You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2009.
Sophie is a Momma, putting me to bed and refusing to tolerate any of the delay-tactic shenanigans that I actually tolerate from her. Then Sophie is a baby, crawling on the floor. Sophie is pretending to change her own baby-doll’s diaper. Sophie is pretending that it’s an incredibly stinky diaper, and I get to pretend to say “ewwww.” Then we both have to be silent, because baby-doll is going to sleep.
Sophie is a fireman. Then she is the kid’s-folk musician Hullabaloo, singing each of Hullabaloo’s songs, adorably. Then a bird. Then, eventually, Sophie is Spiderman, who, as far as she knows, is a huge eater of interesting spidey-food. Sophie has never seen Spiderman, but she knows that a friend in daycare is a big fan.
Then Sophie tells me it is raining and we need to put on our jackets right right now and stand under an invisible umbrella or maybe an actual blanket. This pervasive rain fantasy of hers may be the largest legacy of our trip to Britain.
Sophie is doing the dishes in her play-kitchen, while casually murmuring “Oh-my-gosh.” She is cleaning the floor. Then she is going to school. Or work. Sophie’s work is pink, she tells me. Pink and blue and green and black.
A monster is coming, she announces, and we all must firmly declare, “Monster, leave me alone.” So we do.
I’m pretty sure that all this fantasizing is a normal stage of child development. I’m pretty sure she knows that the umbrella is invisible, not real. I’m pretty sure that telling fantasy-monsters to go away is good practice for adulthood. I hope so, because the other option is that my child is insane.
UPDATE: a friend at yoga informed me that, if we actually did a psychological evaluation of anyone under 5, every single toddler would be diagnosed as a bipolar schizophrenic. So I feel better, sorta.
Two of my favorite blogs have recent posts about young kids’ social cruelty: here and here. My story isn’t as dramatic as Mom-101s or Girlinapartyhats, but I’ve been thinking about it lately because Sophie’s erstwhile best friend keeps on hurting Sophie’s overly-fragile feelings.
“M is coming over! M can jump on my bed!” Sophie says.
But when M arrives, M refuses to jump on the bed. She only wants to play with the tea-set. Without Sophie touching it. When Sophie insists on making pretend-tea alongside M (even resorting to a tearful tantrum to get herself included), M decides that now she only wants to throw some balls around — although everyone else is now eating dinner. “M, wanna eat?” Sophie keeps asking. But M won’t eat.
“I want my blankie,” M says.
“I want my blankie too!” Sophie declares. She gets two, then makes the blankies into a pillow-fort and invites M in. M refuses to join her. And so goes the whole play-date.
Lots of 2-year-olds are happy with parallel play, I know — but Sophie isn’t one of those kids, and she doesn’t understand it when someone comes over but won’t engage with her.
A few weeks ago, while walking to the park, M refused to hold Sophie’s hand. For days, Sophie kept telling me, “I wanna hold M’s hand.”
They used to be good friends. I thought it was a phase: M was tired, this day, or hungry, that day, or just moody, that time. But it’s been a couple months now of Sophie feeling spurned every time they get together.
M is a remarkably independent girl. Even as a baby, she refused to cuddle with her parents. Sophie is a remarkably sensitive girl.
It was easier when Sophie met her first truly-mean girl at the playground, two weeks ago. That bratty 3-year-old tried to keep Sophie off the slide, then pushed Sophie down the slide. Sophie spoke up for herself, loudly and clearly: “Don’t push me!” I was proud of her. Eventually, Sophie started playing with this girl — until I heard Sophie suddenly scream, and saw the other girl had a huge hunk of Sophie’s hair in her hand.
I told Sophie that what we do with mean girls is just walk away. We sat under a tree, eating our snack, while the mean girl looked on jealously. That one was relatively simple.
Soph’s best friend isn’t mean, like that, just independent. And I’m wondering how many more playdates I should arrange, when it keeps on hurting Sophie’s feelings.
Last weekend’s bike race was held in a park that had a small rock-climbing wall. So here’s more cute photographic evidence that Sophie has a healthy balance of girliness and spunkiness — but maybe I should watch her more carefully when she’s bouldering – especially because I was also supposedly watching the other girl in a dress, then, too.
Here’s Sophie at the Halloween-themed bike race:
Ben’s amazing Celopacific teammates keep their children amused by encouraging the older kids to decorate the younger kids.
Sometimes I worry that Sophie’s becoming a very girly-girl. Then I think, nahhhh.
After Sophie spilled chocolate ice-cream all over her outfit, she was walking around the house naked, twirling a tape-measure that, she has decided, is a fire-hose.
“I fire-man,” she announced, while admiring herself in the mirror. “I get out of fire-truck, make everybodies feel better. I make them wet. Everybodies feel better.”
It was one of those many moments when I wished I had a video-camera rolling. Yes, folks, this is Sophie’s current ambition in life: she will heal the world by bathing everyone.
And now, a break from our regularly-scheduled programming.
Thanks to my facebook friend Janna Wagner, I decided to enter the Washington Post’s contest for America’s Next Great Pundit. I think all of you should enter, too.
I’m going to repost my entry here, because it may not go very far in the Washington Post rounds, and I am curious about bringing this blog away from only mommy issues.
So here it is.
I keep hearing that we are in the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, but I don’t see it. Where are the current news photographers with the power of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, or the other classic photographers of the Great Depression? Current media photographs of signs reading “Bank Closed” don’t carry the same emotional weight as 1930s news images of visibly struggling people in breadlines and farm shacks and migrant-labor camps.
Recently the Boston Globe, New York Times, Slate.com, and U.K. Guardian have all grown desperate enough — or underfunded enough – to beg readers to send in their own images of the recession. Photos of unfinished subdivisions, crowded job fairs, and unsold cars predominate. There are a lot of photographs of signs: “Foreclosure Tours” and “Going Out of Business Sale.” There are very few photos of people.
How do you photograph a poorly regulated banking system? How do you personalize a global credit crunch?These may seem like huge issues, impossible to illustrate in a single image. Yet there were also complex, worldwide issues in the 1930s. Unlike today, though, the Great Depression did not see a great narrowing of media budgets. There was an expansion of available images because the New Deal government funded artists through programs like the Farm Security Administration which subsidized the photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans and the other artists whose photos are now iconic. In the 1930s, artists also organized themselves into what historians call the “cultural front,” fighting to persuade the general public to notice the plight of workers at the bottom.
Perhaps later historians will identify another “cultural front” of the depression of 2009. Maybe it will include Camilo Jose Vergara’s beautiful photos of American Ruins, with the hopefulness of colorful small businesses blooming in the wreckage of American cities. Maybe it will include a blogger or tweeter I have not yet heard of. Or maybe we will have no Dorothea Lange, this time.
That’s it. But here’s the personal mommy angle, that I didn’t have room to include:
This morning, Sophie’s daycare teacher told me that one of Sophie’s playmates is several months behind in paying for daycare. Her checks keep bouncing. This means that daycare teacher has a choice: forego one-sixth of her salary (since she makes her living caring for six kids a day), or evict this one-year-old whose family is clearly struggling. So far, the teacher has chosen to simply give up one-sixth of her already-slim income.
I keep hearing these stories, and keep wondering why they’re not in the news, instead of Balloon Boy nonsense.
Since Ben is our family photographer, and Ben has been out of the country for a while, this blog has been lacking in visuals, lately.
To make up for it, here is a video of Sophie, adorably playing with her good friend Gracie.
Sophie keeps telling her baby-doll, “Your daddy will be home in half weeks.” It’s the most exciting thing that she can think of, especially now that her own daddy is home after his latest 8-week absence.
Now that her daddy is home, Sophie giggles even more. She chases him round the house and he dangles her above the bed. She convinces him to dance to her current favorite song — Hullabaloo’s “Hey Everybody” — and he shows her how the stereo volume can be turned up far beyond anything Momma ever revealed. Then he washes her hair, and Sophie, eager to reciprocate, stands in the tub next to him, carefully washing his hair, lovingly, generously, empathetically. They’re adorable together.
This means that I get more time to myself, finally, to catch up on months of postponed work. I also get to take a shower in the morning without having to first make sure that Sophie is fed & warm & comfortable & occupied with something relatively non-destructive — and without having to worry that, when I emerge from the shower, I will find Sophie has covered herself and the floor with metallic magic marker. It’s an incredible luxury to simply get to take a shower.
At work, people ask me, “Did you get your hair cut? Something looks different.” That is how much more relaxed I am, now that Ben is home.
It’s a huge relief having Ben home, but it’s also a challenge to reunite after a total of four months apart (two months last spring, two months this fall). Now, I go to ride my bike and find that Ben has removed my bike-wheels (he likes to tinker with every bike in the house, and apparently they were his bike-wheels). I go to sit in my car and find that Ben has moved my driver’s-seat and Sophie’s carseat too (he likes to borrow my car). I go to read in bed and find our bed full of clothes that he half-finished sorting. I have to adjust to living in a house that is messier. He has to start remembering to bring his half-eaten cereal bowls to the sink, instead of leaving them in every room. It’s a challenge for both of us to adjust back from independent living habits. I’m trying not to nag.
Instead, we finally tried the simple, common, pop-psych solution of date night. If it’s good enough for the Obamas, it’s good enough for us. And it was good: surprisingly relaxing to simply have dinner and a walk on the beach, just the two of us, giving each other our full attention, for once.
Sophie is blossoming, too. Now she likes to sing her versions of common songs: “Twinkle tinkle star, how wonder watch you are…” “Q R S, L-M-N-O-P, Next time won’t you sing with me.” She likes to wear her big-girl underpants with sparkles, and to try out every potty in every place we visit. (She still hasn’t mastered pooping in the potty, but she is a whiz at peeing.) She is so tall and skinny that no toddler pants fit her (2T is far too short in the legs, while 3T is far too baggy in the waist) — until Ben discovered that leggings look fabulous on her, as if they are pants. She can stay up later, now, too, so we can join other friends for dinner. Yesterday, she proudly helped our friend Christine carry bowls of strawberries and whipped-cream to everybody at the dinner-party. The day before yesterday, at our friend’s campfire, she stood by herself, playing air-guitar and singing, “Hey everybody, I say hey everybodies, the party starts right now.”
It doesn’t make any sense, but I decided that the best way to deal with the exhaustion of single-parenting, was, paradoxically, to give myself even more work and less sleep: I took Sophie camping. And it worked. It made both of us happy.
Here is the not-exactly-kid-friendly place where we spent our weekend: the “Thin Wall” at Joshua Tree. Left to right, that’s our friends: Jason belaying Leah on “Congratulation” (5.11a), Andre belaying Justin on “No Calculators Allowed” (5.10a), and Joanne at the top of “Chocolate is Better than Sex” (5.9). That last sentence may be gobbledygook to my many non-climbing readers, but maybe you all can just read it as poetry.
And mentally add into that picture Sophie scrambling at the base of the cliff while making up her own names for the boulders, then playing jump-on-her-own-shadow in the sand, and then playing which-favorite-new-friend-can-I-hit-with-my-nifty-foam-airplane.
Sophie had a good time, except for the moment when I told her that she wasn’t allowed to solo-climb despite her elaborate fantasy-play that required me to sit on one rock while she scrambled up another boulder. In her fantasy, I was sitting in a pretend-hair-salon rock-chair while she went to get hair-salon-supplies from the rock-closet or rock-grocery or something. In reality, she’s not allowed on rocks without me standing next to her with my hands up to catch her if she falls. It’s a reality that disappointed Sophie. Even as I enforced my rules, I was immensely proud of her independent courage.
Sophie delighted me throughout the weekend. Driving past the dramatic modern windmills at San Gorgonio Pass, she held her baby-doll up to the car-window, saying, “Baby-Doll, See dat? See dat? Airplane-flower-thing! See dat?” Long car-rides are getting easier now that Sophie can admire the view out the car-window. It doesn’t even really matter that part of what she admired was a huge train transporting hundreds of military vehicles to 29 Palms. It’s more important that we endured a 3-hour-drive with relatively few tears. I have high hopes, now, that any drive between 10am and 3pm will almost certainly bring a long nap, which makes the drive easier on both Sophie and me. It’s easier, too, now that Sophie’s current favorite music — Jack Johnson, Yo-Yo Ma, Nina Simone, and Hullabaloo — is all actually pretty good driving music. It turned out that Yo-Yo Ma is especially good for speeding on the small roads of the California high desert.
We drove up with Joanne, who had warned me that she has no experience with or affinity for kids, but her schedule fit ours, and she was willing to stop for diaper-changes and listen to multiple renditions of “Polite Pete the Pirate.” Actually, Joanne’s rock-climbing habits made her wonderful with Sophie. I don’t think I could have done that drive without her respectfully passing Sophie toys and drinks again and again and again.
At any rock-climbing gym, you can tell the novices because they are the loud ones frantically yelling, “Reach left! Reach up! Reach right! There’s a hold just above you! Just above you! Don’t fall!” The experienced climbers are the quiet ones who only occasionally say, “Take a deep breath. Remember your feet. You’ll figure it out.” Joanne has a rock-climber’s respectful-approach to giving advice, and a rock-climber’s habit of laughing at small challenges. Joanne quickly became Sophie’s favorite person.
Rock-climbers always ask, “Do you want help,” then wait for a reply, before offering help. Rock-climbers reserve their highest admiration for people who climb hard routes without getting any advice from previous climbers. Rock-climbers recognize that the people around them may want to solve their own problems — and that other people’s perspectives might be so different that specific advice is often useless, anyway (my center of gravity does not match yours; my strategy for that climb may be useless for you). Because of this deeply-ingrained, constantly-reinforced respect for independence, rock-climbers make great parents of 2-year-olds.
In a lot of ways, I think rock-climbing is good preparation for parenting. Rock-climbing teaches habits of tolerating some risk, creating back-up safety systems, remaining calm under pressure, and making sure that anyone teetering off-balance simply doesn’t fall on her head. I often feel that parenting a toddler is pretty much constant bouldering.
Yet I had been resenting how much parenting keeps me from actually rock-climbing. Then, this weekend, I also realized that parenting prepared me for better climbing. Carrying Sophie around has strengthened my wimpy arm muscles. Self-reliantly dealing with whatever challenges arise is a skill shared by moms and climbers. Climbing quickly — because I left Sophie at the base of the cliff with a relative stranger — actually makes me a better climber.
But more than that, I used to climb because it was the easiest route to bliss. My friend Bubbles told me that he climbed in order to stay sane through medical-school, because on a good hard climb, you’re only thinking about your next move, not the rude thing your supervisor said yesterday, or the challenge at work tomorrow, or the mundanities of grocery-shopping, or the myriad other things that are usually rushing through all our heads. On the rock, you can only think about the present moment. The fear and the physical imperatives of climbing all wipe out any thoughts of, “I should have said that yesterday…” or “Maybe tomorrow I’ll…” Rock-climbers purposely place themselves in the eternal present. Meditators do this too, but meditating is hard mental work, while rock-climbing is comparatively easy. Step off the ground and you have stepped into temporary nirvana. That is my rock-climbing philosophy.
Getting back on the cliff for this weekend, though, my first thought was not nirvana. My first thought was terror. Why purposely place myself at risk, when I have a child to mother? But I took a breath, took a step up, and another step. By the time I was ten feet up, I had gotten that glorious in-the-present-moment feeling of being truly alive.
After my climb, I realized that I also get that in-the-present-moment feeling while mothering. Dance-parties with Sophie in my living room, night-night walks under the rising moon on our suburban street, numerous times in any day of parenting, there is that alertly-observant presence in the present that has no space for the pesky past and non-existant future. There is pure joy.
There are also annoyances, of course. Sophie eventually grew restless at the base of the cliff, so we drove to the nearby campsite before the rest of the group. I learned, too late, that a single parent should never attempt to set up an unfamiliar tent in a gusty wind-storm. “Tent fly away,” Sophie told me, repeatedly. “Don’t wanna sleep in that kite!”
I also learned that if you have a two-year-old like mine who hates all blankets, then it’s not enough to dress her in double-fleece layers for a night sleeping in the high-desert. It is important to securely place the rain-flap on the tent, for extra warmth. It will not be fun doing this at 2 am in a high wind.
But the rest of it was fun. Sophie rode her bike round the campground’s dirt-road, finally getting enough balance to lift both feet off the ground and glide. Sophie stared for half-hours at a time at the horses tethered to a nearby campsite, fascinated every time they ate or pooped. Sophie ate whatever food anyone in our large group offered her, greatly varying her diet, which has descended lately into way too much mac-and-cheese or peanut-butter-crackers. Sophie loved the moon in the desert. Sitting on my lap next to the camp-fire, Sophie started singing, “If you’re happy and you know it say wahoo.”
When she woke up in the morning, after commenting on how exciting the sky looked through the tent roof, the very first thing she said was, “I wanna ride my bike.” It was too cold for bike-riding, though, so she settled for learning how to put her hands in her pockets while walking over to see the horses poop again.
I learned that, to ease the transition to camping in gusty winds in an unfamiliar place, it’s good to let your toddler play in your parked car, a bit, before venturing back out to the scary exciting outdoors. Still, my little girl is a camper. As soon as we got home and bathed the desert-dust off ourselves, Sophie insisted that I take her warm camping clothes down off our clothes-line, because she urgently wanted to pretend to re-pack it all for our next camping trip. As I drove her to daycare this morning, all she kept saying was, “I climbed rocks.”
We’re going to Joshua Tree tomorrow, to join a group of friends who are rock-climbing for the weekend. I packed my climbing shoes & harness, but couldn’t even find my belay device or slings or biners. Instead of the basic rock-climbing gear that I used to carry, here’s what I packed this time:
- Sophie’s ukulele
- Sophie’s bike and helmet
- Sophie’s pail, shovel, and dump-truck
- Sophie’s foam airplane (it flies surprisingly well)
- Sophie’s favorite (and most dirty) doll
- brownies
- whipped cream
- hot chocolate
- more cozy fleece clothes than Sophie can possibly wear
- and more kids’ CDs than we can possibly listen to in the car, even though it is 3 hours each way.
This will be slightly different than the rock-climbing weekends I used to have before Sophie was born.
This will also be slightly different than the car-camping trips I went on with Ben & Sophie when she was only crawling.
We are driving up with a friend, so at least there will be someone to pass Sophie her toys & drinks & snacks in the car — but this happens to be a friend who isn’t comfortable around kids. She has assured me, though, that she can tolerate listening to Hullabaloo.
Sophie has started rehearsing by turning her bedsheet into a tent.
I am excited to have a weekend in the desert and with other adults. I might even get to climb while I’m there.
