1m2aSandbox

Last night the girls were getting ready for bed, and it wasn’t super easy. We’re at the end of the first week of school, and tears are close to the surface and tempers are frayed and everyone’s tired. But bedtime was going relatively smoothly and I was in Cora’s room helping her pick out clothes for the next day when Maddie came in and said formally, “Mommy, when I’m finished with my bedtime routine I’d like to lie in bed and talk to you about my day a bit.”

Hmm. That doesn’t sound good. Bedtime is the time of day Maddie’s most likely to talk about her day. When I pick her up from school, pretty much every day is a “good” day and she talks about the stuff that went right; but a few hours later, when she’s had time to sit with her day a bit, she’s willing to talk about whatever might have been a bit harder.

Yesterday morning as the girls were getting ready for school, Maddie said, “Hey, Cora, after school do you want to go bike riding out in the front circle?”

This is a complicated question to deal with, because Cora would LOVE to go bike riding, but is a wee bit afraid of her bike. She took the training wheels off in the spring and isn’t as proficient on two wheels as she’d like, so avoids the bike to keep from getting frustrated.

As I expected, Cora said grumpily, “No, I don’t really want to ride my bike. I fall off too much. I’m no good at it.”

My daughter Maddie is a bit of a pack rat. She can have a hard time letting go of things – well, ANYTHING, really, and will easily attach sentimental value to the Kleenex she used to mark the spot in her book as she read it for the seventh time. So her room can get a bit cluttered, and let’s face it, so does Cora’s. Cora actually does a pretty good job of keeping things picked up, but neither of them offer to just “get rid of stuff” on a whim.

A few times of year, the gradual creep of junk – small happy meal toys (and I swear, we don’t do happy meals – they win these pieces of crap at school or whatever), a billion pencils, birthday party grab-bag goodies – the detritus gradually seeps into their rooms until I can’t stand it any more and I snap.

I wait until they’re in school, then I go through and “clean up” their rooms for them. And in addition to organizing and vacuuming and such, I get rid of junk. I admit it. I sneak stuff out behind their backs. But just in case they go looking for some plastic necklace I didn’t know had been made by a BFF, I stash all the junk from the most recent clean-out into a box, and it lives in our garage for six months. If, at the end of the six months, they haven’t asked for any of the stuff in the box, I freecycle it.

We’re into our last week before school starts, and frankly, I’m pissed.

For whatever reason, this summer has seemed too darn short and too $#@ing emotional. I don’t feel like I’ve had my fair share of long, lazy days by the pool with the girls, eating pb&js and spooning out frozen smoothies while we laze on our towels. I haven’t hit that stage of “please, God, can school start up so these kids will stop driving me crazy!!”

We all seem to be reeling with emotional hangovers right now, coming off a weekend of back-to-back farewells: Thursday night was a very sad culmination to a whirlwind summer shocker as some of our best friends suddenly planned a move all the way across the country. I lost a good friend, and Cora and Maddie both lost sweet girls who were part of their inner circles. Then Friday we said farewell to another family, this time moving to Austin and taking their daughter, Cora’s best friend, with them.