Stella was walking slowly down the stairs, thoughtfully sucking her thumb. Suddenly she pulled her thumb from her mouth and turned back toward me.
“If I’m outdoors, is it okay to take spit out of my mouth?”
“No,” I said. ”You always keep your spit inside your mouth.”
“But I mean at trees and plants and stuff,” she said.
I wavered.
“It’s watering,” she insisted.
First big snow of the winter — and it’s heavy, sticky snow. The girls made snowballs, a snowman, and some kind of fort-type piece of snowy real estate before demanding hot chocolate.
I snapped this photo with my cell phone, loved it, and decided this should be our holiday card this year (yes, I’m this late ordering our holiday cards; it’s like this every year). But Chris protested; it wouldn’t look right blown up, he pointed out, since it’s taken with such a low-quality camera, and anyway, he’s always insisted we should take a picture of all four of us.
I’ve never sent out a picture with all four of us. I don’t like posing for pictures, I don’t like the way I look in pictures, and I don’t plan far enough ahead to have professional pictures taken in time for a holiday card, anyway. I prefer to send out snaps of our cute, fresh-faced girls; I figure that’s who people are really interested in seeing, anyway. No one needs to see our grizzled faces, right?
Every year I’ve gotten my way on this issue because I’m the one who actually deals with ordering, addressing, and mailing the cards. But this year, Chris dug around for our tripod, figured out the automatic camera feature on our digital camera, and rallied the troops for a shot.
So? The results:
Uncropped, but otherwise, that right there is the Official Shtemplin Family Foto.
And here, mostly for my own amusement, is the best outtake:
Happy Holidays!
The girls got haircuts on Saturday. This is a more loaded statement than it may appear, on first reading. Allow me to elaborate.
I happen to be the kind of mom who is mellow about some things — like TV on Saturday mornings, and snacks before dinner — and uptight about others, like the way my children appear in public. My pet peeves include sleeves with snot trails on the arms, fingernails packed with enough soil to support miniature chia pets, and unkempt, ratty hair.
The fact that my own hair is often fairly unkempt — ratty, even — is another blog post.
So, naturally, I’ve been combing their hair. This was not a problem when they were babies and had hardly any hair. (Lila spent her first two years of life essentially bald.) As preschoolers, their hair was so wispy and fine it took two passes of a comb and we were done.
But in recent years their hair has grown thicker, and their wills have grown stronger. Recently I realized it had become our unfortunate family tradition to fight over hair-combing, pretty much daily.
Chris suggested months ago that we simply get their hair cut. Reasonable enough. But I had, as I said, “feelings” about that. Combing my daughters’ hair — in theory, anyway — could be a moment of quiet bonding. And their hair is just so pretty. It’s the hair I always wanted when I was around their age. Of course, I didn’t have that hair myself because my mother always cut it.
I asked my mom a while back why she never let me grow my hair long. (Yes, I phrased it just that way, with the petulant, loaded “let.”) “Because you cried every time I combed it,” she said, sensibly enough. ”It wasn’t worth it.”
Finally I asked them: Haircuts, yea or nay? They instantly agreed (a rare occurrence indeed): yea. Forty-five minutes and twenty-five bucks later, they look freaking adorable, and can now comb their own hair successfully.
I don’t know what took me so long.
I’m not writing because I’m too busy writing. To put it another way: The blog is taking a backseat at the moment to the novel. The novel which is bound to be bloody awful, mind you, because I am writing it in thirty days; see nanowrimo.org for the backstory on that. Still. I haven’t flexed my fiction-writing muscles in a looooong time, and I have to say, it feels pret-ty good.
Stay tuned.
Lila has recently started wanting to help me more in the kitchen. Now that she’s tall enough to reach the counter and old enough to follow a recipe, her involvement has moved from “help” to genuine help. She can peel veggies, mix batter, knead dough — almost everything except wield a knife. An interesting side effect is that when we start cooking, she starts talking. Actually she’s pretty much always talking, but when we’re working together in the kitchen, she starts talking more deeply, sharing more personal thoughts.
There’s been a lot of conversation about cancer here lately. Lila knows a child who lost her mother to cancer a few years ago, and another whose mother is very ill with it now. I’ve been trying to follow Lila’s lead in terms of how much to talk about it; her lead, it seems, is to talk about it a lot, especially when she’s helping me in the kitchen.
The other day we were making mashed potatoes, and I was pointing out that not everyone who gets cancer dies from it. Lila has two now-healthy grandparents who illustrate this point quite nicely. But Lila focuses on the grimmer statistics, and is clearly perturbed that something hasn’t been done about this. “When I grow up,” she told me as she peeled potatoes, “I will find a medicine that will cure cancer. And the cure will only take a few days, so it won’t even be a big deal anymore.”
I imagined this as I chopped the peeled potatoes for the pot — cancer as a mild bacterial infection, say. I’d like to see you, but turns out I have cancer, so I’ll be lying low this weekend. Let’s get together early next week, ‘kay? If only. It occurs to me how it must seem to Lila like grownups have made a mess of it — we must seem so incompetent, allowing diseases and other things to get out of hand. She’d fix it all herself if only she were old enough.
“What kind of medicine would it be?” I wanted to know.
“I don’t know. Some kind of plant, maybe?” Lila mused. ”Something we didn’t know was actually a cure, all along.”
When she’s not cooking with me or Chris, she’s often engaging in another favorite pastime — playing orphan with Stella. I suspect this is another expression of her underlying anxiety about her acquaintances who have, in fact, lost parents, but I don’t think she realizes the connection. As far as she’s concerned, it just makes for extra dramatic play: children in peril, getting by on their own wits, despite the lack of grownups in their lives — or sometimes despite the involvement of incompetent grownups in their lives. I hope and believe it’s a healthy expression of her innermost worries. I have to admit I prefer the cozy cooking chats, even when the topics are so sad that I try to hide my eyes from her, so as not to confirm how vulnerable the grownups really are.
The girls were up at seven, and so was the dog. I fed and let out Sully; the girls helped themselves to the TV. Everyone seemed okay to me so I went back to my warm bed — and didn’t wake up again until nine, which is pretty much unheard of in these parts, these days. The girls had been left alone with the television so long they actually grew sick of it, turned it off, and began working on some art projects in the dining room. The term benign neglect sprang to mind.
Stella came in to snuggle — this is what finally woke us — and told us about a paper helicopter she was making in the other room. When snuggle time was over, she got out of bed and announced, “And now I’m going to go make history!” I wish I felt that way upon getting out of bed.
The morning art projects resulted in hundreds of minute paper cuttings all over the dining room rug. Chris told the girls they’d have to pick up after themselves before they could expect breakfast, which garnered predictable results — much whining, little action. When the floor was (kind of) clean, Lila whined for pancakes. When we asked her to repeat her request without whining, it seemed that Lila was literally unable to do it. She tried again and again, and the closest she got was a monotone drone. ”You sound kind of like a robot!” Stella shouted joyfully. Which led to robotics from both girls for the next ten minutes.
Pancakes were, of course, had. Conversation wound through Word Girl episode recaps to Stephen Colbert to Emmy awards to the Oscars. Lila saw ten minutes of the Oscars last spring, and recalled that Hannah Montana was there. ”But her real name isn’t Hannah Montana, you know,” I said. ”I know,” Lila answered, “but I don’t remember what it is.” ”It’s Jody Minnesoty,” Chris replied, which brought the morning back where it ought to have been all along.
Sullivan ate something wrong. Something very, very wrong, judging from the fact that she ignored her breakfast this morning and ran straight outside to start gnawing on grass. She’s now sitting on my lap, despite the alarming sounds she’s emitting. I think she’d jump off before crapping all over me, but perhaps this is overly optimistic. Having had two infants, it’s not like I haven’t been there before, anyway.
I don’t actually mind her being on my lap right now because it’s so goddamned cold in this house. We haven’t turned on the heat yet — a combination of Yankee pride (you call this cold? I’ll show you cold!) and procrastination (we put off having the furnace checked until, um, next week). So Sully is a portable furnace, just the right size for a lap. A noisy, potentially smelly furnace, but she does the job.
I have another coping mechanism for this 58-degree house: My forty-year-old red & white wool poncho. My great-aunt Temple knitted it for my mom back in the late sixties or early seventies; when I was in high school, going through my faux-bohemian phase, I swiped it from Mom’s closet. I’ve had it ever since, and it always does the job. It’s really scratchy, and the fringe makes it thrillingly dangerous for me to, say, cook over an open flame, but MAN IS IT WARM. It’s generously sized, too — I could have worn it throughout my pregnancies, had I not already been equipped with the portable (nonremovable) heaters that are babies in utero.
Another effect of wearing this poncho is that I am flooded with memories of Aunt Temple. It was at Aunt Temple’s house that I ate my first pancake. Aunt Temple also gave me my first pinwheel, on my seventh birthday. Aunt Temple lived several hundred miles from us, but there was a spare room at my grandmother’s house that was understood to be hers, and it was always pretty and tidy — and clean, exotically so, compared to the rest of Granny’s house. And cats. Aunt Temple brings to mind, for me, cats. Cozy cats. Cats that sit in knitting baskets piled high with soft wool, or maybe in your lap, like this puppy in my lap, right now.
I’m pretty sure today was my last day of hot yoga. I bought a punch card for ten visits when my usual yoga classes were unavailable, after the Y fire. And today was number ten. I’m not buying another anytime soon.
I never really could come to terms with the amount of sweat in that studio — my own (a shocking, unprecedented amount) and everyone else’s (slipping and sliding in someone else’s perspiration on the floor, after class? Having someone else’s sweat drip onto my water bottle? Thanks anyway).
Being the fairly social animal I am, though, what I liked about the place — aside from the yoga itself (top-notch instruction, really) — was running into all the people I know. It’s a small town, and hot yoga is hot stuff. There have been some sessions when I’ve known eight or nine of the other yoginis in the studio.
Today it was just two: Sasha, a Wondertimer, and Jodi, mom of one of Lila’s classmates. This meant I started out the session with fresh discussions of job searches and classroom dynamics on my mind. Clearing out all the fluff in my brain is not my strongest skill. I’m not the best at being here now; I’m too busy being wherever it is I need to be next, or finishing up wherever I’ve just been. As I’m twisting into triangles or contorting into eagle poses, my mind is pretty much anywhere else it wants to be.
An hour and a half later, the yoga class ended with me in a sweaty heap on the floor, and my mind had wandered off on random topics, one of which was the desire to go do a little shopping.
Which is why I ended up at Goodwill early this afternoon, buying a leather jacket with generous fake-fur trim, and now I’m wondering if it was a yoga-induced haze that led me to think this was a reasonable purchase. Too young? Too retro? Too…too? Not sure.
Will think about it as I wear it to my cool yoga classes at the Y.
Here’s how the conversation went. We were walking out of Cedar Chest Kids and heading back to the parking garage when Lila said, “Mommy, is the tooth fairy real? Tell me the truth.”
I stalled. “What do you mean? Did somebody say something?”
“Some kids on the playground were saying that the tooth fairy isn’t real, that it’s really moms and dads. Is it real?”
It took me a while to speak, and when I did, I spoke slowly: “Do you…want…the tooth fairy to be real?”
Lila huffed. “I want you to tell me the truth,” she repeated.
So I took a deep breath and laid it on her: It was really moms and dads, just like she’d heard on the playground. “But please,” I added, “Keep playing along for your sister.”
I watched her face for disappointment or — worse — disillusionment. But instead I saw something else: hints of a conspiratorial spirit.
**
That was several months ago now. This morning, she lost another tooth. And she’s been playing it up big, using her sweet-syrupy voice, opening her eyes up extra wide, as she expresses concern that the tooth fairy might forget to come tonight, and maybe she should write a note for the tooth fairy. And boy does she hope the tooth fairy knows the amount most kids are getting these days.
I’m glad she’s keeping up appearances for Stella, but she’s laying it on pretty thick. The tooth fairy might have to write a little note telling her to take it down a notch.
Stella is allergic to nuts… OR IS SHE?
Backing up a bit: When Stella was a toddler, she ate some cashews. Quite a few cashews, in fact, before I caught up with her and took away the bag. And a few hours later she broke out in a set of angry hives, all over her little baby body, and we landed in the Cooley Dickinson ER at nine o’clock p.m. for a shot of epinephrine and good ol’ cry.
The allergist handed us a few Epi-Pen Jrs and the directive to avoid not just cashews but all tree nuts. And, he said, also peanuts. Because even though peanuts and tree nuts are totally different animals, it was just simpler that way.
Simpler for him, maybe. Not simpler for us. Not simpler for anyone around us, either. Stella was that kid — the one who forces an entire preschool classroom to avoid PB&J sandwiches for a whole year. (It was not my idea. I swore I was okay with other kids’ allergenic lunches. The director insisted! I promise!)
But the allergist also said this might not be forever, this nut segregation. When Stella was about age five, she could be retested.
Today was the big day. We’ve avoided all antihistamines for a week in preparation for this. I picked Stella up from kindergarten early so she could get a series of scratch tests on her arms and back. And the results were negative! My heart leapt for joy until I heard the next step: bloodwork.
Let’s put it this way: Stella’s not stoic about shots. She puts up an impressive fight against any and all needles. I knew I’d need backup, and the phlebotomists came out in force to make the bloodletting as quick and streamlined as it could possibly be. What I didn’t bargain for was how pathetically articulate — and LOUD — she would be throughout the whole thing. I can only imagine what it was like for people in the waiting room to overhear her: “NO! STOP! AAAAGHHHHHH! TAKE IT OUT OF ME! BLOOD IS STREAMING OUT OF ME! AAAGHHHH! TAKE IT OUT! TAKE IT OUT!” And when it was finally over (thank effin’ god) she marched out of the office with what she termed her “bloodtaking” arm held ramrod straight in front of her and her face streaked with tears. Not a confidence-building sight for any new patients.
So. If that test is also negative, we move on to the “food challenge” — which involves three hours of eating ever-increasing amounts of cashews, and if that ends up being positive I imagine it will be no big deal, because Stella will be so heartily sick of cashews she’ll never want to eat another one anyway.
(I brought her to Sweeties afterwards. I sprang for the two-foot-tall rainbow twisty lollipop. You would have, too.)
