les mots

I think the real reason we get the Post on Sundays - besides a fading yet persistent attachment to reading the paper on an actual piece of paper - is to see Frances' face light up when she finds the 'Kids Post' section of the paper and watch her scope out a quiet spot to read it in. She still prefers being read to, and so the sight of her with a book or newspaper, all wrapped up in her own universe, evokes the tenderest feelings. Nostalgia for the days of board books mingles with a vicarious excitement for all the books she has yet to meet.

Her increasingly independent reading has developed alongside her brother's growing fascination with language and books. At three, he is in love with rhyming, rhythms, the sound and look of letters. He cracks himself up with nonsense rhymes and silly words and will sit motionless, barely breathing, before a good, musical poem. In the right mood, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats transfixes him, and today I read the witches' scene from Macbeth - at his request - four times in a row.

The same witches that mention tossing the liver of a blaspheming Jew, the nose of a Turk, and a Tartar's lips into their bubbling cauldron full of hell-broth? Yes, those witches! I would not have thought of it, but the scene is included in our latest favorite poetry collection for kids, A Foot in The Mouth: Poems to Speak, Sing, and Shout. (The team behind it, Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Rashcka, have collaborated on two other collections worth checking out, A Kick in the Head and A Poke in the I.) As Gabriel explained to me, the illustration of the witches is kind of silly, so when he looks at it the words don't sound too scary.

It's the sound that entrances him, after all. His response to poetry illuminates how words are so much more than their definitions; how the sound and feel and rhythm of language is what first draws us in. I don't think I'm breaking any rules by sharing a poem here from the same collection:

The Pickety Fence

by David McCord

The pickety fence

The pickety fence

Give it a lick it's

The pickety fence

Give it a lick it's

A clickety fence

Give it a lick it's 

A lickety fence

Give it a lick

Give it a lick

Give it a lick

With a rickety stick

Pickety 

Pickety

Pickety

Pick

So I'm reading this one tonight, per Gabriel's request. (Okay, maybe I suggested it. And then asked if we could read it one more time.) Usually after dinner the children either leap onto the couch or circle the coffee table, surveying the haphazard piles of library books like vultures. (Or maybe vulture chicks, which I imagine are way cuter than their parents). They often fight over the reading selections. But this evening was different. Gabriel was holding a dinosaur book in his lap, open to his favorite picture. It was at the ready should his attention wane, or should he feel the need to assert his independence. Frances was on the other side of me, reading her own book, nearly oblivious to us, except when we begged her to listen to a really good poem. But she wasn't interested in our excellent, musical poems. There was nothing to fight over for her - nothing at stake - because she already had it covered. And that's how it is as kids grow up sometimes. They become more independent, and while independence comes with pride and accomplishment, and makes for less conflict and effort in certain ways, it's a loss and a sadness all the same.

Tonight was the first time she has ever indulged me quite like this - turning half of her attention to what we were reading and asking her to share in. Pickety pickety pickety pick! Don't you love it? She'd look sort of vague and say, sure. Yeah, that's good.... and then go right back to her book. It struck me that part of the pleasure Gabriel and I had taken in these poems earlier in the day was anticipating sharing them with Frances. We just knew she'd love them, too. But there we were, each with a book in our own lap, and the only selection that really snagged her attention - the only time I felt that language magic bind us all together - was the poetry of those nasty, scheming witches.

But really, am I complaining? Double, double, toil and trouble? I'll take it.

laura's world

Could it have been dyeing eggs with natural dyes on Saturday afternoon at the SERC's charming nature center that got us started? Maybe it was talking gardening with friends there, or remembering a certain hushed and intimate deer run-in along one of the trails last spring while Gabriel slept in my arms.

Something opened the door to the spirit of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which has been hovering about the house and moving among us these past days. Now, if you had been present to witness the piles of colored foil candy wrappers littering the dining room table after church and Easter egg hunting yesterday, you might be skeptical. Where indeed is the single hard brown cake of maple sugar at each child's place? Surely they are nibbling away at them slowly, speaking only when spoken to like quiet bunnies possessing untold powers of restraint, determined to make the holiday sweetness last as long as possible.

Well. I'm afraid the candy situation is the opposite of Little House living. But bracket that for a moment; let me tell you about how Gabriel begged to read Little House in the Big Woods with us on Saturday, and how he sat rapt, leaning against my right knee, for an entire chapter. And how when Frances, leaning on my left, begged for a second chapter, he chimed in and begged along with her. And how he later wandered away from the table during lunch, picked up the book and held it in his lap on the couch, saying Please Mama, please oh please read more to us.

What an unexpected bit of happiness! Who would ever think a just-barely three year old boy would be so smitten with life in the Big Woods? Reading these chapters together, and including Mike this time around, has made for the most pleasurable experience of shared family reading. Frances, having read many of these books last year, gets to be the big sister with superior knowledge while at the same time exercising noblesse oblige in inviting her little brother to partake with her in the language and imagery of the Ingalls family life. She even tolerated Gabriel's request to hear the story of Grandpa and the Panther three times (so far) without complaint. It's a pretty good story, after all.

Gabriel incorporates his favorite stories into pretend world, entering in alongside (or as) the story's characters in his imaginary play. Usually this means crashing around the kitchen as a dinosaur, or declaring he is The Red Cross knight while stabbing an invisible dragon. So you can imagine my surprise and delight as I peered through a doorway to see him asking Frances to make the beds just like Laura and Mary do yesterday (picture him "fluffing" all the pillows in the house with great determination) and then later observe the two of them playing at being industrious little helpers, dusting and cleaning and making butter with a tinker toy churn and paddle.

As for Frances, now that she is - as she will tell you - five and five-sixths years old, she is more awed by the Ingalls' abilities and accomplishments. She also notices what is missing. When we read today about Mary making a dress for Laura's doll for Laura's birthday, Frances marveled at her skill. They know how to do so many things! she sighed, then a moment later turned to me and said, but why don't they know how to read yet??

Besides a newfound enthusiasm for the domestic arts, the kids have been profoundly nature-oriented of late. Maybe it's that our more limited transporation situation has been keeping us closer to home, or it's simply the irresistible swing into warmth and growing things outdoors, but I like to think it has something to do with Laura's orientation to the natural world. We have been awash in her articulation of a child's attunement to signs of seasonal change, such as fascination with the dripping icicle that heralds spring. I know it has shifted my backyard vision.

Frances led the charge to explore under the footbridge in our neighborhood yesterday. I spied a bumpy-backed toad along the banks, so stagnant murky water notwithstanding, we all had to tramp down and take a closer look. Better still than the toad was a beautiful green speckled frog who stared up at us with copper-rimmed big black eyes for a long few minutes. We returned his gaze in awe. He finally jumped closer, and Frances begged him to hop into the apron she made of her Easter dress, but he declined.

The best part of all this good clean fun has been its salutary effects on Frances. As you may know, I had been at a loss before her puzzlingly bad behavior last week. But being with her family, lots of time outdoors, freedom from schedules, increased solidarity with her brother, and swinging and singing her wild crazy songs all by her lonesome in the backyard have brought her back to herself. Little House in the Big Woods is a long thread that has been quietly looping itself in and through all of those things, stitching them up neat and tight. 

But will the seam hold under the pressure of school tomorrow? 

(One last aside: does anyone out there use the Little House on the Prairie homeschooling curriculum? It must exist, right? With the exception of the delayed reading thing, I think it might be a grand pedagogical success.)

weed season

Now begins the season in which one charming weed after another dominates our yard, from dandelions to red clover to these tiny blue flowers that Frances likes to pick, pale roots and all, and thrust into juice cups filled with water. The first mow of our weed-meadow has yet to happen, despite clover growing knee-high on Gabriel. I hope we can resist for a little while longer, for high violet season is upon us! They are everywhere, delicate purple and white flowers peeping up just over grass level, creating an inviting sprinkling of color on the ground and endless picking opportunities. When we finally mow the lawn, we will have no choice but to cut their sweet heads off along with everything else.

This week, Frances flew with my mother on a big blue and red airplane to visit her Great-Poppy (who is also my Poppy, and my mother's Dad), in honor of his 89th birthday. She had been looking forward to this special trip for weeks. I took them to the airport on Tuesday morning, helped them get their bags out of the car, partook in a very big hug, and then watched them walk with springy steps towards the enormous sliding glass doors. I felt an unexpected clutching in my heart, a wave of panic. For a minute I wanted to chase them down and haul Frances back to the car, back to her home, far from enormous pieces of shiny metal that fly in the sky with hundreds of people inside them. 

But I didn't. And as it turns out, life with one kid is a LOT easier than life with two. Gabriel and I had a lovely, companionable few days. In the evenings and mornings, Mike would join us in an alternate-universe family life that included quiet stretches of time in which no one spoke, lots of nonfiction kids books about things like dinosaurs and dump trucks, and hardly any conflict to speak of. But when I would walk past Frances' room at night with its door left ajar, its terrible emptiness spilling out into the hallway, I felt an awful ache.

Five and three-quarters is a fine age to spread one's wings and fly, even as far as Akron, Ohio. Exclusive time with Gramma is always a good thing, and reconnecting with her great-grandfather was truly special. And like I said, family life was pretty darn nice in her absence. But. But it was wrong. Amiss. A key person was amissing. She called us a couple of times, always asking to speak to Gabriel (who was, incidentally, delighted to talk on the phone for the very first time).

According to my mom, Frances' occasional  homesickness during the trip expressed itself as Gabriel-sickness. But that didn't stop her from launching into torturing him upon her return home this afternoon. At times it seemed relentless, and I could only stand back in bewilderment. Her behavior was abysmal, and though it could be explained by the stress of travel, so much of it was familiar that I felt unable to simply attribute it to that and move on. I wanted to shake her and shout: We missed you so much! You are our darling girl! Why be mean?

My daughter is a mystery. She is a tiny blue flower that is breathtaking in its intricate, delicate beauty and at the same time a challenge to the plants living around it. She cries over spilled milk; she has a will of steel. Her brilliance delights and awes; it also contributes to a level of anxiety that can be hard to live with. She's a poet, she's a terror. She's complicated.

We are all charged with figuring out how to live with the double-edged nature of our own shining personalities, and I realize that this is the work of a lifetime, not something to be settled by age six.

Still. Sometimes I wish she would.

a healthy body

 

I was dropping a less-than-willing boy off at the child care area, on my way to the treadmill, happily anticipating the opportunity to sweat out those particular toxins that accumulate when you are charged with feeding, dressing, and shoeing two children and ensuring they are safely buckled in the backseat by 8:30 am every weekday. I do love to get sweaty. But more than that I love to move, as fast or slow as I like, without anyone dragging and scraping his little shoes as slowly as possible across a parking lot. There should be a rule. Every mother should get at least 30 minutes a day to move at her own pace. 

So as I'm saying goodbye to Gabriel at the rec center, another mother I'm friendly with is dropping off her adorable two year old daughter. "Mommy's going to go exercise now," she said as she made her way to the door. "Why does Mommy exercise?" 

"A healthy body!!" responded the beaming miniature person standing at the play kitchen. She was so pleased with herself, so proud to know the right answer. All the adults present beamed right back at her. Adorable, I tell you.

For some reason the exchange stuck with me. Does little Mary Ellen have any idea of what a healthy body means? We give our kids words for things, and eventually the meaning coheres. Maybe right now "a healthy body" has to do with Mommy leaving and coming back sweatier and happier than when she left. Later it will mean something else. 

Once Frances asked me why I had to go for a jog. I told her it was so I wouldn't go crazy. My need to exercise has long been tied to the physicality of parenting small children, which requires considerable stamina yet can be so constricting. A hard afternoon makes me long for freedom of movement. In the early days with babies, I would dream of hiking all day, or swimming in an endless lake. Exercise has sometimes meant escape from the world of sticky hands. The nice thing about "a healthy body" is that it isn't about them. It's a clean and simple reason; it's about me, my body, my health.

I'm finally at a place where that feels true. My kids are such big, capable people now that if anything, I feel nostalgia for the days when they rode contentedly across my body in the sling. I have enough breathing room that I've come to a healthy body breakthrough moment: I can take the time I do have and move. I have missed a regular yoga practice intensely since becoming a mother. Between work, nap schedules, transportation, money, and all the other complicating factors in family life, I haven't been able to attend a weekly yoga class with any regularity. I've nurtured some strange amorphous resentment about that fact for years, mad at a world that conspires to keep me from the haven of a yoga studio. 

But one day I looked around and realized those feelings were misplaced to begin with, and totally unnecessary now with my big kiddos. I've been practicing yoga for anywhere from 15 - 45 minutes daily for the past couple of weeks. I feel sensitized, aware of my body in space, able to breathe! Detoxed - at least for the hour following my practice. I had to get over the idea that I needed a rarified hour of privacy and stillness in which to practice. Who has those, anyway? Today, I encouraged Frances to play with the little girl next door in the backyard during Gabriel's nap so I could unroll my mat on the back deck and do a half hour of standing poses. And it worked! It made me think of watching my dad when I was five or six, doing tai chi barechested in the backyard. I wondered if other dads did weird stuff like that. At least we had a fenced backyard then! Poor Frances and Gabriel have to deal with a mother who does half moon pose for all the world to see. The eventual embarrassment they'll feel, and the fact of being that weird mom? Friends, it feels right to me!

And better yet, I'm forming a group of yogini mothers who would like to practice together once a week. I'm no yoga teacher, but I can be responsible for leading us through a sequence of poses. Someone has secured a conference room at their workplace that we can use on Sunday afternoons. Our first gathering was supposed to be yesterday, but sadly I couldn't make it. (You can read about why here). There's talk of scoping out various outdoor locations for the summer. I am beside myself with excitement.

Accepting our limitations can be so liberating. I finally stopping being mad about the dearth of excellent yoga studios with affordable classes at times that accommodated my difficult schedule, and started doing yoga. I realized nothing was stopping me from unrolling the mat in the middle of my chaotic living room. A healthy body can be about the small choices we make every day (yoga instead of washing dishes!) that quietly nurture new growth, ever-so-slightly broadening our vision.