(no subject)
June 29, 2009
Dear Marie,
I write this to you from a tired place. Last week, we came home from a two-week vacation visiting my family. We rode a train, boated on the Mississippi, swam in Grandma's pool, swung in her hammock, braved dogs big and small, met new friends, reunited with family, went on many car rides, nursed on the sides of farmroads because of meltdowns resulting from too many car rides, attended a memorial where you began to have a tantrum and then blissfully nursed into a nap, jumped on hotel beds, watched amazed at sea lions swimming at the zoo, used public transportation all by ourselves to go to Navy Pier to spend the day at the Children's Museum, went shopping, ate snacks that contained high fructose corn syrup and gelatin, and rode on an airplane. Do you understand why I am tired? I am home now amongst piles of laundry that need to be folded, floors that beg to be mopped, a dirty bathtub, a dishwasher full of clean dishes to be put away, a million errands and no car.
But first, I am your mother. First, I rub and rub my eyes trying to wake up as you buzz around the bed. "Wake up, Mama! Come on, let's wake up!" Usually, you are naked, even though I know I put pajamas on you the night before. Lately, you have been waking up to tell me you need to potty, and then I put you back in your bed. Sometimes you will ask for milk, and I will remind you gently, "We will have milk when it is light," and sometimes you fuss about this, but usually you roll onto your pillow and fall back asleep. Usually you will wake when it is barely light, pre-dawn light, which is fine. You crawl into bed with me and nurse for a few hours before we wake up. But sometimes you don't wake until it is 7:30 or 8, and the look on your face when you realize that you've slept past the time you could have had milk - is stunned. And hilarious.
After milk, there is milk. You allow me to go pee, put in contacts, get my coffee and settle down on the couch before you want to nurse again. Do you want to be close to me? Are you making up for lost time? I don't know. Today your Papa asked you, while you were nursing, what you were doing with all that milk? Were you HUNGRY? Did you want some FOOD? And you raised your hand into the air and signed, milk milk milk milk milk, over and over. I love having conversations with you about nursing. You will tell me things like, "This one's empty! There's no milk coming out! I just suck like this (sucking noises)." Or "There's still milk in this one, but I'll save it in case I want something to drink later." Or "You need to eat so that you can make more milk. Have some watermelon so you can have watermelon milk, and I want it to go to this side (points to right breast)."
Sometimes you tell me that you will wean when I have another baby. But then you think, and you say, "Me and the baby can share milks! You have two! I will have this one, and the baby will have this one." We know toddlers who weaned when their mothers became pregnant. And we know toddlers who continue to nurse after their baby siblings were born. You see these things, and you know that you have choices. It also helps that you hear me answering the polite inquiry, "So, when is she going to stop nursing?" with "When she's ready to wean." We don't plan to conceive for at least another year, but it is something you are hearing us start to talk about. The other night, as you surprised us by reaching up to turn off a light that you'd never been able to reach before, you exclaimed, "It is because I am getting big now! And so you can have another baby!" I don't want you to think that you can control when we have another baby, but honestly, you control when we have another baby. We're not willing to have a shorter birth space than 4 years, but if at 4 years, you are still needing the closeness& time from me that you do now, we will continue to wait. Since I had you when I was 22, I have plenty of time to be fertile and have more children. There is no rush, not to wean, not to have babies, not to do much, really. We live a pretty slow, low-stress life, you and me.
We spend a lot of time between waking up and leaving the house. Partly because I like it that way, but largely because this gives you ample time to do things without having to rush you. You help make oatmeal, do puzzles & read while I shower, pick out your own clothes which usually results in 15-20 minutes of dress-up, which then leads into dance parties in your tutu and tap shoes. You get the idea. Usually what we are doing has something to do with Grace & Liam, who we love and never get tired of. Night time is another slow time for us. After dinner and whatever errand we've had to run, we all exist in the same room sort of doing our own thing. Papa will use the computer, I will fold laundry, you will read books on the floor. We frequently interact with each other, and there is a near-constant conversation, but we're all doing different things. & It feels really good, to exist together, differently.
Now that the weather is warm, we are getting lots of use out of our new picnic basket. Sometimes we go to the lake, sometimes a park, sometimes we take Lucy, sometimes we fly kites, sometimes we just bring a blanket and pick up a pizza and find a grassy spot. We eat and spend hours outside, reading and playing and chasing you around as you squeal and laugh delightedly. Sometimes Papa falls asleep on the blanket and you and I go for a walk. Other times Papa takes you exploring and I get to read a magazine, uninterrupted. We get to treat our picnic spot like our living room, and stay until we can think of nothing else to do, or until we are all exhausted, which is usually the case. I know we will miss this so much during the winter, which I am already dreading.
Want to know what else you're not allowed to eat this month? I am joking. Kind of. After more and more books about food, your Papa and I have decided to rid the house of almost everything preprocessed. No more boca burgers or cheese ravioli or graham crackers or frozen pizzas. While grocery shopping, if the product I pick up has a paragraph of ingredients on the back, I put it back down. What this means is that I cook from whole foods every day, and there are no cheat-meals that cook in under 15 minutes, and this takes a lot of time (usually your nap time). But it also means that the way we treat hunger has changed. Now we (all of us) snack on fruit when we're hungry, or unsalted nuts. The way we used to get excited about ice cream is how we now get excited about humongous fruit - like pineapples and watermelon and cantaloupe. We wait in anticipation for the fruit to ripen, all gather around the kitchen table as it is sliced, and eat it together, happily. I love watching you as you sit impatiently wringing your hands while Papa meticulously cores a pineapple. And I discovered this week that you will happily eat watermelon 3 times a day.
I am also phasing out animal products, though not aggressively. We no longer buy dairy products with our own money, and if the government didn't give us cheese or milk, we probably wouldn't buy it either. We eat it sparingly, and less and less every week. You and I drink almond milk, which we pretty much just use for making oatmeal, or for drinking with peanut butter & jelly. As you grow, we will continue to tell you about our food choices. About how cows are fed grain, which makes them sick, which makes industrial farmers pump them full of antibiotics which goes into the milk which makes us immune to antibiotics which breeds pandemics! The saddest part is knowing that some baby cow was separated from its mother so that humans can drink cow milk, when adults were never meant to drink milk, much less milk of another species. I am always talking to you about food and food choices, which is why you pretend to grocery shop and "read the ingreenients," and you use words like 'antibodies' and 'protein' and 'vitamins' in every day conversation. You are always asking if things are good for our bodies, and why. This is how we learned that when we eat watermelon, we are eating the fruit with the highest amount of lycopenes, which is an antibody that fights cancer.
There is nothing quite like visiting my parents with a two year-old that exclaims at the dinner table that beans have lots of protein!
I love you so much, in every single way that you are, every day.
Mama.