Strandberg Savings & Moan

In the last couple of days, our eldest has started making a birthday list, mostly because he's interested in getting some additional Matchbox Magna Wheels rescue sets. This is complicated because: (1) his birthday isn't until July, so he's got a long time to wait, and (2) Matchbox doesn't make Magna Wheels--cool modular vehicles that lock together magnetically--anymore.

When I made this discovery this morning, I did what everyone looking for something obscure does these days--I went to eBay. There, I did find a couple of the sets he liked, but at $20 plus about $15 shipping, they were prohibitively priced. He, of course, did not grasp this.

"We have to get $20 right now!" he said several times. I tried to explain about saving in order to get the things we want, using my desire to replace the very couch on which we sat as an example, but this did not register, either.

Then I suggested we work out a plan for him to do chores so that he could earn a little money each day toward buying the new toy. When his ears perked up at this idea, I was pretty proud of the important lessons I was teaching him.

Then he said, "I need to do all those chores RIGHT NOW so I can get the $20!"

I told him that even if we had the $20 in hand, the toys were not at the store in our town--they were in California. We couldn't possibly get them today.

"Then we need to go to California--(yes, you guessed it)--RIGHT NOW!" he responded.

Still wanting to get the saving lesson across, we talked about his dinosaur bank and how he'd been putting money in there for a long time. He and Daddy decided to count the money to see if it would be enough for the Magna Wheels.

Apparently they had only made it to $2 when the little guy lost interest and asked what he could get for that amount. He quickly resolved himself to a Matchbox car from Walgreen's and rushed upstairs to get dressed for his outing.

When he met me at the back door to don shoes and coat, he was all ready to go--right down to the fuzzy purple purse with the hot pink flower on the outside and eight quarters on the inside. You may question my judgment, but I let him carry it. Personal finance was hard enough to explain--we'll leave gender for another day.

A Man in Touch with His Emotions

Mealtime around here lately has gotten to be a bit like feeding time in the monkey house.

The kids often use their chairs or stools not as a place to sit but rather as props in elaborate feats of acrobatics. And they still think the utensils that flank their plates are mainly decorative.

But worst of all is the spitting.

This is new and really, really annoying. It's mostly of the lip-buzzing "raspberry" variety but occasionally involves a protuding tongue. And sometimes, like at lunch yesterday, projectiles come into play.

Our two-year-old, who is a voracious fruit-and-vegetable eater, has one picky quirk--she doesn't like the tough peel on many of her favorite foods. Apples are the clearest example; I used to let her munch a whole MacIntosh free-range style on the lower level of our house--until I started discovering curled-up bits of apple peel behind the couch, on the desk, and just about everywhere else her size 7 feet had trod.

I didn't know that bell peppers had a "peel" until, at yesterday's noontime meal, she leaned to her left after taking a couple bites of a red pepper strip and rather daintily (but still noisily) spit the tough outer skin to the floor.

"Hey!" I said in my disciplinarian voice. "We DON'T spit food out of our mouths, es-PECIALLY onto the floor!"

I continued to give her "the look" until she apologized in her sweet, forgiveness-inducing chirp.

Then her big brother said, "I know how you were feeling just then, Mama."

"You do?" I asked. "How was I feeling?"

"Disappointed," he said with certainty.

"Well, you're right," I replied, switching into teachable-moment mode. "I AM disappointed when you kids do something that I know you know is rude."

"Know how I knew, Mama?" he asked, ignoring the lesson.

"How?" I asked back.

"By the three lines in your forehead," he said.

I'm going to try to do four lines tomorrow to see what he calls that.

The First-Aid Kit

Our rescue-centric son discovered the first-aid kit in the trunk of my car about a week ago and asked me several questions about it for two days afterward. What was inside? Why didn't we keep it in the house? How could someone get hurt while we were in the car?

Soon, he had fashioned his own first-aid kit. He emptied the crayons and colored pencils out of the blue plastic case formerly known as his art set to make room for the things he figured he'd need in case of bodily harm: scissors, Scotch tape, Elmer's glue (two bottles so that he'd "have a back-up").

He has been keeping his first-aid kit in his "fire boat," a cardboard box in which grandma mailed some things earlier in the week. The box now has a ribbon glued to one of the top flaps which can be used as a lifeline to retrieve unfortunate souls from the water.

While the fire boat is too unwieldy to take in the car (we did, however, take it outside earlier this afternoon), the first-aid kit is, by its very nature, portable, so that's been going with us everywhere. It even sat with our towels alongside the kiddie pool at the Y today when we swam with the preschool class.

Apparently the Scotch tape in the kit is for the repair of small wounds and the glue is for larger ones. Given the crude techniques likely to be used on me should I spill any blood, I've been avoiding injury at all costs the last several days.

Fried

I am an egg. Cracked open, poured out, and fried.

This is the feeling of being a writer on a serious deadline.

Granted, the topic wasn't overly serious. In fact, it may have been the coolest assignment I'll ever get. I was covering a concert at a local high school featuring the University of Wisconsin Varsity Band, the beloved musicians of my alma mater. U-rah-rah, Wi-i-i-scooon-oooon-sin.

I went to the show for free. I enjoyed the music, even tapped my pen against my chin as I scribbled observations in my notebook (a red one, naturallly).

Then the work started. I had just walked in the door at 5:30 PM when the phone rang. It was my editor, wondering when I'd have the copy in for the story that was set to run in tomorrow's daily. (He'd told me the paper would need it "as soon as possible" after the show.)

"I'll be done in an hour," I said confidently. Then, slightly less confidently, I asked, "Will that be soon enough?" (What did I think I was going to do if he said no? Fly backward around the world like Superman to reverse the progress of time?)

"That's fine," he responded. "I just need to let the night editor know."

Let me say here that editors are very hard to read. It's not that they're mean or without emotion; I understand now that it's just that they're under CONSTANT PRESSURE, down to the very minute, to ensure they get their stuff together.

And tonight, their stuff was my stuff. Along with the piece for the daily, I had two assignments for the weekly regional paper, one a summary of the concert and the other a profile of a local kid who was playing in the band. Both were due by 10 PM.

The first was delivered at 7:30 PM. The second slid into home at 10:04 PM. (Darn email time stamps...)

And now I depart to deposit my yolky self between the cozy flannel sheets of my bed to sleep and dream of crashing cymbals and high-stepping marching band members tramping all over my computer keyboard.

Pipe Cleaners Are NOT Clean

While my daughter and I were on our way to meet some friends (one adult, two children) for coffee yesterday, I realized that I hadn't brought along anything with any entertainment value. Checking the glove box, I found only my duster (yes, I keep a duster in my car for efficient cleaning during driving downtime) and a Wisconsin road map. Dismissing those as viable options, I decided to purchase something inexpensive en route.

We pulled into the Hobby Lobby just around the corner from our destination and sauntered in. We were in search of pipe cleaners, I had discerned, based on our son's recent rabid interest in them. He'd played with some at church last weekend and had been begging me ever since to buy some.

Discovering a wide selection of colors and sizes, we chose two multi-color packs--one typical-sized and one shockingly big. They were so big, in fact, that I thought I might even enjoy playing with them.

The pipe cleaners were indeed a hit, both at the coffee shop that morning and at home ever since. Such a hit, as a matter of fact, that every last one of the two hundred or so that were in the two packages are now strewn throughout our house, gathering like dust bunnies behind the furniture and littering the living room carpet like so much colorful lint.

When I'm bothered by the frightening state of things, I have two options. I can either rue the moment that my clever brainstorm leapt its first neural gap in my head, or I can accept that creativity, growth, and fun are inherently messy and undeniably valuable.

I will choose the second--and will also put yet another Rubbermaid bin on my shopping list so that the creativity, growth, and fun can occasionally be contained.

A Vintage Weapon

When your four-year-old son runs around the house using your wine bottle evacuator to shoot a recently removed cork at the robbers for whom he's been waiting behind the piano, it means one of two things:

(1) You're too permissive a parent.
(2) You're drinking too much wine.

I suppose it's possible the two are linked.

Life in the Slow Lane...and in the Endless Aisle

Tugging the kids into the Y this morning from the distant employee parking lot, I heard the footsteps of a woman unburdened by children making rapid progress toward us from behind on the sidewalk. Our party of three was traveling the path in amoebic fashion, sometimes holding hands, sometimes on the grass, sometimes taking up far more space than an adult and two quarter-pints should occupy. And we were not moving quickly.

As a courtesy, I yanked my charges single-file ahead of me to allow our fellow pedestrian to pass. "Thank you," she said crisply as she hustled on by.

I watched her go, covering half a block before we'd made it another 10 feet. And I remembered days of walking that way, on my college campus or through the halls at work--walking as if I had somewhere to be, something important to do. I still did, of course, have places to be and things (of arguable importance) to do. I just didn't get there at my own pace anymore.

And on days like today, when I've had time for a cup of tea and a little reading before the kids get out of bed, I almost don't mind. Because when I was moving at my own pace, I was missing a lot. I didn't notice how fun it was to jump off of those rocks they put at the edges of driveways to keep people from tearing up the grass. I was inattentive to the many textures and colors snow can have. And I was unaware of how lovely it feels to hold a warm little hand on a cold morning.

Deep thoughts aside, there is one environment in which this Zen approach to the turtle's pace of children falls apart, and that is the grocery store right before lunch. My shopping experience this morning could have taken place in one of the outer circles of hell rather than Pick 'N Save and I wouldn't have noticed the difference. When I wasn't banging my giant cart with the red plastic truck cab on the front into end-aisle displays, I was dragging a child by the coat sleeve across the floor or racing to retrieve a huge glass jar of pickles from the unsteady hands of my two-year-old.

And here's the worst part. Since it takes two or three times as long to shop with kids, I have two or three times as long to endure the boundless variety that supermarkets offer. I remember today's LOOONG stroll down the condiment aisle to be particularly painful. I mean, really--do we need 438 different salad dressings from which to choose?

At least there are some real taste preferences at work there. It was the sour cream that truly baffled me. Does anyone in the world have a favorite sour cream? Then why are there six different brands in permutations of three sizes and three levels of fat content?!

Now that I think about it, shopping was overwhemling for me even before the kids came along.

When the Rain Comes

In church this weekend, we heard the story of Samuel's calling, the one in which the boy went chasing into his mentor Eli's bedroom three times in the night to ask what he wanted before it occurred to Eli that someone else was calling his young protege. At last, Samuel stayed in his room to listen to what God had to say--and God, revealing the importance Samuel would hold in the world, told him that "none of his words would ever fall to the ground."

In his sermon, our pastor explained this idea of words "falling to the ground"--how, in ancient times, words were considered physical things. People would duck to avoid a curse "hitting" them, and they would face a speaker full-on to receive the entire impact of a blessing. It was an engaging mental image, especially when he went on to say that God's own words NEVER miss their mark.

As one constantly praying for direction and guidance, I couldn't help but picture God up on his heavenly throne, speaking down at me, the words falling from his mouth like clouds and drifting earthward--and me running around like a lunatic, dodging the precipitation for which I had asked. In my efforts to figure it all out myself, where I'm going and what I'm meant to do, I don't even notice that I'm dripping with God's guidance. Or, when it occurs to me that I'm soaking wet, I try to towel off so as not to be uncomfortable in pursuing the path I'VE chosen.

Next time it starts raining, I hope I'll toss my umbrella aside, stand there exposed, and tilt my chin heavenward to drink it all in.

Shaking the Snow Off

I have come to grips with the poor memory that results from too little sleep and too many distractions enough to know that if there's something I want to remember, I have to write it down. Sometimes I risk life and limb (not necessarily my own) to do so.

One example: I recently found a receipt on the floor of my car with a few meandering words scrawled on the back with a blue ballpoint pen that barely worked. I immediately recalled that I had written these words while driving (yes, with my children in the back seat) after the heavy snowfall we got in early December. (The roads had been plowed, so it wasn't nearly as dangerous as it sounds.)

This was our first Major Snowfall of the year, and EVERYONE was marveling at how beautiful everything was. The snow was sticky-icy as it fell and left all the bare trees and shrubs looking as though they'd been thickly frosted and sprinkled with glitter. It was one of those truly spectacular things that even snow-haters enjoy.

Taking this in as I drove through a semi-wooded neighborhood, I noticed most especially the tall old pine trees that stood in front of many of the houses. With their wide, needled branches, they had collected the most snow of all--but only on one side. From the north, the trees looked as they normally would, but from the south, they were weighted down, their boughs hanging a good two or three feet lower than their comrades 180 degrees away. Depending on your point of view, they were either standing tall or about to fall over.

As a parent of small children, I can look that way, too. I have one face for the acquaintance who, seeing me struggle to tow my charges into the Y, says with a chuckle, "Boy, you've got your hands full." I give a cordial little laugh and flash a polite smile to confirm that, yes, indeed I do.

But for those occasional others who really want to know just how full my hands are, I turn and show the the side of me that faces the storm, the side occasionally laden with the physical and emotional weight of children, their stuff, and their needs.

This self-exposure is mostly cathartic, a brief respite from stiff-upper-lipdom. But once in a while, someone (or Someone) particularly caring or acutely sympathetic will take hold of me and shake some of the snow off my branches. And the lift I get from that brings me back into balance again, righting me for the storms yet to come.

Being Held and Letting Go

There are certain things about my kids that lead me to marvel at how different two individuals raised in the same house can be. I almost said 'two individuals raised with the same nurturing' in that last sentence, but of course that's not true. The time and attention that I have given each child has varied in quality and quantity--and the two are not directly proportional. (Think 'neurotic mother of one' versus 'slightly less neurotic mother of two' and you'll get the picture.)

My daughter has from birth been very physical, "playing with" her own strength and agility almost as much as she plays with her Little People. She will fall over backward but keep her head and shoulders from hitting the ground through a mix of precocious spatial awareness and superhuman abdominal strength. I remember the time my beloved and I allowed her (under close supervision) to hang by her six-month-old hands from the baby gate in the hallway. This may seem masochistic, but we had been made curious by her unusual feats of upper body strength. And she gurgled her pleasure at the opportunity to show off in this way.

My son, on the other hand, is just a tad on the clutzy side. He knocks himself over with fair frequency and can't seem to figure out how to get his shoes on the correct feet. He's thrilled to play baseball or kick a soccer ball around when encouraged to do so, but left to his own devices, he'd prefer to sit still and build with Duplos or draw pictures of cars and trucks.

This difference in physicality extends to their propensity toward affection as well. The little one loves to be held and cuddled, has from months of age given palpable hugs employing all of her limbs, and allows me to get right up next to her as I sing her bedtime song.

The big guy, on the other hand, often mis-times his kisses, planting the lips before unleashing the peck. Sometimes when I try to hold him close, he pushes against me with his arms in protest. This is most true at bedtime, when he typically says, "Just a minute, Mama," so he can assume his preferred "no touching" position before I sing to him.

Last night, I asked if I could snuggle him during our bedtime ritual. It had been a good day for both of us, which is to say that neither of us hated the other for more than a few seconds at a time, and I wanted to top it off with tenderness. He said OK but was clearly uncomfortable about ten seconds in.

"Maybe I can snuggle you instead, Mama," he said.

"Alright," I responded, shifting around as he directed me with his arms. It was the first time he had suggested this, and it had never occurred to me to approach a mother-son snuggle in this way. The feminist in me hates to think it, but could he have instincts for holding rather than being held at the tender age of 4?

I wound up with my head on his little shoulder and my forehead against his warm cheek. As I sang to him, I thought about the time when he would be too tall and too proud to be held. Perhaps the latter was already the case. But I smiled at the idea of him holding me, at 4, at 14, and even at 40.

PB&J on Whole Wheat

One look at our calendar this morning and I knew our day was going to be hectic. There was preschool as usual, but on top of that, I had a morning meeting at church and had agreed to sub for another fitness instructor at the Y just after noon. With travel times and the stress of donning and doffing winter gear times three factored in, it became clear that we were not going to have time to come home for lunch between commitments.

Since preschool pick-up was at 11 AM and the class I was to teach began at 12:15 PM (both at the Y), I decided the best approach would be to brown-bag it. So I made three PB&Js, sliced up some red pepper, and tossed a few apples into a cooler before we ran out the door at 8:35 AM.

The day could have proven a precision exercise in control freakdom, but the 16 ounces of French Roast I had mid-morning elevated my mood tremendously. No one was more surprised than me at how beautifully things went.

Of course, a little creativity helped. I spent much of the morning hyping our "picnic at the Y" and the "special surprise" I had in store for the kids if they could squelch the sass--which they did almost completely. (Gotta love positive reinforcement...it makes everyone feel better than does the negative variety, more commonly known as yelling and making threats.)

When lunchtime and the unveiling of the "special surprise" finally came, the kids were dying of curiosity. I escorted them to the pool observation deck, a terraced and semi-isolated space near the vending machines. And then I jangled the quarters in my pocket and revealed the surprise--they were going to get to pick their drink from the machine! Oh, rapture!

Once a large plastic bottle of strawberry milk had been purchased, we settled in to eat. The kids were tickled by this typical meal in a most unusual location and sat eating happily as they watched a gaggle of elderly folks doing water exercise in the pool below. Occasionally, one of the kids would wave in response to a smile or gesture from one of the grandmas and grandpas looking up at us.

As I ate my apple, I watched my little boy work on his sandwich. He had eaten the nice soft part out of the middle and was left with a perimeter of crust. He pulled apart the two layers of bread and, setting the jelly side down on his plate, began licking the peanut butter rapturously off of the other side.

On another day, I might have been annoyed by such poor table manners, but we weren't at a table, after all, and I had the coffee buzz going for me. Instead, I saw a sweet child uninhibitedly sucking as much pleasure out of life as he could, and I promised myself that this year, I'd focus on the gloriously rich peanut butter and more often leave the dry ol' whole wheat crusts behind.

When Sarcasm Bites Back

Our two-year-old daughter has in the last month taken to announcing when she either wets or soils her diaper. Since this began around the holidays, I did absolutely nothing about it. The whole potty-training thing seemed like too much to deal with on top of the fa-la-la-la-ing and the ho-ho-ho-ing. (My excuse for not diving in now is...nonexistent. But that's another post.)

The other morning, we were loosely gathered in the kitchen through that inexplicable magnetism a mother has for her children. Small bodies were indiscriminately orbiting in my gravitational system, with each tiny planet disrupting the other's flight plan periodically, when there came an announcement:

"Mommy, I made pee-pee!"

This declaration is invariably followed by a tiptoed, bow-legged dance step not seen in any ballet with which I'm familiar. (Maybe an opera? The Pirates of Wet Pants?)

In reaction to his sister's announcement, my four-year-old son (who has excretion issues all his own), rather dramatically sighed, "Oh, GREAT."

Ashamed that he had probably heard this reaction from me one too many times, I guiltily pretended I didn't hear him and went about finishing whatever it was I was working on so that I could change the young one's diaper.

After a (too) short silence, big brother spoke up again.

"Mama," he said, "what does it mean when you say 'great,' but it's...well..."

He seemed puzzled. Then just a beat later, he managed to say what he was getting at: "You say 'great,' but it's not great. What does that mean?"

It seems my parental arsenal is being depleted. First the kid starts reading and knows when I'm trying to burn through a bedtime book by paraphrasing/condensing, and now he calls me on my sarcasm.

That's just great.

Tripping Hazard

I mentioned in an earlier post that our house, and our Christmas-tree-hosting living room in particular, were littered with a tidal pool of mostly plastic flotsam and jetsam following Santa's visit. There were multi-ethnic Little People clad in bike helmets or suits of armor lying amid much larger stuffed animals as though they'd been attacked. Two pairs of beaters from the Little Tykes Cooking and Baking Set lay in wait beside chairs or beneath other toys the better to injure an unsuspecting, unshod pedestrian. Storage tubs, their lids removed, stood hopefully awaiting the placement of appropriate contents inside them.

In short, the place was a disaster.

It took my inviting my neighbor over for a glass of eggnog Saturday afternoon to motivate me to corrective action. But once I got going, I was unstoppable. Unstoppable, and a dictator of whom my children were not fond.

Their initial protests against the clean-up instructions I was giving them centered on their belief that this was going to "take forever." I suppose when you've only been around for two or four years, 10 or 15 minutes seems far more significant than it does to someone of my ripe old age. Even so, I was unswayed.

More willing to think his way out of this hardship than to buckle down and do the picking up demanded, my son took a more philosophical tack.

"Why do we have to pick this stuff up, anyway?" he asked.

"We have to pick it up," I said, "because the floor is so covered with toys that you can't even take a step without--"

The target of my tirade had begun to back away from me as my voice rose, and in so doing, tumbled backward over a bin of "tea party" cups and saucers (plastic, of course).

Practical lessons are so much more powerful than theoretical ones.