Category: Kids, kids, kids

. . . and I’m not talking about baby goats.

Away from Home–Alone

I spent a glorious seven hours away from my home–alone–frittering away time. I drove, I shopped, I ate, I saw a movie, I mentally scolded the parent who ushered her small child into a movie rated PG-13, then I shopped some more. I only brought home pants for my 7-year old and a pair of white canvas Bass sneakers for myself ($15 on sale from $49.99).

Now, I am procrastinating. I can choose from the following options:

1) Wash dishes in kitchen sink;
2) Straight up family room, including moving dishes to kitchen sink and straightening up couch cushions and putting markers away;
3) Prepare my preschool Sunday School lesson;
4) Check children’s progress in stack of student books perched precariously on my desk.

I don’t want to wash dishes. I am ignoring the family room. I really need to figure out some alternative plans for Sunday School because I loathe the curriculum I am forced to use (David C. Cook). (One activity reads: “Give each child a paper heart. Encourage the children to use the crayons and straws to make their family members on the hearts.” Huh? Straws?) The children’s school books can wait until tomorrow.

So, I thought I’d respond to a friend’s blog in which she ponders the reasons mothers choose to send their little ones to preschool. Or not.

She says this of her twin 3-year old boys: “They seem to be strong, outgoing, independent kids, all three of them. That has to be one of the things I am most proud of, that they are not and have never been, clingy children. So, I wonder still, do mothers who refuse to leave their kids with anyone else, ever, do so because they need to feel like they are the be-all, end-all for those kids? Are they so over-protective because it gives them a purpose in life? Or what? What’s the deal? Or perhaps I am just a reckless, irresponsible mother because I do not hover over the children and I do not dote on them constantly. Maybe that’s it?”

I have never sent any of my children to preschool. Why not? When my twins were three, I began a home daycare, so our days were structured like a preschool, including craft-time, snacks, playing outside, and other activities. Plus, I lived in an very rural area. I am not sure there were preschool programs available. But mostly, I couldn’t figure out a reason I’d want to send my kids to preschool. What would they get from preschool that they didn’t get from being home with me? They were already interacting with other children their age because of the daycare children in our home.

When my next son was two, I began to fantasize about sending him to preschool. Mostly, these dreams were born out of my frustration. He was an active boy who quit napping early. He’d throw the most amazing tantrums in his overtired state. Yet, when he turned three and was eligible for preschool, I couldn’t imagine sending him away. He was great company, a cheerful, extroverted, smart little kid. We spent our days going to the YMCA, running errands, picking up his brothers from school and playing. I started a little playgroup and a group of moms came over every other week to visit us.

I couldn’t imagine any reason to send him to preschool. He’s now in second grade and consistently earns high grades and praise from his teachers for his cooperative, cheerful attitude.

My daughter is a clingy child, the opposite of Smoov’s “strong, outgoing, independent” kids. When my little girl was only three months old, she began to display her personality. I took her to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner and soon after we arrived, my baby started to scream. She cried hysterically and I was unable to calm her down. Finally, I excused myself and brought her home, where she immediately quieted and went to sleep.

She’s a child who is slow to warm up to new situations. She’s shy. When she was a baby in my arms at church, people would always crowd us, eager to say hello to her. Without fail, she’d cry at the approach of people. I never was able to pass her to anyone else as I had done with my boys. My 7-year old was so friendly as a baby that once I handed him over to an admiring stranger in Walgreens. Once, when he was about two, he insisted on sitting with a young couple we didn’t know at Burger King. He has always been the kind of confident, strong, independent kid Smoov admires.

But that’s not because of preschool.

And my daughter is not clingy and shy because of a lack of preschool. She was simply born with this personality and my response to her is not overprotectiveness, though I suppose it might appear that way to Smoov. I attempt to ensure that she feels safe and secure in her home. Gradually, she’s become less worried about people approaching her. She talks to people at church sometimes. She chats quite a bit with adults she knows, like the mom of the baby was watch every day. She adores babies and displays an instinct for nurturing them. But she is a quiet, anxious soul.

But she is good with scissors and recites the alphabet. She dances and sings along with her CDs and cassettes. She recognizes about half of her ABCs and can tell me what they say. She talks, talks, talks all day long in the safety of our home. She has a sharp memory and shows a great deal of empathy towards other people and their emotions. She loves to help me do chores.

I can’t figure out why I would want to send her to preschool. What would she get at preschool that she is not getting at home?

Smoov wonders about mothers like me. “So, I wonder still, do mothers who refuse to leave their kids with anyone else, ever, do so because they need to feel like they are the be-all, end-all for those kids?”

I don’t leave my daughter with anyone else (other than my husband and occasionally, my mother) because of my daughter’s personality. It really has nothing at all to do with my needs or wants. Sure, I’d adore twelve hours a week without children (mine and everyone else’s!). But sending my girl to preschool so that I can be alone would be terribly difficult for her. Sure, if she had to go, she’d adjust eventually. But I can’t imagine that she’d gain anything at all by going to preschool.

I don’t think preschool is a bad thing. I think of it as a fun place, a safe haven for children, sometimes a safer haven for children than their own homes. Kids learn to play with other children, have opportunities to create and explore, experience the structure of a routine and all that good stuff. It’s a great break for mothers, too, and really, who are we kidding? That’s why most kids go to preschool.

And that’s not a bad thing, either.

But lack of preschool does not necessarily make a kid clingy.

Preschool is not the only path to strong, independent, outgoing kids.

Mothers (like me) who do not send their kids away to preschool don’t do so for one particular reason. Each of my kids has missed out on preschool for different reasons. Each of them have different personalities, which were not caused or formed by preschool or the lack thereof.

Most children go to preschool these days for various reasons. Some moms seem desperate to ensure that their children will not lag behind other children. Some moms are eager to reclaim a portion of their day for themselves. Working moms graduate their little ones from plain old daycare to preschool. I have no quibble with any of those reasons.

But I would rather keep my kids close to home during the short years before kindergarten. I see no compelling reason to send my kids to preschool.

Even though I would like to be home alone sometimes. I admit that.

(By the way, I think Smoov is one of the most amazing mothers I’ve ever known. She’s energetic, involved, passionate, patient, creative and brilliant. If you aren’t regularly reading her blog, you might want to ask yourself “why?”)

A Few Notes About My Girl

My daughter has to coil herself into my lap now, she’s so long. She curls her legs up and scrunches her head down to fit.

She has discovered the joy of the small chair. I bought a little kid-sized table for my kitchen and she carries the little chair around so she can reach stuff. Today, while I showered, she brought her orange chair from her room to the bathroom, so she could stand on the counter and brush her teeth. She likes to make faces at herself while she brushes. And she handles the toothpaste tube by herself, proclaiming, “I can do it all . . . by . . . my . . . self!”

She woke up last night at 1:00 a.m. and when I told her it was nighttime, still, she agreed to be rocked. I picked her up and then turned off the bright light. Alarmed that I was going to put her back in her crib, she shouted, “I rock you!” I love how she still says things like, “I hold you” instead of “You hold me.”

She sounds emphatic most of the time because she puts the “not” right in front of the action. For instance, “Today I am going to NOT hit my friend.” Or “I am going to NOT cry when you put me to bed.” “I am going to NOT pee my pants!”

At night, she arranges a collection of seven dollies in her crib on the foot end. She covers the dollies carefully with a crocheted blanket. Then, she settles back on her own little pillow, pulling a tiny napkin-sized crocheted blanket over herself. This miniature blanket is meant for a doll and covers only her belly. She insists on following this routine each night.

I just turned into “Mommy.” For a long time I’ve been “Mom” and “Mama,” but now suddenly and without official notification, she calls me “Mommy.”

She passed gas the other day. She feigned surprise, looked at me and said, “Did you hear that? What was that?” Then she grinned. I wonder where she learned that? (The correct answer to her question is what my dad taught me to say when faced with such a question: “Spiders barking!”)

Ukka, bukka

I said awhile back that I hadn’t been bored since 1983, which was when I graduated from high school. I loathed high school. I thought it was a giant waste of time because I could get straight A’s, even though I never took books home. (I did my assignments sometimes while the teacher took attendance or during my lunch hour in the library.) I had more Important Things To Do, though I hadn’t figured out exactly what those things were.

As it turns out, I understated how boring my days actually are. Repeating the same mundane tasks over and over bores me silly, as do the games and shrieks of toddlers. Washing twenty-seven glasses a day and folding clothes and stepping on Cheerios in the kitchen is dull.

Great stretches of my days are boring, leaving me with nothing to write about beyond, “I woke up at 7:43 a.m.,” and “the three-month old spit up in four places on my blue shirt and I’m still wearing it now.”

But, the boredom is peppered with funny little moments, like yesterday when my husband took our 7-year old son with him to the marsh to release the three captive frogs. My blond son gently freed the frogs and said wistfully, “I’m going to miss those frogs.” Pause. “They grow up so fast.”

My husband reported to me that he couldn’t tell if our son was joking. That boy can keep a straight face and sometimes you just can’t tell.

My daughter sings all the time. The tunes are familiar, but the words are often nonsensical. She belts out these words (to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”):

Swinkle, swinkle, little star;
How I wonder what you are;
Ukka, bukka, world so high;
Like a diamond in the sky;
Swinkle, swinkle, little star;
Ukka, bukka, world so high;
Like a diamond in the sky . . .

And so on. It’s the song that never ends. My favorite part is the “ukka, bukka.”

She ambles around the house, making up words to songs, cradling her babydolls. And every morning, she greets DaycareKid’s mom or dad with the cheerful promise, “Today, I will not hit [DaycareKid].”

On the way to the store tonight, she yawned and then piped up from the back seat: “I am not tired. I did not yawn.”

And before I put her to bed she says earnestly, “Tonight I will not cry.”

Really, it’s the little things I hope I remember, the sporadic dots of vibrant color in the gray monotony of my day-to-day routine. Because soon, she’ll realize that little stars twinkle up above the world so high and the ukka-bukka will be forgotten like so much dust under the bed.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Yesterday, I took the kids to the church picnic at a local beach. The start-time of the picnic coincided with my daughter’s naptime, but we threw caution to the wind and partied on.

She ran from the slide to the swings, then detoured to the shore to throw rocks into the Puget Sound. Then a quick trip to the bathroom, where she refused to use the potty, though I knew she needed to go. Back to the swings, the slides, the shore and then, the bathroom again. This time, she did the deed.

While I stood in line for lunch–a good old-fashioned potluck–she crouched near two moms with young babies who sat on the kelly-green grass. My daughter adores babies and risked being distant from me just to linger in the presence of drooly, crawling little ones. (One of them is CuteBaby, the 9-month old we watch every day.)

We ate lunch and by then, I noticed one of the other 3-year old girl asleep on the ground. Asleep. On the ground. They had to do a three-legged race around her. Later, I saw yet another 3-year old girl sleeping peacefully on the ground. My almost-three year old girl was running, jumping, splashing rocks into the water, climbing, swinging . . . we were there for four hours. (The boys went on boat rides and had a water balloon fight and drank pop from the cans. Good times!)

Last night, I washed her hair in the tub. She hates to have her sparse curls washed, but she held a hand-towel across her face and told me, “I will not cry!” And she didn’t.

Afterward, she told me, “I did not cry!” Then, she thought a second and said, “But I will cry later!”

That about sums it up, I guess. Always reserve the right to cry later. Not a bad policy to have.

Light In, Light Out

My almost-year old daughter has begun protesting bedtime. A week ago, instead of turning off the light and stretching out in her crib without a fuss, she cried. Every bedtime since then has been an annoying, yet heart-wrenching portrayal of Girl Who Hates Sleep.

Actual tears roll down her cheeks and she cries, “I don’t want to go nighty-night in my crib!” Then she does that thing where you change the emphasis on each word.

“I DON’T want to go nighty-night in my crib!”
“I don’t WANT to go nighty-night in my crib!”
“I don’t want TO go nighty-night in my crib!”
“I don’t want to GO nighty-night in my crib!”
“I don’t want to go NIGHTY-NIGHT in my crib!”
“I don’t want to go nighty-night IN my crib!”
“I don’t want to go nighty-night in MY crib!”
“I don’t want to go nighty-night in my CRIB!”

After each recitation, I repeat after her. I’m trying to empathize. But the fact remains: she has to go nighty-night in her crib and her tears do not affect me. Much.

My husband put her to bed last night and his solution to her sorrow was a nightlight. He found one and plugged it in, but when he did so, he had to unplug her cassette player.

Tonight, she wanted music, so I unplugged the nightlight. For some reason, we can only plug in one or the other. (We have stupid outlets in our house.)

She cried–wailed, actually–when I closed the door and he went in to soothe her. He said she wanted the nightlight, so he unplugged the music and plugged in the light.

It’s one or the other around here, and not just lights or music. I can do one thing, but not everything. At least not all at once. And that’s why I feel like a rotten mother. Time’s ticking away and I can’t do everything I want to do with my children or by myself, either, for that matter.

This summer, I still want to go to the ocean. I need to visit my 99-year old grandmother. (She lives close by.) I keep thinking about driving up north to visit my dad’s grave–the sixteenth anniversary of his death is approaching. I’d hoped to catch up on my scrapbooks this summer. The weeds are maturing and dispensing even more weed seeds. We promised a trip to Wild Waves Waterpark. We have missed every single Concert in the Park and we haven’t been to the beach once.

Too much to see, too much to do, too much. I am frustrated.

What I Did. And Didn’t.

While the rest of the country is having a heat wave, our weather is perfect. Sunny, warm, blue skies, gentle breezes. I planted orange and yellow flowers in my flowerpots outside and then we went to the pool. We tried to go in the van, but the battery is drained–again–and so after being completely buckled in, we all unbuckled and switched to the car. The battery in the van (aka The Deathtrap) was dead when we returned home from our trip last week, so before he left yesterday, my husband jump-started it and drove it around awhile to make sure it was working. Which it is not now.

The kids are incapable of simply staring out the car windows when we go anywhere and just leaving each other alone. They have circular conversations about video games or the restaurants they’ll own one day. They plan what the menu will be and who will cook for whom and if they’ll give discounts to relatives. Even my daughter has taken to pleading, “BE QUIET! STOP TALKING!” when we go somewhere in the car. They also cannot stop poking, touching, wrestling, grabbing, shoving and tormenting each other.

When I wasn’t busy doing summertime stuff today (and laundry), I was busy creating a reciprocal blogroll which you can see in my sidebar over there to the right. I think I linked to everyone who links to me–so if your name is missing, let me know. I’m all about reciprocity and I love the fact that I just used that word (“reciprocity”) in a sentence.

For those who were wondering, yes, I did make milkshakes–finally–last night. I am a woman of my word. Unless I forget.

My only regret for the day is that I failed to make my youngest son a Serengeti Trek t-shirt by ironing on the iron-on transfer. And I failed to get caught up on laundry, dust the house, clean the toilets, weed the garden, sweep up the patio, pick up clutter on the floor, empty the kitchen counter, scrub the George Foreman grill, iron those pants hanging on my exercise bike, put away my daughter’s clothes, start an exercise program, write a best-selling novel, teach my youngest son to tie his shoes, “clean sweep” the storage room, clean the litter box, vacuum the floors, mop, organize the kitchen cabinets, make a plan for lunch tomorrow, pay bills, wash windows, sort through school-at-home materials, solve the crisis in the Middle East, and figure out what to do with my hair.

Other than that, it was a day well-lived.

Daisy-Petal Plucking

My daughter should be upstairs, watching a short video before she goes to bed at her scheduled bedtime in twenty minutes.

Instead, she’s in the backyard, wrestling five-feet tall daisies to the ground so she can pluck their petals. She’s wearing fuzzy footy pajamas and her yellow rainboots. When I went out to take her picture, she pointed to the sky and said, “Look! A tiny moon!”

She is addicted to flower-petal plucking. I need to make her stop and go to bed. But I can’t. God made two-year olds this cute so you don’t keep them in a closet, gagged, until they turn four.

P

Babygirl, potty-trained since October 2004: “I peed on the floor!”

Me: “You what?!”

Babygirl: “I need new pants.”

Me: “DON’T PEE IN YOUR PANTS!”

With each ‘p’ sound, puffs of my anger blew her wispy hair back. She blinked and said, “Did I pee in my pants? Did I make you mad?”

Me: “YES! Now, go get dry pants. And don’t pee on the floor again!”

Thus ends the suspense. The clean carpet is no longer. I am, however, still blond.

First Day of Summer Vacation

We celebrated our first day of summer vacation yesterday by whipping up a batch of cantaloupe sorbet and swimming at the pool. Well, I use the word “celebration” very loosely, because I grumbled through the creation of the cantaloupe sorbet and only half of us went to the pool.

My twin 12-year-old boys are avid fans of the Food Network. Which is why when TwinBoyA saw a cantaloupe sitting on the sugar cannister, he said, “Oh! We can make sorbet!” This is a child who has never in his life eaten sorbet, or cantaloupe, either. This is the cantaloupe that I lovingly picked out by sniffing its brown scaly skin and waving it in the air to gauge its weight to size ratio.

Creating sorbet requires digging the food processor out of the front closet, which required shoving aside a Costco-sized package of DaycareKid’s diapers (which he no longer wears), removing entirely the dead vacuum cleaner and moving the box from a Hickory Farms Christmas gift which ought to be inspected and tossed, most likely.

Then, I traipsed to the laundry room, where I was compelled to switch clothes from washer to dryer and dryer to basket and basket to couch and dirty clothes to washer. That done, I pulled the ice cream maker from my utility room cupboard where it has been sitting unused for six and a half year. Before that, my ex-sister held it ransom for quite a while in her storage unit before she attempted to sell it at a garage sale. My mother brought it to me when no one would buy it for $5.00. Five dollars! My dad paid $39.99 for that machine, full-price when one day he got a hankering for homemade ice cream that did not involve rock salt and a crank. I haven’t used it since he died almost sixteen years ago. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure it was ever used more than once, after he satisfied his craving.

For all these years, I’ve kept the metal cylinder in my freezer, ready at a moment’s notice to turn cream into ice cream. That moment came yesterday, catching me off-guard, and involved only cantaloupe and sugar, no cream at all.

While TwinBoyA eagerly watched and advised me, I scooped cantaloupe to the scale where we could measure a precise “one pound, five ounces.” Then, we processed the melon until it was smooth and added a cup and a half of sugar and processed it another thirty seconds. He carefully set the timer for an hour and we chilled it the exact amount of time. When the buzzer rang, into the ice cream maker it went and he and TwinBoy B turned the handle three times every three minutes until it was done fifteen minutes later.

Then into the freezer it went.

My husband stayed home with Babygirl while I took the boys to the pool. I didn’t want to take her because although school is out, no one notified Mother Nature and chilly winds blew dour clouds around the afternoon sky. Despite the warmth of the heated wading pool, I knew Babygirl would be cold.

I wore blue jeans, a cotton shirt, a jean jacket, heavy white socks, red Ked slip-on sneakers and carried Jayber Crow with me to read. A pack of mostly pre-teen boys jostled in the pool, playing basketball, mostly. YoungestBoy had the diving board to himself and perfected a little chubby swan dive, while I held my book open in my lap, but mostly chatted with DaycareKid who ambled over to me and sat on the adjacent lounge chair. He was shivering, so I covered him in a towel and we chatted as if we had not already spent ten hours together. His mother came over, apologizing for him, but I said, “No problem. It’s no problem at all.”

The kids swam and played for two hours while I read in fits and starts, depending on the interruptions.

The sorbet’s exile to the freezer came to an end just as we walked in the door. The boys each had a scoop and I gave my husband two for good measure.

My husband advised me he prefers his cantaloupe unprocessed. The boys ate their small scoops, but no one clamored for more. Next time we use that ice cream maker we’ll be using fudge, marshmallows and broken up Oreos. And we won’t be waiting sixteen years, either. I predict a summer full of ice cream and many more days of wild play at the pool, clouds or not.