The final calendrical first

Edith's first Leap Day.
And her first celebration of Daddy's real birthday.

I'd been trying to make a big deal of this. Nevertheless, when I prompted her early this morning in bed, "Hey, what's today?!" she replied, "Picture Day!" Yep, it was the annual Lifetouch Crying Kids Day at daycare. That hadn't been the answer I was going for, of course, but it's interesting to see that events at school are starting to shape Edith's mental map of the days and weeks.

After that, though, she was very sweet to her daddy all day for his 8th birthday. She repeatedly wished him happy birthday, sang him happy birthday, and told other people about his birthday. She was a trooper when, at her cousins' house for a birthday dinner, she started to complain suddenly that her tummy "felt really bad" and several minutes later, right after Tom blew out the candles, threw up on the kitchen floor. (She immediately was back to her regular self. Her cousin Matthew, whom she hadn't seen in a month, did the same thing an hour before she did. Strange.) When I took her into the bathroom to let her finish vomiting in the toilet and to clean her up, the poor bug said, "It's a shame I threw up on Tom's birthday."

We wouldn't be surprised if her nervous stomach was a response to the stress of a week in which her parents were holding serious Adult Conversations about The Future over her head during all waking moments, putting off requests for stories and songs as long as we could. She hasn't held it against us and even sang us the "I Love Mommy/I Love Daddy" song she learned for Valentine's Day on the way home from her cousins' house. What a sweet kid.

Political endorsement, an update

For a moment this morning I thought that Edith had jumped on the popular bandwagon, swept by the latest whims of the electoral public. And then she clarified that she was committed in her choice of a candidate.

The scene: Early morning, G and T's bedroom. Edith sitting on the bed playing, me puttering around getting ready, NPR on in the background reviewing last night's Democratic debate.

E: Who is she?
G: Huh?
E, insistently: Who is she?
G: Who?
E: Lilluh...lilly...lilluly...kint..lilluhy kinton.
G: Hillary Clinton?
E: Yes.
G: She's a woman who wants to be president of our country. Do you remember what a president is? You talked about it on President's Day at school.
E: No.
G: It's a person who is in charge and helps makes the rules for our country.
E: [Pause, thinking.]
E: I don't want she.
G: What?
E: I don't want Lilluh...lilly...lilluhy Kinton to be she.

There was another pause, and then it seemed as though Edith were suddenly putting this conversation together with her experience at the polls three weeks ago. She broke into a smile and affirmed,

E: I voted for Harry. Yes, Harry!

And she nodded emphatically for about thirty seconds.

(Note: She did press the button in the voting booth, but she didn't vote for Harry. Please see the previous post. Tom is not the only one in this family guilty of gross manipulation of the illiterate.)

So intractable, so gullible...

There are many days that the parent of a toddler rues his child's growing savvy. He can no longer put the toy behind his back and make the child think it disappeared. He can't as easily distract her from a fight over the sandbox bulldozer with an enthusiastic suggestion that she go on the twirly slide, or from crying for mommy milk with an offer of animal crackers.

So as Tom observed, it's almost a shock when he discovers he still has the upper hand in a Wily Battle of Wits now and then.

We dined at Whole Foods yesterday for lunch, along with Edith's friend Julia and her family. Tom and Brian were busy feeding the girls at one end of the table while the mamas talked at the other end of the table.

As we walked out of the store and headed home, Tom was munching on the remainder of a package of brownies we'd all shared.

"Mommy, I had a chocolate brownie! But just a little piece," Edith told me.
"Why just a little piece?" I asked.
"Because the package said on it 'Little girls named Edith shouldn't eat too much brownie, because it's not healthy for them--just adults.'"

Versifying

My first (and close-to-last) original poem, as recorded in my journal at age six, was:

Walking in the grass so green,
I think it is the nicest thing,
I think it is a treat,
To feel the grass beneath your feet.

With bolder strokes, subtler allusions, and far greater fidelity to meter--at less than half the age--Edith composed what I think may have been her first poem today at the public library. We had just finished reading a Frances book, which may have been the inspiration, as Frances is forever inventing spontaneous songs. Or maybe it was the influence of my friend Catherine, who wrote Edith a lovely poem called "Izzy Looks Everywhere" for her second birthday, which Edith has rediscovered this week and made a new favorite around our house. In any event, she was in the midst of one of her logorrheic streams of consciousness, when she sang out the four lines below with deliberate cadence:

Fly down the pages,
Is what I now say,
But tenderly stopping,
The schoolbus is stray.

Literary analysts, have at it.

Finally!

At last we got a snowfall that managed to cover the grass and last more than an hour. Not much more: it fell in the wee hours of the morning and had turned to rain by noon. But we got out there at 8am and so managed to have a sledding day this winter at last. Favorite sledding style--A Family "Samlich": Daddy on the bottom, Edie in the middle, Mommy on top. And Bismarck cavorting down the hill next to us. No one around to take a picture, alas.


The rest of the neighborhood did come out eventually, after we'd returned indoors. "Snowbuddies," as Edith's friend Emma calls them, seemed to be the order of the day. When we went out to walk Bismarck in the evening, they were everywhere. Edith walked around checking them out.

The little kid snowbuddies...


The adult snowbuddies (the thaw already wreaking havoc on their bodily integrity)...


And the neighborhood giant...


As dusk fell, Edith tried to persuade us to shovel snow on top of her and perhaps turn her into a snowbuddy, too.

It's not who she's named for, but....

...remember Edith Ann? I looked across the living room the other morning, and there she was, fidgeting and all:

An overlooked anniversary

Forgive my posting insomnia-induced calculations, but it occurred to me tonight as I tossed and turned that Edith and I have just passed a momentous milestone...

February 1, 2008 was Edith's 1,000th day of nursing.

(It was also, if I calculated correctly, the 1,002th day of her life--figuring that there were two days before then that she didn't nurse while I was away at conferences. So we could alternatively celebrate January 30 as her 1,000th day of life. But all in all, that seems less momentous.)

I know there are plenty of readers of this blog who are disbelieving and frankly, a little disgusted at the idea of a walking, talking, storytelling preschooler still nursing. I know there are others of you, who have been privy to the emotional ups and downs of my nursing relationship with Edith, who probably find it rather hypocritical that I'm celebrating it now and who wish I had put an end to Edith's nursing any one of the last half dozen times I lamented I couldn't take it anymore. I know some of you have wanted to nurse your own children longer but found that circumstances made it impossible, who may dislike posts like this. There may even be a few lactivists among you who think 1,000 days is not much to crow about and that a nursing relationship is to be celebrated only when the mother allows the child to choose its end date (even if that's not until second grade).

But right now, in this sleep-deprived moment, I'm feeling pretty proud of us. We've managed this relationship despite the intense pain of the first ten weeks, the multiple hospital consultants who couldn't help with that, the marathon sessions in the early days when nursing comprised 30% of our waking time. We've managed with the growing squirminess, the puncture wound (ah, teeth), the belly-button poking, the belly-buttong scabbing, the prodding and fidgeting, the constant side-switching, the ten-times-a-day routine until last summer. We've managed despite my being a working mother and Edith's having had other daytime care providers much of her life. We've managed the pumping: I managed toting the extra shoulder bag back and forth every day for the first year, the search for private spaces on campus and in archives, the freezer bags, the stockpiling, the daily washing, the weekly sterilizing, the thawing; Edith managed the bottles. We've managed in stores, in church, on the playground, at weddings, and just about everywhere else.

It won't be another 1,000 days, lactivists notwithstanding. But still, I'm pretty proud of us.

Valentine's Day

The member of our household who is single and underage did by far the best on Valentine's Day. Which only confirms what we already knew about Western bias in favor of early, uncertain love rather than the steadier, long-term variety. Early love makes for a thrilling movie; long-term love lends itself to a subtle, in-depth novel...and who has the time to read those anymore?

So Edith celebrated in grand style, first at a Valentine's crafts night at church last Sunday, and then at school on February 14 proper. She and her classmates decorated bags to hold their Valentines; had a party complete with heart-shaped toast, red jello and the like; played Hug Your Friend When the Music Stops and Toss the Beanbag through the Heart-Shaped Hole; had a scavenger hunt for hidden hearts in the classroom; received a bounty of gifts from their teachers (a definite upping of the ante since I was young); presented their parents with fancy handcrafted votive holders, Valentines bearing their handprints, and handmade refrigerator magnets reminding us to hug our child daily; greeted us at the day's end with an "I Love Mommy/Daddy" song they had rehearsed; and exchanged a whole bevy of Valentines with each other. As with Christmas gifts, two seems to be an ideal age for exchanging Valentines: No matter whether they fell into the category of store-bought cards featuring a recognizable branded character or homemade efforts, Edith was thrilled. "Harry gave me Pooh! And Piglet's hiding in the flowers--that's so funny!" was followed by, "Hannah put glitter on a heart for me! That's so sweet."

Tom and I, meanwhile, find ourselves on February 15 each with a card for the other that--in the bustle of supervising Valentines production and preparing class party goodies--we never found the time to fill out. To be fair, Tom did much better than I did otherwise: He also brought home roses, a chocolate cake, and champagne, along with the enormous Dora balloon that Edith persuaded him I would like. I managed only two Godiva chocolates. We shared them while playing our first round of Blokus, a spatial strategy game we got for Christmas, after Edith was in bed. Good game!

My Valentines. Edith discovered that a Christmas dress recycled nicely as a Valentine's dress.

Decorating cookies at church. Valentine's crafts night was a make-up for the traditional Advent crafts night that was cancelled preemptively in December in anticipation of snow that never materialized.

Instant gratification

Decked out for Valentine's Day at school

Edith, Sarah, and Hannah set to work first thing, decorating the paper tablecloths for the class party with stamps. When she's not absorbed by Valentine's Day, Edith has spent her days at school recently as "Mermaid," the Little (a.k.a. Ariel), while Sarah is Snow White. Since Sarah gets to school early, she has taken to donning her costume right away, then pulling out Edith's and saving it for her until she arrives. It was a testament to the excitement of the holiday that Edith didn't head straight for her fin but got absorbed in something else first.

This picture of a resort hotel room awash in pink neon light was not from a romantic getaway but a business trip. (Can't you tell?) I spent three nights there last week--alone.

Super Tuesday

...and Edith's going with an outside candidate. As we walked down the street to the polling place, I was one of those many Democrats who is still up in the air.

"Who should I vote for?" I asked Edith. "Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton?"

"I would write in Harry," she said.

Evidently she's betting on charisma over experience.

Even if Harrison isn't your candidate, do VOTE TODAY if you're eligible.

Incidentally, Edith asked at breakfast this morning what voting was. Once I explained, she got silent for awhile. It seemed that she was thinking very hard about the concept that you could choose who would be in charge and make the rules...

And a final note for her linguist fans: When we got to the polling place, she said, "Let's go in the boat!" And I said no, there was no boat involved, the word was vote, not boat. And she said, "Oh. Well, they sound almost the same. Hear that? 'vvvote' and 'bbboat.'" Her amigos hispanohablantes would agree with her.

Phoenice Navidad

Logic

Last night at dinner, Edith launched on "Twas the Night Before Christmas." When she came to

"He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,"

she paused, frowned, and amended the line,

"He was dressed all in fur from his head to his feet,"

then continued with confidence,

"And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and seet."