1m2aSandbox

I’m pretty sure I put up this post every single year, but I can’t help it.

Talent shows always make me cry.

Cora did her talent show yesterday – they’re divided up by grade - and I don’t think there’s anything more soul-stirring than watching a dozen kindergarteners put themselves out there so bravely. I felt myself tearing up in the very first act (a very dapper tow-headed boy lip-synching to the Jackson Five’s “ABC”, replete in a mini leisure suit) and it never stopped.

There’s something about becoming a mother that makes you feel responsible for, well, the entire universe. I spent one entry about a week ago linking to therapeutic blogs to help work through this, so I’m not going to dwell on the rightness or wrongness here.

I’m just going to acknowledge that it exists.

Once you become a mother, you see every single child out there as, to some extent, your own. From very early on, I found myself trying to help out frustrated toddlers on a playground, or cautioning complete strangers that they were doing something dangerous (“Do you think your Mommy would let you cross the street blindfolded?”) Just last week I spent a lovely evening with an author friend of mine, attending his book signing and just being a fly on the wall. Once we left the gathering and were walking towards the parking lot, he looked bemusedly at me as I grabbed his hands and proceeded to squirt – uninvited – hand sanitizer on them.

Several months ago Cora was experiencing intermittent chest pains. I was reasonably certain it was some sort of heartburn and treated it homeopathically, since it never seemed to immobilize her. But after about a week of it, I began to worry she was having some sort of heart attack (I know, I know, but I’m a mommy) or something and I was missing all these signs, so I took her to the pediatrician. Just in case.

The pediatrician felt around and asked Cora a few questions. “Where does your chest hurt?”

Cora pointed right around her heart. “Here”.

“And what does your mommy give you when it hurts?”

Saturday night Maddie threw up- most likely from too much sugar celebrating her dad’s birthday. But when Sunday morning church time rolled around and she was astonishingly still asleep, we called an audible and skipped church, thinking if she was actually sick we didn’t want to wake her.

Maddie stumbled out of bed right as rain, so we settled into a slow, stay-at-home family day that was, to be honest, much-needed around here.

What did we do? Lessee – hard to really lay it all out there. Cora and I worked in our herb garden a bit, watering the plants and doing a little maintenance. While watering the dill we discovered nine (NINE!) caterpillars munching contentedly on it, obviously bulking up as they prepared for cocooning. A few minutes of yelling excitedly later, the entire family was gathered around the nine (NINE!) caterpillars, watching them munch in breathless wonder. Looks like we’re going to have several butterflies in a couple weeks.

So that, you know, took a good chunk of time.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve read a few really inspiring blogs by other moms and I finally just need to share them with you guys. Seriously good stuff.

First, The Problem With Being Supermom and How To Fix It at Inspired Action. Her opening sentence struck a deep chord with me:

“I’ve finally realized why it is I try to be Supermom. It’s because I can’t decide what is most important so I just try to do it all…which is impossible and leaves me feeling defeated. Rinse. Repeat.

Maddie sucks her thumb. She’s done it her whole life, and when she was a baby and we were excited when she did, since it meant she didn’t wake up in the middle of the night when her pacifier fell out of her mouth. Oh, sure, we knew we’d pay for it later, but we were so exhausted then we couldn’t do anything but rejoice and sign the credit card slip.

Fast forward almost eight years.

To be fair, Maddie’s not a bad thumb-sucker: she only does it when she’s holding her lovey, which has been restricted to her room. And though she does it to fall asleep, it pops out of her mouth immediately. So we’ve been able to skate by pretty well with the dentist, who’s always said, “No rush. She’s fine. Let’s talk again in six months.”

Second grade is the first year Maddie’s had “real” homework every night, and in the beginning it took some getting used to. Every night she has twenty minutes of reading, twenty minutes of some kind of math, and something “extra” – a website assignment, or a worksheet, or a long-term project or something of that ilk. I think it’s partly to get the parents and kids trained and ready when everything gets kicked up a notch in third grade.

Reading every night has been easy: the teacher says “do whatever” and I just let Maddie pick and am responsible for simply logging in her hours. And hours. And hours. For math, I’ve spent most of the year thinking it’s the same thing – “Do whatever, lady! Just get your kid used to thinking in a ‘math-y’ way for twenty minutes each night!” So we’d gone all over the map with math.

You see, Maddie enjoys math, but doesn’t like the tedium of memorization or practice – she likes the figuring-out-new-concepts thing. So we’ve covered long division and multiplication and percentages and fractions and negative numbers and . . . you get the picture.

Saturday afternoon the girls and I were enjoying glorious spring weather playing outside on the street of our cul de sac. Maddie was zooming around on her bike while Cora scootered happily along, me admiring various tricks and occasionally pulling weeds from the front lawn.

After a while Maddie became restless and asked if she could bike by herself for a while. Now, I have never let Maddie go off for a bike ride before: she doesn’t even walk the half-mile to school alone. Mama’s not quite ready, I guess.

But I could see in her eyes her longing to stretch her legs, so I said, “Tell you what. You can ride the two blocks to the park, ride around the blacktop a few times, then come back, ok?”

Maddie’s eyes lit up.