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Dec 23, 2010

A Fair and Balanced Christmas

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I thought I had most of the Christmas shopping done long before today. But then when I paused for a moment to do a quick recap of the gifts I have for my two cherubs to unwrap on Christmas morning, I realized I had made a grave error.

Mira has over twice as many gifts as Cordy.

It’s not like I intentionally tried to stiff my older child. Mira is just far easier to shop for, thanks to being very outspoken about what she likes. I know that if I find anything involving Thomas the Train, polar bears, or the color pink, she will squeal with joy and proclaim it the Best Gift Ever.

(Until she opens the next item that fits one or more of those categories, where she will yet again declare it the Best Gift Ever. She never leaves a gift giver disappointed by her reaction.)

Cordy, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. She wants a blue bunny. And maybe a superhero sticker book. Her requests are very specific, and not always items that can be obtained. Guess wrong when presenting her with a gift and you’ll be met with the silence of indifference as she sets it aside and never glances at it again.

So it was an honest oversight that I picked up significantly more gifts for Mira than Cordy. Which means I get to join the crowds today to find at least one more gift for Cordy.

Sure, I could hold back a few items for Mira, but if I did that it would be holding back all of the toys/games, because the polar bear clothing can’t wait until her birthday in May, when it will no longer be winter and she’ll likely be near the end of this clothing size. And even though I know she’ll love the clothing, I can’t make her open only clothing from Santa.

Thankfully, both of my girls don’t have expensive tastes, so I’ll only need to find a good book or an interesting small toy to make up the difference. Sometimes the least expensive item is often Cordy’s favorite. But they’re both old enough now to notice if one has significantly more presents than the other, so I have to at least make sure the gift load is balanced.

My mom was lucky – she never had to deal with the issue of gift equalization. I was an only child, making Christmas an easy task for her – if Santa brought me only one gift, I had no one else to compare it with. But possibly because I grew up as an only child, it’s also not a topic in the front of my mind when buying gifts for my children.

(For the record – I’m not saying I wish I had only one child. They just don’t cover this in the hospital when you give birth to your second child.)

I suppose this will be good training for the years to come, because while they will only notice the number of packages at the moment, I’m sure in the future I’ll have to dodge the “You spent more on her than me!” teenager whine.

And that will be the day I give them equal gift cards and let them pick out what they want.

Filed Under: being a mom, Cordy, family time, holidays, Mira, sisterhood ·


Nov 16, 2010

A Day Out With Cordy

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Over the weekend Mira was invited to a birthday party for a little girl in her preschool class. As any 3 year old would be, she was proud she had an event to go to, something that was just for her as well as her parent escort.

I decided to make the most of it and have a one-on-one morning with Cordy. Thanks to a little sister who insists on always being on my lap or hanging off of me whenever we’re at home, I feel like Cordy and I often don’t get much time to chat and bond. This would be our chance to hang out with no interference from Mira, where she could have my undivided attention and I might get the chance to see what’s going on in that pretty little head of hers.

I left the plans open to her, and she decided we were going to the zoo, followed by lunch at Bob Evans. Thankfully, the forecast was for a warm, sunny day – rare in November – so I happily agreed.

Once at the zoo, Cordy was intent on riding all of the rides. The Columbus Zoo has an area called Jungle Jack’s Landing that features carnival-type rides for kids, but this area was blocked off with a sign announcing it was closed for the season. Cordy was disappointed, but I suggested we try to look at some of the animals while we were there, since, you know, it IS a zoo.

With no little sister to object, Cordy demanded we go to her favorite places: the fish and the snakes. For some reason, those two exhibits are her favorites. She loves watching the fish swim around, “driving” the boat in the manatee area. We talked about all of the different fish, and she oohed and aahed over the pretty colors of the coral in the tank.

In the reptile house, she pushed all of the buttons in the information area before moving on to the display animals. She chattered about each one, pointing out one was really long, another was hiding in a tree, and yet another had a funny shaped head. We had nowhere to be, so I let her go at her own pace as she went through her normal routine of pushing buttons, asking me to point out where we live on the map, and then talking about each snake as we walked past them.

Outside of the manatee exhibit, I also let her climb on the manatee sculpture – something I’m usually unwilling to wait around for. But it wasn’t crowded, so there was no wait.

(Cordy, the manatee rider!)

After that, Cordy wanted to ride the carousel – the only ride open in the zoo that day. I purchased a ticket for her and we waited in line. When did she get so big that she now wants to go on the carousel? I remember her crying at the thought of riding it years ago. I remember sitting with her on the bench seats of the carousel because the up and down motion of the horses scared her too much. Now here she was picking the horse she wanted, holding on tight and waving to everyone instead of keeping a death-grip on me.

Having seen her favorite animals and taken her ride on the carousel, Cordy announced it was time to go to lunch. But not before asking to pose (yet again) with her favorite penguin statue.

(This well-loved statue could use a little paint.)

We then went to Bob Evans, where Cordy got to sit on her side of the little booth with no one next to her. “Mom, I’m all alone over here,” she announced, “Can’t you sit with me?” I explained that there was no room for me over there, and that she was big enough to sit by herself now. Stretching out her arms, she decided she liked all of the space to color and work on her activity sheet.

After the meal, Cordy begged for dessert. I normally say no, but since this was her special day, I gave in and agreed. She loved every bite of her sundae, even as I cringed and realized the coloring in the hot fudge and cherry might provoke a behavioral reaction later.

(Side note: it did. She didn’t act the same the remainder of the day and had a fierce meltdown that night over spelling a word wrong. My lesson from this? Even if it’s her special day, we still have to hold firm to rules about “bad” foods.)

(And notice that big gap in her smile – she lost both front teeth in the last 2 weeks!)

On the way home, she fell asleep in the car, but not before telling me that this was “the best mommy-Cordy day ever.”

And it was.

I don’t know how many more years she’ll want to spend time with me in public, but I’ll selfishly hang onto these moments for as long as I can.

Filed Under: Cordy, daily life, family time, growing up, love, memories ·


Sep 15, 2010

Ninety and Still Going

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My grandmother (my mom’s mom) has had a long and full life of ups and downs. She was born to a farm family, and from the stories she was told, she was lucky she was a happy, easy-going baby. She spent her earliest days left on a bed, her mother too busy watching the other children and doing the chores that needed done on a farm to spend a lot of time with the tiny baby who stayed so quiet.

She grew up in the Great Depression, and remembers going to the only store in her tiny village, trading what little their farm produced in exchange for flour, sugar, and other necessities for a family to survive. They reused everything and made do with what little they had. She also met my grandfather in that small farming community.

During World War II, she joined the WAVES, the female support staff of the US Navy, while my grandfather served as a fighter pilot in the Canadian Royal Air Force, and then in the US Air Force once the US joined the war.

After the war, they married and returned to their small rural Ohio community where they raised livestock as well as three daughters. Even in the 1950’s, she still had no indoor plumbing, getting her water from a well outside the house. Cooking a chicken for dinner involved grabbing a chicken from the yard, cutting its head off, and then plucking it and preparing it for dinner.

Eventually they moved to a house in the nearby village – with indoor plumbing – and my grandmother became a secretary while my grandfather went into law enforcement and eventually become the sheriff of the county. They pushed their daughters to further their education, to become women who would make a difference in the world, with one earning an MBA and another her PhD. The third earned only an Associates degree, but she gave them a different and just as precious gift: a granddaughter.

Then, in 1976, just months before I was to be born, my grandmother lost her husband to a heart attack. She’s been alone ever since.

And yet she hasn’t been alone. For a short while my mother and I lived with her. And even after my mom was able to afford her own place, we were only two towns away from that tiny village and visited often. Her other daughters have remained close, too. In the past six years, she’s seen her two great-granddaughters born, and where she remained more distant in my upbringing, she’s increasingly warm towards my girls and enjoys watching their silliness.

She has traveled the world with her daughters and her friends, enjoyed her hobbies, and maintained a level of independence that baffles even me. Her life experience has given her a hard exterior – she’s a happy person, but she sees no point in being overly emotional. Depression and exuberance are equally useless to her. She believes in a strong work ethic and the simple morals of being honest and good to people.

This spring, my grandmother had a stroke, and suddenly the family was hit with the realization that this woman of steel was mortal. Amazingly, she bounced back from the stroke, fighting her way through rehab in order to get back to her own house again. She gave up the two-story house in that tiny village a few years ago, now living in the single-story house I grew up in so that my mother is closer to her. This is a good thing, as the stroke has left her weaker, more tired. But she still insists on living by herself, independently.

Today, my grandmother turned ninety years old. 9-0. At ninety years old, she still lives alone, drives her own car, and makes her own meals. She’s been a widow for 34 years now – longer than the time she was married to my grandfather. And while she sometimes repeats the same story over and over, forgetting that she’s told us before and we already understand the message in it, her mind is mostly clear and sharp despite ninety years worth of experiences crowding the space.

I don’t know how much longer she’ll be with us. My grandmother is slowing down, looking more frail every day. And while we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye (my teenage years were rough on both of us), I do respect the tremendous amount of knowledge and experience she has. I only hope I can take advantage of the time we have left to preserve more of her stories, her history, so my daughters can someday know more about the woman they call G-G.

Happy birthday, grandma. You made it to ninety, just like you said you would at your eightieth birthday party.

Filed Under: daily life, family time, love, memories ·


Sep 7, 2010

Some Days Should Never End

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Last weekend we spent a day in the country for the annual picnic with family and friends. The hosts have a home that can only be described as a child’s paradise: lots and lots of toys, a giant play castle, an enormous back yard full of grass so soft you can walk barefoot, and a fire pit with lots of seating to enjoy the warmth of the fire in the evening. OK, so it’s an adult’s paradise, too.

Cordy and Mira expelled a week’s worth of energy in one day as they roamed the grounds and lived life to it’s child-hedonist fullest. What did they do, you ask?

Eating. Lots and lots and lots of eating:

Mira ate her weight in Doritos, a normally forbidden snack at home.

Bouncing on balls…

…and falling off:

Playing with the kids of friends, while I admired and wished for just a moment that my daughters were that little again:

This little girl? She’s so cute I want to gobble her up.

Playing Queen of the Castle with a real (plastic) castle:

I have few photos of Cordy because she spent most of her day in that castle with the pirate’s treasure chest full of toy loot.

Gathering around the fire in the evening with friends and warm blankets for music and s’mores.

These are days that I never want to end. Days when I don’t have to work, when we’re surrounded by people we care about, when we can talk all day into the night about anything we want, and when the kids can run and play with each other without us needing to be right next to them. These are the few precious days we get in a large number of unimpressive so-so days. I hold the memory of these days as close to my heart as I can.

Also? In reviewing my photos, I quickly realized this child is determined to rule the world.

Look out everyone, she has the power to use those big eyes and that pouty bottom lip to get anything she wants.
Filed Under: Cordy, family time, love, Mira ·


Aug 16, 2010

Heaven Help Us When She’s Sixteen. Or Four.

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You’d think that with a second child I’d feel like less of a novice mother. I’ve been through it all once, so the second time through is just a refresher, only this time I know what mistakes not to make, right?

Right?

Ha.

Miranda is a child so different from Cordelia that I often find myself wondering if Cordy is really mine and I imagined the whole idea of raising her from a baby. Because Mira makes me doubt all of my parenting knowledge on a daily – hourly – basis.

When Cordy was three years old my primary concern was keeping her from completely losing it and slipping into a violent meltdown. Oh sure, I also had to deal with feeding her because she wouldn’t use a spoon, and changing diapers because she had no interest in potty training, but the goal of each day was to get to the end of it without having to restrain her so she didn’t crack her head open from banging it into the floor. The biggest fight we had was keeping the TV on Noggin versus some non-kiddie-crack TV.

Sounds tough, right? I had no idea how easy I had it.

Because with Mira, three years old is totally different. Now I have to deal with refusing to get dressed because she wanted to wear the PINK shirt, not the blue one. And attitude because I dared help her take off her pull-up when she could clearly do it all herself. And refusing to eat her yogurt because I had the nerve to try to help her with her spoon. And dinnertime cries of, “No! I wan appasace not yogut! I change mah miiiiiind!”

And making me go back into the house to find her damn sunglasses, because the sun is in her darling eyes and we wouldn’t want her to go blind, right? And insisting on buying only PINK clothing when we go clothes shopping, a task that she insists on joining me for and during which I endure the semi-incoherent Mira babble of how those leggings match that dress and how she LOOOOVES those PINK shoes.

It’s exhausting.

But now we’re truly heading into uncharted waters, as she’s decided to go exploring her surroundings in ways that Cordy never attempted, either because she wasn’t interested or because she didn’t notice.

Two weeks ago I noticed Mira’s Thomas the Tank Engine pajama top had a couple of holes in it. When I asked her what happened to her shirt, she said, “Da kitdie did it.” It seemed odd that a claw hooked in a shirt would cause so much damage, but I shrugged and chalked it up to cheap manufacturing.

Then a few days later I found Aaron’s beard trimming scissors on the floor of the bathroom. And new holes in her shirt. It would seem the cats had somehow developed opposable thumbs and exacted their revenge on Mira – who never lets them into her room – by sneaking in at night and cutting holes in her shirt with the scissors.

Or Mira just didn’t want to tell us she experimented with scissors. I’m just thankful she didn’t cut her hair.

And then today, Aaron came downstairs with a puzzled look on his face and asked, “OK, which little girl has been using my toothpaste?”

Cordy immediately answered, “Not me!” and Mira copied her with the same response, trying her best to look like she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Well, one of you has been into it, because you forgot to put the cap back on. Now who did it?”

Cordy again proclaimed her innocence, and Mira then looked at the ground, hands behind her back as she kicked at nothing in front of her and quietly replied, “I di-it.”

“Why were you playing with the toothpaste?”

“I bwush my teeh,” she replied, as if to say duh, what did you think I’d do with it? Only she had no toothbrush in that bathroom. It soon came out that she was sneaking into the bathroom in the early morning and putting toothpaste on her finger and pretending to brush her teeth. You know, since we locked up the scissors already.

Then this afternoon, I walked into the living room and sat down, and Mira quickly climbed into my lap. I immediately smelled something odd, but couldn’t quite place it. I knew it was coming from Mira, but couldn’t figure out what the strong, chemical-like smell was.

And then I saw the travel size bottle of Downy Wrinkle Releaser on the floor. The scent suddenly had a name.

“What did you do?” I demanded to know.

Mira immediately started her – now routine – answer of, “I sowwy, I sowwy, I sowwy!” She’s learned to begin with a flurry of sad-voiced apologies and hope her cuteness will keep her out of time out. I then discovered through interrogation that she thought the small spray bottle was just like my “soap” (aka the spray hand sanitizer I often use) and had decided to spray herself with it during the 5 minutes no one was looking. At least her dress no longer had any wrinkles in it.

The worst part of all of this is that we had no idea Mira could reach or would even be interested in this stuff, and how she gets into it without us seeing her. She’s like a ninja. The bathroom items were far back on the counter, beyond her reach and likely beyond her site without a step stool. The wrinkle releaser was in a drawer. Now I’m forced to look at everything and wonder how long until she figures out the childproof lock on the cabinets under the sink? Would she want the pack of matches next to the candle on the fireplace mantle? Could two step stools stacked on each other be enough to reach that high? What if she got a stick to knock them down while balancing on two step stools?  

Maybe I baby-proofed the house better with Cordy? I don’t remember it being any different than now. Or maybe I just had no idea what to expect when raising a typical child? When your first child has autism, you come to accept her quirks and different path of development as your own personal norm. So then a neurotypical second child comes along and suddenly you’re not feeling so smug when your friend complains about her child giving her dolls a haircut and coloring on the walls with crayons, because your second child is now decorating her skin with permanent marker and trying to shave the cat with your razor.

I don’t remember this chapter in the parenting handbooks.

“I gonna gwow up biiig wike mommy an daddy an go to work as a supahewo and dwive a biiiig PINK car!”
– actual life/career planning quote from Mira 
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