An expanding sense of self

When asked her name--or even when not--Alice recently has been announcing,

"My name is Opal Tamsin Alice Lank That's Very Close."

Sometimes she drops That's, with more intimate acquaintances.

The toddler tradeoff

Proposition: To spend one night away, 25 miles from home, at a ranch the kids have visited several times before--the ranch/retreat center belonging to our church, where Edith and Alice know the ranch managers and their kids, and where we've been invited as guests for a night between fun Friday and Saturday events.

Potential pros:
A change of scene; a mini-getaway; a live bluegrass concert and a melodrama, both performed in an outdoor ampitheatre; a chance to do volunteer work as a family the next day (it's the biannual ranch workday); a chance for the kids to run around outside in a beautiful setting; a gorgeous, fairly short drive; the opportunity to see and interact with other adults; the ability to participate in and feel a part of community events, when so much of life with young children is isolated and routine-driven

Potential cons:
Laborious packing, even for one night (we all need linens for the bunkhouse and layers for the mountains; no one but me can yet pack her own stuff); a change of routine, including staying up later than usual, not controlling the menu, and sleeping in a strange place, all leading potentially to hunger, sleeplessness, irritability, and everyone's being off for several days

The decision:
We did it. Because I thought the fun parts would outweigh the potential hassle and upset. How much upset could one night away, that close to home, really be?

The result:
Alice is wired and won't fall asleep until 11-ish and only then in my (twin) bed with me.

She wakes up periodically through the night, as I try frantically each time to keep her from crying and waking up both her sister in the bunk above and the other, elderly guests through the wall.

She is awake for good at 3:30ish(? I didn't have my watch)--and she's darn cranky about it. The only thing that will keep her from wailing for food is nursing. I can't sit up straight on the lower bunk to nurse but neither can I lie down, because she has been lying on both my arms for so long I'm losing feeling in them. So I sit, awake, feeling most cowlike, hunched on the edge of a lower bunk, for who knows how long until there's some light outside and we can get up. Life looks very dark indeed at 4am.

The only lunch food is deli meat (Edith is a vegetarian), and I can hardly keep my eyes open, so we leave in the middle of the workday part of things, feeling we've hardly been any help at all. Both girls are completely off their eating and sleep schedules. We stop for pizza on the way home, at 3:30pm, then they both sack out in the car, at 5pm. Edith is susceptible to being woken up when we get home, in an effort to reset her internal clock, but Alice is not. I put her in her crib, thinking she may be out for the night. But no, she's up again at 7:15. Who knows when we'll get back on track.

And I didn't get much time with other adults, as I was watching Alice most of the time. No one else had a toddler there. I tried not to mind being on the outskirts of the happenings, or self-conscious that I was very poor help at the workday tasks.

On the other hand:

Alice and I got to see the sunrise over the Front Range from the top of a  golden grassy hill.

Edith and I got to go exploring in the woods,with a sleeping Alice on my back, and we sat by a pond and watched swallows swoop and skim the water, over and over, wondering what made them do it.

Edith got to spend two days roaming freely with two kids who live like that all the time, enjoying both the socializing and free range of the outdoors.

The bluegrass was fun.

Edith enjoyed her first melodrama. Except how girly the heroine was--but evidently the fantastical plots twists made up for that.

We got to enjoy the most gorgeous of the drives near our home, up Ute Pass and into the high valley at 9200 feet. It's stunning every time.*

In sum:

I don't know whether upsetting the routine with toddlers is worth it or not. Obviously many people feel it isn't, judging by how underrepresented families with toddlers are at public or social gatherings like the one we attended at the ranch. (There are plenty of young families in our church congregation, just not at the ranch overnight and workday, despite both being advertised as "family friendly.") I know other people who do travel with their toddlers, the pleasure they derive from it apparently trumping the difficulties.

I really can't decide. I can think back to some of the trips we've made or gatherings we've attended with our kids, and while I remember the good parts, time hasn't made the pain and hassle fade. (Sometimes not for them either--Edith still holds against us a particular trip at age three.) I think, if I had an active and intimate circle of friends and family nearby, who made me/us feel plugged into a larger group of people we cared about as part of our daily lives, I'd be inclined to stay near home in these years. But when that's not the case (nice neighbors notwithstanding), sometimes the routine gets so isolating and limited for the adults involved (love of chldren notwithstanding), that I'm desperate to get out of the rut a bit. Until we actually try it and retreat home, swearing we won't do that again soon. And then 60 nights of the bedtime routine later, and...

What about those of you with toddlers and preschoolers?

Have you curtailed your travel and participation in public and social events? If so, do you feel a sense of loss? (If not, what's your secret?) If you still travel and participate in public events, have you modified the way you travel and participate? Does it feel like a reasonable compromise? If you still travel and participate uncompromised, can you clone your kids?

And if this sounds familiar, at what ages has being limited by the routine been hardest for you so far? (The kids' ages, that is, not yours--though I suppose those might be relevant.)

For example, we popped infant Edith into a sling and continued getting out to restuarants and baseball games and church, etc. unhindered for those first 4 or 5 months. Infant Alice slept peacefully in a bouncy chair next to my desk while I worked a full-time job, until she was about 5 months old.

On the other end, I feel that we can start to push Edith's limits considerably more than we could even six months ago. For example, I knew that dinner at the ranch Friday night was going to be BBQ sandwiches, so I told Edith I was going to stop to get her pizza slices in the last town before the ranch. I knew where the pizza place was. Unfortunately, I didn't know they stopped by-the-slice orders at 3pm. Edith was disappointed but understanding when I explained the problem and promised I would figure out a way to feed her. As it was, that involved my retracing my steps through rural, ranching Colorado at 7:30pm looking for a frozen dinner for her, and it was another 90 minutes before I had returned to the ranch and found someone who could open the kitchen for me so I could heat it up. Edith was hungry, but in the meantime, she happily attended the melodrama on her own and hung out with the ranch kids. The pleasure of being there and her understanding of why she wasn't being fed when and how we'd planned made her able to cope with her hunger. And critically, Edith can also now sleep when she's tired, for the most part.

But those toddlers, with their dependence on routine, their inability to tolerate hiccups in the system, and their ability to throw sustained tantrums...well, it's why the post is named what it is.

When Alice and I walk the ranch's labyrinth at 6am, she mocks our experience of the preceding 7 hours by stopping at this stone. That, or she is having a profoundly reflective, transformative experience in the labyrinth.

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*That drive up Ute Pass always makes us think about another theoretical tradeoff: Were we to stay here long-term, would we want to live

(1) where we are now, on the edge between the flatlands and the mountains, in an aesthetically cute but completely touristy town, with very nice neighbors but rather unappealing 1970s ranch housing? or

(2) in downtown Colorado Springs, where there is beautiful old housing stock and we could walk or bike almost everywhere we needed to go, but it's completely flat and more urban without being wonderfully, densely, diversely urban? or

(3) further up into the mountains, where the landscape is what Colorado is all about and feeds your spirit every day, and the kids could have the kind of outdoor, free-range, exploring-nature lives on which Edith thrives (and I imagine Alice will start to), but where we'd have to drive much farther to work, and where I admit the nerd quotient (and accompanying bookstores, coffee shops, etc.) is a bit low for me and the America-first and NRA quotient is a bit high. Oh well. It's probably not a dilemma we'll actually need to face. But it does make us think, when push comes to shove, about what matters most to us.

2.5

Dear Alice,

It's your turn for a letter to you marking the day you turned 2 and 1/2. Though mind you, you've been so focused on turning three (ever since January, in fact) that when I tried to make a big deal this morning of your turning 2 and 1/2 you cut me off. Half birthdays aren't worth the fuss, you seemed to be saying. Get back to me with the news when I've hit the big THREE.

Indeed, looking ahead to "when I'm bigger" is a prominent part of your life these days, no doubt more so than it was for Edith, as you are a little sister. You're aware of things to come that Edith never dreamed of: "When I'm five, I will go to kindergarten." Sometimes you alert us that you've gotten bigger recently, and can't X or Y happen now? Today you were making a pitch for some privilege or another by suggesting, as I put you in the car after daycare, "Mommy, I think I've been growing all day. Okay, can we do it?" Fortunately, when we put you off about some desired activity, you can still be assuaged with vague promises for the future. "Maybe we do it tomorrow'later?" you ask, switching tracks all of a sudden. And I'll agree that the desired activity can, or will, happen later. And I'm still surprised when you say, cheerfully, "Okay" and cease wheedling. Your rosy outlook is a pleasure and will be a boon to you in life.

To be sure, there are some definite big-girl shifts happening now. Your daycare teachers report that you're effectively potty-trained at school, though that doesn't seem to be the case at home yet. (At all.) Last week you surprised us by proposing a move from the crib in your room into the bunk bed with Edith for overnights. You've slept there about 2/3 of the past week, and while it hasn't eliminated nighttime wake-ups and crying for mommy and milk, I think it has made them fewer.

Your ever-blossoming relationship with your sister is a delight to us all. Admittedly, you two can spiral into a quickly escalating round of squeals and shouts--primarily because you are jealous of objects, even Edith's possessions, or her half of an evenly shared booty. She is very generous to you with material objects, though she does take a certain delight in needling you in other ways, in the moments when you're susceptible to being needled. But for the most part you laugh together and protect each other. It's a pleasure, as you seem to be ever more each other's most reliable friend. Not for nothing did Edith's Mother's Day card thank me for giving her you.

You are quickly turning into the family joker, imitating people we know (sometimes uncannily), making silly faces, and adopting funny voices just to make everyone laugh. A little sister seeking attention? A light-hearted soul seeking to loosen up three serious, straight-laced types?

You've recently embarked on extended imaginary play, including a few pint-sized imaginary friends whom I must be careful not to sit on but can help carry from one place to another, cupped in my palms. When playing with real humans, you like to serve us meals that you cook. It's sometimes hard to be the attentive, grateful guest at your elaborate banquets while also serving as a princess-explorer in Edith's parallel imaginary world. I look forward to the point when you merge these fantastical scenes and together inhabit a single game.

You seem to your biased mama particularly musical, often singing snippets (or more) of songs you've heard, mostly melodically. You are quick to dance or to sing along to any music in the background. You try making up your own lyrics, too.

Among your current handful of funny pronunciations and words, I particularly appreciate loder (pronounced: loader). It's a combination of louder and lower that works in both contexts: From the backseat of the car, "Please put my window loder down" and from bed, "Please turn the music loder up."

You are ever the people-person, as even others observe, and you frequently point out people in church that we don't know and tell us the children to whom they're related, or ask where particular adult neighbors are, or plan big reunions at our house with your daycare friends. When we dined this week at the neighbors' house, we found you after dinner in the middle of a round of soccer practice, appealing to 7- and 9-year old boys to admire your kicks as easily as if you were playing with your own teddy bears in your room.

Probably as a result of listening in on your sister's bedtime stories since birth, you will point to words and ask me what they say, then try to "read" book titles yourself, pointing to each word in turn. You know most of your letters and the sounds they make, and given your penchant for doing things for yourself (previously unknown in this household), I expect you'll be trying to read to yourself as soon as you can.

You already dress yourself when given the opportunity, and you are proud to be "Daddy's big helper" at the grocery store, finding your favorite items on the shelf and stretching to drop them into the cart. (You're still tiny for your age, not yet wearing size 2 clothing.) You love also to set the table and unload the dishwasher--and you're jockeying to help stir food in the pots and pans on the stove.

We're often astonished by how much you understand of what is going on around you and how appropriately you're able to insert yourself into the conversation. You can read moods on faces, in life or in books, and will trouble to inform us of how people are feeling.

There are any number of funny things you'll say in a day that I need to do a better job remembering. Alas, I fear it's the fate of the younger child not to have her doings recorded as fully as the eldest. But somehow I suspect you'll have no trouble making yourself known and appreciated as you go through life.

It's already impossible to imagine our family without you, our funny, opinionated, observant, youngest member. Alice, we love you--thank you for coming to live with us!

xoxo,
Mommy

Raising 'em right

Thanks for all your help on gardening--clearly there are some expert practitioners out there among you.

I went back to the file containing all our past leases, and even though this latest rental agreement didn't require us to sign the waiver acknowledging a history of lead-based paint use that the previous landlords did, the EPA docs that were given to us as part of those agreements made it look as though the circumstances potentially applied to our 1970 home here, too. Add the fact that the terraced beds we inherited are full of weeds, hard clay, some concrete slabs, and buried junk, and in the spirit of wamnny's comment, we plunged into an experiment in planting root crops in containers.

Then at dinner Edith and I opened a new kids' cookbook from Uncle Peter that offers step-by-step instructions (and photographs) on how to grow various vegetables and fruits, then how to work each into a recipe. We discovered that the book's instructions were for growing every crop, including root vegetables, in pots. Of course the proof will be in the pudding, but at least I feel a little less foolish.

However the plants turn out, here meanwhile are a couple of heartwarming comments, one from each kid, that reassure me we're bringing them up right.

(1) I read Alice a picture book at bedtime, at the end of which was printed the music for the song referenced in the book. I started trying to sing the song, a Yiddish folk tune, so it was probably fortunate that Alice interrupted and said she wanted to be the one to sing it. She then took the book, gazed at it seriously, and sang out,

"Bright cottage years with pleasure ife,

The shortest, gladdest years a wife."

(2) Edith unearthed some old Glee Club concert posters, mounted on foam-board. One actually had been printed at Harvard, to advertise the joint YGC-HGC concert in Cambridge one year. It featured a cartoon of dapper men in tuxes juggling and beating up on bulldogs. Edith asked me to explain the cartoon, so I did. She was silent for a few minutes, then announced, "When I learn karate, this is going to be the first board I practice chopping."

Gardening, Garden State style

I took the girls to the garden store today to get some potting soil. Edith got a bunch of vegetable seeds for her birthday, and I thought it would make the most sense to grow them in containers--(1) easier and (2) prudent, since we don't know who did what with the existing plots in our backyard before we moved in. But I did need help figuring out which soil to buy and how much.

I explained my idea to one of the clerks at the nursery, a highly recommended local store with plenty of friendly gardening experts on staff, I'd been told. But this particular employee just stood staring at me as I explained my plan to pass over the terraced garden plots in our backyard to do vegetables in containers.

Finally, she spoke. What kind of vegetables?

Well, I said, feeling a bit uncomfortable, Edith loves beets and had gotten beet seeds, and we'd been told [by their own staff earlier in the season] that root vegetables grow quickly and easily, making them a good option for our extremely short growing season here.

Root vegetables in containers? she asked in clear disbelief.

I fumbled, feeling foolish. Well, they're deep containers...no?...Not possible...? Okay, well, then I guess tell me about what it takes to make sure the soil is okay in the backyard.

What did I mean, she asked, looking blank. They could do a pH test on a sample for us, to see if our plants were likely to grow there. What else was I worried about?

Well, you know, I said vaguely and confusedly, bad stuff in the soil. I continued--embarrassed and talking fast and too loud--that I guess I sounded like a New Yorker, because somehow I had the impression that you couldn't go around growing vegetables you planned to eat just anywhere.

She shook her head and said she really didn't know what the problem would be. At that point I was so ruffled and uncomfortable that I thanked her for her help and said we'd figure out our plan from there, departing quickly for the section of the store housing bags of soil and compost.

There another clerk stopped and asked if he could help. He was a young man that seemed a bit readier to be pleasant and encouraging than the first clerk. So I explained again what I was thinking, prefacing it this time by saying I was sorry, it was probably a silly idea here in Colorado, but coming from the New York area, I had the idea that you needed to be sure your soil was safe before putting stuff in it, and...

He shook his head, smiling, and said I was being  unnecessarily cautious for Colorado and probably unnecessarily cautious for New York, too. Go ahead and put them in the ground. How did I need to prepare the soil for planting, I asked? I knew that was an important step. He shrugged. No need to do anything at all. Just be sure the dirt was nice and loose. No need to add anything to it. (This did not sound like the advice on "You Bet Your Garden," the organic gardening show on NPR out of Philadelphia, which always made soil preparation sound like a critical, if complex alchemy.) Then he excused himself for minute to get some stock from the basement.

By the time he came back, I had gathered my wits and recollected some hard facts. In the apartments we'd lived in in New Jersey, I said, management had prohibited planting vegetables, because of lead contamination in the soil from  exterior house paints. His eyes got big. Oh, he said, well, that was different. Then he looked skeptical. He didn't think lead-based paints were used anymore.

"Well sure, but they were used when the apartments were built in 1947," I reminded him, "and for who knows how many decades after that as the management repainted."

Oh, he nodded again.

"Nineteen-forties," he said. "Wow, that's an old building."

At least the historian was on solid ground here--as any Northeasterner would have been in this case. You may infer here my unexpressed eye roll at the Westerner's inability to imagine a 65-year-old building.

But really, is it me, or is it them? After all, there's a new housing development here in town, being built on an old gold mining tailings pile, where planting is prohibited ("Low maintenance living!" boast the advertisements) because stirring up the ground is such bad news for human health. What about all the pesticides my neighbors use growing grass where grass don't belong?

Is New Jersey that much more polluted than Colorado? Or are Coloradans that much more blase about environmental contamination (concern smacking of all that regulatory, freedom-infringing stuff)?

Or am I just a complete dolt of a novice gardener? Other than proposing to grow beets in containers, of course...

A postscript about Ranger

P.S. But wach out for Ranger he's danger. Scout was in the north yard so Scout's out. Billy and Sunny were there too but Billy is silly and Sunny is a hunny. The End

AutobLography

I am going to pony camp. I love picking up poop. Sunny is my favrit pony. Idigo bites and Billy nibls. [Transcriber takes over.] Indigo is black, and Billy is brown with white spots on his butt. Scout and Rockette and Sunny and Jose are okay. They do not bite or nibble. Scout is white with brown spots, and Rockette is white with brown spots. And Jose is brown with a streak (only it might not be a streak--I don't really know). And Sunny is very light yellow with a blond mane.

I feed them. I groom them. I ride them! And I love them.

The End

-For everybody who we know that doesn't know about pony camp. From Edith to all of you.