McMe-Time With Fries

They made me do it.

I am writing this blog post on my phone, in my parked car, having just participated in one of the most salacious, shameful activities in my mom-repetoire, so embarrassing that I feel compelled to immediately share with the world. It involves… sleeping children. And… fast food.

But before I dive in, let me just provide some context– after an exciting morning of having a cavity filled (honestly, the most restful moment of the day), I spent an hour getting the kids ready to go to the doctor. This had me a little anxious already; last time we went to the doctor’s Harper distinguished herself by shouting,  “I’m not listening to you! I’m going to escape!” and running out of the room. This morning she is being especially contrary, vetoing the sweater I offer, turning down the suggested boots with disgust, really wanting Special Baby to go in the car seat instead of Ollie. (How do you argue with something like that?) Getting downstairs takes cajoling, getting across the street to where the car is parked takes threats, by the time I’m trying to get her in the car seat she’s kicking at my face (“I want to do everything all by myself on my own!”) while Ollie watches the show, and I’m yelling at her there on the avenue for all to see. “Stop kicking me!” I add as I shut the door, just in case any disapproving eavesdropper needs to know why I’m spewing venom at a sweet-faced little blonde clutching her dolly.

So. Then, the doctor’s office, where Harper repeats her trickery despite not being the one being examined at all, pushing at the doctor’s chair experimentally and whispering, “No doctor for me OR Ollie.” One shot and one screaming baby later, we are headed home. “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up!” Harper announces as we get back in the car.

Now, we don’t drive often. This used to be because, hello, we live in New York City which is where people live when they are superior beings who walk places and frequent local shops. Now I admit, it’s mostly because finding parking in our neighborhood is an exercise in futility, so that my outings are all coordinated with alternate side parking, when the streets miraculously clear for the street sweepers, only to have every spot filled the instant it’s legal again. So driving is a little bit of a novelty for the kids, and for me, and so I am unused to this weird phenomenon of the kids both falling asleep in their car seats on our way back from anywhere.

Car naps used to disturb me because I used to care about “junk sleep” and “nap schedules.” Then I had another baby. Now I take what I can get. And when both kids are asleep at the same time, it’s like a spa vacation. In my car. So you know what I do?

I drive to McDonalds. I do. And I go through the drive-through. I do! McDonalds is so evil and disgusting! I, who used to be a vegan who lectured people on how supporting companies like McDonalds was destroying the earth and making angels cry! And… “Ah, can I get an iced coffee? And, like, a grilled chicken sandwich? Do you have something like that? A grilled chicken sandwich?”

“A McChicken?”

“Um, is that grilled?” I hear how ridiculous this sounds and correct myself, “Yes, please.” (It is not. It is a big chicken finger covered in greenish ribbons imitating lettuce and something like mayonnaise.) (It is DELICIOUS.) “Is the chicken organic?” I’m kidding, I don’t ask that. But I do think it. Oh, and can I just say that the sandwich, coffee, and fruit thingy that I get all cost $5? Do people know about this? That’s amazing!

And then, there I am, parked on a tree-lined Park Slope street, my kids snoozing away in neck-kinking slumps, sipping a McDonalds iced coffee (the medium is large enough to kill a horse — what is wrong with this country?! — oh, and delicious), and you know what? It’s the second-most relaxing moment of my day. After having my cavity filled.

PS Read more about how deeply, embarrassingly imperfect of a mother I am over at an even-more public forum here!

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.

Malka’s Miniature Room

The other day Harper declared Malka to be her best, best friend. This was after some quality time spent engaged in Harper’s favorite friend-activity, namely, holding hands and running and falling down. Just like true best friends, they spend a lot of time being sort of awful to each other. But lately an amazing thing has happened. On a playdate Malka’s mother (the accomplished poet and YA author Carley Moore, who also makes a killer smoothie) and I realized we hadn’t heard from the girls in a while. After a moment of cold dread, we found them happily playing together in Malka’s sweet little room. After two and a half years of parallel play interrupted now and then by knock-down-drag-out brawls, this is a very thrilling developmental milestone. Malka is an older woman, having already turned 3, and I think her maturity might be rubbing off on not-quite-two-and-a-half Harper.

I believe the sweetness of Malka’s room has something to do with their congenial play. There is just something about this room (and the whole apartment) that feels like home, that reminds me of what I loved about being a child and my own room growing up– a relaxed, homey warmth.

Here’s what Carley has to say about the 9×12 room and how it came together: “My mom, Judy Haller of Jamestown, New York, made both of the quilts.  The purple one she made for Malka when she was born and it’s made from fabrics that we’re designed to look like childrens’ fabrics from the 1940s.  I love some of those patterns–the tiny kittens and the hearts, very retro.”

” The second one (the red and blue one), my mom made last year for Malka at Christmas.  I love the reds and blues and that there is a different panel for every month.  I come from a long-line of quilt makers–most of the women in my family quilt (my mom, my aunts, my grandma) so it’s special to have these in Malka’s room.  Plus, they are so one-of-a-kind–the quilter’s vision is always so interesting to me, kind of like a writer’s voice.”

“Shells–Malka loves shells and jewelry.  We try to arrange those on her dresser, and she rearranges often.  She sometimes tries to sleep with her shells she loves them so much.” [Ed. note: Also My Little Pony! Hello, wave of nostalgia! YES!]

“The new bookcase.  It’s a piece of crap from Ikea–a Billy to be exact.  I don’t want to knock the Billy though.  We have many of them in our house full of books.  I always say that I won’t buy another, but they are so cheap and they fit a lot of stuff.  Now Malka has some bins for tiny things like cars, paper dolls, and beads, and all of her books and puzzles fit in one place.  Yay!”

“Matt’s father made the Malka collage when she was born.  He’s a painter and collage maker.”

I think it only fair to note that this room was spic-and-span when we arrived, but the girls immediately pulled down one of the toy bins and got to work making music and playing. I’m telling you, this room WORKS!

You know what else I think helps make this home so cozy and warm? The excellent design choice of cats draped luxuriously here and there.

Also, Malka has a kick-ass doll house that really reminds me of the Fisher Price one I used to have.

So there you have it. And now, let us hold hands and run in the fields together. Metaphorically, I mean, of course.

Hello, Greenwood Playschool, How Are You?

I was sitting here thinking of how to write this post and experienced a brain-montage of “talking! doing! making!” moments. Listening to a friend talk about how she’d started a playschool co-op for her daughter. Sitting on the bench in front of the bakery, casually mentioning the idea to another mom-friend. Gathering notes. Trading ideas. Meetings and playdates along the way with various baked goods in tow (this, before the second children started to appear). Interviewing teachers. Having sample lessons with teachers. Running up all those steps. Wait. That last one maybe wasn’t us.

Anyway, here it is, it’s started! We’ve had two-and-a-half weeks of playschool (we have to call it playschool or the accredited-preschool cops will bust down Beth’s  beautiful door). It’s been, honestly, better than I ever imagined. The kids are so READY. When we started talking about this process, many of us weren’t sure 2-year-olds even needed any kind of school, which was part of what made paying 8 zillion dollars for a Park Slope Sprouts Something feel silly.  Now that they are all two-and-a-half or thereabouts, they are just so ready and so into it.

Our teacher Cyndi is amazing — smart, funny, easy-going, creative, and so energetic I think she might not be actually human. I was the TA on the first day, and it was too rainy to really play outside much. Cyndi took one look at the bouncing bunch and announced that it was jumping time. And then they sang a song and jumped up and down.  Over and over. It was amazing. They are also doing schoolier stuff too — learning days of the week and talking about weather and sitting nicely for snacks and reading stories and having choice time and doing art projects…it’s so cute I might explode.

Impressively, everyone’s done really great with the separation. Harper freaked out a little the first time I left but since has been completely fine. Every morning we go over it. “And then you come back?” “Yes.” “You’ll come get me?” “Yes.” “Is Ollie going to be there?” “Ollie will stay with me and we will come pick you up.” Then she asks me what color Cyndi will be wearing. “Will it be purple Cyndi or orange Cyndi?” “I don’t know.” “Because why?” “Because…um…get your backpack.”

Harper loves the routines. She comes home and immediately commences to play school like it’s her job. Which it sort of is, I guess. She doles out spots. She sits down cubbies. She sings the hello song and goodbye song in an endless loop. She only answers to the name “Pretend Cyndi.” It’s all just a very satisfying response.

If anyone is interested in starting a co-op, or wondering how to go about it, or has any advice for us as we proceed through our school year, let me know! I can’t say how pleased I am with how it’s going. I feel so lucky to have found this group of moms and kids, too.  Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s choice time. And my choice is always to read. (By which I mean sleep, obviously.)

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.

Summertime at Camp Ikea

What do cool Brooklyn parents do when it’s 100 degrees out and their under-air-conditioned 3rd floor apartments are doing their best sauna impressions? They go to the Children’s Museum I think, or a hip indoor playground, or the Met, or Coney Island, or something else culturally and intellectually stimulating to make their non-New Yorker friends jealous. I wouldn’t actually know. Instead, today my kids and I pretended we live in the suburbs. We got in the car, cranked up the air conditioning, and drove to Ikea.

You know how sometimes it’s too hot to eat? Well, not at Ikea. Bonus: views of lower Manhattan AND ALSO SOME GUYS WASHING SCHOOL BUSES! Harper found that pretty interesting.

Harper especially likes the bathroom at Ikea. They have a little potty in the big stall, and more importantly, a miniature sink for munchkin hand-washing. She really would have washed her hands at this sink all day if I had let her.

After slunch, OCD handwashing, and a diaper change marathon, we headed to the indoor playground. I mean, the kids’ section.

Even baby Alton got in on the action, enjoying a playmat soaked with shopper germs while Harper played in a wardrobe. “I’m just looking for big girl toys. Sorry, baby Ollie, there’s no toys.”

And finally, ice cream.

I mean, is that the best afternoon ever or what? Also, they have a parking lot and no one is there on a weekday. And just wait until Harper is big enough for the play area daycare thingy! The only problem with Ikea is that because I can’t do math, I get tricked every time. “Yeah,” I think, “I’ll pick up this cute wooden toy. It’s two dollars! Oh, and we certainly need some heart-shaped ice cube trays. Only two dollars!” Every time I go I’m convinced I’m not going to spend any money and then am shocked at my total. Those tricksters! Turns out those only-two-dollars-es add up! Oh well. If you can restrain yourself you can have a kids meal, a temperate place to play, and a new toy to bring home for $5 or so.

As we were strolling through the monstrous warehouse they make you trek through to leave (oh, and Harper loves sitting in the shopping cart, too) I said, “So much of our furniture is from Ikea. Our bookshelves–” “Mama,” said Harper, seeming a little dazed, “Let’s not talk about things.”

Indeed.

Springtime in Brooklyn

I’m glad I always have my babies in the early spring.

I’m also glad Adam takes such beautiful photographs.

And I’m extra glad that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has all those cherry blossoms.

They seem to be the only things that get exuberant enough early enough to properly herald the end of winter.

Even if they are essentially only photo ops.

I’ve never been to the actual Sakura Matsuri festival though. Despite living in New York, I don’t love crowds. My favorite thing, I think, is a place that’s usually crowded, when it isn’t. Perverse, isn’t it.

Harper feels the same way as I do about crowds.

Sabine’s Room: Small and Serene

Here is Sabine.

The lovely and refined Sabine (who you might recall from our adventures painting cookies) was Harper’s first ever friend that she made herself. Isn’t that cute? They found one another in the childcare at the Y. Finally Sabine’s mother and I took the hint and started making playdates for them. Harper is obsessed with Sabine. The other day I told her we were going to do something really fun and she said, “Oh! Play with Sabine?” She was so sad to leave Sabine’s house yesterday that she decided she would dream about Sabine when she went to sleep. It’s ridiculous.

I like Sabine too, and it just so happens that she has a beautiful little bedroom (6×9, I think — I know, HUGE compared to Harper’s) that perfectly reflects her serene and ladylike bearing. She and her mother were gracious enough to let me snap some pictures in order to present our first-ever-that’s-not-Harper’s tiny bedroom tour.

In a seriously tragic twist of fate, Sabine is moving to Seattle, and their apartment is thus on the market. This lovely (if ever so slightly misleading) photo was taken by their real estate photographer, Jessica Brown.

Sabine’s mother, Carrie, told me a bit about how the room came together.

“Mama is  not so crafty, but luckily grandmamas are. Each made her quilts that are layered on her bed (which is from Ikea– super basic 100 dollar crib that turns into a toddler bed); my mom also made the pillow covers on the bed.  One of the owl pillows came from a cousin who used to design kids’ clothes (the orange one) and the other came from a friend of a friend who sells her stuff on Etsy (her name is Jannine Doto).

The cross-stitch piece above the head of the bed is made by Dave’s mom (Nana) and the little framed piece above it is actually a soap wrapper from the gorgeous works of Saipua of Brooklyn. The tapestry on the wall is from a long-ago trip to Peru that Dave and I took waaaay before Sabine was born (of course).  The mobile is just a basic metal piece (bought at Area kids in the slope) to which I affixed cute little paper balloons of different animals that I found at Pearl River Mart in Soho. Sabine still loves those!

There are hooks on the adjacent wall  that we got on our “babymoon” trip to Maine. We knew we had no closest space in the nursery so were trying to think of ways to maximize wall/vertical space.

The green dresser was a FIND of a lifetime. I bought it on sale (90 percent off) at Anthropologie on 5th Avenue in the city– and neither the sales girl nor I could believe the tag of 160 dollars (down from 1600). She said, “you know that is cheaper than most of our dresses!” Funny stuff. I had it delivered for another 50 bucks or so and never looked back. It’s been a life-saver since it houses all of Sabine’s clothes, blankets, extra linens, and a great many toys etc.

The rug is a basic wool one from Ikea– and the shelf is from Ikea too. The toys are from various places: the abacus was mine when I was a kid, the piggy bank on the shelf I found in a little antiques shop in Seattle (in Ravenna); and the dollhouse was an Amazon purchase.”

And there you have it. Isn’t it pretty?

Harper's like, "Wait whaaaat? Sabine is MOVING? WTF PEOPLE? I REFUSE TO ACCEPT THIS!"