Things Jemma Says: Beverages

"I LOVE milk! But I care for water, too."

Good Things, May 2012

Is there anything quite as hopeful and happy as Memorial Day Weekend? Especially when the weather cooperates with 90's and sunshine, it's such a great reward for enduring a midwestern winter and spring, and it's such a great feeling to have the entirety of June, July, and August stretching out before us.

This weekend, we spent almost every possible second outdoors. I planted my window boxes (red geraniums, as always, plus a bunch of herbs that I will try not to kill before the 4th of July), Jason and I stained hundreds of shingles for the new garage and painted the exterior trim, and of course we ventured to the beach - two days in a row - to soak up the sun with family and friends, to come home sandy and tired, to splash in the freezing water (or go under, if you're Annie), to eat some traditional summer favorites. Good things abound, both this weekend and this month:

Jemma's wrote a list of some friends on the chalkboard . . .

 . . . and made me this sweet placemat for the Mother's Day Tea at preschool.

Making a fort for ponies in the front yard out of random materials on a lazy Saturday morning.

An impromptu walk on "The Secret Path" one afternoon after school.

Kite Festival in Grand Haven.

Jemma (high score!) at her end-of-year bowling party.

Jersey Junction to celebrate Annie's AWESOME performance at the elementary school talent show.

Homemade cherry pie.

Saturday night dinner outside.

Gymnastics at the beach.

Jumping waves and playing with my parents on a Sunday afternoon.

Blondies in the breeze on Memorial Day.

Traditional summer stop at Redamak's for burgers.

And Blue Moon ice cream at Sherman's on the way home.

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.

Read Elsewhere: Faith, Parenting, Imperfection, Story

From The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides:

"Everyone he knew was convinced that religion was a sham and God a fiction. But his friends' replacements for religion didn't look too impressive. No one had an answer for the riddle of existence. It was like that Talking Heads song. "And you may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?' . . . And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife.'" As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live."

 *****

"As he took in the marvelous sights, the dusty Polo Grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he had got in the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God. Furthermore, it seemed to Mitchell that this didn't have to be a difficult thing. It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again."

From Blue Nights by Joan Didion:

"On this question of fear.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. . . . As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death.

This fear. 

Once she was born I was never not afraid."

*****

"I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies. The very definition of success as a parent has undergone a telling transformation: we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say adult) life, to "raise" the child, to let the child go. If a child wanted to try out his or her new bicycle on the steepest hill in the neighborhood, there may have been a pro forma reminder that the steepest hill in the neighborhood descended into a four-way intersection, but such a reminder, because independence was still seen as the desired end of the day, stopped short of nagging. If a child elected to indulge in activity that could end badly, such negative possibilities may have gotten mentioned once, but not twice."

*****

"What I have memorized is my child's face at different points in her life."

From the blog Superhero Journal:

"The ways that you are imperfect allow people to connect to you and love you even more." 

From Seth Godin's blog:

 A true story

Of course, that's impossible.
There's no such thing as a true story. As soon as you start telling a story, making it relevant and interesting to me, hooking it into my worldviews and generating emotions and memories, it ceases to be true, at least if we define true as the whole truth, every possible fact, non-localized and regardless of culture.

Since you're going to tell a story, you might as well get good at it, focus on it and tell it in a way that you're proud of. 

 

 

 

 

Halfway . . .

 . . . to having the rock-hard arms of Madonna and the zen mind of Ghandi.

Wait. Was that not the promise?

Regardless, I have reached the halfway point in the 30-day yoga challenge, and I remain committed. I actually had to miss class yesterday (thanks, pinkeye!) and go to two classes today to make up for that. It did not kill me, so I assume it made me stronger?

Speaking of cliches (as though a 30-something upper-middle-class housewife rambling on about yoga wasn't enough), I have decided that the prize I will be giving myself when I finish this month o'yoga is an item of Lululemon clothing, which I have so far avoided buying because I'm afraid that what they say is true: this particular brand of $95 yoga pants really is the Best! Thing! Ever!

Recent Absurdity (Some Rated PG-13)

At our aforementioned trip to the park last weekend, Annie and Jemma climbed all the way to the top of a metal bar structure that they call "jail" in spite of my worried-mother grumblings about it being too high. When they arrived at the top, they wanted me to take their picture. I agreed on the condition that they get down immediately after, and they promptly settled themselves into a side-by-side, hands-on-chin, cheesy smiling pose, as though I was shooting their senior pictures, but not before Annie glanced down and read the graffiti that was scrawled on top: Brandon was here. Suck it, bitches! She read it aloud, then Jemma repeated it in a sing-song voice, then I took the photo. Thanks, local hooligans.

*****
This outfit:

Also, this outfit (though I love that she's sneaking in a little before-school reading):

Also, this outfit (with an added bonus that she's pretending to be an "old lady"):

*****

The fact that it has somehow become tradition that Jemma wear Jason's "My Goodness, My Guinness" t-shirt each time we are at Dune State Park.

*****

While I'm making dinner tonight, this conversation:

Jemma: Mommy, what are you making?
Me: Risotto.
Jemma: Oooh, I love your homemade risotto!
Me: Thanks!

(five minutes later, she wanders back into the kitchen)

Jemma: Mommy, what's a ho?
Me: I, ahh, what? Why?
Jemma: Because, HOmade. What does the "ho" mean?
Me: sigh of relief

Mother's Day 2012

I say that we don't really have a Mother's Day tradition, and it's true. Some years we're with my extended family, some years we're with Jason's, and some years we're on our own. But it seems like one way or another, at least two or three of the holidays since I've been a mother myself, we've ended up hiking at Dune State Park, one of my very favorite places on earth. And that's what we did today: picnic lunch on the beach, phone calls to both grandmas en route, climbing the big dune and jumping back down, collecting ladybugs, stopping for ice cream on the way home. I'm not going to pretend that there wasn't the usual amount of bickering and "she looked at me!" and "but it's my turn to sing!" and "my legs are tired," but there isn't much that homemade cards and Anthropologie gifts, a good hike to the beach, and a good bedtime story later at night can't solve. So maybe this is our new Mother's Day tradition.