Tag Archives: parenting

Moon drops and perfect days

May 21, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

It was a recipe for chaos: the Little Brother’s 10-year anniversary and Declan’s 2-year birthday fell on the same weekend. The class that Dan is taking at OSU had a field trip planned for the entire day of said birthday and then, of course, the club’s anniversary took on a whole new significance when its closing was announced. It felt like Dec’s birthday was going to get sucked up by everything else in our lives.

Instead, the appearance of old friends and reunited bands at the club really put Dan at greater ease than he’s been at weeks. The whole weekend felt like a vacation. Dec and I spent most of his birthday on our own, taking phone calls from singing relatives, opening the cards and gifts that people had sent to him and enjoying each other’s company. I let him lead the day, happily fulfilling requests like “let’s hug and snuggle” and “read it again, mommy.”

When a packet of glow in the dark planets arrived in a package from my dad, I dutifully put them up in order on Dec’s bedroom wall. Because he’s watched a Science Channel special about the formation of our solar system on the DVR several times, he was able to name every planet after I went through them with him once or twice. Uranus tripped him up a few times, but he’s now an expert who runs into the room yelling “panets!” several times a day, then points at each one expectantly: “Murkee, mommy? Wenus, mommy? Earf, mommy?” And yes, the set does include the recently demoted “Fluto.”

Most of the adults in his life don’t remember learning the planets until well into elementary school, so again, he is blowing our minds.

His Giga (my mom) got him an amazing blue and silver indoor/outdoor spaceship tent and a Moon in My Room. The latter slipped from his hands as my mom and I were putting a play kitchen from Target together that involved approximately 6,231 screws.

“Baby dropped the moon,” he told us.

Everyone tells me that two is a magical age. And it is. We had a little cake with a number two candle when Dan got home. Declan was every bit as excited to pretend to make his daddy dinner in his play kitchen as he was to sit inside his tent and pretend to be launching into space.

Motherhood

He wants pink

April 20, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

Every parenting newsletter I get tells me that it will help build my son’s confidence if I let him start making little choices. I usually give him two options: Broccoli or edamame? Goodnight Moon or My Many Colored Days? The playground or the library? Edwards or Obama?

Lately, the color of bath water is one of his favorite daily decisions. He went through a brief and surprising anti-bath period a few weeks back, so I got those red, yellow and blue bath tablets in hopes that the excitement of orange water would bring him back to what had been one of his favorite rituals. It’s worked almost too well. He wants a bath in the morning after he had one just before bed and he hates to get out. I’ve taken to draining the water while he’s still in the tub, so he can flop down his belly, watch the water swirl down the drain and say “bye bye green bath.”

Pink is a favorite. Purple too.

I don’t have any hang-ups about boys and pink, although I have caught myself accommodating other people’s hang-ups on occasion. As a baby, unless he was wearing some kind of sports-related outfit (which was rare – I don’t like inflicting an athletic destiny on him any more than I would want to inflict a pageant destiny on a daughter), Declan was often mistaken for a girl. I always stumbled over whether or not to correct people, and felt dopey when I did. Honestly, he wasn’t even aware that he was an individual yet, he was a sweet ball of rosy cheeks and big eyes, why project an identity crisis onto him? Still, it usually prompted dramatic apologies, as though they had emotionally scarred my son by implying he looked like he could be the same, apparently inferior, gender that I am.

He once joyfully picked up a pink ball at Target and started carrying it with him, and a strange grown man lauded the sporty interest but questioned the color choice. When we told him we didn’t see the problem, he suggested “well that’s fine for now.” Implication: An affinity for pink will destroy him once he is old enough for preschool. My husband gets indignant: “It will always be fine!” he told the pink-phobe.

When I ask Declan what color shirt he wants to wear today, the answer is often pink. I’ve scoured the piles and piles of hand-me-downs we have for a shirt that had the slightest trace of pink on it – maybe a sunset or a flamingo. No luck. I’ve scanned the racks at Target, Old Navy and Kohl’s for a plain pink t-shirt, a pink oxford, maybe a golf shirt with a pink stripe… there is nothing. Meanwhile, in the girls’ section, where the racks look like a massive strawberry confection exploded, everything has a hoochie-mama vibe — spandex fabrics, low necklines, capped sleeves, cheap ribbons and sparkles. Does anyone make gender-neutral clothing for little ones?

Motherhood

Truths

April 14, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

For the most part, I’m a strong believer that telling my son the truth is usually not only morally correct, it tends to be practical. Unless he’s sleeping or having too much fun to pay attention to me, I always tell Declan when I’m leaving the house without him. Sometimes there are tears, but I find out that he almost always recovers in under two minutes. For reassurance, he looks to my husband between 10 and 50 times while I’m out and says, “Mommy: She’ll be right back.”

He now sometimes sings “she’ll be right back” to himself while I’m away.

Motherhood

Deceptions

April 11, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

About a year and a half ago, my five-year-old niece was bouncing her entire body off a Fitness Ball in my living room, flopping herself onto the floor and then making sudden, armless leaps back over it like a suicidal dolphin.

“Could you help me keep my daughter from killing herself?” my sister-in-law implored.
My husband sprung into action.

“Uh-oh. It’s six o’clock,” he said. “The purple ball has to be put away at six o’clock.”

The rest of us nodded solemnly.

My mother watched the episode and uttered, “wow, parents are devious.”

Motherhood

Preschool woes

March 26, 2007 tinymantras Leave a comment

We took our first mom and baby yoga class when I was still counting my son’s age in weeks. Because the instructor was also a preschool teacher, the small talk on the very first day revolved around the process of enrolling kids in preschool. Her main message was that we not wait – we should get our babies on wait-lists months, if not years, before we wanted them to start school.

This is a bewildering situation, given how mysterious children can be, and how long it may be before their personalities, abilities and learning styles come to light. I’ve looked and asked around casually, comfortable that he’s probably best off at home. But in the past three months, Declan has revealed his incredible ability to memorize and retain information. As the year began, he mastered his shapes in one week, colors in another, the next he was counting to twenty and identifying numbers up to nine pretty handily. He forms sentences about subjects that I don’t remember talking to him about in the first place. Yesterday, we took a walk in a park. As we started up an incline, he repeated “walk up hill!” over and over. He’s blowing my mind.

Just a few months ago, the periodic visits with kids at library reading hour, COSI and the park seemed like enough outside stimulation. Today, I’m having a hard time finding any preschool with programming for children under three – I was hoping there might be one that just does a half day or two a week for that age nearby, but no luck.

Armchair Astrophysics, Motherhood, Zeitgeist

Andy Wormhole

March 14, 2007 tinymantras Leave a comment

One of the great joys of the DVR is the fact that I can catch up on all of the old episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that I missed when I had a social life. (I managed to pull off watching all of The Next Generation episodes I hadn’t seen before during those first few months of napping and nursing.)

As a result Declan has two requests that he makes daily: “space show watch?” and “wormhole watch?” These are usually code for “lie down and snuggle with me after I jump up and down while looking at images of space.”

But it’s more than a TV/snuggling fixation. His vocabulary expands daily: rocketship, Earth, meteor, planet. Space toys, outside of Twilight Turtle aren’t very easy to find at his developmental level. I stapled cosmic felt onto a board for the playroom last week, threw velcro backing on some glow in the dark stars and made a few planets and spaceships for him to stick on there. I think he would prefer that the whole room was covered in felt so he could stick these things wherever he wished, but at least it’s getting a little use.

When I went to a craft store to get some things for this project the other day, I also spotted a small reproduction of Andy Warhol’s painting, “Space ship” on sale for $2.50. I snagged it and handed it to Declan as soon as I walked in the door. “Space ship!” his father trumpeted.

“Oooooh! Space ship,” Declan repeated.

“It’s Andy Warhol,” I told them.

“Andy Wormhole!” said Declan, wandering into the living room, holding it in his hands. “Space ship wormhole!”

Motherhood

Word Sponge

February 15, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

Cheese
Originally uploaded by tzt.

Lately, Declan has been swabbing up new words and concepts like a syntactic barnacle suckered onto a chubby unabridged dictionary. He began to request “more” of everything, from avocado and blueberries to images of nebulae and planets in the opening sequence of “Star Trek: Voyager” reruns well before Christmas. (To this day, if I don’t capture video of intergalactic travel on the DVR for multiple replay, there can be hell to pay.)

Then, suddenly, he could no longer restrain himself from singing along with the lullabies he’d made me repeat several times a day. He chimes in a word at the end of each phrase, adding new ones as they make sense to him. When his Giga (his name for my mother) gave him a book called “That’s dangerous!” for Christmas, he happily mastered the three-syllable word, sing-songing “Mommy, mommy, DAN-GER-OUS” as he sashayed through the house. Whenever my husband watches taped David Letterman shows during the day, Declan runs up to the screen during the “Great Moments in Presidential Speeches,” and chimes in along with FDR’s “fear” and points his finger determinedly while saying “ASK NOT…” along with JFK.

Now, I’m amazed by his sudden ability to recognize and name shapes and colors as well as several letters and numbers. Yesterday, he wiggled around the bathtub with a foam orange 4 displayed proudly on his belly, chanting “number 4, number four,” before sticking it up into the faucet, so that it looks like we’ll be taking Dali-esque baths filled with numbers and letters in the future:

Motherhood

The dream diet

July 24, 2006 tinymantras 1 Comment

Lynds
Originally uploaded by tzt.

Ever since I first found out that I was going to have a May baby, I dreamed of planting a vegetable garden every year around his or her birthday. It took me until my 30s to realize the rewards of eating homegrown food, let alone planting and nourishing anything, then watching it flourish.

In my pregnant daydreams, this child and I would play with plants in the dirt, then water and watch things grow together. On the languid evenings between late July and the early fall, we would happily eat our homegrown “birthday” tomatoes and cucumbers in celebration of his or her life and good food. I just had to keep my fingers crossed that this child would actually enjoy vegetables.

Now 14 months, Declan screams for bananas and berries in the grocery store aisles, so far mostly unaware of the sugary pleasures of things like chocolate and cookies. The other day he reached out his hand and cried as a bag of avocados rode past him on the conveyor belt in the checkout line, oblivious to a quart of ice cream. “Aha, you have one of those fruit and vegetable babies there, don’t you?” the woman bagging the groceries said.

Last night we stopped for sweet corn at Lynd’s Fruit Farm and walked past a table of tomatoes. Declan started to grab one, which would have caused an avalanche, so I redirected him to walk toward his father. There was another table of beefsteaks on the path, and before either of us could do anything about it, he had one in his hand and took a bite out of it like an apple. Customers and the owners all laughed as they watched him chow down as though his life depended on it, juice and seeds seeping down his chin.

Granted, a few more tastes of confections could change his tastes completely in the next couple of years, but so far, the gardening assistant of my daydreams lives on.

Motherhood

Earth babies are easy

April 22, 2006 TZT Leave a comment

Happy earth day!

Things just get more amazing by the day around here. Declan’s cruising, babbling syllables that appear to mean something to him (including a few clear ones, like “dog” and “ball”) and picking up every speck of flotsam he can find on the floor to put in his mouth.

Right after he was born, there must have been dozens of friends and strangers alike who told me: “don’t worry, it will get easier!” The truth is, sleep deprivation notwithstanding, I basically felt that having an infant was a blast. It was the perfect excuse to live like a retiree – nesting into as complete a measure of domestic comfort as possible, napping at will, going on leisurely outings with the sling or the stroller, and shopping for needs that seemed trivial just to get out of the house.

And when I put my boy down, he’d just stay wherever I put him, smiling sweetly at me, content as long as we cooed at each other before he dropped off to sleep. Now he’s crawling like lightning, crying with frustration as he tries to lift things like this week’s favorite book – a collection of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes – onto beds or couches. We’re trying to teach him baby sign language for useful things like “food,” “milk,” “more,” “hurt” and “help,” but he either hasn’t grasped them yet, or we aren’t picking up on his cues.

This is the heartache of motherhood I’ve been dreading – trying to figure out how to help him through the frustration of knowing what he wants and not having the tools to fully express it.

Under the Whale

Out of Touch

January 31, 2006 tinymantras 3 Comments

We’ve had a January of non-stop pain-in-the-ass bad luck and a couple of truly sad events.

First, our beloved dog Samson was diagnosed with bone cancer. He deteriorated rapidly and was in immense pain. We said goodbye to him over the New Year’s weekend – my husband slept on the living room floor with him to help keep him comfortable. He was a beautiful mutt. Everyone’s best guess was that he was part golden retriever, part chow, and part Afghan Hound. A member of the family for over 10 years, he was one of the world’s truly loveable creatures; a sentient who calmly offered himself up for petting whenever he sensed that you were stressed, a beautiful athlete on the hiking trail and just plain loving soul. We still miss him daily. His ashes and pawprint are on the windowsill.

A week later, another kind and gentle soul, Dan’s uncle and godfather, passed away. The youngest of my mother-in-law’s siblings, eveyone lamented his difficult life, which was rife with health problems. But what I knew of him in the past ten years was that he seemed to be a contented man who was extremely loyal and devoted to the extended family. We took a trip to the Pittsburgh area where Declan was at least able to meet several second cousins who had yet to make his acquaintence. He and I spent the service outside the chapel because he decided that the room going quiet was the perfect opportunity to talk. We went to a strange restaurant afterwards, where one waitress was assigned to the room of over fifty people by herself, and a bartender nearly bit my head off for requesting apple juice.

Other highlights of the month: Dan’s car broke down. He accidentally killed my laptop with a can of ginger ale. Last week we had a flat tire and got food poisoning. We’ve had about three colds in six weeks and a few friends are having scary health issues.

We are grateful that there are new beginnings this week with the Chinese Year of the Dog (I am a dog myself, and the Tibetan Losar.

Meanwhile, Declan can crawl! He scootches around on the floor like an inchworm or a drags himself by his front arms like a G.I. It’s an amazing but frightening development, because he can really cruise. In the tradition of the rural Ohio humor of my family, my mother has suggested that we put a cork in his butt and tie it to a brick.

Tiny Mantras

Tag Archives: parenting

Moon drops and perfect days

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He wants pink

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Truths

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Deceptions

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Preschool woes

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Andy Wormhole

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Word Sponge

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The dream diet

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Earth babies are easy

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Out of Touch

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