I Can't Help It

I am well aware that I should not compare my children, but I can't help myself.  

There is no mistaking a Gutsy Girl.

Here's one-year-old Jillson.  Blue eyes, two bottom teeth:

And almost-one-year-old Bronwen.  Blues eyes, two bottom teeth:

 One-year-old Madelyn:

And Bronwen again:

Madelyn:

Bronwen, Bronwen, Bronwen:

I could stare at her all day.  Lucky for me, I can.

Monday Music Mojo: G. Love Reconsidered

It's Monday morning, and back to reality for me.  The Gutsy Dad is back to work after two weeks off (the kids were on vacation during that first week), but I've been working these past two weeks as usual.  It's been awesome to be able to head off to my work obligations leaving the kids in his care.  This past week he did most of the ferrying around to preschool etc as well.  We made a great team.

Now we're back to the regular routine: he is up and gone before dawn.  On good days he is home in time for dinner, and we have more good days than bad.

So.

Did anyone else go through a G. Love & Special Sauce phase in the 90s? Anyone still in that phase?  I feel like G. Love was a good gateway into funky music for those of us who are (were) more staid.  Edgy enough for us to feel, well, edgy listening to it. But not so edgy as to be totally vulgar, offensive, or valorizing guns and the oppression of women. (Pardon me while I step back down from my soapbox.)

Anyway, I've recently rediscovered G. Love (without the sauce). Somehow I missed the 2006 release of his album "Lemonade," which I've been listening to a lot lately, along with his 2011 "Fixin' to Die." As it turns out, he hangs with a few other guys I like: Jack Johnson and Donavon Frankenreiter.  

I really appreciate an artist who can evolve with the years and who can continue to put out good records whatever the genre. Someone who isn't as obviously a creation of the industry.  I wouldn't have predicted it in the 90s, but G. Love seems to be versatile like that.  Here's a sampling of my recent discoveries. You'll notice a huge difference in style between the first two songs and the second two.

In my running mix I've been digging:

Thanks and Praise (featuring Jasper)

Ain't That Right

The kids and I are enjoying these in Jay Jay:

Rainbow (featuring Jack Johnson)

Home

This is a family favorite.  Madelyn requests it in the car when we drive home from preschool.  "Mommy, play my home song!" Then she sings along (in a twang): "I buh-lieve that it's time for me to come home!" This is also my favorite of the videos. (The kids crack up at the chicken at the beginning every time.)

Speaking of home and silly chickens, here's what I get to look forward to when I do come home. Three little chickens, mine all mine.

April Round-up

I'm not going to let myself go back (too far) to play catch up. It makes me sad for all the wonderful memories in March and February that I've neglected to report here, but I'm in need of embracing an "onward" sort of attitude these days. Note to Gutsy Self: just because you didn't blog about it doesn't mean that it didn't happen or wasn't meaningful.

So, scrolling through some April photos, here's what caught my eye today.

Easter Day.  Dinner & drinks. People in various states of casualness.  The Gutsy Dad almost always changes his clothes right after we get home from church.  I tend to slip on flip-flops and carry on in my church clothes: who has time to change? Things I love in this picture: the heron carving above my kitchen sink that I found years ago while visiting my sister-in-law (before she was my sister-in-law) and her family when the GD and I were still just dating.  My parents' dog Charlotte lounging on our kitchen floor. The glimpse of Tilly's favorite toy in the background in the playroom.  My birds from Lake Constance on the wall.

I am completely in love with my own children, and I am not ashamed to be proud of them.  Their hearts, their spirit, their creative minds, their quirks, their beauty. Here they are before our Easter service with flowers to decorate the children's cross. 

A favorite birthday present.  My mother asked, laughing at me a bit I think, "You really want a beach cart for your birthday?" HECK YES and thank you!  This thing is awesome. 

She still falls asleep everywhere and anywhere.  Here she is during story time, sleeping on the Gutsy Dad. Ali Edwards once wrote a beautiful blog post about her family dog, parts of whom appeared in almost every family picture. This is one thing I love about my own photos. Our two loyal and lovable fur kids always manage to get parts of themselves in the photos.  Here we feature Tilly's back under the GD's arm and Zephie's rump by Maddie's elbow. 

I've been meaning to write about the physical beauty of our church.  It is my style. Of course, it's not necessary for a church to be beautiful for me to love it, but it certainly makes church all the more enjoyable. This is the church's playground. I would have LOVED this swing set/arc as a kid.

 Perfect blue skies for Easter. The sanctuary was filled with lilies and blue hydrangeas. Perfection. They didn't need to tell me twice when they mentioned we could take the flowers home with us after the service. I currently have a GIANT hydrangea potted plant on my dining table.  It must have 15 blooms on it with more to come.  I need to get this thing in the ground.

I made a frozen key lime pie for Easter dinner.  (Ina Garten's recipe.)  Since it uses egg yolks but not the whites, I channeled my Nana and made meringues with the whites. 

I love that my parents were game to join in our weekly "Five of Us" photo on Easter Sunday.

Letters with Madelyn

Since I'll have the one-on-one reading going on with Jillson in 2012, I figured I better set up something to do with Madelyn.

This wasn't hard to figure out.

Recently I have been following Karen Grunberg's blog. She is an amazing woman on many levels (her position with Google Chrome, for example, or her art therapy initiative, or the careful way she blends traditions from her Turkish upbringing with her current family's traditions, just for starters). But one thing that astounds me about her is the way she seems to make a plan (many, many plans, actually) and stick to it. And she documents it. And shares it. She has so many things going on at once. I'd love to see her calendar. 

In short, she is an inspiration.

So. In addition to stealing the "Us Right Now" idea from her, I will be stealing her "Letters with Nathaniel" project idea. I won't go into all the details here (you can read about it on Karen's site), but basically we will be focusing on a letter a week (or every two weeks). 

I think we'll eat foods that start with the letter, think of songs with the letter, do art projects with the letter, and--naturally--make a book about it: Madelyn's Big Book of Letters. Or Madelyn's Alphabet.

When I ran the idea by Madelyn, she was ecstatic. She said "Oh, Mommy! Oh, Mommy, YES! I LOVE letters. Can we do M? Can we please do M? I LOVE M."

I guess we'll start with M!

Anyway. We'll see how it goes. Karen's site has links to many other sites with game and craft and food ideas for the chosen letter, so I won't have to dig too far for ideas. I'm not sure what sort of notebook we'll use to collect our projects, but I will just figure that out as we go along.

Can't wait!

THREE!

Today, my sweet Maddie James turned three. THREE! I can't believe it.

(Today, also, my sweet husband had three surgical procedures done in his nose and sinus area, so we celebrated Madelyn's birthday yesterday.)

All she wanted was to invite a few neighbors over and to offer them cake and ice cream and--her favorite--candy canes. So that's exactly what we did.

Simple set-up:

Store-bought cake (as I was not about to try to produce the much-desired "Dora Fairy Princess" cake). Miraculously, Publix has no problem with this task. As it turned out, this cake was pretty darn tasty.

We did save a few birthday traditions for the "real" day. Madelyn got to use the red "You Are Special Today" plate all day with the birthday train, of course. She spent most of the day with Meme and Kiki and her sisters playing with her new toys, while the Gutsy Dad and I hung out at the hospital.

Time (like an ever-rolling stream) certainly has born these three years away rather swiftly. The magical birth experience we had in Germany seems like it occurred just the other day, and yet it feels like something out of ancient history, a different world, a completely different era as well. But it just happened. The crazy paradox of time in a mother's memory.

Sigh.

Three years ago today in Germany, our little hedgehog was born:

Two years ago today in Kansas, she turned one:

One year ago today in Kansas, she turned two:

And now, oh my word, she is THREE.

Not Exactly the Sugar Plum Fairy

I have got to get this kid signed up for ballet or gymnastics or something in the new year. She is so physical, so active. 

She is a maniac with the monkey moves (swinging on and off things, climbing, balancing) and prefers to wear a leotard and rehearsal skirt every single day. 

She learns real ballet moves and terminology from YouTube ballet videos on the iPad and from Angelina Ballerina on TV. 

She loves to make up her own moves. She gives incomprehensible "French" names to her moves and then tells us what they are in English, such as the "cat step" featured below.

Family Time

We are enjoying a few days of family time, what with the Gutsy Dad home on vacation. We don't have a lot of plans, just enjoying each other's company. And sleep ins!

I am trying to relieve myself of the pressure of feeling we should be "doing something" with this time. I am trying to just "go with the flow," which Jillson informs me means: "don't worry about stuff, Mom."

Speaking of the kiddos, Madelyn recently informed me that the Baby Jesus loved nutella and that is why I should give her some nutella for breakfast. When I told her no, she told me the Baby Jesus was sad at me about that. Way to bring out the big guns, kid. But still, no nutella for you.

That is all for today. I need to hurry off to do nothing with my family.

The Still, Small Hours (Monday Music Mojo of sorts)

This morning I was up at 5:22 to nurse Bronwen. It was a cold morning by Savannah standards (45 degrees), and it was raining. The Gutsy Dad was downstairs fixing his breakfast, and I let myself enjoy a few minutes cocooned in with Bronwen.

Soon Tilly swatted the side of the bed (numerous times) to ask to come up. I patted the bed, and she hopped up and curled into a donut shape on the foot of the Gutsy Dad's side of the bed. Her tail was over her nose. I guess she thought it was cold, too.

The Gutsy Dad came up around 5:30 to say he was leaving, and we laughed because he said Tilly had come downstairs to ask for some petting. After he patted her on the head, she ran right back upstairs. We think she was asking his permission (or, more likely, checking to see if he was on his way out the door) to get up on the bed before she came up and asked me. Funny dog.

For a while it was just me, Bronwen, and Tilly. We all drifted off to sleep, safe on our own little island of drowsy contentedness.

At 6:07 I stirred because I heard some whispers, and the next thing I knew Madelyn was in the bed. Usually, this is a recipe for disaster. Her almost-three-ish-ness, love of bouncing on beds, and inability to resist poking her sleeping baby sister in the face all tend to lead to much disruption and firm admonishments.

But this morning I slid to the middle of the bed, and Madelyn snuggled under the covers, sharing my pillow, letting me put my arm around her and nestling into my chest. 

This is so rare.

She agreed to whisper. This is also rare.

"I hear something, Mommy."

"Yes, it's the rain."

"It is raining outside?"

"Yes."

"But I hope Papa will not get wet."

"He's okay. He has his rain jacket on for running."

"Good. I am glad he has that on."

I love Madelyn's concern for others.

We stayed there together only for a few minutes more, but they were good, long minutes. She talked about her sheep costume for the Christmas pageant and asked if she could "cry it on" while watching Angelina Ballerina later today. Then she told me that she was ready to go downstairs for breakfast, but that first she wanted to go downstairs and tickle her Groovy Girl doll and wiggle her own body and dance a little. She slid off the bed and was off, in the dark, to do those things by herself downstairs.

I didn't want those minutes to end. Lying there, baring her thoughts to me in careful whispers, Madelyn seemed so little and so young to me, which is also rare these days. Thanks to Bronwen's arrival she has seemed--suddenly--to be a big girl. 

But we have to remember she is little. We have to let her be little. We expect a lot from her, just about as much as we expect from her older sister, which is unfair. Yes, she is trying our patience in so many ways these days, which makes us increase our expectations (and our sternness), but we really need to remember that she is really only nearly three.

Oh, it was wonderful to start the day with her, to share the still, small hours with her before the alarm had even gone off. It made me think of this: "Our lives are made in these small hours."

Time falls away, but these small hours, these little wonders still remain.

Performances, Planned and Un

All five of us were in the Richmond Hill Hometown Holidays (or something like that) Parade yesterday morning. All children performed beautifully.

Madelyn rode with her preschool classmates on their float, with the Gutsy Dad and Bronwen trailing behind. Here she is modeling her reindeer mask.

 And singing:

As you can see, she is wearing the same outfit as Friday. She's been adamant about dressing like "Santa's daughter." She took the Christmas-y jacket from one ensemble, paired it with a different red dress, and added black boots. (At first she said she wanted to be Santa, then Jillson said Madelyn couldn't be Santa because Santa was a boy, so I suggested she pretend she was Mrs. Claus. Maddie explained that she couldn't be Mrs. Claus because she didn't want to be a grown-up, and so she settled on being Santa's daughter.)

Do you remember those days? Those days when you just wanted to wear your favorite thing over and over and over again?

(When I was somewhere around Maddie and Jillson's age, I remember being very attached to a t-shirt that had a few little fish on it. I think there is a photograph of me somewhere wearing this shirt. It was in Florida, and I was picking grapefruit. In the photo, either my mother or my beloved Nana was leaning down to help me. I wore either blue or yellow shorts and, I think, sandals. I'd love to find that photograph.)

But I digress.

Jillson rode on the Daisy Scout float with her troop, and I walked alongside with the other Daisy moms.

It was a gorgeous day, and for a small town, Richmond Hill had quite a showing.

We spent the afternoon and evening with good, new friends, who drove in from Skidaway with their three kids to share some barbecue, conversation, and chaos. It's always good to find friends with whom the whole family seems to get along.

At one point, five of the six kids put on quite the impromptu Christmas-Ballet-Princess-Fairy-Fashion Show, popping out from behind our still-undecorated tree, proclaiming what they were supposed to be, and doing little dances. (Bronwen slept through it.)

I love this time of year.

One Thing at a Time

This is the time of year when I am filled with ambition. I want to do everything. I want to decorate the house. I want to do special arts and crafts with the kids. I want to volunteer. I want to listen to every Christmas hymn, anthem, and ditty. I want to say yes to every invitation. I want to run more. I want to prepare for the new year and new challenges. I want to get a job and do it well. I want to be a better mother. 

I want to do everything I normally do (or everything I say I normally do but secretly don't do) and then add, add, add.

I know it is not possible. This is not a post about that. I don't need anyone to tell me "you can't do it all." I get that. I am not frustrated by that. I am not actually trying to do it all.

This is a post about wanting to do it all, and hoping that the want never goes away. This desire to do and be everything fuels me. This is such an exciting world; I get to be in it.

But ambition, when allowed to run rampant as it does this time of year, can be a bit maddening. It really needs direction. I say that because this week has flown by, and I feel like I've done everything and nothing. When, yesterday, I suddenly realized it was November 30th and that tomorrow (which is now today) would be December 1st, I was completely shocked. 

How did it sneak up on me?

It was, rather suddenly, fish or cut bait time for several seasonal traditions that I wanted to start on December 1st. I decided to fish.

Or, rather, to bird.

Two weeks ago at our church we participated in a morning of prepping for advent.  (Never mind the strangeness of preparing for a season which is all about preparing for something else.) I happily found myself at a table with my three children and my husband, and four out of the five of us were PAPERCRAFTING together.  Imagine my insane delight.

The idea is that each paper bird holds a part of the nativity story, and that each day in December we would read part of the story and talk about it as a family. Thus, through the season of advent, we would hear the Christmas story bird by bird.

So yesterday, when I suddenly realized the date, I got motivated. Madelyn and I finished it all up at home together. We found the sticks in our backyard together. We added numbers using stickers from my stash together. I added the verses and yarn by myself, and Maddie hung them on the branches by herself. I was so happy that it worked. That there were ways she could help. And that we actually did it in time to start "using" it today.

As I sat there trimming out 25 verses and tying on 25 pieces of yarn (which takes a lot longer than you would think), I realized that my seasonal surge of ambition was finally being directed somewhere.  I felt calm. I felt productive. I felt hopeful for everything else that is coming this month and next year.

I thought, one thing at a time, just do one thing at a time, and enjoy the time you are choosing to spend doing this one thing. You can't (and don't want to) snap your fingers and have all 25 birds done at once. You have to do it bird by bird.

Bird by bird!

How could I possibly have forgotten about Bird by Bird? I've loved this book (whose title has nothing to do with papercrafted advent birds) since my freshman year of college. I had this passage tacked on my wall over my desk all through grad school:

Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish one short assignment. -- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

One short assignment. Done.

Where She Sleeps

As I've written before, Madelyn recently went through a phase in which she got up during naptime, snuck around, and did naughty things. (Remember the confectioner's sugar incident? The Nivea? The removal of every single item from the bureau? No? Where've you been?!)

On a much sweeter note, she also went through (and occasionally still revisits) a phase of simply sleeping in different places. It was startling at first. But then, it sort of grew on me. Especially as I started contemplating the thought-process behind each of these special sleep choices.

It started in her room.

She is supposed to sleep in her bed on the bottom bunk, like this:

Small bits of evidence began to appear, evidence that she wasn't just sweetly lying there all nap long, such as the sneaky addition of socks on her hands, below:

Then she got more daring, climbing up to the top bunk to try out her sister's bed.  (I nearly had a heart attack when I went in after naptime that day and couldn't find her.) 

Soon she ventured out onto the floor of her room, making nests out of blankets and books:

This one is my favorite. It is so carefully constructed:

Then things started to get really interesting. On several occasions we found her sleeping in the hall:

Or on the floor in our bedroom (pardon our mess):

Or having made a snuggle nest on Tilly's dogbed! (Please note -- she took the pillow off our bed):

And on several occasions, we have found her tucked in behind the bunkbeds in the kids' dollbed storage area. What, you can't see her in this picture?

Here's a close-up. Yes, she is wedged into a doll-sized pack'n'play.

Same thing, different day:

Back to her own bedroom. While I would certainly award some creativity points here, I was a bit miffed to have to refold all the clothes that normally go in Jillson's bottom drawer:

Finally, and most strangely, we had this:

This is our guest room. She got under the desk, under the chair, and under the rug. Don't ask me how.

The wheels in that charming little brain of hers are ever-turning, I tell you. 

Ever. Turning.

(All photos taken July thru November 2011.)