Seriously, It's My Best Work

Son produced a large but fairly crumpled art project with a flourish this morning, and used two hands to smooth it out on the table. "See what I made at Kindergarten the other day?" he asked proudly. "It's a tree." It was indeed a tree, and I exclaimed appropriately over it. "It's a little squooshed because it was in my backpack," he explained.

Even though it wouldn't lay flat, it was impressively large. He'd taken two 7x10 pieces of green construction paper and glued them together along their short ends to form a long rectangle of green. Then he fringed the sides of the green, added multiple stems of brown paper artfully overlapped to form a trunk and branches, and glued on cut-outs of fall leaves. The leaves were clearly photocopies provided by the school, which prompted me to ask of the giant project, "Was making this tree your own idea, or did they give you directions?"

"Oh, I did it all by myself. No one telled me how. I thought of it, and then I made it." He looked up at me smiling, "Seriously," he said (in a quite serious voice), "it's my best work."

I could not control my laughter.

"SERIOUSLY," he repeated, somewhat sternly. "It IS. I mean it."

"I know, Sweetie," I told him, choking back the remaining giggles. "It is certainly your best work."

* * * * *

At the doctor's office getting flu shots, the kids of course ended up with lollipops. "I finished mine in two bites," announced Son from the back seat of the car on the way home. "And when we get home, I'm going to plant the lolly stick. And it will grow into a lolly tree, and then I can have lollies whenever I want!"

* * * * *

After Sons gets on the school bus, Daughter and I go upstairs.

"Mama, dance with me," she says. "Do you want to practice our pirouettes?" She starts her very first "ballerina class" on Friday but has learned this lovely word from watching Max and Ruby, and she is ready for anything. So I get up and we begin to dance.

"But wait. We need music," she announces, stopping. I spend two minutes poking around online and find a Detroit radio station that streams classical music.

And we dance.

Her arms are surprisingly graceful and she sways and points her toes and jumps and tries to spin. I teach her First Position with her feet. And then Second. And Third. We try little leaps. We pretend we know how to do an arabesque. The music swells and we spin some more. Her feet are joyful. My heart is light.

There is, I think, no better way to spend a chilly, grey fall afternoon than dancing blithely around in one's brand-new, very first pair of ballet slippers and the loudest striped-and-flowered tights one owns.


* * * * *

There is something magical about these two afternoons each week that Son is away at school and I am home with Daughter. It is the first time in our lives that we have had each other to ourselves on any regular basis. We do not always do whimsical things. Sometimes we go grocery shopping or run errands. Sometimes we go to the park. Sometimes we scrub bathrooms. Always we have a prolonged story time. And always, we are together, just the two of us.

These last few weeks have made me appreciate so very much how important it is to make the time for focused attention when one has more than one child. As he is learning to read, mastering graphs, learning how to measure volume, she is growing in confidence, skipping through her days, leaving me with treasured memories of her loving heart and constantly flitting feet. She may grow up to be a dancer or a lawyer; he may be an artist or a scientist. But either way, they are growing in ways I could scarcely dream of, and in directions that make me delight in each new day.

Seriously. My children? They're my very best work. Even though I only deserve partial credit for what they are becoming.

Weekly Accounting

Items on the floor I recently vacuumed:
* 3 pairs shoes
* 1 enormous can Lincoln Logs (thanks, Costco!), empty
* 8 gazillion individual Lincoln Logs (picked up very quickly by children, to their credit, when threatened with the idea that I would simply vacuum up said logs)
* 1 bright pink rubber monster finger puppet
* 1 pair eyeballs for Mr Potato Head
* 1 tiny plastic crouching soldier, in desert fatigues
* half a dozen random wooden blocks (mostly the simple bridge shape, which makes an excellent telephone; apparently the soldiers need command centers under each table in the house)
* 1 wide purple rubber band that used to hold broccoli stems together ("So handy for making bow and arrows out of Lincoln Logs! We can't throw it away, Mama!")
* 8,000,000,000 crumbs, assorted

Times I've vacuumed the house in the last seven days: three

Times I've picked the hand towel up off the floor in the bathroom this morning: three

Song and dance routines Daughter has performed this morning while practicing her "ballerina twirls" for the ballerina classes she will begin taking next Friday: three

Number of cherry tomatoes harvested off our very late plants this week, which Son has proudly taken for his snack time at Kindergarten: nine

Times I've called the school bus transportation office to try to remedy the fact that Son is not on their list of children who need to be picked up for Kindergarten: five

Weeks we are into school: three

Times the bus has actually stopped at our house to pick up Son: zero

Hours until the bus arrives for the very first time to pick Son up: two

Quantity of elation this produces in a five year old: immeasurable

Quantity of relief this produces in a mother who was not looking forward to dressing everyone in snow gear, and loading and unloading the preschooler into the car just to drive Son one mile to school several days a week all winter: immesurable times 100

Number of mouse traps purchased: none

Number of mouse traps to be purchased this weekend, in an effort to turn our house into a Hotel California for mice: two frillion ("you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave")

Number of air pizzas I've eaten while writing this post: one gajillion (according to the small pizza makers in my house)

Number of home-made cinnamon-sugar doughnuts I intend to eat this weekend while on our annual field trip to the cider mill and pumpkin patch: as many as it takes to make the day absolute perfection.

May you have a happy autumn weekend in your neck of the woods.

"There's No Such Thing As Only One Mouse"

What would you do if you were sitting on the couch one night, watching some TV, and suddenly this guy
bounded into your peripheral vision, stood completely still in a pose that can only be described as "sudden terrified recognition of having made a gross miscalculation," then glared defiantly at you and dashed under the pink Flintstones-esque molded plastic car that your daughter loves to drive around the house? (Photo thanks to these guys.)

You'd send your husband over to investigate, armed with a giant plastic container and lid, obviously.

Of course, the mouse would be long gone by the time he got there, seeing as mice travel at near teleportation speed.

Also, they can make themselves invisible.

Or at least, they can fit under any doorway and through any crevice that is big enough to admit the thickness of a pencil. Which effectively means they can make themselves invisible because that pretty much describes every door and cupboard in my entire house, not to mention every piece of furniture, bit of hanging decor, and raft of Hello Kitty jammies on the floor. Crevices and easement GALORE in a house with two children, I tell you. Not to mention a particularly goodly assortment of crumbs, certainly enough to keep one or two continents worth of mice alive for long enough to get through a few breeding cycles (which are only 21 days!!).

So, back to the what would you do.

You'd ask Google what to do about a "mouse in house." And then you'd learn all sorts of cheerful facts, such as that female mice can produce up to ten litters of 5-6 babies per year, that their pregnancies are so blissfully short that you won't even have watched all the season openers of the shows you couldn't wait to start watching again before that one defiant wretch under the pink car has produced offspring, and that they are all notoroiously hard to get rid of.

Awesome.

And then you'd read some more about traps (both the death and live varieties) and bait, and in weighing the disgustingness of removing dead mice from traps, you would also learn that releasing live mice back into the wild of your backyard has been studied and PROVEN to produce a greater likelihood of increased mouse activity inside your house. Sort of a rodent combination of "you guys aren't going to believe the treasure trove of warm yummy things I just found" with "AND they tried to kick me out...we'll show them!!"

This site will tell you that "Although cats, dogs and other predators may kill mice, they do not give effective control in most circumstances." Which, duh, my dog and I already know.

It also refers to the presences of a mouse in one's house as an "infestation" -- a word I have to say I'm not that excited to embrace.

I would like to think that the guy I saw was a rogue. A fearful deviant. A unique specimen. After all, I lived in an apartment with mice before (oh, yes, in the plural), and there was much evidence of them to be seen all over. (If you prefer the polite euphamism, skip this aside. If you want the gory details, I'll just tell you that mouse poop is, unlike mice themselves, NOT invisible.) But there is no evidence yet in our house. There are no teeth marks on the wooden utensils, no tell-tale droppings anywhere in the kitchen.

I want to believe that what I saw the other night was the exception that proves the rule. It was the ONLY ONE MOUSE who accidentally wandered into our house and has already beaten a hasty retreat. (These helpful folks are totally laughing at me right now for believing this.)

But some small part of me knows that in the next day or so -- before these recent immigrants can bear the first generation of offspring in this, their new country -- I will have to buy mouse traps. And bait them. And put them all over the house in places where the mice might go but the children will not. And then listen for their sharp snaps. And rinse and repeat.

Anyone who has any advice on the matter, please feel free to squeak up. I will take all the help I can get.

It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

What an excellent day to celebrate. Trot out your eye patches, mateys, and suit up in yer rags, it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I told that to Son, expecting him to be really excited when I explained that perhaps we should try to talk like pirates all day long.

His immediate response, perhaps occasioned by his recent entrance into school, where there are many many rules about right and wrong, was, "But I don't know all the words! How are we supposed to talk like pirates if we don't know what we're saying. We might say "you're stupid" if we don't know what we're saying. Or we might say, "you're dumb.""

Whereupon, I immediately began typing his anxieties into the handy-dandy pirate talk translator, so that I could show him how easy it was to talk like a pirate.

And then I read out the following, in my best piratical voice, with appropriate roars and guttural inflection, and especially raised voices on key phrases.
But I don't be knowin' all th' words! How be we supposed to speak like a band 'o pirates if we don't be knowin' what we're sayin'. We might shout "ye're stupid" if we don't be knowin' what we're sayin'. Or we might shout, "ye're dumb."

He and Daughter were delighted, and I had to read the paragraph three times.

So, if you've got nothing better to do today, may I suggest asking the pirate translator to tell you how to shout yer thots in scurvy pirate? Or read your kids How I Became a Pirate. Or make tiny eye patches for all the ark animals you own. Or go to your local library dressed as a pirate, as if that's totally normal.

However you do it, Happy Pirate Day!

The Man Who Could Build Anything

When we were preschoolers, he built a small white table and three diminutive stools for my sisters and me, so that we would have a place of our own at which to color or play when we came to visit. As we entered our teen years and began to care about boys, he gave us vanity tables for our bedrooms, precisely measured to fit the odd corners of our available spaces, and so sturdily built that twenty-five years later, they still serve as reliable, unshakable stands for 30" television sets. When the middle one of us married, he created a unique domed hope chest, lined in cedar, for the foot of her bed.

He understood why, when I moved into an apartment of my own for the very first time, I wanted a drill and toolbox for my birthday. And so he sent them to me.

He could repair lawnmowers and bikes, cars and dishwashers, install doors and floors, make beautiful turned lamp bases on a lathe.

In a lifetime of loving handiwork, the most impressive things he constructed were two gorgeously crafted wooden-hulled boats which he could use to take his children water skiing in the summers of the mid-1950s, and one semi-underground, environmentally forward-thinking beautiful home for himself and his wife.

And when I say that he built boats or a house, I don't mean that he hired architects and designers, bought plans, and generally paid for the construction.

I mean that he took over when his builders went bankrupt and nothing was done but the pouring of the concrete exterior walls. For six years, he went every day to that house, inch by inch building it himself. He not only acted as his own general contractor; he did drywall, cabinetry, staircases, and flooring, sometimes redoing what he'd paid someone else to do because he couldn't bear that the finished product was 1/16 of an inch off-center. If it couldn't burst and flood or electrocute him, he would tackle it and do it well. So well that the "professionals" would just shake their heads and murmur that they'd never seen anything like it in their ___ years on the job.

They always meant that line as a compliment.

He repaired airplanes for the Navy during the War. Was something of a prodigy at Ford in engine (carburetor, I think) design. Only had a high school diploma.

He loved spaghetti dinners with garlic bread, the turning of the summer to fall, and the smell of salt-air near the ocean. Having grown up in the Depression, he abhorred orange marmalade (the predominant flavor of those lean years at his house) and the notion of purchasing anything on credit of any kind. He was a meticulous man with a firm handshake and a penchant for stories about the power of mind over matter.

He was a man of few words, except when we three girls were dandled on his knees begging for a story about three alligators (or three kangaroos, or three tigers, or three you-name-its). He always obliged, telling us outlandish tales of three sibling creatures who got in and out of the most thrilling adventures. It was a wonder to me as a small child that anyone could just invent like that. Spin a story without warning. Make it up right there on the spot. Despite his own preference for three-dimensional work over books, I am sure that his endless story-telling helped foster in me my love of literature of all kinds.

He taught me the important adage that, in any kind of construction, one should always measure twice and cut once.

He taught me, through his relationship with my grandmother, that love can last decades and still make you hum lightly when you kiss.

He taught me that with patience and precision, one can learn to build anything -- from a story to a marriage to a three-story house.

He was my grandfather.

And the world has contracted a little since he's gone.