Skipping Town

Lucia has handled this move with surprising aplomb so far. She was mellow and fun during the move; thought all the craziness and mess was funny; and really just went along with things with nary a complaint. (Much of this is due, of course, to the fact that my parents’ sole job was to entertain both girls nonstop for an entire week. They excelled at their task.) But now that Grandma and Pop-Pop have left, and Andrew has gone back to work, and it’s just us here in this strange new home, Lucia has moments of homesickness. Sometimes it strikes when we’re doing something she enjoys, like painting rocks; sometimes it’s when we’re playing; sometimes it’s when we’re reading books or doing some other quiet thing. “I want to go home,” she’ll say suddenly. “We are home,” I say. “This is our new house.” “No,” she’ll say. “I want to go home—my regular home.” It is so sad. I tell her that I miss it too, and that it’s hard to say goodbye and move to a new place, but soon we’ll love our new h...

Moving day: Lucia running around yelling “What a mess! What a mess! You’re making a mess!” Friendly neighbors: In our first few days, one family brought muffins, two brought beautiful plants, and we were invited to a cocktail party where we met lots of people from the street. It’s a real community here on our block. We feel extremely welcome. New activities: The girls and I have been exploring. Yesterday we fed bread to ducks at a duck pond—Lucia loved it. As the ducks (and a few squirrels) crowded around her feet, she tossed the bread grandly into the air while shouting, “They love it! They love it!” Later that day, another neighbor stopped by to introduce herself when she passed by on a walk with her four young sons. The two middle boys immediately began running around the yard—and Lucia ran right after them, giggling and running with them through the bushes in her barefeet. Later, when we talked about our day, as usual I asked what her favorite part was, convinced she’d say...

Dear Littlest One, What a month it’s been for you! You’re so very nearly mobile, crawling backwards and sometimes managing to get yourself forward, too. You’re getting into a sitting position on your own, even using that motion—lying down to sitting to lying to sitting—to move around. You are making “ba ba ba” and “ga ga ga” sounds, trying to keep up with all the talking going on around you. You love to stand up, and you beam when we put you onto your feet and exclaim, “Standing! Who’s standing! Big girl standing!” Even Lucia gets into it and yells “Big girl standing!”, to your delight. You have one goal in life: get whatever it is Lucia’s playing with. You have no interest in anything else, anything I might give you to play with. You have eyes only for Lucia and her toys of the moment. You are persistent and steadfast, and though I’m glad to see you asserting yourself, I foresee many a battle in the near future. You have two teeth now, middle-bottoms, and are growing some...

Dear Little One, Because of all the craziness that went along with the move, I neglected to write a letter this month. And so I will write a brief one now, belatedly, with just a highlight or two. Forgive me! One big thing was your mastery of the “arm slide” at the playground. You’ve loved it for a while, but I always supported you when you leapt off the platform. Finally, you pushed me away, and did the lift-off by yourself. You were so thrilled. It’s a little sad that we left just when you discovered this new great thing. I wonder if you’ll remember it. You’ve come out of your shell even more, talking to our (now former) neighbors and often playing with other children at the playground. You take things to heart and notice everything, and when you’ve been wronged, it sticks with you; you’re just learning to talk about things you don’t like. When we were at the park a few weeks ago, two little boys in our playgroup were roughhousing; later, when we talked about our day bef...

We’re here, and so is all our stuff, and if you were with us for the past few days, you’d understand that this is no small accomplishment. The past week has been a blur. Last Monday, Andrew and I went to the bank and got a certified check for the closing costs and the balance of our down payment. On the way home from the bank, we decided maybe we’d better hoard what little cash we had left—so we decided to cancel our movers. Mom and Dad thought we were insane, but the more we considered it, the more reasonable an idea it seemed. Plus, people who’d just moved into the top floor of our brownstone offered to give us all their boxes. It seemed like it was meant to be. Tuesday, we headed into NJ for the closing, an intense two hours of signature upon signature. That morning, we canceled the movers but did arrange for another moving company to do the actual truck loading, driving, and unloading. When we got home, we started packing. Wednesday, we continued packing. For fifteen ho...

I've always loved the poem "Autumn Perspective" by Erica Jong. It's on my mind every day now as we settle into our new home. Here it is: Autumn Perspective Now, moving in, cartons on the floor, the radio playing to bare walls, picture hooks left stranded in the unsoiled squares where paintings were, and something reminding us this is like all other moving days; finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life, hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit, and burned-out matches in the corner; things not preserved, yet never swept away like fragments of disturbing dreams we stumble on all day . . . in ordering our lives, we will discard them, scrub clean the floorboards of this our home lest refuse from the lives we did not lead become, in some strange, frightening way, our own. And we have plans that will not tolerate our fears--a year laid out like rooms in a new house--the dusty wine glasses rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves sagging with heavy winter books. ...

Today, we are moving out of New York. Our boxes are packed; the movers are on their way. To mark the occasion, some thoughts. *** I moved to New York City in 1999, when I was twenty-two years old. Now, twelve years later, I can’t remember what I imagined was on the other side of that move. There was graduate school on the near horizon, and maybe that was as far as I thought. I think, in the back of my mind, I planned to stay—this was, after all, where I’d dreamed of being for years; but if I did, I definitely hadn’t thought about how that would work logistically. I had no money, had never had a job besides waitressing, was young and cloistered enough to feel a measure of stability and relief when I got a work/study job with the Columbia Libraries paying $8.25/hour. I have to steal Joan Didion here: Was anyone ever so young? I moved into an apartment in Morningside Heights, on West 118th Street, that had been assigned to me by Columbia’s housing office. I remember getting ...

It’s our last week in New York. Last week, Andrew drove the girls and me to PA and then took the train back to New York, leaving us to spend the week with Mom and Dad. Though it was a fun week for Lucia (The hose! Watering flowers! The playground! Bubbles! Chalk and Pop-Pop’s stones-and-squares game!), it turned out not to be the relaxing getaway I’d assumed it would be. I’d unwisely taken on a very large freelance editing project, which would have been fine—but Greta got sick mid-week and threw everything into an uproar. She had a high-ish fever, which I managed with Motrin, and a trip to a local pediatrician to rule out an ear infection (there was some ambiguous ear pulling) revealed an eye infection instead. She was uncomfortable, and teething, and unable to either settle herself to go to sleep or to stay asleep. She slept with me most of the week, which was great for her but not so great for my own sleep. By the time Andrew returned, I had past the point of zombie-land and was...

We spent all last week in New Hampshire, a nearly eleven-day getaway that was truly the calm before the storm that is the next three weeks. Although both Lucia and Greta returned to their characteristic New Hampshire ways and rose god-awfully early in the morning (Greta reliably by 5:00am; Lucia by 6:30am), there’s something peaceful about rising with the sun up there, with nothing but quiet outside the windows, and the occasional pheasant in the yard. We spent all the time we could outside, sitting on a blanket with Greta while Lucia played in her ball hut, splashed in her pool, and enjoyed new discoveries from the barn—this time, a rocking-horse-type object. Lucia was particularly interested in the frogs this time, and we spent lots of time down at the pond, where she dipped her toes in the water and tossed clover and weeds to the frogs that were merely inches away. Sometimes, they’d leap at the plant, mistaking it for a bug, which thrilled her. One time an earthworm oozed o...

Dear Littlest One, Seven months! Every month I’m amazed that you’re not a tiny tiny little infant anymore but a growing, curious, active little baby. You’re sitting up on your own now, though I still won’t leave you sitting by yourself since you tend to do the occasional face-plant or tip-over while reaching for a toy. You are eating food, and loving it—rice cereal, sweet potatoes, avocado, squash, peas, and pears so far. You still gaze intensely and longingly at “real” food, though, and I know these purees aren’t going to stay around for long. You have your first tooth, bottom-center left—it broke through the surface a day or two before your seven-month birthday. You’ve been fussier than usual (still not very fussy), so I knew something was going on. And you’ve entered that cute phase where you approach any object with a monster-ish open mouth, ready and willing to gobble up, or at least chew on, anything in your path. Your raptor screeches are epic. I’ve never heard an...

One of the reasons I love Park Slope is that it’s full of families. You can’t walk two feet without kicking a (thousand-dollar) stroller. Kids and parents are everywhere, and I’m sure I’ll never find an equal to this baby-raising community. Friendly conversations, commiserating smiles—it’s all great. But along with this massive collection of families is chaos and overcrowding—and I’m not even talking about schools, which is too far off in our lives to be a Reason but is certainly among the most important things driving us away from New York. Anyway, again I’m talking about playgrounds. It’s just too much. There are just too many kids. It’s overwhelming for me, not to mention Lucia. A playground nearby, which was being renovated for the past few months, opened this weekend; we’ve braved it twice, but it is just insane. It looks like some sort of gigantic event is going on—a kiddie rock concert, or something—but it’s just a regular day. I’ve gotten wimpy now that I have two kids; th...

I haven’t been keeping up with my Reasons posts, but believe me, every day I write them in my head. Whenever I trip over something, or can’t find a place to put something, or experience something in the neighborhood that annoys or frustrates me, I tell myself I need to write about it on my blog. That hasn’t happened. I’ll try to be better, starting today. Park Slope is an expensive neighborhood. And yet it is still full of trash. Some of it is just par for the course with city living, like the bags piled by the curb on trash day. But sometimes those bags break, spilling trash all over the sidewalk. When you have a toddler who likes to spot things on the sidewalk and add whatever it is to whatever collection she’s building, this is just not going to work. I look forward to not having to walk past bags of garbage when we move to the suburbs. On one particularly outrageous morning at the playground, the playground workers hadn’t yet arrived to empty the trash cans and do a genera...

Today was a gloomy, rainy day, and Lucia and I spent a fun hour this afternoon painting for the first time. She loved it: dipping her brush in the paints, rinsing it in a cup of water, drawing on various sheets of construction paper. At one point, I went into the bathroom, and she followed me as she always does; but as soon as she entered the bathroom, she exclaimed, “I have painting to do!” and ran back to the living room. Andrew got home from work late, and Lucia and I were already in her nursery, reading stories. But I asked her if she wanted to show her paintings to Daddy, and she was just so excited—she ran at top speed into the living room, and I could hear her excitedly showing Andrew each of her masterpieces, jabbering incomprehensibly about using a paintbrush and rinsing it in water and putting paint on the paper. Pretty cute.

Dear Little One, You’re now closer to three than you are to two—a scary prospect, both because you’re getting so big and because I’ve heard terrifying things about the terrible-threes. We have our terrible-two moments, undoubtedly—your screams are so piercing that they leave my ears ringing, and your irrationality (you want to get back in your crib! no! you want to get up! no! etc.) is exhausting. Fortunately, these episodes aren’t too common, and for the most part you are delightful to be around. You’re still a skinny little thing—I can see your ribs—but you’re growing, already into 3T clothes (mostly because you have long legs and a long waist). I still worry about your eating, though you’re long past the stage where I can trick you into eating more just by reading books distracting you in other ways. You’ll eat, or you won’t, and there’s not much I can do about it. You aren’t particularly picky, though we haven’t tested you much. Sometimes you decide you like unexpected t...

This weekend, Mom and Dad came for a quick visit, and we were fortunate enough to be able to arrange to show them our new house. Andrew and I were so excited for the trip—we hadn’t visited the house for many weeks, and no one besides us had seen it yet. We were anxious to show it off, and eager to hear confirmation that we’d made the right choice. When we arrived at the house on Saturday morning, our broker wasn’t yet there, but cars were in the driveway. People approached us: the owner’s daughter, son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. They were at the house to do some work and packing and hadn’t known we were coming. It felt like an illicit meeting, pre-closing: should our lawyers have been present? were we trespassing? There is something inherently odd about the process of turning a house over to a new family, particularly when the house in question has been lived in by one family for so many years. Even if selling is the right or only thing to do (as it seems to be in this case, ...

We had visitors last week—Andrew’s sister and dad were here last weekend; his dad stayed on for the week; and then this past weekend we drove up to New Hampshire to open the house and enjoy our first blissful weekend away from it all. We were there only from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, and a good bit of the first day was spent opening the house (i.e., Andrew and his dad cleaning out unmentionable awfulness while I sequestered the girls outside), but we still managed to take in some of the peace and rest we love so much. We were outside nearly the entire time we were there—Lucia remembered lots of things from last summer, and though it was too cold to get out her swimming pool, she still got to swing, collect stones and dandelions, play with her ball hut, and ride around in her car and tractor. She could not have been any happier running around in the grass. Greta chose to celebrate our stay by beginning to sit up on her own for very long stretches (usually until she...