slow and steady

On Tuesday night, I turned from my laptop - full of that vaguely ill computer screen-overdose feeling - and told Mike I was in sore need of some leisure. I felt like I'd been running all day, only to click and type through seemingly endless work odds and ends and volunteer commitments after the children were in bed.

Then on Wednesday morning I was awoken by the sound of one big sneeze, followed by a series of mildly croupy coughs coming from the direction of Gabriel's room. Not the kind of sick noises that make a mama panic; rather the kind that make her heart sink. I'd keep him home from school, he'd go stir crazy, and I wouldn't get any of the things done that I'd left from the night before. Oh dear.

But was I mistaken! Those coughs were in fact the sound of the universe enforcing the slower pace upon me that I'd been wishing for just hours before. Sometimes it takes a sick kid to help me take a breath, look around, and really know that everything will be just fine. It's okay if those emails go unreturned for a day. Nothing will fall apart if I refrain from productivity - or the scrambly, inefficient semblance of it - for a nice, long stretch.

It doesn't hurt that the weather has become glorious and cool. I watched that bee climb all the way inside each morning glory, with only it's industrious, fuzzy bee bottom visible for a moment, and then climb back out, straight onto the next flower. He was busy enough for the both of us.

Gabriel and I pitched balls to each other, and watered the garden, and tried in vain to catch the tiny baby grasshoppers everywhere. I hung a load of laundry. (The mosquitoes have not yet received the memo about how the beastly buggy days of summer are on their way out, but they'll catch on soon enough.They attacked me through my leggings! Wily, wicked creatures).

So when we were driven indoors, we realized we had time to tackle a project we've been conceiving ever since soccer season started. Daily, Gabriel asks if today is a soccer day. I explain practice is on Wednesdays and games are on Saturdays, but the days of the week are not conceptually easy for him to grasp. So finally, we made a calendar.

I found some nice watercolor paper, which we first drew on in pencil to create a grid. Gabriel wrote the word "September" above it with such pleasure and satisfaction! In the past week the whole world of letters and words has suddenly opened up to him. It is a joy to watch him make connections and feel compelled to write important things down, all by himself.

We went over the pencil lines in marker. Then Gabriel drew soccer players on every Wednesday and Saturday. Finally, he painted his calendar. And the finishing touch? "I will draw a wild poodle at the top. Made out of...balloons!"

We added the God's eye he made in church on Sunday, and the calendar was complete.

Does he understand the days of the week, or when soccer practice is any better? Doubtful. But he is very proud of his work. And honestly, so am I. A long morning of creative mothering at home was just what I needed to tip the scales back towards a place of balance.

whirlwind

Day One of Second Grade was last Tuesday, and all things considered I think it was a success. I mean, from my perspective. Sure, Frances was full of excitement, curiosity, and at least a little dread - it was her first day of school after all - but it was also my first day of school. The day that ushers in a long season of lunch-making, schedule-adhering, and calendar-loading with school events, activities, and child care back bends. So is it any wonder that I approach September with at least a little trepidation myself?  

The truth is that though the job falls to me, I am at best a mediocre Family Manager. I put everything into iCalendar, then write out the important things I absolutely cannot forget in dry erase marker on the white board in the kitchen. Yet still I woke at 5 am most mornings this week, my head abuzz with the day's happenings. (And I still manage to arrive five minutes late to nearly everything on the calendar).

These first couple of weeks are the hardest, don't you think? Everything begins at once. Tonight was the kickoff event for the terrific nonprofit I work with, at which most of the Hispanic families I support showed up and made me feel so very privileged and proud. The rest of 'everything' for us included Gabriel's first day of preschool, for which he was nervous,

 

excited, and happy. Today was his third day, after which he reported on a nature walk that featured spider webs sparkling with rain drops and a blow out party with a huge parachute. I think he's doing just fine.

Also Frances's first gymnastics class (thankfully she got a ride there with a friend who is also taking the class, so that I could get to my event), a job interview and related supervisor-pinning-down process for me, the creation of the 2012 parent schedule for our cooperative preschool class, endless school-related forms and supplies to send in, and Gabriel's first soccer practice.

It was a rush job to get there, and I was hot and sweaty and suffering the latest pregnancy symptom (if you must know - and you must, right? - it's bizarre itchy skin, one of  the little indignities that no one tells you about, you just discover along the way). Let us just say I was doubting the wisdom of another commitment on the calendar every Wednesday from 5 - 6 pm.

But oh! Seeing my boy out there, looking simultaneously midget-like (emphasized by mingling in a crowd of four year olds wearing oversized tee-shirts) and very big and capable, relishing his big kicks and runs for the ball...? It was, in fact, a great idea. He is a real soccer player now.

That does not, however, make me a real soccer mom. I'm just the hot, itchy lady sitting in the grass with a heart full of gratitude and tenderness.

incorrigible

In the shower tonight, after I momentarily lost my mind and agreed to let Gabriel wield the shower head (ostensibly to rinse himself off, but really to feel powerful and soak the entire bathroom, including his mother), he began dancing with it and singing:

Dang me.

Dang me.

Oughtta take a rope and hang me. 

Hang me from the highest tree! 

Mama would you weep for me?

Which of course made me laugh. And abruptly turn off the water, residual shampoo notwithstanding. He has been gripped by the compulsion to make mischief of late, especially in matters concerning his sister. She has been overtaken by the same disease: baiting, taunting, and engaging her brother in wild wrestling matches that sadly - this should not happen so soon to a big sister - often end with Gabriel pinning her, crowing with satisfaction while she shrieks under his considerable weight. 

Last night she shut him out of her room while he beat on her door in agony. How he hates to be excluded from her doings! So in retaliation he ripped her meticulously written "room rules" off her door, tore the sheet in half, and shoved it into the kitchen trash. Well. Furor erupted from Frances's light, long-limbed form. She screamed at him from the other side of her door, something about being a bad brother and never, never forgiving him.

A moment passed - long enough for Gabriel to realize what he'd done - and he knocked. She screamed some more. Then she heard his tearful voice choke out: Didi. I am trying to say I'm sorry.

She threw the door and her arms open to him. I saw the whole thing go down. They were wearing matching bright yellow over-sized sleep shirts from the University of Iowa (my sister's alma mater), clutching at and hugging each other, Gabriel with tears of remorse streaming down his face, repeating his apologies, and Frances tenderly comforting him and eventually taking him downstairs to read Green Eggs and Ham. 

I watched the whole scene, slack-jawed. The drama, the mysteries of sibling intimacy! Only later, after Gabriel was in bed, did Frances look pensively at me and say, I don't think I really did forgive him, Mama. I'm still mad. But when he cried like that I got so confused.

It happens to the best of us, kid. The thing is, the gripped-by-naughtiness bug is not limited to sibling relations around here. Since school started last week, my daughter has been push, push, pushing me. My patience wears thin during these spells. On Friday night, as I was saying goodnight, she said something complaining and mean to me that stopped me in my tracks. I told her it was disrespectful and hurt my feelings. 

She gasped, immediately apologized, and then earnestly blurted out: I've been evil for the past four days Mama. I say and do mean things when I don't even want to. But I can't stop. I don't know why this is happening. I'm sorry!

Well, that took all the windy indignation out of my sails and gave empathy a chance to make itself felt, something I am always grateful for during difficult times. Her confession reminded me of a passage that resonated deeply when I first read Anne Frank's diary, so many years ago. Do you remember this? She describes standing back and watching herself be cruel to other people, while feeling powerless to stop the behavior. How comforted I was by that eloquent echo of my experience as an eleven year old! And Frances, at seven, was somehow also able to articulate that awful, trapped feeling too.

At dinner Mike talked with us about the story of the golden calf from Exodus, as he was planning to ask an opening question about that passage for seminar at St. John's tonight. About three minutes after the Israelites receive the ten commandments, they build themselves an idol, thereby breaking the very first one. Curious. I sneakily but steadily ate four chocolate chip cookies this afternoon, having just told my children one cookie was plenty. We humans are incorrigible. We do the things we know we should not do. But oh, if we could express remorse whole-heartedly as Gabriel did, and in turn receive the kind of abundant, open-armed forgiveness Frances offered (at least in that moment!), those inevitable bouts of saying and doing the wrong thing might become a lighter burden to bear.

new beginnings

Tomorrow is the first day of second grade. Before we went grocery shopping on Saturday afternoon, Frances suggested we return to our habit of creating a weekly school lunch chart (taken from Feeding the Whole Family, a favorite cookbook) so we'd be sure to buy everything we needed for the first week. Gabriel wanted one too, even though he doesn't start preschool until after Labor Day.

Packing lunches! It's really here. I have my doubts about our ability to wake, dress, breakfast, brush teeth, comb hair, and be out the door by ten of eight tomorrow, after so many lazy summer mornings spent in pajamas. Like the other day, when Gabriel and I decided to tackle the overgrown mess that once was a relatively tidy garden. In our pajamas.

 

We cleared the weeds and tangle of cucumber vines, and planted spinach seeds in their place.

The basil is one of the few crops that have survived my neglect.

And the morning glories have distinguished themselves as a plant that seems to actually thrive the more I ignore it and let the weeds and bugs have a party all along the trellis they climb.

But oh dear. This garden stuff is well and good, but now I think I am just hemming and hawing, delaying a bit of news I've been wanting to share for some time.

Would you like to know why I have been such an awful gardener this summer? Besides lack of experience, an aversion to mosquitoes, and a preoccupation with collecting lots of continuing education credits to reinstate my social work license...? Pregnancy, my dear friends! We are having another baby. And my first trimester, which is now coming to a blessed end, knocked me squarely on the tuches, as my ballet teacher (circa 1985) would say. Oy, the exhaustion! These past weeks, if my family had clean clothes to wear and something to eat for dinner, it was a good day.

I am thirteen weeks and four days in. This morning Mike, Frances, and Gabriel accompanied me on a prenatal appointment at the birth center where I am hoping to deliver (in the vicinity of March 1). We heard the heartbeat! Like a miniature pony galloping away, either underwater or in a wild wind storm. It is an extraordinary sound, isn't it? I had been looking up at the ceiling, holding my breath and praying the midwife would find it quickly - I badly needed reassurance that there was indeed a tiny person growing in there - and the moment she found it, tears of relief and gratitude came to my eyes. I turned my head and found Mike's eyes smiling at me, then Frances's eyes looking awed, then Gabriel's eyes looking incredulous: is that really the baby?

My son soon began dancing, as is his wont, to the fast-paced beat. We really filled that little examination room.

So we are all well, striking out into new unknowns. Another year at St. John's, second grade, the 4's class, new social work ventures (I did indeed finish those CEUs and am now an LGSW in Maryland again)--and in the midst of all of these transitions, we are all keenly aware of a mysterious, quiet, and persistent presence. A new person is getting ready to join our family.