Nesting

Be mindful of the goals you set.

So one of my summer goals was to declutter a room a week. I was plodding along, not exactly setting the world on fire with my progress, but making a dent here and there.

And then Ainsley had an accident of the potty training variety and out came the bleach.

And then Dave invited friends to spend the Fourth of July at our house, and I scrubbed and scoured and accomplished an amazing amount in no time flat. He did, too!

And then one of our visitors dumped half a bottle of fish food into the recently cleaned tank that will be sparkling once again in an hour or two.

And then I opened the pantry and spotted moths . . . the kind that begin as something called weevils
 . . . the kind that require you to carefully check every package of dry goods in the vicinity and to scrub and to bleach and possibly to paint.

And then I called the exterminator to come do what he does best and this requires that every piece of furniture be pulled away from the walls and since you can't very well spray a dusty surface, I'm grabbing the vacuum and the Murphy's Oil Soap.

And then a problem of unspecified origin forced me to clean under the washing machine this morning. There I discovered a long lost earring, one of Ainsley's socks, two Legos, no batteries, one penny, Russian currency of an unknown denomination, a tiny burp cloth that must date back to Timothy's infancy, and a Chuck E. Cheese token.

And on it goes.

Many pregnant women experience nesting syndrome. Just before delivery, you wake with a burst of energy and an intense desire to zip over to Home Depot and then dash by the fabric store. Visions of order and beauty and Potty Barn catalogues dance in your head, and you make herculean progress in a brief span of time. If all goes well, this induces labor.

Case in point: I planted mums when I was forty weeks pregnant with Tim. My water broke shortly thereafter.

I should note that where nesting is concerned, there is vast difference between having a baby at 33 (my first) and at 45 (my last). Oh, I had the same intense desire to get it all done, but that surge of energy? Non-existent.

Nesting with Ainsley? I went to Walmart and bought sleepers and diapers. I probably came home and took a nap. I had a long To Do list, but I could barely muster the energy to lumber to the couch and hoist the remote.

And it was August and it was blazing hot and I felt every one of my forty-five years.

Not a total slacker, I invested a lot of time thinking about my To Do list. High on the list was reorganizing the pantry. Not sure why this was such a priority, but it was.

Then I flew to Michigan for a visit. I returned home to find that we had left a potato -- and I think it was just one single potato -- in the pantry. It had been there for two weeks. Now, you can leave many a household item to mold and moulder for two weeks or more, but you can't do this to a potato. Trust me on this point.

The bugs, the stench -- blahhhhhh! The saving grace was that I was long past the morning, noon, and night sickness that would have sent me sprinting for the bathroom.

Awful -- just awful.

I emptied the pantry. I sorted, scrubbed, bleached, and, yes, even painted. I nested. Under duress, but I nested.

Necessity may be the mother of invention; I think it's also the mother of productivity.

It's now been an hour or two, and the fish tank is indeed sparkling . . . but the filter is no longer operating. Necessity is calling, and it's ordering me up to the road to Petsmart.

She Couldn't Make Toast without Consulting the Recipe

Mommy blogs, mommy blogs.

Some make you laugh; some make you cry; some make a vow of celibacy sound like a really good time.

I read one the other day about how mothers just can't manage a shower. This mother has a ten-month-old (?) and can't get the five to seven minutes it would take to rinse, wash, and towel off. She and her husband don't flush the toilet after 7:00 because they don't want to wake the baby.

And I think to myself, "Puh-lease!"

Then I realize I didn't get a shower yesterday.

Now, I'm certainly not blaming my slovenliness on my children. No, the blame rests squarely on the Boy Scouts of America whose inspiration resulted in seventy-two pounds of damp, noxious gear encrusted with the red earth of Georgia all entering my house sometime Saturday afternoon.Which is all a long-winded way of saying I worked my tail off yesterday.

The attic is stuffed once more, the house looks pretty darn good, but I'm a mess.

But let's forget about the Boy Scouts and get back to motherhood.

I am convinced that God gave me the combination of kids I have and gave them in the order in which they arrived so that I could learn one essential life lesson: humility.

If Kolbe had been my first, I would have said, "What do you mean the baby doesn't sleep?You nurse, you rock, you put baby in the crib . . .  and you greet baby the next morning."

But Kolbe was not my first. Tim was my first, and he never slept. Okay, never is a bit of an absolute. Twenty minutes was a "good nap." He cried a lot. He wanted to be held all the time.  He eschewed pacifiers, avoided the swing, tolerated the bouncy chair, but mostly wanted me and only me.

Getting a shower was a challenge. While Dave and I routinely flushed at will, I clearly remember the night I needed to go the other end of the house which required a very risky maneuver -- walking past Tim's room. I went out the back door, walked around the house, and knocked on the front door so that Dave could let me in. I wasn't walking past his room.

I remember the night Tim finally conked out. Two teenagers decided to tie their dog to a little red wagon. The dog came yelping up my driveway and woke Tim up.

I'm lucky I didn't wind up on probation.

I remember another night the long battle to La La Land had been fought and won when a neighbor of mine banged on my door (at 10:00 p.m.!) and woke him up. The neighbor heard shrieking, looked at me with amazement, and asked, "Does he cry like this every night?"

To this unidentified neighbor: I have forgiven you. It's taken thirteen years, but I'm totally past it. Really, I am.

Sleep deprivation is tough, tough, tough, and no one expresses this better than the hilarious Simcha Fisher who writes about her little daughter's sleep habits:

          Basically, she was sleeping through the night, I would say.
          For as much as two hours at a stretch, all through the night.

I couldn’t make toast without consulting the recipe. I would try and start the car when it was already running. I would use “thing” to substitute not only for nouns, but for any part of speech, as in: “Could you please thing this thing in the other thing over there? Yes, you. You Thing, with the red thing on.” And of course I lost things — school books, hot cups of coffee, children ... you know, things. I spent a good half hour hunting for a misplaced bag of parsley, which couldn’t have roamed very far from the soup pot of origin, could it? By sheer chance, while searching for my keys, I discovered the parsley tucked safely inside the dishwasher, where, oh yeah, I put it because, um, because of some reason, surely.

Read the whole thing -- it's Simcha at her best. She goes on to say that, though the baby is now sleeping better, "I couldn't make toast without a recipe syndrome" lingers on:

Yesterday I lost three-and-a-half pounds of ground beef. Where could that meat be, where could it be? The previous day, I had forgotten to take it out in time to have hamburgers, but left it out so that, if I forgot again the next day, it would at least be partially defrosted. But then I forgot to put it away. So where was it now?

So I asked my husband, who knows me, What the hell did I do with that meat? and he had an inspiration: Maybe it’s in the washing machine! In fact, it must be in the washing machine. That’s where I put it to defrost, because — I dunno, to make room in the refrigerator for some laundry?

All that happened was that I located the meat while the washer was only half-full of water and soap. The situation was saved before any kind of whirring, churning or centripetal force came into play.

The worst part was that the blood leaked all over the clothes; but if you think about it, that’s really pretty good timing in a bad situation. It’s like breaking your leg in the lobby of the hospital, or punching your brother while in the confession line: At least you're already in the right place.

Punching your brother while in the confession line? Hilarious. Not that things like this ever happen around here.

My baby is now -- I can barely stand to type the words -- pushing three. Ask her age, and she'll chirp, "I'm two and a half." Ask her birth date, and she responds, "August forty-ten."

Everyone sleeps great. (Although we get visitors. The visitor who knows how to be inconspicuous is welcome; the one who gets cold and grabs all the covers and then gets sweaty and kicks them off or kicks the closest parent, well, she can just scamper on back to her own digs).

I still don't sleep well.

While Ainsley is pushing three, I am now pushing fifty, and one of the pesky side effects is insomnia. On the days I can sleep late, I don't in fact sleep late. I long for a night I fall asleep reading around ten and wake refreshed around seven. This would require medication, and medication, I've found, generally comes with side effects.

"I couldn't make toast without consulting a recipe."? I get it.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

To moms everywhere:

Maybe you, like me, had a four-year-old come running with a grisly tale of an overflowing toilet. Upon investigating, you found that this boy with a flair for the dramatic wasn't exaggerating one little bit.

Maybe you, like me, sat in the backyard wondering why oh why your phone was ringing off the hook. When you finally answered it, you found that your assistant catechist, a mother, and your entire class were all waiting at the atrium for a session scheduled to start fifteen minutes earlier.

Maybe you, like me, let your adorable toddler try on her Easter dress for just a minute and then found that this darling frock -- lovely, smocked, purchased by Grandma -- had had an unfortunate encounter with an uncapped Sharpie.

Maybe you, like me, have been wringing your hands, questioning your purpose, pouring yourself glass of wine. If so, I suggest reading this article on the impact of nurturing mothers.

It seems the hand that rocks the cradle really does rule the world, or as the author puts it, "One generation full of deeply loving parents would change the brain of the next generation, and with that, the world."

Here's a summary of the study:

Researchers brought the kids and parents into a lab and videotaped them as the parents, almost always mothers, tried to help their children cope with a mildly stressful task that was designed to approximate the stress of daily parenting . . . Ratings of parental ability to nurture their children were done by study personnel who watched the videos. . .

Several years later, on average, the children had the size of a brain area called the hippocampus measured . . .  The researchers found that children with especially nurturing, caring mothers, based on their behavior during the laboratory stressor, had significantly larger hippocampi (plural of hippocampus - you’ve got one on each side of the brain) than kids with mothers who were average or poor nurturers.

Why is the hippocampus so crucial?

Because more than any place else in the brain, when it comes to the hippocampus, size matters. Other things being equal, having small hippocampi increases your risk for all sorts of troubles, from depression and post traumatic stress disorder to Alzheimer’s disease. 

In addition to protecting us against brain illnesses, we all need big hippocampi because this brain area, while not much bigger than your little finger, plays a disproportionately large role in how you will be able to handle the stresses and strains of your life, and how you will remember your life when it’s all said and done. (Emphasis mine).

Wow.

It's a rainy day today, and my van is in the shop. We enjoyed a slow, lazy morning full of coloring books and Legos. John grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote a bunch of random letters on it.

"I wrote a note to Auntie Kate," he told me, holding up his paper. "It says, 'Dear Auntie Kate, I love you.'"

With Valentine's Day still fresh in his mind, John colored a heart for her. I gave him little scissors and encouraged him to cut it out.

"I can't do it," he said. "I don't know how."

I demonstrated and told him to give it a try. He was thrilled to see that he could cut out a heart. This was very much the kind of mildly stressful task these researchers studied with children. These challenges arise a hundred times a day. A child struggles to tie a shoe or manage that last button or get that Transformer to transform. And there's Mom. Is she helpful or encouraging or comforting? Is she cranky or distracted or cheerful?  Is she blogging or texting or chatting on the phone?

I can be all of these things depending on the week, the day, the hour.

Today I folded John's note and the heart and put them in an envelope to mail to Auntie Kate. "Are you going to letter it," John asked. "How do you do that?"

I showed him how to "letter it." He carefully wrote J-O-H-N in brown crayon in the upper left hand corner. He put the envelope in the mail box and raised the red flag. Lettered!

I remember a day years and years ago when much  a younger Tim fell apart during piano practice. He hit a tricky measure and no amount of repetition or counting could help him get it straight. I had just plunked an enormous quantity of unfolded laundry onto the couch. I looked at Tim's obvious frustration and said, "You know, Tim, this laundry is overwhelming. I can't do it all, but I can fold one shirt."

We both persevered.

It is constant, this life-long gig we call motherhood. I find it helpful to keep my eyes on the prize, to read articles like this, not so that I can become undone by the enormity of it all, but so that I can once more be inspired by the greatness of this vocation.

No one has expressed this better than G.K. Chesterton who once said this about motherhood:

I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.

That hand that rocks the cradle? It really does rule the world.

With this Handy Bucket . . .

The world is my oyster.

Me, Me, Me!

So two-year-old Ainsley joins me for an early morning rosary.

Me: Hail, Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee . . .

Ainsey: The Lord is with me.

Me, smiling: The Lord is with me.

Ainsey: The Lord is with ME -- me, me, me!

Me, assenting: The Lord is with you!

Ainsey, placated: Oh.

Brief Exchanges That Leave Me Nervous

Me: What are you doing?

Ainsley: It's gwitter!


Me: What are you doing?

John: Nothing ...


Me: What are you doing?

Ainsley: I just cweaning up.

A Day in the Life

John comes running to tell me he stayed in his bed all night
... and I find a wet pile of jammies and undies on his floor.

We all head to confession and manage to arrive five minutes early
... and the line is so long we turn around and go home.

We manage to produce a great Christmas photo this year
... and I still spend hours wrestling with Christmas card software.

I decide to make cookies to ease a little stress
... and we're out of eggs.

We borrow two from our ever-so-generous neighbor
... and Ainsley drops one on the floor.

So we borrow a third egg
... and I sit here consuming vast amounts of batter.

Ainsley wakes up from her nap a touch out of it
... and wants nothing more than to
rest her head in my lap.

She goes from out of it to green
... and vomits all over me and the study.

She gets a clean shirt
... and then says, "I didnt mean to do that to you pants. But it's okay."

John brings in something of Kolbe's
... and says, "I swung it around and around and broke it to pieces."

Ainsley comes in the room looking a little less wan
... and tells me, "I want a candy cane."

Life ... sometimes sticky, occasionally smelly, somewhat unpredictable, teaming with brightness.

Nothing Like a Sleeping Baby

As I was reading in bed the other night, I heard a Thunk! as Ainsley fell out of her bed. Thankfully her bed is very low to the ground. I soothed her bumped head and tucked her in with me. She was snugly and sweet -- patting my cheek, putting her head on chest, being, if only for a fleeting few moments, the baby she seems to have so suddenly and so completely left behind.

She's two in all its glory. While we still get hugs and kisses, she's go, go, go these days -- wholly invested in little girl activities.  Let's play dolls or build with blocks or play tea party. Being content simply being held? Not so much.

A few months back I tossed out my rocking chair -- the rocker my dad bought for me when I had my first child, the rocker in which I have spent a good chunk of my life reading Curious George and Winnie the Pooh, Mike Mulligan and The Hungry Caterpillar, the rocker that, I was forced to admit, was falling apart and beyond repair.

Some time after pitching the rocker, I realized I had all but quit reading to Ainsley. Her bed is just not conducive to a forty-seven-year-old woman reading a book, even if it's in large print and only eight pages long. I missed the reading, but I really missed the slow and snugly part of Ainsley's day. My friend Amy offered her glider rocker. We are reading and cuddling once more.

Last week Ainsley conked out in her car seat on the way to Mass. Typically this is not a good thing. A poorly timed twenty-minute snooze can leave her half-rested and cranky. On this day it worked out just fine. I carried her into church where she peacefully slumbered for forty-five minutes.

Tim was serving Mass. Kolbe and John didn't engage in any semi-overt guerrilla warfare in the pew. In the quiet presence of God, uninterrupted by phone or To Do List, I enjoyed the luxury of holding my sweet baby. I twirled her soft, blond hair and rubbed her fair, still-chubby cheeks. This was a welcome and unusual treat.

A while back it was John who went catatonic in church. During an extra-long homily, he put his head on my lap and out he went. The boy who is full-throttle from dawn to dusk, just lay there, chest rising and falling. I tousled his caramel blond hair. I noticed his shoes on the wrong feet. I rubbed his arms still bronzed from a summer at the pool and in the yard. John has a year round tan his Irish mother could only get from a bottle and then there would be an orange cast to it.  He blazes through the day with equal parts of action and mischief (with a whole lot of charm and affection thrown in). For this all-too-brief time, I enjoyed the weight of his slumbering form and drank in the cuteness that is age four.

Motherhood is a physical job from start to finish. Long before I gain my first ounce of pregnancy weight, I am overcome with fatigue and nausea. One of my babies had hiccups for hours and hours every single evening for months. With both Ainsley and John I had weeks of Braxton-Hicks contractions. With each pregnancy I had the distinct thought, "I can't get any bigger. I just can't." Somehow I did.

Infancy brings the joy and challenge of nursing. Mothers rock and hold and feed and burp, rock and hold and feed and burp. How many of us have found ourselves in a grocery line or Mass without the baby and noticed that we were doing a soothing, jiggly motion simply because it had become second nature?

Toddlers have shoes that need tying,capes that need fastening, boo boos that need kissing, hands and faces and backsides that need washing.

When I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with Ainsley, I sat in a doctor's office with John. He had spiked a fever of over 104.5. With ears, throat, and nose clear, the doctor suspected a urinary tract infection. Getting a urine sample from a dehydrated two-year-old who was not yet potty trained proved to be a challenge. I spent hours -- hours -- sitting in a hard plastic chair with a feverish John draped over what really didn't qualify as a lap. I had little left to give.

This is motherhood. It's a physical job, a demanding job. I have sometimes felt touched-out. There wasn't enough of me to go around, or so it seemed.

But then these needy little people grow up just a bit. And a tiny part of your heart crumples. We so want them to grow and thrive and develop. We cheer their every milestone. This, of course, means they need us less or at least need us differently.

And I find myself mourning just a little bit.

We are currently at the beach enjoying bacation, as John likes to call it. Ainsley has picked up on this.

"We on 'cation," she asks me every night. "John John on 'cation? Timmy on 'cation? Daddy on 'cation?"

Yes, sweetie. We are on 'cation.

Her favorite part of 'cation is the king-sized bed that means she gets to sleep with mom and dad all night, every night (rather than clandestinely sneaking in as she likes to do at home). After our queen-sized bed, this king-sized baby feels positively cavernous. Or it would except that Ainsley has taken to pressing her squirmy little self right up to me. "Mama!" she says in her bossy voice, if I try to move an inch. She wants my arms around her and my cheek next to hers.

"She thinks she's in utero again," I commented to Dave.

For this week this suits me just fine. After all we're on 'cation, and there really is nothing like a sleeping baby.

Everyone's Baby

On our recent visit to Michigan, my sister Kate dubbed Ainsley "Everyone's Baby." Kate would snatch Ainsley up and whisk her away to eat pancakes. Ainsley never uttered a word of protest.

We spent a day with my younger sister, Karen. Within minutes Ainsley was running around saying "Karwon! Karwon!" Maybe it was all the cool togs Auntie Karwon bought her. They formed a bond in an instant.

At home Ainsley has a few favorites she'll dash off to see. Daddy is number one, of course, but Tim rates right on up there. "Aunt Patti" was one of her first two word combinations.

Once in a while I'll have a twinge of worry bordering on hurt feelings that "Everyone's Baby" seems such an apt moniker. What about me, I wonder. Fifteen weeks of nausea, six hours of labor, sixteen months of nursing -- doesn't that buy me a little loyalty? I don't necessarily want her to be "Everyone's Baby." She's my baby.

I've known kids who couldn't be left with anyone. My now sixteen-year-old niece would shriek non-stop from the time her mother left the room until she returned. We joked that Hannah had a mental Rolodex with a photo of every babysitter in southeastern Michigan. The babysitter would walk in and the wailing would commence. My other sister -- Hannah's aunt, not her mom -- babysat one night and was determined to get Hannah calm. Karen finally loaded a sobbing Hannah into her car seat and said, "I have more gas than you have energy," and proceeded to drive around the neighborhood for an hour.

Hannah never stopped.

By about four, Hannah had grown out of this. I remember watching her in swimming lessons. She was a tiny mite of a thing who could keep one nostril above water if she stood on her tip toes. She was determined to stay in the class. When Hannah was five she flew on a plane by herself from Detroit to Atlanta to spend a week with me. This child most people would have called clingy -- Nobody but Mom's Baby -- was suddenly confident and ready to face the world. Maybe she needed that extra closeness.

Yesterday our AC on the bedroom side of the house blew out thanks to an army of ants that took up residence in the wiring. The temperature had topped 95 degrees that afternoon. The house was sticky. About two in the morning, I was awakened by a tiny voice that quietly called, "Mama." Just once. Very quietly.

Is there a sweeter sound than that?

A friend of mine was consoling me over the issue of Ainsley being "Everyone's Baby." When the going gets rough, my friend shared, Ainsley will call for Mama.

And so she did.

Exonerated

Years ago my sister glanced across her living room to see my niece toddle over to a small metal table, lift a cap off one of the legs, deposit Kate's keys into the hollow tube, and thoughtfully replace the cap. Had Kate not been looking, those keys could have been missing until the table was hauled to Goodwill a decade later.

My mother-in-law says we always have something new going on. With some things-- Kolbe's funny quips or Ainsley's emerging speech -- new is entertaining; new keeps us laughing. But with other things--I'm thinking of toasted cell phones and broken arms--new yes, fun no.

We do our level best to keep the not so pleasant New from involving permanent damage to life or property. I remember scouring the house just before John made his debut taking mental note of items that would need to beat a hasty retreat before he became mobile.

The list was long.

We had marbles and magnets, 144 piece erector sets and Snap Circuits. We couldn't overlook the veritable sea of Legos. As John began to crawl, the top of the fridge became the repository for all things verboten--gum and marbles, finger paints and random dice, glitter and Easter candy. There we ensconced the granddaddy of all off limits items - the permanent markers.

Over time John proved far more enterprising than his older brothers. Soon the top of the fridge was overflowing. After a while I wondered if I could get away with stowing Ainsley up there, and I lamented the fact that the nice couch wouldn't quite fit.


Now we have Ainsley on the move. As I was emptying the trash the other day, there amidst the diapers and the coffee grounds, I spotted her shirt, onesie, and pants. Okay.

This morning Dave''s wallet went missing. I discovered this because I needed $5.00 cash. It is one of Dave's ongoing crosses to bear that I never have cash. After hitting up the older boys with no luck, I scouted out Dave's wallet and instead spotted Ainsley carrying his pager, watch, Chapstick, and rosary. Dave, the man who never leaves anything out of place, had emptied his pockets on the living room end table. Ainsey spotted the stash. Treasure!

A quick run through the house turned up all items except for the wallet. The search was on. We dug under cushions. We pulled back ugly couch. I searched the trash. I peered into vents. I sorted all the toys.

No wallet.

We unearthed a battalion of Lego guys, odd socks innumerable, and a bunch of change. I lost track of the pacies we found. It was either nine or ten. I figured this was worth a good $10.00, maybe $15.00, at least enough to cover the driver's license fee. Dave opened a cooler and found a diaper that had long been fermenting. (If we invite you on a picnic, better offer to bring your own food.)
  
All of this brought up a little PTSD stemming from a fruitless and highly frustrating search way back when. I was determined not to repeat the error of my ways.

Dave couldn't go to work without his driver's license. I was hosting a meeting with six women. I had planned to blitz the bathroom and run the vacuum before their arrival, but instead spent every spare second pulling the house apart. Despite all this, we remained calm.

Hours into the search Dave asked a key question. Did I actually see Ainsley with the wallet? Hmmmm. I had seen her with all the other paraphernalia. We checked Dave's coat, his dresser, and the clothes he had worn yesterday.

And found the wallet.

We apologized to Ainsley for besmirching her good name. Sticky fingers ran off to have fun (probably involving her brother's science fair project or my purse).


Innocent until proven guilty, no matter how long her rap sheet is.

I Caught a Smile

This same day we spent about ninety minutes in a portrait studio and never saw a glimpse of this gumby grin.

I'm Two and I'm Good at It

Just over two years ago, my friend Rachel and I had babies a week apart. Henry and John are now taking the world by storm. A few signs of the times:

1. Your favorite word is Nope! As in: Do you need a new diaper? Nope! Are you ready for a nap? Nope!
2. Mynt! is another favorite. It’s a variation on “mine” and follows your penchant for adding a “T” to everythingt. Megan = Megant. On = Ont. Dad = Dadt. Oddly, Mom is pronounced Momp.
3. Screaming and flailing on the ground underscore your deeply held opinions.

But two has its charms as well.

1. Saying “I wove you.”
2. Standing up in your crib every morning and taking inventory of your loved ones. Where Dadt? Where Timmy? Where Kolbe? Where Ainsey?
3. Carrying your new Thomas the Tank Engine train around. Sleeping with it clutched in your chubby hand.
4. Doing the Linus thing and never letting go of your “bot.”
5. Dashing to the window, overcome with excitement at seeing the garbage twuck.

Gushing, Insufferable Mother

She's simply beautiful.