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November is that month when people post every single day. Nablo ... you know. It just (30 seconds ago) occurred to me that doing that might be fun and a good practice. And because I like rules, I am posting now, November 1, 10:43 p.m. See you tomorrow, maybe.

I stole this from Eva.

Considering I’ve been at this for over four years, I don’t have so terribly many posts hanging out in my ‘drafts’ folder. But a while back Eva treated us to a tour of her draft posts, and it was pretty amusing. I don’t think I can quite reach that level of hilarity, but here’s my list, most recent first:

Title: It’s not who you are, it’s where you are. Or something.
Content: A paragraph about how taking care of little babies is all hands-on, and then a paragraph about my coworker who swears she will never send her son to public school in this city. And then a few words about Ingrid’s awful first dentist visit last spring and about a job offer I recently turned down. This was meant to be about how the main task of parenting ultimately becomes finding the right places for our kids to thrive, even as we keep on trying to figure out the best places for ourselves to thrive.

Title: She did the face.
Content: A photo of a drawing Ingrid made this summer by lying down and having me trace her body on a big piece of paper, then coloring it in. Only the photo didn’t turn out so it mostly looks like a crime scene outline with a big blazing orange sun in the corner, and you can’t see the priceless facial expression she drew.

Title: Put Up
Content: A list of all the produce I’ve canned, dried, and frozen from our garden and CSA this summer. Huh. Maybe I’ll post this one soon.

Title: What’s so funny?
Content:
"I believe I have cracked open one of the great mysteries of parenting.
The mystery: Why do people do it?
The answer: From the outside, the most horrible parts of it look FUNNY."

Title: Teeth
Content: A long, long thing about Ingrid’s horrible first dentist appointment, which I’ve tried and failed to write about in many contexts. It just ends up too long and hard to explain.

Title: Maybe it’s the weather.
Content: A day-by-day replay from about a year ago, showing me slipping into the horrible post-partum winter blues, including running into the Perfect Mom at the library, taking Iris to the doctor on the wrong day, and then taking her on the right day but forgetting my wallet. At the time I thought it sounded too whiny to post, but from here it looks almost funny.

Title: Untitled
Content: “There's the mama who dances around the kitchen holding her daughter's hands, making up verse after verse to the tune of Everybody clap your hands. And then there's the mama who hears still-awake cranky Ingrid crying over the baby monitor, slams the cheese grater down on the kitchen counter, and yells, She can just cry it the fuck out.”

Title: The Bottle
Content: None.
(I must have meant to write about our early successful attempts to give Iris bottles of pumped milk.)

Title: Switch Hitter
Content: I assert that my boobs switched roles (overproducer / underproducer) when I started nursing a second baby, and give several theories as to why this might have been true. (I don’t believe this was actually true, though. Or it’s not anymore, anyway. Maybe I’d mixed up my right and left momentarily?)

Title: On Joining the Crowd
Content: “Strange indeed.” Then several blank lines and “Buying a House.” This was almost four years ago, and I have no memory of what I was thinking.

Facing the Book

OMG. I want to tell you about a fabulous web site. You post your profile, and you can search for your old friends by school and class year. People post pictures and all kinds of things about themselves, so you can see that guy you had a mad crush on when you were sixteen is now a paunchy lawyer in a red state. And then you can become “friends” with people you know, and post updates on what you’re doing, and make jokes with each other. It’s like blogging, only you don’t have to write so much, and the people you’re talking with, you actually know in real life. And apparently it is also possible, within this fabulous new web site, to play some form of Scrabble.

So. Erm. That’s where I’ve been. I’m not sure what I’m more embarrassed about: spending so much time there this week, or having taken so long to come around to checking it out. Save me.

I continue to feel like a superhero for navigating daily life with two little girls without (much) trauma. We get where we need to be, we eat (relatively) healthful meals, the house is (relatively) clean, the laundry’s done, the new tabs are on the license plates. The girls’ fingernails are even clipped. And it usually only takes five or six tries to get Ingrid to stay in bed at night and go to sleep.

A gets back on Friday and oooh boy am I looking forward to it. These trips of his are instructive for me. They reveal my deep many-armed mama-goddess nature … something every mother deserves to get more in touch with. But, man, life is just more fun with him here. Aside from me getting to sometimes take a shower with no one else in the bathroom. Aside from sometimes getting to sleep in. Everything is more enjoyable when he’s around. Two more days!

Is it me, or...

... is it impossible to find a raincoat in kids' size 5 or 6? Other than a $65 Marmot one from REI, I mean. I haven't spotted a single used one this summer, and Target has cute ones up to size 4 and then ... nothing. Is everyone supposed to stay inside when it rains now, or just roll up the sleeves of Mama's Mountain Hard Wear and waddle around like E.T. as we did this morning?

... are these a little odd? Granted, I wet the bed until I was old enough to write a five-paragraph essay (oh, and I spotted them while shopping for diapers for my three and a half year old to poop in) but I am weirded out by the teeny bopper marketing.

... is something off with Google Reader? It keeps showing old things as new, no matter how many times I click 'mark as read' or whatever. It's a pretty interface, but, grrr, I'm about to go back to bloglines.

... is it really, really dark in the morning all of a sudden? The girls are getting up at about 6, and it feels like night then, and continues to feel like night until after we're done with breakfast. I'm ordering the light therapy box today.

... are freshly roasted pumpkin seeds with lots of salt totally, totally addictive?

Self-Congratulatory Monday

The entire world is apparently falling into financial and political ruin, but at least I'm finding a lot of reasons to feel good about myself—beyond even the pipe cleaner sculptures:

Yesterday Ingrid pulled out her new favorite trick: "But Daddy does it that way!" And we had a conversation about how different people have different ways of doing things, and this is the way I do it, so when she's with me we will do it this way. She thought for a minute and then said, "When I grow up I'm going to do things like you." And I was able to pull myself out of my sick little moment of ego glow and say, "You know, when you grow up you'll probably do some things like Daddy and me and some things in your very own special Ingrid way."

Iris had her lead level rechecked at her one-year appointment, since we live in an old house in the city. And it came back? One. One! After spending the summer eating sand and dirt! Clearly I am a fabulous housekeeper, swabbing down the floors many times a day with clean, wet rags.

The biggest pat on the back I'm giving myself (and if you are a single parent, feel free to throw up and / or slap me right now because obviously this is small potatoes in the big world of solo parenting) is about how things are going here, on day eight of fifteen (or maybe more) days of A being gone. Things are fine. We get up, we have breakfast, we have our little routine for getting us all showered and bathed, we do stuff, we weather tantrums, we procure and eat food, and it is all fine. I've had lots of help: in-laws, friends, the babysitter for that poetry class (which went smashingly last week, both the class and the scene at home). But beyond that it somehow feels like things have clicked into place. Like instead of barely surviving, at this moment I am somehow now the strong, clever mama I hoped I'd be, getting the daily stuff done and even—slowly—inching us a tiny bit at a time toward a world of more creative play, cleaner closets, and a creative life for me. Yay.

Feel free to congratulate your own self in the comments and I will virtually pat you on the back. It's Monday, after all.

Generation Gap

This morning my father in law—Grandpa Gary—accompanied us to our first Mu*sic To*ge*ther class of the fall. He loves to sing and was thrilled to have the chance to dance around a little room with a dozen or so under-fives, his adorable (and adoring) granddaughters among them.

Everything was smooth until "She'll be comin' 'round the mountain." The teacher led us through several of the traditional verses. She'll be driving six white horses, we'll all run out and meet her, etc. etc. Then (in that weird sing-talking that the music teachers I guess are trained to do) she asked the swaying, dancing group for suggestions for the next verse.

Rollicking right along, Grandpa Gary made his forearm into an axe and shouted, "Kill the old red rooster!"

The teacher inhaled quickly. Everyone stopped dancing for a second and watched her try to decide what to do. "Should we really sing that one?" she said very quietly, looking at the ceiling and forgetting to sing.

"Or 'eat a little tofu?'" I offered in a small voice.

She finally collected herself, skipped the butchering, and led us into "We'll all have chicken and dumplings," followed closely—and cunningly, I thought—by "She'll have to sleep with Grandpa."

Fortunately, my father in law thought it was a hoot. He grew up chopping the necks off of poultry and not knowing any other path to chicken and dumplings, and he's broad-minded and big-hearted enough to laugh gently at small clashes of perspective, especially when country meets city.

Without him there, I wouldn't have noticed the absence of that verse, which is indeed a traditional part of the song. But, in honor of Grandpa Gary, I'm going to throw it in occasionally when we sing it at home. We eat some meat in our family; there's no point in being squeamish about where it comes from.

How are things at your house? Do you kill the old red rooster?

Best Laid Plans, and Where on earth does she get that syntax?

Friday I took the day off work, hoping to catch up with the various things I'm really behind on. A is out of town this week and next, and I thought it would be great to get a little on top of things before the inevitable crazy couple of weeks.

Instead, we woke up at 7 Friday morning to a baby completely covered in vomit, and I spent most of the day sitting on the kitchen floor nursing Iris, holding her while she dozed, and/or pointing her in the right direction as she threw up. Poor thing. It was a short sickness, and we had a nice Saturday, visiting a public garden we'd never been to. Then Ingrid came down with the crud at bedtime Saturday, and A and I pretty much both got up for each of probably fifty vomits. After a while I stopped going back to bed and just curled up in my bathrobe at the foot of her bed.

A, somehow, took care of just about everything Sunday while I tried to catch up on sleep. The theory was that he'd be able to get more sleep near the beginning of his trip, while I'd need all the reserves I could gather during this 15-day solo stint. After hours of napping (and feeling a bit under the weather myself) yesterday, I feel relatively human today (day 1 without A). I hope things are going as predicted on his end.

This week has all kinds of nuttiness in store, including several weirdly overlapping work commitments, plus the start of my poetry class, during which Ingrid's old day care teacher is babysitting—great for Ingrid, but I'm imagining Iris may cry the whole time and wondering what on earth I was thinking to set this up.

........

On a whole other subject, I've really tried to give out more popsicles in the past week. The other day Ingrid asked for one after dinner, but in a whiny voice, and I was in the middle of changing Iris's diaper so I told her she'd need to ask in a nice voice when I was finished and then we could talk about it.

As I pulled Iris's pants up, Ingrid gave me the most earnest look ever and said, "Mama? Let's talk about this popsicle problem."

I gave her a popsicle.

Stingy Mama

A year ago, on one of our first outings as a mama-and-two-girls trio, we went to a big giant craft store and bought three bottles of poster paint. Red, yellow, and blue. For kiddie painting projects.

In June, I found some all-natural, juice-only popsicles at the co-op and bought them. For treats on hot summer days. I bet there were 16 in the box.

Ingrid loves to paint, and we do it often, and I'm in charge of doling out the paint. I squirt it onto a piece of cardboard, she uses it up and asks for more, I squirt out a bit more, feeling a little antsy all the while about wasting paint.

It probably goes without saying that she loves popsicles. Who doesn't love popsicles? I heed the limit-the-juice warnings, though. I give her one on an especially hot day, or at a special time. More often than not the "don't spoil your child" devil sits on my shoulder as she slurps away, and I slap it back: just this once, I say.

But know what I've still got? Three bottles of paint that are less than half used up, and a good three quarters of the box of popsicles still in the freezer.

I am stingy. With art supplies. And hippie popsicles.

Goal for the new (school year): Loosen up. Objective A: Be extravagant with the art supplies. Objective B: Be more generous with the popsicles.

Chewing as fast as I can.

Iris is so cute these days it is almost unbearable. She has ringlets! Red ringlets! And she staggers around the house clutching a tube of toothpaste or a plastic lid in one hand and waving the other arm wildly over her head to maintain her balance. She articulates new words every day, with such adorable deliberation and glee: Ba pa (backpack). Bap-pul (apple). Keekeepat (kittycat). She is fearless, now, about wanting to join the world of the big(ger) people. She climbs into Ingrid's chair. She lunges for my glass of beer, wanting a taste. She is full of pride when she scoops up yogurt with a spoon and reaches her mouth with it.

Ingrid is interested in coloring all the time, and her drawings have begun to take on new characteristics—instead of monochromatic scribbles, there are patches of color, or squiggles almost like writing, each with a different crayon. She'd be happy if I spent the whole day playing pretend games with her: school, camping, putting the babies to sleep and then being really quiet. She wants to be able to cut a perfect arc with scissors. She is all of a sudden a crackerjack trike rider, speeding down little hills and around corners and stopping expertly at intersections and alleys. She is interested in growing up. The other day she asked me, "Mama, when I grow up can I have a permanent pen?" A frequent conversational topic is "When will I be big enough to drive the car?"

And me, I am in the middle of just about every project I can think of to start. Our garden is half harvested, and we seem to have hit a break between waves of ripe tomatoes. I have two simple baby blankets I want to sew for friends, and a zillion essay and poem ideas, most scribbled in the notebook I jam into my purse for when I have a minute. Add to that (work thing A) and (work thing B) and (long-term career planning thing C), plus my pipe dream of clearing out half of our swampy basement to create a sewing and writing studio slash Reggio Emilia style atelier for Ingrid and me, and there's a whole lot in the works.

I'm taking a poetry class this fall, which starts next week, along with an early childhood class for the girls and me, plus a low key parent-child soccer thing at the park, and a music class for either A or me to take the girls to Saturday mornings. The summer has been so idyllic—the hours at the park, the evenings in the backyard, all the lazy walks to the coffee shop in the mornings—that in a way it seems like a shame to begin all this. I want to relish more days of not having to be anywhere and not having to coax Ingrid through anything too hard (e.g. speaking to human beings other than family members).

But as the weather gets colder I know we'll want these activities on the schedule, these appointments to hang our routine on when "wading pool visit, followed by picnic, followed by giggling sisters pushing each other on the swings" is no longer feasible. It's September, and it's time to start on all of these things, and to keep harvesting tomatoes, pressing flannel, writing poems, and clearing the stuff we no longer need out of the basement.

Potty Genius

Since yesterday afternoon, Iris has pooped in the potty three times and peed in it at least twice.

For those who might have trouble telling apart "the sisters with the I names", Iris is the baby. Who turned one two weeks ago.

Yesterday she climbed onto Ingrid's little potty with her pants on. Out of curiosity, I took her pants and diaper off and sat her back down. Then the phone rang. I was distracted for a few seconds, and when I came back to her the deed was done. The two times today were kind of the same thing. She went to the potty and fussed and fussed until I got her undressed and helped her sit down.

Her big sister—who, in all her three years plus three months, has landed every poop squarely in a diaper—looked on proudly, clapping. Good job, Iris! Hooray for you!

I will now begin shopping for my outfit for the Nobel banquet.

It's been a busy stretch, here. A was away for five days, we are embroiled in the last scramble of a day care decision, and I've been busy (pardon my blushing) reading a book about how to be spontaneous. And eating tomatoes. Maybe this week I'll get it together to write again.

Misnomer?

We chose Iris's name a few days before she was born. It rose to the top of a pile of names that we liked but that each had a fatal flaw: Edith or Alice (too plain, maybe, and without much meaning for us), Harriet (too much like my real name), Freya (A loved it, but it made me think frazzled), Siri (a nickname for Sigrid, it turns out, and it means butt in Japanese), Esther (a bit too old lady, we worried).

And Berit, the most gorgeous reject of all. It means splendid, magnificent. It's Scandinavian, but related to the Irish Bridget, the goddess of fire, poetry and wisdom. But it's too odd, we thought. "Her name is Berit," we'd say, and people, we predicted, would answer, "What?" Our last name is unusual, hard to spell, and easy to mistake for a female first name, and we didn't want to set our girl up for a lifetime of "What?", a lifetime of spelling it out.

Iris, we loved. Love. I love that it is strong, short. Feminine without being too delicate. I think goddess and rainbow far more than flower.

The problem with it, we knew (and we were drawn to it strongly enough to choose it in spite of this) is that it's a lot like Ingrid. It looks like we chose it to match. We didn't. But people are either charmed by the cute matchiness or they have trouble telling them apart. "Oh, the sisters with the I names," people say. "Which is which, again?"

This bothers me more than I thought it would. Ingrid and Iris feel different to me—ok, similar in sound, but almost opposite in tone and texture. It irritates me that people think of them as alike. I don't want anyone to think of my daughters as interchangeable. They are not.

And also this baby girl, this red-headed, bright-eyed, intrepid little gusto-filled rocking chair surfer of a girl, seems way more Berit than Iris to me.

I've felt it since she was born. Curled on the hospital bed peering into her bassinet in the middle of our first groggy night together, I kept thinking of her as Berit and having to correct myself. That went on for weeks.

And then for months, in my broken new mom sleep, I dreamed of being pregnant again, which I didn't and don't want. My main feeling in the dream, though, was relief: We could call this one Berit.

A agrees: she seems like a Berit. She seems like Iris, too, he points out, because we call her that over and over and it's grown to fit her, sort of. He is less likely, even, than I to rock the boat or go back on something so significant. But we've both slipped, in the past couple of months, into calling her Berit or Bear. Ingrid has picked it up, too, and uses Berit interchangeably with darling, sweetie, and Gyris.

At a barbecue this week, someone heard me call her Bear and asked where that came from. "Um. Um um," I said. "Um, well, partly it comes from, you know, from her just looking like a little bear. And, um, it's also short for..." And then, mercifully, I needed to go and rescue the little Bear from the stairwell and the conversation didn't continue. What could I have said? It's short for the name we didn't give her but should have. The name that seems like hers even though it's not.

I've thought a lot—and A and I have talked—about officially changing her name. About going through whatever paperwork that entails, and sending friends and family an email with the subject line, "The Baby Formerly Known as Iris." We're reaching the end of the time when that kind of change would be unproblematic for her little self.

For now, we are going on with the multiple nicknames. Are we nuts? Will we ruin her? I don't think we will officially change her name. But I can see a future where we start to use Berit more than Iris, at least within our family, and maybe outside it, too. Whatever we do, I have a feeling Berit will follow Iris through her life like a bright little shadow.

Epilogues

Right now the blackboard of shame says 8 days, and my record is 11.5.

No one at day care ever so much as batted an eyelash about the train undies.

The neighbors finally took down their Christmas wreaths around the first of June.

I run at least twice a week these days, and my pelvis hardly makes that snapping sound at all anymore.

Ingrid has asked about nail polish two more times, and each time my wimpy ostrichlike vague response has somehow satisfied her.

The nipple healed after one day of pumping and one day of acrobatic new nursing positions. It turned out the cause of the weird nursing was not teething but coxsackie virus; both girls had it, with the sores on their tongues, fevers, and crankiness. All better now.

The day care decision is pending. The at-home day care lady swears she's only taken one sick day in the past year. I'm leaning toward that, but waffling.

The little car is great. We never miss the old one. Well, we haven't sold the old one yet, but we never drive it and never feel the need.

Speaking of cars, I've now gone a whole seven days without anything flying off the roof of my car, but I did drive all the way to the fabric store today with the trunk open.

And I laughed through it all.

Wednesday night A was out of town, and it was a work day. The events of the evening seem worth recording for posterity:

Pick girls up from day care.
Decide it will simplify dinner to pick up a you-bake pizza.
Tell Ingrid we are getting pizza.
Drive around tiny cramped pizza place parking lot looking for space.
Drive around block looking for parking space.
Drive around block again.
Drive around block again.
Finally find spot to park.
Get girls out of car.
Order, pay for, and wait for pizza.
Carry baby and pizza to door.
Get pizza guy to walk around counter to open door for me.
(Door opens inward—isn't that against code?)
Inch across parking lot with children and pizza in all limbs.
Place pizza on top of car.
Put girls in car.
Make right turn onto major neighborhood street at rush hour.
Accelerate.
Look in rearview mirror in time to see pizza flying spectacularly off roof of car.
Cry, "OH NO!"
Pull over.
Comfort Ingrid, who is crying.
Convince her it is the silliest, funniest thing that has ever happened.
Drive back to pizza place.
Circle parking lot. Twice.
Park illegally.
Get girls out of car.
Wipe cheese and mushrooms off of rear bumper.
Enter pizza place. Laugh sheepishly.
Tell pizza guy what happened.
Order duplicate pizza.
Gracefully accept 50% discount from kind pizza guy.
Wait for pizza.
Gracefully accept help (again) opening door.
Inch back to car.
Ingrid asks, "Mama, are you going to put the pizza on the roof again?"
Reply, "No, kiddo, I think I've learned my lesson."
....
Arrive home.
Turn on oven.
Feed hungry, tired baby her dinner while pizza bakes.
Field random phone calls from A's friends.
(Why did I not let the machine get them?)
Returning from answering a phone call, notice funny orange coloring on baby's upper lip.
Turns out big sister has drawn her a mustache.
Or tried to let her smell the scented marker.
Decide not to worry about it.
Baby becomes inconsolably tired.
Decide to put her to bed before pizza is ready.
Upstairs, whip off uncomfortable work shirt and bra to nurse baby.
Halfway through nursing, hear oven timer start to ring.
Let baby nurse for another minute.
Put baby in crib.
Rush downstairs, topless.
Remove pizza from oven just on the cusp of burning.
Run upstairs for comfortable bra and shirt.
Run down and cut up slice of pizza for Ingrid.
Baby is crying in crib.
Tell Ingrid to blow on pizza before she eats it.
Run upstairs to calm baby.
Put baby in crib again.
Cut myself a slice of pizza and sit down next to Ingrid.

Next time, I'll probably just make us all omelets and toast.

The Wee Eliot Ness

Ingrid's been peeing on the potty with total reliability for months. Number two, though? Never.

We'd tried all sorts of encouragement, all kinds of potties, all kinds of conversations, and a good long stint of no-pressure, hands-off waiting. Out of some sort of idealism, I'd been resisting offering bribes. And somehow I'd been thinking that, once I finally crossed into the world of offering presents and prizes for poops in the potty, it would definitely happen.

But nope. This jar of temptation has been sitting on top of our bathroom cabinet for well over a week.

And we are still changing diapers. Ingrid apparently shares my resistance to such base forms of coercion.

She has her own ideas of what would help, though, as I found out the other day:

Mama: What do you think would help you learn to poop on the potty?

Ingrid: An ice cream cone.

Mama: Mmm, good idea. When you poop on the potty, it will be such a big day, we'll go out and celebrate by having a big yummy ice cream cone.

Ingrid: No, no. [Stammering a little, trying to express an important thought.] While I'm sitting on the potty waiting for poop to come out, I'll be eating an ice cream cone!

Somehow I think we're just going to have to wait her out on this one.

Dreamy

The red currants are ripe, and both girls know how to pick them—Ingrid conscientiously placing most of hers in the bowl, and Iris with great concentration and two tiny fingers. The herbs—parsley, dill, mint, sage, basil—are ready to be pinched back and harvested. There are flowers, and Ingrid and I clip a little bouquet for the table: coneflowers, amaranth, lavender.

It's hot out, but not too hot to run. There've been warm, breezy days, and no rain since I can remember, but lots of help watering the garden, and lots of time in the wading pool in the backyard and the big pool at the park.

Iris's hair is a couple of inches long, and in the humidity it whips into ringlets. She is intrepid, standing on the seat of the child-sized rocking chair, holding the back with one hand and rocking it, brave and strong as a tiny cowgirl. Everywhere, she looks for things to climb. She is becoming lean and uncontainable.

Ingrid is mysterious as ever, but affection and joy rise up. At the park, she throws off her shoes before I've even set down our bag and wades to the middle of the pool. Look at me, Mama! Look at me! She makes a bed for the two of us on the couch and asks me to lie with her under the blanket and read Shel Silverstein poems. She hugs me—for the first time, I realize, in ages—with arms that suddenly seem so long.

Our CSA delivers strawberries—pints of them that keep coming: one, two, three, four, five. And heaps of salad greens, piles of chard, and handfuls of sweet peas. Ingrid helps me make shortcake biscuits. We eat dinner outside.

We end the days, all of us, covered with the evidence. Sand inside diapers and undies and under my watch band; fingers and faces stained with berry juice; arms and legs and cheeks mosquito-bitten and smeared with dirt; the knees of tiny pairs of pants filthy and scraped; sweat—mine and theirs—everywhere.

For the first time in a long time, I wish this could last forever.

Picnics

The best thing the girls and I have done with our days this summer is to pack up swimsuits, sandwiches, and sunscreen and spend the whole middle part of the day (from the end of Iris's morning nap until the beginning of afternoon nap time) at the park.

We play in the wading pool until everyone's hungry, and then we sit on a bench in the shade to eat. We pee in the sketchy rec center bathroom. I slather the girls with sunscreen again and we swing and slide and climb until Ingrid's tired, I'm hot, and Iris is putting rocks in her mouth faster than I can take them out.

The weather has been perfect for this lately—low humidity, no rain, temps in the 70s and low 80s. It feels great to take our time at the park, to eat outside, and to know we have with us everything we need for this stretch of two or three hours.

The picnic makes a huge difference. All winter (and spring) we were rushing back to the house to feed someone before her (or someone else's) nap. Eating outside buys us some crucial amount of time.

And I don't know why, but at the end of a long park trip feel a little like I've been on one of the (often gorgeous and sometimes truly hard core) backpacking or canoeing trips that A and I used to take. Sun-baked, muscle-tired, slightly hungry, toughened, and newly focused. And, oh yeah, with sand in my lilypadz.

What's the best thing you're doing with your days this summer?

Things I would have written today if I used Twitter:

Revising complaint letter to awful children's dentist...replacing "half-assed" with "insincere" and "piss-poor" with "unacceptable".


Peered at bathtub turd like a medium reading tea leaves for several seconds before realizing I didn't actually want to know whose it was that badly.


Purchasing an ark's worth of Schleich animals to bribe Ingrid to poop on the potty.


Also, a case of size six diapers.


Ingrid's first really good poem:
Corn, corn, what do you say?
I put a spoon on my tray!


One day I will look back with nostalgia at my evening routine of rinsing the sand out of my lilypadz.

Depleted

I've gotten out of the habit of writing, and been out of energy for it. A was away for over two weeks, and during that time I gradually wore down my reserves: up many times a night with a teething Iris, plus awake in the 5 o'clock hour every morning. This left me not exactly tired, but with the sense of having basically nothing left for anything but getting through each day. That sense is lingering, actually, and it takes every bit of optimism I can muster to believe that some day I will like this again and will feel I'm doing something useful rather than just keep us all safely standing in one place.

My parents were here for about a week of A's absence, and they are rock stars. My dad built three giant raised garden beds. My mom helped with every step of the daily grind, from the sublime (the girls giggling together about their very own game of peek-a-boo) to the horrid (awful hours with Ingrid that left me, during nap time, weeping and grousing, "Why did no one tell me having kids would be like this?")

I contracted pink eye. It wasn't too uncomfortable, and it felt appropriate to look red-eyed and gooey, like I finally looked as exhausted as I felt.

A is back; we have weathered the usual reentry shock. We've figured out that our mornings suck when I sleep in, and that it goes more smoothly when we are all up early and groggy together and have a chance to adjust to the day at once rather than me stumbling down the stairs and getting slammed with tantruming wide awake girls desperate for mama time.

Oh, and we found out that Ingrid's day care is most likely closing in the fall. The director is selling her house (where the day care is hosted) and moving away, for personal reasons. This after I told the terrific preschool to give our spot to someone on the waiting list because we are oh so happy with what we have. There is still some ghost of a chance that the families and teachers will be able to pull something together to keep it going at a different location, but over all it is a pretty sucky development.

I planted the garden with tomatoes (weirdly leggy, most of them), basil, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, winter squash, peppers, beets, radishes, and a ton of herbs. It's been raining and raining and warm but without much sun, and the idea that things will bloom and produce things we can eat seems rather theoretical. The allium is blooming, though, which is lovely.

I am working on a few posts for this week. More soon.

Again with the baby squashing.

Squishing, whatever.

Kate guessed right. It is about a just three year old squashing, elbowing, and upending the crap out of her baby sister. I’ve written about the problem and a move toward a solution before, but it’s kept up. The squishing, I mean.

The squishing comes in waves, as does my ability to deal with it calmly rather than giving in to the primal baby-protecting urge to scream like an offended mama baboon at my dear determined three year old daughter.

I had a revelation about it this week, though. Probably one of those flashes of insight that you can file under “this is news to no one but caro.” But bear with me:

We went to the almost-last of our early childhood classes on Tuesday, and not one but three kids—besides Ingrid—made Iris cry. Swiping toys from her, clonking her (with ambiguous intentionality) on the head, pushing her over. From this I learned two things:

1. Poor Iris. I was trying hard to be attentive and protect her from all the chaos, and she got tipped, squished and stolen from anyway. (Though I totally went to bat for her in a tussle with a really strong and energetic boy over a fake celery stalk that she had first. His mom had to pry us apart.)

And this is the big one:

2. It’s not just Ingrid. Three year olds do not know how to deal with nine month olds, no matter how earnestly their parents explain why we are gentle with babies.

Sibling rivalry and deep-seated resentment are probably part of what’s going on at our house, but they aren’t the whole story, and that’s both a relief (our child-spacing decisions have not made a sociopath of our daughter—phew!) and convenient explanation for my somewhat inconsistent reactions to the infractions.

See, I think this is more than one problem.

Sure, the expected sibling rivalry is part of the issue. Sometimes Ingrid tips Iris over on purpose, and it's clearly because she is mad or jealous or feeling something she doesn't know what to do with.

But those other kids on Tuesday were doing exactly the same stuff to my baby as her big sister does, and they are not mourning their lost place in their mother's heart. They have other reasons for squishing the little one. And so does Ingrid. Here's what I think some of those reasons are:

For one thing, they are figuring out what's acceptable. They know people get worked up about hitting and pinching. But what really counts as hitting and pinching, and what's a nudge or a tap? A lot of what Ingrid does to Iris, she does just to see what will happen. ("Does this hurt her? How about this?")

I also think there must be some question in the three-year-old mind as to what sort of creature a nine-month-old really is. She sidles around the house holding onto things, and she gets in the way, but she doesn't respond to "excuse me" the way a person should, nor does she scurry away from a little push the way a cat sometimes does. What's a three-year-old supposed to do with that? Do the same things hurt her as would hurt a big kid? Or is she more like a stuffed animal?

And the last thing may be unique to Ingrid: I think that sometimes Iris gets all up in her face and she is too overloaded by the sensation of being pulled or leaned on (or the drama of having her carefully arranged toys messed with) to react in an acceptable way. Even when she remembers that she shouldn't push, she's so blinded by sensory overload that she can't find a way to get the baby off her without breaking the rules.

None of this, of course, means that it's ok to squish the baby. But it means that I have, all of a sudden, a lot more—much needed—sympathy for Ingrid. I can now think about this problem without thinking of her (baby harmer!) or myself (awful second-child-having Mama!) as a monster.

And it means that, while I always let Ingrid know it's not ok to squish, bite, hit, jab, etc., I can't treat all of these incidents as though they are exactly the same problem. "Go and hit a pillow instead" doesn't help when what's needed is "Ask Mama for help when you feel that way" or "Iris needs her hands on the couch to be able to stand up" or "If someone touched you like that it would hurt, so it hurts Iris, too." Pushing the baby over in clear, intentional expression of anger gets you a four-minute time out, even if you are only just three. Pushing her out of your face when you're overstressed by having your face pulled on and don't know what to do just gets you a firm "no" and a few minutes of being ignored while I comfort the baby, and then, when everyone's calmer, a talk about better ways to get some space for yourself.

The hard-core behaviorists out there will tell me this is wrong, wrong, wrong. But in this case—these cases, really—I don't think blind consistency is fair. Or—based on several weeks' really, really consistent time outs on the stairs—very effective. I think that all I can do is react as appropriately as I can to each squishing incident, and—more important—be really on top of the preemptive separation and redirection.

I see glimmers that Ingrid is learning what needs to be learned, but it's slow, and it's hard to imagine when it's going to end. I find myself looking forward to the day when Iris learns to squish back and I can let them duke it out on their own without worrying so much about the uneven match. Hopefully, by that time, they'll have both learned a lot of good words to use instead.

More on That Girl

Thank you for all of your thinking and commenting about the Ingrid situation. It was hugely helpful to write all that, and even more so to hear your perspectives on it. Especially since so many people seem to have eerily similar daughters, which makes me think that, as Emmie mentioned, development (age 3) and situational (new big sister) stuff has got to be exacerbating, if not creating, a lot of our current troubles.

It is hard to sort out what causes what, though. Some of this does seem to have been going on for a long time, like the shyness (really intense since Iris was born—and that's nine months) and the need for every ounce of my attention every moment of the day (pretty much since birth. Ingrid's birth, that is), which makes me think of it as a more enduring temperament issue. I do think there are solutions, and times will get better.

I don't have a lot of coherent things to say about what's working, because frankly right now not a lot is. I do seem to have found a tone of voice that will occasionally talk her down from a tizzy. I convinced her the other day that instead of letting the feeling of oatmeal stuck on her teeth make her whole body feel weird and bad, she could step back and look at it "like a puzzle to work on". (The girl loves puzzles). She's even repeated that strategy on her own a couple of times. Huzzah!

But most of the time I feel nowhere near that successful. One tantrum seems to just pile on top of the next, and in between that there is endless whining, weird smells, questions to which I have no good answer no matter how many times she asks me, pushing the baby over, etc. etc. etc. And being, I am discovering, immature and lacking in inner peace, I have a really, really hard time just letting all that tantrum and discontentment wash over me. I get all riled up. Worried, mad, unhappy, etc. etc. Bad.

The 24 hours that A and Ingrid were away did us all some good. Iris and I had never had that much time alone together, so that alone was wonderfully sweet. She learned to play peek-a-boo (by covering one eye with the back of her hand, then taking her hand away and chuckling) and to open the fridge, a skill I believe Ingrid still has yet to master.

And, in addition to a lot of adorable baby snuggle time, I GOT THINGS DONE. I did a ton of stuff around the house, and Iris and I went for a run and ran errands and everything went so quickly and smoothly. It was like I'd been driving around with the brakes on all this time without knowing it.

To be fair, there is alchemy when both girls are around and awake. Ingrid is easier on her own, too. I just hadn't realized how very much easier it would be with only the baby in the picture.

So that was validating, and a good break, and now A is fixin' to leave in the morning for two weeks for work. My mom is coming for a good chunk of that time, but I've got two solo days at the beginning of the trip and four at the end without her, and I feel like an utter wimp for being so worried about how hard it's going to be, because I know people do this all the time, but I am worried and have already lined up various friends to relieve me for an evening run here and there, and warned certain people to expect random midday phone calls from me when I need to speak to another adult before I lose my shit. Perhaps you should expect some random and even less coherent than usual posts from me, as well.