Fish Out of Water

My four-year-old is.......engaged?

For several months I've been hearing about my daughter's best friend at school, a little boy we'll call Ernie. Each day she'd come home and when we'd ask her how her day went and who she played with, her answer was always the same: "Ernie." Then one day, out of the blue, she said to me, "Mommy, Ernie and I are engaged. He's my fiance." I didn't quite know what to make of that, so I just said OK and figured I'd either hear more about it some other time or never hear about it again.

Sure enough, this kept going - always the little stories about Ernie, always he was the only one she played with at school. They would either play Star Wars - she would be Princess Leia and he would be Luke Skywalker - or they would play Mermaidia (a movie about mermaids put out by the Barbie people in an attempt to bring down the fortress of Disney Princess). So we'd ask her if they were still engaged and she would giggle and say with a little coy roll of the eyes, yes Mommy, we're going to get married when we grow up.

A few weeks ago my husband picked her up at school and called me in the car as I was driving home. "Here, talk to your daughter," he said, and put her on the phone. "Hi sweetie, what's going on?" "Guess what, Mommy! Ernie kissed me today!" ...... "Oh, wow, that's, um, interesting. And what did you do?" "I kissed him back, silly!" Giggle, giggle, giggle. "Where did this happen?" "Under the slide on the playground."

My daughter isn't even five yet and she's already kissing boys. OK, boy, but still! I didn't kiss a boy until I was 14! And no one proposed to me until I was 23! She is waaaay ahead of me already. WOW. I guess what they say is right: kids grow up a lot faster these days.

Last weekend we decided to invite Ernie over for a play date. I wanted to get to know his mom and I knew my daughter had been wanting to have him over for a long time. My husband and I had tea and scones with his mom and really enjoyed hanging out with her. Of course the first thing she said when she sat down was, "So, you know they're engaged, right?" I actually thought this was interesting because part of me was starting to wonder if it wasn't just the imaginings of a very creative little girl. But no, clearly it is mutual because HE told his parents too! She wasn't aware of the kissing so we told her about that. We all had several good laughs about it, and then at some point the play date got very quiet. You know what that means, right?

NAKED!!!!!!! My husband went up to check on them and they were parading around upstairs naked as jaybirds. They actually ran into the bathroom and hid behind the toilet when he showed up. The first thing Ernie said when they were caught was: "It was her idea." And you know what? It was! She came downstairs and gleefully admitted that it was indeed her idea. And grinned from ear to ear as she stifled yet another giggle.

I'll let you know when the wedding is. I wonder if she'll decide to go with white or cream.

Toddler! (Well, she will be when she toddles)

Yesterday was my baby's first birthday! So I guess technically she is no longer a baby. Are kids officially toddlers when they turn 1, or when they actually start to toddle? She can toddle if someone holds both of her hands. She can stand while holding on with one hand, or leaning her chest against something. I can see how much she wants to stand on her own, she's just not quite there yet. Probably a few more weeks for that. I'm figuring she'll be walking in a couple of months. Maybe she'll surprise me and do it sooner. I guess we'll find out soon enough. I remember her big sister could stand without holding on at about 10 months, and she walked at exactly a year. So this one has a couple months to go yet.

We sang her happy birthday and went to brunch but she didn't know the difference. I had really good French toast! The birthday girl was cranky by that point and spent most of the meal yelling and throwing food on the floor. Her big sister whined a lot. It was a pretty typical day with two tired parents and two little girls.

It has been a busy and crazy year since she was born. I can't imagine life without her. Happy birthday sweetie! You should start talking soon so we can finally understand all the stuff you've been telling us.......

Voice Mail

Tonight my daughter received a letter in the mail from my grandmother. It was some stickers and paper to stick them on. Whenever my grandmother gets stickers she always sends them to my daughter, and she loves them so it works out great. We told her to call and leave a message thanking her great-grandmother for the stickers. The great-grandmother in question wasn't home, so her voice mail greeting picked up. When it was time to start talking, my daughter said her first name, and then said, "Mommy, what's our phone number?"

This was because my grandmother's voice mail greeting says to leave your name and your number, and she'll call back. I was so impressed with my daughter's attention to instructions! I quickly realized why she kept saying her name, and explained that she could leave a little chatty message too, which she did, but it was so cool! She heard the very specific instructions and set out to do just what she was told. (If only she would be that attentive to my requests to brush her teeth in the morning......) I was very proud of her. She is a very cool kid!

Monday evening stuff

The poor baby has been a snot fountain for days. She cries at night, in her sleep, and it's hard to console her. Today I picked her up at day care and she cried the entire way home, and then cried whenever I put her down. She just wanted to be held and cuddled. Her daddy and I took turns cuddling her and then he tried to give her baby food for dinner. Mostly she wanted to go to sleep. He took her up to bed and about three and a half minutes later - just long enough to change her diaper and clean off her face - he came downstairs. She just rolled over and went to sleep. She even sounds like she has baby laryngitis. When she cries, it takes a minute for her little voice to kick in. It's all raspy. She doesn't have a fever, so I'm not worried, but it would be nice if she could breathe a little better! Poor sweetie.

Luckily no one else seems to be quite as afflicted - at least not yet - and of course now that I said that, we're all going to catch it. But everyone is fine. The big girl was telling me that today at school they went to an aquarium, got a 50-gallon octopus tank, brought back an octopus, and learned how to kill it! I am so curious about what really happened and what she's actually talking about.

Her new favorite show is Bindi the Jungle Girl. We finally did tell her that Steve Irwin died - about a year after his death - and now she loves to watch Bindi. She keeps telling me how much she wants to meet Bindi. She also told me that when she is 8, she wants to have a TV show too! Highly unlikely, since I don't follow the Lynne Spears school of motherhood.

Last night we were watching Sense and Sensibility together and she could not stop talking in a British accent. And she's actually pretty good at it! I was impressed. I was explaining to her why the Kate Winslet character gets so sad, and she was asking me in her best Queen's-English accent, "So he didn't love her?" It was so cute! Tonight I had a bit of a rough stretch with her, but I've calmed myself down and we are now happily hanging out together downstairs. She is playing with Play-Doh while I post this and do some Net surfing.

Yesterday I got to meet my friend's one-month-old baby girl. Hard to believe my giant ladies were ever that small, but the baby's already 10 pounds, so she's definitely bigger than my two were at birth. Amazing. I got to hold her and she just slept and snuggled in next to me in that sweet baby-hamster way that babies do. She had some very cute yawns, and I loved seeing her mom hold her. The mom is one of my very oldest friends so it was really special to see her with her first baby. Also she had her baby at the same birth center where my girls were born so I was proud to have told her about that place. She was as happy with her experience there as I was.

It's suddenly cold outside! The autumn came really late this year so now that it's here, it has whacked us upside the head. Not fun! Oh well, this is only the beginning........

Eight years! And crawling! (This is about two different things.)

Today I went to pick up the baby at day care. I had the big girl with me and when the baby saw her, she zoomed across the floor to see her big sister! It was pretty cool to see how much that baby wanted to move. She does this funny thing of putting her feet on the floor, like these big pushups, and then wondering why she isn't getting anywhere, but then she remembers to put her knees down and then she goes. We cheered when she did it. It was very exciting.

The other very exciting thing for today is that on this date eight years ago, my sweet husband and I were married. All the usual cliches apply: we can't believe it's already been eight years, where did the time go, and the obligatory HOW DID WE GET SO OLD? But mostly we are very happy to be together. Happy anniversary my sweet!

OK, I guess I might have a few more things to say....

For example, we had a momentous event in the house this morning: the big girl checked with me about where she would be going this morning to make sure her clothes were appropriate (her school's dress code prohibits spaghetti straps), picked out an outfit, and put it on all by herself, WITHOUT EVEN BEING ASKED. I was drying my hair after my shower, and noticed that she had been gone for a little while. I went in her room, fully expecting to find her farting around on the floor naked, and discovered her with undies on and skirt on its way on, with no help at all from me. A few minutes later she pranced in, fully dressed, and totally coordinated, and extremely proud of herself.

How about that!! It was very exciting. Her daddy took her out tonight for ice cream after dinner - I was very tired so I stayed home with the very sweaty baby and tried to feed her enough to get her to go to sleep. That took a while. So of course we entertained ourselves with a few reruns of my new favorite show, What Not to Wear. I so love Clinton and Stacy. But OY, her crazy high heels - how does she walk in those things? She is going to make some podiatrist very rich in about twenty years with all the foot problems she's going to have. And yes, I know this makes me sound like a Jewish grandmother. Well, with any luck, someday I will be one. (OY again. That is a semi-scary thought.)

The birds and the bees!

OK, I remembered something pretty earth-shattering (at least in the life of this family) that happened a week or so ago: I told my four-year-old where babies come from.

Now, a little background. She had known for a while where the baby comes out, because I was very clear about that when I was pregnant with her baby sister. I told her the baby would be in there for a long time, growing and growing, until the baby was too big to stay inside, and then lots of muscles would work together to help the baby come out the vagina. She was fine with that. In fact, she loved to tell anyone who would listen that that's where the baby came out. But she never asked me how the baby got in there in the first place.

I learned about that stuff when I was 3 or 4, so I always figured I'd tell my kids around that age too. I don't want them getting older and then having some kid on the playground tell them something totally wrong that would be hard to get them to stop believing. I've always felt that I should be the first person they should hear that stuff from.

But anyway, since she hadn't yet asked how the baby got in there, I was just sort of riding it out to see what happened. One morning we were in the car together, driving to school, when I asked her what she wanted to talk about. She said, "Fish eggs." I wasn't sure what she wanted to say about them, but I was up for it. Eventually she asked about how the egg becomes a baby fish, so I said that the egg comes from the mommy fish and the sperm comes from the daddy fish, and the sperm fertilizes the egg, and then it turns into a baby fish. Not missing a beat, she said, "Does Daddy have sperm?" I said yes. And that's when it all happened.

"How does the sperm get out?"

"You really want to know?"

"Yeah!"

"It comes out the penis."

"Disgusting!"

[Some giggles here from both the mommy and the daughter.]

"OK, then how does the sperm get to the egg."

"What do you think? Take a guess."

"The vagina?"

"Yeah!"

"OK! Does it walk?"

"No, it swims."

"Is there an aquarium?"

"No, the sperm go in a sort of special water. It all works very nicely."

"Oh. OK!"

And that was it. I think I did say after that that only grown-ups do it, but she was ready to move on. She had gotten the information she wanted, and she did not want to sit and yak about it for hours. Aside from the slightly embarrassed giggling, I think I did really well! I stayed true to the promise I had always made to myself - that whenever my kids asked me about that, I would be honest and tell them how it worked, and I wouldn't make them feel bad or wrong for asking.

So now she knows. I know we'll have many more conversations about this in the years to come, but at least the major mystery has been unraveled. Happy (almost) Mother's Day to me!

Expressions of love

I was in the car this morning with the girls, driving home from gymnastics. I suddenly had this urge to tell Miss P how much I love her, which I did, to which she responded, "I know, Mommy. I love you too." We both got all googly and talked about how much we love each other, and then she started a sentence which took her a while to finish. She was saying, "Mommy, you make me feel so.....I love you so much....you make me feel...." and did that for a while, and then finished this way:

"Mommy, you make me feel like a horse."

Happy birthday, big girl!

Yesterday my older daughter turned four years old. Last year I told her that because her birthday is on St. Patrick's Day, she gets to be Irish one day a year. She quickly corrected me, saying, "Mommy, I'm not Irish, I'm Jewish!" Serves me right for trying to be cute.

She rushed into our room yesterday morning right after she woke up (as she does every morning), and the first words out of her mouth were, "Mommy, I'm four!" She was so proud of herself. She had a whirlwind birthday weekend. A party with some of her friends at the gym where she takes gymnastics lessons, a sleepover with two of her very favorite friends who live an hour away and whose dad was glad not to have to drive home after coming for the party (plus we see them so rarely, so it was great to get to hang out with them), TONS of awesome gifts, and a special dinner out a restaurant tonight with my parents and grandmother. Quite a weekend, and she's only four!

And yet, how is she four already? Every time I look at the baby (who is now six weeks old!), I remember what the big girl was like at that age, and now she's already four. It's such a cliche, and all parents talk about how fast the time goes, but one of the reasons cliches are cliches is that they are so universally true. The time really does fly, and it is a very strange experience to watch your children grow. Miss P was a very feisty baby - we all saw her strong personality from day one - and she definitely maintains that energy to this day. She is headstrong and determined, and she throws herself into everything she does. We had our first parent-teacher conference last week and that's what her teachers told us too. We are so proud of the kid she's turning out to be. Sure, she drives us crazy and she doesn't listen, and it always takes her being told 1,000 times before she'll brush her teeth, but those are the small things. The big things - like the way she throws herself into my arms and tells me she loves me about a hundred times a day, the way she can't go more than a few minutes without hugging and kissing her baby sister, the way her smile and her laugh can fill an entire room all by themselves - those are the important things, the things that remind me every day how lucky I am to have her.

Happy birthday sweet girl! Here's to another crazy year. We love you so much!

Random Thursday stuff, and getting over the embarrassment

So today I talked to that client twice. He was really nice to me on the phone. It was pretty awkward. I sure felt like a horse's ass. But we seem to be moving past it. La la la la, I hate this kind of crap..........luckily this is not a client that we do tons of work for, so I could go six months without hearing from him. So whatever. Life goes on.

I am now even more crazy at work than I was before, because now I'm deeply involved in training the woman who is going to be covering for me while I'm out on maternity leave. It's so hard to extract what I actually do from my head, and translate it into terms that another human being can understand. So much of what I do is not even understood by the other people who work at my company, so it's hard to imagine how someone who has only been there three days will be able to grasp it. But she's obviously smart and a quick learner, and I think we're going to be OK. I hope so anyway.

Today the baby was moving and moving and moving. The midwife gave me a sheet that explains how I'm supposed to count fetal movements, and be sure there are at least two active periods during each day. I don't think I need to bother with the counting, because this baby is a constant mover. I'm lucky if I get two NON-active periods during each day. She has been head-down for about two months, and for the last few weeks she's had her back on my left side, and has been kicking me hard on my right side. Sometimes she kicks so hard it hurts. That is not fun! But my daughter loves when she moves. She leans her head against my side and cuddles up with me on the couch, and whenever there's baby activity, she yells, "Oh! She moved!" That makes it so much fun!

My poor husband called me today around noon from the side of the road on I-95. He had had a tire blowout in the fast lane while going probably 85 miles an hour. Luckily it was a rear tire and he has front wheel drive, so all it did was make a loud noise and start stinking of burning rubber. He didn't have any control issues with the car. He was able to pull into a middle median and get out of all the oncoming traffic, thank goodness. He called AAA, which said they would be there in an hour and a half. Nice. So he hunkered down to wait for them and then a nice PA state trooper stopped and helped him change to the spare. And the trooper didn't even give him a ticket for having an expired registration sticker. I am so relieved that nothing bad happened. If the worst that comes out of the tire blowout is that we have a day or so of inconvenience while the car is in the shop and that we have to pay for a new tire when we weren't planning for it, I'm OK with that. The important thing is my sweet husband didn't get hurt.

Now it's time for bed! Tired pregnant lady here.