Posted by Kimberly on May 28th, 2008 — Posted in The Ladies, The Agony and The Entropy, Kipple
I didn’t really mean it the other day when I said I had too many shoes. Really, how can anyone have too many shoes? It’s just not possible! Unless, maybe, the shoes in question no longer fit the feet for which they are intended. Then there might possibly be an issue–especially if the owner of said shoes is unwilling to part with them, despite their apparent loss of functionality.
It’s been well documented over the years that I have a bit of a thing for shoes. What has been less apparent–although will probably come as no surprise–is that this fetish of mine extends beyond myself to include the feet of my children as well as my own. In fact, The Ladies might possibly have cuter shoes than I do. The problem is, unlike me, they keep outgrowing theirs. And therein lies the problem.
The very idea of simply throwing them away strikes me with the same visceral reaction that some other mothers have when it is suggested that they really need not save the baby teeth (ew!); what your baby’s molars and incisors are to you, my baby’s outgrown sandals and sneakers are to me. Except that baby teeth are so much easier to simply tuck in the back of your jewelry box.
So, what to do with the wee footwear that I can no longer force onto tiny feet, but also cannot force myself to part with? Well, used to be that I simply left it all in a heap on the bottom of the hall closet, but my recent organizational spree has eliminated that as an option. And somehow, storing non-functional items in the Magical Pockets of Delight seems….wrong.
Putting them on display so that I can continue to enjoy their form long after their functionality has fallen by the wayside, however? Seemed like the perfect idea. And so, the red dinosaur rainboots Diva Girl refused to take off in the store, the strappy rainbow sandals I loved so much I’ve bought a similar pair every year since, the sparkly pink jelly shoes that have long since faded to orange, the ladybug shoes that marry two of my favourite things, and the matching pairs of Irish dance slippers (No, they don’t dance; I just liked the shoes) now reside in style on shadow boxes on the wall outside the bathroom door rather than gathering dust in the back of the closet.
It pleases me to have them out on display like this, these random talismans of my children’s childhoods. It’s possibly a bit odd, creating wall art out of outgrown shoes, but it’s a lot less icky than putting a bunch of lost baby teeth on display.
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Posted by Kimberly on May 12th, 2008 — Posted in The Ladies, Diva Girl, Zen Baby, Kipple
Mother’s Day really isn’t a big deal to me. I of course make sure to honour my own mother with a specially chosen mushy card and token of my affection, appreciation, respect, but for myself the day is a bit of a wash. Solo moms are rarely gifted with tiny velvet boxes and our kisses tend to begin with the kids, not Kay, so the anticipation factor tends to be fairly low–limited to whatever teacher generated craft has come home this year.
Not that the crafts aren’t lovely, wonderful, meaningful, blah blah blah…But really….It’s not like the kid thought this stuff up on her own. And after the “Mom&Me Cookies” debacle back in the first grade, when I was presented with a jar of dry ingredients, a recipe, and an overexcited six year old who spent the entire day nagging me to essentially make my own damn gift, I’ve kinda been soured on the whole teacher-driven maternal appreciation thing.
So, since it seems somehow tacky to encourage the children to remember to tell me how much I rock, I pretty much just let Mother’s Day go except for using it as an excuse to buy myself something pretty. It’s not like I really need the cards and flowers to know that I’m a great mom and they love me, and really, if I have to ask for them, I don’t want them at all. Needless to say, my expectations for this year were, as always, fairly low. I was planning on calling it a red letter day if I got to sleep past 8.
Motherhood is nothing if not surprising, however. And sometimes, even when they make you cry, they are even good surprises.
That, my friends, is my Diva Girl, growing up before our very eyes. Up until now, she’s been reasonably oblivious to the whole Mday experience; like most kids, any occasion that is not designed to culminate in her being showered with gifts doesn’t tend to figure high on her list of priorities. This year, however, for the first time my daughter celebrated Mother’s Day without any external prompting. According to my Mom, who witnessed this little project in the making, it was all Diva directed–she decided on the shape and picture for the card, and then spent an hour with the Zen Baby working on her sister’s poem before creating her own ode to my maternal awesomeness.
You know, little velvet boxes are nice (I got one of those too–also Sabrina’s idea), but they really can’t hold a candle to the genuine love that shines through a poem that contains a line thanking you for letting the kid play in your room. I never really realized just how much I’ve missed getting a Mother’s Day card all these years until I held that painstakingly created cardboard butterfly in my hands on Sunday morning. But that’s ok, because those two poems, a decade in the making, were totally worth the wait.
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Posted by Kimberly on April 14th, 2008 — Posted in Zen Baby, Kipple
The Zen Baby has a boo boo and apparently it is all. my. fault.
I never told her, you see, that it is a bad idea to stick your finger on a lightbulb.
How could I possibly have been so negligent?
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Posted by Kimberly on April 3rd, 2008 — Posted in Diva Girl, No Pudding Until You Finish Your Meat
I’ve noticed in the past year or so the term “Helicopter Parent” has become part of the parenting lexicon, a label used to describe those overly invested parents who micromanage their kids’ lives–and especially their schoolwork–to the point of pretty much doing everything for them. Other than rolling my eyes at the idea, I’ve pretty much ignored the phenomenon because, well, clearly that’s not me: I’m a very hands off parent, especially when it comes to school; I’ve always believed in allowing Diva Girl to succeed or fail on her own merits rather than making it all about me.
It’s been a conscious choice, this hands off policy I have towards Sabrina’s academic achievement. I recognized early on that one of the more complicated aspects of balancing my career with my children–beyond the daycare juggling, working mom guilt, and other every day concerns of every working mom–would be resisting the impulse to turn my daughter into my student.
Teachers are in a uniquely difficult position when it comes to the education of their children–we have an insider’s understanding of the system and what is required to succeed, which makes it that makes it that much more difficult to refrain from stepping in to ensure that our little preshus gets the best grade possible. It’s a very tempting, very slippery slope, and one that I have no desire to slide down, so I’ve always made an effort to keep home and school separate when it comes to Diva Girl.
For the most part, it’s worked pretty well. Sure, I’ve been tempted to get involved in an assignment or two, confident that I could make it that much better, but the ability to recognize how fundamentally wrong that statement is has always been enough to stop the helicopter blades from rotating before they achieve lift off. Of course, the fact that Diva Girl has always shown herself capable of getting her As and Bs all on her own has made it easier for me to keep my feet planted firmly on the ground and focus more on encouraging her to do her best than what that best is deemed to be.
Until now.
For the first time, Sabrina has brought home a report card filled not with As and Bs, but with Cs and it is challenging everything I believed about myself as the parent of a school aged child. I used to believe that I didn’t put a lot of stock in grades, that Diva Girl’s willingness to put forth her best effort in any given area far outweighed any achievement in my eyes. How then to reconcile a report card that was–to my mind at least–not good enough with my oft-spouted philosophy that your best is always good enough, no matter what the numbers say? Especially when I do believe that despite the lackluster results, she is trying. However I also believe that my daughter is not a C student–two facts that unfortunately seem to be in direct contradiction with each other, given the evidence marching down the report card page.
All of my self-delusions about my lack of unhealthy investment in Sabrina’s school progress came crashing down as I held that report card in my hands, speechless in the face of this unexpectedly lackluster achievement. To be perfectly honest, each C felt like a personal affront–as though they were an indictment of my ability to parent rather than an assessment of Sabrina’s math and reading ability. In other words, as I processed that report, my maternal rotors started turning.
And then my Diva Girl brought me crashing back to Earth with one simple question, “Are you disappointed in me?”
Normally by now I would have already told her how proud I was of her and commented on her various achievements as reported by her teachers. Clearly th fact that I hadn’t done that this time spoke of my disappointment as loudly as if I’d shouted it at her. And looking at all those Cs, I thought about shouting. Looking into those big hazel eyes, however, I thought about how, in the grand scheme of things, a couple of Cs on a fourth grade report card isn’t really that big of a deal and about how my sense of self worth as the parent of a Good Student paled in comparison to my child’s sense of self worth as a Good Person, regardless of her achievements as a student.
I don’t want this not even failure to define my daughter’s sense of who she is and what she can accomplish when she puts her mind to it. While I clearly do not want her to believe that she is a C student, I also don’t want her to think that a C isn’t good enough when she’s giving it all she’s got.
So that’s what we talked about this time–what she thinks she can accomplish and how she can better meet those goals. And of course, as always, we talked about how proud I am of her and how confident I am that she can conquer the world if only she puts her mind to it. What we didn’t do was climb on board my mommycopter –not because I didn’t want to enact a rescue mission, but because even though it’s what I want, I’m still rational enough to know that it’s not what she needs.
Sure, I want to see Sabrina take to the skies and soar, but only if she’s the one at the controls.
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Posted by Kimberly on December 31st, 2007 — Posted in Diva Girl, Kipple
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but even if I have, it bears repeating: I hate New Year’s Eve. It may even beat out Valentine’s Day as my least favourite commercially manufactured holiday. At least with Valentine’s Day, there’s candy. With New Year’s there’s just overinflated expectations and, now that I have a child old enough to indulge in same, whining and tears over the indignity of being denied the right to watch crappy tv until a giant ball drops from sky, thus ending an evening with far too much hoopla and not nearly enough payoff.
I have a hard enough time working up enthusiasm for the whole clean slate thing that I don’t feel–my personal New Year starts the first day of school–without being confronted with the “But Arthur gets to stay up until Midnight!” argument. Dude. Arthur is a fictional talking aardvark who has a pet dog (seriously, wtf?). I’m hardly going to be swayed by the fact that his parents let him do something. And even if I were so inclined, this is also the family that produced the whining wonder that is D.W. Again, hardly a stunning endorsement of their parenting decisions.
I’m really not up for this tantrum tonight. I’m tired, I have a headache borne of negotiating one too many battles over toys today, and no matter how many times I pick it all up, it still looks like Toys R Us threw up in my livingroom–forget sugarplums, at this point I’ve got visions of garbage bags dancing in my head. Enduring the monumental tantrum that is brewing over bedtime really isn’t how I want to spend the last moments of this year. But I also don’t want to start next year having set the precedent that we stay up until midnight. It’s not something I’ve done in past years, so why should I now just because some kids tv show put it into my kid’s head that this is what you do for New Year’s Eve. Thanks Arthur! You really dropped the ball on this one.
So, no reflective, navel gazing year end post from me. No uplifting looks towards the future. Just a sincere belief that it would be great to sleep through the initial moments of 2008.
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Posted by Kimberly on December 27th, 2007 — Posted in Zen Baby, Kipple
Regan: “You wanna know why Bina gave me Princess Luciana for Christmas, Mama?”
Me: “Why?”
Regan: “Because she loves me.”
Me (melting into a puddle of maternal goo and wanting to prolong the moment): “And why did you give her Princess Ro?”
Regan: “Because you told me to.”
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Posted by Kimberly on December 25th, 2007 — Posted in The Ladies, Diva Girl, Zen Baby, Kipple
Few things put the vastly different personalities of my daughters into stark relief like Christmas Morning.Diva Girl is a whirling dervish of excitement, blowing through the Christmas tree like the Tasmanian Devil on speed; The Zen Baby, not surprisingly, takes a more relaxed approach to the festivities.
Where Diva grabs her stocking and immediately unpends it all over the floor, thereby ensuring sensory overload what with the jumbled mess of toothbrushes, lipgloss, temporary tattoos and various odd and ends strewn about before her, Zen Baby is meticulous in her stocking excavation, each item withdrawn, examined, and exclaimed over before moving on to the next–until her sister grabs it and dumps it all over the floor for her, that is.
Within an hour of waking me up (at the crack of dark, but it’s one of the few times a year I don’t mind) and racing to the tree, Sabrina will have gone through all of her presents. Everything will have been catalogued, touched, and tested. Practically the minute she processes what the gift it, she’s moved on to the next thing. In her half of the room, the toys are scattered with reckless abandon, mixed, mingled, dropped where she was when the next thing caught her fancy. Regan, however, is still playing with the first toy she saw, and half of her packages remain ignored under the tree. It’s not that she’s not interested or lacking in gratitude, she just hasn’t gotten that far yet. She will, given time (and the mom-imposed restraint shown by her big sister), but it’s just not a priority to her. She likes this toy, and she will savour it.
Two very different little girls with two very different approaches to presents, and I suspect, life in general. One who lives full throttle, out loud, determined to wring everything possible from every experience and constantly leaping before she looks, the other with the unique ability to immerse herself in life, to fully experience each moment before moving on to the next, and always careful to be sure exactly how high the ledge is before she jumps. Both perfect in their own ways.
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Posted by Kimberly on December 23rd, 2007 — Posted in Diva Girl, Kipple
As you may have gathered from the preceding “hoopla,” I am very big on Christmas tradition. There is, however, one seasonal tradition that I could definitely do without: Diva Girl’s traditional holiday meltdown.
For as long as I can remember, December 23rd has marked the day that Diva Girl official gives up on the concept of the Nice List and wholeheartedly embraces her place among The Naughty. I don’t know if it’s the pressure, the anticipation, or what, but every year is remarkably the same–Sabrina always ends up losing her shit in a spectacularly ugly way.
Much though I’ve worked so hard to create the belief in Santa, to nurture it and protect it in the face of an increasingly cruel, unforgiving world, today is the day that I fantasize about pulling back the curtain and revealing the whole thing for the sham that it is just so that I can explain to my daughter exactly why she won’t be getting any presents this year. I won’t of course. I’ll jingle the bells and nibble the cookies and fill the stockings, and if I’m honest, I’ll look forward to doing so all day tomorrow–I love my daughter after all, and the idea that she would be disappointed on Christmas, screaming in frustration rather than squealing in delight, is just not one I truly want to entertain.
Except…Maybe a little, in my Grinchier moments as I deal with the noise noise noise of her lack of gratitude and her unwillingness to help out and her just general crappy attitude as best described by loud, angry screams and rants against the injustice of it all. When I really do wonder why, exactly, I spent all that time, effort, and money getting her just the right things, the things that show just how well I know her, just how much I love her, even if she can’t always see it, when I could have been out getting a pedicure and a really great pair of shoes. The answer, of course, is that I do love her. And I do love to make her happy, and I do look forward to seeing her face when she sees what Santa has left for her-despite all indications to the contrary–under the tree.
But I wonder, would it be wrong if, in addition to the Littlest Pet Shops and the 17 different kinds of fairy, if Santa also left a little note this year, telling her to get with the program and stop with the tantrums before she manages to completely take herself out of the running with him? Or is my heart really just 2 sizes too small?
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Posted by Kimberly on December 21st, 2007 — Posted in Diva Girl, Kipple
I know that there are different schools of thought on the subject, but I’m going to go on the record here and say that at our house, we are firmly Pro-Santa. I wouldn’t say that we’re all about the Claus–we are Catholic, after all–but the jolly old elf does play a significant role in our holiday celebrations.
In our house, for example, all presents come from Santa. I give each of The Ladies a new pair of jammies on Christmas Eve, but that’s it. Every single thing under the tree on Christmas morning–and other than those jammies and The Ladies’ gifts to each other, our tree remains bare until the 25th–is from Santa. Sometimes it sucks, like when your daughter’s most compelling argument for the existence of Santa Claus is the fact that her mother would never buy her all that stuff, but for the most part, I love the fact that magic is such a big part of our Christmas and I work hard to keep it that way.
As Diva Girl gets older I keep worrying that this will be it. As more and more of her friends join the ranks of unbelievers, I keep thinking that this will be the year when she’s no longer able to suspend her disbelief and embrace the wholly improbable idea that some fat guy in a red suit holes up in the tundra all year with a bunch of elves who magically create the exact same stuff you can buy at WalMart and then bends the laws of time and space to sneak into kids’ houses to leave it under the tree and sneak a few cookies along the way. It hasn’t happened yet, but I keep waiting.
She’s clinging pretty hard to those beliefs, though. So hard that sometimes, I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t start dropping some hints (and not just because it would be nice to get some credit for all that great stuff under the tree rather than dismissed as the person who gives her pajamas). Listening to her plan her show and tell last night was one of those time. Diva Girl, you see, plans to base her show and tell on “Why I Know There Is A Santa Claus.”
Her evidence, such as it is, is pretty compelling. The Squeaky Baby Santa returned to her after she lost it at the mall nearly a year before (not as easy as it sounds; that particular doll had been discontinued years before and it was only a fluke that I came across it in a thrift store a couple of weeks before Christmas.). The jingle bells Santa “forgot” when he stopped for a cookie break. The copy of The Polar Express Santa personally dedicated to her after she did such a good job taking care of the bells last time this happened (that Santa is a forgetful guy!), the magic Key Santa uses to get into our apartment. And of course, her letter from Santa (not one of the grinchy ones). It’s actually adorable to watch her assemble her arguments, and I feel no small amount of pride that I’ve been able to cast this magical spell for her, but I’m just not sure it’s such a good idea to allow her to go to school and start laying out her case to a bunch of cynical fourth graders.
So, what’s a mama to do? How do you join the message of “yes, there is a Santa Claus” with the idea of “maybe it’s not a good idea to talk about this with all your friends” without the jig being up? Do I let her go to school with all her paraphrenalia, ready to convince all those doubters in the existence of the Big Guy in Red, only to come home devastated that they teased her? Do I sit her down and have a chat about “The Spirit of Santa Claus”? How do I preserve the magic and her self-esteem in a situation where the two ideas seem to be mutually exclusive?
Update: Sometimes Diva Girl’s teachers actually come through. Hard as I tried, I could not dissuade her from her show and tell plan. Short of “Everyone will laugh at you and call you a baby,” there was no convincing her that this was a bad plan. So, I let her go, hoping that the other kids wouldn’t be too cruel, and that she wouldn’t come home too crushed. I know at least some of them still want to believe, so I was hoping they’d provide some support and cushion the blow.
None of that proved necessary, however. Diva Girl’s teacher handled this beautifully–exactly the way I would have, actually. Her approach was simple, no fuss, no muss, and avoided the mockery, the teasing, and the possibility of a full scale Santa war on the last day before Christmas vacation. What was her brilliant solution? She simply didn’t manage to find time today for show and tell. Diva Girl is of course bitter that she missed her chance in the spotlight, but I’m going with small price to pay.
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Posted by Kimberly on December 18th, 2007 — Posted in Diva Girl, Heathers
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