speech and memory

ah, the linguistic adventures of a two-year old.  ice cream is "icing cweam," said always with a hopeful lilt and bright eyes. a bathing suit is a "baby suit."  lately, and i have no idea where she gets this (1952?) she's been saying "goody gosh!" about everything.  yesterday after she sneezed, she said, "bless you, me."  when she eats ribs with my dad (polishing off every possible edible portion, then gnawing on the bone) she says every time without fail, "ooh la la!"

last night neesy and i took sho to an outdoor concert at kindleberger park in the next town over.  (sho quickly removed her dress and shoes and got down to the business of shaking her booty.)  it's this magical, sprawling, super-hilly park that i used to live right across the street from when i was sho's age, so it holds a special place in my heart.  my first memories take place in that park, and the crazy slides that were built in to the massive hills.  it was the height of bravery to hurtle down those suckers, which have since been removed (which shows you just how cool they really were).

neesy and i keep wondering whether sho's first memory has happened yet, or will soon.  i'm conscious that it might be happening soon, so i'm extra on top of my mama game.  when she smashed a bug with a rock the other day, i scolded, "sho, you just killed that bug.  it's dead now."  she looked so stricken, i quickly said, "it's okay though kiddo, it's okay."  god forbid her first memory be her mother accusing her of murder!

this is my favorite chapter of her life so far.  a few months ago, she actually read a couple words for the first time, and is now identifying letters from time to time.  (not that she's a genius or anything.  all colors but PINK stymie her, and she continues to stand in the dog's water bowl far more often than necessary.)

what a remarkable honor it is, to be present at the dawning of a person's speech and memory.  i wouldn't trade it for anything.

party down

last night, sho fell asleep early which meant...time for some friday night sewing!  woop woop!  i drank some homemade iced coffee and watched season 3 of californication from the library, so it was pretty much the craziest party night all week.

 

i made a little matching pants & monster set (shouldn't every kid have one?) for the baby shower of a friend from high school and his wife.  then i was like, man lately i've been sewing for every kid in the world but my little shoshi mama!  so i threw together a little baby sling for her, complete with a pocket on the front.  that kid loves her some pockets.  

 

when her great-grandma got her the doll last christmas, sho was pretty "whatever" about it, despite the dope little outfit i sewed for it.  (side note: it's a special kind of creepy feeling, being an adult who just slaved over making tiny doll clothes, particularly when your kid could care less. oy vey.)  anyway, with the sling plus the added maturity of her two years, sho is now a pretty good little doll-mama, even insisting on taking her baby along while climbing the biggest tree she's climbed to date (though she also doesn't hesitate to throw her across the room when the mood strikes...probably no babysitting jobs for shosh quite yet).  we stopped by my work to pick up something i'd left there, and ended up spending an hour roaming around the grounds, which i've pretty much never even noticed.

through her eyes, though, there were endless treasures.  windows to peek through, new dirt to examine, sticks to pick up, bang against things, and discard...at first i kept saying, "sho, don't you want to go to the library?"  before finally realizing that the whole point of going to the library this morning was for sho, so why not just let her be perfectly happy right here?  i tell you, that kid.  she was almost just like, "chill, mama. chill."   i will do my best, little dude.

xoxo

rubble

no one knows this (until now), but once or twice every week, i stop off at the house where david and i used to live and where shoshanna was born two years ago.  it's usually while i'm on my way to work or on that side of town anyway.  it's always a jarring time warp to see the faded pennants i sewed just last spring (and intended to replace every summer); the familiar old porch where so many photos were taken and visits with friends were spent, but missing our mismatched pots of growing vegetables and zinnias planted from seed; and the same peeling-paint windows as always, but without my homemade curtains and window boxes overflowing with flowers. 

i sneak into the side yard with a small bag of cat food, pour it into two big piles mostly hidden by overgrown weeds, then tiptoe away and drive off like a cat food-dispensing criminal.  when i moved in, the street was overrun with hungry wild cats, and i quickly took it upon myself to feed every last one, and keep them warm during the winter with an elaborate "straw palace" i built underneath the porch.  somehow i just haven't been able to totally cut them off from my life yet, even though it's somewhat crazy to drive all the way across town to feed some mangy alley cats on the reg, eight months after i moved away.

anyway, there was also a house on the corner with two skinny dogs tied up in the yard, and oh man, the first freezing winter that we had sho, those dogs tugged at my heart endlessly.  back in the early days of this here blog, i wrote about the time david and i hauled a huge doghouse down the street using nothing but our skateboards, so they could have a little shelter from the wind and snow.  something about that moment, sneaking into those jerks' yard and working together under the cover of night to help out their dogs, always stayed with me as being somehow representative of our relationship.

when i turned the corner on our old street today, i saw this where that house used to be:

dude, the symbolism.  what the hell happened?

i just hope those dogs are as happy now in their new life away from myrtle street, wherever they may be, as i am in mine.

on raising a powerful girl

so last night sho was blowing some bubbles in the yard, and she kept yelling, "POWER!" every time she waved the bubble wand around.  neesy and i started laughing: power bubbles?  really?  but that word totally sums up a lot of her approach to the world, running so fast her body can't keep up and flinging herself from tall surfaces and yelling at the top of her lungs.  POWER!

there are a couple things i keep in mind during our day to day adventures, to encourage that sense of power in my super tiny girl.

1) animals are girls too.  whether narrating the pictures of a story we're "reading" about a whale or a worm, or pointing out a squirrel doing something crazy, i am often taken aback by my initial impulse to call everything a "him."  dude, this impulse sucks.  really, the only creatures of interest are boy-creatures?  i am embarrassed to admit that i really have to fight against it sometimes.  i hope that shoshi will always discover that her imaginary friends of the tiger variety are, naturally, female badass tigers.  RAWR.

2) let her trust her instincts.  when i was pregnant, a few peeps recommended "the continuum concept" which is a book written in the 1970's by an anthropologist who lived with the yequana tribe in south america, and was fascinated by how blissfully happy everyone in the culture was, from the tiny babes to the elders.  a lot of what she wrote about is pretty well-known attachment parenting stuff, but the lesser-known parts of the book discuss the almost total lack of injuries among the children -- even though they were allowed to play with sharp knives, near open pits and rushing rivers, in an amazonian jungle to boot.  kiddos were given the space and respect to discover their world on their own, therefore their instincts about that world were honed from a super-young age.  groovy!  and: nearly impossible in our baby-proofing, fast-cars, overprotective culture!  still, i let her take a lot of risks (and play in a lot of dirt).  i try to give her the space to climb and reach and (ocassionally) fall, whenever i can. 

3) listen to her (within reason) if she says "no" or "stop."  obviously i can't always do this because the kid would never sleep (ever) or wear shoes in public places.  but if she says NO to me putting pigtails in her hair, i listen.  a girl should always feel like she has the power to say no and be listened to.

does anybody else have any "rules" they keep in mind while navigating this crazy earth, either with kiddos or without?   

weekend adventures

do you ever have one of those moments where your thoughts are floating lazily, and you have this happy leftover feeling that you know is because of something pleasant you've just thought of, but you can't remember what it is and so you sort of drift through your thoughts, knowing there's something nice waiting for you in there somewhere?   i was thinking this weekend that that's kind of how shoshi mary is for me.

i'm trying to set up some daily and weekly traditions for the little family that is shoshi and me.  i have a feeling that we'll be moving around quite a bit over the next few years before we're able to settle into a home of our own, so i would like some customs for sho to feel anchored to throughout those changes.  so far i have scrambling eggs together on saturday morning, and ice cream cones on sunday night.  any other ideas? 

all shoshanna needs is a pot of water and some bowls and ladles, and she will be happy for hours.  we went to a birthday party for one of sho's peers over the weekend, and they had this elaborate enormous plastic water table shaped like a pirate ship.  it was fascinating watching all these wild two-year olds working industriously for like an hour straight, not talking, just intensely moving water around from cup to cup.  it was a good time...but i'm also thankful that sho can be just as happy with some pots and bowls in the yard.

neesy had some tickets to "breakfast with a farmer" this weekend at a dairy farm out in the country, so off we went to show our girl some cows!  it was honestly pretty sad to see the baby cows, lying alone in their glorified dog houses with a tiny fenced-in area outside for them to stand in, while their mamas stood with swollen udders twenty yards away, unable to nurse or cuddle their newborns.  it just felt wrong to me, and it was a much-needed reminder to buy foods that are made with love for the animals who feed us.

still, it was pretty cool for shosh to see some cows for the first time in her life!  her favorite part of the day was a trough filled with feed corn and buried plastic farm animals.  she kept pulling off her shoes and trying to immerse her entire body in the sheer hedonistic pleasure that is a large trough filled with feed corn.

did you know that if you put heavy whipping cream in a jar and shake it for awhile, it makes butter?  it was an activity for kids, but neesy and were like "hell yes, we were born to shake up some butter," and shook our jars with great enthusiasm, several heads taller than all the other cream-shaking butter-makers.     

                       

it was a good weekend, and it ended with my tuckered-out little dumpling of a bed hog looking something like this:  

i was quick to join her.

fathers' day

since it's been three weeks since sho's papa has seen her or even called to check in, my mom got up with shoshi this morning as a fathers' day present to me, allowing me to sleep in til a luxurious 8:45.  heaven!  then they brought me a doughnut.  i tell you, this father gig is pretty great.

but the real subject of this post is my dad, or "chuck" as he's known to shoshanna, which still makes me laugh on the daily.  what can i say, they're on a first-name basis.

although coming to stay with my parents has been an occasional hot mess, for the most part i've been super thankful that shoshi has been given this brief stopover in the land of grandparents.  my dad jumped right on board with the whole two-year-old-in-his-house, all-the-damn-time thing.  he greets her in the morning like he hasn't seen her in days, and willingly invites her to sit on his lap at dinnertime, even though we all know that ends up with peas in your water and full bottle of ranch dressing emptied inexplicably in your lap.  sometimes it's nice just to have someone else's eye to catch and smile with when sho is being cute or weird, like how she always screams over to our very proper and sweet, elderly next door neighbor mr. sweeney, "HEY WEENIE!  HEY, WEEEENIE!"

"chuck" is my daughter's number one male influence.  (though her grampa doug is also an incredible dude, a gruff wise-cracking plumber with a secret heart of melted butter who dotes on shoshi like no other.  he installed a special toilet seat in their house when sho was a baby, so she could sit comfortably on their toilet forevermore.  that's love, man.)  because of my dad, sho sees men as steady, even-tempered, and most importantly, her friends.  they are true buddies, and it is the craziest thing watching her ride around on his back while sho pretends she's riding a horse ("hee-ha!"), because i remember doing the same thing.  he always makes her feel like a special, cool little dude who is worthy of his careful attention, even if he can't always understand what the hell she's saying or why she does the things she does (see: sitting in the dog's water bowl for the third time that morning).  he is a true friend and ally, and when you're a two year old, that counts for a lot.  (when you're a twenty-eight year old, too.)

thank you to my dad, for being sho's "chuck" every day of her life.  she and i are real lucky girls.

where we are

it is seriously so hard to snap a picture of shoshanna mary wearing clothes lately.  i'm not sure how she does it exactly, but toward the end of every day for the past month or so, she somehow finds a way to wiggle out of her clothes and ends up running merrily around our back yard, front yard, even down our steep driveway and into the neighbors' yards.  fortunately, we live on a tiny dead end street, with the added benefit of neighbors whose children used to be little nudists as well.  we still laugh about the time we answered the door to the then-three-year-old neighbor boy, standing totally naked and by himself on our front doorstep.  "hi!" he said brightly, beaming up at us. 

my dream for shoshi and myself is like that of many people my age.  i would like to raise her (and maybe her someday-siblings too, who knows) on a piece of land with a small, cozy home attached, near other like-minded families who want to share the burdens and joys of farming, raising a few animals, and living intentionally as a community together.  i'm not trying to go totally back-to-the-land or off the grid, but i would like to live near enough to other families so we could be a significant part of each others' daily lives.  i think more than anything, that tribal sense of community is really important to us as humans, and is largely missing from the way we live today.  i would love for sho to be able to run out the door and directly into the open arms of a wild little kid gang.  i would love to be able to do the same, to grow vegetables with other women and sit by an impromptu bonfire in the evenings with my friends and neighbors.

at times i feel guilty about how far away i feel from making that life a reality for my girl and me.  things are just harder when there is only one parent.  dreams get deferred, in favor of high-quality day care and rent payments and healthy food and new shoes and and and.  but what i need to remember is that where we are now is just a stop on this long, twisting path.  what the future holds is a total mystery to us all, whether you want to believe it or not. 

and what i'm finding is that this stop isn't such a bad one, after all.  because right now, my kid gets to run out the door directly into the lush flora of my mother's garden, and into the open arms of a loving little kid gang -- and more often than not, while she's totally buck naked, to boot.