Turning Two

I'm not sure how over a week has passed since Dear Son experienced his 2nd, birthday, but it has. He had a great time being a "farmer" on his new tractor. He enjoyed his "Melmo" (Elmo) cake, his balloons, and his "pizzas" for his birthday dinner. He liked the "presents" as well, and once in awhile pulls one out from under the Christmas tree saying "Presents!" and preparing to unwrap it. I explain to him that those are presents for other people we are saving for Christmas to unwrap. He accepts this, but not until he asks, "Why?" He's been asking "Why?" for months now, and I know he got this from Big Sister. All I can say is that the "Why?" stage is going to be a long one for this child...and for his weary mommy.

We had Son's party on Saturday after his Thursday birthday, but on Thursday we met Daddy for birthday lunch together and then we took the kids around the corner to get a big mylar turtle balloon for Son. His favorite stuffed toy is "Turtle." We also got a couple latex balloons for Big Sister so she didn't feel left out. On the way back home, the kids sat in the middle row of the family mobile clutching their balloons like prizes. Both of them looked quite pleased with life all the way home. At one point Daughter said to me, "You are the best Mommy I've ever had!" I was thinking to myself that it's a good thing I've never had competition. I'll accept first place in the contest, regardless.

Everything else is fairly status quo, save for my peek into my clients' lives through my professional window. I'll abbreviate my explanation here just to say that some days I am burdened with the filth and misery of this world and what children in our culture are subjected to. And what they survive. I typically get to see them in the therapy room by the time they hit their teenage years, and the histories they come with frequently make me sick to my stomach. It's no wonder they start tripping out in the midst of the holidays as they are even more painfully reminded of not only the lack of positive family relationships during this season, but of their painful family histories that represent the reasons why they are without family. It seems unfair for me to even mention how I feel burdened by it all and weary of it, as I am not the one who has to literally live it. I simply share in the journey of those who do have to live it. Yet just walking through it with them can be exhausting and emotionally draining. More importantly, it drives me to love and nurture my own children even more intently, as if being an exceptional parent can somehow have the power to cancel out even a tiny bit of the fact of how many children in this world suffer so miserably at the hands of their parents.

Two Years Still Feels Like Yesterday!

I confess...I had flashbacks last night. They were briefer than the past year, though. About 8:30pm, as I was snuggling with Dear Daughter in her bed, I thought of the eve of Dear Son's birth. How I read Daughter stories as I tried to ignore the contractions that had me in intense pain for two days. My doctor told me that morning that it was latent labor and she would see me the next week. I'd been awake all night in some serious pain, and this was only latent labor? I had to withstand another week of this? Well heck, what did I know. I never even felt the contractions with Dear Daughter before they decided she had to come via slice and dice mode. Who was I to argue? But man, did this latent labor feel painful!

I timed the contractions and tried to hide my pain as I finished a few bedtime stories. By the time I tucked Daughter in and left her room, I'd had about 40 minutes of contractions at semi-even intervals, but getting closer together. They were now consistently five minutes apart. I called my mom, the labor and delivery nurse. She agreed I'd better go in. I will spare you a repeat of the details I've already shared here.

Suffice it to say that every year as Christmas draws near, I begin to have a few flashbacks of the trauma of Son's birth and the aftermath. The holidays were a blur that year. I don't think I came out of the blur, semi-conscious, until about March. The only thing harder than laboring with a baby and then ultimately going c-section and then doing the whole newborn thing, is doing all those things with a 2 1/2 year old to parent as well.

I survived it. And every year I pat myself on the back and after I breathe a prayer of thanks for my beautiful baby boy, I follow with another prayer of thanks that goes something like this, "Thank GOD that's over!"

He's beautiful. He wasn't planned--at least not at the point that he came to be. But he's loved and wanted as much as a child could ever be. I can't imagine our lives or our family without him.

Happy Birthday, "Bubbie!"

Puffy Paint and Purple Gingerbread Men

The cold and icy weather has left us engaging in indoor activities. I decided to try a recipe for "puffy paint" last week and got brave enough to plop both the kids at the table to get dirty in it. It didn't necessarily make a real nice "puffy" paint, but it did make the paint thick enough to minimize the mess made by a painting not-quite-two-year-old.


And then there's Little Miss Sweet Tooth. She's been asking since about August to make a gingerbread house again. Last year we made one out of graham crackers. It was a pain in the you-know-what and didn't hold together very well. I looked at recipes for home-made gingerbread houses, and frankly it didn't seem worth the work involved. Especially if there are no big gingerbread fans in the house. So I wimped out and bought a kit. It was totally worth it. It came with a prepared platform to guide the pieces in and all the house pieces were precut. There were just enough candy decorations (even after Daughter nibbled on a few of them). The only complaint was that there wasn't quite enough icing. I could have easily made more if I wanted to mess with it. But I didn't. So we made do.










No complaints from Daughter.







Then there was the sugar cookies. Yes, that IS PURPLE icing you see on her lips and teeth. I'll explain later. The princess getup? Doesn't everybody wear their best princess gown and tiara on the occasion of Christmas cookie decorating?


The intention was to bake the cookies and stick them in the feezer until the end of the week when we look forward to a visit with Great Uncle Ron and Great Aunt Pat. Daughter wanted to decorate the cookies with them. But she couldn't stand it and wanted to do "a few of them" and save the rest for Great Uncle Ron and Great Aunt Pat to help with. Daughter does not suck her thumb, by the way. Unless there is cookie icing on it.

And yes (if you look closely) that IS a MOOSE, a BUNNY RABBIT, and a CHICKEN and a HEART you see on the table. And yes, (if you look closely) that IS ORANGE and PURPLE cookie icing you see on some of the cookies. I can explain the moose to anyone who doesn't know me well enough to already know about my love affair with the wildlife of northern Idaho. My home is well decorated in moose in a wimpy attempt to cling to a piece of the Pacific Northwest. It's no surprise a couple moose made it into my cookie cutter collection. The bunny and chicken? I'm just really not sure about those. There was also a cowboy in the cutter collection, but the dough kept sticking to him so we gave up. My only explanation is that I inherited my grandmother's cookie cutter collection, and these were included. Daughter had to try one of everything. Including, of course, the Valentine's Day heart shapes. As for the purple and orange icing, only Great Aunt Pat fully understands this. Let's just say it's a "sweet" (pun intended) gesture towards her and her brother and their very intriguing color attractions.

Daughter has a wild creative streak, and so we simply must indulge, even if it means a completely eclectic and non-traditional Christmas cookie spread.

Butt-Ugly is in the Eye of the Beholder

The wee ones were pleased as punch with this year's Christmas tree, and this took the edge off my own sentiments to Dear Husband that what he had brought home was one butt-ugly tree.

We strayed from our usual Thanksgiving weekend tradition this year, as we feared with Thanksgiving being so early our tree would dry out before Christmas even arrived. We planned to get the tree the following weekend. I had seen a sign in front of a local tree nursery that advertised "Live Christmas Trees" and wondered why we had never considered before the option of putting up a potted tree that could later be planted in the yard. Husband and I discussed the idea and decided it was a perfect plan that is environmentally sensitive and financially helpful as we could use it later as a contribution towards the foresting of our five acres. Upon making this decision, Husband took on the task of taking the wee ones to pick it out while I was busy all day with other commitments. I had visions of a perfectly manicured Alpine Pine in a pretty pot in the corner of the family room. I know it was a dreamy ideal. After all, I've never even seen an Alpine Pine around here except for the fake ones, like the one I recently bought at Hobby Lobby for the upstairs living room. But, despite realizing deep down inside that an Alpine Pine was unreasonable, I must admit that I wasn't totally prepared for what I would see in the downstairs family room when I returned home late afternoon.

Dear Husband greeted me at the door all proud of himself and chattering about how he'd purchased a 6 ft tree but it must have been larger because he had to trim the top to fit it under the ceiling downstairs. I felt the excitement in the air with the wee ones running around while I unloaded groceries exclaiming about their adventure picking out a tree with Daddy. Dear Daughter was giving a long narrative about the whole event while Dear Son ran in circles saying, "Trismas tree, yay! Trismas tree, yay!"

Then I descended the stairs amidst all the buzz and rounded the corner. Let me just say that Charlie Brown would have been very proud. After a moment of surprise, my response was a calm and monotone, "Well, that's not quite what I was expecting." Dear Husband was baffled and irritated by my response, explaining how he had purchased the best looking tree they had and that it is a "natural pine tree" and that he thinks it is quite a nice looking tree. I let his words drone into the background and interrupted with, "Well, couldn't we just trim it up a bit and shape it better?" Husband would have nothing of it, insisting that would ruin the tree. I looked at it skeptically and my eyes fixed on the upper half of the tree where there is a good two foot length of tree trunk completely naked of branches. I said, "Well, maybe we could wrap some green garland around that part of it." Husband shot me a look that said, "Woman, you are really annoying me!" and I shut up except to mumble under my breath, "Man, that is one UGLY tree!" Dear Son walked up to it after that and announced, "Ugly!" which is when I realized that I had spoken that last sentiment out loud. I sneaked a sideways look at Husband, who shook his head and displayed a smug look on his face.

The rest of the evening was really quite fun. Dear Son continued to say, "Ugly!" each time he approached the tree with some shiny bauble to hang on it, and I snickered every time. Actually, I giggled to myself (albeit out loud) the entire time that I doled out the decorations to the elated wee ones and watched Dear Husband fight with the lights as he tried to get them to look just right on his Charlie Brown tree. I was having fun, and I was even feeling pleased with the ugly tree. Ironically, the more pleased I became with it, the more irritated Husband became with me.

Despite my visions of a perfectly manicured Alpine Pine being dashed, I think the butt-ugly potted "natural pine" will make for a fun annual tradition. That is, if Husband can handle it again next year.

In Which Daughter Demonstrates the Annoying Influences of the Media

It would seem that my dear four-year-old daughter absorbs far too much media advertising during these days of shopping, shopping, shopping, and all the holiday hoopla. I really can't figure out the source from which she absorbs this stuff. She is only allowed an hour of tv per day, up to two hours on an off day or on a dreary, cold, or rainy day. This "tv time" consists of the Noggin Network or PBS or a kid-friendly video. I never have the tv on outside of this time except after the kids are in bed. It would be pointless anyway, as the kids would hijack the tube as quickly as they hijack my jacuzzi bath. And so Dear Daughter gets virtually zero television commercials (except when I'm away at work and Husband indulges the kids in SpongeBob on Nickelodeon). Daughter, in fact, never experienced a single television commercial until sometime during the past year, and when she finally was exposed to them, they really agitated her! She would be in the middle of a show and suddenly a commercial would break through and she would come unglued wondering what happened to her show and when it would be back. She would whine and nag and cry until the show returned, so it's not like she was even listening to them. And yet somehow, she absorbs this stuff from somewhere.

As I was driving this morning, I listened to her chattering away from the middle row of the family mobile. She was jabbering about some "make believe" toy that she was conjuring up in her head. She was very clear with me that this was not a "real" toy, but just one that she was "imagining." Her description went on for several minutes in great detail. I confess, I had begun to tune out and was instead thinking about the tasks on my "to do" list for the day. Then I heard her voice kind of trail off and there was a brief pause before she punctuated her narrative with a matter-of-fact, "Batteries not included."