Terrible/Perfect

The light at the end of the tunnel

I've been noticing lately, even in the midst of one of Baby's long, stressful stints as a sleep-hating mutant, that we're passing out of the uncomfortably (very near unbearably) intense patch we were in as a family. The Big Kid and Baby Show has begun to look more like the Big Kid and Little Kid Show, which is both sad and wonderful. More and more the two girls play together for longer and longer stretches, requiring less and less intervention from me. I remember this well when Big Kid was entering her twos: how suddenly space began to open up in my life for getting things done here and there. The house began to look tidier, I had time to work on projects, we were productive and we had fun. Then it seemed like time for baby #2 which, of course, it was.

And as that Baby becomes less and less of a baby, as she becomes more independent and willing and able to leave my side, it has been a marvel to watch the two girls becoming friends. Big Kid is enormously proud of her little sister, always thrilled to see her when we pick her up at preschool, showing her off to her friends. They adore one another. And they fight, always over the stuff, but mostly it's hugging and kissing and running around the house laughing together. I found myself standing at the sink, doing dishes the other afternoon, while they murmured together, playing with toys and books.

"Oh. Yes. This is how it will be, mostly," I thought.

I have a little breathing room in other areas, too. Mr. Terrible and Big Kid's relationship has improved dramatically*. That fact is of no small significance in both of their lives, or mine. With the freedom and encouragement to attend sesshin regularly, I think he'll be happier, which means we all will be happier. I don't mind. It means that we can move forward as a family. I can begin to think about regularly scheduling in what we've all needed so badly for so long: time alone for each child with each parent, time for each parent to be alone, and time for the parents to be alone without the children (that one's going to take some working up to).

It's been sunny outside the past few days. We've been to the park again, we've been walking. We pulled out the table work again (Singapore Math) after a months-long hiatus.

I'm looking forward to the coming months. I see a massive spring cleaning and home reorganization in my future (IKEA HO!), as well as lots and lots of time spent outdoors.

I see hiking, and picnics, and perhaps even a long afternoon alone in the house with my sewing machine.

And like that, we will have done it.

We will have made it through, together.

*I don't think I've ever discussed this here, out of respect for Mr. T's privacy. In essence, Big Kid and Mr. T's relationship never recovered from the whole-family turbulence of adjusting to a new family member. Which is to say, the two of them did not adjust at all. I don't think it is unfair to say that their dynamic has dominated our family life for two years. It's been...difficult.  

A caterpillar party

So, so very much happened to this cake.

While I was mixing the batter, I thought to myself "Golly gee willikers. This batter is stiff!" and then I realized that I'd neglected to add the bowl full of milk, oil and vanilla extract to the dry ingredients (just the eggs and sugar). So mixing was a bit cacamamie. Then I got busy with something and overbaked a tad. I think this cake should come out at the "toothpick is almost clean" stage, because when I made it the other night it was moist, and stayed moist for 24 hours just sitting out on the counter. This particular batch of cake, not so much.

When I went to decorate, it all went swimmingly until it came time to use the "writing icing" I bought at the store, which has the vague warning that "results may differ on glazed desserts" written on the tube. I've successfully written on many cakes before with beautiful results, but this stuff was total fail sauce. It was sticky and gummy and runny all at the same time, and even when I wrestled it into reasonable submission it then began to liquify, turning my birthday message into the unchecked tears of a sad clown.

It said "Happy Birthday Little Bug", WHICH WAS ADORABLE. And then it did not.

The last blow occured while I was driving on the freeway with Baby today, when a truck started to pull out from the shoulder right in front of me going about 5 miles per hour. I had to slam on my brakes and come to a complete stop to avoid hitting him. It was a world of suck. I stopped about 2 feet from dude's bumper and was very lucky that there was little other traffic and no one was behind me to slam into me when I stopped so dramatically quickly. Anyway, the cake was in a bag, on its stand in the front passenger footwell, and was "secured" in a upright position until it experienced some resistance to its change in velocity and awoke from its deep, cakey slumber to find itself in a top-down position.

Poor cake.

It survived, however, to be lit up and then eaten.

This party was very simple and fun to put together. It had, as you can see, a Very Hungry Caterpillar theme. I made the cake and cupcakes and did basically a whole meal and ate so much that I became a big, fat caterpillar and made a small house for myself called a chrysalis (butterflies don't make cocoons!). Now I am going to rearrange my cells and emerge as a competitive figure skater.

The fabric on the table is from Andover's Eric Carle line and I love it to bits. I'm happy that I had it to use for this occasion, and now I'm all fired up about fitting it in to a project. Often I feel turned off creatively by licensed prints, but there are several out right now that I would love to make quilts out of. The Carle stuff is all wonderful and makes me nostalgic for reading Big Kid Brown Bear, Brown Bear many hundreds of times when she was an infant. The Robert Kaufman line of the good doctor's work is done well, too. It's too much! I need to stop looking at fabric. 

Except: ruh roh! Somebody else has a birthday this year and I have promised myself I will make her a quilt for her bed. I've been looking at fabrics and putting colors and prints together and moving them around and feeling unsatisfied and frustrated then I saw Paper Dolls from Studioe and I think I'm back in the game. 

She's also talking about an Alice in Wonderland tea party theme, with little "Drink Me" bottles and "Eat Me" cakes and costumes and a tunnel to crawl through to simulate going down the rabbit hole and her baby sister will be the Jabberwocky. Eight months may be just enough time to plan the event.

Hopefully her cake will be less battle tested.

Some cakes

Sometimes I wonder why I do these things. She doesn't understand, and won't remember, but it's still important to me: to tell her that I love her, like this.

I suppose she does like cake. 

So there you go.

Mothers Who Push (or, I Really Need to Stop Using Colons So Much).

Have I made it uniformly clear that I have an obsessive child?

This is what has been going on in my house for...I don't know, two weeks now? Ever since I remembered that we have a Mozart-themed date at the symphony coming up and I thought I saw The Magic Flute mentioned in the concert description and picked up some background material. To say that she knows this show is an understatement. She has watched two separate complete performances of it on DVD at least three times each. She has listened to two recordings (so different!) of the full opera over and over (and over, and over) again, as well as the charming Mozart's Magic Fantasy from Classical Kids, a kind of radio play that follows an older child as she magically enters into the story of The Magic Flute and features highlights from the opera sung in English (we also listened to Mozart's Magnificent Voyage; the series is a fantastic way to introduce children to classical music and I'm looking forward to hearing all the rest).

We've had a number of these musical, theatrical and literary obsessions: Peter and the Wolf, all things Romeo and Juliet, Tchaikovsky in general, the How to Train Your Dragon books (which, as far as I know, have not been set to music yet). They go on for ages, too. Months and months of this absolute...immersion. I have obsessive tendencies myself, so I kind of get it, but at the same time I have a very Tommy Chong reaction to the whole thing. Whoa, man. That is intense.

Because I am her mother and spend most of my waking hours in her presence, I get tugged into the whole thing myself. It just occured to me today that I need to set up my iPod with her music on it so she can do her thing and listen to Diana Damrau and Leonard Bernstein and whatever else that's engulfed her at the moment, and I can, you know...not.

She told me today that she wants to sing in an opera when she grows up. It was very sweet, despite the sort of annoyingness of her constant attempts to sing Der Holle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen (3:08 is the acrobatic coloratura run she's emulating; I kind of hurt myself giving it a go). I nodded lovingly at her, and then had a thought I didn't expect to have: If genetics has been kind, she may have a strong musical aptitude and the potential of someday having a stellar singing voice. Maybe I should teach her music.

Particularly in the wake of the parenting manifesto controversy that shall not be named, it brought forth the specter of one of my greatest fears: I will become a stage mother.

I'm a bit self-conscious about how personally interested I am in this funky little niche passion my kid has. A bit worried that I am that guy that thinks his kid is a geeeeeeeenius (I don't. Every child is a brilliant little freakazoid double rainbow expression of the universe's terrible majesty, and mine is no exception.) I have kind of been that guy, and I don't want to be that guy.

So I felt a little squirmish when I thought that it might be an idea to get ahold of a digital piano and try it out with the kid. She has asked numerous times to learn an instrument (most often cello), and I figured that with the interests she seems to have, it wouldn't be a surprise if she liked playing music or even wanted to go into performance at some point. If she does, piano skills would be a real asset. That shouldn't make me feel weird. It's an activity to try that is directly in line with her interests. She's been in soccer, and hated it, and is now in ballet, and loves it, and this would be an instrument. So what's the big freaking deal?

Basically, I am afraid of pushing too hard for my own selfish reasons.

Amy Chua is, most assuredly, a mother who pushed. But who decides what is too hard? Or not about the kid anymore? When does it reach that point?

So many of us get our kids involved in something: ballet, soccer, American football, violin, chess, baseball, whatever. Most kids, even if they don't join an organized sport or take lessons, does something, loves something. But at some point, pursuing a passion for sheer enjoyments' sake intersects with something a bit stickier: the amount of dedicated practice that it takes to truly master a skill. I have nothing to add to the discussion on Amy Chua's book (in no small part because I haven't read it) but from what I've gleaned she does have at least one very good point: learning is not always fun. Mastery requires something more than passion, it requires dedication. It requires practice. And it seems that some kind of push from outside is neccessary at some point.

Going into anything new, whether it's piano or the (inevitable, I think) drama classes, requires us to ask the big question: When can my child quit?

For Chua, the answer is a resounding "never".

But why? Why never?

It seems that Chua values mastery above most anything else, and she is right: the only way to achieve it is to not quit.

After a little soul searching I have come to an understanding I feel very comfortable with. Mastery is wonderful. It is worth pursuing. And yes, mastery seems to almost certainly require some outside pressures. But I don't get to decide what my children want to achieve in their lives. They do.

That being said, I do get some input while they are under my roof.

For my girls, there will be no "quitting" in basic education. No "that's enough" of reading, writing, math and science. But everywhere else? How do I help them deepen their experiences and push themselves through the hard spots without making it all about me?

I think by taking the middle road.

I intend to follow my girls' leads, which for my older daughter, in the here and now, is barreling at speed towards Fancy Song and Dance. 

I intend to continue to introduce them to new material and experiences, like music they haven't heard and books they haven't read and activities they haven't tried.

I intend to require daily, meaningful practice in exchange for our paying for music lessons.

I intend to require them to "finish out the season"; if one of them tells me she doesn't want to do something anymore, she needs to finish out the term, whether that's the ballet quarter or the summer drama workshop or reaching the next recital.

That seems reasonable.

I think that will go some distance towards making sure there is never a movie made about me.

Two

Baby turned two years old today! Which, I suppose, makes her less Baby and more Little Kid, but she's still pretty bald, wears diapers, and walks like she's holding a basketball between her knees, so I get to call her my Baby for a while yet. Or forever.

As much as I love big family celebrations or the cacaphonious joy of the little kids' Friends Party, there is something particular about the day we spend together as a household on someone's birthday. It is always quiet and simple and ordinary, and it is always perfect.

For my January girl the, uh, tradition (all two years' worth) has been to have a completely out-of-household-character taste of summer in the worst part of winter (or is that February?): we buy wildly out of season organic fresh fruit from halfway around the world (blueberries are my and Baby's favorite, Mr. Terrible likes pineapple, which is never in season here anyway, and Big Kid likes all of it, but mostly cherries, which we couldn't find today), and set our pink-iest blue-iest gingham-iest linens and cheerful bright hothouse flowers on the table.

In the future she'll pick what she wants to go do on her day, but for now that is snuggling. So we did that. Big Kid tried to convince her that she wanted to watch some Ingmar Bergman but that was a non starter (although Big Kid did pull out the Special Occasion clause of our verbal screen time contract and watched it on her own, trying to bodily pull Baby in front of the screen every now and again).

I'm still on the hunt for the right birthday cake. I tried this one that Amy K. really likes, but I thought it was bland. The texture was very nice, but the recipe calls for no salt at all and I thought that definitely made the cake lack...I don't know. Depth, or something. I topped the slices with chopped mixed berries and blueberries and fresh whipped cream, so it was fine, but not excellent. If you have a killer basic white cake recipe, something moist and flavorful with a fine crumb, let me know! With any luck I have many more birthdays to bake for.

Baby got a few gifts from us, too. Nothing handmade. I didn't plan for it, and that's fine. She got a tiny plastic pony, a couple of board books and baby doll that she has been walking around with, holding to her chest murmuring "I luff yoo, baby!", so it's cool.

I like that on their birthdays I always think about their birth days. How arduous and exhausting Big Kid's was, and how wild and wonderful Baby's was. And it always makes me think of my sister, and my grandmother, who were at both births, and how much I love them both.

And of course now it is nearly 10 p.m., and thanks to whatever mysterious causes are behind her erratic sleep patterns, Baby is wide awake. And she's pooped in her diaper. 

Like I said...still a baby.

The best of all possible worlds

I am having a fantastically mixed life right now. I don't mean "fantastic" like "extraordinarily good", I mean "fantastic" like "bizarre and grotesque". However the longer I live, the more I am convinced that the key to a good life is optimism. I don't mean to suggest a Panglossian approach, but rather the maintenance of hopefulness. I have a great deal of hope, actually. One might say a Roddenberrian degree of hope.

Sometimes, however, I do run into Big Problems and Major Difficulties. Keeping up optimism in my current circumstances is a bit harder than it usually is. I have to pull out the big guns. 

First there is gratitude, which is lovely and I highly recommend it to anyone. Transformative practice, that.

Right in this moment I'm grateful for sleeping children, the opportunity to sift through the various extant recordings of Die Zauberflote and settle on the Klemperer for my big kid, and a pile of fabrics washed, ironed, cut and almost ready to be pieced.

Second, it almost always helps to try and see the humor in things. I'm a huge fan of levity. Maintaining levity and a sense of humor are things I actually do fantastically, by which I mean extraordinarily well.

My children help me out in the humor department on a daily basis, even when what they're doing doesn't seem particularly funny in the very near term.

For instance:

Today Big Kid wet her pants a little bit while we were at my sister's house because she didn't want to miss a moment of the movie Enchanted. I didn't bring spare pants (which I should, because she pees her pants pretty often at my sister's, always because she doesn't want to stop what she's doing to go before it's a little too late), but my sister had a clean pair of my girl's underwear at her house from the last time Big Kid peed in her pants while we were there, so she ended up wearing just clean knickers. That was how I came to load her into the car to go home wearing nothing but underpants on her bottom half (no socks or shoes, either, for whatever reason).

On the long drive home, with Baby fast asleep, Big Kid told me she needed to go poop. It takes a while to pull off the freeway and find somewhere to go, and I was running through my mind exactly how it was going to play out: pulling sleeping Baby out of her seat, getting Big Kid into the McDonald's bathroom without any pants or shoes on, or putting pants and shoes on a kid who needs to poop really bad, then dealing with the whole potty routine, getting exhausted and likely sobbing and/or screaming Baby back into the car...it was just horror upon horror playing out in my imagination. But as I opened Big Kid's door, I realized that the whole mental exercise was moot, because she'd already started pooping in her pants. I pulled her out of the car, and she pulled down her underpants.

So that is how I ended up watching my half naked, barefoot child poop in a McDonald's parking lot. 

The whole thing was not at all funny at the time, although I feel defeated enough by rogue tinkling and (thankfully only very occasional) over-delayed bowel movements that it doesn't really make me angry as much as frustrated and disappointed. But now it seems hilarious. Because it is. 

By a stroke of luck, she missed her underpants and I had dog child waste bags in my backpack, so I cleaned up the poop and we were on our way.

I didn't say a word about it.

But from now on I will be bringing fresh pants, of both the under and over varieties, everywhere.

Optimism, with a side of pragmatism.

Showtime!

The Big Kid was taken to the theatahhhh, ever so generously, by a dear friend this afternoon (thank you again!). It was a touring Broadway production of The WIzard of Oz, and apparently she quite liked it (although all I could get out of her was that Glinda was "very, very beautiful", and she wanted to know why water melted the witch; I couldn't help but think of Wicked).

Of all of the many traits of my firstborn, her patience for and dedication to the arts is one of my favorites. If I'm allowed to say so, it's striking. As my friend very aptly put it, she is "a born patron of the arts". She is kind of an exhausting child to parent, because of her sensitivity and intensity, but the flip side is that she has passion and a keen insight; she processes what she sees, chews on it and makes meaning of it and takes it into herself. All that sensitivity isn't there for nothing, I guess.

Despite the constant drama of my little drama queen, I quite like her. I'm looking forward to knowing her as an older child, adolscent and woman. I expect we will be able to talk about books and art and music and plays, which will be a wonderful gift. I have little doubt that we will be able to share a love of Jane Austen and BBC period dramas, which is...oh, my. More than I could have ever asked for in a child.

In these early years of her life, she's been exceptionally fortunate to have friends and family who are willing and able to expose her to enormous variety and incredible quality in the arts. She sees local family theater, professional ballet and symphony orchestras, fine art exhibits, handcrafts and films. Frankly she is light years ahead of me; the adult me, let alone the 5 year-old me. Much of my education in the arts is coming alongside hers as we explore in advance of and after taking in a show of some kind (and this, my friends, is why home education can be pure magic). 

In the coming weeks she has quite the schedule. We're going to the symphony to hear some Mozart music, which we will prep for by reading some children's literature about his life and work, listening to CDs and (crossing my fingers on this one) taking a peek at the Ingmar Bergman Magic Flute, which I found at the library (it's opera, it's over two hours long, and it is in Swedish; I'm recklessly optimistic that she will love it).

Then there is a family theater performance of Alice in Wonderland, dovetailing brilliantly with her new obsession with the Tim Burton film and (yay!) the original story. She hasn't seen the Disney animated film yet, so that is on our agenda, as is further reading (biographies are always in the offing around here). There's an audiobook read by Jim Dale I'm going to try to track down, and I may have also purchased a pattern and some blue fabric, but don't tell the kid.

And then of course there's this pink creampuff:

She saw this advertisement in a local parenting magazine, tore it out and taped it on her wall. So I think she's a little excited to go with her Other Mother (not the Gaiman kind of Other Mother, the kind that takes you to the ballet and lets you trade your sugar cookie for her salted caramel ice cream and is very understanding and patient with you when you Want All of the Things in the gift shop).

Cinderella prep is pretty light. I'm thinking that we will find some alternative versions of the story, and listen to the Prokofiev score a number of times.

It strikes me that a great deal of the home learning that we do grows right out of her pointed interest in the arts, and particularly performing arts. Everything is connected, of course, with one topic bleeding right into another, or rather all of them tangled up like a ball of yarn. You're never sure which strand goes where and how it's all tied up together, just that you pull the string in one spot and it tugs away somewhere else, somewhere totally different and yet, of course, connected all along.

I love the quality of discovery in working together to learn something. I love the process, as my daughter's companion in all of this, of tumbling down the rabbit hole of each topic, finding books and CDs and experiences that complement and expand on that little duo of dark, rich hours she spends in a velveteen seat watching the marvel of the human animal putting on a show.  

I love sitting there with her, holding her hand, and coming to know the world a little better.

This time.

Well hey there.

It's January!

....

ehhhhhhh.

I'm feeling a little seasonally depressed right now. I'm having a little malaise. I've written about this before, so I won't stretch the subject much further but over the last several days, swilled in the murky, turbulent neural juices of post-Christmas shock and gazing across the long, soggy expanse of Pacific Northwest winter ahead of me, I realized that this feeling, this shifting shapeless fog of ennui, has become so very old hat to me that it's very much like being, say, nauseated. We all know when we're nauseated, we all hate it, we know that it has some cause or origin and we know that it will subside eventually (and if it doesn't, we know to seek medical help). We use comfort measures, like fizzy drinks, hot broth, and lying on the couch wrapped in a warm blanket watching television to help it along a little faster. That's exactly how I feel about this brain feeling when it pops up (predictably, this time of year). What I mean to say is that when depression crops up, and when my thought patterns begin to trend towards the "despair" end of the spectrum, I realize it's just my head needing to hurl, figuratively speaking.

This week I've been applying comfort measures (chocolate and copious amounts of caffeine) and forcing myself to expedite the departure of the sadness train by dragging myself around the house putting Christmas away, sorting and organizing the kids' stuff to make room for their Christmas bounty, and eating good-good-good-for-me food. It's helping, and this feeling shall pass. Hopefully without regurgitation of any kind.

(I hate vomiting so. much.)

I left my camera at my father's house on Christmas day, so that's the other half of the reason for not checking in sooner. I'm not sure anyone needs to read my writing without pictures to look at.

Baby was hugely, fabulously cute at Christmas. The whole gift thing was still very "Whaaa...?" to her, but every time she opened a gift she made a face, with her eyes popped open and her mouth hanging down in a perfect gaping oval, that was a perfect cartoon expression of surprise. I wish I'd been able to get a clear picture of her doing it, but in the fray (of the whole day, really), I was only able to capture a handful of small, quiet moments.

Like these.

She is an unmitigated delight. Even when she's waking me up repeatedly from the hours of 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., I love her to distraction. And I also want her to be quiet and go to sleep. 

Sleep! That is my #1 goal for this year. More and better. I like that goal best of all.

It is #1 because a lot of the shit that I don't like about my life directly follows from not getting enough sleep. My other goals are, in descending order of importance, #2: Be nicer to my children, #3: Stay on budget, #4: Eat less crap, #5: Get some exercise, and #6: Make some shit.

In pursuit of goal #5 but directly contravening goal #3, I've been doing some fabric stash building.

I would like to make a bunting for Baby's birthday two weeks from now, so I've been picking up fat quarters that seemed cheerful. It wasn't until today, unpacking my bag from Joann, that I realized that my bunting-fabric collection was shaping up to be something else entirely.

Well, would you look at that.

I've had a picnic quilt in mind for a long time now, because over the summer I take the girls all over the place and often set down on a park lawn with a basket and a blanket (which is, I think, my favorite confluence of conditions ever: dappling sun, children laughing, a cold drink, blue sky, a book...I feel contented just thinking about it). I've been using plain, unsightly bed blankets these years, or a flannel rag quilt that belongs to Big Kid that shouldn't be out like that, but I don't own anything exactly right for throwing down on grass or sand or springy aromatic forest litter. But these fabrics! Shazam!

With significantly less "Shazam!", I ordered and received these fat quarters from Heather Ross's Far Far Away 2 line.

All along I have planned to use these fabrics as the foundation for a twin/full size quilt for Big Kid's 6th birthday, and they are just wrong.

Let me be clear: the designs are absolutely as charming as I'd hoped, and I love the fabric. But they are printed on what seems like an unbleached linen-cotton blend. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself; the fabric is beautiful and sturdy, the printing is great...but if standard quilting cottons are Wonder Bread, this is Dave's Killer Bread. That's not a bad thing, but the designs look faded, for lack of a better word, in such a way that when they're placed side-by-side with crisper, brighter quilting cottons, they recede. The other issue is that the Rapunzel print is huge. One repeat, with the whole tower and surrounding flowers included, is about 12 inches tall by 4 1/2 inches wide. It either needs to stay whole on a project that will take a really large print well, or be cut up into fragments, which I really don't want to do.

Unfortunately I'm back to the drawing board with Big Kid's quilt (so far I have a collection of pinks and purples; I was relying on the Heather Ross fabrics to draw in marigold/orange tones and make it less saccharine). I'm also sitting around with six Heather Ross fat quarters that I love, but don't quite know how to use. I would like to make a quilt with them, and I have seen some that are lovely, but maybe bags or something would be better (tea towels might be nice). Suggestions more than welcome.

I'm also daydreaming about other quilting projects (I'm freaking out about Anna Maria Horner's quilts right now...this one is amazing, but I am thisclose to getting some Folksy Flannels) and, ahem, digging my other Heather Ross WIP out from under the mess it got buried in.

This weekend I'm working more on getting the house straightened up, starting out each day with a few cleansing breaths and a reminder to myself of how I want to be remembered as a mother, taking a (wet) walk or two, and maybe, hopefully, putting in some time on the sewing machine and at the knitting needles.

And buying some fabric. It's legit; I have a birthday bunting to make.