1m2aSandbox

Cora’s been in a rotten, terrible, no-good, horrible mood.

Since, like, CHRISTMAS.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen our sweet, happy girl turn into a weepy, crabby, snappy, angry little brat. Over, and over, and over again.

Cora will leave school and be monosyllabic. She won’t want to talk, walk sullenly home, and head straight for her candy jar. Then she’ll ask for something ridiculous, like a trip to the Build-A-Bear store, and when I say no she’ll storm upstairs and cry and sulk and yell at me when I darken her door for a good HOUR. Then she’ll pull through it, then be cuddly and sidling up to me and wanting lots of love.

Since moving to Texas six years ago, I’ve been very fortunate to find a small group of neighborhood friends to go through parenthood with me. In our neighborhood we have seven other families with children almost exactly Maddie and Cora’s ages; moms who tolerate my crunchiness and willingly watch my kids when I have a babysitting crisis; and dads who like to play rock music and video games as much as Brian does. This core group is very dear to me: the children are rock solid besties with my kids, and will never leave each other out, and I know my gal pals ALWAYS have my back.

Yes, we are all super close. And yet my children know they are not EVER allowed to get into a car with one of those dads unless there’s someone else in the car, too.

As the weather warms up, this family spends as much time as we possibly can out-of-doors. We’ll go for bike rides; we’ll play in the park – for HOURS; we’ll take books, snacks, and a blanket to our neighborhood pond and lie on the grass for hours reading books and feeding the ducks – really, we’ll do anything to simply hang out in the great outdoors.

With all this time spent outside comes a lot of great things – fresh air, vitamin D, lots of exercise, seeing our neighbors – and one bad thing: the ice cream truck. I swear, that guy waits until we leave the house, hiding around the corner, then fires up his tinkly little music and starts stalking us. EVERY SINGLE TIME we are outdoors we hear his music, and Cora always turns to me and says, “Mommy, PLEASE may we get an ice cream? PLEASE? Just this once?”

EVERY SINGLE TIME I have to say no to the kids – and not just because I want to. But I never bring money with me on our outings; why would I need to? So every single time, I promise Cora we’ll get ice cream the next time Mommy has money when the Ice Cream Guy is around.

Yesterday was that day.

Is there anything at all more emotional than a room filled with parents watching an elementary school talent show?

I swear, the sweetness just about killed me last night at our family talent show: little legs hanging from the piano bench, head earnestly bent over the keyboard; a father and son doing a comedy act, the boy staring adoringly the whole time at his father; children all night long swallowing their fears and clutching their violins and guitars and microphones as they mounted the steps and stood, trembling, in front of EVERYONE.

We survived another Valentines Day: an entire day of poor-quality candy given out with alarming frequency and absolutely no censorship whatsoever, along with a class party filled with cupcakes and ice cream sundaes and cookies and . . . you get the picture.

Every year we walk through the Sugar Minefield, and this year it claimed Maddie as its victim; her meltdown Friday afternoon was colossal. CoLOSSal. I thought we were going to have to cancel the dinner we had planned with a near-and-dear friend in from out of town. But she pulled herself together, and admitted she could tell she’d had too much sugar.

Progress, I think.

This year, though, in addition to the whole sugar overload, I saw the other frightening tightrope of Valentines Day for the first time: the whole girl-boy dynamic.

Sunday night I asked Cora what she’d like for lunch at school the next day, and she said, “Can you send an omelet with me?”

I know. So cool that my kid wants an omelet for lunch. BUT –

“The thing is,” I replied, “Omelets aren’t as good when they’re three hours old, and by the time you ate it for lunch it’d have been sitting in your bag for a while. It won’t be hot anymore.”

Cora looked at me wistfully. “Well, some of my friends’ moms drop off a hot lunch for them every day . . .”

Big eyes staring at me.

Yeah, I broke down and said “yes”.

The Olympics are on, and we are one of those families that watch a lot of it. For the first time, the girls are old enough to remember the last Olympics and have been looking forward to this for a few months now.

We pre-record everything so we can a) watch it back at our leisure; and b) skip over all the commercials and filler stuff. So we’re about a day behind, which is fine by me.

Don’t get me wrong –we don’t watch just the last two minutes of a race: we watched the qualifiers for the men’s snowboarding slopestyle before the opening ceremony had even happened, and we watched every bit of the finals as well. Poor Maddie had trouble sleeping one night, worrying about Sage and how he’d hold up, and if McMorris’ rib injury would keep him off the podium.

Over the weekend I got out a big trunk of stored toys: things the girls didn’t need on a daily basis any more, but still wanted to hold on to. Maddie had asked for a glimpse of some old stuffed animals, and I thought it would be fun for the girls to see some of their old favorites.

Within minutes of my dragging the trunk into the living room, we’d had a stuffed-animal explosion.

For the rest of the weekend, the girls had an elaborate game going on consisting of several shops/stores in a small town “somewhere”. Cora opened up a toy store, while Maddie opened up a doctor’s office and a pet shelter. Cora set up a cash register, arranged her stuffed animals attractively, and hung “open” and “closed” signs, while Maddie filled out adoption certificates for the shelter stuffed animals and hung out a “the doctor is in” sign when she was home.

In short, they had a great time.

I’ve recently launched a small business selling products I make myself, and it’s come out of something I’ve been doing for a while for my family and friends. The girls have gotten used to seeing me set myself up to make something, and think it’s pretty cool that enough people like it that someone will PAY for one of Mom’s creations.

Cora’s always been interested in helping out; she loves creating things and getting in there with her hands. And yesterday Maddie came up with a way to help out, too:

Maddie’s making a commercial.

Last night for our house was Superbowl Night – or, as my kids see, it, the One Night A Year They Get To Watch Commercials.

Some of them.

Yes, we still record the game and watch it live so we can pause and skip commercials. Do I think they’ve never heard of bad guys and fires and serial killers?

I hope not. But even if they have, I’m not going to sear more images in their brains. I already get enough late-night nightmare-induced visits to my room as it is.