I'm beginning to believe baby birds have better survival instincts than human toddlers

The girls have been pretending to be birds since lunchtime. They built a nest of blankets on my bed, Adriana sat on Lyra, Lyra "hatched" out of a blanket/egg, and Adriana has been "flying" about the house getting imaginary worms and bugs for her baby to eat. It's adorable, and I love that they can play together so well sometimes. But I just now heard Adriana say "Okay, Baby Bird. Now it's time for you to learn to fly, so I have to push you out of the nest. Lyra, just flap your arms like wings when I shove you off the bed. Ready? Steady..."

And then they were both shocked and angry that I stopped them.

Questions I was unprepared to answer this morning

1. Are bays made by earthquakes or by erosion?
2. Do flamingos have kneecaps?
3. Why don't people lick the amniotic fluid off of their babies when they are born like mama cats do?

It does make the times I pretend to gnaw on the baby seem a little more sinister

“Some animal mothers? Eat. Their. Young,” I told Adriana one day last week when she was being obnoxious about something.

“Lucky for me you’re a vegetarian,” she snarked right back.*

So yesterday when I was browsing the children’s section at Books Inc., I couldn’t resist picking up a copy of Monsters Eat Whiny Children by Bruce Eric Kaplan. Lyra was getting antsy at that point (and starting to whine for a Thomas board book that I didn’t even have to glance at to know I wouldn’t like), so I bought it without reading it. Adriana found it in my room just before her bedtime, so I got into bed with her and read it.

Immediately I recognized the artwork from the author’s cartoons in The New Yorker. Henry and Eve are whiny children who disregard their father’s warning that monsters eat small children, and then are abducted by indecisive monster gourmands who spend the book debating the best way to eat the children. The drawings are simple and amusing, and it’s full of lines I am sure to be annoying the kids with. I mean, I don’t think I’ll be able to resist suggesting “Perhaps a whiny-child vindaloo” next time we are wondering what we should make for dinner. Adriana and I both giggled throughout the story.

The humor in the book is definitely aimed at adults, but it’s in the way there are jokes in animated films that are for the grown ups that go right over the kids’ heads, rather than something akin to Go The Fuck To Sleep. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that book. In fact, I found it quite amusing, especially the audiobook version read by Samuel L. Jackson). I wouldn’t share Monsters Eat Whiny Children with some of Adriana’s friends. Adriana, though, loves all things scary, and can handle the idea of monsters eating children. On the other hand, I also picked up a copy of Outside Over There. Perhaps my girls will start to take these books as warnings.

*I love this kid so much.

Civics lesson

On the way to drop of my ballot this morning:

Adriana: But what is voting for?
Me: Well, it's so we can decide who is in charge and makes rules, and so we can say what we think the rules should be.
Adriana: But you're the mom. You're in charge. And you get to make up the rules yourself. 

Our great future in plastics

I’m reading a fascinating book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams. It’s written in a casual, fun-to-read style, and I’m learning a lot about evolutionary theories, cultural trends, and ecology. I rarely read non-fiction, but this book has drawn me in the way a novel might.

The problem I’m having is that last night before I fell asleep, I read the chapter on plastics. I learned a lot about the chemicals that are in plastics and our cosmetics, and how scientists think these things may be contributing to early puberty (and what early puberty means in terms of cancer rates). I didn’t know that BPA was originally used as an estrogen replacement in women, a replacement for DES. That makes its use in so many products today seem much more ominous to me. When Williams wrote the book, she had herself and her young daughter tested for many of the chemicals she was learning about, and then tried to reduce the presence of those chemicals in their life, but found it very hard to do.

I woke up this morning, thinking about our exposure to these things. I already try to buy lotions and soaps that don’t contain parabens and phthalates. But plastics are ubiquitous. I made my orange juice this morning in the juicer we received as a wedding gift--that was ten years ago, before BPA was being questioned so much. I sliced peaches to put in oatmeal for the girls and me on a plastic cutting board that for all I remember at this point may have been treated with triclosan. I served the kids their oatmeal in brightly colored plastic dishes that I’m pretty sure are BPA free--but what else is in the plastics? I am generally pleased with myself for not feeding the kids a lot of processed foods, but every time I pack us a picnic, I put cut up vegetables, sliced fruits, and sandwiches into plastic containers. Canned beans seem like such a quick and easy alternative to soaking and cooking dried beans, but do they contain chemicals from the cans? I reheat leftovers in the microwave in plastic containers that say they are safe for microwave use, but how do I know? Our water bottles say they are BPA-free, but what is being used in the plastics that can hurt us? Even the produce I buy at our farmers’ market comes home in plastic bags.

I’m finding myself feeling helpless and hopeless. I remember a similar feeding years ago reading Our Stolen Future for a college course, but then I was only worried about myself. Now I’m wondering what effect the choices I make have on my daughters.

Compare and contrast

Okay, I know you aren't supposed to compare your kids to one another, but sometimes the difference in behavior in kids three years apart is particularly striking.


Five-year-old

Adriana: Need any help in here?

Me: Actually, yeah. Can you give the onions a quick stir?

Adriana: Sure...looks like they're getting brown kind of fast. Want me to turn the heat down a bit?

Me: Yes, please.

WTF? When did I start letting her mess with the stove? When did she learn to caramelize onions? Whatever, they came out great.


Two-year-old

Lyra: [catches my eye, purposely turns water cup upside down over the dinner table] 

Me: Why did you do that?

Lyra: To try to make you cry.

And everyone thinks this one is such a sweetheart! She did say it with a very charming smile.

Lost and Found

Earlier in the school year when I went to the parent-teacher conference at nursery school, Adriana’s teacher mentioned that Adriana didn’t know her address and phone number. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to teach those to her. That afternoon I wrote down my number for Adriana. She copied it down a few times herself, and then was able to recite it to me. I told her that if she ever got lost, she should find and adult, (preferably another mom with kids, or someone who works wherever we are) and have them call me.

But Adriana is the kind of kid who tends to stick pretty close and know where I am. Lyra is my runner. It was Lyra who took off from me in Target a couple of months ago, running down the aisle and then dodging through racks in the clothing section. I ordered Adriana to stay by our cart, and then I tracked Lyra for a while by the sound of her giggles, and the amused smiles and pointing of other customers. But then she was gone, and I couldn’t find her anywhere. An employee made an announcement over the speakers for everyone to look for a two-year-old girl with short blond hair, a red shirt,  and Thomas rainboots. She was quickly found back by the dressing rooms, a good three quarters of the store away from where she’d taken off.

But today, Adriana and I got separated at Happy Hollow. We’d been there since it opened, nearly six hours before, and we were all tired. Adriana was on a play structure that was a little too big for Lyra, and Lyra wanted to see the lemurs one more time. I tried to catch Adriana and waved, and then took Lyra to watch one lemur hanging from another one’s tail. We sat for a while, and then a couple who had been there watching the lemurs with us not long before brought Adriana to me. She seemed fine, but as soon as she saw me, she burst into tears. Although it had seemed she was looking at me, she hadn’t caught my wave and seen me take Lyra to look at the lemurs one last time before the park closed. She had looked up, seen I wasn’t there, remembered that Lyra had been wanting one last ride on the carousel, and headed off in that direction, calling for me. When I wasn’t the merry-go-round she started back and then hesitated. The couple had seen Adriana and asked her if she was okay. She says she told them, “I can’t find my mom,” and they had brought her back to me. Simple as that. She and Lyra were wearing similar outfits today (and maybe the couple had seen us together earlier), so the other parents knew where to bring her.

It’s funny the things that don’t occur to me. I thought because I taught Adriana how to find me if we were separated, I didn’t need to worry much. I hadn’t anticipated the trauma it would cause to her if we were actually separated. Can I blame Lyra for that? She thought her little escapade was hilarious. I’m not particularly concerned about getting separated from Adriana again. I think she’ll stick close, as usual, and I think I’ll be more aware of going out of her line of sight (for what it’s worth, on the larger play structure at the park earlier in the afternoon, she had gone out of my sight plenty). I’m starting to wonder, though, if in a panic she would be able to recall my phone number. I’ll just cross my fingers and hope I don’t have to find out.

This might be kind of cheesy. I blame the vast quantities of sugar and sunshine.

At one point last year, I posted something on Facebook about considering a last-minute trip to the beach. My friend Kym commented that it would be harder to do that kind of thing once Adriana started kindergarten, so I should take advantage of the time we have now.

I followed Kym’s advice that day, and pretty much every other time I get the urge to spend a sunny day at the beach or a rainy day in a museum. The girls are at an age where day trips are easy, and our schedule allows it, so why not?

Today was one of those days and it was perfect.

Soon enough they’ll be in school and this will be harder. Right now I want to see Adriana’s eyes widen with excitement when I pick her up from nursery school and say “Want to go to Santa Cruz?” To have them beg for “one more ride” on the merry-go-round and let that turn into three more rides. To concede that since it had been such a warm day that they really should be allowed ice cream after dinner, even though they already had ice cream after lunch. To carry them in from the car sound asleep and tuck them into their beds, still covered in sunscreen and sand and ice cream. And right now I want to hope that maybe some day they’ll remember some part of it all.

Supermoon

Lyra woke, crying, sometime around midnight. I went in to her and laid down beside her to nurse. I hadn’t closed her blinds before bed, and between the slats, I could see the moon. It didn’t seem any bigger than usual, but it was incredibly bright. Her eyes, I realized, weren’t closed as she nursed; I could see them shining there, looking at me as she nursed and twisted her fingers through my hair.

“Baby, look. Look at the moon.” She stopped nursing and turned to look out the window. “That’s the supermoon.”

“Supermoon?”

“Yes.” She sat up in bed, so I did too, and she climbed into my lap and wound her arms around my neck as we looked out the window.

“Is it pretty?”

“Yes.”

“Is it magic?”

“Yes.”

“Is it white like the roses."


"Yes."


"Are you my mama?”

“Yes.”

“You love your baby Lyra so much?” She leaned her face against mine.

“Very, very much.”

And we laid back down together, snuggled close, my body curled around hers, and we nursed to sleep.

Facts of life

Adriana was going through a photo album with Lyra before school this morning. I remember Adriana at this age, or maybe a little older, figuring out that she wasn’t always in pictures with Brian and me because there had been a time before her. Now Lyra is reaching the same realization.

Adriana: And here is a picture of me and mama in Minnesota.

Lyra: And where is me?

Adriana: This is before you were born. You were in mama’s belly.

Lyra: Ooooh. And before I was in mama’s belly I was a fairy and I lived in a flower.

And even more awesome than the fact that Lyra said this? The fact that Adriana did not correct her.

To market, to market...

...to buy no fat pigs. Although I could probably get one there if I wanted. We are lucky to have an excellent farmers' market in Mountain View. We started going pretty much every weekend as soon as we moved here five years, and now nearly all our produce comes from there (bananas and mangoes are notable exceptions), along with our eggs, bread, and some cheese. And cookies. The best macaroons in the world are available for purchase every Sunday morning in Mountain View, just in case you were wondering.

This week, Adriana had a birthday party and our cupboards were bare, as we’d just returned from a three week holiday the previous afternoon, so I biked Lyra over to the farmers’ market, where I bought:

• 2 pounds zucchini
• 2 bunches asparagus
• 1 bunch carrots
• one big bag of peas
• 4 artichokes
• 2 bunches asparagus
• 1 pound bag of salad greens
• 6 apples
• 3 baskets of strawberries
• 4 sweet potatoes
• 6 yellow onions
• 4 lemons
• 6 avocados
• 2 cucumbers
• 12 eggs
• 1 loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread
• 1 baguette
• 2 kinds of cheese
• 1 quart sheep's milk yogurt
• 1 bunch basil
• 1 bunch cilantro
• 1 bunch parsley

As I piled the groceries into my bike trailer I thought I'd bought most of what we needed for the week (along with a few things from the grocery store--cereal and beans, among other things). But I think I forgot how to shop while we were away. Either that, or my kids are just extra hungry this week. It's Wednesday night, and I have left 3 avocados (the ones that were nowhere near ripe, which I picked so they would last through the week), one cucumber, half the salad greens, a lemon, and an onion. I still have most of the eggs and sandwich bread, as well as the yogurt, which I'm using slowly because it's seriously expensive (but it’s awesome and it has a very short season, so I had to buy it this once).

I'm going to have to go to the supermarket tomorrow for fruits and vegetables. And I’m sulking because I know they won’t be as good as what I got over the weekend. I think this might be the very definition of first world problems.

Travel journal: Thoughts on traveling with kids

We are traveling now. Last Tuesday we flew to Paris, and spent a few days there with friends, and then we all took the train to Amsterdam to see the tulips (I will post eleventy frillion flower photos later on). This morning, Brian, the girls, and I flew to Zurich, and we’ll be here a few days before returning to Paris.

Brian asked me this evening, “Are we doing thing wrong? We aren’t doing most of the things in the guidebooks. Are we supposed to wait until they’re older?” My instinct was to say no and wave him off, but the subject had been on my mind as well.

Traveling with the kids can be exhausting. There was their jetlag to contend with as well as our own. Adriana is in an age of being very picky, which can make eating out a bit of a challenge, and in Amsterdam grocery shopping became interesting. No crispy rice cereal? No Cheerios? Most of the breakfast cereals were laden with sugar. We are constantly thinking about snacks and meals to make sure we avoid the blood sugar-induced meltdowns that the kids (okay and we) are so prone to.

But other things are wonderful with them. I explained pointillism and Seurat to Adriana in the Musee D’Orsay, and watched her face as she studied Starry Night Over the Rhone, which was familiar to her from a Van Gogh book we have at home. Last night Lyra chatted up a tram driver, who had seemed grouchy when we first boarded but was soon smiling and talking to Lyra. As we waited to take off this morning, the flight attendants brought around small chocolate bars for everyone. "Mmmmm...toc-a-wit. What a wuv-a-wee suh-pwize!" Lyra said, and gave the flight attendant such a brilliant smile that he handed her a second one.

Today was an easy day. In Paris we were jetlagged and overwhelmed. In Amsterdam we walked around shivering in the cold and rain. After our flight this morning, we spent the time getting settled (into our third IKEA-stocked rental apartment in our third country in a week). That was exactly the kind of day we needed. We explored a bit within a small radius of our apartment here, got lunch and coffee, bought some groceries. I was baffled by German. Brian and I raised our eyebrows at how expensive everything is here. Both girls have had colds, and I wanted to pick up some more children’s Tylenol, so I went into the pharmacy around the corner.*

It’s not the kind of day that’s in the guidebooks, but I felt so happy as I walked along the Limmat holding Lyra’s hand and listening to her talk about her friend Toby, breathing in the cold air, eavesdropping on bits of conversation that I couldn’t understand. I’m glad we’re traveling now. I’m glad that we ran around doing touristy things in Paris and Amsterdam. I’m glad that tomorrow while Brian goes into the office here, the girls and I will go to the park to blow bubbles and watch boats on the river. I’m glad that we’re going to write postcards together and figure out the post office here. In the next few days we’ll go to the zoo and take a boat ride around the lake and maybe even take a look at Chagall’s windows in Fraumünster if the kids are on good behavior or if we feel like taking turns staying outside with them while the other one goes in to look around. It’s not on any of the guidebook itineraries, but I think it will be fun.

*Children’s paracetamol in Switzerland apparently only comes in suppository form, so I bought some ibuprofen syrup instead. I feel as though I could do a great favor for the children of Europe by bringing them chewable tablets.

This is no place you ever knew me

Adrienne Rich, one of my favorite poets, died this week. I first read her poems in high school, and some of her essays were assigned reading in my courses at UCSC. She lived in Santa Cruz, and when I was in school there I attended several of her poetry readings; once I waited in line to have a collection of her poetry signed.

This is from her poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” Such a perfect description of a place I love.

Within two miles of the Pacific rounding
this long bay, sheening the light for miles
inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over
strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind
returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs with
ever-changing words, always the same language
--this is where I live now. If you had known me
once, you’d still know me now though in a different
light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.
But it would not surprise you
to find me here, walking in the fog, the sweep of the great ocean
eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always
I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth. What I love here
is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks
small canyons running through pitched hillsides
liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading
to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle
on their blond hills. I drive inland over roads
closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons
roads that crawl down into the darkness and wind into light
where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled
to death with lowstruck boughs. These are not the roads
you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching
for life and death, is the same.

Gymnastics and personalities and anxieties, oh my

Or, a lot of words about a little event.

When Adriana was maybe eight or nine months old, I took her to a class at the Little Gym by our house. It went horribly. They would pass out instruments or toys, sing a little song, and then put the toy away and move onto the next thing. Every other baby in the class seemed to do fine with that, but the pace was too quick for Adriana, who didn’t understand why the bell or scarf she’d been handed was already being taken away. We had just moved to Mountain View, and I had thought it would be a good place to meet other moms, but it just seemed too obviously a bad fit, so we didn’t go back. When she was a little over a year old we began attending a toddler gymnastics class at the rec center in Palo Alto, which was a perfect fit for her personality: it was completely unstructured at that age--just free play on the gym equipment. For 45 minutes once a week, she tried all her crazy stuff in a padded room while I got to talk with the moms and nannies as I followed her around.

We stopped that class when Lyra was a few months old. Adriana was in nursery school and it just didn’t fit well with our schedule. But it’s become apparent lately, that Lyra could use a padded room for her monkey impressions, and Adriana has expressed interest in gymnastics. There are a few places we could try, but the schedule at the Little Gym worked for us and it’s close to home. I did Lyra’s trial class first. There is a huge difference in the girls’ personalities, and I knew she would like whatever class we chose, and going with just her would give me a chance to check it out and talk to them about how the older kids’ class would go.

And Lyra loved it. When we walked in and they asked if she was Lyra, she jumped up and down, and said “I am baby Lyra! I love watermelon and swings and penguins and my mama.” She did fine with the pace of the class, wandering off from the group occasionally, but always having fun. Toward the end of the class time, she managed to somersault off of one mat onto another seemed to make the instructor a little nervous but reinforced why we were there.

After class I talked to the woman working at the desk about Adriana, explaining that she can be slow to warm up to new people and places. She told me the names of the teachers for her class, and suggested that we arrive early to give us some time to check things out. She explained that parents would sit on the other side of the window to watch, but if she needed me close, I could go sit inside, although they would prefer I didn’t follow her around to the different things she would be doing.

During the week, I would occasionally mention the gymnastics class and tell Adriana everything that the people at the gym had told me. I described the place to her, and talked about what Lyra had done during her class. And I promised that if she didn’t like it, she didn’t have to go back. She was anxious, though. “I want you to stay right with me the whole time,” she kept insisting. I didn’t talk about how that wouldn’t work out logistically because of Lyra; we have enough sibling rivalry as it is. I promised her she would be able to see me through the window the whole time. “I get nervous about new places, too, but it usually turns out okay,” I told her.

We arrived early, just as another little girl and her mother were going into the building. The teachers at the desk greeted Adriana by name, and the one teaching her class came around to introduce himself to her. Lyra answered all his questions while Adriana remained silent and held my hand. He gave Adriana a quick tour, and then introduced her to the other little girl who was there and suggested they play together.

There’s this wonderful thing about little girls this age: if you introduce them to someone and describe them as a new friend, they can instantly play together. At the California Academy of Sciences I ran into someone I know through La Leche League. We’d never met one another’s older children, but when we introduced the girls to one another, they ran off to play immediately. The same thing happened when Adriana was introduced to a girl at the gym: the other little girl led Adriana over to where the toys were as the teacher had requested, and they sat down to build with blocks together. And then when it was time for class to start, Adriana and her new friend stuck close together as they followed the teacher onto the mat.

I hadn’t realized how nervous I was about her behavior until I watched for a few moments and began to relax. She joined in the activities, did what the teacher asked, and seemed totally comfortable. She looked over to the window and made eye contact with me any time they switched activities, but it was always to throw me a smile and a wave. And I love that smile so much. It was the grin she has when she is having fun and feeling grown up and proud of herself. As I saw the teacher demonstrate some of the exercise, I wondered if she would be able to do them, and some were obviously a bit complicated, but others she managed easily, and she was willing to try everything.

At the end of the class she came running out the door to me. “It was so fun. I did it! I’m going to come back tomorrow, okay?”

So I signed her up for next week.

Adriana’s Magic Bed

Every couple of weeks Adriana comes home from school with a special backpack that contains at least one book, and some suggested activities. The most recent one was The Magic Bed by John Burningham. Instead of a craft project, the suggestion was to have the child make up a similar story of their own. This is the story that Adriana dictated to me.

Once there was a girl named Adriana. She had a magic bed. It was pink with sparkles on it. When she got in it and said the magic words “abracadabra abracadee” it would take her wherever she wanted to go. One night she said “abracadabra abracadee” and it took her to the moon. There were treasures all over the moon. The treasures were stars that fell out of the sky. Adriana picked up the stars and threw them up as high as she could so they would be back in the sky and everyone could see them again. Then she got back in her bed and said “abracadabra abracadee” and went home again.

18 months

Yesterday I heard Lyra wake up from her nap and call for Adriana. I went in to my bedroom, and there she was in the middle of my bed. She rolled over, sat up, and asked again, “Ana? Ana?” I told her that her sister was asleep and she shouted, “Go ‘way!” at me over and over, giggling and bouncing on her knees there on the bed. I sat at the foot of the bed, finishing the chapter I’d been reading, and finally she crawled over to me, and climbed onto my lap, straddling my waist. Putting her hands on either side of my face, she looked at me and said, “Mama. Mama. Mama.” And then she let her head drop back and giggled while I kissed her cheeks.

And really, is there anything else I need to remember about Lyra at 18 months? I think if I only remembered that one perfect moment, I think that would be fine. She is mostly a happy little girl. She runs and falls, runs and falls. She can jump with both feet of the ground now, shouting “Jump! Jump!” while she does it. She sometimes eats a lot, and sometimes only wants to nurse. Some nights she sleeps well, other nights she is bothered by new teeth coming in or a stuffy nose or something she ate, and she wakes me up hourly. She doesn’t like strangers to get too near, but she loves to wave and smile at everyone. She requests kisses when she bumps her head or bangs her knees (which are always scraped up). She demands hugs from her sister and then smacks her in the face a second later. She yells “Hide!” and ducks behind a chair, then “Find you!” when you find her. She cries when Adriana gets out of the car at school, and won’t let any of the sweet women who work in the YMCA child watch touch her, but clings to Adriana the whole time I’m gone. Two weeks after Brian hung a bike in the rafters in the garage, she still exclaims “Bike! Up!” every time she sees it.

For Lyra, everything is exciting. Everything is yelling and pointing. Everything is full speed and top volume. And then she pushes her face against mine, and says, “Mama, mama, mama.”

Adriana's chocolate chip banana bread

Around the time she was two-and-a-half, I started involving Adriana more in cooking and baking projects. But lately she's lost interest in helping quite so much. For the most part that's fine. She plays pretty well by herself while I fix dinner or work on something on my own. It's nice, though, when she does want to help. We work well together in the kitchen. There are times lately when I wonder how on earth Adriana and I are going to survive the teen years when we already seem to clash so much. There's less clashing when we're cooking together.

Earlier this week when the baby went down for a nap, Adriana and I set out to make chocolate chip banana bread, and I discovered that now that she's four, she can do most of the work herself. She still needs me to reach things for her, to read the recipe, and to take things in and out of the oven, but even the hand mixer was fine for her to use (although I did remind her a few times to hold onto the bowl with her free hand.

She liked mashing the bananas,

knows how to grease the pan,

and measure out ingredients.

I knew she could use the standing mixer on her own, but didn't want to get it out. She assured me she would be fine with the hand mixer, and while I did hover quite a bit the first time she turned it on, I quickly figured out she really was fine with it.

She even recalled a valuable (and messy) lesson learned at Christmas time about what happens when you turn on a mixer at full speed just after adding the dry ingredients, and carefully mixed them in a bit with the spatula.

Mixing in the chocolate chips was hard as the batter was quite thick by then, but she did it all herself.

She did need me to hold the bowl while she moved the batter into the pan, and then she spent a lot of time making sure it was just right to make up for my assistance.

Then she set the timer for an hour

and went off to play while I did the dishes. (Wait. What?) She did a puzzle,

decorated some cupcakes,

and helped entertain the baby after her nap.

She was eager to pose with her bread when it came out of the oven.

And then she spent the next hour trying to convince me to cut it before it was cool. It smelled so good that I did have to give in.

We got out a picnic blanket, sang happy birthday and blew out the wooden candles on the wooden cupcakes, and then ate the banana bread. If you are the kind of kid who worries about getting messy, it's best to eat it with a fork.

But some kids don't mind a little chocolate on their hands and face.

So we don't clash nearly as much when we cook, but photography may still be an issue. Upon seeing these pictures, Adriana pointed out that I was supposed to be taking close-up pictures of the food, not pictures of her. I guess she's been paying attention to the recipes I use from Pioneer Woman and Smitten Kitchen. I've promised next time to frame the photos properly and use the real camera, not my phone.

15 months

Aaaaaaand once again, this is more of an “and-a-half months” post. Because I am outnumbered.

This month we are all noticing how much fun Lyra is. If she doesn’t nap much, I’m not terribly disappointed because she’s fun to play with. Brian enjoys getting to spend time with her. And when I asked Adriana her favorite part of the day a couple of weeks ago she said, “Playing with Lyra at the park. Now she is not just a sister, she is my friend.” And then I died of the sweetness.

Part of the fun we’re having with her comes, I think, from her language development. Someone asked me recently if she had any new words, and I said every day. I’ve been surprised to find Lyra has more words than signs. Some words she only speaks; some words she only signs; much of the time she does both; and she seems to pair signs for animals with the sounds they make. Every day she mimics something new, and seems to understand it. The best thing is probably that, in addition to “mama” and “dad,” she now says “Ana,” and it’s sweet how pleased Adriana is to have the baby say her name. But everything she says seems adorable to me. When spring really arrived at the end of March, I put a sunhat on her, and she told me “no hat,” her first two word combination. She comes into the kitchen signing and saying “eat eat eat,” so I ask her what she wants and she exclaims “Peet-ya!” (At least one kid shares my deep true love of pizza.) She grabs onto her diaper and tells me “Poop!” and then runs away howling “Noooooooooo!” when I offer to change her. She even tries to say “thank you.” That started one evening as she was handing me books from a pile and saying “tank” each time, and I realized that she knows that we say “thank you” when someone gives us something. She was handing things to me, so I wasn’t sure if she was prompting me, or just wasn’t clear on who says what. Now she seems to understand that she should say it to us when we give her something, but when she gives one of us something, she’ll often stand there and prompt us to thank her until we do.

Since Lyra was about six months old, she’s been in love with Adriana’s baby doll--the doll that Adriana herself is very attached to. When it first started I bought Lyra her own doll, one that was safe for younger babies. Lyra poked at it some, but never became very attached. It had a plastic head like Adriana’s doll, but a fat, stuffed body. Finally a couple of weeks ago as Lyra was becoming more and more determined to get her hands on Adriana’s baby, I bought her a similar one. Lyra has become very attached to the doll. She carries it around, and it seems to be comforting for her when she’s upset. She picks it up in the morning with glee, and if I try to take it away from her when I go to feed her she wails “Baby! Baby!” and will not be comforted until she has that doll back. Also? She still tries to steal Adriana’s when she get the chance.

Lyra is attached to Brian in a way that Adriana wasn’t at this age. She recognizes when he’s leaving for work in the morning and runs to be picked up and hugged. When he comes in after work, she runs to greet him. She demands time on his lap, and sometimes even lets him rock her to sleep. When Brian’s parents were here for a weekend, she was particularly devoted to her Grandpa Andy. She constantly wanted him to hold her and read to her, and when he picked her up to hug her good-bye at the end of their stay, she clung to him and cried as he handed her back to me. Now she points to his picture and tries to say “Grandpa.” I am especially amused by this, because it just sounds like she’s saying “damn.”

She eats so much these days, it constantly surprises me. But then there are days she hardly eats a thing. I know that’s normal, and after Adriana I am less surprised by the days where she doesn’t want to eat much. Yesterday I realized with surprise that she had gone seven hours without nursing. She’d eaten plenty during that time, and then nursed a lot in the evening as if to make up for it, but I was definitely surprised by how long she’d gone without, even though I had offered a couple of times. Her sleep’s been mostly awful lately. I bring her into our bed when I go to sleep, and while I used to barely have to wake up to feed her, she now is doing a lot more crying and shifting around. We wonder if it’s teeth and keep sticking our fingers in her mouth to check. I start to think maybe it’s my caffeine, and am careful not to have any after 10 AM. I try to figure out if it’s something she ate, but since she eats everything and eats so differently from day to day, it’s hard to say. Perhaps our bed is too crowded, I think, but then when it’s just me and the baby, she’s still up every hour. I know she’ll outgrow it, whatever it is, but that’s hard to remember at three in the morning when I’m trying to calm a screaming baby who won’t nurse.

There have been some days full of crying, too, which always surprises me. Usually it’s solved by an extra nap, though, and for the most part she’s just the happiest little girl I know, smiling and shouting “hi” as she rides through the grocery store in our cart, running giggling down the sidewalk, and shrieking “wheeeeeee!” in the swing at the park.

Monster party

This morning, while I was getting dressed, Adriana began talking about getting ready for a monster party. She took my phone and went to make some calls. Then she came back and told me that five monsters were coming; the sixth wasn’t going to be able to make it. The party would start after dinner, and the monsters would sleep over at our house, so she found five blankets that would be good for monsters. We would need to go to the store beforehand, she told me, so we would have all the ingredients for monster chow. And we had to be certain to make plenty of monster sauce for on the monster chow, otherwise the monsters would eat us instead. Oh, and monsters drink only a certain kind of tea, which we happened to be all out of, so we would have to pick up some of that while we were out, too.

Most of her fantasy play is mimicking real life or a story in a book, and this tale seemed to come completely out of nowhere. I asked if they had monster parties at school, and she told me that it was from a book at a friend's house, so when those same friends were over this afternoon I asked about it. My friend knew it was a game the kids had played, but she hadn’t read the book to Adriana. And the book does not feature most of the details Adriana had been sharing.

After our friends left, I started to go into her bedroom for something, and she through a fit because if I went in there the monsters would all leave. They apparently don’t like moms coming to their parties. Of course, I questioned why the monsters were there if the party wasn’t until after dinner, and she told me that three of the monsters had come early to get ready. While I was fixing dinner she pretended to hear knocks at the door and let the other monsters in. And after she had her dinner we went outside to enjoy the nice weather, and she sat beside me at the table on the patio, making garlic bread out of play-doh to go with the monster chow and monster sauce.

I described the monster party to Brian when he came home from work. We questioned her for more details about the monsters and she answered a few of them willingly, but when Brian asked where she’d met these monsters, she said, “Dad, they are just pretend monsters.”

She doesn't say "Duh" yet, but you can totally hear it in her voice.

How weaning (eventually) happened

After I took the girls for their check-ups in January, I joked with Brian that when the pediatrican asked me whether I’d considered weaning, I nearly answered “Which one?” Because of course our pediatrician was asking about Lyra and of course I wouldn’t have said anything of the sort. The fact that Adriana was still nursing at four years old wasn’t something I was trying to hide, but it wasn’t something I was going around advertising either. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but it’s not exactly the norm in mainstream parenting, and I’m not the kind of person who wants to stand out. And so I debated whether to write about this, but it’s such a milestone for us, perhaps particularly for us, that it would be a shame not to. And I think that, because it’s outside the norm, it’s worth sharing.

We went through stages when people would ask me about weaning. The first was when Adriana was a newborn, and people would ask how long I planned to nurse; when she was a little over year it came up again, since it’s very common to wean around the baby’s first birthday; and finally, people who knew she was still nursing when I got pregnant again asked if I had plans to wean. There were times all along when I considered it, even right at the beginning when I was tired and depressed and had thrush, and particularly when I was pregnant and it wasn’t always as comfortable as it had been. But it never seemed like the right time to wean completely, and it seemed as though it would happen eventually.

She got older and began to eat a bit of solid food, and she backed off of nursing a bit then. There was a point sometime before Adriana’s second birthday when I started pushing her to nurse less in the afternoons, because I found it frustrating to stop what I was doing so often to nurse her (and once I was including her more in what I was doing, she stopped asking so much--what she had really wanted was more of my focus). Sometime around the time she was two and a half, I began to refuse to nurse her in public. And because we were always going somewhere, pretty soon she was nursing only around sleep--to fall asleep at nighttime and naptime, and then when she woke up. That was our pattern when I got pregnant and it worked. She gave up napping not too long after her third birthday, so then those nursings were gone (although for the first couple of weeks, I would still lie down and let her nurse for a bit at what would have been naptime--she seemed to need something like that to make it through the afternoon). I pushed to get rid of the morning nursing, which worked for a few weeks, but then mornings got rough and we added it back in. A couple of months later, we dropped it without much effort.

It feels like a confession of sorts to say that after the baby was born I wished Adriana would stop. I was glad it was comforting to her, but the contrast between nursing a newborn and nursing a preschooler somehow overwhelming to me. I was ready to be done, but I also knew it was the wrong time to stop her. It was what she knew to do. It was reassuring to her. And with the adjustment to having a new baby at home (and then knowing that we’d be moving over the summer) it seemed like too much to ask.

There was one misguided attempt on my part to cut her off cold turkey. In June, I spent three nights in the hospital with a stomach bug of some sort. Lyra was in the hospital with me so she could nurse, but Adriana was at home with her grandma. She fell asleep for those three nights without nursing (but cuddled up with Grandma), so on my first night home, I laid down in her bed with her at bedtime, just like I always do, but this time I refused to nurse her. It was awful. Within a few minutes we were both in tears. Finally I nursed her, sad to not be done, sad to have tried and failed, relieved that it was so easy to make it all better again.

After we moved last summer I began talking to her about weaning. I told her that she was the only one of her friends that still needed “mom milk” to fall asleep, and talked about other ways to fall asleep. On nights when she did fall asleep without nursing (because we were in the car when she fell asleep, or because I hadn’t been home, or because she was tired and fell asleep during her story) I would point it out to her in the morning. Sometime before our move, I suggested that when she was four she wouldn’t nurse any more. I tried to talk about it as casually as possible, and it seemed to work. She began talking about it herself. And it went on for several months like that, and then in December one night she told me that she wouldn’t have milk to fall asleep. I got into bed with her, read her some stories, and then we cuddled up together. After about 15 minutes of tossing around, she told me--on the edge of tears, trying to be brave--that she needed milk after all. I assured her it was fine, and she nursed to sleep. She talked about it in the morning, and didn’t suggest it again.

I teased her the night of her fourth birthday about not nursing. She laughed, and said “Maybe when I’m eight,” which gave me a good laugh. But I knew I wasn’t going to cut her off because she had turned four that day. Then one night about a week later, nursing became uncomfortable for me, so I stopped her. She cried and yelled and hit and kicked, and then she fell asleep in my arms. The next night I stopped her before she was asleep. She cried a little, but didn’t throw the same fit as the night before. For two more nights I read her long stories until she fell asleep. On the fifth night she asked to nurse, and I told her that she was four and a big girl, and that I would stay with her as long as she wanted, but I wouldn’t nurse her. And that was it. That was the end.

I had been dreading bedtime. I was done with nursing and waiting for the right time for Adriana. Now bedtime can be so nice. (I won’t say it always is, because, look, she’s four; sometimes she’s going to fight it, no matter how tired she is.) Most nights I just lie in bed with her and read her stories. Sometimes she falls asleep during the story, and other times she just lies in my arms and I rest my face on her hair and feel the moment when her body relaxes and she falls asleep.