Nascar in the Pit

Life lately has felt rushed.  We get up very early, head to two – sometimes three- schools most days. We go to Salisbury on the weekends.  Oh, we moved out of our kitchen, and now we are back in. Those lazy late morning days of summer feel as far away as the sweaty, hot days that made the pool a relief.  And in the midst, I wonder if we are enjoying each other.

Today was different.  John and Rosie were both out of school.  At breakfast we talked about whether to go see Mac in Salisbury or go to “Life and Science” (our awesome kids museum that’s only five minutes from home).  We settled on Salisbury, but after we got up from the table, we slowly started doing what we do when we have time at home.  I got the kitchen cleaned up.  The kids started playing.

When I got in the playroom, Rosie was balancing on the arms of a chair, reaching above her head to the third shelf for art supplies.  I decided it was time to reorganize and put those scissors, glue and markers within her reach.  So we started moving things around, making masks and beaded necklaces.

And before we knew it, everybody was hungry again.  So, I taught them to crack their own nuts.  One thing after another.  Rosie dug out the playdough while John was immersed in his playmobil pirates and castles.  As I put chairs together for our kitchen, I could hear them discussing whether this particular pirate was dead yet, and if so, if he needed to be buried in the playdough.  It was messy, but they were enjoying each other.

I just listened.  Lately the kids had been fighting so much.  Where was today coming from?  Was it having nothing that we had to do?  Was it my being completely available to them and not worrying about registration glitches  my student’s projects?

I kept thinking we would go outside, but it didn’t happen until 4pm.  We waited for it to start raining.  We finally headed to Life and Science, and when we got there, I herded everyone past the gift shop and the indoor exhibits to go outside.  Even in the rain, we needed to breathe air outside for a while.  I kept saying I wanted to see the bears.  Rosie was chiming in that there’s a new wolf.  So we headed that direction with John whining “Nnnnoooooo, not the bear.”

I didn’t care really what we did.  I just wanted our bodies to move.  After we greeted the domestic animals: the pig, donkey, sheep, cow and goat, John found an old pile of dirt.  It’s a frequent attraction for his friends, and it has shrunk in the last few years.  It’s probably four or five feet tall with a hole in the middle and on one side, as though they’ve used a big shovel to get some when they need it.  So I would say it looks a little like a miniature volcano.

John started running the rim.  Well, why not?  Soon we were all chasing each other around the rim, alternately running, skipping and walking.  ”It’s a volcano!”  Whoa, he’s in the middle!  But you’re the water. (spray with water). Good, all better.  Running, running.  Down in the hole, up on the rim.  All in a circle.

The bear?  ”No, it’s way better to play Nascar in the Pit!”

“OK, tell me more.”

“We’re Nascar drivers,” says John.  He lifts an elbow and uses his index finger to emphasize this point. “And we have to drive the inside of the course.”  He’s running below the rim, in circles. Rosie’s on the rim.  ”No, you can’t run on the rim!”

Yes she can.  She’s the mechanic.  She fixes any of the cars that break down.  ”Well, ok.”  Everybody is back to running.  Breathing hard.

We pause for a minute.  I look up, through the drizzle and see the bank of trees.  ”Look at that, guys.”  Shades of muted yellow, orange, red and brown brown against the deep green of the pines that aren’t changing. We’re alone out there, cheeks are pink, and all I hear is our breathing.  It’s timeless and beautiful.

But it didn’t last long.  Nascar in the Pit is over. “Hey, do you want to be a skier or a snowboarder?  I’m a snowboarder!”  The swishing starts again, around the dirt pile.

“No, I’m a treeclimber,” Rosie says.  She starts marching the rim again, legs high, arms climbing.

“You can’t do that.  We’re on a ski slope,” John says.  Everybody is still going in circles.

“What if she’s on ski patrol?  She climbs trees to see if everybody is ok?” I add that one.

“Great,” says John.  ”Better help this guy over here.  Rosie and I start to help John.  ”No!  Him!”

OK.  Rosie and I carry a stretcher over to the woods and dump our guy into the hospital.  Back to the dirt pile.  Better keep going.  Might be more injured snowboarders.  John hasn’t paused.  He’s going.

Then it’s 5:05, it is still drizzling, and they are closing.  We head home and do the dinner thing with Adam, who reads to them calmly while I cook, and then its time for the bath.  After the bath the kids spring into John’s room and are jumping on the trampoline and the bed….we have one designated old bed we let them jump on….  Anyway, Adam and I both have the half-headache feeling of “why can’t this be easy?  I’m tired.”

They are springing into the air.  Doing somersaults, completely naked.  At least underwear would be nice.  ”It’s time to do get dressed,” Adam says.

“But dad,” John says as his feet flip over his head.  ”This is the fun of my life.”

I heard that.  In a different way than normal.  Here we adults stand, wishing we could rush through this and get them asleep.  But this is the fun of his life.  We are all together.  He and Rosie are conspirators instead of enemies.  I got it.

But your refrigerator is empty!

Remember that little girl in the movie, Monsters Inc?  She toddles around talking nonsense.  She is very cute but causes lots of mischief.  Yesterday Rosie reminded me of her.

We had bible study meeting at our house last night.  With our kitchen getting very close to functional, I really wanted to make something for everyone.  I had been buying pre-made desserts for three months.  So before taking the kids to a playground around 4pm, I prepped the dry ingredients to make a raspberry/blueberry cobbler.  A friend had served me a cobbler a couple months ago, and she gave me the recipe on a strip of red paper.  So I left the house with bowls of measured sugar and flour on the counter beside the recipe.  Milk, water, etc to be thought about later.

We get home later than expected, and I need to get it in the oven.  Shouldn’t be hard because it’s a matter of putting it all together.  Rosie runs in the kitchen and grabs the recipe.  ”I need this in my kitchen.”  I wasn’t worried about it because her kitchen is pretty small.  She’s back in my kitchen in less than a minute, “Here, you can use this one.”  She hands me a yellow sheet of legal paper with writing.  She got it in the trash.  ”OK,” I said.

A minute later I call her.  ”Rosie, I need my recipe back please.”  She comes running in the kitchen.  ”It’s in my refrigerator.”

“Can you go get it please?”

She doesn’t come back.  I find her playing near her kitchen.  She has carefully lined the entire coffee table with plates, each one containing one piece of food.  We’ve been in the house less than seven or eight minutes, and she’s only played in one room.

“I put it in the refrigerator,” she says, “but it’s not there.”  Mmm.  Her fridge is completely empty.  I look in her stove.  Her microwave.  In her bag of veggies.  In the sink.  The whole kitchen is only about four feet by three feet, so it doesn’t take long.  No recipe.  This is crazy.  It’s gotta be right here.  So I look around, starting to feel my stress level rise.

“Rosie, think back.”

“I put it in the refrigerator.”

I decide to call my friend who gave me the recipe.  Can’t find her number.  It’s not on any of the emails she has ever sent me, dating back to ’04.  Takes me three mutual friends before someone answers.  I get her home and cell, but she doesn’t answer either.

At this point people will be here in 60 minutes, and the cobbler is supposed to cook for more than an hour.  And the kids are hungry.  It’s dinnertime.

I realized no one was going to help me.  My friend wasn’t available; Rosie had moved onto playing with bunnies, and John didn’t witness any of it.  His head is buried in a playmobile catalogue. (Otherwise, he would have probably been my answer.  He frequently knows what has happened.)  Only thing I have to depend on is my memory…not necessarily a good thing.  I had read the recipe that afternoon when seeing what the dry ingredients were.

So I took a deep breath and thought back.  I remembered being surprised that you put the flour mixture on bottom and pour the fruit on top.  It rises while cooking.  And water on top.  I put it together out of memory, and thought of what Bubie (my grandmother) used to tell me.  How can something with lots of butter and sugar taste bad?

And in the end, it came out fine.  I think I’ll wait until Rosie gets older to lend her any more recipes.

Rosie on Fire

Rosie — sweet little frequently quiet Rosie — is coming into her own.  She has let John talk most of her life.  He has a lot of ideas and got used to having the airwaves to himself for the first two or more years of her life.  She started talking late.  But I think she’s ready for that to change.  She has started to hold up her hand to him and say, “John, stop talking please.  I’ve got something to say!”

John just started kindergarten, and he’s in school until mid afternoon.  Rosie has moved into the space with gusto.

OK, but today.  That’s where I was headed. On the way out the door to get John I asked if Rosie wanted a snack.

“Yes!”

OK, how about an apple?

“Sure, let’s take John a banana.”

Alright, well maybe I want one to.  So I grab an apple and taste it.  Blech.  Soft, mealy, bland.  ”Rosie, how’s your apple?” I ask.

“Great!  Want a taste?”  Hers is crisp, sour but sweet, tangy.  Mmm.

I grab another apple.  Not a great habit, but obviously I got the bad one in the bunch.  My second one is as bad as the first.  OK, forget that, let’s go.

Half-way to get John Rosie asks how I got finished with my apple before her.  Well, I explain, mine weren’t like hers.  I go into the mushy vs crunchy, sweet vs nothingness.  I didn’t eat them.  I’ll cook them later I tell her.

She thinks.  ”Well, if that happened to me, I would stomp to my room and go to sleep! Yeah, go to sleep with one of my animals.”  (This sounds like “tomp to my womb.”)

“Not a bad idea,” I say.

“You should stomp to your room, then and go to sleep.”

“Rosie, if I do that, who will pick up John?”

She paused.  It was silent back there.  I thought she was off onto another idea.  Then she finally answers, “Well, somebody who isn’t eating an apple.”

When it’s over….

Much of what I wrote about last summer celebrated the new experiences of life.  Firsts.  Bearing witness to the passage of time.  I could do that now.  We just went skiing for the first time with our kids and were amazed that we spent the whole day skiing together…and had fun!  But something else is on my mind.

 

A much more subtle aspect of the same truth has been hitting me lately.  It’s exciting when your child does their first bike ride without training wheels, their first steps across the kitchen floor, their first day of school, proud smiles on their faces.  The passage of time is both beautiful and painful, and what’s been eating at me lately is that the ending of things also marks an important passage of time. It’s not often something I notice.  Or rather in the moment I don’t know it’s the last.  I just wake up six months later and realize something precious hasn’t happened in a while.  Let me explain, or at least describe, what I mean….

 

It’s 4am.  I hear my name and pull myself out of bed, head down the hall, and slip into bed with John.  I pull his little warm body into my own.  I feel him relax and drift back to sleep.  The next day I think I’m tired. I had to get up in the middle of the night.  Then one day I realize it’s been months, and my name is no longer being screamed in the middle of the night. In that moment, the sweetness of that middle-of-the-night connection seems more poignant than the next day’s weariness.  

 

When is the last time a baby nurses?  It’s another of those middle-of-the night experiences with children.  Seems like we all talk about wanting these to end.  But once it’s over, or even promising to be over, I savor those moments when the world is still, and Rosie and I are all there is.

 

How about the last conversation with your mom or dad — the kind of conversation where you feel that connection that goes back to childhood?  That feeling that all is right with the world, and this is a safe space.  Or even just the everyday type of conversation about who you saw or what you did.  When does it happen last?  Seems like it’s not the day they die or the day we die.  It imperceptibly slips away before then, without warning or fanfare.  And then we are the grown ups without that parent to talk to. And their voice on a tape, or notes about their childhood take on different meaning. 

 

When does “yittle” become “little?”  And “I hate it the cheese” become “I hate the cheese?”  Or the screeches of “I do!  I do!” — Rosie’s claim that she wanted to be part of things back before she could talk well — become sentences, normal sentences, like “I want the front of the bath.”  What day will she stop looking at my food saying, I yike toast, or whatever is on my plate, and just start asking if she can have some.  Language at three-years-old is like the inside part of a celery stalk…sweeter, more tender, worth enjoying.

 

One of the things that left me without my realizing it was singing songs to John at night.  Every night we rocked and sang. John had a bottle until he turned three, and I would sing to him while he drank it.  And then as he got older, he would request songs until we had to stop. He learned about Easter and Christmas, all through music. When the bottle needed to stop, the bedtime stories, a beautiful thing of their own, stepped in.  The songs remained part of the routine for a while, but eventually without the intimate quiet of the bottle, the songs slowed and stopped.  The rocking chair still sits in his room, now filled with whatever someone needed to put down.  The new routine is also wonderful….everyone piles onto one bed – one parent per child — the chosen books are stacked and have to be read in the right order.  When done, they are dismissed to the floor.  It’s a family affair, two stories going at once.

 

So there it is.  When a child clings to you, burrowing his or her face in your shoulder, needing comfort from the fireworks or the guy dressed in a costume, you tell them the guy is not going to hurt them and that the fireworks are far away.  You want them to be ok with the world.  You want them to be independent.  You want them to turn, face the world, and walk on their own. 

 

And eventually they do.  Eventually they can pedal their own bikes, run into class without even a glance, go get the paper, and embrace all that life has to give them.  Their bodies lose that baby fat and get lanky.  It’s beautiful, and bittersweet.  We celebrate those victories and their pride in what they can do, but it also hurts to see the baby in them slip away.  Rosie is three, and she takes ballet, which was her own idea, has a pink baseball glove and knows how to use it.  John is almost five, a little boy with opinions, a love for baseball and six books under his belt.  (They’re way short, but he can read them.)  Adam and I can’t hold onto it. We don’t want to.  Or maybe we would want to.  But as my dad said, “It doesn’t matter how much you love them.  They grow up anyway.”