Sleeping with the cows

We've been busy preparing this week for a trip to the continent.  We'll be gone just a week, but the kids are ecstatic about it because while our primary reason for going is work-related, we've promised to make a full trip of it and take them to visit the friends, horses, and cows they left behind in Switzerland.

Part of my preparation for this trip is in the form of knitting.  There are two little ones that I've missed dearly, and I wanted to bring them a little something special.  So I've been busily knitting away some foods for their play kitchen.  I had so much fun knitting tiny treats, that I went a bit overboard.  But can you not stand the cuteness?

The carrot and strawberry patterns are my own, but the others are mostly free patterns that I found online.  And while the doughnuts are not the healthiest little treats, and the Swiss children probably won't even know what they are, I think they are adorable.  Once I saw the pattern I couldn't help myself.  It was so clever!

And the garlic and mushrooms make me very happy.  I actually knit more mushrooms than I had intended because Kitty Bill kept claiming them for himself.  He loves them.

And lest he be forgotten, my other knitting preparation was actually for Kitty Bill himself.  Since we're planning to camp in a Swiss cow field for a few days, and it's near freezing, we need to dress warmly at night.  While we were getting our winter gear out, he reminded me that I still haven't made him a hat.

I've made Kitty Bill countless hats over the years, but I knew what he meant.  A couple years ago I made Moonshine a special hat with elephants on it.  And then Sunburst saw it and put in her order for one with horses on it.  And Kitty Bill?  He has since been begging me for a hat with robots on it.

A kid who loves to build electrical things needs a robot hat, don't you think?  But he didn't want any old robots, they had to be just the right kind of robots.  Cute and friendly ones.

He has been a fan of robots for years.  Oddly enough, it all started when we moved to Switzerland.  The moms in our area would get together and have a kind of yard sale (boot sale, for my UK readers) at the local park, and they would sell off their kids' outgrown clothes and toys.  At one of these sales there was a giant, plastic monstrosity of a robot, and Kitty Bill went berserk for it.  It was red with moving parts and sounds, and no doubt with enough batteries lasers would shoot out of its eyes and scorch something.

He was two or three years old at the time.  There was no way I was bringing it into our house, and no amount of distraction would budge his tiny heart.  As I recall, there was a lot of screaming and kicking, but we made it home without the robot.  I promised that I would make him one, and I did.  I knit him this crazy transforming robot.  I was good to my word, and he was so happy that the plastic robot monster from the park was long forgotten.

But then robots became a thing, just like horses are with Sunburst; they are the magic key.  So if I wanted Kitty Bill to wear a sun hat, I had to embroider a robot on it.  A winter hat?  Robot. Eventually he grew out of that phase, they all do, but for a time I was thoroughly convinced that any woman that wanted to marry him would have to agree to having robots on top of the cake.

But now he's seven, and he still wants a robot hat with cute robots on it.  How can I deny him that?

I'm happy to announce that it passes the cute and friendly test.  Kitty Bill absolutely loves it.  Now he can't wait to sleep with the cows!

So now I have another pattern to share... but it needs a name.  Any suggestions?

Forcing the light

We had such a crap day yesterday. I can only blame it on this flu which seems to be both dragging on and on and dragging our spirits down. Although I love Martinmas, it was tempting to call the whole thing off yesterday. We just weren't feeling the love and the light, and I wasn't sure we could carry it. And anyway, we're supposed to be celebrating it again on Saturday with other families, in German (or Swiss German?!-- they haven't actually given us the songs to learn yet).

Anyway, we decided to go out and sing with our noses running and without light in our hearts. And I think it was the best decision. One way to find the light is to force it. Sometimes the candle goes out and you have to relight it. It was a pretty good lesson, a very tangible lesson, for all of us.

When things were going poorly yesterday we put everything aside, pulled out the kite paper and folded window stars. Sunburst offered up the story of St. Martin, from memory, and it was quite sweet. We made soup. A very green, minty, broccoli soup which we ate before going out with our lanterns into the cold, dark night.

We live out in the country now, and we could barely see the path with our lanterns. It's not that they're aren't bright and glowing. They do a fair job. It's just that it's so incredibly dark out here. After having lived in the city for so long, the children gasped at the starlight. And we walked... sometimes off the dirt path and into the weeds. Some of us stepped in horse poo which littered the path. Kitty Bill walked into a fence with his face, luckily it wasn't an electric one. It was an experience that mirrored our experience lately, both inside and out.

We pressed on through the dark with our voices and our lanterns held out before us. At one point there were hoofbeats, and we saw a rider crossing the path in front of us wearing a headlamp. That was interesting! And we finally made it to the top of the hill where we could look down upon the lights of five different cities. The air felt different there, and it was breathtaking.

It was a good message:

Press on, press on.
Even when you can't see the way.
Even when the night is dark, and the path is unclear.
Even when it is hard and makes no sense.
Press on.*

We turned the bend and headed home on a different path. I coaxed a reluctant Kitty Bill onward with promises of hot cocoa to warm him up, and we finally made it back home again.

Everyone is a little worse for wear today. Exhausted, but somehow more peaceful. It's early yet. The hills are shrouded in mist and it's drizzling rain, but I have hope that the light will shine from within us.




*(Reminder to self: This message could be equally applied to this year's Nanowrimo novel.)

Experiencing winter

Winter has finally arrived! We woke yesterday to a world blanketed in glorious wet, white snow, and the kids and I were eager to run outside and greet it.

Every winter I'm reminded how a landscape of new-fallen snow is like a huge blank chalkboard. Virginal, unmarred, fresh from experience, a lot like our children. They head out the door decked in their woolies and dance the dance of tactile experience, each footprint and snow angel marking the landscape in their wake, as if their bodies were chalk dancing upon the chalkboard-- ever moving, ever marking, ever experiencing. Onward.

How so representational of their experience of life! Starting out fresh and new like a clean slate, and as they move forward in experience and age the landscape gets marred, the experiences become less fresh, and they simply begin to know things. They learn how squishy the snow feels under their boots, and they learn the best way to roll a ball to make a snowman. And as they go along each footprint and trail and snow angel begins to lose the fresh, experiential appeal. Like you and I, they slowly begin to take it for granted. Been there, done that. And like us they forget how that experiential knowledge was first formed-- by experience. They even being to say, "Oh, everyone knows that."

We adults are notorious for this kind of thinking. We assume so many things, especially, that others can read our minds. That others know why we react the way we do. We easily fall into making assumptions that others must share this same knowledge, but how can they if knowledge is acquired by experience? And each experience, however similar, has its own nuances and particulars. Even siblings, raised in the same household by the same parents, grow up with a different experience, dependent upon how that experience melded and was interpretted by their own temperament. Our experiences shape us, make us who we are, and because we are each our own person, the knowledge we own will never be truly shared by another.

When it comes to children, adults oftentimes fall into the trap of assuming that children have all kinds of knowledge that they simply don't yet have. We've all said things like, "You should have known better." It's easy to assume they should have known better, that had they been thinking clearly (i.e. like us and with our background of worldly experience), that they wouldn't have done x,y, or z. But children aren't us. They are not small adults. They are newly forming, and don't have our experience. That's why human children are born to parents and not hatched and left to their own devices. It's our jobs to show them the way, to help them make decisions. It's why we biologically can't reproduce until we've lived long enough to have some life experience, and with this experience we can guide our children in so many ways-- from how to build a snowman to how to interact with others in the world.

Yesterday Sunburst played in the snow for the very first time with other kids. She lost her gloves last week, so she borrowed her dad's big floppy ones, and went out to play. The kids happily made snowmen, angels, snow tracks, and tossed a few snowballs. All was well and good until Sunburst, with Moonshine in tow, came back to the house in a puddle of tears. It seems that one of her snowballs hit the neighbors' daughter in the face, and the father of the child burst from the house and gave Sunburst what for. Sunburst tried to explain that she wasn't aiming for her friend's face, but tells me the father told her in a very angry voice that because he witnessed her throwing it, he believed that her intentions were completely malicious in nature. In other words, he thinks my eight-year-old daughter is a bad kid.

He didn't bother to stop and tell her why it was dangerous to hit someone in the face with a snowball. He didn't bother to ask if she had ever played at throwing snowballs at someone who wasn't over five feet tall before. He didn't bother to notice that maybe her "two-fisted hand of snow" was because she was wearing her dad's big, floppy gloves. He didn't even bother to consider any previous knowledge of my child playing with his, and all the kindness that has passed between the two of them. He tossed all that aside and just assumed that she had his experience of growing up in Minnesota and knowing kids who had damaged eyes as a result of taking a snowball in the face.

It's been a long and hard week over here with Kitty Bill's dangerously exploratory antics and his successively getting terribly ill, several nights of no sleep, a death in the family, and the stress of preparing for the holidays and preparing to move overseas all at once, and then my usually joyful daughter appearing at the door crumpled. This father was the last straw in my otherwise awfully experiential week. I marched my crying daughter over there, and in not so many kind words, asked him to explain his reactionary behavior to Sunburst. Luckily he slowed down long enough to accept Sunburst's apology and share his experiential knowledge of the dangers of snowballs with her. We had to go home and discuss what a "torn cornea" was, because that vocabulary wasn't yet a part of her experience, but otherwise, I think it went well. Though to be honest, my irritation still lingers.

Whenever any of my kids have an issue, whether it's with another child or with another adult, I encourage them to work it out. It often does a world of good to simply tell someone, "It hurt my feelings when you did that." And as Moonshine found out last week at her ice skating class, sometimes the only thing it does is put the ball in someone else's court. Even if they are unreceptive to your feelings, at least you shared them. This is how we gain experience-- from speaking our peace and letting others speak theirs. If we hadn't stood there and looked the neighbor dad in the eye and let him know that we had a problem with the way he handled the situation, we wouldn't have heard his stories about Minnesota, and Sunburst wouldn't have gained any other experiential knowledge than: that angry dad thinks I'm a mean, bad kid.

Kids cannot be "bad." Surely, they can act dangerously. Carelessly. Especially kids who tend toward choleric temperaments-- they are all body and action, and sometimes they get carried away. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, they take things too far. But that's what kids are designed to do-- to cross lines. To push boundaries. To explore their limits (and ours!) That's how children learn, and by guiding them and sharing our adult experiential knowledge with them, hopefully they can learn more easily.

There has been a lot of talk lately within our local homeschooling group about "bad kids." Certainly, there is a lot of undesirable behavior. Wreckless behavior, even. But innate badness? In eight-year-olds? This is a common misconception, but I don't believe it. I think this is just a lack of experience and a lack of understanding about how knowledge is gained. Perhaps a lack of guidance, even. But not because a child is truly bad.

Somewhere, hidden deeply within the bylaws of our local homeschooling group, is the idea that if you see a child misbehaving at an event, you should step in-- regardless of whether the child is yours or not. And once in a while people do, some with success and others with certain disaster if they forget that children are still learning. You can't reprimand or redirect a child without reason, or your efforts are meaningless. If you blast them without guidance, you are no more than the harsh winter wind drifting the children like snow and pushing them farther away from any chance at meaningful experience.

To truly understand children, you have to walk out into that fresh unmarred landscape and pretend you haven't been there before. Make some footprints. Grab a stick and make a trail. Let it all be new. Everyday. Every second. Take nothing for granted. Lay down and let the cold, squishiness of the snow envelope you. And then step back and behold what you have made.

A big attitude and a little math (Part 1)

Do you ever get the urge to flush them down the toilet?*

Sunburst has been driving me crazy! There, I said it. It's true. She's been mouthy and rude and inattentive to oh, everything we say. Her nose is almost constantly plugged into a book. And when it's not she's inadvertently doing something to make Moonshine and Kitty Bill screech! Sunburst has hit this pinching, pushing, tripping, tricking, ignoring, goading, annoying stage... and oh! I'm just at a loss with her. It could be that she's eight, do you think?

With the weather so nice and warm a couple of weeks ago, I made an executive decision to drop our language arts block and forge ahead. I was hoping that giving her some "headier" work would give her that challenge she was constantly looking for. I got the feeling that she needed to control something. Own something. Feel bigger, in a sense. And I think it worked, sort of.

We returned to our math story I was telling back in November just before the car accident. Poor Clara! You see, we had abandoned her at an inn during a terrible storm, where she and Beremiz were playing dice games to pass the time. We revisited that lesson, and then moved on to another dice game they had played in our absence, The Matterhorn. (I love how these story people seem to go on without us sometimes.)

The Matterhorn is a great game for teaching number values. The jist of the game is to get up and down the mountain via rolling three dice. The mountain is comprised of two number lines, 1-12 (which is the peak) and then 12-1. You have to roll each value to climb and then decend the mountain, but luckily you can add the dice values. For example, if your first roll gives you the values 1, 2, and 2, you can make the sums 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Then you would roll again. It's supposed to be a contest between players, but we just played singularly with much shouting and cheering.



Then the weather got really warm. When it's so nice outside the kids are out the door before I've finished my morning coffee, so our next few lessons were totally off the cuff. Standing there on the back walk I eyed the sidewalk chalk and remembered how impressed Sunburst was that her friend The Artist has his own watch and is learning to tell time. Voila! A lesson was born.

I drew a huge circle on the back porch. That alone brought the kids running over with curiosity. As they walked around and around the circle I began the story.

It was finally time for Clara and Beremiz to leave the inn. He told Clara to meet him at 8:00 sharp the next morning so they could eat a quick breakfast and set off. But Clara had a problem. She didn't have a watch. Nor did she know how to tell time. Beremiz loaned her one, and we set to work on the "learning" portion.

First we added the numbers.
Next I handed Sunburst a kiddie-sized rake and set her to working the hour hand.




Once she had that down, then Sunburst set to work marking off the individual minutes.




Then, with a bamboo stake, she worked the minute hand.



The rain washed away our clock and Sunburst drew it back, every minute accounted for. At that point it was clear that Clara was ready to meet Beremiz on time, and we were off. Again. And though I didn't plan for it, a lesson emerged that touched on Sunburst's atrocious behavior. Clara and Beremiz met a bereaved mother on the side of the road. Her eight-year-old daughter had taken her own boasting and rudeness too far. She mouthed off to the King's son, and now the whole family was in hot water over it. Unless the girl would come forward and hear her punishment from the King, the family would lose its farm.

Tsk. Tsk.

Sunburst thought surely there must be something Clara could do to help.



*Larger than life toilet brought to you by Kid's Commons, a children's museum we recently visited. That's me living my dreams as I attempted to flush Sunburst down the toilet. The kids really DO love to climb down inside of it, spurred on by the actual flushing noise it makes, where they enter the bowels of a house and explore all the hidden staircases and so forth. Very cool.

The Uniform of Motherhood

Do you ever feel like between homeschooling and housework and trying to meet everyone's needs that you lose sight of your own needs or dreams or passions?

This past weekend I took some time off from all things motherly, housewifey, wifey, and teacherly to nurture myself. It wasn't a planned diversion from the day-to-day around here. First I had to reach my limit, feel overwhelmed and under-appreciated, and pitch a fit. Then, surprisingly, I got some time off. A mental health day, if you will.

First up I did some art journaling ala Visual Chronicles. Just one piece that totally summed up my emotional moment enough that the whole family actually understood. They got the picture way more than my beat-a-dead-horse thousand-word diatribe. I'll have to remember that for next time.

Next I surfed the web, ate chocolate and spent a couple of hours pushing fabric through my sewing machine. It was better than great! I fought the urge to do anything for anyone else. It's so easy to fall back into that sinkhole, made even harder by the fact that I have this huge pile of children's mending and good intentions sitting on my desk. Instead, I concentrated on me. Me. ME! And my needs.

Oh, the irony! I made myself an apron.

I've never owned an apron before. I don't even come from apron folk. But I picked through the mess of fabric in my closet and came out clutching an old bathroom curtain to my chest, completely re-smitten with its feminine flowers and sheer eyelety goodness.

At first glance this apron seems like a big joke. Einstein thought so, too. It's sheer, white fabric. Completely useless for wiping your hands on the edges with wild abandon or catching spills or doing the real work of life. Not exactly a workhorse. But look again, I say. I've been doing that work for years without any barrier whatsoever. Just me and the sludge of life ensconced together in this domesticated dance. Just me and the sludge.

Let's face it. As a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom with three kids, there's not much time for my needs. On good days I get my hair brushed and my clothes remain unscathed by the various body fluids emitted by small children. I'm not particularly resentful of the snot or its liquidy cousins, it's just something I've become accustomed to as an accesory to motherhood. I wear it. Or it wears me. At the end of the day I can't tell. The uniform of motherhood. Be one with the snot.

This apron, by contrast, is not a sludge-catcher. Oh no! It's counter to how I feel on a day-to-day basis. It's the Anti-snot. I tie it on and my whole mood changes. It wraps its little flowers around my aura and softens my edges. And when my edges are soft... well, that transfers to the entire household, you know?

Now I'm singing, "I feel pretty," while I sling mash and wipe butts. Who's the workhorse now?

STOP telling your kids they're smart!

Apparently, telling your kids they're smart sets them up to be underachieving failures. Fascinating!

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

a side order of sleep

As you know things have been a little kooky over here, and we've been really struggling trying to get our rhythms back in place. Everything depends upon that rhythm- our ability to function in the world, stay focused on tasks, and communicate clearly and humanely with one another.

Clearly and humanely. I always had assumed that would be the easy part... but when our rhythms are out of whack, nothing is easy. Nothing is clear. And I find myself suddenly at the end of the day wondering how did we get here?

Rhythm, to me, depends primarily on two things: food and sleep. Regular and consistent mealtimes are easy. I watched my kids to see when they get hungry, and I began to anticipate that hunger. We eat every 2-3 hours. I don't know if that's normal or not. But that's when we're hungry. You can set the clock by it. 9, 12, 3, 5:30, and 7:30.

Sleep, on the other hand, is less easy. When Sunburst was a wild and energetic one-year-old who fought sleep with an iron fist, it astounded me how our neighbor's same age child would easily nap twice a day and be back in her room for a 6:30 bedtime. We struggled with sleep issues for years, but eventually we moved past the iron fist business and got on with life for the most part. This past November, our sleep patterns fell apart all over again. A solid month of houseguests, a car accident, illness, holiday fervor, and an injured Mommy who couldn't physically get it together to do the normal bedtime routine turned us all into sleepless wrecks. Normally, I climb in bed with them and we read for 30 minute stretches before the singing and other Mommy voodoo. For the first couple of weeks, I couldn't physically climb into their bed. The nightmares and pain had us up and down all night. One sleepless night led to another and the whole system crashed.

In a moment of complete desperation, I picked up this book, recommended to me by the wise Aleisha.



I can't say enough good things about this book. It had me crying by page six. I'm not saying that I wasn't bone tired and emotionally fragile, because believe me, I was. But it opened my eyes to thinking about sleep and parenting in a whole new light.

And we're sleeping again, for the most part. But even when we're not, because life is always happening, it's like my brain is more attuned to what's going on. I can see sleep issues as sleep issues rather than plots to overthrow my sanity. I can cut us all a little more slack, and the rhythm can still flow through us. And so at last we're back to being mostly humane, functioning people. Who knew?

Normal, freaky children

Something is going down at our house.

Sunburst seems to have developed a tic. She came home from the pool yesterday clearing her throat, "Ughm." She didn't swallow a frog or inhale any overwhelming amounts of chlorine, at least I don't think so. It appears to have just, ughm, happened on its own in this sudden, constant, and irritating way.

Einstein and I both noticed it right away.

"Ughm," we said to her. "Ughm. Ughm, ughm."

She looked at us with complete cluelessness and kept on ughming.

"Why are you doing that?" asked Einstein.

"Will you, ughm, stop, ughm. It's irritating." I said to her.

"Ughm," she said to us. "I can't, ughm, help it." And she was right. She couldn't. Her sudden reflexive throat-clearing noise was as much an unconscious part of her now as blinking. But goodness knows it was driving the rest of us insane. I googled around and found a lot of information on Tourette's Syndrome. And although it's one of those things that has a childhood onset, after only two hours of constant throat-clearing, it seemed a little fast to me to be making that kind of leap.

I only panicked for a minute before some dark recess of my brain remembered reading about normal childhood tics in the Ames and Haber books. They studied children for years at the Gesell Institute of Human Development and have a series of books out for each age. Yes, there are actual yearly manuals to help navigate the terrain of childhood, such as Your-Seven-Year-Old. When a friend first turned me onto these books, I thought she was crazy. A book is going to tell me about my child? My special, amazing, and unique child that these authors have never met? Yeah, right. And the moon will grow a thousand arms and start dancing the samba.

I was surprised how wrong I was. These books are great. I read them and sigh and know that my children are just as freaky as everybody else's children. That crying jag Moonshine went through because we changed the color of the shingles on our house? Normal. That phase Sunburst went through when she started pilfering vegan marshmallows out of the fridge? Normal. That cheetah persona she adopted years ago including running on four legs and pretending her friends were gazelles for the biting? Really weird and NOT normal, but we got through it anyway.

And what of this more recent urge to pee when faced with something difficult? I've been noticing this for a few months with Sunburst-- when we draw a new form or work on math or I ask her to help wash dishes., suddenly she has to pee. I figured it was an escape tactic, and was secretly pleased when she used it on Einstein the other day over practicing a new song on the piano. "She does this all the time, " I told him. "She's one of those Hall Pass kids... you know, the ones who were always running off to the bathroom in school." Apparently that's normal, too. Freaky, but normal, according to Ames and Haber:

"At eight, the most common of these outlets is a need to urinate when taxed with somethig he does not like or is unequal to. Dish-wiping is sure to be interrupted almost immediately after it's begun by a trip to the bathroom... A difficult school subject such as reading may produce a distended bladder in a very short time. This reaction may be thought of as "internal perspiration," emotionally induced. It is not just an alibi, as shown by the copiousness of the ensuing secretion."

Aside from specific behavioral tidbits, these books also describe the ages as going through times of equilibrium and disequilibrium, spiraling between the two, so that a child might spend half the year being pleasant and the other half acting like some monster from another planet. So far that seems to be how it works around here. And really it makes a lot of sense. The diseqilibrium helps them to make huge developmental leaps, just like sicknesses and short phases of completely aggrevating behavior, tantrums and so forth. A method to the madness, so to speak. And these books remind me of that and just make me feel better about everything, including throat-clearing.

Under the "Tensional Outlets" section of the Seven-Year-Old book I was pleased to read:

"There is, however, a certain amount of muttering and mumbling, loud breathing, and little throaty sounds."

Throaty sounds. Check. But little? No. Sometimes these books are off by a year, and you have to read the year before and after. The Six-Year-Old book actually has 'tics' listed in the index, as well as the section on Tensional Outlets:

"Facial grimaces, sometimes almost tic-like in nature, are frequent, and many make numerous, irritating throaty noises or throat-clearing."

Irritating throat-clearing? Check. But why? I racked my brain to figure out what triggered this sudden anxious reaction. Just before she went to the pool she overheard me on the phone with the doctor's office trying to get her an appointment. She's got an odd, tender bump on the back of her head. I think it might be an occipital lymph node, but just to be safe, we want someone to check it out.

At bedtime last night Sunburst asked me about the doctor and her bump. Bingo. She was worried. I tried to allay her fears the best I could and this morning she was tic-free until I brushed her hair and she remembered about the bump and started ughming all over again.

Kiddie Mats

Last night I found myself telling an old friend about a recent work dream I had. She and I used to work at a movie theater when we were in college, back in the day. We shared the same shame of donning those awful, itchy polyester suits with stripes up the sides and matching bowties while we served popcorn and nachos to the masses.

We were a stunning sight-- dripping with the stench of greasy popcorn and imitation butter flavor. We spent hours sweeping up stray Milk Duds and popcorn kernels, empty boxes of Junior Mints and Sweet Tarts, filling soda after soda after soda, and scrubbing the popcorn kettle until our fingers ached and we gagged on cleaning fumes. Those were the good times.

The bad times, aside from drunks, vomit, bathrooms, and one particularly degrading manager, were relegated to a few choice shows in the summertime, known to the insiders as "kiddie mats." One day a week in the summer we would open for an early matinee showing of old kid's shows-- animated films like American Tail and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and we'd reduce our admission to a buck. On top of that, we'd bring out these tiny soda and popcorn containers and charge the kids a buck a piece for the pair, soda AND popcorn. It was a win, win situation for the customers... but for us, the lowly servers, it was a nightmare!

First of all, we had to be at work at 8 am... which is not horrible unless we were one of the unlucky souls to have worked until midnight the night before, which was usually the case. We had to clock in, hurry up and throw last night's popcorn into a warming bin, dump the icy cold nacho cheese into the machines, and then start filling and capping a ton of those teeny tiny sodas and prepping box after box of popcorn. At 8 am!

We'd open the doors and it would be a mad rush. Inevitably, most of the crowd would consist of daycare kids... not just a group or two, but dozens upon dozens of excited, screaming, little folks who completely outnumbered their hired caregivers at least 15 to 1. And they all wanted popcorn and soda, of course. And at least half of them spilled a good portion of each on the floors. Talk about mess! And the caregivers always wanted nachos, which were never, ever quite hot enough at that hour of the morning. And then we'd get chewed out, because a woman with 15 screaming kids needs to feel heard by someone, anyone. "Yes lady, you and your need for hot cheese in the morning are important."

Inevitably, at least one kid would get his fat little forearm stuck in a cupholder and be hollering like mad while we greased him like a pig to get it out. More than one kid would pee in the seats or on the floor. Good times, indeed.

After kiddie mats we'd have bits of popcorn crushed into the carpet all over the lobby and have to clean the theaters with blowers and tackle the soda spills with mops. Kiddie mats were like tornados, come to think of it: Loud, frantic, and messy.

And they haunt me still today, apparently. I dreamed my superviser was calling me to let me know I was scheduled to be there at 7 am. From Texas, no less. Nevermind that I don't even live in Texas anymore, my dreamself doesn't remember about that. My dreamself was just horrified at the idea of kiddie mats. My dreamself wanted to sleep in, have a quiet morning to myself, maybe have a read over a leisurely cup of gourmet coffee and NOT under ANY circumstances, grease, wipe, mop, blow, sweep, or serve ANYBODY.

My dreamself apparently doesn't remember that I'm a mom now, either.

It has been 15 years since I worked at that theater. Why would I dream about kiddie mats NOW? After all these years? Then it dawned on me, my life is like kiddie mats. No sleep, get up early, make food, screaming kids ---noise, noise and more noise, and always something underfoot. Everytime I clean one mess up, there is some new disaster, like we're living in a minefield. Kiddie mats. My life has been downgraded to kiddie mats.

Hmph. Well, at least we don't have any cupholders.

Cha-Cha, the bee, and me

I was waiting in line at the craft store when I found myself standing in judgment of another woman and her kids. It was just Kitty Bill and I, sandwiched in a long check-out line, and at the front of the line was what I presumed to be a Grandma, a mom, and two kids. This wasn't any kind of Grandma we have in our family-- this one had a Cha-Cha DiGregorio thing going on. The big hair, tight clothes, scarf around her neck, the whole bit.

That's fine; I'm a big Grease fan. I'm no Sandra Dee, but I probably lean more that way than the other (we're just going to leave the leg hair and Birkies out of this one, okay.) The mom-type person was also dressed more, shall we say, modern. Or retro-modern. Hip huggers, heels, hairspray, you get the picture. Anyway, aside from the Grease flashback, I wouldn't have paid these ladies any mind, that is until the kids caught my attention.

The little girl with them looked about six-years-old. She sat down on a chair, crossed her legs, put her hands out and exclaimed something about not wanting to "break a heel or chip a nail." And I was forced to do a double-take. She was younger than Sunburst, and she was wearing hip-huggers, high heels, and carrying a bustier purse. At six-years-old!

Then she got up and did some kind of dance, to which Cha-Cha Di-Grandma remarked that they should charge us all for this entertainment. The little girl said, "I make 40 bucks a day." And the little boy, about the same age, said, "Good. You can buy me a gang." And he crossed his arms in that defiant stance and pouted. At least his pants weren't hanging around his ankles, which tells you I've fully crossed over into the 'Don't trust anyone over 30' category.

The other customers and I exchanged glances that said, "Yikes!" And I instantly thought, Thank God my kids aren't like this. I paid for my glue stick, patted myself on the back, and went home to my angelic children.

We spent some time in the yard, and Sunburst announced that she had found "the bee who lost his buzz," and tromped through the house with said bee perched on a dandelion. I started to think to myself, "crazy child," but then I remembered the little bustier girl. High heels or entomologist...? No brainer there.

An hour later we hurried the kids out the door to attend our neighbor's pipe organ recital at a local church, where rows 1 and 2 were reserved for families with children. It was a beautiful room and quite small, I think, as far as churches go. We arrived a few minutes early and waited patiently. Kitty Bill shyly flirted with the women behind us, and Sunburst and Moonshine, glowing in their new Easter dresses, sat very primly and quietly exchanging glances with all the other children. Homeschool enrichment at it's finest. Perfect, I thought. And then the music started.

What was I thinking taking my kids to an organ recital? At a church, no less. People dress up, sit quietly, and don't clap or fidget or anything until the song sequence is over --and these are good ten, fifteen minute songs; it's like a Phish jam but obviously not very Phish-like. Kitty Bill only made it through the first two parts of the first song before he started audibly fussing. And so what does one do with a slightly fussy baby? Breastfeed.

In the past this handy device has worked in many scenarios where I needed to soothe and quiet my children-- whether they were teething, bleeding profusely, or I was trying to handle an important phone call or make it through my father's funeral, breastmilk has always done the trick and done it well. With all the noise in my house, I failed to recognize one thing about Kitty Bill. He does not nurse quietly. It sounded like I was suckling an army of pigs, and oh how the heads began to turn. It's pipe-organ music, and so you would think that it would drown us all out, but it wasn't like that at all. Oddly enough, every cough, sneeze or gulp reverberated just as much as the music did. The room was designed to carry voices, after all, and it was designed well. You could hear a pin drop AND the music, simultaneously.

This is when that coveted aisle seat in the back row would have come in handy for my quick and painless get-away, which was neither quick nor painless. Moonshine lasted until the middle of the next song before she started climbing around on the pew and finally squirmed out of Einstein's grasp and ran for the door where she could see me through the glass. But she couldn't get to me. Only one of the doors worked, and only from the inside. She screwed up her face and prepared to have a full-on shrieking when Einstein ran up the aisle and let her out into my arms.

While Einstein, Sunburst, and all the well-behaved children of others enjoyed the rest of the music, we crawled around the lobby and got to know it pretty well. Moonshine got into a debate with a woman about vegan diets, Kitty Bill fingered the bronzed-eyes of St. Thomas, and I let the irony of the day wash over me.

Pride cometh before a fall.

It was just another humbling moment, one of many, where I'm reminded that no, my kids aren't all that.