Celebrating Spring

What a really wonderful weekend.  The beautiful weather, abundant sunshine, and warm enough temps to be outside just lolling around in the grass (oh wait that was Mason), recharged my batteries.  Sharing it with our family and friends made it that much more enjoyable.


Saturday JT worked at the restaurant of a private club downtown and the boys and i had a great time doing easter crafts, cleaning the house (no really) and in general just enjoying the day.  I don't think i even remember any tantrums that morning.  Which in itself is an Easter miracle.

After naps we headed out to our friends' house for some fellowship, a relaxed meal, and a really relaxing evening catching up.  JT was able to meet us out there and although Silas fought a bit about going to sleep over there-- he ultimately did and this time we didn't expose anyone to contagious illnesses.  Last time he had strep throat and we didn't realize it.  Woops-- that's one of my "parenting get out of jail free" cards.


Sunday the boys enjoyed finding their easter baskets and then did an egg hunt in the backyard with Kerala.  Kerala and Henry were very determined, but Henry is two years older, so he was a little quicker, and had slightly more strategy about where to look.  So Henry could barely lift his Easter basket at the end of the hunt, Kerala's was quite full as well and Silas, well...


Here's how it went for Silas.  He did agree to get dressed, so hey that was a great first step in my book.  He found an egg or two and got really excited to open them and find candy and a little bunny.  Then he decided that was good enough and he was ready to move on to the independent play section of the day.


We spent the next hour or so playing soccer, baseball and letting Silas and Kerala entertain us with their duos on the guitar.  Then we had a wonderful meal and more fun outside after naps.  Made for a truly wonderful celebration of spring and gave me a glimpse of some of the fun to come being outside this summer with the boys.

Isn't that such a smart way to spend our money?

So we hit costco for what seems like our weekly outing on Saturday and found that they had children's vitamins for Henry.  It was a huge bottle with a dinosaur and Henry was quite happy.  At home he honed in on the number on the outside "300."  JT told him they would last almost a year.  So then we talked for quite awhile about how many days in the year there were and how old he'd be in about a year. 

Cue to this morning when the boys slept in and i had to wake them up.  Henry sleepily woke, extracted himself from his blankets and then just let loose with a torrent about the vitamins.  "Mom, aren't you so excited that we spent our money so smartly?!  These vitamins will last us almost a year!"

Welcoming Spring

This week we got a sneak peak at spring and it was lovely, really lovely.  Warm temperatures and sunshine allowed me to pick up the boys and hit the park most days after school.  Henry and Silas resurrected their bikes from the basement and Henry was getting quite comfortable on his by the end of his first session.

JT has been working on end of quarter projects and will be starting spring break next week which we're all looking forward to.  We've got plans to get the yard prepped so that when it's really warm we'll be all ready to plant in another month or so.

Preparations for Henry and Silas' frog and toad party are continuing apace.  I've got the birthday crowns about 75% done, the frog bean bags were helpfully sewn by Oma, and this weekend i've got to hit the thrift store to find hankerchiefs for the frog parachutes.

Clearly i need to take some pictures because i don't think i have anything new to share.

Travel Log

On day one of my trip to NM and while i've been looking forward to the trip for work, i've been dreading it for family reasons.  Silas is so needy right now and has episodes of not being able to seperate from me at all that thought of having to leave him come Monday morning had me really worried.  But just to make sure it's clear that i don't have the blueprint, when i mentioned it was time to get my coat on, his eyes got a little watery but he just gave me a big hug and asked who i was meeting on my trip. 

He and Henry bid me a fond farewell and i just skeddadled out of the house.  Then he got dressed and put on underwear with Oma.  Sounds like it was a great day all around.  So curious to see if the trend continues, but glad for all our sakes that it went well today.  Henry just kept keeping on.  I promise more updates on him to come-- i know they've been Silas centered lately.

Dry little Piggies

Silas surprised us again today on the potty training front.  After my last post the thrill of underwear seemed to wear off, or for some reason he just didn't seem to want to wear it.  No biggie.  Someday he'll potty train, i know that.  Then this morning we were talking about when and if we needed to get dressed and Silas was giving us a little bit of static about needing to get dressed before some friends came over to play.  I told him he could stay in his pajamas until just before they got there.  Then surprisingly, around 9 am he told me he wanted to get dressed.

I hopped up, headed straight for his closet and as we were going to change his diaper he announced that not only did he want to get dressed on his own free will, but he wanted to go potty, and then pick out underwear.  And we did.  And he picked some underwear with pigs on it and was very happy to show and tell everyone that he was keeping his underwear warm and dry.

He resisted the 30 minute timer i set to go potty but wore his underwear all day-- even when we went grocery shopping, and didn't have an accident.  Could this really be something?  I'll keep you posted.

Brotherly Love-- the real world

Silas is in his normal spot rocking in the chair outside my bathroom while i get ready in the morning.  Henry was upstairs for at least 15 minutes before Silas came up and not a mention of the rocking chair.  As soon as Silas comes up and starts to make a beeline for it, Henry says loudly-- "I want to rock."  Which of course makes Silas wail because this is part of his routine, and you just don't get between Silas and his routine (he doesn't care much for your routine though, thank you very much.)

I point out that Henry hadn't given the chair the time of day until Silas wanted it.  Henry chose not to engage on that one but offered a solution-- why didn't we bring up the child's rocking chair from downstairs.  Hey good troubleshooting kid, i'll be back in a jiffy.  I bring the chair up and after i've gotten the hairbrush through my hair twice i look back as more screams are breaking out.  Henry is rocking in the chair i brought him, but only if it's going to be right in front of Silas' chair, bonking into it with every rock.

And that about sums up the state of brotherly love in our house right now.

Good Night Ceremony

I was just re-reading my post on planting the seeds of tradition and thought a nice spin-off post was needed.

I've been doing more and more reading about Waldorf approaches to childhood. They are big into simple and ceremonies. Part of simplicity is embracing nature and natural materials and going for authentic experiences. So they're big on marking celebrations with candles. After the experience celebrating the winter solstice with the candles the boys got to where they wanted to light a candle each evening that lived on the dining room table. They loved it!

I had read about a bedtime ritual that embraced lighting a special bedtime candle and was intrigued by the idea. But couldn't quite play out a scenario in my head where i'd be in the room with both boys that didn't end with them fighting over the candle leaving us all out on the curb, homeless.

But really. I shouldn't have sold them short. I decided to try it one night and here's how we do it in detail in case someone else is wondering how on earth this could work with two kids.

They have to be in bed with all requests already submitted (in writing, in triplicate). If you ask for more water or another book after the candle is lit we don't do the candle the next night. You have to be in your own bed and "settled down." This is a completely subjective call by me.

I light a small candle, kneel in the space between their two beds and we sing a few quiet songs. I'm not musical nor good at remembering the words to things so right now we sing "rock a bye baby," "twinkle twinkle" and then a song called "thank you" sung to the tune of Happy Birthday in which we take turns thanking people for all the good/helpful stuff that happened during the day.

Then we all blow out the candle together and i depart.

They truly love the candle and there is a reverence that comes over them in the presence of fire that i didn't expect. But what makes this account different from all the waldorf "inspirational" reading i do is this truthful account of the "other details." In my house there are nights that immediately after blowing out the candle Silas jumps out of bed and demands water or jumps into Henry's bed and starts yelling "wrest-a-ling, wrest-a-ling," or generally shows that he is not planning on sleeping anytime soon.

Basically sometimes the candle works magic and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes we don't have time for a book and a candle. So this act hasn't transformed my house into a peaceful beautiful night-time tableau, but it is another way of connecting with the boys and something that they love and that we use as incentive and a way to ground us at night. And i try to think we're laying seeds for when Silas is no longer 2.

Chefing-- not so out of the blue

I know i said i would post about JT going to cooking school. And i've been meaning to. I've also been drafting posts in my head as i drift off to sleep. The difficulty is making the post interesting without putting JT in the public eye. If you haven't noticed, this blog is primarily about me and the boys. It is very little about JT and that is largely by design. JT is a very private person and is not interested in putting into the public sphere things he deems private-- which includes just about everything. And yet cooking school was a personal decision for him but also one we very much made and are adjusting to as a family.

So... here goes. First just to catch everyone up, JT has been thinking about cooking school and cooking professionally for about the past three years. During that time he made some professional changes to see if he could find more job satisfaction and used all of his free time to cook, read about cooking and generally become as immersed as possible in the world of professional cooking. Somewhere along the line we started talking about cooking school and a career change for him, but it was one of a few options. And we started saving, and projecting and budgeting (oh wait, that was just me.)

Over the course of those three years JT tried out a few other directions he was considering going in and decided that cooking and food was really where his primary passion lay. He got a few seasons of gardening under his belt, learned the basics of smooth kitchen operation (clean as you go), took over all the meal-planning and shopping and embellished his "routine" meals with things like 14 hour briskets and homemade hot dog buns.

He started researching cooking schools and hallelujah, found a great one here in Chicago. Even better Kendal College has what i call the "Executive Chef" Degree but i think is called something kinda mundane like the "Accelerated" Program. It's shorter and cheaper and designed for folks that already have a degree and don't need basic gen eds. Check, no need for writing 101.

So we set a one-year timetable. We saved almost all the pennies we could, set-up and mostly followed a quarterly "step-down" budget to ease back into living off of my non-profit salary, and began to talk about our plans with friends and family. JT and i talked ad infinitum about the changes we expected, how we'd handle them , and thoughts about how we'd handle what we didn't expect.

JT started in January and by all accounts is very happy-- although he has some work to do in certain areas like deboning fish and Cornish game hens. He loves nothing more than a new challenge and certainly cooking school meets that criteria. He's adjusted to his new 4:15 am alarm clock pretty well and i'm pretty proud of myself for navigating the mornings solo-- not my time to shine historically.

We're still feeling our way through the options, choices and challenges we will face after JT wraps up his program a little over a year from now. But we're taking one steady step in front of the next and just trying to talk-- a lot about all the new issues to sort out and routines to build.


Having seriously less money will be one of the biggest challenges, because of course money provides opportunities and options that not having money doesn't. But it also provokes creativity and simplicity which are values i've become to cherish more often. So we're making sure that we're "providing" for the boys and that they get the benefit of seeing their Dad making a difficult decision to do something that he loves and thinks will bring him happiness. Oh, and he learned how to iron his own stuff after almost 10 years of marriage!

Halloweeen?

Today we scored a pass to the museum of science and industry and i took the boys on the first ever big outing solo, with no stroller! All was amazing. Some shenanigans getting out the door but nothing major, two boys that did awesome in a very over-stimulating museum, just enough to see and do, and then lunch in the car ride home. Awesome. And naps which went smoothly for the first time in a few days. I didn't bring the camera, but thought i'd share a write-up of the outing so it was fixed in my minds eye.

After some web research and recommendations from friends, we decided to focus on seeing the full-size Sub, the Zephyr train you can walk around and go on, the enormous model train area and the airplane area above the trains. We had some incidental contact with other exhibits, but we focused on those. We probably could have skipped the airplane one because by then Silas was getting a tad overwhelmed, but really i couldn't have asked for a more fun outing.

We started by exploring the outside of the Zephyr train and found out they offered free tours inside the train every 15 minutes. I told Henry we could do it on the way out and we all agreed we go off in search of the submarine. It's a pretty meandering path through some other exhibits, but we made our way to the Sub are. Silas says "submarine" but it sounds just like "halloween" and i kept getting confused when he'd talk about the big halloween.

There are all these movies and mini exhibits about the war on the way to the submarine. Henry wanted to stay put and watch each old black and white newsreel but a) i'm not sure wartime newsreels are the best "screen time" for him and b) Silas was not interested and a little scared. But we finally made it down to the enormous room where the full-size submarine is kept. You walk down and around and get to see and do lots of little exhibits along the way. Henry found some more videos and Silas found buttons (which come to think of it is exactly how we spent our museum day a year ago). Henry and I started having a pretty big conversation about war at the tail end of the exhibit and he revisited the topic as i was tucking the boys into bed. I answered a few questions and told him we could talk more today. But his brains all stirred up and hopefully won't beset by too many bad dreams.

Next up was the enormous model train exhibit. We spent a long time there, checking out all the different aspects of the model train country. Silas finding all the buttons, Henry scanning for the built-in steps to stand on for a better view. Silas' favorite part of the museum was here, where you could push a button near the Sawmill vignette and listen to "TIMBER" and the crack of a loud tree falling. We did that many, many times.

Upstairs for a quick poke through a big airliner, a bit of getting lost trying to get back down, and then the promised tour through the Zephyr train. Seems it was the fastest train in 1930 and was able to travel 120 miles an hour. It made a special trip between Denver and Chicago for the World's Fair, and a donkey was picked up in Denver, brought on the train, and presented to the train president (i think) once they arrived in Chicago.

All of this to explain why a portion of the tour was led by an animatronic donkey. When the boys were questioning the donkey on the tour i explained it was a robot. But then later i said maybe it was magic donkey. On the way home we debated which was probably right (Henry-- robot, Silas- magic donkey) and Henry told me we'd have to go back and be scientists to figure it out.

Then pb&J in the car, a little belly-aching and some good rest for all our sore legs. Plus we cleaned the house, which i will write about (scintillating cliff hanger) in my next post.