Moose turns 1

Dear Ilan,

You turned one today, and more and more I find myself thinking of all the things I'd done for Roan by this age that I've never done for you.  Like mommy-and-me swim lessons.  Certainly those are a total waste of money and time spent in a bathing suit, but still, you would love them.  I've never made you a smoothie.  Not a single one.  I've never finger painted with you, or taken your handprints.  You've never been to the zoo, or the children's museum.

I've had exactly one playdate for you.  It was with two other babies in the neighborhood, the moms were both first time mothers.  I had a hard time relating to them.  All the things they talked about were things I didn't spend any time on, though I could remember overthinking all those same issues with Roan.  We had an extended conversation about weaning.  "How did it go?  Which feedings did you cut first? How did he react?  How did you feel?"  The questions seemed earnest and absurd.  I just stopped breast feeding you, and that was that.

Sometimes I get caught up on all the experiences I haven't given you, all the places I haven't taken you.  But you have Roan.

We turn boxes into trains and you sit inside them and Roan pulls you around the house until the boxes break, picking up toys and distributing them everywhere you go.  You "push" Roan around in your walker. You two play in the bath for what feels like hours, complicated splashing games that I don't understand.  You have huge matching dump trucks that you race around the room and bash into each other and and the walls and laugh and laugh.  At mealtimes you take turns putting your feet on the table, waiting for me to notice and scold.

There is a game you both love that I call The Wheelbarrow - Roan grabs your foot and drags you around the room backwards, you slide along your belly and sometimes on your face.  Occasionally he slingshots you across the room.  I hate this game and always put a stop to it, and when I do, both you and Roan give me identical guilty looks.  You both know The Wheelbarrow is forbidden.  It usually ends with you getting hurt. Yet I've seen you scooting backwards on your belly, offering Roan your foot, instigating.

I've realized: I may not be the same person for you as I am for Roan.  My parenting strategy has shifted.  I remember with Roan rushing from one activity to the next, not even taking time to clean up the messes we made because isn't it amazing how much fun Ro is having and yes let's totally switch gears from spin art to playdough, never mind that there are flecks of paint drying all over the chairs, who has time to clean?

I don't feel that way anymore.  I've made a rule that we have to clean up one activity before starting another one, and by the time we're done cleaning, you guys have usually forgotten about the new activity and wandered off to play the Wheelbarrow game on the sly.

Today, on your birthday, you refused to take your morning nap.  You were in good spirits, and we shopped for ingredients to make your birthday cake.  The plan was for you to nap in the afternoon and Ro and I would make the cake.  But you didn't take that nap either, so I put you in the Ergo so you could help.  Eli, one of Roan's friends, came over to help too.  With all this help, the cake took forever to make.

When it was finally done, we had a vanilla cake with raspberry, green creme cheese frosting, and raspberry and sprinkle toppings.  It actually tasted pretty good.  I made everyone smoothies, and then, after two more friends arrived, we lit the candle and sang happy birthday.  Roan opened your presents for you, and played with them for you too.  You were too delighted with the cake to care.

Sad face - I scooted the cake away from you

Eating a raspberry off your thumb

The Last Night of Channukah

Saturday night was the last night of Hannukah.  There's something very comforting about eating dinner with so many candles burning, and leaving them to burn down late into the night.  Each year that Hannukah ends I promise myself that I will do this more often, light lots of candles, when it's cold outside and I'm cranky, or when I just want to give myself a treat.  But I've tried, and lighting menorahs in February just isn't the same.  There's a certain magic and charm in knowing that people all over the world are lighting candles and spending time together on these nights, and have been doing so for thousands of years.

This was the first year that Hannukah and Christmas really sunk in for Roan.  We've been seeing Christmas trees and decor for weeks now, and eventually I felt it was time to explain to him that we are Jews, and Christmas is not for us.  I probably did this all wrong - I should have got some advice before launching into this conversation which I was completely unprepared for - because how do you break this kind of news, that sorry kid, all this widespread commercialized happiness is not for you.  Instead you get candles and latkes and eight nights of presents.  Roan thought it over for a few days.  Then he announced that he didn't want to be Jewish anymore.  When I asked why he said, "because Christmas is better than Hannukah, just a little bit."

We spent this Hannukah talking about all the beautiful and unique aspects of Judaism.  It was a shorter conversation than you might think, given my limited knowledge.  I also realized: maybe I don't care whether Roan chooses a Jewish life for himself.  I'm giving him a Jewish upbringing and education, and he can do what he wants with it.  Except, he wasn't allowed to discard it as a 4-years-old because of Christmas envy.  Thankfully, at the end of eight nights of presents and lots of stories, Roan seems more amenable to being Jewish.

We lit two menorahs this year, one that Roan made at school, and the bicycle menorah.  Roan's menorah was made from nine shot glasses with photos of him wrapped around the glass, and tea lights inside. Adorable as it is, the design is terrible.  A tea light shamash is useless, and on the last night I went through about 15 matches trying to get all the candles lit.  Since we won't be using this menorah again, here are some photos so we can always remember it:

Happy Holidays.

The Mountain Lion

We spent Thanksgiving in San Antonio, in 70 degree sunshine, with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.   Our first day there we took advantage of the sunny weather with a little picnic.  We packed mac n' cheese and a bed sheet.  At first, Roan enjoyed sharing with his little brother...

Until Ilan got a hold of a fork of his own.

There is a Lyons Family Thanksgiving tradition that everyone must contribute at least one dish to the meal.  Cooking in a crowded kitchen was never my bag, and now that there are children underfoot I can be the auntie that takes them on walks and gets them out of the way. In exchange, I don't have to cook anything!  Everyone wins.

I got carried away here, taking photos of Roan and Julia on the swing...

Also, there was a mountain lion loose in the Dominion.  Roan and Julia were obsessed with finding it and taming it with sticks. We spent a few hours each day hunting it, laying traps, leaving it food, discovering its many many lairs. It's like when all the kids are chasing limping pigeons all over the playground and all you can think is, damn, I *really* hope they don't catch any pigeons.  I had much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, but not finding that mountain lion was in my top ten.

Kale Chips

Excitement and Anticipation

The Big Grab

The Hand Switch

Shoving into the Mouth

Coming Right Back Out

Fall Routines

We've fallen into some nice routines.  On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays I go to the office, and Roan goes to Chai Tots.  We ride bikes there.  After we cross Prospect Park West we go down a hill, that gets steeper and steeper with each block.  I ride in the street and Roan rides on the sidewalk and we meet up at the intersections.  After crossing the street together we say, "see you at the intersection!" and Roan speeds away.  He coasts down the hills, his feet up on the part of the bike that would be the chain stay (if his bike had a chain).  He picks up some serious speed.  I lock my bike outside Chai Tots and ride the F train to work.

I'm used to riding my bike in the city, but riding with Roan introduces a new level of vigilance.  In addition to paying attention to traffic, swerving around double parked vehicles, and making sure I don't get doored, I must ride slightly ahead of Roan and clear all the driveways for him.  I'm getting better at it, learning the tricks and short cuts, so it doesn't take so much of my attention away from all the other details I need to keep in mind.

I'm not sure what we'll do when it gets too cold to ride, or  there's snow on the ground.  Both of us love this morning ride.  We chat about all sorts of things.  Lately Roan keeps asking why cars don't have 2 wheels like bikes and motorcycles do.  This question continues to vex him, despite all my explanations about weight and balance.

On Wednesday mornings I take Roan and Ilan to music class.  They both love it.  Ilan crawls all over the room, into other people's laps, attempts to climb over other children, pulls up to look out the window.  Roan sits in my lap or follows Ilan around, trying to keep him out of trouble.  In the afternoon we see friends, or meet up with big groups of neighbors at the park.

Fridays are for grocery shopping and cleaning up.  We buy challah and juice for Shabbat.  We almost always have dinner guests.  Lately I've been making thick soups that we can dip our bread in.  Ilan knows his way around these dinners - he yells for the bread and he yells for the juice and he'll eat nothing else.

On Saturday mornings I make French toast with the leftover challah. On Sundays Roan has a swimming lesson.  Sometimes we ride our bikes there, and sometimes we drive and the whole family comes.  After the lesson we go to Pinkberry for frozen yoghurt.  Roan and Jay share theirs with Ilan - I get a flavor that Ilan doesn't like so he leaves my bowl alone.

There's a comfort in these routines, in knowing what to expect.  Especially since we never know what to expect at night.  Ilan just got four new teeth and has been up every hour or two screaming about it.  So it's nice to have a loose pattern to follow, some shape to our days and weeks, so we know what we are doing even when we are too tired to think.

Welcome to a new week.

Some Perspective

How did I neglect to post this photo of Roan and Ilan?  It's from September, on Roan's first day of school.  It's one of my favorite photos from this season.

For context, here's a photo of the two of them I took last week, during the Thanksgiving holiday, in San Antonio.  Their cousin Julia is in the background, crowning Ilan with a flower crown.

Looking at these photos, taken only 10 weeks apart, I can see it, how it's true what the old people say, that your childrens' childhood passes by in a blink of an eye, how quickly they move towards independence, to becoming surly teenagers. But day-to-day, when you are constantly feeding and wiping and dressing and washing and your home is a place in constant need of picking up, sorting, and cleaning, always cleaning, it doesn't seem like the time is flying.  It seems like this babyhood / toddlerhood / childhood thing will never ever end.  So thank you, digital photography, for giving me some perspective tonight.  Thank you for helping me appreciate my children.  They truly are amazing.

Birthday Party

Dear  Roan,

This year we had your birthday party in a venue that was not our apartment.  Every year your Daddy and I argue over what to do for your party - I am cheap and want to have it at home, but a house full of kids and their parents (and the resulting clean up) stresses your Dad out.  This year I let him win.

We had your party at the Audubon Center in Prospect Park.  There were bird puppets to be made and there were insects and magnifying glasses, bird puzzles, bird mobiles, a tee-pee looking thing, animals that you can climb on and see the world through their eyes.  You weren't interested in any of this.  I had made you a train cake for your birthday and you needed to stare at it.

Then we went on a nature walk.

Everyone was "starving" after the nature walk, so we had pizza and pasta and bananas for lunch, and then you blew out the candles and we ate the train cake.  Everyone got to chose which part of the cake they wanted to eat.  You chose the funnel. The hopper car full of jelly beans was the most popular. The adults said they didn't want any but ended up eating all the Oreo cookies / wheels.

Your birthday party was strangely calm.  There were 7 other kids, and we asked everyone to leave their siblings at home.  Nobody cried, nobody fought, there was very little screaming.  And coming home to a clean house was pretty extraordinary.  Somehow it didn't feel like a birthday party to me, because the usual crowding and chaos that I've come associate with children's birthday parties was missing.  It was very civilized.  A perfect party for my 4-year-old introvert.

Nor'easter

4 Years

Dear Roan,

You are four years old.  "Whaaaat?!"  That's how I feel, and that's what you say when I tell you something crazy or unbelievable, like we are putting sprinkles in our pancakes, or the small intestine is full of millions of tiny villi that slurp up energy from our food, or that Toys-R-Us is still under water from the storm (all conversations we had on the morning of your birthday).

You have so many questions.  I try my best to answer you, but you are starting to ask questions that I don't know how to answer, or I have to check the internet in my downtime and get back to you later.  Having a 4-year-old is realizing: I don't know as much about how things work as I thought I did.

E-mail is something I am just unqualified to explain (and you are unsatisfied with my explanations).  We've been talking a lot about storms, and helping people in shelters and people without power.  It's hard to explain a power outage when you're not sure how electricity works in the first place.

Your birthday was Sunday and Daddy took you shopping.  He spoiled you - you came back from your outing (which, like most Daddy outings, involved a hot chocolate from Southside) with a lot of gifts.  We had Mac n' Cheese for lunch at your request.  Then you played with some of your new toys while Lani took a nap.

In the afternoon we rode our bikes to your swim lesson at Beth Elohim.  On the way there we stopped at Pink Berry for frozen yoghurt.  You were so excited to tell your teacher all about your birthday.  "Today is my birthday for reals!" you said, "we made pancakes for breakfast with sprinkles!"

"Pancakes with seagulls?" she asked.

Sometimes I forget that not everyone can understand you.

We rode our bikes home on 8th Avenue through piles of leaves.  We stopped at Judah's house to meet their new cat, which they rescued from a shelter post Sandy.  You ate vegan chicken nuggets and then ate a second dinner at home, steak and mashed potatoes.  Then you got raspberry and blueberry ice-cream.  And so did Lani Lou.

I tucked you in with four blankets, and then your birthday was over.  But the celebrations are not over yet.

Happy 4 years, Roan Michael.

10 Months

Dear Ilan,

Your personality is starting to shine through.  The word for you this month is: excitable.  You are excited about everything!

When I put you down for sleep I lay you on your back in your crib and you smile up at me and pump your legs up and down, in this manic sort of excited way, fast fast fast, your heels make a swishing noise on the sheets and your whole body slides up and down.  You are so excited about going to sleep!

At mealtime, especially on Friday nights when we have challah and juice, you are so excited to eat that you can barely contain yourself.  Your whole body quivers and you wave your arms and try to lunge out of your chair to get to the food.  Sometimes we have ice cream for dessert and I share with you.  You smile and bounce and moose and make this gurgling noise of happiness in the back of your throat.  Your baby anticipation is so sweet and infectious.

At bath time, or anytime when anyone is in the shower or bath, you charge into the bathroom and pull yourself up on the tub and moose until we let you in.  And when we do, you reward us with the biggest grin and hit us repeatedly with your arm slaps of happiness. You love taking baths with Roan, even though he constantly splashes you and squirts water in your face.

There are two things you like to say: mum mum mum mum, and bah bah bah bah.  Mum is both me and Jay. Bah is bottle and food.  You are always excited to see us and always excited to see your bottle.

You play a game at bedtime that we call The Game.  We try to read you books and you try to crawl off the bed.  We grab your legs and pull you back and you laugh and laugh.  Repeat.  If we don't grab your legs quickly enough you stop and look back at us, waiting.

Roan has taught you how to growl.  The two of you growl at each other constantly.  And you growl at Jay and me, when you are happy, when you are angry, when you are hungry.  Or, when you just feel like growling.  You have also started to wave and play peek-a-boo.

Some photos from Month 10:

You have  only been on the swings a few times.  You like them.

You love pushing cars around the floor, you and Roan follow each other around the house with various cars and trucks.

You have a walker that you are just getting the hang of.  You push it until it crashes into something, then you  growl until somebody comes and turns you around so you can push it back.

Happy 10 months, Lani Lou.

Sandy

I've had so many e-mails, texts, and phone calls in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and just wanted to say that we are all okay.  We live at one of the highest points in Brooklyn (something I really hated while I was pregnant and had to walk up the hill everyday, but something I'm really appreciating now) so we were not directly impacted by the storm.  We have a lot of trees down, but none of them fell on our car or our building, or even on any of the bars, restaurants, and stores that we frequent.  Our gym, a converted armory, is now being used as a shelter for evacuees with special medical needs (mostly elderly and disabled) from lower lying neighborhoods  We are not avid gym-goers, so haven't really noticed the unavailability of our elliptical machines.

We cannot leave the neighborhood, because public transportation is extremely limited, and what's running is overcrowded and slow.  Traffic is horrendous, many streets are closed because of trees and debris - we aren't driving, and car services are all booked.  We are working remotely when we can, hanging out with the kids, taking walks around the neighborhood to see all the stuff that the downed trees smashed.  Public schools are closed (many are being used as shelters) but Chai Tots opened yesterday on a scaled back schedule, so Ro and I rode our bikes there this morning.  It was nice to have a break from him.

Last night we celebrated Halloween with friends and went trick or treating.  Finally, Roan is getting the hang of this Halloween thing.  Last year, when people offered him candy, he said, "no thanks, I already have some."   This year he accepted it, and would run to me and exclaim, "Mommy, everyone wants to give me candy!"  like he can't believe his good luck.

Here are some photos I took outside our building, before we went to the Halloween party.

Here are our next door neighbors' jack-o-lanterns, which we saw shining brightly as we trudged up our hill, heavy with candy:

Collaborators

Playground

Cowboy

Me, Your Mother

There are barely any pictures of me.  I'm always the one taking the pictures, and in all honesty, I don't want my picture taken - I'm fleshy from two pregnancies and rarely take the time to put on makeup or fix my hair.  My outfits are a haphazard combination of whatever I was wearing the day before and whatever I've left in the dryer.  The kids are much more photogenic.

But maybe, someday, when I'm old, my kids will be curious about what I looked like, who was this person that raised them?  So Jay took some photos of me out in the yard.  Ilan steals my thunder, but here I am.

It is clear in this photo that I have an absurdly large, bumpy, and crooked nose which will continue to grow as I age.  I really hope you boys don't inherit this.

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It really bothered me this year, how ugly our Sukkah is.  These last two years I've proven that I can design and build a functional Sukkah, but that's no longer enough.  This unrest is part of a general trend - I've been oddly compelled to clean stuff, like the dishes, and put away toys, and unclutter clutter, and all in all, it's pretty annoying, to be spending so much of my free time tidying up, but I guess I'm on the path to becoming a Real Domestic Woman, who cleans up after everyone.  It's like a switch got flipped inside of me - it never used to bother me that our apartment looks like a preschool, now it does.  I even moved all our bikes out into hallway, because something inside me finally recognized that they weren't the avant-garde / steampunk decor I once thought they were.

In line with this transformation, I'm ready to graduate to a wooden Sukkah, but just didn't have the energy this year.  Instead, for beautification, we painted the Sukkah.  We put it together up-side-down and invited some friends over for a painting party.  It is still ugly, but now it's ugly in a colorful way.

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At Prospect Park, with the Portnoy boys.  Fall afternoons are the best.  I'm relieved to say that I've finally figured out how to prepare dinner with two kids underfoot, and still have time to spend the pre-dinner-time hours playing at the park.  The old me wouldn't have cared about coming home late and popping a frozen pizza in the oven or making PB&J, but the Real Domestic Woman I am turning into is all about meal planning, everyone eating the same thing at the same time, no food left behind. I spent years confusing feminism with a disdain for cooking and cleaning, which left me with an amazing tolerance for rice and beans and dirty stove tops, but lacking in some practical skills when it comes to running a family.  I'm finally figuring it all out.

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By the end of summer I had to admit that I could no longer keep up with Roan on his bike.  Jogging alongside him was no longer viable.  He constantly wanted to race, and could ride for several miles without stopping. Me, not so much.  The time had come for me to ride my own bike.  It was the only way I could keep up!

This is the part of parenting I've always looked forward to - me and my kids, playing outside together, tiring ourselves out.  Every weekend Ro and I take rides on the green road, up to the farmers market and Grand Army Plaza, and rides through Prospect Park.  The other day we rode about 6 miles, through puddles, on the wide bike path where cyclists train for centuries, on gravel roads, on the horse path, over bridges, under tunnels, we stopped to watch a band play, bought lemonade at a street fair, laid in the grass and ate snacks.  This part of being a mom is every bit as wonderful as I'd hoped.

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Maybe you noticed, we cut Ilan's hair.  I hated to do it, because he has fabulous hair, just thick enough to stick up all over.  But we had to give him a buzz cut, to get a good look at the dent in his head, and see how noticeable it would be.  We thought it would help us make our decision.  We think it's very noticeable, but nobody else seems to.  Either that or we are surrounded by polite people.  Hmm... polite people in New York City?  That's probably not it.

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I don't understand why Roan and Ilan are making these grossed out faces, I was just signing them a song, but this picture made me laugh because they look so much alike.

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