Second grade starts

It annoys me how ridiculously early that school starts here in Nashville now. August 1 is not a school start date. It should be the start of another week of summer camp. Or the last week of swim team. Or the week that you go to the beach. NOT the time to load up your kids' backpacks with those elusive Black Warrior pencils, Elmer's glue sticks and two-pocket folders with prongs in red, blue and yellow (why no green, folks?). 

At any rate, I am now the proud mother of a second grader. Isn't he cute? 

William really was so excited about going back to school. He was ready to see all his peeps again. And of course, I made sure that he had a turquoise shirt to wear, since he always wants to wear his favorite color on the first day of school. Well. It's sort of aqua, but it's close. Close enough.

We managed to get to school and find his classroom and meet his new (and very young!) teacher, all without incident. And we even had Andrew with us, so that's saying something.

William, in classic William form, found his new classroom and immediately began chatting everyone up. He even managed to corral his teacher and tell her all about how he's reading "The Lightning Thief" and how exciting it is.

But oh, I can't get over how grown-up he's getting, and how weird it feels to have a second-grader!

I mean, I remember starting second grade so clearly. I had a navy blue backpack with a strawberry patch on it. My teacher was Mrs. Munson. My desk was right under an air-conditioning vent, so my mom found a cardigan sweater that I could keep on my chair. It was the year we learned the song "Eidelweiss" because our classroom's assigned country for the International Festival was Austria. It was the same year I started ballet lessons at the good old Jackie O'Neal School of Dance (wonder if it's still there?).

It seems hardly possible that I'm on the Mom side of second grade now. And even more weirdly, I'm older now than my mom was when I was in second grade. Whew.

Monday is his first full day. Let's hope it's a good year!

Another great week at the beach

It would be hard to have more fun at the beach than these two crazy characters did last week in Pensacola.

We had a terrific week. Seriously, it was one of the best family vacations we've taken, right up there with the weekend that we spent in the mountains when Andrew was about eight months old.

The boys were great. They had their own room in our beach condo this year, and they really did well together. The first night, they stayed up and chatted and were marginally noisy 'til nearly 10. Every other night, they conked out shortly after we closed their bedroom door.

So we played on the beach, we collected shells, we played in the waves, we ate (a lot of) shrimp, and we just generally had a nice relaxing week.

Oh yes, and there was Putt Putt. The Third Annual David Wyckoff Golf Tournament, in fact, was held this year. William and Andrew, along with their buddy Sammy, played all 18 holes in this year's tourney.

As Sammy's dad Bruce remarked, "We're not even going to pretend to keep score, are we?" Nope. We putted, we ate ice cream, and then we went home.

More photos to come soon!

Summer pressure

It's July 6th.

We are more than halfway through the summer, as defined by the public school calendar here in Nashville. And I'm starting to feel the pressure.

What pressure? Why, the pressure to Do All The Important Summer Things.

Think back to the summers of your own childhood. Okay, think back to the summers like those of my childhood. Catching lightning bugs in the yard after the sun went down. Eating drippy popsicles on the back deck. Spending long mornings at the pool while the sun blazed overhead. Trips to the amusement park where you squelched around in wet shoes from the water rides. The slip'n'slide in your best friend's yard.

You know. All the poetic nostalgic stuff. The stuff that often sounds better in print here, on my blog, that maybe it actually was at the time. (Although, honestly, I think I enjoyed all those things an awful lot when I was actually doing them, too. I have never not enjoyed popsicles or lightning bugs.)

So now I'm a parent. Summer only lasts about nine weeks now, due to the schools' insane August 1 start date. That gives me a finite amount of time to make sure that my boys experience the optimum amount of Fun Summer Childhood Stuff that will make them reminisce dreamily when they're thirty-cough-something one day.

So let me run down the list...

• Berry picking: check. Thank goodness we did that one early. We've been meaning to go back, but a combination of crazy weather and crazy work demands means that we haven't done it yet.
• Lazy days at the pool: check. Sort of. William's been getting individual swim coaching instruction at our neighborhood pool, which means we've spent a lot of time at the pool. Not exactly lazy hours on a chaise lounge, though. 
• Trip to the zoo: check. That's an easy one. I'm sure we'll fit in at least one more, too.
• Trips to the parks: check. We've hit greenways and playgrounds. 
• Trips to the ice cream shop: check. Does frozen yogurt count? Another easy one to do again soon. 
• Making homemade something or other: Hmmm. We have not yet made homemade popsicles or anything else summery yet this year. Must get on that.
• Trip to the beach: it's coming. Let's all pray for good weather.
• Fireworks viewing: no check. It rained cats and dogs here on the Fourth. We heard some fireworks set off by our intrepid neighbors who braved the drizzle, but we mostly just watched the televised version from the comfort of our family room sofa. 
• Trip to the farmer's market: still need to do this. I'm jonesing for some heirloom tomatoes, and the boys would eat their weight in watermelon if I let them. 
• Catching lightning bugs: sadly, no. By the time it's dark around here, Andrew really really really needs to be in bed. William and I have enjoyed watching them flash around the neighborhood, though. But we've never done the mason jar-with-holes-in-the-lid thing.
• Attending a live music show outside, check. Hooray for Cheekwood and its Thursday night Family Night. We've packed a picnic and eaten it on the lawn of Cheekwood twice already this summer. Easy and fun. 

Hey, I haven't done too badly. Okay, pressure's off. Now I just need to not add anything else to my list, and I'll be in good shape. Of course, in about another three weeks, I'll be panicking over school supply lists and back-to-school clothes. But perhaps I can enjoy this satisfaction for a little while first.

Picking strawberries

Have you ever made plans--the most seemingly perfect plans for Something Fun to Do--only to watch them unravel in a heart-stoppingly rapid and dizzying fashion? 

I was convinced that my plan to take Andrew and William to pick strawberries last week was just such a plan. It sounded so simple, so bucolic, that it was bound to fail--and to fail spectacularly. 

And yet...

My plan succeeded. We drove to a local farm, collected our buckets, and picked strawberries with absolutely no fuss, no tantrums and no trouble at all. 

Only the most perfect berries would do for Andrew and William.

A friend recently posted on Facebook that she has been taking her children to a U Pick farm near Lebanon, Tennessee for years. I smiled at the pictures of her happy children with their buckets full of ripe fruit, but then something else that she wrote caught my eye: the farm was not far away and was easy to get to. 

Ah ha! I thought. I've been wanting to take William to pick fruit for years now, and this year, even Andrew is finally old enough to go. My brother John volunteered to go with us, for crowd control. 

Andrew was so excited by his first few hand-picked strawberries
that he kept calling me to look, look, Mommy!

So we got up on Friday, got dressed, and took the leap of faith. I told myself that even if it didn't turn out that well, it would still be better than a morning of hanging around the house. I wouldn't be telling William to stop playing Minecraft or peeling Andrew down off some rickety stool that he shouldn't be climbing on. And we might even end up with a handful of fresh strawberries.

It was worth it. And it really was.

Amazingly, even though it looked like rain, it didn't rain. It wasn't too hot. We didn't get lost on the way to the farm. We got blue raspberry Icees on the way there, so the boys were both already happy before we even got to the farm. The farm wasn't crowded. We didn't have to hike a long way to get to the picking area. 

How many WINS is that? Are you keeping count? Don't hate me for gloating over this. Didn't you read my last post about the terrible trip to Target?

Look, Ma! I picked these myself!

I didn't even have to tell the boys to be careful when picking the fruit. They took to it like they'd done it a hundred times before. They inspected the plants and delicately lifted up the leaves to search for ripe berries. I probably squashed more overripe berries than both of my sons put together. 

We picked a smidge over a gallon, then paid up and headed out. My brother inspected the nearby blueberry patch but that fruit won't be ready to pick 'til late June or so. William eagerly volunteered to go back to pick blueberries and blackberries later in the summer because he enjoyed the strawberry picking so much.

That evening, I washed and sliced a big bowl of those strawberries. William gleefully pointed out all the tiny dark red berries that he had so carefully harvested with gentle fingers. Andrew didn't care whether he'd picked those particular berries or not, he just wanted MORE MORE MORE. 

And you know, those berries were maybe some of the best fruit I've ever tasted myself. 

Target Tantrums

Yes, that was me in Target with the two badly behaved little boys. And yes, that was me responding in a perhaps less-than-civilized manner to them.

Andrew was the louder of the two and probably the most disruptive. But William cannot be held entirely blameless. William was amusing himself by, in the excellent words of my friend Marissa, "poking the bear." Andrew wanted to push the cart all by himself with no one else even coming within a 12-inch radius of the cart. In the time-honored tradition of big brothers everywhere, William used this as an opportunity to do things like put one finger on the cart, which drove Andrew into a mad frenzy.

Oy. Why do I take them anywhere together?

Of course, then you have the Judgmental Mommies. They can be spotted easily by their two most visible characteristics: a disapproving frown and a napping infant in a carrier on their chest. Just you wait, you Judgmental Mommies. One day that sleeping baby is going to grow up and demand candy NOW or throw a fit in the store aisle because you won't buy them a whatever or refuse to either walk or ride in the cart and you are going to FEEL SO ROTTEN about judging all those other parents who came before you. And so you should.

And just so you know, I won't really put Andrew in time out for the rest of his life, even though I threatened to do so in the shoe department.

Even though it is mighty tempting.

And darned if Target was completely out of faux Crocs in Andrew's size. We didn't even get any shoes to make up for the chaos.

The magic jack o'lantern

I'm almost afraid to post this because I'm afraid it will jinx me or something! But last night, I somehow stumbled onto a way to keep Andrew in bed after the lights go out. And it worked. It was like a miracle.

He deeply adores the electric jack o'lanterns that I bought at Target a few years ago. Even though I optimistically store them away every November, he always digs through the bin of Halloween gear and retrieves them.

So you might drive by our house one balmy May evening and spot a jack o'lantern leering at you from our front porch. The azaleas are blooming, the dogwood tree is covered in white blossoms, and the jack o'lantern is lit. I'm sure our neighbors think we're crazy.

Last night, Andrew objected when I removed the jack o'lantern from our front porch. I told him that it was bathtime and that I was not leaving the pumpkin outside again. Then I had an idea.

"Would you like to keep the jack o'lantern in your room tonight?" I asked temptingly. "You have to stay in your bed, though, if you want to keep it in your room all night long."

"YES!" Andrew shouted gleefully. It was if I'd offered him a winning lottery ticket. And let's face it, when you're three, a light-up pumpkin is more exciting than some piece of paper with words on it that you don't understand anyway.

So after taking a bath and brushing his teeth, Andrew willingly climbed up into his new big boy bed and got all cozy. I plugged the jack o'lantern in and handed the Cars flashlight to Andrew. I turned off the overhead light and reiterated that it was time to go to sleep--and that the jack o'lantern's presence depended on Andrew's ability to stay put in his bed. Then I walked out and closed the door.

I braced myself for the usual telltale thump that heralds Andrew vaulting out of bed and making a beeline for his bedroom door. So he can taunt me. Nothing.

A little while later, I could hear him "reading" to himself, probably by the light of his pumpkin. (William later confirmed that Andrew was indeed doing just that.) Then quiet.

And it stayed quiet.

I was shocked. Shocked and gleeful.

Oh please please please, let it work tonight, too. I'll put a Christmas tree in his room if it'll convince him to go to bed.

It's just a phase

Oh my dear Lord, Andrew is wearing me out these days. Wearing. Me. Out. Like an old sweater. I am the old sweater, moth-eaten and pilled. 

He can be adorable, though. Oh yes. See how adorable he is here, in this last-day-of-school photo, holding his out-of-season bunny ears:

He can be precious and hilarious and so sweet that you just want to nibble on him.

And then he can be a terror. I remember this being a tricky age with William, so intellectually I do know that this is a phase. And it will eventually come to an end. But the meantime is utterly exhausting.

For example, Andrew no longer feels compelled to take a nap. Never mind that he still needs a nap most days. Nope, he's not going to take one. But then he's exhausted and shrieky and wound-up by dinnertime, which makes dinnertime awful and bathtime even worse. 

I can hear you thinking, "So just put him to bed early." Ha HA! If only it were that easy. Putting him to bed early means that he just pops in and out of his room for an hour or two. He might demand water. Or announce that he wants William to see his pajamas. Or he might just enjoy opening and closing his door, over and over and OVER and over again. 

The end result of this is that he doesn't get enough rest, and I'm tired and frustrated, too. 

William was tricky at three, William was tricky at three, William was tricky at three. I just have to keep reminding myself that we somehow made it through. If I could just remember how we did it, though...

Hey look, it's William on the last day of school when he was newly three!

Big Boy Bed...Sort Of

Whenever Andrew starts to drive me nuts again, I have to remind myself that William was a bit of a terror at this age, too. And it, too, passed. In fact, William, bless his heart, even likes to remind me about all the exasperating things he did when he was three. 

So knowing that this is a rather, er, tricky age for the young men in my family, it was with some trepidation that we took down the crib yesterday. Here's a picture of Andrew all gleeful at the prospect of giving up the crib for a big boy bed at long last. 

If you're saying, "Wow! That looks like trouble personified!" I would have to agree with you. He's adorable, yes, but oh, he can be such a handful. Maybe several handfuls. It's the age, it's the age, it's the age. If we can just make it to age four....

So this is the big boy bed, sans bed.

We put a mattress and box springs directly on the floor, while we wait for the actual bed to be delivered. Andrew didn't care, though. He was just delighted by the prospect of No More Crib. And to his credit, he eagerly tossed his beloved binky in the trash can, as we had agreed months ago that a big boy bed meant no more binkies. And he did so on his own free will, with no coercing from us. And didn't look back. And didn't even whine for it later.

Of course, he was up and down for hours last night after we put him to bed. And he was up and down all afternoon when he was supposed to be napping. He played the xylophone. He played with the castle. He took a can of Lysol and sprayed the whole thing on his dresser and ruined the finish. Good times.

And now he's resisting bedtime again. Normal. It's normal. He's got to be exhausted but he's just so darned excited by his new sleeping arrangements that he can barely stand it. I hope it becomes less thrilling soon.

How many more months 'til he turns four again?

Hello, Seven!

So the craziest thing happened on Monday.

William turned seven. Seven years old. SEVEN.

See that? That's what a seven-year-old looks like!

I can't quite grasp it in some ways. I mean, I remember being seven pretty well. I had a birthday party in our yard, and we played in the sprinkler. We borrowed one of those funny jobbies where the sprinkler resembled a clown face, and the force of the stream of water from the hose made his hat rise up in the air. Then I entered second grade, and my teacher's name was Mrs. Munson. We learned the song "Eidelweiss" in her class that year. I had a navy blue backpack with a big red strawberry patch on the pocket. See? See how much I remember? Seven wasn't that long ago for me!

Except, well, yeah, it was. This is what seven looks like in my world now:

So a belated happy birthday to my sunny firstborn son! You've always been so full of life and laughter. You're so friendly and warm and encouraging toward others. You ask such thoughtful questions and come up with the most amazing answers. You're reading chapter books, like The Magic Treehouse series, and you're a master at Legos. Yep, you're seven all right. I'm not quite sure how we got here, but it's been a pretty fun ride!

Easter photos

Here are my boys, all cleaned up on Easter Sunday. Actually, I should admit that in this photo, Andrew's arm is not raised so that he can hug his big brother. No, I managed to snap this photo in the nanosecond before Andrew hit his big brother. In the church. Lovely. 

After church we went home, where we managed to get a few slightly more angelic photos of the two:

Aw, I am going to miss those sweet little outfits like the one Andrew is wearing. He's just about to outgrow them. Look how grown up William looks in his button-down shirt with his grown-up front teeth!

I thought that it would be easy to get good pictures of them by this time. Ha ha! Well, William is finally old enough to sit still and smile on cue, but Andrew cheerfully disregards any pleas to smile and look sweet for the camera. I'm not actually sure how we managed to get these last couple of photos, come to think of it. David's camera has a faster shutter speed than mine, which may have been key. 

Diane did manage to successfully capture the whole family in one good picture, though! 

Don't look too closely at the way I'm clutching Andrew's legs to keep him from diving out of my arms.

Honestly, though?

This is what Andrew and William are really like:

I mean, what else can I tell you? They're nuts. I adore them, and they are so incredibly silly. 

Kairos Time

Sometimes I'm just so tired because parenting is so exhausting. How many times in one day can you take it when your three-year-old keeps taking off his shoes while asking "why?" over and over and over again in an increasingly louder voice? Or when both your kids insist on wrestling each other on the hardwood floor, and then scream when they inevitably bash their heads into it? Or when you have to scrounge up food for nutritious meals to serve to your kids three times a day but they whine that they don't want to eat more vegetables? Did I mention the never-ending stream of requests for snacks? Don't get me started on the whole production that is making William do his homework. 

Sometimes I just have to say, "Oh well." For example, on Sunday after church, a woman stood in the doorway with a disapproving look at on her face while my children raced noisily through the door. But I was so tired of keeping up with them and with everything that I have to do that I just let them be rowdy. (Don't worry, I didn't let them knock anyone over. Other than themselves, that is.) I just didn't have any more energy to police them for something that, by that point, didn't seem like a very big deal. 

I've also had those days when I've been so freaking busy, with deadlines raining down on top of me, that I have just pushed my kids away from me constantly, with increasing frustration...only to hear the strains of "Cat's in the Cradle" echoing in the back of my brain. Argh. Argh. Argh. I've thought, while I flipped through journal articles and double-checked academic credentials of expert sources, "My kids are going to grow up and only remember the woman frantically trying to write six articles at once and batting them away from her while she typed furiously. They're going to remember the woman who yelled at them to be quiet all the time." 

I want us all to be able to find those special, magic, sacred moments in our lives that make it okay to still live with the rest of the craziness that we kind of have to live with. I want some kairos time sprinkled in among my chronos time.


The Peevish Mama has written about the precarious balance of kairos and chronos, and so has Glennon at the Momastery. Glennon wrote one particular paragraph in her blog post about kairos vs. chronos that leaped out at me:

"I used to worry that not only was I failing to do a good enough job at parenting, but that I wasn’t enjoying it enough. Double failure.  I felt guilty because I wasn’t in parental ecstasy every hour of every day and I wasn’t MAKING THE MOST OF EVERY MOMENT like the mamas in the parenting magazines seemed to be doing. I felt guilty because honestly, I was tired and cranky and ready for the day to be over quite often. And because I knew that one day, I’d wake up and the kids would be gone, and I’d be the old lady in the grocery store with my hand over my heart. Would I be able to say I enjoyed every moment? No."

Oh boy, that hits me where I sometimes live. I love my children. I love them deeply. But sometimes, the daily wear-and-tear of parenting is just...well, I'd be lying if I said that I loved every  minute of it. 

But Glennon pointed out something else that pierced my heart and gave me hope. You can't live in kairos time all the time, obviously. You have to go to Target. You have to clean the bathroom. You have to do all those chores of daily living and parenting. But you can look for those kairos moments folded into the chronos time. And you can savor them. She wrote,

"These kairos moments leave as fast as they come- but I mark them. I say the word kairos in my head each time I leave chronos. And at the end of the day, I don’t remember exactly what my kairos moments were, but I remember I had them. And that makes the pain of the daily parenting climb worth it. ....If I had a couple Kairos moments during the day, I call it a success."

I'm going to work on that. I'm going to work on being more deliberate about looking for the kairos in my life. In the meantime, here's a picture of some kairos time with my family yesterday afternoon...

We just went out in the yard for a little while and kicked the soccer ball around. We weren't out there a really long time, and yes, there were other things that we probably "should" have been doing. I say "should" because David and I both had work to do that we ended up working on that evening. I probably should have been making dinner and washing clothes. But we put it aside for a little while just to get outside and play with the kids. 

Because these kinds of moments, the ones with the soccer ball in the backyard on a windy Sunday afternoon,

are the ones that I hope that we all remember.

Three is the magic number

From this....

    

to this, in just three short years!

See how he's holding up three fingers? That's so you'll know that he's three years old now.

Happy birthday to my beloved second son, Andrew. You are such a wonderful, funny little boy, sometimes shy and sometimes exuberant. It has been quite an adventure, my sweet, sweet boy. 

As most parents do, we tend to mythologize the birth story of both of our boys. The stories are true, of course, but there's a certain way of telling them that makes them into Stories, if you know what I mean. Andrew's birth story always starts out, "It snowed the day you were born!"

And it did. I remember watching the snowflakes drift down from the sky from my hospital room. I remember fretting that I'd sent William off to school in a Red Sox baseball cap, instead of a warm stocking hat. I remember bringing along a bag full of fleecy warm baby clothes and blankets because we were planning to bring home a new baby(!) in that cold, cold weather. 

Today was a sunny day, cold but not bitingly cold. We went to church, then came home for lunch. Andrew took a nap, while I threw together his little birthday party. The only thing he requested was chocolate cake, and by George, we had ourselves some chocolate cake tonight. Pizza and chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream. It doesn't get much better than that when you're three years old. 

Three years old. No longer a baby, but a little boy. A little boy who loves Corduroy and Super Why and cats and dogs and yogurt and strawberries and, yes, chocolate cake. A little boy who stubbornly refuses to potty train but who so desperately wants to be a big kid like his brother. A little boy who puts crayons underneath all the doors in the house and when asked why, explains "They help the doors feel better." (Because that makes sense to him, somehow.) A little boy who will very soon (I promise, sweetie) get his long-awaited big boy bed. A little boy who still loves to be carried by his mama...until he's ready to be put down so he can run, run, run. 

My precious little boy, Andrew. 

Happy Groundhog Snow Day

Snow! A Groundhog Day Snow Storm!

Okay, so "snow storm" is a bit of an exaggeration. It would be like calling a VW Bug a giant car. We got enough of a dusting of snow last Thursday evening that William's school was closed on Friday, and then it snowed again that night and we woke up to a winter wonderland on Saturday. The 9 am basketball game was cancelled (yeeha!), and I began scouring the house for weather-appropriate attire so we could venture outside and play.

We had a short-lived snow-handful fight (too loose and powdery to make good snowballs)

and William made a snow angel or four

and Andrew got in a few last tossed handfuls of snow

and then we went inside and guzzled down some hot chocolate, as God intended for snow days.

It's a good thing that we did our playing in the early morning (all of these photos were taken before 9 a.m.) because the snow had completely melted by early afternoon. It was if we had dreamed it.

Every time it snows, I reminisce about how it snowed the day Andrew was born, and how I was so relieved that I was actually in the hospital, safe, when the snowflakes began to fly. I fretted that whole winter that I would go into labor in the middle of one of that winter's frequent snowfalls, stranding me at our house. This year, I just worry about whether everyone has a hat and mittens and the right shoes. Much better.

Lessons Learned from an Overscheduled Weekend

Lesson No. 1: Don't ever do this to yourself again. Three birthday parties, a basketball game, a dinner meeting, a church meeting, and church is a lot to pack into one weekend. Too much. What on earth was I thinking? William the Extrovert loved it, but Mommy the (Much Older) Extrovert is getting too old for this kind of pace.

Lesson No. 2: Grandparents really do make the world go 'round. Without my parents and my in-laws, there is no way I could have gotten everyone to their appointed and respective events this weekend. Not unless I cloned myself or acquired a time machine (or ideally, both). Since David was down with the flu* this weekend, the grandparents were even more of a godsend. (*Apparently we needed another challenge.)

Lesson No. 3: Eggs are good. Everyone in my household ate eggs on Saturday, and we were all remarkably cheerful after that. I guess the protein gave us some much needed energy and fended off any hunger-related meltdowns. Note to self: if you forget Lesson No. 1, at least make sure to remember Lesson No. 3.

Lesson No. 4: Do as much as you can in advance. Make sure the car's gas tank is full. Buy birthday presents in advance, wrap them and have them ready to go in advance, pack changes-of-clothes and backpacks in advance. Store things in the car so you don't forget them. Don't plan on "picking anything up" along the way because there is just not going to be any time to do this. Okay, I actually already knew this lesson and had all the birthday gifts and cards ready to go, but sure enough, that proved to have been a Very Good Idea.

Lesson No. 5: It's okay if you have to yell. Sometimes you get frustrated. We're human, after all. This morning, I felt terrible after I screamed--literally screamed--at Andrew this morning when he shut the locked door in my face, leaving me in the garage and him in the kitchen. With the clock ticking and us becoming increasingly more likely to be late to church. I'm trying to yell less these days, and while that's a good and noble approach, sometimes someone does something that really necessitates a good honest-to-God yelling. I apologized for it afterward. For the screaming and yelling. Not for the being-frustrated part. I'm still trying to yell less, but the world didn't collapse when I did have a bad moment.

Lesson No. 6: It's good to have at least a few moments of downtime in between all the activities, if there's any possible way to swing it. I managed to take William to eat breakfast at Bread & Company after his crack-of-dawn basketball game on Saturday, and it was seriously the best part of my weekend. William and me and a plate of eggs. (See Lesson No. 3.) We really weren't there for that long but it was long enough for us to just relax and be together. We talked about the recent video made of the reclusive giant squid and all sorts of crazy stuff. Afterward, William asked if we could have another breakfast date again together soon. Heck yeah, I told him. It was awesome.

So we survived our hectic weekend, and we lived for me to tell the tale on my blog. Not too bad. David's on the mend, and no one had a meltdown all weekend long, save for my little garage yelling episode. But I'd say that we're all pretty glad that our busy busy busy weekend is behind us.

Now...off to bed with me!

The tumbling tot

It's lousy to be the second kid. Or the third kid, if you have three, which I don't, but it's the same concept.

When William was a toddler, we did Gymboree and Kindermusik classes together. We went to the children's playrooms. We did storytimes at bookstores and libraries. We went to the zoo, to the botanical garden, the science museum. I earnestly took him anywhere that I could think of to entertain and enrich him.

Then I had another baby. Immediately, that baby, who will turn three next month, got dragged along to soccer games, and t-ball games, and swim lessons and church choir practice, and preschool performances and, yes, storytime and trips to the zoo or the farmer's market or Monkey's Treehouse. He went to birthday parties in the Baby Bjorn at five weeks of age, and he went to family camp out in the boonies of central Tennessee just a couple of weeks later. He got passed around at church dinners and Bible studies .

Our busy lives went on, and we just brought Andrew along with us.

Andrew will begin his very first activity today in about an hour. I signed Andrew up for a seven-week parent-and-child Tumble Tots class at the YMCA near our house.

I told him about it the other day. He couldn't quite believe it. "I go to Tumble Tots? You go to Tumble Tots with me?" he said, opening his eyes wide. "You be in class with me?"

Oh, yeah, that sound you just heard? That was guilt piercing my heart. This poor sweet child has gamely attended so many soccer practices and birthday parties for his brother's friends. But he's never gotten to do much of anything that was intended for him and him alone.

Well, I have done one thing. Back in the early autumn, I did start taking him to the downtown library's story hour-puppet show on Tuesday mornings. But unfortunately, the demands of my freelance writing career have sometimes taken precedence. We go often, but not all the time. I wish we could go every single time, as Andrew loves it. He may even love it more than William did at the same age. And William really loved it.

So David suggested that I look into a tumbling or gymnastics class for Andrew because he's always been pretty physically agile. And he adores doing his version of yoga whenever he overhears me talking about going to a yoga class at the Y. (He's got a nice downward dog. Tree pose could use a little refining.) It sounded like a good idea.

I had no idea how good an idea it really was. Oh, that face when he grasped that he's finally, finally getting to do a special activity--and not just a special activity, but one with Mommy and not also for or with his big brother. It was like he'd won a major award. Mom's still holding on letting him join a soccer team (I've seen teams of three-year-olds playing soccer, and while the humor value is off the charts, I don't think it's something we need to add to our already busy schedule just yet.) but she's letting him do Tumble Tots.

It doesn't matter if Andrew can tumble. It doesn't matter if he ever learns to tumble. It doesn't matter if he pays attention to the instructor or loves the class. It matters that he knows that he's getting to participate in an activity that was chosen just for him. With his mommy, no less.

Let's just hope that the instructor doesn't ask me to do any tumbling, though.

Sunday Morning in the Balcony

When William is gleefully and noisily slurp-slurp-slurping his little cup of grape juice during communion, I have to remind myself that God really does love him just the way he is.

Boy, though. If sitting through church with a squirmy six-year-old boy doesn't test one's ability to be calm and in control, I don't know what does.

Our church is beginning to have a conversation around what a family-friendly church looks like. What kind of services does it have or should it have? Do we need to make any changes to our services? If we did, what would they look like? Would it be worthwhile to make changes, though, if it alienates some people? What if it bothers the parents of those children who have deliberately chosen to attend our church the way that it is now because of the way that it is now (we presume)?

I think it's worth having the discussion, to be sure.

We attend a big Presbyterian church that has what you might call a "high church" bent to it. And I personally love that. I love High Church. I love the liturgy, the processional, the way that someone carries the big Bible into the church at the start of the service, the hymns, the hymnbook, the responsive recitations. I love the way that the words are worn smooth on the Lord's Prayer, and I love the thundering notes of the pipe organ that I can feel in the bottom of my stomach and in the marrow of my bones. I love it when the choir sings a complicated piece of music written by Haydn or Bach that makes me feel like I've just attended a professional choral concert. I love the way the children's choir members wear floppy white robes and line up on the front steps to sing like the little angels that they weren't behaving like just a few minutes earlier in the hallway.

I love that my child experiences these things each Sunday (or often enough). I love that he will grow up with this as his experience of church. I love the way that he can stand at front of the balcony and look down on the choir members as they process into the sanctuary. I love that he can page through the hymnal and find songs that I remember singing as a little girl, along with newer songs that I sang at Montreat youth conferences and much, much older songs that my grandparents sang in churches far away.  I love that he is participating in the life of a church that wants to nurture his faith by encouraging him to ask hard questions, examine his faith and ponder the possibilities.

But I know that I am not everyone.

And even I admit that it can get very tedious, sitting in the balcony with my child as he wiggles around during the Scripture readings. Our church doesn't have a children's time, so there's little opportunity for the kids to get up and move around during the service. I actually look forward to the times when they serve communion by intinction because we get to walk down the main aisle to receive the elements and then walk back up to our seats. Even better are the weeks with a baptism. William gets to go down front with his friends and see the babies up close. I don't even flinch when all the kids race back to their seats, with William and a few other children pounding up the balcony steps like they're doing wind sprints at a football stadium. They're burning a few calories and burning up some energy, and they're having a positive experience in church at the same time. That's a win-win, in my book.

Would it be good to have more of those interludes? Would other adults find it annoying? Does it matter if they find it annoying, since the children are every bit as important to the church as the adults are--and maybe more? Is there a way to make (almost) everybody happy? Or honestly, is happy not the point? Is the point more about making people of all ages feel included and welcome, and if there are some pounding feet in there, isn't that sort of, well, just fine? Wouldn't it be just fine with God, since He really does love all of us, just the way we are?

Even if our faces have juice stains and our patent Mary Janes are a little scuffed? Even if we're a little hard of hearing and have to use a cane to negotiate the walk from the parking lot to the pew? Even if we're flustered from shepherding a rowdy group of kids and just sort of want a few moments of peace to rest? Even if our kids are grown and we've had a good night's sleep and today we're looking forward to a soul-piercing sermon? Even if we're glad to be there but still have a hard time sitting still and being quiet for 75 minutes? Even if maybe we're not so glad to be there but Mom said we had to be there so what are we going to do about it?

Gearing up for the Big Boy Bed

This morning, a giggling Andrew bounced up onto my bed and crawled under the covers with me. "Mommy," he announced. "I want a big boy bed. Like William's.

This is the second time in about four days that he has made this announcement. I think he's serious.

William never tried to climb out of his crib, so we kept him in the crib for an unusually long time. In fact, he got his big boy bed about a month before his third birthday. We actually kept the crib in his room for another nine months or so because we didn't want to get rid of it but didn't know where else to put it. But he got to sleep in a twin bed on the other side of the room. And oh, how he loved it.

Andrew doesn't exactly try to climb out of the crib, but he throws his leg over the rail so that William can easily tow him over and out. They started this little routine about a month or so ago. Mr. Social Butterfly gets up fairly early each morning, but apparently, he gets lonely. So he started venturing into his little brother's room and helping Andrew get down from his crib so he'd have someone to hang out with. Andrew now expects this.  David reported that this morning, Andrew wasn't messing around. He was issuing a royal demand, calling, "William! William Wyckoff! Come get me! William Wyckoff!"

I think the boy needs a big boy bed of his very own. I've notified him that he has to give up his nighttime binky once and for all when he moves into a big boy bed. I don't know if that's really sunk in. And I've told him that big boys also use the potty. I know that he knows that, but he is cheerfully content to stick to his own agenda on the potty-training front. Which is to say that he will do it on his own time. Whenever that may be. (Insert resigned eye-roll here.)

I'm totally fine with getting him a big boy bed, but there is a complicating factor at work now. When William gave up the crib, we knew we needed to hold onto the crib. We were planning to eventually have another baby. But Andrew is it for us. No more babies. We don't need to hang onto the crib anymore, but it's going to be very hard to get rid of it. It's a drop-side crib that we ordered from Albee Baby in early 2006. A few years ago, after William was finished with the crib, the Consumer Product Safety Commission began to ban drop-side cribs because of a series of infant deaths. Ours was never recalled. It was and is very sturdy. But the facts remain. We can't sell it or donate it. We basically just have to throw it away. And it's huge. How do you throw away something so large? (And also so nice. It really is a nice crib. I just hate to toss something that never gave us any trouble.) We investigated the possibility of getting a conversion kit, but apparently it's not so easy to procure that sort of thing seven years later. So, oh well. I wouldn't want someone to take a chance on it, obviously, so we will get rid of it.

So the plan is to haul my mother-in-law's second twin bed out of storage, try to polish it up a bit, and then buy a new mattress and linens for Andrew. And I guess we'll take apart the crib and find some way to get it to the junkyard.

Andrew wants sheets "like William's." William currently has Pottery Barn Kids sheets on his bed; he rotates between the National League baseball sheets, the American League baseball sheets, and the Star Wars sheets. Guess I'll take Andrew shopping sometime soon and let him pick out something.

Two Boys, Two Front Teeth, and a Partridge in the Pantry

Merry Christmas from the Wyckoff boys!

Every year, I dream of the perfect Christmas card photo of my two boys. I  spend weeks, valiantly attempting to capture them on film (um, or the digital equivalent) with beaming smiles and perfectly spotless seasonally-appropriate clothing. Needless to say, these are my kids, and that is more than just a tall order; it's dreaming the impossible dream. 

So, this is what I ended up with this year:

Yeah, so they're wearing old sweaters and jeans, and Andrew's got cookie icing all over his face, but you know, it's okay. This is what they really look like. This is what they're really like. They're wild and happy and messy. Unless they're asleep, they're almost always in motion. They're opinionated and exuberant and silly, and while they pick at each other, they also adore each other wildly. This picture shows my sons the way they really are. And you know what? I love that. I love this picture.

Also, it's very last photo of William with his top front teeth!

 He lost one top tooth at a birthday party one Saturday evening about ten days before Christmas. The other one hung in there at a terrible, stomach-churning angle for several more days. We pleaded with him to pull it out already. I offered him bribes. I finally just dived in and tried to pull it out myself. Finally, on Friday morning, he woke up, and the tooth had given up the ghost and fallen out on its own. Hallelujah. It was a  Christmas miracle!

As I can't resist a good photo opportunity, even if it's long past the deadline for the Christmas card, I took lots and lots of photos of William and his new smile, usually as I hummed "All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" under my breath. He was mostly a good sport about it. Mostly.

"All I want for Christmas is NOT my two front teeth," he finally objected. "I already have two front teeth" and he pointed to his bottom two front teeth.

And what he really wanted for Christmas was Ninjago Legos. If the phrase "Ninjago Legos" means absolutely nothing to you, you must not have any contact with boys under the age of 10.

As you might expect, Andrew also wanted Legos for Christmas. He called them "Andrew's Wegos," and he wanted "Andrew's Wegos, and a train, and a truck and a car." He got all of the above. And he got a new "pack-pack"* and a Grover toy. One grandmother gave him a classic set of wooden vehicles, and the other gave him an "Andrew's Wego" car wash set.

(*That's Andrew-speak for "backpack." I can't bear to correct him. I also adore that he calls the cape on his Batman jammies a "caper." Jumping jacks are "jumper jacks." And the water fountain is a "water mountain." Oh, and on the first day of Christmas, my true love game to me "a partridge in the pantry." See, I have to cherish these things. William used to say cute little things like that, and we'd all sigh and giggle, and then three weeks later, he'd be saying the real, correct name for something, and I'd miss his little spoonerisms.)

So here's one of my favorite Christmas Eve photos of the boys. They're wearing their wild Hanna Andersson jammies that William picked out.

They were nearly bouncing off the walls by the time bedtime rolled around that night. (This was after nearly setting a world record in garnering time-outs that morning.) But they managed to set out cookies for Santa and get in bed before it got too late. 

That left plenty of time for David and me to play Santa and Mrs. Claus while watching "A Christmas Story." Twice. It was a longer evening than we'd hoped to have. Poor David. I thought he remembered his vow to never put together anything on Christmas Eve ever again, after assembling the play kitchen a few years ago. But he was seduced by the Dark Side that is Costco and its colorful wooden train table. And so Christmas Eve found him surrounded by wooden pieces and screwdrivers and plastic bags and who knows what else. To his credit, he got it done. And Andrew was over the moon when he saw his train table from Santa the next morning. 

More photos to come soon. In the meantime, Merry Christmas!

A post-Thanksgiving musing

Do you ever feel like time is just FLYING by? I mean, yeah, yeah, we all know that "time flies" is a big old cliche, maybe even one of the very biggest cliches. But sometimes I look at my kids, and I think, "Whoa. When did this all happen?"

Case in point: I took William to the dentist earlier this week. The dentist and I were discussing how his permanent teeth were coming in, and I was asking him if I should be worried about how crowded his lower jaw seems to be with these big new teeth coming in. The dentist said no, he's still young, but then he noted that I should probably thinking about finding an orthodontist in another year or two. Braces. We're already starting to think about braces for my sweet little baby. Braces! For a child who just yesterday was standing in his crib in footie pajamas with tousled blonde baby hair and hollering at the top of his lungs, "MOMMY. Come open my DOOR, please!" It seems so close, so recent.

Hmm, perhaps that's because my other baby actually WAS doing that very thing just a couple of days ago. But then, Andrew has an ace in his pocket that William never had. He's got a big brother who is more than willing to come liberate him from his crib so he'll have someone to play with.

I walked out of my bedroom a couple of mornings ago and thought that I heard voices from behind the closed door of the playroom. And that's because I was hearing voices, and no, they weren't all in my head. William had somehow managed to get Andrew out of his crib all by himself. Later, when the boys realized I was awake, Andrew bopped down the stairs to look for me. "Hi, Mommy, hi!" he said cheerfully. Footie pajamas, check. Tousled blonde hair, check.

When William appeared a few moments later, I asked him in a mock serious voice, "So did you change Andrew's diaper for him?" William paused, thinking I was serious. "Welllllll, no," he admitted. "Why not?" I asked. William furrowed his brow and thought about this. "I can't do that!" he finally said, throwing up his hands.

At any rate, he is cracking me up these days. Six going on 26. And on a seasonal note, I was very very thankful this year on Thanksgiving for my lovely little boys. I'm so fortunate to have them and their daddy. I'm grateful for all of my family members. And how terrific was it that we had a big turkey dinner at our house this year, and my Grandaddy Bill got to come along? We had a 92-year age range, from Andrew to Grandaddy.

Here are a few photos....this first one was taken outside of The Meadows. William and I went to have Thanksgiving lunch with Grandaddy and my parents and brother, and then everyone came to our house later for dinner.

And here's one of Diane with William, after we had all stuffed ourselves.

This was the first year we had to have a Grown Ups Table and a Kids Table. The adults who sat in the dining room got to use my good china and the crystal, while the kids (and the adults) who sat at the Kids Table in the kitchen got stuck with the everyday stuff.

One little brother with another! Andrew showed his Uncle Mark how to be a turkey and gobble gobble gobble. William has been singing "The Turkey Trot" for days now, and Andrew has learned just enough of it to be hilarious.

The weekend after Thanksgiving is one of my favorites. We visited with some friends, and I took the boys to see Santa at the nearby garden center. Of course the day that Santa visited, it was about 35 degrees outside, and the Santaland exhibit was in a little uninsulated gazebo thing where you could see your breath. This picture was about as good as I could get under the conditions.

For the record---and I'm sure this will shock exactly no one--both boys want Legos for Christmas. I asked Andrew what he wanted for Christmas, in fact, and he said, "Wegos! Andrew's Wegos!" So I asked him what he wanted to get William for Christmas, and naturally the answer was "Wegos! William's Wegos!"

The Dynamic Duo

Love these super heroes! Batman and Wobin, here to save you from your trick-or-treat candy!

Of course, I keep having to rescue Batman's Halloween candy from Robin. Robin is a sneaky little super hero who keeps finding new and innovative ways to steal candy from his big brother.