Parents versus child-free

Interesting article in Slate about why toddlers throw tantrums (nutshell: they have no way to identify their emotions, no experiences to draw on, no way to distinguish needs from wants, and their world is generally extremely confusing).

I think this exchange in the comments sums up the two camps of people who want and don't want kids:

Commenter 1: And this is why I don't have children.
Commenter 2: FYI: the headaches are far outweighed by the good stuff like daily moments of pure joy and awe.
Commenter 1: I don't believe you.

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Goo

I just spent the last ten minutes cleaning sticky goo out of my purse.

Over the weekend, K and I went shopping for groceries in our neighborhood. The butcher shop had individual foil-wrapped chocolate covered cherries by the cash register. I couldn't remember the last time I had one of those. I threw one in my bag and... forgot about it. Until this morning, when I reached in to grab a pen.

The worst part is, I can't even blame the kids.

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Revisiting Betsy-Tacy

I reread Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series every few years. Every time, it's like being wrapped in a warm hug. And every time, I get something new out of the books.

This time I started in the middle, with "Betsy was a Junior" and "Betsy and Joe," chronicling Betsy's junior and senior years of high school. For the first time when reading these books, I identified more with the parents than with Betsy and her friends. I admired her parents for being so warm and supportive while giving out discipline and good advice in the gentlest way. For turn-of-the-century parents with three girls, they are surprisingly progressive in encouraging their daughters to follow their dreams, including pursuing careers and travel. Maud Hart Lovelace has said that this series is strongly autobiographical. While I'm sure that she has idealized her parents in these books, you can feel the warmth and security of the home she grew up in.

Since self-compassion has been on my mind, I also detected some wisdom in "Betsy was a Junior" that never struck me so much before. Betsy has a disastrous junior year. She starts out with grand plans to study and write diligently, to be a leader in school and in her community, and to take over the family responsibilities of her college-bound older sister. Instead, she spends the year forming a clique, which alienates friends; going to endless parties and neglecting her schoolwork; and, at her lowest point, leaving her little sister at home alone and unsupervised. Each time, the lesson she learns is short-lived. It's not until the end of the year that she's forced to grow up a little. But, taking stock of her junior year, she reflects:

All those resolutions she had made on Babcock's Bay! How they had been smashed to smithereens! She wondered whether life consisted of making resolutions and breaking them, of climbing up and slipping down.
"I believe that's it," she thought. "And the bright side of it is that you never slip down to quite the point you started climbing from. You always gain a little." . . . .
She thought about those lists she had made in her programs for self-improvement. She hadn't followed them out by any means, but they had revealed her ideals.
At first they had been mostly about brushing hair and teeth. Then she had reached out for charm: green bows, foreign phrases, perfumes, a bath every day. Last summer's resolves to be thoughtful at home and to excel at school, had shown a sort of groping after maturity.

I love that. Your goals reveal your ideals and express who you are and who you want to be. And that in itself is valuable... even if your resolutions, inevitably, get smashed to smithereens.

After reading those two books, I went back to the very beginning of the series when Betsy and Tacy are five and they meet for the first time. I haven't reread the early books in a while, finding the books where Betsy is older to be more interesting. But as the mother of a five-year old, I am enjoying the early books from a new perspective.

It's been long enough since I reread the series that I've forgotten some of the things that happen. As with all books I love, I want to simultaneously tear through all of them and make them last as long as possible. It's a struggle to go to bed at night (and even more of a struggle to pack lunches and catch up on work and do responsible grown-up things) instead of staying up reading!

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Max X-O, Great Soldier of the Forest

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Happy Valentine's Day

K has spent the last few days making valentines for each kid in his class. I cut out construction paper hearts and he wrote the kids' names, drew a smiley face, and added stickers. We finally finished tonight.

The other day, X also came home with a list of all the kids in his class for valentines. It hadn't even occurred to me that we needed to do valentines for a room full of toddlers. But check out what I made. Ten minutes with an online photo editor and printed out at home, four to a page. BAM.

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Shoes!

I swore off buying shoes online (sort of... at least partially swore off...) And I rarely try on shoes at stores. Taking my shoes off in a public place would be like an invitation for X to run away. So I've basically had a shoe-buying moratorium. Which is fine for cold weather, because I only wear four pairs of shoes: my beloved Clarks Dara III ankle boots in brown and black, plus snow boots and a pair of casual Born mostly-flat ankle boots for the weekends. My feet are hard to fit, and ankle boots are comfortable and easy. The Clarks Dara boots are also waterproof and nice enough to wear to work. But my black boots are showing their age, after four years of heavy use and multiple heel repairs. I found a place that does full resoling for Clarks shoes, but it costs $60 plus shipping. Today I found out Clarks is having a sale, and I got a $20 off code, so I got new ones for half price! Yay!! I'll probably stick out the rest of this winter with my old boots and then switch to the new ones next fall.

For summer, I have three identical pairs of cheap pumps, in pewter, taupe, and brown, that I keep under my desk. I wear commuting shoes to work (usually my Born Mary Janes) and change into heels when I get to work. On weekends, I wear flip flops or comfortable walking sandals. I'd like to upgrade my warm weather shoe wardrobe. My feet have permanently grown post-pregnancy and many of my old shoes don't fit well anymore, and my work shoes aren't in the greatest shape. But it's a lot tougher to find warm-weather shoes that fit right. I probably need to do some actual shopping, or at least order a bunch of things and return a lot of them.

What's your shoe routine?

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Baby milestones

I already think of X as being 2, even though he has a few weeks to go.

Talking: X is starting to surprise me with the things he says and understands. He's even getting to the point where other people can understand what he says. Despite his increasingly clear speech, he consistently refers to Big Bird as "Boot doot."

Potty: He'll use it if he is in the vicinity, which I'm pretty sure is more than K was doing at this age. But he keeps wanting to go back and sit on it again, so he'll go at least three and up to a dozen rounds, which gets messy.

Binky: We always used the word "pacifier" until X brought "binky" into our vocabulary. Anyway, X has just had his first week binky-free. He was biting right through them. I brought a new one to school and within a day, he had bitten holes in it. I Googled "toddler biting pacifier" and everyone said it's time to wean. At first I panicked and bought a bunch of new ones, because I really didn't want to take them away. He loves them so much. But then JW realized he was biting through them and brought me to my senses. I don't want him to choke on a bitten-off piece of plastic. He still keeps requesting, "Binky, binky," and I tell him, "You bit them, and now they have holes and they're broken," and he nods and says "Bite, holes." He's been crying for a few minutes when we put him to bed and first thing in the morning, but mostly he's okay.

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Blizzard

Phew! The weekend's over. Sort of.

Thursday night I stayed at work until 3 a.m., because I knew I wouldn't get anything done the next day.

Friday both kids were home in anticipation of the blizzard. It started snowing around 9 a.m., but by the end of the day we only had six inches or so. We made waffles and did inside things. X and I went out and did some shoveling. At night the power went out, but it was back by the next morning.

Saturday we woke up to about two feet of snow. We went out in the morning to shovel, but the winds were strong and X cried when the snow whipped him in the face. I took the kids back in. We were going to take turns shoveling, but instead JW stayed out there for five hours straight, not coming in for a break. It turned into a community event, with everyone out trying to help each other manage the snow. A generous neighbor with a snowblower helped us with the sidewalk and the bottom of the driveway. If it weren't for him, we'd still be digging out. We went over with thank-you cookies today.

Today the sun was out and we scraped slush and ice off the driveway in preparation for tomorrow's freezing rain. We also pulled the car out and shoveled it off while the kids played in the snow. It was sort of amazing to see pavement so soon after yesterday's five-foot drifts.

Tomorrow K's school is closed, but thank goodness, X's daycare is open. It's going to be another late night or early morning for me as I try to finish whatever work I can, since I won't get to work until tomorrow afternoon after spending the morning with K. I have three things I was supposed to get done tomorrow morning, and one will take several hours.

I wish I lived in one of those places where they can't handle snow and everything shuts down when they get half an inch. I hate how here you're expected to go on with your everyday life and business continues as usual, but meanwhile everything is covered with ice and leaving your house is a giant pain in the ass and the schools are closed.

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Breakfast

Yesterday morning I got out bigger bowls than usual for cereal. X got all excited and started shouting, "Ice cream, ice cream!"

This morning, I announced, "Time for breakfast!" X, who was busy coloring, looked up and said, "Chicken, chicken!" I said, "Yesterday you wanted ice cream for breakfast, today you want chicken?" X thought for a minute and then shouted, "Ice cream, ice cream!"

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The happy homemaker, male edition

I liked this Slate article from a full-time homemaker (with no kids) who calls himself a "stay-at-home dude." As someone with a life that often feels rushed and chaotic, the author's contentment with making sure the household runs smoothly appeals to me.

Many of the comments are predictably awful (one just reads, "soooooo gaaaaay"). At first I thought, how typical and sexist. But then I thought about how I would feel if a woman wrote the same article, and I think I'd be more judgmental about it. Which is just as sexist, but in the other direction. When a man writes about how he feels fulfilled by staying at home and delaying his own ambitions by supporting his spouse in her more powerful and higher-earning career, I think, how liberated of him. If a woman wrote the article, I'd probably have a lingering suspicion that she was trying to justify falling back into traditional gender roles by claiming she was happy about it. Maybe it's because I like the idea of having somebody who's happily homemaking... but I don't want it to be me.

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X and the bathroom

X said his longest sentence ever this morning! "Daddy take a bath. Scrub, scrub!"

Also, whenever someone is in the bathroom, he starts to open the door, then steps back, points to it, shakes his head and says, "Busy."  But sometimes he can't help himself and he barges in anyway. None of the doors in our house have locks, and the bathroom door doesn't close that well. As a result, both kids regularly visit us in the potty. These days K usually doesn't come in unless he needs something, but X enjoys it as a group activity. He'll sit on the potty too. He used to try to get me to move over so he could sit next to me, but now he'll consent to sitting on the froggy potty by himself. Once he tricked me into taking off his diaper so he could sit on the potty, and then he took off running. Leaving the bathroom door wide open, of course.

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