Cerebral Celebration

Living this life requires a certain amount of celebration. 

 

Living on this planet requires skill, work, and a positive attitude. It is often joyous and full of adventure. Sometimes it is mundane. Sometimes life is rocky and rough and the celebration of something as small as a job well done, or as marvelous as a birthday can smooth out the edges, and add sweetness to an otherwise tastes-like-dirt kind of day.

As a summer birthday girl, birthday celebrations have always meant swimming pool parties and up-till-late slumber parties. Memories of my own birthdays can be invoked with just the right hint of Copper Tone and the damp smell of chlorine laden towels.

When my oldest daughter was born two days after my birthday, I was giddy with the knowledge that the summer birthday tradition would carry on...and on and on it has!  My sweet July girl loves her swimming pool birthdays, and her friends always rave that they are the best ones of the year.  We make no fuss and do no fancy games or themes or treats.  Just cake and pizza at the pool... and the kids just swim, swim, swim.

Remarkably, here it is just days before my youngest turns 5.  A Halloween-y baby is she.  Thanks to indoor swimming pools, she's decided she wants a pool party too, and so we'll head down to the pretty cool Genoveva Chavez Center in Santa Fe, and maybe my little one will try her new found dunking skills on the big slide.

 

Birthdays are important.  They create big anticipation and are almost always filled with laughter, joy, and smiles. But I never would have realized how important they are to Moms if I had never become one. Before I had children, birthdays were a selfish fiesta of  a day that was "all about me," or a more generous, "what can I do for you," when it came to my dear friends and my partner. 

But now that I'm a mother, and I've experienced the intensity of pregnancy and birth, and all the wonder and amazement, exhaustion and excitement, confusion and cuddling that accompanies growing with my children...I can honestly say that I have a new-found respect for birthdays. As my soft spot for my children's birthdays grows deeper, I have a better understanding of my own Mother, and why she always helped to make my birthday special. She still does, in fact. She, too, must have that same sweet collection of memories of my actual birth day...her own pregnancy, labor, and delivery of a little baby that turned into me. 

 

Birthdays are a festival of the very best cake, a wonderful dinner, and presents.  Nowadays, I tend to splurge on a nice thing or two for myself, but I tend to get a little crazy when I shop for my kids...they deserve it all, you know...whatever it is they want. And if I am unable to get everything on the list, I hope that others can fill in the holes.  So far, it seems that most everything on Signe's wish list has been acquired, with a little help from family!

This desire to fulfill my kids' wishes was discovered when Nena was still a tiny baby and probably wasn't wishing for anything yet.  Only 5 months old for her 1st Christmas, I went a little crazy with gifts in anticipation of all the joys she'd have as she grew older. It was made worse by the fact that her grandparents and we were burgeoning with extra money, and a baby seemed like the perfect person to shower the gifts upon. Late night Christmas eves have been the norm around my house...with last minute Santa placements, and sometimes a few mechanical struggles to make the hours grow later and later.

Lately, I've been wishing for a different Christmas tradition. The excess consumption and waste of paper and plastic does sometimes make me cringe inside. I wish to be more creative so that I can still fulfill my sweethearts' dreams for Christmas joy, but feel like I'm being gentler on the planet. 

Time with family, friends, baking, and creating...these are all the best parts of any celebration.  I would like to focus on those aspects more--to fill up the hearts of my loved ones with love and attention.

Someday, I would like to find a new location to celebrate the holiday season...a place completely different from our mountain location. 

My dream involves a bungalow on the beach, swimming in the ocean all day, and lounging peacefully in the tropical air in the evening.  Someday...

Photo Copyright Sandra Aamodt

Cycles

Many of us know that life travels in cycles...sometimes big and obvious ones like the seasonal cycles...but there is also the very non-linear circuitous way that life ebbs and flows. Last year at this time, my youngest daughter would fall asleep around 9 or 9:30 at night, and sleep until 9 or 10 in the morning. Lately, everyone has been falling asleep between 8:30 and 10 pm, and waking early--like around 6 or 6:30, despite the fact that the mornings are darker and darker each day. I like watching and observing these more subtle cycles, and I'm so grateful that my kids are able to live within their own. Not being pushed or rushed or limited to a time-constrained day surely helps them to live a life that is less hindered and more free, even if we still have schedules to abide by in general.

Sig has been hopping over milestones lately. After an entire summer spent at the pool, which has now been closed for nearly a month, she suddenly discovered that she can go entirely underwater. Because this is her new-found fun, she wants to go out into the hot tub every day. It's pretty fun to watch her go under over and over and over. This will bring a whole new level of fun into our pool days...the slides, diving boards, and all the other fun can be more thoroughly explored. I'm sure that it took my little one so long to feel comfortable with her head under the water because of the one snafu I pulled while staying at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. They have an awesome pool with some really amazing, established landscaping. The palms are huge, and the whole pool area is a tropical funzone. They have some pretty cool slides too. When Sig was 2, I had her in my lap while we zoomed down a slide, and my foot slipped on the pool bottom when we came off and we both went under. That was the last day she ever put her head under water intentionally until last week.

She also learned how to do the monkey bars on her own. And then she discovered that she could crawl on top of them. In absolute adorable terms, she said to me while crawling along the top, "Now that I'm nearly five, I am learning how to do so many things! Look at me! Who knew I would go underwater and crawl on top of the monkey bars all in one week?"

Really, who would've thunk?

Of course, who would've ever guessed that she's be a wig afficionado, as well?

Inspiration and Change

On Monday morning of this week, I woke up inspired. I’d had some vivid, strange dreams and woke up compelled to get my own act together. It has been 10 months since I took the doula training workshop, and I’ve done nothing towards working on the certification process. I’m employed, and actually enjoy most aspects of my position, but it’s not, nor has my job ever been, what I want to do when I grow up. I’m busy parenting, and living, and working, and working out, but I haven’t been focusing on steering my career down a different path.

As if compelled through the same cosmic vibe, another doula contacted me on Monday about getting together all the doulas in town for a meet-and-greet networking session. I perused some graduate school options, and looked into other formal training to set me firmly on this new road. I’m looking. I know that I will be able to pull this all together into a tightly knit grouping of skills that I will be able to use for my next career. Doula, childbirth educator, herbalist, and then what? Prenatal psychologist? Deep ecologist? Massage therapist? Somatic experience counselor? I'm not yet certain, but I am looking.

And speaking of inspiration, Nena has taken a great interest in cleaning. This can be readily summed up as being inspired by a movie that she currently loves, Another Cinderella Story with Selena Gomez. Nearly every day she tidies up, cleans off the table, the kitchen island, and the coffee table. She cleans the windows she can reach, and the refrigerator. She mops the floor.

Tuesday when I came home from work, she’d begun the process of rearranging the living room. I was surprised, and not necessarily motivated to help her complete the task, but once we got going, we REALLY got going. We scrubbed, and cleaned, and pulled apart all the electronics, we debated which way to arrange the couches and tables and where the TV should go. We drew our ideas on paper, and then discussed them with Daddy and Signe. All the while, we watched HGTV, and Nena kept getting inspired by more ideas along the way. In the end, we did a complete 180-degree rotation of the furniture, and it looks lovely. What I saw as limiting at first, given the constraints of our wood stove and the back door, turned into an excellent opportunity to clean, renovate, and redesign our living space.

I have never forced my girls to clean anything. I’ve asked for assistance on occasion, and probably ranted that I wished they would help me on more than a few, but I’ve never forced or required them to do chores. Seeing Nena’s inspiration to clean and her motivation to design the layout of a room has been so much fun. She has amazing neat and tidy characteristics, which play out in the meticulous care she takes to arrange her bed, and her dresser top, and they way she places blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals on her bed. It is truly fascinating to watch this develop.

Signe has random moments of cleaning inspiration too. Sometimes she’ll head up to their room, shut the door, and I can hear the sounds of bumps and footsteps and singing. After a while she’ll call out, “Mom! Come see my room!” And I’ll head up and everything will be picked up from the main part of the floor, and stuff will be bulging out from beneath the dresser, and shoved into the toy bins, and overflowing from the closet cubbies, and she will be beaming with pride. So cute.

As the summer wanes towards fall, I feel the changing of the season. The leaves are starting to turn yellow and orange. The late summer flowers are starting to die back. The mornings have been a touch chilly, and there is that indescribable feeling of change. It is happening.

Today was our Official Not-Back-to-School Day

Thankfully, today we did not go to the first day back at school. I woke, and as usual took Nuptse out before 7am. The scenery this morning was amazing because of the remnants of the overnight rain storm. Pink, brush-stroked clouds hung low to the East, and rich, dark, almost daunting clouds hung thickly over the east-facing flank of the mountains. The air was damp, and smelled of moist dirt, wildflowers, and sodden vegetation. Once back, Nena greeted me at the door, her hair still mussed-up from a night of sleep. I took a shower and she took a bath, and we hung out while I made an iced coffee and gathered my lunch. She dressed in a new fashion top that she picked out yesterday, and wanted to go to Grandma’s house early, before her sister woke up. I commented that I was glad I didn’t have to fork over cash to the class, in addition to all the other school supplies, school clothes, and other “necessities” that I would have had Nena actually been going to school today. In thinking about that, I realized that the bargain spending we’d been up to all summer on new toys and clothes was still pretty meager in comparison. I gave hugs and kisses all around, and set off to the Farmers Market before going to work.

The traffic was horrid thanks to the many scattered road construction messes in town. I managed to avoid the school zone near my house and went on my way to the Farmers Market, which was burgeoning with fresh vegetables.  After the market I sauntered into work, and got busy researching hazardous waste sites that resulted from the Manhattan Project. I went to Tae Kwon Do for lunch, ate a salad for lunch, and checked in with my beautiful daughters early this afternoon.  They were playing cars and were about to head off on a walk with their Dad.

The relief and lack of stress of not worrying about another first day at school is profound. Last year I felt as though I was walking on eggshells for nearly two weeks, and Kindergarten was orders of magnitude worse--to say nothing about the first go at it! Last year Nena started the first day out okay, but in watching her play-out the day that evening, I could hear the sound of my heart breaking. She pretended to be her teacher while her sister was a student, and she described the discipline, punishment, and laws of the land. The sense of demoralization was overwhelming and I felt like pulling her out right then and there.  But the previous year had gone so well, I reminded myself, no reason to jump the gun.

Day 2 and Nena did not want to go, but somehow she mustered up enough courage to give it a try. The weekend came, and I knew that Monday was going to be tough. But this time I’d done my research. I was prepared for her to say she didn’t want to go. And she didn’t. Fine, I said, stay home and play. So she did.  On Day 3, and Day 4, and Day 5. On Day 6, I said, this is crazy, you do not need to go to where you are feeling so much pain. So I formally pulled her out. She went to first grade for 2 days.

For 6 weeks prior to the first day of first grade I saw a continual build-up of anxiety and fear. Panic attacks started happening, which I thought were extreme “tantrums” or “fits” and yet I hadn’t made the connection between the pending first day of school and this upswing of severe emotion.  Finally, after school had started, and these panic attacks occurred multiple times throughout the day, I realized that these could not be simple extreme tantrums.  These were so much more than that. The doctor confirmed my concerns, and that only made my decision to remove her from school so much easier. Ironically, all the psychological banter surrounding separation anxiety involves working towards getting a child back in school. Everything I read about it made my stomach turn, yet deep down provoked a fear that I might be doing the wrong thing.

But as the weeks went by, the panic began to subside. The bright, sparkley-eyed  girl started shining through.

As the first day back to school came nearer, I asked if Nena wanted to give it another go, and she said no, although when all the catalogs with the shiny and colorful new backpacks arrived, she gave it some further thought, but then said no again.

We went and checked out the class lists out of curiosity, and wondered why her nemesis wasn’t on any of them...had she moved and changed districts? We’d seen her a few days prior, so we knew she was still in town.  Had the school messed up and forgotten to put her name down? Nena worried about this as this girl was a major factor in her discomfort with school. Try not to worry, I said, it’s really unimportant to our own situation.

No eggshells today.  Just another normal day.  For that, we are all glad.