And so it happened...

Yep, some little kid drowned on the first day of open swim at camp. He's all right mind you but come on. Talk about putting reality to my worst nightmare(literally). I almost called the counselor and changed my sons ability to go into the "big" pool. BUT I was talked down by my friend who said that I have to let it go and trust that his counselors and life guards are on their game now. The "it can't happen to us" syndrome has left the building. I reluctantly agree so here I am sending him there again, with the hopes that he comes back to me o.k. I guess this is a part of being a mom. Letting go of your fears so that your children can experience life. It goes along with riding your bike around the block, crossing the street without holding hands and sleeping over at a friends house. All unknowns, but necessary steps to becoming your own person. All I know is that if I get another note like that I will do it.

Happy Father's Day

To the man of my dreams:


Thank you for all that you are
and all that you are not.

Thank you for what you say
and for what you don't.

Thank you for listening
and knowing when to ignore.

Thank you for your gentleness
and your kindness.

And above all

Thank you for always loving me
No matter what.

You are the greatest man there is and will ever be.
I love you forever...
Happy Fathers Day
Jen

life gets away from you

A friend sent me a very appropriate e-mail today and I thought I would post it with a few comments. I can't believe it has been 2 months since I last posted. I'm putting money that no one even reads this anymore. Life really gets away from you. Anyway, I really hope I don't feel like this in the future, although I already do in some ways. I want to look back at this part of my life and really appreciate it. My children are so interesting, and fun. Each has such a unique perspective of life, I stop myself from talking to others about them negatively. I do not want to be that mom who can't find something good to say about her family. I love them with everything I am and I will do anything for them forever. Unconditional love, something which I have searched my whole life for and now I have found through the eyes of these three beautiful children and an extremely loving husband.
My goal this summer...maybe this year is to video tape my life, the lives of my children at least five times. Not just the special occasions, but the mundane humdrum of life as well. Playing outside in the sprinkler(the poor mans pool), eating pizza picnic downstairs in front of the t.v. or just at the dinner table, bath time with all three in the tub, the times we take for granted and wish we could remember later. I want to get it all the love hate the tantrums, theirs and mine! Yes they could use it against me in a court of law later, but I don't care! I want to capture it and preserve it forever. Thanks Karin for sending me the e-mail and reminding me to cherish these time. Now here the e-mail:

By Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow
but in disbelief.
I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three
almost-adults, two
taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people
who read the same
books I do and have learned not to be afraid of
disagreeing with me in
their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes
that make me
laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and
shower gel and
privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than
I like. Who,
miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets
and move food
from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick
soap I bought for
the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the
baby is buried deep
within each, barely discernible except through the
unreliable haze of
the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is
finished for me now.
Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The
ones on sibling
rivalry and sleeping through the night and
early-childhood education,
all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and
Where the Wild Things
Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I
suspect that if you
flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What
those books taught
me, finally, and what the women on the playground
taught me, and the
well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that
they couldn't
really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false
test, then
becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you
realize that it
is an endless essay. No one knows anything.
One child responds well to positive reinforcement,
another can be
managed only with a stern voice and a timeout.
One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put
baby to bed on
his belly so that he would not choke on his own
spit-up. By the time my
last arrived, babies were put down on their backs
because of research
on sudden infant death syndrome.

To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is
terrifying, and then
soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself.
Eventually the
research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring
over one of Dr.
Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in
which he describes
three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and
active. I was
looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old
who did not walk.

Was there something wrong with his fat little legs?
Was there something
wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he
developmentally delayed,
physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went
to China.
Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine.
He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too.
Believe me, mistakes
were made. They have all been enshrined in the,
"Remember-When-Mom-Did
Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the
bad language,
mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed.
The times I
arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare
sleepover. The horrible
summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling
out of the
classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I
responded, "What did
you get wrong?". (She insisted I include that.) The
time I ordered food
at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove
away without
picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I
include that.)

I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the
first two seasons. What was
I thinking? 

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of
us make while
doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This
is particularly
clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in
photographs. There
is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the
grass on a quilt in
the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4
and 1. And I wish
I could remember what we ate, and what we talked
about, and how they
sounded, and how they looked when they slept that
night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the
next thing:
dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the
doing a little more
and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't,
what was me and
what was simply life. When they were very small, I
suppose I thought
someday they would become who they were because of
what I'd done. Now I
suspect they simply grew into their true selves
because they demanded in
a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.

The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense,
matter-of-fact and
I was sometimes over the top.

And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the
three people I like
best in the world who have done more than anyone to
excavate my
essential humanity. That's what the books never told
me. I was bound
and determined to learn from the experts. It just took
me a while to
figure out who the experts were.