I know…it’s been a while. I have a good excuse.  No, I’m not trapped under something heavy, but I am swamped. Yes, I have become overwhelmed by a force from which there is no escape: artwork.

My five year old loves to draw, color, cut, and glue. She calls herself The Artist. In fact, she has requested that when I accept her most recent masterpiece (to replace the one I received five minutes previously), that I do indeed respond, “Why, thank you Artist!”

Let’s see if you can relate. On the average weekday she creates at home five to seven pieces of artwork. That is per day. On weekends that figure can double. Despite my fire breathing conniptions and her promise that she will not leave them there, I find itty bitty slivers of paper from her cutting escapades abandoned all over her bedroom and my living room rug on a daily basis. I am inundated with tons of snow flakes, crowns, intricate paper sunglasses, and of course the usual rainbow, flower, and giraffe cutouts.

And this is just what she creates at home. A single day in preschool produces several more pieces of artwork that get tossed out of her backpack, and those are usually three dimensional. Recent projects have included stuffed blue paper whales, a Maypole, what I think is a tree made out of a paper bag with who knows what inside to hold it up, a stuffed laced pillow, and there is even the occasional diorama. Oh, and not to mention the bean shakers, which always break when the kids inevitably conk each other over the heads with them, leaving me to spend hours upon hours picking up miniscule beans from the rug because no matter how much I clean I JUST KEEP FINDING MORE AND MORE AND MORE. WHY??? WHY IS THIS A NECESSARY MONTHLY CRAFT???

Deep, deep breaths.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I love that she is creative, and that she has the desire to make her vision a reality. I recognize that every piece of artwork is special; her heart and soul poured into each carefully thought out squiggly line. But I don’t know where to put all of this sh…tuff. I save some, but a lot of it I used to try to sneak into the recycling bin when she wasn’t looking.  Hey Judgy McJudgerson, there’s only so much I can keep for all of eternity.

Of course I got caught in this sinister act, and am forever reminded of the betrayal.

“Remember when I drew that pretty picture and you threw it out?”

Uh-huh.

She and I are going to need to hold a conversation pronto about what should and should not be saved, but I know that she will not be very amenable to that discussion. These are her creations. Why would I not cherish each and every one?

So, help me out here. How do you handle this influx of brilliance without reaching Hoarders Level 1? I need to be armed with ideas, and believe me, ideas are welcome.

Help!

You can guess how long I've had this Maypole sitting in my bay window. She won't let me take it down!!!

 

A family of four, they sit together huddled in a booth, picking over the remaining slices of pizza. The mother stares out the window, watching the passing cars. The father turns and strikes up a conversation with his youngest son about his day. Not more than ten years of age, the boy chatters on about his friends and the video game he wants to play later that evening. He turns his focus across the table and asks the same of his older son, but the teenager is short in reply. Quiet murmurs escape his lips while his eyes remain fixed on his plate; busy fingers fiddle with crust.

The father gets up to leave and asks the mother if she is going out tonight. She glares at him across the table, challenging, and in cold, flat tones replies, “Of course I am.” He looks away and does meet her gaze again.

She looks to her younger son and says, “Do you have homework to do?”

He sneers at her and replies to the affirmative. Glancing at the father she orders, “Make sure he gets it done.”

The teenager intercedes, “Don’t worry, I’ll help him.”

The two men, one taking on a role much too early for his years, walk away. The young boy, reluctant, stays put. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she says. Head hanging low he rises and follows his father.

She sits there for a few minutes, staring out that window, unseeing. Rising to leave she gathers her purse and glances again towards the glass. This time, she sees her reflection and freezes. Her face is drawn, the bags under her eyes telling more than she would ever want revealed. She raises a hand to touch her face, but stops and turns away. Grabbing her keys she walks off alone.

The days and weeks have been blending together so much that wow, is it really July already? Yesterday morning my son ran up to give me a hug and his head plowed right into my stomach. As I doubled over with discomfort, the blow was twofold. When did he get that tall? I spend hours a day looking at him, but in that moment I felt like I was truly seeing him for the first time in ages.

He is getting so big, and yet he still wants me to sit in the rocking chair and sing Rock-a-Bye Baby to him every night before bed. He can dress himself, but he prefers to pretend that he can’t. He can sleep without a binky, but is so much happier when he has it. He can poop in the toilet, but after months of training still flat out refuses to do so.

It was suggested to me recently that my three year old son is not progressing in development as quickly as he should because we baby him. When that happened I was angry and defensive. He’s only three! How can you say that a three year old is immature?

Well, I still struggle with whether or not that comment was appropriate, but it did open my eyes a little. After I stopped projecting my anger outward, I took some time to look inward and noticed in myself a tendency to do everything for him. I was dressing him in the morning because it is faster and I need to get going. I tend to physically put him on the potty because he fights me on it and I need to get it over with before he pees his pants and dinner burns on the stove. I tend to give him a sippy-cup because when he inevitably knocks an open cup over I will need to wash the floor, and I have laundry to do and baths to give, never-mind adding more to my cleaning checklist.

Sometimes I don’t want to deal with the fact that learning is messy and slow. I forget that the messy and the slow are necessary.

Am I doing him a disservice by babying my boy who only wants to be babied? Maybe so, and he is not happy with my attempts to change things. You should have seen the fit he threw last night when we made him put on his own pajamas. “I want you to do it!” he cried.

I suppose this is part of the cycle that I helped to create and we just have to muddle through it, but I also feel that this is part of his personality. *sigh* It took me some time to admit it, but in truth there is a part of both of us that doesn’t want our baby to go.

At least he can eat his own ice cream. I mean, a little dude’s got to have priorities.

It was three days before we were leaving on vacation. We would be driving from our home in Massachusetts to Washington D.C. for a few nights, and then traveling onward to Virginia Beach. Yes it was that morning when our beloved mini van, The Tailgater, stopped revving on the on-ramp for 95 as I was headed to work, emanated steam from the hood, and proceeded to take a huge financial crap on my life.

But I’ll tell you what, I paid that $900 to fix it gladly and thanked God, karma, all the stars in the heavens, any power that be, for making those cylinders stop doing whatever it is those cylinders do on that Monday morning instead of on the day of the trip. It took two days to fix, including the ordering of parts. Can you imagine if that had happened to us in, oh, I don’t know…Delaware?  

Come on now…not that there’s anything wrong with Delaware. I just don’t want to break down there with my two kids in tow, holed up in a hotel room somewhere and wondering if we will ever make it to the beach.

But we made it. We found out the air conditioning didn’t work when we got into Rhode Island, and spent the entire ride down south sweltering, but we made it.

The entire process this time around, from the planning and packing, right down the actual vacationing was so much easier than the last family vacation we took several years ago. Back then Dominic was right around 18 months and Sofia was 3.5 years of age. We needed gates and bottles and food had to be cut up in tiny pieces, and by God you had to watch every step they took for there were stairs and tiny foreign objects that could be put in mouths, and oh yeah plus there were two pools and an entire ocean to worry about.

Well, there were still two pools and an entire ocean to worry about, but as they aged we also prepared and wow, all those swimming lessons have paid off.

I think more than anything it was a peek into what life is going to be like when they are older. Things are starting to get easier. Family vacations are beginning to feel like that, time spent together, enjoyed together. All the other stuff that makes it feel like work (bottles and diapers and nap times and please for the love of all that is holy sleep through the night) is fading away. I guess if I have to say good-bye to their baby days, this is the good stuff. No, the great stuff.