So the Story Goes

The short story:  I find Sydney, who is naked, huddling and crying hysterically in a sleeping bag.

The long story..

I had floated the idea of a camp over for Sydney's friends, Nora and Bennett, during the beginning of the summer, and it all came to fruition on Labor Day weekend.  So Nora, Bennett, and their father came over bearing tents and sleeping bags, and as soon as the tent was erected, the kids disappeared into some wonderland of their own.

The campout was successful, for the most part, with both kids deciding at the last minute to sleep with me in my small tent rather in the big Coleman six-person tent, and the night passed and the morning came without incident, and all was well.

Then we adults got busy, as we are wont to do, and, based on yesterday's self-baby-sitting performance, spent less time than we perhaps should have looking after the children... or perhaps we thought someone else was looking after them... or something, but in any event, what I finally got out of Sydney was this:

Nora asked Sydney if she wanted to take off her clothes and, for some reason, Sydney said yes.  Sydney and Nora and Bennett all played for awhile thus, Sydney sans clothes, until Sydney apparently wanted to put her clothes back on but forgot where they were, and also, apparently, forgot that there were more clothes waiting for her in her room in the house.  Then, forgetting about the clothes problem, Sydney and Bennett decided to play a game with a sleeping bag called Who Can Get Out of The Sleeping Bag, which involved getting into the bag, zipping it up and then cinching up the top.  It turned out that Bennett could get out of the sleeping bag, but Sydney could not, and so Bennett went to find an Adult, but said Adult didn't really understand what he was trying to tell her.

This is how I found Sydney, naked, upset, and stuck in a sleeping bag.  All par for the course on a Labor Day weekend, right?

The Five Year Old

Sydney’s birthday falls during the week this year so we had her birthday party on Saturday. She invited just a few friends from her school and a bunch of relatives; and since it was an unseasonably warm day for April we had the party outside. She wasn’t fooled though—she knew she wasn’t five yet. Today is the day that she is five.

Sydney the five-year-old can brush her teeth and get dressed without being told (although she doesn’t always). She can jump rope and dance ballerina-style. She can sometimes do math if she’s not thinking about it too hard. She can write hers and her sisters’ names. She can play Go-Fish but doesn’t quite get the concept of Connect Four. (Oh well. There’s still time.)


Sydney the five-year-old requested that all of her friends bring their favorite dress up clothes, so we had a green lantern, two fairies, one adult in a pirate hat and three cowboy/girls. Sydney’s presents included a fairy queen costume, a Spider Man mask, and Indian Princess costume, a bow and arrow and some pirate gear. On the morning after her party, she came down with her Indian Princess costume on over her Buzz LightYear pajamas, and wanted to go outside to practice shooting arrows before we had breakfast.


To Sydney on her fifth birthday:

May we have many more exciting adventures.  I have no idea what’s coming next.

What Child is This?

A friend of ours came over the other day to see the sugaring operation and brought his young son, Bennett, with him. Bennett and Sydney both go to the same pre-school, but they've really gotten to know eachother during the rides to and from their school. As soon as Bennett got out of the car, both kids ran into the house, upstairs, and were gone.

A little while later I went upstairs to check on them and found Sydney's door closed. I didn't hear anything so I knocked and opened the door, only to find no children in the room. Puzzled, I stared at the empty room for a bit until the strains of an enthusiastically untuned guitar came wafting from the closet. I closed the door.

Normally Sydney is very attached to myself and her father and while she will at times play by herself, or, on off occasions, with her sister, she'll pretty much insist that we be a part of the action. But when her friend comes over a whole different Sydney emerges. She's confident, she's feisty, and Things Happen.

While down at the sugar house I happened to glance out of the corner of my eye both kids walking purposely down our forest road with a box of cheddar bunnies in one hand and a play sword in the other.

"Where are you going, guys?" I yelled out.

"We want to see where the road ends," they shouted back.

I decided I better come with them.

By the end of the journey (a mile's walk in either direction) both kids were tired and complaining that their legs were going to fall off, but that didn't stop Sydney from somehow getting Bennett to carry the sword, the box of cheddar bunnies and her jacket, nor did it stop either of them from suddenly breaking out into a game of "police police"--a game where a police officer puts a driver in jail but the driver says he/she is a race car driver so the officer lets them out (I'll have to try that on our local cops someday)-- or from hopping from rock to rock in the spring stream for the rest of the day.

When it was finally time for Bennett and his father to go home, Sydney burst into exhausted tears. She would not be comforted by the fact that she would see Bennett the very next day or that we all promised he could come back to her house very soon. She morosely followed my husband, Bennett, and his father back up to the driveway, where the two adults got to talking and the two kids immediately found Something To Do.

When I got back up later, I found a small Chinese guardsman statue nicely decorated with balls, a scarf and various sticks. Sydney was calmly watching Sesame Street. "Nice decorating you did there," I said to her. She barely glanced at me. "Yeah," she said, absently.
Oh good, the Sydney I know is back.

The Car Seat: And Then There's Reality

Recently a carpooling situation has been introduced into our daily routine, which relieves us, in theory, of multiple trips back and forth to Sydney's pre-school.  My husband brings Sydney, her schoolmate, and Lauren (by default) to the school, and then her schoolmate's mother brings Sydney and her son back to her house, where I will pick her up on my way home.  This arrangement works well, in theory. 

But in order to accomplish this, a rotating saga of carseats must occur.  A third carseat must somehow be inserted between the first two car seats of the car, since  Children Can Be Seriously Hurt Or Injured by the Passenger Side AirBag!! Children are ALWAYS Safer in the BackSeat!! 

It is nearly impossible to put this third car seat into the car without going through major bodily contortions, and it is completely impossible to do it within fifteen minutes.     Add to that the other two car seats were recently removed from the car because Sydney and her sister went somewhere with Grandma the other day, and we can all be pretty much assured that something, somewhere, is going to be buckled in either haphazardly or possibly not all.  The end result is three most likely "improperly" installed car seats and a possy of parents who are now exceedingly late to their destinations. 

The LATCH system?  Well one car has it and one car does not, and anyone who thinks this finger pinching system is easier than the seatbelt contortion is high on drugs anyway... but when you're dealing with multiple people trying to install carseats in multiple different cars you don't add multiple different ways to install them.  So we only use the seatbelts.  Which means there's this large metal object dangling from all three car seats, ready to smash someone on the head in the event of an accident, and also a whole group of child car seat safety experts shaking their heads in disbelief.

A recent study shows that most car seats are installed incorrectly.  The study tries to fault lack of awareness, but that's not it at all.  I'm perfectly aware that our hurried installation of merry-go-round car seats are likely lacking in some way.  Sometimes I discover they're not installed at all, due to a miscommunication from Party A with Party B.  It's a lack of time and resources, also a very real lack of safety features in the car itself.  Here's the thing, corporate America, I shouldn't have to buy separate pieces of equipment to keep my children safe in your car.  Your car should be made safe for my children.  My 1 1/2 year old should not have to ride backwards with her feet scrunched up against the ill-fitting back seat for another three years because we can't be bothered to make a back car seat which can comfortably and safely accomodate her.   And I should be able to fit three children into the back seat without spending half an hour installing car seats badly or, alternatively, buying 16 car seats and a minivan.

You know, sure, on paper, we should all slow down, relax, make sure that all our t's are crossed and our i's dotted before setting out on any adventure.  We should all brush our teeth daily, eat a good breakfast, exercise for fifteen minutes, sleep 8 hours a night, get a little me time in there somewhere and make sure our children's car seats are installed properly by stopping by our local police station and having them double check our installation (which in our situation would be several times a day).  Yeah, doesn't that seem properly reasonable?  Except we all slept late, we're out of milk, I can't find one of my running shoes, I stayed up late last night doing laundry, I'm not sure when I last had a free moment and all three car seats are outside on the driveway soaking in the morning dew.  Oh, and our friendly local police only work part time.  Also, we're already half an hour late and the car needs gas.  What do you think is going to happen?

Lipstick on a Pig

Sydney came home one day with a picture of a dinosaur she had drawn during one of her outings—the library or preschool, I don’t remember which. It was a girl dinosaur, she informed me, because it was wearing lipstick.

Uh oh. Gender minefield, my brain said.

See… I don’t wear lipstick. Or eyeshadow. Or blush, or nail polish, or any of the other body painting items that I presume 90% of my fellow women use. I don’t even own these items, nor have I ever understood how or why I would use them. Furthermore, most of my stockings get used for practical things like sucking up unwanted ladybugs in the vaccum in the winter or shoring up tomato-laden plants in the summer. I own a few dresses but rarely wear them, all of my shoes are comfortable and usually scuffed up, my regular jewelry consists of one plain gold wedding ring, and basically I’m lucky if I manage to put all of my clothes on right side in and get to work without spilling something on them in the morning. In short, I don’t get the whole feminine body image thing. I don’t even think about it.

Add to that the inherent stereotypes created by a society which assumes that “lipstick is for girls, trucks are for boys” and my need to create for my daughters a caring and open childhood free of added burdens simply because of their physical sex while at the time time not dooming them to freakdom and ridicule by their less open minded peers and parents, not to mention trying to explain (for example) the symbols on the bathroom door for practical purposes such as not going into the wrong toilet by mistake, and what exactly do I say? Clearly, an older person or a peer informed Sydney about the lipstick=girls connection. And since Sydney’s mother doesn’t have or wear lipstick, that part probably had to be explained too. And now here I come along, bent on undoing Sydney’s developing understanding of why her dinosaur is a girl.

But on the other hand… what if she wants to be the icon of feminity when she gets older? Who am I to impose my own views of gender on her? I certainly don’t want to limit her possibilities just because I happen to be an unrepentant thirty-something tomboy with a penchant for motorcycles and excavators and no fashion sense at all. What if she’s destined to design the next Ralph Laurenesque line?

And what will happen when she does start toeing the line in the makeup department? How will she interpret her mother’s complete lack of competence in this arena? Where will she learn to wear lipstick and eyeshadow and what purse to carry in the fall if not from me?

All this was going through my head as I finally said, carefully: “Boys can wear lipstick too, you know. And I don’t wear lipstick, and I’m a girl.”

To which she replied: “But mommy… you do wear lipstick! You put it on whenever your lips get dry!” Proving that even though she is out in the world she still sees the world largely through the actions of her own parents. I do indeed wear Chapstick, mostly in the winter, and so does Daddy, so we decided it was still a girl dinosaur but her lips were dry which was why she was wearing chapstick/lipstick.

With that settled, Sydney rattled the picture in my face. “ROAR!!!” she said.

Phew. Dodged a bullet. May she think Chapstick and Lipstick are the same thing for many years to come.

Royal Arguments

In the ever growing, complicated saga that is Sydney’s daily existence, there are times when she is reprimanded and feels maligned by the process. Which is to say, most of the time.

Sydney doesn’t like to be caught doing something wrong, be told what she is doing is not nice, or find out that what she thought was right was actually wrong, which bodes well for her future behavior, I suppose, but makes the whole process convoluted and drawn out in the moment. Take for instance this exchange, in which I had just reprimanded Sydney for yelling at me while I was in the midst of talking to someone else:

“Mommy! I have to tell you something.”
“What, honey?”
“When superheroes are serious to princesses, they fight.”

Possibly in retrospect, I should have realized that this matter of fact statement had already been discussed and agreed to during the day by Daddy and Sydney. Apparently the agreement was that princesses and superheroes are equal, but when they are serious with each other it sometimes leads to fighting, which is why she assumed that I had gotten mad at her for yelling at me. But I didn’t know that at the time, and assumed that what Sydney was trying to tell me was that a) I was a superhero but I was being mean b) that she was a princess and therefore people couldn’t tell her what to do and c) she didn’t want to fight. Apparently I was wrong on all counts, so the conversation rapidly went downhill:

“Well, I can be serious to princesses.”
“No! Because princesses don’t like it when people are serious!”
I don’t even know where this princess thing came from, but I wasn’t buying it. “Well, princesses have to be strong which means they can’t cry when people are serious with them.”
“Why?”
“Princesses have to rule the country, right?”
“Well, I’m the ruler! And I don’t want you to be serious!!”
“Honey, I have to be serious with you sometimes when you yell at me for no reason.”
“I said I was sorry!!! I’m going to my room for 55 hours and I’m never coming back!!”

At this point, a seriously over-dramatic Sydney mopes slowly out of the living room – or stomps madly, depending on the circumstance, but reappears well before 55 hours are up with a sad expression on her face.

“What’s up, honey?”
“You shouldn’t be serious with princesses!”
“Honey—“ where’s the fast-forward button? – “Honey, I will always be serious with you when you yell at me.”
“But when superheroes are serious to princesses, they fight!!”
“Well I don’t think they should fight at all!”
“DADDYYY!!!”

After many tears and sobs and a version of the story that in no way matches mine, Daddy finally comes in to clear up the matter between the two of us. Apparently, superheroes and princesses need some kind of moderator when they start to fight. I’m not sure who won the final negotiation, but at last we reached a compromise:

“Honey… what will make you feel better?”
“You have to tickle me.”

That, I can do.

To Sydney on her 4th Birthday

When you were born I had no idea what to expect in the years to come. And up until now, though you outgrew your baby clothes and started walking and talking and eating real food, you were still our first little baby. But the other day you showed up nonchalantly at the sugar house, having walked down the snowy, wooded trail all by yourself, and you thought nothing of it. I, on the other hand, was completely thunderstruck.

Actually, you’re doing that a lot to me, nowadays. Instead of the scribbles and fanciful colors upon the bottoms of which your teachers have dutifully translated what the picture is for us, you’re actually drawing yellow suns and red houses and birds with wings in their relatively correct places. You wrote your name, in recognizable letters and in fairly recognizable order the other day, although the E had a few extra lines in it for good measure and a few of the letters were backwards and one was over in the corner of the page by itself. I’m not saying you’re all grown up, but you’re definitely not an infant, a toddler, a three year old anymore.

You can help out now, and not in the way that your little sister “helps out” by removing all the tupperware from the drawers and scattering it all over the kitchen, or the way you once helped Mommy and Daddy “put the corn to sleep” which involved pulling out the corn plants, laying them on their sides and covering the whole thing over with dirt and then patting them hard (we didn’t have a very good corn patch that year). When asked to bring knives and forks to the table, you take them courteously and you put them right where they are supposed to be. You’ll entertain your sister for awhile so that one of us can make dinner. And you’ll relay messages between parents, although not always with the necessary accuracy (“Honey, Syd says that you said to tell me the washing machine is burning up? I’m sorry, can you explain that again?”) You’re growing into a pretty reliable, well-adjusted kid.

That’s not to say you aren’t still hilarious. At your birthday circle at pre-school, I arrived to find you in crown and cape, and the teacher informed me that Sydney had taken a “birthday vacation” and left Prince Charming to stand in her stead. Super Prince Charming, to be exact, not to be confused with Buzz Lightyear, Mighty Mouse, Super Dorothy, Tin Woman, Emergency Buzz (for those times when you don’t have time to say “to Infinity and Beyond!”) or Super Max. It becomes a bit of a challenge, at times, to keep up with you, especially when you announce out of the blue that you need oil (Tin Woman drinks oil, you see. Because water makes her rust.) or that I have to take off your spacesuit before you can get into the bathtub. But once I do catch up it’s just a pure pleasure to immerse myself in your world, for all its chaotic, illogical orderliness.

The most amazing thing about you growing up is that it turns out that I am growing up too. Now that I find myself having to concentrate through a haze of conflicting conversations between Daddy and Mommy, Daddy and Sydney, Sydney and Mommy and Sydney Talking To Herself, or trying to drive in a straight line while also trying to right a suddenly up ended water container, I’m a lot more sympathetic. Patience has become my middle name. Trying to come up with definitive answers to seemingly obvious questions such as “how do they make light bulbs?” has made me realize that I really don’t know all that much and that what I do know isn’t really black and white. Most of all I’ve learned that you cannot cook the best steak in the world at the same time that you are trying to prevent your almost 1 year old from climbing up the stairs and your 4 year old from writing on the walls. Multi-tasking means compromising at best.

So, Sydney, we’ve made it to four. In another four years, you’ll be eight. In 4 times 4, you’ll be learning to drive. And 4 after that you’ll be out on your own. But that’s a lot of fours down the road.