Spring has really sprung.

This is Duchess after returning from her regatta.
























We're dogsitting again! She helped Cook lounge in the hammock, and Duchess do her homework.

Sleeping with Pachycephalosaurus

I left Skipper in her bed, awake but sleepy, and when I checked on her 10 minutes later, I discovered that she had brought her favorite dinosaur to bed with her. She appears to be giving it plenty of room. 

Still not dead.

Sooo... I really don't have anything to write about. But I thought I should show up here.

Duchess is ready ready ready for school. She's seen some of her classmates at various social events in the last week or so, and she was thrilled. And I think she's getting a little tired of me and Skipper. (I am a little tired of myself and Skipper, too, so I'm sympathetic.) Oh, and she likes soccer.

Skipper is getting very worried about her new preschool. At random moments during the day, she wants to talk about how sad she is to say goodbye to her friends, and how nervous she is about going to her new school. She's climbing over a mountain of anxiety to get through this newest transition. She is also very happy right now, though, because she's going to get her bribe/incentive tomorrow rewarding her for 20 nights of having put herself to sleep and slept through the night in her own bed, without hollering for anybody.* A low bar, yes, but it's absolutely worth the purchase of a bribe (a baby doll, of course, to add to Skipper's large  team of pretend nurturees, currently starring a blue elephant named Elfy and a naked thrift store baby named Donner) to speed up our return to the world of Sleeping Through The Night Every Single Goddamn Night.** And I'm really loving that world.

But we're going on vacation! Hurrah!


* Except to attend her in the bathroom. I'm the privy counsellor, which is fine, as long as I get to go back to sleep
** We should have had a French baby. They sleep through the night, you see, due to all the superior French parenting they get. Stupid American-issue babies.

5 PM, kitchen floor

Self-medicating

I'm not much of a medication user for minor complaints like colds, fevers, indigestion, etc. I generally feel that  suppressing symptoms just takes away your cues about what you need to do to take care of yourself, and it's not worth the money, the waste of environmental resources, or the addition of foreign chemicals to your body. I'm not hard-line on this, but even when I do buy and use medication, I usually try to stick to things with only one active ingredient at a time. It's a general approach that Cook shares, so our medicine/first-aid kit before kids usually consisted of some elderly ibuprofen, bandaids, and maybe a few cough drops. We've beefed up the first aid side of things over the last few years,* but we still don't really have much in the way of over the counter medication.

Today, though, I bought the kind of cold medicine that has THREE active ingredients and claims it'll make you feel totally healthy. I felt a little frisson of danger, like maybe I was going to go home and cook up some meth.** I live a crazy life! Actually, at the moment I'm just kind of beyond caring about cues to take care of myself. I'm tired and under-exercised, yeah. That's not news to anybody, and I have stuff to do, and it's raining. Now dope me up!

*Especially recently, after Cook sliced off the very tip of his finger and we discovered the value of non-stick dressings.
** Though apparently that's not possible any more. 

 Lately Skipper has been putting herself to sleep pretty often. Today she kicked me out of the room after her pre-nap book, and I heard her yakking away to herself for a few minutes, pretty loudly. She sings to herself, loudly, extensively deploying what a friend of mine calls (in describing her own peculiar child's singing) a "strange toddler vibrato." Anyway, when she stops making noise, she almost immediately falls asleep. I went in to check on her about 90 seconds after the last note faded away, and this is what I found.

And these are two pictures from this evening. This is Dutch, reacting to my explanation that the amount of  money we are going to start regularly putting away for her college education is enough to pay for 1% of her expected costs to attend community college while living at home

This is Skipper, playing with the all-time favorite toy in this household.

2012

2012 is going to be Dutch's lucky year. She announced that tonight after beating me at Carcassonne. She got the green light to stay up as late as she wants tonight, as she has every New Year's Eve since she turned 3. I think the first year she actually fell asleep before her normal bedtime, and she's never made it past 10:30, but tonight she's going strong, and I suspect she'll make it. I probably won't, however.

I feel a little wary of 2012. I'm really tired of being in limbo. I'm getting too old to be in limbo. Even if this isn't a fabulous year for me personally, I'd really like to see some positive social changes out there, lest I become a terrible, terrified, cynical shadow of a person, crouching in a cave waiting for everything to come crumbling down. However, there are plenty of anti-cave forces in my life, and plenty of reasons to hold out hope and enthusiasm for 2012. I'll focus on those.

My New Year's Resolutions:
1) Whittle down and organize my various communication and media electronic files - email, photos, movies, etc. I know that sounds petty (and I should be whittling down other things), but it makes me feel weirdly out of control to have all this stuff piled up in virtual heaps. And I'm going to get my email inbox down to empty this year. Take THAT, 2012!
2) Be nicer. I'm not setting out any metrics for that; we'll see how it goes in a qualitative sort of way. Maybe I could at least avoid yelling at my kids for a few days, to kick things off.

***

Now it's 11:15 and Dutch is asleep on the couch in an elaborate nest of pillows and blankets that took a half hour to construct. I think I'll wake her up for the turn of the year, for the first time. Rituals and ceremonies are important to this kid. She offered some very solemn toasts at dinner, raising her teacup of sparkling cider to say big important words.

I wish you all a joyful, rich 2012. No caves!

Some photos

Skipper likes to supervise all baking and cooking activities.

She fell asleep on the couch at 10:30 AM last week.
That's Punghy lying behind her.

Escape

Everybody has some preferred ways to escape reality. Some people choose healthy, constructive tools, like exercise, meditation, sewing, painting, music, etc. I go for food, trashy books, and mindless surfing of the internet. Cook likes frisbee and cheap video games, and Dutch reads fairy books. Skipper, apparently, sleeps.

I had to work on a Tuesday this week, a day when Skipper normally stays home with me, and so our new babysitter took care of Skipper all day. Skipper doesn't like being babysat, and when I left at 8:30 AM, she asked me (sobbing) to leave her in her bed. I did. At 12:30, the babysitter texted me that Skipper had been sleeping the entire time, and should she maybe wake her up?

Skipper has a long history of sleeping a LOT when she starts a new childcare situation. Every time, actually, except for one nannyshare with what I now think may have been an unusually gifted nanny. She definitely uses sleep as a way to avoid real life. It's like a weird sort of stress-induced narcolepsy, though it seems to be willed rather than inadvertent. I hope that she retains the ability to do this. When other teenagers are doing drugs and developing eating disorders, I want to see Skipper taking long, long naps.

So a bike with a box on it is called a bakfiets, or sometimes a Dutch cargo bike, or a box bike. They're really cool, but kind of heavy and cumbersome on hills. There are quite a few in Portland, usually full of kids. Actually, there are many really cool cargo bike options out there - mostly super-expensive, but much cheaper than a car. I covet some of them.

Today I took Skipper* to a bike shop downtown to buy some gear** and I got her a new helmet. It's awesome. This video doesn't do it justice (and it mostly features me being annoying), but check it out! Also, notice the awesome pants, which I made her back up to show off for the camera.

And this is a video from last night. Skipper had a long day and a short nap. After dinner, she wanted me and Cook to come play with her, and we ignored her for too long.

* Dutch is off on a four-day camping trip with my aunt and uncle, an event to which she's been looking forward all summer. Cook said to her just before she left, "I'm going to miss you!" and she said cheerfully "I'm not going to miss YOU guys!"

** My boss got hit (pretty damn hard) by a car last week while biking to work (and he really wasn't doing anything wrong - the driver just didn't look for bikes before turning left in front of him at high speed). And it's getting darker earlier and earlier, and the rains are coming, so I decided it was time to invest in some more lights and reflective gear for all of us. I intend to wrap the trailer in reflective tape.

Tin, aluminum, and diamonds

Cook and I are approaching our tenth anniversary. Last night, while Cook was trying to fall asleep, I recounted half an episode of the Daily Show (an OLD episode) while wearing my nightguard. "And den he was prutehding to be Johje Boosh and he was like 'heh heh heh deh room has to smell like ciddamon!'"And Cook, good person that he is,* said nothing until I finally noticed that I was being insane, and then he gently confirmed that yes, I was.

Cook and I are very different, and he is a very private person,** so all I'm going to say about this whole married-for-a-decade thing is that it's been good, and it's been bad, and here we are!

*Also being mostly asleep.

** You can imagine how he feels about having stories about him posted on the internet. He's pretty gracious about that, too.

Life is Good.

Grilled cheese sandwiches are lovely. They're almost as lovely as a nap. If only one could nap AND have a grilled cheese sandwich at the same time.

* You may notice that Dutch drew a Harry-Potter-esque mark on her forehead. She may have used a Sharpie.

Evidence

This is what I found when I looked under Dutch's pillow this afternoon:

If you're unable to see, but are curious, the books are:

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Karlsson on the Roof
• Little House on the Prairie
• The Boxcar Children
• Meet Felicity

If only I had this kind of faith in myself.

Last night I was lying with Skipper, trying to con her into falling asleep (I do this by ignoring her and pretending to sleep myself, which often results in my actual sleeping), and she rolled over, kicking her blankets off. A few minutes later, she said "Mama, why my blankets fall off?" and I said grudgingly "I don't know." She thought for a minute and said cheerfully, "Maybe because me did sumfing AWESOME!!!"

I think I may have made a mistake.

I signed up to be a volunteer "coaching assistant" for the soccer program Dutch is doing. (50 6-year-olds, 8 sessions, some scrimmages, some drills, etc. - pretty low-key.) The recruitment email said you didn't have to have any particular soccer knowledge or skills, so it sounded like an easy thing to do. We went today, and Dutch had a fabulous time, but I, operating pretty much without guidance, and under the watchful eyes of about 100 parents who had NOT volunteered, found the whole thing a little daunting. And tiring. We schlepped there after a long day of schlepping,* and I was already kind of worn out, and then I had to run this drill? Which involved a lot of wrangling of children? And running around? And I wasn't really planning on that. I was exhausted, hoarse, and very thirsty by the time it was over. I'm getting old.

However, Dutch loved it. I mean LOVE loved it - she's really excited. She declared her intention to be a two-sport athlete (soccer and baseball), and generously said she'd play tennis with Skipper, who has declared that SHE will play tennis when she gets older.

*I picked Dutch up early, and took her to the dentist, and then we went to the grocery store, fetched Skipper from the nannyshare, got pizza, and went to the field. Between 2 and 6, I rode two buses and a train and waked about 3 miles. So did Dutch, I might add - sometimes I'm so proud of her. I bet no other kid arrived at soccer with 3 miles of walking under their belt, or left with another mile and a bus ride still ahead of them, and she didn't complain at all.

I stay up too late

I am very, very tired. I think my sleep deficit is the size of the nation's debt. Every night, I think "I HAVE to go to sleep at a reasonable time tonight."

Every night I stay up too late.* That time after the girls are asleep is so precious that I just can't find the willpower to give it up.** It's the time when I am not defined by my parenting role, and I can cast around a little bit to try to remember who I am.*** When I go to sleep, that time is over, and I know that I'll be woken by somebody who needs me for something she thinks is very important.

Today Dutch told me that she doesn't like school; she explained that she just wishes she could be with her family all day. She doesn't want us there all the time, just when she needs her mom. I told her that I think that when you boil down this whole "growing up" business, it pretty much just comes to learning how to be mom to yourself.

So maybe being somebody's mom, for me, also means having less time and mental space to be mom to myself. Between 8 and 11 PM, I try to catch up on that.

* By which I mean 11ish, usually. That may not sound late to you, but in that case, you probably have either no kids, grown kids, or kids whom you've trained better than I've trained mine.

**Not that I'm known for my willpower. I can't find the willpower to give up anything I like, from ancient socks to any sort of food that's bad for me.

***Other than unemployable and exhausted, which aren't exactly adjectives anybody hopes to earn from any kind of yearbook.

Merry Christmas!

Dutch's favorite present at the moment: long flannel nightgown with lace trim*

Skipper's favorite present at the moment: box of marbles**

We found out today that the seller of our house-to-be is absolutely not going to make half the repairs we suggested. So if you're looking around for a late holiday gift for us, please make it a quick course in chimney repair and roofing

.

*Because it looks like something Laura Ingalls would wear, of course.

**Merry Christmas, downstairs neighbors!

Morning lull

I'm sitting in my living room, in my pajamas, ALONE. Skipper and Cook got up at 5:30 (after Skipper and I discussed for about half an hour whether or not she might want to go back to sleep). I got up at 6:15. Cook left for work at 6:40* and Skipper fell asleep at 7:15. Dutch hasn't woken up at all. This is not normal (except for the Cook leaving at 6:40 part), and I feel a bit lost. We have to leave in 40 minutes, but I am reluctant to wake Dutch until I absolutely have to...

*In our new schedule, Cook works from 7-3:30 (and bikes to work in the dark). I thought it would be sucky to get all three of the rest of us ready and out the door by myself, but it's working really well. Most of the time. Dutch and I do yell at each other quite a bit, some days.

The little one.

Skipper is growing! I don't know how big she is, physically (though she still fits easily into 12-18-month-old clothing), but she is making big developmental jumps in language and emotional maturity, which is exciting. This is your un-edited report on what she's up to these days.

Last night she woke up at 2 AM and wanted to chat, and Cook heroically got up with her. She asked to use the potty, pooped, and then sat in her highchair and ate a rice cake. (I don't know what Cook was doing while she ate. Possibly napping on the floor.) She went back to sleep eventually, but she spent a lot of time talking happily to us while we tried to sleep.

She says some recognizable words now, and tells recognizable stories in words and sign (eg "Daddy. Bicycle. Bye-bye." or "Skipper. Eat. Cereal.").

She loves her menagerie of dolls and animals, and carries an armload of them around. She likes trucks and books. Especially books about trucks.

She's had three days at her fancy new daycare.* She cries at drop-off, but I can hear that's she's done crying before I leave the yard, and the teacher reports that she seems happy during the day.

These pictures were taken by the babysitter last week. I think they give you an idea of what Skipper's like right now.

*It's a Montessori daycare, and pretty hard-line on the whole Montessori cult/philosophy. I'll have more to say about that in the future. For now, imagine wood floors, wooden toys, three kids, a very young punk-styled teacher with an undergrad degree in wood-carving (plus a Montessori training certificate), gluten-free vegan meals, and kind of a lot of rules. It's both soothing and a little scary.

Breakfast, captured in real time.

Skipper has taken to waking up at 5 AM. Yesterday it was my turn to get up with her. I was so addled from lack of sleep that I decided she was just so adorable, seriously addressing her breakfast and carefully deploying her spoon (okay, occasionally) and her handled cup, that I had to film her. Here, for your viewing enjoyment,* are about 15 minutes of breakfast.

*When you start watching, you may think "oh, that's kind of cute. I look forward to the part that's interesting!" And then you'll realize that there is no part like that. It's just Skipper eating her breakfast. It's okay not to watch.