Pit-Pat-Paddle-Pat, Pit-Pat-Waddle-Pat

There is a bridge out near my workplace around which the public works department has set up a lengthier-than-desired official detour. Ingeniously--and not too surprisingly--a few of us have discovered a secret "back way" to our office building.

This definitively unofficial route takes a driver down a street that winds between the many paper mills and machinists' quarters that line the Fox River. Taking this route might be disruptive to the workers in the area, who have to cross this street to get from one building to another on their "campuses," but it's quicker than the city-sanctioned detour--and people always do what's most efficient. (I'll never forget the countless paths barren of grass that popped up at UW-Madison wherever the sidewalk layout did not provide the most direct route from one place to another.)

I was traversing this route on my way home from work today when I had to slow down not for a semi backing up to a loading dock but rather for a four-member family of Canadian geese. Mom led the way, followed by two babies, and Dad brought up the rear.

They hesitated for a spell at the side of the road, disoriented by the noise of motors and factories. I stopped, but another driver wasn't so sure he wanted to give them the right of way. Still, the courageous birds marched forward, forcing my oncoming counterpart to either yield or be branded vicious and evil. He yielded.

As I watched those geese cross the street, afraid yet fairly certain they were safe in herding their young toward the puddle for which they were headed, I thought how much like them we need to be as parents. We may not be quite sure where we're going or what path is safest, but as long as we do what we can to protect our kids, we trudge onward and hope that society as a whole will see the value in what we're doing and give us the benefit of the doubt--and a little help across a busy street when necessary.

The Life of the Mind

Since the rescue helicopter moved from the living room to our boy's bedroom a couple of weeks ago, morphing into an urban search and rescue vehicle in the process, a new step has been added to our bedtime routine. It involves moving the many boxes, kits, hats, and jackets needed by an EMT from the red Little Tykes race car bed (which doubles as the aforementioned rescue vehicle) to the book-reading chair beside it.

We were making this move tonight when our boy announced, "Tomorrow's Friday!"

"Yes, it is," I said.

"Friday is the day I don't work, so we can leave all this stuff in the chair instead of putting it back in the car," he said.

"OK," I said. "That sounds good."

And then I wondered what conversation or negotiation between my beloved and me he overheard that led him to make that declaration. Were we talking through the "day care dance," reviewing pick-up arrangements and planning car seat placements? Or were we discussing days off and determining who'd be working what extra hours to prepare for being away from the office?

Whatever the case, it's clear that he's always--ALWAYS--listening and learning. That's both encouraging and scary.

Full House

Our little girl loves her Little People, and judging by the looks of this photo, her Little People love each other, too.

Speaking "Midwestern"

I went through a stage in the latter half of my college years, particularly when I started working as an intern for a large corporation in the Fox Cities, during which I strove to eliminate from my diction any trace of Wisconsinite vowel sounds. This came about mostly in reaction to new friends from Indiana or Ohio teasing me about the way I said things like "toast" or "boat." The looong 'o' that sounded completely normal to me apparently sounded a lot like a foghorn to them.

So I worked hard to sound like I was from, well, nowhere in particular, eliminating words like "bubbler" from my vocabulary, until people were occasionally surprised to learn that I was from Green Bay. I still struggle with "toast," but I've mastered nipping my 'o's in the bud more than I have triumphed over the "you/ya" dichotomy.

It must be the German heritage of our area, but I say "ya" without even thinking about it. "I love ya," I tell the kids when I tuck them into bed. "See ya," I say to friends when we part company.

Our boy has taken note of and deeply internalized this, I learned during last week's annual meeting with our financial planner. We had picked up Happy Meals for the kids on the way to the meeting, hoping to keep them more content than they had been during last year's review, when a tall (and graciously fake) tree had been knocked over against a glass tabletop.

The kids were divvying up the goods as we started to talk with our money man, taking napkins, ketchup packets, and milk chugs out of the communal bag that contained all the "extras." I saw our boy pull an item from the bag and hand it to his sister, saying clearly, "Here, sis...this one's for 'ya.'" And he pronounced it 'yah,' like one might say to a horse that one wants to get a-movin'.

I'm going to have to work on that.

Romp and Circumstance

There is something very moving about a bird's-eye view of a sea of mortarboards in motion. Given the shape and dimensions of this most unusual type of headwear, a mortarboard viewed from above renders its wearer more or less anonymous, leaving the observer of a graduation ceremony with a timeless, big-picture impression of the importance of education to society at large, rather than just to the individual.

Most of us have at one time or another had such an angle on a graduation; typically, it is achieved at a large proceeding in a university stadium or a high school gym. I got to experience it in a preschool classroom, where all views were of the bird's-eye variety since the graduates were only waist high.

I was surprised by how emotional the simple sight of twenty-plus pint-sized kids in red caps and gowns made me. And that was before the ceremony even started.

The children sang to entertain their adoring friends and relations, and the finale--a long-standing tradition in the school--was a song called, "Love Grows." Its lyrics were sweet and plain:

Love grows, one by one,
Two by two, and four by four.
Love grows 'round like a circle
And comes back knocking at your front door.

There was a verse, too, about taking the hand of a friend, which the tiny choristers naturally did as they sang. Encouraged by their teachers, that is how the kids had referred to each other all year--as "friends"--even if they weren't entirely and equally chummy with every member of the class. "Time to listen, friends," Mrs. C. would say before running down the rules for swimming or passing out the supplies for a project. Theirs was an insulated, egalitarian society built on the premise of sharing and caring, one on which the rest of the world should be modeled.

And here they were, graduating and ready to move on to the harsher reality of elementary school. Yes, it's silly to call kindergarten "harsh," but what I mean is that it's a first step toward the divisions and social segregation that inevitably occur in the school setting. I don't remember having a lot of enemies in the early grades, but I do recall that I didn't call everyone "friend," either.

Preschool has prepared our son and his 23 "friends" developmentally and academically for their entry into "real" school...and I hope it has set the stage for them socially, too. Because it sure would be nice to see them all join hands to sing again 13 years from now.

Kissing Capers

Our precious girl started a fun new game this week. When I give her a smack on her kisser, she swipes her tongue across her lips and says, "I licked it off, Mommy!"

I kiss her again. Another lick.

I thought I'd make the game more interesting after a bath one night by kissing her big toe after she'd "removed" three or four kisses from her little mouth. Without batting an eye, she lifted her foot to her mouth and licked her toe. Her knee and forearm followed.

When I attempted to stymie her by kissing the small of her back, she twisted her arm behind her and "wiped" the kiss off.

Not a bad way to hold Mommy's attention longer than the duration of a single kiss.

An Interesting Bit of Trivia

As we were driving home from this afternoon's library visit, a small boy's voice reported the following from the back seat:

"Mommy, did you know that some people in Australia, Africa, and South America like scars?"

"No," I responded. "That's pretty interesting, though."

When we got home, I inspected the "Cuts, Scrapes, Scabs, and Scars" book he had checked out, and on page 25, I found the illustration you see here.

Literacy is SO cool.

When the Training Wheels Come Off

Since my beloved has returned from several weeks of barely interrupted business travel, we've been catching up on family time (which partly explains the dearth of blog posts lately), and one of the family activities I wanted him here for was the removal of the training wheels. I had decided a couple of weeks ago that it was time for our boy to give "free wheeling" a go.

Here's why I made that decision: There's something about the bursting forth of spring that makes us all want to venture into something fresh, something new. Learning to ride a bike is one such adventure of self-discovery and growth, I figured. That, and I was too lazy to search for the right wrench to make the necessary adjustments to our son's less and less even (and more and more treacherous) bicycle support system while the toolkeeper was away.

Tonight, the now resident toolkeeper found the elusive wrench and loosed the nuts and bolts that had kept our firstborn upright since his fourth birthday. And I learned why the image of the parent running alongside a nearly five-year-old child on a bicycle with no training wheels is so iconic.

As I kept pace with the peddler (an excellent workout for the hamstrings, by the way), holding the back of the seat with my right hand and palming the end of the handlebars with my left as we made our way up the block, I coached and cheered for all I was worth, grabbing his hip or seizing the reigns according to need. And then a point came when the handlebars hovered out of my fingers' grasp and my grip on the seat fell away by instinct, and there he was, riding a bike.

I started to laugh. He did, too.

"You're doing it!" I said.

"I'm doing it! I'm doing it!" he echoed, and though I couldn't see his face, I knew he was smiling.

Three or four seconds and about 10 yards later, I lunged to his aid, letting him tumble slowly into the grass toward which his collision course was taking him. He was even happy to fall.

I was happy, too. I was happy that I knew when to hold on and when to let go and when to take hold again.

That, after all, is the essence of parenting.

Vocabularious

One of my favorite things about watching my kids grow has been observing how their speech develops. Pronouns, syntax, verb tenses...it's all too precious to a word lover like me. It's a good reminder, too, of how non-intuitive the English language is when you hear your children use words like "goed" or "throwed." No wonder we need a Spanish version of the national anthem. There are probably no easy translations for words like "o'er" and "ramparts."

Anyway, I introduce this topic because, as I was doing my semi-annual ironing the other day, my two-year-old, whom I had admonished to stay far, far from the ironing board as she watched me, looked up at me and said, "Mama, can you give me a flavor?"

My mind went immediately to the local ice cream parlor, where we had stopped as a reward for good behavior after a recent Mother's Day shopping trip to a trinkets-and-delicates gift shop. (There's nothing quite so nerve-wracking as taking two preschoolers into a tiny store with more glass in it than you'd find in the entire Marshall Field's housewares department.)

"What did you say, honey?" I asked her, stalling as I tried to figure out why she'd be asking for ice cream at 9 AM.

She pointed at the floor beneath the ironing board. "I dropped my blankie," she said. "Can you give me a flavor and pick it up?"

Siren Song

We were halfway down the long hallway into our church's sanctuary this morning when it occured to me that the "special effects" button on the firefighter's helmet my son was wearing might be a problem. Push it, and a wailing fire truck siren sounds.

Now, you may question my judgement around letting him wear the firefighter's helmet into church in the first place. I questioned it, too. But sometimes, I just roll with what makes the kid happy rather than what social norms dictate.

Given that, I'm not okay with noisemaking, battery-operated toys in a religious service. So I did my best to remove the helmet from his possession as we entered, setting it beside me on the seat to keep it under my guard.

The introductory portion of the service was a bit drawn out--lots of announcements and talking of little interest to the kids--so our eldest got restless.

"Can I get a Worship Bag, Mama?" he asked. The Worship Bag contains a board book, laminated bookmarks for locating songs in the hymn book, and some pipe cleaners--a low-key, low-volume entertainment kit.

"Not now," I told him. "Wait until everyone is done talking."

I figured I'd let him cross the front of the church once the choir stood to sing its anthem. When I saw one of the choir members rise, I sent him scurrying for his target. It was then that I noticed the choir was not only standing but was on the move, heading to the stairs just a few feet in front of where we sat in the front pew. His re-entry, it seemed, was going to be slightly problematic.

As I signaled for our boy to dodge the choir director, who was now standing right next to our pew and blowing into a pitchpipe, I shifted in my seat to make room for the child, picking up the firefighter's helmet as I did so in order to move it out of the way. (Can you guess where this is going?)

I pushed the "special effects" button.

The siren sounded--just as an a capella soloist began to sing.

I dove under the pew to muffle the sound and to hide my face as much as possible.

When I had sat up again, my boy leaned over and asked sternly, "Mama, WHY did you push that button?"

I deserved it.