phew. the school is going to stay open. a monumental effort by parents, teachers, staff, alumni, parishoners, and kids and we did it. raised enrollment by 25%, and raised a lot of money.

anna continues to talk up a storm, and will talk to anyone or anything. i finally got her a play-yard thing, so she has a safe place to roll around in. apparently they are not for keeping kids confined, but rather for keeping them safe from marauding bands of older siblings.

carter is now completely obsessed with superheroes, and now that ava learned that there are women superheroes, she is getting into the act. today, she wanted to dress up like wonderwoman. i sort of hedged on showing her a picture of wonderwoman (they know about all of the superfriends only from me talking about them in the car -- i have been reciting the plots of as many 1970 saturday morning shows that i can remember), because i knew we had very little that could pass as a wonderwoman costume, since all of ava's clothes are pink, white, and black. finally she bugged me enough that i showed her a picture.

note: do NOT image google "wonderwoman" "batgirl" or "catwoman" with the kids around. i leave it to you to figure out why.

i found a pg-rated image of wonderwoman, and she studied it very carefully. then she pulled out a pair of navy tights, cut them so that she had short shorts, used the remaining legs as wonderwoman's boots (never mind that hers were really red, navy was just fine for ava). then she found a red t-shirt, tucked it into her navy short shorts, then drew white stars on her "shorts" and a yellow eagle on her t-shirt. no, she did not ask if she could do that, but i decided not to say anything at the destruction of the shirt in the name of creativity. then she got a lasso. all in the span of 10 minutes.

i could not believe it. if she could have figured out how to make an invisible airplane, she would have.

and even better: she appears to be growing out of the 5-year-old behavior that has been causing me to pull my hair out. all year she has been overreacting, getting very very instantly jealous or mad or or sad or frantic or whatever--if something wronged her, she would leap to the most extreme emotional state she could muster. which is typical of most small children, however, ava would then add fuel to the fire by getting even more worked up when people justifiably reacted negatively to her behavior.

for a solid year i have worked very very hard at staying calm and saying to her something like "that is a completely unacceptable way to speak to me...." or something along those lines. a clear disapproval, a statement of what was not ok, and a suggestion of a better manner of speaking or acting. i did not always succeed, but generally i managed to stay calm.

(it was a very challenging year).

now, the overreacting has not stopped, but she has stopped the snowball effect of reacting to everyone's reactions--for example, today she was sweaty and hungry and had to go potty at the rink and she came off the ice and started barking at me--just uber-grumpy. i said very little, but took her to the bathroom and then when she came out i said "ava, you can skate, or you can go home, it is entirely up to you, but i do not want to hear you speak to me like that. i did not come here to be barked at."

she looked at me and said "mommy, i'm sorry for speaking to you like that. i don't want to bark at you."

and that was the end of it.

YIPPPEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!

another example: the other day, despite tons of things going her way, she was whining about everything. nonstop misery. i was extremely irritated, and it was all i could do not to launch into one of those "don't you know there are kids starving in this world? kids who have NOTHING?... " and so on. finally, in the car i turned to her and said "for the love of god, what is wrong?! because as far as i can see, your day has been pretty darn good. perhaps not terribly exciting, but not bad by any stretch!" and she looked at me and said "i'm sorry. i don't know why i am crying and whining. there's nothing wrong. for some reason, i think i just need to cry." and she did, and then it was over. i said "now i understand. i get like that too sometimes."

yesterday, carter was crying and she said "carter, please stop crying, you are making me want to cry." -- i nearly jumped with joy over that one. a clear articulation of empathy.

watching your children grasp empathy can be a very tortuous process. i think the rumblings of empathy are there very early, and you can see it often. but not always. and when it appears to be absent, you start to fret. but there are so many competing thought processes and emotions in a young child's mind, it really is no wonder that thinking about other people gets abandoned at times. it is becoming clear that as she gets older, it is getting easier to do some parallel processing of all those thoughts and emotions.

in short, it is pretty cool to see her taking shape as the person she is going to become. it is almost like she is emerging--well, i hate to use the obvious butterfly analogy here, but frankly that is sort of appropriate. as an infant and toddler, she was completely attached--practically still a part of me. then the preschool and kindergarten years have been this long, arduous process of figuring out how to be separate and independent, yet not isolated. i think (and i may be wrong here) that she is just starting to become self aware and confident--pleased to be a distinct person, and not afraid, yet still very confident in her closeness to me.

at least i hope that is what is going on.

where have i been?

www.savesaintagnes.blogspot.com

i am not sure if i have posted this before, but anna has a strawberry hemangioma on her eyelid. this is basically a proliferation of capillaries that sometimes can grow quite large, then eventually cuts off its own blood supply and goes away. technically it is a benign tumor. kids get tehm everywhere, and they are usuay nothing more than a cosmetic nuisance. however, the one place you do not want it is on the eyelid or near the mouth. mouth because it can obstruct nursing, and eyelid because it can obstruct vision. so on tesday the kids and i went to the opthamologist in burlington. that was a blast. 3 kids under 6, forced to sit still for 2.5 hours then asked to behave in a doctor's office for an hour. mommy was not the most composed human being by the end of the day. but the doctor felt that it was not impacting her vision, and she was comfortable seeing her in 3 months. the hemangioma is not on the eyeball part of her lid, so is not pressing on it, and it is not preventing her eyelid from opening. so, another watch and wait thing.

she was 3 months old almost 2 weeks ago, and almost right at that point she gained the use of her hands. her dexterity just imcreased on a logarithmic scale--first she was aiming her fist at things and within days she was almost using a pincher grip (almost...). The joy she expresses when she sees one of her toys is so infectious, and as soon as she finally succeeds in graspint part of it she urgently shoves it into her mouth to complete her investigation of the object. she is also desperately trying to roll over.

but the best part is that she is now truly laughing. especially when i blow raspberries (little ones) on her cheeks. and her laugh is this sort of yell/raspy exhale that doesn't exactly match her appearance.but it fist with her pattern of using her nasal passages to make noise. seh still makes this grunt from the back of her nose in greeting. it is the weirdest and cutest thing.

she is also HUGE.

carter managed to break the turtle's tank. fortunately the glass held together and nothing leaked (praise be to god), and we happened to have a relatively comfortable plastic bin lying around. i am tempted not to replace the glass tank until the end of the summer, but i have no idea if a turtle can survive in plastic.

when ava was younger, she peppered me with a ot of intriguing questions, but the standard-issue kid queries were never part of them. on the other hand, in the last week carter has managed to ask me why the sky is blue, how anna managed to actually get inside my belly, and if god really is in tucker. the questions are never ending and tend to be accompanied by a series of follow-up questions to further clarify the answer. it just amazes me how different they are.

another example is how they deal with my absence. ava just doesn't deal with it at all--she tends to completely decompensate and when i return she never provides any self-analysis or insight into her struggle. carter never bats an eye, but when i come home he usually goes on at length about how he missed me, and how he loves me, etc. the other night he even went sofar as to say "mommy, i missed you so much, i was so afraid that something would happen to you and you would never come back!"

i was floored and almost said "YOU? you were worried about THAT? but you are so confident!"

and then i looked at ava, who was busy drawing, and wondered if she has ever even allowed herself to articulate that fear in a dream, let alone consciously.

yesterday it was announced that ava's school is going to close, unless they manage to find 10-15 more kids in the next 2 weeks. that is about as likely as me heading off to paris for the weekend, so now i am left with the biggest sense of dislocation i have felt in a long time. the only other option is the public elementary school, which has a decent reputation, but would mean putting her in a huge class. or at least huge for her.

which might work out, but the thing that kills me is that both kids have come to identify st agnes as their school. despite all of ava's struggles this year, they see it as a wonderful place, they know everyone, it is just their school. it IS school. they have known no other, really.

AND i just adopted the pre-k turtle for the summer. i'll be damned if i am going to permanently adopt tucker. even if he does not bark, smell, or jump on me in the middle of the night.

he really does not smell. that is the interesting part. his food however is another story.

i just cannot believe it. and to do this to all of the teachers at the absolute end of the year is just terrible.

carter had a staph infection on his foot. we think it was an infected blister. he woke up yesterday complaining about his foot. i thought his leg was asleep. a half hour later he was still complaining, and since he rarely complains like that, i took a look. there was a rather large whitish, raised circle on the ball of his foot, and it was very tender. i could not tell if it was a blister, a wart, or an infected splinter or other object. but pretty quickly it got redder around the outside and larger, so as soon as the doctor's office was open, i called. at 10 am, i looked again, and it was disgusting, and really astounding at how rapidly it had progressed.

by noon, at the doctor's office, he was in tears, curled up in my lap. that is really not normal for him. the nurse and the doctor looked at it and both said "eeeww." and then they both asked me how i could have possibly resisted the urge to pop it. i admitted to desperately wanting to open it, but that i really did not want to risk doing so, in the event that 10,000 baby spiders crawled out or something (it was that big and gross looking). i was really really really afraid that it was MRSA (resistant staph), and the doctor knew this and told me that she had had plenty of kids with MRSA who were just fine.

the doctor drained it, cultured it, and prescribed major antibiotics. today she told us it was almost certainly staph, and tomorrow we will know if it was MRSA. there is nothing like a brush with a major bacterium to unsettle you.

so, bandaged foot and all, he graduated from pk3 today. as expected, this prompted a lot of reflection on the past year, and it really is amazing how much he has grown up. he was still nearly a toddler then, and is a kid now. three was a weird year for me as a mom. it is hard to explain. with ava, even though she is so so so different from me, she is still a girl, and she identifies with me as such (despite her utter disappointment in me when i put on the same old yoga pants and grey t-shirt one morning: "mo-om, why do you always have to wear that?"), and i identified with her. so, as she has grown up and away from me into her own person, there has been a struggle to untangle her from me. in other words, she wants to be unique and independent, but she is so fundamentally similar to be just by virtue of being a girl that she struggles to carve out her own identity--and if she goes too far in doing that she gets frightened and snaps back to me like she is wrapped in a rubber band. it is very tangled and complicated with her. her identity and my nurturing are too mixed up together. i say that like it is a problem, but when i say too mixed up, i just mean too mixed up for this to be an easy process. it is what it is. there are things that are easy with her, and things that are not, just like with anyone.

however, with carter, it is the absolute opposite. he is a boy and very much a boy at that. he just comes with an entire fundamental identity that is very different from me and he knows it and he does not really care that he and i are not connected in that way. his connection to me is very clear--i nurture him. so, he has no problem separating his existence as a person from his need to be snuggled and comforted and taken care of. when that need is met, he pops up and runs off to go be the little guy he likes to be. i am not sure this makes sense at all, but from my point of view it was a weird realization that i might not have to go through years of separation anxiety with him. granted, he still has some days when he does not want me to go, but generally he does not behave like i am tearing out half of his personna when i leave.

however, it has taken some adjustment on my part as i watch him connect with the men in his life in a way that i simply cannot grasp. i can certainly identify the things that interest him, and some of them even interest me (dinosaurs, space), and willingly learn about those things that do not interest me (vehicles, superheroes), but this year in particular saw the evolution of a very different way of thinking about these interests. to explain that would take perhaps a whole book, but suffice it to say that it was not a way that i immediately understood. there was a lot of interest in things that conferred power, and a lot of interest in good guys and bad guys, and there was a lot of interest in building structures out of blocks and running through the house holding a plane or helicopter aloft and making engine noises, and basically sorting out how the world works. now, i will not state that this is definitely gender based, but interestingly it was a means for him to connect with other males.

now, for a part of this year--pretty much in the beginning--i was the one with the separation anxiety, as i watched him apparently growing away from me, becoming more foreign to me. i could see that i simply was not as fun or exciting or interesting as some other male individuals in his life were, and i was left sort of bummed out. of course, every evening he would curl up with me, and i filled a need that was still rather acute, but i knew that this would eventually end, and i definitely did not want to end up not being able to relate at all.

as the year has drawn to a close, this as ever so subtly changed. he is still interested in a lot of things that i would not normally even notice (again, vehicles), but his way of thinking has changed. he has suddenly become more abstract in his analysis of the world, considering things more deeply, and wants to have conversations about them. for example, when i said "god is everywhere" (i refrained from launching into a full-scale physics lesson about the nature of energy and the connection between god and energy as i see it), he spent about a week asking me if god was in the various things he saw in his environment--the lake, his sneaker, the bricks, dogs, his bike, the rain, trees, fire hydrants, mailboxes...the last one giving me fits of giggles that were very hard to explain, but isn't it funny to think of god arriving in your mailbox? open it up and out pops the divine.

he has always been interested in god, existence, etc., but his thinking has taken on a new complexity. also, he tends to be a kid that really trys to decipher everything. the meaning of things, the way everything fits together--and this he and i can connect on.

the way i look at it, 3 was the year that he pulled away from me, and then returned as a kid that might be unique and different from me on the surface, but still a person that i can understand and who can understand me without confusing that for being the same person. he is not tangled up with me. i will never be able to play good guys/bad guys with true enthusiasm, and i will never drive a race car, or a big digger, but i have a certain weath of knowledge due to my greater number of years on the planet, and he likes to tap that. that is pretty cool. and he still snuggles up with me.

kindergarten graduation is tomorrow. i cannot believe that we have made it through the year. it was a very very difficult year for her in many many ways. i am not sure how valuable her school experience actually was. there is a lot that she loved, and a lot that she is proud of, and she obviously learns very well from other adults, but all that came at the expense of a lot of her happiness, confidence, and frankly, health. and i am not sure how much the experience exacerbated the above-mentioned tangled-ness with me. i love school, i am a total nerd, but in hindsight i think that if she had not gone through these past 3 years she might have untangled herself a lot more slowly and in a way that was not too scary to her. her school experience was very rewarding in many ways, as i said, but if i had known how it would impact her i probably would have done it differently. i am not sure i am thrilled with where we are now, and i am not sure if the summer is enough time to remedy some of the snarls we have found ourselves in. she is just not like most kids. for example, we had a very toned down stranger danger discussion because she wanted to use the beach bathroom by herself. i did not go into any details, but made the point that there are some people that are not nice and i don't want her alone with them. her reaction? absolute FURY with me. i mean she was livid. clearly it was absurd and a manifestation of her fear, but wow. i let it go. but that sums her up--she is so incredibly intense that sometimes she gets angry at me for upping the intensity. i don't know, it is very hard to figure out.

(speaking of fear, the other day carter and i read "are you my mother?"at the doctor's office, and when i finished it he declared that it was a very scary book. frankly, i have to agree with him. i never understood why that little bird was so cheerful as he fell 30 feet then went on a search for his missing mother).

at any rate, we'll see where the summer leads us. right now, she is pretty proud of herself and looking forward to first grade.

i wonder what anna is going to be like.

today was very summer-y. carter went around the lake on his bike with peter, and ava nad i met up with them at the beach. then peter left and the kids and i stayed at the beach for 4 hours. very nice.

however, my little speech to carter about sharing backfired on me. i told him that if one brings toys to the beach, one must share them. period. if a toy is precious, then don't bring it.

i forgot to add, "if you want to use someone else's toys, you must ask"

he marched right up to a mom and kid with some very compelling toys and said "you know, if you bring a toy to the beach, you HAVE to share it."

oh god, ground swallow me now.

so we revisited the topic, with a little more nuance to the conversation.

then we came home and made rhubarb crisp. that was fun. messy though.

the whole time, anna slept. basically she was asleep from 9 am to 3 pm. this is disconcerting, but she has no fever and is happy and laughing and trying to get my attention right now by blowing bubbles at me.

school is almost over--pk3 graduation is tuesday and kindergarten graduation is wednesday. this is both superb and worrisome. i am fairly certain that emotions will be on a more even keel when we do not have to get up and ready to go, and ava is not subjected to her self-imposed perfectionism for 6 hours a day. that tends to exhaust her and she comes home ready to explode. i am so ambivalent about this whole school thing--i loved school as a kid, and still do, but as a parent i can now see what a tremendous drain on a kid it actually is. i can't stand that we have no time to do things together, and i despise that her best behavior is reserved for other adults. and it is only just starting.

however, i am definitely going to miss the time with only 2 kids, or 1 when carter is there, and i have to admit that i enjoy tapping into other people's creativity. it lessens the pressure.

we got a plot in the community garden! we turned the soil yesterday, which gave me even more respect for all those women with children slung on their backs and hips as they toil in the fields. i can tell you, 2 hours of shoveling soil with anna in the sling was backbreaking. it was worth it though--the kids love it, and ava calls it the imperial garden -- based on a magic treehouse book in which the characters visit ancient china and land in the emperor's imperial garden. i love that.

our day was cut short though when a storm blew through, bringing high winds, hail, and snow -- everything was blowing sideways, and we ran to the car in suddenly 30 degree weather (the temperature probably dropped 30 degrees in a matter of minutes) only to find that the battery was dead. that was really fun. 1 hour later we were up and running again, but not before the kids had exhausted their patience and goodwill towards each other. we arrived home hungry, grumpy, freezing and filthy. casting aside our concerns about industrial food, we immediately called main st pizza.

hopefully that has not dampened their enthusiasm for gardening--i tried to explain that it really doesn't often snow on may 31, but i am not sure they believed me.

last night carter was playing with a feather from our down comforter. after a blowing it up in the air a few times, he decided to lick it. the result was predictable--it stuck to his tongue and lips, but it was pretty funny. so he asked if i wanted to try it.

i said "no thanks, i don't really feel like licking a goose."

(this is something i tend to do when the kids put fingers that have recently been somewhere unsavory in their mouth--i say "well, you might as well be licking the sidewalk/windowsill/cat/etc")

cater looked at me for a moment, then said quietly "a goose?"

i said "yes, these feathers came from a goose."

he looked at me, very very seriously, then tearfully said "a dead goose?"

i paused, wishing for a rewind button, and finally said "yes, a dead goose."

"the POOR GOOSE!!!" carter cried.

as happy as i was that he had such a profound degree of empathy for the suffering of the goose, i did not want nightmares, so i tried to do some damage control, and talked a bit about using all of the goose, thanking the goose, hoping it had a good life, etc. that seemed to mollify him.

interesting that the feathers were the connection. he has been eating meat forever, without ever asking about the origin (though i do make a distinction between ok meat and not ok meat--ok meat comes from happy cows, not ok meat comes from sad cows--that is a tremendous oversimplification, but i figure he has a lot of time to learn about the evils of CAFOs). i suppose feathers are a lot more obviously part of an animal.