A sense of color

Last night Edith called out for Daddy in her sleep; when he went in he found she was struggling with a growing pain. Edith periodically will get aching pains in her feet in the middle of the night. Her pediatrician said they were not an uncommon phenomenon and could be chalked up generally as growing pains.

Last night's growing pain was uncommon for her, however, because was in her hand. And as she described it to Tom, she tipped him off that she may be prone to another relatively uncommon phenomenon: She told him that her hand was aching with a green pain. He asked her to clarify and she could only say, as if he should understand, that the pain was green. This morning she told me about it using the same description.

Is Edith synesthetic?

We're curious to find out as she grows up. I have a relatively mild version of the common color-grapheme form of synesthesia: that is, letters and some numbers appear to me in certain colors. So do days of the week and months of year--all of which also occupy particular locations in space. As we move through the week or the year, or reference letters of the alphabet or positive integers, I mentally am located at different places in these several spatial schemes, all of which are different colors. I never realized this was an unusual phenomenon until adulthood, when conversations with Tom and my dad made it clear that not everyone's mental world is organized like this. My mother's is.

Just this weekend the classical music show "From the Top" was interviewing a young musician who sees certain notes and chords as particular colors. And what seems much more potentially cacophonous, she also hears certain notes and chords when she sees certain colors. She recalled that once when she was young she and her mother were in a room with a brightly painted floor, and she asked her mother what note the floor was, not knowing it was a strange question.

If Edith exhibits this tendency, we'll be curious to see how her particular form plays out. It may be some time before she even realizes that it's something unusual to be articulated, however, such that we may have only the random green pain now and then as a clue.

***

In a show of sass that I really shouldn't be honoring by preserving it as an anecdote, Edith tried a new set of objections the other night when she wasn't getting her way. We were at a party at the home of a Chinese member of our church, in whose house you take off your shoes at the door. Our friend was passing out slippers to the guests, and she gave Edith a blue, sparkly, adult-sized pair that I thought would thrill her to her sparkly toes. But Edith had spied the pink sparkly slippers given to another guest and wanted those. She started to whine at me, asking for the pink slippers. I reminded her in the words from daycare that "you get what you get and you don't get upset"...and specifically, that we were guests in this home and did not get to dictate who got what. I said that Mrs. G was wearing the pink slippers--"see how they go with her pink sweater?"--and that was that.

Once I mentioned Mrs. G's sweater Edith switched tacks:

"But Mom," she whined, "that's too much pink for an adult!"

And then...

"Mama! Her pinks don't match!"


The denouement: I told Edith I didn't want to hear it, but she continued to whine that Mrs. G was wearing too much pink for an adult and that the pinks didn't match. Finally I told her the only acceptable way potentially to change the situation was to approach Mrs. G and politely ask whether she might be interested in exchanging slippers. Edith did this, Mrs. G was amused, and all was well.

Just be careful when asking Edith what she thinks of your next accessorizing effort.

Flights of fancy

Edith is plunging into literary analysis.

The other night she had me read a chapter of Peter Pan before bed; I chose the section in which Peter first teaches the children to fly and takes them to Neverland. (For those who might be familiar with the Disney movie or the Broadway play but not with the book, know that Barrie's original is a much more detailed and engaging story...if also one that raises even more questions about the emotional health of the author.)

When we finished that chapter Edith requested one from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I went to find it on the bookshelf and was just reflecting that it was a night for fantasy stories when Edith, evidently thinking along the same lines, broke in:

"The two stories are kind of the same, because they are both about a magical land that children go to. But they're kind of different, too, because in this one [indicating Peter Pan] they already know all about the land and they have a guide to take them there and show them around, but in that one they don't know anything about the land and they get there by themselves by accident and don't understand anything that's happening."

I know I'm her mother and am biased, but for my money it sounded as good as any initial brainstorming for a freshman writing seminar essay. I still want to read the rest of the paper.

***

We need to capture one of Edith's spontaneously invented stories on tape. Today we got one about Belle, who has many brothers and sisters. The problem was, Belle was the strongest of them all, and that made the other brothers and sisters jealous. She could pull a baby's crib across a room with a rope, even if it was 90-feet tall. [Edith proceeded to tie a cloth tape measure to one end of Alice's crib and start to pull it across the room.] Then one day her father, Jesse, asked Belle to go defeat the family's enemies, the Philistines. So she went out to the field of battle, lassoed the biggest Philistine, and pulled him over. Edith made sure we understood that this was different than hitting him between the eyes with a stone--pulling him over is different than knocking him over.

I should reassure her the copyright has expired on that one.

***

We're halfway through our course of parent-child swim lessons. There are just three kids in Edith's class (the advantage of taking a class at 8:30am on Saturdays). The extra attention doesn't necessarily translate into more intensive learning time, though. Our half hour in the pool goes something like this:

"Okay, pull with your hands! Pull your bricks through the water, one after the other!"

"Mama, want to act out a story with me, about the night the lagoon howled?"

"The night the lagoon howled?"

"You're going to pull your way through the tunnel. Pull, pull!"

"The night the lagoon howled. It was a mermaid lagoon, and one night there was a panther in the woods near the water, and he howled."

"Can you go through the tunnel? Pull with your hands!"

"No. I don't feel like it."

"Edith, can the mermaid swim through the tunnel at the edge of the lagoon?"

"Uh huh."

"Good job! Now let's lie on our backs and kick with our feet. Look up at the new lights on our ceiling! How many lights do we have?"

"Honey, I've got you. Can you lie on your back?"

"The crocodiles are at the bottom. The mermaid needs to swim away."

"Edith, can you lie on your back?"

"No, I'm cold. Mama, let's go swimming for awhile. You're a mermaid."

"We're in swim class right now."

"Oh, yeah. Mama, you're a mermaid."

***

The biggest fear of the moment seems to be not crocodiles but fire. We've been getting lots of comments and questions about fire in the last week. They may have been prompted by a faulty fire alarm at school, judging by the story Edith told me today in the car:

"The fire alarm went off at school."

"And was it a drill? Did you go outside? There wasn't really a fire."

"I think it just went off by accident. Sometimes it was just going off by accident! And when it went off Torrey cried. And oh my gosh, Mom, Ms. Kate asked Torrey if he wanted some pizza and grapes, and he said he didn't. And when I realized Torrey didn't want pizza and grapes because he was so scared, I started to a little get upset, too. Do you know that Kyra goes to dance class?"

So we've been getting lots of questions and comments about fire, as well as stories that involve putting out fires. We' re not entirely sure yet how to reassure her. Unfortunately tonight we were at a church family's house for a birthday dinner, and another guest asked what had happened to the house next door. Before I could get Edith out of the room we were hearing the the story of how the next-door neighbor's house burned to the ground, everything lost within half an hour of the start of a dryer fire, one of the worst fires the fire department had ever seen, the family got out but the cat didn't, nothing left at all.

There's definitely a downside to an active imagination. At least children's books don't include many stories of banks nationalizing and universities freezing hires.

***

Belle builds a log cabin

Diaper redux

Since there seemed to be sufficient interest in cloth diapering out there, I thought I'd offer a brief update on our experience so far, in case it might be of use as an additional data point for ALZ, Holly, or any others considering taking the plunge in the near future. Those who have already read far too much about fecal matters on this blog can skip to the next post.

The short version is that it's going great, despite our initial concerns, and now seems very doable. In fact, it's going to be hard to go back to disposables, with all the leakage out the leg holes and the cost and the waste, when we enter the daycare stage.

Having been introduced to the world of cloth diapering by the loan of secondhand pre-folds from a friend, I then did internet research on this unfamiliar arena of baby care and baby goods and as a result, spent awhile in the beginning looking longingly at the all-in-one diaper options. Nothing like an innovative gift to prompt further consumer desires. Fortunately, I got over it before hitting "Purchase" on any attractive online diapering sites. While all-in-ones still look great, after a few weeks we figured out that the pre-folds really are pretty easy, too, and that they even seem to have a number of potential advantages. For one thing, they dry quickly, on the same medium heat and in the same time frame as normal laundry. No 90-minute dryer loads on high heat needed. The cotton is also very easy to clean and doesn't retain odor.

In fact, while our laundry has undeniably increased with the addition of diapers, this is laundry that I find I enjoy doing. There is something innately satisfying about taking visibly soiled items and turning them into fresh, gleaming white, soft, fluffy squares once more. Much more satisfying than ordinary laundry that you know is dirty but doesn't look especially dirty when you throw it in. And since my least favorite parts of laundry are lugging heavy baskets up and downstairs and matching/folding/putting away, it is no problem at all to run up and down with just a couple dozen diapers, then take them all out of the dryer and stack them up, no matching or folding or separating into different piles for different room and different drawers.

We're still using disposables at night, since Alice seems to wake up with diaper rash when she sleeps for twelve hours in a cloth diaper. But otherwise it's nice to feel that our family has taken one modest step toward a smaller carbon footprint. We'll see what we can manage next.

Happy Valentine's Day!

What Valentine's Day in bed together looks like around here:


One for all Princeton and once-Princeton readers: Edith requested an outing to "the place where the men have wrinkled clothes and no heads":

Life between the lines

There are lots of unscheduled extras that get squeezed into the interstices of the day when you have kids, as well as plenty of last-minute revisions to the plan. Yesterday was my first crazy Thursday of the semester. The night before, I rounded up and packed the bags--my backpack, my pumping bag, my insulated milk bag, my purse, Alice's gear bag, Alice's insulated milk bag, Edith's lunchbox--and rehearsed what seemed like a completely full calendar for the next day:

8:30 -- Drop off Edith at school
8:45 -- Drop off Alice at babysitter's house
9:00 -- Arrive at work, pump
9:15 -- Clean pump parts, store milk
9:25 -- Print handouts for afternoon seminar
9:30 -- Walk 1/2 mile up-campus to history department
10:00 -- Teach first history precept
11:00 -- Teach second history precept
12:00 -- Walk 1/2 milk down-campus to writing program
12:10 -- Pump
12:25 -- Clean pump parts, store milk
12:30 -- Attend job talk
1:20 -- Walk 1/2 mile up-campus to history department
1:30 -- Attend history lecture
2:30 -- Walk 1/2 mile down campus to writing program
3:00 -- Teach writing seminar
4:40 -- Meet Tom to...
5:00 -- Pick up Alice
5:10 -- Pick up Edith
5:40 -- Arrive home to make dinner, walk dog, eat dinner
6:45 -- Pick up babysitter from Girl Scouts
7:00 -- Drop babysitter at our house with Edith, take Alice with me and Tom to class at church
9:30 -- Arrive home from class, drive babysitter home, finish putting Edith to bed
10:00 -- Collapse

Then Thursday dawned, and the day suddenly looked like this:

7:30 -- Edith wakes up with eyes swollen and crusted shut, crying.
7:35 -- Soak Edith's eyes to get crust off so she can open them
8:00 -- Call pediatrician for an appointment
8:15 -- Call preschool to let them know Edith isn't coming; Tom cancels day at work
8:30 -- Drop off Edith at school
8:45 -- Everyone piles in car so Tom can drop off Gretchen, then Drop off Alice at babysitter's house, then take Edith to pediatrician
9:00 -- Arrive at work, pump
9:15 -- Clean pump parts, store milk
9:25 -- Print handouts for afternoon seminar
9:30 -- Walk 1/2 mile up-campus to history department
9:55 -- Take call from Tom about which pharmacy to use with our prescription plan. The news: Edith has pink-eye.
10:00 -- Teach first history precept
11:00 -- Teach second history precept
12:00 -- Walk 1/2 milk down-campus to writing program
12:05 -- Call Tom en route for full report from pediatrician and to suggest he inform preschool our kid was there for several days with an infectious disease
12:10 -- Pump
12:25 -- Clean pump parts, store milk
12:30 -- Attend job talk
1:20 -- Walk 1/2 mile up-campus
1:30 -- Attend history lecture
2:30 -- Walk 1/2 mile down campus to writing program
3:00 -- Teach writing seminar
4:25 -- Check email and find out (1) I have drafts of senior theses in my in-box, (2) there is a departmental faculty meeting at 4:30
4:30 -- Call Tom to rearrange pickup
4:32 -- Print senior theses
4:35 -- Attend faculty meeting
5:10 -- Leave faculty meeting early to meet Tom, Edith, and Alice
5:05 -- Pick up Alice
5:15 -- Pick up Edith
5:40 -- Arrive home to make dinner, walk dog, eat dinner, keep Edith from touching Alice
6:45 -- Pick up babysitter from Girl Scouts
7:00 -- Drop babysitter at our house with Edith, take Alice with me and I stay home to mind the contagious fort, Tom to class at church
7:00 -- Nurse Alice to sleep
8:00 -- Administer eyedrops, read Edith to sleep
9:30 -- Arrive home from class, drive babysitter home, finish putting Edith to bed
9:30 -- Having lost a workday, Tom stays at church to start writing sermon; preparing to lose the following day at work, I begin prepping for classes next week
10:00 -- Collapse

Two months, ten hours, and six words

From diapers to that other subject only a young parent could find engaging: sleep.

Just past Alice's two-month mark, we celebrated a major milestone: Last night Alice slept from 9:30 pm to 7:30 am...and so did Edith. We haven't had cause to complain about Alice's nighttime sleep, which typically has been lasting from about midnight to 5am, with a feeding at 5 that earns us another couple of hours sleep. But the ten-hour night was definitely a step up and was the more wonderful because it was exactly in sync with her sister. Hurrah! Tom and I had forgotten what an evening to ourselves was like.

***

A Valentine's challenge for our clever friends and families. This afternoon on NPR we listened to a piece in which people were asked to tell the story of a romantic relationship in exactly six words. What would you say?


My offering: We met in Laura's Palm Pilot.

Tom's offering: Love, two kids, degrees...a breeze.

Your turn.

Chronicle of a weekend

Idolization of big sister has begun (of course I came in at the tail end of the conversation):

I should say, too, that I stopped filming when I did because I thought Edith was about to wield that blanket in a boisterous, matador-like style that threatened injury to the babe. Instead, she was preparing to share her beloved blanket with her sister, spreading it over Alice and tucking her in.

That was typical of what was a generally good weekend. I feel the need to record some of these days, if only for my own sake, because I imagine they will soon be a blur.

Saturday Tom left early for a day-long professional conference in Trenton, and a friend from church arrived shortly thereafter to babysit Alice, so that I could take Edith to her parent-child swim lesson. She continues to be more interested in the imaginary mermaids at the bottom of the lagoon than in the YWCA swim instructors' requests that kids pull with their hands and kick with their feet...but fortunately everyone is laid back, and so we have fun.

Back home, we three girls then vegged on the couch for several hours, as I let Edith watch Peter Pan 2.5 times (bad mama moment). The amount of housework to be done was plaguing me, but every time I tried to leave the room to vacuum or do laundry Edith began to wail. She has developed an overactive imagination about the monsters lurking in every room of our house and professes to be unable to be out of sight of an adult. Add Alice's disinclination to nap, and it made for a mellow morning on the couch.

But eventually I couldn't stand looking at that undone housework anymore, not to mention missing a beautiful spring-like day outside. So I persuaded Edith into our second walk downtown. Once she got outside in the 50-degree weather, her spirits shot through the roof, as she skipped along the sidewalk imagining the flowers she's going to pick as soon as spring comes. She's my child: solar-powered. We arrived downtown and sat outside Edith's favorite ice cream shop enjoying outdoor ice cream in February, then went to the cool new indie bookstore to stake out a corner in the children's section and read for two hours. Found a beautiful illustrated Cinderella that makes it seem the prince and princess have time to fall in love with each other and do so for reasons of personality. In other words, it was legitimately romantic. Having recently finished Edith's first Beverly Cleary book and first complete unabridged chapter book, Ramona the Pest, we also enjoyed a chapter from another Ramona book.

Tom picked us up as dark was falling in order to drop us back home before going to lead a small group at church. But we chafed at not seeing him longer, so he brought us all along to the small group session. We completely derailed the Bible study portion of it, but Tom claimed that seeing the children did some of the members good. I know that seeing him did us good.

Today Edith was in one of those magical moods where she's inclined to cooperate, agree, and engage cheerfully throughout. We find ourselves staring at her, wondering how to bottle it. The first joy was that she participated readily in Sunday school class when the music teacher came in to work with the kids. In fact, all the kids participated enthusiastically in music, making for a banner morning in the three-year-old class, to the great pleasure and relief of me and the other teacher.

Edith continued in this cheerful demeanor in church itself, where the children's sermon was much better for having a complete complement of elementary choir kids there, instead of just Edith.

After church at our usual diner lunch she chatted cheerfully with our favorite waitress about Valentine's Day, then she dug into her pancakes with intensity and gave me and Tom some room actually to chat with each other.

It was another beautiful day, and after lunch Edith proposed we go to one of the local farms. We agreed on the condition that our turnaround time changing out of church clothes at home be fast. She agreed--and complied, staying focused on changing and beating me back out the door. Then when we switched farms on her due to time constraints, she agreed to the change without complaint.

All of the considerable snow we got this week melted at once this weekend, making for a muddy mess at the farm. There were signs warning people to park with care, and we saw at least two cars spinning their wheels in mud. The footpaths around the farm were even worse. But it didn't keep Edith from cheerfully tromping around gathering spilt feed corn and scattering it for the animals.

After the farm trip we attended a surprise party in Butler, our old grad school apartment complex. I enjoyed seeing a bunch of the history grad students, most of whom I feel out of touch with these days.

Then the tables were turned, and rather than Tom heading to an evening meeting at church, he went home with the girls, and I got to go to a fancy dinner with a job candidate for a position in my department. What a pleasure to enjoy good food at a new restaurant we've never tried because it is so expensive, as well as friendly adult conversation! The other person in my department with a preschooler and a newborn was also there, and it soon transpired that the job candidate had the same. So the conversation turned at times towards childcare and pumping in spite of our best efforts...but it also dealt with pedagogy, politics, and Princeton. Such a refreshing change of pace.

Now on to the week.

E & A in January

Who knew that diapers would yield more comments than anything other than giving birth? Thanks for the thoughts from all quarters. We're impressed with how many of you have mastered the use of cloth or are preparing to take the plunge. We've been moving ahead with this project slowly, currently at about half cloth and half disposables as we navigate the various logistical challenges--like having a diaper bag too small for a stack of quilted cotton squares and finding that Alice tends to soil diaper covers at the same rate as diapers themselves, meaning we run out of covers pretty quickly. The various newer models--BumGenius, FuzziBunz--are tempting for their ease of use (if not for their cutesy names), but we're thinking it wouldn't be cost efficient if Alice starts daycare come summer and we're back to disposables much of the week. So for now we'll attempt to master the old-fashioned type. (Though if anyone has thoughts about the all-in-one brand that Babies R Us carries, Bumkins, let us know, as our gift certificate credits are BRU are abundant.)

And now for the promised photos. At church this morning four people commented on how much Alice suddenly looks like Edith. We can't see it, so you may judge. Many more commented on how much Alice has grown, and on that we concur!

Sisters hanging out on a quilt made for Alice by Desi's grandmother:


Alice is already watching big sister closely:

Another fabulous handmade cardigan, this one by Alex, elicits more smiles:

And serious mode (7 weeks):

Reading, I:

Last weekend Edith astonished me by accompanying me (and Alice) on a one-mile walk through the bitter, windy weather to the public library without once dawdling, complaining or asking to be carried. We made it because she suggested I pass the time by telling her the story of Peter Pan, which lasted us all the way there. When we got to the library we found a beautifully illustrated copy of the J.M. Barrie original, and Edith blew me away by listening to me read aloud, in chunks and with some spur-of-the-moment abridgment of the more sophisticated nonsense prose, for three hours. We parked ourselves in a corner on the floor, Alice alternately nursing and dozing in my lap, and Edith prompting me to continue whenever I paused. She was especially fond of this painting of Mermaid Lagoon. Maybe I should suggest that the church pastoral staff try to work Peter Pan into their sermons...

Reading, II:

"Hey, Mom..."

"Psst, Edie, Mom is watching us..."

"Um, Edie, Mom is still here..."

"Mom, some privacy, please!"

Teaching Desi about little siblings, as he's a few weeks away from his own.When they'd had enough of babies, Desi proposed that he and Edith have "a book party," then write their dissertations:

Finally, some of the promised cooing. We're having regular cooing chats these days, but the minute the camera comes out Alice stares at that and lets go her end of the conversation. For what it's worth: