innocence

There is so much I want to tell R.

So much I want to tell her, but can’t. I don’t want to scare her.  Plus, she’s too young to understand. But I want her to know that she shouldn’t do this. That she can’t run out into the street in front of the house because this might happen. That she should always stay close to Mommy because people like this live in the world. That she can’t play outside alone because of this.

How do I keep her safe without taking away her innocence?

I started taking piano lessons when I was four years old. My teacher, Gayle, lived across the street from us. She had probably a dozen students, ranging in age from four to about 12. We had recitals at a local church twice a year, once at Christmas and once in the spring.

Jeanine was four years older than me, and I idolized her. She was pretty and friendly. She wore a maroon-colored dress to the Christmas recital in December 1982. And in February 1983, when I was six and she was ten, she was kidnapped, raped and murdered.

I don’t really remember my parents telling me what happened, but I assume that they did. I remember Gayle crying a lot. I remember seeing Jeanine’s parents on television. I remember never being left home alone. As the years went by, convictions were gained and overturned and new trials were ordered and pardons were granted and now, almost 25 years later, no one is paying for what he did to her.

When I was in sixth grade, I sat next to a boy named Shannon in Mr. Kallenbach’s math class. He had been held back once and was a year older than us. When May came around and we were all looking forward to going to middle school, Shannon went out to check the mail. He found a notice that he would be held back again. He waited until his mother was gone, then he shot himself in the head.

I remember the aftermath of this clearly. Since he lived in a neighborhood adjacent to mine, we knew within hours. They had counselors at school the next day. I remember crying out in the hallway outside Mrs. Doyle’s music class. I remember clutching my friends, feeling sad but not hysterical. My parents didn’t let me go to the funeral or visitation.

I suppose things like this are inevitable in any child’s life. I just wish I could protect R from it all. I wish she didn’t have to know that things like this happen. I wish, I wish, I wish. In the days after September 11, when Dave and I were newly engaged, I started to wonder why anyone would ever bring children into a world where something like that could happen. Where Darfur could happen. Where Rwanda could happen. Where Bosnia could happen.

I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe it’s to try to raise our children to do better, to be better. Maybe there’s no answer. Why did I decide to have children when just four years earlier I was certain I could not? I guess time dulls the horror. And what if everyone decided not to have children because bad things happen? That’s certainly not the answer.

But now we are left with explaining to our kids that bad things happen in this world, sometimes to good people and sometimes for no good reason and no fault of their own. I guess it’s all part of growing up.

We’re a happy family

My husband may not be the most romantic guy in the world on a daily basis (unless unloading the dishwasher a couple times a week qualifies as romance), but when it comes to the big moments, he really does it right. He agonizes over things like setting and mood and timing and the EXACT RIGHT WORDS. I find it all very endearing.

Jennie wrote about how it took her husband five months to tell her he loved her, which I thought was funny because that was exactly how long it took my husband. And Jennie and I both knew a heck of a lot earlier than that how we felt about those crazy men of ours.

Dave and I started dating in July 1999. Well, dating seriously. We’d been out a few times before that, but it was July when I decided to let him kiss me. From then on out we were pretty much inseparable. When New Year’s Eve came, we knew we would both be working (newspaper reporters, Y2K scare, you get the picture) for at least part of the night. We were both able to break away about 11 p.m. though and head to a big shindig where many of our friends were already partying. As the clock struck 12 on a new year and a new century (depending on your viewpoint on the whole century deal), fireworks filled the sky in front of us. Standing behind me, Dave leaned in and whispered, “I love you.” I smiled and said I loved him too. And we made out for a minute.

It was all so sweet, I almost forgave him for dancing to “The Humpty Dance” while clutching a bottle of champagne later on that night. Almost.

Bored at work

MyHeritage: Celebrity Collage – Free genealogy

$85 perfume

This morning, I caught my husband putting Chanel No. 5 on a not-quite-two-year-old girl.

“What?” he said when I objected. “She likes it! She even knows to hold out her wrist.”

She likes to smack her best friend upside the head with a sippie cup too, but that doesn’t mean we let her do it. And now my toddler smells like perfume instead of … toddler.

See Santa! NO SANTA!

What a delightful weekend. I hope the next time I am facing the billionth tantrum over a refused request or wondering how many times she can want me to draw a circle, I remember the last two days and how awesome it can be to parent a toddler.

I think the best thing about being R’s mom is that I get to experience everything over again, for the first time. Everything is new. She’s never seen Santa Claus before. She’s never been on a “choo-choo” ride before. She’s never touched a shark before. And because of that, because of her wonder and joy and exuberance, I get to feel that way too.

Because my workplace is a corporate friend and I eat lunch at my desk and could therefore be the first person to respond to the e-mail offering one free pass, we got to wake R up early Saturday morning and be at the Children’s Museum two hours before opening for breakfast, pictures with Santa, free carousel rides and unlimited trips down the “Yule Slide.” The biggest bonus? No crowds.

We got home in time for her to take a 3 ½ hour nap, waking up only to go to Christmas at the Zoo, where she pet a baby shark, rode a “choo-choo” and another carousel, ate chicken fingers and Cheetos and called various animals, including reindeer and yaks, “cows.” She spent the whole ride home chatting about her choo-choo ride and the Christmas lights and the cows.

Sunday morning was the children’s program at our church. Standing proudly on my lap in the very back row, R proudly called out that she saw a cow, which says Moo! Then she saw a Baby! Baby JESUS! The woman in front of us could barely contain her guffaws. When R asked the pastor after service where the Baby Jesus went, he told her that the baby was sleeping. Shhhhhh, she said, Shhhh.

Of course, she refused to have her picture taken with Santa.

Mmmmm, ice cream

Motherhood has brought many unexpected things to my life: almost daily conversations about human feces, impromptu dance parties to ‘O Holy Night’ and ‘Ave Maria,’ a rediscovery of Barbie dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids.

But these fun little snippets of time are just the pecans on the sundae of things that have surprised me, especially in the last few months: grammar, vegetables and fear. The fear is probably the ice cream. The grammar is the hot fudge sauce. The vegetables are the whipped cream. It’s my sundae and my analogy. Leave me alone.

Before December 28, 2005, Dave and I ate with our health in mind. We belonged to a gym (and went! A lot!). We took long hikes and long walks with our dogs. We had a salad before nearly every dinner. I lovingly prepared all of our meals from the Cooking Light magazine or cookbooks and it didn’t matter if we were eating at 8 p.m. I kept carrot sticks and celery and apples and bananas and oranges in the crisper drawers of our refrigerator.

I think it’s fair to say that since R began eating the same food as us eight or nine months ago, healthy has been replaced by dear God get the meal on the table quickly so we can avoid another tantrum and she can get to bed at a reasonable hour. This means we eat a lot of crockpot meals and things that can be thrown together in 45 minutes or so with a toddler either wanting either to “help” or my undivided attention. I am very conscious of the fact that we don’t eat a lot of vegetables anymore. I want to do better. Suggestions?

I’m also becoming increasingly conscious of little colloquialisms I use that are rooted in terrible grammar. “How come?” I heard myself asking R the other day when she was telling me how she hit her good friend A at day care (don’t worry, she was told not to do that). What does that even mean? How come? And I have caught myself saying “on accident” too. That doesn’t make any sense either.

As she begins to talk in complete sentences more and more, I’m certainly more aware of sentence structure and speaking clearly. She’s got this new habit of starting with the verb and ending with the noun. (Hey, maybe when she said ‘Hit A’ she meant A hit her… Oh, God, have I punished her for being the victim?)

Finally, the really filling part of this dessert is the fear. I’m afraid of everything, things I was never afraid of before. I’m afraid our smoke detectors aren’t working and there will be a fire and I won’t be able to get to R in time. I’m afraid every time it snows or storms and R is not right beside me. I’m afraid that someone will break into our house in the middle of the night. I shake my fist at the teenage drivers on our street who seem to think the cul-de-sacs are a great place to practice for the Brickyard. I’m afraid my brakes will fail with R in the back seat. I’m afraid when I take R out in public that some crazy person will just randomly start shooting (okay, that’s not really an all-the-time kind of fear, but I have thought about it). I’m afraid when I walk down the stairs holding R that I will fall and we will both break our backs and be paralyzed for life.

I’m not even safe in my own home.

So far, I haven’t let the ice cream take over my life. The ice cream must actually be frozen yogurt, because I think that it’s healthy. It keeps me cautious. It prevents me from taking crazy risks. And it means I’m looking out for R’s safety, above all else.

Just five minutes of alone-time is all I ask

Why can’t a person even GO TO THE BATHROOM in peace and quiet anymore?

Yesterday, I was, ahem, using the facilities in our downstairs bathroom when R marched right in the room. She instantly headed to the toilet paper roll (I now understand why people roll the paper under instead of the always-normal over) and began pulling sheets off the roll.

She handed them to me solemnly and said, “Wipe, Mommy!”