Skipping Town

Dear Girls, This month, I have been negligent in writing your letters, so I’ll write this one to both of you. It has been a busy month, with trips to NH and Connellsville, and you continue to be good travelers—sleeping in the car, adjusting to new surroundings, immersing yourselves in whatever is new and exciting wherever we are. You continue to play together in a charming, often hilarious way. Lucia, you love to throw the hula hoop around the front yard, yelling “Go get it!” to Greta, as though she’s a pet. Greta, you are always happy to oblige, running and screaming as you retrieve the hoop and bringing it back to your sister. Lucia, now that Greta is entering her terrible twos, you’ve been demonstrating your status as the “big girl” of the house, sometimes impressively—like when you spontaneously clean up the play area in the middle of the day, just so that the room “looks nice”—and other times boastfully, like when I scold Greta for doing something and you loudly point out...

We escaped a brutally hot week in Maplewood last week by heading to Connellsville—we didn’t plan the trip because of the weather, but we wound up choosing very luckily. Even better, Molly and Luca could join us for a couple of days. Lucia and Greta had a splendid time from beginning to end. What’s not to love about Gra and Pop-Pop’s house? A pool, marbles for the pool and other pool toys, sidewalks for scooter-riding and stroller-pushing, wonderful books, a veritable toy store in the attic, monstrous My Little Pony structures (which I purchased last year at a Cville yard sale and hadn’t taken back with me), a visit to Grandma and Aunt Florence, ice cream at Dairy Queen, undivided attention, new ballerina dolls from Uncle Don and Aunt Joanie. We even squeezed in a visit to the Clarks in Pittsburgh and went out to lunch, all nine of us, each kid accompanied by a Beanie Boo. Now we’re back home, with lots of rain but at least no 100-plus temperatures. Greta is having more toddler mom...

I’ve been inconsistent in recording my garage-sale finds this summer. Rest assured, I go to garage sales every weekend that we’re here; and rest assured, I always buy something. My greatest joy, however, is the church rummage sale. I’ll do anything to ensure I make it to a rummage sale, and already this summer my determination has caused marital unrest. A case in point: three weeks ago. Sure, we had eight people coming from Brooklyn for lunch; sure, we had to get everything ready; sure, the girls were whiny that morning, trading meltdowns. But a synagogue nearby was having a rummage sale, and I went, leaving Andrew and the girls behind, just an hour before our friends arrived. Andrew wanted to kill me. Moral to the story: Andrew got over his anger, and I got a pile of great kids’ books for 10 cents each, several hundred envelopes (white and lavender) for $1.50, plus a large, eclectic mix of butter-yellow Fiestaware for $10. My true love is the annual “turnover sale” at a church ju...

We did so many fun things this week: gather dewberries, gather appealing red berries that may or may not be edible (the fun is in the gathering), gather wildflowers in order to practice ikebana (Japanese flower arranging, or simply arranging wildflowers in small plastic milk jugs), swimming at our cousins' pool with frog innertubes. The girls went to their first parade on the Fourth of July, and loved gathering all the candy thrown at them. A few pictures:

Our final two nights in New Hampshire were made exciting by the appearance of a bat in the house. Friday night, I was reading on the couch around 8:30pm when I heard Andrew yell and scuffle in the kitchen. He came running out, panicked: a bat had flown out of the pantry, straight at his head. Behind him, I saw the bat swoop out of the kitchen, into the dining room. Quickly, we closed off that room; there’s a door leading to the outside from that room, and I went outside and opened it up. One of the doors to the room was in the barn, so I held a blanket over that doorway while Andrew ran outside to get it. Behind the blanket was a clear fwap fwap fwap. Once the door was in place, we waited, listening. Andrew looked in from the outside; the bat was swooping back and forth across the room. After a while, we didn’t hear it anymore. After a very long while, Andrew decided to go in and look around. The bat was gone. Or so we thought. Late that night, around 5:00am, I woke up. The sun wa...

Lucia has taken a greater interest than usual in Greta’s well-being. Lucia always sleeps with a night light, and I always bring one along for Greta, too, even though I don’t put it on for her: I just click it on whenever I check on her. This week, though, when I’ve gone upstairs to check on the girls and go to bed, there’s Greta’s night light: turned on, and placed right next to her crib. The same during naptime. Apparently Lucia waits for Greta to go to sleep, tiptoes into her room, turns on the night light, and puts it beside her—with Andrew and I none the wiser. Sometimes she also takes all the extra pacifiers from the bureau and tosses them into the crib. Lucia is also very worried that Greta is going to fall off the floating dock into the pond. This is a legitimate fear, one that Andrew and I have both lost some sleep over this week. Even though one of us always has a hand on her, we’ve both had very clear visions—either in dreams or just before going to sleep—of Greta not on...

There’s something about being in New Hampshire that allows me to see the future. At home, caught up in the day to day of life with the girls—days that are blends of mind-numbing tedium; blood-pressure-raising frustration; and incredible happiness and wonder—it’s almost impossible for me to see past the point where we are right now. “It goes fast,” people say. “Soon it’ll be Lucia going to softball camp/driving off to a ballgame/heading into the city to shop with friends.” Really? My dancing, singing, hair-accessory-loving three-and-three-quarter-year-old will one day not need me to arrange macaroni on her fork? My “NO”-screaming, arm-crossing, new-word-attempting one-and-three-quarter-year-old will one day know how to walk down the steps by herself? This time of small children seems, most days, like a permanent state. But here: here I see it differently. Today it rained off and on, but there was no thunder or lightening, and the girls played for a solid hour in near-silence this m...