Books: Encore!

When my girl loves a book, she wants to read it over and over and over and over again. My friend Alex (who really gets kids) says most kids are like this, that it's because they crave predictability. And that adults, mostly, crave novelty. This explains why I sometimes almost always skip every other page of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and also why I hid that one Dora book under the bed two weeks after my grandmother gave it to Ingrid for Christmas.

But every once in a while we hit on a book that I genuinely don't mind reading as many times as Ingrid wants. We've had a couple of these lately: Books that sound and look beautiful, and that leave open some mystery.

My Name Is Georgia is the most recent one, and it is terrific. Told in the voice of the artist growing up, learning, doing what she loves to do even when the wind almost blows her over. We've read it at least twice a night since my sister in law gave it to us a couple of weeks ago. And it looks like the author/illustrator, Jeanette Winter, has some other great titles, including one about Emily Dickinson. Hooray!

I Am Pangoo the Penguin is like Velveteen Rabbit meets I'm a Big Sister Now. Ingrid and I are both loving the determined stuffed penguin—Absolutely! And the story (the favored stuffed animal displaced by new birthday gifts but, it turns out, still loved fiercely) is pretty resonant around here.

We've borrowed My Dog Rosie from the library at least a dozen times since we discovered it when Ingrid was just about one. It's a simple story, and the illustrations were some of the first that she really was able to "read", but there's still something in it even now that longer, more complicated stories are on the shelf.

And last, a true classic: In the Night Kitchen So absurd. So rhythmic. So much fun.

Which books do you ask for over and over and over again?

Fly Girl

A big reason for Ingrid's sudden interest in getting out of diapers has been her desire to score a pair of Percy Underpants like the ones her friend Henry wears at day care. She mentioned them to me one evening in an admiring tone, and I casually mentioned we might be able to buy her a pair once she got really good at using the potty.

(I don’t believe in bribing children. Really, I don’t. I was thinking of this more as a natural consequence: You’ll be good at wearing undies, you’ll need new undies, you can pick out the kind you want. I love Alfie Kohn. Honest.)

Ahem. So over the past few weeks she’s been doing great with the toilet peeing, so Saturday I decided it was time to follow through on the bribe dish out the reward buy her some new underwear.

When I asked her if she wanted to go out with me to pick out some new undies, she literally quivered all over: PERCY!

You probably anticipated this: Every last pair of Thomas the Tank Engine underwear (at least in our T@rget) is “for boys”. With a fly.

This gave me less than half a second of pause in the store. With a tiny bit of effort, I probably could have redirected her to one of the many types of “girl” underpants that sort of caught her eye anyway. (Ponies!) But I am stubborn and unwilling to let the sexist underwear-making establishment deprive my daughter of the train-imprinted butt she’s been dreaming of for the past many weeks.

We bought the Thomas underpants, fly and all. She held onto the package all the way through the store, all the way through a trip to the bakery (for a special green cookie) and the library and all the way home. She loves them.

She noticed the fly, of course, and the idea that a boy who wore those undies would pee through that hole has clearly captured her imagination. But it doesn’t at all diminish her sense that those are her special underpants.

But now I’m thinking about day care. She’s so proud of them, she’ll want to wear them there for sure. Her day care is by far not a place where old-fashioned gender roles rule. But still, most kids there are three and four years old, and I’m beginning to see that kids that age can be pretty insistent about what’s For Boys and what’s For Girls. Am I setting her up for some sort of ostracism—or—worse—disillusionment about her beloved, chosen, prized undergarments—by sending her to day care wearing undies with a fly?

We Made it!

For the first time in months, there’s far more water than ice. It’s comfortable to go outside without a coat, at least for a while. The sun isn’t just bright; it’s warm. I can open the windows and let the (I know, now) stale winter air out and the sweet, sweet outside air in.

Today was just gorgeous. Perfect blue sky, perfect warm sun, and everything melting, melting, melting. We splashed in puddles. We drove with the windows open.

There’ll be colder days again before we’re through, I’m sure. There might even be more snow. But I can smell spring from here. The front porch and back yard will be ours—really ours—again, and the house will feel three times bigger. Ingrid and I will be able to dig in the garden while Iris naps. Green things, I’m told, will start busting out all over the place.

All day I’ve been surprising myself with how happy and relieved I feel. It’s as if every half hour or so I wake up from a nap, blink a few times, and discover again that the whole world is made of chocolate.

If you live somewhere more temperate, this will seem silly; you had this day ages ago. But if you’re in, say, Duluth or Winnipeg or Fairbanks, take heart. It’s coming. It really, really is.

With My Pants Down

I haven't written about the girls' constantly overbooked pediatrician's office and its awful time suck of a phone system, but it—and our resulting lack of a consistent person to look into the kids' ears when needed—has been a major pain and occasional near medical disaster this winter. It's the sort of large bureaucratic mess that, every time I deal with it, makes me want to speak to the person in charge, tell them exactly the nature of the inconvenience their establishment is causing me (and probably all of their other clients as well), and extract from them specific and realistic promises about how and when it will all be made better.

So a couple of weeks ago, in my spare time, I hammered out a ranty yet respectful letter to the clinic manager and medical director expressing my concerns.

This morning as Iris was napping and Ingrid was bopping around the living room taking stuffed animals from the airport to the library, the phone rang. It was Smeldon Smirkowitz, MD, Medical Director of the clinic.

The good doctor was completely sympathetic, graceful, and articulate. He gave a long and somewhat convincing spiel about their sincere efforts to rectify the situation. He said that they do not, as I accused in my letter, want patients to rely on M*nute Cl*nics for care; I countered that someone in his office had, not two hours earlier, suggested I go to such a place for the infant flu vaccine that Dr. Smirkowitz's clinic had apparently understocked.

As he continued with his spiel about supply and demand this and hospitalized patients that, I found myself in the most dreadful mommy-brained state, using every neuron to block out the Music Together and the toy-covered carpet, follow what he was saying, and make the slow, fatigued shift of gears from You can have a banana or a pear; those are your choices to formulating some sort of articulate response.

As the gracious doctor wrapped up his final point, Ingrid climbed onto the dining room chair next to me. Is there anything else, asked Dr. Smirkowitz, that I can tell you? Do you have any further concerns?

Just as he said this, Ingrid put her arms around me, looked into my face, and said, Mama, I peepeed in my pants.

I thanked the dear doctor for his time, hung up the phone, and went to find the girl some clean undies.

Sigh.

Cream

For a day when I couldn't breathe through my nose, my birthday yesterday seemed pretty charmed.

It was a work day for me, but I came home a couple of hours early to take a nap and sit on the couch knitting in complete silence for 45 minutes or so before picking the girls up from day care.

Ingrid came home excited about the promised piece of Mama's birthday cake (A got ahold of a fantastic chocolate cake with some sort of amazing chocolate cream inside).

Before dinner, Ingrid and A mysteriously disappeared into the basement. It turned out A had a little surprise (earrings! and flowers!) that he got Ingrid to help him prepare. (She signed the card, put the flowers in a vase, and, it seems, helped tape up the wrapping on the earring box).

A friend joined us for dinner: takeout Thai food, a huge treat since our extra-lean budget went into place last summer. Iris fell asleep at seven, and I drank a whole beer. We stretched Ingrid's bedtime a bit so she could have a sliver of cake, which she dug into with relish.

I kept thinking about my past several "birthday wishes"...from when I blew the nuts off the cake five years ago (a baby, please) to the following year (please, a baby?) and the next (a healthy baby?) to last year (another healthy one?)...and feeling so sleepily, stuffily grateful that no giant want looms so large anymore. Huzzah! I can now use my birthday wishes for, I don't know, better hair. Or a winning Obama/Clinton ticket this fall.

I read to Ingrid before bed, and before I left the room I said to her, Thank you for making my birthday so special. With her eyes almost closed, she gave me a drowsy smile and said, I loved it. I wasn't sure what she meant until she finished: It had cream in it.

Blah, Blah, Adorable, Blah, Genius, Blah Blah

Iris is at the cutest, most dumplinglike possible age: almost seven months, and so cherubic it is pretty much a full-time occupation to kiss her cheeks and the back of her neck. And lately (now that ear infection number two is on the way out) she is in the greatest mood: screeching at the cat, grinning at all of us (but mostly at Ingrid), levitating towards the ceiling fan and the hanging bell in the dining room. Loving sweet potatoes and letting most other foods dribble down her chin. And pulling off some amazing physical feats like going from tummy to sitting to tummy again all on her own.

And her sleep continues to go pretty darn well. Since last Saturday, putting her down for naps and bed has kept on being, well, easy. Nurse, doze, put down, cry for usually less than five seconds, sleep. Middle of the night wakings are still not so good. But the predictable napping and easy put-downs do a world of good for my sanity and, I am convinced, her mood.

Ingrid has done some pretty unbelievable things in the past week or so, too. She is all of a sudden using the toilet for all her waking pees, and is completely into doing it All. By. Herself. Could you give me a little privacy, Mama?

She is also suddenly interested in climbing into the car seat on her own. How embarrassed should I be that I have not been able to get her to do that until now? She’s a reluctant climber, and I just couldn’t persuade her to do it, even last summer when I had to swing her into the car over my giant pregnant belly. All of a sudden, she doesn’t even want me to stand near her while she gets in. Phew. Hooray.

And—this tickles me the absolute most—lately she is looking at letters and words in a different way. She’s realized what I am reading when I read her stories and is interested in how words look. One day last week we sat together at the computer “typing.” (She loves this. Big font. She chooses the color. She asks me to type words, or she presses keys and asks me what she’s written.) I typed “Ingrid” and “Mama” and she “read” them (not a surprise, since she sees those words often—it’s more shape recognition than reading). Then (here’s where the genius comes in) I typed “Daddy” and asked her what it said. And she said? “David.” Which in my opinion is pretty damn awesome. David is a kid at her day care (all their names are written on their cubbies in big letters). She could have easily guessed “Daddy” from the Ingrid/Mama context, but she was looking at those letters enough to know that it looked like David’s cubby. Must give the standard disclaimer: There’s no pressure about this kind of stuff around here; we just follow what she’s interested in, and I know early reading isn’t necessarily a sign of future anything (isn’t even necessarily good). But it’s so exciting to see her figure this out.

There is also, as you perhaps may have detected in my posts of the past, oh, seven months or so, some weirdness and strife in Ingrid’s and my relationship, and it’s hard to explain why but I feel like I am on the verge of figuring something out that will make things better. She has become so mysterious to me, and it seems like there is a key thing about her that I haven’t been understanding right, and I feel like I am almost to the point of figuring it out enough to at least know what questions to ask. That sounds cryptic, but I don’t mean it to—it really is that foggy, even to me. More on that later.

I am turning 34 on Wednesday (Or is it 35?, I keep asking myself, honestly.) My birthday gift from A (which, ok, I requested pretty explicitly) is the time and money to attend, over the next couple of weekends, two writing workshops through our terrific local writing center. Hooray. And spring is almost here. Hooray again!

Vitaversary

One day this past month we hit the fifth anniversary of my chucking my last packet of birth control pills and beginning, instead, to pop a daily prenatal vitamin. Eighteen months of trying to conceive, one pregnancy, eighteen months of breastfeeding, another pregnancy (while still nursing), and six more months (and counting) of breastfeeding later, I am still rattling through one giant bottle of the little capsules after another. Five years on prenatals is nothing compared to what long-term infertility veterans go through, but the image of all those purply-pink pills (oh, and the uncoated nasty yellow ones that made me sick) tumbling through my system impresses me just a little.

And I count myself infinitely lucky to have so much to show for it. I tossed those birth control pills knowing there were no guarantees, knowing I sometimes ovulated no more than once a year. I would never have guessed—and barely dared to hope—what a fruitful five years it would be.

Breakthroughs, Parenthetical Questions

Sleep was going downhill. With the baby, I mean. There were 15-minute naps at non-nap times and no naps at naptimes, and at bedtime there was nurse nurse nurse nurse nurse, fiiiiinally drift off to sleep, geeeently attempt to put down, startle, wake up and cry, nurse nurse nurse nurse nurse til I thought I would lose my mind.

There is no accounting for what happened next. Saturday night after the third nurse nurse nurse nurse, I thought to myself, I bet she doesn't even really want to nurse. I bet she just wants to lie in that crib and go to sleep. So I gave her a little head snuggle (soft baby heads! They are why I do this at all!) and put her in the crib. Lay on the bed next to the crib where she could see me. Watched the clock and tried to relax.

She cried for two minutes, but (speaking of what you hear when your kids cry) it wasn't even like Mama, you are abandoning me! Pick me up! I'm dying! at all. It was more like I'm tired! Tired! AAAAA! Tired, tired! Ti...

And then she turned her head to one side, said ummm and went to sleep. For three hours, which is the longest she's slept in days. Textbook! I should have taken advantage of it to sleep, but I stayed up until midnight playing euchre (isn't euchre quaint?) and eating chocolate chip cookies.

And then naps today were like that, too. Well, they were still pitifully short, but instead of nursing her until I felt like my brains were being pulled out through my nipples, I lay her in her crib and cooed at her while she cried for between thirty seconds and three minutes and then zonked out on her own.

Also, today Ingrid peed on the potty three times and only wore a diaper at naptime and when out for a walk. I won't go into it but this was totally unheard of before today.

And at dinner I gave Iris some bits of banana to occupy her. (Should I not be doing that? Should I be reading up on the Heimlich?) She didn't get many of them to her mouth anyway, but she pulverized some of them and scraped the rest off into her lap, and then I swear to God she very deliberately tapped her little mitten-y hands together in the sign for more. She did it three times, and then after I gave her another pile of banana chunks she didn't do it again. A saw it too. Is that totally unheard of, that a six-month-old could do a sign? She's seen me do it a few dozen times in the past week but...is that even possible?

Also, she can now scooch forward. Not crawling, exactly, but for a non-crawler she is all of a sudden damn mobile. As of Saturday.

And after months of resisting my doing anything with her hair, Ingrid is all of a sudden into wearing pigtails and it is ADORABLE.

And this week Ingrid and I discovered the kids' non-fiction section at the library. Why had we only been looking at the fiction before? She chose a book about butter, two about bees, one about lacrosse, and one called The Biography of Wheat.

The bees were what started it. I bought some honey in a honeycomb at the co-op as a treat and I felt I needed some backup for my assertion that the honey was in that thing because the bees put it there. Who put it there, Mama?

I wish I had something more coherent to say. I've been eating a lot of toast with honey. I have a lot of work-y stuff going on that I can't exactly write about. I've knitted four inches of that bag (and by the way, I forgot to mention: All that yarn? Cost four dollars!) And I'm wondering, is there sometimes something wrong with bloglines where nothing comes up for, like, twelve hours, or has the entire blogging community just taken up the practice of observing the Sabbath?

Between the Lines

This post gets at something I've been thinking about lately. The post is really about a miserable sleep situation, which hasn't exactly been on my mind, though we may be getting there. What I mean is how she describes her baby's crying:

I do believe that some crying could be endured. But my heart quails at this type. This is the type of crying you do while sitting on the floor of the bathroom after the IVF cycle has failed- the kind that takes over your whole body, with sob after sob. How can I bear to hear my baby crying that way?

First: Point taken. Hearing a baby cry like that is awful all by itself.

But also: Babies' (and toddlers'—er, preschoolers') displays of emotion push parents' buttons in very special ways, depending on who the parents are and where they've been. What Mare said was kind of a metaphor, but also kind of not. It was kind of like saying My baby's crying gets to me because it sounds like one of the worst moments of my life.

Lately, Ingrid's and my hardest times come when she wants something from me (Help me, Mama! Now! With both hands!) and, even after we've gotten through You need to ask nicely, I can't help. I'm holding the baby and/or flipping pancakes and/or brushing my teeth and/or Ingrid knows perfectly well how to put on her shoes so I'm not going to do it. I tell her that gently, and I tell her what I can do (in a second, with one hand, sing to her while she puts her own shoes on), and then her face breaks open and she wails as though I have just sawed off one of her fingers. And that's when I start to have to take deep breaths and leave the room to calm down.

Here's why those moments are the worst of my day: In those tantrums, I'm hearing something that's not there. I'm hearing You are not a good enough Mama. You are not giving me what I need. Not good enough! Not good enough Not good enough!

Sick and wrong, huh?

Because she's not saying that, of course, any more than Botany is staring at a negative pee stick. She's two. She's having some drama and some difficulty sharing me with Iris but she's not blaming me.

Anyway. This isn't the same as Mare's thing. Hers is a sort of compassion (maybe an excess, I don't know), and mine's more about, uh, me and my warped outlook on life.

But do you know what I mean? What do you hear that your child's not saying?

Stash

Well, enough odd introspection. Enough rambling holiday tales. Let's talk about yarn.

I'm only a very new knitter, and in general I'm not exactly crafty, but I'm sort of getting hooked. The meditative powers of knitting are, of course, well known. And crafting things is good creative cross-training. I get more writing ideas when I'm engaged in a physical project like knitting or sewing.

I am wary, however, of the stash. A few years back, I made a foray into quilting (and maybe I'll go back to it when the sewing machine can be set up without endangering curious little ones). I have such a high tolerance for repetitive, boring tasks that I enjoyed it quite a bit, and made one or two things I was happy with. But shopping for fabric played a large part in the whole enterprise: buying fabric that might one day be used, or buying one thing, then using another. Now we have an entire piece of furniture dedicated to storing my fabric stash. It is a little cupboard in the hall, and, although it also does a nice job holding up a decorative bowl full of fossilized clams, it also seems kind of wasteful and silly, and I'd really rather not build up a yarn stash that also needs its own piece of furniture. (Let alone spend the money that would require. The day care costs: Yowch, they are killing us.)

Enter the nearby giant thrift store. A week or so ago, I discovered the bin of plastic bags of used (or should I say pre-owned) yarn, and dug around long enough to find this:


















I'm starting to make a striped, felted bag out of it, and I'm loving imagining the history of the material. It feels like I'm carrying out work the previous owner never got to, and I feel a responsibility to her. Look at those labels! This is old stuff. And the photo doesn't show this, but there were also tiny pieces of yarn coiled into meticulous little skeins. Too short to use for anything I know about, but carefully saved nonetheless.

I'll be keeping my eyes on the yarn bin at the thrift store from now on. I like the idea of basing these little projects on scavenging rather than shopping, carrying out the good intentions of someone's long-ago shopping trip. And maybe someday somebody will return the favor by putting the remains of my fabric stash to good use.