More Spectacularly Bad Parenting

Scott, my weird-news-junkie husband (er, that means he's hooked on weird news, not that he's weird) just alerted me to this: NZ judge orders 'odd' name change

Short version:
Some phenomenally wacked-out people named their child Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. The girl, apparently a lot brighter than her parents, was horribly embarrassed by the name. (Her friends knew her as "K.") She was put in protective custody so her name could be changed, presumably to something more (cough) mainstream.

I ask: How stupid do you have to be to name your child Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii? 'Cause if you're going to name your child after husky-voiced 1930s film star Tallulah Bankhead, SPELL IT RIGHT! (That's probably what the kid was embarrassed about...not the "Hula" or "Hawaii" part....)

I really should be writing a talk for church tomorrow. Just overcome by the appalling lack of parenting skills out there.

This has been causing endless hilarity around our house this week

...mostly because Scott and I keep repeating it at odd times. Tonight we couldn't even get through the whole thing without cracking up.

From the Shouts & Murmurs column, "Animal Tales," in the June 30 issue of The New Yorker:

DALMATIANS

“Hey, look, the truck’s stopping.”

“Did they take us to the park this time?”

“No—it’s a fire. Another horrible fire.”

“What the hell is wrong with these people?”

Yeah, we're odd. Read the whole thing here.

Not exactly a visit to the Louvre. But then, when you have kids, who wants to see the Louvre?

Um...in the bathroom at the children's museum, there's a shadowbox of animal poop. Little mounds in varying shades of brown. Labeled: fox, toad, moose, squirrel. (Go ahead — say "moose and squirrel." It'll make you feel better.) Ever so appropriate a display for these little scatalogically-minded people who are in there to go potty.

The museum trip was my adventure buddy Rose's idea late last night, just spontaneous enough that I could tell the girls this morning that we were going on an adventure, and wouldn't that be fun, and they were waaay excited but able to take it in stride. We played on some Blue Man Group-esque wind instruments made out of PVC pipe, and played with the weaving exhibit (which has opened up a whole new world of classification for Beth, who was delighted to find that her sandals were woven, and so was the basket, and so is the plaid pattern on Daddy's shirt), and saw a play (Beth called it a movie, which tells me I definitely haven't been doing my job as a promoter of the arts). Sarah was fascinated with the wind display — she'd reach up as high as she could to put a hollow ball in a plastic tube, then push a button to trigger a blast of air that shot the ball out. Over and over again.

There's also a recycle shop at the museum, where local businesses donate things they're getting rid of in bulk. Amid bins of plastic wheel-shaped dohickeys and sheets of surplus plastic paperclips and unused folders for conference packets, there was a find: the magnetic sheets left over from making stick-to-the-fridge paper dolls. And then Rose found a bunch of wallpaper samples, and we concocted a paper-doll-making scheme: we'll use the sheets as templates to make cardboard paper dolls and clothes that attach with Velcro.*

So, yeah: great day at the museum. And, for your enjoyment, two Joshisms:

First, a classic from any apartment-dwelling kid: "Beth, can you come over and play in my backyard? When I have a backyard?"

And: on the way home, out of the blue, Josh piped up, "I love you, Beth."

"I love you too, Josh." And then companionable silence.


_______________________________________
*Brooke, one of these sheets will be rolled up in my luggage when I come out to visit. This has Ellabelle written all over it.

Beth and the snappy comeback

Yesterday Beth clocked herself falling off the couch, and despite Scott's best efforts at getting ice on the owie immediately, she ended up with quite a shiner. So we coached her to say "You should see the other guy!" if anyone comments on it.

She thinks this is hilarious, and in true three-year-old fashion has been repeating the joke over and over and over, giggling like a loon every time she says it.

Oh, and her emphasis makes it even funnier: instead of "You should see the other guy," it comes out "You should see the other guy!" I love my kid.

From the photo archives

I've been meaning to post some of our better pictures....

Getting on the T at Alewife...not the train, just the T

Beth and some friends playing on the turtle at the park in Concord


This was the view all the way home from my seat on the train


Beth the giraffe girl on our trip to the zoo

Sarah's first water balloon. She isn't quite sure what to do with it.

Beth got to ride a pony! Such excitement...and such horror when I discovered a flea after we got home. Totally worth it, though.

Beth being an "alligator" at her swimming lessons

Sarah reading to Pink Teddy

The girls in their sundresses

Sarah feeding Baby Margie (with some help from her daddy)

Beach day

I can differentiate the days this week by what we did in the water: Monday and Tuesday were in the saltwater pool at our friends' vacation house; Wednesday was all of the ward kids running through the sprinklers while the moms sat in the shade; Thursday was eating goldfish crackers in the splash pool; today was the beach.

We are all sandy and a little sunburned and that bone-happy tired that a day of sun and sea and sand do to you. This was Sarah's first time playing in the ocean. She alternately loved it and clung to me (more out of missing her nap than fear). Beth dug in the sand and bossed her friends around, all while holding an uneaten PB&J in one sandy hand. (The picture is of Beth and Josh digging and talking.)

What did they get out of it? At the top of Beth's report to her daddy was "I goed wee-wee in the ocean!" Give me whatever stern looks you want, but I love that my three-year-old lives close enough to the ocean to learn this great trick early in life. And Sarah? Her picnic lunch was sandy PB&J, sandy fruit snacks, sandy grape halves, sandy apple slices, sandy sippy cup. Er...excellent source of roughage.

43 new e-mails

I've been gone for TWO DAYS and I have 43 new e-mails. Hello? I mean, I know a good chunk of it is spam...but really.

My visiting teaching companion invited us all out to her summer house in the Berkshires for a few days. Scott read the e-mail especially carefully and realized that it would be, like, ALL female (except for a five-year-old boy who showed up today) and bowed out, but the girls and I did the two-and-a-half-hour trek out there and had a great time. Glorious, glorious. The girls loved the pool and the fact that there were other little kids! to play with. Have to say the best part for me was getting a tour of Tanglewood — my friend used to work at the BSO and spent five summers out there running the sizable volunteer program, so I learned some fun things I probably wouldn't have heard otherwise. (Am positively drooling over the fabulous perks they have to offer big donors.) I even got a quick look at Seranak, the former summer home of Sergei and Natalie Koussevitsky.

(That said, we didn't actually go to a concert. I have to go back, and I'm going to drag Scott with me.)

Time to read those e-mails. I have a sinking feeling that a chunk of them have to do with tomorrow night's book group, which I'm leading, and though I'm enjoying Angle of Repose I didn't get through quite as much of it in the last few days as I had hoped to.

Getting along swimmingly

We spent yesterday afternoon at the pool. Hurrah! Our town boasts the country's first public swimming pool — and while I'll complain all summer that the words "historic" and "pool" shouldn't be used together (there's this issue about the bottom of the pool crumbling and flaking off every year, and let's not talk about the old drains), it is awfully nice to have a swimming pool a mile away.

Beth's been taking swimming lessons. The first day — last Monday — she was pretty weepy and panicky and I had to hold onto her every moment we were in the pool. By the third day she could make it through the class without tears (and thus earned herself an afternoon trip back to the pool); by the end of last week she didn't need me in the pool at all. Today Sarah and I sat in the shade (though it's so humid shade doesn't help much right now) and hung out with our friends the Russes while Beth and Lila and about eight other kids had their lesson. It's so, so cute: they sing songs and splash themselves with water and then pretend to be pancakes in the water (they sit on the one-foot-deep bottom of the pool and kick their feet, then flip over and do the same thing), and eventually the teachers lead them out in a big long train of two- and three-year-olds in blue floaty rings. And they jump off the lifeguard's diving board into the teachers' arms, and hang onto the fence in the middle of the pool and practice their kicks. Beth's favorite thing to do is be an alligator: float on her tummy with her head out of the water, walking along the bottom of the pool on her hands.

So yesterday afternoon the pool was packed, thanks probably to the fact that summer vacation has just barely begun and the weather is so swelteringly unbearable that it's a choice between being sopping wet at home in your clothes or sopping wet in the pool in a bathing suit. Kiersten and Sam got there shortly after we did; Sam, who's not quite one, loved the water and turned blue with cold quickly. Sarah wanted me to help her float the whole time, preferably in circles with her head leaning back in the water. The kid's a fish. Beth showed off her alligator skills and practiced climbing in and out of the pool while Kiersten and I watched some Spectacularly Bad Parenting in action. (If you want your kids out of the pool? Get them yourself. Don't send some complete stranger after them when you're wearing your swimsuit and could very easily get into the pool. And don't make idle threats, 'cause kids see through those. Follow through on what you say once in a while and they'll start falling in line. I so, so want a month with those kids and a chance to slap that woman upside the head. But I'm not going to get it, so I'll just be snarky about it in the pool. And on my blog.)

(Good Bethism: after we got out of the pool and I was changing Sarah's diaper and Kiersten was changing Sam's because both kids were soaked and FREEZING, Beth pointed to Sam and said, "Oh! He has blue boy parts." We had a good laugh over that one.)

Here's the thing: I love hanging out in the pool. I love being out in the sun and the water and giving Beth piggyback rides in the "deep part" while trying to keep Sarah from throwing herself in for an attempted backstroke. The shallow end of the pool, the only side the kids are allowed in, is all of three feet deep in the very center. It's not like I'm practicing my butterfly stroke. But by the time I got home my calves were aching and I was really, really tired. I guess toting two kids around in the water for an hour is a pretty good workout. We're going to spend a lot of time there this summer, and Sarah will get to stomp around the pool and refuse offers of help until she desperately wants to be swung around by the hands, and Beth will play alligator, and at some point Beth's almost-seven-year-old friend (and object of hero worship) Audrey will take her in the pool, and we'll go through untold cans of spray-on sunscreen. Sound good? Come join us someday.

Bethisms #6

As we're driving home from church yesterday:

"What did you learn about in nursery today, Beth?"

"America!"

"What's America?"

"It's a place where you have flags up."

Well, it certainly will be on Friday.

School's out! Which means...

...tomorrow afternoon is the Primary Water Party, and my only real responsibility is to bring 50 filled water balloons.

The fact that I'm not really fazed by this speaks volumes. A few months ago I would have been horrified by 1) the fact that I was in any way involved in Primary, 2) the very idea of over a hundred just-out-of-school kids with access to highly volatile water-filled bombs, and 3) the foolhardy notion that I could transport a quantity of said volatile explosives from my house up to the church on what are some very bumpy roads (pardon me while I invoke curses upon the heads of the lame voters in this town who wouldn't come up with the money to get the roads fixed) without turning the trunk of my car into an environment suitable for breeding mosquitoes.

My friend Rose suggested trash-bag-lined laundry baskets for storage and transport (and offered to come help fill the balloons). The Primary president, keenly practical, suggested filling the balloons with a sports-capped water bottle. (She also has a refreshingly sardonic view of what is actually going to transpire tomorrow, thanks.)

I needn't have worried about any of this, though, because the minute I brought the package of balloons home Scott jumped on them with all the wicked enthusiasm of an eight-year-old boy. There have only been two, um, incidents (though he faked chagrin when I wouldn't let him "test" the first balloon on me). Should have known my husband is much better equipped to deal with children — and their games! — than I am.

Cross your fingers that the air pressure doesn't change considerably overnight. And that it's warm tomorrow. And that no slap-happy preschool-aged boy tries to impress Beth by hitting her in the face with one of those babies, 'cause they hurt, and she'll burst into tears and then the fun will be over.

And they're off...

Brooke is, as I write this, on her way to Salt Lake City. Sarah is back in Jersey. Margaret is in Buffalo (and I hear there was shuffling involved). Jen is in New Mexico. Cynthia is way out in the western wilds of Oregon. The women I was closest to in Pittsburgh, the women who laughed with me and cried with me and had babies the same time I did and made it through grad school (our own and our husbands') with me are all scattered.

I should feel happy for all of us, because we're off doing what we wanted to be doing. We finally have income to pay off those student loans, hooray, and the in-limbo feeling of being somewhere we knew would be temporary is over (well, except for Brooke, but that's another story). Instead it makes me sad. We had something really special, something priceless, and it's gone. Okay, not gone gone, but we've replaced library dates and morning walks and campy moviefests with phone calls and e-mail and the occasional visit.

It's been a rough first year here in Boston. (In all fairness, I have to admit I made it worse for myself by holding on to some hope that Brooke's husband would do his residency at Brigham and Women's instead of the U of U, and figuring that if I just made it through the first year I'd have my library-and-lunch buddy to go on grand new adventures with.) But it's a tough audience up here. That famed New England reticence? Alive and kicking, ever so politely. The ingrained formality of this area is such that I don't feel I can or should speak my mind — when I spoke my mind to someone this week I got a curt e-mail telling me the friendship was over. (It's no great loss, but still.) There are playgroups we aren't invited to join, a discussion group that took me off the e-mail list, couples' movie nights I hear about after the fact. No one is trying to be unfeeling; they're very kind when we're around; we just don't belong yet. And despite what you're thinking, it isn't my big mouth that's gotten me sidelined — I've heard the same thing from other newish people here: "It's a tough ward to break into." "No one talked to me for the first year." "There's a huge division between the owners and the renters."

On the other hand, there are people who have been marvelously kind: Danika, and then Mindy, who each took my kids for three days when we had to go out of town, and made them much more fun-filled days than I would have; Jen T., who stepped in and ran a book group discussion for me on zero notice when I couldn't do it (and by all accounts did her usual brilliant job); Marci, who recognized me in line at Costco the first week we were here; Emily, for whom I really should make a mix of gingerbread house party tunes; Lisa, who is possibly more vehemently opposed to the school district's kindergarten plan than I am, and who may even have a bigger mouth than I do; Kiersten and Ana, my terrific neighbors. I like these people. There just isn't enough history yet. We have kids, and the people around us have kids, and that means that we're all a bit wrapped up in our own lives, and it's easy not to think about adding new people to the mix.

So this is my tribute to my glorious Pittsburgh friends. To Brooke, who opens her arms to everyone and will make vats of homemade ice cream to share after a huge backyard circus. To Sarah, who shares hilarious (and potentially embarrassing) stories about herself with anyone who will listen. To Margaret, who won't let you be new in her ward without finding out what you like to do and introducing you to someone else who likes to do it (and inviting you to join book group while she's at it). To Jen, who is Beth's godmother in all but name. To Cynthia, who won my heart when she stepped out of standard-visiting-teaching mode and said, "Can I take Beth for a walk and let you sleep?" I love you all, and I miss you, and I would transplant you all to my corner of the world in a heartbeat, but instead I wish you deep roots in the new places you're planted.

(I know this post was sappy, so I'm apologizing now, and don't leave me comments about how sappy it is! And I know I've been off the blogosphere for a while. The last month has been a roller coaster ride, and I have a lot to write about, and I promise to get to it, but first things first.)

This totally weirded out my innate sense of market segmentation

Could someone please explain what a bright-red Ferrari was doing in the parking lot of Jo-Ann Fabrics this afternoon?

Bethisms #5 (yep, they're coming fast and furious)

Yesterday the girls rediscovered their collection of finger puppets and played with them very enthusiastically in the kitchen for a while until I banished them (the puppets, not the girls) to the living room. This morning the girls very enthusiastically pulled all of Sarah's diapers out of their box and spread them around the living room.

When I went to put away the diapers this afternoon, I discovered one little finger puppet inside each diaper.

***

This afternoon the girls were eating snacks in the kitchen while I was trying (mostly in vain) to get a handle on the chaos that erupts in this house. When I went back into the kitchen, Sarah (with Beth's help, I'll bet) had flung all of her Cheerios on the floor.

"We're planting a Cheerio plant!" Beth announced. "It's going to grow Cheerios!"

Uh-oh!

That's Sarah's new word. She uses it as often as she can, and often manufactures incidents in which it would be appropriate (including but not limited to dropping her sippy cup at a restaurant and announcing "Uh-oh!" in a loud singsong). Her eyes get very big and her mouth rounds down to a little pinprick of an "o" at the end. Really, it's the cutest thing. It's annoying, but it's cute.

Beth has been using it, too, and her incidents aren't manufactured — they're the result of poor parental attention span. About a week ago Scott put the girls in their pajamas early (we were having dessert or something before they went to bed), and figured he'd change Beth into a diaper when it was actually time for her to go to sleep. And he forgot. Beth woke up at 12:30, crying, "No, no, no, no, no!" and when I went in to check on her she was standing up in bed, soaked, in tears.

Scott gave her a bath; I changed the bedding (really, if you have a kid this age, having two mattress pads for the bed is a terrific idea, 'cause one of them will probably be wet a good portion of the time).

During the bath, Scott said, "Bethie, did you wet the bed?"

Sad voice: "Yes. I had a accident."

"Yeah. Whose fault was it?"

Sadder voice: "Mine."

"No, not this time. Whose fault was it this time?"

A gleam in her eye, a small grin, a triumphant note to her voice: "Yours!"

Now, lest you think that Scott is the only dunderhead in this marriage, I did exactly the same thing a few days ago when she took her afternoon nap, with identical results. Uh-oh, indeed.

Grandpa Wes

My dad came to visit for two weeks, which was awesome, and actually gave us enough time to do a few of the things we'd planned, in between everyone's naps. (He flew out here on his 74th birthday, and I teased him that he and Sarah were on the same nap schedule.)

So we dragged him to Beth's last gymnastics class, where he took a bunch of pictures, and he helped Scott and our downstairs neighbor with the weekend yard work (I hid inside the house, which has never been cleaner), and we saw the baby giraffe at the zoo, and at some point he discovered Linda's Donuts, so we feasted on fried sugary goodness for pretty much the whole time he was here.

We also got up reeeeeeeeally early on Patriots Day (sans kids and Scott) to see the reenactment of the Battle of Lexington. Dad loved it, and especially loved the fact that the historical society rep who was keeping our corner of the crowd entertained before the battle started had a lot of information about clothing and the different dyes used by the British officers and rank-and-file for their red coats.

We spent a lot of time downtown: a trip to the aquarium (way cool, but which I will never, ever again attempt during school vacation week), a day walking most of the Freedom Trail and taking the ferry up to Charlestown to tour the U.S.S. Constitution, and one great evening when the girls woke up quite late from their naps and instead of running to Star Market to find something to cook for dinner, we parked at Alewife and took the T to the North End for Italian food. (To be fair, here, the day we walked the Freedom Trail we ended up meeting Scott for Japanese food in Porter Square, which was equally yummy.) The girls love the subway — Sarah is big enough now that she insists on climbing out of the stroller and pressing her nose to the window next to her big sister. I'll never understand this, since there's nothing to see. Keeps them happy, though.

Oh, food. We took Dad to Legal Sea Foods, which of course was good, but the hit of the stay had to be the stuffed clams we picked up at Frankie's Catch of the Day, five minutes away. It was like a clam cake stuffed back into the clam shell, and we all sat there making happy noises about how good it was.

Somewhere in the two weeks Dad was here I finally pulled together a cover for the 43-year-old cradle my mom made (yes, made) for my oldest cousin — said cousin's sister is having a baby this month and the cradle, now with a fleece-lined denim cover that was the cause of much bad language and some very sore knees (from kneeling on the floor to cut out the huge pieces of fabric), is on its way back to her in Salt Lake via UPS. I felt an odd sense of relief the day I shipped it off: I won't be the next person to stay up all night with a crying baby. Felt good to get the cover done, though.

Anyway, the day before Dad left the weather finally turned ugly (we'd had clear days in the 70s and 80s for two weeks) and we got drenched walking around Bentley. Beth got to use her new umbrella, which made her week, and I think Dad enjoyed himself. Miss him already. It's hard to be this far away from my family, especially with little girls who need to know their grandpa.

Happy 3rd Bethday!

I've been meaning to post pictures from the two Bethday parties, which were, respectively, two and three weeks ago now. (I've been a bit busy with my dad in town — see next post).

On her birthday we opened up family presents in the morning and then had our neighbors and her uncle David, aunt Chelsea and cousin Spencer come for cake in the evening. Cute little Beff-Beff! She looked absolutely radiant all day. And grown up! All the attention got to her as the day wore on, but she did a pretty good job of holding up under pressure. She just got very, very quiet toward the end there.

As for the friend party...we stole the idea from Fancy Nancy: Bonjour, Butterfly, which is one of Bethie's favorite, favorite books. We took around cute butterfly invitations to the kids she has playdates with (Beth pasted construction paper squares to the backs to make butterfly "mosaics") but had to change the date/time because two of the three little invitees couldn't come! I think three is about the last time ever that you can change a kid's birthday party to a different day and have her not notice and not really care.

I baked and decorated a butterfly cake, which I have to post a photo of simply because no one but the little butterfly girls (and Scott) ever actually saw in its entirety. The girls decorated their own butterfly wings and helped me make their antennae, and we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and then played wrap-the-girls-up-in-a-toilet-paper-cocoon and let-them-burst-out-as-a-beautiful-butterfly, and we played musical chairs and hide-and-seek and red light/green light, and they were served (but did not eat due to the excitement level) peanut butter sandwiches and string cheese and carrot sticks arranged to look like butterflies, and of course there was cake and a lot of crawling through our butterfly tunnel and then their moms came and I was EXHAUSTED. Really, that's what it felt like: one big adorable run-on sentence of a birthday party. Scott stayed home to help (hooray!) and Sarah blissfully napped through the whole thing. I'd made a list of possible games to play, and we ended up going through ALL of them and then some. It was just warm enough to go outside and run around for a few minutes, so we even got in some good backyard time.

Bethie had a glorious time. She still talks about her butterfly birthday party. She's so, so thrilled with being fwee.

Bethisms #4

Two quick things:

Since Beth knows I get peeved when she takes her clothes OFF during her nap, today she decided to put clothes ON. Two PJ tops, to be exact. I was laughing too hard to tell her that wasn't exactly the idea either.

And on our way back from dinner tonight, Beth sang out, "Mommy, that says zoo!" Sure enough, off to my left there was a Zoots dry cleaner. Hurrah, hurrah! She's getting it!

TOOTH!

Sarah has a tooooooooooth! Finally! It's just one little razor-sharp line along her bottom gum, but at least we know she has teeth in there somewhere. It poked through yesterday, and she's 15 months old today.

She's also very self-conscious about it, is favoring her bottom gum, and woke up twice last night screaming about it. I'm going to carry Tylenol with me while we're out and about at the zoo today.

Kid freedom

I really, really need to write about Beth's birthday party today. And I will. It's just that my friend Mendy passed along the recent Lenore Skenazy column from the New York Sun: Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone. I just have to comment about this, and about all the resulting hysteria.

My next-door neighbor Kiersten and I have been talking about kid freedom quite a bit over the last few months. It started when Kiersten's mother asked if Kiersten's son Sam would be taking the bus to school. "Uh, no," she said. "He'll be walking the half-mile with Beth and Sarah." And then she called me saying, "I'm not wrong, am I? They're walking to school, right? Because it's just half a a mile." I assured her that, yes, they would be walking, and as soon as Beth was comfortable with the route she'd probably be walking by herself before Sam and Sarah were old enough to join her. Another neighbor whose kid isn't quite three months old echoes the sentiment, so there will be four little neighbor kids doing this. And we won't be shadowing them. (But then, we won't be paying for full-day kindergarten, either, and we have plans to put the kids in a neighborhood rock band, too, so maybe we really ARE bad parents.)

As a ten-year-old kid, I walked downtown every day after school (about a mile), got bus money from my dad, and took the bus out to the babysitter's house (another eight miles), where my mom picked me up after work. I knew the UTA bus schedules so well that it actually irks me now that they've changed bus routes and numbers — I don't ever take the bus in Salt Lake any more, but if I need to I'd like to know that the #5 bus is going to be at the corner of 13th South and 19th East at 5, 25, and 45 minutes past the hour (except on weekends). Taking the bus was the cornerstone of my independence. I knew how to get around by myself, how to trust a map and a bus schedule. Because I took the bus as a (pretty little) kid, I wasn't afraid to take the subway in Washington, D.C. or the tram in Moscow, Russia as a sixteen-year-old. I wasn't afraid to go back to Argentina after my mission, toting two friends who'd never been there (one who had never been outside the U.S.), for a three-week, four-city trip. I wasn't panicked about finding my way around L.A., or Pittsburgh, or now Boston. My younger sisters, who for various reasons never took the bus, have very different views of the world and their ability to navigate it.

Beth is three. We already talk about which numbers we see on the buses in our area, and where those buses go. ("Look, Beth, that's a #73 bus! Is that OUR bus?") I just HOPE that by the time she's nine she begs me to let her take the T by herself. If she hasn't asked by the time she's twelve, I'm sending her and a friend to the zoo with Charlie Cards and $50 for lunch and admission.

If I don't let my kids walk to school alone, take the bus and subway alone, and learn to do things like read a map and remember landmarks, how can I expect them to be responsible drivers (and navigators!) when they're 16? How can I expect them to survive away from home when they're 18? How can I expect them to be adults who can function outside of an air-conditioned SUV?

Your thoughts, please. I'm interested in what people have to say about this. (And I'm especially interested if you don't agree with me, by the way.)

(Oh — and I love the title of Lenore Skenazy's blog: Free Range Kids. Someone actually suggested that as the name for the group that ended up being Half Day Play...hilarious!)

Beff is turning free!

Beth turns three today, and I'm not ready for it. I have the kitchen table piled high with presents (it's Potter family tradition to celebrate birthdays as early in the morning as possible), and we're well into the planning of the butterfly birthday party next weekend, and she's itching to be finally three instead of having her birthday "coming up in April," but I'm just not ready. I'm feeling nostalgic (and, yes, a bit weepy. Sniff!).

Three years ago right now I was in the hospital with a magnesium solution IV, a headache, and an automatic blood pressure cuff so I could only sleep in 15-minute increments. I was scared, tired, and majorly pissed off because the baby wasn't due until May 10th and I'd just left a bunch of things hanging at work. When Beth was finally born (emergency C-section, five weeks early, at 4:08 in the afternoon) she was itty bitty: 4 lbs., 10 oz. Here's the mildly famous shoe picture for reference.

And now she's a Big Girl who goes on the potty (most of the time), talks up a storm, knows her ABCs and loves to figure out which words begin with which letters ("What does cookie begin with? Cuh-cuh-cuh-C! Oh, I did it!"), and is sweet to her little sister (again, most of the time, and there's nothing sweeter or more maternally satisfying than seeing her take Sarah's hand to help her go throw away a diaper). She's also a drama queen of some note (I think it goes with the age, and the fact that she's female and related to me), bossy, opinionated, defiant (daily), and, on occasion, even manipulative and sneaky.

I miss my tiny skinny little Bug. I love my big girl Beff. I miss the freedom I had when I was kidless (Road trip without worrying about someone puking in the car? Sure! Three-hour trip to the mall, trying on every green sweater, knowing that everyone with me will behave? Why not?), and I love her snuggling up with me on the couch to watch the Food Network (we're both big Ace of Cakes fans, which I fear has greatly inflated her faith in my ability to adequately decorate her butterfly birthday cake). I miss the little mewing noises she made as a newborn, and I love her soft little grown-up-sounding voice from the back seat of the car telling me that her imaginary friend Mei is strapped in the car seat with her. I loved being the center of her world, and I love that her world is expanding beyond me.

While I'm thinking about birthdays: congrats to Danika and Amy, who both had baby girls this week! If the first part of this post didn't make it clear, I'm just a wee bit partial to baby girls...and the big girls they eventually become. Happy birthday, Bethie.