Clara's Scowl

It's pretty easy with her to turn one of these into a laugh.

Out of Focus, but Cute

Weekend at Deb's

After Thanksgiving we went up to Falmouth for the weekend. I'm always surprised at how much the boys play with my kids, considering a) they're girls, and b) they're so much younger. But they really played together a lot, and there was lots of wrestling. My kids, of course, were just enthralled with them and didn't want to leave.

We went to a local candy store where you could make your own candy cane (actually, most of the kids made big lollipops with the candy). The store had a great setup. We took a horse-drawn carriage ride, and there were carols and hot chocolate and egg nog. It was lots of fun.

Lenny the Brown Bear

The World's Biggest Chocolate Moose

Red and White Striped Candy in the Works

Here it Comes!

Lee Making Hers

Everyone Smile!

(we had to bribe Jack)

Thanksgiving

We spent Thanksgiving with the entire east coast contingents of the Caswells and Smiths. Dinner was in my brother Dave's new kitchen, and we followed it up with a walk on the beach.

Giving Thanks

The Paparazzi

The Kids on the Beach

Bare Feet and Cold Sand

(you know where this is going to end up)

25th(!) High School Reunion

Here is the house in LaGrangeville, NY in which I lived from 5-18 years of age.

Here is the view from the house.

The few times I've been back I've been struck by how beautiful the Hudson Valley area is. I love the gentle, rolling hills.

The family who bought the house from us has now lived there longer than we did, and she was kind enough to invite me in. She has loved that house, and oddly enough she loved the wallpaper my mother had put up enough to keep it in three of the rooms and the hallway. Seeing that wallpaper was like opening a well-loved children's book I haven't seen since I was a child.

Wallpaper from the Boys' Bathroom

Wallpaper from the Girls' Bathroom

Wallpaper from the Dining Room

They had, of course, made some changes. There is now a pool in the backyard, and they connected both the living room and dining room to the porch (which they had enclosed) with double sets of french doors. They had also added a large sunken room off the back of the house. But it was the same house in many ways. They had bought all 30 acres of woods that we owned, and so it was still all one piece of property, which was nice.

Sadly, when I went back to walk in the woods, it as apparent that no one goes back there anymore. All those well-trodden trails were gone, and things were very overgrown. It was still pretty, though, and I think if I had been plunked down anywhere in those woods I would have known where I was.

I stayed with my friend Cheryl's in-laws, who live in Milton in a somewhat ramshackle Victorian surrounded by apple orchards overlooking the Hudson.

My friend Jackie happens to live just below them, with a fantastic view over the river. Her children, Isabella and Grace, are 7 and 5, so I'm hoping that soon we can get all the girls together.

The reunion itself was interesting. Jackie didn't go, so I went with Cheryl and her friend Ann. There was a very low turnout (about 50 people out of a class of 580), so there was a lot of "where's so and so?" going on, but it was great to see the people who were there and catch up a bit. It was actually really fun, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I did come home completely exhausted, though. Traveling down memory lane is much more tiring than you might think.

Ooh, La La!

Lee's been going to French school once a week. The transition, like all transitions, has been a bit rough for her, but she comes out happy afterward. She's started counting in French around the house, and throwing other French words around. Not just that, but she speaks French gibberish. It's great. What comes out of her mouth is complete nonsense, yet somehow it sounds French. I guess that's exactly why you want to learn a foreign language as a child.

To support this effort, I am supposed to be reviewing my French. Our library offers Mango Languages online, and I've checked out The Idiot's Guide to Learning French, but I haven't been very good about putting in the time. Even with a few minutes here and there, it is coming back, though. It's back in my brain somewhere!

The fun thing is that Lee teaches Clara what she knows, and so now Clara, who has just started counting to ten in English, is beginning to count in French as well.

In addition to "Bonne nuit!" which gets tossed around at naptime and bedtime, they both seem to have both picked up on "ooh, la la!" It's hilarious. They'll be playing in the other room, and you'll hear one of them say "ooh, la la!"

More Chapter Books

We've been reading to Lee an awful lot lately. It's been so fun, because the books are now ones that we both find interesting.

In the past month, we've read Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, A Wrinkle in Time, and we're partway through James and the Giant Peach. She's just eating up the stories. She's little enough that she can (just barely) sit on your lap while you read to her, and it's special time that we have together when Clara is asleep.

A New Era

This past weekend, the kids watched Star Wars for the first time. WOW!!!

This is the fun stuff of parenting.

My Preview of the Teen Years

I've heard that for girls, the ages of 4 and 5 can be a preview of that dreaded teenage years, and I can certainly see why. Today was especially tough. It was Lee's first day back from the cruise, and at times I thought Bridges had somehow swapped her for another kid, or perhaps she'd drank some crazy potion down in Mexico.

I won't go into details of the behavior. Aside from other niceties, she repeatedly expressed a desire to put a spell on me that would make me die (and Clara as well; let's not forget her). I have never seen behavior like this from Lee.

Well, I learned a few things today. First (and I already know this but it is oh so hard and yet oh so important to remember), things go much much better if I don't lose my temper. If I can step back and remain rational, then the world seems consistent and rational to her. Second, she's tired (looking back on my terrible teen years I wonder if I wasn't overtired a good deal of the time). This sounds obvious but in the heat of the moment it's easy to forget. Third, I need to keep telling her that there are natural consequences for her behavior and these have nothing to do with whether or not I love her. Fourth, I need to tell her I do love her even when she behaves like this, because that's what family is. And lastly and most importantly, she is not a bad girl. She's a wonderful girl who happens to be behaving badly. Isn't that the the human condition? We all behave badly at times and all we can do is try and do the best we can.

Gills

Last week I took Lee back to the DeCordova. On the drive over, we started talking about remembering things, and I brought up the mnemonic that Bridges quite often uses to remember a list of things. It goes like this: one is a bun, two is a shoe, three is a tree, etc... For each number you visual whatever you are trying to remember in relation to the rhyme. For instance, if you want to remember to buy milk, butter, and eggs, you think of a picture relating milk to a bun, butter to a shoe, and eggs to a tree. Then when you want to remember it, you just have to bring up the picture again.

We decided that Lee would try to remember her ten favorite sculptures that she saw. So as we went around, she'd decide whether or not a particular sculpture would go on the list, and then she'd have to come up with a picture. It worked really well, and she remembered nearly all of them even after we got home. She made a collage by cutting out the pictures of her favorites from the brochure.

One of her favorites was "Pine Sharks." It seems a bit silly now, but at the time I wasn't one hundred percent sure they were sharks (this was before I read the title of the work). I thought that possibly they were dolphins, since I'm never quite sure how their dorsal fins are different. Lee kept assuring me they were sharks.

"But how do you know?" I finally asked her.

"Because they have gills, Mommy," she said. And she was right.

A ha, we seem to have reached the point where she knows more about certain things than I do. It's wonderful!

Look, Clara's Swimming

I Am a Zebra!

Clara was a zebra for Halloween this year. (Actually, I think she was a zebra last year as well. I know that Lee was a bat last year and this year. Thank goodness my kids don't grow out of costumes very quickly. )

Someone asked Clara what she was going to be for Halloween, and she said, "A zebra!"

"What does a zebra say, Clara?" they asked.

She spread her arms wide and responded, "I am a zebra!!!"

Aside from the humor in that statement, I love its life-affirming quality. Maybe I should get up every morning, spread my arms wide, and say "I am Ruth!!!"

Haunted House

This Halloween, we turned our playhouse (shed) into a haunted house. My nephew Liam had created a haunted house for several years, but he's a bit too old for that now, so he generously lent us all of his props.

It was pretty scary, especially after dark. We covered the walls with black plastic and hung spider webs, skeletons and other props. We had about five or six things that went off with scary screams or the like.

The reaction from the pre-school crowd was mixed. Some kids wouldn't go near it, whereas other kids weren't scared at all. Nearly all of them were fascinated though. Lee's friend Ben thought it was all pretty funny.

We'll definitely do it again next year.

Being the Queen

We had a strange afternoon last week. We were planning on going up to visit my friend Nicole, who this past summer decided to get the heck out of Lexington and move to Manchester-by-the-Sea, across from the beach.

It's a bit of a trek up there, so before we left I called Nicole. Well, she said, there's this one thing. My neighbor, who's a photographer, wants to photograph me in my wedding dress on the beach for her portfolio. But it should only take a few minutes.

Whatever, I thought. It was a nice day and my kids love being on the beach. Of course one thing turned into another, and as it was getting dark, Nicole was still getting makeup done. She had also had this idea that Lee should be photographed in a flower girl dress she had. Lee was more than happy to wear the dress, and she happily pranced around the beach.

The neighbor showed up, and they did the shoot as the light was fading. Your daughter really likes the camera, the neighbor said to me. No kidding.

Mommy, Lee said to me at one point, I like being the queen.

Alistair

We've been babysitting a friend's son on Thursday mornings this fall. She reciprocates by having Clara over during Lee's gymnastics on Wednesdays.

When the weather has been nice, we've walked up the bike path to the Adams playground, where they have these cool tires buried sand.

There's also a pretty little pond nearby.

What's in that tree?

Alistair doesn't like getting his picture taken as much as my publicity-hungry girls, so he wasn't in this shot.

Ripped

Lee's getting ripped from all the rings and gymnastics.

A Cruise I Lose

I'm supposed to be on a cruise ship to Cozumel right now. Tomorrow I should be SCUBA diving. Instead, I spent last night cleaning throw-up out of Clara's pyjamas, and sleeping in bed with her feverish burning little body kicking mine all night long.

Which sounds like a decent reason to miss the cruise, but the flu is just an odd coincidence. The reason we're not on the cruise is because we couldn't find Clara's certified birth certificate. I still can't believe that's true. I'm not the type of person who loses things like that. I'm also not the type of person to wait until 8 pm the night before a 7 am flight to gather together anything I absolutely need before leaving. But, that's the way it happened.

"Do you have any idea where it might be?" my Dad asked the next morning, speaking as someone who had not spent three hours the previous night tearing the house apart. It's not as if we have lots of papers lying around. We can only guess it went out with the recycling at some point.

Our first thought was to figure out how to get a new document down there. We knew Lexington could turn one around quickly, but catching a later flight wouldn't get us there on time, and even FedEx same-day delivery wouldn't arrive on time. So we figured if we showed up, they might just let us on (would they really turn away a two-year-old?). The town could fax down a copy in the morning, and we gathered some supporting documentation as well (medical records, baptism certificate, etc...).

But after talking to a second employee of Carnival, who ever so sympathetically(!) assured us that not only would they never allow us to board but they would only refund to us the taxes on the vacation, we decided that Clara and I should just stay home. I really didn't want to fly to Houston, drive to Galveston, and then be turned away. What then?

So we re-packed the bags, called a car so we didn't need to get Clara up at 5 am, and went to bed very late. Poor Bridges slept just a few hours, and when the car came, Clara woke up anyway and was, of course, heartbroken at the news.

"I want to go on the cruise, I want to go on the cruise," she cried. How do you explain to a two-year-old why she isn't being allowed to go when you've been getting her excited about it all week long? Even though I knew she would get over it, it was heartbreaking.

Yesterday she asked for Lee and Daddy numerous times.

"Are they almost home?" she'd ask.

But here she is, sick with a flu, so perhaps there's a reason for everything.

It turns out that Bridges had some additional stress on the way down. He realized that he didn't have a notarized letter from me stating he could bring Lee out of the country, something that is necessary for international travel when one parent travels with children. So he spent several hours wondering if he and Lee would be turned away. But since Lee was technically in a stateroom with her aunt, she checked in with her and in then end it was a non-issue.

And, this morning, Bridges just told me that Lee woke up not feeling well and won't even get out of bed. So he's with her, and I'm sure he'd rather be home than in some tiny stateroom with a sick child.

Ugh....

Halloween

My parents stopped by on Halloween to see the girls in their costumes (Lee a bat, Clara a zebra, which I think was the same as last year). The girls were very excited for trick-or-treating, and they had a great time going around the neighborhood.

Afterward, we tried a new approach, which was to let them eat as much candy as they wanted that night in the hope that they'd get sick of it and/or we could just throw away the rest. Actually, Bridges thought we were trying this new approach. We had actually discussed it, but I didn't realize we'd decided to give it a go. I thought we were just drinking wine and not paying attention.

But either way, candy was consumed, although I don't believe they actually ate all that much. However, as it was getting on toward bedtime, Clara suddenly threw up on the kitchen floor. Bridges gave me a look (the new approach was, after all, my idea to begin with).

Secretly, I thought, "this might work after all!" Perhaps Clara would lose her taste for candy. I remember I didn't eat hot dogs or potato chips for years and years after throwing up at a cookout when I was little.

But no, soon after the cleanup was complete Clara asked for more candy. Lee, on the other hand, was so traumatized just from witnessing the throw-up that she claimed she wasn't going to eat dessert for two weeks.

A Big, Big, Big One!

Yesterday my parents were here visiting, and I took Clara in to the potty. She started talking about peeing, and suddenly she said "Daddy has a penis."

Yes, he does, I said.

"He has a long one. A big, big, big one!" she exclaimed gleefully.

(Mind you, her only other penis sighting would have been the two-year-old penis of her friend Tyrone, which definitely did not qualify as large.

Yes, I said, chuckling to myself. But Clara, penises are private and so we don't talk about them in front of company. Do you understand?

Ok, she said.

She then proceeded to run out to the bottom of the stairs and yell up to Lee, "DADDY HAS A PENIS!"

Science Experiment

On Fridays we've been doing science experiments. A recent one involved testing the strength of a raw egg. There's the egg, sitting in some play-doh in a bowl. We put a cookie sheet straddling the egg and a book, and then started piling books on top.

Clara woke up from her nap and came down to see what was going on.

Here's Lee putting on the final book.

Oops, it broke.

Musical Beds

I know that the sleeping gets better as the kids get older, and generally we're much better off than we were a few years ago when we were suffering from ear infections and night terrors. But Clara's in a bit of a low at the moment, which impacts all of us (well, Bridges more than me as he now gives in before I do when it comes to getting out of bed in the middle of the night).

It started a month or so ago when Clara stopped wanting to sleep alone (let's remember that her sister is sleeping just a few feet above her so she's not exactly alone). But, she wants someone in bed with her. We did a bit of the lying down with her to get her to sleep, and Bridges would do that in the middle of the night too. A few nights he ended up sleeping in there next to her for several hours. She was up at least once a night pretty consistently.

Her behavior has now morphed into a strange form of musical beds. She's napped in our bed for a long time, but now she'll mix it up, sometimes opting for the guest room or for her bed. At night, we put her down in her own bed, but if she doesn't fall asleep right away, we'll often agree to move her to our bed or to the guest room (and we'll move her back to her bed when we go to bed). The other night, I put her to bed in her bed, but when I went upstairs later, she was sound asleep in the guest room. During the night, she switches beds at least once. If she was asleep in the guest room she wants to go to her bed, and vice versa. The problem is that we haven't gotten her to the point of doing this without waking us up.

Lee is amazingly undisturbed by all the goings-on. She never even asks anymore "Where's Clara?" in the morning.

Don't Laugh at Me

Lee's getting very sensitive about certain things. She's suddenly very modest when getting undressed anywhere (although Naked Girl still makes an appearance in the comfort of her own home).

I also have to be very careful not to laugh when she says something that strikes me as funny. "Don't laugh at me!" she says. It's hard though, because sometimes she's just so cute, especially when she's being earnest.

Clara-isms

Clara comes up with some funny expressions, only even after you correct her she'll just keep on saying things in her own way.

One that I like is "noisy things," as in "Mommy, you were making noisy things down here!"

Another is her way of asking politely, which, believe me, she says many many times in a day. It's always "may you give me" instead of "may I have."

She also usually says "how" when she means "why," as in "how are you putting on your shoes, Daddy?"

Let's Just Get a Cow

I've been reading some chapter books to Lee. We finished The Secret Garden several weeks ago. It's such a great book, filled with all sorts of every-day magic: animals, springtime, gardens, and the healing of physical and emotional wounds. All through the eyes of a child who's never been exposed to any of this in her life. Lee loved it, even more than I expected. After we finished, I was outside raking one day and she was developing some very ambitious plans for her garden next spring. It's amazing how a book can fire the imagination.

Our next undertaking was Little House on the Prairie, which was just as well-received. I really enjoyed re-reading it as an adult. It was fascinating to see Lee begin to grasp how differently people used to live. A few days ago she told me that we should just get a cow. Then we'd have all the yogurt, milk, and butter we could want, right in our backyard!