Tag Archives: kids

Last Day of the Season

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A few days of this beautiful weather and I’m already thinking about loading up the kids and Huck and heading for the woods this weekend! Our family has a hunting camp near the old home place–a spot where we can gather to holler and get dirty and shoot at stuff. (Remember last year when Huck got to be “a real dog, all day?”)

DSCN5636I steer clear of Cowtail when it’s hot, buggy, dry, or when people are shooting at stuff. Even though our 100 acre tract is posted, there ain’t enough orange in the world for me to take my babies into the woods during deer season. I’d even worry about Huck–someone might think they had drawn a bead on the fabled white buck that roams the forest.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with hunting anything we can eat. Shoot a rhino or a hawk or a mockingbird and we have a problem, but if we can grill it or roast it and it’s within the season and the limit, etcetera etcetera…have at it. I don’t shoot guns, but I take my bow and arrows to see if I can hit a balloon off a piece of plywood. I’ve never been one for the noisy kind of hunting.

At Thanksgiving, the nephews were talking about deer hunting and a friend of the family asked Daddy if he was ever much of a deer hunter. Daddy laughed and said, “I hit so many with my truck we didn’t have any space in the freezer for me to hunt.”

Then Daddy told a story that I really get now that I have kids of my own. He said that one year, Joe had finally gotten old enough to go deer hunting and he was beside himself with excitement. He kept asking Daddy to take him, but Daddy put him off time after time because he was too busy. If you don’t know much about deer hunting, it happens in the EARLY morning hours when it’s nice a cold and most people are asleep. It requires hours–to get out to the right spot, settle yourself, and wait. Our dad worked six days a week as a country veterinarian, so it was hard to find the time that hunting required.

Finally, on the last weekend of deer season, Daddy promised Joe that he would take him hunting. Joe could hardly sleep. Next morning, they woke up before dawn and as Daddy was getting his rifle ready, he realized that he was out of bullets. How was he supposed to tell Joe that they couldn’t go after all that waiting?

So they went anyway. He didn’t say a word to Joe about the bullets. They tromped through the woods and climbed up in the stand and waited and waited. Daddy let Joe hold the rifle the whole time. They didn’t spot a single deer, so Joe never had to take a shot.

As Daddy told the story, forty years later, Joe heard the truth for the first time. And judging by the way he laughed, he didn’t mind one bit that the gun was never loaded. He got to go hunting with his dad, just like he had been promised.

Hunting-Season-Is-Over-in-CT

We only have so many mornings to fulfill our promises to our kids. Even when it’s cold and dark and way too early.

Pledge, Vaseline, and Vocabulary: It’s Slippery at Our House

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cussLast night, as G was ordering Chinese food and I was picking the right pair of stretchy pants for my dinner out with friends, Carlos went exploring.

That never ends well.

The night before, while the rest of us were finishing dinner, Carlos had gotten into the industrial size container of Vaseline still lurking in the baby cabinet.  He slicked down his hair (still trying to get that out).  He coated the floor in the hall.  He wiped it in the fringe on the edge of Mommy’s favorite rug.  He painted EVERY doorknob with the goo.  Wiped it across his rug and up a recliner.  Stuck it in the grooves of a louvered closet door. You get the picture.  (PRO TIP:  Vaseline makes hardwood floors really shiny, but they’re kind of treacherous.)

So just as I slipped into the elastic waist pants that say “La Dolce Vita pasta special please,” I heard Vivi shout, “Carrrrr-LOS!”

G and I both came running towards the kitchen.  Carlos ducked into the pantry and hid behind the dog food bag.  Luckily, the wall of lemon scent that accosted our noses warned us not to take another step forward.  That kid had used a can of Pledge to turn the kitchen floor into a skating rink of lemony goodness.  I held on to the cabinets as I worked my way over to the paper towels.  G and I each put a few paper towels under each foot and started sliding around the linoleum to clean up the mess as safely as possible.  We both managed not to slip.

Our kids aren’t as smart.  I blame myself that they’re not more aware of the side effects of cleaning products.  They haven’t had much exposure.

Carlos trotted out of the pantry giggling and promptly slipped on the mess of his own creation, ass over tea kettle.  He started crying.  Which brought Vivi from the den.  More ass, more tea kettle.  Two kids down and I’m trying not to laugh but the fumes from the lemony miasma had worked their way into my lizard brain.

After it was cleaned up, Vivi and I went back to the den and flopped on the couch.  She picked up her Hardy Boys Mystery, but before she opened it she said, “That Carlos sure makes a lot of messes.”

I, ever mindful of increasing her vocabulary, replied, “Indubitably!  He is a little scamp!”

And she answered, “Imagine when he grows up–he’ll be an even bigger asshole.”

Whoops. Seems like I have slipped after all.

Kids In the Hall

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After we got the kids to bed tonight, I came into the den to discover that the carpet was covered in a colorful blanket of tiny paper slivers that Carlos had cut from a junk mail circular.  No big deal–I had given him the safety scissors and the flyer before I walked out to take a call from my friend, Rachel.  It’s just that in the 30 minutes I was occupied….yeah, those of you with kids are laughing right now, right?  What could go wrong??  

He hadn’t cut his hair or the sofa or the dog’s tail.  But he had sliced up the program from Vivi’s theater camp performance, a stack of yellow Post It notes, a bag that had held some leftover chips from Willy’s, a few other pieces of mail, and one very special list that he unearthed from the back of my desk drawer.  

When G came in and found me standing there in the middle of the paper flurry, transfixed by the piece of white paper that I held in my hand, he asked, “Did he cut up something important?”  I considered his question.  “Not important.  Just…old.”  

Here’s what remains:

hall

 

I wrote this list in 2004, when Richard and I bought this house together.  I lived here by myself for a couple of months before he moved back to Georgia, so while I was getting the place habitable, I jotted down ideas for every room.  I found the notepad a few years ago and stuck it in the back of the desk drawer.  There are still some good ideas on there but they don’t exactly fit my current living situation.  I like the note about getting pictures from Helen–I wanted to surprise Richard with some family snapshots from his childhood in our first home.  But a gray and white paint scheme with window pane checks and black and white picture frame collage?  These were the ramblings of a woman who had:

A.  HGTV Poisoning

B.  An irrational belief in the power of painter’s tape

C.  No children

D.  No idea what a Magic Eraser was, much less why a homeowner might need one

Here’s how that hallway turned out.  It’s still yellow, still dark, still got the scratches on the doors.  There’s one door covered in butterfly stickers.  One door with a warning sign Vivi drew of all the things that aren’t allowed in a baby nursery (sharp things, chokies, balloons, gum, etc).  There’s the bathroom door with a big hook lock on the outside that G installed after Carlos plugged up the toilet so bad that we had to replace the whole thing (it was a kid’s vitamin bottle).  There’s the door to the room with the big bed where we all piled up together on Sunday morning.  Where Carlos bounces then puts his hands on his hips and declares, “Dis not a trampoline.  Dis a BED!”  There’s the traveling trunk that belonged to my great-grandparents. That’s what Carlos leaned against when he was first learning to stand.  Above the trunk hangs a Matisse poster that I bought in London on my first big adventure.  Vivi used it to learn her colors.  

So I never got to the ideas on that list.  Maybe the hall didn’t need that much work; maybe it will get some real attention one day.  We have made one “improvement.”  I called in a muralist who expressed his own vision on the wall beside the bathroom door.  I think he really captured the cacophony of modern life rendered against the clean lines of the mid-century modern aesthetic.  He’s a real up and comer.  

hall2

 

Even Magic Eraser couldn’t clean it off, so I guess it will be there for a while.

Statistically Significant

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Thank you all so much for the kind messages of support that you shared privately and publicly yesterday.  I am encouraged and inspired by the stories you shared about your own experiences with kids and labels.

On the subject of labels…another label that was thrown about when we first began seeking help for Carlos was “significant developmental delay.”  He had just turned three but was talking like a two year old.  When kids his age are slow to communicate it can be due to autism, speech problems, or significant developmental delay (SSD).  Or a combination.  It really is difficult to tell whether they don’t know how to speak or don’t grok why we speak.  Maybe Peppa Pig is on and they just don’t care to speak.

keyboard-155722_1280Now, you better believe that when I heard that phrase uttered by the school psychologist, I heard something along the lines of, “crippling developmental delay,” or “life-shattering developmental delay.”  I imagined that my sweet-voiced boy would wake up one morning and say, “Hodor!” and that would be it.  “Hodor hodor hodor.”  (For those of you who don’t read/watch Game of Thrones, Hodor is a gentle giant who can only say one word.  Yep, you guessed it–Hodor.)

After a few days of being afraid to even look at the paperwork that had Significant Developmental Delay listed as a possible situation, my lifelong curiosity about words broke through the blaring sirens of panic echoing between my ears.  I parsed the phrase.

NOUN:  Delay–yeah, I get that.  He’s behind on the sentence making.

ADJECTIVE:  Developmental–okey doke.  He’s hit some milestones but others are still ahead of him.  He’s developing at his own pace.

INTENSIFIER ADJECTIVE:  Significant–ugh.  That’s where life implodes and all I can see is a wall of white light and Carlos living in our basement for the rest of his life.

In my English major brain, “significant” means:  consequential, earth-shattering, eventful, historic, momentous, monumental, tectonic, weighty.  (Thank you, Merriam-Webster thesaurus!) When I mentioned my fear of this label being stuck on our kid, G and his scientist brain said, “Wait a second!  ‘Significant’ means something worth noticing.'”

WUHT?

He started in on statistical significance, standard deviations, black magic statistics, Greek symbols.  But he was right.  “Significant” doesn’t mean cataclysmic.  If I skim all the way down to meaning #5 in the dictionary, significant means “sufficiently large in size, amount, or number to merit attention.”  Well, shucks.  That doesn’t say anything about my basement.  The synonyms for this meaning are downright cuddly:  biggish, healthy, respectable, sizeable, substantive, good, tidy.

Would I have gotten less freaked out if the form said “Biggish Developmental Delay?”  Probably.  This lesson in semantics reminded me of the danger of labels for people:  words mean different things to each of us.  A school psychologist means one thing when she says “significant” and a mother hears a different thing, while talking about the same tiny person.

My friend, Wise Heather, shared an interesting article today:  10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing.  In light of my struggle with significant, number seven struck a chord.

7. Statistically Significant

Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg wants to set the record straight about this idea:

“Statistically significant” is one of those phrases scientists would love to have a chance to take back and rename. “Significant” suggests importance; but the test of statistical significance, developed by the British statistician R.A. Fisher, doesn’t measure the importance or size of an effect; only whether we are able to distinguish it, using our keenest statistical tools, from zero. “Statistically noticeable” or “Statistically discernable” would be much better.

For the rest of this journey, I will be cool if my son receives extra help at school because he has a Discernable Developmental Delay.  I want him to be comfortable in the world.

With the progress he’s making, I’ll also be cool with buying him a thesaurus for his fifth birthday. Either a thesaurus or an erector set because Dude is wild about the mechanical toys!  I find that…significant.

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Saturday Morning Cartoons

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1975saturdayOur family had one TV when I was Vivi’s age.  Black and white, no remote, rabbit ear antenna.  It got three channels (four if there was a solar flare or something)–ABC, CBS, NBC.  One TV, three kids.  The rule was “whoever gets there first decides what we watch.”

This is why my dad says that he would get up on a Saturday, get dressed to go to work, and walk out in the living room to find me already awake and watching the test pattern on the TV.  I loved me some Saturday morning cartoons and I had one narrow window to watch them.  From 8 a.m. to 1:30.  Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Super Friends, Land of the Lost (my favorite!), Electro Woman and Dyna Girl, Far Out Space Nuts, Isis, Shazzam, Hong Kong Phooey.

By the time American Bandstand came on at 12:30, then Soul Train after that, we were sated.  With brains full of brightly colored Sid and Marty Kroftiness, we wandered out into the rest of the weekend.  Once the cartoons were over, we spent the weekend doing the stuff we could do any day.  We rode bikes, played with the dogs, played on the swing set, explored the woods, read books, played games, made up stuff to fill our time.  Ordinary stuff.  Cartoons were only available for four hours; getting to watch them was a special opportunity.

I got to thinking about all of this last Saturday.  Our whole family was in the backyard all morning.  I was vacuuming the pool.  G went down to the river and took cuttings from wild roses that grow down the bank.  Vivi and Carlos played on the play fort with its slide, swinging bridge, rock climbing wall, fire pole, swings…you get the idea.  But what struck me as strange is that my kids have no sense of “Saturday morning cartoons.”  They can watch cartoons whenever they want.  Not that we let them watch whenever they want…I mean, cartoons are always an option for them.  If Carlos wants to watch Peppa Pig at 6 p.m. while I cook dinner, we have it On Demand.  If Vivi wants to watch Littlest Pet Shop at 6 a.m., she knows to punch 186 on the remote.  And keep the volume below 15.

My kids only get to play like that in the backyard for a few hours on weekends.  I know, I know.  Free range kids and all.  We live on a river and have a pool (#goodproblemstohave).  Even though both are fenced, I’ve always been nervous about turning the kids loose in the yard without keeping an eye on them.  They get most of their Vitamin D on the deck where I can see them and put a lock between them and drowning.  I spend money on sand so they will have dirt to play in when there is an acre of dirt at the bottom of the stairs.  Duh.

When they are free to gallivant in the backyard, they look like this:

Sometimes you need to tie a zebra to the swing with a pink feather boa. You just DO.

Sometimes you need to tie a zebra to the swing with a pink feather boa. You just DO.

 

Dirty feet are happy feet!

Dirty feet are happy feet!

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Giving his sister a little shove…with his head.

My goal for the summer is more Saturday mornings like this, and fewer Saturday mornings like this:

test pattern

Ouch.

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Carlos has been sick this week in that special confounding way that small children do.  He spiked a fever on Monday afternoon and had to leave school early, but after one squirt of Motrin he was chasing the cat around and giggling madly.  I stayed home with him all day Tuesday and felt like a real dummy because he was FINE.  We jumped on the trampoline, played in the sandbox, ate black grapes and dried apple chips in the sunshine, and we didn’t take a nap.

teddy-242868_640Then five minutes after the urgent care place closed, he reached up and touched his right ear gently and said, “Mommy, hurt.  Ouch.”  After a couple of hours of misery, his ear drum burst and the fever came raging back.  Ear infections are such assholes.  He spent the whole night suffering and I did too, right beside him.  Little ones get sick in the blink of an eye.  But they get better just as quickly.  Hopefully they do.

This is the first time that Carlos has been sick since he really started talking. “Ouch.” “Carlos hurts, Mommy.” “Carlos not want medicine.”  It’s always hard to see your child suffering, but it’s really difficult when they are old enough to communicate to you how bad they feel, but not old enough to understand how swallowing that yucky medicine is going to make their ear feel better.  Or why the kindly doctor needs to ram a swab in that pitiful ear to take a culture specimen.  Three-year-olds inhabit a very immediate world.  The hurt is right here, right now, but the healing is some other place, days away, down a strange path of jabs and glop and ointments.  He must think we are crazy to do these things to him.  

 

"Carlos water the flowlers."

“Carlos water the flowlers.”

And today?  He’s back to being his old self.  After dinner, when he told me that he didn’t want to take his medicine, I said, “I hear you.  I understand you don’t like it.  But Dr. Setia said that’s the best way to get your ear to feel better.  It won’t be for much longer.”  And dang if the little man didn’t sit there and take his glop and jabs and ointment like a champ.  We only had to chase him down the hall once and there was no hog-tying involved whatsoever.  

These moments of parenting remind me of what my sister said about doing a med school rotation in the Emergency Department:  “It’s hour after hour of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer chaos and panic.”  Yep.  

The Glameris Life

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viviHow exactly did we end up HERE, you ask?

Well.

Last night, Vivi crowed, “Mommy!  I laid out my own clothes for tomorrow!”  I went into her room to ooh and ahh over her being so responsible…but all she had laid out was a diaphanous sequined sundress and a pair of pink high heels.

“Oh, sweetie.  I’m so proud of you for taking care of this.  I love the way this dress looks on you.  It’s for school, though, not dress up, so you’ll need to wear something under it, like some leggings or shorts.

She thought that was a grand idea.  She dug around in the “bottoms” drawer and came up with a pair of old brown yoga pants.

Okey dokey.

“How about a little jacket for the morning because it might be chilly?”  She frowned at the blue butterfly hoodie that I pulled from the closet.

“Can I just wear a shirt under it?”

Sure you can.

“I know you love these pink high heels, but they’re only for dress up, not for school.  You won’t be able to run or play or climb on things if you try to wear those.”

She brightened.  “I can wear my OTHER pink shoes!”

Of course you can.

So when she emerged in this riotously wonderful ensemble this morning, the only thing I could say was, “You look FANTASTIC!”  She smiled and spun a little so that the sundress flared out.

Her sister, lounging on the couch in a cloud of teenage disdain, asked, “Is it Tacky Day?”

Vivi looked at her in confusion and answered, “No, it’s Tuesday.”

________________________

Do you let your kids out of the house in their own creations?  I do, but I worry.  I worry that someone will make fun of her.  Someone will break her heart.  Someone will think she’s weird.  But I shut my mouth because I want her to pay more attention to the bold voice within her than she pays to the timid voices around her.  Especially the frightened one in my head that says, “Fit in. Lay low. Don’t attract the attention of the carnivores.”

And wouldn’t you know, Vivi’s schoolwork folder contained an essay that made me think we might be on the right track:

ALL ABOUT ME

     By Vivi

I am a book worm.

I am nice to others.  My mom

sas I am glameris.  I have lots

of talints.  I love to play

Dragon City on my sisters ipad.

If you say Im alwasy an arihead,

your rong.  I stay as calm as in

egal.  Im sometimes loud but

I can be qiet too.

 

This is the drawing she did to go along with her essay.  She drew herself as a lion, surrounded by a mane of “adjtives” that describe her:

vivi lion

 

She’s glameris and frindly and amaginitiv and talinted.  Most days, my only hope is to keep her spirit intact.  She’s ALREADY OK.

She’s not wasting time worrying about carnivores because she’s the straight up Queen of the Jungle.

(And if I said that to her, she would correct me to point out that lions do not live in jungles; they live on the grassy savannas of Africa.)