Four

Four? How is that even possible? My baby is turning four tomorrow. Four is hard to deal with. It's as hard to deal with as Seven was except I was too busy telling you about the day Amanda was born to whine about Seven. I hope to get around to telling the story of the day Alyssa was born, but first, I'm going to whine about Four.

I'm not ready for four. Especially since, before I know it, four will turn into seven. And then thirty. Four is tough. It's so big girl-ish. So not a baby anymore-ish. So mind of her own-ish. I'll be latching onto Four for dear life because I'm certainly not ready yet for Alyssa to get any older.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I will adore Four. I have no doubt that Alyssa will be amazing at any age. She is happy and funny and completely fearless. She's also bossy and has a bit of an evil streak but we're focusing on the good stuff.

We went to the Renaissance Faire last weekend and there were people dressed up in scary costumes who would parade through now and then… witches, goblins, skeletons… The older kids would run away when they showed up. One of the other 7-year-olds we were with would cry and hide behind her mom's back, but Alyssa… she would walk right up to them and let them twirl her around. During the belly-dancing show, she went up and stood right in front swaying her hips until one of the dancers came down and danced with her and then another invited her up on stage to dance with them.

She still loves shoes, dresses and baby dolls. She would have three zillion baby dolls if I would allow it. This gives me great hope for a future jammed full of a LOT of grandchildren. They will mostly be naked though until she whines enough and I finally give into her demands to dress them. She plays endlessly with her baby dolls but she also plays with little people and Barbie dolls and she makes up the funniest storylines, complete with all different voices.

She loves to sing and dance and she is LOUD. I'm pretty sure she picked up these habits from Amanda. Sometimes our world comes to a complete halt while Amanda and Alyssa turn the house into their version of a Broadway musical. She can be very self-sufficient. She hardly ever wets her pants but when she does, she cleans up the mess and changes her clothes before she mentions it.

She's at an especially adorable stage too. She's constantly telling me she loves me, but not just normal I-love-you's. She does those too, but lately she's also starting to say she's sorry when she does something wrong and sometimes she seems to use the phrase "I love you" interchangeably with the phrases, "I'm sorry" and "I forgive you". So sometimes if she's unhappy with me for something or if I'm unhappy with her, she'll burst out with this very emotional, "I LOVE YOU!"

You'd really have to hear it to understand but she's just so dramatic about it, and sometimes the dramas play out so FAST that it makes me want to laugh but I can't because she's so completely serious. One second it's like her world is shattered because I've said no to a second cookie. She's clearly upset with me, but then a second later she lets out a very distraught, "I love you!" and then she flings herself at me in an embrace dripping with feeling as if she was mad, but all is forgiven. She loves me even if I don't get it right every time.

The other day she grabbed my hammer when I wasn't looking. Mind you, my hammer is pink, so it probably looks pretty harmless, but in Alyssa's hands it won't be harmless when she starts pounding on the furniture or her sister's head. When I asked her to give the hammer back to me, she refused and then sat on it as if that was a surefire way to keep it away from me. When I picked her up and took the hammer away from her she was LIVID. I mean seriously angry and she stayed angry for quite a while. She kept saying, "You won't say you're sorry!" and I kept saying that, no I wasn't sorry that I took it away from her, because she knows better than to play with a hammer and she or someone else could get hurt. She went on and on, really upset until finally I was about to tell her I was sorry if I'd hurt her feelings but… I didn't get as far as an explanation because as soon as I got the "I'm sorry…" out of my mouth she yelled out an ever-so-dramatic, "I LOVE YOU!" and flung herself so hard at me that she nearly knocked me over. She stood there clinging to my leg and I knew once again that all was forgiven. She still loved me.

Nope, I'm not ready for Four. It's just that I have loved Three so much. I'm not ready to let go of this stage when she acts like I'm some kind of magician when I do the simplest little things. She oozes with gratitude over tiny things. I can strip down the bed to change the sheets and if Alyssa sees, she will be overwhelmed with appreciation: "You did this? You did this for ME?!?" To her, I didn't just yank the bedding off and throw it in a pile on the floor. No, in her mind, I just turned the bed into a trampoline and the bedding/pillows into a soft landing place perfect for jumping into.

"Amaaaaaaaaaanda!!! Come see what Mommy did!"

And it's like that all the time. I never know what amazing feat I've performed until it has been declared magical by Alyssa. By the time Seven rolls around, it is much harder to perform magic. Seven is a tougher audience. I adore Seven. But I have to work a whole lot harder for Seven.

Alyssa told me yesterday that she's decided that instead of turning four, she is going to turn two! For a split second I tried to decide if we could make that work somehow. As if it was her turn to perform magic. Really? Would you? You would do that for me???

The first day of Kindergarten

5:38 am

Am I too old to be having that nightmare where I oversleep and miss the first day of kindergarten?

7:32 am

At what point did I switch from trying to make this a peaceful, relaxed morning to coaching Amanda through every bite of her waffle,"Eat faster, eat faster! Do you want to be late to school on your very first day?!?"

9:25 am

Welcome to one of the longest mornings of my life. Kindergarten. Who knew it was going to be this hard?

Okay I suspected it. I was afraid that as hard as I tried to put on a brave face, I would end up a blubbering mess of tears. I thought that my pockets would be overflowing with wadded up Kleenex and that I might scare the children by sobbing loudly and uncontrollably. I thought Amanda would probably do okay other than being horrified that her mother was making a spectacle of herself. She’d be in the corner whispering to another kid, “Who is that lady? How embarrassing!”

Yesterday was my first indication that things might go a bit differently than I was expecting. Amanda went to a birthday party for a pair of twins that she has grown up with. She’s gone to almost all of their birthday parties and always had a blast. So I had absolutely no reason to believe this party would be any different. But do you remember those old Folgers commercials…the ones where they would show a scene in some five-star restaurant and a smarmy voice would whisper, “We have secretly replaced the regular coffee at Café de Foo-Foo with Folgers crystals. Let's see if these picky coffee-drinkers can taste the difference…” Well if that voice had been at the party yesterday it would have said, “We have secretly replaced Dione’s happy little social-butterfly of a daughter with a nervous kid who will be terrified if she loses sight of her mother for even a second.” I could tell the difference immediately and it freaked me out more than a little.

Since Amanda was a baby she has been happy to hang out with pretty much anyone, any time. I might have had a hard time leaving her but she never seemed to have much of a problem leaving me. Amanda has never been clingy, never had a problem talking to other kids or adults for that matter. In a situation where she doesn’t know anyone she will act shy for a few minutes but then she warms up, makes friends and ends up having fun. So yesterday was weird. And it cranked up my anxiety level for the first day of kindergarten, oh about 150%.

So back to today, the good news is that I didn’t cry… Well okay I teared up a bit when I saw Amanda’s name on a red apple hanging on the window outside of her classroom. For some reason that got me. This is Amanda’s classroom! How did this happen? But then I sucked it up and managed to keep my brave face on until I got home.

Amanda on the other hand? She was the crier. After a few minutes in her classroom, Amanda started crying and told me she didn’t want me to leave. “Please don’t leave, please stay with me, Please don’t goooooooo. I don’t want you to leave, Mommy.” When the teacher suggested that any kids who needed to go to the bathroom might want to go before she started class, Amanda said she wanted to go and she wanted me to go with her. I knew this was not going to be pretty.

As soon as I managed to cram myself, Amanda and Alyssa into the tiny little bathroom (with this tiny little kindergarten size toilet) Amanda had a full-fledged meltdown. The tears started flowing freely, and she was sobbing, “Please Mommy, please Mommy I want to go home, pleeeeeeease…”

On the outside I was smiling brightly and sticking with the, “Oh this is going to be so much fun, Amanda. You’re going to make friends and you’re going to sing songs and you’re going to love this, Sweetie, I promise,” thing, but on the inside I was thinking, “OHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhh nooooooooooooooooo… what if she doesn’t have any fun and doesn’t make any friends and they don’t sing any songs and she HATES this and we have to do this all over again tomorrow?”

It only got worse after that. Amanda totally wanted to leave Kindergarten but Alyssa totally wanted to stay. So Alyssa was fighting me, practically tore my shirt off while desperately trying to jump from my arms so she could play with the fabulous selection of toys while Amanda was sitting on her little corner of the carpet holding onto my leg, unsuccessfully fighting back tears because she wanted out of there badly. Did I mention that she was the only kid crying? She was. I think I was the mom that all the other moms were relieved not to be at that moment. The other parents were great though, very sympathetic. A couple of them tried to get their daughters to befriend Amanda but Amanda wasn’t having it.

The other parents were leaving a few at a time and I finally decided that I was just going to have to do it, just hug her good-bye and hope for the best. She tried to follow me out the door, but then she turned around and stayed. I stood outside with another mom talking for a bit and when I peeked in the window I saw that Amanda was marching around the classroom with the rest of the kids, miserably marching, but at least marching, which was a good thing.

10:08 am

I call my mom to report the morning's happenings and ask her how my first day of kindergarten went. Did I cry? Nope. Did she? Yep.

11:10 am

I had all of these grand ideas about how I would spend the four hours (actually 3.75 hours) between the time I drop Amanda off at school and the time I pick her up. Now I’m just mostly hoping I’ll be able to spend it doing something other than obsessively worrying how she’s doing. Is she okay? Is she still crying? Is she making friends? Is she having fun yet?

12:45 pm

So the first thing I noticed when I picked Amanda up from school was her huge smile. No tears in sight. (insert enormous sigh of relief) Her teacher even sent her home with a little red happy face paper, which apparently, in kindergarten teacher speak, means Amanda had a good day.

Actually according to Amanda she had a great day. Not that I was concerned. During crayon time, she wrote down her thoughts… She doesn’t write much yet so this was mostly just lines, not actual words, but she read it to me slowly so I could type it out for future reference...you know, like maybe tomorrow morning in case she decides to barricade herself inside her room and refuses to come out until she's old enough to skip school completely and just get her G.E.D.. So here’s the scoop on school in Amanda’s words:

"I had such a good time at school. I want to go tomorrow. I don’t know all the kids at the school but I know some. I hope other people get to come here on their first day and they have a lot of fun. I didn’t eat any of my lunch at school but mommy sent me some lunch. I did not get into trouble the whole time. I made three friends. Every day I want to go to school but I can’t because some days I have to be off of school."

In case that’s not enough for you, I asked her to give me the play-by-play starting with the moment I left:

• She cried for seven minutes (no, she can’t tell time) and then the little girl sitting next to her asked, "Did your mommy leave?" Amanda said yes and the little girl said, "Mine did too. Wanna be friends?" (Ahhhhhhhh…)
• She didn’t get to eat the snack I packed. None of the other kids ate snacks from their backpacks either. The teacher gave out pretzels but Amanda doesn’t like pretzels so she didn’t eat anything at all.
• They sang a song about Humpty Dumpty and an alligator song.
• There was a puppet table, a paint table, a play-doh table and a crayon table. The boys went to the puppet table, she wanted to play at the play-doh table, (of course) but there were too many kids and not enough chairs so she ended up at the crayon table where she drew pictures of me and Alyssa but not Daddy because he’s hard to draw with the beard, moustache and nose (?).
• It’s not okay to leave your stuff on the floor because one girl tripped over something one of the kids left on the floor.
• They can call the teacher “teacher” or "Mrs. P****r" but not "Mrs. P." One boy called her "Mrs. P" and she didn’t like it.
• They learned all about the letter “A” and tomorrow will learn all about “B”.
• She made three friends, one of whom high-fived her, without specifically saying that she was high-fiving her but that was okay cuz Amanda said “I was like, oh I know what you’re doing,” and high-fived her right back.
• The teacher was really nice and only got mad when kids didn’t listen and then they got time-outs but Amanda ALWAYS listened.
• They got to play outside two times and one of her friends fell down and scraped her hands up.
• They mostly sat on the carpet not in chairs and Amanda picked a square on the carpet that had a flower on it, but one time her friend sat in the flower square and Amanda had to sit in the boring old zebra square.
• When I asked her if there were any cute boys in her class she said, “Oh yes! The little boy who had to wait a really long time for his mommy was CUH-UTE!!! (She doesn’t know his name but he’s blonde.)

And best of all:

• She can’t wait to go back tomorrow.

Oh and as for me, I’m doing better too. We survived our first day of kindergarten and with any luck we just might survive the whole year.

Just sitting in the park

Though I always think it's kind of funny when Alyssa uses one hand to make sure those two fingers on her other hand don't fall out of her mouth, what is most exciting about these pictures is that Alyssa is SITTING, completely unassisted.

We were at the park yesterday and as I was pushing Amanda on the swing, I looked up to see that Scott had set Alyssa in the grass in the sitting position. And aside from the uptight mommy voice in my head asking, What is he thinking? Why isn't she on a blanket? Doesn't he know she has delicate little thighs? Doesn't he know she could put a leaf in her mouth and choke on it? Why isn't he watching her so he can catch her if she starts to tip over? I was also thinking, each time I glanced up, "She's still sitting, SHE'S STILL SITTING!"

Yes, she will sit for quite a while assisted by her boppy pillow and sometimes she will sit by herself for 20 or 30 seconds, but with me nearby to catch her when she starts to sway. But at the park, she sat there perfectly steady for a good five or six minutes like it was no biggie, like she'd been sitting for years. She sat like that until she saw me walking towards her and then she did this little happy dance and tipped over. So, of course, I spread out a blanket and sat her up again to get these pictures.

Yay Alyssa!

Alyssa's first cereal

Tonight I felt like a terrible mother. I don't have those moments that often. I mean in general, I know I'm not perfect in the mommy department and I make mistakes. A lot of them, I'm sure… but for the most part I figure I'm doing a pretty decent job. I know that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the house is perfectly clean or if every meal was completely balanced, it matters that they're healthy and happy and very much loved, which, of course, they both are.

But tonight I gave Alyssa her first "solid" food… her first cereal. And now I'm feeling like a jerk. We started her big sister, Amanda, on cereal a full two months earlier when she was a baby and I recall feeling a touch of guilt over that too. Everything I'd read on the subject suggested we wait until she hit the six-month mark because starting earlier could cause allergies or have other problems associated with it. But her doctor suggested we start at four months because Amanda was so big and waking up so often to nurse and she thought solids would fill up her belly a little better and might keep her sleeping a bit longer.

More sleep? I jumped right on that bandwagon and started feeding Amanda cereal the next day. Risking a lifetime of allergies or who knows what in order to get a few more hours of sleep. Way to go, Mommy. Unfortunately cereal didn't help things at all in the sleep department and Amanda wasn't a particularly enthusiastic eater. She was always wildly enthusiastic about nursing but the other stuff? She could take it or leave it.

So the first cereal milestone was not one I was terribly excited about this time around. Our doctor said we could start Alyssa at four months if we wanted to, but since she was sleeping well, we could wait until six months if we preferred. No reason to mess with a good thing.

So my plan was to start cereal on Alyssa's six-month birthday but we weren't at home that day. We'd made sort of a spur of the moment trip to Monterey, and packing rice cereal had been the last thing on my mind. So I decided we'd wait til we got home and then for various reasons we didn't get around to trying cereal until tonight. I didn't think she'd be that interested anyway. I hadn't noticed her tracking my fork from food to mouth or any of the signs you're supposed to look for. Plus Alyssa is pretty laid back about the whole nursing thing compared to her sister. Don't get me wrong, she's always been a good nurser, I've never had any problems with her, but compared to Amanda she seems to have such self-control and restraint.

I chose to do on-demand feedings with both girls. With Amanda, I felt like a full-service-bar with a flashing neon-sign on my chest glowing "open 24 hours" and Amanda would stumble in at all hours with that frenzied, half starving look and I'd be like the harried waitress, rolling my eyes, but never able to say no to a paying customer, whipping the boob out yet again… and she would eat noisily, making slurpy, happy sounds the whole time...and then if it were nighttime or naptime she'd often fall asleep with that satisfied, half-drunken look about her, my boob still in her mouth and I'd count to 20 or 30 or 60 and then hold my breath and slowly and quietly, so as not to disturb, pry my boob from her mouth. At which point she would usually start searching around, like hey, hey, hey… don't take that away, I was still eating… and so I would wait, again, until she drifted off to sleep and try the routine all over again.

Sometimes this went on endlessly until I thought I might lose my mind. And then when I was finally free, I would breathe a huge sigh of relief, roll over and attempt to get some sleep myself or if it was daytime, attempt to get something done. But then at some point she would stir in her sleep and wake up looking for the boob. I swear it felt like she needed to know where my boobs were at all times. I always imagined she must feel something like a homeless person, sleeping with one eye open in case someone tried to steal her shopping cart.

Though nursing Amanda was wonderful, being a human pacifier was not particularly fun. Luckily it hasn’t been that way with Alyssa at all. She shows up right on schedule (her idea, not mine), she orders politely, she eats in a very dignified manner and when she's done, she's done. I expected her first cereal experience to be a similar thing but it wasn't.

You know that thing they do on Survivor every season where after the contestents have been existing on rocks and leaves for months, they auction off a chocolate bar and a spoonful of peanut butter and six women scratch each others' eyes out for their chance at it? That was Alyssa and her rice cereal. The girl was deadly serious about that cereal.
From the very first bite she ate like she was completely ravenous. We couldn't shovel the food in fast enough to keep her happy. She tried to assist in the process, helping her dad get the spoon into her mouth, grabbing for the bowl, because I think she knew she could do it more efficiently. When Amanda asked if she could feed her, I said, "be careful," a warning I offer on a regular basis, but this time I was more concerned for Amanda's safety, slightly afraid Alyssa might chew one of Amanda's fingers off… you know, if she had teeth.

So I sat there photographing every bite, feeling like a total jerk. Poor kid was clearly HUNGRY. Who knows how long she'd been waiting for this meal? And me just taking my sweet time. Oh well… Live and learn. She has a full belly now, and she'll be well fed from here on out. Time to move on to my next dumb parenting moment.

Nope, it's not just gas

To think that only days ago I was excited about the fact that Alyssa was finally starting to get the hang of this being awake thing. Yes, we were lucky if she kept her eyes open for more than twenty minutes at a time. And yes, the only difference between her awake time and her sleep time was the fact that her eyes were open. I liked to pretend it was more than that though… I liked to imagine that she was actually choosing to give up her precious sleep time to hang out with us.

So the other morning I was changing her diaper and yammering on and on about who knows what, and she looked up at me with an expression very similar to the one you see above.

Yep, she smiled. And smiled. And then she smiled some more.

It felt like time froze for just a moment while I locked eyes with her and just reveled in that smile. Honestly, I've been enjoying Alyssa's company immensely all along, but she's been such a serious little thing. No matter what kind of goofy thing we'd do to amuse the kid, she'd just stare at us with a stern expression, then eventually yawn and go to sleep. I'm pretty sure we're at least mildly entertaining every now and then but she's been a really tough audience. So I can't even explain how thrilling those first smiles were. It was nice to have some acknowledgment that she's enjoying herself at least a bit.

I'm pretty sure it will be quite a while before Alyssa masters the ability to roll her eyes or she would have done it a second later when I started bouncing up and down and screaming like an idiot, "She's smiling, she's smiling!!! Amanda look… Alyssa's smiling!"

Since then, she has repeated the performance a few times. She just beamed and beamed at her big sister for what seemed like an eternity and she's blessed her dad with a few grins too. But trust me, she's no pushover. She refuses to smile on command.

Clearly she's going to make us work for it, but that's okay. It's definitely worth the effort. Just look at the picture above and I think you'll agree.

Finally, a real bath.

Well it happened... After a middle of the night feeding, I was about to place a very sleepy Alyssa back into her bassinet, when in the dim light I spied something really nasty looking there. I almost screamed because I thought it was a big ugly bug that I'd come painfully close to laying my precious newborn on. But I turned the light on to discover it was actually the remains of Alyssa's belly button.

Still pretty gross if you ask me.

Funny thing about motherhood... suddenly most things that were once absolutely disgusting to me, poop, pee, spit-up, boogers, etc. no longer bother me much when they're coming from one of my own kids. But for some reason, the brown dried up stumpy belly button thing... BLECH!

NO, in case you're wondering, I will not be saving that for the scrapbook. I was thrilled to hear the nurse say they'd changed their thinking on newborn belly-button care. Three years ago when Amanda was brand new, we were supposed to carefully clean her belly button a few times a day with alcohol swabs - a job I detested like no other. It was a powerful bargaining chip for Scott since I was willing to do just about anything else as long as he would handle belly-button duty. This time around they said we didn't have to do anything at all. Yup, apparently it would dry up and fall off without any assistance. And it did!

So in the wee morning hours, Alyssa and I celebrated her little belly-button milestone by performing a special ritual... I got a big wad of toilet paper, yanked the nasty little stump out of the bassinet and flushed it ceremoniously with the same amount of respect I would have given a big hairy spider. Good riddance!

And then today, it was time to give Alyssa her first real bath. I love this "first", probably because I love the "freshly-bathed baby" part so much. I wasn't freaked out about the first bath like I was with Amanda because this time around I was much more confident in my ability to do it without her slipping from my grasp. I was far more concerned about timing the bath properly so that Scott would be willing to take time out from watching football to take a few pictures.

Alyssa seemed to thoroughly enjoy bathtime. I'm pretty sure she was loving that warm water. And I'm loving that I get to cuddle with her and inhale her fresh, clean, Johnson's no-tears shampoo baby smell. Ahhhhhhhh...