In Which I Get Overly Proud of the Kindergartner

She's in the shower and she asks innocently, "Is she really naughty?" She's referring to a classmate who I guess might struggle with some sensory or learning issues. Tonight, Jemma's been telling me about all the times this little one has needed extra help "making good choices."

"No," I tell her. "She's just learning how to be in a classroom. Some kids just take longer than others to learn those kinds of things."

Jemma is incredulous: "But mom, we've been in school for 130 days!"

"Well, I'm sure you're a good friend to her and to everyone, right?" I say.

"Yeah," she says, her voice mixing with the shower steam, "Sometimes I hold her hand and ask if she wants to sit by me on the rug. And Monday she was wearing leopard pants, so I promised her I'd wear my leopard leggings on Tuesday." I think back to yesterday: leopard leggings, purple shirt.

"I bet she loved that," I say.

"Uh-huh," she says, and she finishes up making a potion for her sister to find when it's her turn in the shower next.

*****

Her homework one day was "List five words that describe you." Jemma's list:

AwSoM
Feryis
FredLy
MAD
haPpy

I suppose she thought she should keep it real - you know, talk about how awesome she is, while also admitting that she's occasionally furious and mad.

*****

Her New Year's resolution was, in part, to try more new foods (YESSSSS!), and now at least once a week at the dinner table, she'll pause before a bite of broccoli or cannellini beans or pork chop and ask, "Will you tell Mrs. M?" And I say yes, and I end up texting her lovely teacher the details of just what Jemma tried that night. I'm going to get as much mileage as I can out of that resolution.

*****

Before Spring Break, Jemma came down the stairs one morning, casually sporting a green skirt around her shoulders, with her neck and head sticking through the opening where her waist would normally be. (Additionally, she was wearing a green-and-white striped shirt with navy-and-white striped leggings.) She seemed quite proud of her look, so off to school she went. Fifteen minutes later, a text from her teacher: "Love her style. A skirt as a wrap!" She did it the next day, too (different skirt, of course) and we began referring to her as Project Runway. I think she was trying to start a trend, but sadly, the other kindergarten girls didn't seem to catch on, and her coat interfered with the flounciness of the skirt-as-shawl look, too. I have my fingers crossed for a resurgence later this spring, though.

*****

She wrote a poem yesterday after reading a book of poems and patterning it after one she'd liked:

SLeping

Do you Like Blue? Do You Like red? Do you Like SLeping in your Bed?

do You Like YeLLow? do You Like WHite? do you Like SLePing At nigHt?

She brought it to school this morning, then brought it back home this afternoon with a glowing note on it from her teacher. I was praising her efforts and creativity when she got it out of her folder this afternoon, but she looked less than thrilled.

"What?" I asked.
She pointed to the first line. "I like this line the best."
"Yeah? Why?" I asked.
"The other one . . . there aren't enough words in it," she said.

I was secretly thrilled. I mean, I don't want to brag, but she's basically scanning poems correctly at age six. I see a bright future! Like . . . being an English major! Everyone knows that's where the big money and abundant jobs are, right?

*****

Her teacher and I have decided to keep her in kindergarten forever.

Six-Year-Olds Make No Sense

Ours doesn't, at least.

One day over Christmas vacation, she essentially had a six-hour crying fit about . . . writing a single thank-you note. And getting dressed and brushing her teeth to go skating at the skating rink. Which she CLEARLY didn't get to do after all, because of the crying. And the screaming. And the lying on the hallway floor, the ripping up of the paper on which I had nicely written the names and gifts she needed for her thank-you notes, the slamming of the bedroom door, the threatening to run away in the snow while still wearing purple footie pajamas, etc.

The next day, she giggled almost constantly, hugged us a million times, went to church and sat still and quiet as a mouse. She built a fairy house and threw snowballs at the fence from her perch in the hot tub. Just before bed, she laughed so hard over something her sister said that she peed her pants and all over her bedroom floor.

Just now, she came downstairs after being tucked in ten minutes ago, wearing an entirely new set of pajamas than she'd been wearing when we turned out the light. She said her nose was itchy. She also said she'd already had a scary dream about a bat.

She started yoga class yesterday and is smug about how many of the poses she already knows from her kid yoga video. She loves her cats. She reads constantly. She resolved (possibly to impress her teacher) to "eat helthy food" in the new year. (Also: to "lisin on the first triy," to "riyd my to well bike," and to "do chors evrey day.") (I would welcome them all.)

You know how sometimes, your kids turn ages, and it seems wrong, and you can't believe they're that age? Well, that's not the case here; I can believe she's six. She turned it in a blaze of glory, with a chocolate raspberry torte from Julienne Tomatoes, surrounded by her cousins up north, followed by sledding and a (very) little painting party with friends when we got back home.

She's mostly happy, except when she's not. She mostly skips through the house, sings to herself while she's drawing or writing, hugs me fiercely when she gets home after school. She still comes to find me first thing in the morning, says, "Snuggle", and gets under the covers with me. She still sits on my lap at night when we read books before bed, and I feel the weight of her as she turns to let me scratch the bare skin on her back. Her hair smells like Cheerios and shampoo, and sometimes a little bit like gum.

She drew this self-portrait yesterday. She is six.

My Very Favorite Writing

I think that if I could freeze my children at any ages they've been so far, I'd pick either 18-24 months (so cute! such chubby cheeks and squeaky voices! and they haven't started saying 'no' too much yet!) and kindergarten. The writing and drawing skills from the kindergarten stage are particularly my favorite, so it is no surprise that I adore every single thing Jemma brings home these days. I love the inventive spelling, the backwards letters, and the scrappy little drawings so much that it's hard to part with any of them, though I do guiltily sneak a fair amount of them into the recycling bin during the day when she's at school. I try to photograph some of my favorites, though. To wit:

I like strawberries. I like cherries. (Other things she "licked" during that stage included friends, donuts, and her family.)

"Me and my family." Awwwww.

A recent self-directed art project with stickers and the most adorable spellings of Halloween words ever.

Speaking of hilarious and adorable writing, Jason and I volunteered in Annie's classroom to help with an oil spill simulation, and this is the thank-you note she wrote us a couple of days later:

That's a keeper, for sure.

Summer, Halfway

It's six weeks down and six to go and I'm sitting outside with a Left Hand Milk Stout thinking that seems just about right. Jason's on a ride and the girls are freshly tucked in bed after a day that included both slushies and the new fro-yo spot in town, which also somehow seems right.

One of the fifteen new arborvitae in the back yard has died. Just one. Jemma bit my shoulder today when I lifted her into the house for a time-out, wet and dripping from the hot tub, and then she drew me a picture and wrote, "MOM IM. VORE SORRY. I LOVE YOU MOM. JEMMA."

The girls did a couple of pages in their workbooks this morning, but my early summer fantasy of languid, coffee-drinking mornings with the three of us working happily at the dining room table has proved to be exactly that: a fantasy. The girls spend much of their time outside (they are brown, despite the sunscreen I slather on them daily), creating elaborate fairy houses or homes for caterpillars and roly-polies they dig out of the mulch.

They cannot both be upstairs together at the same time, a situation that will have to change when school starts. When I send them both up to change clothes or get an item to bring wherever we're going, there is inevitable prolonged nakedness, followed by laughing wresting, followed by crying wrestling, followed by looks of stricken confusion when I ask what is taking so long. They forget why they're upstairs at all. Jemma threw a twenty minute fit about getting dressed yesterday morning, and Annie and I had this conversation when it was her turn:

A: So can I get a pedicure?
Me: What?
A: Can I get a pedicure as a prize for getting dressed?
Me: HAAAAAHHHHHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA. No.

You can imagine she didn't take that very well.

(I wondered today while I was driving whether, if a parent raising girls mapped out these particularly hysterical days on a calendar for a period of several months, the parent would eventually, in seven or eight years, come to see that the particularly challenging periods were occurring in, say, some sort of monthly pattern. (No reason at all! Ahem. Just wondered.))

We took a family bike ride tonight. We can do that this summer sans bike trailer, Jemma pedaling her little heart out, the bright pink feather in Annie's hair left over from the rock concert peeking out of her helmet. (She wishes aloud that there could be a rock concert every night. She is learning the guitar now, too, from Jason.)

My favorite photos of the summer so far are mostly the ones of the girls, really close up, eating something special: ice cream, s'mores, corn on the cob. Also the ones of us around any kind of water: boating on Walloon, spending an afternoon at the beach with friends, wearing goggles in the hot tub or at the pool, my toes on the dock. (Jemma wanted to take the swim test at the pool yesterday but was a little nervous. Annie offered to swim next to her the whole way. They made it all the way to the other side.)

Everyone asks me lately what I'll do in September when both girls are in school all day, and here's my standard answer: I don't know. Some days, that's a Zen, the-universe-is-unfolding-as-it-should, calm "I don't know;" other days it's a wide-eyed, nervous-laughter, slightly panicked "I don't know." Either way. Both. I've got a few ideas, and in the meantime, I'm trying to be okay with not knowing, and with six more weeks of summer.

End of an Era

Since September of 2007, I've spent a chunk of every school year driving someone to preschool. On Monday, I did it for the last time ever.

I still remember exactly how the first day of preschool went for Annie. I had never dropped one of my babies off at school before. Jemma was only eight months old, still in the infant car seat, when we brought Annie into her classroom and I hugged her good-bye. I went home, cried a little, put Jemma down for her morning nap, and cleaned the heck out of a bathroom (even bleaching the bath toys) with no "helpers" in sight.

I cried a little on Monday, too. Jemma stayed to play on the playground for a few minutes after I picked her up, then we walked out to our car and let the gate swing shut behind us for the last time. She skipped ahead, her bag full of a journal that shows just how far she's come this year: her self-portrait, once a circle with legs coming right out of the chin, is now adorably accurate as body parts go; her letters, once backwards, are now formed neatly and correctly; the words she knows how to read now uncountable. She's ready, surely, for kindergarten in the fall. But I'm going to miss the sweet mornings at the happy school in the red brick church.

Heat

Since returning from Florida, it's been nearly 80 and sunny here every day. We've been walking around in stunned euphoria: eating ice cream, playing in sprinklers, wearing tank tops, embarking on a night run at 7:15 p.m. wearing shorts and a tank and coming home, sweaty, to drink a Blue Moon on the front steps. Getting back into the groove of regular life has been a little tough to manage in light of the sudden summer environment, and I confess that kindergarten forms may have been hastily turned in at the last minute, I forgot to get my allergy shot for a week, and doing anything besides staying at the playground after school pick-up seems annoying. And though the heat and sunshine for mid-March seems like the tiniest bit of bad karma (like, we might have to pay for it with an April where it rains every day), we are basking in the glory of every warm and sunny moment: Shamrock shakes outside on St. Patrick's Day, a Sunday hiking Dune State Park and picnicking at the beach, dinner eaten on a blanket on the front lawn.

Jemma continues to be her sweet, silly self. She is obsessed with my phone's Siri function and specifically wants to know what Siri's middle name might be. (We have asked; Siri has no reliable answer.) We have her spring conferences at pre-school on Thursday, and we fully expect to hear that she is ready for next year and the full-day challenges that it might bring. She reads more and more words every day, counts well into the hundreds, and loves to be given math problems to solve. (We are still working on her remembering to look before she crosses the street, though . . .)

Annie is, right this minute, at piano lessons, where she is working on Au Claire de la Lune. She has a million questions about everything, all day long, and she spends much of her time doing her hair seven times until the braid looks just right, jump-roping backwards on one foot, and eating adult-sized portions of everything at every meal. She loves writing to her new pen pal, Aunt Lisa, and telling anyone who will listen about how she gets to be a flower girl in her uncle Brett's wedding next winter. (After a mere fifteen years of dating, my brother finally got around to making it official with the woman our girls have always called Aunt Meagan. My mom has possibly not stopped crying tears of joy since the announcement, and nobody is mad that the wedding is going to be in Jamaica, either.)

I'm trying to fit the odd yoga class and lake run around a bit more freelance writing and a bevy of daily phone calls and emails with the list of various people working on our house project, which grows by the day. As of now, we've involved a seamstress, heating and cooling professionals, a dry basement company, a landscaper, an electrician, a painter, and a woman in NY state who makes slipcovers for the Pottery Barn rocker in addition to our general contractor and much help from Connie in the design department. I am looking forward to the final product, though I have no idea when anything about it will be final. In the meantime, I have started re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't read it since my freshman year of high school. It calms me.

Jemma is Five

Dear Jemma,

Just typing that title - FIVE! - makes me amazed, proud, and sad. Nobody here can believe that you are five whole years old, and yet you are. We have been blessed with five whole years of your delightful, inquisitive, silly, sweet, social, confident self, and we feel so lucky.

Right now, you're at school, which you continue to love, and you talk almost daily about how much you can't wait for next year's school, when you'll be at the same school as Annie. You have learned SO MUCH this year: you can write all your uppercase and most of your lowercase letters; you can read short words; you can spell short words; you can add little numbers; you are fascinated by science; you are intrigued by maps, globes, and Google Earth; you love to read and be read to; you have learned to swim and scoot on a big-girl scooter and do the monkey bars all the way across, both forwards and backwards. We are so proud of you.

At home, you do puzzles, draw pictures, beg to play checkers on the iPad, play with the bazillion stuffed animals and babies we have, and want to be doing anything Annie is doing. You are usually the last one up in the morning and now that it is winter, you prefer to start the day by sitting on the heat vent in your room before you come out to eat breakfast. You can dress yourself completely - even all your snow gear! - and you never, ever, ever want to wear jeans. You want to grow your hair out long again. You love to have your toenails painted.

You are silly. You tell knock-knock jokes that make no sense, you love to watch silly cartoons, and when we read a funny book you've read before, you start giggling even before the funny part happens. Last night you had me and Annie both belly-laughing in my bed just anticipating what Tacky the penguin was going to do.

You are tender-hearted. Even during the limited amounts of time when you watch even the most innocuous television, you're known to run from the room or cover your eyes if anything even sliiiiiightly uncomfortable or loud or scary or awkward is starting to happen. Your compassion makes you such a good companion to our family, because often, just as the rest of us are at our worst in difficult situations, you'll save the day with a kind word, a hug, or by running to get some little thing (a glass of water, a book, a stuffed animal) to make us feel better.

You are enthusiastic. When you are excited about something or hear especially good news, you pump your arms triumphantly in the air and do a little wiggly dance of joy. The smallest things make you happy: dessert, time with beloved family and friends, a good song, a fun time sledding or ice-skating, a good story-and-snuggle session before bed.  When I read this quote this morning on my daily happiness calendar, I thought right away of you:

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about" - Charles Kingsley

We still tend to baby you sometimes, call you Roo and Moppet and Snuglet, pick you up when you should really have two feet on the ground most of the time. But in spite of your status as the little one in this family, you have so much to teach us about how to be, and you have such a bright future. We are sure of it. We love you so much, and we have loved our five whole years with you in our family.

Happy belated birthday.

Love,
Mommy

Preschool, Observed

As luck would have it in this, the most ridiculously busy wonderful time of the year, I've been volunteering in Jemma's classroom every single day this week. Tuesday was the day we celebrated her birthday and the birthday of her good friend H., who also has a December birthday that will occur over the holiday break and who (sadly) is moving out of state after the new year.

H's mom and I planned a joint treat - ice cream with lots of fun toppings - and converged on the classroom to set up the treat and enjoy circle time with the birthday girls. We'd scooped all the ice cream, set out all the toppings at the two snack tables, and then we stood for a minute, watching as the kids sang a few of their adorable holiday songs, including one about Santa to the tune of "Bingo." When they were done, having ho- ho'd their way through the final chorus, Mrs. C. said, "Good job! You remembered all the verses! Kiss your brains!" and, you know what, they did. Proudly and immediately and confidently kissed their own open palms and planted a kiss right on the tips of their heads.

When do we stop doing these things?

*****

Today I was the Holiday! Party! Helper!, which meant showing up half-way through the classroom time to (again) set up the day's snack, clean up all the requisite hot chocolate spills, and then to assist with the pinata-whacking for Las Posadas. I was laying out Christmass-y napkins next to plates of Clementines and Rice Krispie treats when a little boy disengaged from the circle and came up to me.

"Who are YOU?" he asked.
"I'm Mrs. D." I said brightly. "It's nice to meet you."
He sat down at a seat. "I play Mortal Kombat every day at my house! Pow!" He was thrilled with his announcement. I looked at my friend A., my eyebrows at the ceiling, a smile frozen on my face.
"Gosh, that's interesting information," I told the little boy.
"Yeah!" he continued, "I'm a GAMER!" and A. and I almost died on the spot.

*****

Tomorrow is a field trip to sing those adorable holiday songs at a retirement home. God only knows what will happen there.

Don't Do It

This morning started out fairly well: coffee with peppermint creamer; the girls playing checkers on the iPad and then creating some sort of secret project in Jemma's bedroom; Annie helping me make homemade cranberry sauce and giggling about every pop! the berries made; sunshine and playdates and bread-making ahead.  Jason had headed off to an early meeting, and I felt like a pretty great mom, if I do say so myself.

Then I pushed my luck and dared to leave the house.  Why not, I thought, go to the library and exchange books and movies so we'd have brand-new, fresh ones for this weekend's road trips?  And, because it's sunny and because we're eco-friendly and fit, why not walk there?

Big mistake.  HUGE.  The girls fought the whole way there about who should be carrying the books and about how many movies we could check out and who would pick them.  They fought while we were there over who got to check the items out, then fought about who got to push the automatic door-opening button on the way out, and I abandoned thoughts of running into the grocery store for the single thing I needed.

Worse, Jemma began to cry the minute we stepped out of the library's doors on our way home.  "I don't want to waaaaaaaaaaaalk!" she wailed.  I tried optimism:  "It's so short! We'll be home in five minutes!"  I tried cajoling:  "How about you race Annie to that pole?"  I tried mirroring:  "You're tired.  You don't want to walk.  I hear you saying you wish we had driven."  Still she wailed, and I tried tough love:  "Jemma, I don't like to listen to you cry.  I'm going to walk ahead and I'll wait for you when you calm down."  She wailed some more, Annie and I walked ahead, and then she started calling for us.

"Wait for meeeee!" she cried desperately.  "Mommy, wait!"

Aha! I thought.  "I'd be happy to wait for you if you're done crying," I said, pleased that my plan had worked.  We were almost halfway home; we'd just have to make it a block or two more.  Annie and I stopped and waited the few seconds it took for Jemma to catch up with us.  As soon as she did, she started having a fit again.

"I don't want to waaaaaaalk!  I'm tired of walllllllllking!!!" she trailed along behind us, then sat smack down on the sidewalk and screamed, much to the amusement of the college-aged neighbor and her mother out for a morning walk.  So again, Annie and I walked a little ahead, trying in vain to outrun the screaming, and again Jemma called for us to wait, and again she ceased crying right up until the second she finally caught up with us.  Don't do it, I thought, don't do it, don'tdoitpleasepleaseplease and "WAAAAAA!"

We finally made it home and I marveled that in less than an hour a place that had been the setting for such an idyllic morning had been populated with a four-year-old screaming about nothing, a mother with a tight-lipped mouth slamming peanut butter on the counter, and a seven-year-old who used the opportunity to sneak off with the iPad again.  It reminded me of a passage that made me laugh with recognition in When Did I Get Like This? by Amy Wilson:

Me: What kind of bagel would you like, Connor? We don't have any raisin, but we have plain and sesame.
Connor: Why didn't you get me raisin?
Me:  They didn't have any.
Connor: But I really wa-anteddd . . . rai-sinnnnn . . .
Me: THEY DIDN'T HAVE ANY.
Connor: (breaking down) Why couldn't you - just get me - a - raisinnn - baa-aa-gell . . . I wanted - it - so - MUUUCHHH AHHHH . . . .

This is the point where I bodily carry/drag him to any part of the house in which I cannot hear him, or at least will hear him only faintly, banging his fists on the wall and crying out to the gods that this "always happens to" him. I am not sure if ostracization is the correct disciplinary technique here, but I am sure it is better than the Saying of Things Mommy Might Regret, or worse.

After a while, silence.  Connor reemerges, sniffling, clearly attempting to function rationally.  I, modeling coolheadedness, act as if nothing had happened.

Me:  Hi, bud.  Are you ready for breakfast now?
Connor:  (lip quivering) I am.  But, Mommy.  Really.  I just have to ask you one thing.
Me: Don't do it.
Connor: Why didn't you-
Me: I'm warning you.
Connor: - buy me a -
Me: I'm begging you.
Connor:  - raa-hay-hay-zinnnn BAAAAAA-GELLLLLL . . .

Later, I find the patience to build a Lego house with them, we bake rolls together for Thanksgiving, and we sort Annie's laundry in quiet peace.  But that moment on the sidewalk, when I was loaded down with library books and movies (for them) and Annie was furious at her coat (that I bought her) and Jemma, almost five, was determined to ruin what could have been a perfectly pleasant quarter-mile walk, I fantasized for a minute or two about being the mom of the college-aged daughter.  For the love, Jemma.  Just stop crying.  Don't do it.

Things Jemma Says: Little Words

• "Patt-er-en" for pattern
• "Unrase" for erase, and "unraser" for eraser
• "three-year-older" when describing last year's pre-school

Cause and Effect, Halloween Style

Sunday morning, in the car on the way to church, in a conversation prompted by Jason's story of his Saturday night attendance at The Haunt, a local scary attraction:

Annie:  "And R is going to be a vampire for Halloween.  Were there vampires there?"
Jason:  "Yes!  There was a bridge you had to cross that made you feel dizzy, and people dressed like monsters who kept jumping out and trying to scare you.  There was a guy with a chainsaw who pretended to run towards you!  Do you know what happens if a vampire bites you?"
Annie:  "No, what?"
Jason:  "You become a vampire, too!"
Annie and Jemma, eyes huge in backseat: "Wow . . ."
Jason:  "And do you know what happens if a vampire bat bites you?"
Me, interrupting:  "Do you want to sleep tonight, Jason, or . . . ?"
Annie and Jemma, eyes huge in backseat.

*****

Last night, midnight, Jason and I fast asleep in our bedroom:

Jemma, standing one inch from my face:  "Mom."
Me, bolting upright, flailing in the covers:  "Aghhhhhh!"
Jemma:  " sniffle . . . sniffle . . ."
Me:  "Jemma!  What?  What's wrong?"
Jemma:  "Do bats eat us?" Begins to wail hysterically, sobs for fifteen minutes while I rock her in her room and explain cheerfully that bats eat mosquitoes and are so helpful!
Me:  Unable to get back to sleep for over an hour, due to the elevated heart rate from being scared awake.
Jason:  Sleeping soundly, snoring.

Her Name Means Jewel

She is almost five but she still willingly begins and ends each day in my arms.  At bedtime, after we read a book or three, she slumps contentedly into me and turns her head so her cheek rests on my left shoulder.  I smell her hair and scratch her back before I tuck her in.  Mornings, she opens her door slowly and comes out sheepishly, squinting at the light in the kitchen where the rest of us are already having breakfast.  I scoop her up and we snuggle.  Her warm body is not yet ready to talk.  She wants oatmeal or yogurt or fomps.

She jumps out of the car to go to school after she kisses me on the nose.  She talks to me the whole ride home and all through lunch.  She wants a cheese quesadilla - in the microwave! not the stove! - for lunch almost every day.  She hums while she draws.  She sings songs to herself while she builds with Legos or pages through books.  She has learned to do the monkey bars all the way across without stopping and to ride her sister's Razor and to play Doe-a-dear on the piano.  She can write all her letters and is working on her numbers and wants to know what two plus three is, please.  She brushes her teeth and washes her hands and cuts her waffle all by herself.  She gets dressed every morning and comes out, proud, to smile at herself in the full-length mirror in the hall.

Her bedroom is a mess of puzzles and pop beads.  There is an old Easter hat turned upside down, filled with a blanket, made into a nest for a stuffed animal in the middle of the floor.  It can not be moved.  There is a stack of books in her bed and a swaddled Bitty Baby, too, whose clothes must be changed from time to time.  She finds treasures on the ground everywhere we go, says, "I'm not picking up garbage, Mom," just before she hands me a penny, a pop-can top, a fall leaf, a cicada shell, an orange bead, a shell, a rock, a dragonfly wing.  The treasures must be kept in her bedroom, too.

She spills almost every time she eats.  She calls out "'Night!  Love you!  See ya in the mornin!" when we're closing her door at night.  She scowls when she doesn't get her way, says an emphatic "Phooey!" when she doesn't hear the answer she was hoping for.  She loves her sister, her Dumbo, her purple water bottle, her friends at school, her crayons, her bed.

Sleepy-headed Ninny

It's what we call Jemma when she does this after four straight days of beach time with neighbors, running, biking, kite-flying, hiking, boogie-boarding, hitting the whiffle ball with a plastic bat a trillion times, reading, coloring in bed with a contraband pen and getting ink on the sheets, shopping for her sister's birthday present, watching Olivia cartoons, whistling, scooting, giggling about the word "nipple," eating peaches and apples and homemade macaroni and cheese, and living it up for one last summer weekend:

Who They Are Right Now

Right now:

:: they are both still sleeping.

:: Annie falls asleep listening to her Suzuki piano CD or reading a Magic School Bus book in bed most every night.

:: Jemma has progressed to being able to swim underwater half the length of the indoor pool at the gym.

:: their shoulders are a deep, smooth shade of brown, no matter how diligent I am about the sunscreen.

:: they still fill afternoons playing "dog," "baby," and "school."

:: I sometimes catch Jemma kissing her finger, then pressing her finger to the photo of herself and next-door neighbor J that's on our refrigerator.  (I told his mom.)

:: they love picking the snap peas from the garden and eating them raw before we even come inside.

:: they want to learn about sea anemones, shapes, artists, germs, cooking shows, and music.

:: they can identify a U2 song on the radio within ten seconds, and refer to anything by James Taylor as "Sweet Baby James."

:: they spent a portion of last week's Whitecaps game learning about strikes, balls, and outs from their patient daddy.

:: they have each grown about two inches since Christmas.

:: they are still one another's very best friend.

A Day to Live in Infamy

Today, after four-and-a-half years of being a practicing vegetarian (making exceptions only for McDonald's chicken nuggets), Jemma willingly and happily ate an entire hot dog.  A Pronto Pup, to be exact.  And I am as proud as someone who just got a new gig writing for a website whose tagline is "Clean food for modern families" can be.

What's New, Bullet-Style

• Last Friday afternoon, Jason and I sat in a title office and signed closing papers and a big, horrible check to finally sell our South Haven house.  It is hard to know how to describe the way it feels to sell a house that was the first big thing we owned together and to which we brought home baby Annie from the hospital.  It is also hard to know how to feel about the fact that it took nearly SIX YEARS on the market and us bringing an amount of money to the table that would buy a used car for that thing to finally sell.  I'll go with . . . bizarre.  Surreal.  We came home and drank champagne, toasting to "one mortgage!"  
• Jemma, as I previously mentioned, taught herself to swim.  Early last week, she was still getting a snootful of water every time she tried to remember how to "hum" underwater to blow bubbles.  Today, during the minutes when she wasn't asking (at 4:00) if we could "eat lunch soon," and during the minutes when she wasn't being irrationally weepy about the tiniest boo-boo ever on her big toe, she was swimming half the length of the kid's pool underwater, popping up every single time and looking at me with big eyeballs through her goggles.  "Mom!  Did you see THAT?"  I definitely did, little fishie.
• Jemma also taught herself to whistle, which she now does at every possible opportunity, including in church.  It is almost too cute to tell her to stop.
• Annie and I spent an hour this afternoon going through the giant pile of crap she brought home from school in those last few days.  My favorite things are her artwork and an entry she wrote in her journal about her parents.  It ends, "I was the first baby that they ever had."  
• Michigan strawberries are at the farmer's market!  (And in my tummy!)  Time to make shortcake.
• I began the day at 6:15 a.m. with yoga class outside at Reed's Lake.  It was a clear, cool morning, and doing sun salutations facing the rising sun with the grass under my mat felt like being on vacation.
• Our fish Priscilla died.  What?  I never mentioned a fish before?  That's because we'd only had her for about a month, ever since the day Jason and Annie came home from the Science on Saturdays program I'd signed them up for - with a fish!  There was NO MENTION of a fish in the promotional materials.  And yet there she was, in her clear Tupperware container which would remain her home forever, until we flushed her down the toilet this morning.  Is there any child, anywhere, who does not have a memory of flushing a goldfish down the toilet while they cry a little?  RIP, Priscilla.  You were a spunky goldfish on our kitchen counter for nearly five weeks.

Two Conversations in the Car

Driving to Jason's office with both girls in the car:

A:  How much longer until we get there?
Me:  Only two more minutes!

*quiet*

A:   . . . fifty-nine, sixty!  That's one minute!  One, two, three . . .
Me:  Uh, well, about two minutes.
A:  You didn't say about!  You said two!
Me:  I know.  But there are stoplights.  See?  We're at a red light now.
A:  I'll pause.

*****

Driving down Wealthy Street with Jemma:

J:  Why is the road so bumpy here?
Me:  Well, it's made of bricks.  Isn't that cool?
J:  Why is it made of bumpy bricks?
Me:  A long time ago, roads were always made of dirt, when there were more horses than cars.  Then people started to use hard things to make the roads, and one of the things they used was bricks.  Most roads are made of hard, smooth things now.
J:  Oh.

*one minute of silence, followed by Jemma's laughter*

Me:  What?
J, still laughing happily:  I was just thinking, What if the road was made OF BANANAS???!!!!

Things Jemma Says: Lunchtime Conversation

J:  Tell me a choke.

Me:  Why did the chicken cross the road?

J:  I don't know.  Why?

Me:  To get to the other side!

J:  Mommy, that's A True!  Tell me a choke!

Things Jemma Says: Packing Edition

While packing, Jemma brought me a slip of paper she'd previously colored for me and said, "Let's bring this in case you forget that I love you."

(No chance, cutie!)

And Then

And then I took Jemma to the doctor this morning and found out two things, both somewhat alarming.

Thing One:  Jemma has pneumonia-ish.  The doc wasn't positive, but definitely heard some things going on in her lungs that didn't sound great, plus seemed fairly impressed with the horrid sound of Jemma's cough and the weekend I described.  So Jemma's currently on Zithromax and a steady diet of movies, coloring, and yogurt-eating, which unfortunately did not stop the anticipated side-effect of the Zithromax from kicking in just after dinner tonight.

Thing Two:  Jemma weighed 24 pounds on the doctor's office scale.  Now, a month or so ago at her well-child appointment, Jemma weighed 31 pounds on a (different) doctor's office scale.  To be honest, 31 pounds seemed on the high side for her; she's usually 28 or so when she steps her wet little body on the scale at the gym, post-pool.  BUT EVEN SO.  This means that, in the course of the last month, between the "I-don't-like-French-toast" in Jamaica and the four-day sickness last weekend, she has lost about four pounds, bringing her weight to that of a hearty 18-month-old.

I bought Ensure at Target tonight and will take your advice in the comments below.

*****

I started reading Just Kids by Patti Smith this weekend.  I'd heard part of a Fresh Air interview with Smith months ago and was intrigued enough to grab the book off the library shelf the last time I was there.  My first impressions are that Smith and Mapplethorpe lived during a very interesting moment in American history (NYC art scene in the 60's), but that Smith's words don't do justice to the events they experienced.  Her writing style reminds me of nothing so much as the way my second-graders used to spin their tales during weekly Writer's Workshop, beginning every new paragraph with "And then . . ."

I had to have an intervention with my second-graders one day.  I wrote the word "then" on the whiteboard, drew a big X over it, and held a brainstorming session to come up with other transitional prepositions.  We banned the word "then" from their writing.

This was especially on my mind tonight when, during dinner, I had to endure Annie's re-telling of today's episode of Word Girl.  It's her favorite show ("Word Girl's my favorite!  I never miss Word Girl!") for reasons I can't really fathom (a monkey named Captain Huggie-Pants?), and tonight I sat bleakly through what might have been the longest, most non-sensical plot summary ever:

"So, Mom?  On Word Girl?  OK, there was a boy named Toby.  He had this robot?  And the robot's arm . . .  and then Toby had a DREAM that this girl was trying to . . .  and then there was a bad guy trying to rob a bank but . . ." 

Her voice faded in and out as I coached myself silently to maintain eye contact and make appropriate facial expressions throughout, thinking the whole time that I really need to track down a chart I remember reading long ago (by Swistle?) that gives points to parents for enduring various annoying parenting tasks, one of which was being forced to listen to the plot of a show or movie.  (Anyone?  CBHM?)

After dinner, and after Jason called five minutes after the time he had said he'd be home to say he was "on his way" (this did not go over particularly well), and after I'd given the girls their baths and let them draw all over the tub with bath crayon, I fled to Target.  (For the Ensure.  Also: coffee creamer, La Croix, snacks and activities for our upcoming train trip,  and cute dollar bin thank-you notes.)  And there, on an end-cap in the books section, was the paperback of Just Kids - with a little "National Book Award" sticker on it!

What?  Patti Smith writes the grown-up, artsy, rock-star version of "And Then" and she gets a National Book Award for it?  Because that's what it reads like so far.  So far, it's

"One day, Robert and I moved into a sleazy hotel and got lice.  And then we moved into the Chelsea Hotel and met famous people.  And then Robert thought it seemed okay to have sex with male prostitutes and get gonorrhea and give it to me!  And I didn't really mind.  And then I took Janis Joplin back to her room.  And then I had a boyfriend who had sex for money to support his heroin habit.  And then I wrote some poems . . ."

I mean, I know it was the sixties, but COME ON.  I am still reading it, though, because I think she's going to meet Andy Warhol, and then it might get good.