A 1/4 Milestone

Today, I took that giant leap of faith. The one I have been avoiding for several months. The one that was so traumatic, I am actually writing about it. Today, I let The Boy walk to school without anyone walking with him, crossing him over the street, or watching him walk to make sure he gets there.

The school is about six houses away, down the street. It's a quiet neighborhood, with many other children being walked to school each day. But, as close as the school is, I can't see it from here. This makes me crazy.

Every child needs to find a new level of independence at each age. Crawling was an act of independence, walking even more so. But what mother doesn't try to cushion the possible side-effects of learning these new skills?

The learning curve seems to be the child's, but in fact, it may be a shared experience. The child learns new skills, gains confidence, and with each independent move sharpens the line of separation. They become persons, individuals in their own rights. The parent learns that to allow that independence, to let those apron strings get erased and of course, the worst lesson - letting go.

There are gains for the parent, to be sure. There is a freeing-up of the time that used to be spent on things like diapering and spoon-feeding. I can have a coffee table without worrying that some child with an unsteady gait will crash head-long into it (The Boy may still do this, but he's a boy). We don't have to buy only melamine plates and plastic cups, we can have real china.

But even with all those gains, I still wonder if I wasn't better off with the 2 month old who couldn't go anywhere without me and would always be right where I put him. It saves a lot of worrying when he doesn't have to cross the street.

Boo Hoo, Boo Boo

Children, with their bouncy gaits and inattention to safety concerns are just accidents waiting to happen, and they happen frequently. Every mother will apply numerous kisses to heal the inevitable boo-boos during their children's younger years. Well, every mother but me.

The Girl was my first baby. Having read that coffee tables are a top source of injuries to babies learning to walk, I removed the coffee table from the livingroom as soon as she started to crawl. When she was two years old, I put the coffee table back, assuming she had gained some balance and coordination. Within a few days she had managed to topple off the sofa onto the table where she received her first bump on the head. I tossed the coffee table into the trash the very next day. This was her only major accident in her toddlerhood. The Girl was naturally careful and concerned for her own safety and rarely suffered any serious boo-boos needing attention. I am not sure that to this day she has ever truly experienced pain. She has made it her life's ambition to avoid pain at all costs.

The Boy, on the other hand, was born already programmed to self-destruct. He found new and interesting ways to hurt himself, or at least to try to hurt himself - a good portion of the time I was able to thwart his plans. So this should have afforded me ample opportunities to try out my boo-boo kissing and other make-it-all-better techniques. But it was not to be.

The Boy had a different approach to getting hurt. Getting his finger caught in the door jamb didn't make him cry, it made him hide his finger from me so I wouldn't see that he was hurt. He would react angrily to my solicitous questions about his general well-being. I quickly learned that the question "are you alright?" and outstretched arms never resulted in his running to me for comfort. Instead,he would pace about and mutter; returning to me only after the pain had ceased at which time he would relate the somewhat horrifying details of the incident.

In some ways The Girl's caution and The Boy's stoicism saved me from a lot of unnecessary panic over minor cuts and scrapes. But you have to admit, I have missed out on practicing the healing arts of motherhood. Therefore, I am unskilled in this particular area of nurturing. It's one reason I can't risk having any more children, the next one might be normal.

Parents Connect

Everything about your world changes when you become pregnant. If it's your first pregnancy, you will be full of questions about your changing body and curiosity about your growing baby. It's a time of concerns, too, always wondering if your particular symptoms are normal.

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What Every Kid Knows - but will never tell

Every mother faces that day - the first day of kindergarten when they leave their child to the unknown world of school. I remember when it was The Boy's first day.

Timid and shy, he stood with his back against the brick wall of the school, only watching as the other children ran about to greet schoolmates they had left behind when classes ended in June. On his first day of school, The Boy stood as close as he could get to me, with all the clingy need of a kindergartener , eliciting promises from me to stay with him. I was calm, reassuring and comforting. I told him all about his day and how much fun he would have. He looked up with the eyes of a dog that had been beaten as if to say "How could you do this to me"?

But that was the first day of school. By the third morning, when his older sister was not going to be able to watch over him, and I was torn between staying or being on time for work, I was told in a confident voice "Just go ahead, Mom, I can handle this myself".

A strange thing happens to your beautiful, loving and needy children when they start school. They become kids. They speak the language of kids, their ideas and opinions come from other kids and the only people who are acknowledged to know anything are other kids. I remember all too well the innocent five year old girl with the silken curls, the frilly pink dream of every mother that I took for her first day of kindergarten 9 years ago. That little angel went into the school that day, but she never returned. Instead, they sent home a kid. I still have not recovered from the first time those soft, cherry lips uttered her first kid phrase: "Duh, Mom, I already know that".

I assume that whatever strange and mysterious things go on at school, they are too secretive to share with parents for it seems the children are debriefed at the end of the day with strict instructions to never admit to knowing anything or remembering anything that occurred during school hours. The Boy has only been in school for two weeks before he knew the routine well. I could see his resolve in our conversation while driving home one day that first year.

"What did you have for lunch at school today?" I already knew the items on the menu, I was just being interested in his choices. I thought mothers do that, so I was trying it.

"Nothing."

"Nothing? I gave you lunch money, didn't you order lunch?"

"I don't know."

"You gave them your lunch money, what did you order?"

"I don't know."

This line of questioning obviously wasn't going to work so I took another tack.

"When your teacher takes you and your class to the cafeteria, what do you do there?"

"I don't know."

"Do you get a tray with food on it? Do you sit with your class and eat?"

"I don't know."

"Okay, let me get this straight. When you went into the cafeteria you blacked out and entered some kind of vortex and when you emerged you had no memory of it?"

"I ordered a hamburger and they gave me pizza."

Finally a confession, apparently brought about only because they had made a mistake. His loyalty to the secret school society was weakened when they disappointed him.

"And white milk."

That must have been the last straw, he spat the words "white milk" as if they left a bad taste in his mouth. Even I would not have been so foolish as to forget the chocolate milk and I am only a mother.

But that was the last revelation. I tried to find out what they learned, what games they played or how he liked his teacher. But he had recognized his slip and all I got was: "I don't know".

When I went for my first parent/teacher conference, I heard what a polite child he was, how friendly and outgoing with other children. The teacher explained what letters they were practicing and how they had learned to count by tens. She showed me his artwork and praised his efforts.

But for all I know, it could all be a lie. It may be that they do none of these things. All I have to go by is this stranger's word and a few scraps of paper with some scribbles on them. I have no way of knowing what really goes on in the secret school society.

The Boy knows, but he's not talkin'.

School Bus Tales

Monday was The Boy's first day on the school bus. Oh, I know school started months ago, but we hadn't planned on needing the bus at first. Initially, I was going to continue to drive him to school but then those plans changed. Then, for a while, his friend's mother had graciously offered to pick him up and drop him off. The circumstances that made that possible then changed and the bus was the only option left. It was a hard sell.

The Boy has always seemed all-confident to me, in every endeavor. Like most boys, he thinks he can do anything and often he is right. He has compared his mother's continuous cautioning -"don't do that, you'll get hurt" - with the usual outcome - "see, I didn't get hurt" - and this has only strengthened his conviction that Mom is a worry-wort and he's invincible. So I was unprepared for his nervousness about the school bus. He simply told me "I am not going to get on the bus".

To tell the truth, I was nervous too. It's my job, I'm a mom. I was careful to try to hide it although, it may have shown through in the fact that he did get that cell phone for his birthday (for emergency calls to Mom in case he got lost) and the fact that I may have told him 20 or so times to make sure he didn't get out of the bus until the driver assured him that this was his stop, and that we went over all the subsequent numbers he should call (all programmed into the phone) if for any reason I didn't answer.

In my defense, I had a hard time of it when The Girl took the bus. We had several incidents where the bus didn't stop to pick her up, a new driver didn't drop her off, she purposely stayed on the bus past her stop and they had to bring her back and once when she went off with the neighbors without telling me and we had everyone including her teacher out looking for her. I ended up following the bus to school in my car for three weeks before I finally felt secure.

But it wasn't fears of getting lost, or of not knowing what to do, where to sit, where to get on or off or any of the fears that crossed my mind that were bothering The Boy. He just didn't think he would know anyone on the bus and as he explained to me "Mom, I'm shy".

So when he saw the little boy next door waiting for the bus, that was it. Once this small and brave kindergartener who was a bus veteran agreed to take over the care of my second-grader, all fear vanished and I was told to leave the area.

The next day he refused to let my husband walk him to the bus stop, but I insisted that he remain at the end of the driveway to actually view him go aboard. I thought I was fairly calm, I didn't ask him to identify the vehicle. After all, I figured it's hard to miss the yellow monstrosity and so I decided against asking "are you sure it was the school bus?".

The Boy did call me on the cell from the bus on that first day. He was about 5 minutes into his trip and announced "I will take the bus again tomorrow". To my relief, he does still like to have someone in the background, slightly out of view but present because I need a witness that he actually got on the bus or I will be calling the school to check. This is day three now, and I have only done that once.

I'm Batman

A study at Waterloo University that explored children's storytelling abilities has shown that pre-schoolers are able to immerse themselves into the minds, thoughts and perspectives of a storybook character. I was already well aware of this stunning ability.

During my son's entire enrollment at preschool he had a Batman fixation. He was only interested in toys if they had something to do with Batman. His desire for Batman action figures knew no bounds, and I was dismayed to find that one Batman would not suffice. Batman was no longer the predominantly black and purple caped crusader of my childhood, he came in many different outfits in every color imaginable.

Oh, and every Batman had his own accessories. A green and yellow suited Batman might have a long string with a grappling hook. Other strangely-appareled versions could have boomerangs or rocket launchers. The more strings that were attached and the more tiny missiles it could fire, the better he liked it because it made the toys much more dangerous to innocent family members who might get reeled in by a bat-hook.

You rarely got any intelligible conversation out of the Boy, most discussions ended with him simply stating "I'm Batman", an answer he seemed to think answered all questions. I was used to a lot of attention at the grocery store, as The Boy stood proudly in the cart with a towel tied around his shoulders, announcing to other shoppers "I'm Batman". They were usually quite impressed, and I achieved the rare status of being the mother of a superhero.

But it wasn't until the Christmas party at his preschool that I understood the origin of the Batman obsession. He had a particular friend who was his entire preschool world. For the party, all the parents had purchased gifts to be wrapped and given to Santa to hand out to the children. Of course, The Boy's gift was something Batman-ish. Soon after we arrived, his little chum walked in, dressed in full Batman costume. A novel sight for a Christmas party, I thought. "He won't take it off", his mother complained. Oh, how I knew her pain.

What I didn't know until the Boy and his cohort had scrounged around the hidden recesses of the pre-school, was that in the dress-up box there was a Batman cape with hooded mask attached. The Boy emerged with the cape and kept it on for the entire event, even when he sat on Santa's lap. Santa, of course, already knew that he was Batman (Santa knows everything) and The Boy was quite happy to be recognized. Later, one of his teachers revealed to me that they often had to hide the cape, or my son would wear it all day, every day.

So it was no surprise to me to find that young children can become completely immersed in a storybook character. They didn't need a university study to prove that. What would be more useful to parents is if they did a study on how to get them out of the Batman costume.

How To Be a Slacker Prepared

The countdown to school begins. We now have less than 48 hours to the first day of school and preparations are proceeding at a fevered pitch.

The Girl has started out well. She is organizing all her notebooks and folders well ahead of time, even preparing labels for each section of her mega-binder so that all homework and class worksheets can be placed in their rightful category. To watch her, one can't help but be impressed with her organizational skills and her responsible approach to schoolwork.

However, school often starts this way. It doesn't take long to degenerate into a mad search in the evening for the math worksheet and hastily placed phone calls to classmates wondering if they know which words she is supposed to study for the vocabulary quiz. I have had teachers tell me of homework that arrives crumpled with chocolate fingerprints and other,less easily identified stains. Other work may still be damp from having been placed under her wet bathing suit in her backpack. Books needed at school are left at home, books needed for homework are left at school. Miscellaneous items are scattered throughout the cars and homes of relatives and friends. The urgent plea to buy her an item needed for a project due on Friday is usually made on Thursday night.

Yes, The Girl is organizationally challenged, suffering from impaired preparatory skills, lacking sufficient organization motivation. In other words, she's a little lazy.

I can understand this, as I was the child who did homework in front of the TV and wrote five page reports the day before they were due. The difference is, that I got away with it. If you are going to be lazy and unorganized, it's imperative that you turn in what appears to be a well thought out paper, a report full of references or at the very least, pass the pop quiz. These are the real skills that she is lacking. It's hard work to be prepared, but if you are going to be a slacker, then you need to learn how to deliver the goods under pressure and at the last minute.

I think a lot of this is dependent on maturity. This is the child that didn't like first grade because they didn't play as many games as in kindergarten. If you find first grade to be grueling, then middle school is bound to be like being taken from a warm, comfortable bed and dunked into a tub of ice water. But as she grew to accept that first grade was about learning and not about socializing and fun, so she will accept that middle school is about responsibility and preparing for the future. It just might take some time.

At least that's going to be my line when I get to the first parent/teacher conference. I hope they buy it.

Ben Franklin Never Had a Mom

The sun is shining brightly outside my window, so brightly in fact, that it's hard to see the computer monitor. Whoever would have thought that I would come to prefer dim rooms with little light for the sake of reading words from a little screen?

Despite the bright sunshine the weather forecast promises thunderstorms. Now thunderstorms are the bane of the computer addict - close and severe storms mean powering down to protect your machine. Separation anxiety can overcome you within minutes.

But thunderstorms are greeted in my house with as little fanfare as possible. I don't want to have the children overly-anxious about lightning as I was when I was a child. A healthy respect for its power and the dangers it possesses is fine, but my mother knew how to instill deep and lasting fear.

Most people know how to avoid the most obvious dangers during a thunderstorm - turn off the computer, maybe turn off the TV, don't talk on the cordless phone, don't take a bath. Don't try to emulate Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod experiments. But my mother had much more detailed rules.

Windows all had to be closed. No one was allowed near windows or doors. We weren't allowed to tread upon the carpet as it might contain wool fibers, and she was convinced that wool was a great conductor of electricity. For similar reasons, we weren't allowed to pet the dog, not even if she was dry. She felt that dog hair was probably as good a conductor of electricity as the carpet. So we were a family of 5 sitting on the couch with our legs crossed under us, yelling furiously at the dog to go out to the kitchen until such time as the storm had passed.

They say the odds of getting struck by lightning are about one in nine million. Strangely, although I don't know nearly nine million people, I personally know three who have been struck by lightning. None of them were walking on the carpet or petting the dog.

My rules for thunderstorms are a little more lax than my mother's. No playing outside in the rain when there's lightning, no holding steel rods out the windows. You can watch TV if you sit on a chair a good distance from it until the power cuts out. If there is more than one crack of lightning in a row that sounds like it just blew up your garage, it's probably best not to sit too close to an open window. If the power goes out, only the mother can light the candles and no, you can't take one to bed with you.

The truth of the matter is, if you don't do anything really stupid, the chances of being struck by lightning are one in nine million. Let's face it, if it's gonna get you, it's gonna get you. Might as well watch the end of American Idol.

There Goes the Bride - Again

The Boy was 6 when he walked into the kitchen one day and said to me "Mom, I like girls". It was very matter-of-fact. I nodded, a little short on words since I didn't know if this was just a declaration or the beginning of one of "those" chats. I simply said "That's good, glad to hear it".

Now there's no doubt he's a handsome little thing with a shock of dark blonde hair that glistens with natural streaks of gold, big blue eyes and a winning smile. But The Boy is only 7 and he's been engaged twice and married once.

Oh yeah, he got married. His first fiancé, who is 8 years old, moved to another town and he was quite distressed at first. But it didn't take him long to replace her with a new neighbor who is also 8. The kid's got a thing for older women.

The wedding was sprung on me without advance warning. The Girl got busy making cupcakes for the occasion, filled the house with stuffed animal guests and they all got dressed up. The Boy wore a shirt and tie - he knows how to impress a lady. I was commissioned to play the wedding march on the keyboard and they marched through the house to a lovely outdoor ceremony after which they were taken away in a red wagon. It was a lovely wedding.

Now the wife is moving across town, and will be attending a different school. At 7 and 8, I don't think long-distance relationships survive very long. I don't think I will survive if I am called upon to transport him daily to visit her.

On the other hand, I don't think I am ready for yet another engagement or a second marriage. Besides, who will get custody of the wagon?

Boys, Bumps & Bikes

The Boy is growing up. I guess I still think of him as someone who wants Batman pyjamas and Spiderman shaped snacks, but little by little he's eliminating those icons of boyhood with items that are "cool". We were looking together for a skateboard online, and I was quoting him the specs of the ones we could afford. I later overheard him telling a friend, with a sad resignation in his voice, "I have to get the Spongebob one".

A few weeks ago, the kid couldn't even ride a scooter. I have to hand it to him, he practiced for hours in the driveway, a few feet of coasting at a time. He was out there regardless of whether the sun was beating down on his fair face or whether rain was dripping off his hair into his eyes. And - he mastered it.

The next thing was the daily harangue to take the training wheels off his bicycle. I told him it had to wait for a weekend, when I would have time to come out and help him learn to ride it, relating serious stories of the dangers involved - learning to steer, falling down, collisions, injuries, crashing into solid objects. He was unmoved. Alas, he had outgrown his bike and it was in bad shape so taking the training wheels off didn't make a difference, the bike was unrideable. Not one to be easily defeated, he opted to try the girl neighbor's pink bike. The kid rode it easily on the first try, he didn't fall once. I guess all that practice on the scooter had already honed his balance.

Now he has a new bike - larger and more manly in red and black. He is obsessed with riding his bike the way he was obsessed with mastering the scooter. He rides the bike every moment he can, thinking up ways to go faster, looking for objects to run over and plotting tricks and risky maneuvers with which to frighten his mother.

I am nervously biting my nails and biding my time over this one. I know the obsession with the bike will cool and eventually his bike-riding will be just one of many things he likes to do. I know that his skill on the bike will increase and so far, I have managed to keep him from ditching his helmet (although I have my doubts about its future, it has Power Rangers on it).

I wonder if one day The Boy will be grown up enough that I won't worry about his high interest level in dangerous activities.

I doubt it.

I think I'm going to need a lifetime enrollment at the nail salon.

Saved From Television

I don't watch TV anymore. It's a conscious choice now, but it started when my cable bill became too exorbitant to budget about three or four years ago and for the next two years we didn't have television in our house. The reception these days is so weak, an antenna provided nothing more than snow.

After the cable went off, I bought the first of what turned out to be a series of cheap DVD players and invested in movies and children's shows for the kids to watch. A membership in the local video store provided the newer films that we couldn't afford to buy. Besides, once the kids have watched a movie about 25 times or so, they lose interest. Of course, once they have watched it 25 times or so, you have lost brain cells. By the way, you don't get those back.

I noticed how well-behaved and engaged the children were when we visited relatives with cable. They would turn on Disney or Nickolodeon and sit transfixed before the flickering screen. Foolishly, I thought that if I relented and got them real television at home, it would have the same effect. So, in an effort to avail myself of an electronic babysitter, I got satellite TV with not just one Disney channel, but two! East coast and west coast so they could watch everything twice if they wanted to.

I never re-entered the world of television viewing myself. I kept up with all the news I needed on the net and threw myself into blogging - a brave new world. The internet had taken up all the slots in my prime-time.

As I traverse the blogosphere I find I don't actually need a TV to keep up with all the latest shows. There are entire blogs dedicated to sitcoms, reality shows and soap operas (although these are starting to lose popularity).

As for the kids, they tire of television easily now. My grand scheme to pay a monthly fee and secure a few moments of quiet for myself hasn't really panned out. These days, they would much rather play outside, ride scooters, run and scream and get deliciously dirty.

Sometimes, they make me proud.

A Weekend Reprieve

When you have children, there is a certain noise level to which you become accustomed. Even when they aren't fighting or trying to wrest the remote control for the TV from one another, there is never anything akin to quiet. Children make noise, even when they are behaving well.

And yet, give a mother just 48 hours of peace and quiet and she quickly adjusts.

This weekend the children were away at their cousin's house. A pair just made for my pair - a slightly older boy to play video games, discuss Pokemon card collections and pass on outgrown clothes for my son to hang with and a slightly younger girl for my daughter to adopt as her little sister/doll/plaything.

It was the first quiet time my husband and I have had since our brief honeymoon. We were married in May and since then our time has been spent working and blogging and listening to the sounds of children who unfortunately don't go back to school until September.

The children arrived home this evening in typical fashion, each trying to out-talk the other, first through rapidity of speech and then through volume. It didn't take long for them to tire of us though and within minutes they had recruited the neighbor children to take part in their mission to re-acclimate us to noise.

What I found interesting is my initial reaction to what was basically very minor noisemaking for four children. It was like a volcanic eruption of words and sounds, screeches and squeals. But two hours into their homecoming and I realized that I am already learning to block out the titters and teasing and listening only for sounds of dangerous mayhem.

I often wondered how my mother dealt with the noise and confusion of five children, I can barely handle two. I do now know why my mother gave up on fastidiousness in housework, however.

Upon arriving, my daughter remarked "Oh, the house looks so clean".

Yeah, that lasted about as long as the quiet.