American Museum of Natural History

Yesterday we all had one last adventure in New York. Because everyone is sick, we nixed the original plan for the Bronx Zoo and headed up to the Natural History Museum instead. Dave had never been, and for me it had been years; Clio has been talking about dinosaurs lately; and Thursday night we had dinner at a restaurant just down the street, so it ended up seeing like the obvious choice.


Both girls got some hands on action: Clio turned a penny into a souvenir penny, complete with engraving of a wooly mammoth skeleton


and in the Frogs exhibit, Eleri was all about pushing the buttons of every machine that made noise or pictures.


Clio contemplated the scale of the dinosaurs (or maybe she's counting her fingers- the dinosaur hand only had three)


But ultimately she was not impressed. After seeing this huge skeleton, she asked "when do we see the really, really big dinosaurs?"


Maybe this kid belongs in New York after all.

Happy Birthday, MaMa

Today is Dave's grandmother's 93 birthday. That's right, 93. Clio made her a card (okay, I had to write "Happy Birthday," but Clio managed the "MaMa" and her own signature)


and we decided to take a picture to make a little e-card. Or, since it's on the blog, maybe its a b-card. Anyway, getting a 3 year old and a one year old to sit still and hold up some paper is an interesting challenge. Here are some of our best (and worst) efforts.



I guess, if you can't bring the mountain to Mohammed, you can always bring Mohammed to the mountain.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAMA!!!

On Being Thoughtful

I always considered myself to be a thoughtful person. I send thank you notes promptly and write them beautifully- so the giver know how much I appreciate who they are to me as much as what they have given me. Not to pat myself on the back or anything, but I also write wonderful cards and toasts that make people laugh, cry, and feel good about themselves. But the truth is, it kind of ends there. I am rarely on time with those cards, especially if the recipient is out of state, and I am ridiculously inconsistent. I mean well, but it has recently dawned on me that well-meaners are the reason for such expressions as "it's the thought that counts." It always seemed to me that the thought was the easy part, the execution- the finding, the buying, the wrapping, the sending on time- that was so hard. But I have been blessed with an actually thoughtful husband, one who thinks very sensitively about gifts (even if he, too, is inconsistent at best and rarely on time), and I believe that he has, in a way, given me the greatest gift: understanding what it means to be thoughtful.

Where is this coming from? you might be thinking. Well, there are two men in my life who are, on the surface, impossible to gift. Both of them have birthdays coming up (Dave's is tomorrow and my Dad's is the 18th), and both of them got shafted for father's day, the guilt over which has been hanging around my subconscious for the past six weeks. They are impossible to shop for for different reasons: my Dad because he claims he doesn't need anything and, in truth, is awfully content and seems to feel genuinely fortunate in his life; and Dave because the things he does want are so specific, so thoroughly researched, and, often, so expensive, that they are all way out of my league. For Dave, I would give the gift of taking something he really was interested in and doing the research for him, only he would never trust my research and would spend so much time verifying it, that he might as well have done the work his own way from the start.

Perhaps in some part due to all that research, Dave tends to have a "better way" to do just about anything, and he believes that the rest of us should think his way is better, too. (Similarly, my Dad is always coming out with these bits of information that sound so random that everyone puts it down to the Irish Gift for Gab- meaning, we assume he's making it up. Our family's favorite example of this dates to a drive through North Carolina, circa 1993, when my Dad announced that the town we were approaching was home of the world's hottest pepper. Annoyingly, it turned out that my dad was correct about that pepper, and Dave's "better"methods tend to actually be, well, better.) A while back, Dave and I joked about an experiment whereby, rather than arguing every time he told me the better way, I would just go ahead and take his advice and see what I learned. So, for his birthday, I decided to think about how he would go about buying a gift, and even from this hypothetical exercise, I learned a few things.

Before I got down to business, though, I wasted a lot of time trying to remember the brilliant idea I had had for a gift for him a while back; the one genius idea that was going to be the gift to end all gifts. (I have always been both a procrastinator and an exaggerator). Then, giving up on the genius but forgotten idea--and here comes tip number one--I went to his favorite store: Paul Smith. (To be honest, this was a stroke of luck- on my way from one errand to another, I happened to walk within a block of the place and remembered that it was right there and that Dave loved it.) I suppose this should be obvious, but I think too often we end up getting our loved ones gifts that we want them to love, rather than gifts that they will love--gifts that reflect who we think they should be, rather than who they are.

Once inside, I realized that half the work had been done for me; this store is Dave's favorite for very good reason: as I walked around, picking up one thing after another, I felt that Dave would very much like every single thing here; my job, then, was to choose which things. Part of the problem with this particular store is that it is very expensive. I looked at a price tag here and there and new there was no way I was spending $300 on a shirt, especially while Dave and I are sharing one bank account, with dwindling funds. And I remembered another lesson of thoughtfulness. A few years back, my parents went to Italy. For Christmas that year, I was thrilled to receive a Missoni scarf--as a lover of texture, pattern, and color (and, okay, knits in general), I have always been a huge fan of the brand. I remember, when I opened it, that my mom apologized that it was "only a scarf," but that it was all they could really justify purchasing in the expensive store. But to me, owning a genuine, beautiful anything from Missoni was a big, wonderful deal; I wore that scarf religiously for the next two years, particularly with the perfect little Calvin Klein jean jacket, and the feeling of absolute chic that I got from owning and wearing that little piece of Missoni made that scarf one of the best gifts I have ever received. So I bought Dave some socks. Fabulous, striped, Paul Smith socks. I hope he will get that same feeling every time he wears them.

I think thoughtful gift-giving is also about sending a particular message. At this moment in our lives, where we have been through so much change on a yearly basis but have found ourselves voluntarily signing up for so much more, I wanted Dave to know how I feel about him as a person; what I promise to him in all the changes ahead; and that I believe we will get through it all if we can both remember to have an open mind and sense of humor. Because Dave is more private than me, I won't share the details of what gifts accomplished each of those things, but I will say that he gave me a great compliment upon opening it all: that it was, indeed, very thoughtful.

Next up, dad. I better get thinking.

Outfit of the week

Another gem from the Morgan and Greta repertoire.
To quote Cat Deeley, "I mean, have you ever....?"

With those little criss-cross back straps, front and back views were totally necessary. I have no excuse for adding the side view as well. Except, well, have you ever...?

Scoot!

Last year, when she turned two, we got Clio a scooter for her birthday. She took on step onto it, promptly fell off and cried and insisted it go back.

This year, we tried again. When I took Clio to Little Things, a toy store in Park Slope, to make a birthday list, she rode the display scooter around the store the whole time, gleefully sailing from the dolls to the arts and crafts and back again. Upon hearing this, Nonny and Papa offered to get her the scooter for this birthday, so I went back and bought it in orange. Clio loved it upon opening and then refused to ride it. Wouldn't even set a foot on the thing.

My first mistake? Orange. Turns out, Clio wanted a pink scooter. Not knowing this was truly foolish of me- everything these days comes down to pink or red. So much so that I had to take all the pink toys away from Clio and Elsie the other day unless there were two identical things so they could each have one. When I realized that I only had two clean kid cups left at lunchtime, and that one of them was pink (but the other one was not), I had to do some quick thinking to avoid a disaster, and gave one girl a pink cup with a green straw, one a green cup with a pink straw. In a world where everything must match and pink rules, this was, apparently, just enough. I also need to realize that pink may not be just the age, and that it's time to stop forcing my preferences on my daughter as if I know better: when I was about her age and my parents re-painted by bedroom, I chose orange. Guess what color my bedroom is now? Not pink.


My second mistake? None of Clio's friends have scooters, and right now she has little interest in doing anything that someone else isn't already doing. I suppose peer pressure can be a useful thing: to get Clio riding, we simply brought her scooter to Lydia's block party and suggested Lydia take it for a spin.


Tricky. Maybe even devious. But effective: Eventually, Clio decided she wanted to have a turn, too.
I think it's also helpful to have a destination, and the conga band was a pretty intruiging one at the party.


Let's hope there are regular bands of scooter-riders in our neighborhood in Boulder- I think Clio shows real potential; she just needs "encouragement" of the non-parental variety.

And yes, she has a helmet; but that has been a complete deal breaker, so while she's in the barely-standing-and-barely-moving-while-being-supervised-phase, I think we'll let it go.

Eleri Ruth, Daredevil

As if it weren't bad enough that when you turn your back for two second, Eleri is at the top of the stairs or even all the way into the bathroom contemplating the toilet bowl cleaner (or just the toilet bowl), she has a new trick, which is yet to be captured on camera: she climbs right on up on the coffee table, crawl to one end, and sits down with her bottom hanging right over the edge. So now you need to hover in the living room to block against two major falls that always seem imminent. And when she's not climbing, she's busy unplugging sockets from outlets (and trying to plug them back in), or trying to get in to the kitchen cabinets to sort out the cuisinart blades.

One good thing about a fresh start in a new house: we can plan around this adventuressness from day one.

Status Update

We move in less than two weeks.

We have yet to sell the house, and, largely because of this, we haven't packed a box. If you came over, you would never suspect that such a big change was afoot. But I've always said that that's the way it is with moving (or having a baby): after a stretch of anticipation, the tangible change itself is quite sudden. One day you live here, the next day you live there. One day you're pregnant, the next, you have a child.

It's been very hard to know how much to let Clio in on what's going on. When I was pregnant with Eleri, we didn't really start talking about the baby all that much until I was about 8 months pregnant- to Clio, my belly grew so gradually that the change was imperceptible; time to a two year old is so big and stretched out relative to an adult that we figured starting the conversation too soon would only lead to impatience and, possibly, anxiety. Ever since Clio turned three, she's been talking about turning four, and I have tried to convey how much time lies between two events: I describe all the seasonal changes and major holiday milestones that need to occur before she has another birthday; I stretch out my description itself to make her feel the distance still to be traveled. But here we are, less than two weeks out from a different kind of milestone, and I found myself a little surprised when Clio's friend Elsie showed her Colorado on a map in her coat closet yesterday. There was something so tangible about it, and I feared, in that moment, that I haven't sone enough to get Clio prepared. I had pointed the state of our future residence out in an atlas recently, and showed Clio the route from here to there (it was a road atlas, and, yes, sometimes I forget that Clio is just three) but somehow Elsie's map, with it's brightly colored states and clip-art rendering of mountains in Colorado, was, ironically, so much more real.

We have talked about moving to the mountains. When I talk about our new house, Clio remembers one of the rentals we looked at together, one where the owner lived downstairs and had a dog, and she asks me if our yard will have a stuffed animal in it. I tell her yes and hope I will remember to arrange this when we arrive. We talk about her new school as a place where kids catch butterflies in nets, because when we visited, some children were outside doing just that. We went to Ikea today to pick up additional sheets for Clio's bed (and to clear out of the house for a couple of showings), and as we pulled into the parking lot Clio announced that she would like a Cinderella bed. I asked her what a Cinderella bed looks like, and she said, "Just like Elsie's" - Elsie just got a cascade of white netting over her toddler bed, an attempt of her mom's to help the transition to a bedroom shared with a baby sister. We got our own netting and ceiling-mount ring, and I told Clio she would have to wait for this special princess bed until we got to Boulder, to make sure there is something tangible to look forward to.

But we haven't really talked about the leaving part. We didn't tell Clio yesterday that this was her last playdate with Elsie (though Elsie made a wonderful picture book for Clio that tells the story of their play time together, and she said to "have fun in Colorado"). And I can't quite bring myself to explain that she's almost done going to Titi's house. It seems easier to avoid that anxiety, and to let it happens as it happens. But then I wonder if I am forcing my own preferences on to her.

We have reached the stage of the "lasts" - last mom's night out, last dinner with Elsie's parents- and I find this difficult. My friend Lila had offered to organize going-away drinks for Dave and I, and said something in offering that really resonated with me: she said, "I understand if you don't want to do an event at all; you might not want that moment of rupture." This was a few weeks ago, and as the moment approaches, I realize she is exactly right: I don't want the tear, the abrupt moment of good bye. I would rather slip away, glide into my "new life." But I worry that by not giving Clio more warning, we are creating, rather than avoiding, a moment of rupture.

At the same time, I am aware that kids live in the moment, and that Clio will make new friends and will quickly adjust. Kids trust their parents, and take their cues from us in any given situation. A friend who is going through some major changes of her own said a therapist reassured her that whatever you tell the kids is "normal", they will just take to be normal. So I'm trying to learn from Clio and just live in the present. Tonight, after Dave went off to the office to finish up one last proposal and after Eleri went to bed, Clio and I went outside and sat on the front stoop and blew bubbles. She chased after them and reached up into the sky, pointing out airplanes as the sunlight faded. She allowed me to take her picture, directing me to photograph her shoes, and made very silly faces. I squeezed her tight and told her I loved her, and I'm not sure I've heard anything sweeter than the exact quality of her voice when she said "I love you too."