Rounding out November

Some belated photos from The Game, with RLM





A recent breakfast moment


From mid-month, a video of the girls in the bath. Despite the somewhat aggressive bids for attention by big sister, Alice manages to demonstrate most of her communicative repertoire at 11 months: yeah, happy, hi, bye, clapping to "If You're Happy and You Know It," and making twinkly finger motions to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." The main missing piece is her frequent (and overextended) use of the word baby, often combined to make the phrase happy baby. It seems to be an apt self-description much of the time.




And from Thanksgiving in Delaware, where the best part of the holiday for us was seeing Edith's joy in playing with her cousins. She and her eldest cousin, Abigail, in particular speak the same language, and they dove right into imaginary games and storytelling together. I was delighted when they told us they were holding a meeting of their new club, The BigFeet Club, named for how they decided they both look when they have on their footie pajamas. Edith has been wanting to hold a meeting for a week or two now but didn't know what one does at a meeting; Abigail was more expert, and their collaboration was instantaneous and full of giggles.


Another afternoon I passed the bedroom where they were playing and caught Edith saying, "When the other cyclopses asked who had blinded him, he said, 'Nobody'...," then heard Abigail's peals of appreciative laughter at learning of Odysseus' cleverness in the adventure with the cyclops. Edith was recounting the full story of the Odyssey, her latest favorite, and Abigail, another story devotee, was lapping it up.

The cousins left Mom-mom and Pop-pop's house before we did, and about fifteen minutes after their departure we found Edith hiding behind a large plant crying because she missed them.

We'll see them again soon enough. Now that we've passed Thanksgiving we find ourselves hurtling pell-mell into the chaos of advent, semester's end, Alice's birthday, and Christmas. Last year people assured us we had no need to keep up with the usual seasonal obligations, busy as we were with the arrival of a new baby. Funny that...It seems one has to produce a baby oneself to merit the calm and space apart from the demands of ordinary life that ought to mark the celebration of a baby's birth everywhere at Christmas.

Now we find our free pass has expired. Forget cuddling a newborn while spending time with family and enjoying the holiday. We're wondering just how one juggles papers, exams, senior theses, and research projects; article and sermon deadlines; meetings, pastoral care, and fundraising; pageants, recitals, and concerts; gifts, cards, wrapping, and shipping...along with a first birthday. (And why do expectant mothers get the reserved parking at Babies R Us? Isn't it the mother with the squirming, ex utero kid in tow, racing to get an errand done before the pre-dinner meltdown, who needs the help?)

Having a baby seems to be one of the few events for which most of society agrees that ordinary time stops. Can't we apply the lesson to the celebration of Christmas?

An open letter to the Bulldogs

Dear Yale Football:

For sixteen years now I have enjoyed the annual ritual of checking in with you guys the weekend before Thanksgiving.* Since my maiden The Game in 1994, the first time I ever traveled anywhere without my parents planning or signing off on the details of the trip, I have found it an exciting way to start the holiday season. In the early years the biggest thrill was being part of the "Football Concert" between the Glee Clubs the night before, sharing the stage for both serious music and the football song antics. After graduation, living in Boston, The Game became an opportunity to reunite with old friends in my new city--or to make a pilgrimage back to New Haven, which still felt like home. Those were the years when I missed college most intensely, and The Game was the chance to return, knowing one was welcome into the crowd once more. Then it was important to sit in the student section, or as near possible, and to see everyone one possibly could at the tailgates.

Subsequently the sense of urgency faded, as The Game took on the quality of a pleasant annual gathering with a particular group of people--now people I actually knew best from the post-college years in Boston. Next came the opportunity to introduce my kids to the fun. Indeed, I realized this year that I have quietly slipped across a divide. Not only do I no longer care about sitting near the students, I realize that I don't look like the students anymore--fashions have changed, they all carry hand-held devices we didn't have back then--and that I am one of those old alumni trying to find space apart from the crazed drunken revelers to make this a family event with my young offspring. I dress my children in blue and white and buy them flags when they ask and smile when they cheer "YAY, YALE!!" at the top of their lungs, taking more pleasure in their fun than in my own experience of The Game. (For accuracy's sake: Only one of my children is as yet old enough for the flag and the cheering. The other, not yet an ambulatory English speaker, was attending her inaugural The Game this year--an important milestone, even if it's hard to know her feelings about the matter.)

Yes, sometimes it's bitter cold at The Game (more often in Boston it seems, whether because of the latitude or the design of that U-shaped stadium I don't know). Sometimes it's muddy at the tailgates. Sometimes the band's uber-prop is fantastic, and sometimes it falls a little flat. Sometimes you have to abandon your car several miles from the stadium and hike in. All of those unknowns are part of the ritual--what makes each The Game that year's The Game.

But here's the thing: One of the unknowns ought to be whether you guys are going to win or lose. Because for all the fun of The Game, frankly, it's also hard going with little people. It's great when they tell you they love football and that they had a fantastic day. But even so, the six hours in the car is tough on them. So is the absence of bathrooms, healthy food, places to squirm around, or opportunities to warm their toes. It throws them off their game for at least 24 hours afterwards--and it completely wears Mama out.

You may feel secure by now in the belief that I'm forever faithful. But kids can change a relationship. At this point I need you to step up and give a bit more on your side. You may think that offering a variety of types of losses, from the pathetic blowout (2007) to the final 1:30-minute heartbreaker (2009), is sufficient to maintaining my interest. But as a friend said in the stands yesterday, that last 1:30 would have been heartbreaking were it not by now seemingly inevitable.

So what do you say? I'll think about continuing to haul my kids up and down the crowded Northeast Corridor once a year to sit outdoors at the start of winter and get hungry and tired, if you can see your way clear to manage a win now and then. Otherwise, we may have to go our separate ways, at least for the time being. There are warmer, quieter ways for me to visit with old friends. And if we stick to those I'll be spared the unanswerable question:

"But Mama, at the end of the song it says 'Harvard's team may fight 'til the end, but Yale will win,' but at the end Yale didn't win. Why?"

Why, indeed.

All best wishes,

A '98er seeking greater commitment



*Minus the year I was expecting a baby (2008) and the year I was giving a professional paper (2006), and in the latter case I trekked up to see you play Princeton at home as the next best option, creating a mini-The Game-substitute with some friends.

Shards

Some days our full lives seem a rich, exhilarating ride. Tom pulls up to get me from work at 4:52 (or so), and I climb into the car ready to enjoy our eight minutes of animated conversation about the small triumphs and challenges of our respective professional days, coasting on the tail end of the workplace adrenaline...before the happy reunion with the girls and turn to family life when we arrive at daycare.

Other days it feels as though we're barely holding the straining team in check, each obligation pulling us in a different direction, threatening to burst the thin harness. Sometimes the only thing holding it all together, especially when sleep is frayed and meals rushed and conversations abandoned in the face of a peppershot of interruptions, is the interior monologue creating the narrative out of all the scattered bits.

And sometimes we're too tired even for the narrative. I just read a book prologue reflecting on a typo in a student paper: how "shard experience" seemed a more accurate description of the student's topic (an esoteric New Age gathering) than "shared experience." So here, the shard experiences, the scattered bits:

***

Yesterday we met a man whose father was born during the Lincoln administration. I'm still marveling over that one.

He was most improbably attending a preschool birthday party at which we were also guests--at Chuck E. Cheese. He asked my dissertation topic, and when I said it was American missionaries in Asia between the world wars, he noted that I should have interviewed him.

***

After dodging all germs so far this fall, Alice came down with a virus today. The good news: It's not flu.

***

Alice now says a very clear and intentional "Bye!" complete with wave whenever she notices that someone is exiting. She has a clear "tee" for the tall things shedding leaves outside the window, with which she is quite taken. Incidentally, she has decided that the black-and-white minimalist line painting of a mother and child over the changing table is a "tee." Interesting insight there into the developing mind's categorization of objects.

She claps her hands and pats her head appropriately when someone sings "If You're Happy and You Know It," and one morning I opened a bleary eye to see her bopping up and down in our bed doing those same motions, and I realized she wanted someone to be singing "If You're Happy and You Know It."

Funniest, though, is that she usually responds to an interrogative inflection with a blase, "Yeah." It makes for some amusing "conversations."

***

Edith's first birthday party was loosely organized around her favorite things at the time: flags and spoons, balls and balloons. Were we to adopt the same strategy for Alice in a few weeks, the party would be about crayons and cups, trees and music. I tried to get some video of her "dancing" as she so often does when she hears music, but this abbreviated bit is the best I could do:

And another domestic scene, with Mirror Baby:

***

Edith is not going to Africa after all--though Tom and I are. Sorry to get ahead of myself with that news. I do promise I'll write about it more at length soon. Tom was very much hoping we all could go, but the international flight with a 20-month-old quickly seemed like a nightmarish prospect, and after further reflection and conversation with the leader of the project on which we'll be working, we decided that it was quite possible we would find ourselves 48 hours into a trip to Africa finding that Edith was still holding out for Colby Jack cheese, applesauce, or cherry tomatoes, as at home...with disastrous results for the emotional well-being of the whole group, as well as Edith's physical integrity. So the girls are staying stateside next July with Mor-mor and Grandpa, and I'm coming to terms with leaving my babies for two weeks (not the least because it dictates an end date for the nursing relationship with Alice, if she hasn't quit of her own accord by then).

***

I know there were other shards floating around in my head all day--happy birthday, Sesame Street!--but they've evidently been swept under the couch or ground to unrecognizable powder by now. So some belated pictures to close:

4 and 1/2

It doesn't feel surprising that as of today, Edith is closer to 5 years old than 4 years old. She has been anticipating 5 for awhile. Five is when she'll be a flower girl for her cousin Kerri. Five is when she's going to Africa (more on that later). Five is when she's starting kindergarten, quite possibly at the school down the street where we vote and where we played on the playground this summer and visited the kindergarten rooms with a friend who teaches there. Edith already is acquainted with the giant stuffed giraffe at the entrance to the school, and if the academic job market continues in its slump and we remain in Princeton another year, Geoffrey the Giraffe will welcome Edith through the doors next September.

Meanwhile she starts to seem more like a school-aged kid to us all the time. She has grown tall, and 5 is the size I look for in clothing for her now. She loves devising projects, then following through with them. Here is she is walking on the tin-can stilts she wanted to make after hearing about them in one of the Ramona books. It took a month of patient waiting while Mommy and Daddy drank their way through two cans of coffee, then an afternoon's work with twine and a hammer. Learning to walk on them was the fastest part. Edith was satisfied that they made the kind of clanking noise on the sidewalk that Beverly Cleary describes--she relished it as much as Ramona.


She also is very interested in writing these days, asking us to help her sound out words so she can write cards, lists, and even stories. She doesn't want to try working things out on her own, but if we agree to stand there and help sound out words phoneme by phoneme, she has amazing patience and motivation to get it all down on paper. Interestingly, this interest has not translated into a desire to try sounding out printed words in books for reading purposes. I think she doesn't have the patience--open a book and she wants to hear the story NOW, however mind-numbing its "Cat sat on mat"-ness.

The other day her class read a Berenstain Bears book about manners, in which the Bears make a chart showing the penalties for not observing various rules of good etiquette. Edith was quite taken with this idea and wanted to devise a chart of our household rules and the penalties for breaking them. Here's what she came up with:


Note that Edith loves finding reasons to go into the attic, accessed by a fold-down ladder she finds intriguing. We don't use the attic for anything, even storage. Thus having to sweep the attic if one yells may not be all that dire a consequence... As parents, we prefer the more logical connection between dumping sand [out of one's shoes while in one's carseat] and cleaning the car.

But sand or no sand, it's fun to watch Edith come up with projects, fun to share yet more stories with her (children's versions of the Odyssey are her latest favorite), fun to tickle her funny bone, fun to watch her put our hugs and kisses away for safe keeping, fun to dress up and dance around the room. Four, five, halfway in between...we love it.

A little wicked

A witch and her familiar visited our house yesterday

She was one mean witch

Preschool was anti-witch, so for the school parade Edith did pretty princess(-witch) in dress and shoes, no broom, hat or makeup.

With Torrey and Sarah


Alice enjoyed the parade, too

Trick-or-treating later in Oz--er, our old seminary neighborhood

We also made some special visits by car. Here's Edith with her babysitter, who was dressed as an iceberg preparing to go out with a Titanic friend

At our neighbor and friend Mrs. Harding's, Edith found her long-lost mother

Earlier in the day Edith enjoyed a sweeter alter ego on a playdate with new ballet class friend, Helen. It was hands down the best playdate we've ever had: the girls ran right off and played together sweetly, jumping into imaginary play in which they seemed to be on the same wavelength, never needing us to umpire any disputes or mete out any discipline. Edith didn't opt out, come hang at my side, and ask me to tell her stories, as she often does. Only when the girls were called for lunch did they come, and then they ate hungrily while we adults continued to talk. I was waiting for Edith to protest the artisan bread with crusts still on, but she dug in. When I gave her the five-minute warning that we were leaving, there were no protests or tears from either side. Helen's mom seemed as struck by the smoothness of the affair, and we agreed we'll definitely need to do this again.

There was time for one more persona before bed, a pirate

Even a rainy night didn't put out Edith's jack-o-lantern

Thanks to Brian Critz for what were, of course, the best pictures in the bunch, #2 and 3. Thanks to Mor-mor for the costumes!