Tag: toddlers

the accidental coffee hour

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I’m not sure if it is worse to forget a dentist appointment, or to remember it a week early. Either way, I’d gotten a baby-sitter for little Em, and somehow presented our dentist visit to Erik with the right balance of enthusiasm and bribery to convince him it would be ok. And then the receptionist looked at me sympathetically and said, “Oh, I’d love to get you in today – we even have an opening! But your insurance…” and we all know insurance usually has the last word. We walked back out into the wind and sunshine and I decided that if Erik hadn’t earned his treat, I’d at least feel better if I had mine. And so we landed at a coffee shop, with one extra-large bar of blueberry crisp on a saucer and a small cup of coffee with cream. 

Sitting in a coffee shop isn’t Erik’s ideal world. I find this forgivable in a three-year-old. We discovered the saving grace of a Little Free Library inside, complete with childrens books and a few toys. So we read. We counted the wooden blocks that he pushed up and over the curled wire frame of the toy. We took a bite of the blueberry crisp; then he decided he was done, and I took several more bites. He climbed on and off his chair and I watched him flip through the books and talk about the people around us and I took a picture because sometimes I forget to just sit with him and listen. 

Yesterday we went for a walk, Em in the stroller and him on his little strider bike. And then half way through I saw the way he was crouching and I offered to raise the seat. I forgot for a moment how much he’d grown; how eighteen months ago when his sister was born, he wasn’t tall enough to even sit on the seat at its lowest. Here he is now riding a mile around the neighborhood. 

We could go back further; once upon a time in my first springtime with him, we walked miles and miles with the stroller, or him in the baby carrier on my back, twisting around side to side trying to touch the trees and almost making me lose my balance. There was a summer that he learned to ride the tricycle and every time we went to the park after that I had to push him back up the almost imperceptible hill before our house. I was pregnant, no less, but he was cute and it was worth it. We spent a lot of those pregnant days playing on the footbridge across from the park. Peek-a-boo and chasing games, letting him run downhill and walk back up over and over. Climbing the bridge rails and holding his shirt to keep him safe while he leaned over and threw leaves into the water.

It’s been years and years since he was born. A million maybe. Almost four really. That’s how motherhood is. You love so big it could fill eternity but there it is all crammed into a body the size of a not-quite-toddler-anymore. It makes the time pass, and it doesn’t. Life as a parent goes by those contraries, and I forget sometimes to stop and look at the tiny boy who came out fighting on a quiet June morning. 

But here he is in front of me, asking me to read the book we found in the little library one more time, and reiterating that he really doesn’t want even a tiny bite of the blueberry crisp. So I put my phone away and help him count the blocks as they go up and around, over and over. The Zebra striped square. The orange circle. The green triangle. And I read about the Monkey Marimba at the zoo. I take a bite of crisp and hold my coffee steady as he climbs in and out of my lap, and I take the time we didn’t spend at the dentist to be with my boy again.

Hey there – you know there’s a whole host of stories and essays I publish only by email? That’s also the place where you can really write back – join the conversation. Drop your email address right here. Let’s be friends.

the God of math

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I wake up some days already ready for bed. I don’t think I am completely alone. All it takes is children, especially children who wake up at night asking for Mommy or a piece of toast or wanting their pacifier back to feel as if you’ve spent half your day’s energy before you dropped back into bed at 3 am.

It’s days like this that I need to remind myself of God. God is good at math. Stay with me – a blog is a terrible place for a deep-dive into algebra and I am aware of it. God knows how many hours are in a day. Twenty-four. Ask him. He’s not stupid. He also knows I have kids. Two. An even easier number to count to than twenty-four. But (and this is where the numbers get tricky) with two kids pulling you different directions every waking moment, twenty-four hours can begin to feel more like forty-eight, or even (hang in there) like forty-eight hours that require seventy-two hours worth of energy. That’s three days and we can stop climbing there because you get the picture.

So suddenly the really simple math of one day = twenty-four hours is less simple. It’s less like addition and more like the quadratic formula. Once it was “8 hours of sleep = 16 hours of energy = 8 hours at work + 2.5 hours for meals + .5 hours of exercise + 1 hour of driving + 2 hours of in-between things and down-time + 2 hours of eating the food”. Now it’s more like “6-ish hours of sleep + 2 cups of coffee (drunk cold because of children) = 12 hours of energy + 1 dinner of cold cereal + 2 childrens’ and 1 adult meltdown + a quick trip to the Starbucks drive through = negative 3 attitudes”. 

Things don’t seem to add up anymore. And that’s without dividing by 2 months quarantined at home, or raising to the power of 3 legos stepped on. I could go on. If you feel tired just looking at that kind of math, you’ve got the answer right. Tired. It’s tired. I’m tired. Tired is the answer even if you sneak in a third cuppa (luke-warm this time.) I think the quadratic formula involves imaginary numbers and I’m equally confident in guessing that your energy by the end of many days feels equally imaginary. (Also, can we please just raise a red flag about imaginary numbers in math? Seriously WHAT THE HECK. Ok, rant over.)

The math, I reiterate, is exhausting, confusing, and doesn’t seem to add up. This is where it’s nice to have a God who’s good at math. He can solve for X. Or for Mom, which is more important. He knows how much energy I need to get through a day. I mean, if he can number the thick hairs on my head (constantly changing as I enjoy what seems like postpartum balding), then surely he can figure out how much energy I’ll need after laying awake in bed for an hour, and getting up two times during the night. He hasn’t left me without resources. I have the strength of Christ waiting to be availed. I have hope that one day, in heaven, our attitudes will never slip into the negative and by all that is gracious I will never step on a sharp toy again. 

I think of the woman with her unending jar of oil or the five loaves that filled five thousand bellies. There were two mites dropped into the offering box at the temple – all the widow had to live on – and I’m betting you she didn’t go home and starve. Maybe the prayers muttered over a morning cup of coffee have a power of multiplication just like the legos. Maybe the quiet of two kids napping simultaneously has spiritual power to calm the wind and the rain. I’ll probably never beat God at the word problems that read as long as a Thursday afternoon, but I begin to understand that the math will always add up. The bottom of the coffee cup with it’s dried brown rings is always steaming again in the morning like a very promise of God: there is always enough energy for the hours.

my favorite fork

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We have probably all heard of Abby Heugel’s tweet by now: “Welcome to adulthood. You have a favorite spatula now.” It’s true: there’s a spatula we use so often that I keep it in the little spatula dish on the stove, even when it’s clean. It’s lime green with a bamboo handle and I bought it at TJ Maxx before I even made plans to move out of my parent’s home. But I also have a favorite fork. 

It happened like this: When I was 22 and just engaged, I moved into an apartment of my own for the first time. My husband would move in later, you know – after he actually became my husband. But when I moved in, I didn’t have any silverware. This dawned on me after I sat down and tried to eat a meal and didn’t have anything to eat it with. My mother-in-law-to-be came to the rescue. One afternoon when I was at spending time with my fiance at his family’s home, she went downstairs or into the garage or somewhere and came back with a ziploc bag full of mixed silverware. 

“It’s not matching sets or anything but you might be able to find a few that coordinate,” she said, and handed the bag to me, “Or you can be eclectic and make them all different.” 

I went the eclectic route. No two spoons, forks or knives were matching. One knife was even three-quarter sized, and one fork had U. S. stamped on it and a large oval hole in the end of the handle; for lightness of transport with the US Army maybe? I gathered them all into a cheap silverware tray from Target and was content. 

Then we got married. We used our single Williams Sonoma gift card to buy a ladle (much needed), a garlic press (apparently just for show), copper-colored teaspoons (they matched my wedding colors), and silverware: two spoons, two forks, and a knife. That was $99 of the $100, and we told the cashier to throw away the plastic card – we couldn’t afford to get anything else just to use the last dollar.

In a year, we had a baby. When he was six months old I pulled out one of my eclectic spoons to give him his first meal of rice cereal, just a quarter-teaspoon’s worth on the tip. The spoon was too big of course, but I persisted for a week or two until I finally remembered to put baby spoons on the shopping list. There are now four Munchkin baby spoons with heat-sensitive tips rolling around in the diaper bag, used far less often than they should have been but in my defense the boy loved finger food, and he had a really wide mouth for those eclectic spoons. 

That boy is now two and I’m realizing that eclectic silverware doesn’t make it any easier to teach a toddler how to properly use them. Clearly, toddler utensils need to be added to the shopping list, but who wants to do that when you have an old US Army fork with a hole in the end, or a hobbit-sized butter knife? But perhaps that is just my wild individuality showing – I too-often prefer the unique and unexpected to the ordinary, even when an ordinary toddler fork would make my job easier. It is honestly always a bit of an internal battle now when I sit down to meals: do I give him a full-sized fork like a good, patient mom (damn my absent-mindedness in shopping!), or let the gooey mac’n’cheese become finger food (again)? 

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I must have had a good morning that day that I gave him silverware when we sat down to lunch together. I didn’t pay much attention to which silverware I gave him, except to reach past the heavy, polished pieces from Williams Sonoma to get the smallest one in our bunch of definitely-adult-sized forks. And so we sat down together with our no-two-alike forks and our diced sweet potatoes with cinnamon and I think I actually was looking at something on my phone when he interrupted me.

“Twinkle shtarsh!” he exclaimed, holding up his fork.

“What?” I looked at him confused.

“Twinkle shtarsh!” He pointed a chubby finger at the handle of the fork he was holding up. I looked at the fork. He was right – there were tiny starburst patterns all along the handle. 

“Sing twinkle shtarsh, Mommy?” I smiled. Yes, why not?

“Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high,” he listened, and gazed adoringly at his fork, “like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle twinkle little star…”

“How I unner what you ow,” he chimed in almost inaudibly. 

I sat in the moment, silent for a few minutes even after he went back to stabbing and inhaling his sweet potatoes. Perhaps the toddler utensils that never made it onto the shopping list were less crucial than I’d thought. Maybe I could miss out on a few supposed necessities and still end up with a successful, spoon-wielding boy after all. Maybe – just maybe – what this boy needs from me isn’t the perfect preparedness one expects of mothers, or constant use of heat-sensitive baby spoons. Maybe what mattered more all along was the eclectic, the unique. Maybe he just needed me to be his mama, unlike any other mama. Shining and twinkling in my own funny way, just like the starbursts he admired so much.

Welcome to motherhood; I have a favorite fork now.

the waiting months

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Spring and waiting seem to go together like coffee and cream. It’s not winter anymore; some parts of the country have crocuses and snowdrops springing up and snow hasn’t been on the forecast for weeks. At the same time, a certain Dairy Queen in Moorhead, Minnesota opens for the season March 1st and you can see a line of people with spring in their hearts and winter boots on their feet stretched out several feet long, waiting to get ice cream that they hope will, with an irony as swirled as their chocolate-and-vanilla cones, convince the cold to leave again.

But whether you’re licking an ice cream while you stand in the snow, or welcoming snowdrops, there’s no finality to March and April. They’re an in-between. Spring probably doesn’t feel fully real yet in the first warm days. And yet spring is a season unto itself. These months may be seem to be a segue to summer but they’re really a destination too. 

I think there are seasons in our lives that feel like that. We’ve waited and worked to get to where we are and we’re there now, at a destination of sorts, but it’s a moving, shifting destination. An arrival that signals an end and a beginning, and is itself a long, stretching, middle. It’s like having toddlers. (So many of my ideas and writing and topics revolve around toddlers right now.) You’ve waited and wanted to become a mom, and then you were eager for them to be walking and talking, and now they’re walking and talking, and you know that childhood comes next but it’ll be a minute yet, and here you are! But here you remain. 

It’s possible that this is largely the sleep deprivation talking. The nap strikes, the refusal to eat dinner. Don’t misunderstand me – I love this boy of mine and his sweet attitude and his constant activity and his curiosity. I love him deep and whole and I love him all the time. But if you’ve ever gotten on a treadmill to run at a fast jog for hours until your legs give out and then another lap for good measure, you know what kind of energy and tenacity it takes to parent a toddler. 

It’s just like the month of March. You’re in between two starkly contrasted seasons and it’s a season of its own and it seems to be longer than January and February put together, ya know? 

But don’t swear off children just yet. Recall the snowdrops I was talking about. They’re not the only spring flowers. Snowdrops come and then crocuses come, and soon there are even daffodils. Here in Colorado the golden forsythia glow even on a cloudy day. There are green spikes of irises reviving in my neighbor’s garden bed. The sharp yucca plants become more vibrant. Lilacs are stirring. Trees are budding out before they sprout leaves. You may lay down on the landing of the staircase in exhaustion and open your eyes to discover your toddler bending over you to give you a goodnight kiss as he “tucka ‘oo in” for a nap. You may find that one day when you lay down next to him in the middle of the nap strike, you both begin to giggle uncontrollably, down on the floor, face to face. Making memories, I hope. Laughing memories that stay bright in the dusty storage banks of recall.

Look for those moments. Hunt for them. Lay down – a patch as small as the landing of the stairs will do – and stare at the ceiling until you can remember what it is about this season that brings you joy. Don’t hustle too far too fast yet: let moments of happiness “tuck ‘oo in” to the season of in-between. It is better when we linger.