Tag Archives: Vivi

The Alone Part and the Adventure Part

boxcarVivi and I went to the library today.  She chose seven books from The Boxcar Children series.

I never read these books when I was a kid.  Did you?  They were mentioned this week on The Writer’s Almanac:

The Boxcar Children series is the story of four orphans, Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny, who range in age from six to fourteen. Their parents die, and their grandfather is granted custody. But the children are afraid that he is a cruel old man, and so they run away and set up house in an abandoned boxcar, supporting themselves and living an independent life.

Gertrude Chandler Warner said that after it was published, many librarians objected to the story because they thought the children were having too much fun without any parental control. Warner said, “That is exactly why children like it!”

As we were driving home, I told Vivi, “You know, when those books came out, some people didn’t think kids should read them because they didn’t think it was right for children to read about kids who lived on their own and had fun adventures without any grown-ups around.”

I looked in the rearview mirror and she was gazing out the window, nonplussed.  I asked, “What do you think about that?”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t think about the alone part as much as I think about the adventure part.”

Huh.  That pretty much sums up the first three years of therapy for me.  When Fartbuster and I divorced, I spent at least a year staring at the alone part instead of at the adventure part.  

The Alone Part–that’s the part where you end up sitting on the edge of your bed and asking yourself, “How did I get HERE?” (to quote my friend, Heather).  The alone part is the part where you can’t breathe or sleep because your brain is hashing up every NEVER AGAIN and ALWAYS that it can lay hands on.  The alone part demands logic and reason and a really sound explanation.  The alone part asks, “WHY?”

The Adventure Part–that’s the part where you end up sitting on the edge of your bed and asking yourself, “What do I want to do today?”  The adventure part is the part where your whistle comes back and you get some jig in your giddy up.  The adventure part sleeps at night and dreams during the day.  The adventure part demands leaps and giggles and doesn’t care to explain itself.  The adventure part asks, “WHY NOT?”  

Sunday Sweetness–Happy Easter

 

spring

Happy Easter from my favorite chick!

Raising Carmen Miranda

Carmen MirandaMy first conversation upon returning home Monday afternoon:

“Hey, Vivi.  How was your day?”

She looked up from the couch where she was engrossed in a Hardy Boys mystery.  Her pink sneakers lay on the floor beside a pile of dirty socks.

“Um…it was pretty good…but I got a red.”  That’s the system in her class–everyone starts the day on green then moves to orange or blue for good choices or yellow then red for bad choices.

I’ve given up on making a big deal about the color of the day, because most days she’s on green.  Last Friday was an orange day.  Today, red–tomorrow, who knows?  We focus instead on the chain of events that led to the result and recognizing the moments when she has the chance to determine which way it will go.

“So how did that happen?”  I asked her, while rubbing her back.  G came in the room and listened in.

“Well………” she popped her finger out of her mouth–she still sucks on her finger when she’s tired or lost in a book.  “I was on yellow then I went red.”

“I understand that, but usually red happens after several bad choices.  Can you remember what happened before you went to red?”

“Um….I got too rambunctious doing the conga.”

Well.

G’s shoulders were shaking at this point.  I tried to keep a straight face but I turned to him in all seriousness and said, “This is ALL on you.  That’s your half of the genes, Senor.  No one in my family has ever been chastised for excessively exuberant conga dancing.”

Now, if she ever gets sent home on red for unbridled square dancing…that will be my half of the genes.   

There are some days when parenting makes me want to throw my hands in the air and shake my body like I just don’t care.  

 

 

P.S.:  I know that Carmen Miranda was more famous for her samba, the Brasilian dance.  The conga originates from Cuba.  But first graders don’t samba.  It’s not on the CRCT until third grade.

Daddy Did My Hair

Vivi has a riotous head of fine, curly hair.  It can get a little bit snarled up while she sleeps.  My sister dubbed her “Sideshow Bob” one morning when we went to New York:

 

sideshows

 

 

A few months back, I wrote about the magical silliness that happened when Daddy Went to the Grocery Store.  This time, he went to the beauty supply aisle. God help us all.  Here’s what happened…

G is convinced that Vivi’s hair will remain silky through the night if she sleeps in a sleeping cap.  Remember those?  I sure do.  My Grandmama Eunice wore one every night to keep her hair fixed.  I was thinking of something like this:

hair net

 

Granted, the pink one is pretty grandmotherly–that’s too prim and fussy for a first grader.  But I know they make sleeping caps for kids too, something cute and practical like this:

hair net kids

That’s what I thought we were talking about when he said he had picked up a sleeping cap for Vivi while he was at Kroger.

I didn’t really expect this:

 

 

hairnet

 

What…was she robbing a 7-11 and stopped to take a nap?

It reminds me of that scene in Raising Arizona:

Raising-Arizona-Nicolas-Cage-robbery

 

The one when Hi robs the convenience store and Ed gets so mad she drives off so he has to carjack some old man who says, “Son?  You got a panty on your head.”

Tonight, she told me it’s comfortable, so she wants to sleep in it.  But she thought it was a little plain, so she duded it up with some St. Patrick’s Day leftovers:

 

hair net

 

There you go.

 

These Hips Will Never Be 15 Again

roller bookWhen I stood up after a one-hour meeting this morning, my hips popped and cracked so loudly that my coworker and I had to laugh about it. But I’ll take the creaking bones and sore muscles in exchange for the two hours of roller skating joy I felt yesterday afternoon.  Those sounds were just one more reminder that these hips will never be 15 years old again.  For that, I am grateful.

Back in middle and high school, roller skating was a thing.  It was The Eighties, so we skated in Gloria Vanderbilt jeans with a plastic comb sticking out of the back pocket, sequined leg warmers twinkling in the disco lights.  On a Friday night at the Skate Inn, the air hung thick with Aqua Net, Love’s Baby Soft and Polo.  I didn’t live close enough to The Big City to get to go skating every weekend–only about 3-4 times a year for birthday parties and such–so I never got really good at it.  Not like Amy Sarsfield, who had her own white skates with yarn pompoms tied into the laces.  She could skate backwards.  When it was time for Couples’ Skate, she and her boyfriend slipped around the oval in a waltz, not just holding hands and tottering along side by side.

In those days, my main concern while skating was looking cool…which didn’t simply mean staying upright.  I had to fight gravity and inertia, keep my hair combed, bounce in time to “Freak Out” by Chic, look around for my friends and any cute boys without looking like I was looking around.  My hips were busy keeping me looking cool while all of that was going on.  Because skating for me was all in the hips.  Maybe my legs were too long or my center of gravity was too high or the legs of my Gloria Vanderbilts were too tight to allow the right movement, but I never felt safe and graceful while up on skates.  Some primordial fear of falling kept me from completely lifting my feet off the rink surface to push.  And don’t even try to do that crossover step on the corners!  So I wiggled and glided and slammed into the carpeted wall to stop (ever so gracefully).  If I really lost momentum in the middle of “Brick House,” I might summon the courage to lift my left foot an inch and give a push/wobble/recover but every one of them made my breath catch in my throat.  My whole body vibrated with teenage tension, waiting for the BOOM!

Well.  That was thirty years ago.  After a looooooong hiatus (um, 30 years), I’ve been roller skating three times in the last month!  Vivi likes to go and I like to take her on any and all adventures…and if you’re going to the skating rink with a six year old, you’re gonna skate.  This is not the kind of coaching you can do from a distance.

roller skatesEach time we go, we get a little more comfortable.  Vivi falls fearlessly and often, like a game of Pick Up Sticks.  She’s tall for her age so she resembles a rolling flamingo sporting a look of dogged determination.  I look more like a turkey leg from the Renn Faire, up on skates.  At least my jeans these days have a little more give to them, so there is some blood getting to my feet.

My hips are faaaaaar more experienced at 45.  They’re wider, but wiser.  As I was gliding around the rink yesterday, smiling openly at the middle aged men hot-dogging around, I thought about that 15 yr old girl I once was and it hit me–I’m not the woman I used to be.  And that’s a good thing.

I’m not that girl anymore.  I’m three times older than she was.  My hips know how to shift weight from balancing a baby.  My toes know how to press for a corner because I learned that snowboarding in Utah–heel side J’s and toe side J’s.  The gliding along, moving weight from side to side, well that’s like skiing.  I still look around, but now it’s to find my kid and give her a wave.  I still can’t lift my feet all the way off the floor for fear of toppling over.  But I can still feel the music in my hips and I don’t care if I look goofy as I bounce along.    Especially if it’s the Harlem Shake or the Cupid Shuffle.  That stuff’s right up there with the Commodores.

Skating still makes me wobble, but it’s FUN.

It’s one of those things I would have denied myself if I had spent too long thinking about it.  I can’t go roller skating because I’m too old, too fat, too clumsy, too tired, too fragile, too impatient…too afraid.  But when you’re the mom of a girl and you never want to hear her say that she’s too clumsy or fat or fragile to try something fun, you have to shut up, lace up, and show her how we roll.

fixedskate

A Letter To My Daughter

This is a Mike Letter, complete with photo montage and watercolor. Rufus the cat is completely unrelated.

This is a Mike Letter, complete with photo montage and watercolor. Rufus the cat is completely unrelated.

It’s my turn to host the blog hop!  Our theme this week is “The Last Letter I Wrote By Hand.”  Mike Miller, if you’re reading this, it’s in honor of you and the exquisite letters you’ve sent my way over the last 28 years.  Y’all seriously. Mike not only writes REAL letters, he writes them on paper he has made and/or painted by hand.

Letters are dear to me but have faded from my life for the most part.  There’s a Heineken box in the basement filled with all the letters I got while in high school and college.  When G and I were decluttering the den this weekend, he found a “To My Wife” Valentine stuck in a cabinet drawer…signed by Fartbuster.  Yeah, it was time for a cleaning!  I remember writing a letter on mint green paper to give to  Fartbuster on our wedding day.  I wonder what happened to those promises I meant so deeply that day.

Well, that was then.  This is now.  I do still write some letters, about two a year.

I keep a little journal for each of my children and I write letters to them about what’s going on in their lives at this date and how they are growing and changing.  I’ve been writing these letters since before they were born.

The first letter in Vivi’s journal is addressed to “Dear Pollywog,” because we didn’t even know then if we were having a boy or a girl.  That letter was composed in my cozy compartment on a train trip across Canada with the Cowboy Junkies.  Yeah, that was a cool letter.  A few months later, I wrote Vivi a letter from a beach in Puerto Rico before she was born.  I was watching a pelican dive and dive and dive for its dinner and it made me think about persistence.  I wanted her to know that it’s important to know that it sometimes takes 100 tries before you get what you’re aiming for.  There are letters about her first step and first word.  Her favorite knock-knock jokes and a picture she drew for Santa on a napkin we left next to the cookies and milk.

Old journal, new media

Old journal, new media

The last letter in that journal was written a year ago–I’ve had less impetus to write now that she and I TALK so much.  The letter described a typical Saturday morning, the games we played all piled in the big bed together and the mango she and Daddy shared for breakfast.  The pirate game we made up on the playfort and her favorite Octonauts shows.

On the page behind that letter is a little note she wrote to Daddy when she and I were on an adventure:  “I mist u som uhc dad. I luov u.  Thak u.”  One day, she’ll meet herself in these letters.

I guess that’s why we hold on to letters.  They capture those moments in the folds of the paper, the people we were on those days.  

What’s the last letter you wrote out by hand?  Want to read more stories about handwritten letters?  Follow these links to read more!

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Mrs. Malaprop and Moses

“Malapropism” is when you accidentally confuse words with a funny result.   Like the time in college when my art history professor asked why my friend was always falling asleep in class and I said, “Oh, it’s not that you’re boring.  She’s a necrophiliac.”  I meant narcoleptic.  Oopsie.  The term is coined after a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play “The Rivals” (which I actually read and enjoyed back in college, thanks to Dr. Darlene Mettler).  

First Babysit Church

First Babysit Church

Today, Vivi and I were riding a tandem bike around the island.  We passed a church and she yelled, “Hey, Mommy!  It’s the First Babysit Church!”

After a good chuckle, I explained that the two words shared many letters, but they had totally different meanings.  But given Vivi’s propensity for asking questions I then found myself pedaling the bike, balancing, steering and explaining baptism versus christening, John the Baptist and Salome, Protestantism and Catholicism, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, and the Diet of Worms in 1522.  At least we got to our lunch spot before I had to remember the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation.  Wars have been fought over that one.

moses

When we got back to the apartment, Carlos had gone all Old Testament on us.  He had on a Burger King crown and was trying to crawl into a picnic basket made of reeds.  That’s my boy, Moses.