Skipping Town

Today, after Quiet Time, Lucia said she didn't want to use the iPad: she wanted to make peg dolls instead. "Can we make peg dolls, Mama?" she asked, excitedly clutching a new shipment of wooden pegs that had arrived in the mail. Yes, little one. Yes, yes, we can. Greta woke up from her nap just before we began, so make no mistake: this was not an hour of quiet mother-and-daughter crafting at the kitchen table. It was more a scenario of the girls spreading all of my felt across the kitchen floor to make an "island" and me madly glue-gunning as they attempted again and again to unwind all my yarn, like pesky kittens. Still: any request for crafting, especially when it's chosen over something like the iPad, is, I will say, a satisfying moment for this mama.

After another snowy week last week, I was counting the seconds until we could go to Connellsville and have a few days of R n' R, where it wouldn't matter if we were snowed in because Lucia and Greta wouldn't even know we were there, so focused they would be on Gra and Pop-Pop. Alas, we got another snowstorm on Thursday, so we couldn't leave that afternoon as we'd planned. I wanted to just get in the car and go; Andrew pointed out we couldn't even leave our driveway. Friday, we gave the girls their Valentine's Day gifts in the morning. I'll digress here to say that after years of assuming everyone gave Valentine's Day gifts to their kiddos, I see now I was wrong. It doesn't matter. I like planning their little Valentine's Day surprises, and this year I (fine, WE) gave them each a mermaid Hello Kitty, some colored pens, a few tiny notebooks, a unicorn necklace, a book, a coloring book, and a tiny teaset featuring the very kawaii Rikkukuma bea...

Another Tuesday. Tuesdays can go so many ways. They're always long, with no preschool or babysitter, and in such snowy, cold weather we're always completely cooped up. Running an errand is usually a good thing to do, except when trying to get Greta ready for an outing is more stressful than just staying home. So today we stayed home. I thought I'd try to remember and record all the many things we did and played with today, just for fun: Reading books (including a new book Andrew brought home from work--"Tea Time with Sophia Grace and Rosie") Having a snack (granola bars) Setting up a large expanse of pillows, doll crib, and doll bed and putting a variety of stuffed animals down for a nap Coloring. Lots of coloring. Sit N' Spin / rocking horse trade-offs Fort-building in the basement, with the red storage bins I still haven't used for organizing my life Dancing (Greta) Shopping-cart pushing (Greta) Clothespin fairies--they're lost in t...

Lucia at dinnertime:  "Eating dinner is not fun. I like playing and drawing." Lucia, looking at the refrigerator: "Mama, when are we getting a new refrigerator?" "When we get a new kitchen." [Panic-stricken face:] "But...but...When we get a new kitchen we have to TAKE ALL THE FOOD OUT OF THIS REFRIGERATOR FIRST!" We let the girls watch some Olympic figure skating this afternoon, which they loved. But Lucia seemed troubled that each skater was on the ice by herself. "Where are her friends?" she kept asking. She seemed relieved when the skaters returned to their coaches and teammates. Lucia and Andrew played outside in the ice-snow for a long time today. Andrew pulled Lucia on the sled; Lucia sucked on icicles; and they played an elaborate game of princess/giant/witch/etc. Greta, for her part, refused to go outside or even put on any socks. For one second, she agreed to go outside; I got as far as her snowpants before she mutinied. ...

This has been the longest week of my entire life. I feel like the past six days have pummeled me. I last posted on Tuesday, and the rest of the week proved to still be long and ridiculous. Wednesday morning we woke to yet another wintry wonderland, everything snow-covered, all the tree branches coated in ice. School and sitter: cancelled. Andrew worked from home, but the day was just long, long, long. I have no memory of how we spent it. I'm sure it involved coloring and dancing and the Sit N Spin, maybe the Squinkie fairies, perhaps the "slide" I make for them out of an old Ikea shelf. Yes: we did the slide. I remember now. There was a lot of jostling and arguing and pushing and it all ended very unhappily for all. That afternoon, pushed to the limit of feasible activities, I dumped the food-coloring-tinted ice cubes into a Pyrex baking dish, announced "Rainbow ice!", and left them to it. They squealed with excitement and managed to find ways to play with the...

Monday: snow day. Just a ton of snow. Snow and snow and snow. Snow covering our car and coating all the tree branches. Preschool was cancelled; I had to cancel the sitter since it was too dangerous to drive. At least Andrew worked from home so at least I didn't go totally insane. Still, our across-the-street neighbor does occasionally wonder if we're all dead inside, since on days like this our car just sits there in the driveway, snow-covered, and not a soul is seen outside our house. Our entire life on these winter days takes place within these walls. And then today--Tuesday is always my long day, and today was doubly long since it followed an identical yesterday. At least the roads were clear today, so I took the girls to Target, where the "fun carts" were not only buried in snow but also encrusted in ice. With my boot, I kicked and cleared one well enough to push inside; and then a very nice employee helped me clear and dry off the rest. So at least we had some ...

Dear Baby Grets, Little baby, you are an endless source of frustration and joy. When you are good, you are so very, very good: giggling, joking, dancing with wild abandon and surprisingly good rhythm. When you are...not so good, you are writhing and screaming on the floor instead of letting me put on your coat; you are taking off your socks and shoes as fast as I can put them on you; you are grabbing things from Lucia and running as fast as you can (which is pretty fast) around the house. You are full of opinions, more and more each day: you've even insisted on picking out your own clothes and pjs a few times. But you are so cute, and so silly, that we'll still keep you around. You love to pretend to put things in your mouth or into a cup of our coffee, watching for our reaction and then saying with high hilarity, "Noooo!" A tiny fairy Squinkie in Mama's coffee? Noooo! Does a plastic coin go in Greta's mouth? Nooo! And on and on. You find this hilarious...

Winter with little kids is hard. It is easier to be here, in a house, than it was to be cooped up in our apartment in Brooklyn. Here, at least, we have various areas to be cooped up in--we can be cooped up in the living room or play area; we can be cooped up in the kitchen; we can be cooped up in the basement playroom. Still, we are cooped up. It has been snowy and frigid, so there has been no opportunity whatsoever for going outside, and until this morning our car was snowed in. And so the past few days have been long, long, long. Tuesdays are always tough for me, since there's no preschool and no babysitter, and this Tuesday was made even harder by an early Greta wakeup, an early departure of Andrew for work, a long freezing day, and Andrew's post-work drinks, which meant he missed bedtime. (He actually skipped the drinks because of the snow, but then had a ridiculous two-hour commute; but I digress.) The day did not start promisingly: the girls' scream-laughing chase a...

Friday night, we had dinner plans with friends. We had reservations; we had a sitter all lined up; we had on nice clothes. We'd planned to leave once the girls were in bed. Andrew was giving them their bath when suddenly the power went out. Our entire neighborhood was pitch-black. There were some minutes of chaos as we grabbed the girls out of the water and put their (battery-operated) night-lights on. The power stayed off for an hour, putting our dinner plans in jeopardy; but five minutes before we needed to be at the restaurant, the lights came back on. We speed-walked into town and had a lovely dinner. On our way home, we ran into a neighbor walking her dog and accepted her invitation to come in for a drink. It was nice to be so free-wheeling until reality struck with Greta's 6:30am wakeup. Sigh. Sunday, our same dinner-friends came over in the morning, and the dads watched all five kiddos while the moms went to yoga. Then Andrew and our friend went out to chain-saw some l...

Dear Little Lulu, You're growing up so fast. It's suddenly apparent that you are not such a tiny little girl anymore--your hair is getting longer, your preferences for clothing more outrageous and personal. You love wearing tights, and spend most days in some sort of dress-up outfit, usually a leotard or leotard-with-attached-skirt. You are not bothered by the wintry cold in such outfits. I walk around the house in two sweaters, and there you are in a leotard. Right now you love playing hide and seek, and though our range is limited--you have yet to realize you can hide absolutely anywhere in the house and always just stick to whatever floor we're on--you manage to find inventive places, like covering yourself with pillows on the couch. It's hilarious when you and Greta both play. You both hide in the same place, and though you understand the point is to hide quietly, Greta squeals and scream-laughs, often popping out to see where I am then darting back into your...

Just backed up all my pictures (ha!) and thought I'd post a few more from our winter and holiday activities. Fun in the snow: Cookie baking: A folded-book Christmas gift: Playing "resting":

Two things happened to make our return journey memorable: it rained the entire way, both days, and Andrew erased all the content (pictures, contacts) on my iPhone. We got an early start on the 28th, drove in the rain, stopped for lunch at another great BBQ restaurant called Duke’s in Orangeburg, SC; drove in more rain. We stopped for the night in Christiansburg, Virginia, and made peanut butter sandwiches in the hotel room for the girls. Andrew and I ate takeout Olive Garden. (And I went to a Target just down the road before picking up our food to buy some 70%-off Christmas stuff.) The next day—breakfast at the hotel, and then more rain, and then a very unwise stop at a pub in Winchester, Virginia, where Greta was teetering dangerously on the edge of a total meltdown. I thought some videos would get us through lunch; couldn’t get the YouTube app because my iPhone hadn’t been updated in forever; Andrew decided he knew how to update my operating system; and then—everything was gone. My ...

We spent Christmas week in Jacksonville this year, a lovely reprieve from the winter back home. When we arrived, it was in the eighties; the girls got to play outside and run through the hose. They were ecstatic. They shared a room at Andrew’s parents’ house, which we weren’t sure was a great idea, but it worked out fine—once again showing us that we’re slowly approaching a time when we’ll once again be able to travel with some degree of sanity. The weather cooled but remained nice for most of the week, and we kept the girls outside as much as possible—going to playgrounds, looking for cats, playing with toys on the deck. The day after Christmas, Andrew, Lucia, Greta, and I even went out to Atlantic Beach. It was pretty cold that day, but the girls still took off their socks and shoes and ran in the surf. Greta made designs with shells in the sand. Lucia built an elaborate structure from sticks she found in the dunes. Andrew and I were freezing, but the girls were in no hurry to l...

Last Saturday, we set out for a new adventure: our first road trip with Lucia and Greta. Andrew and I took many a road trip in our pre-children days, tooling around Spain and California, taking the long way, going off the map, pulling into small, newly discovered towns and worrying about a hotel only at the last minute; or finding great luxury rooms in San Francisco through Priceline or Hotwire, not caring where we stayed. We took a few short road trips with Lucia when she was a few months old, to San Francisco and wine country; and of course we've driven to Connellsville and up to New Hampshire. But sixteen hours from New Jersey to Jacksonville was taking our family road trips to a new level. We planned the trip from necessity--four holiday-season plane tickets and mountains of presents made flying unrealistic--and really didn't know what to expect. Andrew took command of the itinerary and planned our route down I-95, and in a rented SUV (our small station wagon wouldn't...

Dear Baby Grets, Oh, but you love being two. You've embraced it. You revel in it. The power of no! The power of your own will! It's intoxicating. You have learned that you can assert yourself and your whims in this family with just as much force as anyone else, and there's no going back. Your worst fits are triggered by having to put on your clothes, socks, shoes, and coat. You also don't like to be told no, or to give up something you want to hold onto, or to stop doing something you want to do. You have learned exactly how to enrage Lucia--grabbing her stuff and running away with it and refusing to give it back. When you're particularly angry, you don't just yell "No"--you scream it at an ear-splitting pitch and volume. If there were ever any considerations of a third child (there have not been), your two-ness would have squashed it expediently. After you are done with all this, we will be free of age two forever! All this said, you are also co...

Dear Lulu, ***Note: For the first time in four years, I'm going to combine two months of letters into one. I wrote your 50 Month letter last month, and forgot to post it; and now here we are, past time for Month 51, and I've missed this one too. It's New Year's Eve, and for the sake of finishing off the year all caught up with blogging, I'm going to just post a two-month post. Forgive me...*** As I've said before, being four years old seems to suit you. You can do more and more things on your own all the time--from getting dressed entirely to putting on your boots and coat to retrieving your scooter from the basement and carrying it upstairs. The house is your domain: you traverse it from top to bottom, from attic to basement, embracing the various activities you do in each room. Your bedroom: stacks of tiny cubes, elaborate games with your many princesses. The basement: riding your scooter, crawling through the tunnel-and-hut setup, coloring, doing art proj...

It's been busy busy busy around here the past few weeks, but we've been having lots of fun with the holidays. We went to Connellsville for Thanksgiving, driving during the day both there and back, and Lucia and Greta were superb travelers--playing together, playing with toys (especially their Magiclip princesses and small Gingerbread Girls). We had a great week--Andrew and I got to have some shopping getaways; and we had a night out at Lynn's Bar with Molly. Lucia and Greta loved playing with Luca. Neither girl ate more than a bite of Thanksgiving dinner. We also did our Christmas celebration, since Andrew and I will be in Florida for Christmas this year. The highlight, as always, was our homemade gifts. Molly made dot-painted boxes filled with recipe cards of the best recipes she made this year; for Lucia and Greta, she made boxes of elf donuts from Cheerios; Mom and Dad created a photo book with detailed, photographed instructions on making scrippelles; and I made tin...

Dear Little Grets, This later is late, and I have only you to blame, little one. This is just a fact of life right now: you are taxing. You take all our energy and then some. Most nights the last thing I can think about is writing a blog post. You have fully embraced Being Two, and we've entered a stage where everything--each piece of daily life--is a challenge. The hardest things are changing your diaper, putting on your clothes, putting on your socks, putting on your shoes, putting on your coat, getting you into your car seat. Unfortunately, these are all the things we have to do pretty much on a daily basis--usually more than once a day. This might be the winter that we just never leave the house. You're also getting frustrated with talking. You know so many words, and are putting two and three together--but you are more or less unintelligible. The three of us--Daddy, me, and Lucia--understand almost everything, but occasionally you stump us, and this makes you very angr...

The kids in Lucia's preschool class were asked recently what they were thankful for; the teacher wrote each of their answers on a sheet of paper, which each kid then decorated. Lucia's read, "I am thankful for giving my sister hugs and for my daddy. Especially when he comes home from a trip." Isn't that too cute? Andrew was on a business trip last week, gone for five days to California, so the week without Daddy must have been either in progress or fresh in her mind. I'm thankful when Andrew gets back from a trip, too. It was a long week, but we managed, really fraying only at the very end of Friday, when we'd expected Andrew to get home earlier than he actually did and we were all just tired and ready for things to be back to normal. The hardest part of being alone for this long stretches of time was just taking care of myself--showering, getting dressed, getting my contacts in. The days themselves--this time, at least--went along pretty smoothly, hel...

Dear Rapunzel, You are deep into Disney Princess World these days. You've loved the princesses for a long time now, but ever since your birthday, your love has grown--thanks, of course, to the deluge of princesses you received as gifts. Your very favorite princess right now is Rapunzel, and your Barbie-like Rapunzel doll is your constant companion. You sometimes refer to yourself as Rapunzel as well. Ariel, your prior favorite, has been supplanted for now. You love the Disney Princess books Daddy purchased for the iPad--the books are read to you, with accompanying music, and you turn to these immediately when you get to use the iPad after Quiet Time. You are pretty delightful these days, with funny dances and observations, and you chatter nonstop. Just nonstop. You talk to me, to Greta, to Daddy, to your toys, to yourself. You are incredibly bossy; nothing frustrates you more than when Greta refuses to do what you want her to. You are generally tolerant of Greta's ever-inte...