Friday Favorite Things

So I'm trying a new thing... each Friday, I'll post favorite moments from the past week.   In no particular order...

1.  Wednesday night, we had dinner in the Sukkah.  Marc built us a little hut outside, and Friday night, we bundled up in hoodies and had beans and hot dogs outside.  It was lovely, peaceful and sweet.  Jessie brought out her spelling words, Sammy chatted about how much fun school had been, Julianna ate her beans and hot dogs and babbled along with us.  There's something magical about the five of us together, and I never take that for granted.

2.  On Wednesdays, I cover Jessica's library class.  Sam's teacher lets me pull him out of class each Wednesday so he can come and be my helper.  I love that we get that little break in the middle of the week together.  He's doing so well in class, I'm so proud of how he's adjusted.

3.  There's a whole bunch of third graders out there that still refer to me as "Mrs. Jessica's Mom."

4.  Last night, we did two sheets of Mad Libs that Jess brought home from school.  And it turns out that Marc really does still have the sense of humor of a toddler.  Or no, it's actually more like a ten year old boy.  He kept  using completely inappropriate words (madlibs are supposed to be inappropriate, right?), like "penis," "toilet" and "booby."  It was ridiculous, and the kids were thrilled.  But the best part for me was that Marc was absolutely delighted by this - it's like some part of him just didn't mature past early adolescence.

5.  We play "Find the Sukkah" in the car these days - which is similiar to "Find the Christmas Lights" when you drive around and yell excitedly when you see them.  Only sukkahs are mostly in people's backyards and not all that pretty... but either way, I've been playing it in the car on the way home from school with the kids, and my stepdaughter Sarah really gets into it.  She's so much fun to play it with.  The older she gets, the more I like her :-)

6.  Jessie is actually reading at night in her room.  She's been on a reading strike, as of late, and it's making me insane (which is why she's doing it, I'm sure).  She actually took Hop on Pop out of the school library on Wednesday.  But the past two nights, she's been snuggling up with a real chapter book before bed, which thrills me.

7.  Julianna is now really, really into brushing her teeth.  She loves it, and is so enthusiastic about, she'd do it three or four times a day if we'd let her.

8.  I just sent Marc to the store with instructions to get me something lovely.  And he will.  Enthusiastically.  I like that :-)

9.  My sister, this morning, sounded happier than I've heard her in a long time.  Joy is contagious.

10.  My niece Abigail Bridgett, is officially a crawling girl.  Mere weeks away from being a toddling girl, as she's pretty enthusiastic about walking along when someone is holding her hands.  I can't wait to see Julie and Abby running down the hall together giggling, and this is a major step in that direction.

Okay - I'm kind of ready for her to walk

I like the crawling stage.  I do.   I enjoy the early, early toddler stage - where they're just starting to walk, just starting to talk.  Everyone has ages that they seem to prefer, and I really like the first year or so.  I mean, I love my kids always, but my favorite age has always been the first year to year and a half.

So I don't mind that Julianna is an exceptionally late walker.  I didn't mind when her younger cousins started walking and then running before she did.  She can stand on her own, balancing fine for extended periods of time.  And she's been reliably cruising along furniture for a long time now.  But she's definitely not walking.   Defiantly not walking.   Because I truly believe that she could walk, but she's adamant that she won't.

But all of her peers are walking.  I went to the library with her yesterday, which I do fairly often.  And Julianna has always loved bopping around the library.  She crawls all over the place, following along behind me, chipper as can be.  And yesterday, we went to the library, and she helped me return the books, putting them into the bins and then we crawled (she crawled, I sauntered) thru the new books, and over to the fiction section, down past the teens and into the children's room.  We picked out books and started to make our slow way back to the front of the library to check out.   We saw another toddler, who was, go figure, toddling.  Julianna was thrilled - she loves people in general, and was perfectly content to sit and chat with the little girl.  They showed each other their dresses and Julianna showed off her new sneakers.  All of this was done with grunting and pointing, as neither kid was actually talking, but they communicated really well.  The other mother dragged the kid away eventually, and then another mom wandered by with her two boys - and they were commenting about why that little girl (my little girl) wasn't walking yet.  They were actually laughing at her, because she was crawling and not walking yet.

It turns out that the little girl she was playing with was fifteen months old.  Julie is almost eighteen months.

I'm not freaking out about it, because I know damn well that kids meet their milestones on their own schedule.  Sam was a comparatively early walker, he was walking by the time he was thirteen months.  Jessie took her first steps at eleven months, but didn't reliably walk until she was right around this age.  But Julie is steadfast about not walking.  Determined not to - and it appears to be a decision that she's made, she's not walking and that's it.  She's crawling, and if we gently encourage her, she gets either mad or sad, and has on more than one occasion, when someone has hinted that perhaps she'd like to say, walk over to Mama instead of crawling, laid her little head down on the floor and moaned for sympathy.

I know I'll miss my crawling girl - but right now, I'm thinking that I'd like a little toddling monkey.  I'm ready - and I know that she is.  If I could just somehow convince her of that....

Because it's impossible for me to get a pic with all three smiling at once

I've resigned myself to a lifetime of pictures where only two thirds (at most) of my children are smiling and looking at the camera.  You'd think with a digital camera, I'd have a better chance of it, but nope - I have lots of duplicates of the three of them, in the same pose with different ones looking at the camera...

Sukkah building and apple picking, oh my

We're embarking on our third of four Jewish holidays that fall, boom, boom, boom after one another in early fall.  First we had the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, and the Yom Kippur.   Now we're starting on Sukkot and we'll finish up with Simchat Torah.  Sukkot is a cool holiday - we build a little hut outside, to remind us of what it was like when the Israelites wandered in the desert.  Very nature based and kid oriented.   This was our first year building one, and I'm not entirely sure that it's kosher, but it's pretty.  Added bonus is that the birds and squirrels are DELIGHTED that we have built a little hut for them, and have spent most of the past two days out there exploring it.

We also did our annual apple picking trip this weekend.  I had been waiting and waiting to go, hoping that Miss Julianna would start really walking, but alas, she's still mostly a crawling girl.  She'll walk, accidentally, if she forgets that she can't do it.  But mostly she just staggers along furniture and crawls if there's nothing to hang onto.  The apple picking was, as per usual, a lot of fun.  Julie sat in the carriage and ate many, many apples, the girls chased butterflies and Sam was instructed on how to pick the apples nicely so as to not hurt his friend, the tree.

New Years Resolutions

It's the Jewish New Year - or actually, it was the Jewish New Year last week, but I'm just now getting around to resolutions.  As a convert Judaism, each year I have to relearn what each holiday is really about.  Because each year, it seems to mean a little something different to me.  This year, I'm very focused on resolutions - about thinking about the kind of person I want to me, the ways in which I failed to live up to what I should have been in the past year, and the opportunities going forward to make the world, my world, a better place.  I'm a 37 year old woman, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a stepmother, a stepdaughter, a sister, step-sister, aunt and niece.  My life is made up of relationships, and at this stage of my life, it's really more dominated by my relationships rather than my own identity.  Which is okay, as long as I don't lose sight of the fact that there is more to me than how I relate to other people.

So I'm thinking about how I could have been a better daughter, a better friend, a better wife, a better mother.  Ways in which I want to change.  I want to be more patient, more present.  All the way around.  I have a tendency to multi-task, like most moms, and unfortunately, I tend to multi-task all the time.  Which isn't great, in terms of being able to actually pay attention to the child in front of me, or the husband trying to tell me something or the mother on the phone.  It's great in terms of getting stuff done, because I get a lot of stuff done, but for this year, I'm going to try and focus less on getting stuff done and more on paying attention to what's right in front of me.

Another resolution that I've been working on, and hope to continue to improve with, is not apologizing for the clutter.  I have three small kids, two stepdaughters, a husband, friends who are in and out of my house.  My house is always a mess.  Always.  Looking around the room now, I can see a thousand things I'd like to sweep thru and pick up, and it's never not like that.  But you know what?  I've got a family, and a life, and my house will never NOT look "lived in."  And that's okay.  It's not filthy.  It's not unhealthily dirty, it's vacuumed and swept and mopped, but I'm never not going to have shoes scattered everywhere, baby dolls willy nilly all over the place and blocks galore.  Well, not never, but not for the foreseeable future, thank goodness :-).  I never go to someone's house and think to myself  "my God, what a disaster, you'd think she'd clean a little..."  And if that's what people are thinking when they come to my house, well, then, I sincerely hope they keep it to themselves or that they just don't visit anymore.    

I left, and she cried until she vomited

I feel kind of like I'm in a relatively new stage of my life.  With two kids in school and a toddler (who STILL stubbornly refuses to toddle) at home, my life is very different than it was when I had a kindergartner and a toddler at home, or a second grader, a preschooler still at home and an infant... I was more home based then.  I didn't volunteer much with the school, I was a stay at home mom with very small children.  Especially because for all of Sam's life, I've had an extra kid or two here with him, because I was babysitting for Jordyn and Harrison.  My days revolved around naptime.

But now - I've both my big kids out of the house during the day.  And Marc is still home during the days, so I've also got someone here all day who loves my baby as much as I do.  Added bonus is that Julianna adores her daddy, so I've been feeling very ... free.  I've volunteered for a LOT at the school, because I've got three kids at the elementary school, Jessie, Sam and my stepdaughter Sarah.  Which means, if I volunteer for one class, I feel obligated to volunteer for all three of them.

Today, I had two library classes to cover.  I left for the first one and came back about an hour later.  When I left, Julianna was sitting on the floor and she started to fuss as I left, but I knew she was fine.  She's a daddy's girl, it was before her nap time, and I knew she'd be fine.  I didn't worry about it.  With Jessie and especially with Sam, I was always reluctant to leave them.  But I really thought Julie would be fine.

When I got home, she was curled up asleep, in just a diaper, up against Marc and under a blanket, and he said that she had cried so hard, she threw up all over herself.  I felt... like the worst mother in the world.  The fact that she had been that upset broke my heart, and picked her little naked self up and brought her into the bedroom, snuggled her until she drifted back off.  The whole rest of the day, every time I left, I dragged her along with me.  She came to pick the kids up, to drop off at Brownies, to pick up at Brownies and to drop Sarah off at home.

I had been so cavalier about how easy it is now - because she is such an easy baby.  Because she is so relaxed and happy with her daddy and so very social.  But she still needs her mama - and yesterday I realized that all over again.

Julianna is such a different kind of baby from the other two.   One of the obvious things you shouldn't do, with more than one child, is to compare, and I know that, but do it all the time.  Julie is just so much more social than either of the other two.  Especially Sam, but even Jessie was relatively timid with strangers.  We were waiting at pick up at the Brownies yesterday, and Julie started a conversation, with hand gestures and grunts, with a total stranger.  She showed her the socks on her feet, and then pointed to her shirt and then her pants.  Waited after each one until the woman commented appreciatively, and then moved onto the next item.  She kissed Marc's friend Mike before going to bed last night.  It was only last year that I could get Sam to talk to Mike when he was over.

Bedtime Battles

Confession time here - I'm crap about putting my kids to bed.  I like to cuddle them to bed.  I just do.  I nursed Sam until he was almost three and a half, and Jessie liked me to sing and read her to sleep.  I just never got in the habit of shoving then into bed, flicking out the lights and dancing out into the living room for grownup time.  But I'm working on it - because at eight years old, my daughter has developed a serious aversion to falling asleep.

Mornings have been impossible with Jessie lately, because she's so overtired.  Yesterday, we had a long conversation about ways that we could improve, and since her health teacher (God bless her health teacher) had recently done a class on how much sleep the average third grader should get (which is at least ten hours), Jessie was completely on board with the fact that she needed to go to bed and get more sleep.  We decided that if she slept from 9:00-7:00, that would be a solid ten hours and life would be lovely.  We also agreed that going to bed at 8:30 would give her enough time to doze off on her own, to ensure that she was actually asleep by nine.

Last night was the first night - and she fought it bitterly.  Just bitterly.  She wasn't angry or weeping, but resigned and resentful that I was enforcing the rules.  She listened to her Sound of Music CD, and was asleep by nine.  And this morning was, as promised, lovely.  This afternoon, I went to the library and got her books on CD, so she has other options to listen to as she drifts off.

Sam is still a work in progress.  He's always been such a good sleeper, so I'm probably going to stick with what works with him - which is for him to fall asleep next to me in my bed and then trek him into his own bed.  Most of the time.  Sometimes, I'm sure he'll just end up crashing in my bed still... and Julianna still nurses at night, and since we've co-slept from the beginning with her (as we did with Sam), I'm in no rush to kick her out of my bed.