Just the Four of Us

Today I felt myself switch over into "Single Mother Mode," and had a better understanding of how I do this when Lena's gone for a month every summer (Lena has a great summer gig working as a sea kayak guide in Alaska). Yesterday left me feeling a bit insane, but today was sweet and I felt very glad for the three little loves who are still at home with me while my Love is away. We woke up at 7:00 (usual wake-up call by Lukas who likely had been watching the clock for an hour), and all 4 of us climbed into the clawfoot tub for a hot bath. Bathing with my children is, perhaps surprisingly, one of my most favorite things. Hot baths in general are hugely medicinal for me, and I've found that they work a similar sort of magic on my relationships with my children. Anytime there's bad energy between us, a shared bath is sure to switch us back into a more patient, loving, and respectful state. I think it's as close as I can get to just popping them back in my womb for a moment. Things are getting a bit squished in the "family bath" these days, and I have been wistfully remembering the heaven of the two-person jacuzzi tub we had in our last home. It was the deal-maker in convincing me to move 30 minutes away from where we'd been living previously, and it was the one feature of the house that made it hard to leave two years later. Still, I totally took that tub for granted. But as squished as we all were in the bath this morning, it was absolutely the best possible way to wake up, after a night of barely 6 hours of interrupted sleep at the bottom of a four-person pig pile, in an unheated bedroom.

Tonight we once again mourned the absence of Lena by once again doing something that she generally dislikes for dinner. We went out to eat at our favorite restaurant, and it was lovely. While we waited for the food to come, we played drawing games on scrap paper. Our old standard, "guess what this is I'm drawing," occupied us for a couple of minutes until no one could guess that Jasper's black scribbled circle was actually supposed to represent a "RED apple," and things started to fall apart. I decided to introduce them to one of my old favorite drawing games from my childhood, and it was a huge success. We each drew the head of a person on a piece of paper, and then folded it over so that whoever would be drawing the torso wouldn't be able to see what the head looked like. Then whoever drew the torso folded the paper again so that the third artist could add the legs. Jaz and Luke have just recently gotten to the point of being able to pull this off, and they LOVED doing it. Here are the results:


I left the restaurant feeling full of good food and good love for these three small people whose lives have become the purpose of my life. When we got home, Luke and Jaz each ate a banana (apparently they were still hungry), and then Jaz fed a sliced banana to Zeb (who is perfectly capable of eating a banana all on his own, but who loved being fed by his big brother). Jaz and Luke take such good care of Zeben, and I just can't get enough of it. It makes it all feel worth it. I love watching them be so tender with their baby brother. I stood and gawked and snapped some pictures until Jaz yelled at me to put the camera away.



Later, as Jaz was climbing into bed, he reminded me of how he'd alerted me to get a marble out of Zeben's mouth earlier in the day.

"It was really a good thing I noticed that Zeben had that marble. Because if he ate the marble, he might get dead or something."
"Yes, thank you Jaz. That was so scary for me. You do a really good job taking care of your baby."
"But if he did eat the marble? And if he did get dead? Then I guess we could just have another baby, right?"
"Well, regardless of whether or not we ever have another baby, we would feel really, really sad if anything bad ever happened to Zeben."
"But then, if he did die, you'd at least still have two kids left."
"Yes, I would. But I really want to just keep having all three of my kids."
"Yeah," chimed in Lukas, "because we're all your babies, so you don't want any of us to get smushed or dead, right? Right?"
"Right."

I sat in their room, on pirate watch, until they had both fallen asleep. And, sleeping, they really did look just the same as they did when they were my babies. And I was reminded of how it feels when your newborn baby wakes up in the night to nurse, and you just feel so excited to get to look at him again. Even if it's only been two hours. And you study each little detail of his face. And you're so tired, but you just can't stop staring even after he's done nursing and he's peacefully sleeping again. You want to eat him with your eyes. I guess I still feel that way about my big babies. When I let myself remember.

"T" is for Toilet

I thought I should probably get right to the point and start making things now that I have this blog to document my progress. So, this afternoon, while Zeb was napping in the stroller, I opened up the fabric cupboard and got to work thought about what I'd like to make first. I've been meaning to make a set of alphabet beanbags for several months now. Luke and Jaz are fairly obsessed with learning about letters and reading and writing, and I thought we could probably think up a few fun games involving the beanbags (if I ever got around to making them). My original fantasy involved finding 26 different types of printed fabric, one for each letter in the alphabet. The "A" fabric would be dotted with apples, and the "B" fabric might have balloons on it while the "C" fabric could be covered in cars, and so on and so forth. This is why so few of my ideas actually make it past the idea stage. Because clearly, once you get through with all the apples, balloons, cars, dogs, elephants, frogs and houses, etc., it's going to be hard to think of something that starts with the letter "Q," let alone find a fabric covered in miniature quilts.

These are the kind of things that keep me awake at night. Really. I lie in our huge nest of a family bed, with peaceful, sleeping bodies all around me, and obsess over what kind of fabric might best represent the letter "X." Maybe skulls and cross-bones? Like for X-ray? Or would that be too confusing? Would Luke and Jaz then think that "X" was for "skeleton," or might they get even more confused and think that "X" was actually for "pirate?" This is the kind of thinking that can drive a sleep-deprived insomniac mama crazy. So I've decided to put an end to that idea and move forward with a simpler version of the alphabetic beanbags. Please take a moment, though, and appreciate just how fabulous it would have been if I'd been able to pull it off. Instead, I am planning on making the whole set out of only 4 different soft, flannel fabrics. Stay tuned for more details.

Lena is away and won't be back until after bedtime on Thursday. She's gone to someplace in New York for a Forestry Conference, where she will be presenting a poster about her research. The kids and I decided to mourn her absence this evening by eating "breakfast for dinner," a concept that horrifies my sweet love and is absolutely prohibited when she's home. So I made Belgian Waffles from scratch, topped with maple syrup and whipped cream, with chicken apple sausage and applesauce on the side.

While I was making this masterpiece of a breakfast dinner, just when my hours of preparation were about to culminate into a perfectly-timed, hot-off-the-waffle-iron meal, I heard a series of squeals and shrieks from the other room. Jasper was yelling in his most excited and animated voice for Lukas to come quick.

"It's an EMERGENCY, Lukas! You have to SEE this!"

And then moments later, Lukas calmly appeared at my side in the kitchen, where I was whipping the heavy cream to perfection.

"Um, Mom? Um, I think there's an emergency happening in the bathroom. The toilet is, like, overflowing water all over the floor."

Much to my shock and horror, the toilet was, like, overflowing water all over the floor. It was pouring out of the bathroom and into the front hall. It was like a cartoon of a toilet overflowing. I'd never seen anything like it before in real life. Water was literally gushing out of the back of the toilet. I joined in the scream fest and added to the flood by trying to flush the toilet again. Bad idea. We raced upstairs to our better-equipped bathroom, and I told the kids to grab as many towels as they could. We ran back down, and threw towels over the floors in the bathroom and the front hall, and I plunged the toilet, and finally there was calm. We all peeled off our cold socks and rolled up our pants so that we wouldn't feel the wet cuffs against our bare legs. I realized that the waffle iron was beeping in the kitchen. I feared the sausages were burning. I began to transition from panic about the toilet overflow to panic about a ruined dinner. Meanwhile, my three children were all grinning. I don't know that I've ever seen them quite that giddy before.

"I am definitely going to share about this at meeting tomorrow."
"Can we do this again sometime mom? Can I overflow the toilet again?"
"No, this is not the kind of thing that we ever try to do on purpose."
"But that was SO funny, Mom! Remember when you were screaming and running upstairs to get the towels? I thought the water was never going to stop! I thought it was going to keep flooding the house until Mama got home!"
"Pleeeease Mom, can we do it again, Please?"

I hope not. But we can relive the experience over and over and over again, like we did at dinner tonight. And, despite the unappetizing discussion of the Great Toilet Water Flood, the food was delicious.

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This is actually a craft blog

In case you were wondering. Or, I suppose I should say, in case I was wondering since as of yet I am the only subscribed reader of this blog. I have been reading many craft blogs lately, blogs where people (mostly mamas) post pictures and descriptions of all the lovely things that they are making with their hands and their sewing machines. And while reading their blogs fills me with inspiration and awe, it has also made me realize that blogging is an excellent way to motivate oneself to create. Thus, the point of this blog is mainly to motivate MYself to create things which I can then post about making on my blog.

Along the way I may also end up blogging about other sorts of things. Like the fact that letting my five-year-olds watch the movie, "Hook" this past weekend was perhaps one of my most hideous mistakes as a mother. I admit that I even felt a bit of dread as I clicked on the title of the movie while scrolling through the family movies section of my parents' "on demand" cable listings. But for some reason I chose to ignore that little alarm of the maternal instinct alert system. We (the 3 boys and I) were staying at my parents' house for the night and my desire to have a couple of hours of peace--doing what now I cannot even remember--stood in the way of my better judgment. We don't have cable at home, and the kids don't watch TV at all (though they do watch select dvds from time to time with some amount of passion), which is perhaps why I allowed myself to make such a callous decision in that moment. What's a couple hours of unsupervised movie watching in an otherwise media-starved life? And they LOVED the movie. The few times I peeked in on them while they were watching it, they were both flushed and grinning.

"We really love this movie, mom."
"I didn't know you would let us watch this movie, this is a PIRATE movie!"
"This is really the best movie, ever, mom. Really."
"I love you, mom."

But apparently, what they failed to mention at the time is that they were absolutely terrified. Which is why I am now sitting on the floor of the kids' bedroom waiting for Lukas to fall asleep. He is too scared to be awake in a room without a grown-up, even with all the lights on. And since my wife was completely and totally appalled to learn that I had allowed this unaccompanied viewing to take place (that in fact it was my idea), it is now officially my job to sit here until his eyelids finally collapse for the night. Thank goodness for wireless and my trusty laptop.