It Happened to Me

Harper at the Children’s Museum. (Photo somehow in LlGC ~ NLW’s Flickr photostream)

Who remembers the “It Happened to Me” column from Sassy magazine? I always wanted to contribute, but sadly, nothing ever happened to me. No abusive boyfriends, no messily divorced parents, no getting sold into slavery, UGH.

Once you’re a parent, however, there are many more opportunities for terrifying and dramatic things to happen, and/or for small things to suddenly become terrifying and dramatic.

Here’s one thing that happened. It was a few months ago, and I think my heart JUST now stopped racing from it.

Harper got lost.

At the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

For, like, five minutes.

It was just how you think something like that will happen. I was bent over putting Ollie’s shoes on, and a noisy Catholic school group of older kids swept by like a flock of geese in plaid, and when they were gone, so was Harper. My friend who I was there with and I looked at each other, looked around. “Harper?” I peeked around the corner.The looking-at-bugs-with-magnifying-glasses section? Nope. The pretend-pizza-shop? Nope. Huh.

My urge to be a calm, collected, non-freaking-out mother has me constantly quieting my brain’s urge to panic, so I stuffed Ollie into the carrier and started fast-walking around in a sort of hectic fake-calm, calling Harper’s name, looking around, garbling incomprehensible things at bystanders: “Did you see my? Dress and braids? Harper?” After a minute, my friend and I exchanged a look, and I commenced internal freakout.  I just KNEW she’d been SNATCHED BY AN EVIL CHILD-SNATCHER who would obviously pay admission to get into the Brooklyn Children’s Museum just to CAPTURE INNOCENT BABIES.

I raced to the admissions desk by the front door, and sputtered: “Child! Missing! Girl! Mine! Blond!” A young man nodded and said, “Ma’am, it’s all right, it’s only that you’ve endangered your child by blogging about how adorable she is, you fool, don’t you know that only creepos read the internet?” “Excuse me?” I said. He repeated himself: “You stay here. We will find her. This happens all the time. Don’t worry.” Then he said into his walkie-talkie, “Code 3″ (or something.) For some reason it was very reassuring to me that they had a code for this. Oh, so it’s just a thing that happens so often they can’t even be bothered to say it! That’s good!

I stood at the desk mournfully watching the door and the busy street beyond it for an excruciating 20 seconds or so. Then another employee called out, “Found her!”

And there she was: happily driving the city bus, a few feet away. “Hi Mama!” she chirped. I threw myself on her, squeezing her with crushing freakout-love, causing her to wiggle away and look at me like I was crazy. A nearby nanny I know from around the neighborhood told me she’d recognized Harper and told her to stay put until her mommy found her. I fought an urge to smother the nanny with hugs and kisses too.

Turns out, Harper was completely unaware that I considered her lost. “But I knew where you were,” she explained. “YES BUT I NEED TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE TOO,” I said, squeezing her hands as I did for the next three days. It did make me realize this was a conversation we’d never really had: what to do if you’re lost. My friend shared what she’d heard, which was to tell your kid that if she is lost she should find a lady or a mommy to help her. In my day you were supposed to look for a policeman or someone official looking, which actually sounds ridiculous now, which is sad, but whatever.

Now whenever we are somewhere crowded I remind Harper in a strained, trying-to-sound-nice-but-really-still-freaking-out voice, that she always has to be able to see me. The other day at the botanic gardens she made a point of walking backwards while drilling my eyes with hers for a good minute before she forgot and started running after a bird. Whatever. I remind her now and then about the “find a lady” rule, and try to still not freak out about things too much, and to remind myself of how in the end, that was a pretty good way to learn that lesson — in a protected, indoor place for children, where they even have a code for it.

So here’s another thing that happened: we had a fire in our home. (I already blogged about it over at the day job blog, in a post that actually sort of had a point.) Yes, home, the home we just PURCHASED. It was pretty sweet. I’m super glad we didn’t burn the building down. The co-op board just hates when that happens. So, yeah, this ceiling fan we’d inherited (whatever, it was ugly) had stopped working, but apparently deep in its tinny guts it was still trying to work, and sort of, like, exploded? All of the sudden, flames were shooting out from the ceiling. I was kidding before when I said it was sweet. It sucked.  But again there were many “thank goodnesses.”  I was home with Ollie while Harper was at school, so she didn’t have to be freaked out by it. Again, it could have been so much worse. I was right there. I was holding Ollie. I saw it happen, was uninjured, called 911, they arrived in a split-second, there was only a bit of smoke-damage.

And on the upside, I got to answer for myself the question: what would you grab in case of a fire? Our carefully-curated “fire folder”, containing our birth certificates and wedding photo negatives and such? Nah. The kid and the dog. That’s it, not even my wallet, oof. But hey, at least I took the dog with me to freak out in the lobby while greeting the firemen with a quivering “There! Up! My kitchen! Fire!” When I told Adam the whole story he said, “Hey, you took Quimby! Nice!” with just a touch of surprise.

So anyway. Those were the scary things that happened, and you know what? Even though I’ve now been able to write this “It Happened to Me,” I think I’d rather just keep having a boring life where nothing really too bad happens. I’m a fiction writer anyway.

(Which reminds me…the last round of revisions of the novel have been turned in! So I can once again spend my evenings doing relaxing things. Like finishing moving in. Yes, it’s been two months. Shhh we’ve been busy.)

This is Kensington. Or Windsor Terrace. Or Something.

Our corner, as it was in the 1940s. Thanks, Brooklyn Collection!

Well! So! We did it! We moved! It went kind of like this:

March, 2011: “Hey, we’re having another baby! But wait, we live in a 1.5 bedroom. Okay, a 1 bedroom. Oh, who cares.”

August, 2011: “HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TO MOVE.”

November, 2011: “Wait, what? After some months of getting super depressed about how super depressing Brooklyn real estate is, we found a non-depressing apartment? Weird! Let’s buy it!”

February, 2012: “Wait, what? We bought an apartment? HOLY SHIT NOW WE HAVE TO MOVE.”

From thence followed very shoddy packing, some chaotic days of moving, including panic attacks about whether or not our voluminous books-n-records collections were going to make our movers commit seppuku, some very shoddy unpacking, still not finished. Oh, I forgot the spirit-crushing anxieties over retiling the kitchen and bathroom and repainting and changing light fixtures and doorknobs and whatnot, which caused me to guiltily remember every time I’d mentally answered someone’s “Man, my renovations are killing me” with a resounding (albeit silent) “SHUT YOUR PRIVILEGED LITTLE TALK-HOLE!” (Turns out that stuff actually really is stressful. Who knew!)

So anyway, we made it, we’re here, in our new little corner of Brooklyn. If you’re from Brooklyn, we are on the border between Kensington and Windsor Terrace. If you’re not, we are still kinda near Park Slope, on a different corner of the park. Or, as our Manhattan-bound real estate lawyer put it, “Kinda near the ocean?” Exactly. Actually, you know, all of New York City is an…oh, never mind.

In EB White’s great essay Here is New York, he writes:”A woman friend of mine moved recently from one apartment to another, a distance of three blocks. When she turned up, the day after the move, at the same grocer’s that she had patronized for years, the proprietor was in ecstasy–almost in tears–at seeing her. “I was afraid,” he said, “now that you’ve moved away I wouldn’t be seeing you anymore.” To him away was three blocks, or about seven hundred and fifty feet.”

This is precisely so. We’ve been moaning about how weird it would be to leave the place we lived for 7 years, our beloved best-ever neighborhood, and then sniffling and saying things like, “Well, I guess if we really miss the bakery/bodega/block we could always…walk over one day. It would take like 15 minutes though.”

But I have to say, so far we really love it. First of all, the space. We have our own bedroom! Adam and I, that is. The kids have their own bedroom! Shared, that is. (If you’re from Brooklyn: I know, isn’t that exciting? A bedroom! With a window and a closet and a door! If you’re from anywhere else in the country excepting possibly San Francisco: Yes, the kids share a room, get over it.) We have  multiple closets and multiple doors! The kitchen has these storagey things called “cabinuts” or something! It’s all quite thrilling. And the building is full of friendly kids and neighbors and dogs and such. Harper’s favorite thing ever is pushing the elevator buttons. My favorite thing ever is pushing my SUV of a double stroller into the elevator. People, this is the life.

I’m already feeling protective of Kensington, though. I was just about to write about how I love my new coffee shop/office, our new playground, our new library branch, our new playspace, and then I was about to write something about how none of these places are as ridiculously crowded all the time as their shinier Park Slope counterparts (we’ve never waited in line for a swing at the playground here, if you can believe it), but then I thought, Waaaaiiiit- If I tell everyone how great it is here than everyone else will move here and then where will I be? In line for a goddamned swing is where.

Then I remembered that, thank goodness, I hardly have that kind of influence. Or readership. And also, we’ve only been here a few weeks. There’s plenty of time to realize we’ve made a TERRIBLE MISTAKE AND RUINED OUR LIVES AND THE LIVES OF OUR INNOCENT CHILDREN.

Nah. Come on, Steeplechase Coffee has red velvet twinkies! What could go wrong?

Here We Are

The Read Balloon: A Glorious Day

I’m officially behind on everything: this blog, every blog, to-do lists, returning phone calls, social interactions, personal hygiene. And this is in part because of a very wonderful, thrilling new stress: we are moving! Yes, after looking on and off for two years or something like that we have found an apartment and then we bought it and now we have to do something about getting ourselves in there. Hold on, you say. That’s nice, but isn’t this a Read Balloon post about books somehow? Stay with me here, yes, I’m getting to it.

So the place we are moving into is a big ole 1950′s co-op building with 55 units and some exciting features: elevator, laundry, and tons of kids. We’ve already been to a birthday party there — there are 10 kids under the age of 3 — and were regaled with tales of intra-building playdates on cold winter days, chase games in the corridors, laundry room toddler jamborees, and holiday parades in the lobby. We’re so excited!! It is going to be our favorite and our best!

All of this is relevant because the book Harper and I have been obsessed with lately is Amy Schwartz‘s excellent A Glorious Day. It’s one of those sweetly uneventful books (a friend who was roped into reading it 9 times in a row to Harper was like, “What is up with that book anyway?”) that really appeals to small children. Harper loves to read and reread details like what kids have for breakfast, or how they prepare for bed — after all, these are the main events of her life too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The book is basically an ode to Brooklyn family life, and this (along with the wonderful illustrations) is why I’m okay with reading it 7,000 times a day. 10 kids (am I counting right?) live in a little 4-unit apartment building, and the book is concerned with all these kids — the baby, the little kids, the big kids — spend their day. They play in their small apartments, they meet up in the stairwells and on the stoop, they stroll down the block to the playground. They flow in and out of each others’ lives organically — hearing each other in the bath at bathtime, helping each other locate lost pets, seeing one another at the store on on the street. With all the aspects of city life that seems so unwholesome for growing children, I love a good reminder of what’s so wonderful about it — the built-in community, the sights and sounds, the constant stream of interesting stimuli.

Plus, Schwartz’s illustrations are so lovable. We’ve already packed the scanner or I would share my favorite page, which features the bedtime arrangements of all the kids in the buildings and all the various shared bedrooms (another newfound interest of mine) — the bunkbeds next to the crib, the twin beds lined up Madeline-style. I’m so glad we stumbled upon this book, which came to us at just the right time, as all good books do.

Now let’s hope I can somehow return it to the library on time. This move has me psychotically scattered, but that’s another post. A post I will never have time to write.

A Glorious Day by Amy Schwartz. Warning: This subversive text features children jumping on sofas and eating potato chips for breakfast. Just so you're prepared.

The Dance of the Sugar-Crazed Fairy

Image from Gyo Fujikawa's Night Before Christmas

I’m so behind on my to-do list these days that I’m starting to get out-of-season — I have potentially great blog posts that have remained entirely in my head and soon will be putridly out of date, like a Shamrock Shake you find in your fridge mid-June, unspeakably furzed. All these cute seasonal things have been happening — an attempt at candy cane playdough in little babyfood jars as presents to Harper’s classmates (it looked really cute but ours was a weird gelatinous mush the next day and I fear everyone else’s was too — I bet that never happens to The Artful Parent lady!), a day devoted to making salt dough ornaments, which were a big hit with Harper and infected our apartment with a plague of glitter.

And, also, I took Harper to see The Nutcracker, an outing I’ve been looking forward to since Harper was the gestational age of approximately 20 weeks. We went with a local, kid-friendly version — Lincoln Center is for the reliably potty-trained, I think — at Brooklyn College. The good people at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts have put together a sweet, family-friendly version, including a voice over explaining the trippy things occurring on the stage. That said, the thing is still 2 hours long and, as I’d forgotten in the 25-odd years since I last saw The Nutcracker, kind of creepy.

Also, taking a two-year-old to the ballet is akin to walking a bull with a time bomb strapped to it through a crystal palace. The best part was just before the curtain went up, when Harper was perched on the edge of her chair, her hands clasped, saying, “Oh, I’m just so essited for the ballerinas!” I almost floated our of my $7 seat, I was so charmed by her essitement. As soon as they dimmed the lights, however, she started saying she wanted to go home. I spent the next half-hour or so whispering answers to her many questions as quietly as possible and bribing her with M&Ms.

At one point she announced she was going home and took off, so I slunk after her, inwardly pouting about missing the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. In the lobby, Harper stopped to stare at a ballerina on a television screen before saying, “I want to see that!” “That’s what’s going on inside the theater,” I said in a very nice and not at all annoyed voice. “Let’s go!” she said brightly, bounding back towards our seats.

By the last third or so of the ballet,  though, I did one of those Parenty Things you think you’ll never do and truly don’t understand until it happens to you — that is, I realized it would be easier to get out of the parking lot if we left before the show ended. Away we went. In the car Harper sighed dreamily. “Did you like it?” I asked her. “I did,” she said, “I really liked those M&Ms.”

All in all, a cultural triumph.

Now there are presents to be wrapped, and tomorrow, cookies to be made. (Harper was very concerned that Santa would eat her Hanukkah cookies, so we decided to make some just for him.)  There will be a walk in the park, since global warming’s fucking with our sledding tradition, and then a delicious Christmas meal (delivered by Fresh Direct, of course), and then I am staying up to catch Santa.  Dear blog people, happy holiday of choice, and to all, a good night.

(PS Check out my post on creating holiday memories over at the Redbook Motherboard blog!)

Images from Gyo Fujikawa's The Night Before Christmas

In Love With Inconvenience: The New York City Parent

 

Brooklyn, Land of the Schleppers

One thing I love about living in the city is having interesting, sophisticated, worldly conversations with the smart, creative people one meets here. To wit, one of my recent favorites, concerning the question, “How do you get in the door?” I bet moms in the suburbs don’t have stimulating conversations like this one.

In the strange case that you were curious, here’s my version: If we are in the double stroller I kick Harper out, make her walk up the front stairs, then pull the stroller up the front stairs into the vestibule where I park, unload, put Ollie in the carrier, then lug everything up to our third floor apartment while shouting at Harper, “Go! Go! Don’t pick up the neighbors’ shoes! Just walk! No, don’t sit down and talk to Pretend-Murray! Walk! Up!” Or, alternately, if we are in the single, umbrella stroller, then I kick Harper out, make her walk up the stairs, unload whatever groceries we’ve acquired or cubbies that have been stowed in the basket, take these up into the vestibule, then fold the stroller and insert it into the stroller-pile in the hallway before lugging everything up while shouting, “Walk, Harper! No, Pretend-Murray doesn’t need a time-out! Go up the stairs! Up! Up!”

My friends and I like to discuss our other fox-chicken-chicken feed type conundrums – how to get groceries, walk dogs, take the subway, etc – in excruciating detail, grateful for every inkling that someone else has it worse. “Oh, you have to store your stroller in the basement? Drag!” It’s very enriching. And it’s not just the everyday household stuff either; it’s schooling (“How many pre-Ks is Punky applying to?”); it’s housing (“I hope the co-op board approves us so we can move into our $800,000 studio!”) – we just like everything to be about 12 steps more complicated than it is anywhere else.

But as I was transporting an IKEA haul up our rickety stairs the other day, having performed extremely complicated car-moving maneuvers (coordinating, as I do, all driving outings with times when the car has to be moved for alternate side parking/street cleaning anyway), it occurred to me that I probably secretly like all this ridiculousness. After all, it is a kind of a puzzle, a riddle to feverishly occupy my mind while my body performs numbingly boring tasks like grocery shopping. It becomes a kind of a game to multi-task as many tasks as possible, to transform an ordinary errand into a complicated series of strategic moves. Everyday life, become chess.

That said, I wouldn’t mind a slightly less crafty opponent, sometimes.

Fall in Prospect Park

Every once in a while someone who doesn’t live in New York expresses concern about the strange practice of raising children in the city, and I realize they don’t know about the park. The park! We are obsessed with the park. Or I am. Harper has probably spent 60% of her life in the park. The playground, the meadows, the zoo, the botanic gardens, the carousel, the other playground, the other other playground, the tot lot. Oh the park. It’s true about city dwellers and parks being our yards. And we don’t even have to mow. It obligingly glows in Autumn. This is good because we are too lazy to drive out of the city in order to enjoy fall color. Which is good because we live near the park. Oh the park.

“I’m going to dream of Halloween”

I guess I’ve got a chip on my shoulder when it comes to kid Halloween. Every year I get annoyed that there are scary, inexplicable decorations everywhere, spooking Harper. (The other day at the children’s museum — “Why there’s a hand there, Mama?” “Oh, you know. Just a really fun severed hand floating in some fake formaldehyde as a hilarious joke. Whee!”) She also hates masks and face paint, although she did manage gather up the bravery today at playschool to get her nose painted pink. Then there’s the candy situation. Why would I want strangers to give my kid a bunch of terrible junk food I don’t really want her to eat at all? Why? And let’s not forget the costume situation, which just reminds me of what a non-crafty mama I really am. Maybe it’s the deep-seated costume-wariness of a bespectacled person. Glasses really make costumes impossible. I’m probably the only person in the world or at least Park Slope who wants Sarah Palin to jump into the Republican primary race — just because she’s a good costume for me, people, that’s it.

Still, over the course of the day I admit that my Halloween grinchiness was melted away. Harper was delighted with the morning’s costumes, invented by her: Charlie and Lola.

I was proud of her for this costume idea. First of all, it’s literary and almost entirely unrecognizable by the general public, and thus, my kind of costume. Second of all, it included her brother, which melted my Halloweeny heart. Third of all, it was easily thrown together, consisting of normal and rewearable clothes. I mean, am I an unfun Mom or what.

This costume was perfect for the morning at school — after all, it’s just clothes. And Harper really really liked pretending to be Lola all day. She demanded a lot of pink milk, addressed me as Marv or sometimes Minnie, and got into zany mishaps with an invisible Lotta. Good times!

But a few weeks ago a desire to also be a fairy princess was expressed. What IS a fairy princess? How does she know about them? I don’t know. All I know is, I placed an order with the brilliant Halloween seamstress that is my mother and a few days later a sweet, diaphanous, sparkly fairy dress arrived in the mail. Tiara, wings, and wand were obtained. Alton was squeezed into Harper’s old monkey costume.Costumes #2 were in full effect for evening.

Harper of course refused to wear the fairy princess getup. At trick-or-treating time we made our way out onto the street, Harper dressed as a cranky 2 year old who needed a nap. (A very convincing ensemble, I have to say.) But the magic smoke bubbles at the bakery across the street and hordes of costumed kids changed her mind, as did our accidental trick-or-treating on the way to her friend’s house. “Why he is giving me candy?” Harper kept demanding.

Finally we met up with Malka, her parents, and Adam. As usual, Malka and Harper whipped each other into a frenzy of giddiness, and soon Harper was racing around in her fairy princess costume which was good so I didn’t have to freak out on her about demanding it. The girls loved trick-or-treating, monkey-Alton fell asleep in the carrier, and the grownups got to feel charmed by brownstone Brooklyn in all its neighborhoody glory.
In conclusion… tiara+lollipops=really impressively tangled hair.

Rockaway Beach: The Mini-Montauk.

For a few years now, we’ve celebrated the Amy Shearn Birthday Week of Tribute by going to Montauk, a sleepy little fishing town known only to locals and us. In October, that is. This year when Adam suggested it, I shuddered. I love Montauk. I love my birthday weekend trip. But traveling with two wee people, as cute as the photos turn out, is just so much work. What I really wanted was a morning with a cappuccino and newspaper and then perhaps a professional haircut from an elderly poolshark (both of which have been accomplished today, thank goodness).

Luckily Adam came up with a brilliant solution: a day trip to the Rockaways. For free, after only a 30 minute drive, we got our sunny, abandoned beach, our wild waves, our feeling of being out of the city, and we were home in time for Ollie’s nap. Heaven.

 

Mastering the Kid/Baby Combo Outing

The path through Pier 6 park. Talia guides Harper while Alton sweats on my chest, never being photographed.

Forget everything I said about the importance of white space in the day of the wee. Harper’s painstakingly giving up her nap, and oh but the days are long when a 2-year-old never sleeps, rendering herself too tired to really properly entertain herself in ways other than, oh, say, experimenting with opening the oven. I’ve been sort of torturing her with nonstop fun, with the goal of keeping her occupied and tiring her out so completely that bedtime’s a snap.

The real challenge is finding just the right outing for a 2-year-old and a 4-month-old — and I imagine this will only get more complicated as Alton learns to do annoying little brother things like “walk” and “have opinions.” So what are we supposed to do all day? (As Harper asks me every morning, “We going somewhere Mama? What we doing today?”)

The playground is pretty annoying when you have a sweaty babelet strapped to your chest and can’t follow the tot up onto treacherous play equipment.  A playdate at someone else’s place is pretty good, and you might even get to go pee by yourself. The pool is near impossible. A picnic in the park is tough – too many places for big kid to run. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum is a good option, since it’s so contained – you need a place where it’s really really hard for the older kid to harm herself while you’re distracted or nursing or sneaking a drink from your flask – but you have to pay and stuff.

This week’s real winner was Pier 6 – good thing, as I was developing a real complex about how we hadn’t been there because I was such a lazy and incompetent mother. We finally went yesterday, and you know, it’s not a bad baby/tot outing. I give it a B. The Water Lab is lovely, really engaging, pretty contained, and none of the water deep enough to be worrisome if the ambulatory child wanders off a bit. That said, Harper did suffer a minor head injury, refreshing her perpetual black eye, but that’s to expected from any really fun day.

Anyway, the park is beautiful, and I’m so thankful that our friends Kim and Talia escorted us there, since I was a bit intimidated by the idea of getting there. In the end bus ride was actually fun, too, if a little complex with the stroller/kid/baby combo. Harper and Talia were super into watching out the windows, and when we got off the bus at the park Harper literally wept.

Thank goodness for friends, really, who make it possible for us to go places other than our living room. Or the Y. No offense to the Y.