1m2aSandbox

I do enjoy cooking, but I don’t love the weekly rut of meal-planning, shopping, and making “do” in the kitchen. In a dream world, we’d hire a personal chef to make dinners (and pack school lunches!) for us. The only catch? I would get to tell the chef exactly what to make, and be insanely micro-managing on the whole shopping/organic/good produce thing.

I know, I can dream, right?

Weeknight dinners are always a little catchy: some nights I’m teaching and leaving my mom to feed my kids – not exactly cool to leave her with the whole “hey, what’s for dinner? I don’t know, I’m leaving, you figure it out” taste in her mouth. So on those nights I need to cook the meal in advance. Then on nights I’m home I can make a meal from scratch – but I’d much rather have extra time for hanging with my kids.

Dear Maddie:

This weekend, my baby, you looked one of your worst fears in the face. And you kicked its butt

Last week, reasonably out of the blue, you decided to dust off your bicycle – not ridden in almost four years because of a one-time fall – and give it another shot. You spent the weekend joyfully rediscovering what it feels like to put the pedal to the metal and truly enjoyed riding that bike – though it’s too small for you and your nearly-eight-year-old legs.

You rode the bike to school one day, having thought about what it would look like for a second-grader to ride a bike with training wheels but deciding to do it anyway. I don’t know if anyone teased you about it, but I know the training wheels have weighed heavy on your mind all week; by Wednesday you asked me if I could raise the wheels up a bit so you could start practicing riding on just two wheels.

And then came Friday.

When Maddie was four years old, she fell off her bike. She was riding in a bike-a-thon and a couple boys her age came whizzing around the corner, skimming too close to my slow-and-steady girl, and tipped her over. Ever since then Maddie’s refused to ride her bike. At all. Every once in a while I’d bring it up and suggest giving it a try and Maddie would say, “I am too scared to. Remember the time I was riding my bike and I fell off it?”

Yes. Yes, I do. I’ve remembered it for the past three and a half years.

Last week Maddie came home from school and announced, “In two days we get to go to school dressed like our cultural heritage! So I’m going to dress Hawaiian!”

Yeah, ‘cause we look so darn Hawaiian.

Actually my mom grew up there and I was born there, so TECHNICALLY Maddie’s descended from a Hawaiian, I guess, but we’re the white Hawaiians. The ones that actual Polynesian Hawaiians don’t so much like.

So I set out to put Maddie straight on our heritage and explained why she really couldn’t dress Hawaiian. “Well,” she pouted, “Then what can I dress up as?”

Ah, now we see. It’s called Maddie Gets To Wear A Costume To School Day.

We had a long week last week, mostly from anticipating- and then wallowing in – Valentine’s Day, and by the time the girls got home on Friday we were pretty fried. I was facing a reasonably hectic weekend, an incredibly filthy house, and the prospect of two exhausted, bickering children.

I was not looking forward to it.

But for whatever reason, we had one of those golden afternoons, where you hit that sweet spot and simply coast from one happiness to the next. Not in any huge, life-changing, trip-to-Paris kind of way, but in a sweet contentment kind of way.

Dear Maddie:

We had a bit of a rough morning recently, didn’t we? School mornings are never easy, but this one seemed to start out pretty well and I had reasonably high hopes for getting you to school relatively incident-free.

Then it came time to brush your hair.

As I approached you with the brush, you raised your arms up and blocked me from your hair. And then I said, “Honey, you need to let me brush your hair – and not fight me – or you need to brush it yourself.”

I then lifted my arm up to brush again – and you pushed my arms away.

Today our school is celebrating all the kids’ 100th day of school. Kindergarten in particular has a rip-roaring good time with lots of extra activities, like making a necklace of 100 Fruit Loops or counting out 100 pieces of snack; but the grand finale of the nearly week-long festivities is today’s big excitement: the 100 Days Shirt.

Each kindergartener is supposed to make a shirt with 100 – SOMETHING – on it. 100 stamps, or buttons, or stickers, or pom-poms, whatever. And when I say a kindergartener is supposed to make it, I mean his MOM is supposed to make it.

The other day Maddie and I were walking to school, Cora scootering on ahead. Maddie was holding my hand, pausing every once and a while to give me a brief, affectionate hug. As we neared the school Maddie grew quiet, clearly thinking about something.

“Hey, kiddo, what’cha thinking about?” I asked lightly.

Every Sunday Maddie brings her personal Bible to church; her second grade class is encouraged to do so, trying to build the kids up to actually use their Bibles and become comfortable with them. Yesterday when Maddie ran to grab hers before getting in the car, Cora said, “Oh! I want to bring mine today, too!” and ran off to pick hers up – her new-for-Christmas, very lovely but perhaps intimidating-to-a-five-year-old grown-up Bible. I wasn’t sure why, but was happy to go along with it.

I dropped Maddie off at her Sunday school room before walking Cora to hers, and when Cora walked through her door she made a beeline for the teacher, clutching her Bible to her chest. Wanting to find out what was up, I did what any respectable parent would do: I eavesdropped.

“Hey, teacher, do you want to know something really interesting?” Cora peered owlishly up at her instructor.

Her teacher, of course, nodded yes.