Just Powers

One thing I know about my Emma, that I have known since the first time she tried to breastfeed at only a few minutes old, is that she is happiest when she is doing something as perfectly as she can. “If at first you don’t succeed” is not really a part of her experience. She likes to get it right the first time, no “try, try again” for this girl. Which is why I wasn’t surprised when she walked practically the first time she got up on her legs. And I didn’t worry at all when she talked a little later than some, since she was speaking in full-blown sentences within two weeks.

She has been writing her name for about a year and a half, but didn’t seem to have much interest in any letters beyond e, m and a, until the last few weeks. But that is how it is with Emma, she fools you into thinking she is paying no attention to whatever developmental milestone you think she should be hitting, until you give up. And then she hits it, right in the center of the bullseye.

She has been getting excited lately about writing and has been asking us to tell her what letters are in particular words so she can write them down. We have helped her and she has been writing words this way for a few weeks. Last Friday I came home and Emma had written this:

Our au pair told her the letters to write and Emma wrote a short story (a poem really isn’t it?) about our weekend plans.

The next day Emma took her handy dry-erase board (thanks WP for a great birthday present!) and said “Wait Mommy, don’t look!” She ran out of the room for a few minutes, then came back and said triumphantly “LOOK!” and she had written this, with no outside help:

I know I shouldn’t be surprised. I know kids learn how to write. I know it’s no big deal really.

But holy mackerel - how did she know how to DO that? I mean “William”??? That is NOT a short word. And “Mommy (momy)”?? How does she even know what letter that is supposed to start with? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? Didn’t she just start walking? Didn’t she just say “lasagna” for the first time? Suddenly I feel like I am on a wondrous boat ride with Mr. Willy Wonka that has turned into a psychedelic trip down the chocolate river - “There’s no earthly way of knowing, what direction we are going…”

It’s a whole new world…

I love the holidays. I love Thanksgiving, I love Christmas, I love New Year’s, I love my birthday and Emma’s birthdays (which are all mixed up in there) and I pretty much love the month of December in it’s entirety.

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I also love when the month is over and January shows up with it’s quiet calm, cold and dreary to be sure, but still and contemplative.

In the beginning of December when the tree goes up and the decorations come out and the cookie recipes are shuffled I can never imagine a time when I will be happy to have the tree gone and the wrapping paper back in its place. And yet, every January I take a deep sigh of relief. I love the celebrations and the time together - and even as we put the decorations away I can’t wait for next year. - but I also love the time I have in January to reflect on what a great time we had during the holidays, what we can do differently next year, and especially how happy and grateful I am to have had another special holiday season with my family and friends.

So, Happy New Year to you all and best wishes for a peaceful and joyous 2012.
xo

This post is part of the Monday Link up with Just.Be.Enough. a site empowering us all to focus on what we are proud of in our lives instead of being discouraged by what we aren’t quite doing right. This Monday Link up is the last one in the Be Enough 4 Me Cancer Campaign, a collaboration between Just.Be.Enough. and Bellflower Books that will provide memory books to women diagnosed with breast cancer.

I went back to work full-time this past February.

After being a work-from-home-mom for two years after Emma was born, and then a stay-at-home-mom for two more years after William was born, I left my children in the capable and loving hands of our new au pair Claire, and marched off into the world to earn my keep as an Administrative Secretary for two academic departments at Gallaudet University.

The first month or so was much better than I thought. There were some tears in the mornings when I left, from the kids and from me, but it was reported to me that they recovered quickly and once I hit the office I recovered too. Dressing up in office clothes was exciting after four years of the jeans-and-a-t-shirt uniform of a stay-at-home-mom and being actively appreciated by my new employer made me feel great. I thought “wow, this isn’t as hard as I thought - we’re gonna be ok!”

As we settled into our routine the tears stopped but in their place Emma would ask me earnestly at bedtime “Mommy are you staying home tomorrow?” When I explained that I needed to go to work to help the people in my office she replied “but what about your kids?” and my heart broke. Then one day a couple of months after I started, she said “Mommy when are you going to STOP working and stay home with us again? Like not go to work anymore at all.” Ironically I was having the same realization around the same time - that this new arrangement is permanent. There is no time in the foreseeable future when I will be home with my children for a large chunk of time. I had no answer for Emma when she asked me that, except to say “I don’t think that is going to happen sweetie…but we are going to the beach in a couple of weeks!” Lame.

The truth is that I don’t think I was a very good stay-at-home-mom. I was impatient, I tried to do too much, I lost my temper, I lacked creativity. Claire is much better at it than I was - she is patient and kind with the kids, she has boundless energy, she has new, fun and creative activities for them every week. She is a rock star.

Admittedly things are different for Claire than they were for me. Her ONLY job is care for the kids - we don’t ask her to clean or do laundry or go grocery shopping - so she has the energy to play with them and the ability to focus all her energy on them all of time, something most multi-tasking SAHM’s don’t have the luxury to do. She also gets off at 5:00 or very soon thereafter. She works 9-10 hours a day as opposed to 24. Knowing there is a break coming up in your future helps fuel the patience required to deal with little ones I think and the lack of a break can be soul-crushing.

Which brings me to the heartbreaking reality of the situation - maybe my kids are better off now.

I go back and forth with myself about this - if I didn’t have to work, would I still choose to? Most days I say no, I would not. I would gladly give up the appreciation and fulfillment I feel from going to work every day if I could only be with my children while they are little. I am painfully aware of how fast they are growing and it hurts my heart to know I am missing large 10 hour chunks of their life every day. And Emma still asks me, seven months later, when will I stop working and come home. All of that causes me to spend large amounts of time plotting how we can lower our expenses enough for me to be able to stay home.

But occasionally - usually on a weekend day when we are having a particularly rough time, they ARE two and four after all - I will think to myself “I could never go back to being with them full time, we would kill each other.” And I realize that maybe missing each other desperately is ok. They have fun adventure-filled days with Claire. We snuggle and kiss when I get home from work and get to reconnect on the weekends. People always say that the most important thing is that your children know they are loved - maybe my kids are feeling more love from the three stable-ish adults in their life than if there were only two less stable ones? Or maybe I am just justifying it because the alternative - that my kids would rather have me home regardless of my less than stellar care-taking abilities - is too painful to bear.

Many moms I know love going to work - they miss their kids but are very clear for themselves that staying home would never be an option for their family. And other moms I know have gone to great lengths to make sure they can stay home with their kids. I fall somewhere in the middle - I sit at work feeling great that I am a contributing member of my team but with a huge pit in my stomach from missing my kids so much. Most days I cry either to work or on the way home, sometimes both. I miss going to the park and to Brookside Gardens, I miss the Zoo in the Fall, I miss snuggling with them on a rainy afternoon, I miss cooking with them and eating lunch with them. I especially miss macaroni and cheese - a guilty pleasure that is mostly absent from my work place.

So I don’t know the answer to the work vs. stay home conundrum that so many millions of families struggle with, but I will continue to try and figure it out. Our situation at the moment may not be “perfect” but I am coming to believe that it is “enough” - for all of us - and in the end that is all I can ask for.

But I still really miss macaroni and cheese.

Emma and Will shared an ice cream cone recently. It was rough going for a minute or two but they worked it out.

In which a horse sees his image for the first time, and a fairy princess tries to decapitate him.

Happy Halloween!!

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is water. Unfortunately I am exhausted and it is late in the day, so this is not going to be the post I wish it to be. I also love participating in Blog Action Day though, so I am loathe to not post something.

Over at Change.org’s page about Blog Action Day they have an explanation of why water was chosen as the topic for this Blog Action Day. I will post a couple of facts here which will have to suffice as my post on the topic - but please please head over to the Change.org page and check it out. There is so much information there it will make your head spin. And there is a cool water use calculator, which I just took:

Over 600 gallons of water a day sounds like a heck of a lot for one person, even if it is 500 gallons less than average. I guess we need to add some low flow shower heads to our “wish list”.

So, here are some facts about water to get you thinking, and maybe acting -

• One in eight human beings do not have access to clean water.
• Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.
• The UN predicts that one tenth of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply and sanitation.
• African women walk over 40 billion hours each year carrying cisterns weighing up to 18 kilograms to gather water, which is usually still not safe to drink.
• Every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.
• It takes 24 liters of water to produce one hamburger. That means it would take over 19.9 billion liters of water to make just one hamburger for every person in Europe.
• The average person uses 465 liters of water per day. Find out how much you use and start thinking about how you can use less.

This week I am in charge of snacks for my daughter’s pre-school class. This means I am responsible for providing healthy, fun, well-rounded snacks for 14 three and four year olds on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Holy Kitchen Nightmares, I haven’t been this stressed out since my family took the class guinea pigs home for the summer in fourth grade.

I know I know, it seems like such a simple task right? Throw some carrots and cheese and pretzels into a basket and you are good to go right? Oh no my friend, it is far more complicated than that. You must have the perfect combination of nutrition and variety with extra points thrown in for creativity.

So here is my snack fantasy: I breeze into school with fruits, vegetables and a protein formed into zoo animal shapes and contained within cages formed from pretzels. The teacher looks at me and says “Wow! I have never seen that before! So creative - and yet nutritious too!” Then later, at the mandatory co-op meeting she brings up MY snack to the other parents as the example of a perfect snack.

When the snack is presented to the kids they all laugh joyously as they pick out their favorite zoo animal and then eat everything because it just tastes so good. They all want to play with Emma after snack, because she is the one who brought in the best snack EVAH.

The other mothers call me or email me that night to tell me that their kids were still talking about the snack when they got home and could they please find out how I managed to get their kids to eat veggies. Oh and also could they please be my best friend.

I am snack genius and pre-school hero.

Here is how it really went down:

On Monday I provided square pretzels, cut up cheese sticks and red seedless grapes. When I was putting them out the teacher said “You know next time you could get the pretzel sticks and then the kids could make little barbells with the grapes!” GREAT Jen, great - snack FAIL. I could just see the teacher making a mental note “No creativity. Lazy mom. Poor Emma.” CRAP.

So I spent the last two nights scouring the internets for some creative snack ideas that would really wow the teacher (oh yes, and provide nutrition to the kids, that too of course). I came up with a few things, but nothing I could do without a trip to the grocery store (and just as an aside, what is the deal with “Ants on a log”? Raisins and peanut butter? How gross is that?). So I opted to make lace cookies with Emma yesterday (from my Grandmother’s recipe, points added for tradition maybe?) Then this morning we made cheese sandwiches and cut them with heart shaped cookie cutters. Then we cut apples horizontally to show the little star in the middle where the seeds live. Fun, right? Healthy, right? Pretty, right?

When I arrived today to set up the snack, the teacher came in and said “Wow, that’s a lot of food.” CRAP. And then came the mental note “Overachiever. Martha-Stewart wanna be. Poor Emma.” I. Cannot. Win. And she didn’t say it, but I could see in her eyes that she didn’t think cookies were a good idea AT ALL. (Even though in the handbook it says we can bring a sweet ONE time during the week - I swear it does.)

I have another shot at snack on Friday, and then again in December, so I guess I might yet figure out how to make the zoo animals etc., but at the moment I think I am just going to throw some carrots and pita chips into the basket and leave a tub of hummus with the teacher. Emma will just have to figure out another way to become the most popular kid in the class, and I will just have to give up on making the teacher like me. Or having friends.

Being a mom has brought me some of the happiest moments I have ever known in my life, which has surprised me a little I think. I guess that’s the thing about being a parent, you have no idea what you are missing until you have a child and your entire world is rocked.

And yet, despite the joy being a mom brings me, there are moments when I weep.

It usually happens in the middle of the night, in the dark, and I am usually holding one of the kids as they sleep, or struggle to sleep or refuse to sleep.

I weep because in the quiet of those moments, I realize how tiny my kids are. And in the same breath I realize how big they are, and how fast they are getting bigger. I flash forward to a time when they are in elementary school and refuse to let me kiss them goodbye when I drop them off; then to high school when I am lying awake at night waiting for them to come home from a night out; then to the day when they leave for college and finally I end with the time in the future when Mike and I have time to go on dates again, are able to sleep for eight hours uninterrupted and can clean up a room once a week instead of every hour.

And as I sit there in the dark, fast-forwarding through my life, I try desperately to memorize the feel of the little body in my arms, the look of the sweet face sleeping and the smell of a freshly bathed baby. I know I will forget, as the days move on and get fuller and more hectic, I will forget the quietest moments in the dark of the night. And the knowledge that I will forget makes me cry even harder.

My babies are slipping away from me, which is what is supposed to happen of course, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. Really, they started slipping away from me the moment they were born, and I am just fortunate enough to be along for the ride.

I know there is more weeping in my future, because time will only move faster as the years go on. It’s ok really, because those moments in the dark help me remember to try my best to cherish every moment with my kids, try not to get upset about the little things, and make sure they know how much I love them.

Bethany 2010, originally uploaded by Justpowers.

We got back yesterday from our annual trip to Bethany Beach in Delaware. Can’t wait until next summer so we can go back.