All Adither

Six

It was the worst day ever

she says as she rounds the corner

Lips drawn down

Eyes pale

You have lots of worst days ever

I remind her

She shakes her head

And offers up a small award she got in gym class

See? I raise my brows at her

This is not what she wants

She wants to believe, right then, that everything is awful and bad and wrong

The most horrible

Ever

She lies on the floor of her room like a deflated balloon

Unwilling to tell me why

This is what it’s like to be a man, I think

Momentarily, I pity the other sex, trying to figure us out

I give up and leave

She'll talk when she's ready

Or not

We are in the fecund pool locker room

She changes from her wet suit into dry clothes

Nothing is ever fun

I wither

because I swam through blue-yellow water

teeming with kids

for her

I understand this is payback

But that doesn't stop it from being 

hilariously dreadful

Repetition repetition repetition

Claire wanted to visit her old preschool teachers this last week. Since her elementary school has been on Thanksgiving vacation and her preschool has not, we snuck in Tuesday morning to say Hi.

They all crooned to her in staggered rounds, "You're so tall!"

The refrain: TALL, tall, tAll, taLL.

A song scratched across my eardrums like a dusty record.

Later in the day we ran into friends we hadn't seen in a while. It was the same chorus. Claire, you're so tall. Look how tall you are. You've grown so much.

Claire, for her part, didn't seem fazed.

I try as hard as I can to make Tall seem positive for her. Tall is great! Tall is cool! You can reach things and see over heads!

But inside, when Tall dribbles out of people's mouths like blood, I writhe and gnash.

She's also brilliant! I want to cry. She's funny and spirited. And look at those dimples and that thick, chestnut hair.

Of course, though, Tall is the first noticeable thing about her.

I just have to give in and realize it is one of the themes with which we live. And understand that the world likes to exclaim the obvious.

Alone in the dark

Claire does this thing where she genuflects kisses on my face. Minus the religion. It's a ritual for her most days when I drop her off at school. She kisses my forehead, cheek, cheek, chin. (Though I know that if this were truly genuflection, it would be forehead, chin, cheek, cheek. Whatever.)

I've realized something about her. She's just like me. Not in every way. But in her need to stay occupied until the moment she falls asleep, lest disturbing thoughts swirl around her brain in an endless helix.

I finally caught on last night, our first bedtime in San Diego, where we're spending the kids' winter break. She muttered from her sleeping bag that she needed something to do. That a dark room next to a slumbering brother would not stand. She whimpered for a while, then started to cry in earnest. At first I was annoyed. After a day of traveling, I just wanted to lie there in a stupor. But it soon become clear she was seriously distressed. I brought her into bed with me and tucked her under my arm. We slept that way for a few hours, until she inevitably turned into the thrashing octopus that emerges around 1 or 2 a.m.

I woke J. to move her to her sleeping bag.

At home, Claire is always up late, rearranging her bedroom, tucking dolls under blankets, playing until she's so exhausted she conks out. I didn't understand until last night, though, that she needs to. That her rearranging and playing is tantamount to my reading before sleep. It's a defense mechanism to ward off the figurative monsters. Or, as she puts it, the "bad thinkings".

She's so open and lively and imaginative during the day that I sometimes forget what those same qualities can do to a person alone with their thoughts in the dark. A small, unmedicated person to whom everything seems wondrous, but also big and scary.

See Claire read. Oh. Oh. Cute, cute Claire.

This is pretty much what I've been up to lately. Listening to Claire work her way through a massively huge collection of Dick and Jane stories. My sister gave it to us a bunch of years ago and Claire recently picked it up. She loves this book.

I love listening to her sound out words. It's the sweetest spot in my life right now.

A little hula

It's spring. There's sun. Kitty Cat likes to pretend she can gyrate enthusiastically enough to keep the hoop going for more than 3.6 seconds. I just clap and smile.

There is so much

and yet, not enough.

Relief lite

In our neighborhood, baby great blue herons chitter and screech from their treetop nest, sounding, at night, like the worst kind of cat fight. Bloody and vicious. But it's only the chicks (hatchlings? nestlings?) ululating. 

They are usually done before I go to bed, so they don't wake me.

It is Kitty Cat, with her bad dreams, that rouse me most often lately. Her mind 

twisting innocuous, everyday things into shadows and meanness. Poor kid. Like 

me. Who woke up crying in the middle of every night until I was five.

She called me from the tail end of a bad dream last night, asking if Andy was real. 

"Candy?" I said, my mind fuzzy, still mostly asleep.

"No, Andy," she insisted.

This morning we figured out she meant Andy from Toy Story. No more for that book. 

Then we were off to Children's Hospital for her endoscopy, the thing we've dreaded all summer. To Kitty Cat, it was a big adventure, getting up at 5:30 am, driving through barely lit streets, finding "Pteranodons" in the gray-pink clouds. And then the monitor wrapped around her finger and the pads taped to her narrow, milky chest and gas that the anesthesiologist made smell like bubblegum.

When I went to her in the recovery room she was groggy, eating a banana-flavored popsicle, but having a hard time steering it. She watched everything the nurses did and listened to everything they said. They told her she couldn't do anything to compromise her balance for the next 24 hours. She promised she would definitely not ride her skateboard. It helps that she doesn't own one.

"No Razor scooters either," I said, running my hand down the length of her thick hair.

It was odd being the parent. When I have always been the child in these situations: the one having my tonsils removed or my wisdom teeth pulled or my nose fixed, with my mom waiting when I came to.

Now Kitty Cat is eating and drinking and playing, lightly. Eat-lite. Play-lite. It's a lite kind of day.

My three-year-old's disdain for the toilet

Kitty Cat was a potty-training prodigy. 

Slightly after turning two, she decided it was time to use the privy. In her limited toddler garbledy-gook, she'd announce when she had to Go and would high-tail it to the bathroom. 

By two-and-a-half she was in undies. We were delighted. 

After the hand-wringing and quiet cursing we went through trying to entice Fruit Bat to the toilet, we could hardly believe our luck.

Just before she turned three, however, it all went down the crapper.

Now she's all, "I won't EVEN go to the bathroom, mom." Everything these days is I won't EVEN. Tomorrow I expect her to start wearing belly shirts and flicking her tongue ring at me.

She doesn't EVEN have time for the potty. Her Snap 'n Style doll is too bitchin', her TV show too engrossin', her tricycle too thrillin'.

So instead of informing us when it's time to Go, she tries to hold it by walking around like this

We've tried rewarding her with Skittles. We've tried laying off and pretending we don't care. We've tried giving her regular reminders. None of it matters. Because going pee? Bo-ring.

She starts preschool in a church basement this September (only the best for our girl). And, though her new teachers issued this statement in her student packet

and we are relieved that if she misbehaves she won't be relegated to a cubicle under fluorescent lights while forced to stare at spreadsheets on a monitor, we're still concerned. I'm thinking the staff won't be as willing as I am to stuff wet undies in their purses and move on with their day.

Anyone have a Psalm for potty training?

Super Croup

This keeps running through my head:

She's a very croupy girl
The kind you must leave home with mother
She will only let your spirits down
when her breathing becomes a squeak

She's a supercroup, supercroup
She's supercroupy
Supercroup, supercroup
She's supercroupy

Yow.

Fifi Fluff

Fruit Bat has been really into card games lately. I recently dug out my Old Maid deck that I've had since the age of 8 (or so). The images are so awesome and vintagey. At the time, I just liked the colors and the characters, but now I can really appreciate the illustrations.

And I want to know: is it too late to rename my second born?