I love staying home full-time with the kids. We have so much fun together. I love the quietness of it, the times we have for reading and painting and making meals. I love to go on outings, meet up with friends, play in the yard for hours and hours.
I’m discovering that I am a mom who needs activity. Even if the activity is just being outdoors and swinging or bike riding or chatting with neighbors (we do a lot of that!). In contrast, I don’t do so well just hanging out. Last weekend, I was the parent who got up with the kids in the mornings. On Monday morning, Bryan noted that we’d had a feast for breakfast every morning: crepes on Saturday, pancakes on Sunday, and waffles on Monday. All included eggs and sausage and juice and coffee. I told him that it was easier for me to have a project to do with the kids when we’re up early together. “As opposed to just playing with them?” he replied.
He’s right. If we’re just playing in the sun room, I get bored really fast. I try to read a magazine or clean or pull out the laptop. I’m not sure why. I’m happy to read the kids books for long periods or play a game or color on the easel or play a make-believe game. Andrew and Sylvie both like helping me cook, and they have fun cracking eggs, measuring milk, and whisking ingredients. But if the kids are just hanging out, doing their thing, I don’t really have the patience…actually the interest…in staying tuned in. Oh, and they love it when I just watch them play. Bryan’s mom is an expert at that. She loves watching kids play and do their thing. Bryan seems pretty good at it too. Ahh well, we all have our strengths!
So that’s something that’s been on my mind, and I thought I’d share. Another thing on my mind is that we have a fair amount of Sylvia-unhappiness in our household. That girl is amazing. I love her over the moon. She has so much energy and spirit and spunk. When we go to restaurants, she greets all the other patrons with waves and “HI!!!” and dimples galore. When she laughs (especially when Andrew makes her laugh), it’s heart-warming enough to make a statue crack a smile.
She also has passion and sadness. We visited Sarah and baby Charlie today. They were coming home from their morning stroller ride. It made me think, “What a lovely daily ritual! A stroller ride. Why don’t we do regular stroller rides?” The reason, I quickly remembered, is that from the time it was warm enough to take Sylvia on her earliest walks and stroller rides, she has gone on only a small number fully happy. Invariably, the first half is good and the second half involves some screaming. At least a third of the walk she needs to be carried (if she was in the stroller) or held (if she was in a carrier) as she screams and flails. The girl doesn’t like to be confined.
Sometimes I think I should just do things more frequently or consistently with her. If we took a walk every morning at the same time to the same place, maybe that would be better. It isn’t. Or if it is, Andrew doesn’t want to go and he ends up being the one crying and needing to be carried.
Sylvia also tends to fuss or cry most times we drive in the car. It’s not like when she was little and screamed the whole ride. That got better when she was around six months. It’s that she didn’t want to get in her car seat in the first place or she wants something Andrew has or she finished her snack and wants more. For the most part, I can talk her down or cajole her into being calm, but keeping her happy in the car is an active process. She doesn’t get calmed by music or audio books. She sometimes likes to look at books or play with dolls, but then she drops them and I can’t reach them and that’s a big problem.
We had lunch with Bryan today. His office is on the other side of town, and Sylvia cried all the way home. She was saying, “Wa.” And I have no idea what she wanted. She got her arms out her car seat in her tantrum. I guess it all makes me appreciate quiet drives across town when I get them.
All this is to say that if I one day have a grandchild I’d like to remember that things as a parent are sometimes kind of rough. And the rough parts can be mixed in, part and parcel with the sweet, darling, wonderful parts. I’m already finding that I forget things about parenting. I kind of forget what it was like to wake up many times in the night or to have a sick tiny baby. Just like with child birth, the hard parts kind of fade into amnesia and the glowing parts stay crystal clear in my mind. So I write this down not to complain, not even because today is particularly harder than any other day or week, but just to keep it real.
