Springtime

Springtime around our house means planting our summer veggies, getting bikes ready for a season of warm weather rides, sorting clothes in the closets upstairs, and wrapping-up Maia's preschool career at Triangle Co-Op.

From Early May

This summer we've planted the usual tomatoes and basil, but we're also going to add a cluster of red beets in the back corner of our yard.  I have two kids who love eating beets, so why not take advantage of that by putting some seeds in the ground and seeing how they grow?  It's going to be too rainy to plant them tonight, so perhaps that'll be a morning task if the weather clears up tomorrow.

There was a little open house this morning at one of our school options for Maia; we hadn't included this school (Angell Elementary) in our list of schools to visit during kindergarten round-up season due to the fact that it hasn't usually had any available kindergarten spaces.  This year, however (in part due to some structural changes in how the University uses its North Campus housing for grad students) there are spaces available at this small school very close to downtown Ann Arbor, and so we added it to our list of potential options.  The district notified us a couple of weeks ago that Maia had gotten a spot in Angell's kindergarten class for next year, and so it was time to pay the school a visit.

The school is Ann Arbor's oldest, built in 1923, and its driveway entrance is right across the street from Triangle Co-Op.  Although Angell's home neighborhood is very, very wealthy, it's also heavily attended by kids outside of the immediate neighborhood, almost 40% of whom are children of international graduate students at the U.  Taken collectively, Angell students speak about 30 different languages at home in the evening with their families!  It's reassuring to us as potential "in-district transfers" that this school is accustomed to welcoming families into the school community who don't live immediately next door or down the street.

Now it's time to pay a visit to our neighborhood school, which has the district's attention due to a new lab school program that's been initiated this year with the University.  (Here's an article about it.)  "Objective" measures like standardized tests would say that our home school is struggling in a way that Angell isn't, but any former teacher worth her degrees and pay steps knows that MEAP scores are complex and fraught with issues and lousy as sole indicators of what's going on in a building.

All in all, it's a fortunate "problem" to have.  Maia's more than ready to begin kindergarten, she's excited and eager and is lamenting the number of months that she has to wait, and our options are exciting and good.  The kindergarten I saw this morning had engaged five-year-olds clustered around tables and using math manipulatives in small groups on the floor (no rows of desks in sight!), and it was a cool sight to see on an ordinary Monday.  :)

Awwww ...

Well, the lottery at Ann Arbor Open didn't go our way this evening.  They had a huge group of applicants (129 for 36 spots!) and our number is really high.  Oh, well!  We'll know more about some of our other possible schools sometime in the next couple of weeks.  :)  Onward!

Springtime!

• We learn about one piece of our kindergarten puzzle tonight, at the Ann Arbor Open School's kindergarten lottery.  Open isn't a neighborhood school, in that there are no designated streets or neighborhoods that are its attendance area.  Instead, it draws students from all over the district and thus is a 100% "school of choice" location, where all families gain the opportunity to enroll through a lottery system.  (Siblings of older Open students get first dibs and need not go through the kdg. lottery.)  Open's progressive school philosophy, as far as I understand it, is largely based on progressive education theories (a la John Dewey) of multi-age, interdisciplinary, democratic and project-based learning.  Classrooms are multi-age/multi-grade, children "loop" with teacher for more than one year (except for stand-alone kindergarten), and democratic principles play into the school's structure significantly more than in most public schools.  Progressive education is based, to some degree, on the notion that education is responsible for creating citizens, whereas many of the criticisms of public school structures today seem based on the idea that schooling is for creating workers and/or consumers ... but, I digress.  In any case, we'll see what happens tonight!  (Kids who are wait-listed after the lottery often enroll anyway--after a spot opens up--but it'd be nice to have a definite answer tonight, if possible.)

• Eli can climb up the ladder into Maia's bunk bed, he's gotten much less barrel-shaped (and might have dropped some weight, perhaps), and he's obsessed with playing outdoors for all of his waking hours.  He'll say "outside!" again and again, or perhaps will say "bike!" or "house!" (for their backyard playhouse), or will simply open the back sliding door and go outside on his own.  Today he's wearing his froggy rain boots (he put them on at around 7:30 AM, as soon as he was dressed) and we've spent most of the morning outdoors in the backyard.  He's asleep now while Maia's at school, and he'll likely sleep for another hour or so to get to his usual 3-hour nap total.

• Eli probably has passed the 150-word mark in his speech, although who knows?  We've stopped counting.  He talks all day, every day, and will get annoyed and more insistent if you don't answer him right away.  My favorite: before he goes to sleep, he goes down the list of people (and sometimes dogs) that are in the house with him or who he's seen that day, and we have to answer where everyone is right at that moment.  It goes something like this:
• "Mommy!"  "I'm right here."
• "Daddy!"  "Daddy's reading to Maia."
• "Maia!"  "Maia's listening to her book."
• "Beezy!"  "You're in your bed, going to sleep."  And so on.  Yes, he calls himself "Beezy.'

• My favorite Eli word right now is "yogurt," which he pronounces "yuh-guk."  I love it.

Maia's business cards

There's this little deli in Ann Arbor called Zingerman's.  We go there a lot.  A lot.  Coffee, real bagels (not round loaves of bread like Lender's--barf!), occasional sandwiches of the lunch or breakfast variety.  Smoked salmon.

Our celebrity sightings at Zingerman's (everyone in Ann Arbor has a list): Clive Owen, Ed Norton, Mario Batali (many times), Courteney Cox and David Arquette, almost Anthony Bourdain and Ryan Gosling, and a totally random one described below.

Maia's been going there her entire life; her first visit to Zingerman's post-birth was at about ten days old.  Eli was sooner--I think he might have been three days old.  That's not counting the visit or two that I paid to Zingerman's during my two days of labor-before-labor.  Before Eli was born, the Zingerman's staff had offered, seriously, to deliver a sandwich to the hospital or to our house after his birth.  Zingerman's doesn't deliver!  (Well, not usually.)  This little anecdote serves as a nice segue into the story of Maia's business cards.

Maia makes quite an impression there, and she seems to consider the deli and the Next Door coffee shop as an extension of our house.  It's part of Maia's Ann Arbor domain.  She's been placing her own orders since she was about two, and she strolls around Next Door and greets the other patrons in a way that might, sometimes, be a bit too much.  We've had to ask her to take it down a notch.  She fancies herself an employee there sometimes and once, while she was clearing a table, the 1980s actor (and now director) Emilio Estevez helped her with a sandwich basket.  (Random.)

She frequently chats with Zingerman's co-founder and co-owner Ari, who asks her pertinent questions about school and Harry Potter and her books and art works and whatever else she might be focused on at the moment.  She always looks for Ari at his table in the back of the coffee shop and is genuinely happy to see him.  A couple of months ago, it came to our attention (via a request for how to spell our last name) that Ari was planning a surprise for Maia.  We didn't know what exactly it was (we'd heard "business cards," possibly) or when it would arrive, and due to the fact that Ari runs a multi-million dollar business, we would not have been at all surprised if it didn't come to be.

We should have known better, because we've totally gulped down the Zingerman's Kool-Aid and we know how they do things, and we know that their affection for our kid is genuine and real.  Of course Ari would do it, and it would be awesome.  The cards are fantastic: covered in rainbows and depicting a flying unicorn and the deli building with slightly demented looks on their faces!  Maia's portrait is drawn in Zingerman's style at the top, along with her title:  "Maia Genisio, CEO-in-training."  

We were all surprised and genuinely touched, I think, and Maia's thrilled.  She's handing them out with aplomb.  She gave one to Ms. Mariann today at school, and one to her best friend, Lia.  

Here is Maia with Ari, both holding up their Zingerman's business cards:

From Early March

Settling in.

From Morning reading

Little by little, day by day, it just creeps up on you that you're now a parent of two kids, as opposed to one baby and one kid.  Maia's a few months shy of kindergarten, where she'll be in school from about 8 AM to 3 PM now that Ann Arbor switched officially to all-day K (joining pretty much the rest of the state).  We're not yet sure where she'll be going to school; we're choosing among six schools in the Ann Arbor district, five of which appear in the 100 best schools in the state, according to this list at least.  I will profess my deep skepticism of rankings here, but I'll say, too, that these places seem really promising as public school options for our kid.  I've talked to a lot of parents and administrators in the last month, and the anecdotes appear to coalesce with the data.  We are really, really lucky, and this little "problem" of not being sure where among these schools Maia's going to go is a pretty sweet problem to have.

On another monumental note: today is Eli's weaning day.  He's just shy of 19 months old and this morning's wake-up nursing session was our last together.  He's been requesting his "Mamak" (a blend of "Mama" and "milk") with less and less frequency, and my supply is dwindling in response.  I think it's time to end this chapter now; I don't want to continue through to the point that I have discomfort and my last memories of nursing my little ones include pain.  I did a bit of math this morning and realized that I've been a nursing mom for between 41 and 42 months over the course of the last five-ish years; this has been one defining feature of my physical and emotional life through most of my thirties.  It is very hard, today, to see it go, but (to get all Buddhist about it) that's also my attachment speaking, my clinging to the familiar as opposed to surrendering to change.

Now that it's over I bet there will be another post or two on the topic, but for now I'll say "hooray!" for reaching this milestone, and for what we've achieved as a family in this regard.  Particularly during a baby's early infancy, at least in my experience, it's a family decision, and it's one defining aspect of a family's way of life.  Brian's role in it all goes so far beyond support; his unspoken message throughout, both in word and behavior, was that this is the way it is.  He never questioned our path or "suggested" alternatives or advocated for less nursing.  Eli never had a drop of formula, and considering his mammoth size and really frequent nursing as a little baby, I think it's important to honor the role his daddy played in it all.

I'm aware of the evidence that the weaning process can coincide with bouts of blues and depression, and so there might be a moody bump or two in the road here, but awareness is key.  Thank goodness I'm a research nerd!  :)

"Greening" our household

Clearly, I've turned a corner with blog posting and I've decided to write a bit about lots of random things, as opposed to just longer, kid-milestone posts.  Those will continue to come, but they don't always provide the full picture of our family life that I envision for this blog.  It's "The Family G," after all--all of us!  :)

On to the topic of the day:  there are thousands of blogs and websites and lists out there for people who are working, step-by-step, to rid their homes of strange chemicals with 21-letter names and petroleum origins.  We're one of those families, but I don't want to write one of those blogs.  It's been a project that's been going on for a few months, and I thought it might be time to put up another post about my progress, because it's a little thing of which I'm sort of proud.

(There are various "Dirty Dozen" lists of chemicals to try to avoid, but I've been focusing on household and cosmetic products, because our family's food consumption is pretty un-processed and clean, largely thanks to efforts Brian has made over the years.  That was his contribution, and this is mine.)

Here's what I've done:

• Fragrance-free, basic detergents for laundry and dishes (Method and 7th Generation, usually).
• Mrs. Meyers cleaning stuff for the house.  I re-fill old spray bottles with a mix of concentrated cleaning stuff and water.
• Shea butter (pure, a jar of it that's hard when it's cool and softens with heat) for lotion.  I use almond oil for this, too.
• Oil to clean my face (castor/jojoba blend).  I've been giving the Oil Cleansing Method a try.
• Unscented or plant-based scents for all the kids' lotions and shampoos and stuff.

Here's where I still have some trouble:

• Paper products like T.P. and napkins and stuff.  It's so hard for me to spend so much more money on items like this.  I've switched to kitchen/dish cloths rather than using a lot of paper towel, but the toilet paper and napkins are still lousy and cheap, rather than the greener stuff.
• There's still a lot of plastic.  It gets recycled when it's empty, but still.  :(

I went through our cabinets recently and got rid of the old bottles of Johnson & Johnson or Bath & Body Works (among others) that have gone unused; the pile of bottles to go into recycling was quite satisfying to look at!  :)

Here's the website I use for my shopping:  http://www.goodguide.com/

I know I have blog readers out there who make similar (and often much greener) choices with your shopping lists, and so perhaps this is largely a "hey, I'm working on it, you guys!" sort of post.  :)

Odds and ends

• Eli's 18-month appointment was yesterday.  He's 32.5 lbs. and 33.5 inches tall.  He's begun talking in sentences and uses somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 words, and he demonstrated a nice toddler-sized amount of stranger anxiety about our doctor's exam.  He actually straight-arm shoved her away from him when she was looking in his ears!  
• Maia's 5-year, pre-kindergarten appointment was yesterday, too; it was a busy morning at our doctor's office, but it's nice to get both of these appointments done at once.  Maia weighs just eight pounds more than her little brother, which explains the lack of difference you feel if you pick up one of them in your arms, and then the other soon after.  :)  She's very, very tall for her age at almost four feet--I think it's pretty clear that my dear daughter will be taller than me, for sure, sometime during her teenage years.

Time

Joanna wrote the following to me in an e-mail recently:

"I know it's a wonderful thing to watch children growing up, it's beautiful, it's exciting... I mean, it's supposed to be a wonderful thing, right? So why does it just make me feel so SAD that Maia is getting so big, so old?"


I've been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of days, and I've developed an hypothesis or two.  I'll begin with what feels like my own answer:  when I feel sadness about my kids getting older, I think that the source of it is a recognition of all the hours and days I've missed in busyness and unawareness and  habitual counting-down of the days.  Those moments when I recognize clearly how old my kids have gotten are like flashes of a camera or the snapping into focus of a microscope.  Something dark or blurry becomes momentarily clear, which is a gift, but it makes me realize the darkness or blur that lies all around it.


Life goes on, we have to-do lists and calls to make and bills to pay ... but we have other things that aren't necessary and yet they consume so very, very much of our time.  I browse the Internet too much, I spin with worry and anxiety too much (although I'm getting better here!), and I certainly could condense some of my required errand-running into more contained periods of time.  I don't believe that it's realistic to expect continuous, all-day-long awareness of the minutiae of life (I recall this blog post, "Don't Carpe Diem" when I think along these lines), but I think the essence of my spiritual practice these days is to gather just a few more moments of awareness every day, to quietly try harder not to "lose" entire days to the dark or the blur.