Hello There, Bloggy Blog

• Last night for dinner we had this pumpkin-coconut-kale curry thing for dinner that I ate over spaghetti squash. It was Squash Inception!
• There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the girls about dinner, even though I gave them rice into of spaghetti squash. Why do I feed them such terrible food?! Don't I love them?! This is in contrast to the night before when we fed them Costco pizza (I had been sick with a stomach bug and didn't feel up to cooking yet) when they sat there in serene happiness, cleaning their plates and asking for more.
• For Lewis, I picked out chunks of pumpkin and slices of chicken from the pot and rinsed off the curry sauce. As one does.
• I am working! Although actually not that much this week, between our babysitter being out of town and me having that stomach bug. Recently I have been working on questions about tidal effects in the Solar System and spaghettification.
• We have a parent-teacher conference for Grace tomorrow and in preparation, her teacher has asked her to come up with an intention for the rest of the semester, like in a yoga class. I think her intention should be to get ready in the morning quickly and independently; she thinks it should be to learn to go really fast on her scooter.
• This week is also parent week at her ballet class, which means we are allowed to go into the class and sit and watch. She is taking ballet at the school associated with Salt Lake's professional company and it is kind of hard-core. They all wear the same leotard and are required to have their hair in a bun and aren't allowed to wear earrings or nail polish. I'm not sure if she'll want to stick with it beyond this year but she likes it, being the rule follower that she is, and I like that everything is in good taste and non-skanky.
• We are going through a tough time with Violet, mainly preschool-related. She's been there since January and seemed to like it pretty well at first, but things have been going downhill. Now she says that she doesn't like school, doesn't want to go, school makes her sad, etc. Her teachers sat down with me recently and we had a hard-to-hear conversation about how she doesn't participate with the group, sits off by herself a lot, has pretty drastic trouble with transitions between activities, and often turns non-verbal and withdrawn when she's upset at school. MY HEART. We're still processing, trying some new things, and thinking through our options-- give her a break from school for a while? get some kind of professional help/opinion/evaluation? try a different style of preschool that would be a better fit for independent Violet with her long attention span, maybe Montessori? push through at her current school? I don't know. I do know I broke down crying while describing her current struggles during a visit to a Montessori school last week, so that's awesome.
• And Lewis? He has moved from the high chair to sitting at the table, he says "nigh nigh" when it's time to go to bed  and "allo" when he puts a phone to his ear, he gives wet open-mouthed kisses complete with "mwa!" sounds, and I really really really want to get him into his own room at night. We have to move the girls upstairs to their new room first, so we are still in process on that. I did buy bunk beds yesterday, though-- hooray!

One Year of Lewis

One year ago today, before the Sun had risen, Lewis had arrived here in the world after a much longer labor than I would have predicted. And then he was here, his beautiful amazing self was here, on the very morning that Grace started kindergarten and our family changed and grew and became what it is now.


Lewis' Zeroth Birthday from Julia Silge on Vimeo.

And now Lewis has made his first trip around the Sun and we have spent the past year seeing him get gorgeous and big, opening up to the world, becoming everyday more who he will be. I love newborns, I love babies, and when I watch that video, I feel absolutely in love with the tiny squashy newborn Lewis was and so happy for one-year-ago me to get to hold his curled-up body and kiss his wrinkly old-man fingers. But there is so much joy in the future of one-year-ago me too, as the newborn in that video turns into this gorgeous happy baby who is toddling around the living room right now.



He is walking, just within the past two weeks or so, and stomps unsteadily around the house like a cheery drunk person, arms waving, little diapered butt hitting the ground when his balance fails him. It happens so fast, over just a few days, the transition from not being able to walk to it being the preferred method of locomotion. He still occasionally drops to all fours for his super-fast waggle-butt crawl, but its days are numbered. He says "uh oh" and "dada", with an occasional "mama" that he doesn't quite use appropriately yet. He claps his hands and says "yayayayayaya", and he waves goodbye, repeating either "nana" or "dada" while waving (apparently there are no "b" sounds yet, and no long "i" vowel sounds either). He still has just the eight teeth he's had for months now, apparently believing in the "all at the same time" school of teething. He likes to eat fruit and cheese and books (all paper, actually) and sticks. And dirt. And rocks too, if we're being honest. I did finally put all the crayons up high so at least they're not a regular part of his diet anymore.



He is a joy to be with and his presence in our lives is a gift. Today my parents are coming in town; we'll have a party with cake and a few presents and grandparents. I am so glad to be celebrating this milestone.

Happy birthday, my delicious blue-eyed boy.

A Good Book Is Hard to Find

Apologies to Flannery O'Connor.

Grace's reading has blossomed in an amazing way this summer since kindergarten ended. She actually sits with a book and just reads independently, by herself, absorbed in book after book after book. It is such a joy to see her become a reader; it makes some deep part of me happy to see her become totally engaged with a book and just want to READ. Also, I will admit to a bit of jealousy as I am not reading as much as I want to be, or as much as I did as a girl, or a single person, or a woman with no children. In this season of life with my three little ones, I read for fun about as much as I did during grad school, which is not really enough.

We've always done reading aloud and we stick to lovely worthwhile classics for those, books that we love that we are so glad we can share for the first time with Grace. Right now Rob is reading through the Narnia series to her, a chapter a time, before she goes to bed. We can't wait to start Harry Potter, and Ballet Shoes, and The Cricket in Times Square, and so forth... I am having a harder time finding books that are just right for her to read by herself, though. She is just at the cusp of being able to read chapter books. The early reader books we have (you know, those paperbacks that star a character like Amelia Bedelia or Eloise but are not the original works) are starting to lose their appeal for her, and she occasionally still enjoys plowing through a pile of picture books, but those options not really challenging to her or moving her skills forward. On the other hand, most of the classic children's chapter books that I think are so wonderful are still a bit too hard for her to read independently. I feel like she's in a challenging in-between place right now.

The great discovery of the summer has been the Magic Tree House series. I think I saw these books mentioned briefly on someone's blog as a good introductory chapter book and BOY, was that person right. They are somehow perfectly designed to appeal to Grace at her current reading ability and developmental stage. She LOVES them. She has finished the entire first series since school let out and is well on her way to catching up to all the ones in the second series that are currently published before school starts again at the end of August. They aren't what one would call great literature but they aren't junk-y vacuous books either. (Ask me sometime about the Barbie book that Grace brought home once from the school library. ANGRY PARENTS.) I have taken to requesting about four at once from the library and depending on how busy our schedule is, she will finish all of them within 48 hours of us picking them up at the library.

So here I am, crowd-sourcing some suggestions for books for her to read. What else would be good for a newly-independent reader just taking her first steps into chapter books? The Magic Tree House series is about as far as I'm willing to go when it comes to lack of real literary merit. I'd prefer for her to read books of real value and beauty, but age-appropriate appeal is important too. I got some of the non-fiction "research guides" that the Magic Tree House people put out to go along with their books but she struggled to get through those and did not enjoy them at all; reading became WORK again. I know that eventually we all have to read things that are hard to get through but that is not what I'm looking for right now for Grace. I really want her to love Frog and Toad and Little Bear but much to my (hopefully well-hidden from Grace) disappointment they just haven't grabbed her in the way Magic Tree House has. I guess a related question to my main one above is how can I make Grace love Maurice Sendak?

Faces

Lewis is 10 months old (well, 11 months as of tomorrow) and I think he looks so much like Grace at the same age; what do you think?





I feel like Lewis reminds me so much of Grace at the same age in his mannerisms and expressions and whatnot as well. Genetics are so interesting! And here is what Grace looks like now, about six year later, with her adorable lack of front teeth:



There was such DRAMA involved in the removal of these teeth. Grace is very sensitive about physical pain and does not have a lot of toughness in her. When she lost her bottom front teeth, she let us "help" them along a little but she really freaked out about the pain and the little bit of blood and whatnot. This time around, she would barely let us touch them and she basically waited until they fell out, but in the meantime there was lots of drama about how they hurt when they wiggled and so forth. And oh, how sickeningly loose they were at the end... The second one to go could rotate almost 90 degrees on the last day. SHUDDER. I much prefer her now with her charming big gap.

I do love taking photographs of people, my small children or whoever. I went to a portrait photography workshop that our friend Mike organized last weekend and had such a fun time. We talked about making portraits for a while and then went outside and shot a bunch of portraits of each other using just our phones. I brought Grace with me because Mike had said it was open to all ages. When I first broached the idea to her, she said, "Mom, I already know how to take pictures of people," but when I explained it a little more she decided she would like to come. She took my new profile picture up there in the corner. Here are some of my favorite ones that I shot that day:













What a fun day...

What Is Saving My Life Right Now

This post is part of the synchroblog that Sarah Bessy is hosting, inspired by this lovely post she wrote yesterday.

My gorgeous squishy baby boy. I give him baths in our kitchen sink and he splashes in the bubbles with his sweet beautiful bare arms and legs. I nurse him to sleep at night, his ears perfect pink shells and his breath even and deep. We had rain the other night, something you really stop and notice in this arid valley, and we could both smell the summer rain through the open window as he drifted off to sleep. 

Rob's daily presence in my life. I really can't say enough times or with enough emphasis how wonderful it is to have Rob finished with his medical training. He is available, home, here more now than he has been since before Grace was born. We went from years of 80-hour work weeks to suddenly when we moved here he works 4 days a week. I am still so thankful, now two years into this phase of his career.

Organizing, cleaning, purging. Baby boy clothes are ready to go to a friend with a littler baby than mine, little girl clothes are packed in a box to send to a friend one state away who doesn't think homemade clothes are strange, my email inbox seldom contains above five items, and I did a giant cull of my RSS reader to only keep the things that matter to me, the things that really make my life happier.

Employment. It's looking like I will soon join the ranks of the gainfully employed. This week I was offered a job writing astronomy content for an online education company. It's part-time, flexible hours, working remotely, etc and I think it is going to work out.

The pleasures of summer food. Cold-brewed coffee, apricots and berries, rosé wine, lemon cucumbers, slaws and salads, anything grilled outside.

The promise of honestly cool weather in another 6-8 weeks. Summer in Utah is beautiful in ways summer has never been for me elsewhere, and it is blessedly not too long.

Reading a summer-y novel in stolen minutes here and there. It was great. I need to read more.

Beautiful children's bodies in swimsuits, full of joy, utterly lacking self-consciousness.

Grace sprawled on the couch absorbed in book after book from the library.

The way Violet pronounces "marshmallow".

Playing piano.

YouVersion.

Naps.