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the water pitcher
I’ve been experimenting with some Montessori things around the house. When I say Montessori, I mean keeping items that let Lux care for herself without asking for help. I have long practiced the belief that child-appropriate-things will just materialize in my life at the necessary time, and I’ve often leaned away from buying things outright. However, three years into this, I’ve finally realized that some useful things must be sought out and purchased. And if you can manage to get them immediately after you conclude that your child would enjoy them, they turn out to be the most satisfying for both of you.
Some of these Montessori-type things have really been a hit and some have just been so-so, and I’ll try to document them as we try them out. Anything I post here would be familiar to someone in the Montessori world; I don’t mean to pretend that I’ve discovered any of these nice ideas!
First up: a hit. A 16oz glass pitcher, of satisfying weight, with a tight-fitting plastic top. I ordered one, and one day later, we concluded we needed two. One to sit on the table filled with water, waiting for a thirsty customer. Another filled with milk, sitting on an accessible shelf in the fridge, waiting for a starving toddler in the morning who has cereal and a bowl, but no milk.
The first night the pitcher arrived, I put it on the table with some glasses and Lux spent most of the meal asking us if we would like some more water and then solemnly pouring us half-glasses full. Joe and I were tossing water back just to keep up with our eager waiter. I felt she was 2x as engaged as usual and I had the aha moment-–time at the table for Lux is often an endless succession of requesting things and then waiting for her request to be filled. It was a treat to have her focused on what was happening and reversing the constant “I need” refrain.
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23/52
Joan: my fierce explorer/climber/tumbler. 
Lux: likes to put her shoes on by herself, but will accept help from Joe. -
22/52
Lux: best seat in the house, and a pastry to boot. 
Joan: the tumult of motion in this photo feels so right. -
Ruby (& frankie too)
If you’re missing my 52 photos of the girls, please do go check out this mom’s tumbler of her daughters. There is magic in these photos. Looking at them reminds me so much of passing moments at our house; I can begin to see the sticky slippery affection/disregard mess that is universal with siblings (and how much of life is lived on the floor at these ages!).
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Six years
Six year anniversary for us this weekend! It’s much more satisfying to look back on a marriage and see how far you’ve come than to look back on oneself, and wonder why you were so annoying. I get a little flustered looking back at old me–gosh she was whiny! But looking back on our early marriage years well, things have come along way. I’ve always wondered if a marriage might end because people forget what it’s like to do things by all yourself–get an unexpected bill in the mail by yourself, arrive at a new airport when all the taxis are gone, by yourself. I don’t take those things for granted and I never mean to, but I can read this article about masters of marriage and know in a split second what he means by “little bids for one another’s attention.” They happen all day long and it’s easy to decide you’ll catch up later and explain yourself. Nope. It’s a challenge for me now and I imagine it will be challenge next year too; I know what I’m up against.
We only have one tradition and it’s a bottle of Veuve. : ) Easy, delicious, and no guess-work about reservations or the right gift. We caught the golden hour last night after lumping the girls into bed like quick-scrambled eggs and scooting up to the roof.
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white flag
The muchy muchness of two knocked me totally on my back last week. I could not seem to refresh, no matter what I did. Conversation at the playground usually does it. Or sunshine. Maybe a podcast and a pastry treat on the way home. But not last week. Their needs seemed to be growing like basil on the windowsill—long, droopy tendrils reaching out to brush you, desperate for water every time I looked over. Joan is wrapped around my ankle as much as she can be. She’s having a tough month, and it means crying, lots of it. My shoulders would tighten in anticipation of her frustrated outbursts that seemed at random–in the stroller, on the ground, in the carrier, in the highchair, feeding, not feeding, napping, not napping.
She is weaning too, so the oxytocin I’ve been running on is easing its foot off the gas pedal and I’m putt putt putting down the road, gravel kicking up underneath. I’m craving chocolate, pasta, cheese, watermelon, pretzels. Constantly hungry but never appetized. Hormones, yes, and flavors too, rushing in to fill the empty tank.
I only ever bought one bottle. Plastic, BPA-free naturally. Used it for Lux, and Joan. A token bottle of formula, every week or so, for an evening out or to sooth a long car ride–wonderful. I’m indebted to that formula. It was a tough month or two with Joan back when she refused formula because I never felt confident leaving her for more than a couple hours. By the way, where were you the day BPA-free died? I was sitting in the park, chatting with a friend, who mentioned in a ohdidyouhear voice that BPA-free had been found to be worse than BPA itself. We have few confidences as modern parents, and that was one silly one that felt good to get right.
All my posts here should be headed with an italicized caveat of this is how I feel this week ONLY. Like that post about getting things done with two–it’s still true. But this is the flipside, and the flipside just flipped, with a vengeance. I do not have this figured out. I do not know the secret. I don’t know how to write an email when my children are talking to me. I don’t know how to talk on the phone when they are in the room. I don’t know what to do when I have no family nearby and all my friends are as equally and wonderfully yoked as I, and I am so. tired.
I think it was Tuesday when I told Joe I’d rather have an empty savings account than feel the way I do, and asked if I could get some help. How did I feel? Mean, angry, crazy. On the outside was one mom who could calmly handle cleaning peanut butter off the floor for the fifth time while one fussed in my ear like a buzzing fly and one jumped on and off my back. But on the inside was a bird about to fly the coop, for good. The bird was the trouble because the bird is a very real part of me that needs some time to shimmer in the sun. A couple hours to flick drops of water back onto my feathers and pick among the bushes for a red berry.
So bring on the avalanche of applications for the job from sweet, educated, athletic, thoughtful women. I’ve read almost twenty so far and I can tell you, this voting group is doing well. Thriving. There are lots of them. I can see in an instant that my girls’ lives would be enriched by hanging out with any of them, and yet deep in my heart, I am skeptical. It sounds a tad hypocritical doesn’t it? To self-identify as feeling crazy and hassled, and yet to believe that no one else can be trusted with your children.
I have a friend who gets a lot of help. So I asked her, it must take a lot scheduling to figure all that out? She shrugged. “It just takes a lot of ‘That isn’t how I would have done it, but oh well, it’s getting done.'” Ahhhh my handicap. Why I never would have made management, had I aspired. No one else will know how to handle a toddler, a stroller, a diaper bag, and a city street corner. No one can listen carefully to Lux and respond with the right mix of affirmation and information. No one else will remember to replace “good job!” with “look at all those things you did!” ….You see what I mean about the silly things it feels good to get right. Right by your definition, and important pretty much only to you. The girls would do well with a little of the un-devoted no-nonsense I see doled out on the playground by nannies.
What is that magic number of hours? Three hours a week? Six maybe? That’s what I’m hoping. Honestly all I want is enough time to walk away so I can enjoy walking back to them. And yes, I admit, enough time to write down a few sentences so I can remember all this at some future date that I’ve been promised will exist.
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21/52
Lux: Somehow whenever we’re supposed to be getting dressed, we’re jumping on the bed instead.
Joan: determined to walk and won’t stop begging for a hand to hold until she can do it herself.Second photo by my cousin Molly, taken at my grandparents’ farm. Thanks Molly!
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No Sleep till Sundown
A plea for suggestions! Lux hasn’t napped during “naptime” for months. This was fine for me, she often reset during the time anyway through her imaginative play and talking to herself. But now she’s really begging to get out of “quiet time” and I think it’s because we don’t have any real routine for her to do in there. (She’s napping/hanging out in our bedroom because Joan naps in the crib in the girls’ room.) I’m thinking an mp3 of a book on tape that I could play, or a mix of songs and a book? Like a quiet time playlist? Some special quiet toys that only come out during that time, or…..?? What’s worked for you all?
Any ideas, I’m taking them.
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me, you, and everything we want
It’s easy to tack Brimfield dates onto a map of our marriage and recall the phases we were in at the time. How you shop together as a couple is always a relationship barometer. In the realm of your standard shopping trips–in which grocery shopping is probably the easiest category–there’s IKEA shopping. IKEA has a bad name, for reasons that I believe link back to the way they bait you into walking through their entire inventory. Then there’s clothes shopping, in which you always reveal more of yourself and your fears than you intended to, because you’re trying to ignore your fears and pretend they are not there with you in the dressing room. That’s a tough one too, but usually at least just one of you is making the decision, and the other one is trying not to stare at the clock in bewilderment.
But Brimfield has always meant shopping as a couple, making decisions as a couple, giving each other the side eye, as a couple.
First year: shopping as newly married, looking for a few pieces to prove we could buy things together and that our apartment had character. Second year: shopping as new business owners, hoping to find pieces that could frame our little market and bolster it. Third year: shopping as we were pregnant, hunting for the perfect old crib that would fit our tiny apartment, or the right artwork that would represent everything we hoped for the new babe. And so on, until what is now our sixth year, all so known as: yesterday.
We had something of an argument a few nights beforehand when we tried to lay out all the things we expected the other to do. I expected Joe to present me with things he didn’t actually really want, and wait for me to say why we didn’t need them. He expected me to be a naysayer, and talk us out everything, including the exact things we needed. I expected to feel overwhelmed by the options and revert to strictly window shopping, and then feel a wave of buyer’s remorse as we drove away. We hashed this all out and felt much better. It was very adult, and my, how much we know ourselves now don’t we?
But, as it turned out, this edition was much more about the fact that we were shopping, really and truly, with two kids. The children were not as taken with the affair as we expected—the big tents, their posts sunk into mud, their interiors filled with untouchables. The strange chilling breeze that alternated abruptly with a blazing May day sun. Joan hit her whining pitch early and stayed there, and I had no idea what was wrong and evidently, no satisfying solution. Lux was under-dressed for the cold breeze and curled up in the umbrella stroller like an unfurled butterfly, coldly staring back at cooing passerbys trying to say Hi. I saw things–gold bracelets! quirky watercolors! a rack of cardigans!–that I wanted to examine at leisure, but as soon as I paused, I felt the tug and whine to keep moving. Joe tried on a vintage plaid while Lux murmured complaints in the background at a dull roar. We looked at each other and muttered “mutiny.”
Had the threshhold been reached, I wondered. Were we ignorant to gaily attempt this affair–so blithely executed by the hipster couples toting antique tin wash boards back their cars (yes, I really saw them)–as a young family?
Somehow it turned around. We went back to the car for our trusty larger stroller and popped Joan in it, with a bottle. I took off my sweater, put it on Lux, and zipped her up in the vest she had refused earlier. I revealed to her a few of the secrets that had kept me walking so far–the prospect of lemonade slush and a fresh crepe. Her eyes widened and she agreed to continue hunting. Once she was walking by my side and outside of the stroller, she and the shopkeepers struck up an easy relationship. They slipped her tokens from their tables and dug through their piles to find prints of dogs and cats. The fields were full of puddles from the morning’s downpour and she was wearing her rain boots. Joan was shielded from the sun and actually kicked with glee when she caught my eye. We found a bag of wooden bobbins, some clothespins to turn into little people, a small metal toolbox for craft supplies, and a large metal trunk from India to holding the steadily-growing pile of dress-up clothes in the girls’ room.
And I was so happy to have a child old enough to share my favorite foods. Brimfield is as much about the food stands—like a state fair, but with better food—as the antiques. It’s a vanity, perhaps a lunatic one, to pat yourself on the back that your child likes the same food as you when it’s fried dough and kettle corn. Nonetheless! There’s a thrill when you can nod with them and say “Right? It’s so good.”
Brimfield is an enormous antique fair in Western Mass that takes over grassy fields in the spring and fall. Here are a couple posts from others, with better photos than mine, if you’re curious for more: 1/ Design Sponge 2/ A Continuous Lean 3/ Soule Mama
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18/52
Bridget caught this moment at Drumlin Farm. Lux was playing with her friends, and then left them to come over and dig with Joan. It was so sweet. I’m of the “try it ’till they don’t like it” school when handling hand-to-mouth exploring, if you can’t tell!