rivka

Today was the first rehearsal for the Christmas pageant. ( Read more... )

Alex: How old is the real baby Jesus now? (NB: We have recently discussed the fact that "the real baby Jesus" won't be at our Christmas pageant because that story happened a long time ago.)

Me: Um. The real baby Jesus was born very very long ago, thousands of years, and people can't live for that many years. So he died a long time ago. (Considers, and rejects, introducing the idea that some people believe in the Resurrection.)

Alex: Why?

Me: ...Because the earth is very old, and people have lived on earth for such a very long time. They were born, they grew up, they got old, and they died, and then new people grew up and got old and died. That's how it is.

Alex: (firmly) I'm never, ever going to die.

Me: Good! (suddenly realizes where this probably came from.) ...You know, usually children *don't* die. Children almost always grow up and live for a long time.

Alex: What if they have a long sickness?

Me: Even when children have a long sickness, they usually don't die. Their doctors can usually figure out the right medicine to give them.

Alex: (sounding satisfied) Their doctors are detectives.

Me: That's right.

---

I guess that to a kid who has only encountered the concept of death as an intimate and personal tragedy (Grandma Nancy had a long sickness, and she died, and it's so sad that Papa still sometimes cries when we talk about it), the idea that most people who have ever lived are dead now is incomprehensible.

It's not just the idea that everyone dies someday, although we have introduced that idea and apparently it didn't take. It's the idea of generations upon generations of dead people. Laura and Mary Ingalls are long dead now, and so is Blackbeard, and so is everyone else who lived in the "old-fashioned times" that Alex has been interested in learning about, and there were, literally, countless generations who lived and died before them.

Golden boys and girls all must
Like chimney sweepers, come to dust.

And this is not the sort of thing I tend to think about, until I suddenly find myself saddled with the responsibility of explaining it.

Dear retailers,

I understand that you expect people to shop in advance of the season, and that therefore you stock in advance of the season as well. Reasonable enough, I suppose.

However, has it never occurred to you that children regularly lose their mittens? And that, therefore, it is absolute lunacy to "not carry mittens anymore" by the 3rd of December?

No love,
Rivka

This was our last day of vacation. Tomorrow morning we'll drive home, visiting bosssio and family on the way. Which is probably just as well, because tomorrow's supposed to be chilly and rainy. Today was cold enough - in the upper 40s most of the day, and windy. But we had a good time anyway. ( Read more... )

Having a wonderful time. ( Read more... )

After church today, I met with families whose kids want to be in the Christmas pageant I wrote. ( Read more... )

I feel much differently about snow showers when I am wearing my ankle-length wool coat and gloves, and carrying a cup of hot tea in my hand.

Funny, that.

It's not supposed to stick, but... I know it's normal for many of you to see snow before the end of November, but this is totally bizarre for Baltimore.

A while back, I asked for recommendations for read-aloud chapter books. Since there was a lot of interest in the topic, I figured I'd provide an update about which books have worked well for us.

So far we've tried:

The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne.
I don't have to supply a plot summary for this one, right? A few of the stories went over well, but other stories are fairly pointless from a three-year-old's perspective. We never got that far into it. Principally valuable at this point because it started us off on chapter-book reading, although I'm sure she'll like it more when she's a bit older.

My Father's Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland, by Ruth Stiles Gannett.
Little boy rescues dragons from terrible predicaments, using only his ingenuity and an oddball set of supplies. These books are amazing. Really, really wonderful. Alex just completely ate them up. There is a lot of adventure, but almost nothing is actually scary. The plots move quickly. These books are charming and funny and don't show their age at all.

Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Little girl grows up in the backwoods of Wisconsin in the 1870s. We read half of this very quickly, and then stopped. Some of the chapters make for great read-alouds. Others, like, uh, the hog-butchering chapter, not so much. We've had some interesting conversations about how people used to live. I guess we might take this one to Williamsburg, even though the period is off. Alex is still very fond of Laura and Mary, but she doesn't really ask for me to read this one. She's getting Little House in the Big Woods paper dolls for Christmas.

Mr. Popper's Penguins, by Richard and Florence Atwater.
Polar-obsessed housepainter raises a family of penguins in his suburban home. We started off fine with this one, and then Alex got bored after a few chapters and we didn't continue. I had to do a lot of modification of old-fashioned language. She might like this more in a year or two. I thought it was charming.

James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl.
Abused little boy rolls off for adventure inside a giant peach, accompanied by giant insects. Alex's verdict: "Really good, but a little bit scary." We gulped this book down in just a couple of days, although I confess that I skipped the very long songs that the Centipede sings. There's a lot of brisk adventure and not too much description in this book, which is good for a three-year-old. Michael thought Alex would be traumatized by James's mean aunts, but she seemed intrigued by them instead.

Ramona the Pest and Ramona the Brave, by Beverly Cleary.
A little girl lives a little girl's life. Massive, massive hits. Ramona the Brave is 190 pages long. We got it from the library on Sunday afternoon, and finished it this morning. Plus, Alex has been pretending that Ramona is her friend who comes to her parties. I wasn't sure how much she would get these stories, because they're very elementary-school-centric, but apparently Ramona's appeal is universal. Her beautiful new red boots get stuck in the mud. Another kid copies her owl picture. She's simultaneously excited and a little creeped out by Halloween. Just, you know, kid stuff. I'm loving the books, and so is Alex.

Where next? One of the children's librarians sent us home with Ursula LeGuin's Catwings. Alex is plugging for Ramona and Her Father, although I remember it being kind of sad. And I've ordered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle from an Amazon Marketplace seller. It feels like the whole world of reading is open to us now. We're having a lot of fun.

HOLY FUCK, IT'S SNOWING IN BALTIMORE.

I am wearing a canvas field jacket over a thin cotton maternity shirt. The jacket can't be buttoned at the bottom. I have a six-block walk to the light rail when I leave work, followed by a three-block walk from the light rail stop to my house.

Updated to add: Okay, flurries have stopped, but still. That is ridiculous.

Suddenly last week I realized that no matter how you do your counting and dividing, 27 weeks is the third trimester. It was a bit of a shock. I was going along thinking I had plenty of time, and then... my due date is twelve weeks away tomorrow. Whoa.

Just a month ago, I was able to send shock waves through the clinic where I run my research subjects by answering a casual nursing-station question of "When are you going to give her a little brother or sister?" with "February." No one had noticed.

If I had any doubts about how pregnant I look now, they vanished when I got on a crowded light rail train last week. Instead of saying something like "Would you like to sit down?" the guy seated next to me jumped up and said firmly, "Sit down, Miss." It was an order. Then this morning I stopped off at the cafeteria to buy a doughnut and a (sadly, decaf) cup of tea. "Giiiiiirl!" the cashier said. "When did you... when did you..." She seemed to realize then that "when did you get pregnant" is not really a polite question. Instead she turned to the cashier behind her. "Did you know she was pregnant?"

In the third trimester, your condition becomes public property. No one has touched me without permission yet, at least.

I feel really well these days. Oh, I get pretty tired by the end of the day, and sometimes have a sore, aching belly in the evening. I can still feel sick if I don't eat frequently enough. And I'm having some killer heartburn. But for the most part, I feel great. My energy level is fine, I can still walk comfortably (albeit in a swayback waddle), I can usually get up from the floor without help, and I can even still buckle my shoes. I can still pick up Alex, although I can't carry her any distance. I have a decent appetite. My sleep is of fair quality. Niblet's movement and positioning aren't uncomfortable yet. So this is a nice time: gloriously big, without any of the real disadvantages that will probably hit next month.

Alex is being excited and loving about the pregnancy. She likes to pat and stroke my belly. She pushes gently on it and says, "I'm rocking the Niblet." She talks to him. At RE yesterday, we were talking about our families. Alex was eager to volunteer: "I have a baby brother! He's growing inside my Mama." Was there anyone else in her family? She had to be specifically prompted before she came up with Michael and me.

We've told her from the beginning that I'll go to the hospital to have the baby, and Papa will bring her to visit us there. We looked at fairoriana's hospital pictures together and paid careful attention to what the big brother was doing. And we're talking a lot about her own birth.

A week or so ago, at dinner, she turned to me and said, "I have some sad news. What if the baby comes on a school day?"

"Then you'll be at school," I said, bewildered. "And probably Papa will pick you up after school and bring you to the hospital to see me and the Niblet."

"But who will take me to school?" Oh. We explained that someone will come and stay with her when the baby is born, and if Michael and I are away at nighttime that person will sleep at our house and take her to school in the morning. Which reminds me: we'd better start lining up our childcare.

My plan is to have one main and one backup babysitter on call to come to the house. Then I want to have emergency backups in case we have to leave for the hospital in a big hurry, before a babysitter can get there: a neighborhood family with a kid Alex's age for daytime, and, for nighttime, a neighbor who wouldn't mind listening to the baby monitor until the sitter arrived. I need to start making calls about that.

Other things I need to do: fill the gaps in our baby supplies, figure out where I'm going to put baby gear in the new house, get up the nerve to talk to my boss about maternity leave and my post-leave work schedule, line up a lactation consultant just in case, take some belly pictures and some Alex-talking-to-the-belly pictures.

Tomorrow I'm taking the morning off to go to the hospital for my third trimester labs. Glucose tolerance test, regular bloodwork, and the fun and exciting Rhogam shot. Should be a great day.