BREAKING NEWS! What a 5-year-old American girl in Colorado has to say about the royal wedding!

I just managed my first all-nighter in I don't know how long. Because I'm teaching my third class in a row, without breaks between, and because senior theses and junior thesis proposals have come in this week, I'm awash in student papers: from last block, from this block, from students who aren't even mine. The reading, commenting, and grading mounts.

I started on the most urgent stack last night at 11pm, after prepping for today's class. These were the drafts due back to my students with comments this morning. By 3am the unread stack was still deep...so I turned on the royal wedding. Because of course, good cynical American republican that I am, I would never deign to watch the royal wedding unless I happened already to be up and in need of a stimulus to keep me awake. Of course.

At 3:30 am I heard a small, remarkably awake voice calling from Edith's room. "Mom?" I went in. "I'm just waking up to find out if it's time yet for the wedding, and what's going on. I'm totally awake." So my partner in guilty pleasure came down and joined me on the couch. I know--it's ridiculous to get a five year old out of bed at 3:30 am on a school night to watch TV. When I was five, it was just happenstance that I awoke one night on a family  vacation to a strange sound in the room where I was sleeping (which turned out to be my brother grinding his teeth in his sleep), and fleeing the scary noise, was baffled and utterly disoriented to find my mother and aunt hunched over the television in the middle of the night, watching a fairy prince and princess wave from a golden carriage as they rode past cheering crowds. To save Edith similar disorientation should she happen to be awakened by the noise of the TV in the wee hours, I brought her in on it from the get-go. After all, she's at the peak of her fairytale-princess enthusiasms, and shouldn't one seize organic opportunities to encourage a child's native interests?

Edith came in just as members of the royal family were arriving at Westminster Abbey and remained remarkably attentive until all the main characters had again passed through the gates at Buckingham Palace. In between, she offered the following comments:

• After the bride and her father had made their way down the aisle to the front of the abbey: "Whew. I bet she's glad that's over. That was probably one of the hardest parts for Kate." (Edith herself  expressed marked shyness last month about having to walk down the aisle as a flower girl in front of all those eyes.)

• When the archbishop of Canterbury began to pray: "Finally we're hearing one of the people who's in the movie...instead of those people who you can't see whose voices are just above the movie talking and talking."

At 5am Alice woke up for her regular morning nursing session, which usually happens in our bed. Instead, I carried her downstairs. Of course, she was curious and sat up to see what was going on. She wanted to watch, too. And she put it all together:

• Earlier this week Edith had been showing Alice the cover of the current New Yorker and explaining, as best she understood, why it was funny. Watching the royal carriages roll through the streets of London, Alice suddenly exclaimed, "Where's their bed? I want to see them in their bed with the mother [sic] in the blue dress and the father there!"

• We turned it off then. Edith asked sleepily if there was any more, and I told her the new couple would appear on the palace balcony and kiss in a bit, but that she should go back to sleep. Both girls returned to bed. But half an hour later, Alice popped up and demanded, "Is it time for them kiss on the balcony? I want watch them kiss on the balcony!"She marched to the TV, turned it on, and intently watched the prince and new princess as they waved to the crowds--balcony yes, but where was the kiss? Alice was furious to learn she had missed it.

Paparazzi in training? What have I done?

But the papers are graded. On to the next stack...

While we're searching for the camera...

...to retrieve pictures from Easter, a recent head-scratcher:

The walnuts we purchased from the store this week were labeled "free range."  My thoughts: (1) I've seen those trees in Lord of the Rings, and I'm not sure I want to eat their fruits, (2) Do we now put any words proved to poll well on packages, provided they're not technically false? Maybe I should tell students that I'm handing out organic, cage-free, locally handcrafted syllabi to see if it generates higher class enrollments.

Extra-ordinary aspects of an ordinary April Saturday

1. It's snowing.

2. For breakfast, Alice (all 23 pounds of her) ate

• 6 am -- a bowl of Cheerios
• 6:30 am -- a bowl of oatmeal
• 7:15 am -- a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, crusts and all
• 8 am -- pancakes

3. Nevertheless, at 7:30 am I was reading Alice a book of her choosing, What to Do About Alice? (a picture book about Alice Lee Roosevelt), and when it mentioned the president's daughter growing up, our Alice began to whimper, "I don't want to grow up. I want to stay little!" 

Needs to change her diet, then.

4. I was at work from 8:30 to 5:30 preparing my syllabus for the next block, and I never saw another person in the building. Guess everyone else is either smart enough not to teach the last block of the year or expert (or tired) enough to wing it at the end?

5. Went out to my second live cultural event in two weeks! For Christmas I gave Tom tickets to see David Sedaris, who was in town tonight, and so we got to have a date. (Got caught in the driving snow walking from our car to the event center--who would have thought?) And earlier this month I heard Amy Tan speak on campus. Two completely different writers stylistically, but not unalike. Both spell-binding storytellers who know how to start with a seemingly casual tangent, then circle in tightly on a good story, drawing you with them, before spiraling back out to where they began. Both inspire me to want to write, too, even while making it clear I may lack what it takes, as they both draw their endless inspiration from terrible childhood experiences with psychologically abusive parents. How could my loving folks do such a thing to me, leaving me high and dry with no deep wounds to work out of my system?

Perhaps, whenever I feel like we're screwing up on the parenting front, I can take comfort in the fact that Edith and Alice might make the bestseller lists one day.

Stay tuned for a reality check

...several decades from now.

Alice: I have a baby in my belly. Uh oh, it's crying. (Reaching under her shirt.) Here, you take it.

***

The shades of age two...

Alice, this morning: Mommy, is it waking-up time? [Ans.: Not quite.] Oh. Can I sleep on your pillow? Next to you? Is there room? Thank you, Mommy.

Alice, this evening: I want pizza NOW! ... I NOT want pizza--NO! ... My hand is hurting--I need a Band-Aid! NO! I not want a Band-Aid! I NOT want pasta! ... I WANT PASTA! Put a Band-Aid on my hand! I want to eat my pizza! NO! No, pizza! No, Edith you not look at me! Everyone be quiet! I talking! No, it's not your turn--it's my turn to talk! Go 'way!

Written out, that last bit sounds like a tired, hungry kid at the end of a long day. Which she was. But the back-to-back contrary statements are common throughout the day. They're just delivered with more posturing sass and less shrillness when she's well fed and rested.

Good Saturday

(A little known precursor to Palm Sunday.)

Most Saturdays, getting out of our house feels like a major achievement. Everyone is tired by Saturday, and everyone wants down time. Alas, we don't tend to agree on what that is.For the kids it means getting up at the crack of dawn to play, while for us it ideally would mean sleeping in. For the kids it means seeking as much undivided adult attention as possible, while for us it ideally would include a peek at the newspaper or a magazine over breakfast. For the kids it means staying in the house, while for me and Tom it ideally means getting out to enjoy something different from the daily routine. For the kids it means family-only time, while for us it ideally would mean some social interaction with others whom we don't get to see in the crush of the weekday routine. All of which is to say, it's hard to achieve perfect Saturday relaxation on everyone's terms around here.

So today it seemed like great good luck that we happened on a plan that worked for everyone, with relatively little stress. Having started the effort to get out the door at 10:05 am, by 10:25 we had managed to bundle everyone into the car (Movie Star Poop Car, that is--thank you, Alice), and headed down to the college, where a group of science faculty, science majors, and community science educators were putting on a low-key science fair for kids, with simple demonstrations, experiments, and displays. I hadn't known what to expect, but it turned out to be just our speed. It wasn't too crowded either, meaning no waiting, and all the undergraduate volunteers were incredibly friendly to the kids. I think Edith's favorite part was playing with dry ice, while I marveled at holding a human brain in my hands. Alice wasn't so sure about the robot that kept bumping into us (courtesy of its young operators).

Afterwards we ate at the campus dining hall, always a treat, and Edith got to jump in a bouncy castle that some of the college students had rented for the sidelines of a campus soccer tournament. No waiting! No time limit!

We picked up some invitations for her birthday party on the way home, and while Alice took a 4-hour nap (!), Edith and I filled out the invitations and hand-delivered the ones going to neighborhood kids. One of the things I like most about where we live is that we went to drop off five invitations at five houses, all on our block, and it took an hour, because at each house the neighbors came out to talk, or had us in to look at their remodeling, or invited us to have a drink and meet their visiting friends, or discussed their upcoming travel plans. We lucked into such a great environment here; I want to know how to find that wherever we land next.

Another novel feature of the day was that Tom was on-call chaplain for the police for the first time, meaning we spent the day following the happenings in town on the police radio he was carrying. At first I wasn't paying attention to the crackling voices on the walkie-talkie, slightly irritated that they were distracting Tom from our family day, but by dinnertime I was hooked, trying to interpret every conversation between the dispatcher and the officers on patrol--the multi-car accident at an intersection on our regular commute, the domestic disturbances, the cars without visible plates, the narcotics bust, the toddler who fell off her daddy's shoulders, the liquor violations, the mentally ill people in trouble, etc. It was an interesting, if sobering, alternative narrative of a day in the Springs to have running in the background while our own family tried kid-friendly science experiments, chatted with the neighbors, and laughed, joked, and tickled its way through the bedtime routine.

Rain!

A strange substance fell from the sky in Colorado Springs tonight, as if angels were crying. What an extraordinary thing.

I'm not sure people out on the roads remembered how to drive in rain.

"Can you drink rain?" Alice asked as she tentatively wiped some off the car door, held it to her lips, and looked at me to see how I'd react. "Is it water?"


Glory hallelujah! Who would have thought we'd get to the point that we enjoyed getting soggy on our way to the car?

***

An addendum to the sickness story: Today the pediatrician's office sent a lab report indicating that a strep culture they did on Alice when she was in last week turns out to have been positive (they'd thought it was negative at first). So the kid had severe constipation, nausea, an ear infection, and strep all at once. Now I'm surprised she was hanging in there with us at all.

***

After the fall's start-and-go attempts at enrolling Edith in extracurriculars--all of them physical activity--we signed her up for after-school science enrichment for the next six weeks, her choice among several options offered weekly for an hour after school by parent volunteers with particular skills. No sooner had we signed her up than she said she was too scared to do it--mainly, it turned out, because she was afraid she'd forget to stay at school on the right day and would accidentally take the bus home, and that she wouldn't know where in the school to go for the class. But they met yesterday for the first time, and with the logistics resolved (after-school science meets in the art room, and her teacher sends her there before taking kids out to the bus)...she loves it. The whole six weeks are built around a central mystery: a dog has been dog-napped, and they're going to use various kinds of science to figure out whodunnit. Of course, provide a story and Edith's with you all the way. She made me and Tom each review the bios of the suspects when we got home. She was clearer on who they all are, I think, than on the science behind the acid-base indicator, the prism, or the invisible ink they used today. But that's fine. She wishes science happened every day.

***

Pop quiz:

Edith suggested it was time we name the car Tom's grandfather handed down to us. (Side note: How quickly our daily lives have changed with two cars! Another blessing.)

1. Who suggested which name?

(a) Purple Shiny
(b) Harold
(c) Mugisa ("gift" in Swahili)
(d) Movie Star Poop Car

2. Which name won in the final vote?

Perk-up pictures

We've had another bout of illness in the last week--all Alice. It included a trip to urgent care and from there to the ER, after both ends of her digestive tract had been non-functional for three days. The cure then proved worse than the disease, as Alice cried her way through the next 36 hours due to some 2 dozen diaper changes and powerful stomach action that left our house smelling like a dairy barn. (If we'd been able to hook her up to the grid, we'd have earned some energy credits.) The pro forma follow-up visit to the pediatrician revealed a raging ear infection...and now she has a cold. But at least she's talking and walking and smiling again, and all digestive systems are go.

And although Tom logged more time with the patient overall, I realized in the course of the week that I'm a pretty decent mother to very sick children. My patience for changing foul sheets, holding little vomiting bodies over the toilet, helping rinse mouths, and generally soothing limp, sad, little people lasts far longer than when navigating confrontations with willful, dawdling, wheedling, stubborn, healthy children. Not that I'd ever wish sickness on my daughters. We're so glad that Alice is on the mend. But like newborns, very sick children are so supremely vulnerable, I'm inevitably moved to compassion and feel an urge to comfort and care for them that lasts for the long haul.

To counter all that, finally a few pictures from my cousin's wedding last month: