Skipping Town

Potty training has begun. I’ve been putting it off and putting it off and finally, on Saturday, I just didn’t put Lucia’s diaper on, explained she could have chocolate if she used the potty, and went with it. She went several times both Saturday and Sunday, with a few accidents. Monday she went just once, but our sitter was here in the morning, and then we went out to a playground in the afternoon, so it wasn’t prime conditions. In any case, we’re on the potty-training path. I cannot yet see the end of it. At least when it comes to #1, Lucia knows exactly what she’s doing and (when conditions are right) will say “Mama, I have to go to the potty” when she needs to go. Then she’ll sit down with a smile, and sit and sit, and occasionally she’ll say in a sing-songy voice, “I’m goooiiing…I’m goooiiing…” And then she goes, and she beams. She’s totally ready.   And while we’re sitting there, of course I have to bring Greta along, and while I sit in the bathroom doorway she procee...

Dear Littlest One, What a sweet little banana you are. With your whole-face smile, ear-shattering happy-shriek, and adorable crawl, you are just a jolt of snuggly joy. Of course, your sleeping is atrocious; you’ve been biting me while nursing; and you’ve begun a charming lip-buzzing that spews baby food all over me as I feed you. Still, to me you seem pretty perfect. You are crawling quickly and determinedly. You’re pulling up on every possible piece of furniture, and you seem to be trying to crawl on top of the low ottomans. You have just realized you can stand in your crib, so now when we hear you “calling” for us, we often find you standing there, watching the door. You now sleep with a small lamb stuffed animal. I put him in with you for the first time two nights ago—and your sleeping that night, and the subsequent nights, was much better. Coincidence? Or will you eventually have an animal-overflowing crib just like your big sister, comforted and happy with an entourage ...

Have you ever been around someone who only talks about one thing—something completely uninteresting to you, like the stats and performance of a sports team, or, even better, some kind of fantasy-league sports team. On and on and on. Talking and talking. You can’t even feign interest because you have no idea what the basic parts of the subject are. It just seems to involve a lot of time on the computer, looking at players’ faces and some numbers that have to do with them. Boring. Painfully boring. (Andrew likes sports and has done the fantasy-team thing, but fortunately conversation about them is minimal.) Alas, for the past few weeks it is I who have become the deadly bore. Of course, my topic of obsession has nothing to do with sports or fantasy sports. Instead, I have been talking much too much about a sale at the local Methodist church. They call it a “turnover sale,” and this is the seventy-eighth year the church has held it. Donations come from all over, and all the money rai...

Dear Little One, It’s been a big month for you. This month, we said goodbye to everything you knew: your home, your room, your playground, the familiar streets where we walked, the shop windows you knew by heart. Here, everything is different: you have different-colored walls in your room; you have a new carpet; you have new rooms in which to play. There’s a different playground—we haven’t quite found our ideal match yet—and different rhythms to our days. It’s a lot for me to handle—I can only imagine how confusing it is for you. You’re handling it very well overall. Some new things, you love: the duck pond, the pool we joined, painting rocks on the porch. Some new things, I thought you’d love, but you’re taking your time coming around to: the backyard, mainly. It’s currently shaded by a cloud of mosquitoes, so I don’t blame you for keeping your distance. I’ve bought a sprinkler and a sandbox—all yet to be set up—so I’m hoping we’ll venture there a little more often. ...

We had a lovely visit this morning from some friends from Brooklyn, two little boys each three weeks older than each of my girls. Lucia was thrilled to have someone to chase all around the house, and Greta enjoyed crawling around and chewing companionably with another little baby. Later in the day, inspired by this other baby’s ability to pull up to standing, Greta decided she, too, would stand. She pulled herself up on the flowered ottoman, arranging her tiny feet underneath her and then pushing right up. Sometimes she starts out in a very wide V and then scoots her feet together inch by inch. Standing! Able to reach newly out-of-reach surfaces! Nothing is safe! I can sense her preparing to practice this newfound skill all night, robbing me of yet another night of sleep. Note to Greta: Don’t make me do sleep-training, my sweet little baby. Please don’t let it come to that. But when you wake up every hour from 10:30pm on and I’m still nursing you three times a night and you’re eig...

Greta is full-on crawling now. It started off slowly, just a few tentative paces, but now she’s off. Yesterday, for the first time, she crawled from the living room into the kitchen to find me. I could hear her coming; she is so excited by crawling that she squeals the entire time she’s moving, and soon her tiny head peeked around the doorway. She was smiling hugely and could not have been more pleased with herself. Then, in the space of about ten seconds, she got into the bag of recycling; ate the bottom of an empty paper bag; put a magnet in her mouth; and pulled two potatoes from a bag on the floor. She is absolutely into everything, and all she wants in life is whatever Lucia has, the smaller and more poisonous or hazardous the better. I never had to worry too much about baby-proofing with Lucia, but I see that my efforts with Greta are going to have to be a little more intense. Starting with the basics: no bags of recycling—no bags of anything—on the floor. Greta’s number-one...

Things have been so busy around here that I haven’t had time to keep up with regular blog posts. Hence this little list of tidbits. The Pool We’ve joined the Maplewood pool, which, according to everyone I’ve talked to, is what everyone does during the summer. “Have you joined the pool?” “You have to join the pool.” “Everyone goes to the pool.” So we, too, joined the pool. (A little technology aside, for readers twenty years from now to chuckle over: The first day we went, intending to just check things out, we were surprised by the fact that no day passes were available; so I did the whole registration on my iPhone and showed them the email receipt to secure our entrance. That whole process would have been unthinkable even five years ago; it will seem archaic, what—next year?) Anyway. Lucia loves, loves, loves the pool. It’s actually a pool complex, all outdoors, consisting of four pools: a real diving pool with two platforms, an Olympic-sized lap pool, a kid pool going...

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 ...