September 7, 2009
Our Last Hurrah
Donovan is starting preschool in September, and it’s made these days of summer so meaningful and poignant for me. I had gotten into the habit of frantically scheduling our weekly activities to get Donovan out of the house and keep us both entertained during his daily pre- and post-nap periods. Each week is divided into ten time blocks, two of which are reserved for the babysitter, which means I have eight play date/activity “slots.” Lately, however, I’ve felt more like keeping Donovan to myself. I realize that I have a relatively fleeting chance to take advantage of his cuddly affection and desire to spend so much time with his Mom, and I’m determined to relish it. Right now, for example, I noticed he got very quiet, so I went to check on him. He was fiddling with his tricycle, mid-poop and with snot running from his nose, and I was compelled to give him a big, smelly, slimy hug. My affection for this kiddo simply overflows – he’s subjected to hugs and kisses all day and, to my complete and utter delight, he’s all too happy to reciprocate. (Except, of course, when he’s huffing and hollering like a total tyrant. He’s two years old, after all.)
It hit me that once he starts school, he’s stuck with it for (if all goes according to plan) at least 20 years. I was so excited for him to start preschool, and I’m still of the mind that he’s more than ready for it, but it makes me a little sad to think there’s no going back – my baby is becoming a school kid. Three and a half hours a day doesn’t sound like a lot – and God knows I’ll use the time productively – but I have a feeling that being away from my up-until-now constant companion every single weekday morning is going to be a big adjustment for me.
Of course, my husband and I have already assured Donovan’s teacher that he’s going to be the class favorite. I laughed to make it sound like we were joking, but the truth is Tony and I are both pretty sure Ms. Leila is in for a complete and utter wooing. I mean, the kid’s just so damn smart. And funny. And cuddly. Seriously, can I just keep him all to myself for a couple more years?
Addendum: Donovan just ran up to me and said “I love you” (more like “Ah ruv woo” with a mouthful of biscuit). He then snuggled in my lap as we sat outside among the fallen autumn leaves and had a discussion about gravity. This is what makes life amazing.
May 3, 2009
Love Letter
For the most part, I try to keep my posts from being too treacly (I save the “Oh my God, my child is so amazing” stuff for my personal journal), but Donovan has me swooning like a schoolgirl these days and I can’t help but share. Some notes about a few of my favorite moments over the past week or so…
Dear Donovan,
When we were playing with cars in your room before bedtime the other day and you said “I’m a kid.” and then pointed at me and said “Mommy’s a kid,” I burst out laughing in delight. For a few minutes, at least, I understood what people mean when they say that kids keep us young.
A few minutes later when you let me wipe your snotty nose without making a big fuss like you normally do and I told you that it made me happy, you told me that it made you happy too. At just over two years old, I can see your empathetic and helpful nature shining through, and I couldn’t ask for a more meaningful gift as a parent.
At the Farmer’s Market yesterday, you took your toy car away from your new friend Ava. After I quietly asked you to give it back because it would make her happy, you changed your mind and brought the car back to Ava. That made me very proud – thank you.
And just now after I put you to bed, I pressed my ear to your bedroom door and listened to you sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to yourself about ten times all the way through until you put yourself to sleep. I was both surprised and impressed by your self-sufficiency.
Every day I marvel at the boy you’ve become: Getting in and out of the tub by yourself; holding complete, meaningful conversations with me; helping me sweep up and then putting the broom and dustpan back in their place when we’re done; saying “thank you” when I say “God bless you”; greeting me with a big hug and kiss when I come home – I could go on for pages about all the things you do that fill me with wonder and joy every day without doing you justice. In short, I am absolutely blown away by your intelligence, energy and love.
Love,
Mom
January 15, 2009
A Bouncy House Day
I remember those heady days of liberation when Donovan was a little baby: free of my workplace cubicle, free to spend each day exploring a new neighborhood, breathing in the springtime air as I pushed the stroller mile after mile. After spending my entire adult life working at full-time desk jobs, suddenly having my weekdays free to spend however I wanted (within the limitations imposed by the accompaniment of an infant, of course) was a revelation and a joy. I marveled daily at my surroundings: brightly blossoming trees, tree-topped hills silhouetted against a setting sun, rapidly shifting clouds and sunlight on an intermittently rainy day. I’d find myself exclaiming out loud on a daily basis at the beauty of it all.
Nearly two years later the fun of being the mother of an energetic little boy still (usually) outweighs the frustrations. This is particularly true on those days when my husband takes the bullet and gets up at 6:30 in the morning with Donovan so that I can sleep in. (Otherwise, getting way jacked up on caffeine can sometimes do the trick.)
It’s tough not to get bored and frustrated during a week of all-Donovan, all the time, however. There are some days when the thought of going to another playground leaves me almost paralyzed with ennui. Sure, it’s great to spend time outdoors and delight in the spectacle of my child running, climbing and tumbling. But…uh, like, what’s in it for me? Making small talk with the other parents (or nannies, as the case may be) is rarely stimulating or enjoyable. Forcing too many smiles at other people’s babies worsens my crow’s feet. And scaling jungle gyms and chasing Donovan across suspension bridges doesn’t keep me amused for long. I am, after all, 31 years old, and as much as I want to embrace the joie de vivre, sometimes I’m just not in the goddamn mood.
But if I manage to completely lose myself in crazy toddler activity, or to share in my son’s fascination with the world around us, for at least part of the day, I figure I’m in good shape. I call this a bouncy house day.
Often, this label can be applied quite literally. There’s an awesome indoor playground up the street called the Coop; it has a ball pit, light-up game floor, plasma cars and bouncy house. Best of all, the parents are fully encouraged to use all the equipment, so visiting the Coop is a lot like attending a 10-year-old kid’s kick-ass birthday party.
But a bouncy house day doesn’t have to involve an actual bouncy house. Yesterday afternoon Donovan and I went up to Griffith Observatory, where we wandered the grounds and half-heartedly checked out the exhibits before heading up a dirt trail to watch the sunset. Donovan held my hand and chattered about everything he saw as we hiked uphill, and then we sat quietly together on a bench and ate a snack as we watched the sun sink into the Pacific. It occurred to me that this 21-month-old boy makes quite a lovely companion. Sure, he does his share of whining and demanding, but he’s also amazingly sweet-natured, funny and engaging. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel really lucky to share his bouncy house.
December 11, 2008
Ugh, I Feel Like a Mom
I’ve just had one of those mom days, and I don’t mean that in the best sense of the word. I mean it in the cliched, woman-being-done-in-by-her-crazed-toddler way.
That isn’t to say that Donovan was being any crazier than usual today. He was actually pretty charming most of the time. In fact, it felt like a breakthrough day in terms of language. He’s been quite the talker for awhile now, and has become very adept at telling me what he wants. But there was something different about the way we were communicating today – it seemed more meaningful somehow. For example, he’s started to correct me (with surprising patience) when I mistake what he’s trying to say. He was talking about guitars and I assumed he wanted to play with his toy guitar. I muttered something distractedly about how the guitar was in his room and he should go get it, but then Donovan made a point of getting my attention and pointed to the picture of a musician playing a stand-up bass that we have hanging in our living room and repeated very clearly, as if I were an idiot, “guitar.” Ah.
But I digress. It was around the same time this afternoon that I gave him a Snack Trap full of Cheerios to munch on while he wandered around the house and I tried to figure out what we were going to do to entertain ourselves during the several hours we had to occupy before dinner, bath and bedtime.
Here’s the thing about Snack Traps: They suck. I had forgotten about this because the thing had been out of commission for months, growing mold under the passenger seat of my car (yeah, I washed it). In direct conflict with its intended purpose, the rubber lid with the slits cut in it only seems to incite toddlers to turn the cup upside down and rapidly shake it until the contents fall out. Should that prove unsuccessful, they proceed to reach in and simply throw their food on the ground. It’s as if knowing that there is a mechanism in place to try and prevent a certain outcome, the little devils do everything in their power to overcome that obstacle. At least that’s the case with my little devil.
None of this would matter much to me under normal circumstances. Donovan normally gets his snacks in a plain old uncovered bowl, and 80 percent of whatever he’s eating always seems to end up on the floor. That’s what our dog is for. But today was the day of our every-other-week visit from the housekeeper and she had just left! I was so desperately (and naively) hoping that we could at least maintain clean floors through the afternoon. A ridiculous notion.
It was in the midst of Donovan’s battle with the Snack Trap that I took a look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t wash my hair this morning because I was in such a rush to get to our weekly Parent & Me class. The short haircut that had at first seemed cute and youthful in a punky/pixie sort of way was now growing out into that awkward phase and looking puffy and misshapen – it was starting to resemble your quintessential low-maintenance-middle-aged-woman short cut (AKA my worst nightmare). Makeup had for the most part been neglected as well. I was wearing the same yoga pants for the third day in a row – I thought they made me look svelte and sporty yesterday, but for some reason today I was feeling a little thick around the thighs. Shit, at this point I may as well have thrown in the towel completely and pulled on a pair of high-waisted “mom jeans.” I leaned in closer and examined my face. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep or the particularly dry weather, but I felt that I looked a good ways deeper into my thirties than I actually am. My God, this kid is aging me.
Of course, the rational part of me knows that I was just having a bad day, appearance-wise. And the cool experiences I had with Donovan more than made up for my perceived physical inadequacies. That said, I’m going to blowdry my hair, sweep the mascara wand and squeeze into my skinny jeans tomorrow. Enough with this looking-like-a-mom shit.
October 11, 2008
Here’s Why My Kid’s a Genius
I was at a Mommy & Me class with Donovan a few months ago. The class leader asked each person to introduce herself and her child and mention something new that her kid was doing. One of the mothers, Susan – a casual friend of mine, actually – said the following: “I wrote them all down the other day and realized that Chelsea has 68 words.” (The Chelsea of which she spoke was just over a year old.)
Now, I’m not saying that this woman was lying. Never in a million years would I make that kind of accusation about a perfectly nice person, someone who had in fact hosted me and Donovan at play groups in her home on more than one occasion. I’m sure that, in her estimation, Chelsea had in fact used 68 words at one point or another during her first 13 months of life. Nonetheless, her statement bugged the shit out of me.
I didn’t want to admit it at first, of course. I told myself that I merely thought it was silly. Then I started recounting the story to my friends and family, laughing about how ridiculous this declaration was: “She wrote them down? Who does that?!” And finally, I realized that Susan had totally gotten into my head. I found myself identifying every little thing for Donovan, carefully pointing out objects and over-enunciating their names. I can imagine how obnoxious I looked to the casual observer – repeating each new word Donovan uttered over and over again, cheering him on with each new acquisition. I never resorted to actually writing them all down, but I would excitedly tell my husband, mother-in-law, mother, and anyone else that I didn’t feel self-conscious about bragging to about what an impressive vocabulary Donovan was building.
Before I had a child, I always thought it was weird how parents to toddlers continued to refer to their kid’s age in months instead of years:
“How old is Caitlin?”
“23 months.”
“Oh, so she’s almost two.”
“Well…yes.”
Now I totally get it. We parents don’t want to skip ahead by even a few weeks because the younger we make our child out to be, the more advanced they seem for their age. There’s nothing that juices a first-time parent’s ego like telling them how gifted their child is, or how you thought he/she was so much older – “my goodness, Atticus is so mature for his age!”
It’s almost impossible not to buy into this stuff. Really, shouldn’t you be a proud parent? I know I am. And on that note, I have to share something that Donovan did that seemed absolutely genius to me.
He was about 16 months old when he made his first joke. I was still nursing him at the time, and his habit was to ask for milk by saying “muck” and either pointing at or taking my hand and leading me toward the rocking chair in his room or the couch. On this particular afternoon, however, it was a couple of hours earlier than I normally nursed him and when he said “muck,” he pointed at our dog Tuffy’s head. Here’s the topper: Then he went “hee, hee, hee!” He was letting me know that he knew better – you don’t get milk from a dog’s head! – but that he was just being silly.
I don’t know about you, but I think that grasping the concept of humor at less than a year and a half is pretty damn impressive. And so that’s my big “check out my gifted child” story. Sure, I couldn’t credit Donovan with 68 words when he was a year old. But what do you find to be a more appealing character trait – an expansive vocabulary or a sense of humor?
That’s what I thought.
August 1, 2008
The Freedom of Those First Steps
Every parent I know gets excited at the prospect of their baby’s first steps. And try as I did not to get caught up in “keeping up,” I couldn’t help but eagerly anticipate this milestone myself. While I find it easy to make fun of other parents for being competitive with each other or rushing their child’s development, there was definitely a part of me that wanted to see Donovan walking before his first birthday. And I’m not proud of this, but I have to admit I felt some satisfaction when he started toddling around well before some of the other babies we know around his same age. I’ve always had a bit of a competitive streak, and I guess that extends to my child as well.
But once Donovan really got going, my pleasure had nothing to do with competing anymore. It become a thrill simply to watch him getting around so much more effectively and with such confidence – it was as if he had gotten his driver’s license. Not to mention that his bow-legged, inadvertently rapid-paced gait was simply hilarious to behold. And Donovan’s new propensity for getting around afforded me my own newfound freedom. Now I could simply put him down and let him go nuts exploring (and systematically tearing apart) the house while I sat and enjoyed my morning coffee…and maybe even – dare to dream – read the newspaper.
Look at my cute baby!!!
When Donovan was about eight weeks old, I emailed a few photos to some friends with this subject line. I figured that, knowing me as they did, they would get the joke. That being, of course, that I wasn’t actually one of those overenthusiastic mothers who sends out endless missives with the assumption that everyone in her address book cares to see photo documentation of her baby’s visit to the pumpkin patch, funny-looking hat, first experience with solid food (and what a lovely sight that is), and so on. I happen to be very judicious about how often I send out pictures and to whom. But send them I do because I’ve got an adorable baby boy, dammit, and I want them to see that!
And therein in lies my hypocrisy. I might be making light of the fact that I’m a proud mom who clogs up her friends’ inboxes with huge photo files from time to time, but that doesn’t keep me from doing it. I think that it’s almost physically impossible for us mothers (not to mention fathers – my husband does it just as often as I do) to not share pictures of our offspring. After all, we’ve received countless messages of this sort since our friends and acquaintances started procreating, and now it’s our turn. And let’s face it, those photos are pretty damn cute. Especially now that we’ve entered the digital age and can snap away with abandon, all but guaranteeing that we’ll catch the little rug rat smiling sooner or later.
This wasn’t always the case. In the days soon after I gave birth, I had lots of requests to send photos. I honestly don’t know if people really wanted to see them or if that’s just what you’re supposed to say to someone who has just produced another human being…probably a little of both. But I was reluctant. From one to maybe six weeks old, Donovan wasn’t much of a looker. His skin was mottled and flaky, his hair patchy and colorless; he had squinty, suspicious eyes and – this isn’t going to sound nice but it’s true – kind of a piggish-looking snout. In short, he looked like a newborn. And while they may be precious, fragile and miraculous, newborns are not what I would call cute.
And so I held off on sending out photos. We did include one in our email birth announcement – a picture of Donovan sleeping with a little blue hat on (his dad airbrushed it to get rid of the rash around his mouth). This seemed to be required; every birth announcement I’ve ever received included a picture of a squinty, wrinkly, sort of pissed off-looking little creature. And I suppose, as newborn photos go, ours wasn’t bad.
But once our guy got to be a couple of months old, he was undeniably a handsome fellow and I couldn’t wait to get those photos out. And the thing about babies, particularly your baby, is that they just keep getting cuter and cuter. And so we keep snapping away because we can hardly believe the way this tiny human is transforming before our very eyes. And why wouldn’t we want to share this amazing process with our friends and family? After all, it’s bound to brighten their day when they see the little munchkin’s cherubic face peering out from the computer screen. At least, I like to think so.
