Kid Amnesiac

When Mother’s Day rolled around this past spring, I had child art on the brain. Which wasn’t to say that I didn’t give Matt numerous not-too-subtle hints as to what “Simon” could get for me, but that I longed for the day when Simon himself, as opposed to “Simon”, would present me with a gift. Presumably, until he’s old enough to cut grass or shill lemonade, that gift will be child art.

One of the things I always used to notice about the houses and offices of people with kids is that they nearly always had child art on display. And why not? It’s charming, heart-warming, and critic-proof. Even the most snobbish interior design critic will give you a pass for anything tacky made by teeny tiny hands; child art can humanize even the most imposing or dull spaces.

My mother-in-law must have sensed my longing, because she presented me with a plaster cast of Simon’s hand at Mother’s Day. It was done in a stepping stone mould and now happily sits in my back garden. I was very excited to have a piece of child-art, even if Simon’s participation was minimal, and longed for more. It made me feel like a real mom!

Well, be careful what you wish for. KIP sends Simon home from pre-school with a different piece of child art nearly every day. I’ve got crayon “drawings”, a water-color “painting,” a paper-plate “hat,” an aluminum foil “mirror” and a card (no quotes here) with a “letter” from Simon inside. The letter was real enough, but owing to its legibility and its inclusion of verbs and pronouns, I suspect fraud was involved⁺.

This is all perfectly adorable, but it poses a huge problem for me: What do I do with all of this stuff? Right now, the child art is piled up on my sideboard in the dining room. I don’t have space to display it all, and I can’t bring myself to throw any of it out. Storing seems to be the logical choice, but I’m worried about the scale of all of this. Amortized across the next 17 years, the amount of child art likely to enter my home will crowd out other things-things like food, clothing, and furniture.

Thus, I will end up, old, alone, and sad, in one of those homes that people cannot walk through. And yet, how can I throw out the work of my child’s hands?⁺⁺ The solution is clear: I will keep every piece until I can no longer navigate my attic, at which point I will sort through it all, keep a few pieces, and throw the rest out. The elegance of this solution is that it has me arrive in the same place I would if I just sorted now, therefore not only accommodating procrastination, but also making the entire job more time-consuming and difficult by doing so. Perfect! You can call it “The Goldstein Way.”

⁺Actual text of letter, “Dear Mommy and Daddy. School is great! I love you, Simon.”

⁺⁺ My own mother would have NO problems throwing this stuff out, so one elegant solution is to just let her do it.

I hope it’s not confirmation bias or simply the effect of his new haircut, but I think Matt and I are already beginning to see the effects of KIP on Simon. He seems older all of a sudden, possessed both of more understanding and more independence. The changes have been in the works since he began to walk nearly three months ago, but the overall effect remains revolutionary. What’s more, as I have traveled twice in a short span, it almost seems as though I left a baby behind to get on plane one day, only to return to find a familiar looking little boy waiting for me the next.

A few months ago, I’d be using this space to lament how fast time has gone by and to mourn the loss of my (likely only) baby. But I’m not feeling the loss at present. Somehow this transformation seems wholly positive. In no small part, this is because Simon has been in a terrific mood for the last three days, and I’ve greatly enjoyed his company. The larger truth is that, after nearly two years, Simon no longer feels like an extension of me. The first all-consuming months of motherhood ended long ago, my heart and mind have at last caught up to this reality, and I can now see Simon as an individual and cheer his budding independence.

So what’s new? Well, mainly what’s new is that he tries to do more things for himself and he follows instructions better. If I ask to hold his hand to go down a sidewalk or across a parking lot, he’ll grab my hand with his and (mostly) follow along. There’s been much less carrying going on of late. He’s also understood me and complied when I’ve asked him to do things like put his clothes in his hamper or go get a toy from another room. Just yesterday I half jokingly asked Simon to draw me a picture, and then watched and cheered as he marched over to his easel, picked up his chalk, and began to scribble away.

He’s also discovered two restaurant tricks that equally delighted the two of us. At Just Fresh yesterday, I asked him to put his high chair away after lunch. It had wheels on it, but I was still surprised when he pushed it all the way to the back of the restaurant and down a short hall. A few fellow diners looked up and cheered his efforts, too. We’ll be going back there just for the movable chairs.

At Heine Brothers later that day, Simon discovered that if he gets on his tip-toes he can just about reach a small stack of cups and the water dispenser they sit beside. It’s enough of a stretch that I had to re-align his cup and pour the water for him, but he was insistent on getting the cup down, shoving it as close to the dispenser’s spout as possible, and then carrying the drink back to his table. The smile on his face lit up the whole room.

Unfortunately, he’s also approaching two. So along with all these cute and helpful tricks, he’s picked up a few less than cute, not-so helpful ones. Like reaching into his diaper pail to take diapers out (yuck!), tumping cups over once he’s had enough to drink, un-spooling toilet paper rolls, and trying to push out the window screens.

As I’m feeling generous, I’ve decided to credit KIP with all these positive developments and chalk up the annoyances to age.

I’ll collect my thoughts later. For now, my single observation about life is that everything is happening at once, and not all of it is good. As a result, I’m pretty frazzled right now. If I squint, I can just make out a clearing on the horizon, but much like Vegas, I’m worried that everything is really much further away than it seems.

A quick tally:

1. Annual list review (a work thing): My documents are due in eight hours, and I fly to Boston next Tuesday. I’ve been gunning so hard that I missed convention speeches to work on this. I hope I can find them later on YouTube!
2. Annual budget (another work thing): First pass complete
3. Corporate alliance pitching (a huge work thing): First two passes complete. Possible third pass tomorrow and trip to Las Vegas in two weeks.
4. Preschool: Continues to go well this week. Now must sell cash-books for fall fund-raising. Will miss annual parent night due to business travel.
5. Gardening: Sitting at about 50%. Presently halted due to items 1-3 and the presence of mosquito bites, itch mite bites, chigger bites, and a patch of poison ivy from which I need to recover. The latter must have been tangled in with some Virginia Creeper I was working on. There is no prevention for itch mites, which live in my pin oak tree, and the others are getting me despite my being hosed down in 40% deet and wearing long pants. I am the Helen of Troy of the insect world. I want a personal bat to sit on my shoulder and eat all these horrible, horrible creatures.
6. Sleep: Way behind. Simon is suffering terribly from rag-weed allergies. Despite medications and trip to the doc, he is too clogged up to sleep well.  Therefore, Matt and I have been up with a cranky, coughing, sneezing, runny-nosed child at midnight and the wee morning hours all week. Can I give him Valerian tea? Do they make Baby Ambien?
7. Photos: Have taken a few. Have uploaded none. See points 1-6 above.

Fingers are crossed for a bit of respite this weekend. I like to keep busy, but this is surely taking it a step or ten too far.

Such an unusual state of mind for me, but no less true for it. I had been a font of negative prognostication this weekend. Simon, Matt, and I had a lovely, low-key Saturday and Sunday, featuring sandbox play, coffee houses, yard work (thanks for all the help, Jim and Evie!), dinner with friends, and lots of just hanging out. Sometimes even in PJs.

Simon slept a bit better, a condition I attribute to his reduced stress levels. Unfortunately, his “kennel cough” has turned out to be allergies, so the nose is still overflowing. A highlight from last night occurred when little Sophie, who will be three in two weeks, grabbed a napkin and wiped off Simon’s nose. She didn’t have the gentlest approach, but I give her huge props for being adorable and getting the job done.

The one dark cloud suspended in these otherwise sunny skies was the prospect of Monday. I had the notion that Simon was in decompression mode, and that when he hit KIP this morning he’d rebel mightily. To be honest, I pictured the worst screaming, crying, kicking fit yet.

But I was wrong! Matt tells me instead that Simon whimpered a bit in the car, then bucked up, walked from the parking lot to the building, whimpered a bit more, bucked up and began to play with a puzzle in is room, then whimpered only slightly when Matt left. Matt stood outside the door and testifies that within ten seconds, Simon was happily back at his puzzle. This is only the second time he has not had to be escorted out of his room for special one-on-one attention with a teacher.

Progress! And it could not come at a better time, for one week from tomorrow I head out to Boston for another business trip, and I’d very much like to be over the worst of the stress of a new schedule before I leave him for three days.

Rarely have I been so happy to wake up to a Friday. And I’m not alone. The entire Whitworth-Goldstein household is ready for the long exhale that is a weekend, having come through a pretty challenging week. The one who most needs it the most is Simon, but Matt and I are trailing close behind.

It was a week of highs and lows. I know the balance will tip the other way shortly, but this week at least the scale tipped to the low side.

It’s not just that Simon cried every day when we dropped him off and had to be taken out of the room to be comforted. It’s that he’s taken his stress home with him, too. It’s been over a week since Simon has slept as well and readily as he used to. He’s cried when we put him down at night, he’s awakened frequently at either midnight or 4:00 a.m. and needed to be comforted, and he’s barely napped at all. Coming from a child who previously all but begged to go to bed and regularly logged 11 hours at night and 2-3 during the day, this represents a huge shift. I can only hope it will also be a temporary shift, as currently our entire household is tired and cranky.

Then there are the stress-related behaviors. Simon hasn’t let go of dirty dog for a week. It practically takes pliers to separate himself from his pacifier. I’m sure if he were older, he’d either be binge eating or smoking, so clear is it that stress is manifesting itself in an oral fixation. I suppose it could be worse: at least he’s not twisting his hair out of his head or biting his cuticles, two hideous obsessive-compulsive habits found in my immediate family. And I’m happy that he’s eating. I’ve been cruising on erratic junk food binges myself, having not much appetite for actual food.

For the icing on the cake, Simon currently has a runny nose and eyes. Now, it could well be that he’s spent a fair bit of time outside, the allergen count is high, and he’s stuffed up accordingly. Or, it could be that he has his first case of what a dear friend calls “kennel cough.” Notably, the runny nose began his first full week in school, and the child has had only been sick once (a mild stomach bug) in his previous 22 months.

The upside stuff takes up less space. Wednesday afternoon I took him to visit his friend Christopher after his barely-there nap. When we got there, Simon charged in to greet Christopher immediately, initiated play in a way I haven’t seen before, and followed a few two or three step commands I gave him without hesitation. He also saw Christopher’s late lunch set out on a toddler table (fish sticks and ketchup), sat himself down in a chair at the table, and helped himself to a taste of something he’d never had before. That was new as well. These differences are subtle but noticeable, and I think are attributable to time spent at KIP. He’s already learning.

He’s also picked up a few new words that are hilarious in their randomness. From a new toy he’s picked up “yak”, after months of reading about the festival of lights he said “Chanukah” last night, he’s told us that the animal on his backpack is a “shark” and yesterday he made his first ever attempt at “Grandma”, as in “Yay! Grandma!”

I’m hoping that next week will be a bit easier on all of us. If only I could gaze into a crystal ball and see Simon at school in a month or so, I know the next few weeks would pass faster. In the absence of such magic, I’m relying on the everyday magic of the weekend. TGIF.

I’m telling on my husband. But I’m not mad at him at all. Quite the opposite, I really feel for him. Yesterday he made the mistake I’ve been expecting to make. It, of course, involved preschool.

I took Simon to KIP yesterday because I had a big, big call from 12:00-1:30 and wouldn’t be able to pick him up, which is my regular assignment. It wasn’t a pretty scene. The minute I turned into the Keneseth Israel drive off of Taylorsville Road, Simon realized what was going on and began to cry. By the time we reached his room, he was kicking and shrieking and reaching for me. A teacher immediately whisked him out of the room, and I left feeling awful. Again.

At lunch time, Matt picked him up. The minute Simon saw Matt, he began to sputter. But the teachers immediately told Matt not to be fooled, that he had had a great day and continued to improve. He participated in art, liked the music, and ate a good lunch. Success!

Buoyed, Matt escorted a no-longer crying Simon into the parking lot. Then they got to the car and the full horror of the situation revealed itself. Matt had taken the wrong car. We have a semi-permanent loan of my Dad’s old Camry, and it does not have a car seat in it. (Dumb, yes, but we don’t feel like the car is really ours. We haven’t taken off the very un-us “God Bless America” window decal my dad affixed in 2001, either.)

So there’s poor Matt. Standing with Simon and looking at a car with no seat. He tells me he felt sick, and I believe him. He tells me he tried to call family members to come rescue him, and I believe him. He tells me he seriously considered putting Simon on the floor in the back seat, and I both believe him and admire him for not doing so, as I would have been sorely tempted myself. Would it have been dangerous and stupid? Absolutely. Would it have been tempting nonetheless. You bet.

Instead of breaking the law, Matt gathered himself on a bench for a bit, then did what he had to do: returned Simon to his class so he could go swap cars. Poor Simon completely fell apart and had to be taken out of the building this time, and I’m sure the staff at KIP-fine, compassionate people that they are-were none too pleased with us. Again.

Thankfully, there is an elegant solution to this problem. And it’s not to be more careful in the future. We’re going to buy a second car seat this weekend. Thankfully, this is one problem for which throwing money at it offers a simple fix.