Our Little B Words

The Dream.

2012-02-09T05:37:00.000-08:00

I fellasleep monstrously sick last night.

…Justsick enough to trigger another one, even though it hasn’t been four days sincethe last time.

I’venoticed that anytime I feel off, it happens. If the temperature suddenly risesin the night and I start to sweat in my sleep; if there was an argument thenight before and we never quite set things perfectly straight. Once I had areally rigorous workout that left all of my core muscles so sore I couldn’tcough without wincing, and if I held my arms out in front of me, my fingertipswould tremble. In the dream I was doubled over, sick to my stomach from all ofthe crying. I said something really melodramatic about being terrible forcaring about my body at all when he couldn’t even have his. I felt bad forworking out. I walked upstairs to get a drink of water when I came out of itwide awake and sweating, and every muscle in my body felt like it was working reallyhard to keep me up. That’s when I realized what it was that was making themhappen.

In thelight of day, nothing about the accident bothers me. It’s not even weird for usto laugh about it – the “knack,” we call it, that he has for evading death. It’shappened twice in less than two years. I joke that if he died tomorrow, Iwouldn’t even be surprised. “Yeah, yeah… sad and all… but not surprised.” Istill call him an ass when he’s being an ass. I still forget to kiss himgoodbye sometimes if I’m busy, because I don’t feel like I have to question ifhe’ll ever be back. In fact, when words like neurosurgeon, or MRI, or motorcycleaccident expose themselves within our day-to-day conversations with other people,it’s sometimes hard for me to even wrap the meanings of such wild, theatricalthings around an image of my own husband. For the most part, it’s almost as ifit happened to another family entirely - somebody else’s Spencer, and I’m justpassing on what I heard had happened from them.

But thenevery few weeks, the dream that he is not alive anymore manifests itself -- heavy,and still, and quiet over my thoughts, as if it is something that justconstantly exists in the back of my mind and is only revealing itself, insteadof making an entrance. And for a few hours out of my existence, I taste theexperience of bearing a life, empty of him, as if it’s exactly what I do everysingle day. It’s awful. It’s so awful. But it isn’t a nightmare. Nightmares areterrifying, and to be terrified, you have to have something bad to anticipate.In this dream, the worst is done. He is already gone; he has been for weeks uponweeks by now, and what I’m living out is just a very, very poisoned state ofbeing. It isn’t like any dream of death I’ve ever had before. It isn’ttypically a very dramatic scene that I walk into. And it isn’t dark and dismalto start. My kids are all surrounding me, and I’m almost never without a chaperonebecause both sides of the family are still flooding in to help with whateverthey can. They’re always smiling. And I can smile around them too.

I don’tfeel like I cry every day or anything. But I feel distinctly nasally,itchy-eyed, thirsty, heavy-headed… just, all the time – even when I’m otherwise feeling prettyeven-keeled. It’s as if the aftereffects of crying are just a chronic conditionI’ll live with for the rest of my life, even if I never actually cry at all.

I feelokay enough to get by now, okay enough to make light of all the ways that hewasn’t perfect when he was alive… I just feel knocked off balance, the way thatyou do when you’re sick, but you try to keep up with doing things the way younormally would, anyway.

I hearmyself telling people every time that I barely have time to think about it, really,because I’m so caught up with tending to the all the normal things that haven’tstopped needing to be done just because he died. The baby stills throws most ofher food to the floor every time she eats, and that needs to be cleaned upright away or she’ll get into it as soon as she gets down. Matthew still triesto wonder off in other directions at the store if I take my eyes off of him foreven a second. He still puts up a fight when I call him back to my side. Stillcauses scenes just about everywhere we go. And Mary still comes home fromschool almost every day, so rambunctious and moody that it takes all of thepatience I have just to put up with it, much less navigate my every choice ofwords around… especially with everything else I have going on. Then I sigh, thesame way I do when I’m not dreaming, and I realize that I’m beginning to rant. Inmy dream, I can talk about it like it was just something that happened, justsomething that made everything harder. Of course it’s sad. But everyone alreadyknows that -- they’re sad too, so I don’t talk about it all the time. I feellike I’m getting to a place where it’s good to just try to stay above it asoften as I can, holding my face away from it, like a smell I’m trying to avoid,or like I’m up very, very high and trying my best not to look down, becauselooking at it won’t change the fact that it’s there, and it’s not like any ofus could ever successfully ignore it.

The onlyemotional thing I tell them – and I tell them this just about every time I havethe dream – is that I’ve forgotten how to play with the kids. I can laugh atstuff with them, and I can tickle them and kiss them and take them to placesthat are fun, but I haven’t figured out how to really enjoy them the way that Iused to. Or how to be enjoyable to them. It’s like we’re detached. I still lovethem, but I can’t completely reach them anymore. I don’t even know if thatmakes any sense. I don’t think I’ve ever read that anywhere or seen it on amovie. And I’ve never lost anyone I was ever really close to, so I don’t knowwhy that feeling is one I so strongly relate to the thought of losing Spencer. Butfor some reason, it’s what I feel every few weeks when that dream reoccurs.

And thenI go back to being normal, making a joke, or telling them that we’re fine, (reallybelieve it) and that it’s probably just a normal part of grieving.

Thenafter a while, somewhere in there, a little ways in, after everything else hasbeen a steady rock-bottom ride, but something I could handle almost comfortably,I start to cry. And it doesn’t feel like it’s something I’ve been living with,it feels like it just, just happened. I’m choking for air. I double over. Ilean into someone. I fall apart, completely, crying as if it’s the only way Ican suck up any oxygen at all. Being loud. I cry so hard that everything in mefeels ugly. I can’t believe it’s real. I can’t believe it’s real. I can’t believe it’s real.

And thenI wake up. And he’s upstairs making breakfast. I can’t see him, but I can hearhis boots on the floor. I can hear his eggs crackling over the bottom leftburner of the stove, and the spatula scraping the pan. I can hear him clearinghis throat. He sounds a little congested, like me. And just like that, life isback to normal.

None ofit was real.

“Bruh Tee” and Other 16 Month Old Nonsense.

2012-02-07T05:21:00.000-08:00

Everyday she raids my cabinets of pots and squeals at my feet until I hand her a spoon. Then she takes them to the coffee table and pretends to stir soup. Every few seconds, she grabs one of my candles and takes a drink from it.

I love this picture for so many reasons.

One day, Scarlett decided she wanted to draw outside. Needless to say, I haven’t been upset about it.

Scarlett has always had this really illogical habit of learning new words -- practicing them, MASTERING them -- and then promptly and systematically forgetting that they had ever even existed. At any given time in her life she has consistently kept a vocabulary of about two to three words. As soon as she’d learn a new word, the last one was out, never to be heard from again -- even when prompted and reminded and begged for a comeback. It wasn’t until very recently that she started actually accumulating words, which is still a pretty slow go.

Right now, she has more than she’s ever had before at one time. Here’s the rundown:

Mommy: Mama!

Daddy: Dada!

Mary: Mammy!

Matthew: Mat-mat!

Milo: Meow!

Baby (her baby doll): Babby!

Brush Teeth: Bruh Tee!
--- (Scarlett’s favorite activity in the universe, THE UNIVERSE, above playing with dump trucks or pulling every book off of the mid-level shelf at the library or even sticking her fingers in the mouths of younger babies, is brushing her teeth. She is pretty much in a constant state of brushing her teeth around the house, taking breaks a few times a day only to eat and sleep and play outside. She says this one a lot.)
Bread: Breh!

Blueberries: Boo Bay!

Bottle: Bob-bye!

Oatmeal: Oapmee!

Pizza: Peet-see!

Thank You: Dane Doo!

Please: Peas!

For the record, “please” and “thank you” have been said maybe a dozen times collectively in the past four months, and please has since been replaced with the act of slamming her hands down on stuff, and then twisting herself around in a knot on the floor, squealing like a pig being stabbed in the gut. Meanwhile “brush teeth” and “pizza” are said, hands down, more than mommy and daddy and Milo, combined.

On that note, I love how accurate an illustration this is of her capricious personality. Basically all we hear from her all day long are requests to have her teeth brushed and to be fed pizza, peppered intermittently with wild, shrieking laughter, and great, big, growly dinosaur roars. Then again, she hasn’t even woken up yet, and Lord knows there’s no telling what today will bring with this one. Just a few days ago her favorite things were eating chicken and spinach and dancing to the Hokey Pokey. Now when you offer her the chance to do either, all grinny and exaggerated about it, she cries for a toothbrush.

She may not exactly be the linguist her brother was at this age, - or the one her intense (dude, I’m talking INTENSE) love of letters led us to believe that she might be - but she is certainly shaping up to have quite the character. And really, when you can mimic a dying pig like this one can, who needs decipherable language anyway.. Right?

Just The Way We Were.

2012-02-05T05:35:00.000-08:00

In unrelated news: I am trying to teach Scarlett to eat with a spoon. Still.

I was kind of wondering why she hadn’t asked before, but on the way to her conference it came out: “Why are you reading all of my stuff all of a sudden?” It wasn’t her usual ‘I’m just curious’ tone. She was getting pissed. I didn’t sympathize, but I understood.

“Because you’re eleven.” I say, my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. “If you have something private to say, you can say it to yourself in your journal without any fear of it ever being read. You aren’t allowed to be writing notes in class anyway, so those aren’t subject to a right to privacy. And when I trusted you to come to me with messages that I should know about that you received on your iPod, you didn’t. You took that trust and instead of turning it into something beneficial, you chose to take a route that landed you here. I can’t blame you completely. I misjudged what you were ready for.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know…” with heavy-hearted, downcast eyes. (Hm, I think. Progress.) Then she hits me with it. “But you’re like, the only parent I know of all my friends who does stuff like that… you’re like, stalking me.” She says the words like they’re a bug she’s flicking away from her. Disapprovingly.

Before I even know what I’m doing, I check my mirrors and I pull the car to the shoulder. Her eyes bulge at me like she’s a little afraid I might kick her out of the car.

“Your friends aren’t bad people,” I start. I’m not yelling, but there’s a distinct urgency in my tone. “But for one reason or another, they’ve been robbed of something very vital to a happy, healthy life. The ability to know self-respect. I know that to you that’s just a word right now -- But it’s what makes the difference between good people, Mary, and the people who grow up to behave like scum - because it’s the only skill in life they have to fall back on, and who walk through life spreading their scum onto the rest of the world like a disease, building it up to look like something better than self-respect. As far as I’m concerned, the people you “know” are sick with ignorance. They aren’t my responsibility, but you are. And right now, I’m failing you; when I mislead you to believe that at eleven years old you have the right to behave like a piece of trash without my getting involved unless I had your permission -- I was no better than every other ignorant parent of a scummy kid in this school. You guys are rotting away in here right now, and you don’t even know it. You guys are babies, all caught up in trying so hard to be something so ugly, something so far from what you actually are, something that you would never want to be if you knew what it really was.

So if you want to measure my parenting strategies against those of your friends’ parents, than by all means, honey, be my guest. It’s not that I don’t care what they do. It’s that I am actively striving to do something different.

And I hope I achieve it, too. I really do. Because something tells me that whether I ever get through to you or not, you’ll spend sixth grade being more of a ‘parent’ to your friends than their actual parents will. And I won’t be making that mistake with you.”

I drove off after that, and she wasn’t quiet, but it didn’t feel like we were on opposing teams anymore. I always thought that when I had these kinds of moments with my children that they’d be more staged, more strategized; that I’d have some kind of preparation before me to draw from, and that I’d know exactly what I was going to say more than half a nanosecond before it slid from my lips onto the open ears of my children. But I didn’t.

I tried to think back on Parenting With Love and Logic and How To Raise Confident Girls, and all that other crap literature taking space on the bookshelf above my bed, (*These books are not actually crap.) but it was like trying to birth Scarlett after I’d read all of those articles and books on managing labor pain without an epidural. In my very hour of need - the moment of truth, all of it ditched me. All of it. I thought of a million don’ts that all seemed to make so much sense in the calm of the afternoons I spent reading them, but I couldn’t remember what a single one of them actually was.

　

　

I wasn’t even sure that what I was saying wasn’t coming off as a little too derogatory. (Maybe calling them “sick” was a little much. And did I really use the old ‘they aren’t my responsibility’ line? Couldn’t I have done better than that?) You know how you walk away from a confrontation sometimes suddenly enlightened by a dozen more effective things you could have said instead, just ten minutes too late? That’s half of the feeling I was hit with. Except without the perfect, punchy lines. Just the awareness that I could have probably done better.

“Stalking her…” I thought, pulling into the school. Jeeze.

…

The conference was brutal, it really was. She spent most of it slunk down into her chair, her long legs climbing out from under the desk, and hands over her face in defeat. Once in a while, when a teacher or I would say something directly to her, she’d peek at us through a slit in her fingers and nod her head abidingly. We were tough on her, but the truth had to come out into the open; she’s not headed in a very good direction, and we need to see a change. We didn’t baby her feelings, but we did let her know, without question, that we were on her side. This was a team effort -- it wasn’t going to move a muscle without a lot of effort from her, but we’d be there for her every step of the way. (You know, all that parent/teacher stuff.)

We walked out to the car through the parking lot with my arm over her shoulder, both in kind of a strangely high spirit. We picked up some ice cream bars on the way home and we got started on some very important business. The business of talking. Just talking.

All this week we’ve stuck to our guns about the new routine. Today, we’re six chapters into Dear Zoe -- a book I picked up for her at a consignment shop down the street last year, but after skimming it myself once I got home, decided she wasn’t ready for. The main character, a fifteen year old named Tess, starts smoking weed with her boyfriend and at the end loses her virginity -- even if they stop halfway through. It’s a short, easy read, but it’s heavy. Do I necessarily think that she’s ready for this kind of material? No, I don’t. But we live in a world where she needs to be - whether I like it or not. At least this I can be a part of.

There’s a part in the book where Tess talks about her step dad. A part that in the thirty-seven seconds or so it might have taken to read, changed a big part of my life.

“David is the disciplinarian, the one who makes me rub some of the makeup off my face, the one who’s saving for my college education. He never got to hold me when I was a baby, and he’d never been a dad before he met mom so I think he just thought it was his job to make rules… I don’t think he really knew how to be a dad until Em came along, and by then the way we were with each other was just the way that we were… I really believe he was doing his best with me when we all moved in together. He can’t help it if his best is better now, or that loving a new daughter can’t change how he is with me… It’s not tragic or anything. It’s just the way it is.”

It was something I related to so heavily, it felt like my very life had been pinned exactly into words. It took one of the most complicated dynamics of my life - my relationship with my stepdaughter - and, like a slap in the face, turned it into something so simple, so obvious, that it made me feel stupid. Even though Tess’ step dad loves her a lot, and even though Mary and I have more than what a typical step-family has, I knew that from that day on, I wanted to change the script with Mary and I. I can’t go back in time and rock her to sleep or watch Disney movies a thousand times over, the way Philip Beard describes Tess’ step dad wanting to do so accurately. But I can be more than what I was, even if it takes a little more effort. Even if it takes a lot.

I feel like this whole experience with Mary recently is another slap in the face kind of wake up call. Something I needed as much as she did. When we were walking to the conference on Tuesday, I saw one of those cheesy, motivational posters outside of a classroom window. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. I pinned it in my brain, thinking lightly, that’s a good one to remind my children of once in a while… yeah, I like that. When Mary and I got to that familiar description of Tess’ relationship with her step dad that same afternoon, I realized how befitting that hokey, motivational saying was to my own situation with her.

Because I felt distinctly different on that day. Distinctly unstuck from the discription that had pinned me down so well a year before.

I can't promise that I'll be a better parent from here on out indefinitely, or that I'll know all of the perfect things to say even when practically giftwrapped the perfect opportunity to say them, or that I'll even notice every glaringly obvious mistake I make staring me right in the face, but I can promise that 'just the way that we are' will never be good enough for us.

I am failing at that, too.

Still. :-)

Pardon The Mess.

2012-02-02T04:29:00.000-08:00

Our Family Is Under Construction. 

I’m always telling other people I “complain” to about my children that I’m only venting. I’ve learned from experience that kids at almost any age cycle through stages and phases so quickly that there’s never reason to fret for long about any one thing. You always figure it out (more or less), and by the time that you do, there’s something new going on to shift your focus anyway. “When I bitch,” I tell them, “take it all with a grain of salt. I know we’ll be fine.”

Recently, all of my children’s most difficult behavioral challenges to date have lined up on my ass like a solar eclipse. To compound matters on an epic scale I never prepared for, Spencer and I aren’t at our strongest. We’re gradually learning to live with the hard reality that the damage done to the frontal lobe of his brain - the part of the mind that controls certain aspects of personality - in the accident, left an impression on him that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. Compared to what we could have been dealing with today as a result of the accident in September, this (a permanent change in his personality and demeanor) sounded like a piece of cake I didn’t mind taking on at all. But it’s proving to be a challenge on the both of us. We’re putting in double-time the effort lately, not just in what we put into the kids, but in the one thing we’ve never had to before -- us.

Just when I was starting to think that things couldn’t get any more difficult, they did. And although I won’t go into detail about it on here, I’m perfectly willing to admit that it’s something I feel in over my head dealing with a little. (Okay. Maybe a lot, but it’s getting better.) The thing itself was big. But the more important problem that it opened my eyes to was colossal. For one punch-gut moment, everything else was put into perspective -- but not the refreshing kind of perspective, where mountains turn into tiny, suddenly manageable grains of sand. No, this was the kind of perspective that made me see with effervescent clarity that every mountain in front of me is even more worth the climb than I thought it was before. And it was about to get harder.

Mary needs to put more effort into the direction her life is going, I agreed with Spencer, but more importantly, WE need to put more effort into it. If we don’t go out of our way to show that we give a shit -I MEAN- crap, then we can’t expect her to. She isn’t an adult. She needs this stuff spelled out for her in all capital letters. YOU ARE WORTH THIS TO US.

Our biggest issue is that spending time with the other two kids is almost impossible not to do. But I still go the extra mile to make sure that the time I have with them is time spent somehow contributing to the enrichment of their lives. The only television Matthew watches are the movies we watch together (something we usually plan a full day in advance, at that). I ask people to buy my son books in place of more toys on his birthdays and my son is quick to remind me, even in the presence of company if we forgot to hold hands and bow our heads to say “morning” or “lunch-time” prayers. I see to it that Scarlett gets to stretch her legs and breathe in fresh air, even in the dead of winter, because (even though I hate the cold, myself, like you wouldn’t believe) I believe these are things that are good for the soul, and even at sixteen months old, her soul is worth the moon and the stars to me. I raise my kids a little differently than other people I know, and I’m sure than even the people who love me dearly roll their eyes at some of the cornier, over-the-top ideals I hold onto in regard to my little ones, but quite frankly, my kids mean more to me than they do so I don’t care.

But, really, what do we do for Mary? I mean, what do we really go out of our way to enthusiastically do for her, just to enrich her life? When I thought about it, the truth is, I had a hard time coming up with anything I was truly proud of.

I’ve made a million excuses for it over the course of the past year, too. I mean, she’s never around, first of all. She sleeps in until noon on the weekends (which - even though I’m not particularly fond of, I realize that not everyone is going to like waking up at the crack of dawn like I do, and I try to give her room to be her own person… at least that’s what I told myself I was doing). And on the weekdays she goes to school, and stays after for band one day a week. By the time she gets home and finishes her homework (or wakes up), she has chores that she just tries to blow through as fast as she can so that she has time to spend with her friends. And spending time outside of the house is important. She needs fresh air and exercise and healthy socialization. And Lord knows the kid is grounded so often that even I relish the opportunities she has to enjoy a little freedom.

But it’s not like we neglected her either … I mean, we started limiting the amount of time she slept-over away from the house on the weekends so that we could spend more time with her ourselves… we wouldn’t let her have a cell phone or a face book account and she wasn’t allowed to wear make-up to school… and last week when she had a day off from school I even had my mom watch Scarlett so that I could take her and Matthew out for a nice, sit-down lunch date! I thought I was really on top of things… at least as much as I had reason to be.

But I realize now that Mary’s not as well-adjusted as I thought that she was. Although it doesn’t necessarily come without effort to her, she usually ends every school year on the Honor Roll. But her grades are in the toilet right now, and getting worse. To the unsuspecting outsider, Mary looks like she farts self-esteem in her sleep. Her self-assuredness is what I’ve always esteemed her for, but I realize now - after the “thing” that went down earlier this week, in a domino effect that led to a long, hard series of recognitions - that self-esteem doesn’t mean to her what it should. To her it means being better than her friends are at pretending they’re all something they aren’t. Tough and Stupid.

Starting two days ago, I told each member of my family that we’re raising the bar. Among the new house rules are a few set aside specifically for Mary:

1.) Friends.
Until her grades improve, Mary has an hour and a half to gallivant with her friends outside of the house after school. (Provided she’s done nothing to have that privilege taken away.) And no more than that.

The fact is, Mary goes to school everyday with kids who are being brought up to behave like scum. Point Blank. When eleven-year-old girls text message each other about how awesome it is to smoke weed and think that it’s fun to pass notes about how people in school think that they’re “pregnit” with their “ex’s” baby -- something in their lives, somewhere has gone horribly awry, and unfortunately, right now, these are the breed of children my daughter socializes with seven hours out of everyday. But at home, her friends are awesome. Especially her best friend, who she hangs out with everyday after school, and whom I don’t even mind her working on homework with together. In fact, I have a hard time grounding Mary from Kait altogether because I think she’s such a positive influence, among so much other negativity. But right now, we’re losing our kid to her friends at an intolerable age, and she needs us in her life often enough to compete.

2.) The T.V., my phone, the computer, and that IPOD? That thing she can’t begin a text-messaging conversation with, without use of the word “bitch?” It’s mine. (I’m stoked.) The rest? Gone. For how long? Count on it being indefinitely, I told her. Because they’ll be collecting dust in the storage room until I can think of any good reasons for her to have each one, individually.

2.) Make-up is trashed. All of it. Period.
For the record, I think make-up is awesome, and I buy it for her myself. She’s at an age where she should be able to have fun experimenting with it at slumber parties or even wearing a little bit out to the occasional school dance. It is not for sneaking off into the bathroom at school to let her friends (the same class of friend who steal cigarettes from their parents and text people pictures labeled, “wanna see a pic of this guy I fucking made out with last night??”) paint her face, as if her mothers not going to notice those ridiculous raccoon eyes, smudged with sweaty mascara the second she walks in the door. I told her bluntly the day we packed it all up, even what she got for Christmas, “I’m not doing you any favors allowing you to believe that you look even remotely attractive walking the halls of sixth grade painted up like a hooker whose been crying because you don’t know how to apply it. It just looks sad. And gross.” When I feel like she’s learned to fully appreciate the freedom and beauty of a fresh, clean face first, (which is totally on me to make happen) then I’ll be happy to teach her myself.

3.) Mary and her dad will go out to dinner, just the two of them, at least once a month. More if we have the extra cash lying around, but at least that often.

4.) Mary and I will spend 30 minutes a day reading a book together (her choice, she had dozens..) just like we used to when she was younger and such a thing was mandatory for school. It was something we both used to really enjoy and there’s no reason it can’t be enjoyed now too. We stopped doing this when she turned nine because it just felt a little over-the-top to keep making her coming in early so that we could take turns reading aloud to one another. But I think what Mary needs in her life right now is a little over-the-top corny -- so that’s exactly where we’re going.

5.) Mary will be in the house to help cook and serve dinner with me every night.
She’s been wanting to learn how to cook and I’ve been wanting to teach her, but we rarely seem to both feel like it at the same time. Besides, I could use the help, she could use the sense of purpose, and we could BOTH use the quality time.

6.) Compass Learning.
Her teachers and I signed her up for a tutoring program that’s designed like a game, and tailored to each student-in-need’s specific problem areas within a given subject. (Hers is math. She dropped 60 points on the State Test from the beginning of the year - when the whole idea is to go up. Less because she truly struggles with the subject and more because she’s admitted to spending the majority of that class in particular passing notes to her friends -- when she isn’t caught up in the distraction of fighting with them. But she has some major catching-up to do.) She’s coming out of clarinet (which is something she’s wanted to do for a while anyway) to work on the program at school over that period, and she’ll do it for twenty minutes after she comes in for the night at home, too.

7.) Notes.
If she passes notes in school, she better hide it like hell from me. I took a look through her drawers one day, trying to find her brother’s medicated chap stick and in the biggest of all her vanity drawers, upward of like sixty notes, all folded into little squares just spilled out onto the floor as soon as I rolled it out. Never mind what she’s talking to her friends about, and that the language she’s using is deplorable -- with all of her time spent writing and responding to asinine notes about how to say the phrase, “suck my dick” in Spanish, it’s no wonder she’s not learning anything! For every single note I find from here on out, I get to pick a piece of clothing from her closet to donate. And you better believe I’ll be going straight for the American Eagle tops and skinny jeans first.

　

　

I don’t normally use this space to write about Mary. It’s a blog about our younger kids, mostly, because I’ve always felt like at her age, Mary deserved more privacy than that. Besides the fact that I’m questioning her right to the amount of privacy we’ve allowed her to have up until this point -- We’ve been instilling these new set of rules for three days now, and so far, every part of it has been incredible. Not just because I feel like it’s making a different for her, but because she’s enjoyed it. We all needed this. We really did. And I know that this shift in focus for us is going to lead to more good things I’m going to really want to remember.

I’d love to hear some input. How have you gone (or do you plan to go) the extra mile to instill family values into your own children. Any constructive advice? Believe me, I am all ears.

This Is Puppy.

2012-01-25T08:57:00.000-08:00

The quintessential rag doll tagalong

This is Puppy.

You’ve probably seen him before. If you know us in person, I know that you have.

Puppy follows Matthew everywhere. The skating rink. The library. The doctor’s office. The bathroom. He tags along for every game of catch in the park. Sits between our laps and every book we’ve ever read together. And when Mary is not in the car with us, he takes her place slumped calm and composedly under a seatbelt, next to Matthew’s booster; his front legs wilted happily over the heavy nylon stretched across his lap. He has stains of every color variation and texture embedded into his fur. He gets washed almost as often as Matthew’s underwear and he is worn with the sands of being well loved.

Yesterday it occurred to Matthew that with the speeds he’s learned to ride his bike at now, he can’t comfortably hold puppy by the ear while simultaneously holding onto the handle bars and keeping his balance. I wasn’t bringing the stroller either, so Puppy couldn’t come.

This was an issue.

I started to put my foot down. I started to tell him that it isn’t going to be a catastrophe if puppy misses out on this one bike ride just this one time, just around the block. I knew that Matthew would understand. He usually does, even if he persists a little. He’s attached to Puppy enough to want to bring him everywhere, but he isn’t so attached that he falls apart if we forget now and then. But then I stopped myself.

I looked at my son; long legs draped over a tall huffy, one foot resting carelessly on the pedal, the other keeping him upright and steady on the pavement, not straining to reach at all. His face looking on in that thoughtful way, but void of all that stark anticipation it used to be filled with just last year when he mounted a two wheeler with training wheels for the first few times. This year, he isn’t gripping the bars as tightly. He isn’t nearly as entranced by the idea of going (all the way!) around the block. His tongue isn’t going to be stuck to the inside of his cheek when he first pushes off. And he won’t even bat an eye when his tire goes slicing through a puddle bigger than he is; If anything? He’ll laugh and look back and say, “Whoa, Mommy! Did you see that?” He might even just call me “mom.”

He’s getting so big.

Matthew’s grown out of a lot of things in his four years of life; a lot of things I’ve really dreaded having to let go. His Nautica crib sheets. His Winnie-the-Pooh snowsuit. His argyle sweater vest. His habit of putting his pants on backward. His use of the made-up term “amn’t” (am not), Even, to a large degree, his intense fondness of Thomas the Tank Engine. These were all things that, for a time, I pictured when I thought of him… that I don’t anymore. The weird thing is that it never stings quite like I think it will when I pack one of them up to donate or I realize all at once that he hasn’t needed (or done, or wanted, or said) one of these characteristic things in a long time. There isn’t even usually much more than a passing thought and maybe a little, biting wince of sentiment paid to it after it’s whisked off, inevitably replaced as it will be by something new and twice as integral to who he is.

I’ve learn to give away stuff by the boxful without even bothering to give it a once over like I used to, just for the sake of breathing it all in, one stuffed animal at a time, before it’s meaning is no doubt lost on someone else who will never love it like he did. Who has time for senselessness like that with three kids around..

But I know that on the day that Matthew looks on this creature for the first time and only sees beads where he once saw sympathetic eyes; feels nothing more than stuffing sandwiched between long-threaded fabric where he once felt an unshakable, beating heart; hears nothing where once there was a voice… we’ll both have lost a little something worth remembering in a very big way. This animal, more than anything else he has ever loved as a child, holds the magic of his youth.

　

　

Until then?

　

　

“You know what? I bet we can find room, somewhere…”

Puppy will be there.

"Mommy, Leave Her Alone. She's Just Being Cur-ative!"

2012-01-23T10:10:00.000-08:00

So Scarlett has a new thing.

It’s called: being covered in marker for the larger part of everyday no matter how many times I bathe her. I mean, it’s called drawing.

This is where my mom jumps in to complain about how I only bathe my kids every other day unless there’s some dire reason to do it more often. Apparently only bathing your kids every other day is a generational thing and my brothers and I were bathed everyday of our lives, whether we needed it or not, not that she’s judging or anything ;-). Marker on my childrens’ arms and hands and face and behind their knees and in between their toes and on their teeth used to constitute a dire need for bathing. But as of yesterday - the fifth day in a row Scarlett’s gotten a bath at both the middle of the day before we left the house and bedtime, only to become soiled twice as badly ten minutes later with the same marker I just wiped off - IT DOESN’T.

I can’t purge my house of these dry erase markers either because they’re literally a staple in Matthew’s daily life. He learned to write using this Melissa and Doug dry erase board when he was two. He learned to tell digital time with it by using it to practice writing down what time it was on the microwave every time it changed. He writes me sentences now and little notes on it and I use it to teach him letter combinations and math now. Plus, he can draw 32,000 different pictures on it a day without any one of them winding up on the kitchen floor because the baby pulled it off of the fridge AGAIN. And again. And again. And again. This board is like magic, and I love it, and Matthew loves it and once I showed it to Scarlett SHE loved it. Which I just thought was the bees freakin’ knees until this showed up for the first time:

And honestly, even after that I still didn’t mind. I just thought I’d have to keep a better eye on where the markers wound up. I talked to Matthew about how to be responsible and put them away immediately after he’s finished using them. He readily agreed.

But then he forgot.

And she wrote on the table.

Then he forgot again.

And she wrote on the floor.

Then he forgot again.

And she wrote on his carpet.

Then he forgot again.

And she wrote on the cabinets.

And every time that she wrote on something, she accidentally wound up with it inside of her ears and under her fingernails and over her eyebrows and in her hair and all up and down her arms and positively covering her clothes. And that was without trying to write on herself.

Then, oh my word!, she discovered that you CAN write on yourself. What a fun new thing! And life for me has been a very long series of baths and baby-wipe rub-downs every since. And shockingly little else. Seriously. Shockingly.

The up side though? (Because with a face like that, there’s always an up side…)
She really does love to draw. And it’s just hard to hate anything that makes her this happy.

Even when it drives me FREAKING BANANAS.

This Is The Motherload of Misery They Were Talking About.

2012-01-20T10:25:00.000-08:00

It’s my honest opinion that Scarlett is becoming kind of a psychopath.

To be fair, she was never really not crazy before, so it’s not like I’m being caught completely off-guard. She was ten months old when she threw her first balls-out temper tantrum, and ever since her father and I have attentively (and even somewhat admiringly) taken note of the fact that the healthier and stronger and more brilliantly energetic she becomes with age, the crazier she shows us she is.

I say admiringly because back then… you know, before she could throw stuff, her temper - however big for her age - was still packaged small enough not to have to duck for cover from.

Nonetheless: “This one is going to be a real pain in the ass.” is a phrase we’ve gravely exchanged many-a-time during her infancy. Yes, I said infancy, and no I don’t feel bad for it either. Because we were right. And it’s not like we ever held it against her. If anything, we exalted her for it. (‘What a personality!’ We’d always say. This is what parents of difficult children always say to make themselves feel better for having unruly, nutcase children.) Scarlett was too helpless to be unruly as a baby, but she was definitely a high-maintenance nutcase right out of the gate. I could tell it by the way she cried the day she was born. It was the way my mom always described my oldest brother’s cry. She practically warned me about that cry. And I recognized it immediately.

And this is a child who never, not once in her entire babyhood teethed. Which, from what I hear is really supposed to be the only thing babies who aren’t colicky are even capable of doing that’s difficult.

So you can imagine how, now that she is an all-the-more capable, irrational and ridiculously short-fused toddler, that whole teething thing is going down.

Yeah.

NOT WELL.

My child hates life on an epic scale right now. In the span of… three months I guess, Scarlett has popped six enormous teeth. And judging simply by how many fucked-up notches she’s kicked up the crazy in the past three or four days, I think it’s fair to say that the rest are coming in all at once. NOW. Just like everyone told me they would.

Everyone said the same thing when Matthew was a year old before he got any of his teeth, too. They said that by the time they did come in, they’d be coming in all once and that he would drop a motherload of misery on us, the likes of which we poor inexperienced parents could not even comprehend. But it wasn’t that bad at all. Especially because the worst of it happened while his dad and I were hundreds of miles away on our week-long Floridian honeymoon and the most we had to endure of it was my mom calling our hotel room to tell us that Matthew was practically dying of an ear infection. We felt really bad about it, but then accidentally wound up on a topless beach about ten minutes later and forgot about it pretty fast. By the time we got back home he was totally normal. (Best baby ever, that kid.)

I love Scarlett to death, but I don’t think a single day of her infancy/early toddler hood has been easy on us. It’s been joyous and all that, for sure. But certainly nothing resembling easy.

　

And honestly, I’m okay with that. I am.

I’m really just taking the time to write it down because I’m clinging to the hope that her being a tyrannical maniac-child now means that she’ll be a delicate flower in her preschool years; that she’ll inexplicably transform the way that Matthew did around the age of two, except in the opposite direction. You know, the way that evolves out of being a lunatic instead of into it. Remember how I said Matthew was the best baby ever? Yeah…. Let’s just say that if some kind of magical transition doesn’t work out in my favor this time around, I’m going to feel really jipped.

　

Let’s hope they’re just tag-teaming me on a larger scale. Otherwise, I’m really in for it when Scarlett’s three and Matthew, (maniac that HE is) turns six. As for right now? Mary holds the title for being the least difficult child. And really, that's just ludicrous. I think even she herself would agree with me on that one.

You Are My Adventure.

2012-01-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

Last night when I put Matthew to bed and we finished saying our goodnight prayers, he said to me, “Peter Pan said in our book that ‘to die would be an awfully big adventure.’”

-- “Well, I guess it would. Don’t you think?” Matthew always gets pensive about death and weird shit when we say our nighttime prayers because of the whole ‘if I die before I wake’ part.

-- “Yeah,” he said. “but a scary one. But… adventures are supposed to be scary, right, mommy?”

-- “I dunno. I guess. You know, I’ve never really thought about it before.”

-- “Have you ever had an adventure?” His eye brows jumped when he said the words, and he held them there while I answered.

-- “Well,” I reminded him, “in the movie, Peter Pan also said: ‘to live would be an awfully big adventure.’ And I feel like I’ve lived a very special life so far.”

-- “Me too… I wonder why that wasn’t in the book.” He said, searching up into the corner of his ceiling, like maybe that's where he would find the answer; his arms tucked behind his head now, the way they always are.

-- “I don’t know. But I like that they put it in the movie because I think it’s a really pretty line.”

-- He pursed his lips and nodded, as if he had no idea that he was only three, and he were agreeing to something of grave importance. “I don’t think I want my living to be like that though.”

-- “Like what?” I asked, a little confused. “An awfully big adventure?” He nodded. “Why?”

-- He dropped his eyebrows very seriously, and shrugging, he said: “Who wants to have a adventure that’s ‘awful?’”

　

Sometimes I think that if he were any more wonderful, any more seamlessly charming, any more of a joy to mother, even in the smallest possible way, my little heart wouldn’t be big enough for all of him to fit.

-- "You are my adventure," I laughed, kissing him on the head and tickling his sides, not really meaning anything of it in the moment. But he is.

And he is the greatest one I will ever have.

A Lot of Over-Analytical Jibberish About Being a SAHM and Teaching Kids Stuff.

2012-01-18T05:20:00.000-08:00

It almost doesn’t even feel right to still say that I’m “home-schooling” Matthew, because the truth is, I think it’s too unstructured to really call by any name at all.

I don’t know what an actual home-school situation looks like. I’ve never seen one in action, and I don’t plan on home-schooling him in the future, so - unlike most things concerning my kids - it’s not something I’ve put a tremendous amount (read: Alicia-amount) of effort into researching. I actually like it that way too. And I’ve kept it this way on purpose.

There aren’t a lot of things I “firmly” believe in when it comes to parenting. I’m open-minded almost to a fault that way. I think narrowing the number of ideas a person’s willing to consider on any subject only narrows their understanding of it, which can only ever cripple their scope of knowledge. The downside to this is that sometimes it can be difficult for me to stand firm on things. Even the ideas that I don’t like, even the ones that piss me off, I have to consider. The one exception to this, though, has been that of educating my children. Even before I knew how I wanted to do it or what ‘being involved’ meant for me specifically, I knew that it’s what I wanted. To be involved.

I know that there are a lot of moms out there who feel very strongly otherwise, but I feel like for me, being able to stay at home with my kids is a luxury. Not that it is always luxurious. But it is something we don’t need, and that we choose to sacrifice so that our family can have. When we decided to make it work for us, I vowed to put my EVERYTHING into this position. To be blunt, I overcompensated, BIG TIME to make up for all the guilt I’d racked up having to spend so much time away from Matthew when I worked; trying to do it all, and giving him less of myself because of it. A lot has changed since then.

Of course, another part of what’s changed is that I learned from spending time with him at home how advanced he is for his age. Which made me pull the reigns in even more, and for a time, to stop teaching him at all. I learned that there’s a lot of debate about whether parents should teach “gifted” children anything before they go to school. So while I thought about the different sides to that argument, I stopped. Until I started to feel with more and more conviction that for any parent to willfully avoid teaching their child whatever their child asks to learn, would be grossly irresponsible. I just do.

So I sat down and I reevaluated what being home with my kids was going to mean for our family.

When I say that I home school Matthew, now, I feel like I need to be clear that I use the term very loosely. A way that is so lax, that when I look back at what I’ve done with him at the end of even my most purpose-driven days, it’s hard to say that I’ve done anything more with him than really just be his mom. Because, to me, the two are one and the same.

I am proactive with it. I do seek out learning opportunities. But because he digests information in big, heavy gulps the way that he does, it looks like I do a lot more formal teaching with him than I really do. The truth is, I strive for it to all kind of happen organically. I promised myself early on that I would teach him to climb trees the same way I’d teach him to tell time the same way I’d teach him to make his bed every morning. Nothing is more or less important. I believe that his childhood experience as a whole is the only true priority and that that blankets every aspect evenly.

There are standards and goals oriented to what we learn, but they’re pliable. If there’s anything I really believe in firmly, it’s preserving the simplicity of childhood for as long as humanly possible. That’s one of our most important goals, which helps to keep the rest of them in check; less like a destination and more like a reminder of direction.

I kept telling him he only had to "color in" twelve of those little boxes, but he insisted on writing the number twelve in each of them instead. My little ~~nerd~~ overachiever. :-)

Matthew can spell an impressive amount of words correctly without any help at all anymore.
But the other day Mary REALLY pissed him off. He called me into the dining room as if it were an emergency and said, "Is this how you spell nanneh-nanneh-boo-boo!?"
No, my love. It's not. But it sure is cute.

Which brings us to The Little One.

Now that Scarlett is becoming less like a precious little package of nagging sounds and smells and more like an actual human being everyday, I’m putting serious consideration into everything I’ve done to shape Matthew’s childhood so far. I’m trying to figure out how I want to take everything I’ve learned from my guinea pig of a firstborn son and put in into her. Like any parent wants for their child, I’m aiming as close to perfection I can get with this new opportunity. Obviously, that’s what she deserves.

Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done, too. I mean, what the heck does perfection look like anyway? Do I see it the same as I did for Matthew?

Part of me wants to go big with Scarlett. If I can be candid, part of me is gently eager to learn whether she’s gifted or not -- in the same way that a newly pregnant woman is all happily aflutter to learn the sex of her baby; knowing that each possibility will be magic in it’s own form and an exciting experience to navigate accordingly -- the idea of either disappointing me, completely nonexistent. On the other hand, part of me thinks I should actively avoid educating her at all for fear of comparing her on any level, to her brother. But a bigger part of me thinks that wouldn’t be fair, either.

I’ve even found myself picking up letter-oriented toys and games for Scarlett, and putting them back because I thought: 'am I favoring this toy over a baby doll because I’m trying to mold her in that direction? If I buy the baby doll over the letter activity, aren’t I doing exactly what I felt was negligent in regards to Matthew?' It got to the point where I was overanalyzing everything.

I just want to give her all that I can, as both a mother and a teacher, and I know that I can’t do that if every move I make is based on some fear of doing this or some fear of doing that. I know that keeping it simple, unstructured and unrestricted by fear or expectation is going to be key for us here.

I’ve always tried to raise Scarlett as I would if she were my only child. I feel like both Mary and Matthew have had to compromise a little too much sometimes for the sake of one another, and even though I feel like there’s a lot to be gained from such an experience, I also feel like the pendulum can swing too far in any good direction. Recently I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this, and I’ve found myself applying it to the way that I want to “home-educate” Scarlett while she’s young; which in my book is really just a fancy way of saying “raise her.” And that is, in a way that is only benefited and in no way hindered or handicapped by my experiences with any sibling that has come before her.

Maybe it’s possible, maybe it’s not. But shoot for the moon, settle for the stars, right?

The Age of Pretend.

2012-01-15T05:05:00.000-08:00

It is a known fact that Matthew is only actually Matthew as you and I know him about 40% of the time. The other part of the time he’s some form or another of alter Matthew ego. A one-man swat team. A police officer. An evil villain bent on world domination. A magic frog. A pirate. A wizard. An astronaut. A paleontologist. Sometimes he’s even a skateboard or a bike or a dump truck that’s come to life, and can walk and talk like a person -- but is NOT a person, because they are a skateboard or a bike. Or something really weird like that.

Of course, more than anything, though, he pretends to be a cowboy. Matthew thinks cowboys are the shit. In fact he loves to pretend he’s a cowboy so much that sometimes he blends his alter-cowboy-ego into another. Like a cowboy frog. Or a cowboy paleontologist. Or a cowboy dump truck that’s come to life and learned to practice wizardry with Harry Potter and is now a magic cowboy dump truck who pirates on the weekends.

I can’t tell you how many pictures I have of Matthew eating cereal or coloring a workbook page or crafting a sock puppet or sneaking cookies or even just sleeping in nothing but racecar underpants and a great, big, old cowboy hat. Obviously. I mean, cowboy hats take priority over pants any day of the week.

So it shouldn’t have been shocking to me when Scarlett came thump-thump-thumping with her big, heavy toddler steps into the kitchen the other day with Matthew’s red cowboy bandana tucked between her chin and her chest, trying diligently to hold it there while she walked around. I laughed it off at first. And I tried to ignore how cute it was because SERIOUSLY, I HAVE TOO MANY COWBOY HAT PICTURES ALREADY; A woman has to draw the line somewhere. But she circled the downstairs eight times, going no where, just holding that bandana under her chin. Picking it up every time it dropped and putting it right back into place, so that she could walk around some more. Then came the clencher… She went for the hat.

For three hilarious minutes she tried to juggle holding the bandana tucked under her chin, and lifting the cowboy hat to her head. Unsuccessfully. While I laughed at her. And took pictures.

Eventually I tied it around her neck the way I’m always doing for her brother. And I helped her balance the ten gallon over her head.

And in the following few moments, sitting there, playing with my children on the floor, snapping silly photos over peels of shrieking laughter, I fell in love with motherhood as if I were only meeting it for the very first time. And I found myself thinking something totally profound:

“Oh my Gosh, I love these people.”

I really, really do.

To Sum Up What We've Learned About Punctuation Recently:

2012-01-15T03:20:00.000-08:00

The other day Matthew comes walking into the kitchen, giving me the air-quote gesture (or whatever it’s called) while he asked me for some water. “What are the air-quotes for?” I asked, assuming they’re called air-quotes, maybe.

“They’re not air quotes,” he corrected, still framing everything he said in little finger hooks. “They’re quotation marks. Quotation marks are to let people know someone is talking.”

“Right…” I said, smiling.

“Well, I’m talking to you aren’t I?”

“That you are.” I said, laughing.

“That was a question. At the end of a question you draw a question mark. Right, momma?” he asked, drawing an imaginary question mark in the air.

“Mm, hm. Right.”

“NOW GET ME SOME WATER, WOMAN!” he yelled, out of nowhere.

“Matthew Spencer! What in the world are you yelling for?”

“Because! I wanted to use my sex-clamation point! … [finger hooks] ON THE WORLD!”

So, This Might Sound Sexist, But.

2012-01-11T03:53:00.000-08:00

Alternatively Titled: BANGS!

I very excitedly took Scarlett for her first haircut over the weekend.

I should explain first that a lot went into this decision. Scarlett’s freakishly long baby hair had a legacy, after all. It got so long that we called her Rapunzel. It became a conversation piece. It was fun! Having a girl with naturally long, pretty hair was like winning the lottery: people loved it! Toward the end, though, opinions started to turn. Some people wanted it cut so badly that they threatened to do it behind our backs while they babysat. Others gave us dirty looks for even considering it.

This was a huge debate. We even took her once, and walked out of the salon before it was her turn because Spencer couldn’t go through with it. And while we mauled it over for an unreasonable amount of time, her hair just kept growing and growing until eventually, it was just starting to look neglectful. And since I care more about what people think of my parenting than I do my actual parenting, I decided it was time.

Bangs! I thought, on the drive over to the salon. Bangs are adorable. Scarlett will make them look even more adorable because she’s already the cutest baby, ever. This is a good thing. I should not be sad.

The whole experience was awesome and Scarlett had a ball, asking to be held by every strange customer who walked in the door while we waited our turn. She was the center of attention and everyone gushed over her long, pretty hair, and agreed that, yes, bangs on her would be the cutest thing, ever. I should not be sad. Of course, she squirmed a lot in the chair, but the stylist did nothing wrong, and cut her hair exactly the way that I asked her to. She even gave us a certificate at the end that read: MY FIRST HAIRCUT!, and they taped the first snip of hair to it.

Turns out though…?

Now that her wild, unruly little locks have all been trimmed into submission, she looks… Well, a little like a boy. Exactly what, right or wrong, sexist or not, my husband, and our daughter, (and, okay, even me a little) were worried would be the case. Not worried in a this is a huge deal! kind of way, but still, you know… aware of.

I wasn’t at all upset -- and hey, I’m just glad that the child can SEE again -- but as we made our way through the house the ensuing afternoon post-haircut: Matthew said she looked like a boy… then Mary walked in the front door with her friend and said she looked like a boy… and then Spencer pouted his lip and said she looked like a boy, and even gave her a sympathetic hug.

Apparently a few inches of hair over her face was the last, remaining thing saving her from looking exactly like her older brother. I mean, exactly.
It’s cool, I mean… She still looks adorable, because, well, let’s face it: She’s Scarlett. (WITH BANGS!) …I did however, make sure (like any truly responsibly mother would) to dress her in the absolute most lace and frill-laden, flower-patterned top that I could find for the next day’s family get-together wherein she was introduced to a number of new people.

I know, I’m horrible. Worst feminist role model, ever.

Speaking of, I’ve been keeping a mental tally of which sex so far is more difficult to raise. Hair is already responsible so far for giving boys the upper hand on like, six accounts. And we haven’t even gotten into the era of French braids and lop-sided, pain-in-the-ass pigtails.

...

Pigtails. Pigtails are so adorable…

One Basket of Toys and a Baby Doll.

2012-01-06T04:18:00.000-08:00

When it comes to parenting I draw a lot of inspiration from parents who are much more minimalist than I have it in my own blood to be. Our home is not one hundred percent plastic free, and everything that we own is not recycled or handed-down, but I can get behind the idea of keeping things simple. Especially because I’m all about keeping organized (even if I fumble pathetically at it sometimes) and simplicity is a big part of that.

Before I tried to regulate it at all Matthew could have been buried twelve times over in the number of toys that occupied every crevasse of his small room. Since we’ve moved him to a bigger room, the battle has crossed over with even bigger and even better toys that he has only become even more attached to with age. Two years ago a thought like this would have never even crossed my mind, but with Scarlett, I decided that we’d really strive to free her from the burden of owning too many toys. She has a small basket filled with developmentally beneficial playthings that have been handed down from her brother, and for a long time, that was it. Once that basket is filled, I decided, we’d gift them out to other children and fill it anew with updated, more age-appropriate games and puzzles. Her room is the smallest of the house, and one basket of toys seemed more than sufficient.

I idealized that with her, I’d foster a healthy imagination by not relying so heavily on factory-made toys for all of our creative play. Her room would never be a mess, even if she played with every toy she had at the same time. She would never grow to dread the task of picking up after herself because it would always be so easy. It all sounded so Zen.

Then she started to collect stuffed animals, and truthfully, I didn’t even know where they all came from at first. I started picking them up and contemptibly trying to figure out how in the hell toys we don’t buy our children always end up sneaking their way into our lives. Until one day I thought back to her time in the hospital and realized that I recognized a lot of them from the corners of her hospital bed. These annoying little stowaways were actually gifts that doting aunts and uncles and mom-moms and pop-pops and friends of ours gave to her to make her feel more at home in the sterile confines of her old hospital room. Now generally, I don’t give a shit about throwing stuff away so that I just, quite honestly, have less crap to pick up at the end of the day. But even just the passing thought of giving these weird, little animals up to someone else made me wince with shame… They were all in great condition, Scarlett really did seem to enjoy them, and besides all the practicality, there was just something pleasantly symbolic about them coming home with her that made me want to cling to them in that moment as much as I did to her.

So I pulled a matching basket out from the storage room and then she had two: one basket for wooden/plastic pulley, push-button toys and another filled to the brim with feathery, plush creatures of every known species, real or ever imagined. And we were still good.

…And then Christmas 2011 happened… Scarlett’s first Christmas old enough to tinker with toys, and she was spoiled by all of the same adoring family that she was in the hospital, about a thousand times over. And the toys were all fantastic! And she loved each and every one of them! And they all served so many purposes fundamental to her development! …and her intellectual growth! And I’ve even seriously thought after we tore into a few of them at home ‘Oh my gosh, this toy is so cool! How did we ever teach her such-and-such a skill without it?’! …The downside, though? Exactly two of them (out of about thirty) fits inside of a linen lined wicker basket from Target. So my one-basket-of-toys limit is a little benched right now, and the organization of my house has seen better days.

But you know what makes it worth it?

A picture like this. A picture wherein my little girl is just lost in love with a small, cushy baby doll with heavy lashes that close over it’s beady little eyes when she sleeps with it cloaked between her arms.

Being the failure minimalists that we are, Scarlett has always been more in love with hot wheels cars than anything else, just because that’s what was available to her most. (Naturally, since Matt has all the toys, she just says the hell with her basket after about five minutes of rummaging through it and ends up raiding his lego/hot wheels/make-it-blocks bins for anything sized just right to block an airway.) She’d never owned a baby doll before, but I kind of figured that if stuffed toys were any indication of the interest she had in snuggling or nurturing inanimate creatures, that she was probably going to be a bit of tom-boy anyway. And I actually thought that was kind of cool. (For the record, I think anything she does is cool. If next year her thing is rainbows and unicorns I will undoubtedly think both of those things are the shit.)

But that doll of hers is something else entirely. It’s as if it sets a surge of womanly instinct pacing through her blood whenever it’s near. Her maternal radar ignites. Suddenly, it doesn’t occur to her that she’s a child anymore. All reality and calculation of time is out the window. In her world, she is a mother, caring for her child, as if somehow without ever being taught, without even knowing so many other basic facts of life or survival, that is something she already understands. She instinctually craves.

And I think to myself, watching her, I want to remember this.

I want to remember the way she lights up. She pulls it close. She kisses it’s face.

I want to remember the way she folds it between her shoulder and her ear with a sing-song-y ‘aww,’ and pats it dotingly on the back.

I want to remember the way she throws it headfirst into it’s stroller and then exclaims Uh-Oh! when it ricochets off the seat and thumps to the floor. I want to remember the way she runs after it again. She sniffs it’s butt. She rocks it from side to side when I throw my voice to make it cry.

I want to remember the way she struggles to hold the bottle to it’s face, throwing it to the floor behind her when the baby is done, as if that is exactly what you’re supposed to do.

I want to remember the way she tries to put it’s pants on by placing them methodically on it’s inanimate, plastic head, and then breaks into a sudden flurry of applause at her accomplishment when they wind up somewhere, anywhere, even remotely touching the doll’s body.

I want to remember the way she tucks it under her arm while she waddles from room to room, the little one bouncing indolently at her hip in a clumsy, thump-thump rhythm around the house.

But more than anything, I want to remember there being a time in her life when her wildest dream in the world was just to be somebody’s mom.

Ninety percent of the time I’m thinking so much bigger. I dream of running the perfect household, and of raising worldly children, and of owning a studio where I paint without end. Of course, among being an artist and the world’s most perfect mom in my wild, unlikely dreams, I’m a writer, too… and a photographer, and I’m fluent in like six languages, and I don’t forget my purse everywhere I go.

I intend to teach Scarlett to dream the way that I do, and to reach for them harder than I ever have, and to put endless heart and soul into every endeavor she takes on. And I intend to teach her that life stretches so far beyond the apron strings of motherhood.

But even still. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that some of the world’s most enriching experiences are the ones that take no ounce of effort at all. Like that of simply loving a child, like it’s the only thing that has ever, really mattered.

As if, of all your wildest dreams, loving that child was always first.

The Christmas Rundown!

2011-12-30T04:57:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-29T03:59:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-27T05:37:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-23T04:50:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-23T01:47:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-21T04:32:00.000-08:00

(And also, I have a question.)

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.

2011-12-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-14T07:50:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-12T08:25:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-11T04:58:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-09T03:29:00.001-08:00

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...

2011-12-07T05:00:00.001-08:00

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.

This Is Why He's Spoiled.

2011-12-05T04:57:00.001-08:00

With the exception of an occasional family-movie-night, we don’t really make movies available to Matthew. Although I think some kids can handle it just fine - screen time to Matthew has always been like poison. It practically takes a rehab clinic just to get him away from it once we’ve decided “screen time” is over. So, even though we are lax about a lot of other things, we determined a long time ago that t.v. for Matthew just could never be one of those things we indulged him in on a regular basis.

But recently we’ve been realizing that our son doesn’t understand fundamental references we make to classics like Pinnochio or The Wizard of Oz… For the love of God, the boy doesn’t even know who the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are! So now that he’s getting older and rapidly more mature, we decided to every now and then, make a family even of watching something really cool together. Tangled was one such movie, and let me tell you -- it has become a formal obsession for him. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that he’s talked us into putting it on for him on probably eight different occasions.

On his most recent attempt to talk me into poisoning his brain, he comes to me and says, “Man. I really wish I could watch Tangled today.”

“No more Tangled, Honey,” I said. “Your obsession with this movie is getting a little out of hand.”

“I know, I know. But it’s just so cool, Mommy. Like, literally. I wish I was watching it right now.”

“Well, I’m a little afraid your brain is going to turn to mush and ooze out of your ears if you watch that movie one more time. And where on Earth did you learn the word ‘literally’ from anyway?”

“From Tangled! Believe me when I tell you this, momma…” he said with a convincing shake of his head, “That is one GOOD freaking movie.”

Is it no wonder this kid has me wrapped around his finger? I mean, seriously…

The Generations.

2011-12-03T06:37:00.000-08:00

My great grandmother is ninety-nine years old, and I have always, always loved her pictures. The last time I saw her face to face I think I was ten. So when I think of her, I rarely actually envision the way she might look today. Instead I always think of the photographs of her hanging on the walls of my mom and dad’s house from when she was young. Looking up into the camera, even in all shades of grey, she had all the coy femininity of a Hollywood starlet back then. And even though I didn't look anything like her, I used to hope that I would grow up to be anywhere near as pretty as she was in those pictures.

My grandma’s pictures were always a favorite for me to look at too because even when I was ten I could tell how much I was going to grow to take on her features, which I’m proud to say I have. We always looked so much alike that my mom would literally tell the boyfriends I brought to the house growing up, that she hoped they liked the way the lady in this certain photograph looked, because that's exactly who I’m destined to resemble in my granmotherly age.

On another note, I’m horrible at keeping in touch with people, and with the only exception being my mom who practically enlists the FBI to track me down if I haven’t called or updated my blog in three consecutive days, family is no different. (Little Brother, if you are reading this -- I will call you today, I PROMISE.) But when Scarlett was sick, my grandma, who lives hours and hours away called the hospital every single day to tell me that she loved us, and to update me on just how many people back in Indiana were praying for my little girl. When we finally got home, Matthew helped me to open a hand-written letter she mailed to us containing four photographs, dating back as many as seven generations. In the letter she said that she wanted me to paint a portrait of the women in my family, including myself and Scarlett, and to adorn it with the saying: pioneer women come from good stock. A few of the reference photos were unclear and difficult to work from, so I have to admit that I was nervous about starting it. But painting this, especially from photographs taken so many generations before I was even alive, was an experience like no other project could have given me.

I don’t know if Scarlett will live to be ninety-nine years old like her very lovely great, great grandmother, or if she’ll be as wonderful and selfless as the women in our family tree who I’ve been lucky enough to know more closely -- the kind who calls from Indiana everyday just to tell you that they care, or the kind who frets for your safety if they haven’t heard from you in THREE days -- but it feels good to know that she comes from a long lineage of very strong female blood.

Speaking of Scarlett's stay at A.I.: On one of the last days that my parents brought the kids to visit Scarlett and I in the hospital, Mary cried so hard that her face turned red when it was time for them to leave. As long we’re on the subjects of pictures I love, I have to say, it’s ones of the two of them together - both of my daughters - that I hope are still being passed around seven generations down the road from now. It’s worth mentioning to me that Mary might not share my blood, but she embodies beauty and strength of spirit like no one else I’ve ever met. Family to her, blood or otherwise is everything. And for that, I am just as proud to call her daughter as I am Scarlett.

Here's to the next generation of awesome.

A Long Overdue Letter to Someone Other Than The Baby.

2011-11-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-10T06:43:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-05T12:29:00.000-07:00

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...

2011-11-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-11-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

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.

On Life Lessons and Pissing Off the Principal.

2011-10-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

He doesn’t always eat his vegetables without putting up a good fight about it first, and he doesn’t always respect his sisters’ space. He gets a little mouthy when he thinks he can get away with it… and when he’s the victim of an interrupted nap or a crumby night’s sleep, he can complain until it makes your freaking ears bleed.

He is so much work. From sunup to sundown and every moment in between, we mother and father him the best way we know how. Maybe what we’re doing with him will work, or maybe it won’t. Maybe what feels like it’s effective now is only allotting us a short-term sense of obedience. Maybe what feels like it doesn’t would pay off in the long run if we really stuck to our guns.

Maybe the way that we talk him down from heaving breath and a flaming temper will teach him what we want it to, or maybe it won’t. Maybe our having patience with him now will instill an innate sense of patience into him later. Or maybe it’ll teach him to take advantage of us at every opportunity; to walk all over us because he knows that we’ll excuse him for it if he didn’t sleep well the night before, (or he’s at a tough age, or he’s only learning to sort through his emotions, or he’s under a lot of stress, or it’s our fault for any number of reasons).

[Insert Life Lesson #1,452.]

The other day a group of four middle school girls showed up at my door to beat up my step-kid. Mary came home from school that day crying, saying that she never wanted to go to school again. She said that the girls would be here at four o’clock, and that if they found out she snitched, the beating would only be worse. Sure enough, at four o’clock, I watched four very pumped up sixth graders parade up my driveway, and knock on my door.

In my defense, it all began very cordially. I reminded myself that these are just little girls. They are daughters of mothers themselves who are probably trying as hard as I am to steer their children in the right direction. I told myself that eleven is a mighty tough age and that these girls are fighting the same age-old battle to fit in we all have before. We all sat down, I offered them some sodas, and we talked about how silly it is for five such intelligent, capable girls to get themselves caught up in this kind of trouble over a tiff in the cafeteria. I might have said the F word once or twice, but I did it with a smile. Everyone apologized. In fact, Mary went first. And the girls left.

Then the girls followed Mary to my neighbor’s house and they beat on the door there, calling Mary names and offering her money to come outside. When my husband and I walked out front some hours later to take Scarlett for a stroll around the block, we heard the girls laughing and chanting up the middle of the street, “Mary! Come out, come out, Mary!” At which point, the gloves came off. Mary’s father and I: a set of parents that could probably pass for a pair of much older siblings because of our age, met the girls nose-to-nose in the middle of the street, and proceeded to put the fear of fucking god into each and every one of them… who not only just about shit their skinny jeans right there in the street, but cowered into a huddle of kittens by the time that we were done.

The next day at school, Mary went to the principal like I instructed, who had a message for her waiting there from me. The girls told their sides. Then Mary told hers again, once the principal had all of the information. After the principal talked to the girls, she asked Mary if her mother might have been a little rough on them… if maybe I was mean to the same girls who had had themselves dropped off in my neighborhood, and who not only knocked on the door of my home to beat up my child, but who also disrupted the evening of my neighbors as well. Mary said no, that I went out of my way to be very nice, and that I even thanked them for talking to me.

The principal said, “The girls tell me that your mom said something along the lines of ‘nobody… nobody is going to lay a goddamn finger on my fucking daughter.’ I don’t know, Mary. That sounds awfully mean to say to a bunch of eleven year old girls, doesn’t it?’”

“Well,” Mary said. “If it makes you feel any better, she also turned to me and said that I wasn’t going to lay a fucking hand on them either.”

The ringleader of the posse was suspended, and the next day one of the other girls in the group started to tease Mary for being a snitch. She said in front of the class, “…That’s why you was afraid to fight Savanna, you snitch!” To which Mary said, “Well, at least I wasn’t afraid of her MOM.”

Everyone laughed, Mary told me that night over dinner, laughing herself. “Even the teacher had to turn away, not to laugh!” ‘It wasn’t even my dad!’ Mary went on to the class, ‘It was my MOM!’
~~~

Research suggests now that the person a child grows up to be has more to do with nature rather than nurture than was ever believed to be true in the past. Mary doesn’t have any of my genes, which makes raising her all the more puzzling than it is to raise the children of mine who at least inherit some of the qualities most familiar to me. I don’t know. As if keeping up with a three year old weren’t enough to exhaust me… keeping up with all of the hair-brained theories on how to do it without turning him into a sociopath sure do. Throw a preteen from a broken home and an infant with health issues on the table and it’s all I can do to stop myself from turning into one.

Before these girls actually showed up at my door I told Mary exactly what I’d always believed to be my stance on handling bullies: that it was important for her to diffuse the situation herself. That even though it would be tough, and frightening, that my coming to her rescue at the first sign of friction would only shield her from gaining a valuable life experience that would shape her ability to handle conflict for the rest of her life. I told her that it would be difficult for me not to get involved, but that I’d be doing it out of love, and that I’d be here to help her through the outcome.

Then four little shit-head brats showed up at my door to beat up my kid, and my view of everything I believed in changed. Maybe I screwed it up. Maybe I helped her out. Maybe I was too hard on those girls, or maybe I’m too lax with my own. Maybe none of it matters anyway, because nature’s already wired them to turn into who they’re destined to be with or without my constant intervention. I don’t know.

All I know is that I’ll be here. I might not always get it right. But I’ll be here to try. At the very least, for better or worse, my kids will know that.

Oh, and also?… Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my fucking kid. And yes, principal so-and-so, you can quote me on that.

My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Eater.

2011-10-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

And All Of The Ways I Used To Really, Kind-Of Suck At Being A Mom.

This was actually for a math activity. Matthew loves to measure things out, and he's getting pretty good at it. Everytime he stops pouring something into the measureing cup to see where he's at, he can tell me: 'okay, this many cups... just this many more to go!'

I remember reading in all of the baby books that it was important not to start an infant on a sweet solid first, like bananas. It’s like giving a puppy bacon, they all said… you can’t start them off on the good stuff and then expect them to be thrilled when at the next meal they get something comparatively awful. My only guess is that this is where it must have all started. Honestly, I don’t even remember what the first food Matthew ever had was. But I do know that as far back as the highchair, Matthew has been a NIGHTMARE to feed. And even though I read through all of the baby books I had, I’ll admit there wasn’t much of anything me or my husband took too seriously back then. Careless as it sounds, I wouldn’t put it past us.

I dreaded starting Scarlett on solids because I assumed all babies sucked as much as Matthew did to feed. Matthew hated even being set in the highchair, and the higher the stage of food, the worse it got. When his food started coming with microscopic chunks in it, he’d literally gag and isolate every one with his tongue just to spit it out. When his food started becoming more chunk than puree, it took every trick in the book just to keep him from starving to death.

Even though it probably got even worse in his toddler years, I worried about it less. Toddlers are surprisingly capable of thriving just fine on shockingly small portions of food, and notorious for being picky eaters anyway. As long as we were able to make what little he did agree to eat count, we fully expected him to simply grow out of it…

At least until he got old enough to fall in love with sweets. And that’s what killed us because I’ve always been naively liberal about my stance on keeping kids away from any kind of sugar.

I always tell people that the biggest culture shock that comes with getting married and having kids is that the amount of special occasions you will attend (and therefore, exposure your kids will have to junk that tastes way more awesome than anything you’ll ever make for dinner) is STAGGARING. You wouldn’t believe how many opportunities there are throughout the year to expose your child to sweets without even trying. I always figured that because we’ve never filled our cabinets with anything that wasn’t of some nutritional value, that we could allow ourselves to treat the kids outside of the house, in the event of a special occasion. But seriously, you would not believe how much that shit adds up.

There’s cookies and pizza at every birthday party, candy and pies on every holiday, and cakes at every special occasion, right? And even if you don’t celebrate any holidays and your kids don’t have friends, you’ll take them to baby showers and bridals showers and engagement parties. You’ll go to rehearsal dinners and weddings and company picnics for your job. You’ll drag them to your Aunt Susan’s retirement party, to your brother-in-law’s graduation, to a beef and beer benefit for a second-cousin’s-friend’s-uncle’s spouse who passed of Cancer, and to your parent’s 25th anniversary. They’ll even get cake at all the funerals. Then there’s festivals and carnivals and circus shows and movies where you’ll get popcorn and cotton candy and soda. The zoo and the roller rink and the library you take them to will all have neat little special events throughout the year and they’ll get treats then too. When they behave at the doctor you’ll get them a doughnut on your way home when you pick up milk, and every time you go to the bank, the teller gives them a lollipop.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the once in a while you take them out for a double-scoop ice cream cone after their cousin’s clarinet recital, just for the hell of it.

By the end of the year it’s no wonder their taste buds are more set to the tune of icing and sprinkles than chicken and broccoli casserole. At this point, Matthew has taken to holding his nose whenever he gets to the dinner table and declaring, “Ugh. I’m sorry mommy. But I don’t like dinner.” Not ‘I don’t happen to like what we’re having tonight,’ -- No, he says: I DON’T LIKE DINNER. And he’s not even trying to be rude.

Since it would probably be impossible at this point (or, cruel, at the very least) to break our son from sugary-treats cold turkey, I’ve decided to just cut back on them wherever we can manage, and to put a MOMENTOUS amount of effort instead into getting him hooked on fruits and veggies.

At first, I started slipping them into things I knew he’d eat -- which already isn’t much. He’s eaten a veggie burger once or twice, and cauliflower mashed into potatoes, but Matthew’s sharp and the stakes are high. He finds a green pepper in his sloppy joe and he’ll never trust them again. EVER. Then, I started making fruit & vegetable smoothies, and telling him that they were ice cream. (You know, lying.) Eventually, when I started making a new kind of smoothie, I’d tell him what was in it, which has kind of, sort-of helped to warm him to the fruits and veggies inside a little. Finally, I started getting him to help me actually make them. And believe it or not, we had ourselves a bit of a breakthrough! I’m not the homemade applesauce and jam making-type, but if it’ll get him to at least put his hand on a piece of fruit, I’m willing to go the extra mile.

He still doesn’t like, like, any dinner at all besides pizza and the occasional green bean casserole (covered in enough fried onions), but he’s eating more veggies and fruit than ever before.

So, I have to know:
What tricks do you have for making fruits and veggies more appealing to your picky-eater?

(For the record, Mary and Scarlett are both fantastic eaters. Even when Scarlett nearly starved herself, refusing formula to the point of hospitalization and being fed through a tube in her nose, she’d scarf down a bowl of garden-fresh spinach like chocolate frosting. I wonder how much of it is the luck of the draw, and how much of it has to do with breastfeeding/making your own baby-food vs. formula/buying jarred food. Any thoughts?)

Spaceman Stucky

2011-10-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

One of the things I miss most about Matthew being two was that he was always asking these awesome, out-of-the-blue questions... Questions that just made you marvel at the wonder of childhood… Questions like: Momma, where do the people in our dreams go when we wake up, and how long it would take to get to the moon if you could swim through the air to reach it, and why do bees buzz when they fly but birds don’t? and of course, Daddy, what the heck is poop, anyway? Before he started really taking a huge interest in reading, I used to do these awesome ‘theme weeks’ with him, where I’d take something he showed an interest in, or asked a question about during the week, and I’d turn it into a whole theme for the next week’s activities. It was terribly corny, but god, it was so much fun.

Picking out things he was interested in was never difficult.. The tricky part was always narrowing it down to just one thing (Even if that one thing did end up being our digestive system, once or twice.) But now that he’s learning to read and write, (which is really exciting, don’t get me wrong) it’s turned into all he wants to do. Half the time, when he’s given a minute left to his own devices, he can be found with a cowboy hat on his head and a rubber holster falling from his waist, rounding up pretend bandits with a plastic shotgun like a normal kid. The other half the time, he’s curled into the couch with a dry erase board, copying words he sees around the living room, letter by letter in squeaky blue ink… just to teach himself how they’re spelled. I’ve been wanting to kind of pull in the reigns a little bit with all of the reading and writing stuff lately, but I wasn’t sure how. I decided that as soon as he started showing an interest in something that wasn’t skill-based again, we’d jump back into doing a theme.

Then last week, he pulled a book off the shelf about Space that he’d gotten for his birthday but never opened. He immediately wanted to know what the lines in a picture of the solar system were, and what each of the other planets was called, and why they looked so different from one another. Before I knew it, I couldn’t shut him up!

At the back of the book there were some planet punch-outs you could use to build a mobile, which of course he HAD to have put together. Once they were all out, I found a few you tube videos about the solar system online to answer some of his questions. I hooked the laptop up to the T.V. so that it fed the video onto the television screen, and the two of us went over each one. Matthew gave me the idea to pause the video at each new planet, so that he could fish that particular one out of the pile of punch-outs, and line it up in accordance to the video… nearest to farthest from the sun. He got so into it that when he left to take a potty-break, he shouted all the way from the bathroom not to un-pause the video before he got back. And when we were done, he made me promise that when we went to his grandparents for dinner that night, that I’d bring the planets and the book so that we could finish the mobile there.

On Monday, we finished the mobile and hung it over his bed. It was such a huge hit that when we came across this Space Projection night light at Wal-mart, we had to bring it home. It, of course, is a huge hit, too.

Projects:
On Monday, eager to show off when he’d learned about each planet over the weekend, we made the above diagram. I gave him free range of how to decorate each planet -- the only guideline being that he needed to give it some kind of distinguishing mark. Neptune, for instance, is covered in glitter, since it’s described in one of our books as being “a beautiful blue,” and Jupiter is not only the largest, it has a big, red spot.

On another day, we made this awesome rocket ship out of a paper towel roll and some tinfoil. Matthew got in some great fine motor practice by not just drawing the triangles and circle we needed for the wings and the cone at the top, but by cutting them out, too. He apparently missed wielding the scissors so much, that he cut out like a hundred little shapes with the leftover foam and we ended up using them to make kind of a mosaic effect on the foil. Then we put a picture of Scarlett on the window. She loved it! When she saw it, she pointed to her face, went “BABA!” and threw her hands up in the air like she was flying. We also used the rocket ship to practice counting backward from ten for the blastoff, and then skip-counting in different ways to change things up.

Matthew also got the idea one day to take out a sheet of paper and draw the planet mercury while I read ‘There’s No Place Like Space.’ I gave him the idea to draw something on it that would help him remember something specific about that planet. He colored it grey and then, he planted a number 1 right in the middle. What a great idea! We ended up making an illustration of each planet on it’s own sheet of paper, assigning them all a number in order of their proximity to the sun, and then stapling them together to make a book!

Vocabulary:

some of the things Matthew asked about a lot this week were Galaxies, the Universe, our Solar System, the Sun, Astronauts, Telescopes, the Lunar Rover, and Gravity. One of his favorite facts to tell people is that Saturn’s rings are made of ice crystals -- and that some of them are as big as our whole house!

Theme Reading:

There’s No Place Like Space; Me and My Place in Space.
(We also read a few non space-related easy-readers: We Are In A Book; When Tiny Was Tiny; A Thomas the Tank Engine story; and a Trucktown book called, Dizzy Izzy. Matthew’s read most of each on his own but not any one of them all the way through yet.)

Another cool, little touch about doing a space theme this week is that we recently purchased the membership on Starfall.com… (For those of you who haven’t heard my sales pitch, I highly credit this website for teaching Matthew so much of his phonics at such an early age. And now that they have a higher level of games, including Math, available with a membership package, I literally BEGGED my husband to let me sign him up - even if one of my favorite things about the website had always been that it was free) … And the early math section is centered around a space theme, itself!

But. Hands down, the highlight of the whole week? Definitely the Please Touch Museum’s Space Room. Matthew spent like half an hour launching foam rocket ships into the air (through the rings in the first picture) toward the giant planets hanging from the ceiling. He also got to dress up in an astronaut costume, complete with little helmet, and stand in front of a monitor that put him in different settings, like on the moon and at the pilot seat of an actual space shuttle.

(If you look closely at the monitor you can see me showing up on the screen, bent over with the camera. I am a bigger nerd than he is. I love being a grown-up, and having an excuse.)

Suffice to say, I don’t think he’ll be forgetting the experience soon. Which is good, because there's only so much a three year old boy should know about poop.

Letter to my Lollipop: 12 perfect (perfect, perfect!) months.

2011-10-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Scarlett,

I can’t believe how much you’ve come alive in just a matter of weeks since you turned one. It’s taken me a little while to write this month’s letter to you because there’s been a lot going on with your brother and sister, but you have not been accommodating, young lady. You just keep growing.

You left that first year behind you Scarlett, the way a bullet leaves the barrel of a gun. With unmerciful force. The kind that’s impossible to keep up with. Sometimes I watch you grow, and I just want to hold you tight, and beg you to slow down. Other times, I’m so excited to find out who it is you really are -- what kind of amazing person it is this whole time you’re destined to grow up to be -- that I think I wouldn’t mind if you actually sped up a little. It’s a good thing we don’t have control over things like the speed of growth in our children. As much as we belly-ache about it being out of our control; we mothers are entirely too fickle.

I’ve never used this word before today, but Scarlett, you are a total ham. To watch you do just about anything is entertainment I would pay for. People get so caught up in watching you be you, that they often forget what it was they walked by you to do in the first place before they got distracted. I’d worry about Matthew and Mary resenting how much attention you get from it if it weren’t for the fact that they give most of it to you themselves. Matthew can’t go a whole day without screaming “Mommy, Daddy! Look at what my baby can do!! Isn’t she so silly!” Even if it’s something we’ve seen you do a hundred times before, the boy won’t let us look away until we’ve watched you do whatever it is from start to finish… and we’ve applauded the show. And the day you turned one, Mary told everybody. There was not a soul in the 6th grade student body who left school that day not knowing what a momentous occasion September 29th was.

Onto the new stuff:
You are officially a transportation junkie this month. You weave in and out of rooms, under chairs, and over toys ALL. DAY. LONG. You try to climb up the back of the couch every time we set you on it, you have the endurance to scale the stairs more time than I could, and pretty much the only place you are content to sit still is about five and a half feet up on your daddy’s shoulders. You pass out from sheer exhaustion twice a day, and believe me, both of those naps are hard-earned breathers for you. When you are awake, you are always on the move. Just watching you is exhausting sometimes -- and I have a three-year-old. I know a thing or two about being exhausted.

You’ve become a pro at standing yourself up, and at getting back down again too. There was about a two-week window last month where you would pull yourself up on things, just to practice falling back down from them onto your bottom. I can’t imagine that you actually just liked falling, so I assume it was to practice getting yourself unstuck from the standing position in a more practical way than basically pushing yourself back and bracing for concussion. It must have worked because now you get down with much more grace than you ever did before. It still involves a bit of a plop at the end sometimes, but you reach for the ground with some intention this way. And I have to say, although the other way was adorable, it’s nice to see you crawl off with a little more dignity than you ever could after falling and clocking yourself on the head with a hardwood floor.

Speaking of trying to kill yourself by becoming mobile: your new nickname around here has become “cabinets.” You can guess why. I am always reminded of your eight or ninth month as you roam from one domestic death-trap to the next around here: when every stranger who peeked over at you and asked your age followed it up by saying, “Oh, I bet she’s just into EVERYTHING, isn’t she?” And how it made me worry for you, because you weren’t. Oh, how my worry has just MELTED away now that I get to helicopter around you, from one slamming, sliding, noise-making, potential finger-chomping door to the next.

…Okay, so maybe “melted” isn’t the verb. I guess it’s just repositioned itself in a more appropriate place. Believe me, I’ll take that.

I’d say it’s bittersweet, but really, there is nothing bitter about it. Even when I have to run to the sound of a piercing cry and the aid of throbbing thumb, I can do it knowing you’ll be okay. In my eyes, that is an invaluable something to know. I’m full of shit when I complain about you being into everything. I love it with everything I’ve got. I really do.

One of the coolest things I learned about you last month is that your ability to communicate, even though you aren’t actually talking yet, is pretty advanced. As a follow-up from leaving the hospital, I set up an appointment with Child Development Watch to have you evaluated as you continued to recuperate. I’m not sure what they did to determine it (to the untrained eye it just looked like a bunch of playing with toys), but they said that they were able to score you with the communicative as well as cognitive ability level of a much older child. Pretty neat stuff.

The other cool thing I learned was that you have a small birthmark. It just showed up one day out of the blue. It’s cool because it’s mocha, like the few I have on my legs, but it’s also cool because, even though I love that it’s there (Daddy and I even kiss it every chance we get!), it’s not enormous like mine. It’s very small and perfectly adorable.

Part of what makes you so entertaining these days is that you think everything is either hilarious or super, duper fun. Playing peek-a-boo with you is entrapping. You only recently learned how to actually cover your eyes, and not just some random part of your face when you play. Do you have any idea how cute it is to play an interactive game with a person who is so new to the world that they don’t even fully understand the concept of hiding? Cute enough to trap me in a game of it with you for like thirty minutes. Seriously, it’s that bad. I love you so much, it’s pathetic, Scarlett. It really is.

What we’ve been up to:
We went to the Please Touch Museum a couple of weeks ago, and you had a freaking blast. Of course, you touched everything, but mostly you just loved having the freedom to roam a gazillion square feet of floor space on your hands and knees. Also, I’m pretty sure it was your first time on a carousel. And you had a few bites of your first Philadelphia cheese steak afterward. Even with only a single tooth to speak of, you can eat anything.

We also went to the neighborhood Halloween Festival Dues Drive, which was so much fun that Daddy decided he wants us to take you guys every year.

Aunt Becca’s bridal shower was last week, and you ate about twice your weight in banana pudding and oreo cupcakes, so naturally, you had a pretty good time. Your baby cousin cried a lot of the time because of all the commotion, but I’m really psyched that you guys are already starting to show signs of a budding friendship. You like to stick your fingers in his mouth. It’s weird, but really cute.

The other night, we had a sleep-over at your other Aunt’s new place. You literally hunted down every chocking hazard, electrical socket, and breakable object in there, so naturally, you had a pretty good time. It was also the first time you’ve ever slept in bed with me and Daddy. Falling asleep wasn’t easy, but you woke up with the best, most excited smile I’ve ever seen first thing in the morning… And I’ve seen some good ones.

These are a few of your favorite things:
We usually head outside with your morning bottle to watch Matthew ride his bike up and down the sidewalk before breakfast, and then you play in the grass before you ever even get dressed. This is definitely your very favorite part of the day. You also love your strolls around the block and your trips to the swings at the park. Your favorite toy of all time is a purple dog that’s programmed to say your name when it plays educational games with you and sings to you at night. Your favorite book is Shoe Baby, and your favorite lullaby is Silvery. Matthew and I sing it to you every day at naptime, and then again before bed.

Silvery, silvery
Over the trees
The moon drifts by on a runaway breeze

Dozily, dozily,
Deep in her bed
A little girl dreams with the moon in her head.

Then Matthew says, ‘I love you my little girl,’ and kisses you on the head. It’s how we end every single day. Matthew and I at your crib, taking turns kissing you and telling you, in our own little ways, how much we love you.

This is usually the part of the letter where I go on an on about how much this is true… how much I love the living freaking daylights out of you, but seeing as how I’ve already rambled on for like, 3 pages, I’ll give you a break, and just tell you once again that I love as much today as I ever, ever have. Infinitely. Infinitely and endlessly, my little girl. Forever and ever, amen.

An Ordinary Picture At The Dentist.

2011-10-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Matthew went to the dentist for the first time. Mary has a lot of dental issues, so in preparation for getting her braces, (which she is SO EXCITED FOR, by the way) we’ve been in and out of the dentist A LOT to have different things done to her mouth. Pulled, drilled, cleaned, filled… you name it, this poor kid has had to have it done to her teeth. Matthew always loves going to the dentist for his sister. We get to pick her up early from school, read stories and meet people in the waiting room, and play with the tropical fish at the front desk. He’s been waiting for his turn to go for like, a year. Last week, it was finally his turn.

He went back without Mommy or Daddy to hold his hand… (which I’ll admit, even though neither one of us is the clingy-type, bumped me a little)… He did super well, and he came out declared cavity free with all kinds of super fun stories about what it was like to ride the chair and spit in the sink. I tried to get a picture as we left, but his arms were waving around so much in the stairwell while he talked, that you can’t really tell what’s happening. This is really the only picture that’s even remotely in some kind of focus, and I have to say, I think it would have been my favorite anyway. He isn’t smiling with the goodie bag pulled up to his face like he’s trying to in the others… in fact, he isn’t really doing anything all… But MAN, pictures like this, ordinary as they are, sure do knock me for a loop sometimes.

I look at pictures like this… At his long arms, and his dirty fingernails - in their perpetual state of needing to be clipped. I look at his mop-top head of tousled hair, and his body falling more and more into proportion. I look at his washboard stomach, no longer protruding with that bubble belly of toddlerhood, but falling straight into his bony, little waist. I look at his laced up shoes, and I look at his stance: totally balanced… notably mature.

I look at pictures like this, and there is something on the verge of being unfamiliar about it. He is just growing out of the him I used to know, that fast. It’s faster than I can keep up with, even when I am with him so much. For a moment, I am awestruck, looking at a picture like this. I can’t believe how wonderfully, beautifully big he has grown. I am excited for the new him he’s growing into, even when I miss the him he’ll never be again.

I always fall back on the familiar feeling of being proud, though. Just proud. It’s comforting to know that in every picture I will ever see of this boy, be it one I take today of him in the tub, or one his wife sends to me from four states away far off into the future, the pride I have for him will always feel like home.

Things I Never Want to Forget About My Kid at Three and a Half.

2011-10-15T03:58:00.000-07:00

He loves to play the harmonica. He carries it around in his back pocket, and the way he moves when he plays me a song is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

He much prefers playing outside in his bare feet, even in the rain.

There is no convincing him the contraction amn’t does not exist in the English language. He has me convinced that it should.

He has a whole crew of imaginary friends.

He is incapable of giving up, even on things he has NO CLUE how to do.

He sticks out his tongue when he gets nervous. We’re hoping this goes away before he starts talking to girls.

When someone asks his name, he has to reply: “Matthew Spencer Stucky. I live at [insert full address].”

He thinks he can marry his best friend when he turns six. He’s convinced her that this is a good idea, even though she will be nine by then.

He has never gone to sleep without saying a prayer before bed. I hope that never changes.

He is an early riser, like me. I hope that never changes either.

There is no superhero in comic existence that could compare to either one of his grandfathers. I dare you to challenge him on this.

He could talk about a chapter of Harry Potter for forty minutes without stopping to take a breath.

He thinks our pastor is God.

He gets so into his imaginary play, that he gets embarrassed when he catches someone watching him, even if he’s been playing boisterously in front of them for twenty minutes.

He gets absolutely lost in the illustrations of all of his books. He tells me all of the time, he wishes he could jump inside of them.

He is the only three year old I know who is embarrassed by passing his own gas, or falling.

He’s worse than a puppy about running to the sound of an open door.

He picks me dandelions everywhere we go, and he puts them in my pocket so that the yellow end sticks out. If I’m not around, he’ll pick them to save for when I get back.

He still calls Scarlett his baby. “What a big girl you are, my baby-baby!” he’ll coo to her all day long. Even as she pushes him away and screeches at him for getting too close.

Once in awhile, he’ll take a stab at calling one of us by our first names, as if it’s totally expected... It'll almost catch him off guard when we correct him. It kind of creeps us out.

There is nothing worse than having to sit in the seat of a cart at the store. NOTHING.

He associates his father’s first name with my coming down on him for something. When his dad is teasing him, he’ll turn to me and say, “Mommy, can you say (lowers tone) ‘Spencer’ to him?”

As many children come to the door now asking to play with him, as do for Mary. WHICH IS A LOT. At 3:00, once school lets out, a herd of four or more sometimes come all at once barreling up our drive to ask for them.

He impersonates people all the time with hilarious accuracy.

He is very protective of other people. You can’t even jokingly give someone a hard time in this house without his butting in every time to say, “Don’t you speak to MY [sister/cousin/mom-mom/cat/etc.] like that!!”

When he’s really happy, he kisses me on the lips with both palms planted squarely on my cheeks.

He calls every kid he seen within six years of his own age, a friend.

The very idea of not crawling under every row of chairs in a waiting room is inconceivable to him.

For every few minutes he spends actually driving his Hot Wheels cars off of furniture cliffs like a normal kid or crashing them into one another; he spends two solid hours just parking them. All 200+ of them. Next to one another in perfect rows of ten, or patterns of color.

Whenever we let him sleep with us, he changes positions and locations ONE HUNDRED times, only to always wind up at the foot of the bed, like a dog.

We had a dog for a few months, who ran away a year ago, and never came back. Matthew talks about him everyday.

When he was two, he’d always kiss me on the back of my hand. Now that he’s three, he does it to every girl on the playground.

He thinks there are two of all of us: the us we are in our dreams and the us we are awake.

He knows every word of at least eleven of his favorite songs by heart, and thinks nothing of singing, “Country girl, shake it for me girl, shake it for me girl, shake it for me!” through every isle of Target, improvising guitar solos with his harmonica.

There is no greater privilege than helping to roll the trash can to the end of the curb and back.

He tells me he loves me more than ice cream. I tell him I love him more than pizza.

Everyday for three months, he woke up asking if he was old enough to go to school yet. I finally told him that he would be old enough to go to school when he learned how to read. Three months later, he was reading 50-some page books on his own… Yesterday he asked me when he starts school.

--At which point, I sat down to make this list. Because I have decided, that at some point between the ages of three and four years old, (and I can’t be sure exactly where…) my son officially became the coolest human being on the planet… And that’s just the kind of thing a mom likes to keep track of, ya know?

What are some of the things you want to remember about someone special in your life, the way they are right now?

It's Official: He Read His First Book! And My Heart Exploded.

2011-10-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

Story-time is pretty lackadaisical around our house. It’s the one part of our preschool day that doesn’t happen at any specific time, or in any specific place. It’s usually impromptu and other than getting it in everyday (for both kids) and trying to keep a variety in the genres we circulate, there really isn’t much rhyme or reason to how it unfolds.

Other things in our house are not like this. We have a magnetized pocket chart hanging from our (artificial) fireplace mantle, with word cards color coded by grammar; we have scales and puzzles that teach everything from phonics to math equations up to twenty, and charts for making our own bar graphs with dry-erase markers. We have colorful dry-erase workbooks and letter tracers of all shapes and sizes and brands, and measuring cups we keep around just for adding and subtracting soapy water by volume in the bathtub.

But story-time in our house, however unstructured, is like sacred territory. No matter how many colorful toys and tools we have to dress up other activities to make them exciting… story-time, in all it’s simplicity, has remained the tried and true favorite of he and I, alike. Sometimes it’s loud and interactive; sometimes it’s lulled and relaxed; sometimes it’s intense and fascinating, and interrupted with a million breathless questions; and sometimes it’s nothing more than me reading his favorite chapter of Harry Potter for the eighth time and counting, before I move on to where we actually left off the last time we read. But it is always wonderful.

To this day, (and I don’t know what the difference is, but for some reason) the boy could plow through a whole day of structured, organized learning time, practically void of the need to come up for air -- but story time has always been the one time he has decided is no place for incorporating education. He will happily - giddily, even - practice phonics at any other time, or at any other place, in any other form (by writing words, or building sentences at the pocket chart or by playing games with sightword flashcards)… but story-time is for having stories read to him, and that’s it. Purely, as he sees it, for entertainment. It doesn’t matter if he knows how to read every word in the title, or every word in the story -- whenever I’d proposition him to take a shot at reading something off any kind of book, he’d cross his arms and lock his lips. “That’s not how story-time works,” he’s told me more than once. “I like it when you read to me.”

And so, I would.

I tried not to coax him too much, but I’ll admit that it was hard. He’d been gulping down every concept there was to know in preparation for independent reading for almost a year now, on top of being able to memorize sight words by the dozens at a glance. He’s only three, so obviously there was no rush for him to learn… I just felt like with his gift for language, he’d feel SO rewarded, if he were able to see that he was capable now of reading words from the pages of a book , on his own! A real book! For a kid who loved stories and letters and reading so much that he’s made me read to him the same freaking chapter of Harry Potter EIGHT TIMES, I just didn’t get what was holding him back from wanting to on his own.

Then on Friday, something changed.

Two of his friends came scuttling up the sidewalk from their house on Fischer Price skates, asking if he wanted to play. We were out in the front yard with a couple of books we hadn’t had the chance to read yet, because we got distracted building bird nests out of twigs and chopped grass I’d spewed from the mower that morning, and filling them with rocks from the garden. When the two friends joined in the game, assigning roles of Mommy Bird, Daddy Bird and (“Hmmmm…”) Step-Father Bird!, I ducked out to watch with my husband, and laugh.

Before I knew it, on their own, they’d gravitated toward the books: two level 1 easy-readers I’d picked up from the library the day before. Cheyenne, being six, and SO EXCITED to show off her brand new reading skills, very motherly opened the first book and began to read to the two three-year-olds at either side of her who were positively transfixed on the pages in her lap. Every few pages, she’d get caught up on a new word, and Matthew would help her out. “Sorry,” he offered first. “Enjoy,” he helped, second. “Throwing,” he spat out, next. When it got to a funny part he liked, he stopped her from turning the page, and he asked if he could have a turn. He pointed to the words himself and he read aloud: “I am MAD! …(and sad)… I AM MAD AND SAD!!!” and the three friends erupted into a fit of laughter that danced on my heart like an old favorite song.

That night, Matthew and I cuddled up with the same story, and we read each and every word together. He didn’t read the words one beat after me, as if he were trying to learn it -- but right along with me, as if he’d known how to read for a year and a half. When he got to the part that made him laugh out in the yard with Cheyenne, we laughed like loony-tunes together on the couch, and I knew exactly why it’d meant so much to me for him to know this experience himself. When the story was over, he asked if I could read it again -- but just to him, instead of together.

“Sure, buddy,” I said. “But why? Don’t you like to read, too?”

“Yeah, but that’s not how story time works, that’s all. I like when you read to me.”

“I understand,” I said, telling him the truth. “I love, love, love, when I read to you.”

And so, I did. And it was wonderful.

The Party.

2011-10-06T05:57:00.001-07:00

The day of your birthday party, it rained and it was cold. In fact, it was the only cold, rainy day of the fall this year and the first outdoor party I’d ever planned so I prepared myself ahead of time for it to be a bust (knowing I wouldn’t mind -- but hoping that you didn’t either). Normally an occasion like this is more for the adults than it ever is for the baby the celebration centers around, but to me that was not only okay; it was important. A whole lot of people worried about you a whole lot this year, and this party was a chance for all of them to come together to celebrate not only the first anniversary of your birth, Scarlett, but your health.

When we got to the park, the rain stopped completely. Matthew made a mad dash for the soggy playgrounds surrounding the pavillion where Daddy and I set up, and Mary tried to help. His shoes fell off and I had to change his socks before anyone even arrived; then of course, his butt and back and hands were soon to follow. The wind was whipping around so hard we had to tape everything down, and it was freezing.

Seriously, the weather was so unexpectedly bad, it was funny. I have pictures of you from the week before at another park in shorts and a tank top; but you might have thought your birthday fell in the middle of winter from the pictures I have now.

Wouldn’t you know it though? You not only tolerated the weather well, you had a total freaking blast! I don’t think a smile wiped from your face a single time all afternoon. You reached for every person, studied every card, fondled all of the cool decorations, and pointed and squealed at each and every gift. I have never seen a one year old so undividedly involved in their own first birthday celebration as you.

We spent an entire week preparing for this party. Mary and I painted molds with melted candy and rolled out fondant for a two-tiered cake. We dipped marshmallow pops in rainbow sprinkles and tied ribbons around the sticks. Matthew even helped to coat popcorn in melted candy to turn it purple, and all of the other treats were strawberry to top off the tables with pink. I made your pinata and the banner of flags too, which Mary helped me stream together. I laid out the scrapbook of your first year, and as soon as I print them out, I plan to make envelopes out of scrapbook paper and fill them with each letter I’ve written to you. It was a little bit of work since the budget called for a lot of do-it-yourself-ing, so the fact that you enjoyed it (even if you were the only one) meant the absolute world to me.

But honestly, even if you didn’t, I loved stringing it all together for you anyway. Your brother and sister are both at an age where they could help with some of the details, and with Daddy being home recuperating from his surgery, the whole family was able to work together in a way we never would have had the luxury to under any other circumstances. The entire week leading up to your party was a celebration, Scarlett. A tribute to you and the light you’ve brought to our lives as a family.

I love the living, breathing daylights out of you, kid. We all do.
Happy, happy birthday, bug.

Love, (love, love, love, love, love)

all of us.

We'll Call It Self... Um, Discovery. Yeah. That Sounds Good. Right?

2011-10-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

He was clearly more than a little mortified. You could see on his little face that he was hoping to God I didn’t know. I tried as hard as he did to play it off. I couldn’t help myself though -- I asked if he was okay. (I just felt so bad for making him embarrassed. I wanted to take it away.) His eyes got big, but he didn’t look at me. Mm-hm. I immediately regretted asking even that. I went back to pretending, and I left the room to collect my thoughts. I reminded myself that this was a perfectly normal development for a three-year-old boy, and then I proceeded to have, despite myself, a miniature panic attack over what to do.

I haven’t read anything specific about this, but I’ve skimmed a few things that have come up in passing while researching other things, and I know just from that that the healthiest way to handle this was to leave it alone. If anything (and only if necessary) address that it’s private -- which he clearly understood without my help. I pouted my lips when I told my husband later that night, who practically celebrated the news. “I know we’re not supposed to, but I can’t help feeling like we should talk to him about it,” I said, already knowing he’d be against the idea. The unconcerned grin on his face died completely. I never saw him get so protective.

The hard part isn’t accepting that even my baby is (and yes, I am wincing even as I type this) a sexual being… (Still wincing, by the way. You should see my face right now. It’s awful.) It’s that he’s old enough for it to be healthy for him to have some level of detachment from me.

I’ve always tried to keep an open dialogue with Matthew. He’s so smart, and has such a wonderful way of absorbing information about the world without losing his sense of child-like wonder in it or imagination. I have a hard time even pretending to him that Santa Clause is real because a part of me feels like I’m tainting his fascination in the real world by having to add made up things to it. Recently, when we started reading Harry Potter and discussing the fact that potion that come from magic plants don’t really exist, I showed him that medicines and foods and products of all kinds come from plants that really do exist -- and to him, that was magic. I planned for sexuality to be no different.

After all, nothing in life is magic if not the process of creating life itself! So with the birth of his baby sister at the age of two-and a half, Matthew was easily and enthusiastically educated about many basic facts of sexuality as we believe them: That mommy and daddy and God all worked together to create him and his baby sister, and that they grew from a tiny seed inside of my belly, and that I pushed them out into the world from a hole between my legs that is private. Mary grew inside of another woman’s belly - which is why I am her step mom. All babies are grown from the belly of a woman. He knows as well that it’s okay for only Mommy and Daddy and Dr. Fletcher to see his private areas because we are responsible for taking care of his body until he old enough to take care of it on his own. Recently I’ve even begun to hand him the washcloth at bath time when the area between his legs is ready to be washed, to further enforce the idea that we all have private areas of our own, and it’s important to respect that.

I thought we’d conquered the hard part.

But at least that part he needed me for.

I think now that the hard part is realizing that eventually some of what your kid will need from you most is a measure of absence. I realize I’m getting a little ahead of myself, here. He’s still three. The stability of his day still depends heavily on my willingness to cut his sandwiches into the shapes of long-neck dinosaurs with a plastic stencil -- but still. It’s rough. You’d think after having an ill child hospitalized and a husband barely escape death for the second time in our marriage that my skin might be a little thicker by now in dealing with these normal family developments. But, you know, I think it being normal is what makes it hard. It means he doesn’t need me to help. Not to understand, not to teach him what’s appropriate…Nothing. Hard as it is to accept, in this weird way, it just means he’s one more step toward being self-sufficient - which should be a good thing. Only I’m completely heart-broken over it.

I know it’s illogical, but every fiber of the mother in me thinks the very idea is obscene and offensive (even though it’s not), and is at the same time worried he’s entering into this whole new phase of life alone (even though, obviously, he should). It’s literally the most conflicted I have ever been with myself. It’s an endless parade of even-thoughs and but-stills. Leave it alone, even though you feel like you shouldn’t, even though you know that you should.

Yesterday Spencer and I caught him together without him knowing that we had. “At least he knew to lock the door,” Spencer laughed to me in a hushed voice outside the bathroom. I laughed too… “Yeah, but wait. Isn’t it dangerous for him to be locking himself into a room? I mean, what if he got into the medicine cabinet or something.” He thought about it for a second, neither one of us really knowing the answer to this one, and then asked Matthew if he was okay… if he needed some more time, or some help… or… you know, something. The poor kid jostled the lock undone so fast I thought he’d break it. I’ll spare you the ensuing details, except to say that the two of us have probably never hidden so uncontainable a laugh together in all of our marriage -- I mean this was better than Matthew’s first cuss word, and I thought nothing would top that.

The Moral? I have no idea. But leave it to parenthood to bring you to your knees of a broken heart and irrepressible laughter at exactly the time.

Everyday, I Celebrate Them.

2011-09-30T06:14:00.000-07:00

Dear Scarlett, yesterday Matthew and I woke you up to sing Happy Birthday.

Matthew remembers the day you born very vividly, and every chance he gets to talk about the time I left him to push you out of my belly, he takes. This particular morning, singing Happy Birthday to you and talking to you while I changed your diaper about what a wonderful day that was in my life, was one such opportunity. He told me I did a good job pushing you out, because he loves his Scarly. He took your hand and he kissed the back of it, the way he always does to me. Normally when he grabs you, you instinctively pull away and protect your face, but this time you let him. You looked over at him and you smiled.

We played outside for a bit, and then Daddy watched you while I shopped for your birthday party preparations with Matthew. Picking out a card for you, by the way, was one of the most deceptively impossible tasks I’ve ever encountered in my life. I thought picking out a card for a one year old would be easy, but no card in the world put to words what this day means to me, or what you mean to me. I kept reminding myself that I write words to you myself all of the time, so what does it matter. But every time I almost settled on something I didn’t love, I imagined it sitting in your baby book, exemplifying what your first year alive has meant to this family, and how it would always fall short. Plus, every card - even the ones I didn’t like - that said any form at all of “Daughter, I love you,” made me cry. Seriously, every one. Until eventually even the cards for four year old boys and twelve year old girls caught my stare and jerked at my insides. I was a train wreck by the time I left that place.

Mary came home from school with her friend, who couldn’t wait to tell you Happy Birthday herself. I spent the afternoon and early evening finishing your DIY pinata (Which, can I just say, turned out AWESOME.) and your flag banner decorations (Which also turned out awesome!), while you scaled the staircase over and over and over again with Daddy and Matthew on your heels -- alternatively cheering you on, and exasperatedly asking if you were trying to kill yourself. Before you went to bed we all gathered around your highchair for ice cream. We sang a chorus of Happy Birthday to you and you helped us clap at the end. I picked out a bedtime story about a surprise birthday party, and I talked you to sleep about everything we were planning for yours on Sunday.

You went to bed as loved as you are every day that has ever come before. I put you to bed feeling like one small day is so inadequate to celebrate you, and feeling very excited for Sunday. When I put Matthew to bed, he asked if we could celebrate you every day. Then I realized that aside from the ice cream, I think we already do, and I told him that. “Every day I have with you guys is a special occasion,” I thought out loud to him. He pulled the back of my hand to his little lips and he gave it a kiss. He turned over in his bed and he went to sleep as loved on that day as he is every other day that has ever come before.

The Apple Orchard

2011-09-27T04:12:00.000-07:00

Last year, the first outing we had as a family of five was to Milburn Orchards. This year, we hit the orchard a little bit early to go apple picking. Neither of us had realized until we got there that this was the first place Scarlett had really been to outside of the hospital and to visit grandparents when she was brand new.

We propped her up against a goat pen when we first got there, so that she was standing solidly on the ground, holding onto the wire for a good look at the animals. She was so into it this year. On her own, she bent down, grabbed a fistful of straw, poked it through the gate and then reached for the animal when it freed the snack from her hands to give it a pat on the head. She looked up at the camera with an ear-to-ear grin when two more full sized goats and a baby no bigger than a basketball came tumbling over too. She bent down for more, and she figured out how to distribute the straw among all of them fairly. Some for this one… Then some for that one… And some for the little guy too. Then she’d start again with the first, giggling contagiously the whole time.

We went apple picking and cider-doughnut picnicking in the grass and hay riding. She had a friendly donkey lick her hand, a horse swish it’s tail in her face, and a turkey gobble huffily at her brother who could have peed himself over the sound. Spencer even hung her upside down into the pigpen so that she could pat a pig-belly over the gate. We played in the sandbox, then fumbled through Mary and Matthew’s favorite inflatable obstacle course near the concessions and played a few fall games they had set up, like golfing for gourds. Mary even took her through the haunted house and haystack maze. It was awesome, and Scarlett loved it as much as any of us.

Last year when we went, she napped against my chest the whole time, snuggled into the wrap, barely weighing a thing. She came out only to pose, crumpled like a raisin in the sun, on a haystack and some pumpkins.

In the last week and a half, Scarlett’s hit quite a developmental growth spurt. She started finally crawling on her hands and knees, pulling herself up on furniture, and even scaled the staircase herself, twice. She’s also using a tightly pointed finger to skim the lines of text in her favorite books to pretend she’s reading, and is able to pick out the right word when we play with our YOUR BABY CAN READ flashcards about 70% of the time. (I never did these with Matthew -- But I totally wish I had, we love them!) Also -- get this, she’s snapping! Well, okay, she’s trying very hard to snap. But still, it’s pretty cool. Needless to say, her ability to enjoy the trip yesterday was heightened a great deal from even what it would have been a month ago.

~~~

I think this has been the most incredible year I’ve ever witnessed come full circle.

Baby, Baby Scarlett - A few days old (Fall 2010)

There aren’t really words to describe how it felt to see these two pictures next to one another on the screen of my computer once I got home -- but I will say, it was a very close second only to the trip itself.

Not-So-Baby Scarlett - A few days shy of a year! (Fall 2011)

Powerful.

2011-09-25T06:11:00.001-07:00

Dear Scarlett,

In four days, you’ll have your first birthday. This letter isn’t about that, though. This one’s a little tougher. It’s about the month that came before, the eleventh month. Last night mom-mom took you and I shopping for birthday clothes. An outfit for your pictures, an outfit for your party. We raided The Children’s Place, and Baby Gap and Gymboree for the pretties little ensembles that we could find; from socks and hats to jeans and faux fur jackets… all in twelve month sizes.

It isn’t that you’re twelve months that made picking out those clothes bizarre to me. It’s that you actually fit them; clothes that aren’t six months behind your actual age. It’s strange still to hold up clothes that have been hanging in your closet for months and months waiting for you to grow into them, and to be able to tell without even putting something over your head now that you’ve outgrown it. Over the course of this month you’ve actually grown into some of those clothes, and then back out of them again within a matter of days. I take clothes down by the fistful every week to box up and give away. It used to feel good to do that. Now it just serves as a unrelenting reminder, like a taunt that you ever had to catch up in the first place. Today I’ll be so happy to hang up these new clothes because I’m more ready than ever for a fresh start.

In four days, you’ll be one. I’ll be honest, it’s been difficult for me to find the words to you for this month’s letter, Scarlett, which is why it’s four days before your first birthday that I’m willing myself to write it. Sometimes I have so much bubbling up inside of me about it I could burst - even now. And other times I recognize again that you being alright is the only thing that matters, so I just want to put it all behind me. I have feelings about this month that make me breathless with joy, so I want to share them. Whenever I try to though, I’m gripped suddenly with remembering that the only way I could have reached those feelings was by making to other side of a time when I was scared for you. And I never - I mean never - want to remind myself about that, not even if it was a gateway to something wonderful.

I can tell myself it’s good because it was that time - that being scared for you - that saved you, but I can’t make myself feel good about it.

I think about you being twelve or twenty-two someday, and I know that it’s stupid to care this much about telling you. I think about how small a hiccup like this, that happened when you were too small to even remember, will matter to someone your age. I think about that and I can’t imagine not wanting to tell you about when you were sick… Because by the time you’re old enough to be told this silly little story, that’s all it’ll be: a story. But even knowing that, when I sit down to write about the eleventh month of your life, addressing it to you, it just feels like I’m not ready. I don’t know why, but for some reason, the healthier you get, the harder it is for me to accept that this ever happened to you in the first place.

It was in the eleventh month of your life that you got better. But it was also in the eleventh month of your life that I really saw for the first time how sick you actually were. You recovered so powerfully, that with every new thing you had the strength to do, I saw all of the things you were being held back from. And they were huge, like the steps of an elephant. It wasn’t just pulling yourself up on the coffee table, or trying to stand on my lap. It was things like reacting to Daddy for the first time, by squealing his name when he walked in the door; or laughing like a loon when I hid behind a teddy and popped out with a silly face. These were things you always wanted to do, but your body wouldn’t let you. It took every ounce of energy you had, just to keep you alive. You couldn’t exert it on squealing or laughing. You couldn’t waste it on feeling something powerful.

You should see the clothes we got you. I’ve never been so excited by a material thing in my life. Not ever. Not my wedding ring, not Matthew’s baptism certificate, not Mary’s most hard-earned A. I look at these clothes and I imagine you inside of them, all put together in your first birthday outfit, eating cupcakes off of picnic table in the park; I see you being strong and exuberant and completely yourself, so happy it’s infectious, and I love these clothes for being part of that image, the way that people love Christmas trees and ocean waves.

I just want to let you know, Scarlett, that this month of your life has been one of the most powerful 30 days of mine. And that even though sometimes feeling something powerful can be scary, or hard, and it can even be something a part of you wants to forget, it is something I don’t want you to take for granted. There is no doubt in my mind that next weekend will hold one of the very happiest day of my life, because you will be glowing with health and beaming with life of your own. But this month was good too, daughter, because it held you. And you are a powerful something to hold.

And that will always be something to celebrate.

Love, (love, love, love, love, love)
Mommy.

Surviving A Family Like Mine, and Living to Blog About It.

2011-09-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

(Everyday around 4:00 the neighborhood kids collect around our driveway. Matthew, Mary, Cheyenne, Mason, Daisia, Kaitlyn, a couple of baby-sisters and Matthew's best friend in the wide, wide world, Jake, for chalk, bubbles, football and crafts. By the way, Matthew is loyally devoted to the older blonde at his side. He very much beleives, without anyone planting the idea in his head, that he's going to marry her when he turns six.)

Even if home schooling Matthew were the only thing going on in my life, it would be an overwhelming experience. So when things started to go nuts between Scarlett’s health issues and then Spencer’s accident, I immediately felt for Matthew… Knowing that home schooling him would be the first thing in our lives to fall off the priority list, if something had to.

It can be exhausting when every person in your family needs you on your toes. Scarlett, for example, was determined to have a gross motor delay that requires her to be seen more frequently by the doctor, and Child Development Watch is suggesting now that she even start physical therapy to catch up. Spencer’s still on watch for seizures; for the blood clot in his lung to possibly get worse; and for a subsequent brain bleed, so he’ll be out of work for a total of eight week and pending. Even Mary is adding to the grey in my hair now by coming home from school everyday positively floating on all of the attention she’s getting from the boys at her new school. She doesn’t know it, but sometimes I think she’s in as much danger going to school with eighth grade boys as Spencer, who’s still at risk for a brain bleed if he yells or strains too hard to take a shit.

Compared to what everyone else is going through, it almost seems ridiculous that schooling a three-year-old who already knows how to read and to write, should be any kind of a priority at all. But to me it is. Last year when it first came to my attention that Matthew was learning things at a faster pace than what was normal for his age, I borrowed four thick library books on the subject of gifted children, trying to figure out if I was a nutcase or not for thinking that Matthew might fit the mold. I returned them having been bombarded from cover to cover to cover with tale of the sorry state of gifted education, and how it’s exactly the “last priority” attitude that got us here in the first place. I decided then that I wouldn’t let that be the case with my kid. That Matthew being different wouldn’t make his educational interests any less of a priority to me than they would be if he were only just now beginning to put sounds to letters of the alphabet.

Above all else, I don’t want to lose sight of what it means for him to be three. That’s my highest priority when it comes to doing this. But Matthew’s learning at a late kindergarten level now -- which is not unheard of, but is certainly not typical for a three year old -- and that makes it hard. He’s reading more than a hundred words on sight, he’s writing a growing number of words on his own, and he’s able to build sentences with me at the pocket chart with our word cards. He can read and record information by bar graph, write out and solve simple equations, and he can both recognize and make specific fractions using pictures and objects already. The kid’s just on fire.

We’re even six chapters into Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, (I mean, we’re talking a twenty-some chapter book I know adults who read.) and not only is he actually able to keep up with this massive load of naked text, he’s made me read one of the chapters six times in one week because he loved it so much. This doesn’t make him Rainman or anything, but home schooling him does require special attention, and an understanding of what it means to be this kind of different … all without losing sight of what it is, and what it should be, to be three.

Which means counterbalancing a lot of this organized learning nonsense with a solid amount of good, hard, peer-interactive play. Which of course, for me, just means surrendering even more time and even more energy, and even more precious, dying brain cells to the cause of educating Matthew right. Or at least, not screwing him up; I’ll take that.

As kind of an exercise for myself, I decided to make nothing mandatory for him this year. Nothing. To see how much of our home schooling activities he’d do by choice, if I weren’t pushing him at all. I’ve also decided to fill our day with at least a few activities that don’t focus on an end product, or on any kind of right or wrong answer. But on good old-fashioned, creative fun -- which I knew to expect off the bat (as these idealistic fantasies of mine usually are) would probably be a lot easier said than done.

Actually, though, it wasn’t. In fact I couldn’t believe with the extra workload around here, how easily Matthew’s schooling weaved into the day. Of course, by now part of it’s just us falling into a routine and part of it’s his own enthusiasm, but I think a lot of it’s the simplicity, too, which makes me proud. We’ve finally found our place, I think; a place where home schooling isn’t just something we’re trying to do, but something we’re actually -- dare I say -- succeeding at.

Obviously, things are pretty neurotic around here so recording all of it in writing has definitely slowed down. On top of everything else, we get visitors on a daily basis who want to check in on Spencer and the baby, so keeping the house presentable isn’t something I even have the luxury of letting slip for a while. Plus, keeping ourselves afloat for an entire season out-of-work is taking energy and time and precious, dying brain cells to figure out too -- so finding time to write is hard to come by.

I do plan on doing it though, even though it’s something I kind of struggle with sometimes. It’s frustrating to me personally that so many parents of children like Matthew aren’t comfortable with sharing much, for fear of being put down for pushing their children too hard, or “hot-housing” them, or for bragging. I’m lucky to have had this blog for about two years and to have met nothing but mega-awesome people through it, so I’m hoping this part of my blog will be as well received. I figure that even if it isn’t though, it’s something that means a lot for me to be able to share. Matthew’s my kid, and watching him grow in any way is endlessly fascinating to me, no matter what pace it occurs. This is also a huge part of our life right now, and an interesting facet of our relationship. I know that if I didn’t include it, looking back on these chronicles someday would feel a little incomplete.

So anyway, until I can get back on my blogging feet, here’s a quick video of Matthew reading a couple of sentences he built himself on the pocket chart; reading a few words of the week, picked from one of the week’s focus stories … as well as the adorableness of his surfboard t-shirt/dinosaur pajama ensemble he most impressively picked out himself: Please enjoy!

The Aftermath.

2011-09-11T06:29:00.000-07:00

His head is shaved now. The day they took off the bandages from surgery, I gasped when I met him in the hall. About a third of his head was shaved. The rest of the hair was still there, framing gashes the accident left, and a long, fresh, surgical scar half a foot long. His skin was zipped together with creepy black stitches in this massive U shape, like someone had used his own skin to sew a pocket onto his head. He was being walked by a nurse; taking slow, hulking steps, hunched over and holding on. When he came home, his aunt met us at the house to cut the rest of his hair off, and I gave him a bath.

Three times a day, I bring a flashlight to his face, and shine a light into his eyes to check for normal dilation.
“Puff out your cheeks,” I tell him. “Stick out your tongue. Smile.”

He’s susceptible to seizures; post-traumatic, post-operative and post-concussive, for like, up to three months. We were home already, and these first two weeks back were supposed to be the most critical, they said. He should make a full recovery with enough rest, but they can’t promise a seizure won’t happen or that his personality or memory won’t be effected to some degree. And that was supposed to be the worst of it.

The biggest change was that he needed to have the neurological assessment done three times a day, but I could do it myself, so he came home.

“Close your eyes. Now hold your arms out in front of you like Superman.
Pull my fingers. Push my hands.
Bring your arms out to the side.
Now touch the tip of your nose with each index finger, one at a time.”
I lay my hands underneath of the balls of his feet, “Push down.” Place them over the tops, “Now up.”
I jokingly ask if he remembers my name, but I really pay attention to the answer.

It’s the memory thing that scared me the most, only because I know how much something like that would piss him off… Well, not only, I guess, but mostly. The personality shift is already there, so even though it scared me the most to begin with, I know now that I can manage it. His mood swings are hard to keep up with, but not impossible. When his patience is short, I know it’s not his fault, and that in another twenty minutes he’ll be on the other side of it; unexpectedly soft-spoken, and feeling awful for making this any harder on the people helping him than it already has to be.

By Friday morning he was still hocking up blood, and that’s when we knew that something wasn’t right. It was early on his second day home, and this was the sixth time I was seeing blood come out of his mouth. I called the doctor and got an urgent call back saying to get to the Emergency Room, like yesterday.

A CT scan showed a that he had a pulmonary embolism; one of the most severe complications of brain surgery. A blood clot in his lung, a potentially fatal condition. Apparently the third most common cause of death in hospitalized patients.

An ultrasound showed more in his legs, which is where the clot in his lungs had originated from. He’s normally so active that a few day’s rest made his blood clot up all over the place, and one of the clots traveled into his lung -- which could have killed him while we were home, thinking everything was fine. He was readmitted. Having just had surgery for a brain bleed, blood thinners can’t be used to treat the clot. So yesterday they operated on him a second time. They put a filter inside of him, and made him lie on his back for four hours wearing the same vibrating boots he’s been wearing since the accident -- boots that were supposed to be a precaution to prevent clots from forming in the first place. The filter should block anymore clots from reaching his lungs, brain or heart, but nothing can be done about the one that’s already there… They say it’s too small to require treatment beyond blood-thinner, and again, blood-thinner is not an option for post brain-surgery patients.

Last night wasn’t anything like the day that came a week before it. He was able to really eat for the first time in a week, the first time at all in almost three days, so I came back to the hospital with Mexican food he’d been craving since Friday and we ate chili rillanos and Spanish rice over a bedside tray on wheels. We talked about how much we miss each other and how I kinda like his head shaved again… laughed about the kids more than anything, and spent every-so-often assuring one another that everything would be fine, and life would get back to normal soon enough. I’m not in any rush, I told him. This is life, I said, and right now living it with you is all I want out of it.

I haven’t told anyone this, but on that night a week ago, Spencer and I came back from a wedding, and I got on the motorcycle with him for the first time. He didn’t want me to -- not without a helmet or him having his full endorsement, or the three-hundred dollar sissy-bar on the back being installed yet -- but I told him I could do it… just around the block. It was dark, and I wasn’t dressed for it and I was terrified, but I needed a little excitement. We arranged a sitter for the kids that night not just because of the wedding, but because Spencer decided I needed to get out… said I was getting Cabin Fever from being so cooped up with the kids, and I thought you know, he’s right. It had to be a little dangerous. I needed to be a little scared. My life is so stale anymore, I complained to him out in the driveway, smiling my very best pretty, pretty please without any words at all.

He let me on, and my heart raced. I mean, I was gripped with fear. Fear like I’d never felt before then. My legs had never felt so bare and exposed in all my life, ripping down the road, between cars and speed bumps and things we might not see in the black of the neighborhood (a neighborhood I’d never cared about being unlit before this night). I felt absolutely petrified and rightfully unsafe in shorts and a tank top on this loud and unfamiliar thing. My arms went a little numb with fear that someone would back out of their driveway and my skin would come tearing off my body on the blurry road beneath me. But I clung to him, trusting that he would keep me safe until we made it home.

Now here I am, taking care of him, utterly too aware of just how much this life is not in anyone’s control. His safety is not my hands anymore than mine was in his the night before the accident that almost killed him; that still threatens us even this morning, in the aftermath of all the damage.

The funny thing is, I don’t know if I regret getting on the bike with him the night before. The logical side of my brain - that nagging side that usually owns my every thought, even when I wish it wouldn’t - knows that I should, that I really was tempting fate by getting on there and saying to hell with what happens. I need to feel it for myself, even if it is terrifying. But, stupid as it sounds, instead I found myself saying to him last night, over our Mexican dinner at the hospital, ‘if I never get on it again it’ll probably be too soon -- but at least I got to feel it once.’

Oddly enough, he understood exactly how I felt.

Spencer Was Hit On The Motorcycle.

2011-09-06T02:18:00.000-07:00

“Yeah, you go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The first thing in ages -- beyond ages -- he’d ever done for himself, was buy a Harley. His permit let him practice off of major highways, without a passenger. He ate, slept, and breathed this thing. He couldn’t believe it was really his, he kept saying. For weeks the only thing out of his mouth was all of the things we’d do with this bike; was getting a helmet, a sissy-bar so I could ride, and pipes. And how he couldn’t believe it was really his. My husband isn’t an easily excited man; this thing… this thing did it.

His parents watched the kids for us all night, but we needed to be there by 9:00 a.m. to pick them up. I’d follow in the car so that he could ride the bike. I’ll be right behind you, I said. But on my way out the door I stopped to feed the cat, and then I knocked out some dishes while the house was still quiet. And then I left.

An officer flagged me away. Turn around. My heard stopped. It was right outside of his parent’s turn.

No. No, I was only being dramatic. It probably wasn’t even an accident. My heart didn’t race, my palms didn’t sweat. I took seven, then turned onto forty from another direction. I kept the radio off, but I knew he was fine. He’s always fine. I never really thought for even a second, it could be my husband. That while I was doing the dishes, he was flipping lifelessly over a car.

I could see the officer from this side of the accident when I pulled into the neighborhood. A red car parked sideways in the road. My legs went numb crunching into the drive. The bike wasn’t there. The bike wasn’t there. The bike wasn’t there.

I interrupted her. Where is Spencer! Confusion. Shrug.

I slammed into the door, I tried to say, THERE WAS AN ACCIDENT. I couldn’t get the words out, just noise. Just noise again. Why couldn’t I talk? I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t walk. ALICIA! ALICIA! She screamed after me, coming outside. “You can’t go. You can’t drive like this. Stay with the kids.”

Mary asked one time what was wrong, but she had to know, and she didn’t push. I took the baby from the highchair. I ignored the question. I walked to the door to watch my mother in law peel out of the driveway, take the corner hard. So much noise was coming out of me, and I couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t crying. It was me trying to breathe. Trying not to fall. Trying not to scare the kids. Trying not to drop the baby. Still trying to breathe.

We prepared for this, Spencer and I, after the school bus accident that killed Zach. How we would tell the kids. What we would do if they were around when one of us had to react. We wouldn’t have the luxury of losing it. This was part of being a parent. It was bigger than being a wife or a husband, we agreed, at least in this moment. Mind over matter, we promised each other, for the sake of the babies. And this was the day. It wasn’t the school bus accident. That was only a prelude to the real thing. Zach died to prepare me for this. Spencer died today. He’s dead and now I have to tell the kids. Somehow I have to tell the kids. I started to fall.

But first I have to hold the baby. First, this is all I have to do. Remember to breathe. My hand is over my mouth, to keep the noise in. I can’t react yet. I have the kids. Keep the noise in. Don’t’ let them see this.

The SUV could have flipped, she took the corner so fast. Tires screamed. Then she was screaming. In the kitchen, screaming, “A MOTORCYCLE. A MOTORCYCLE. THEY WON’T LET ME IN! ALICIA, IT’S HIM! ALICIA, IT’S HIM!” She grabbed the phone, calling the hospital. “My son, Joseph Stucky was in a motorcycle accident. Is he there?”

I clung to the baby. I couldn’t look in the direction of the kids. They were watching a movie in the connected room. Mary heard it all, she had to have, but she never come in the room, never asked what was happening. Matthew giggled over the movie Tangled. I couldn’t hear the movie, but I heard him laughing.

An officer called my phone. I was on my way to the hospital. Trauma.

He was in a neck brace, on a stretcher. Blood, everywhere. The tips of his fingers to the end of his toes; hair was missing from his head, where the pavement shaved it off. His fingers glittered with shards of tiny glass. His face was swollen, his teeth were chipped and crooked. His head wasn’t the shape it was supposed to be.

Blood on his brain. Family poured in, grabbing me, hugging him. Crying in corners and into his chest. This is what kills people who make it to the hospital, we all knew it. Everyone there knew what it was like to lose someone like this. Everyone, but me. I realized he was scared. A reaction no one had ever seen on him so it was hard to recognize. He was cold and chattering, asking why he was shaking. If it were happening to anyone else, he would have known something like that. He wasn't being himself. He told me not to stop touching him, even when I knew it hurt.

I held his hand, clasped in mine against my stomach while a nurse prepped him for surgery. She wrote a B in black marker on his temple, above his ear. Stroke, they said. Brain surgery. They always include me, like I’m going through it too. They did it with Scarlett and now they were doing it with him. Nodding at me, to make sure I understood what was happening when they talked. They put a cap on him, they wheeled him away, they walked me to a room where I fell asleep three hours later, two chairs next to his dad, after everyone else left for the night. We woke up at 2:00 a.m. to see him, bandages over his skull; a clear hose, draining a golf ball swelling of blood and traces of cardinal red tissue from underneath. Like the feeding tube that Scarlett had, but worse. Worse because it was blood and worse because this time, I had to leave.

I came home to an empty house last night. A puzzle on the floor. A wine glass sitting out from the end of our date last night. Biscuits on the counter we left before we could eat this morning. The remnants of our life scattered in and out of every room, still with the quiet of an empty house. This could have been it. I could have lost him.

I fed the cat and I put away the dishes before I went to bed, thinking about the day. About clinging to the baby, imagining what his mother was turning that corner to see. About losing all sense of reason in the panic, when I always told myself I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t do that to my kids. I should have thought about them. No, I should have thought more about Spencer. No, I should have thought about his mom, his poor mom, like she thought of me.

He was sitting at a red light when it happened, when I was standing right here, doing the dishes. The car came at him at full speed, never even tapped the breaks, never saw him sitting there. Spencer looked down at his right mirror in just enough time to know that this was going to kill him. No time to react. No helmet to protect him. The bike shot our from him like a rocket, landed thirty yards away. He remembers slamming into the windshield, like a dream. He flipped over the length of the car then skid for a ways. Road rash ripped his t-shirt and shaved his skin. Witnesses say he got up immediately, his body in shock, stood himself up and left a bloody handprint on the back of the car, catching his balance. He walked to the median, and he collapsed.

I should have been there. I should have been there.

Last night I fell asleep with the cat thinking, this could have been my life, wondering what we were supposed to learn from all this. I don’t know the answer to that. But I know I should have been there for him. I should have been there, and I don’t ever want this house to be quiet again.

Hulk-Baby

2011-08-27T06:47:00.000-07:00

On Catching Up All At Once.

(Alternatively titled: I Am Apparently Incapable of Producing Normal Human Children.)

This past month has been a weird one with the baby. Just weird.

So much of the past few months have been spent defining Scarlett by all of the things that she wasn’t doing. For the past five of them she’s been stuck at about the physical and psychological capacity of a six month old. Which means, now that she’s getting better, that virtually every single week since she’s been home, she ages more than a month. A MONTH, a week.

Which basically means that we have a hulk-baby on our hands.

The lighter side to this, is that with her gaining over a pound a week, we find ourselves now with about a three day window of time in which to fit a three month span of baby dresses onto her before she outgrows them. Dresses that I have been lusting to put on her since about the day she was born. Which means that she can be found inappropriately overdressed for even the smallest occasion, most of the week. Occasions like… you know, army-crawling around the backyard, for instance, or watching Mommy fold laundry. Because, I’ll tell you right now, I will be gosh-darned if I’m going to let the fact that Farmer’s Market is the fanciest place we go all week stop me from putting THIS dress on THAT child before she outgrows it forever.

And besides, it makes for some really cute pictures, you have to agree. Even if she is busting out the seams of her dress like a big, green, comic-book monster.

Of course, being a hulk-baby also means catching up on about five months of firsts all at once, which is kind of a double-edged sword. Because, let’s face it, no one has that much access to a camera and decent light (or pristinely swept floors for that matter). We are on constant vigil with this kid. It’s a little exhausting.

The first week of this month, she learned to wave hello from side to side, and to open and close her hand to say goodbye. The next, we went to the circus and she learned to clap. She literally went into the circus having virtually not a clue in the world that clapping is even a thing that people do, and left the tent unable to stop herself. She’s become so hooked on this crazy new flair of hers that I’m hard pressed to think of a single interaction with her during the day now that doesn’t prompt a celebratory applause. Story? [clap!] lunchtime? [clap!] Stroll? [clap!] Daddy’s home? [HEART ATTACK OF HAPPINESS -- clap!]

Somewhere within the second week, the growing just got out of hand.
She points. She says CAT and DAD respectively, and she mimics our actions. When we do our Your Baby Can Read flashcards, and Matthew and I stick out our tongue at the word TONGUE, Scarlett does too. When we put a hand on our ear at the word EAR, she does too. And when we put our arms up at the ARMS UP card, she lifts a hand and puts it on her forehead, looking terribly confused. It is, hands down, the cutest thing in the universe. She kisses by request now too, which is awesome, it is, although the hugs on cue are even better somehow. And she also lifts herself up into a sitting position about 600,000,000 times a second. Abs of steel, this girl has, I’m not joking.

Changing her diaper, on a side note, is not easy these days, mostly because I’ve had to learn how to do it with her sitting up (seriously, she will not lay down) -- which, I don’t know how familiar you are with certain laws of physics like gravity, but it pretty much makes doing this very complicated. My only other option, though, is pinning her down by the chest with my elbow, which only invites her to fight against me (and really, scraping human waste of a person is just one of those things in life that requires the cooperation of all parties involved). Only she doesn’t cry like you’d expect; it’s like a game to her, like arm wrestling. Only it’s like… baby wrestling, because she’s putting her entire body into it. Her entire HULK-body. And I’m not as strong as I look, so sometimes she wins.

Incredible as those things are though, in all seriousness, the one thing that truly takes the cake has got to be the crawling. She hasn’t even made it up on all fours yet, so it’s still a very primitive attempt at the real thing. But oddly enough, I think that’s what I like best about it.

So many things come so easily to Matthew. It’s not often I get to savor the experience of encouraging him to truly work at overcoming a challenge. And I wouldn’t change that for the world, believe me… Shun me for bragging if you will, but my son is one-of-a-kind, (just like my daughter is, just like your children are) and I will never deny him the complete understanding that he is as much worth bragging about as any other child. His strengths are a part of him just like his weaknesses are, and I love them all the same because they are his.

That being said, when Scarlett started to catch up to so many milestones all at once, a small part of me… Just a small part, felt robbed of the experience to share in some of that with her. Some of that, Come on, baby girl, you got it! You can do it! time. Her gyrating across the floor on knobby little elbows in a wild hunt for choking hazards, while she learns… well, it gives me some of that.

Also, be still my freaking heart, it does makes for some really adorable photographs, doesn’t it?

Seriously. The cuteness is painful. Oddball Hulk-baby or not.

Walking the Line Between Genius and Total Hellion.

2011-08-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

There was a time when Matthew got the best of me more often than I would have liked to admit. We weren’t always so in-tuned to one another. And I can remember all too often in the very early days of his toddlerhood, standing back, watching him, and frankly not knowing, I mean, at all, what to do next.

There weren’t a lot of things I went into parenthood feeling strongly about. Attachment parenting, co-sleeping, character endorsement on products and clothing,… I really wasn’t so die-hard about any one direction that I couldn’t leave room for a little first hand trialing and error. Matthew was my first, after all, and to be perfectly honest, I knew that I was treading unpredictable territory anyway. I figured I’d get by with a pure heart and the best of intentions long enough to get my feet wet, learn a thing or two from experience, and then I’d take it from there. A day at a time, that was my theory.

It sounded good. Solid. Practical. Realistic. What it really was, was kind of a mess.

Even when he was the youngest of the lot, he was the runt at daycare that snatched toys and pushed older kids and ran away when he was being spoken to. He flung himself to the floor when he was upset and he kicked at me when I tried to put on his shoes. I remember him never wanting to eat his vegetables, as far back as the highchair, and learning at an absurd age to negotiate 4 sugary snacks out of his father for every one bite of produce he did agree to swallow. Naturally, I blamed myself. If I weren’t such a shit parent, my son wouldn’t be such a hellion.

Except that, when he was good, he was exceptional at being good. Almost as soon as he learned to talk, he knew how to say not only please and thank you, but I’m sorry, and even excuse me. Which is why I had such a hard time figuring out where exactly Spencer and I were screwing up.

Sometime after he turned two, it came to our attention that he was probably gifted. I started pre-schooling him from home in a very, very laidback way, just to get an idea of where his ability actually was. Then, over the summer, we gave it a rest. The line between what he was capable of doing with a little encouragement and what was just plainly over his head was becoming blurred, and frankly, I was as in over my head as anybody. They say that there’s a fine line between genius and insanity, so balancing this whole giftedness thing was a little like dancing on a tightrope. On the one hand I knew that over stimulating a gifted child risked robbing them of the only childhood they’ll ever have. While on the other hand, under-stimulating them risked a complete system shut-down, which is the theory behind why gifted children tend to be such crumby test-takers. After all, what’s the fun in knowing all the answers?

Fearful that I was going to somehow damage him emotionally or something, we took the summer to learn normal things like how to swim independently with a pair of water-wings and how to pedal a bike, while I took that time to privately assess how I wanted to approach teaching him when we picked back up with our academics in the fall.

As far as his behavior was concerned, it turned on a dime when we started occupying him with learning to read and write. It was night and day. Days at a time without needing to stand in the corner for talking back, months without melting down. Likewise, toward the middle of August, it started to backslide. Finding this niche of his was like the answer to all of our parenting despair. Not because we had an excuse for his behavior, but because we had an actual SOLUTION for it. As long as he was being stimulated enough throughout the day, both physically and mentally, he was an angel. A docile, compassionate, sweet-hearted angel, even after the books were put away.

And this was good to know because last week, he threw a wedding gift for my friend clear across The Hallmark Store because I wouldn’t let him out of the stroller. I WONDER WHY, GENIUS.

After a 3 month hiatus, I wasn’t expecting to be blown away on Monday when I pulled out the old backpack and started a refresher play course with him at the table. Well, as is the trend in my life, I was wrong. I mean, I was really, really wrong.

He read. He wrote. And he got to the bottom of every puzzle I placed in front of him like he was eating it for breakfast. He rattled off words I held in front of him like he was telling me his name. TREE. BOY. ELEPHANT. DOG. CHIMPANZEE. IT. PARK. WAS. DINOSAUR. We did a puzzle where you match a picture in one column that starts with a certain letter to another picture in a second column that starts with the same letter. In three minutes flat he did not only all twenty-six of those, but he traced every letter of the alphabet with the accuracy of an adult. It was unbelievable, even to me.

I decided that it was time. I took out a book that he was familiar with and I asked him to read it to me. He opened the first page. IT WAS DARK. IT WAS STORMY. IT WAS NIGHT. He turned the page. M-M-ME?… M-M-MEL-VIN! HAD A FLAT TIRE. He turned the next page. HE PULLED INTO A SPO-OOOKY JUNK-YARD. He turned the page again. MELVIN FOUND A NEW TIRE. MELVIN HAD A STINKY BUTT. MELVIN POOPED ON A DOG!

He erupted into laughter. His older sister fell to the floor, hardly able to breathe. Matthew rolled on top of her shouting POOPED ON A DOG, POOPED ON A DOG. MARY AND MELVIN POOPED ON A DOG!

Closing the book, I suddenly found myself in a familiar place. Standing back, watching him… watching him be so innately, wonderfully, Matthew, and not knowing at all what to do next. Because more than I want to nurture in him a love of literacy and academics, and more than I want him not to throw merchandise across The Hallmark Store (Though, I’m not gonna lie, that would be stupendous.), I want to preserve in him that innate Matthew-ness he has right now, rolling on the floor like a goon with his sister, utterly unaware of how extraordinary he is. And I know that that is the biggest challenge involved.

I guess the only thing I can really know for sure is that this boy, he will always give me a run for my money. I may never stop feeling both ill prepared and intimidated by the echoing void of answers I have regarding how I’ll to raise this spirited little boy to be a great and steady man. I guess neither good intentions or a solid practical plan will always be enough. I guess we can expect that sometimes, along the road, even reality will warp into something we don’t recognize. And I guess that I should just get comfortable coming from a place of just not always knowing, when it comes to this journey I’m on with my son.

But looking ahead, lost as I am in all of this, all I can do is laugh alongside him.

Because, after all, where’s the fun in knowing all the answers, anyway? Right?

I Left.

2011-08-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

Matthew started hitting Scarlett.

And if it were out of sheer frustration, or plain curiosity, I’d be almost unconcerned. He’s three and he’s impatient, and she’s one and likes to lick people. Disagreements are bound to ensue. Mary and Matthew were born seven years apart and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the innumerable amount of things even they’ve learned to fight over, it’s that no two children are immune to sibling rivalry. But this, he was doing it in secret, and then lying to me about.

Secrecy is something we take very seriously around here, especially given Mary’s history with her biological mom of mental abuse and abandonment. Lying is practically a federal offense. But there was a bigger issue at hand here. I think he might sincerely resent his sister.

In fact, to assume that he wouldn’t at least a little, almost seems naïve. Even I struggled to understand how leaving Matthew with my parents so that I could stay with Scarlett in the hospital didn’t translate into Your Sister Is More Important To Me Right Now Than You Are.

Today, he cozied himself up between cushions on the couch with his older sister’s video game - a contraption he knows damn well he is not allowed to play. (Video games are one of the very few things I intend to be practically militant about keeping away from my boys for as long as I can, but because he has an eleven year old sister, he knows what they are. Once in a while, he’ll try his luck with picking one up and just hoping I won’t notice.) Today when he did it, instead of taking it away from him, I decided just to sit down at the end of the couch, and watch him. I placed my hand on his knee. I combed his hair to one side with my fingers. And I told him that I was sorry for leaving him for such a long time.

He didn’t react right away, but I could tell that he was thinking about what I said. “It’s Okay.” He peeked up from the hand-held screen, which I did not expect.

-- You were gone for a really long time, he said.
-- I know. I decided to be with Scarlett while the doctors made her sickness go away. The hospital can be a pretty scary place for a little girl if she is all alone.

His eyes were back on the screen.

-- Well. You could’ve just left her there so the doctor could fix her. And then got me. And then went back to the hos’cabal.
-- I wanted to. I missed you a lot.

We were quiet for a minute. His eyes never came back up.

-- I wasn’t scared, though. At mom-mom and pop-pop’s house. I had fun. I had ice cream.
-- I know. I made sure that Mary stayed with you too, and that mom-mom and pop-pop brought you to visit us a whole lot.
-- Scarly wasn’t scared when you were there?
-- She felt much, much better because I was there. Some babies couldn’t have their Mommas with them.
-- Were they scared?
-- Yes. They were scared. So I read stories to them and the nurses held them until their Mommas could be with them again.
-- You’re a good Momma.
-- You’re the best son. And a good big brother too. You let your sister have me when she needed me. That was very brave.
-- Hey, Momma?
-- Yes, baby?

-- Can you get out of my way? I’m tryin’ to play my video game here.
-- Sure.

I took the video game, and I left. And he let me.

The Honeymoon Is Over.

2011-08-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

What I like to call a big, heaping pile of responsibility with a cute, furry side of pain in the ass.

What we do have is a small house, with not much of a backyard to speak of. What’s there is overcrowded by a two car detached garage, five vehicles, not including the boat or the new motorcycle we just bought, and a shed. The driveway wraps all the way around the house to the garage in the back, taking up most of what would otherwise be yard space.

On good days I love our house, with it’s sturdy brick, new windows and shutters we painted ourselves. I feel safe and grounded in owning a piece of land, in having shelter when not everyone else does. I feel proud of the sawdust my husband and I have kicked up together to make this place our own version of beautiful, I love that we’ve put our mark on this place with our own two hands and hard work and sheer will. I love that we’ve used this place to dream of beautiful children and to love them into being within it’s walls. I feel freedom in having a small mortgage, which is largely to thank for our having all the things that take up legroom in what would otherwise be that one thing I sometimes dwell on not having -- that thing called space (in that other thing called a yard).

Other days I look at our house and even though we have a huge master bedroom, and each one of our children is lucky enough to have a room to themselves, I wish we didn’t have to share a bathroom with our kids. And even though we make great use of 3 floors, I wish we had an actual upstairs, more than a finished basement. And even though my husband’s favorite part of this whole property is ~~that damn~~ his beloved garage, I wish we had a yard. And even though we have three healthy children, I wish we had a dog.

This has become a lot like our marriage. Once the honeymoon is over, they said, marriage will be a marathon. And this is where we find ourselves already; winded and trying at times to do what once came with no effort at all in endless leaps and bounds.

~~~

It’s 1:00 a.m. when my day begins now... everyday.

And this is how our any-given 24 hours together will go down:
The alarm drills a disheveling sound into my head at what can only be described as a clearly unnatural time for any person to wake up. It gets me up for the second one I’m about to hear over the baby monitor. I lie awake waiting for it while Spencer sleeps. When Scarlett’s first half of formula feeding has run dry from the bag elevated above her crib, the machine that pumps it into her tummy overnight on a continuous drip will sound. When it does, I wake up to rinse the bag of stale formula and fill it with a new, warm batch. I have to change her, knowing to expect she may still wake up needing a bath and new sheets in the morning. She’s lucky not to have the vomiting issues most babies in her situation do, but it’s a lot of stress on her bowels. Typing this, I don’t know why I don’t think this part sucks more than I do -- I guess it’s probably just too early for me to have a very strong opinion about anything. I just do it, and I go back to bed.

Spencer goes to work at 4:00 a.m. and I wake up about the time he leaves, usually in time to hand him his lunch and kiss him a sleepy goodbye. I think the last time I made a post about our routine I was still waking up when he did to cook a hot breakfast for him before work. Sometimes I think about that and I wonder what the hell was wrong with me back then. And then I remember that Scarlett wasn’t born yet, and that life was a lot easier.

If I’m lucky Spencer walks through the door, too dirty to touch the kids or even the couch or Lord knows, anything I could use his help with around 6:30. It’s been about fifteen hours since I’ve seen him last, but even with as exhausted as I am from a day tending to three kids and a house and all of the impossible number of errands and chores that go along with having a family this size, I know that he put more muscle into the first four hours of his day than I will all week. Both of us are aching with exhaustion and neither one of us is finished the day’s responsibilities.

Every night before bed, while Matthew is brushing his teeth and Mary is turning down her sheets, Spencer and I swaddle Scarlett. We lie her on the carpet of the living room floor, and she starts to cry. Spencer holds her head into place and shushes kisses onto her forehead, telling her he’s sorry and that it’ll be okay. I unwrap the supplies and I uncap the sterile water. I can’t look at her while I’m prepping the supplies. Any shot at getting this done as quickly and painlessly as possible for her depends on my not becoming emotional about the process.

I dip the tubing into the lubricant and slide the end of it into her nasal cavity, penetrating past the point at the back of her sinuses where it always gives a little resistance, and I have to check for signs that I’m not forcing it into her lungs. She swallows involuntarily, which helps it down. She gathers a long, heaping breath to cry anew, and with that I know for sure I’ve got the position right. The tubing is plastered into place on her cheek with medical tape, which keeps her from pulling it out too easily, but doesn’t prevent it completely. “We’re almost done,” daddy shushes into her ear, unwrapping her and lifting her into his arms, letting her cry into his neck. I check the PH balance of her stomach acids by collecting some of it through the tube into a syringe and then dispensing it onto a special, color-coded strip.

We put her to bed with the same rocking and signing and prayers we always have, but before we turn to leave, we map out her calories for the day, convert the number of ounces she’s had of formula into cc’s, and subtract that number from 940. We divide it by ten, and we plug that number into a machine on a pole by her crib to set the rate at which her sustenance will be fed to her through the night. We turn on the video monitor and I set my alarm to buzz at 1:00 a.m.

By the time we hit the sheets at night, we’re lucky to have the energy it takes to string two words together, much less express our gratitude toward one another for all of the effort gone into making another day work. We realized recently, in fact, that the whole evening unravels in such a flash each night that if we don’t take the time to stop everything and hold each other for just a minute as soon as he walks in the door, we often miss the only opportunity we’ll get all day to kiss. ALL DAY.

~~~~

Then last night, in the rut of it all I found this, folded into an envelope the said: to my wife.

All of our kids are lucky, and so am I, it began. An impromptu, just-because card left for me on the counter. I want to thank you for being so good to me and to our babies. You are the best in every way. You knew that something was wrong with my little girl and you fought for her until she was healthy again. You researched every possibility yourself when everyone else told you not to worry, and you stayed by her side even when it meant being away from everything else. Scarlett is so lucky to have you. We all are. You are not just my wife, but honestly my best friend. And the best damn mom. I just love you so much, and I want you to know that everyday you make me so proud to be your husband.

Love, Spencer

On good days I love our marriage, with it’s sturdy roots, it’s tested character, and it’s growing integrity. I feel safe and grounded in the shelter we provided for one another, and in the strength we have to bend. I feel proud of the ground we’ve made on our journey, the dust we’ve kicked up together, and the amazing feats we’ve carried out in the name of love. I love that we’ve built this family around our own collaborative vision of beautiful, with our own two hands and hard work and sheer will. I love that we’ve used this place to dream beautiful children and to love them into being within the very walls of our own flesh. I feel freedom in daring to dream as big as we have, and in being content to dream on, too.

Sometimes I look at my life and I think I’m only 25 and I have all of this -- and I feel burdened. And other times I look at my life and I think I’m only 25 and I have all of this -- and I feel stifled with gratitude that stuns me to my core. No matter what end of that spectrum I’m at on any given day, what I have at the end of it all is him, and that will always be all I need in just and perfect measure.

Let the marathon begin.