1m2aSandbox

When the subject of Mother’s Day
came up a few weeks ago, I told Brian I had three requests: I
wanted time to go to my favorite used bookstore – ALONE; I
wanted to take a nap; and I wanted a day off from feeding the kids
– all the dicing, shredding, steaming, cajoling, spooning,
snack preparing, the whole thing.


And the visit to the bookstore was negotiable.


So for Mother’s Day weekend we came up with a plan. Since
taking an entire day to yourself simply isn’t practical when
you’ve got a nursing child, we split my “day” up
into two days and I went to my bookstore on Saturday while the
girls were napping. And yes, they were napping when I left, but no,
they didn’t stay that way for long, so that definitely counts
as a gift.


That left Sunday for my napping and break from food duties.

You know the separation anxiety is getting
bad when your daughter cries because you’re going to the
grocery store.


Your older daughter, that is.


Since we’ve moved to Texas, both girls have become only more
clingy, more anxious when away from me. I expected it a bit when we
first moved – new environment, no friends, and so on. And
when we moved in January Cora was 8 months old and four months into
her official separation anxiety stage, so I was trying to grit my
teeth and deal with that as well. I kept thinking it would get
better – that gradually Cora would begin to become more
confident without me, let me go to the bathroom by myself, for
pete’s sake!

Maddie loves playing games, and makes up
half a dozen new ones every day: “Now we’re going to
play the Baby Game.” “Now let’s play the
Telescope Game!” “And now this is the Balloon Kite
Game.” She’ll spy an everyday object – say, the
blinds cord in a window- and be off. Her favorite games involve
someone (usually Mommy) making up rules or chores or tasks to be
accomplished, and giving them to Maddie to complete one by one.


Combine this with Maddie’s innate love of movement, dance,
and exercise, and you’ve got one hundred different versions
of Simon Says meets Imagination. So when Maddie discovered our
Twister game sitting in a pile of board games, she was immediately
intrigued.

I make this one tea periodically –
it’s a yogi tea, tastes like the chai tea lattes you buy at
Starbucks minus the sugar and milk. Anyway, I like it because
there’s no caffeine and it’s mildly sweet on its own,
so I make a few quarts at a time to keep in the fridge, adding
honey and milk as needed.


At any rate, a friend of mine is in her first trimester and having
a hard time with it nausea-wise. I gave her a quart of the tea
– one of the primary ingredients is ginger, and I thought
it’d settle her stomach. The result? Two enthusiastic thumbs
up, and a request for more tea. Kindly enough, she refrained from
calling me at 2 a.m. when she actually ran out, and waited until
the next day to make the request.

My grandmother Gypsy (about whom you’ve heard a great deal in these blogs, I know) loved nature – being outdoors, gardening, growing things, bird-watching, the whole she-bang. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when her great-granddaughter is the same way.

Maddie’s always loved being outside, and walks were a big part of her day from the very beginning. We’d stop and look at flowers growing in front of apartments and talk about what type they were, smell the blooms, stroke the soft petals. And Maddie has a serious thing about rocks: she can’t resist picking them up. In New York, we had a collection underneath our shoe bench of tiny rocks –sometimes just cement chips – that she’d pick up on all our walks. She’d keep the bigger ones in the back yard and exclaim over them periodically, pointing out their interesting aspects. Since we moved to Texas she’s been an even bigger fan of the outdoors, and revels in the birdfeeders we’ve got hanging by our breakfast window. Just yesterday she heard a bird cry and said, “I think that’s a morning dove! I bet he’s saying good morning to me!” (She was right, by the way!) And of course, gardening with Daddy is one of her favorite things to do. Which means I can see her great-grandmother in her on almost a daily basis.

But this article isn’t about Maddie – it’s about Cora. And if I thought I saw Gypsy in Maddie, she’s doubly magnified in Cora.

I did my final drawing over the weekend
for a free copy of the href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHealthy-Child-World-Creating-Cleaner%2Fdp%2F0525950478%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1209357069%26sr%3D1-1&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325"
target="_blank">Healthy Child, Healthy World: Creating A Cleaner,
Greener, Safer World courtesy of the Healthy Child
organization, and the winner is:


Kari Valliere! Kari, you should be getting your free copy of the
book in a couple weeks – congratulations! I’m still
loving the copy I bought myself a few weeks back.


I’ve gotten a lot of feedback still from Earth Week, and I
have to confess the research I did has made me more conscious of
the choices I make. We went to the zoo over the weekend, and the
drinks they sell come in plastic cups that have an explanation on
the side: the cups are made from sustainable corn, and are
completely compostable. While this was exciting, I couldn’t
help but notice that there was nowhere to put these compostable
cups but in the trash can, wrapped up in a plastic bag! I find
myself looking down the chain of events a little further than I
used to.

There’s this television show
Maddie’s addicted to: “Davey and Goliath”.
It’s a 1970’s claymation show about a boy (Davey) and
his dog (Goliath) that the Lutherans put out as a healthy choice in
kid’s programming. It’s surprisingly progressive for
its time – Davey in 1975 has way more many multi-ethnic
friends than Maddie unfortunately does now – and with its
great gospel lessons is one of the few shows Maddie can pick from
for her daily “video”.


One particular episode has fascinated Maddie for months: Davey
learns to bowl. Of course, the show isn’t about the bowling,
it’s about learning to enjoy what you do and not have to be
perfect at everything, but Madeleine’s fixated on the
bowling. She’s nagged me endlessly about wanting to go
bowling, and I’ve put her off by telling her she’s too
young, that the balls are too big and heavy for her. But I read in
a local magazine about a 3-year-old bowling league (!!!) and,
feeling guilty, called a local alley and discovered that, indeed,
Maddie could bowl any time. I stuck the information in my back
Mommy pocket for a blah day.


Yesterday dawned sullen and blustery, with 30-mile-an-hour winds
whipping through our back yard, and I decided it was Bowling
Day.