And Happy Mother's Day to me! And everyone. To everyone who wants to celebrate. Bittersweet day for many this year, I suspect. It's always a pretty rough one for a lot of people, so I guess this is a year of solidarity.
I'm surviving. Chaya isn't sleeping well in our currently warm weather - also harder to sleep with the the sunnier longer days, and with her NEED to stay up and read books that are "too long" and she wanted to sleep but the books were so long.... Today involved a handful of meltdowns, including a long one in the kitchen floor where she cried because she didn't want to tell daddy it was breakfast time, but then he came out on his own when she had wanted to be the one to get him and then she hit me which wasn't ok so I made her go to her room with daddy and there was sobbing and crying and... there was other stuff. Not quite like a few days ago when she started sobbing because it was not Valentine's Day. A companion to the evening I heard her bawling after bedtime and she explained she was "just crying because there were no Easter Eggs" and asked me to leave her alone to cry herself to sleep. My heart!
At any rate, Chaya and I made a Mother's Day Card card for her preschool project. I think the intention was to make it possible to pass off the supervision to a sibling or non-mother-parent, but Chaya wanted to do it immediately on getting home. So I helped her paint and glue flowers and a little poem for me. Then Chaya let loose on it. Also the card's for Daddy. He's having such a great Mother's Day!!
Like his hair? I did that!
It was terrifying. He was like "here, here's a razor with an edge on it. Make it short." And then his hair just started flying off all over the kitchen so much that even though I cleaned afterwards, we found his hairs all through lunch later in the day. It's not super even with the edges and he doesn't have sideburns anymore (whoops) but I actually think he pulls it off quite nicely. I think I'll be way more confident with it next time around, if such a time occurs.
Anyways, Chaya did some serious work on that card once she found a silver sharpie. The sharpie fortunately remained on the card alone, as opposed to "the couch, the wall, the windows, the bed, all her books..." all the places she tries to draw on with her markers which are saved only by the fact that she dries those babies out so fast they don't leave a mark on much of anything after a few days.
Our other preschool project of the week was cookies! I thought Miss Thing would be thrilled. She's usually a pretty active and excited participant when cookies are involved, so I got all the ingredients in our weekly grocery delivery and started making them on Wednesday morning. Chaya helped toss some flower and salt from the bowl to EVERYWHERE IN THE KITCHEN and then... got bored. She was terrified of the mixer this run around and kept asking to "watch sooooooongs" from her spot on the kitchen floor while I finished the other 5 million steps that were carefully crafted to help her learn measurements and the joy of baking. She did lick the paddles and insist that all her cookies needed to have M&Ms though, so it was semi-collaborative.
Chaya's the master baker is all.
My knee is still pretty delicate (but I'm surviving an increasing leveling up in PT, go me) so I don't drag Chaya outside for entertainment all that much other than sending and picking up mail. This is fun in its own right. Chaya's acquired some pen pals this month. My mom sends her all manner of things, but largely photos of me when I was a kid. Sebastian and Cedrick draw their little hearts out. It's been great. With Andrew's birthday coming up and all the associated packages related to that, as well as her magazine subscriptions, she's gotten tons of mail recently. Though some days, there is no mail for Chaya and that's... really not ok. We need more pen pals apparently.
Chaya still gets out with Andrew. He takes her on trails and bikes and on his runs. Usually her part of the runs happen in the stroller, but sometimes, we have to ad lib.
Baking, running, mailing, and creating are all well and good, but there are plenty of hours in the day to fill beyond that.
We rely on screen time here as much as any parents. And this far in, Chaya's a little less amenable to the creative storytimes and music classes and educational programming. Honestly, it's fine. We're not setting hard and fast limits right now. Or insisting on specific content. Or any of that. Life's too short. Friday, Chaya spent her screen time watching Slovenian video compilations on how to sneak make up into high school classes and hide your gum in printer cartridges. There were also pastry compilations. I liked those.
That said, I do find that break-times often lead to losing the urge to watch. So we watch something short before breakfast (unlimited play time before songs and breakfast, but just a short pre-breakfast "song:). Then after Chaya cleans up her plate (the dish is talking to its sister dish and the fork wants to play with the spoon, she says), she gets some more songs.
After that I tell her we're taking a break. She sometimes howls and cries, but it is what it is. I take about 5-10 minutes of protest as normal transition. Often, though, even within that time she flips on the creative switch and starts drawing or playing make believe. And if she asks after 15 minutes, I let her watch more tv, but usually she doesn't as long as I keep playing with her.
Her imagination. We're very into the "let's pretend" phase. You can see a more fine tuned grasp of real and not real than even the beginning of the year. Sometimes the make believe is multiple levels. We're pretending to be kids pretending to be bunnies pretending to have a party, for instance. We're acting out scenes for tv or a movie. It's fascinating.
Chaya likes to be a bunny most of all. When she's a bunny, she has ten twin sisters named Zoey. Then it's definitely "a shark that is friendly and scary," which pretty much sums Chaya up. Chaya's recent playtime themes still includes mommy-and-baby-animals, but we've graduated to reenacting pages from her books. Most bedtimes, she'll point at two characters on every page and tell me to be one while she's the other.
On Friday we immersed in a page from Boynton's One-Two-Three, in which hippos are on a car ride and the brother and sister hippo are fighting while the baby is crying. "Five is nice for a ride in the car, as long as the car ride isn't too far." Brother and sister were fighting over a toy we decided, so I was brother and she was sister (or vice versa) and we fought over a toy most of the day. Except sometimes I was the baby and she would give me the toy because I was crying. I also cried because my diaper was wet or soiled. Or because i was hungry. Or because I wanted to play hide and seek. Occasionally we were the parents trying to resolve the dispute. She's pretty good at that role.
In other news, Chaya isn't the only one who gets to play. I'm in a band now! I feel pretty awesome about this. My bestie Fidel and his bestie Luis and me have been playing around on a site called bandlab. We make music - covers of songs we like - together. A band for the lockdown generation. It's cool. We're from East Coast, West Coast, and Ecuador (sorry, I don't really know coasts down that way) and with the lockdowns we could just as soon be three houses apart. But whatever the distance, there's always music to make and share and discuss in Spanish that I am sure i totally and absolutely understand and communicate clearly in! Also, we have a band name. Chaya came up with the name when she misunderstood Wild World, which we've covered but I don't think was published yet.
Anyways...
My first try vocalizing. I don't know if it's me or something about recording, but getting timing synced up was really challenging. I was always a half beat later than I thought. Some serious readjustment for that. And I learned some recording and mixing techniques. A really fun learning process.
Bandlab's a cool site. I've done some just vocal recordings too.
I am out of practice and realize it's been a while since I actually did vocal exercises, but working on it is really therapeutic.
Of course, Chaya may love singing, but I'm not allowed to sing when she's around. If I try to record anywhere near her, she'll start yelling STOOOOOOOP WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Which makes for an interesting recording. Little extra flavor to it. Somebody does not hold back, but her criticism is rarely super constructive. At least I'm still allowed to sing her bedtime song to her. Daddy was cut off. He's allowed to sing baby shark sometimes. Chaya has her preferences.
Anyways, if you wanna be a groupie, I'm down with that. Just send me - or Chaya, really, Chaya really REALLY likes mail - some fan letters. I'll send you random items to ebay someday when I'm really famous. Maybe a toothbrush or a few shopping/to-do lists. Maybe some of the baby photos my mom keeps sending Chaya. The sky's the limit.
Happy Sunday. Mother's Day if you like it. If you don't, at least it's a day to mark time. We've been through almost two months of the new-what's-going-on. We don't know what comes next. But here we all. It's mother's day, which means it's mid spring and we're almost halfway through this weird weird year. Whatever day is it, may it be restorative and healthy and full of whatever music the children allow.
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