p.s. Here's what we did with our apples, day 2. Simple, just right.
Monday, October 12, 2009
no words necessary!
We went apple picking with Milena, Nathaniel and Caleb today. Such fun. So what if we're tired?
p.s. Here's what we did with our apples, day 2. Simple, just right.
p.s. Here's what we did with our apples, day 2. Simple, just right.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
sleep woes
Lest you think our life together is all peace and happiness, punctuated by slightly rocky moments that lead to valuable Lessons Learned, I am here tonight to tell you about 18 months of waking up at 5 am. There is no lemonade to be made of this enormous lemon. We are all tired, and being tired for so long can lead to serious grumpiness, general confusion, impaired multitasking, and if you are a toddler, many head clunks and face plants.
At Gabriel's last check up, our pediatrician suggested we move his bedtime later, endure a week or so of an exhausted baby, and then in theory, one morning we would wake up to his happy morning shouts at 7 instead of 5. Sounds great, I said. We'll do it, I said.
Yesterday afternoon, day #4 of this particular round of sleep training, ended in me shouting STOP CRYING STOP CRYING STOP CRYING STOP!!! to the saddest, reddest, rumpled up toddler face you've ever seen. I am not proud of this. In fact I feel awful about it; it was a very low point in my mothering career. In the immediate aftermath it felt like the absolute nadir.
He was so unbearable, asking to be picked up, put down, picked up again, put down again, crying, biting, throwing hard objects. I had to fetch Mike from the Aeneid to come take the boy away from his ragged, scary mama. Mike bathed him and sat with him and when I came into his room I saw the two of them calmly sitting on the glider together, Gabriel's pink cheeks and wet eyes shining. The minute my son saw me his eyes locked with mine. He slowly lifted his arms toward me and softly said: Mama.
Oh, the tears. (Mine, that is.) The vulnerability of children is downright painful to witness. I had been so mean to him, and here he was before me. Parents can be awful to their children, yet children need them and love them and form unshakable attachments. This hurts to ponder.
So there is my sad tale. The boy is exhausted. Getting down to the nitty gritty: his old bedtime was between 6 and 6:30, and he would wake up between 4:30 and 5:30. We've been putting him to bed at 7. This is night #5. Does anyone have ideas/thoughts about this? My Weisbluthian history/past success is telling me to go earlier instead of later at night, but there have definitely been nights when bedtime was as early as 5:30, and it didn't seem to alter the wake up time.
I have this intuition that the boy wakes up at 5. He just does. I'll keep at our later bedtime experiment for a few more days, but maybe a 6 pm bedtime is the best we can do in order to preserve as many nighttime sleep hours as possible.
But I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this one.
In happier news, Frances is reading. Tonight she read the entirety of Hop on Pop to Gabriel, who was captivated. About a week ago I was reading to her from Stuart Little and she asked if she could read some. She read an entire paragraph! She hit a difficult word and passed the book back to me. I was amazed. She's been doing this work kind of secretly - focused on words and letters and writing - while making it clear she does not want us to take notice or discuss it with her. Too much pressure. But now, I think she's arrived, and it makes me cry and laugh at once to hear her sounding out words with confidence.
At Gabriel's last check up, our pediatrician suggested we move his bedtime later, endure a week or so of an exhausted baby, and then in theory, one morning we would wake up to his happy morning shouts at 7 instead of 5. Sounds great, I said. We'll do it, I said.
Yesterday afternoon, day #4 of this particular round of sleep training, ended in me shouting STOP CRYING STOP CRYING STOP CRYING STOP!!! to the saddest, reddest, rumpled up toddler face you've ever seen. I am not proud of this. In fact I feel awful about it; it was a very low point in my mothering career. In the immediate aftermath it felt like the absolute nadir.
He was so unbearable, asking to be picked up, put down, picked up again, put down again, crying, biting, throwing hard objects. I had to fetch Mike from the Aeneid to come take the boy away from his ragged, scary mama. Mike bathed him and sat with him and when I came into his room I saw the two of them calmly sitting on the glider together, Gabriel's pink cheeks and wet eyes shining. The minute my son saw me his eyes locked with mine. He slowly lifted his arms toward me and softly said: Mama.
Oh, the tears. (Mine, that is.) The vulnerability of children is downright painful to witness. I had been so mean to him, and here he was before me. Parents can be awful to their children, yet children need them and love them and form unshakable attachments. This hurts to ponder.
So there is my sad tale. The boy is exhausted. Getting down to the nitty gritty: his old bedtime was between 6 and 6:30, and he would wake up between 4:30 and 5:30. We've been putting him to bed at 7. This is night #5. Does anyone have ideas/thoughts about this? My Weisbluthian history/past success is telling me to go earlier instead of later at night, but there have definitely been nights when bedtime was as early as 5:30, and it didn't seem to alter the wake up time.
I have this intuition that the boy wakes up at 5. He just does. I'll keep at our later bedtime experiment for a few more days, but maybe a 6 pm bedtime is the best we can do in order to preserve as many nighttime sleep hours as possible.
But I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this one.
In happier news, Frances is reading. Tonight she read the entirety of Hop on Pop to Gabriel, who was captivated. About a week ago I was reading to her from Stuart Little and she asked if she could read some. She read an entire paragraph! She hit a difficult word and passed the book back to me. I was amazed. She's been doing this work kind of secretly - focused on words and letters and writing - while making it clear she does not want us to take notice or discuss it with her. Too much pressure. But now, I think she's arrived, and it makes me cry and laugh at once to hear her sounding out words with confidence.
Friday, October 9, 2009
our very own giving tree
Thanks to my mother's reminiscence about creating a 'fall tree' with me and my friend Scotty Devorin nearly 30 years ago (see her comment after my first post), we had the makings of a new project. Our own fall tree. Here it is:
My thinking had been that Gabriel would be able to participate and enjoy sticking leaves onto the branches too. Oh, was I feeling proud of myself when I went to bed the night I made the tree. I was imagining the two children finding this masterpiece in the kitchen the next morning, hugging me in gratitude, and getting right to work. Then I would, of course, actually sit down with my coffee, and drink the entire mug while it was still warm.
Fantasy! They did like the tree. Yes. Gabriel likes it too much. Turns out it is just as much fun to take leaves off the tree as it is to put them on. Our resident Destroyer discovered that in fact one can actually rip entire branches off with ease. Such fun! As you can imagine, some screaming ensued. I almost joined Frances in her protests, sad as I was to see my work defaced. It took me the entire broadcast of The World to make that tree, kid! At one point I calmly squatted down to his level, took his chubby little hands in mine, and gazed into his soulful brown eyes. With great feeling and solemnity I explained that this is a special tree and we like the leaves, we like the leaves ON the tree Gabriel, so please don't take them off, okay? Let's hug on it. And we did. And then he grinned at me and ripped four more off, crumpled them in his hands, and threw them up in the air.
So this explains why the topmost branches are the most leafy on our fall tree, and why I took a picture now - this may be as full and colorful as our tree gets. But - yes - this became another lesson in Valuing Process Over Product (tell me when these stories get old). We've been going on afternoon leaf-finding walks, looking for actual leaves to add to the construction paper leaves. It takes us about 45 minutes to go around the block. Sometimes we bring our maracas and sing on the way, we usually meet up with some neighborhood dogs (a thrill), and all three of us are pretty happy. We bring funny old lady purses from the dress up box and end up filling them with acorns and pine cones and the like, and now have "nature bowls" on our little craft table.
Yesterday our walk ended in the three of us sitting on a sunny acorn-laden spot of sidewalk, throwing acorns as high as we could in the air. Don't knock it; it's pretty fun! Our friend Chester rode by on his way home from the college and stopped to chat. Frances sang him 'Pollito Chicken' (off Dan Zanes' Nueva York album. WE LOVE IT.) and then soon after that Mike biked past and joined us and we all walked the rest of the way home together.
So, the fall tree gave us our new autumn nature walks. I can let go of a few branches for that.
Here are some recent playground pictures...fall here has been so beautiful, I can almost forgive Annapolis for being Annapolis.
My thinking had been that Gabriel would be able to participate and enjoy sticking leaves onto the branches too. Oh, was I feeling proud of myself when I went to bed the night I made the tree. I was imagining the two children finding this masterpiece in the kitchen the next morning, hugging me in gratitude, and getting right to work. Then I would, of course, actually sit down with my coffee, and drink the entire mug while it was still warm.
Fantasy! They did like the tree. Yes. Gabriel likes it too much. Turns out it is just as much fun to take leaves off the tree as it is to put them on. Our resident Destroyer discovered that in fact one can actually rip entire branches off with ease. Such fun! As you can imagine, some screaming ensued. I almost joined Frances in her protests, sad as I was to see my work defaced. It took me the entire broadcast of The World to make that tree, kid! At one point I calmly squatted down to his level, took his chubby little hands in mine, and gazed into his soulful brown eyes. With great feeling and solemnity I explained that this is a special tree and we like the leaves, we like the leaves ON the tree Gabriel, so please don't take them off, okay? Let's hug on it. And we did. And then he grinned at me and ripped four more off, crumpled them in his hands, and threw them up in the air.
So this explains why the topmost branches are the most leafy on our fall tree, and why I took a picture now - this may be as full and colorful as our tree gets. But - yes - this became another lesson in Valuing Process Over Product (tell me when these stories get old). We've been going on afternoon leaf-finding walks, looking for actual leaves to add to the construction paper leaves. It takes us about 45 minutes to go around the block. Sometimes we bring our maracas and sing on the way, we usually meet up with some neighborhood dogs (a thrill), and all three of us are pretty happy. We bring funny old lady purses from the dress up box and end up filling them with acorns and pine cones and the like, and now have "nature bowls" on our little craft table.
Yesterday our walk ended in the three of us sitting on a sunny acorn-laden spot of sidewalk, throwing acorns as high as we could in the air. Don't knock it; it's pretty fun! Our friend Chester rode by on his way home from the college and stopped to chat. Frances sang him 'Pollito Chicken' (off Dan Zanes' Nueva York album. WE LOVE IT.) and then soon after that Mike biked past and joined us and we all walked the rest of the way home together.
So, the fall tree gave us our new autumn nature walks. I can let go of a few branches for that.
Here are some recent playground pictures...fall here has been so beautiful, I can almost forgive Annapolis for being Annapolis.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
the simple pleasures of a weekend at home
We have traveled quite a bit over the past month. We had three weddings in five weeks, and while all of them were extraordinary affairs populated by people I love, I was in dire need of a homebody weekend featuring unscheduled expanses of time and perfect weather.
That is just what I got.
So though I have nothing exciting or impressive to share, I wanted to tell you about the little mundane bits that were satisfying in a homey way:
1. I discovered baking soda as a household cleaner. Okay, I can already feel your eyeballs glancing up to the address bar, wondering if you should be returning some email right now instead of reading about housecleaning of all things but really, friends, this stuff works! I usually use white vinegar but you can't really scrub with the stuff. Enter baking soda. Sprinkle some on your bathtub and get out the sponge. As Gabriel would say, woah. Are those awful and basically useless cleaning products filling up aisle after aisle Madison Ave's nasty gift to us? Thanks, Don Draper. Thanks but no thanks.
2. In my quest to do such household chores during my children's waking hours (so I can read more than 6 pages of the New Yorker at a time once they do go to bed) I spent some time this afternoon outside with Gabriel washing windows. I know, at this point you are thinking what has happened to Meagan? Washing WINDOWS?! Well, it was that sort of day, and I don't think we ever did clean them when we moved into this sad neglected house. Ew.
I gave Gabriel some of the newspaper I was using, and we merrily scrubbed away together. Occasionally he would say: Keen! Keening! Yes, yes, thank you for helping me to clean. We are cleaning. Eventually he got bored so I filled a bucket with water and he rushed to get out his special old paintbrush. So industrious, this child!
Please do try this at home, especially those of you with toddlers. When we first discovered it, painting with water on the sidewalk was nothing less than a revelation! (Thank you to Milena for loaning us her great book First Art). Gabriel loves to paint the walls of the house, the railing of the back deck, you name it. We started working on letters today, painting big As and Bs and of course Gs. At the time Frances was taking a super long nap - sleeping off a cold - but usually she joins in, drawing elaborate 'stories' with water on the ground. Quick, while the beautiful weather lasts. Hit the sidewalk with a bucket and brush, and bring a novel for yourself.
3. You may know that I love the Goya aisle in the grocery. I love all the dried peas and beans in their bags snuggled up next to one another. I love the colors. I love the bulk foods section in Whole Foods. (Frances recently explained to an adult acquaintance that "we're really into bulk foods.") I would like to stick my hands in all the bins and feel my fingers submerged in the cool smooth navy beans and yellow pellets of millet. Weird, I know.
So how could there be a new legume, something I hadn't yet tried? Somehow I never brought home those enormous white beans. The bag I bought was Goya, labeled Giant Lima Beans. They are surprisingly quick to cook, very creamy and buttery, and the cooking liquid makes a hearty, seasonally just-right broth. I simmered them with a little olive oil, salt, and a lot of sage leaves from the almost-all-done herbs growing outside. Tonight I added some of them to sauteed eggplant, bell peppers, and mushrooms with some beany broth and half a jar of leftover Trader Joe's pizza sauce. Really, really good! A little hill of parmesan on top (not for my man Sin Queso, of course) and brown rice below. Some of you are snickering. But this is the sort of meal I adore; makes me feel so good. I'm out for some more huge white beans right now.
Okay, not really.
I think what this weekend was good for was realizing there can be pleasure in these everyday tasks if I can do them without feeling rushed and in the company of my family -- that is, if Mike is around to help and lend some solidarity to the whole domestic endeavor, if it all feels like part of something greater and beautiful, even. There actually is something beautiful about washing windows with an almost 18 month old on a sunny October day. Now, how to bring that feeling into the slog of a dreary Wednesday afternoon?
That is just what I got.
So though I have nothing exciting or impressive to share, I wanted to tell you about the little mundane bits that were satisfying in a homey way:
1. I discovered baking soda as a household cleaner. Okay, I can already feel your eyeballs glancing up to the address bar, wondering if you should be returning some email right now instead of reading about housecleaning of all things but really, friends, this stuff works! I usually use white vinegar but you can't really scrub with the stuff. Enter baking soda. Sprinkle some on your bathtub and get out the sponge. As Gabriel would say, woah. Are those awful and basically useless cleaning products filling up aisle after aisle Madison Ave's nasty gift to us? Thanks, Don Draper. Thanks but no thanks.
2. In my quest to do such household chores during my children's waking hours (so I can read more than 6 pages of the New Yorker at a time once they do go to bed) I spent some time this afternoon outside with Gabriel washing windows. I know, at this point you are thinking what has happened to Meagan? Washing WINDOWS?! Well, it was that sort of day, and I don't think we ever did clean them when we moved into this sad neglected house. Ew.
I gave Gabriel some of the newspaper I was using, and we merrily scrubbed away together. Occasionally he would say: Keen! Keening! Yes, yes, thank you for helping me to clean. We are cleaning. Eventually he got bored so I filled a bucket with water and he rushed to get out his special old paintbrush. So industrious, this child!
Please do try this at home, especially those of you with toddlers. When we first discovered it, painting with water on the sidewalk was nothing less than a revelation! (Thank you to Milena for loaning us her great book First Art). Gabriel loves to paint the walls of the house, the railing of the back deck, you name it. We started working on letters today, painting big As and Bs and of course Gs. At the time Frances was taking a super long nap - sleeping off a cold - but usually she joins in, drawing elaborate 'stories' with water on the ground. Quick, while the beautiful weather lasts. Hit the sidewalk with a bucket and brush, and bring a novel for yourself.
3. You may know that I love the Goya aisle in the grocery. I love all the dried peas and beans in their bags snuggled up next to one another. I love the colors. I love the bulk foods section in Whole Foods. (Frances recently explained to an adult acquaintance that "we're really into bulk foods.") I would like to stick my hands in all the bins and feel my fingers submerged in the cool smooth navy beans and yellow pellets of millet. Weird, I know.
So how could there be a new legume, something I hadn't yet tried? Somehow I never brought home those enormous white beans. The bag I bought was Goya, labeled Giant Lima Beans. They are surprisingly quick to cook, very creamy and buttery, and the cooking liquid makes a hearty, seasonally just-right broth. I simmered them with a little olive oil, salt, and a lot of sage leaves from the almost-all-done herbs growing outside. Tonight I added some of them to sauteed eggplant, bell peppers, and mushrooms with some beany broth and half a jar of leftover Trader Joe's pizza sauce. Really, really good! A little hill of parmesan on top (not for my man Sin Queso, of course) and brown rice below. Some of you are snickering. But this is the sort of meal I adore; makes me feel so good. I'm out for some more huge white beans right now.
Okay, not really.
I think what this weekend was good for was realizing there can be pleasure in these everyday tasks if I can do them without feeling rushed and in the company of my family -- that is, if Mike is around to help and lend some solidarity to the whole domestic endeavor, if it all feels like part of something greater and beautiful, even. There actually is something beautiful about washing windows with an almost 18 month old on a sunny October day. Now, how to bring that feeling into the slog of a dreary Wednesday afternoon?
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