Sunday Sibling Moments

We've been a little Anneliese-heavy in these parts this week, but in case you forgot about them, there are other awesome people who live in this house too.

Mark took this one post-bathtime:

Charlotte is channeling her Uncle Brad with that hairdo.

And I took this one of Daddy too. Because it's cute when he pretends he's playing legos just for the kids.

Can you see the snaggletooth in these pics? Yep, thought so.

And there is a dose of easy sweetness this corner of the internet has been needing. My family is sometimes really good for that kind of thing.

You're welcome.

(Me too.)

Snaggle-Toothed Toddler

See this quirky sunny smile?

Memorize it. This is the last handful of pictures we have of it.

The very last pic is here:

Moments after Uncle Nick took out his cell phone to capture this sweet good-bye wave (after the sweetest of sweet mornings with her, no seriously! delightful!)... Anneliese took a tumble and smashed her face on that very window bench.

YES SHE IS OKAY.

There was lots of blood. There were even more tears. There was a washing machine full of bloody-slobber soaked burp cloths. There was a mad hunt for a knocked-out tooth that never surfaced. There are bruised cheeks and a swollen lip and nose, and there is pain.

BUT SHE IS OKAY. I know that's what's important.

Yet nagging just below the relief that it's not much much worse, and the mommy guilt (bloody accident on my watch!), there's this (yes, shallow) sadness that her baby smile is... gone. I mean, different. Her whole look is different. See?

The little grin we have loved for almost three years is just, done. Over in a second. We'll now look at pictures and instantly be able to tell oh that was before she fell. Her baby face. Or something. I don't know. I know it's terribly shallow but I'm sad. It's a bizarre thing to mourn but I'm mourning it just the same.

Anyway, UPDATE ON THE TOOTH. So after a weekend dental visit and an x-ray, it turns out that the "knocked out" tooth isn't actually missing. It's...

(brace yourself, you will cringe)

... still up there. Jammed up into her gum/jaw. (!!) Um, YEAH. Want to see a gross pic of it? Of course you do.

(Look away, people with Weird Teeth Heebie Jeebie Issues.)

(You can see this didn't deter her from eating pizza for dinner. Yes, Daddy cut it up first.)

And the jam is directly into the developing permanent tooth right above it, so the extent of that damage will be a fun surprise to learn about when she's seven. Yay.

The hope is that as the swelling subsides, the tooth will sort of... work its way down? Be possible to re-fuse to the.. jaw? Something? Basically it might work itself out, with some coaxing from the dentist, over a period of several weeks and several follow-up appointments.  If not, then surgical extraction is in her future.

Either way, it's time to embrace a new level of quirk for this sunny grin.

If you're into tooth praying, pray for this thing to work its way out on its own, and avoid surgery. And for comfort for Anneliese's poor little sore mouth, especially when she's horizontal (trying to sleep) which seems to make it worse. Thank you, friends.

Oh Anneliese

I know that each of our kids will fade in and out of easier and more difficult seasons (and I'm dreading the day when they're all three teenagers at the same time), but right now it's our dear middle child who's giving us a run for our money.  I keep alluding to our ongoing frustrations with this stage, and I keep getting sweet comments and emails and snippets of conversation affirming her wonderful cheerful demeanor (true), her good listening when she's in x person's care (true), and how she can't possibly be as naughty/frustrating/defiant/etc as we think she is (false).

I know full well that at preschool, for grandparents, at church, for sitters -- she's generally compliant and manageable and happy and, well, easy. But at home, every day, especially every morning when she and I are both barely awake, dang if she doesn't try my limits. Test them. Push them. Push past them.

I have tried a healthy handful of times to write a post explaining the madness, but none of them is exactly what I want to say. It's too critical of her yet too defensive of her. Also, too critical of me yet too defensive of me. I'm scared I don't know how to be blog-honest anymore. I don't know when it happened* but I don't like it. So while there probably aren't great (yet still guarded) words to explain how frustrating Anneliese has been lately, for some reason I sure want to try anyway.

She's just... into everything. Drawers she shouldn't be in. Grabbing things from other people's hands. Slamming doors just to make noise. Hitting siblings, seemingly just to hear them shriek. Emptying clothes from closets. Into everything.

But unlike Nathan before her (who was easily corrected with a warning, a reminder of the rules, and follow-up consequences), Anneliese is incredibly and proudly defiant. She doesn't care about consequences. Punishments don't upset her, and we can't seem to find a toy or privilege that truly bothers her to have taken away (even Hattie!).... likewise one that as a reward is enough to motivate good behavior. She just. doesn't. care.

It's maddening.

I tell her fifteen times to do any one thing. And I know, I KNOW, that's not good parenting. I know that telling her a hundred times just teaches her that she can get away with not doing it the first ninety-nine. But I also don't want to teach her that if she doesn't do it the first time, *I* will do it. So I find myself telling her to put toys away, to put her shoes on, to climb into her car seat, over and over and over again before she finally does it. And I don't know how to stop.

There's also the story of how she and I got locked into the closet in between the girls' bedrooms last week, for almost an hour. In the dark. In the heat. With a diaper full of poop. While I was glasses-less blind and post-shower naked. Which would be a funny story if it hadn't been so panic-inducing (no seriously, there were tears and panic) and if I weren't so overwhelmed by the string of naughties that led to the situation in the first place. (It involves lots of lock/door manipulating to try and foil her attempts to bust into Charlotte's room when they're both supposed to be sleeping which she does all the time; clearly our efforts backfired in a big ol locked-in-the-closet way.) (And in case you were curious, I CAN scream loud enough to wake a sleeping five-year-old through three closed doors, but I am NOT strong enough to break down even one of those doors on brute strength alone, nor am I crafty enough to pick a lock with random things I found in the closet -- pieces of my childhood telescope or the strings of a guitar. MacGyver fail. Sweet baby Nathan for the rescue-win.)

A sign of how far the frustration has come: when I wash my hands in the bathroom, I feel angry. Just the smell of the soap, which Anneliese finds and makes a mess of several times in any given week, triggers angry overwhelmed feelings. My hand soap smells like anger. This is so not okay, to feel like this.

Sure, I can remove the things that cause her worst offenses (remember the markers?) - but for everything we remove/take away/hide, there's always something else to get into. Aside from living alone with Anneliese in a padded room, I don't know how to prevent this particular into-everything brand of naughtiness.

She's stubborn and persistent and determined. I think this will serve her well later in life, but damn if it doesn't make her a difficult toddler in the meantime. Can she really not control her impulses? Because I think she can. She's almost three!  But I don't know if this is normal toddler stuff, or if she's acting out, or what.


Sometimes when the hard mornings have passed and she crawls in my arms and snuggles, and makes her thumb-sucking praying hands, like she has done since she was an infant, I just want to kiss her hair and cry a little.

Oh sweet Anneliese, I don't know what you need. I don't know what I need.

What I do know is that I hate it's so hard right now (for you too!) and that I love you more than life itself. We'll figure it all out somehow.

*Yes I do.

School Choir

The kindergartners were the choir in school chapel this morning.

Nathan, formerly shy and hesitant, stood there on the front row and sang his little heart out. I have never never seen him show such confidence in a group of people before. I was dumbfounded.

And proud.

I cried.

I always cry. I mean, I'm emotional today (exhaustion, naughtiness, overmommied, underslept, just not my best week) but that aside, I really do cry anyway, every single time.

It's what my morning needed.

Two Cooks

Last month we had a friend who needed some good luck on a work trip, so we decided to make some key lime bars to send along. Which isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is to say that Nathan and Anneliese helped, and whoa dang if those two don't have scarily different approaches to cooking.

There's this one, who is focused and methodical and neat. And who, at barely five years old, knows how to separate eggs. (Not that he doesn't love a good chocolate cake-batter-beater mess occasionally.)

And then there's this one, who is messy and hands-on, and revels in the task where she can literally dig in. (Not that she doesn't have her I hate sticky hands moments resulting in soapy chaos in the bathroom.)

I guess it takes all types? To make key lime bars, anyway.

We Are No Longer a Bucket Seat Family

Look who's riding forward in the car like a big girl these days!

Yes, Charlotte is finally old enough and heavy enough to turn around and ride in a toddler seat. While it's true that we probably could have squeezed another month or two out of the infant bucket seat, we turned her around anyway, for a whole litany of reasons mostly involving the big kids' ability to easily scoot past her and exit the van on the non-busy-street side of school dropoff but those details are boring (just ask Mark who pretty much dozed off every time I brought it up with him). 

The unexpected detriment to this seating arrangement is that Nathan can't see Charlotte's face from the back row of the van anymore, and he's sad (and vocally so) about it.

The unexpected perk to this seating arrangement is that I can see Charlotte's face, which means I can see all three baby faces, and once in a while I glance in the mirror and see three tilted heads, three thumbs in mouths, three sets of fingers curled over noses, and I could just about burst from the sweetness.

And then I remember I'm driving a MINIVAN full of MY THREE CHILDREN and I'm all WHAT IN THE WORLD WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN???

Anyway Charlotte. Riding forward. New thing.

New Specs

Nathan was Child of the Day in his kindergarten class today! I don't have the full details on what that means, but he definitely got to be the line leader and might or might not have done... something? with the class calendar.

For his special day, he wanted to wear his favorite shirt to go with... his new glasses!

(Combed hair is apparently not an essential part of his Child of the Day look.)

He looks sweet and smart and... different. And maybe a little bit Bumgarner? And definitely too grown up to be my baby boy. *sigh* *sob*

Awkward at El Señor

So Anneliese's preschool teacher casually mentioned (and then emailed) (twice) (and sent a letter home) that they would like a family picture for each child to display in one section of their classroom.

Yeah, sure, that's no big deal. We take family pictures all the time. I'll just print one of the myriad options I have lying around here and send it in. Hahahahaha. No.

We can't even get all of us to look at the camera at the same time, much less look pleasant and smiley (or god forbid, thin!) while doing it.

Yeah so the best option I had when school started was this little gem (you think I'm kidding but I'm not). I almost sent it in with her. (I was talked out of it.)

Then last week we found ourselves in Knightdale, to eat Mexican at the best Mexican restaurant ever a completely regular Mexican restaurant (no matter what Mark says about its superiority, I assure you the best Mexican food ever is not found in a grocery store strip in freaking Knightdale) (although I do like it too and we have had many happy family meals there) (I digress). And in a moment of pure genius (genius? something) we took advantage of sweet Another Nathan, ever at the ready with his phone, and had a little family photo shoot.

At the El Señor.

In Knightdale.

Yknow, like you do.

To be fair, we did get one blurryish shot where Charlotte isn't face-palming the fact that she's related to the rest of us (and that's the one we sent to Anneliese's teacher), but that's not as funny, now is it.

OHANDPLUSALSO. The family pic wasn't even the hardest part of what we were to send in to preschool. We I had another of those delightful all-about-me collages to make. I think we've well covered how I feel about preschool homework, so instead of making you all roll your eyes again, I will just show you our my masterpiece.

heck yes I let that  El Señor pic do double duty by appearing in this collage
(expect to see it in your Christmas cards too, just sayin)

(Anneliese helped a little.)

Now you may praise me.

Tigers, the Next Generation

Mark and Nathan took a daddy-son road trip to see Clemson play Furman (yes my Furman) this weekend. The girls and I hung out at home (and wore purple, thankyouverymuch) while they met up with friends to watch football and eat junk food and relive college memories.

And then a few hours before they were due home Saturday night, this cropped up on facebook and I almost fell over from all the adorable:

Nathan and his first friend Lucas, the son of Mark's friend from Clemson, standing together in their dads' happiest place at Clemson.

I'm totally framing this for their future dorm room.

(Word on the street is that Mark is still friends with Justin even though he let his son go to a game not wearing orange *gasp* but we will keep you posted as the story develops.)

Crawling Cruising Clapping

Charlotte is having a kick-ass week, if I can say so. (And I can. It's my blog.)

It was only about a week ago she started pulling up, and then just over the course of the last few days she started legitimately crawling AND cruising along the furniture.


(If you can't see the embedded video, click here to view it on YouTube.)

Her other favorite new trick is clapping her hands on (verbal) command. And in case you were wondering if there's anything cuter than a baby girl proudly clapping for herself? There isn't.

Basically she's telling that fifty percent delay to just KISS IT. As well she should. Yay Charlotte.

Daddy, Reading, Beautiful, My Family

Once in a while I stumble into an ordinary scene that for some reason makes me almost unspeakably happy.

Like this.

I have words, but no articulate thoughts. I love them all so much.

We Used to Have Trees. Now We Have Mulch.

Remember when that tree crashed in our driveway and street earlier this summer?  We finally had the other half of it removed. Along with a giant dead tree from the backyard, and a slew of giant limbs from a giant oak looming precariously over our guest house.

(Aaaaaaand I just realized I somehow don't have any pictures of the house with the tree in front of it. Really Erin? A whole year in this house and no pictures from that angle? Really? Fail. Luckily I am an excellent internet stalker, even to stalk myself, so here is the Google streetview of our house, obviously taken before the tree came down:)

And here is the house during the work:

Anyway it was quite the project. A work crew showed up at 7:30am on Wednesday and worked until dinnertime. The kids were fascinated (and a little bit terrified.)

It was loud. And grindy. And involved multiple trucks. And saws.

Ask me how I felt about all the noise. 

But the good news is... we no longer cringe with every gust of wind, that a tree is about to crash into our house or our cars or our guest house or our neighbors' house. And our backyard has enough clear space to finally put a swingset in. And the pool now has a lot more afternoon sun. (Just in time for fall! Woo hoo?)

And, thanks (?) to Mark asking them to leave us our ground-up chipped up trees, we now have... mulch. Mulch for days. For years. (We will never use all this mulch.) (Read: someone please come take this mulch.)

(Also: what's the over/under on how many weekends til Mark and Nick are over dealing with spreading all this around, one wheelbarrow at a time? Now taking bets. Winner gets to climb to the top of the mulch mountain and stake their family flag. Yknow, to class it up.)

The work in the backyard we have been wanting and needing, but y'all -- losing that beautiful tree in the front yard was painful. Painful. So because we kind of hate our new bare space, someone help us figure out to plant to replace our tree. Something that grows not-too-slowly, will be big enough to de-naked our front yard but won't get so big it's scary, and has pretty colors in the fall. No oak (too slow, too big), no boxelder (I have bug issues), no bradford pear (too stinky). Some kind of maple? Plant nerds, help us!

And I hope this is the last tree-drama blog post I ever write.

Dress-Ups in the Car. Naturally.

Here is something I know.

If you're out running errands, but then you suddenly realize you can't run any more errands until the huge mess in your car is cleaned up before it makes you completely batsh!t crazy, so you stop in the parking lot of one of those errands and clean all the trash out of every corner of the van, including every compartment in the back row of seats where your son hoards straw wrappers and milk box cartons and dried up markers and bottle lids like some garbagey combination of a chipmunk and Oscar the Grouch and you just can't take the mess anymore... if you do that, and then you carry a bag of trash to a nearby dumpster, your children (because of course the children are with you, why would you have the urge for such a task when you are alone -- or at home -- where it would be easy? ) will get into the bag of Daddy's work shirts for the dry cleaners, and oh they will play dress up in the car.

And it will be adorable.

And you won't even mind that it made a mess of the car again. Because it was going to be trashed again twenty four-hours later anyway, and you knew the control (well, the illusion of control) you get from a clean car is only ever fleeting.

So you will just smile and take a picture of dress-ups in a parking lot. Yep. You will. This I know.

Pulling Up

Look who else is having a milestone week! (She must've decided using her arms wasn't quite the disaster she'd imagined it to be.)

Good job Charlotte! So proud of my sweet determined little girl.

Now if someone can just teach her how to sit back down, and we could minimize the 4am crib hollering, mommy would be very happy.

First Day of School!

I'm feeling super emotional right now, so all I am going to say is this --

Nathan's first day of kindergarten! Anneliese's first day of preschool!

Now don't mind me, I'll just be sitting here on the floor, crying and snuggling my one last baby and hoping she doesn't grow up so fast on me too.

If you're also in need of a good cry, take in this scene from the kindergarten hallway.

*sob*

{PS. Update -- they both loved school. LOVED. IT.}

And Then a Whale Skeleton Made Me Cry

We had a whole list of things on our summer bucket list this year, and we actually got to ALL of them (!!) -- fun things like day camps at church and swim lessons and tae kwon do and beachy day trips and visiting the planetarium and bouncy house play centers and smashing water balloons on the side of the house.

{Whoa I just made our summer sound really playful and idyllic. Um no. Please understand it has been barely-controlled (sometimes not-at-all-controlled) chaos. Don't for one second picture me as more Together than I really am.}

{Whew. Had to get that little disclosure off my chest.}

The girls had mother's morning out at church, and I had Nathan all to myself (school still has not started) (I can safely say we are the last people on the planet to not be back at school yet) (or at least the last people on the internet) for one last summer day -- with no plans. When I asked Nathan what he wanted to do for one last pre-kindergarten hurrah, he didn't even think about it. 

Dinosaurs.

(I decided not to tell him just how much his last-day-before-school activity sounded like... school. Whatevs.)

{Wait, another tangent. Before we did anything fun and dino-related, we had to go get play doh for Nathan's class. In an effort to save my sanity, I signed up to bring it this month (even though I knew it meant I had to get it now) for the one and only reason that I could choose any color. We got (wait for it)... brown. It's the only thing they had ten cans of. (No I am not going to *make* the play doh.) Nathan is happy with it. Brown means they can make (wait for it again)... dinosaurs. Okay then.}

So anyway we trucked off to the science museum (deserted -- I mentioned how everyone else and their grandma is back at school by now right?) and I listened to him chatter on about which whale skeleton corresponded to the whale statues in the lobby, and how most but not all meat-eating dinosaurs walk on two legs, and how plant-eating dinosaurs still eat meat because leaves have bugs and bugs are meat, and how a sea turtle's ribs are actually outside its body (in the shell?) not inside like ours and like a whale's.

(?)

(Don't ask me how he knows all this stuff or even if it's correct.)

And I basically followed him around the museum and tried not to cry. I don't know when my baby boy stopped lying on the floor incessantly kicking his legs and grabbing toys with his feet, and turned into... this.

My God. I love him so hard.

Emerald Isle

I was able to get away for a short visit to the beach for Labor Day.

My friend Martha invited us to her house at Emerald Isle. It's a beautiful home, right on the sound, and she and her husband were sweet and generous hosts, making us fancy food and fancy cocktails and keeping us laughing til the wee hours.

We sat on the screened porch with cocktails, we watched the sun set from their deck, we walked to the beach and got sandy and sweaty, we swam in the ocean for a spell, we had fabulous outdoor showers, and then we drove away sad because it wasn't long enough.

But even for just a day or so, the beach is good for my soul.

Identity Crisis? The End of an Era.

I have a lot of feelings these days. 

Big feelings that I'm trying not to feel, if I'm being honest. I'm worried if I dwell on them too much, even to write this post, I will feel sad and emotional and overwhelmed.

Charlotte is weaned. Officially and for real. I thought it had happened when I went to Asheville for the weekend, but she nursed off and on a few times a week for another month or so after that. But the last time I let her do it was the night before her birthday. It's been almost a month. So... pretty safe to say we're done. Done. 

I'm glad I had a good cry about it then, because now... I don't know what to feel about it.

For the first time in six years (SIX! YEARS!) -- since the fall of 2006 -- I am not pregnant or nursing. Because I breastfed right into each following pregnancy, I haven't had so much as a weekend of no one else needing my body. In six years.

That's not a complaint. I am very okay with how it played out. 

But there were lots of times I would daydream of having my body to myself, doing what I wanted without regards to caffeine or morning sickness or  pumping or heartburn or medication guilt (oh the meds guilt; I cannot begin to explain  how every pill over the last year has made me ache). I could imagine this coming freedom -- I would feel neither the kicks of a baby inside, nor the tingle of a milky letdown, and how weird and wonderful it would be. We laughed and pictured a big "off the boob" party, complete with booze and swimming and debauchery. Oh and t-shirts.

But.

Now that it's here... I don't know. It doesn't feel like a party. It feels lonely, to be honest. And I hate, for the sake of my needing a separate-from-Mommy identity, that it doesn't feel happy or relieving instead. Basically I'm sad that I'm sad. What the what, Erin.

And the identity changes get more complicated:

Now with Nathan starting kindergarten, it also feels like the End of an Era. I quit my job to be a stay at home mom "til the kids were in school" -- so now, even with two other babies still at home, I'm scared to feel his daily absence too acutely. I mean, this is it. He's in school every day. From now til college. My SAHM time with him... done. I don't get to prolong it or do it over or do it differently. Did I do it well enough? As well as I wanted to? As well as I thought I would? 

The questions I'm scared to let myself think too hard on.

And sweet Anneliese, stubborn and naughty and utterly unfazed by consequences, is also complicating those feelings of mommyhood success. I don't know what to do with that child these days. She confounds me. After all these years of having nothing on my agenda except learning to parent well, she still kicks my ass way too often. Downright cheerful in her defiance. I just... I don't know.

I never wanted to be That Mom whose whole self and world was swallowed up by my children, but the reality is raising these kids is what I do, it's the most important thing I do, and it consumes the largest portion of my brain and my energy and my time. Being a mom of babies has been part of my identity, the main part of my identity, for a long long time. (SIX! YEARS!) And now it's changing. My children need me in different ways. It feels strange. 

And somehow it's changing how I think about myself. 

Most days I don't know what to feel about that. 

Not yet anyway.