End-of-the-Day Connection

Earlier tonight I sat in the large rocker in Sam’s bedroom, the room I used to call “the nursery.” It is now Sam’s big boy room complete with glow-in-the-dark stars and a dresser full of dinosaur puzzles and a shelf displaying his Lego creations. An infant tub filled with discarded newborn clothes sat in the corner. The little yellow leg of the Winnie the Pooh onesy that Eva wore when she came home from the hospital dangled from the top of the pile. Eva still sleeps with me at night, and the crib has been moved next door. It’s piled full of clothes that no longer fit her, clothes that only a newborn could wear, clothes that I can’t quite let go of yet. Just in case.

Before Eva was born Sam and I would snuggle on the rocking chair and talk about our day.  We’d think back to how we had squeezed bright colored play-doh through a press and made a giant grey-brown mass or we’d laugh over the way he’d lifted up his shirt and told me he had a baby growing in there too.  “Your baby is pink,” he’d say, “But mine is green.  It’s not ready to come out yet.”

Tonight as I wedged a pillow in between my hip and the arm of the chair so I could nurse the baby Sam sat up in bed and asked if he could climb in with us.  His big green eyes have recently started dominating his face, and most nights during what used to be a carefully orchestrated bedtime, he crinkles his forehead and looks at me sideways and uses words like “snuggle” and “cuddle.”  Eva is four months old, and Sam has tired of having to share bedtime with her, having to lay in the bed while Mommy rocks Baby.  He used to be the one getting rocked.  Before Eva arrived we would read three books, and then turn off the lights and turn on the lullaby music.  I would wrap my arm around his shoulders and we’d quietly take about what we’d done that day and the list of people we love.

Now bedtime is often rushed or broken into pieces.  I nurse Eva until she’s asleep and then lower her into the swing in the living room and hope she stays that way until Sam and I get through our books and our rocking.  Sam and I are both trying to hold on to our old bedtime routine, our end-of-the-day connection.  Most nights Eva wakes and starts screaming while we’re still reading so we improvise.  Tonight Eva would not go to sleep at all so I had held her on my lap while we sat on Sam’s Lightning McQueen sheets and read about tractors and trucks and Sam’s new favorite, a book of opposites.  Up, down.  In, out.  Happy, sad.  Sam does not like nights like tonight, where he lays in bed and watches me hold his baby sister.

“Can I sit with you?” he said.  And the eyes. “I want to snuggle.”

Sigh.

I held Eva as close to vertical as I could while still nursing, and I pulled my leg over to make room.  Sam squeezed in and pulled a blanket up over us.  I pushed the rocker forward and backward.

“No more spots,” Sam said as he folded his arms over the top of the blanket.  The light in the hallway showed his big smile and reflected off the infant tub filled with newborn clothes.  The Winnie the Pooh onesy was the same one Sam had worn during our early days together three years ago, and even after two babies, it looked barely worn.  They grow so fast.

“Nope,” I said.  “No more spots.”

(This is a piece I recently wrote for thenextfamily.com, and you can read it here.)

Cracking Open

The weather around here is the same weather that drives us all crazy every year. Sunshine and melting snow and mild temperatures that make it okay to leave your coat in the car one day. Freezing drizzle and fog and big fat snowflakes mashing into a mess on the streets the next day. Every morning when I walk into work someone comments in the parking lot. "Not going to be too bad today" or "I thought winter was over" or "I see spring coming" or "Is Summer ever going to come?" The ice has started melting on the river, large areas of open water growing bigger every day, the bald eagles perched on the edge fishing. Sammy has started looking for barges as we cross the bridge into Minnesota every morning, and some days he whines that he can't see anything, that it's too "froggy." March in the upper midwest. Manic depression.

I just told someone the other day that I was beginning to feel myself coming out of the newborn, 24/7-breastfeeding-can't-be-put-down baby fog. I could almost physically feel the world and our lives cracking open in the same way the early ice does, pieces moving and sliding against each other, trying to find the position that will relieve the stress and allow it all to settle into place and melt comfortably.

Muscles!

The kids love Brooklynn

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind, and we've gone back and forth between constant motion and complete standstills, between days in which Mommy needs to get away and days in which the kids need more of me. Mommy the introvert who has never had much of a social life has been out visiting friends, reconnecting with the world, going to readings and meeting friends for lunch and getting back to the gym. Eva is cooing and babbling and figuring out that those are her hands out in front of her and she can use them to put just about anything into her mouth. Sammy has been enjoying tumbling classes and playdates and evenings with Mommy's friends. And we've all survived the inevitable meltdowns of a 3-year-old who is upset when tumbling class is over or the play-doh has to be put away or Mommy's friend gets in a different car and doesn't come home with us after a lunch date at Culver's.

Sam enjoys wrestling with Tara's fiancee Robb

Every morning before the children wake up, I look out the window and try to prepare for what the weather will bring today. Will Sam need his winter coat and his snowpants? Will Eva need her brown fuzzy snowsuit? Will Sam's boots end up slapped into puddles and soaked or will they slip and slide along the ice patches in the driveway? Last week we turned a corner in town and did a slow 360 in the car ("Mommy, look, it's like hockey!") but by the end of the day Sam's boots and pants were soaked to his knees from playing in puddles. With all the ups and downs and turmoil and transition, I look out the window every morning and try to prepare my children for the day... one day at a time.

See more pictures of Brooklynn's visit here.

Sam helps paint the bathroom

Blowing out the candles on the birthday cupcakes
Sam and TT made while I was in Iowa visiting a friend

A Blip on a Radar Screen

Last week I ventured out for our first social function as a family of three. I dressed Sam in his Packer jersey and wrapped Eva in yellow and green. I changed my own clothes a dozen times trying to find something that would make me hate my post-pregnancy body less. I filled the diaper bag with Size-One Pampers and a thick stack of wipes and a bottle of breastmilk and a change of clothes for both children and the camera with a fully charged battery. I always charge the battery before Sam and Lucy get together.

“I love her, mommy. She is my best friend,” Sam had told me the night before as we wrapped her birthday present and made her card.

When we got into the car to head to the party I wasn’t even thinking about Sam’s peanut allergy. I was taking deep breaths and trying to remind myself that it was going to be okay, that I could handle two children out in the world, that if Kate Gosselin can manage eight, I can certainly manage two…especially when one of them can’t walk.

We climbed the steps of the lodge that Lucy’s parents had rented for the party. Sammy held on to the railing with one hand and carried Lucy’s present with the other. (“Can I help her open it, Mommy?”) I carried Eva and the diaper bag. We entered a party filled with soft lighting and pink lollipops and strawberry frosting and toddlers running in every direction. Lucy greeted us as only Lucy can –sure and confident and approachable –and Sam’s fist immediately gripped the material of my pantsleg. He gave her the present and we hung our coats on the back of a chair.

Eva slept contentedly in the car seat bucket under the pink blanket I’d gotten from the hospital and I tried to encourage Sam to go run with the other kids. I pointed out Gedion and Arie and Quinn, all racing in circles. Sam leaned his head against my leg and said nothing. I told him I was going to catch him, and we chased each other for a while until he was comfortable going off on his own, hiding with the other kids behind the stacks of folding chairs leaned against one wall. I sat near Eva and wondered how anyone could sleep with all the noise. And when Sam sat down to drink pink lemonade out of the can and eat Nerds and Smarties out of the box, I wasn’t thinking about the half-dollar-sized welt a tiny piece of peanut protein had raised on his back six months earlier and the way the doctor had said “Imagine that happening to his throat.” I was listening to Lucy explain that Arie was from the neighborhood and Nora was from Wednesday night Daddy and Me and that girl over there was from Montessori.

And this is where everything becomes a blur for me. I know lollipop centerpieces stood in the middle of every table, and lollipop cookies on sticks were laid out near the kitchen, and in the corner was a gorgeous cake with delicious strawberry frosting. And there were shiny white plates with silver piping around the edges. And the entire room smelled of warm spices and fresh baked bread. But that’s all I really remember in detail after that.

 “Hey, Sammy. Go get some treats,” Gedion’s dad said. “Did you see the chocolate covered peanuts?”

 And some kind of anxiety that I have never experienced before shot through me. “Peanuts? There are peanuts here?” I said. “Sammy can’t have peanuts.”

“Oh that’s right,” Gedion’s mom said.

This is the point in the story where I should have stopped and thought to myself, “Okay, find the peanuts and see if we can put them away.”

But I didn’t.

Instead my postpartum hormones took over and I rushed around the room and pushed the peanuts back from the edge of the table and sighed and sweated and hoped that none of the twenty sprinting toddlers would be eating them or carrying them or rubbing them on Sam’s skin. Instead I hovered near Sam all night and thought of his cousin who had gone to the hospital after a peanut reaction…from a kiss. Instead my heart raced and sweat ran down my chest and I had to take off my gray and green Packer sweatshirt. Instead I sat in a chair by the door and felt the enormity of my life fold in on me.

I wanted to leave. I wanted to go home and pull myself into a cocoon and protect my son from peanuts, protect myself from chaos, protect myself from life. But I didn’t.

Here’s the thing I did do right: I stayed. I let my son climb on the metal chairs and roll the balls on the pool table and spin the rods on the fuseball table. I let him eat too much sugar and drink too much pop and lick too much frosting off cake he didn’t really want. I let Sammy be a kid.

The next day at work I talked to a friend whose 11-year-old son has lived with allergies since he was a baby. When Sam was first diagnosed she had given me books and links and advice on Epi-pens and which kind of Benadryl to keep in my purse. She had talked to me about medicalert bracelets and immunotherapy. She had warned me about Dairy Queen and Chinese food and ice cream processed in facilities that process peanuts. The day after Lucy’s party I asked Laura how to handle such a situation, how she deals with it, what she would have done.

“What you have to realize, Barb,” she said, “is that even though Sam’s peanut allergy is very real and very scary to you, it is not even a blip on the radar screen to other people.” She told me to think of all that I had to do to get ready for Sam’s party last month, to think of all the things I had to remember and manage. She reminded me that other people are in the same place dealing with their families, raising their own children, doing the best job they can.

Lucy’s parents love Sammy and they would never do anything to harm him. And he is so much more than a blip on a radar screen to them. They are bend-over-backwards kind and generous to both Sammy and me. They are bend-over-backwards generous to everyone. And they had made sure all the other food they served, including the cake, was peanut-free. But our first outing as a family of three reminded me that I, alone, am fully responsible for my son; I, alone, need to pay attention. I wasn’t prepared for how out of control life could feel when there are two children and one mommy and a body full of post-partum hormones, but with the first adventure out of the way and many lessons learned, I think we’re going to be just fine.

(This story originally appeared on thenextfamily.com)

Two Birds in a Nest

“I don’t have a daddy,” my son said from the back seat as we pulled away from the curb in front of the daycare.

The last of the leaves had recently fallen and the guy who sold sweet corn out of the back of his pickup had closed shop for winter and my belly was ripe with Baby Sister. Sam spoke with the same matter-of-fact tone you might expect from someone commenting about the weather or the color of the sky.

Thanks to Todd Parr’s The Family Book, Sam understands that there are all kinds of families. And he knows our family doesn’t have a daddy. Whenever we get to the page with the single parent bird with the two babies in the nest, he points to the baby birds and says, “That is me, and that is Baby Sister.”
He is comfortable with our family, but at three he’s just starting to realize that we’re not like other families, that he is different.

Even before I had gotten pregnant with Sam, I knew that I wanted him to have a sibling, someone he could call twenty years from now and say “Mom drives me crazy,” someone who would be with him as I lay in a hospital bed at the end of my life, someone who would understand when he said “Remember that Christmas that Mom…?” My sister and I have been close most of our lives, and when our father passed away, although we didn’t grieve in the same way, we had each other to lean on, to talk to, to connect us to our father in some way. My sister is the one person in this world who understands why watching a UWGB college basketball game can move me to tears. She is the one person who can look at my children and say “I just saw Dad.” She is the one person who understands the importance of toasting my dad at the kickoff of the Packer Superbowl.

I conceived Sam just after I turned forty. After nearly a year of fertility testing and surgeries and clomid and progesterone and estrace and five failed inseminations with donor sperm, I met with an RE who told me my chances of conceiving with inseminations were good, that I just hadn’t gotten lucky yet. But my heart and my wallet couldn’t take any more of the up and down of inseminations, the two weeks of getting ready followed by two weeks of waiting followed by despair and the need to get right back on the horse. It was grueling and draining, and the longer it went on the more I questioned whether I’d ever become a mother. So I told him I wanted to do IVF, and I took out a loan and quit drinking coffee and spent weeks sticking needles into my stomach and then weeks pushing even longer needles into my thigh and then months waiting for the arrival of my first born, anticipating how blissful yet difficult parenthood –single parenthood –would be.

“No,” I said. “Our family doesn’t have a daddy. Just a mommy.”

“I have a mommy,” Sam said, and I shifted the rearview mirror to see him smile. “Just a mommy and just a TT!”

TT is Sam’s grandma. MY mother. She is the one who drives my sister and I crazy together. But she has also been my biggest supporter during my life as a single mother. Whenever we spend a weekend with her, she takes Sam on adventures to the park or the grocery store. She teaches him how to cook and reads him books and lets him jump all over her first thing in the morning. They drink “coffee” together and draw pictures and sing songs. As a single mom I don’t get much time off, but when TT is in town I get to sit back and watch my son from a distance. I get to see the way that he loves her, the beautiful connection between the generations that I’m sandwiched between.

“Yep,” I said. “You have a TT!”

TT is the one who drove me to the clinic when I went back for a frozen embryo transfer in the hopes of giving Sam a full sibling. TT is the one who cried for me when all the embryos were gone and I still wasn’t pregnant. TT is the one who thought I was crazy when I decided to try just a few inseminations with a new donor. TT is the first person I called when I peed on a stick and got a faint pink line at age 43.

The bitter cold winter has set in here and Baby Sister is now a living breathing entity that smiles and coos and giggles. And despite the entertainment value of having a 3-year-old hold his funnel-shaped flute up to his chest and say he is “pumping milk” or ask you whether “the gum store can deliver like the pizza store does” our life without a daddy is often messy and complicated and challenging. We’re all adjusting here… Sam to sharing his mommy with another little one, Eva to being outside the womb, and me to being pulled in two directions at once as well as living with another post-pregnancy body and the hormones and lack of sleep that go along with it. But every single day I navigate the mess and endure the treadmill of domestic chores and thank God that I made the choices I made. When Sam and I snuggle at the end of the day and go through the list of people we love, we include each other and Baby Sister and my sister and TT and I cannot imagine our family any other way.

(One of my TNF installments.)

Snowed in on the 44th

"Happy Birthday, Mommy! I made this Packer cookie just for you."

A month ago the thought of any normal two day weekend stretched out in front of us was a little daunting. Just the idea of 60 straight hours of being the sole caretaker of two young children was exhausting enough, and the reality was often as challenging as I had imagined. But a lot has changed around here in the last few weeks, and when the forecast for my 44th birthday was for a major winter storm that would trap us here making a long weekend even longer, I didn’t break out in a sweat or even swallow hard. We made the best of it playing and wrestling and sleeping and eating. It helped that Sam had his first tumbling class at the Y Saturday before the snow hit and I got a little quiet time to myself while Eva slept in the carseat. They kicked the parents out of the room and I found a seat by the windows looking out over the pool and I almost didn’t know what to do with myself for those 45 minutes. But it went fast. As has the last 4 months and the last 3 years and, really, the last 44 years.

My baby, 16 weeks

Yes, she actually sleeps like this.

A frosting chemist

Eva poses with her flower and we all hope for spring.

Sam has discovered HappyMeal.com (Bad mommy!)

Sam loves Free to Be You and Me as much as I did when I was a kid.

Jumping to the Brothers and Sisters song

Florida

Ann's been living in Florida almost a year and a half now, and for most of that time I've been saying I couldn't afford to travel there. Two full priced airline tickets (including the cost of the bags), parking at the airport, and the cost to get to any airport that might fly there relatively inexpensively would all add up to more than I had to spare. And now that both Sam and Eva are in daycare I really have nothing to spare. But when the daycare was closed for a week and I found myself planning to take a few days off to stay home with the kids, I checked into last minute airfare and spent money I didn't have. And it was worth every penny.


I was more than a little afraid that one or both children would be difficult on the flight, but I was also aware that the flight was only 2 and 1/2 hours and I could endure just about anything for 2 and 1/2 hours. No need to worry though. Although Sam was a typical three-year-old who needed constant attention and entertainment, and getting various toys and snacks and books out of the diaper bag was a little challenging with a 15 pound infant in my arms, the flights were not bad at all. My children travel as well on airplanes as they always have in the car.



We had a wonderful 4 day visit with Ann and her family... a boat ride to see dolphins and beach on an island, a hike on the beach and out to the end of the jetty, hours in the pool, and a superbowl party we'll all remember. Ann is an amazing mother and her home is warm and welcoming and full of love. Sam loved having rooms filled with toys and big kids to follow around and play with. I loved having another adult to hold the baby or entertain the 3-year-old. And we all loved the endless supply of tasty food. I wish we could have stayed longer, and before we were even home I was thinking about how I can come up with money to do it again. Soon.







See more photos here.

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The Big Game and a New Game with Old Friends

When we got together with some old friends to watch the big game (NFC Championship against the Bears), although Sam kept yelling "Go packers," the kids were much more interested in other games.

TT Visits