one happy kid

Well, there are two happy kids, really, but this is a short photo ode to Gabriel, with whom I have spent more one-on-one time over the past three weeks than in the entirety of his life up until Frances' recent departure for the greener pastures of Annapolis Elementary School.

I'm gaga for Gabriel. I feel like I'm falling for the kid anew, so forgive me for reveling in these lovey dovey days and sharing them with you. I have absolutely no perspective - and hence no shame. I hope it isn't too gross (I know, I know - stop the presses! Mama blogger's children are happy and she adores them!).

I have discovered, contrary to my fears, that being a second child is not tantamount to getting the short end of the stick. Having a big sister is pretty neat, and having parents who are more settled in their roles isn't bad either. That said, I do feel like it is finally Gabriel's time to shine in the sun. He gets lots of attention, he has more creative space to express himself without his big sister around to compete with, and he has enough distance from her to inspire wild running across the blacktop, shouting Didi!! Didi!! when she steps down the back steps of her school with the other walkers and car-riders at 3:35.

Greeting Frances today, who is showing Gabriel a sticker her new pal Halligan just gave her.

We usually hang out on the lovely playground adjacent to Frances' school if we get there early. Gabriel giggled crazily, so surprised and happy was he to discover he is able handle the big kid climbing challenges.

Speaking of new competencies...That right there, thank you to Milena, is a real bike with training wheels. He skipped the tricycle.

This is the kind of thing you need a quiet kitchen to accomplish.

Sometimes living in Annapolis isn't bad. This was taken today at the harbor downtown, just a few steps from where we pick up Frances. Gabriel woke up early from his nap and wanted to visit with the ducks before school got out. He told me every docked boat hailed from Delaware.

The yellow September light fits my mood perfectly these days. With a second child, one realizes how fleeting everything can be. Not that the future does not hold new, unforseeable amazements - but I am cherishing this particular moment.

tastes like fall

That's what Mike says about these, one of our very favorite cookies. Inspired by the beauty of the changing season, Gabriel and I made them yesterday. My qualms about not attributing this recipe to its rightful author (I wrote it down many years ago from some forgotten website or magazine) are totally overwhelmed by my wish that you fill your house with the scent of these molasses cookies, and eat lots of them, soon.

3/4 cup softened butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup unsulfured molasses
2 and 1/4 cups white whole wheat flour, plus a bit more
1 tsp baking soda
1 and 1/2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsps cinnamon  **I use heaping tsps for both spices
raw, coarse sugar for coating

Preheat oven to 375. Grease a baking sheet.

Cream the butter and brown sugar, then add in the eggs and molasses and beat until well-blended.

In a separate bowl, mix together the dry ingredients, then add to the butter mixture. Beat until the dough no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl, adding more flour if you need to.

To form the cookies, roll balls of dough and then flatten them in your hands. Dredge each disc in the raw sugar (it turns out that this is an excellent job for a two year old). Place on the sheet 1 - 2 inches apart, and bake for 6 or 7 minutes. Watch out; don't let them get too brown on the bottom.

fresh eyes

At my children's request, the kid clothesline came out again yesterday. This year, it is situated a little big higher. And both kids now possess the fine motor skills necessary to hang underwear and washcloths and socks up with clothespins, which is very satisfying.


As I knotted the rope to the deck, I remembered a distant post featuring smaller children hanging wet rags out to dry. So I checked, and in so doing, I discovered it has been almost exactly one year since I began this blog. Amelia got me started on September 21, 2009.

Friends! So many of you have traveled the past year with me on Homemade Time, and for this I feel wellsprings of sincere gratitude bubbling up with fresh feeling, tightening my throat. It is no small thing to have friends and family like all of you. Writing to you - and reading your comments - has made mothering richer and sweeter. It has given me a creative place to think through the chaos of the day, and to make meaning from it. Thank you. 

It's been a whole year since Frances and I were reading The Folk of the Faraway Tree, and Dame Washalot inspired us to do some dripping wet wacky laundry of our own. Kind of funny that I just read this article by Cordelia Fine, which launches into a commentary about how bogus our gendered thinking about little kids is with her experiences (as child and parent) reading Enid Blyton. Like Ms. Fine, I do plenty of on-the-spot editing when we hit particularly egregious passages about girls being the weaker sex in our treasured oldey-timey children's classics.

But my elisions are a wee drop in a big bucket filled with all kinds of weird crap - much of which I probably do a fine job of perpetuating without even realizing it. I read a review of Cordelia Fine's book, Delusions of Gender, in the Washington Post last week. I don't feel any desire to read her scrupulous debunkings of pseudo-scientific studies that claim to prove the innate differences between girls and boys. But I'm glad she made the effort. Just reading the review did enough to get me back to thinking about gender more globally.

I felt a little sheepish reading about her book. I too am suckered in by all sorts of biological destiny-style accounts of gender. It lets me off the hook for those shortcomings of mine that seem mapped onto my gender, my persistent femininity. Too accommodating, too afraid to speak up and upset someone, lacking in sufficient personal boundaries, prone to harbor resentments rather than communicate directly about difficult issues. Etc etc. Oh, and I throw like a girl.

So when Science says it's all because of my chromosomes, those things I don't always like in myself become less personal in nature - more my womanly lot in life. An opportunity to relinquish personal responsibility is hard to pass up.

And becoming a parent, especially a parent of both a boy and a girl, has brought countless conversations with countless enlightened feminist types about the surprising "hardwired" nature of gender that we discover as we watch our children grow. Boys and girls are so different. All the preschool mothers agree. I am among them.

Yes, there are differences between most girls I've met and most boys I've met. The terms masculinity and feminity do make sense to me (more on this another day). But when someone comes along and scrambles my habits of perception a bit, I feel called out. I've been seeing through a particular lens that emphasizes certain behaviors and traits and relegates others to the periphery. Oh, there he goes with the trucks again! He's such a boy.

For example - here's some of the pervasive stuff in the big bucket I mentioned earlier - I name every non-human actor on our family stage a boy. I use the male pronoun with every backyard squirrel, stuffed animal, and Dr. Seuss creature. Where's he going? I ask Gabriel about the bird outside our window. What's that little guy doing? Oh, he's looking for worms!

Where are the girl bugs and teddy bears? (We read a book recently featuring a female teddy bear - a sidekick, not even the protagonist! - and honestly, it struck me as kind of weird.)

The only reason I know I blanket the world boy like this is that Frances corrects me when I use the wrong pronoun with her toys. Some are girls and she is truly offended when I slip up; she's like a first-time parent when a stranger gets a newborn's sex wrong. Frances also reminds me that the blood-sucking mosquitoes are mamas looking for blood to feed their babies every time I slap one and triumphantly shout: I GOT HIM!

This disturbs me, the way my language betrays my prejudices.

So tonight, I'm setting an intention: to resist the temptation of categorizing my children. To put up a speed bump at least, so I'm caught up the next time I attribute behaviors to their boyness or girlness. Or to being a typical first or second born child, for that matter. To being such a sensitive person, or a smart person, an athletic person or a bookworm.

What do those things really mean?


What do they have to do with Frances and Gabriel in all their glorious mystery? (Or with me?) It is hard to stand back and let them tell me who they are, to sit with not-knowing and give them that space for expression.

I am not always so good at it. But writing to all of you sure does help me a lot.

a wondrously regular day

You know that feeling, when you are in poorly-lit, faintly depressing grocery store and you have picked the wrong line yet again, and the demoralized checker is operating in a fog, and a slow-moving woman in front of you is sorting through an impossibly fat envelope of coupons, and it seems as if the very effort required to remain standing and upright is more than you can muster? And all those People and Woman's Day magazines whose headlines you are scanning as you begin to teeter (Angelina Jolie has too many kids! Fat free cupcake recipe inside!) make the whole thing surreal and you grip your cart for support and start seriously considering the candy?

This morning with Gabriel at our sunny and cheerful Trader Joe's reversed whatever damage those sorts of shopping trips have done to me over the years. He makes me laugh. We both were feeling giddy and silly, so I indulged all kinds of antics with the little kid-sized grocery cart. I probably crossed a line when I tickled him as our very nice checker unloaded all the frozen berries and cereal and cheese and apples. He shrieked a little too loud in his adorable, unhinged way.

I put him down to pay and when I looked, there he was, cracking himself up with a stray paper bag.

Oh, it was so funny! Where's Gabriel? THERE HE IS!!! Hilarious, I tell you!

And as I was writing this, I looked over to the coffee table and saw a sweet remnant of our evening that I cannot resist showing you:

We learned all about what being a Title 1 school means, and I signed up to volunteer with the PTA, and we got to sit at little tables in the kindergarten classroom and watch Miss Burns use the Smart Board to show us all about field trips and the school library. But mostly I watched Frances sitting on the rug with her new friends, specifically two little boys named Quadir and Anthony. Gabriel joined them, looking right at home. I could not stop grinning as I looked over at Mike.

We're doing this thing. It's happening. We have a kid who writes her name on a blank name tag passed to her at Back To School Night in the elementary school gym. (By the way, doesn't it look fantastic? She has effortlessly captured something in her writing that indie rock boys from my youth attempted to replicate in the hopes of indicating their own authenticity.)

Well. Well well. Friends, I am feeling the flip side of the disorientation Frances endured yesterday morning. I am looking around and feeling grateful, elated, awed by how all this came to be.

How did we get here, anyway? Tonight, while the children sleep and Mike talks Pascal in seminar, it all feels strange and wonderful to me.