School’s Lasting Impression

This is Peanut’s third week of preschool. I think she’s doing well, since she never cries when I drop her off, and is always smiling when I pick her up, but I don’t really have a sense of how she spends her days. I realize that she’s only two, and while String Bean gives me the run-down on her entire school day in the car after I pick her up, she was pretty mum about the particulars when she was only two, too.

I still ask Peanut about her day, but I don’t get much from her. When I ask, “What did you do today?” she says, “Nothing.” “Did you have a snack?” “No.” “Did you go outside to play?” “No,” (at which point String Bean sets her straight, since she can see the playground from her classroom, and always notices when Peanut is out there). Last time I picked her up I asked: “Did you color or paint today?” and she said “No.” “Then what is this green stuff on your hands? It looks like paint or ink,” I told her. She looked at her hands and nodded. “It’s paint. I painted.”

I don’t know if she can’t remember her day or if, as chatty as she is, she just doesn’t feel like reliving it. When she’s calm and focused, I’ve asked her if she likes school, and she always says yes, so I’ll assume that whatever she does remember from her bi-weekly morning sessions there, it’s positive.

Surrogate Sister

The other day we had an impromptu play date with the neighbor boy two houses over. He’s four, and in String Bean’s preschool class, but while they had weekly play dates for their first two years of life, they rarely interact at school. My girls were outside waving at the cars and pulling weeds on our lawn (if I call them flowers, and ask them to pick them, they’re more than happy to do it all for me), when he ran over to visit, then invited the girls back to his house to see his favorite toys.

The girls had a great time with him, racing up and down the stairs, playing catch, exploring his toy collection, and his mom and I, who used to visit together almost daily, but now rarely do, had a nice chat together. When dinner time rolled around, I herded the girls home, to much protest. A few minutes later my neighbor called to say as soon as we’d left her son had said, “Why couldn’t you have had her first, Mom, so I could have a sister?” Apparently, despite the fact that he and String Bean don’t play together at school, he still has a fondness for her. I told String Bean what he’d said, and she laughed and called him silly, but I notice she’s repeated it about a dozen times. She also keeps asking when we’re having another play date at his house. So even though she doesn’t play with him at school, or even acknowledge that he’s there, I guess she still has a fondness for him, too.

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.