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!)

Christmas in March (and January, and . . .)

Right after the insanity of the Christmas season was over (as in, the very morning after Christmas), Jason and I made the tough decision that we are no longer going to make the big effort to see our extended families at the holidays.  In spite of all our attempts to pare the holiday down to its most important pieces, it was still all Too Much of some things (driving; large gatherings where there is almost no quality interaction with anyone; bringing food all over the west side of the state; wrangling overtired, overstimulated children; scrambling to see all sides of our extended families; tearful breakdowns on Christmas evening) and Not Enough of other things (quiet, meaningful, cozy time with our family of four; special time with our parents and siblings; time to attend church; time to build our own traditions on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day).

We told our parents, who were understandably a little disappointed but who seemed to accept that this is the natural way of things:  after all, at some point, they, too, stopped gathering with their extended families at the holidays and instead focused in on immediate family - siblings, parents, children, nieces and nephews.  When a family gets too large to fit comfortably into someone's home for a few hours, it is bound to happen that sooner or later each segment will splinter off into being with just their little tribe, and while I'm sure the extended family gatherings will continue to occur, we're not going to sacrifice our sanity at the holidays to go.  

However, we genuinely love and miss many of those cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles, so what we are doing is being intentional about finding time during the rest of the year to get together with those people.  There is no reason at all that we have to try to see one another between December 15 and January 1 every year!  So, keeping in mind that we'll be (conspicuously) absent from the Christmas festivities, we're making plans to see some of those relatives during less-crazy times.  In January, we made the effort to drive and meet up with Jason's grandparents and an aunt and uncle to whom Jason's always been especially close.  We hung out at his grandparents' house for a while, "visiting" and watching the girls dance in the living room, then went out for dinner and were able to really talk and catch up before coming home to our own beds on a Friday night.

This weekend, we're heading to Ohio, where we're going to meet up with two of Jason's cousins, their spouses, and their kids for a Great Wolf Lodge extravaganza.  It's not a short trip and it's not exactly cheap, but we are so very much looking forward to spending three whole days together with great people who live far away.  I think it's going to be really fun; I think, too, that we're going to get in about a hundred times more quality conversation and memories than we would trying to navigate a two-hour holiday party while chasing our sugared-up kids.

We are packed (Jason's contribution:  beer, iPod), we are waterpark-ready, and we are especially hopeful that in our own little way we'll be strengthening the family bonds, Christmas tree or no.

Six Going on Thirty-Six

I'm driving Annie to catechism last night in Jason's Audi when we pass a white Subaru just like the one I usually drive, which causes Annie to begin asking a series of questions about which car is "mine" and which is Jason's and how this was decided.

"When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to drive a mini-van!" she says firmly.  This immediately reminds me of our conversation at tea in Chicago a couple weeks ago, the one where I asked what she wanted to be when she grew up and she responded without hesitation, "I want to have five kids.  No, seven!"  (At least  she's chosen the correct transportation for her large brood.)

She edges towards six-and-a-half and I watch in disbelief.  She says, "That's easy-peasy lemon-squeezy mac-and-cheesy" when she finishes her math homework.  She flounces out of the house wearing leopard-print leggings, a yellow t-shirt with an embroidered peace sign, a tan hoodie sweater with hot pink polka-dots, and purple socks.  She eats adult-sized portions of mahi-mahi but declares that brown rice "creeps me out."  She is fascinated by the girl in her class who just got a pink streak put in her hair, by tornadoes and tsunamis, by The Boxcar Children's parent-free adventures, which I catch her reading with a flashlight after lights-out at night.  She puts away all her own laundry (though she mutters, "Darn it!" under her breath when I tell her that it's waiting in her room).

She has one legitimately wiggly tooth.  I see her stick her pointer finger in her mouth, press down on the tooth, and push it firmly back and forth, a little looser each day, a little closer to the telltale gap-toothed smile that screams Big Kid to the rest of the world.

Jason watches her watch her tooth in the mirror.  "I don't want you to lose your baby teeth!" he says.

She makes a face, half amusement, half pity.  "Daaaaaaad, I have to!  I'm growing up.  That's what kids do," she says, and runs off to write who-knows-what in the secret journal she keeps in her nightstand drawer.

Here, There, Everywhere

Another weekend, another round of throwing a suitcase into a moving vehicle and schlepping our children to a new location.  Without exactly meaning to, we've gone ahead and scheduled ourselves major weekend plans every weekend but one for all of February and March, and if the packing/unpacking routine is getting a little stale, the perks far outweigh the nuisances.  For one thing, I literally cannot believe that today's date is March 7, and I know that spring - true spring, daffodils-poking-up, absolutely no snow in sight - is going to be here in a flash.  For another thing, we've been able to spend some really quality time with just our little family of four and with some of our other favorite people.

This weekend's lucky location was Petoskey, where we were scheduled to do absolutely nothing.  And that's what we did.  We crashed my accommodating brother-and sister-in-law's (completely renovated, head-to-toe gorgeous Victorian) house for the first time since they've moved in.  From pancakes in the morning until bedtime at night, four little blonde girls ran from room to room, squealing with delight and not needing serious adult intervention at all.  Jason and Trevor played a ton of guitar, Lisa and I walked to the bookstore and bakery in town, and we bundled up to go ice-skating as our big outing of the day on Saturday.  We were able to watch my niece's adorable Highland dance recital and break into spontaneous family polka circle (complete with confused basset hound), and I count that as the weekend's culture and exercise component.

Late Saturday night, I sat up reading Claire Dederer's new book, Poser, while Jason and Trevor had a few brotherly beers at The Noggin Room.  In a book about yoga and competitive mothering and making a living as a writer, I came across this quote, which seemed just right:

"In my experience, cousinship is the perfect human relationship:  Like siblings, cousins will be with you forever, no question; unlike siblings, cousins adore each other and forgive each other always, no question."

Read Elsewhere: On the Appeal of Yoga to the Suburban Housewife

From Poser by Claire Dederer:

"It felt good to be moving.  I didn't think of it as an escape; I just felt the relief of moving and not thinking.  There was also this relief:  It was a room I didn't have to clean.  It was like an hour-and-a-quarter visit to a hotel.  It had that same visceral thrill:  I will never vacuum this floor.  I will never dust these baseboards.  Never."

Yes.  YES.

Life List: Flossing My Teeth

I was feeling blue the other day and decided that, it being March (!) now, I needed a project.  Only with the piles of snow still sitting around outside (and the cold rain today), it doesn't quite feel like spring cleaning time yet.

So then I thought I should peek at my Life List and choose something to work towards.  Only everything on it seemed so . . . BIG.  And complicated.  And expensive.  (Household financial review in progress here, is what I'm saying, and fun items like getting a new DSLR and learning photography, say, or drinking wine in Napa, for example, were definitely out of the question.)

Still.  I needed a project, so I chose the easiest, cheapest, more basic thing off my list and decided that March of 2011 will be The Month of Daily Flossing.  My whole life, I've avoided flossing - never did it growing up, never acquired the habit as an adult - but here I am, four days in, and so far, so good.

Join me if you want.  My dentist will be so proud.

At Book Club

Amid discussion of Precious and Tosh.0 and Charlie Sheen, talk turned to motherhood, as it always does, and specifically to the wonderful, horrible first few weeks of new motherhood - to that moment when each of us realized things were somehow never going to be the same again.

General consensus of the group can be summed up as follows:

1.  Nobody tells you how HARD it's going to be.  Nobody.

2.  Nobody gets right in your face during those first, hard weeks and promises you that it's going to get better.

After I told the group about one memory I have of a night when Jason had gone out with co-workers while I was up every two hours, rocking Annie in the chair and nursing her, crying because my life had disappeared, another woman asked me, "What are you going to tell your girls someday, when they're thinking about having kids?"

"The truth," I said. The whole, wonderful, horrible truth.  Isn't that what this blog is all about?