On Not Being Able to Take It On

What a week. How to sum up?

Well:  let’s go back to 2^nd grade, when Viva first started at the school she currently attends. Pretty much since then we have been hearing about two trips that fifth graders can go on each year:  a week of Science Camp in March, and a week on an historic trip to Washington, DC and colonial Williamsburg during spring break in April.

Considering we have been hearing about both trips since 2^nd grade, and rather intensely since 4^th grade, and super intensely since the start of 5^th grade, it was a no-brainer that we were going somehow to get Viva to attend. The DC trip is super expensive and is actually coordinated by another local school. They invite our students as a courtesy. As we started talking about this in the fall, we held out hope that a miracle would happen and our ship (full of money) would come in and one of us would be able to accompany Viva on this trip. Unfortunately this did not happen. We put down a deposit and began making payments on a ticket just for her. And then in January we discovered that only one other kid from her class was going (due to the huge expense) and that none of the teachers from her school were going, and that they were having trouble booking enough chaperones. We did not feel comfortable sending her 2,600 miles away with complete strangers. So we made the decision to pull out of the trip, losing a $400 deposit, but with the wonderful prospect of Science Camp still in the offing.

Science Camp! A week in the wilderness! No technology! Hiking! Archery! Canoeing! Bunking in a cabin with nine of your girlfriends! Smores! Campfires! Being away from your boring parents and annoying siblings for five whole days! What could be better?!

The weekend before the trip, we were running about getting last minute items – a small flashlight, a disposable camera, extra socks. It was very exciting. On Sunday, we reviewed the packing list and taught Viva how to roll her clothes to pack for camping. On Sunday evening, after we came back from the playground and had dinner, Viva said she didn’t feel well. I touched her head. It was burning. I put her in the shower, from which she had to exit promptly to throw up.

OH WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY….

I gave her some ibuprofen and put her to bed. Sweet Dub came home from his Sunday gig and we conferred. We were both heartsick. In the morning, despite our reservations, we decided she should try to go to camp. She said she felt fine. She felt slightly warm to the touch and her energy seemed good. We agreed to let her go.

Which is how I ended up on Interstate 10 at 8 PM on St. Patrick’s Day, with one kid in her pajamas sleeping in her car seat, driving out to pick up the other kid 90-some miles away, all the hell the way out in a cabin in the woods in Riverside County, because she had a fever of 103.5. We didn’t get back home until nearly 11:30 PM, at which point I realized we didn’t have any ibuprofen, since we sent it with her and the camp staff confiscated it.  Sweet Dub had to venture out to find a 24-hour pharmacy and nobody got to bed before midnight (except Ceeya, who slept through it all and was Full Of Beans at 6 AM.)

The next day, when we took her to see the pediatrician, her doctor asked me, “Do you think it’s a virus?” at which point I wanted to punch her in the face, because guess what, I haven’t been to medical school – maybe YOU could tell ME what YOU think it is?

But I didn’t punch her in the face, and for the next couple of days we treated it as the flu until we concluded that it just wasn’t getting better, and due to Sweet Dub’s crazy schedule this week, on Thursday I ended up having to take both kids to Urgent Care after I got home from work and we stayed there for the better part of three hours. And we got a chest X-ray, and my kid had a fever of 100.8, and then they told me they thought she must have walking pneumonia, which doesn’t even make sense since usually with walking pneumonia you barely know you’re sick, and Viva at this point had had a fever since Sunday and had stopped eating and was barely moving. I have never seen her so sick and so depressed.

Over the weekend, after a couple days of antibiotics, she perked up. We are tentatively looking forward to her birthday weekend this coming weekend, during which we are having her best friend over to go to the movies, to Dave & Buster’s and to stay for a sleepover.

But I am still so sad for her. She went back to school today, and all the kids were talking about Science Camp. I had paid for a Science Camp T-shirt, which I forgot about (!) and which she received today. When I called to talk to her after school, she told me it makes her sad to look at it and she wants me to take it away.

There is nothing I can do to make this better. This is one of the worst parts of being a parent, watching your kid have to suffer disappointment – particularly over something that they have been looking forward to for such a long time. Viva was literally X-ing out the days until Science Camp on her calendar all month.

This is just a big sucky thing. My heart hurts for her. I can’t carry this for her, much as I want to. I can only watch, and sit with her, and tell her I’m so sorry for how much it sucks.

And P.S. that is why I didn’t blog last week. Tune in next time, hopefully for something more uplifting…

Nuggets

Photo:  3 pigs craft and flannel board story - Creative Commons, by Mommachels-Flickr

I have only touched briefly on the school changes that have happened with us over the past few months, but I want to give a bit more background because this has impacted us a great deal. Around December of last year, it was becoming painfully clear that (1) due to staffing changes, Ceeya’s preschool was not providing the type of care we had become accustomed to; and (2) it was becoming cost-prohibitive to send her there. The preschool was struggling financially so it was understaffed and couldn’t afford to bring in different teachers, and we became aware of an exodus of kids from the school.

Ceeya’s preschool teacher had taught 3^rd and 4^th grade previously but she had no classroom experience with this age group. I didn’t feel she was engaging the kids at the appropriate level – she seemed to default to arts and crafts and coloring, which I felt was a missed opportunity for this age group. They are little sponges for information at that age, and school can be so much fun for them. I also noticed that Ceeya’s toileting hygiene started to slip because the teacher wasn’t as on top of it as the previous teacher. The children in the class were a mix of three-and-four-year-olds, so they were all potty trained but still at the age where I would say they needed regular reinforcement on how to wipe and wash their hands.  At home in the bathroom with her I realized she had stopped wiping at all and no longer even flushed the toilet. It was infuriating and I had to have repeated conversations with her about how important it was to keep herself clean. I also had conversations with the teacher that seemed to go nowhere, since there was no change.

As things deteriorated, we started working with Ceeya at home in the evenings and on weekends with materials we got from Lakeshore and various online sites because we felt her fine motor skills were stagnating (a relevant concern due to her sensory processing issues) and quite frankly because she was bored with school.

At the same time, I started looking into other preschools in our area, most of which were (1) just as, if not more, expensive and (2) not accepting new students. The situation was looking desperate. And then the skies parted and the fates conspired to have me run into a former coworker/ friend/ neighbor at an event that I would not usually have been at, but was asked to attend because another coworker had a dentist appointment. And there, my problems were solved, because she told me about a FREE LA Universal Preschool (LAUP) program in our old neighborhood, which was collaborating with a FREE pilot pre-K program at Viva’s school (which, hello? How did I not hear about it?). They were in need of additional kids for the program because it was still new. 

So in February, Ceeya began attending two FREE educational programs and our only cost now is before and after care, which saves us $500 a month. Instead of coming home with coloring pages, Ceeya now comes home with sheets to help her trace her name. She is learning to read sight words (the, and, this, etc.) and can read some books by herself. In LAUP, they have done a unit on the life cycle – so they have hatched real live chicks from eggs, they have a tank full of tadpoles, and they recently acquired caterpillars and are learning about chrysalises. She has a new best friend named Miles, who is crazy about her.

All of this is great, except for one thing:  the naps.

Due to the structure of the LAUP/Pre-K programs, there is no nap time scheduled for these kids. The person running the LAUP program also runs the after-school program, which includes older kids. There is no separate quiet space for the younger kids to nap.

Ceeya is awesome when she’s well-rested. When she’s not, it is – how do you say? – challenging. Basically, she falls apart at the slightest perceived provocation. Witness, last week at around 5:30:

I have just gotten home and I have gone into the other room to change my clothes. Ceeya and Viva have unpacked their lunches and are sitting on their bed talking.

Ceeya:  Guess what we had for snack today?

Viva:  What?

Ceeya:  Tacos and chips.

Viva:  Chicken nuggets.

Ceeya:  [falls out screaming and crying]

Mama [runs into their room]:  What happened?

Viva [wearily]: I have no idea, all I said was chicken nuggets.

Ceeya [after 3 minutes of unintelligible cry-talking]:  I said I had tacos and she said I had chicken nuggets!  [screaming and crying again]

Mama: I don’t think that’s what she meant.

Ceeya:  But I didn’t HAVE chicken nuggets! I had tacos!

Mama:  I understand. So if YOU know you had tacos, then you had tacos. What difference does it make what she says?

Ceeya:  Because she is MEAN.

Viva: WHAT? Oh my God. I didn’t even –

Mama:  Viva.

Viva:  What?

Mama:  She is deliriously tired. Let’s not make things worse. Let me talk to her. Why don’t you go relax yourself in the other room, okay?

Viva goes off in a huff. I am left to put Ceeya back together from a little puddle on the floor.

And repeat this scenario in various incarnations to infinity, and that is what our life is like right now on the weekdays. Sometimes Ceeya passes out at about 6:30 and we have to bathe and pajama her in a half-conscious state. Sometimes depending on his schedule Sweet Dub is able to pick them up from school at 2:30 and can manage to get Ceeya to take a nap by 3:30 or 4:00, but by that point since she wants to sleep for two hours she is impossible to wake up. Either way, it is not a good time.

 

For future discussion:  Ceeya just misses the cutoff point (must be 5 by October 1) for kindergarten for the fall. Her pre-K teacher says there is no point to her doing another year of pre-K. In the meantime, Viva’s teacher is saying that Viva is at the top of her 4^th/5^th grade class and she won’t have anything left to learn in 5^th grade next year. I really wish I could just take one year off and take the kids out of school and travel. There is that whole pesky “how would we eat” dealio though.  Hmmm…

 

It's Personal

In my Internet travels today, I came across this article, in which the author describes how she read her 5-year-old daughter’s diary.

Her daughter had asked repeatedly for a diary so she could be like her older brother. She was clearly thrilled to have it, and happy to be a big kid and have her own secret book with its own key. She told her mom not to look, and she laboriously wrote down her secrets in it. The mom, Kim, started to worry that something was wrong.

She unlocked the diary and was pleasantly surprised at what she found. Her daughter, who at nearly 6 years old is still mastering how to print, was merely cataloguing all the things which made her happy.

Her relief was so great that she took a picture of the pages with all their adorable misspellings and posted them on the Internet – I’m not sure why, except to reassure the Internet, who probably was not all that worried about it, that her daughter was perfectly fine.

To me, it’s one thing if her daughter left the unlocked diary lying around; particularly if she left it lying open. It would be difficult to resist a peek. But she didn’t. Kim rationalized unlocking it by creating a problem that didn’t exist:  her daughter was being secretive, thus she must have something to hide.  

Again, this is a 5-year-old girl.

Every child is different. But if she suspected something were seriously wrong, Kim could ask her to draw a picture. She could ask her if something’s bothering her. She could just talk to her. She doesn’t describe anything that I can see would trigger this sort of reaction – for example, was her daughter having trouble sleeping, did her eating habits change, was there some sort of radical change in her personality?  It sounds to me like her daughter was having a pretty developmentally normal moment, establishing boundaries, indicating that she is an individual with opinions and ideas that she is working out.

I understand some parents believe that they have the right to poke around their child’s rooms and through their belongings. To a certain extent, I agree that a child cannot expect unconditional privacy – sometimes poking around through their things is the way you find out there’s a fundraiser at school, or that they need $4 for a field trip. But if unlocking the diary did not already cross the line, publishing the thoughts that an evidently sweet and happy kid believed were private certainly did.

With the omnipresence of technology in everyday life, sometimes we forget that blogging and the Internet have not actually been around that long. We forget that we are kind of making these rules up as we go along.

I have shared before that Viva and I keep a mother-daughter journal. While I may occasionally share the things I write to her (as long as they are not too personal), I would not share anything she wrote in the journal with anyone without asking her. And honestly, I would think twice about asking her because I AM her parent and thus the power differential already exists. I wouldn’t want her to feel she had to comply.

I guess what I am trying to say is:  ease up a little bit out there, Internet parents.  Tread carefully. And this is as much a reminder to myself as it is to anyone else.

Flip Flop

I am seeing a shift in my children these days, and it is this:

The one who was miserably bored with school, now—with the shift to a new half-preschool, half-pre-K situation—jumps out of the car and runs to school. She chatters to me excitedly about volcanoes. She tells me they had green eggs and ham to celebrate Dr. Seuss’ birthday. She is eager to see the fuzzy chicks which are going to hatch ANY SECOND NOW in the incubator in her classroom.

Meanwhile, the one who has always LOVED school, who was not at all apprehensive about her 4^th/5^th grade combination class at the beginning of the year (despite my privately held misgivings), is now dragging her butt to school. Black History Month (more specifically slavery) is one reason.  Another is that the 4^th graders were promised a whole week away from the 5^th graders, who were all supposed to go to Science Camp for the week last week. And then only two 5^th graders went to Science Camp (which at $200 a pop, is out of range for many of the families at school). She was looking forward to her grade having their teacher all to themselves for once. The 5^th graders are a pain in the ass, a thorn in her side.

I am nonplussed. I am of course happy that Ceeya loves her new school, which she started in February (and I can’t believe I haven’t yet posted about that yet). But I am bummed that Viva is now really disliking school. Her grades are still good, but she’s really struggling with her attitude. I know, life is not all peaches and roses – Lord, do I know. But Viva is generally a pretty happy kid and now her general mood is one of Funk. And not in the way that I like.

We are planning Spring Break and her 10^th birthday is coming up and I’m hoping that will help. And meanwhile, we keep talking things through. We keep talking. (And in Ceeya’s case, we keep talking loudly, generally right over somebody as they are in the middle of a sentence, and we get offended if it is gently pointed out to us that such behavior is rude, and then we tell everyone within earshot that we don’t want to talk to them ever again and they are no longer our best friend. And then twenty minutes later we wrap our arms around them and squeeze, lest they forget that they are always our best friend and must never leave us. Oh, Ceeya. She is a complicated little person.)

Inescapable, Inexplicable. History.

In my lunch time travels yesterday, I came across the above graffito spray painted across someone’s garage. When I shared it with the family later, Viva said:  “Los Angeles? I don’t think so. I think probably Birmingham.”

 Whew, Black History Month, you are kicking my ass. You are giving my baby headaches, and stomach aches, and nausea, and trembly legs. You are interrupting her sleep.  For it appears that in 4^th grade, the gloves have come off, and the reality of slavery is being presented to my child in class.

 (“Not the worst parts though,” she says. “Mr. B____ skips over the really bad parts.”)

They covered the Civil Rights Movement earlier, and that, she could get behind – of course, it is empowering to hear about taking a stand and forcing a change  – but slavery knocked her down.  My kid is super-sensitive to violence of any kind and she is also hyper-vigilant to any kind of injustice, so learning about the details of the slave trade literally makes her ill. We talked about the Middle Passage yesterday, and of how mind-bogglingly inhumane it must have been, beyond what we can imagine.

 “I hate history,” Viva said, her sweet eyes clouded. “Why do we have to learn history?”

 “Because those that don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it*,” I said. “And because it still influences who you are today. You are descended from slaves. Do you realize how strong your ancestors had to be, physically and emotionally, spiritually – to survive that? That blood is in your veins.”

 “That’s true. But still, I can’t wait until this month is over,” Viva said.

“It’s not easy,” I said. “I know, it’s tough.”

 “I still can’t understand how people could be so mean to other people just based on the color of their skin – how they thought we were inferior,” Viva said. “I mean, they thought slaves were stupid, but how would they do if they got stolen away from their families and taken somewhere they didn’t speak the language?”

 “They had to think that way to justify it,” I said. “They had to see slaves as animals, as less than human, to justify what they were doing to them.”

 “That’s messed up,” said Viva. “Especially because you take someone like Frederick Douglass – he was a slave, and he was super smart. When his master found out that the master’s wife was teaching him to read, he got beaten. Who does that?!”

 “You see what they were willing to go through to get an education?” I said. “It was a big deal just to be able to read and write. Slaves weren’t supposed to be educated. We are really lucky to live in the age we do, as far as that goes.”

 "Yeah, I see what you mean. If they could see what we know now, it would blow their minds,” Viva said.

 Yes, indeed. I honestly love these conversations as Viva begins to see the world in all its messy complications. I think it is important for her to learn the journey of this country and how it is part of a larger global journey and that our struggles with bias and prejudice are far from over, here and across the world.  

I love that girl. What an honor to be along for the ride.

* Which I knew I was paraphrasing, but naturally I mis-quoted. What George Santayana wrote (in The Life of Reason, 1905) was: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” On par with, “You can’t understand where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.”

Up, Up and Away

The other day, when I was working from home, it was a beautiful day. The weather has been a bit cool, which Viva doesn’t appreciate, because now that we live somewhere with a pool, she wants to spend virtually every free moment in it. Since she was thwarted in her Pool Dreams over the weekend, Sweet Dub decided he would pick her up early from her after-school program and take her swimming. To optimize the experience for her, I told Sweet Dub I would pick up Ceeya from preschool and take her to the market with me while I picked up some groceries. Viva would get free time with her dad and since Ceeya doesn’t really swim, and thinks she can, and very much complicates the pool experience, this would take her out of the equation and minimize stress for all involved. (Sorry, future Ceeya, that you were deliberately left out of the Funnest Time EVER. Mommy loves you.)

So we went our separate ways. I pulled up at preschool, spent some time with Ceeya and friends, and then we (just Ceeya and I) motored on to the market, just five minutes away. Shortly after we arrived, Ceeya saw a big red strawberry balloon with a face on it and insisted she must have it. It was the most incredible thing in the world to her, and it was eight dollars. FOR A BALLOON. I admit I was feeling a little guilty that Viva was having her fun time without her sister, so I grabbed the balloon for Ceeya and clipped it to her jacket. It floated along with us hither and yon throughout the store.

Speaking of which, the market is a massive Ralphs which stretches from here to Chicago and back. About halfway through our very leisurely journey through the store—remember, I was trying to give Sweet Dub and Viva some time together—Ceeya said she had to go pee. Naturally, the bathroom was somewhere east of the Mississippi, but somehow we managed to make it in time, and Ceeya beamed as I told her how proud I was that she did not have an accident. We washed up, reclaimed our cart and merrily trudged back to the other side of the moon store, got the rest of our items, waited in a really long line, and finally left the store.

As I was putting the groceries in the back of the car, Ceeya decided she didn’t want the balloon clipped to her jacket anymore and she pulled it off.

Up, up, up into the sky it went.

This is when Ceeya completely lost her mind. Louder than any child has ever screamed since the dawn of time, she let it all out, veins sticking out in her neck, her whole face turning purple, her entire being outraged and her overall attitude one of, “WHAT THE---?? DID YOU SEE WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME???”

And that is when a very nice older gentleman approached and asked what had happened, and then offered to give me a dollar to buy Ceeya another balloon. And because I am an idiot, I blurted out that it was not just a dollar, it was eight dollars, and then he offered to give me half. And then I politely refused. And then we went back and forth like one does, and he insisted he must give me money. “Look at her, she’s hysterical,” he said. So finally I said yes, okay, it was very sweet of him, and then he pulled out a twenty and asked me if I had change. Which miraculously I did.

And then he asked her name, and then he instructed her very seriously that when she got the balloon, “Don’t let it go. Hold it tight in your hand, like this, baby! Will you do that? Do you promise?” and by this time, Ceeya was very quiet and very serious and she nodded and I thanked him again and we went back inside and had to find someone to get us another balloon exactly like it and then we stood in line again and paid for the dang balloon and then we got back in the car and I shoved the balloon into the back seat with my purse on top of it so it wouldn’t float into my line of vision as I was driving the five minutes back home. And then my phone rang from the back seat where I couldn’t reach it because it was inside my purse and I knew it was Sweet Dub wondering where in hell we were.

And that, my friends, is the story of how just stopping by the store for a few things to kill some time turned into an hour and a half odyssey that cost me 12 squillion dollars in balloons and made us late for dinner (which I had to cook).

Viva, on the other hand, had a great time.

The Blah Blahs Have Landed

I won’t bore you with the details, but on Friday, September 9, the Blah Blah Family finally moved.

It took weeks of preparation, as we were essentially cutting our living space in half—moving from a three bedroom house with a separate studio to a two bedroom apartment. If you have never had to do something like this, well, I am not going to say you should try it. But it was cathartic, the amount of stuff we had to go through and decide what we could and could not live without. And also, with the number of times we have moved in the past five years, I have never had a decent amount of time to go through all my belongings and decide what I did not need to keep. Since I knew space was at a premium, I elected to take a week off between Labor Day and Moving Day to devote myself 100% to going through every room in the house and culling all unnecessary items. Result: this time around I was shredding tax documents dating all the way back to 1998. Can you imagine? I’ve been carting all that stuff around?! It boggles the mind.

So: lots of trips to Goodwill to give stuff away, handing over bags of outgrown clothes to Viva’s friend in second grade, a bed to Sweet Dub’s stepbrother, a couch to the Parent Center at our local elementary school—and countless trips to put stuff in storage. Sweet Dub is determined to empty out the stuff in storage (lots of baby items—stroller, car seat, etc. in excellent condition) by putting it on Craigslist/eBay. We shall see.

I have added another 15 minutes to my commute, which means I leave the house with Viva by 7:30 AM, drop her off at school at 7:45-7:50ish, and get to work by 8:15. I am trying to mellow out about it and listen to podcasts or mixes I love on 8tracks or Pandora by hooking up my phone to my car radio. It’s not the end of the world, but for those familiar with LA, I am driving from Culver City/Fox Hills to Echo Park and back during rush hour. I do not recommend it.

The kids are happy, because now we have a pool and Viva can swim every day and Ceeya can float about with her life jacket on when she feels up to it. There are long stretches of pathways and sidewalks that they can tear about on, on their bikes. We are all together, which is all that matters when it comes down to it.

Related story: the night before the move, as I was putting the kids to bed, I said, “Okay, you guys, time to sleep and not a peep. Daddy and I are really busy getting things ready for the move tomorrow so I need you guys to go right to bed and no shenanigans.”

Ceeya: (Sniff. SNIFF!)

Viva: Mom?

Mama Blah (extricating from the bedclothes): Yes, Veev?

Viva: Ceeya is crying.

Mama Blah: No she’s not, she’s fake crying, just like she fake hiccups. You know she does that.

Ceeya: (SNIFF, SNIFF!)

Viva: No, Mom, I think she’s really crying. Look at her eyes.

Mama Blah (peering in the dim light of the nightlight and realizing she’s right): Ceeya? Are you crying?

Ceeya flings herself into my lap.

Mama Blah: Oh, no! What’s wrong, baby? Are you sad?

Ceeya (wrapping her arms around my legs): Yah.

Mama Blah: Are you sad about the move? About having to leave this house?

Ceeya (mournfully): YeeeAAAAH.

Mama Blah: Aw, honey. That’s normal. We’ve had a lot of happy times in this house. But we’re also going to have a lot of happy and fun times in the new house, okay?

Viva: Yeah, Ceeya, it has a really big bathtub [the pool] for you to play in! And we’re right by the park! And lots of kids live around there!

Mama Blah: That’s right. We’re going to go swimming, and to the playground…

Ceeya : (SNIFF! SNIFF!) I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE DADDY! (breaks down completely)

Mama Blah: What??
Viva (simultaneously): Oh my God.

Mama Blah: Baby, Daddy’s coming with us to the new house. You thought we were leaving him behind?
Viva (simultaneously): Oh my God, Ceeya, you’re so weird, we’re not leaving Daddy!

Mama Blah: Viva, go get your dad. (Viva leaves the room.) Ceeya, baby, we all go together—you, me, Viva and Daddy. We are ALWAYS together. We would never move and leave Daddy, okay? We are all going to live together in the new house. (Sweet Dub arrives and we all pile in for a big Blah Blah Family hug as he reassures her.)



Man, kids are something else.

By the way, any tips for cooking on an electric stove? I’m completely useless at it.

My Baby is a Maverick

My Viva is 8 years old. She is bigger than she has ever been, but she is still, in the scheme of things, a little girl. She often shows such maturity and a sensibility beyond her years that I forget she is still quite small yet.


This weekend, after I took her box braids out on Saturday, she wore her hair “wild” on Sunday. At first she was rocking a Macy Gray-style ‘fro, but then she styled her hair so it fell across her forehead. “I want to have rock star hair!” she said. I noticed her hair could use a trim and some conditioning (she’s been swimming a lot this summer and her hair is drier than usual), but no harm hanging around the house or going to Target like that. However, on Sunday evening, which is usually Hair Night, she told me in no uncertain terms that she wanted to wear her hair “out” to camp the next day.


“Ooooh,” said Sweet Dub. “I don’t know about that.”


“Honey, tomorrow is a swim day,” I said. “Do you really want to go with your hair out? It might not look the way you want it to when you come out of the pool.”


“I don’t care,” said Viva.


“Kids might make fun of you if you wear your hair wild,” Sweet Dub said.


“I don’t care,” said Viva. “I like my hair. It’s cool.”


After a bit more discussion, we agreed that she should wear her hair how she wants. I have been a big cheerleader for natural hair over Viva’s lifetime, so evidently it somehow soaked in. She very rarely wears an Afro; her preference is for two-strand twists so she can shake her head and feel her hair swing around. I was pleased she stood her ground, but a little apprehensive. After we concluded our conversation, I said to Sweet Dub privately, “I have a feeling I’ll be doing hair tomorrow night.”


The next day, I dampened Viva’s hair, put some moisturizing crème on it and sent her off to camp. When Ceeya and I went to pick her up at the end of the day, she was standing off to the side of the gym, by herself. She gathered her things and as we were walking out, she said, “Mom, I had a horrible day,” and then she started crying.


Kids made fun of her hair all day. She cried as we walked home, and she continued crying as we sat with her dad and talked about it. Not only did a variety of kids (most of whom were bigger than she is, since this camp admits kids age 7 and up) make fun of her hair throughout the day, but one of her closest friends told her that her hair looked ugly. (This is a kid who usually is at our house after camp literally 4-5 days per week. She is the daughter of a single mom, one of Sweet Dub’s best friends from high school who works until 6 in Santa Monica and can’t pick her up on time. We consider this child family, one of Viva’s “play cousins.” She eats dinner with us several nights a week, we are her emergency contact for the camp, etc. I could not believe that in this instance she would not have Viva’s back. Yes, I am still furious at this 7-year-old child. It is not rational. Let me back off this tangent before I really get going.)


We all cuddled in a pile on the couch, Viva’s beautiful eyes shiny with tears as she let all the stored-up heartache of the day spill forth.


“This is not your problem, this is their problem. It says more about them than it says about you. Your hair is beautiful and you can wear it how you want,” I said.


“You don’t have to do what everyone else does,” Sweet Dub said. “You can be different. It’s people like you who change the world. Who cares what they think?”


“You crying? Why Coco* is crying?” Ceeya said, patting her sister’s leg.


(What is really infuriating to me is that the vast majority of the kids in the camp are also black. “The same flipping hair grows out of their heads!” I said to Sweet Dub later in my Mama Bear rage. “They don’t even know what their own friggin’ natural texture looks like!”)


After she dried her tears and blew her nose, Viva said, “I’m going to wear my hair like this for the rest of the week. Because I LIKE IT.”


She is badass. I wish I had that confidence at 8. And I’m proud of her.

* Coco is her nickname for Viva. This in itself is a long story.

Betwixt and Between

Help! My kid is becoming a tween!
Let’s look at the evidence:

(1) She is borrowing my clothes. Right now she prefers my T-shirts to her own.

(2) She is refusing to wear barrettes or ballies in her hair because they are too “little girlish.”

(3) She has become very picky about clothes and shoes. It is really difficult because she has never been terribly girly, but she doesn’t wear boys’ clothes either. Right now I am skating (unintentional pun) a thin line by buying her a lot of sportswear and surf/skate type of clothes. She’s really into Converse and Vans. I used to be able to buy clothes for her without taking her with me (she hates to shop). This new direction of hers is cramping my style.

(4) She needs to wear deodorant. I don’t mean she is asking to wear it. I mean she HAS to or you have to open a window.

(4)(b) She also needs to shower every day.

(5) She now has a signature hairstyle and won’t let me change it up. This is actually fine, because I basically make small twists all over her head once a week and leave it except for spritzing with water/leave-in or oiling her scalp and ends. She was unhappy with me recently when I did a “quick” hairstyle that she deemed childish (basically parting her hair into four sections and braiding each section. I know, but I was in a hurry.) I confess to being a bit bummed about this because I like variety, but I can’t complain because at least her hair is in a protective style.

(6) It is difficult to determine which sneakers are hers and which are mine if you stumble across them in a dim room. If you hold them up next to each other, there is only a slight difference in size.

(7) I can comfortably rest my chin on the top of her head when she stands in front of me.

(8) She is becoming more responsible. She asks for chores!

(9) She is cultivating patience. She’s amazing with her sister, who is roaring through her “two-hood” like nobody’s business and rounding the corner on three, saints preserve us.

(10) She planted seeds and grew a plant, watering it faithfully, and lo, it did not die.

(11) Right now, at this moment, she wants to be a teacher. My grandpa would be proud.

(12) She recently had an epiphany that I might occasionally want some alone time. You know, like twenty minutes to read or watch a TV show on the DVR and fast forward through the commercials. This doesn’t mean she gives it to me, but at least she recognizes that I am a person with my own needs, as well as being her mom.

(13) She watches programs like Through the Wormhole with her dad and they argue about quantum physics.

(14) She’s coming into her own creatively. She likes to cartoon, and make films, and we are working on a book together. It is amazing to watch her bloom.

Okay, so maybe tween-dom isn’t a bad thing. It’s just freaking me out that my baby may soon be borrowing my shoes.

Have I mentioned that she's only 8?

A Grain of Salt

This week I have been going back and forth via email with the very nice occupational therapist who is writing up Ceeya’s assessment. She cautioned me that because SPD is not recognized as an official condition and will not be until inclusion in the DSM-V in 2013, for now she is going to have to couch her observations very carefully in order to see if we can get full coverage for Ceeya’s therapy. For one thing, she is going to note things that I don’t think are an issue, like Ceeya not being able to put a wooden puzzle together correctly, as a fine motor skills delay. “Read it with a grain of salt,” she says. (I love salt! Salt N Pepa too!)

On the one hand, I appreciate this, as I do not have the fundage to pay for occupational therapy twice a week out of pocket, to the tune of $15,000+ per year (since that was her initial recommendation—a full year of therapy, sweet holy Moses. Have I mentioned that my darling husband got laid off in April and is still unemployed?). On the other hand, I’m not crazy about the idea of Ceeya being labeled with something she doesn’t have, and I worry about all sorts of “pre-existing condition” crap that might follow her forever. That does not float my boat, my friends.

If Ceeya did have some sort of fine motor skills problem, it goes without saying that I would want her to get some help for it. I am not THAT bad of a mommy. I think. But that morning was the first time, to my knowledge, that she had ever even seen a puzzle of that sort. The fact that she matched the shapes to where they were supposed to be, but didn’t actually press them in hard enough so they would stay there, indicates to me she didn’t fully understand the point of the exercise—not that she was incapable of doing it correctly.

Over the weekend, I bought a similar puzzle at Target which had more pieces and was labeled ages 3 and up (they didn’t have any which were labeled for younger kids, which is probably why Ceeya hasn’t encountered them before since she is not even 2 yet). Ceeya matched all the pieces perfectly but again didn’t push them fully into place. When I asked her to do that, she did, with a bit of frustration on a couple of oddly shaped pieces, but she figured out that she just had to move the pieces around a bit to make them fit. Now it is one of her favorite things to do.

This leads me to the official Blah Blah plan for handling our business, which boils down to this: we would rather fork out a few hundred dollars at the outset for sensory-stimulating and educational toys and play with Ceeya every day ourselves than pay out $1,200 a month to a twice-weekly occupational therapist and then fight to get reimbursed by the insurance company.

By this I mean no disrespect to occupational therapy as a profession. I realize neither Sweet Dub nor I are trained to provide OT, but surely there are ways we can work with the OT to reduce the time and cost and make it work for our family.

Stay tuned for next time, when we (hopefully) get the actual written report. What will it say? What does it all mean? Will I ever look at a wooden shape-sorting puzzle the same way? And will there be ice cream? (Highly doubtful, and perplexing.)

Changing the Paradiggum

There was this commercial several years ago in which a bunch of people are sitting around in a conference room and one guy is all gung-ho and trying to get everyone else on board and he says “Sometimes you have to change the paradigm [which he pronounces paradiggum]...think outside the box.” And that has become part of the Blah Blah family lexicon, that “changing the paradiggum.”

And yet fixing one problem sometimes creates another.

Case in point: Miss Celie has been having sleep issues for some time. A (not so) brief history:

Stage One: We started out as co-sleepers. This was very sweet when she was an infant. I would just scoop her next to me and we would sleep with our heads close together all night long. I set up the Co-Sleeper next to the bed, more as a bed rail than anything since she didn’t actually sleep in it, and I slept in between Celie and Sweet Dub. This worked just fine until…

Stage Two: At some point she learned to roll over and keeping her on the side of the bed, even with the Co-Sleeper, wasn’t working. Sweet Dub was no longer worried about rolling over onto her and squishing her in the middle of the night, so we would then go to sleep with her between us. This worked for a very short time, because:

Stage Three: She began crawling and then walking, and would practice in her sleep, flopping around and kicking Sweet Dub in the head. He would wake up, irate, and stomp to the couch and sleep there for the rest of the night, while I would sleep like a rock, oblivious. Not very fair to him, and yet because she was still waking up to eat in the middle of the night, I was too tired to do all that much about it. However, eventually we moved on to…

Stage Four: We’d put her into her crib in the room she shared with Viva at the beginning of the night. At some point she would wake up, I would feed her and/or change her, and because she is a high-need baby (read: loud), I would have to remove her from the room so as to allow Viva to get some sleep. At that point I was so drunk with sleep deprivation that I would stumble to the couch and lie down with her there or just take her back to bed with me. In the latter case, within 30 minutes or so Sweet Dub would get kicked in the face, exit the room and go back to the couch. And I would continually wake up because I was getting kicked and banged into by my very active sleeper. All was not well in Blahville.

Stage Five: Last week, we committed to sleep training Celie and moved Viva across the house into her own room. Bought a rocking chair and hunkered down to battle. The first two nights were rough. She woke up every couple of hours howling. But then…the heavens parted and the sun shone down and she began sleeping through the night. Regularly. For the first time in her nearly 19 months of life.

And now, we are paying the price. She is furious with me. She follows me around screaming at me. She cries, she throws things, she hits. I was reading a pamphlet yesterday for something I’m writing for work and I came across a list of typical behaviors for young kids who have experienced trauma (I am not making this up):

Difficulty sleeping
Excessive tantrums
Defiant, won’t cooperate
Difficulty staying still
Aggression or acting out
Depression or anxiety
Low self-esteem
Inability to trust others
Separation anxiety
Cries a lot and won’t be easily consoled

I could put a check mark next to almost every single one of these. And last night I had to go to an event after work and didn’t get home until after she went to bed. This morning she was a mess, falling apart every five minutes and screaming when I put her in her car seat. At day care, she was fine sitting on my lap on the floor as I talked with her caregiver. I asked if she had been acting out at all. No, she is as she has always been at day care – she’s one of the easy ones, they wish they had 15 kids like her. And then when I got up to leave, Celie fell to pieces. She clung to me screaming. All of the teachers looked shocked. “I’ve never seen her like this,” said her beloved E, who has been her primary caregiver from the beginning. She had to pry her away from me and walk outside with her to wave goodbye. It was not a good way to start my day, to put it mildly.

So I get it: Celie misses her mommy. A lot. And it makes her angry and sad. We have been very much on the go these days, even on weekends, what with T-ball games and birthday parties and going up to visit my ailing grandmother. Celie’s not getting a whole lot of one on one time, and now she’s not even sleeping with me. Where we used to wake up all snuggled against one another and she would pat my face and give me kisses, now she wakes up alone. One of us goes to get her and cuddle her immediately, but it’s still a loss.

And now I have written this epic post, is there a resolution? Sleep issues solved, separation issues drastically heightened. There are no easy answers except take some time off and be with her. This, during a busy season at work when my husband has just been laid off. I need my job. But my baby needs her mama.

For the record: I know I am a good mom. I know I am doing the best I can on this hamster wheel of modern life. Today I am buying a lottery ticket and hoping for the best. Maybe I could stay home with her for a while.

P.S. She is very sweet when she's not mad at me:

Skinny Mini

At our last pediatrician visit a couple of weeks ago, we discovered that Miss Celie had a “raging” ear infection (the doctor’s words, not mine), and that although she’d grown two inches since her last checkup five months ago (yes, we’re off schedule), she actually weighed less at 17 months than at 12 months. I know Celie is a horribly picky eater, and I had been dreading the appointment, because the list of foods she will eat is quite small, and lately she had begun rejecting certain foods that she previously would eat.

Dr. H said we might need to take her to an occupational therapist to work on her food aversion. (This is an actual thing, this food aversion!) But then she conferred with one of the other doctors in the practice and they came up with a plan whereby we are to offer Miss Celie food once an hour while she is awake. We are only to offer her foods which she actually likes, although they do want us to try giving her PediaSure or Carnation Instant Breakfast as a supplement. (It turns out she hates PediaSure and will only tolerate about one tablespoonful of Carnation Instant Breakfast in her milk.)

If she doesn’t gain weight on this plan, by April 21st, they will send us to jail. No, no, I kid. They will refer us to a nutritionist and possibly also an occupational therapist, who will re-teach her how to eat. (I am serious.) I don’t know if this comes through in my regular blogging, but we are actually pretty healthy, balanced-meal eaters. Viva has even commented that her teacher says she is the only kid who brings healthy snacks to school. (That is rather alarming and fodder for a whole post of its own.)

We are educated, middle-class, blah blah blah, which I hate even writing, but I feel like we have all the tools at our disposal for our little one to be healthy and flourishing. Is our kid failing to thrive? In all honesty, I walked away from the appointment with a giant lump in my throat, feeling like a terrible parent.

Sweet Dub’s reaction was similar: “I feel like we let her down,” he said.

Celie doesn’t look underweight. She has a layer of baby fat, and she has curvy little arms and legs. She has a little potbelly, as most healthy kids her age do. She isn’t fat, but her genetics are going to predispose her to that. Sweet Dub and I were both skinny kids and we are not large adults.

She’s also been teething, this time with molars, and she’s caught every cold that’s come down the pike. Her appetite has not been great. At the moment, she eats most kinds of fresh fruit*, cheese, some yogurt, applesauce, peanut butter, crackers of all types, some pasta, and that’s really it. Oh, and air, in the form of any kind of puffed veggie-type food item like Pirate’s Booty or Snapea Crisps. She won’t eat baby food, she won’t eat potatoes (except the occasional French fry, her one food vice), she won’t eat rice or bread, and she won’t eat any kind of meat. She also won’t eat tofu. She eats green beans and sometimes broccoli.

It’s tough. Sometime she will eat things they offer her at daycare and then she won’t eat the exact same thing at home. Months ago she tried peas from a classmate's plate, and ate a bunch of them. She would eat them at home, but then one day she refused and hasn't eaten a pea since.

She is often crabby, and I am quite sure she is just hungry. But if you offer her a food she doesn’t recognize she will turn her head away and screech until you remove it from her sight, or at least from her highchair.

Someday I will look back on this and shake my head at how overly concerned I was, as I watch Celie eat a bowl of ceviche or something. But for now, I’m in the thick of it, and feeling pretty bad.

P.S. My doctor even suggested feeding her ice cream to fatten her up. Not sure that’s the road I want to take – first of all because of the sugar, and second of all because I don’t want her to grow up thinking of ice cream as a food group. Talk to me in a couple of weeks if she still hasn't gained weight.


* Except bananas. What kid doesn’t eat bananas?

Feliz Ano, Internets!

So I'm posting. Anything to get the basset hounds off the screen!

Well, hello. Let me share with you the marvelousness of 2010 that has thus far overtaken me. For quite some time now, I have been sleep-deprived. I attributed my baby not sleeping through the night as not eating enough solids during the day. She wakes up because she's hungry, I thought. So she would wake up at around 3:45 or 4:00 AM every day, and I would change her diaper and feed her a bottle and put her back to bed, and I would eventually fall back to sleep and then when 6:00 AM rolled around I could not get out of bed to get to work on time. This went on, this ridiculous pattern, for eons of time.

Yesterday, I broke down and bought some Overnights diapers in despair. Lo and behold, the baby slept from 8:30 PM to 5:30 AM. Hey, guess what - she was waking up because she was wet, and cold from the wet! Poor thing.

Now that I have had one night of uninterrupted sleep, there's no telling what I might get up to. I have all kinds of ambitious plans. I might blog more regularly, even (though I won't recap my holiday season for you, because I just won't do that to you. There was family drama and that's all I wish to say.).

Consider yourself forewarned, is all. And to all a good night!

Cynthia

In my mind, she is about 28 years old, laughing, dark eyes flashing, with a navy bandana holding back her dark hair, slim and lovely in a sleeveless white top and jeans. She is more beautiful and wonderful than anything, and if I can make her laugh, it fills my heart to bursting, so I clown around and make goofy jokes and funny faces. When she laughs, I can’t even stand how much I love her. I hug her over and over as hard as I can. I snuggle with her and bury my head in the fold of her neck, and breathe in deep. She holds me close. We read together. My sister joins the pile. We sing. We weave our fingers together. We dance around the living room.

She teaches me to be curious, to express myself. She embraces my love of color. She buys me art supplies, takes me to museums. We sing a lot – in the car, to the radio, and at home, to LPs. She loves Motown and the Beatles. We read constantly. We draw, we play games. We do yoga. Sometimes she is sad, and she can’t explain to me why. It hurts my heart when she cries. I climb up on the bed and hug her and wipe her face with my sweaty little hands. She smiles and she cries and she hugs me back.

We are poor. She plans for things months in advance, and on Christmas Day and on birthdays it is like a miracle. There are boxes to open, and toys to play with. How much does she go without so we can have these things?

It is a golden time, when she is the star in my universe. My sister and I are her whole world.

Things change. Today I don’t recognize her. The only commonality seems to be the sadness. She is unhappy with how her life has turned out. We disagree about so many things. Now when we talk it is like we are speaking through some strange device that garbles our words as they come out. We can’t understand each other.

She gave me such a huge gift. So much of how I am raising my children comes from those early childhood experiences. Somewhere along the line, my mother lost her way. She grew clay feet. She exposed her flaws. Natural, it happens. We are all human and imperfect.

But having given unconditional love, she now looks for unconditional support. Even for decisions that are flawed, actions that are hurtful. I struggle with how to deal with her.

As Mother’s Day looms, I try to be mindful of these old memories. I want to be with my children on Mother’s Day – not to get gifts or be fed breakfast in bed, but just to hold them. And sing a little. And maybe dance around the living room. And maybe that’s the best way to honor my mom.