Road Trip Michigan

Our Thanksgiving road trip ended with two fabulous days in Kalamazoo with the Holmes clan.  Sam could hardly contain his excitement as we pulled into Michael and Michelle's driveway and Uncle Ron and the girls, all in their bare feet, jumped up and down to greet us.  Eva was a little slower to warm up to everyone, but it wasn't long before both of them were limboing and dancing and doing kareoke and stuffing their faces with pumpkin pie.  Sam and Jack spent a lot of time "learning geography" from Sponge Bob on the IPad, but when they came out of the bedroom and hung out with the rest of us, they saw girls that liked to sing and dance and jump and play.  And Sam got to witness the antics of "Uncle Johnny" once again.  Eva absolutely adores her Uncle Ron and her Aunt Judy.  The meal was, as always, fabulous, and it was nice to spend the entire next day with Uncle Ron and Aunt Judy.  And the family trip to the tree farm had us all talking about starting that tradition here next year.  All three of us had a great time and as we zipped through Chicago on our way home, we tried to figure out how soon we could go back. Thanks for hosting us Mike and Michelle, and Ron and Judy.  And thanks for all the fun family time!

 

Eva and Uncle Ron shake it up while Malia and her dad sing...

Winding down at the end up the night...

Fascinating Big Boys

Next stop Milwaukee where Sam was absolutely mesmerized by the giant boys that now live with Kelly.  I had a hard time believing that the boys that tower over all of us were the same little guys who used to play fishing boat on the sofa with me 10 years ago.  Zak and Josh and their friend Dan were good sports, coming out of their bedroom suite to play some frigid soccer with Sam as the sun went down and then acting impressed when he drew them a picture of several soccer guys.  Sam was so thrilled by the boys that every time Kelly had any kind of food ready (homemade fries, pepperoni pizza, sausage pizza) he would run in to the bedroom where they were playing video soccer and tell them the food was ready.  And then he'd sit at the dining room table and watch them file in and clean up every crumb, his eyes big and fascinated.  When I think about the kind of kids I want to raise, Kelly's boys always come to mind.  They are thoughtful and courteous and generous, and I don't know many other college sophomores who would sit and do Lego with a 4-year-old on a Friday night so his mom could get Little Sister to sleep in the other room.  And Little Sister had her share of fun too... talking up a storm and getting in to everything and reading and cuddling with Kelly.  Kelly and I accidentally stumbled onto a little alone time to talk and catch up early Friday morning, so I let the kids sleep in and we got on the road for Michigan a little later than planned, but when we left Sam wanted to know why we couldn't stay and when he'd get to see the boys again.  So grateful to have such a good friend who has been so supportive and generous and to have such wonderful positive role models for my son.

TT's Turkey Day

Our Thanksgiving weekend road trip started with a stop in Green Bay for some unusually warm weather and the usual holiday traditions.  Pumpkin pie making and piano playing and tree decorating.  And because we brought the turkey and stuffing all ready for the oven, TT and I had lots of time to play with the kids.   They also got to snuggle and read and giggle and play games.  As I buckled Sam in to the car Friday afternoon for our drive down to Milwaukee, he looked at TT waving in the garage and begin crying.  "I just love her so much, and I'm sad to leave," he said.  By the time I backed out of the driveway we were all in tears.  Thankful for another Thanksgiving with "the best grandma in the whole wide world."

Howl!!!!

A lot has changed since our little family made our inaugural trip to Great Wolf Lodge last year, but if it's up to me and the kids, it will become an annual fall tradition.  With Eva fully mobile (and opinionated about her boundaries) and an entire hotel including our two-story fireplace suite with an inside security doorlock that didn't seem to contain her, it was not necessarily a relaxing weekend.  But who wants to relax when there is pajama time with Wiley and the rhythm-of-nature singing owl, three-story water slides, a howling wave pool, an arcade full of games that give you tickets for prizes, and magic wands that activate the quests that get you closer and closer to slaying a fire-breathing dragon?  It's a trip I definitely wouldn't undertake without another adult, although TT and I were rarely in the same space as she chased one kid one way and I chased another kid the other direction, and we occasionally tagged off and traded.  But it was once again a delightful weekend full of running and jumping and playing in the water and eating food that isn't good for us.  And hopefully next year Eva will be used to sleeping in a bed with us so she won't climb and bounce and kick Sam and Mommy for two hours before finally nodding off.  Thanks again for an awesome adventure, TT!  Sammy can't wait to go back next year, and when I asked him his favorite part he said, "All of it!"

Black Leather and Oxygen

I spent much of this past weekend in the black leather rocker that was my nearly constant companion before I had kids.  I used to spend hours in that chair, rocking and reading, losing myself for days in a Toni Morrison novel or the latest issue of Best American Short Stories or maybe 20 minutes with Alice Munro’s latest fiction in the New Yorker.  But that chair and I haven’t spent much time together since my second maternity leave, since Eva’s eight short weeks of exclusive mommy bonding time expired and I returned to work and a routine that rarely affords me time to sit down let alone read. 

Last week when a friend created a cash mob for our local independent bookstore, I ventured out without my children and bought two Toni Morrison novels (I’m that far behind) and the 2012 Best American Short Stories and Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things.  And despite the long list of things I needed to get done this weekend in between meltdowns and meals, I rocked and read and lost myself in the stories and the beautiful, compassionate, generous advice of Cheryl Strayed’s online persona Sugar.  While I read her advice to married men contemplating affairs and single women contemplating motherhood and scared young people trying to figure out how to get unstuck, my children made forts out of the couch pillows and threw play-doh against the dining room walls and scribbled all over the barstool cushions with permanent black marker.  But I sighed and folded back the front cover of the book and kept reading.

“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it,” Sugar writes to a divorced man trying to understand love.

And in letter after letter, she responds to complex emotions and difficult problems with simplicity and empathy.

Parenting is one of those things that teaches you about yourself over and over again.  Being a mom has changed me because I can see not only what I've been avoiding learning about myself, but I can see what I want my children to learn.  Would I want my children to learn that it's okay to invest energy in a relationship that is sucking energy from them?  No.  Would I want my children to learn that life is always easy and life is always fair?  No.  Would I want my children to learn that people can simply be labeled as good or bad and that there aren’t layers of complexity in between?  No.

I want my children to learn that people are basically good at heart and life is sometimes messy and painful but life is often joyful and these two things go together and that is the beauty of life.  I want them to learn that when others hurt us or anger us, it’s not always about us.  I want them to learn how to feel safe and yet how to take risks.  I want my children to learn about loving and forgiving and being compassionate and setting boundaries.  I want them to learn to soar.  I want them to learn to risk failure.  And I want them to learn that no matter what, no matter what, it will all be okay.

Flight attendants on an airplane tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first and then take care of others.  And this is something I’m often saying to friends.  This weekend as I set out to lose myself in the pages of a book, I instead reconnected with my writer/reader self and the rocking chair that helped me weather painful breakups and job losses and the death of my father.  Thank you, Sugar, for helping me put my oxygen mask back on.

This post is another installment for thenextfamily.com, and you can read all my previous posts for them here.

Halloween on the Prairie

We didn't have time to go around the entire neighborhood as we did last year, and Sam and I didn't get to tell spooky stories about the dark woods behind our development, but we still got to see Sophie the dog and the little girl named Clare and the house with the scary witch at the door.  We got to stretch our legs and run acress the grass and breathe the crisp fall air.  We got to count pumpkins and look at spooky ghosts and marvel at a Halloween tree decorated with spiders.  And we got to listen to Eva announce after every house "I like that house," before pointing to the next lit porch and saying "There's one."

The kids got their costumes on at Jamie's and played in the leaves and sunshine with another Darth Vader for a few minutes before we drove home for a rushed dinner-snack and some bundling up.  I pushed them in the bike-trailer-stroller as far as Nolan's house where Eva got to trick or treat for the first time and we learned that Nolan's mommy just gave birth last Friday.  After that it was non-stop running from house to house with only one spill and about 5 seconds of tears.  By the time we'd gone up and back down the big hill, the sun had set and the wind had calmed and it was perfect Halloween weather.  The darker it got the more the kids loved it, and Sam was once again impressed with the welcome mat at "the motorcycle guy's house" that triggered a spooky sound when they stepped on it.  Once again this year we saw too many people driving their children around from driveway to driveway, missing out on the fun of Halloween by piling in and out of heated cars and cursing the cold.  We were never cold.  Our bodies kept moving and the fresh air kept flowing in and out, and I knew that even after the kids ate their alloted 3 pieces each of sugary goodness we would all sleep well.

Another beautiful dark Halloween night out on the prairie.  Making memories.  I am so blessed.