When the new year starts, we usually make resolutions (we haven’t yet, though Boy might have set a goal at school). We see a year of possibilities ahead while being thankful for what is past.
But sometimes, sad things happen, too. On May 15, 2020, just as the pandemic was really getting into swing, Girl and Boy picked out pet rats. They were small and fit in the palm of the hand – and both may have fit at the same time. Dumbo rats, their ears spread wide from their heads, giving them an endearing look. They snuggled and ate treats and rode around on the kids’ shoulders and had the occasional misadventure.
In September, one sister died unexpectedly. Today, after already having had three (!) tumors removed, we had the other sister put to sleep when a fourth and fifth had burgeoned like unwelcome weeds. The moment when life exists on a knife’s edge, when the next moment, or the next, will bring death – those moments seem much longer, like the world is holding its breath.
Boy and Girl dug her grave and buried her, marking the spot of each sister with a mosaic stepping stone. There were many tears. Burying pets doesn’t mean burying the sadness.
“She’ll be happier because she can be with her sister,” Boy said.
We hope she’s happier now, but we miss you, ratty.
To Our Pet Rat, Who Fills One Hand
Rat: Wide-eared Wide-eyed heart Beats fast beneath White fur warm nuzzle Life conflicts with death White fur cool muzzle A still heart closed- Eyed teeth chew No more Rat.
As they do every year, Boy and Girl celebrated their April birthdays: Boy turned nine, and Girl turned twelve. This year, though the pandemic seems a little bit behind us, we still didn’t quite have perfect birthday celebrations.
Boy’s birthday party brought snakes, an opossum, toads, turtles, walking-stick-making…and snow!
Boy with Possum named Blossom
After a semester of Forest School, he’s happy and comfortable in the world of nature, and he survived the cold. Some whittling sure helped lift his spirits, as did the camaraderie of friends!
We celebrated his birthday with a surprise trip to the movie theater – our first in over two years, when we last saw Frozen II in November of 2019 – and saw Sonic 2, much to his delight. Popcorn and candy – then dinner and cake!
Boy blows out the candles – and now, he is nine!
Girl didn’t get off quite so lucky. Snow sounds like a treat compared to what she got. For her birthday, Boy got a stomach bug overnight!
She began her birthday with a note to me: Mama, I don’t want to be selfish, but Boy’s sick on my birthday, which totally ruins it. I know he didn’t mean to be sick, but…I feel like I’m being unfair to him. HELP – Girl
Ever aware, she felt sad about her birthday AND sad for her brother. This life thing – it’s amazing how many things we can feel at one time. And twelve is going to be a time of lots of feelings.
We did celebrate her birthday with a special dinner and cake (none of which Boy got to eat).
It may be the last year for the candles we used on her fifth birthday cake!
She opened presents, then looked forward to a volleyball tournament, sleepover, and small birthday party at an arcade which were to come.
A bracelet from a far-away friend
But most of that was NOT to come. The tournament happened; they lost in two sets but had to hang out for much of the day to watch other games.
That night, her sleepover began when her friend came over for dinner and they began to watch Owl House…and ended when she started to feel barfy and her friend went home. They both cried, saying maybe she’d feel better. Maybe it was allergies. Maybe it was a migraine (Girl gets those, unfortunately).
But the maybe that was true? The stomach bug.
So that ruined her evening and her party the next day.
Then Dad got the bug a day later (and we’re grateful that the toilet needs were spread out, as we have just one toilet!).
I’m free, I thought – I got off with just being a caretaker! Four nights had passed since Boy got the bug, and I sat up with two sick kids. But last night, I was proven wrong. Alas.
But maybe my body is just responding to other things. Right now, Girl is on the sixth grade campout (she powered through after her day of stomach bug, unwilling to miss out on yet one more thing). She left yesterday, Monday, and will return tomorrow, Wednesday. Today is the first day of her life that I will not see her – the first day in over twelve years. For people who regularly take trips away from their kids, this may feel silly or ridiculous – but it feels big to me.
She may not have had the celebrations she deserves – not yet, at least – but she gets the gift of autonomy, of independence, of adventure.
We have a bedtime routine (more or less), just like you’re supposed to with kids. Ours – who are now eight and eleven, with many missed stories in the two years since I last posted – get ready for bed, brush teeth, and read/are read to. One likes to be sung to; the other doesn’t. Sometimes they get an arm, back, leg, or foot rub. We always say prayers and add on what made us feel grateful that day.
Now we lay us down to sleep We pray that God* our souls will keep Guide us safely through the night Wake us with the morning light
Amen
Tonight was no different. While the delivery can differ – sometimes we say the whole prayer together, sometimes we go syllable by syllable and take turns – the words are the same. After we said prayers tonight and talked about what made us feel grateful, at some point, Boy said that he’d like to live forever. I asked what would be good about it, and he said that you’d get to see everything. I asked what would be bad about it.
“You wouldn’t get to see God. I’m yearning to see God Himself,” Boy said. And yes, he said, “yearning.”
At our house, we do our best to go gender-neutral with God, who is more than we humans can imagine. I said, “God isn’t a he.”
“Yes He is,” Boy insisted. “A men. MEN!”
Oooooh. Having never seen it written, and with our sometimes syllable-by-syllable praying, he heard “amen” as two words, describing the maleness of God (and not just a man, either, but men!). I have to admire Boy’s use of textual evidence – he supported his argument!
But Girl and I had to break it to him. “Amen is just one word,” I said. “That doesn’t mean that God is a he.” In the face of this realization about language, he was quiet for a moment, searching for another way to refer to God.
“What about Lord?” Boy said.
Girl weighed in: “That’s really a name for a male ruler with power over other people.” No dice there, either.
“Let’s just go with God,” I said.
The theological discussion could have gone on, but it was 9:40 on a night before state-mandated language arts testing for Girl. It was time to sleep.
And tonight, I hope they go to bed (because here they are, at 10:04, still talking softly to each other) thinking new thoughts, weighing their words, and reconsidering what they thought they knew. The world is a big place, God is a big concept, and the words we use influence how we – and the people around us – understand the world.
************************** * Girl’s understanding of the non-written word meant that, for years, she said, “We pray the God our souls will keep,” which I always liked – the God, the one God, the God who is God to everyone, regardless of the name we choose or the religion we are practicing when we talk of God. Kids really do get a lot right.
Boy and Girl each deserve to be celebrated separately. At six and nine now, they are very much themselves. Individuals – not like those paired snack cakes. More Star Crunch than Swiss Rolls.
But here they are, together. One separate photo each, one family photo, all from this month. That’s how it works: when you’re part of a family, you are influenced by your family. You’re an individual, and you’re not.
So this year, they don’t get their own posts. They get one, together, as they grow up together. Maybe more Zebra Cakes, then?
2019. The new year. A chance to reinvent yourself, a chance to worry about reinventing yourself – and if you’re an elementary school-aged kid, a chance to pay no attention at all to the adult pressures of self-improvement. Now there’s a resolution to add to the list next year!
While we did make resolutions (these were their own offerings: Girl said she would practice violin once a week without being asked – figuring we’ll encourage her the other times – and Boy suggested he could eat more – meal time is often spent pestering him to put food into his mouth), the new year also presents the opportunity to return to some of the challenges of the start of school.
As a kindergartener, Boy gets a weekly behavior report, given in a series of five faces, either smiling, straight-lipped, or frowning (one of the categories is “Keep your Friends and Your Teacher Happy”). He hasn’t gotten a frowning face yet, but for the past two weeks (and for the first two times ever), he’s gotten all straight-lipped faces. For him, it seems, the pressure of returning to school, of being on someone else’s time, doing work, and following someone else’s direction nearly all the time, is too much. He missed part of recess today, and earlier this week, he would not, apparently, do his work (“I couldn’t get him to pick up a pencil,” his teacher said). His teacher wrote “a very difficult day” on his calendar, which made me think of Kevin Henkes’s Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse, in which Mr. Slinger, Lily’s teacher, tells her, “Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better.” There’s always that hope, but sometimes, it’s hard to know what your child’s sense of that is, whether tomorrow will be better or the same.
And yet. Tonight, in his prayers, the thing he said he was grateful for was school. He talked joyously of the things they’d done today, and he’s excited about next week, especially Tuesday, the hundredth day of school.
I flashed him my own smiley face, and he snuggled up and went to sleep. Tomorrow will be better – and if not the next tomorrow, then the tomorrow after that.
August 1st, 2018. First day of kindergarten for Boy, first day of 3rd grade for Girl. Bonus surprised grown-up in the background. Why didn’t I use a different photo? Three guesses. The camera didn’t work? No. A stray Great Dane photo-bombed the photos? No. Boy? Yes. In the previous three shots, Boy had his tongue stuck out. Oh, well.
Now we’re into the second six weeks, and so far, school is a win for both kids: Girl said that she pays attention in class this year because she is learning new things (in opposition to last year, when she was largely not learning new things), and Boy is nearly always the first to get in the truck to go to school and is always excited to go. He’s learning things like the green song, the pink song, the orange song, the blue song, the yellow song (do you sense a trend? There are more, but you get the picture!), and how to sky write (which is writing numbers and letters in the air with your pointer finger).
Today I ate lunch with him at school, and when he looked up and saw me (he didn’t know I was coming), he radiated happiness. It spilled over and seeped into me, and there was so much happiness that the whole school should have been singing.
I still feel the joy.
And even this far into the school year, so do they. They’re in this school thing together, and I’m glad.
School has started. In fact, school started so long ago that it doesn’t even seem new any longer: on 8/1, Girl returned to school, and Boy began kindergarten! He’s at the Big School, as he likes to say.
He’s been dabbling in reading for a long time. While Girl read her first book at four and a half and, as far as I can tell, never looked back** (or, more to the point, never looked back up), Boy has taken to it like a duck near the water, which is to say that he’s close enough to dip in a webbed foot but maybe he’ll just stay on the shore and eat some tasty bugs, thank you very much.
About two weeks ago, he read Leslie Patricelli’s No No Yes Yes by himself, sounds included – except for the two-page spread at the back, which he could figure out by pictures alone. Tonight, he read the first fifteen or so pages of Mo Willems I’m a Frog. He sounds out words and often plays around with the sounds until they morph into the words they are (like “know,” which is tricky, or other longer words) or the words he thinks they should be – he has a good sense of language, so he often “reads” the text as it might have been written by a different author. He could read words before school started, and school has only increased his interest in words. (He’s long been interested in writing, maybe because it’s a more physical activity?)
In between, he’s done well with Mercer Mayer’s Going to the Sea Park (he read “petting tank”) and Just Pick Us, Please! (in which he read many descriptive words). We read those the same night this week, and when he sounded out or effortlessly read chunks of the book, I turned to him, amazed.
“Do you know what you are?”
“A reader!”
“And how does that make you feel?”
Lying on the bed next to me, Boy punched his two fists in the air. “Like shaking pompoms!” he exclaimed.
Goooooooooo, Boy! we feel like shouting, too. He is, indeed, becoming a reader!
* While I think it’s supposed to be pompons – it comes from the French, so I’ve read – this is how it came out, so that’s what I’m sticking with.
**That’s how you get to be one of the top 100 readers in the state!
We’ve had a full time of it! A birthday party last weekend, a weekend of special activities, a neighbor-friend in town last week, friends visiting from out of the country – both kids looked like they could use a nap today (not that they’re prone to taking them, and not that they did).
Just like that, it seems, Girl is eight. She was a newborn just yesterday, and here she is, over four feet tall, playing softball and piano, choosing to read and go fishing, doing crafts and running around with her brother, loving animals and avoiding picking up her dirty clothes. (Boy, did she grow fast!)
Fishing, April 2018
She reads to her brother, too; he LOVES the Binky books (by Ashley Spires – you know, the ones in which the cat eats bugs and gets space gas? No? You don’t know those books? You’re missing out!).
She has strong feelings – that’s not new – and now writes me notes if she’s feeling upset as a calmer way to express herself. Often, how she’s feeling is “engaged in this book – please don’t disturb me!” As you see below, this is Girl, in her natural habitat (reading another Warriors book by the group known as Erin Hunter).
She’s a joke teller, but she’s serious, too.
And after all, she is just eight – old compared to her brother, breathtakingly young compared to her parents. And plenty silly, too.
Hmmm. There should be some universal truth, some truly touching yet insightful commentary on life here. I’m just going to go with this: it’s good to celebrate those you love, and it’s good to eat cake while doing that. (We went with her choice, s’mores ice cream cake.) Wishing you, sweet Girl (and you, dear readers!), many more happy years to come.
Boy. Five years old. Even his preschool teacher teared up a little bit about it today. There’s no going back, no returning to four or three or the time in the womb when baby couldn’t live without Mama. Even if you’re wanted, you’re never needed in the same way.
Boy, on his birth day, 2010.
Like Girl, he’ll get to go in the attic now that he’s five – but he’ll have to wait until tomorrow. That’s the thing about turning five when you have an older sister: the day isn’t as wholly yours as it might have been. Tonight he had to compete – no, not compete, but share – with his sister: she had her first softball game tonight, just as he had his first t-ball game last night. It’s not a bad thing: having an older sister means more people to love him, a steady playmate, a friend. At first, we weren’t going to take him to her game, as it didn’t start until 7:00 (!). Girl got upset, saying, “I want to play for him on his birthday!” So we took him. She hit the ball each time she was at bat, and she hit it for him. Even just with the two of them, they’re a team.
Boy and Girl in the daffodil field, March 2018
In lieu of cake, we celebrated his birthday with homemade ice cream sandwiches, and we ate them in shifts, with grandparents, Mama, and Boy eating them before the game (and after Daddy and Girl had left) and Daddy and Girl eating them upon their return.
And another birthday, half a decade, has passed. He will only be more than five after today.
He’s not my birthday girl, but I still have been hearing Loudon Wainwright III’s “Five Years Old” in my head today – just like on Girl’s fifth birthday. We dropped Boy off at preschool, and there was the music in my head, and it showed up all of its own accord, like I was my own antenna.
The pet store was all out of ponies
Maybe next birthday.
I won’t forget the day that you were born
Five years ago
We were happy and excited
and we loved you so
You’re growing up so quickly
Now, I feel a little sad –
That’s to be expected;
after all, I am your daddy [mommy].
Five years old. Happy birthday, sweet Boy. May happy days be sandwiched between happy nights, and may your best (and safest!) wishes come true.
Tonight during prayers, Boy asked that his grandfather not die, ever. “That’s so nice,” I sighed, before going on, in the heartless way that parenting sometimes seems to require, to say that everyone dies, and that if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone. Boy acknowledged that we’d have to build more houses, if that were the case. True.
“When we die, does God fix us?” Boy went on to ask. I waited.
“Does God put us back together?” Theological questions seem to be a specialty of preschool-aged children.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Does He put us back together so He can send us back here?” he gestured with his hands, encompassing the bed, the room, our family, our town, life as he knows it.
I talked to him about dust and living soul and how the living soul part is what remains, the part that makes Boy Boy. I added that if I’d had another life here, I didn’t know it (I asked if he had lived another life, and he said no, too), and I talked about how our souls will, as Boy puts it, “go to God” after we die.
These are the kinds of moments that catch me off guard. Much like childbirth classes can do little to prepare you for the reality of having a baby at home all day, every day, reading books about child development (expect them to grow so many inches! they should sleep so many hours! they should be able to pick up small objects with their toes while their hands are tied behind their backs!) do little to prepare you for the reality of your developing child. To be fair, how could we anticipate the questions, explicit or implicit, that children have about their world, both the now and the hereafter? (“But I can’t see God!” Boy said earlier, looking around in the darkness. “If we have living soul in all of us, God is in all of us,” I told him.) How should we answer these questions? What did I leave out? Was there something deeper than I should have asked but didn’t?
Seemingly satisfied, Boy settled down and went to sleep. If the questions weighed heavily on him, his slow breathing didn’t show it. I could return to worrying about daily matters, like laundry and dishes and scattered toys – but suddenly, that all seemed much less important.
Teacher on Hiatus 