back on the blog...

Friends, it has been awhile since I've posted. Here are a few updates.

re: Elizabeth Mitchell
We went to a show! I traveled to Providence with my mom and the kids last weekend to visit our dear friends Jenny, Michael and Kit. It just so happened that she was playing a children's book festival in Jenny's neighborhood about an hour after our plane landed last Saturday. So we drove straight there from the airport and jostled into a little auditorium that eventually filled itself to the rafters with adorable messy children and their sympathetic-looking parents. It was one of the first times I've felt reassured - almost relieved - to be so clearly part of a demographic. (Yes! Messy can be adorable!) Gabriel was exhausted and wanted to nurse. Normally I would hesitate to lift my shirt for my enormous 18 month old toddler, given the sardine-style seating...but then my eyes rested on a mama in the next row who was nearly naked from the waist up, nursing her little one, and so I exhaled and figured it was okay. And of course it was.
I was near tears during the show, wanting to hold Frances' hands and snuggle Gabriel (Frances had to shake me off a few times). When Elizabeth Mitchell invited children to come and dance in front of the stage during the "rock and roll songs" Frances, in her enthusiasm, tore off and climbed onto the stage itself. I sat trapped in the middle of our row nursing the big boy, watching the whole thing, watching Miss Mitchell say no no no! unsafe unsafe! and directing her back down to the designated dance area, then watching Frances in the midst of many children dancing and gazing up at the musicians. She seemed so solitary somehow, so vulnerable in her fandom; I wanted to run up and hug her and squeeze her and dance with her, so she wouldn't be alone, but the funny thing is I feel certain she did not want me to be there with her. She wanted to learn the sign language for the words to "Peace Like a River" alongside the other big kids and move her arms like water and have it all for herself.

Re: Sleep
Yesterday Gabriel slept until 7:15!!! Today he woke up at 6:15. But still. This is SO MUCH BETTER than the past months I can't believe it. I think I just had to vent and complain in this semi-public forum in order for things to get better. Bedtime is now around 6:45 or 7, and the evenings are much sweeter, because we are able to read together and do bathtime together. For the most part the children seem to feel some heading-towards-sleep solidarity that is very satisfying for this mama to witness.

Re: Apple picking
We loved it so much. An apple cake, a bubbling pot of applesauce, and many many slices of apples and peanut butter later, Frances drew a picture that I thought was great - "this is me picking Ida Reds and putting them in a big bag":


What else? So much else. We had a lovely time in Providence. I felt utterly at home. My family lived in the same neighborhood where we were visiting when I was Frances' age (moved away when I was six)and I couldn't help indulging fantasies, wondering what life would have been like had we stayed, had I grown up there.
I hope I find a way to live in Annapolis without the deep-down sense of alienation that seems to color all our trips to beautiful communities with a bit of sadness for me. I wish I could simply enjoy these visits to Rhinebeck and Providence and Vermont and Lancaster - enjoy them without the quiet pouter in the back of my brain encouraging me to compare all I see (unfavorably) to my new home on the Chesapeake. But even with my private background bouts of adolescent grump, the shared foreground proved too delightful to be compromised. Jenny and Michael have two adorable dogs that kept the children busy and happy; we went to the zoo and freaked out over the giant anteaters; we frequented a playground that featured a graveyard of plastic toys left by neighborhood families, strewn about haphazardly and surrounded by the vivid newly fallen leaves. Perfect.





But no amount of plastic toys, cookies, big-hearted friends and attractive playground-goers can make up for a gaping absence. There is nothing in the world like being all together, and so we were very, very happy to be reunited with Mike at the end of our trip.

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.

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.

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.