Tag Archives: kids

Having an “out of mommy” experience

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Today, dd starts Kindergarten. It seems improbable that I’m the mother of a kindergartner. How is that possible?

It’s funny how, as she leaned on me yesterday morning – fussing and crying because I wasn’t coming with her on her school “visit” day events thanks to work commitments – I wasn’t even sure how this was happening. This was my child, clearly, and I was supposed to comfort her as best as I could for someone who had already RSVP’ed to a full-day meeting at a vendor’s site. And she looked at me and called me “mommy” and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I had a child who was so grown. Just unbelievable.

For the longest time, before I met dh, I never wanted kids. They always seemed annoying. Loud. Sometimes cute, but more often than not, I was happy when I wasn’t required to do anything for them. When dh and I started dating, we (fairly early on) had to have “the talk” about how we’d ever raise kids. I shrugged and said, “Of course, any kids of mine would be Jews.” (Being Jewish, and being female, that’s the law, dontcha know.) He seemed confused, since he was raised American Baptist. Oops. Guess that’s something we’d have to figure out.

Eventually, we did figure it out – we’d raise them with both sets of traditions. And we do, muddling through it all as best as we can. Neither of us is religious, though we have religious identities and we both are spiritual people to varying degrees. We don’t attend synagogue or church, and we typically only do our big nods to organized religion on the respective high holidays – Passover, Easter, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah and Christmas (I omit Yom Kippur from my list for various reasons which could be a blog post unto itself).

When we decided to have kids, and then got pregnant, there was a part of me that really went “Oh, crap” rather frequently. Once I was pregnant, there was no turning back for me, and it seemed inescapable that I would become a mother. What on earth did that mean? I remember crying on my pillow one night while pregnant with dd, snuffling over the fact that I was worried I didn’t have a maternal instinct. DH calmed me down and told me that there was no way that was true, and he was right. When I had people reporting to me, I often defended them like a mother lion protecting her cubs. If they went wrong, I’d set them straight, for sure, but I tried to shield them from other people’s BS as much as possible. In other words, just like a mom.

So then we come back to my moment of reverie: dd hanging on me, anguished and looking only for her momma. And that’s me. And though I know she’s mine, there’s something odd about seeing this tall, slim, gorgeous girl coming to me and looking at me as though I can make it all better. I wish I could…but even the most super of all moms isn’t able to make everything all better all the time.

And I wasn’t able to get her to stop crying completely before I left for my all-day meeting; she was wailing for me as I walked out the door. But dh assured me that she’d calmed down not long after I left the house, and later reports from both of them showed that she had a good time visiting at school with her new teacher and the people running the after-school program. And today, I get to walk her up to school on her first day.

So mommy will be there sometimes, but not all. And no matter what, mommy is me. It’s as undeniable as the air I breathe. There are clearly days where it will seem strange, as though I blinked and my life fast-forwarded years in a heartbeat. But as bizarre as it may seem to stare at this wondrous beauty of a girl who can’t possibly be old enough for elementary school – and yet clearly is – the look in her eyes reminds me of the perfect truth reflected in her eyes: mommy is me.

Saying goodbye to camp

Posted on by — Leave a reply

On Friday, dd will finish her last day of her first summer camp experience. Kindergarten starts next week, and it didn’t make sense to keep her in camp for half of the week, with Kindergarten intruding midway through the week. DH and I are splitting the duty; he’s got her for a few days and I have her for a few days, and between the two of us we’ll now begin doing this comical dance that somehow provides us with coverage for days when she’s not in school while simultaneously keeping us from running afoul of the dregs of our paid time off pools.

It’s been a strange journey. I thought I’d write more about it, especially when she was such a sad panda for those first few weeks, crying about not wanting to go to camp before we’d even made out of the house, clinging to my leg like a wet leaf as I signed her in every morning. But somewhere around the 4th week, things went past clicking – and she really fell in love with it.

By then, she knew all the counselors’ names, and they all clearly knew her. They loved playing off her humor and they knew how to push her buttons to get her to smile or interact with them, and this increased my comfort level dramatically over the course of the summer. We’d originally been very hesitant to send her to this camp, since though most friends gave it decent reviews, we heard bad things from one friend whose daughter is a contemporary of dd. There were anecdotes of her dd coming home from camp still in wet clothes (they swim daily) and too-young, clearly inexperienced people tending to my friend’s child. But when I sent in dd, whether it was that she was a year older at the time that she went or whether it was just the difference between the two girls, dd just didn’t have those issues. She never came home in the wrong clothes, or in wet clothes, or in anything other than what I expected.

She came home happy.

She never face-planted into her dinner plate, as I’d been warned that she might, but she did come home tired every day…worn out from playing outside in the lovely summer weather and swimming in the pool.

And now she’s leaving it behind, for terra incognita. She’s off to Kindergarten, a whole new adventure.

We knew that things would change come the Fall; one drop-off would become two, breakfast and lunch would be on-us rather than served up at day care, and a backpack would be the norm rather than a rare exception. Camp was our opportunity to get everyone into that new routine a bit early. Our ds also needed some time to adjust to not having his sister RIGHT THERE when he wanted her, since day care allowed them to visit each other pretty much whenever they wanted. Camp set a serious geographic boundary between them that forced him to handle the day all on his own, and he’s done well with it. Oddly enough, when I come in to pick him up in the afternoons, his sister in tow, he blasts right past her with yells of “Mommy! Mommy!” and gives me the biggest, awesomest hugs ever.

It’s been quite the summer. It’s whisked by in a blur of trips and parties, with camp, daycare and work as the only things not on some kind of orbit. They were fixed points. And now one of them is changing – again. I suppose it will actually get easier; the elementary school is closer to home than camp. Still, it’s all more changes to the routine and somehow we just need to get into the new routine without somehow losing our collective nut.

So expect that I’ll still struggle some with lunches and snacks and the inevitable “OMG HER NEW MORON FRIENDS ARE GETTING HER INTO {name something I’m sure to hate}“. I suppose every parent goes through this at some point or another. It just seems like the summer raced by and I don’t know how it happened that my little girl, who it seems I only just put into day care, who only just became a big sister, is now staring down turning six in a couple of months and is starting Kindergarten in a week. ONE WEEK.

It all seems rather incredible, and yet I suppose I can believe it. So we’ll say goodbye to camp for now – with plans to return next summer (perhaps with both kids this time). And I’ll still think of her as my little girl, because (deep inside her) she always will be.

Coping with the changes of camp

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

This morning was one of the tougher ones to drop off dd at camp; she was nearly inconsolable. Clearly, some of this is related to her being SO INCREDIBLY TIRED from running around all day. She’s used to the more quiet, academically-focused day care environment she spent the last five years cloistered away in. Now, she’s in a day camp that spends the majority of its time outside, playing sports or swimming. It’s not that she’s led a completely inactive or sedentary life; she had some measure of time outside playing back when she was at day care. It’s just that this is so much more concentrated active outside time, and her brother’s still at day care, so she can’t see him whenever she wants.

So, while I have yet to see her do the legendary “face plant into the dinner plate” I heard so much about, she’s coming home beyond tired, and that exhaustion breeds a massive sensitivity that seems to turn her into a great melty mess. Of course, this has then gotten her into whining extensively about how much she wants to go back to day care and how she doesn’t want to go back to camp.

I’m hoping that some of this will be fixed with some sleep, and I’m trying to see if I can work from home on Fridays during the summer so that I can let both kiddos sleep in a little and get picked up a little earlier. There are no guarantees that this will fix everything, but it may make coming into the weekend a little easier. Since it took me nearly 10 minutes to dislodge her iron grip this morning at camp drop-off, I have to figure that there’s more we can do.

We also need to find a way to get her to bed earlier. It’s tough when both parents work full-time and you’re struggling, as it is, to give the kids enough time to eat their dinner and get a bath or some play time before bed. To have to try to push bedtime up to an earlier point is difficult without sacrificing something on the other end. We haven’t yet figured out how we’ll do this, but we need to do something.

I’m open to hearing from those who’ve been through this before, the transition to camp (and kindergarten) after a long stay in day care…maybe we can pick up on something that’ll be a magic bullet to solve this problem, even if it’s only temporary.