Babies=McDonalds

When we were stopped at a gas station off I-94 this past weekend, Nourit spied a McDonalds next door, complete with a brand new Playspace. Now, we secretly love to play the elitist game of pointing to the big yellow 'M' in front of other people and asking "What's that?", then giggling at the shocked looks when our girls sweetly say, "I don't know" or "Old MacDonalds". How could a child not be intimately acquainted with McDonalds?

We have just had enough other choices when it comes to food, and have been able to avoid going there (because we're busy frequenting all the bakeries in Chicago, for instance.) We're pretty conscious about what we eat, and tend not to eat out much at all (but that is mostly because we're poor!) We were thrilled when they opened Panera along the route to Grandma's house because it gave us an alternative to fast fried food. But...I do like me a cheeseburger and fries when I'm prego, so Nourit has been to McDonalds at least once, not that she remembers. Also not sure I told my husband that yet...

Anyway, back to the gas station and the Playspace across the road. Nourit's interest was piqued and she tried to figure out a way to get us to take her and Avi there. "Can we go in and play for 5 minutes?" No, because we'd have to eat there, and we aren't buying food there. "Can't we just pay to go into the play area without eating?" she queried. That's when I dropped the bomb and told her that she had already been to a McDonalds (and perhaps that very same one) when I was pregnant with Avi, because "I usually go at least once when I'm pregnant, because of the cravings."

Then it started. The girls want a sibling.

They started lobbying for a little sister or brother on the car ride home. "You mean to tell us you love each other so much, you want another sibling?" Mike asked. "Yes!!" they both cried simultaneously. Did they not recall the last hour of fighting over toys in the backseat? "And then we can go to Old McDonalds!" piped up Avi. Ahhh...the real reason.

I would like to have a third baby sometime - and not just for the chance to have a cheeseburger, fries and Coke without guilt. Hopefully, though, we can work it out so that I'm like that gorgeous woman in her mid-40's I met last summer with a brand new baby boy and two doting daughters that were old enough to help change diapers. She looked so happy (and rested) that whenever I get anxious that I'm getting too old, I just have to think of her blissed-out visage and I feel I can be little more patient.

Tonight, though, Avi started again, even picking out a name for the baby, definitely a girl. "We can call her by my name!" So we'd have...Nourit, Avi and Avi. Anyone remember the old Newhart show with Larry, Daryll and Daryll? I can see some similarities already. "Or, pooh face!" (that's more like it), "or Lightening the Queen!"

Maybe we'll wait until she at least old enough to help pick a decent name, if not change diapers.

Quotables

Lately, the girls have been coming out with some funny things (and some doozies.) Here are some of the more recent ones that I can remember.

Sleeping
While discussing the ungodly hour that Avi creeps into our bed every morning
Nourit says: "I like to sleep in."
Avi: "I like to sleep out!"

Foot Washing
In a pre-Easter mood, Nourit decides to wash Avi's feet during their bathtime. Still basking in the afterglow of watching my girls treating each other with such affection, I'm rocking Avi to sleep while Nourit runs by on her way to bed. "Wait!" I say, "I need a hug and a kiss." She runs back to provide those, and Avi holds out her arms to Nourit, who, in turn runs away. Avi scrambles down to follow her, arms still open. Nourit, on the stairs puts a foot in Avi's face and generously says "Kiss it!" Of course, Avi does so happily.

Two's and Tree's
Nourit was practicing her math at the dinner table. "1 and 1 is 2. 2 and 2 is four."
Avi asks in her three-year old voice "What's tree and tree?"
Nourit answers without missing a beat, "Two trees."

Synonyms for Nice
On Monday, after spending some time with Nourit's class at school, Avi was in a magnanimous mood, describing Nourit's classmates. "They are friends and kind and nice and...fratulating!"
Nourit: "Fratulating?? That's not even a word!"
Avi: "Yeah it is. It means 'nice'!"

A Month (and a day) of Birthdays

From December 26 through January 27 we run the Birthday Marathon. It actually starts the day before, on Christmas, with Jesus' birthday - but we don't bake him a cake. Nourit came into the world 5 years ago on 12/26/05, but on 12/26/11, she wasn't in much of a celebrating mood. She barely got out of bed, and only with the aid of her 15th dose of children's Motrin did she blow out her candles. The upside is, she had cupcakes at school two weeks before, Fritz cupcakes at our house, a cake at Grandma's house and a cake at Nanny & Pappa's. I guess we won't feel tooo sorry for her!

5 Candles

This is how she really felt.

And then, Grandma's 70th birthday happened on the 30th, but this year, we celebrated it for 5 days with Mickey Mouse and all his friends.

Birthday Breakfast with Chef Goofy

Up next comes Mike's birthday on January 12 - right in the middle of a busy week during a busy month during a busy year. We paused long enough to have a birthday lunch and chocolate cake.

38 years ago today, in a small town in the southernmost part of Canada, Mike was born.

Finally, Avi's birthday came and went with various mini-celebrations of her 3 years over the course of the week. This is as close as we'll come to getting her a pet of her own. This horse is currently on his back, a blanket spread across him with a bandage around his foot. Maybe we're cultivating a little veterinarian?

Trot ol' Joe!

Elizabeth and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (or No Good Deed Goes Unpunished)

It all started a week ago when THE SNOWSTORM blew into Chicago. Fascinating and fun for about a day and a half, and then...no parking. My husband dutifully shoveled out our car (and that of the neighbor downstairs - the one who bangs on our floor and curses at us), and we set out two cute little children's lawn chairs when school and work resumed on Friday. We (and about 2/3rds of our neighbors) continued this reservation system through Sunday, but that's when we got THE NOTE.

"What did you do to make you think you deserve this spot?! Next time, I'm taking it."

Didn't they get that we had shoveled it out, and couldn't they see that we had children? (note: the cute teeny tiny lawn chairs were strategically planned.) It made me so mad that someone wrote those mean words, that those people are Out There, filling our air with their selfish, ugliness, and so I decided to make it my mission to do what I could to help shovel out our street. Reverse the ick, and spread more joy and available parking. So I removed the chairs and tried hard not to spend my entire drive to Nourit's school and back worrying about where I'd park again upon returning home. There was, of course, no parking when I returned home. So, while Avi cried in her carseat for a half hour, I shoveled out a spot and pulled in. More goodwill, more parking!

Yesterday, (when it was in the single digits) I got really ambitious. I gave the girls some spoons and tupperware, told them to play next to the street, and got to work. It took me over an hour, but I pulled down one towering mountain of snow single shoveldly. Avi, however, was miserably cold and so I put her in the car and ignored her cries while valiantly wielding my shovel against that bad person who left the mean note (and all the other people like him. Or her. At this point, I was imagining it was the Woman Downstairs.)

That was where it all went wrong. I got prideful. And, I left the car door ajar all night.

Did I mention Mike just happened to be out of town for 32 hours?

This morning, after my usual "Hurry up-we're gonna be late-you're old enough to put on your own coat" routine, I ushered the girls out to the car. The automatic locks didn't work but it didn't register with me until the car didn't even make a noise. Not even a little chirp. I got the girls back out and stood on the sidewalk looking in all directions for...direction, I guess. The young knight in the white, American-made car drove by slowly and offered to jump the car. Amazingly, I was able to find our jumper cables very neatly stored on our back porch, and soon, the car was running strong. Here's where I made the second mistake. I took the housekeys OFF of the car key (to keep it running) and ran back inside for the backpack. Nourit made it to school, we made it back home, the sitter came, and I was on my way to teach class. Things are good. There are good people in the world. La di da!

Class was 44 degrees when I walked up to our space and the building manager was not in. Appropriately, I led my Music Together class through "I'm freezing, I'm freezing, I hope I don't start sneezing" and after a few rounds of 'Trot, trot to Grandma's House' and 'Pop! Goes the Weasel', we started to shed our coats and scarves, and my good humor returned.

A short hour at home, then out to pick up Nourit and head to Hyde Park for two more classes. I meticulously packed my lessons plans, books, extra shoes, snacks for everyone, brewed myself a steaming cup of Emergen-C, took Avi by the hand and walked out the door. Mistake #3 - I left the house keys inside. I didn't realize this until we made it to Hyde Park to meet Mike and discover HE didn't have his house keys either. But I prided myself (there is that word again - pride!) on my quick thinking. Mike could meet my brother in the West Loop, get our extra set of housekeys from HIM, and then meet us again after class. All would be fine.

And it was - right through classes, dinner at Salonica, and out into the car. Everyone's in their carseats and seatbelts and..."Mike, you put the Club on the steering wheel and that key is on the ring with our house keys. Inside the house." He looked like he would cry. After 16 hours on a train, 5 hours sleep and a sore throat, I don't blame him. So I laughed. And Nourit cried. And we tried calling the only three people we knew in Hyde Park whose numbers were in our phones to see if we could borrow a car for a couple hours. However, (and here's that parking thing again), if we borrowed a car, the probability of finding another parking spot that late at night was nil.

And so we ran. We made it to the Metra just before it pulled away, and between heaving chests, laughed some more. Two trains later we were walking the last mile home with the girls sitting on our shoulders singing the theme song from Veggie Tales. Now they are in bed, and hopefully Mike is on his way back with our car after a quick $50 cab ride back to Hyde Park.

And there won't be a single parking spot available.

My Favorite Things

One of my favorite things is when both my girls are sleeping peacefully, Nourit in the top bunk, Avi on the bottom, their little noses breathing heavily. They are doing that right at this moment and it took exactly 29 minutes from the time I tucked them under the covers until they were snoring in sync. And what magic happened during those 29 minutes that got them from 60 to 0? Why, my melodious voice, of course. All those years between the ages of 7 and 17 when I would play my records (yes, they were LPs), brush in hand, and would belt out every word to every show tune I knew? I was preparing for this day. Whenever I was alone in the house, I would sit at the piano and accompany myself to all the ballads I knew, from 'Where is Love?' from Oliver! to 'On My Own' from Les Miserables. I still pride myself to knowing every single word to 'The Music Man', including the train song. (Whadya talk, whadya talk, whadya talk...)

That career never got off the ground, high school follies notwithstanding.

Until now!

Since the birth of our kids, we've spent almost every bedtime singing our kids to sleep in two part harmony. I have a strict order:
1) Twinkle, Baa Baa, and ABC's - they are all the same tune, something I didn't figure out until graduate music school
2) Hush Little Baby - I decided early on which version we'd sing, and have stuck to it
3) after the first two, it's a mixture of every other lullaby I know (and being a Music Together teacher, I know many), then Jesus Loves Me, Jesus Loves the Little Children, and I culminate with Kum ba yah (at which point, it's a deep and real pleading for God to come quickly and knock these children out to sleep.)

If God (or the Sandman) hasn't come at that point, I'm desperate. I have no more songs to sing. Nourit is begging for "a song that you've never sung to me before." That's when I pull out my deep, unquenched passion: show tunes! I get to sing old sappy ballads, uninterrupted, to a rapt audience. How great is that? It's an educational time, too, though. In fact, tonight my girls learned what a 'sash' and an edelweiss were. (3 points if you can name that musical!) They absolutely love My Favorite Things. At this point, my repertoire also includes Goodnight, My Someone and 'Till There Was You. In the course of writing this, I've even recalled a few more that I'm anxious to try out on them.

But... it will have to wait until next Monday when Mike is working and I put the girls to bed all by myself again. See, he's not so fond of showtunes. (He won't even let me sing anything from 'Grease' around them. Sheesh!) So, unless it's something from 'Spamalot' (the ONLY musical he even admits to liking), I'll have to keep it solo.

Life on the North Side

I'm not sure I can succinctly sum up the journey from our home of 6 years on 61st Street to here, our little enclave in South Lakeview, via an intense detour that lasted about 9 months. (And yes, at times that detour was more painful than giving birth.)

So...I won't. I'll just skip ahead to NOW. 4 months into living on the North Side and here is a peek at our comings and goings and attempts at routine.

Every day, Mike puts helmets on the girls, loads them into the Burley, and makes the 15 minute bikeride to drop Nourit at the Lycée, where she attends full-days (except for Wednesday, which is une demi-journée.) I get a *blissful* 25 minutes of alone-time before he comes back with the Av-Monster. I mean, Meister.

Which I need after the flurry of getting everyone out the door, all accomplished to the tune of the girls fighting, Avi running on tippytoes back and forth on our wood floors, and the young, single, childless resident in the garden apartment below us pounding on her ceiling and cursing loud enough for us to hear. GOOD morning, city living!

4 out of 7 mornings, I put my guitar on my back and get on my bike, feeling oh, so cool, because nobody knows just from looking at me that I can only play 3 chords. To the outside world, I'm a bohemian mama, riding my bike and playing my songs. Oh, and I only ride on the side streets. (Not so brave - or crazy - to ride on the main ones.) I lead my families toward a brighter, musical future, and collect hugs from adorable 1 year olds at the end of each class. Then, I head home to my own adorable 2 year old who tells me daily that she's almost 3. Which is true if you think 4 months away is 'almost'.

Our life on the North Side also consists of Michael and I visiting Hyde Park to teach for a combined total of...5 out of 7 days. And we moved - why? Oh, yes! Because we are in walking distance from Nourit's school. Actually, a 45 minute walk - which I make every Tuesday to pick up Nourit from school. It's lovely, actually, and I'm enjoying watching her play with her French classmates at the nearby playground once or twice a week during these amazing summer/October days. Pretty soon, I'll be studying the bus routes, but until then, I'm getting my exercise in.

Speaking of playgrounds, we have one a hop-skip-and-a-walk-along-all-the-raised-flower-beds away, and are finally sorting out the nannies from the grandparents from the parents. The park association throws wonderful events, and we attended the block party in September, and we have even had a few impromptu front porch conversations this month with our new neighbors. Right now, the girls are wondering why we are the only family on the block that hasn't turned their front porch into a spider web.

We have sold or donated as much of our 'stuff' as possible, limited our Fritz Bakery visits to once or twice weekly, and have worked hard to create routine for our girls again. We've instituted home cooked dinners where we sit and function as a family (although, the girls still miss their wild and crazy days in the dininghall. Not me!) We have become more insulated, sure, and haven't enjoyed the myriad playdates that used to happen spontaneously at our last two funhouses. But we are enjoying our family movie nights, and our family pizza nights, and a less frantic pace. We are trying to refocus on what we have to do to get Mike through school and raise our girls to be loving, interested, respectful humans. It's been a hard transition. And things are still changing and will continue to change over the next few years. For now, though, we can walk 2 blocks in any direction and have a drink, drop off our drycleaning, get a pedicure, get a haircut, get a bikini wax, get an oil change, get change for a dollar, work out, climb a wall, listen to an indie band, see a movie, see a play, eat a hot dog, buy a dog, buy our recently purchased dog an organic, vegetarian hot dog, eat some tapas, eat French, Italian, Mexican, or Turkish, buy groceries, or just buy an oriental rug at 80% off.

I Drink Wine Because They Whine

Really. I do. I have suddenly begun to enjoy cooking because it means I'm in the kitchen at 5 o'clock, and can start to sip a glass of Rosé, or open up a beer, and it's still within the realm of appearing civilized. Breastfeeding be damned. (And damn it, I'm still breastfeeding my 2 1/2 year old and am just too chicken, or tired, or something, to wean her.) I used to think when your child was old enough to ask for it, they were too old to be imbibing. That -and many other notions I had - was B.C.

I love my kids. I think I loved them more before they could talk, though. When I had babies, I felt like I was born to be a mother. A natural mother. Their crying was legitimate and I could always fix it. Now that they are 2 1/2 and 4 1/2, I am naturally and legitimately annoyed 90% of the day. It starts at 5:43 in the morning with thump, thump, thump, thump thump..."Mama, can I sleep with you?" Then the pawing and kicking begins. If I attempt to exit the bed to get some work done on the computer, the alarm goes off. The screaming child alarm. "Don't leeeaaaave meeeee!" Two hours later, when Little Sister deems it appropriate for Big Sister to join the functionally-awake family, it really gets going. Hisses, screams, cries, doors slamming. "You're not being nice to me!" Hissssss. "I'm gonna pinch you and eat you up." Hissssss. "Stop iiiiiiittttttt!" Hissss. And no, we don't have a reptile living with us. Those are the sounds of our beautiful, well-behaved, quiet little girls. The ones I planned to have - B.C.

Don't get me wrong. There are moments of beauty when they are playing side-by-side, immersed in a project at the dining room table or baking mud pies in the sandbox. I have picture-perfect images in my head of Big Sister holding out her hand to a shy Little Sister, inviting her to come into Children's Church with her and Little Sister taking it without a look back at mom and dad. There are sometimes shared giggles...but those are mostly at my expense when they gang up to stick their fingers between my toes.

I know I need to be more patient. After all, we've put them through two moves in one year, and so many other huge transitions. Saying we're having a hard time with it ourselves would be an understatement. Regardless, I just didn't expect a teenager at 4 1/2. Or a banshee at 2 1/2. Mike and I are so calm, so quiet. Shouldn't our kids be, too?

We feed them - really good food, actually. I don't know many other kids under five who eat croissant and crepes for breakfast every weekend, or who enjoy Tuscan-style lunches 5 days a week, and internationally themed, organic dinners each night. So why do they start begging to be fed the moment we clear the breakfast table? They don't stop. Even during meals Avi is reaching across the table for more of what she already has on her plate.

I admit, I am uncertain how to discipline anymore. Spanking, duct tape, and leaving them by the side of the road are out. We've always used 'natural consequences.' But some things don't have one of those. What's a natural consequence to Stink Face? Hitting them on the back so it sticks that way? That'll teach 'em. How do I get Avi to sit still for half a second without squashing her...natural exuberance? And seriously, how does one give natural consequences when you are in the car? There are only so many hours you can promise the "time-out when we get home in three days". After the first 5 minutes they know you can't do a darn thing and they get a sick sense of fun out of making their sibling cry. Then laugh. Then cry again.

So there it is. Maybe I should replace my nightly glass of wine with some yoga and see if that does the trick. If I'm more zen-like, will that make my kids behave? Or maybe I'll just be able to tune out the whining by chanting "OMMMMMMMMMM. Nah, Nah, Nah, I can't heeeeaaar you!!!"