1m2aSandbox

Maddie and Cora are in quite the feisty stage right now, and I’m dangerously close to opening up a can of whoop-ass on both of them sometimes.

I do not, do NOT understand why they are so mean to each other, yet so different with their friends. What is this natural antagonism, this inbred animosity?

I fret that I have instilled some sort of insecurity in each girl: that each is mean to her sister out of some fear of being less-well-loved by Mommy. I worry that I have made each girl feel not as good as her sister. Or even that I walk around trashing my own family members, setting a bad example.

We’re all still reeling from the Connecticut tragedy, I know. And I have nothing new to say – and nothing that hasn’t been said better, by smarter people – on the subject. We live in a fallen world, and as one local official remarked on Friday, evil did indeed visit that town.

If you’re like me, you’re walking around on a knife edge, one sappy Christmas commercial away from sobbing uncontrollably. I know my children are tired of being squeezed relentlessly, snuggled unashamedly, clutched ridiculously tightly. I am unwilling to let them out of my sight, reluctant to stand even a few feet away in a room of strangers. School today will be a strange thing indeed.

Brian and I wrestled Friday evening with whether or not we should tell the girls what had happened: on the one hand, they have little to no exposure to the news or social media, and with Maddie’s tendency to worry about EVERYTHING we could see her getting incredibly wound up about this if we told her. On the other hand, if we kept this from them and they heard about it at school – we didn’t even want to think about the state they’d be in by pick-up time.

So we decided to tell them.

Cora is, for whatever reason, in love with the act of measuring things. She keeps a small tape measure – an automatic roll-up one like people use sewing – in her bedroom, and when we’ve finished with books and prayers for the night she gets out her measuring tape and happily measures, well, all the stuff in her room. She’s said it makes her feel like part of the Cyberchase gang, a math-based cartoon on PBS.

So whenever I get out my industrial metal tap measure – you know, the 25-footer – Cora’s eyes light up and she begs to use it. I pretty much always acquiesce, always reminding her to watch the automatic retraction – it’ll snap your eye out – and leave her to whatever story she’s got going on in her head.

I’ve been working on getting ready for Christmas, and Monday I had my tape measure out preparing boxes for shipping. I left it on a counter and didn’t think anything more about it. But when I went to use it Tuesday to measure out pine garland for our stairs, the tape measure seemed, well, sick.

Yesterday morning I went in to wake up Maddie for school. She’s usually the harder one to wake up, and she’ll often begin to stir in a very, um, crabby fashion, so I usually approach her bed gently, like nearing a wild animal.

But when I gently touched her and lovingly said, “Maddie, it’s time to wake up now!” she opened her eyes wide, gave a huge grin, and stretched happily. 

A good friend of ours came into town this week to run the marathon; he’d originally been scheduled to run the New York marathon, which was canceled at the last minute due to Hurricane Sandy. He’d been one of our really good friends in New York, so we were thrilled to have any excuse to see him.

Now, I am not a runner. At ALL. I have several friends who run, and I truly don’t get it. But I hear that it’s lovely if you can withstand the pain and there’s nothing quite like a marathon. I’ve also heard that having a cheering squad is invaluable along the way; having friends to scream and jump and encourage you along the route makes you feel a bit less alone, a bit less like giving up.

So I hear.

Maddie is usually the most difficult member of the household to wake up. On school days Cora and I end up in Maddie’s room, snuggled in her bed for a few moments before we get up and get moving. Once Cora’s up she’s up and moving and she’ll be dressed and downstairs in two minutes; Maddie takes exponentially longer and will often come sliding into her seat with sixty seconds to gulp down oatmeal before we leave.

Sometimes, though, she wakes up for whatever reason, and occasionally she’s startled me when I’m downstairs thinking I’m the only one in the house awake; I’ll be doing my devotional or packing lunches and Maddie will pad silently up to me, fully clothed and smiling with pride. These are the mornings I live for.

Yesterday was such a morning.

My family has been incredibly fortunate in that Brian’s job requires almost zero travel for work; in addition, he works less than two miles from our house and so is often home for lunch, can have lunch with the girls at school, and can slip out of work to see a school play or something.

In short, the girls see their daddy a LOT. And are quite used to it.

So when Brian told the girls he had to make a three-day trip this week, they seemed unfazed at the announcement. But in retrospect, I think they simply didn’t understand. He traveled once (ONCE!) last year and we survived pretty well, so I figured we’d have a few “I miss Daddy!” at bedtime but would otherwise soldier on. Brian gave each girl a hug and kiss Monday morning and sent them off to school, not to be seen again until LATE tonight.

We started our Matthew 25/Good Deeds jars over the weekend: every day in December the girls draw a slip of paper from their own jar, and they do whatever that piece of paper instructs for the day. It’ll be something like “write a thank-you note to your teacher” or “tell a friend what you like about her” – simple stuff, but all things that encourage you to love on someone else. At the end of the day each girl will put her piece of paper in a box wrapped like a Christmas present with an opening at the top, and at the end of December we put the box under our tree as our gift to Jesus – all the ways we’ve loved him by loving others this month. The girls look forward to it every year and I confess I enjoy it too.

So on Sunday Cora drew “pray for a stranger” and her brow wrinkled up. “Mommy, how can I pray for someone if I don’t even know them? How do I know what to say?”