Thanksgiving in Review (And Variation #3: Allegrissimo)

Last evening after we'd eaten our rather nontraditional Thanksgiving dinner, consisting of an accidentally purchased Cajun turkey breast, several healthfully prepared vegetables, and chunks of pineapple with peppermint tea for dessert, the kids were a bit rambunctious. They'd been inside all day, mostly watching Donald Duck cartoons, while my beloved and I readied the house for the arrival of our guest, his aunt from Kalamazoo. When they don't get outside for even a few minutes on any given day, they're like compressed springs awaiting release.

Release came after they'd gobbled large heaps of pineapple, which has the same effect on a small child as, say, consuming a modest slice of birthday cake with buttercream frosting. Zing!

They were doing laps around the "track" while the adults savored their hot beverages. I glanced up from the table and noticed that both of them had diapers atop their heads, which they were keeping there with the palms of their hands so as not to have them blown off by their high speeds. What was their chant as they raced around the circle this time?

"COME BACK HERE WITH MY DIAPER!!!"

Things calmed down immensely (OK, I wasn't actually there, so I don't know whether it was immense or only slight) a short while later when our cherubs were escorted upstairs for bedtime proceedings, through which our dear aunt was being coached by my husband. (She'll be staying with the kids tonight while we make our big anniversary escape...to Appleton, a city about five miles north of here.)

I remained in the kitchen, happily and peacefully doing dishes. I was washing our china (off which we even let the kids eat on this special occasion). It was a wedding gift mostly from our mom and dad in New York, so as I washed it, I was remembering that Thanksgiving weekend six years ago when we were married. It was a pleasant, almost hypnotic reverie...until I reached into the sink and pulled out a yellow plastic Spongebob Squarepants sippy cup. I wiped it out with the sponge, rinsed it, and set it in the drying rack next to the beautiful French Limoges plates, snapped sharply back into the world of today.

That world is pretty enjoyable, really. After the Nesco roaster had been put back in the closet and the wine glasses were back on their shelf in the hutch, I went upstairs to tuck the kids in.

To our son, I said: You know what I'm thankful for? You and your sister.

Him to me (softly, half-asleep): And I'm thankful for you, mama. And I liked your feast.

Fancy dishes and formality have their place, but gratitude doesn't get any better than that.

Variations on a Theme

Those of you familiar with our home know that we have a "traffic circle" of sorts running through the middle of the first floor. You can start in the living room, walk into the hallway and then the kitchen, and then pass through the dining room right back to where you started.

It's not all that novel, really, but when seen through the eyes of a child, it's something special. I can always tell the moment that its significance registers with a toddler visiting our house for the first time. A tiny tot will walk the circuit once or twice, and then suddenly, her eyes will light up with the realization that she's just made a circle--and that she can do it again and again and again and...

Anyway, this is a feature of our home that our kids have exploited for years now. Particularly during these first weeks of cold weather when we spend less time outdoors, the "track" gets a lot of use. (I should put up a sign like at the gym: 150 laps = 1 mile.)

Yesterday as I prepared lunch, I noticed the kids were tooling around and futzing with a tiny straw hat meant to be worn by a decorative rabbit who just moved into our house. This stylish creature possesses smashing outfits for each of the major holidays. Currently, she's wearing a fetching pilgrim hat and somber black pinafore with white bloomers; the straw hat was on hiatus until sunnier days. The children had been warned to be gentle with the bunny's wardrobe. I suppose this semi-careful play was as close as they could get to heeding that admonition.

I was about to intercept the hat when a game of which it was the centerpiece took shape. The two of them were running around the "track," taking turns holding the hat atop their heads, and shrieking with delight. It took a couple of their passes through the kitchen, where I stood making chicken salad, for me to understand what they were saying as they trotted by:

Child #1: Now I'M the cowBOY! (wild laughter and squealing)

Then a fling of the hat to the other sibling, a change of direction, and...

Child #2: Now I'M the cowGIRL! (more crazed giggles)

And so on.

As they scurried by, I shouted after our eldest, "If you're the cowboy, then what's your sister?"

They responded in unison, "THE COW!!!"


Today, the lap running took on a new form created by our son. Taunting his little sister, he took off ahead of her hollering, "You'll never catch ME!"

She took the bait and shuffled after him. Then suddenly, he stopped and changed course, heading from whence he had just come. She, of course, turned around, too, and ran off ahead of him, chiming in with the common refrain, "You'll never catch ME!"

And so went the exchange. That it was never clear who was chasing whom illustrated that this was not about true competition but was purely a way of burning off pent-up energy.

I could take them outside, I suppose, but it's so much more fun seeing what they'll dream up next...

Being Thankful for the Simple Things

Last night was our Preschool Thanksgiving Feast, the first after-hours event to which the entire family was invited. The meal was a potluck, with emphasis on the luck for me--those with last names beginning with 'S' were to bring a fruit dish. Ten minutes cutting up a cantelope and plucking a pound of grapes from the stems and I was done. I pitied the unfortunate Andersons, Bradys, and Christensens who had to bring casseroles.

Our full foursome arrived just before 6 PM, and we were surprised to find the YMCA gymnasium jam-packed with colorful tables and hundreds of people. I had been expecting only the families of our son's classmates; instead, I discovered that all three classes and their broods were in attendance, bringing the total number of preschoolers to around 70 and the tag-along family members to something like 200.

If you keep in mind the fact that 25% of the feasters were three, four, or five years old and that another 15-20% were younger than that, the scene should be easy--if rather jarring--to imagine. Exhausted parents who aren't used to being out of the house this late at night were, as much as possible, sitting in chairs having tiny snippets of conversation, and toddlers and preschoolers were running rampant along the perimeter of the gym. Toss in six harried preschool teachers trying to distribute pilgrim costumes for the "surprise" Thanksgiving pageant to the banshees galloping like wild horses around the large cluster of tables, and the picture is complete. A peaceful meal this was not to be.

The evening began with a three-song set, performed by the preschoolers, who had donned their paper pilgrim hats and painted-grocery-bag vests. They lined up like good little Rockettes and sang (or didn't sing, in a few cases) a couple of turkey songs, incorporating choreography as appropriate. The last number, the cleverly renamed "Turkey" Dance, was intended to draw audience participation, but the parents mostly just did the clapping part and avoided the tailfeather-shaking move. The whole thing was undeniably precious.

After the thunderous applause had died down and the video cameras had been turned off, it was time to eat. At least that's what we thought. Those fortunate enough to be seated at a table with a green tablecloth were invited to help themselves to the grub. This, however, was a time-consuming process given that each adult was, on average, trying to fill two plates as they filed past the food.

Next came the red tables. Sigh. While an orderly system was clearly required in this situation, the kids (not to mention the parents) who hadn't yet gotten a plate were getting a bit restless.

We of the yellow table looked up hopefully when the emcee took mike in hand to call the next set of feasters. "Blue!" she said festively. "#%&$!" said those of us who, at 7 PM, still hadn't had so much as a bite to eat.

At long last, our turn came. We lined up, the second-to-last family to the buffet table. At 7:20 PM when we sat down to eat, we would normally have been tucking our kids in. Guess that explains why, as we were leaving the Y shortly after 8 PM laden with pilgrim clothing, a hand-painted (and -glued and -stapled) turkey centerpiece, and an almost-empty bowl of fruit, our daugher threw herself to the tile just inside the main entryway in a fit of two-year-old fury. My beloved and I looked at each other helplessly until he shoved a fistful of gear at me and picked her up with the two fingers he had free. Suffice it to say that, despite all the effort the kids and their teachers had gone through to put on what was a very nice evening, thankful was not how we were feeling in that moment.

After the gala of the night before, I wasn't expecting anything special when I picked our little guy up from preschool this morning. We were the last in line to sign out, and as I reached for the pen, the teacher smiled at me and asked, "Do you read to your son a lot?"

"Yes, I do," I answered, thinking of the books that were eternally scattered all over the floor of his room. (My policy: as long as it's not food scraps, it can stay on the floor until I'm driven insane by it or we're having company.)

"I can tell," she responded. "Every day during free time, he spends a few minutes over in the reading nook looking at books. That love of books doesn't just happen."

"Thank you," I said. And this time, I meant--and really felt--it.

The Ignoring Is Mutual

I had some girlfriend time last night with two pregnant friends. When my now two-year-old was born, these same friends and I were simultaneously pregnant and relished time together to dish the details of our mutual confinement.

This time around, I get to be an enthusiastic spectator and, as I found last night, a dispenser of maternal wisdom. (Not sure there is such a thing in this house, but I played along...) Their big question was, "Did you find it harder to go from no children to one child, or from one child to two?"

As you can imagine, that question gave me pause. I tried to remember the time when our oldest was a baby, and all I came up with was a rosy image of him sitting on my lap during babytime at the public library, me taking outings to walk at the mall before it opened or enjoy a cup of coffee with a friend while he sat contentedly in his baby carrier, and both of us being utterly smitten with each other. When I thought a little harder, what I recalled what a great deal of difficulty in the first year of letting go of my former professional self. Hmmm, so that was tough, but...

When I considered the switch from a single toddler to an infant AND a toddler, I could remember very little, a good sign that I was slammed beyond reason with responsibility at that stage of my life. The things that did come to mind were the day that a little boy ran out in a lane of traffic through a parking lot as I took his baby sister out of the car and the pandemonium that ensues toward the end of almost every grocery-shopping trip with my two children. So I was left to conclude that the second transition was the more difficult one.

But as any parent of more than one child knows, sibling interaction helps to alleviate the additional work that comes with additional kids. Even kids who are two years apart play together quite well, leaving a mom free to practice the sanity-saving approach of ignoring her children for brief interludes in each day.

It struck me this morning, though, that this ignoring is sometimes mutual. I walked into the living room to find our kids happily playing "Bob the Builder" with their Scoop and Lofty Duplo set. When I tried to get their attention to say hello, they gave me little more than a passing glance before getting back to business. "Can we ignore Mom?" "YES WE CAN!!!"

Perhaps realizing, after a second child comes along, that your children sometimes like each other more than they like you makes that transition from one to two difficult, too. But boy, it sure is a good thing when you want to sleep for a few more minutes or write a blog post at 7:20 AM...

Mr. Fashion Statement

When I got out of bed yesterday, a glorious surprise awaited me in our living room. I had to blink my eyes a few times and shake my head around a bit before I could believe it, but there was our four-year-old boy, standing at the foot of the stairs, fully dressed and smiling broadly.

It's the "fully dressed" part of that last sentence that's notable. He was wearing shirt, pants, and socks (presumably underwear, too) that he had chosen and donned entirely of his own accord. He might just as well have been levitating, I was so amazed.

The fact that his pants were on backward and that his bright blue socks did not even come close to matching his black-and-chartreuse skeleton shirt were of no concern to me. Dressing the children in the morning can be an exercise (and I mean that literally given all the chasing, squatting, and pinning of bodies it requires) in futility. I was overjoyed that, on this day, I would not have to do it for half of my small brood...and overjoyed that he was interested in choosing his own clothes based on his personal taste. Another little slice of independence for him can only mean less conflict for me.

He expressed his personal taste again later in the day when, during the stroller ride home from preschool, he chose to put his Spongebob Squarepants hat on OVER his hood. Between that, the colorful socks, and the backward pants, I definitely have a trendsetter on my hands.

He dressed a bit more conservatively today, wearing dark gray sport pants and a heather gray sweatshirt with a fire truck applique. But HE DRESSED, and that's what really counts.

Ashes to Ashes, Dirt to Dirt

I alluded in an earlier post to the fact that our driveway and backyard look a bit, um, scrappy. While we don't have any large appliances on display as I've been told you see on some front porches in the South, there are several sizeable items which have taken up residence on the lawn. First is the sandbox, which is tasteful in size and cheery in color (its canary yellow hue will prevent me from ever running into it with the lawnmower). Then there's the "cozy cottage," a small plastic house with functional windows and doors that our youngest and the next-door neighbor really enjoy. During the summer, I dragged it to a new location every three or four days so the rectangular patch of choked-out grass it left in its wake could recover.

Of course, we also have various bikes, trikes, wagons, and wheeled wonders for riding, pushing, and fighting over. The bottom line: there is no end of fun to be had just outside our back door.

We do get outside as often as possible (especially during that dreadful hour between 4 and 5 PM when neither Mommy nor the kids are very happy about being together in the house), and the kids do every so often play with the toys and structures that have been generously purchased or built for them. But there are other things in our yard that they find much, much more attractive.

One of those things is the claustrophobic space (see my post "Nooks and Crannies") around the two semi-enclosed sides of our garage. Early this summer, the family in one of the houses behind us erected a tall privacy fence, which stands about two feet or so from the back of our garage. A month or so later, our visiting gardener, also known as grandpa, cut some branches off the hedge surrounding our next-door neighbor's backyard patio which had been rubbing on our garage roof. The combined effect of these two beautification efforts was the creation of a nifty, rocky, sort of wooded path around the garage. What better way to explore nature and simultaneously drive Mom batty by being out of her sight in this preschool adventureland?

In terms of backyard activities, running around this path is most certainly fun but pales in comparison to the favored pastime of our eldest. This hobby of his also arose as a result of our gardening grandpa's work this summer. You see, when he installed our hedge, he wisely replaced some of the weary old soil with fresh, nutrient-laden black dirt. That left a good-sized pile of earth with nowhere to go, so he deposited it near the entrance to our "shady garden," the narrow, fern-filled side yard that almost never sees the sun. It's that pile of earth that has become our son's favorite place to play.

He calls it his "sculpting pile," and he works and reworks it seveal times a week with a plastic hoe, my "dandelion digger," an old bulb planter, and whatever other implements he can commandeer. (I remember well the day he requested the crowbar...) He will spend more time in that mound of dirt, driving cars around on it, poking at it with sticks, and shaping it into artistic masterpieces, than he spends on his bike, in his sandbox, and in the playhouse combined. And it cost us...nothing.

From dirt these children came, and unto dirt they shall ALWAYS (despite our best efforts to dissuade them) return.

Nooks and Crannies

Have you ever noticed how much kids like tiny little spaces? I've been discovering "nests" throughout our house mostly created by our two-year-old. She'll stash a small pile of books and a few "friends" (this is what she calls her stuffed animals) into the three-square-foot triangle behind the overstuffed chair in the corner of our living room. I've also discovered that she loves the one foot-by-two foot rectangle formed by the corner of our smallish TV room, the short side of the couch, and the end table next to it. She's padded it with little blankets and created an apartment for herself as a guest and for a large teddy bear as a permanent resident.

Then, of course, there's the fort phenomenon. What kid doesn't like to build forts with sofa cushions and blankets? Tiny personal spaces are an essential part of childhood.

I suppose that a small child doesn't often get "a room of one's own" given that she is under fairly constant adult surveillance, so burrowing into a womb-like space gives her both privacy and security.

As a mom, I suffer the same lack of private, cozily sized spaces to call my own. I guess that's why I like the bathtub so much.

Working Girl

This past weekend, I did some work on my first freelance writing assignment in a month or so. I'm profiling two women entrepreneurs/business partners, and, at their suggestion, I spent some time observing them in action in their retail space on Saturday preceding our Sunday afternoon interview.

The first gig was pretty low-pressure. I understood that they get relatively heavy traffic through their store on the one or two days a month that they're open, so I figured I could just show up and do my thing without too much concern about presenting a certain image. OK, so I gave some thought to what I wore, but I guess what I'm getting at in a really roundabout way is that I wasn't worried about the state of my car.

I didn't give it a thought until I strode out to the garage 25 minutes before the Sunday interview was to begin and opened the back driver's side door to set my tote bag on the floor behind the driver's seat. It was then that I realized that: (1) I couldn't SEE the floor, and (2) there would be no other cars in the parking lot but theirs and mine, and, should I arrive after one of them but before the other, the latecomer might just be curious enough about me to take a little peek inside.

In the name of my professional image, I chose to take a minute to clean up a bit. Here's what I collected: a jack-o'-lantern trick-or-treat bucket (handy for stashing and carrying the rest of the detritus), two pink, formerly flying horses from McDonald's and their four detached wings, a slide whistle, a pair of black Mary Janes, a plush Pink Panther, several rocks collected from the post office and preschool landscaping beds, a very important, very wrinkled piece of pink paper brought home from Sunday school, the ubiquitous sippy cup, and a car trader magazine. Stuff, stuff, stuff went the items into the bucket. Wonder, wonder, wonder went my brain in marveling at how I had allowed all these treasures to land (and stay!) in the backseat of my car.

I don't think Daddy has this problem when he leaves for work in the morning.

Parental Dementia = Parentia??

As a mother, hormones and hopeless distraction combine to wreak havoc on one's mental faculties. It starts in pregnancy, when well-meaning books lead you to believe the condition is temporary, the result of a flood of progesterone and other magical baby-growing juices. I'm here to tell you it's anything but fleeting.

Yesterday afternoon, our preschooler and I spent some quiet time with the "literacy bag" we'd checked out from his classroom. The kit contained a book about a Nordic boy who lost a mitten and the ridiculous number of increasingly large animals who simultaneously took up residence in it. It also included storytelling props like the mitten in question and little pom-pom/pipe cleaner animals that the Active Older Adults from the YMCA had assembled. Associated activities like mitten coloring sheets and an animal memory game enhanced the experience.

After we "performed" the story a couple of times, it was the memory game that captured our little guy's interest. We shuffled the cards, set them up face-down in a grid, and proceeded to play.

Now, I don't know about you, but my approach in playing games with my son which involve any level of skill is to subtly handicap myself in some way so as to let him win a little better than 50% of the time. A perfect ratio in my mind is Big Brother 2, Mommy 1. It teaches him that winning's fun but that being a gracious loser is important, too.

That was the approach I took in our first round of Animal Memory. I lost by the narrowest of margins, with one fewer pairs than the champ. As we set the cards up to play again, I decided it was Life Lesson time and that I'd win this game.

The problem is, I didn't. And I was trying, at least for the second half of the game.

Now, I hadn't gotten more than six hours of sleep the night before, and it was wine-soaked sleep at that. Nonetheless, I hadn't counted on my winning being an insurmountable challenge. In my personal history, I have had a pretty remarkable ability to retain random bits of information. Do you remember that birthday party game in which you had 20 seconds to look at a tray of miscellaneous objects and then, five minutes later, a minute to write down as many as you could recall? I was unbeatable at that game! Now I'd be lucky to even remember five minutes later that we were PLAYING a game.

And I haven't even mentioned my trouncing at the hands of my six-year-old nephew when we played Blue's Clues Memory while we were camping...was a month ago? Two? It's all more than a little troubling.

As I was sorting through old magazines this week, I saw on the cover of the August 2005 issue of Parenting a headline for a story on getting your memory back. What does it suggest? Get more sleep, eat more iron, meditate, and...play games. So next time you see me, I may be sitting in the lotus position, wearing a sleep mask, gnawing on a beef stick, and visualizing myself doing the equivalent of the end-zone dance after I kick a four-year-old's butt at Memory. Maybe I'd be better at the Bob the Builder version. I've always liked that plucky Wendy...

The Heavens

Sometimes at the end of a long day with the kids, I need a few minutes just to be alone. Yesterday was one of those days. With both children clinging to my legs and a massive car repair bill lingering in my mind, I was hanging on by a thread at the close of the dinner hour. (It's really more like the dinner fifteen minutes when you have small children, but I suppose it's just an expression.)

I made an appeal to my husband for ten minutes by myself, which he happily obliged, and then I disappeared into the X-room. This is a small rectangular room at the back of our house which seemed without specific purpose (like Generation X...thus the name) until we put a TV in there. One of its finest features, besides the giant cedar closet adjoining it, is its windowless door.

You don't find many living spaces in modern houses with doors. Sure, there might be a formal dining room with hardwood floors and fancy French doors (the space one of my friends calls "the echo room" in her home for its lack of curtains or rug), but it's not the same as this. The X-room is only about 8' x 10' and feels much smaller given its contents--a couch, a coffee table, a bookshelf, and a modestly-sized TV by today's standards. When the door is closed and you're snuggled up under a down throw with a good book (as I was), it is transformed from cozy media center to soundproof escape pod. As far as I was concerned, I spent ten glorious minutes in outer space.

After the ten minutes were up, I reentered the atmosphere and, opening the door, braced for my crash-landing into the noisy, roiling cacaphony of an ocean of bickering voices and battery-operated toys. Instead, I heard nothing.

I walked further into the house and saw no one. Then I noticed that the front door was open a crack, and I approached. There was my family, wrapped in blankets on our tiny front porch. Big brother had been wanting for a couple of days to watch the stars come out, and apparently tonight was the night. Steamed milk in hand, the kids were snuggled around their dad, staring up at an unfortunately cloudy sky. I sat down with them and looked heavenward.

The kids flopped back and lay in our laps. With a fair bit of diligence, we were able to spot one blurry star high overhead. I recited the "Star Light, Star Bright" poem so that the wee ones could make wishes. It was one of those rare moments in parenting that are just like what you thought parenting would always be before you had kids. When we peeled our eyes from the sky and went back inside, I felt incredibly grateful that I'd been to both outer space and parenting heaven in less than an hour.

The Scariest Part of Halloween

The face was freakish. With mouth wide open, tongue extended outward, and eyeballs bulging, it emitted a piercing shriek. In a frightening display of Halloween horror, it went from red to maroon to purple as the noise kept coming. No mask I had seen on the street just an hour or two before could compare. And it was the expression our son wore in response to being ushered into the bath.

Yes, Halloween with small children is fun, but the aftereffects of all those Milky Ways ("milkshakes," our little guy called them), Smarties, and Tootsie Rolls is sheer terror. By the end of the night, these normally sweet children behaved as though they were simultaneously on speed and possessed by Satan.

But the trick-or-treating started out just swell. Little sis, dressed as an inchworm, held her shopping-bag-style goodie sack out in front of her with both hands throughout our entire route, and Big Brother Checkerboard ran maniacally from house to house, too shy to say "trick or treat" without back-up (that is, me). While the inchworm was literally crawling along the sidewalk as she neared home, the black-and-red sensation could have gone all night. (Given that we have about three pounds of candy in our house as is, it's a really good thing he didn't.)

I was a bit relieved when my shift as trick-or-treat escort ended and Daddy's began. In a two-year-old Halloween tradition, I carried my bowl of candy over to the next-door neighbor's house, where we sat on the porch and waited for princesses, Harry Potters, and even a high-school-aged Socrates. The tradition expanded in this year's incarnation to include glasses of wine--treats for the adults. Factoring that in, I'd say a good--if slightly scary--time was had by all.