to him, for the principle to click. For instance, Matthew has a very hard time respecting the authority of anyone other than a select few people. If his uncle reprimands him, Matthew will stand up to him like a bully at a playground who just got picked on by the wrong kid. At home, he’s perfectly thoughtful, compliant, and usually needs little more than a stern look and a reminder to pull him back into line if he starts to step out. But anywhere else, that kind of child would be a stranger to me. It’s perfectly common for him to point his finger in the face of a grown man, standing five and a half feet taller than him, and dish out an order like, “You watch the way you speak to me!” just for being told to sit still or to finish his plate before getting up to play.

I started by firmly but understandingly explaining to him a few times that other adults give him rules to teach him right from wrong, and that they teach him those things because they love him, just like Mommy and Daddy love him. Then I’d ask him if he reacted the way he did purely out of love for whoever it was he was distrustful to -- and his response would always be a very honest no. Then when I’d ask him if he does love that person, of course, his answer, even in anger would be a remorseful and genuine yes, and he would return happy to apologize and able to explain why what he did “wasn’t fair.”

If, by another example, he pushes his friend out of the way because they were… maybe running too close to his tower of blocks and were about to knock it down, I’d ask him if he thought being pushed down was equal to having his blocks knocked down. To my surprise, he’d be able to tell me that it wasn’t because blocks can’t get hurt when they fall down, but his friend can. This is a big deal, because Matthew has a lot of difficulty finding fault in things that he does. He normally has a hundred passionate reasons as to why he was justified in behaving the way he did. I can’t tell if it’s growing apathy for the people he wrongs or if it really is strictly about what’s equal and what’s not, but for whatever reason, the fairness thing has seemed to make it through that thick, adorable skull.

Once I knew that he really understood what was wrong about his I-wear-the-pants-in-this-relationship attitude, I started really cracking down on the gestures he was using that came off as impolite, and thus, unfair: arm crossing, stomping, gritting his teeth at people, pointing his finger in their faces, and talking back. Now, when he’s behaving “unfairly” to a friend, there are no more reminders except a stern, “Finger, Matthew.” or “Arms, Matthew.” And he knows to stand down. Unless he does it to an adult, in which case, he knows the penalty is an immediate, non-negotiable time-out.

The lighter side to this is that he gets equals. One of his favorite things to do when we’re out-and-about is point out to me things that match, or objects that are symmetrical, or patterns that repeat two or more things an equal amount of times, or things that are broken up into equal parts (like Pizza at the shop near our house when we’re waiting for our order), or especially (oh my gosh, especially!) two totally different objects that end up weighing exactly the same on his scale! A couple of weeks ago my dad was explaining to him something that he and my mom took turns doing. “First I go,” he said, “Then mom-mom has a turn. Then I go again. And then it’s her turn again…” “Hey!,” Matthew interrupted, that usual enthusiasm dancing on his words. “You guys go in a pattern!”

You have to understand that Matthew is a little like a diamond in the rough with his behavior, but not so much that it takes only a mother’s love to see the redeeming qualities lying underneath. He has a great big, bursting heart, stronger and fuller than any I’ve ever seen in another child his age, too. And with tact, anyone can get him to follow direction… it’s just that it takes a special understanding of him because (and I realize as I write this how ridiculous it sounds, but…) he takes real offense to being spoken down to. He gets embarrassed, and then defensive, same as you or I would if one of our “equals” tried to assume authority over us with a backhanded slight. This isn’t an excuse for his behavior, it’s my understanding of it -- which is necessary if it’s ever to be managed. And which, again, is much of what we’re focused on teaching him right now.

Mathematics!
Half the time he still says things like, “eight, two-two,” but he’s getting really good at reading digital time. This is one of the things Matthew really learned on his own, simply by asking us what time it was about a dozen or so times a day, every few days. Sometimes he still mixes up the digital two with a digital five, but quite often he comes bopping on through the house calling for everybody to do something specific, (like get him some breakfast or lay the baby down for a nap or turn on our movie) because it’s “already” some actually-correct time. On that note, I realized the other day that he knows how to read prices correctly too. (Another thing I’ve never tried to teach him.) He came to me with a junk-mail flyer for Domino’s once and read that it was only “five, ninety-nine” for the pizza in the photo. We went over a few of the other prices too, and except for one of the prices, where he referred to the eleven as “one-one”, he could tell me what all of them said. One of the things I actually can take credit for teaching him is that he can also find any date on the calendar at all now, in any month -- which means that he can read through the names of both months and days to find the correct one. And we’ve made it a morning ritual of finding today’s date and counting how many days are left until Christmas. I am absolutely kicking myself for not getting an advent calendar for the kids yet.

He knows how to write out different equations, and how to represent a written equation using two sets of objects. He isn’t as confident with subtraction, but he has more fun with it, especially since he memorized a song we learned on Starfall.com about subtracting chickadees. He has addition facts up to the sum of five memorized, but after that he loses confidence. Right now we’re working on making as many different equations as we can from a set sum of objects, and understanding that no matter how the objects are broken up (10+3; 3+10; 11+2), they will always equal the set sum. Coming from someone who has literally, to this day, never enjoyed math, I know this sounds dreadfully arid for a three year old to digest, but keep in mind that all of this is child-led; which means I show him a game I’ve made up utilizing something I’m hoping to teach once, and after that the game only gets played when he comes to me and asks if we can.

Science!
He’s still big into space, so we haven’t really done much off the subject yet. Two days ago when his mom-mom spoke to him over the phone, she told him she loved him all the way to the stars. To which he replied, “Well… well, I love you all the way to the planet with the big, red spot on it -- Yes, Jupiter!” When they hung up I reminded him that Jupiter isn’t the planet that’s farthest away; ‘why didn’t you pick Neptune?,’ I teased. “I know it isn’t,” he shot back. “I picked Jupiter because it’s the biggest one. Just like my love!” (P.S. Santa Clause brought someone a telescope this Christmas -- and I can’t wait to see his face when he opens it! He gets super, super excited whenever he sees someone in one of our library books peeping into a telescope at the moon and stars. Right now he uses an old kaleidoscope that he pretends is helping him to see craters on the moon.)

Language!
Just this week I started with a few Spanish words. I went through the numbers on his sister’s clock in Spanish and I taught him the colors of the Hot Wheels cars he was playing with. I also pointed out “y”, and “con” and I taught him a few other nouns, like dog, cat, library and books. The very afternoon we started, when we went to Target, he pointed out things that were both azul and rojo. Coincidentally, we grabbed the book No, David! By David Shannon at the library on our rush out and didn’t realize until we got home that it was in Spanish. When Matthew insisted that I read it to him anyway, a lot of the Spanish from school came back to me and we ended up having a really fun time making educated guesses about what the words could say. Something we don’t get to do a lot because of how well he’s reading already.

I’ve been reluctant to start putting time into Spanish words because neither his father or I are fluent speakers. I wondered how much it would really be able to click for him, and if it would be worth putting effort into teaching. Then I remembered that there actually are a few fluent Spanish speakers on Spencer’s side of the family. I don’t plan to make it an official part of our curriculum or anything - just sprinkle it into our conversations throughout our day - , but it’s nice to know that on occasion, we’ll be able to have him around people who can naturally speak it.

As far as his English goes, we’re finding that it’s taking effort now to help him continue to speak correctly, where we never had to before. Whereas when he was two and picking up on words like inappropriate and hideous from the people around him, now he’s picking up double-negatives and purposefully slack grammar from Mary’s middle-school friends, as well as incorrect pronunciations from his own friends who are only just now beginning to really talk in a way that other’s can understand. We caught him about six months ago intentionally turning his L’s and R’s into W’s and his TH’s into F’s and V’s… sounds he’s always known how to enunciate correctly. When we questioned him about it, he said that that’s the way his four-year-old friend said those words, and that he was a whole year older than Matthew. Ever since we’ve been trying to set the best linguistic example for him that we can, and staying on top of both he and Mary about the grammar they use.

Writing!… /Fine Motor.
Matthew’s handwriting is the bomb. It’s one of his biggest strengths. Maybe once or twice a week, I’ll pull out his dry erase workbook and just leave it on the table for him to find and have at when he wakes up in the morning. He’s taking more of an interest in learning to write words… He doesn’t like as much for me to instruct him to write them, but if ever he has access to a writing utensil and something on which to draw, he’ll ask me to help him spell or sometimes copy a word I write at the top of his paper. Again, he has to be the one to initiate it though, or for some reason, it loses all appeal. He does not like to write within the solid/dotted guidelines of practice sheets though, which is a shame because he’s really good at them. Instead, he prefers the openness of a blank sheet of paper. Even if he does need to be reminded to keep the letters more closely knit together when he does.

Remember, like, four hours ago when I talked about the perfectionism to the point of becoming depressed by disappointed idealism? Handwriting is really where that comes out in him. The first time I ever noticed this, and realized how against his character it seemed juxtaposed to how in-a-tizzy he can become over much smaller frustrations, he was practicing writing A’s. Dozens of them, over and over again because he couldn’t get the top of the letter to point. It always turned out curved. (This wasn’t something I prompted him to do -- just something I found him doing on his own.) The more I tried to make him see that his capital A’s were great just the way that they were, the more set in his decision he grew. Trying to make me understand that they weren’t correct frustrated him nearly to tears, but he never gave up or even raised his voice the way he would have if it were a block tower or a craft he were fumbling over. Trying to redirect him to a snack break or some fresh air only gave him the sense that the need to get it done right was becoming more urgent. I might as well have been badgering him to hurry up. I stayed out of his hair for as long as I could stand it. Finally after more than thirty minutes, maybe even an hour, and a small juice break he finally agreed to take after he couldn't help but cave to a few quiet tears that broke my heart to pieces, he was able to do it to his own satisfaction. Because of this, I very rarely ask him to sit down and practice his handwriting anymore. I just leave the workbooks at his disposal to mess about with when he wants.

We’re not as big into crafting lately just because we’ve been pretty busy around here, but when we do, I make sure to put our safety scissors to frequent use. Sometimes he’s awesome with them, sometimes not so much. You’d think because of his handwriting he’d have off-the-chart fine motor skills, but I think outside of writing and drawing they’re pretty age appropriate. I think.

Reading!
The only activity that is binding in our schedule, is reading a book together, usually first thing in the morning. I say binding instead of mandatory because I don’t force him to do it; it’s by far and wide one of his favorite activities, but I do keep up with it everyday. I just feel like it’s too valuable a skill for it to be left unpracticed. He loves, loves, loves Mo Willems books, especially the Elephant and Piggie series. We usually read it once together, and then he reads it entirely on his own. Recently we’ve been working on pointing to each word. Because his memory is so fantastic, he can memorize a book entirely without really reading it. In fact, it was memorizing words by the sight of them that taught him how to read in the first place, instead of the other way around. Now that he has a solid understanding of phonics, I urge him to point-read, so that he doesn’t get ahead of himself. It forces him to slow down and really see each word, even if he’s already memorized most of the text.

Right now, we’re working on word families, and letters that make more than one sound. Every few days or so I take like ten minutes to sit down with him and write a word ending, like OW in black dry erase marker. Then he helps me think of words that fit that family, like COW, HOW, NOW, etc. and he writes the beginning letter in front of it to make the word. The next day, we’ll take that same family, and think of words that fit into it with the long O sound, like SNOW, ROW, TOW, MOW, BLOW, and KNOW. I’m not sure what it is about this game that he loves so much, but it’s easily one of his favorites right now. Last night when I was reading to Scarlett, he must have stopped me four times to point out a word family we’d just learned within the story. He also knows about soft letters like C as in NICE and G as in GIRAFFE.

And of course, every few days I make a new, silly sentence at our pocket chart, using our color-coded word cards. Walking into the living room to find a new sentence on the chart is like coming across the surprise inside of a cereal box to him. He gets all excited and runs to me, squealing, “There’s a new sentence, Mommy! You made a new sentence!!” Each one has a number of words he either hasn’t seen in a while or is new to him altogether. Once he figures it out, I keep the sentence there for a few days and we read it once everyday to get him used to seeing the words within it. Today our silly sentence says, “They wanted to read that funny book today, but your dog just ate it!”

And to wrap it all up, here’s a quick vid of the cutest kiddo in town, practicing his point-and-read techniques at the pocket chart. (Or, at least it will be once I figure out how to post it using this new blogger format...) This was from about three months ago, I think, before we learned about punctuation, which we since have.