Watching summer, and an era, draw to a close

Well, this is it, folks.  This is my last night as the parent of two preschoolers.  Tomorrow morning, my firstborn will climb onto his first schoolbus and head off to the as-yet-unknown world of Kindergarten.
*Okay, so tomorrow is orientation day, and I’ll be climbing onto the bus right behind him, but still.  These are uncharted waters for me.  I still have trouble grasping the concept of being a parent to two children sometimes…now we’re adding grades into the mix!

And speaking of grades, I hope that by being unable to find one of the books on the required reading list, I haven’t irrevocably damaged his chances of success…(KIDDING!)

Today, N took the day off from work and we took a day trip to the beach.  We thought it would be a good day for it, and we were right.  There were plenty of people there but not unbelievable crowds, the weather was gorgeous, and we got amazingly good parking.  We split our day between the beach and the boardwalk and just had a nice, relaxed, fun day.  We all needed that.  We stayed a little longer than planned, and the boys both fell sound asleep in the car before we hit the turnpike home.  We put them into bed as they were when we got home, still a little sweaty and salty and sunblocky, and I’ll need to bathe them in the morning and wash their bedding, but I’m so glad we did that.

After I showered away the last of the sand and surf from myself, I tiptoed in to give them one last kiss goodnight.  And breathed deeply of the sweaty, salty, sunblocky smell of summer for the last time this year.  Tomorrow is the start of a whole new era in our lives.  Today was a pretty terrific ending to the old one.

The Return of the Keys

Last Sunday we went to church.  We haven’t been going as often as we’d like lately but we’re working on getting back into it.  N was giving the children’s sermon on Sunday.  We got there early and sat down, at which point I realized I had forgotten the collection envelope in the car.  I didn’t have my purse with me, so no keys.  I borrowed N’s and ran out to get the envelope.  When I got back, N and the boys were gone…to the restroom I figured & sat down to wait.  They came back and sat down & I handed N his keys.  We were sitting on the right side of the church at that point, and then we saw G and L come in so we got up & moved over to the left side and back a few pews to sit with them.

The service started, N did his sermon & walked with the kids down to Sunday school.  R and K decided to be shy (remember we had not gone in a while) so he stayed with them for a bit.  The service ends, we pick up the boys & socialize a bit over refreshments in the Fellowship hall.

Walk out to the car, N asks me for his keys.  I don’t have them, I gave them back to you.

No you didn’t, I don’t have them.

The keys are gone.  Not in his pockets, and I don’t have any.  Not in the car that we can tell.  We go back inside and ask Pastor S if anyone has turned in a found set of keys…nope.  We go in and start searching through the pews for them, N checks the Sunday school room.  Pastor S offers us a ride home, but without my keys, we can’t get into our house.  We realized a couple of weeks ago that mom’s spare key doesn’t work in our lock anymore and haven’t yet replaced it.  Then I remembered that when we were leaving home that morning, I grabbed our spare key and locked the door behind me with it.  I then dropped it in the cupholder of the car since I didn’t have pockets or a purse with me.  So if we can get into our car, we’ll be able to get into the house.

N calls AAA – people are still searching the pews for the keys, lifting the cushions, checking the book-holders.  J and the boys are crawling under the pews, checking the floor.  We determine that the keys are absolutely not in the sanctuary.  We go out to the car to wait for AAA, Pastor S is waiting for us so she can give us a lift home to get our keys, and suddenly the lightbulb goes off.  The back window of our car is broken…one of the boys hit it and knocked it off the track.  It slides up and DOWN at will.  Push the window down, unlock the back door, K crawls in and opens the front door, and VOILA…House Key!  While we are in the car, I start searching under front seats in case I somehow dropped N’s keys while I was getting the envelope out (even though I clearly remember both locking the car with the remote and handing the keys to N).  What’s that?  There, between the front seats?  Is that the emergency wallet key we got with the car?  The one I LOST OVER A YEAR AGO?  Yes, yes it is.

So now, we can get home.  We can get into our house.  N’s keys are still missing but we are fairly confident that they will turn up at some point.

Yesterday we got a phone call from the church.  Another parishioner had picked up the keys from the pew thinking they were his.  When they realized they had an extra set of keys, they retraced their steps and realized they must have picked them up at church.

Someone up there was absolutely looking out for us last Sunday, and yesterday.  I have my faith, and my beliefs, I don’t talk about them much or make a big deal about them, but they are there and are a part of me.  Someone moved that wallet key to where we would find it.  Someone prompted my memory about the broken & hence unused back window of the car.  Someone urged me, when we were leaving that morning, to use the extra house key to lock the door behind me instead of having N do it.  And someone nudged the memory of an elderly parishioner to recall where he could have picked up an extra set of keys in the last few days.
Thank you, Lord.

Eternal Summer Slacking

I’ve been so very neglectful lately.

We’ve been busy doing a whole lotta nothing (hey it’s summertime!) A trip to the park here, a lets-watch-movies-about-winter-to-cool-off day there, and suddenly I realize it’s August and I’ve barely posted anything this summer.  And further, that it is August and we’ve barely DONE anything this summer, and there’s really nothing to distinguish this one from the rest of them.  Too many too-hot days spent hiding inside the house, one rather uncomfortable camping trip, and what else did we do this year?  Saw some friends, had some playdates, ate some ice cream…

I don’t really have much to talk about.  We’re still working on the potty training with K, but he’s doing much better.  The boys went to the township’s day camp for a month, and loved it.  Mostly we’re just doing the day-to-day deal.  J did a fabulous photo shoot of G & the boys the other day, and I can’t wait to see the pics.

So, Happy August!  I’m going to focus on getting out of this rut before I start pulling out the sweaters and wondering what in the hell happened to yet another summer.

Last Day

Time is a funny thing.  It sneaks up on you so fast.  One day you are a child, the next you have a child of your own to care for.  One day you send that child off, nervous and fearful and excited all at the same time, for his first day of preschool.  The next day, he is leaving his last day of preschool, giving high-fives to friends he will not likely see again outside of a few summertime playdates, before they go off to different kindergarten classes and make new friends and move on and forget each other.

We could have done this differently.  We looked at a few preschools that were closer to us, where the bulk of the kids would likely be moving on to the same kindergarten that R will be attending.  The problem was, I didn’t like those schools.  One was in a church basement, and felt dark and, well, basement-like.  I wouldn’t want to spend every morning in a basement, no matter how nice the teachers were, and I couldn’t ask my children to do so, either.  Another, was impossible to get through on the phone.  A third, well lets just say there was a personality clash when I met the director, and we’ll leave it at that.  I was getting desperate.  We were running out of time to register.  We decided to check into the school that we knew was run at our church.  And it was love at first sight.  We already knew the director, we already knew some of the teachers as they were members of our church family.  We spoke to the director, who put us on the waiting list right away, and got us a spot pretty quickly.  At that point in time, looking at preschool, I really wasn’t thinking forward to this day.  The day R would say goodbye to some of his first friends.  The day he would be seeing them for quite possibly the last time.   He has seen these kids every day, has played with them, learned with them, a few times fought with them, but above all grown with them.

He has questioned me several times over the past few weeks.  “Mommy, will S be coming to kindergarten with me?”  I had to tell him no.  “Then will J be coming to school with me?  Again, no.  “How about A, or M, or N?”  No, no, and no.  And then, in a fearful, teary voice, “then who IS coming to kindergarten with me?”  And I had to tell him, no one he knows.  He’s going to have to make new friends, learn new names, join a new circle.

Despite MOMS Club, despite 3 years of preschool, when R starts Kindergarten he is starting alone.  There will not be one familiar face in that crowd.  And oh, how scary that must be.

I love the boys’ preschool.  I love the building, the rooms, the people – the director, the teachers, the assistants.  I love the projects they bring home.  But not this part, the saying goodbye, the moving on.  It’s hard.  Harder than I expected it to be.  The boys don’t fully understand “the end” yet.  To them, “vacation” is a weekend at a hotel for a gaming convention.  What are they going to do with 3 months off?

Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic.  N still keeps in touch with people he’s known as far back as nursery school.  I still have M and T in my life, and I’ve known them since elementary school.  Scratch that maybe, right now I am definitely in sappy and pessimistic mode.  I’m also projecting, I’m sure.  It’s so hard for me to make and keep friends, and sometimes I see R struggling with some of the same issues, and I worry about him.  But he’s NOT me, and hopefully he will have an easier time of so many things than I did.

N tells me “enjoy this time with the boys.  Before you know it they’ll be back to school every day and you’ll miss them”.  He’s right.  I need to stop wallowing, break out the “things to do for summer vacation” plans, and enjoy this time.  Maybe if we branch out a little, we can discover some of the kids he’ll be going to school with in the fall, so he will be able to find a familiar face in that crowd.

Words

I started this blog as a way to keep track of some of the things I want to remember about raising my kids.  I’ve always been a sporadic journaler, and often as not when I look back on words belonging to my earlier self I cringe.

Having had my words so often discovered, and in turn, twisted around and used against me, made me swear off putting my feelings in writing.  But I always come back to it.  I’m not great at it — inwardly I still fear, every time I write something down that is more personal than a to-do list, that someone is going to find it, read it, and come after me with it in some twisted, self serving fashion.

Then, somehow, I decided a couple of years ago to deliberately put my words out there for anyone to read.  And I know that some of my friends come here and read my ramblings, and I deeply appreciate each and every time someone feels moved enough by something I wrote to leave a comment about it.

I recently joined a blog tour group, thinking it would up the bar for me a little bit.  It would get me to post things more meaningful than the usual “cute thing someone said today” or the latest photo.  It would get people outside my usual circle to come here and read my words.  I had hoped this would inspire me to better writing, to opening up to deeper levels of my thoughts.  My astoundingly bad self-awareness came through once again with flying colors.  Instead of feeling inspired, every time I sit down at my computer now, I freeze.  A voice inside my head says “Your thoughts are worthless.  Your ideas are stupid.   Your words are completely meaningless.”  It’s amazing how much that voice sounds like that of the woman who gave birth to me.  The woman who would find my early journals, read them, twist the words around and accuse me of things I wasn’t doing.  I once intentionally scrawled a whole page of “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her” in my journal, knowing she would be reading it.  Funny how she never mentioned that entry to me.  Until I ran away from home, and then a while later she said “We’re walking on eggshells around you.  Why do you hate us so much?”  They would read behind my back, or flat out confiscate letters from my boyfriend, then yell at me for the contents…as if I had any control over what he wrote to me.

Anyways…this post was not supposed to turn into a rant about the people who brought me into this world.  Back on topic…

So now I know people are out there reading my words.  And I’m reading their words.  And I’m thinking that my words can’t compare to theirs.  That I have nothing to bring to the table here.  That all of them are smarter, funnier, more creative, more eloquent than I can ever hope to be.  So instead of thinking about what words I should write, I think I should go and get a snack.  And as anyone who has seen me recently knows, the last thing this girl needs is another snack.  And I close the page and go do something else.  And my own words, once again, go unsaid.

I’m kinda tired of letting my words go unsaid.  I’m REALLY tired of having some really great words kicking around in my head, and feeling them fly away when I try to commit them to either paper or screen.  Of being so afraid of looking foolish that I don’t use words I know because maybe I’ve got the definition or the pronunciation wrong.  The people I know now, they aren’t the ones who jumped on me for every little mistake.  History won’t repeat itself…and if it does, surely by now I can laugh at myself a little?

So what I’m saying here is I’m going to try (again) to be a better writer.  To let my thoughts and feelings show through.  There will still be a lot of talk about the cute things my sons do, the crazy things that happen to me through the days, the pictures I take.  But maybe there will be some more of me, of who I really am, shining through there too.  If I can be brave enough to put myself out there.

I hope you don’t mind coming along for the ride.

Happy Birthday

Today is K’s fourth birthday. He was born on 04/04/04 at 9:20 am. He weighed 8 lbs. 15 oz. and was 21 inches long. It was an easy delivery as those things go, approximately 9 hours from the time I felt the first contraction to the time he made his grand appearance. Yes, I had an epidural.

He’s been excited about this day for weeks, asking me every day, and sometimes two or three times in a day (the passage of time is still a mystery to him) “Is today my birthday? Is it Mommy? Is it my birthday yet?” I would reply, that no, it’s not his birthday yet. “Well when IS it, Mommy?” And I would tell him, a month/three weeks/a week/a few days, and his face would fall for a moment, and then he would go on to whatever he wanted to do next.

So the day finally dawned, and I woke him this morning by singing Happy Birthday. In reply, he started to sing Good Morning to You to me, but N and R heard he was awake and came up the stairs singing. That was the end of any morning cuddle time I was getting, but he was SO excited that the Big Day is finally here. And Four-Year-Olds don’t put their fingers in their mouths and Four-Year-Olds always go to the bathroom in the toilet. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

We took R to school. It was a rare occurrence that he did not want to go, because he knew I had some Birthday Plans with K. But to school he went, and had a pretty good day anyway.

K had received a postcard in the mail from Geoffrey, the Toys R Us giraffe. The postcard told him to come to the store and tell them it’s his birthday so they can make his visit special, and they included a coupon for $3.00 off a purchase of $3.00 or more. So we decided to swing by TRU, only we got there half an hour before the store opened. We decided to pass some time at the Dunkin’ Donuts across the way, and K consumed 2 munchkins and 2 donuts while we waited for the store to open. The half hour passed and we headed back to TRU for his special birthday visit.

We walk in the door, and K marches up to the service desk and says “Excuse me? Today is my birthday! I’m four years old and my name is K!” The people at the service desk make a bit of a fuss over him. He is given a crown to wear and a shiny mylar balloon. They announce him on the loudspeaker. One of the employees gives him a funny little happy birthday song and dance. This last proves to be a little to much for him and he hides himself under my jacket.

I had explained to him in advance that he had three dollars to spend on a little something for himself — some new sidewalk chalk or bubbles, maybe, or a couple of matchbox cars. After wandering the store for a while, and picking out all sorts of inappropriate things (a motorized car, an outdoor swingset, a bike, a HUGE LEGO setup) he finally settled on a couple of little toy boats. He’s into water play at the moment.

We take his selection up to the register, and he hands it over to be rung up along with the coupon card he’s been clutching in his hand this whole visit. The cashier rings it up, then looks apologetically at me and says the gift card is only good on items $3.00 and up, and the boats are ringing up at $2.99. Not to be deterred, I toss a package of gummy worms on the counter – he’d been eying those up too, and any other day of the year I’d have said absolutely not.

The gummy worms were consumed in the car and shared with his big brother once we picked him up from school, but the balloon had an unfortunate mishap. He was playing with it in the backseat, and the ribbon came off. When we got home, he wanted to carry it into the house himself and didn’t wait for me to reattach the ribbon. As he reached our porch, the balloon slipped from his hands and floated away. Oh, the sadness in his voice. What wouldn’t I give to have a renegade balloon be the worst that ever happens to him? “Mommy” he said, his voice quavering and his lip shaking, “I tried to hold it and it slipped and I couldn’t catch it and it’s going up, up, up, and…” and here the lip gets shakier and the voice gets quaverier, and I slipped in with the cheeriest voice I could, “It’s okay honey, lets say bye-bye to the balloon! Bye bye balloon!” and R, who normally might have taken the opportunity to make a little jibe at his brother, chimed in too “Bye bye, balloon!” And K said “Bye bye balloon”, too, and waved at it and watched it for as long as he could as it floated up and away.

And we came inside then, and put his cake in the fridge and had some cupcakes, and went on to have a wonderful rest-of-the-day for his fourth birthday. I even got some more cuddle time in later in the afternoon.

Sappy musings ahead…

K, you are truly a joy to behold. Your whole face is a window to your soul, and when you are happy the sun shines through and everything looks the brighter for it. When you are unhappy, ‘ware the storm clouds, for your storms are brief but so veryvery intense. You are going to change the world one day, and I will feel privileged to witness it.
Happy, Happy birthday my love.

Sick and tired of running and hiding

Ever since I was a kid, whenever I have a nightmare that I can remember, it always involves running away.  And I’ve come to realize that I have spent most of my life running from one thing or another.  Running from conflict in any shape or form.  Running from my parents, my exes, friends who might have seen me for what I truly am and not like me anymore.  Or maybe they did still like me.  I was always too afraid to find out for sure, and I always took the easy way out and ran.

I did not grow up in an abusive household, but I did grow up with parents who felt that any opinion that wasn’t theirs, was wrong.  And as their child, living under their roof, I quickly learned to either share their opinion or hide the fact that I didn’t. Opinions were bad. You weren’t loved if you had one.  Well, you weren’t loved anyway, not if you weren’t their other child, but at least if you didn’t deviate from their norms you weren’t noticed.  You could hide in your room with your music and books and disappear into the fantasy world where you were wanted, and loved, and respected.

Okay…somehow I slipped into a funky persona there.  This is ME I am talking about here.

I don’t discuss politics.  I try to be careful when discussing religion.  That’s just polite, in any setting.  However, I have realized that I don’t really discuss ANYTHING.  Nothing important.  Not that my thoughts and opinions are all that earth shattering, but surely there is some middle ground allowed for in between “what a nice sweater” and becoming an opinionated crank.  I became so good at fading into the woodwork, wanting to be the polite, agreeable, nice girl, that somehow I have failed to become an actual person.  I’m this bland, forgettable wallflower with nothing important to contribute to any conversation. People talk to me at parties and wander away mid-sentence. I chase them down to try and finish my pointless remarks or stories but no one cares.  I’ve seen floral arrangements that make better conversation than I do.

I don’t dance.  I’m no good at dancing – I’m not coordinated.  In seventh and eighth grade I got laughed at during school dances because I was so bad.  And it was easier to just stop dancing.  Because if you aren’t dancing people aren’t looking at you and laughing at you.  So thank you Lori B for laughing and telling me I look like a horse when I dance.  You saved me from YEARS of totally humiliating myself on the dance floor.

Yeah, I really do take things that much to heart.  It’s really pathetic, when I stop to think about it.

I’m working on this.  I am actively seeking, not to purposely cause conflict, but to have an informed opinion and not be afraid to speak it.  I will never be a good debater, I’ve been hiding from it for too long.  I have a big old shell around me that I don’t know if I will ever be able to completely drop. When a situation gets too hot for me (i.e., someone disagrees with me) I immediately realize that whatever I was thinking must be wrong.  Because this person here, who is so much smarter, more assertive, better than me says so, and they must be right. So into my shell I go, and backtrack and waffle on whatever it was I was saying, and everyone goes away happy.  Well, everyone else does.  And I used to think that is what matters, that everyone else goes away happy.

Don’t get me wrong…I do believe that it is important to make other people happy.  But there’s gotta be some room for my happiness in there too.  And I just can’t keep feeling myself inferior to everyone else in every way. I can find some middle ground here. I can disagree with my friends, and maybe we can even argue a little, but in the end we’ll still love each other.  Because that is what friends do.  They love each other, no matter what.

I hope.

A much-needed interlude

Today was a crappy day.  Totally, downright crappy.  N is sick, the weather was yucky, I found out that something I’d been hoping for wasn’t to be.

I ran out to the bookstore tonight after the boys were in bed.  I need to get a gift for my MOMS Club Pollyanna exchange, and a couple of the items on my person’s list were books.  I also wanted to grab the second Magic Tree House book for the boys, since they loved the first one so much.  I wasn’t sure if they needed to be read in order, and the lady at Borders said they don’t.  Of course, I also found out that at this point in time there are 36 books in the series, not including the research guides.  What are we getting ourselves into?!?!  Anyway they didn’t have the second, but I did grab the third.  Because of the 30% off coupon I used for my Pollyanna gift it was essentially free anyway.  Free is always good

So I get home, and K still hasn’t fallen asleep.  He hears me come in and starts calling to me.  I go up to him, and he’s in bed saying his head hurts (no no nonono DO NOT GET SICK!!!)  I lay down with him for a quick snuggle.  He’s got three of his animals in bed with him — Doc the longneck dinosaur, a beanie baby fox, and a little stuffed otter.  He’s playing with the otter, swimming him through the air.  He asks me if I will pet it, so I halfheartedly scratch it’s head.  “No, no Mommy, he likes it when you start at his head, and pet all the way down his back and his tail”  I petted the otter, properly this time, and in gratitude it “gave” me a hug.  And a kiss.  I giggled and told K that it’s whiskers tickled (actually they poked, being made out of thick fishing line type material)  “Give him a kiss back, Mommy”  So I kiss the otter, then tell K that he needs to close his eyes and go to sleep.  He wants to know if the otter can go swimming tomorrow.  I tell him the otter can swim all day tomorrow but he needs to go to sleep now. “No no Mommy — he’s not going to swim all day tomorrow, just for a little tiny while.  And Mommy?  He loves you, Mommy.  And I love you too.  Can Daddy come up and kiss me goodnight?”

K, thank you for once again showing me that no matter how bad my days get, they aren’t so bad that a little affection, even given by way of a stuffed toy, can’t bring a smile to my face.  Thank you for your innocence and unconditional love.

Calendar says what?

2008?!?!  What?  No.  It can’t be!  Can it?  It is?  Really…wow.

Well, Happy New Year, then!

I love New Years.  The start of a new year, blank calendar, 365 days of opportunity.  366 this year, being a leap year and all.

What will 2008 bring to us?

I’m hoping to learn how to sew or knit this year.  To get more organized…that’s a yearly goal for me.  To get our financial situation straightened out.  To learn how to be still, and content, and to just enjoy a moment without worrying about what the next moment will bring.  To be happy with myself.  To raise at least $2,200 and walk 60 miles to raise money for breast cancer research in honor of Aunt Ginger.

My 04/04/04 baby will turn 4 years old this year.  My eldest will turn 6, start kindergarten and will ride a school bus for the first time.  N and I will have to make some kind of definite decision as to whether or not we are going to add another child to our family.

2007 brought some progress to me.  I finished up with going to therapy for depression, and although some days I wonder if I need to start over again, other days I feel pretty good.  Hopefully 2008 will see more better days.

To you I wish a happy, healthy, successful and prosperous New Year.  I hope we all see some dreams come true this year.

It’s over

All the shopping, the decorating, the baking, the cleaning, the wrapping, the cards…it’s all done.  I looked around Mom’s house on Christmas night at the toys and the boxes and the cookies and desserts, and realized it was finished.

So now Christmas is over.  My kids had three days of getting present after present after present, being overstimulated, overfed, oversnacked…and now we’re sitting at home.  With scads of new toys to play with and enjoy.  And for Mommy to find room for in the playroom.

And are they happily playing with their new toys, snacking on the last of the candy canes and popcorn and cookies?

No, of course not!

They are fighting, and cranky, and tired.  They want more, more, more.  They see someone with a gift, and automatically assume it is for them, and get upset when it isn’t.

Of course…as I finish typing this they have curled up on the couch and are happily playing a Leapster game together.

Maybe there is still some hope

Now, if I could just get a nap…no?  No.  Not today.  Gotta go switch the laundry, get K a drink, and get the boys bathed and dressed.  Gotta try to get in touch with my hairdresser and make an appointment to make up for the one that one of us missed.  Gotta find out if I can return the remote control race car that was a favorite gift but broke already.  We’re seeing Mom and J and K for lunch today, and a movie.  It will be a step back towards normal, because I’m sure M&J’s house will be all cleaned up and there will be no presents.  Normal will be good, when we get there.