The Absolute Value of Life

I have a number of friends and coworkers who were pregnant at the same time I was pregnant with Teeny. We sweltered through the summer together, we nested together, we complained together. One kept a blog about her subway rides, logging in detail whether she got offered a seat, by whom and how long after she stepped into the train car. Two were coworkers of mine and a third was the daughter of a coworker, so every work day brought a new conversation about babies and pregnancy woes. Another was the friend of a friend who lives very close by. We hit full term one right after the other and I placed bets in my head about who would go into labor first. Making an entrance at 39 weeks by spontaneous labor and beautiful HBAC, Teeny was the second of the group to be born. That was the only milestone she ever met early. Following the other babies on Facebook, meeting their mamas for tea, and otherwise watching these little ones grow made me absolutely certain that Teeny was not developing at the same pace as her peers. One by one, I watched these other babies roll over, sit up, pull to a stand, and walk. Now they are running around. They dance. They talk. They sing. They are toddlers.

At 16 months, Teeny is not a toddler.

This weekend we had a playdate with one of these babies. Her mom, my neighbor and now very dear friend, has been nothing but encouraging and loving to Teeny and to all of us. She gets right down on the floor and snuggles with her, plays with her and accepts her for the person she is with absolutely no judgment. She doesn't make me feel like the Special Parent I resist being. But it's hard to see her daughter - a beautiful and smart child I adore - doing all the things I want Teeny to be doing. I love to watch this precious girl as she grows, but the very-hard-to-admit truth is that when I see her I am also jealous and sad. I think of all the things Teeny should be able to do that she cannot. I see the many things I wanted for Teeny, and for Bee as her big sister. I am sad for Bee, who can't play with her sister the way she should be able to. I am sad for Teeny, being left out because there is so much she is not yet able to do. On Saturday, my friend and I chatted and caught up. As we talked, we realized with delight that we were applying to the same preschool for our girls. If she is accepted, her daughter -- two weeks younger than Teeny -- will be in the toddler class. Teeny, if accepted, will be with the babies.

Rationally, this is okay with me. Even before we knew about Teeny's needs, I felt lucky that she is a late September baby. As long as she is in private school in New York City, she will miss the cutoff of September 1, so she will be older than all of her classmates. This is to her advantage. I was always among the youngest in my grade, which was hard for me not because I struggled to keep up intellectually, but because I was far less socially and emotionally mature than my peers, which made life difficult and often painful. While Teeny does test within the normal range for cognitive abilities, there is no question that she is behind kids her age in many ways, so I think it can only help for her to be among the oldest in her group. But hearing that her closest pal will be in the class ahead of her stung me a little and made me feel like she was being "left back" before she even got started. I had to remind myself that I want her with the younger kids.

And if that didn't suck enough, at the same playdate, it became clear to me that I was not the only one who felt jealous and sad. She might not be able to walk up to me and verbalize this, but I now know that Teeny is well aware that she is not like other children her age.

Her big sister Bee loves when people come and go. She loves visitors - and with three therapists and other home-based workers, there is no shortage of people parading in and out of our apartment every day. Bee loves to wait at the door and give our guests grand greetings and farewells. She's big on kisses hello and goodbye, and lately she's begun to exclaim, "Mama! I am so happy to see you!" when I come home from work in the evenings. When I leave in the morning she always accompanies me to the elevator. This is a long process. She will "ride you to the elevator" on her bike if she can get on it fast enough, "scoot you to the elevator" if you wait for her to get on her helmet and shoes and dig the scooter out from behind the glider where we stash it, but mostly we tell her she can take her feet to the elevator, which is an excuse for her to run up and down our long hallway, press a lot of buttons, and stall you from actually leaving. Sometimes one of our cats will sneak out and go with her because the huge production she makes is so much fun. And when our friends packed up to go on Saturday morning, Bee wanted to see them off as she usually does. This time, Teeny was right behind her.

The few times Teeny has elected to help Bee throw a hello-goodbye party, she lingered by the door and watched everyone else run down the hall. This weekend, she bunny-hopped right over the threshold. By the time she got there, Bee and our friend were halfway down the hall. Bee ran the length of the hallway to the elevator and back, and she and the other little girl were squealing and giggling as they chased each other. One tripped and fell, got up laughing, and kept running, and then the other bonked into the wall as she ran, stumbling and howling with laughter. Teeny was so fired-up by it all: she was wild-eyed, babbling intently and shaking with intense excitement. She propelled her little self forward as fast as she could, one arm over the other, pulling her legs under her in her modified crawl. At first I tried to help her the way our PT taught us: I held her knees and tried to get her to alternate legs as she crawled. But this was no time for a therapy session. This kid was on a mission: to get to the elevator with her sister and her friend. She gave it her all but she was just too slow. I walked behind her, noticing how erratic and jumpy her movements looked because she couldn't make herself go as fast as she wanted to. The whole time she kept her eyes fixed on her buddies as she hopped like Frogger, pulling her bent legs beneath her. Soon I heard little indignant grunts; she was getting frustrated. My friend waited patiently down the hallway, cheering her on the whole time while keeping an eye on the other two girls, and I hung back, still watching her movements. Halfway to the elevator, I couldn't take it any longer. I couldn't watch her struggle for another second. I scooped Teeny up in my arms and gasped at what I saw. Her knees were bloody and raw with rug burn from trying to race across the carpet. She was trying so hard to keep up that she hurt herself in the process, and I was so overwhelmed with sadness for her that I felt faint. We waved to our friends and I carried her back into the apartment.

When her knees were cleaned up and she had settled down for a nap, I had a moment to collect my thoughts. It felt terrible to have such ugly emotions stirred up by the presence of our dear and wonderful friends. And yet I knew it was normal. I am not done being upset. I am not done being angry. I spent more time that afternoon lashing out at people I love than I care to admit, even though I knew I wasn't upset at any of them. Why can't this be something you can get mad about and get over, like someone being late or forgetting your birthday? I feel a tremendous loss that may never go away, and knowing that Teeny is now catching glimpses of it too absolutely breaks my heart.

With Bee I had to learn that I couldn't protect her from everything. Life is frustrating for everyone. I had to accept that she needs to be able to deal with a healthy degree of frustration in her life. That meant taking a step back and watching my kid take some blows that I would gladly have suffered for her a thousand times over. But we're all the better for it -  Bee is a growing up to be a pretty resilient kid and I am a proud non-helicopter parent. But mothering a child with multiple needs is making me learn this lesson all over again in a different way. I am angry in advance: at the kids who might make fun of her down the line, at the schools who might not want her someday, at the people who will see her as different, slow, weird, unlovable. I am afraid in advance that someday my daughter will be alone. I am scared that her sister will not want to look after her once I am gone. And right now, today, I am troubled by having to make decisions for her. Right now we are trying to decide whether to send her to a part-time private preschool in the fall. Will she need mainstream school or special needs based? Will she be lost in the sea of neurotypical children or will her age-appropriate abilities be challenged in ways that will help her? Is special education more appropriate for her physical needs, and will it be enough for her cognitively? What will her life be like eight months from now? September is an eternity away. It has not even been three months since the day the earth stood still, the day we got the results of her MRI. A lot can happen in eight months; maybe she'll be walking. But what if she's not?

Teeny is going to be different from her peers, but how? None of us can say. The hardest part in this for me is not knowing. That makes it so hard for me to resist comparing her to everyone around her, which is a lose-lose situation no matter what. Because I don't know what will happen, I can't protect her from other people or even from ourselves. Hell, I can't even protect myself from my own big, messy and scary feelings. I have to feel them no matter how much they suck, and she has to feel her feelings too. Just like I try to guide Bee through her preschooler tantrums in a loving way, telling her I am sorry she feels sad/mad/tired/whatever but that I am unable to give her everything she wants, I can be there for Teeny. Right now I feel like my job is to help her break her personality out of prison. To me she is a self still on hold, still simmering, unable to move forward because she is bound by her physical disabilities. I want to help her her to blossom, to sing, to fill the world with all that I just know is brewing under her surface. I will never be the kind of special needs parent that believes that this disability is a gift. I will never see this as a blessing. I wish so hard she didn't have it. Who signs up for this crap? But I can practice radical acceptance and teach Teeny to accept the absolute value of herself - not as something inherently positive or negative but just as another human being who is. I want her to love herself as much as I love her. I can push her to do her best every day and teach her what I truly believe: that her life, no matter how different it turns out to be, has value.

Bee Goes to School

Bee started nursery school at the beginning of September. Her school is a wonderful private nursery school loosely affiliated with the big private university within walking distance of us. She's there three days a week, two and a half hours a day. It's Reggio Emilia based and, miracle of miracles, Bee's head teacher is vegan, has a tattoo (at least one that I can see), has five cats, and is an AP-identified, babywearing, cosleeping, extended nursing mama to two girls. I love her already.

You may be thinking, as we were, that Bee is awfully young for school. She was 2.7 at the beginning of September, which really is the youngest this school will take a child. In fact, we were not actually planning to send her anywhere for another year. But when Teeny was born and Bee started showing signs of regression ("I want to wear a diaper too! I want to eat baby food too!") we realized it would be a good thing to have her socialize with other kids her age instead of hang with a newborn all day. We happened upon this school's annual spring fair and loved what we saw (petting zoo animals aside). Knowing how cutthroat the process can be in New York City and that most deadlines for the coming year had long since passed, I called their office the next day just on the off chance that they might have space. Lo and behold, there was room in the three-days-a-week morning 2s class for a girl. So we came in for an interview. This school does not, as a rule, meet the children as part of the interview process, so really it was a question of whether we liked them and whether we could manage the tuition.

So in September, we got rolling. First we had a home visit. Bee's head teacher, we learned, would drop by for fifteen minutes or so to meet her on her own turf, as it were. And she did - but she arrived more than half an hour early and found me unshowered, in my gym shorts and tank top, covered in breakfast and breast milk, tattoos all exposed and hair wild and crazy from the night before. I was not excited to meet her for the first time in such a state, but what could I do? What could this woman possibly think of me? But she smiled and said nothing, and sat with Bee, looked at books with her for a few minutes, talked about school, snapped a few photos of her for their home visit photo album, and was gone.

That night, we attended a welcome meeting for all the parents. We arranged for a babysitter (our very first, which could be a whole other blog entry) and by this point I was showered and dressed professionally, ready to take on the private school parents. We found our name tags and folder of materials when we walked in, helped ourselves to coffee and took a seat alongside all the other moms and dads for a lovely address by the school's new director and another by the heads of the Parent Association. We sat in the second row and tried to look serious, but couldn't stop whispering to each other. "We have a daughter! Wait, we have two! And one's in school!" I jotted down the info for the first PA meeting and snickered to my husband. "I'm going to be a PTA mom?! Oh my God. Who am I?" I felt like the kid in Freaky Friday, or like someone in costume, dressed as someone's responsible mother. I kept saying to myself, I am the mother of a school aged child. We looked over the class list. Bee was the only kid not from the Upper West Side. I scanned the addresses. Riverside Drive, Riverside Drive, Riverside Drive. No one else in Harlem. I amended my line to I am the mother of a child in school with very privileged kids. And I wasn't so sure how I felt about that.

Next we headed to her classroom, where we and seven other couples sat on tiny little chairs in a circle and ate grapes and sipped apple juice while the teachers talked about rules, policies and their educational philosophy for the twos class. If the first meeting was surreal, sitting in that room with all of the residents of Riverside Drive talking about our babies was even more surreal. We introduced ourselves and I couldn't help but notice that all the other parents were mixed-gender couples, most of them white. There was one family that spoke another language (Italian) and one bi-racial family (Caucasian and Asian). There were no other stay at home dads, no vegans, no tattooed mamas. But everyone was friendly enough.

Two days later, the "phase-in" period of school started. That meant that I too got to go to nursery school for as long as Bee needed me to. Her class is 8 two-year-olds with two teachers for two and a half hours. They started with one hour for four kids and their parent or parents. We all sat there, kneading Play-Doh, reading stories, painting pictures, diapering dollys, and having snack like it was the most normal thing in the world, while our two year olds looked on, very uncertain.

After a few minutes, Bee actually seemed pretty excited!

She got brave and made her way over to new toys, leaving me behind.

But she soon shrank back when she tried to touch something another kid wasn't quite finished with. He barked "No!" at her, and she crumpled into me, scared and unsure of what to do next. I held her, not sure of what to do either. The other kids seemed much more comfortable taking direction from the teachers and moving away from their parents, which led me to believe that Bee was likely the only child who had never been in a nanny or day care situation before. Once I calmed her and her tears were dry, she played happily for the remainder of the hour, but only in my lap.

Still, she is a resilient child and by the time we got home, she was chatting excitedly about school and how much she loved her teacher and how she couldn't wait to go back.

The following school day, which was actually nearly a week later because of the High Holy Days, was also an hour, but this time with all eight kids. Each kid had one parent or caregiver with them this time. This was the day that I learned that Bee can in fact sit at a table. She sat perfectly still, drinking her juice and eating her Wheat Thins and her pretzels. You would never know that at home, her meals are doled out one "drive by" mouthful at a time. It is almost impossible to convince her to sit at the table for more than fifteen seconds before getting absorbed in something else, that is it was, until I saw that she can and does do it at school.

The following week, the class jumped to an hour and a half. The second day that week, the teachers began to invite the parents to go get a cup of coffee. Loosely translated, this meant I think your kid will be okay without you, so you can go sit in the room next door and we'll see how it goes. Some parents were ushered back in five minutes because their kids had meltdowns and couldn't be calmed. One kid was so nonchalant that her mom left not only the classroom but the building itself and the girl barely noticed. Bee seemed fine by this point, not clingy or fearful, yet I had not been asked to get coffee. I was starting to think the teachers saw something in my kid that I didn't, some nervous tic or other deficiency that made them think that she would need her mama in school with her for the rest of the year. By the third day though, the teacher turned to me and said, would you like to tell Bee you are going to get a cup of coffee? I did, and she kissed me and said brightly "Goodbye Mama!" and that was that.

The next day the teacher said she did fine and that we were phased in. My nursery school days were over. Now I could drop her off and leave. But the day after that was a Monday. I quickly saw that a lot of the independence the kids muster up over the course of the school week is undone by a weekend with mama and daddy. Monday saw us starting the process all over again, and the goodbye was a tearful one. But I got a text and a call from the teacher and an email from the school's director, all letting me know that Bee missed me and said so, but that she engaged and played happily for the rest of her school day. And since then, she's been fine. We walk to school together, and by that I mean I push her stroller the entire two-mile, uphill most of the way distance, running because we're always borderline late and sweating from the workout of pushing a 37 pound child in a stroller up a steep hill. But we enjoy it. We count buses and trees. She snacks on Big Bird juice and peanut butter bars. We talk about the songs she will sing in class and the snacks she will eat. We name the teachers and the other kids she will play with. We talk about who will pick her up and what her afternoon will look like. And she knows as we get closer and closer to the school that our arrival there means mama will leave. She tells me she wants me to come with her and to stay with her. But she doesn't protest when I tell her I have to go to work, and she's always happy when Johnny picks her up.

The school's welcome picnic was rained out three times, so we've not yet had the opportunity to talk to many of the other parents, but that's next for us. The first Parents' Association meeting is next week, and the week after that is their annual bake sale. I've signed up to bring two dozen vegan cupcakes and I've volunteered to help sell in the morning. I am starting to see a future with playdates and other social events popping up on Bee's calendar, which is unnerving and exciting all at once, provided Johnny and I can connect with these parents and develop comfort with this whole privilege thing, which still feels very strange.

At the same time, Bee's growing up in other ways. She had her first dentist appointment, which went so much better than I thought it would. She's a diligent tooth-brusher (and an equally diligent toothpaste-swallower) but I couldn't see how her dentist would be able to keep her still enough to examine her, let alone clean her teeth. She worked her magic on Bee, who really seemed to have a good time with her. It helped that she gave Bee her own little mirror to play with and indulged every request to go up in the chair, and then down again, and then up again, and then down again.

Her vocabulary is vast and she is already reading a few words, like Mama, Bee, Daddy, Teeny, cat, car, and exit, to name a few. When we arrived at school one day to find all the cubbies labeled, she ran to hers and announced, "B-e-e spells Bee! What does S-a-d-i-e spell, Mama?" And then she proceeded to spell out the name of every single kid with a cubby. I couldn't believe it. She has mastered the art of "no" in a way she hadn't as a toddler. She divides the world up into people with penises and people with clitorises. Already! And her memory is so spot-on that it's a little scary. She remembers the smallest things and reminds us of them randomly, like which direction to walk in Times Square to find the tourist-seeking, money-grubbing Elmos she loves and we hate, or that she had a purple lollipop when she was on the airplane to Disney. "Remember that lollipop, Mama? Remember that?" she will demand out of nowhere, and I have to think back to what on earth she could be talking about. Sadly, she also remembers our car accident and will, a propos of nothing, randomly remind us that "Mama broke our car" or urge us to drive very carefully and not too fast. This breaks my heart every time it happens. If there were a way I could erase this memory from her mind, I would, but instead I acknowledge her concerns and Johnny and I both remind her that we are always very, very careful in the car. 

She is still such a little girl. Really, she's still a baby. She is going through an "I NEED you, Mama" phase that I admit I don't love. She has no interest in learning to use the potty, and still has big meltdowns when she's very tired. But she's growing up, and it's happening so fast!

Adventures with Coxsackie, or Help! My Kid is Like a Pit Bull!

I work for a national animal welfare organization. What I do is pretty administrative at this point: I'm in an office, sitting in a lot of meetings. I don't get to be out and about with the animals as much as I used to, or as much as I would like. Recently I moved offices from the building that houses our adoptions center and hospital to another that is in midtown and entirely administrative. I love where I work and I love what I do, but sometimes I miss having a dog or cat in my office, being able to take part in a behavior class, or sharing the elevator with dogs, cats, potential adopters, volunteers, medical folks. The activity in our midtown office is very different and much more corporate.

Some dogs, especially pit bulls, have a lot of energy and need a ton of exercise. I learned this the hard way. At one point years ago, I met an absolutely gorgeous blue nosed pit bull who was ten months old and had been owned by a very famous rapper before he surrendered her to our organization. I loved her from the moment I saw her and considered adopting her, so I brought her home for the weekend to see how she might get along in my household. I called her Winnie. This cutie isn't her, but they look a lot alike.

Winnie slept curled up with me and was so cute and affectionate I could barely stand it. She had lots of love to give and she won my heart fast. But she had so. much. energy. I was used to taking my dog - an ancient shepherd-husky mix - for a fifteen minute constitutional twice a day at most, during which time he mostly sniffed at bushes and dawdled while he made up his mind where to poop. This dog needed a lot more exercise than that, but I didn't know it. So while I was out, she ate my garbage and scratched up my floor. While I was home, she ate a friend's cell phone, started a fight with my parrot, and got into absolutely everything. In the space of two days she had done more damage to my apartment and my stuff than a lifetime of other companion animals ever had. My dog Henry, about ten years old at the time and well into his twilight, just looked on and rolled his eyes, as if he was saying, "Really? You want *this* to live here?!" Monday morning, I brought her back and that was that. She was adopted in no time and while I loved her and felt a twinge when I saw her go, I wasn't sorry that she went to someone other than me. She was sweet and loving, but I knew I couldn't handle her.

After this experience, I shared an office with someone who really, really loved pit bulls. Before he adopted his own, he would volunteer to run with some of the shelter pits. He would take them, one at a time, to the park and just run, really wearing himself out, even more than he wore the dog out. It hadn't occurred to me that Winnie might have been just fine at home had I taken her for a jog or done anything with her to engage her beyond a little playful volleying with a tennis ball and some treats. Being that my dog was already ancient when I'd adopted him and he was the only dog I'd ever had, I couldn't have known this from first-hand experience.

Well, now I have a two-and-a-half year old daughter and she reminds me a lot of Winnie. If we don't give her something constructive to do, we're asking for trouble later on. Like young dogs, little kids need to be kept busy and tired out. Since Bee's birth we have had a family rule that we have to leave the house at least once a day, no matter what. At first that rule was for us, so we could get used to having a normal life with a child, running errands with a child, going food shopping with a child. Just getting out of the house with a new baby can take forever. With two it's even harder - someone is always eating or napping or in need of a diaper change. Teeny is almost 10 months old and it still takes me forever to get out of the house with them. I still remember the first time I took both Bee and Teeny outside, alone. I was unshowered, still in my pajamas, feeling completely outnumbered by my children. All we did was take a walk to the playground and the supermarket, yet I felt like we were taking a trip to the moon. But it helped me find the courage to go a little further and try a little more, and soon we were seasoned and fearless commuters, travelers and explorers.

It turns out, though, that this rule of leaving the house every day benefits Bee more than it does us. We try to find something fun and engaging to do, so that even if it's a day of errands we stop at a playground or go visit the turtles in the Harlem Meer or see the koi in the community park a few blocks over. For a two year old, though, a walk around the block is fun and engaging. She picks up rocks, hugs trees, says hi to people, swings on scaffolding, stares at bugs, and so on. But it's not that easy to wear her out, and if we don't succeed, it invariably means that she will ride her trike in circles around the living room yelling "I'm spinning in circles, Mama!" or come tearing out of the bathroom after her bath, naked and wet, slamming into me and yelling at the top of her lungs, "Hi Mama! I'm a crazy horse!" And you know these types of wild and crazy don't-throw-the-ball-in-the-house-Bee moments always end in tears. Better to make a concerted effort, and to do this outside. We all sleep better at night.




After last week's adventures to Sesame Place, the hippo park and a farmed animal sanctuary's family event, she came down with a horrible fever. She was grouchy and wakeful and spat her medicine all over me, and worse, she refused food. A trip to the pediatrician confirmed what we suspected: Coxsackie. It's contagious and it's something you really don't want, so we felt it was best to keep her home, or close to home, while she was symptomatic. For four days, the most we did with her was water the flowers in our outside planter. Parks, playgrounds, errands, everything else was off limits. We were up most of the night with her so we were too tired to do anything but drag ourselves out back to the planter with her and her Kettler trike, and she was so tantrumy from the Coxsackie that these were short visits anyway; interrupted by a fall resulting in a scraped knee and a tantrum or a moody exclamation of "No! I don't want to water the flowers anymore!" Poor tired and crabby kid: we barely recognized her.

But it could be worse. I was home unexpectedly for the better part of a week, during which time Teeny cut her first tooth and mastered the army crawl, or more accurately, the belly wiggle. She feeds herself entire handfuls of homemade banana muffin in a manner not unlike a teenage boy. And I got to see it all!

A friend who is a preschool teacher reminded me that yes, coxsackie sucks, but it beats lice! She's right. I'm grateful. Five days in and she's at about 80% recovery. Her fever is gone, her appetite is back. Thank the gods she's eating again. She still has the rash and the sores are open, not entirely healed. She's still waking up a zillion times a night and is up for the day at 4 am, and then napping at off hours because she can't keep her eyes open. But the worst part for us was the five days of pent up energy. Five days of  Richard Scarry, Gossie and Gertie, Pixar movies, Thomas the Tank Engine, iPad apps, and trying to do outside things inside. She was bored. The first day, I painted her fingernails and toenails blue. She covered herself with Hello Kitty stickers the next day. Another day, she dragged out all her stuffed animals and toys and lined them all up on display. Eventually, she started beating up on her sister.

She heard us say the same things over and over this week so much that she now sounds like a parrot belonging to a cranky old person. "Only roll it," she now says every single time she picks up a ball in the house. "No bikes in the kitchen," she reminds me as she pedals into me while I'm cooking. By day four, she was climbing the walls. She showed me her boo boos a million times, reveled in getting to have ice pops, soy milk and lollipops to her heart's delight, and having mama there all day every day to cling to, sit on, cry on, jump all over, yell at, boss around, you name it. But she was ready to get back to her regular life of activity, and so were we. Fingers crossed that she starts sleeping well again, which would give us the rest we need to keep up with her!

Gratitude

It's amazing how my priorities began to change when I had children. For example, if you had asked me twenty years ago where I would want to live most if I could afford anywhere, I wouldn't have blinked before saying the East Village. Ten years ago I would have said West Village. Now I am torn between Upper West Side and outside the city, like in the Berkshires. Right? It's nuts. I am craving a slower, calmer lifestyle. A backyard, a vegetable garden, a shady tree. Room for my girls to run around and air for them to breathe. A yard with bikes and a ball strewn across it, a kiddie pool. And a second bathroom.

We talk about moving every day. It's not that we hate where we are. We have a great apartment in a brand-new building in Harlem. We have wonderful neighbors and we are less than 10 minutes from 4 express trains. We have a car and a safe place to park it, we have a courtyard with our own planter, we have a small fitness room with a treadmill I can use when I don't run outside. We are refinancing our mortgage and saving a bundle in the process. And still, whenever we drive anywhere, we have neighborhood envy. We ask ourselves if we could live there. We try to imagine ourselves in a townhouse on Hudson Street or in the West 70s (easy, too bad we will never be able to afford it), in  Woodstock (my favorite so far), western Massachusetts (second favorite), Vermont (too far), New Jersey (unlikely), Boston (love it. did you know me fifteen years ago? can you believe I just said that?) Long Island (no way), Hudson Valley (maybe).  Depending on my job, depending on life, we'll see where we end up, but we are now two years into the ten-year plan we put ourselves on not long after Thora was born, and we still think we'll leave the city someday. Hard to imagine! But eight years from now we will have two little tween girls and a lot more grey hair and, if these past two years are any indication, a strong hankering for space, a sense of community that we just don't have where we live, more greenery and quiet.

But for today we are where we are and that's that. I am truly thankful for all that we have and I'm in no rush to skip town. In fact, Johnny and I talk every day about all we have to be grateful for. At the dinner table, we ask each other about something good that happened that day. It's a nice way to end a long hard day. I keep a list now of things I'm grateful for and it's kind of amazing how much awesomeness I have in my life that I never paid attention to before.

There's a sign like this on our way to the 4/5 train station in the Bronx that took me by surprise the other day.

Recently someone posted a link to a website on Facebook. I don't always click on links other people post, but this one caught my eye. It was the website of a group of photographers who volunteer their services to photograph new parents with their terminally ill or stillborn babies. The main photo was one of a woman crying, clearly in anguish, clutching a tiny baby to her chest. It was only when I clicked again and read the blog entry that I understood that this baby was stillborn. Someone had cleaned her, dressed her and placed her in her mother's arms. I couldn't look away. I read every word and looked at every picture and cried along with the mother whose baby never had a chance. I was amazed that there are such kind-hearted photographers who give service by taking part in these terrible moments and providing these grieving parents with a memory that they wish they never had to have in the first place. 

Eventually I wiped my tears and clicked the site off. I went straight to my sleeping Teeny and held her to me. I breathed her in, nuzzled her peach-fuzzy head, felt her warmth. All these months I've been worried about her. Worried because she is smaller than her sister. Worried because she meets milestones more slowly than Thora did. Worried that she is the last of the five babies I know born around the same time to do anything - sit up, crawl, get teeth. Worried that between work and school that I am not home enough, that I don't pump enough or make enough homemade baby food, that she won't wear a sun hat, that she loves jumping in her jumperoo so much that she got a blister on her toe, worried worried worried. Now I felt nothing but gratitude. I have two happy, healthy, beautiful children who are different from each other. My love for this tiny creature felt tangible, visceral. Her beautiful, peaceful face with porcelain cheeks and long lashes stopped my heart for a moment. I made this. Even in sleep, she is so alive, so full of hope and promise. So really, who gives a rat's ass if she learns to crawl three months later than her sister? As someone recently said to me, I have four teenagers and they all have teeth and none of them are still in diapers! Someone else said, don't worry, she's not going to crawl down the aisle. She's here now. She's breathing and living and growing now. She is wonderful NOW. She is learning every day NOW. She is a beautiful, happy and healthy baby NOW. Her pediatrician assures me that she is as developed muscularly as her sister was, that she is normal and healthy and strong, just lazy. "It's all volition," she said. Thora never had any patience and was always rushing off to master the next thing. She's still like that. This kid is just happy where she is. Awake, she claps now, and grins a silly, toothless, gummy grin at anyone who calls her name. She recently learned to splash in the bathtub too. She gazes adoringly at her big sister, who sometimes brings her toys and diapers, feeds her and kisses her, and other times bonks her on the head or pushes her out of the way. I will never have another baby again. I will never experience pregnancy or childbirth again, I will never have another newborn. This baby is already growing up too fast. Just the other day we were talking about her upcoming first birthday and how we wanted to celebrate. I am so lucky, so blessed. I am grateful for what I have now. Especially since it's true what they say: it goes by so fast!

Last night as I put the girls to bed, I realized how much has changed since I last updated. Bee and Teeny now share a room. Bee is in a toddler bed. Teeny is in the crib. It's a little crowded in their room but it's just that: their room. A baby's room is for the baby's parents, I think. The changing table, the glider, the lovingly crafted decorations, decals, framed photos and so on. This is a girls' room now. Yep, there's still a changing table and a glider, but as Johnny and I moved all the furniture around again and again to accommodate the bed along with the crib, we stubbed toes and tripped over things and argued about what we could toss. But what to get rid of? Not the changing table, as they are both still in diapers. Not the glider, as Teeny is still nursing. The toybox? The easel? The bookshelf? No, no. It all has to stay. That stuff is no longer ours; it's theirs and they use it. There are toys tossed everywhere, books piled up in places Thora can easily reach, marker caps under the easel, dried out and capless markers in the toybox, a half painted painting on the easel, dirty socks and a onesie on the floor. I surveyed the evidence of the little lives being lived in this room as I nursed and sang the baby to sleep in the twilight. There was a green plastic ball and one lone pink Croc in bed with Thora, a handful of pacifiers in different colors in the crib. Each girl had a harem of Ugly Dolls with a variety of names: Blue, Concord, Ox, Batoozi. Bee sleeps clutching Big Bird, Teeny rolls herself into a burrito of baby and cotton blanket. Little girls live and breathe in there now. 

Bee is nothing if not a creature of habit, with a memory like an elephant. She now brushes her teeth morning and night with little to no fuss because that's what we do. When I come in from work, she says, "Mama has to go pee" before she even says hello. When I come in from running, she doesn't even try to hug me anymore because "Mama, you're disgusting. You need a shower." I'm allowed to brush her hair as long as I give her a turn with the brush afterwards. She knows we check on her flowers every day and reminds us to take her there if we forget. She knows she has her mini-school twice a week and when we tell her that's where we're going, she doesn't argue about getting in the stroller because even she knows that's too far for her to walk. Going to the sprinklers means she gets to wear her Crocs instead of sneakers. She wants to go back to the hippo park every single day and when we say yes, we're going, she lights up and walks straight over to the front door and says, "Okay! Let's go, Daddy!" and starts down the hall to the elevator.

This week we were supposed to be visiting family, but when our plans changed, we decided to take the girls to Sesame Place. Bee's absolute favorite character, favorite stuffed animal, favorite favorite is Big Bird and we've been talking about taking her there for a long time. It's only about an hour and a half from home, so we decided to do it in a day. It was so much fun. At first, she was pretty overwhelmed. She didn't love all the rides, but she enjoyed a lot of them. She saw all the characters, got to stand on Sesame Street, she got to ride down a river in a big green inner tube on my lap, and she got to meet Big Bird. This is such a big deal that two days later she's still saying, "Remember how I met Big Bird, Mama? Remember I kissed him? On the lip?" and "Hi Mama, how are you doing today? I'm going to Sesame Place again." I keep telling her we will go back, but not today. Soon. She pores over the crappy picture of her with me, Big Bird and Elmo superimposed over a lamely Photoshopped rendition of Sesame Street in a plastic Sesame Place frame and reminds me that she met Big Bird and that she's going back tomorrow. She made me write B-I-G B-I-R-D out for her so she could recognize it, and we wrote out S-E-S-A-M-E P-L-A-C-E for her to read and recognize too. She's not far from sounding words out. She already recognizes words like Mama, Daddy, Bee, Teeny, cat, car, drink. She knows that a is for alligator, b is for butterfly, c is for cookie and car and cat, d is for Daddy, and so on.

Her language acquisition and developing pronunciation are absolutely delightful to observe. She's mastered singular and plural and you vs me. She's getting past tense as well, except with irregular verbs like "Mama, I waked up." She has been able to count well past twenty for a while now, and her pronunciation is slowly getting better. She still says "memen" for seven but now she says "five" whereas a month ago she said "byse." I can tell the difference between how she says "Teeny" and "Shiva" now. For a long time she called them both "Bia" but now it's clear when she means the cat and when she means her sister. 

Today we drove to up to Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Thora has been there before but this time it really registered. She fell in love with Boone the turkey and spent most of the afternoon petting him and talking to him softly. She also met two chickens, a cow, two pigs, a sheep and a goat, and loved them all. She stood in front of the cows, mooing heartily. Then she turned to me and said "Mama, we love cows. We don't eat cows." She skipped in the dirt and collected rocks and sang "Hi animals!" and ate one Field Roast hot dog after the next and wiped her Earth Balancey fingers on my (white!) shorts and asked if she could roll in the mud with the big pigs. 

Here she is saying goodbye to everyone she met at Sesame Place as we started the drive home. Goodbye!