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I have been feeling the ticking of a clock. No, not that kind of clock; you bite your tongue. This shop is CLOSED. I’m talking about the passage of time, a season that has run its course, the end of one phase of life which can only lead to the beginning of the next, and for good or bad all the anticipation that comes with it. Things are about to change.
Sofia starts kindergarten in two weeks. She will be leaving the learning center where she has spent Monday through Friday of almost the entirety of her life and moving on. She is excited about the change, because we have played it up as nothing short of awesome, but I know she is a little sad to be leaving her friends. I try not to show it, but I am a little sad for her as well. It is hard to walk away from all that you know.
I think it’s different for the working mother. I don’t feel the mourning or emptiness that a lot of stay at home moms experience. It doesn’t feel as though she is leaving me. The amount of time we spend together on a daily basis will not differ. Instead it means getting up a hell of a lot earlier and carting two kids off in separate directions on a daily basis. It’s all about logistics. I know we will work out a schedule, but it is going to be very hard for a few years until the little guy is old enough to join her.
That is the stress of the change, but when I sit down and really think about what it all means, this change does affect me in emotional ways. As I focus on her days ahead and all that I must to do get her ready, I am suddenly struck by how tall she looks.
I felt that most when holding up her fall uniform and marveling that her legs could not possibly be that long. Yet they are. Then over the weekend I was watching her run across the beach and I swear I saw glimpses of a young woman’s gait. Oh, how she has grown.
On the average day she may have magic marker on her cheeks and a milk mustache over her lips, but behind those glasses are large, inquisitive brown eyes that have become wiser and more challenging by the day. Questions have become more complex, and more often than not I find myself without answers.
No, our time together is not changing, but she is. I feel how she is just beginning to slip through my fingers. For now, at least, she is still holding on.
 First attempt at play makeup.
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!!!
There have been many challenging experiences we’ve muddled through as parents these past five years, but nothing has been more excruciating than the process of potty training our son. Many months have passed since our daycare insisted on the use of underwear as the tool that is going to get us there, and while that worked in a week for my daughter, with the boy we are still cleaning poop laden tighty-whities on a daily basis.
This has been going on for months. Actually, I just looked back and we’re a few months shy of a year.
You’d think I’d have gotten used to it after a while, but every time that bagged up package of poop came home I died a little inside. Yes, a little dramatic perhaps, but you spend hours upon hours washing your hands and see how you feel because the poop smell it just…lingers. It gets in your nostrils and becomes a part of your very being. For over nine months my life has been inundated with close encounters of the second kind slathered on cotton, and I have had enough.
We tried everything. Stickers and treats and promises of the best presents came to no avail. He weighed the pros for proper poop displacement and decided it just wasn’t worth it to him. “Leave him be,” our pediatrician said, “He will go when he’s ready.” So we waited, and waited, and waited some more.
Then one day while I was out shopping for something random I spied some Cars 2 matchbox cars and figured I’d give it a shot. I showed him one and promised that when he decided to poop in the potty they would be there waiting for him. He wasn’t having it; those cars sat in a bag for several weeks. I kept dropping hints now and then that when he was ready to put that poop in its proper place, Francesco Bernoulli would be handed over to him in all of its fender-less glory. Finally one day last week he decided he was ready, and a few days later he was ready again. He has now added Francesco, Finn McMissile, Flo, and Mater to his collection. We’re talking major progress here!
And he is so proud of himself. And we are so very proud of him.
Oh! I can see that blessed toilet-flushing, swirling light at the end of the tunnel! There it is!!!
But then we came upon an unexpected problem: the five year old is seriously pissed.
“I didn’t get any presents when I first pooped in the potty. I just went! This is NOT. FAIR. I have been going potty since I was three years old. I should have been getting presents all along.”
She then requested poop compensation, to be paid retroactively, for the past two and a half years worth of successful deposits.
I’ve got to hand it to her, she has a valid argument. I have no idea what profession she will choose when she gets older, but she already has the makings to become one hell of lawyer.
 Great job, Dom!!!
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.
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