Green intentions

Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, Rowan rode his bike all the way to the babysitter’s this morning. That’s the equivalent of approximately two city blocks, but it’s the furthest he's ever gone at a stretch. What a difference a year makes. Last summer, Rowan on his bike was the equivalent of the kid picking flowers in the soccer field, all on, off, on, off, don’t let go of the handlebars Mom hey what’s that shiny thing on the ground I’m tired can you push me let’s take the car. Today, he pedaled along steadily. “My bike has magic powers to go over cracks,” he told us, repeatedly. “That's why I'm so good.”

Rachel and I just grinned like idiots. Way back when, before there were children and we had only visions of what children might be like and what astonishing kinds of parents we would be, we both imagined our kids riding bikes. We imagined walking or cycling to school or daycare beside our bike-riding kids. (We actually imagined cycling beside our bike-riding kids as we made our way across, say, the Netherlands, or down the West Coast from Victoria to San Francisco, but I may be getting ahead of myself.)

And today, I got to check that vision off my mental list — always nice when those come to fruition instead of falling by the wayside (“And they will not eat cheese strings”).

My celebrations of Earth Day will continue for the next hour and a half, while Rachel takes both children to Kindermusik and I get my biweekly extra 90 minutes to myself. I have this vision where I will do yoga and some journal/creative writing and screw around on Facebook.

Baby steps

Recently, in an effort to clear up some misconceptions surrounding human anatomy (you will be relieved to learn that girls do not, in fact, “pee out of their bums”), I got out our copy of It’s Not the Stork and sat down with Rowan to have a little chat.

After we clarified — at least, for the moment — the tricky question of the female urethra, we kept turning pages until we got to the pictures of babies in their mothers’ bellies. And I found myself having what appeared to be my first formal “birds and bees” talk with my child.

I’ll save the actual details for another post, but suffice it to say it was all pretty low-key. I communed with my mother, flashing back to the time she made a special trip to the library and got a book — with diagrams — in order to answer my four-year-old questions about how the baby got out of such a small hole. I congratulated myself on my upfront, no-embarrassment, give-just-as-much-information-as-necessary-but-not-enough-information-to-overwhelm approach.

Until Rowan dreamily asked the one question I hadn’t really prepared for: “When are we getting another baby?”

Reader, I snorted. If I’d been drinking coffee, it would have sprayed out of my nose. I immediately felt bad: I mean, seeing that he is a kid, my kid in fact, it might be just slightly rude to suggest that he and his brother have set a precedent I don’t want to repeat. I mean, it’s one thing to shout, as I have, at my ovulating body, “Do I look like I want any more children?” It’s another to scoff at the very idea in front of your own offspring — I mean, it could send the wrong message, you know?

The right message, the true message, is that the two kids we have are the two kids we want. And with every milestone — the crib for sale, the high chair gone, the way these two kids grow and blossom and become more and more their own people, more and more independent — I have no desire to rewind and start over again, times three. I want to run ahead with my boys, not lag behind to nurse their younger sibling or stay home while that baby naps. I’m not ready for another two years of sleep deprivation. I want to cuddle them in the mornings. I want to watch Rowan put on his own coat and boots and help Isaac into his so that they can play outside in the backyard after dinner while Rachel and I have a conversation at the table and then join them. I want to push Isaac on his tricycle as Rowan figures out the two-wheeler with training wheels ahead of us. Forward, not back.

And then Rowan mentioned a few days later that, for his next baby, he’d like twin sisters.

And part of me — the insane part of me, the part of me that’s not be let outdoors on spring days — thought, Oh sure, why not? How bad could it be?

So it’s not quite Lord of the Flies... So sue me.

Until Tuesday, Rowan’s best friend at school was Robyn. Robyn with a Y not an I, as Rowan tells me, repeatedly. Robyn, who sits on the Q on the alphabet rug, right next to Rowan on the Y. Robyn, who we saw one time at the swimming pool with her mom and her baby brother. Robyn, who once showed up miraculously at the public library while Rowan was there and was all he talked about the rest of the day. “If we go to the library, will Robyn be there?” he now asks.

When I dropped him off at school a few mornings ago, Robyn was waiting for Rowan in the junior kindergarten courtyard. They stood, silent, facing each other in their snowsuits, smiling shyly, rapturously, for about a minute. Then they ran off to play together. And a little piece of me melted inside.

But yesterday, yesterday Robyn got mad at Rowan for pushing her. “But I didn’t push her,” he tells me. I am the recipient of enough flying hugs and inadvertent head butts to know that Rowan isn’t always necessarily aware of the degree to which his body, his actions, can affect others. I’m fairly sure he didn’t mean to push, and I have no doubt that she could have easily misinterpreted his clumsy puppy love.

In any case, Rowan is a bit forlorn. He told the story to me and to Rachel. He and his babysitter drew a picture for Robyn after school. And during last night’s bedtime story, when Rachel got to the line in It’s Okay to Be Different (which you should buy, by the way, and not only because it’s been banned by several uptight school boards) that reads, “It’s okay to make a wish,” he said, “I wish Robyn were my friend again.” I nearly cried when she told me that.

Internet (as Dooce would say), it’s taking a lot for me not to swoop in and fix this. All I wanted to do for a few minutes last night was to get hold of Robyn’s phone number and call her parents, explain the situation, and get the two of them back together. I wanted to write a note to their teacher, asking her to intervene, to make that little girl be friends with my little boy again. I imagined walking Rowan to school tomorrow, waiting for Robyn, and brokering the peace.

But I will do none of that. I will stand back and offer support judiciously, quietly, when asked or when it truly seems that Rowan is in over his head. I will let Rowan give his picture to Robyn himself. I will talk to him about his feelings. And I will see what happens. And I am sure that I will do the same thing over and over and over, when Rowan is 12, 14, 17, when his heart is broken and he broods silently in his room for hours, playing ballads on his guitar, writing bad existential poetry. Here’s my pledge: I will watch, and I will ache, and I will listen, and I will nod and cluck and — if permitted — hug. And I will not interfere.

But, man, it’s gonna be hard.

A million little washcloths

Get out your Shop-Vacs, your Hazmat suits, your chisels — the toddler has discovered cutlery and wants to feed himself. Will accept no help. Will in fact strenuously reject help. We are reduced to sitting quietly by, keeping one hand as subtly as possible on his breakable pottery bowl — this being the month we wisely chose to rid the house of plastic dishware, bless our earnest green souls — washcloths at the ready, while he shovels food into his pie-hole.

His expertise is — literally — hit or miss, mostly a function of the food’s solidity. Yesterday, he daintily polished off an entire piece of French toast, handling his fork with dexterity that would rival the Queen’s. This morning’s oatmeal? Not so much.