Trip to the Science Museum

Waiting for the bus with Baby Baby, after dropping off Dutch at school

Skipper loves play dough.

Obsessively pouring sand with a family friend.

There's this crazy contraption with blowing air...

Are you having pan-fried shredded brussels sprouts for lunch tomorrow?

This is Skipper's preschool menu:

Wednesday, 11/30

Breakfast: Banana Bread
Snack: Apples with Pumpkin Seeds
Lunch: Red Lentil Dip with Flour Tortillas, Pan-fried Shredded Brussels Sprouts with Shallots, Pickled Beets
Snack: Granola with Oranges

Friday, 12/2

Breakfast: Rice Pudding with Cranberries
Snack: Bananas with Pumpkin Seeds
Lunch: Gigante Lima Beans with Tomatoes, Kale and Quinoa
Snack: Cranberry Orange Bread

Monday, 12/5

Breakfast: Oatmeal with Raisins
Snack: Pita Chips with Pumpkin Seeds
Lunch: Pasta with Chickpeas, Tomatoes and Peas
Snack: Rice Pudding

Anxious

A few months ago, I went to the doctor because I'd been having chest pains and shortness of breath. I was pretty sure it was anxiety, because I am an anxious person, and I have some legitimate things to be anxious about, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't terribly ill. The doctor said, after verifying that I am, in fact, quite healthy for a fat lazy person, "Is there a chance it could be anxiety?" and I said "Yes, there's a good chance," and she said "What are you feeling anxious about?" and I burst into tears. This was surprising to both of us.

I AM feeling pretty damn anxious these days. Not depressed, just afraid - I think the lack of sadness made me underestimate how much of a toll the fear was taking on me. I'm afraid that Cook will lose his job. I'm afraid I will never get another job (this is the big one, really). I'm afraid my family members or I will get sick or badly injured. I'm afraid of natural disasters. I'm afraid of people being mean to me.

If you're not naturally an anxious person, it's probably hard for you to understand how afraid it's possible to be. For me, life is a series of Almost/If-Only Moments. You know how when something bad happens, you often think about how if you had just chosen to do or not do something, the bad thing wouldn't have happened? Like "If I had just been paying attention when I stepped down that last stair!" or "If I had just chosen not to say that one thing!" or "If I had just gone to check on the baby one more time!" You hear stories all the time about people who missed a plane that then crashed, or who walked out the door a minute before the building collapsed or whatever. Those are Almost/If-Only Moments.

I think about Almost/If-Only Moments all the time. For me, life is a series of escapes from disaster. I did not say the incredibly stupid thing that would somehow have gotten me fired. Skipper did not fall down the concrete steps. Dutch did not hit her head jumping into the pool. I did not drop the pot of boiling pasta water on my feet. Cook did not get hit by a car on his way home from work. This way of seeing the world might sound awful to some of you, and it certainly makes me more conservative in my life choices, but in a way it's also an opportunity to celebrate. Every day, I am grateful that we are whole and healthy (for NOW).

So - anxiety sucks. But I can see as how it serves an important purpose when it doesn't run totally out of control. It's certainly worse when I'm feeling anxious about something I can't really do anything to fix.* Don't worry about me, though - I'm trying to take better care of myself and practice normal-people breathing,** and I feel better!

* Like the economy. I seem unable to do anything about it.

**Apparently I'd been doing a lot of the Oh-shit-I'm-about-to-be-eaten-by-a-tiger-so-my-body-needs-to-get-ready-to-run kind of breathing, which makes me feel even worse. A quick survey of the internet indicates that I'm the only person on the planet who didn't know the difference.

Thanks have been given.

And they were delicious!

What we've been doing:

• Shopping locally (and not locally, but we feel bad about that)
• Eating our huge pile of squash (mostly from our CSA). I really loathe peeling and cutting squash, but we have to eat at least one squash a day in order to avoid being buried. I've already cut my finger once, and I anticipate more injuries as the battle continues. But the food is delicious.
• Anticipating the holidays
• Volunteering (I'm planning to average six hours a week at various places from 11/21 through Christmas)
• Wishing for sunshine

That's about it. How was your Thanksgiving?

Some reading material for Thanksgiving

You're welcome.

Seven!

So, Dutch. My girl. Dutch is a lot of things, and when I start listing adjectives to describe her, the list gets long and very contradictory. Today I went to her parent-teacher conference. Her teacher has nothing but good things to say about her - she's on track to exceed benchmarks in reading and writing, and meet them in math. She's nice to her classmates and doesn't brag. She comes to class ready to learn every day.

Dutch is interested in everything, but only shallowly. She often picks up books, declares she loves them. reads 100 pages, and ditches them.* She's interested in things that are Important - today Cook came home to find her and the babysitter setting up a "church" in the living room, and she asked him to be the priest. She loves knowing stuff, and condescending to people who she believes are less knowledgeable.

Dutch hates being wrong, and making mistakes. She's been brainwashed a little that Practice Makes Improvement (all the teachers I've met at her school are totally on board with the praising-of-effort-rather-than-achievement, which is excellent), and Everybody Makes Mistakes, and Mistakes Help You Learn What You Need To Work On, etc., and that helps, but she still hates it.

Dutch's social life is deeply important to her, in a way that is unfamiliar to me and to Cook. She has no best friend, and she plays with a lot of different kids. She is admirably open to playing with every single kid in her school and seems to see everybody as a potential playmate; she never dismisses anybody based on their appearance, past behavior, or reputation. This can be bad, as she seems to continue playing with kids who have treated her badly in the past, but we're not really sure what the real story is on those episodes anyway. But I think it's probably overall a good thing. The other kids seem to like her, because she likes them, and she's up for anything (again, possibly a bad thing in some ways), and enthusiastic about lots of different activities.**

But what I really wanted to say is that Dutch is really different than I thought she was. Some of you gave me flak about my conviction that she was introverted way back when she was two, and you were right.  Maybe she was, but she sure as hell isn't now - she's a classic extravert. She needs down time, like most anybody, and she's not super-high energy, but she is definitely energized by social interactions, and thrives on new experiences and situations that require quick responses. (Skipper shows a lot more signs of introversion, but I've learned my lesson, and I'm not going to categorize her any time soon.)

So, Dutch. I love that kid.


*"Pride and Prejudice is a dumb book," she announced the other day. "So this guy needs to get married?"


**I have some fear about what adolescence holds for a kid who cares deeply about social cues and likes trying new things. Hopefully the desire to please authority and not to make mistakes will mitigate any potentially dangerous impulses...

Whoa.

This is pretty cool.

Not bored.

Two weeks ago, I took Skipper to a library story time for 2-year-olds. The room was packed with excited kids, all running around, dancing, pushing up to the librarian to get her attention and see the books up close. Skipper sat in my lap, scowling, the whole time.* There were a lot of parents there, too, of course, and I suddenly became aware of my total disinterest in engaging with them or paying any attention to their kids. When Dutch was little, I would have been all over something like this. I would have been chatting with people and comparing parenting strategies, checking out their kids... but no. Not now. I just wanted to get out of there. I was bored.

Parenting small Dutch was a nice period of blissful ignorance- there was a lot of stuff about it that was hard,**  but for the most part we were able to trust our instincts and feel pretty good about the way things were going. When she got old enough to talk and be independent, a whole new world unfolded to us, a world in which we were parenting an actual human being, her own ineffable self, whose problems were increasingly hard to solve, and often seemed to be really not our job to fix anyway. I think we've come around to embracing that. Dutch is a person, with flaws and strengths, and she lives with us, and our relationships with her are fluid and challenging. What we're supposed to be doing to "parent" her is rarely clear, and there's a lot of seat-of-the-pants "parenting" going on around here.*** And that's good. I'm usually not bored. I'm often annoyed, frustrated, or tired, but almost never bored by this job.

Today a baby came to our house, and I really enjoyed seeing him and chatting with him. He was absolutely adorable - exactly in that adorable window of adorableness at 5 months when babies are eager to interact but really can't screw anything up yet and are interested in and entertained by stuff like jar lids. Adorable, I tell you. I got to hold and play with him for a few minutes while his parents were busy, and I loved holding his dense, interested little body. But it felt weird, like I had never held a baby before. And I had no idea what he wanted to do. And while he was adorable, I didn't want to hang out with him any more than that 5 minutes.

I'm done, you guys. No more babies, no more toddlers. Give me the gap-toothed 7-year-olds with their weird conversational leaps and their endless questions. Give me the arguing preschoolers raging against the unfair rules. Babies and toddlers are so last year.

Postscript: I don't mean to imply that babies and toddlers are boring, because they're not, or that parenting babies and toddlers isn't hard, because it is. For me, though, parenting babies and toddlers felt a lot simpler than parenting older kids feels. Still challenging, but more straightforward. (Though sometimes the straight way forward felt like it was up a really steep hill.)



*Though she later wanted to talk about it a lot (no, really, a LOT), and she wants to go back. Her general pattern is that she has to do things two or three times before she can actually enjoy the activity.
** If you want to talk about parenting a baby who hates sleeping, give me a call.
***There's also a LOT of acquisition of knowledge going on around here, on both kids' part, and that's super-fun. I know babies are learning an incredible volume of stuff, but they just don't share much of it with you. Dutch, on the other hand, tells us EVERYTHING she's learned, and, better yet, tells us about it as she's learning it. "Oh, Mom! So! 20 times 5 is 100, and also 5 times 20 is 100! Wow!!!!"

It'll take a year to recover.

We did it! We survived Dutch's party! 

Cook honored the festive occasion by dressing up. The tie, FYI, has his clan plaid on it.

It was fun. It was, however, faster-moving than I'd expected, so I didn't get as many pictures as I'd have liked. The main activity was a scavenger hunt involving invisible ink pens (when Dutch and I were shopping for party favors, she saw those pens, and she Had To Have Them) and clues written in invisible ink on "old" paper (aged by Cook, using coffee grounds and the oven) and then cut into five pieces.  

The idea was that the kids had to put the pieces together like a puzzle and read the clues using the magic lights in the caps of their pens. In practice, it was a lot more chaotic than that.

Dutch and Best Friend (remember her? Still invited to birthday parties after going to separate schools for a whole year) were by far the most engaged of all the kids in actually puzzling things out.

They had to get the shovel out of the shed so they could dig up the treasure...

Regrettably, I have no photos of them discovering the X that Cook had made over the treasure spot, or of them digging it up. There was a lot of yelling, squealing, jumping up and down, and flailing of shovels. They were then fairly disappointed to discover that all they got was a package containing five Mad Libs books. (Another thing Dutch discovered at the toy store and Had To Have.) They recovered, however, and the conversation over lunch went sort of like this (really, really loudly):
"Can I have another piece of pizza?"
"Can you give me a noun?"
"I need an adjective!"

It was tiring. Even though it pretty very low-key by kid birthday standards,* there was a fair amount of food and activity prep required. There was some weird kid chemistry. Several of the kids refused to eat any of the food, including the ridiculously sugary and buttery cupcakes I served up. One of the kids threw a fit because we have bar soap instead of liquid soap. There was a bit of a fracas over whose gift would get opened first.**  Skipper was tired and grumpy and insisted on being carried the entire time (except when she ate all the frosting off a cupcake). We were all so worn-out afterward that we just ate leftover pizza and cupcakes for dinner while watching TV, and put the kids to bed early.



* No balloons. No decorations. No bouncy house. Home-made food. Boring.
**Gift-giving and parties - it's a disaster. We've tried to do no-gift parties, or hand-me-downs-or-home-made-only gift parties, or open-presents-after-the-party parties, and this year we just gave up. Now they're old enough that they actually WANT to see the birthday kid open the present they brought. And I guess it's worthwhile to practice giving and receiving gifts. Dutch and I talked a lot about her responsibility as hostess and as the receiver of gifts. Luckily, she didn't have to suppress any disappointment in her gifts, because she loved them all. 

Got some stickers.

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.