Best Friends

One of the things I hoped for with having two kids a year and a half apart is that they’d be close, not just in age, but in everything. Be careful what you wish for. Actually, I’m glad they’re so close. Mostly, I like that when given the option of playing solo or together, they always choose to play together. Until the tug-of-war games start, and I have to play referee. Then I wish there weren’t quite so inseparable.

One reason I wanted two girls 20 months apart is that my sister and I are 20 months apart, and we’ve been best friends since I was about 8 years old (prior to that, we fought constantly). We’re different enough that we never competed for anything, but similar enough that we never ran out of shared interests to keep us hanging out together. Now I realize that my girls are so much closer, at a much younger age, that their relationship may turn out differently.

They are also very different sorts, with String Bean as the one who wears her heart on her sleeve, and Peanut as the one who never lets her emotions get in the way of having a good time, Peanut as the more outgoing one, and String Bean as the quieter one. But I’ve noticed lately that String Bean’s competitive streak is kicking in. Everything she does is faster, harder, better, and she feels the need to tell Peanut all about her superiority. At this point, Peanut doesn’t seem to care, and whenever String Bean shouts, “It was a race, and I won! I’m better than you!” Peanut just smiles and goes on about her business, totally unaffected. But what happens when Peanut can actually understand what String Bean’s saying? Will they lose some of their chumminess to competition? I’m curious to see.

Nightmares

Peanut has been having nightmares every night for a couple of weeks now. Usually around 2am she’ll wake up crying. Sometimes she calls me right away, so I’ll go in, scoop up the sleepy thing, sing a quick song to her as she falls back asleep on my shoulder, then put her back to bed. But a few times, it’s been something else. She wakes up talking, saying “no” or “I don’t want…” in a sleepy voice, obviously winding up for a full cry as she does so. By the time I get into her room, her face is wet with tears and she’s fully crying, almost screaming, while thrashing violently, crashing her head and body against the bars of her crib. When I try to pick her up to comfort her, she starts kicking at me, screaming more, sometimes even calling “Mommy!” as if she doesn’t recognize me. I usually wrestle her out of bed then sit down with her on the never-used guest bed that’s in her room, letting her thrash it out in a safer place, talking to her until she settles down enough to allow me to comfort her. Sometimes these episodes last for ten minutes, sometimes for forty minutes. Often the next day she has no memory of it, or will only remember of a small part of it. At the cabin it happened, and the only thing she remembered was her baby cousin crying in the night, not that it was her own screams that woke the baby. I haven’t figured out what causes these night terrors, if that’s what they are, or the best way to get her through them. She seems fine the next day, maybe a little tired from the lost sleep. It’s just another one of those child mysteries that keeps us parents guessing. I’m hoping this particular phase is short-lived.

Unicorns

String Bean has a new obsession: unicorns. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but in a week’s time it went from idle curiosity (“are they real? what do they eat? where do they live? do they neigh?”) to full-blown obsession, where she wants unicorn books, movies, toys, and clothes. She’s a little like her dad in that, this urge to steep herself fully in any new interest, and while I don’t have a problem with that in general, I do have a problem with stocking up on unicorn stuff just to have this fascination fade in a month or two.

The funny thing is, at about the same age, I was also heavily into unicorns, so somewhere under my mother’s house, stuffed in old storage boxes, there is a pretty good stock of unicorn paraphernalia, just waiting for a new little girl to love them. Hubby’s going to be doing a lot of traveling this month, so I’m planning on at least one trip up to mom’s house for a hand with the kids and a change of pace from the usual home routine. I’ll be down there, in the storage space under her house, braving the spiders, scorpions, and lizards, trying to scrounge up some unicorn mementos to appease String Bean’s new need. And then I’ll sit and watch her play with my old toys, enjoying the full circle they’ve made.

Cabin Trip

The annual Labor Day trip to the family’s cabin in the Sierras went well. There wasn’t any napping among the girls, and there were some 2am nightmares, with Peanut screaming so loud she woke the entire cabin, so we were all a little sleepy, but we made the best of it. The dog was hiked to oblivion, and the fisherman caught a few keepers and a lot of little guys he threw back, and the crowd enjoyed dining at the huge farm table my grandfather made with his own hands, and sitting around the fire out back at night, waiting for the little ones to drift off inside, playing guitars and sharing funny stories and remembering good times on previous trips up to the cabin.

One of the best things for me is watching my girls pal around up there, exploring every trail, pocketing handfuls of pretty rocks, marveling at the birds, butterflies, and dragonflies, splashing around in the swimming holes I used to play in when I was their age. My mother has spent her summers up here since she was born, as have I, as have my children. It’s nice, in this rapidly changing world we’re bringing our kids up in, to have something as constant as that, existing unchanged for generations.

So another summer of vacationing up there comes to an end. Next summer the girls will be a bit bigger, a bit braver, able to hike longer and maybe swim in the bigger swimming holes. They’ll also a bit more able to understand the history of one of their favorite places to visit, to learn a little more about the great grandpa they never got to meet, but who built such an amazing place with his bare hands.

End of Summer

This weekend we’re off to our family’s cabin in the Sierras, for our annual Labor Day end-of-summer vacation together. There will be eleven of us there in all, a reasonably sized group, perfect for busy dinner conversation, late night chats around the fire out back, large enough to break into groups of hikers, fishermen, and book-readers each day, but not too large for the small cabin with its one bathroom.

It’s nice to have a place to go where everyone is like family, and kids run around together, and dogs roam freely, visiting all of the cabins like official camp greeters. And the fact that my mom will be there to help out with the munchkins is pretty nice, too. Also coming are my sister and my five-month-old niece, who is growing in personality and size so quickly that I feel like if I don’t see her for a week, I’m missing some special milestone. It’ll be nice to spend three solid days with her to see what new tricks she’s up to.

Now, if I could just get some sort of guarantee that the kids will sleep up there (always an issue), I’d consider myself home free.

Back to School

Okay, not every post will be about school from now on. But here’s another one, anyway. So, today was Peanut’s second day of school. Like Monday, she didn’t cry at all when I dropped her off. Instead I got her trademark scowl (“mad face” as she calls it). When I gave her a hug and said she should go play with her new friends, she hugged me back, scowled, then said “No.” I told her she could draw, paint, do puzzles, make a necklace, and she furrowed her little eyebrows and said “No.” I told her I’d be back soon, and she glared at me: “No.” So, I gave her a final hug and kiss and left. I turned around as I went, and she wasn’t crying or making a fuss, just scowling at no one, standing in the center of the room, a bustle of other kids and parents all around her.

So, the two things I was prepared for at drop-off were tears or total joy at being left there, and, like any child, she decided to throw me a curve ball by being angry instead. I’m sure that once she’s used to the routine, it’ll go much smoother. I know once the teacher gets the kids all trained up, she has them sit in circle as soon as they arrive, and String Bean was always quick to say goodbyes to get her favorite spot in circle. It’s a very large class this year, so it might take the teacher a few weeks to get all 25 3-4 year olds in line, but once she does, I’m hoping Peanut falls right in line with them. Or at least starts giving me the kind of goodbye I’m more experienced at dealing with.

Balloons

What is the deal with balloons, anyway? I am constantly amazed by just how fascinated my kids are with them. They please them like few other things do. It doesn’t matter if they’re big or small, full of helium or just breath, they are kept and coddled, stored in special places in the house and mourned greatly when they either deflate or pop. The girls carry them around like babies, play catch with them, and sometimes ask me to draw faces on them so they can give them names and personalities, creating little scenarios for them to act out. They fight over balloons as if they were some prized possession, while the fancy, expensive toys sit unused on the sidelines.

The girls each received one balloon at our Friday play date, and another at a picnic we went to on Saturday. You’d think the enthusiasm would be wearing off by now, but no. Just this morning I had to break up a fight because String Bean had decided that all of the pink and purple balloons were hers, which meant that she had three while Peanut only had one. While we have mornings where they could’ve had this same fight over a handful of Cheerios, it’s the balloons that always bring out the most guarding behavior. But since they also bring out the most creative behavior, I haven’t taken them away. Yet.