Punting on the River Cam.
Climbing the stairs at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
And exploring a field that’s unlike anything in Southern California.
Ain’t she cute?
And her Dad takes darn good photos.
Yesterday, we spent most of the morning biking out to Anglesey Abbey, which, with a couple wrong turns, was more than a 2-hour ride. I had been longing to bicycle through the British countryside, but, by the end of our ride, Sophie was insisting that I sing endless renditions of “Wishy-Washy Washer People,” to keep her content in her back bike-seat, under the wide sky and open fields. The view was so open that the poor girl felt like she didn’t have anything to do. I told myself that I spend most days catering to Sophie’s whims and it would be good for her to cater to my whim just this once.
She was superb in the Abbey, though, probably because we started off with cake & ice cream before exploring the gardens. She loved the “Green Tree Tunnels,” whenever tree branches met over the top of the path. She loved naming the colors of the flowers, commenting on all the naked statues (“man taking bath; another man taking bath”), and running on the grass while cheering herself on: “Go Sophie go.”
But I miscalculated how long a walk back it would be on the zigzag path from the millhouse, and then she fell asleep on the bike, bouncing and swaying back there. I don’t know how she doesn’t break her neck, sleeping on that bike-seat. When we got to quieter roads, I just got off and pushed the bike, to smooth out Sophie’s ride. She slept in that uncomfortable way for 45 minutes, at least.
She woke up just as we turned into our apartment complex. It was past noon, and I figured she would be hungry, but mostly she was just mischievous. There aren’t many firm rules around here. No slapping anyone in the face, that’s one rule. And no putting your barrettes in your mouth. That’s pretty much it for indoor rules, really.
Sophie pulled her little pink barrette out of her hair and put it in her mouth. “Ick,” I told her, “spit that out, please.” She impishly ran around, daring me to catch her. I didn’t want to make this into a game. I chose to ignore her. I was buttering our crumpets, betting that she would spit out the barrette in favor of the crumpet. But she kept darting around, showing me the barrette on her tongue, jogging away. I poured us our milk. I told Sophie that the barrette could hurt her, but she was in a mood. She ran into her room. Finally, I went to fetch her. I picked her up, carrying her to the kitchen table, telling her I was going to have to get that barrette out of her mouth. It was then that I saw that her lips were blue.
Quickly, nearly automatically, I placed her stomach down on my knee, pounded hard on her back, and – thank goodness – that barrette came flying out on to the middle of the carpet. I’m not sure when all those posters “WHAT TO DO IF YOUR CHILD IS CHOKING” snuck into my brain, but the knowledge was there, and it worked. Thank God.
It took a while for her lips to lose their blueness. “Sophie mouth boo-boo,” she told me.
Now we have another rule: Sophie is no longer allowed to wear barrettes. She won’t keep head-bands on, and she doesn’t like hair-bands, so she’s just going to have hair in her eyes, I guess, at least for while.
It took a while for me to breathe normally again. My heart’s pounding, even now, a day later, while I type this. I tell myself that every child has near-death experiences every now and then. I tell myself that I should just be happy that she’s okay, that I remembered the right first-aid move, that everything turned out fine. But, sheesh, that was scary.
5 am: Ben gets up to get in a fifty-mile bike-ride before work.
6:30 am: If we’re lucky, this is when Sophie wakes up. Some days, it’s 5:30. Some days, it’s 7:00, and that’s nice, because I can wake up first and do some yoga without her constantly trying to get my attention by knocking me over. Whenever it is when Sophie wakes up, we first make tea (Sophie’s “tea” is plain milk plus hot water), get her dressed, do her hair (it will not stay out of her eyes, whatever I try), eat some oatmeal cooled with yogurt. Ben and I take turns watching Sophie while the other one showers.
7:30: Wave bye-bye to Daddy. Commence puttering about the house, because it’s too early to go to the parks – it’s still chilly out, and the parks will be soaking with dew, and the municipal cleaners won’t have arrived yet to clear away last night’s beer-cans from the children’s slide. So this is when I clean our house, do the dishes, the laundry, the vacuuming. Sophie plays with her paper dolls, tea-set, markers, legos. There’s not enough toys for her here, though, and soon we will both be desperate to leave the house.
8:30: Bike out of the city, along the canal path, to say good-morning to the brown cows and two horses who wear hats (the hats are there to help prevent a fly-induced eye-infection). Every morning, Sophie declares, “I wanna see cows! I wanna see horsies with hats!” I am happy to oblige. It’s my favorite part of the morning. It’s only a seven-minute bike ride to get to the horses, almost all of it on streets with no traffic. It’s only seven minutes in the other direction to the center of town. It’s amazing how well these British cities work, with the rural bit right up next to the urban bit.
9 am: On our way back from the horses, we stop at “Green Park,” Sophie’s latest favorite. There is also “Yellow Park,” “Red Park,” “My Soccer Ball Park,” “Baby Park” and “Other Side Baby Park,” as well as a few other parks that Sophie has not yet named. There was a great deal of frustration, for both Sophie and me, while Sophie decided which color to name each park and I struggled to follow her shifting names and park requests. We both like Green Park, though, which Sophie also calls Cow Park. Its actual name is Stourbridge Commons. I spend a large portion of my day pushing Sophie on the swings.
10 am or so: We eat a mid-morning snack and finally leave the park. We may go to a museum (most museums open at 10 am), or pester our neighbors (our only friends, here), or go exploring downtown. We may go to another park, or the library, or to the local church’s play-hour, or out for groceries or other errands. Someday soon we plan to go swimming. Another day soon, I am going to bike Sophie the 7 miles out of town to a farm-museum on a classic British estate – but each time I have tried it, she has gotten impatient and insisted on detours after only two miles or so. Yesterday, I tried to take her kite-flying, but by the time I had found the string that goes with our kite, Sophie had declared that kites are a Daddy-only activity. Eventually, I am hoping to figure out a way to take Sophie on the train to London while still letting her have her nap.
After that, I am out of ideas, and stuck with endless swing-pushing, or probably revisiting some local Cambridge museums. Our days are both boring and crowded. Because of late opening times (plus Sophie’s need for free-play run-around-the-park time), there is only the 10am to noon window for morning adventures, and because of Sophie’s napping and eating, there is only a 4pm till 5 window for afternoon adventures. We get a lot more done on the weekends, when Ben and I get more ambitious, ignoring Sophie’s need for down-time and nap-time. Then I spend the early part of every week helping Sophie recover, returning to our days that are full of routines, but short on adventure.
Noon: Return home for lunch and quieting Sophie to sleep. Sometimes Ben bikes home from work to join us, which is nice, because it means I get some adult conversation in my day. Sometimes I keep her out later than noon, but that tends to lead to both of us suffering, when Sophie will get desperately tired but unable to find her way to sleep.
1 pm: Sophie naps. In June, I used this time to work on my manuscript. In July, I am using this time to plan classes, somewhat, or read novels, sometimes, or – at the moment – blog. I don’t know what non-working, non-blogging mothers do during nap-time. It actually bewilders me. I rush to the computer as soon as Sophie is asleep. We have no internet at home, so I actually get a lot of academic work done in the early afternoon.
3 pm: Sophie wakes up and we eat our second lunch.
4 pm: Another park, or out for groceries, or maybe just jumping in rain-puddles outside our home.
5 pm: “Daddy home!” Sophie exclaims every time she hears anyone in our apartment building open the front door. Eventually, Daddy actually is home. I make dinner while he plays with Sophie. Sometimes I go out, to get a few hours baby-free. Sometimes we go out together, for a family stroll.
6: dinner
7: bath
8: bed. To those of you who don’t have kids, you might not understand how dinner can take almost the full hour from 6 till 7, but it does with clean up and distractions and all. You really might not understand how bath can take the full hour from 7 till 8, but it does, with the help of Sophie’s tea-set and all the pretend-drinks she attempts to serve us while she bathes. Bedtime itself usually isn’t over till 8:30 or 9. By then, I may sleep myself. If I’m ambitious, I work more before bed. At first, Ben and I watched movies together, but by now, we’re mostly exhausted.
I’m not sure if our British life is all that different from our American life. In America, Sophie is in daycare three days a week, we drive more than biking, we visit fewer museums, and there are no nearby horsies that I know of, with or without hats. There are more friends and playdates, though. That is what Sophie misses the most, here, perhaps because she senses that it is also what I miss the most. She has started struggling to pronounce names I have never heard her say before. “I want to see Mila. I want to see Tori. I want to see Gracie. Kai and Elijah. Chloe. Sarah, Maci, Nevin. Bryan Christine. Momma? I want to see Mila…” That recitation is also part of our daily routine. Every time we see a train, she remembers that back home, she rode train with Mila. Sometimes she wants to play a game where she announces, “Bye-bye! Sophie airplane now,” kisses me like her Dad kisses me in the morning, then orders me to cry. Then she repeats the whole routine.
I suspect that as soon as we get back to Mila, Tori, Gracie, Kai, Elijah, and everyone else, what Sophie is going to be saying is, “I want green park. I want horsies with hats.”
Every night before bed, I tell Sophie stories of our day, trying to ease her way to sleep, trying to set a tradition that she may follow later, when I hope she’ll tell me her own stories. Maybe I’m creating a future blogger. She’s just started to get enough language that she can participate in these stories, repeating the details she likes.
This was our story of this weekend.
Me: We got in a car, a red car, and the car had a roof that went up and down. You pushed the button to move the roof on and off.
Sophie: Sophie did it! Car roof.
Me: Yes, Sophie did the car roof. Then we drove and drove. We passed cows and horses and sheep. You slept. And then we got to the Peak District and went walking. We walked over stones over a river. We walked past flowers with bees. We looked at birds.
Sophie: Ladybug.
Me: Yes, we looked for ladybugs, but we didn’t find any. We found caves. We found puddles, and you were wearing your boots, so you could jump in the puddles. We saw a man climbing a rock.
Sophie: Man up! Hat boo-boo.
Me: Yes, he wore a hat to protect his head, to keep him from getting any boo-boos.
And so on. What Sophie remembers from the weekend is extraordinary.
We stayed in a castle in a tiny town in the Peak District, a castle that’s now a hostel. Sophie quite quickly learned the way from the tea-room to the toilet to the Italian garden to the spiral staircase to the tree around which she kicked her ball to the field where the sheep grazed, to the kitchen where a kind lady gave her milk when she woke up long before breakfast-time.
Sophie wasn’t much interested in the old church on this giant estate, but she did relish the ladder on the hostel bunk-beds. We had a private room of 2 bunk-beds. We put her in a bottom bunk and piled pillows and blankets all around, and although I worried all night, she didn’t fall down.
It wasn’t a castle, exactly: I don’t think any royalty ever lived there. More like a large country estate, made of stone, full of gothic details, sold to an antiquities dealer in the 1930s, who gutted a portion of it and then re-sold it to the national trust, who made it into a hostel, brilliantly. The front ball-room is now the hostel game-room. The back stretches out in other buildings, barns and kitchens and I-don’t-know what, each now a hostel bedroom. The gardens went on and on. It was a terrific place to take a baby on vacation.
When Sophie was overly-energetic before bed, we took her walking along the river, to another field, to look at the sheep going to sleep, and that’s what she talks about most from our weekend: the sheep went to sleep. We walked home through a darkening wood as bunnies hopped across our paths. We walked a lot all weekend. Sophie is getting almost too heavy for her sling, and annoyingly clingy to me, preferring to have me carry her 90% of the time, so Ben can’t give me a break. Fortunately, Ben takes better photos than me, so he carries the camera, and I need to get better arm-muscles anyway, so I carry Sophie – but, still, that part of the weekend was tiring. On Saturday, we hiked more than 3 miles with Sophie, and then at nap-time, when Ben sat with her so I could go walking without her, I felt so liberatingly light.
On Sunday, we went to a historic steam railway that thrilled Ben. For all his coolness, Ben is also a nerdy railway-buff. Sophie loved the choo-choo too, catching her Dad’s excitement. On the way home, she managed to spill a lot of water on herself, making for a sobbing nerve-wracking car-ride – but still, we had a red convertible Mini Cooper, and we were driving home from a weekend in a British castle in the kind of gorgeous countryside that features sheep on the roads.
It’s Friday, and Sophie is taking her first proper nap this week.
Thursday I decided that spending 90 minutes quietly in bed was the same as napping. After many long talks about the importance of naps, after carefully calming soothing her down, she lay down, tossed & turned, read her Argos catalog, asked me for a drink of milk, lay down a little longer, asked me if she could wake up, obediently lay down a little longer, asked me if I could guess where she had hidden her baby doll, lay down a little longer. As long as she stayed cheerful and relatively quiet, that seemed as good as I could get.
But it wasn’t as good as a nap. Afterward, she was cranky, bursting into loud sobs at the slightest provocation. I put her in her bike-seat and we went out, riding past the supermarket, over the railway bridge, across the giant Coldham’s Common, through the little back streets to the library. A block from the library, I realized she had fallen soundly asleep on the back of the bike.
Unfortunately, falling asleep in a bike seat is not as comfortable as falling asleep in a carseat. Her little head was bobbing around so much that her bike helmet actually fell off. The car behind us screeched to a halt, waiting for me to pick up Sophie’s cute pink helmet from the middle of the road. The mother who was driving gave me a smile. She understood. I strapped the helmet back on Sophie’s head, but the helmet fell off again a few blocks later. By the time I finally got back to Coldham’s Common, I parked the bike under a tree, in the shade, watching her in sleep so deep that I could even brush the flies from her face. I tried to lift her out of the bike-seat, to place her down on the grass for a proper nap.
Of course she woke up as soon as I lifted her out of that seat. We biked home, passing a loud train that precluded returning to sleep.
Today it was finally cooler. Today she seemed to accept our new napping routine: after lying down at home doesn’t work, I put her in the sling for a soothing walk, like we did when she was a baby. We walk around our apartment compound, hoping the monotonous view and swaying sling-ride will lull her to sleep. Today it started to rain as we walked, but she had her blankie and a hat, so we just kept walking, singing her favorite lullaby through the pouring cooling rain, as she finally fell asleep. She stayed asleep, mercifully, as I slipped myself out of the sling, laying her down in bed.
If you’re not a parent, you probably don’t understand the drama of this saga. Without a nap, Sophie will be off-balance for hours, bumping her head at the playground, repeatedly, descending into a tantrum if a butterfly flaps its wings wrong. Without a nap, children’s brain development is actually affected. Without those 90 minutes of napping, we get many hours of crankiness, sometimes even days. Without a nap is hell. Thank goodness she’s sleeping today.
Update: she slept for almost four hours. She woke up after two-and-a-half hours, howling, “I want nighty-night! I want sleeeeeeeep!” I soothed her back down. I almost started to worry, she was sleeping so much. When she finally woke up, she couldn’t stop dancing.
I love this image, from a photo series by Dina Goldstein.
I spent two frustrating hours this afternoon trying to convince Sophie that it was nap-time, not jump-on-the-bed-time, not run-out-of-your-bed-time, and definitely not hit-Momma-in-the-face-time. Nap time. Each time I thought I had her calmed down enough to fall asleep, right when she cuddled close to me on her bed and asked me to put my arm around her, right then, she would haul off and slap me in the face. Taking time-outs really does interfere with soothing a baby to sleep, but I really don’t have any other response to her biting me.
When she started this hitting phase, two weeks ago, Ben set up a little-used chair in the living room as a time-out chair. The problem is, she decided she loves that chair. This morning, she hit herself in her own face just so she could sit in that chair. I’ve been having trouble convincing her that she’s welcome to sit there anytime, she doesn’t have to hit anyone to get in that chair, really she doesn’t.
I’ve reverted to the time-out spot that Sophie’s daycare uses: the bathtub. It’s boringly effective. But it does keep her from getting soothed to sleep, when she keeps hitting me.
In San Diego, on days like this, I could put her in the car, and she would fall asleep. Or I’d put her in the stroller, and she would fall asleep. Or I could just leave her in her crib, and sometimes that alone would be enough to calm her down.
Here in Britain, we have no car. We have no stroller. We have no crib. We do have a sling, and I’m planning on using that for tomorrow’s naptime, but, generally, Sophie sleeps on a mattress on the floor. Usually, I actually like this arrangement, because it’s easier to curl up next to her to get her to sleep, and it’s easier for her to get us when she needs us. She doesn’t need to cry for us to come to her crib; she just walks on over to us and gives us a hug. It’s usually nice. But not when she doesn’t want to sleep.
We’ve been struggling with naptimes since Sunday.
I’m almost tempted to give up. Maybe she’s already old enough to have no nap?
But she spent the whole rest of this afternoon whining, yawning, rubbing her eyes, and whining some more. I had to teach her yogic breathing. I had to do a lot of yogic breathing myself.
When Sophie was home, she kept asking how long until she got on the airplane to see her daddy. Now that we’re here, she keeps asking how long until she gets on the airplane to go home to see her friends. I’m afraid I feel the same way, even though I should know better.
I miss my kitchen, well-stocked with spices. I miss Sophie’s toy kitchen, too, and her water-table and straddle-bike and other good toys that we left behind. I miss my own house, which is filled with all the colors and openness that I like, with my favorite sort of pillows on my favorite sort of mattress. Our apartment here isn’t bad, just orange. It’s full of doors that are constantly needing to be propped open. And it’s hotel-like. I got my revenge on the anonymous, tepid art by posting Sophie’s manic Pollock-like scribbles on top of the blameless Spanish countryside print of blurry nothingness.
I shouldn’t complain. The weather is balmy, even hot. This town is great. As soon as I go home, I’m going to miss the maple trees in the park here, the constant cooing-dove sounds, the ability to bike everywhere I want to go. I’m going to miss the lack of pressure to make conversation with other mothers, since I’m only here 3 months, and not really sure if I want to put in the effort to make friends. That lack of pressure actually often makes it easier to have an interesting conversation at the park. I think I actually found two mothers who make me laugh, two who are fun to talk to, and that’s as much as anyone can ask for. But our newness also means that, like any new people anywhere, it’s mostly the lonely crazies who bother to befriend us.
We did just find a really great take-out Indian place. There’s a lot of competition for that title in Britain, thank Goodness for post-Imperialism, at least for what it’s done for British food. We’re starting to get good routines here, although then we disrupt them every weekend. I really don’t mind that every afternoon, lately, Sophie wants me to bike her to the nearest horse pasture (a six-minute ride along the river, past grazing cows and college rowers) and then to the best-designed park I know.
Most of all, though, I miss my friends, my yoga teachers, my colleagues, my home. I’m glad to be breaking out of old habits, this summer, and breaking away from Sophie’s dependence on physical toys — but I miss those habits and those toys.
I spend a lot of time cooking, while Ben spends a lot of time bike-repairing. Sophie has just invented a way to combine those two hobbies. She stands near Ben’s bicycle, pretending it’s a kitchen. She pretends to pour us tea or juice or mac-and-cheese from the various faucets of the handlebar, crank-shaft, and brake-pads. This is an especially great game when it’s a rainy day out, so we aren’t going out anyway, and I have a novel to read, lounging on the bed next to Ben’s bicycle, waiting for more pretend-strawberries extracted from the wheel’s quick-release lever.
Here are some of the promised photos of Sophie at Avebury:
I especially love photos of Sophie with her Dad.
Here’s Avebury itself.
There’s more on Ben’s flickr page.
And here is Sophie at the scenic graffitti near our house here:
