See ya in a week

We're heading off tomorrow for our last vacation of the summer, a week in the woods in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Let's hope we're all mostly over our sinus infections, snotty noses and hacking coughs! I will report back in a week. Meanwhile, my discovery of the day is that dinner is extremely peaceful when you eat after Agatha has gone to bed. I hadn't quite realized just how demanding she is and how stressful it makes dinner. Tonight she went to bed early because-- for the first time ever, I think-- she refused to take her afternoon nap. That girl turned one and threw herself into the toddler zone. She is high on life and wants everything she sees. Whew! Anyway, we had such a nice time chatting with Henry that we've decided to make it a regular habit to eat just the three of us, at least a couple of times per week.

Happy Birthday, Agatha!

Despite nasty, lingering colds that have been afflicting the family for over a week, we had a great birthday celebration for Agatha today. We served chili and corn muffins and chocolate birthday cake to a bunch of babies and toddlers and their parents. It was LOUD! But fun.

I made Agatha her own little cake, which she pretty much devoured.

She had a great time with so many kids around. She was quite fascinated by a 6-month-old friend and kept pulling up on his carseat, looking at him and poking him. She loved the chaos and noise! Happy birthday to our beautiful, spunky, delightful social butterfly.

One year ago!

One year ago, I went out to dinner with a group of colleagues and a guest speaker who was in town to talk the next day at the college-wide symposium on Visual Studies. I ate soft-shell crabs (hmmm, not a great choice as it turned out), then came home after Henry was already asleep. Here I am, above, in my cutest maternity dress, on my way out to dinner. And below, here I am about 10 am the next morning, eating lasagne and holding Agatha! (Notice that Henry is wearing the same shirt. He probably slept in it.)

I went into labor around midnight, got to the birth center at 3 am, and Agatha was born at 4 am. We were back home again by 8 am. In fact, as I drove up, I thought, "I could still make it to the symposium..." But no, I missed the symposium. It was funny timing from Henry's perspective-- I left the house the evening before to go out to dinner, and the next time he saw me I was bringing home a baby the next morning.

Happy Birthday, Agatha!

Agatha bites back

Lancaster County in August!

Funny thing today: Mom and I took the kids to a nice children's museum and everyone had a great time. Afterwards both Henry and Agatha were playing in the sandbox in the garden outside, and as usual Aggie was getting in the middle of Henry's play, trying to take the sand out of his dump truck. He's usually very careful and gentle with her nowadays, but in frustration he put his hand on her forehead and pushed her back. The surprise was that Agatha got mad and chomped her (new) teeth on his back. He was so shocked; he jumped up and ran over to us for comfort. We were all pretty surprised! She's always been so accepting or, at most, complaining with a loud yell about her treatment. But I guess every docile infant eventually turns into an expressive toddler, and Agatha is starting to make the transition. While I don't want to encourage biting, I was secretly pleased to see that she's quite prepared to stick up for herself and not let Henry push her around.

Emotional Intelligence

(This is Henry and Michael doing Bridge Pose-- yoga. They are very competitive about it.)

Henry is so sensitive now to when we're disappointed with him. "Are we friends?" he'll ask after a mild scolding for putting his shoes on the couch or something like that. The other night Michael and I exchanged a brief eye-roll during the tooth-brushing part of our day, and Henry caught it immediately. "Are you happy? Because it looked like you were getting a little bit upset." It is so touching, humbling, and such a big change from his rather callous former persona. It really seems like the part of his brain where compassion, empathy, and conscience live has just sprouted a whole bunch of neurons.

Along the same lines, he likes to give (and receive, but that's always been true!) compliments. "I like your shoes, Mama!" he said today. He always compliments me on the nice dinner, even, touchingly, when it isn't really something he likes very much, like the vegetable gratin I've been making a lot lately with all our garden produce. Just now, when we were tucking him in, he said, "Hey, guess what? Tonight, on my plate, I saw a canned tomato, and guess what? I ate it! And I liked it! And now I want canned tomatoes every day. It's good that I try new things!" No self esteem troubles here.

Quote of the day: "When I say 'Pelcome,' that's how I say 'Thank you.' That's French. When will we go to Paris again? I want to see Paris. Parrots live in Paris."

Family bath

It's coming up on Agatha's 1st birthday, this Friday, and I'm so sentimental about her now-distant infancy. It's seems like much more than a year ago that I was pregnant with her! I don't remember feeling this way with Henry. For his 1st birthday, we had a party with seven one-year-olds and their parents. It felt like we were coming up for air, resurfacing after a year of submersion in baby-world. By his first birthday, Henry was running (he walked about 3 weeks before his birthday) and already seemed like a little boy, not a baby. We were excited about what lay ahead and relieved to have the demanding baby months behind us. But now, maybe because I don't expect to have any more children, I am already nostalgic for my last pregnancy, for that unmatched, special feeling of carrying a child, and for my tiny newborn.

Of course, this is all a trick of the mind! We can only live in the now and it is so wonderful having these fun little children. Partly, I think, we feel nostalgic for those tiny infants knowing later the distinctive personalities they become. Now that we know the 3-year-old, we can look back and see the seeds of that person in the infant. But when we were holding that two-week-old infant, we couldn't really know the person he'd become. I imagine this dissonance and retrospection just increases as your child grows and matures. Anyway, this ramble is just a taste of the swamp of emotions of being a mom!

Canning Tomatoes

Last week I went to a workshop at the county extension office on canning tomatoes, and this week, Reader, I canned them! We went on Monday to a produce auction to try to buy tomatoes, and we did not succeed. It was a really interesting scene-- the auctioneers went simultaneously down the aisles of produce, and a scrum of 15 or so people followed along and bid on the boxes as they went. Prices seemed high, though, and I was somewhat befuddled by the process. A nice lady took pity on me and clued me in to an Amishman down the road who was selling tomatoes at $5 a bushel. So we bought $14 worth of tomatoes (that's the amount in the first picture) and then I canned them up. I quit when I used up all my jars, which was a dozen quarts and two dozen pints; I froze the remaining 4 quarts or so. It was great! I can't believe I've never canned till now. But now, no produce is safe from me! Michael was complaining the other day because I canned up all the peaches (6 quarts).

Agatha was no help at all, except in flirting with people at the produce auction, but Henry enjoyed the process and really helped. He peeled the tomatoes after I blanched them, and did a careful job. He was very disappointed, though, by my failure at the auction. "I wanted you to win, Mama! Why didn't you win?" A few hours later, when he again said, "You know what, Mom? I really wish you had won," I told him that I did win in the end because I ended up getting the tomatoes I wanted at a better price. This made him feel much better. "You DID win!"

Bean

When Agatha is fussy and wants her dinner but it isn't ready yet, or some other tragedy has befallen her, Michael says, "Let's go out and get a bean." She points toward the door, and out they go. Like Henry, she loves to pick the beans on our little bean tower and eat them.

Knights, Pirates, and Adventurers

Michael and Henry have been watching all kinds of classic boy-tale films lately before bed. They watched the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and now they've started on the Seventh Tale of Sinbad ("He's not a pirate, Mom, he has adventures."). I am regularly greeted with lines like, "Mom, guess what? The rightful king escaped and he's on his way to the castle!" Henry has some toys from the German toy manufacturer Playmobil that are fantastic for him right now. They have millions of tiny pieces and parts, and he's now of an age where he likes to pose the figures and have them act out little dramas. He has the airport and airplane (a gift for his 2nd birthday from Gran), and now a castle with some knights. They all interact-- the other day I happened on Michael and Henry playing airport. There was a long line of knights at the check-in desk; they were having some trouble with agent about checking their maces and swords and pikes and so on. They were playing "Knights go on vacation."

Beautiful summer girl

Goody Two-Shoes

Henry has suddenly gotten interested in being good, doing the right thing. It's like all those rules and expectations suddenly sunk in after years of rolling off his back. He told Michael a long list of things he was going to do right from now on, like "using his walking feet" (something they must say at preschool) and then ran into the kitchen and told me, "Mom, I'm going to wash my hands with soap every day." Huh? We've also noticed that he's much more sensitive to our disappointment in him. We have to be careful not to be too hard on him now or he gets really sad and we feel terrible. It's a very interesting and welcome development!

Sentence of the day: "Mom, I just can't believe that snakes smell with their tongues-- that's crazy!"

Pointing

We feel a little guilty for not reading to Agatha as much as we did to Henry at this age. The general family hubbub gets in the way, plus she's just more easy to amuse so we don't have to think as much for things to do with her. The other day I came into the living room and she had the Richard Scarry book (you know the one) open to the endpaper and was delicately pointing at the tiny pictures of ladybugs, spools, and so on-- that's when I knew I had to do better. (Pointing is a new favorite activity; she's very precise with her little finger.) So we're trying to read to her more. Right now, her preference is for books with photographs of people and animals in them. This is another way she's different from Henry-- he was much more interested in pictures of machines. For months, the only book in his world was "Things That Go." He still loves it!

Language

Sorry-- I keep forgetting to take new pictures! Soon. Just had to post a little about language. Henry is such a chatterbox now, and loves to do all kinds of pretend play, like Restaurant. He likes to take your order, and then tells you that they don't have that anymore, or the oven isn't working so he'll have to bring it to you cold, or could you choose something else because he doesn't know how to write "scrambled eggs"? Yesterday he rode his trike over to Gran's and said, "It's nice that Gran lives around the corner now, so we don't have to get on an airplane." Very cute, but it sounds suspiciously like something an adult said to Henry recently, because he loves airplanes! Sure enough, after a moment's pause, he added, "But I wish we did have to take the airplane, because then we wouldn't have to walk."

Agatha is making all kinds of babbling noises. She's been multilingual for about two months now: she says "loco," "quoi? quoi?" and "good good good good good good." Seriously, though, she does say Dada and sometimes Mama, but no other real words yet.

Where's Michael?

Henry has taken to calling Michael "Michael," instead of Daddy. It started with him imitating me, as he did one day when we were trying to get ourselves out the door and into the car, and I said I'd just call up to Michael and let him know we were going to load up. Henry said, "I'll do it, Mama," and yelled up the stairs: "Michael! Michael! We're going to get settled in the car, so meet us there in a couple of minutes, okay?" But now he routinely calls him by his first name. I guess there's nothing really wrong with it, but it seems kind of weird. And when we're in public I'm afraid that people won't think Michael is Henry's dad, but a step-dad or something (not that there's anything WRONG with that...). Today on the playground, Henry was calling, "Mom, where's Michael?" and "Michael, look at this!" Should I nip this in the bud?

Mouths to feed

We have had homemade pizza as a regular weeknight meal for years. I usually eat 3/8ths of it, and used to give Michael the last piece of "my half". Since Henry's been around, he's eaten that last eighth, so Michael still eats half, and I still eat as much as I want. Perfect! But tonight, I made pizza-- with spinach, squash, and basil fresh from our garden plot-- and left the table hungry. First Agatha ate more than half of my first piece, and then just as I settled down to my second piece, Henry announced, "More! More! More! Can I please have more pizza, please?" So I had to give him the rest of mine. As I count it, that's 1/8 for Agatha, 1/4 for Henry, 3/8 for Daddy, and 1/4 for Mommy. This is not going to work, people! And if I have to make something else to stretch the pizza to four appetites, then it loses its major convenience factor (soup AND pizza?). What is the solution? Two pizza stones?