What not to read

So, suppose you have your third cold of the young year, your period is about to start, and you have spent the previous night waking up every 45 minutes wondering if you are going to throw up, then have spent the morning holding your 4-year-old's head over the sink while he unambiguously does--you! with your vomiting phobia!--but then, surprisingly, everyone turns out to be in a mellow and easygoing mood and you find you have both the time and the inclination to start reading a novel. Your excellent husband, say, has given you a gift subscription to the Persephone book-of-the-month program, and the satiny gray paperbacks have begun piling up faster than you can get to them (because you have been devoting your precious reading time to books with interchangeable titles and subtitles like "Becoming the Parent You Want to Be" and "How to Stop Yelling"). Being realistic, you pick out one of the slimmer volumes, with a whimsical horsehead endpaper and something about princes in the title--sort of makes you think of Kate Middleton and the lighter side of Trollope, exactly the sort of escapist British fizz to hit the spot, as you lie curled up at the foot of the bed where the baby is napping,  a toy helicopter at your feet, and the pessimistic stainless steel bowl left over from last night gaping at your head.

And then you read this:

"But what's the use of spring to me, thought Patricia. It'll be light after tea and, as I go down to the garden to eat the eggs, a blackbird will sing in the holly; the chestnuts will flower in Christ Church meadow, and Magdalen will have her fritilleries, but I'll have a beastly dental plate... I'm old... Hugh's old. God! what a struggle it's been, she thought, remembering monthly nurses, sticking-out teeth, tempers, nametapes, rows about dirty necks, rows about tidying up the nursery; and now that I've finished with it, she thought, now that they're grown-up, wash themselves, feed themselves, don't quarrel any more or drop egg down their fronts, now that my work's done, I've just got to grow old and feeble and ugly..."

Yah, that hits the spot, all right. 

It's Princes in the Land, by Joanna Cannan, in case you want to make sure you don't read it when you are recovering from the stomach flu. 

The letters of H. Patrick Thomas McCobb, vol. I

Peter and I have taken a big step. We've started having a babysitter spend three hours with the boys most Sunday afternoons. We're not going on "dates" or anything like that; Peter spends his time in the workshop whittling a sarcophagus head, while I go on long walks and think about the novel I would write if I ever write a novel. Not romantic, but restorative, which is where we're at right now, as they say.
We're delighted with Sophie, and after her first stint, Henry dictated a letter to her that mostly consisted of the single-word sentence "Love" repeated over and over, with any leftover space filled in with hearts. He was so pleased with the reception this letter got that he cooked up a scheme this week to dictate to Sophie a letter for her mother.
Here is how it went:

Dear Jana,
Hello. Nice to meet you. From Patrick Thomas McCobb.* And from Sophia [Redacted Redacted]. We are at Henry and James's house. They are eating a snack. And we are inside because it is rainy. We wish it was summer so we could make a garden and go swimming. I don't know how to swim. I need swimming lessons. The problem with a big hole is that you'll get muddy. We like summer so we can dig holes in the ground. Dear Jana, I wonder what your whole name is. You know your whole name? 
Love, Henry and James. Goodbye.

*Apparently Henry told Sophie that this is his real name. Henry is just a nickname.

The bleak midwinter, with anecdotes

At bedtime the other night:
Henry: James is cute, Mama.
Me: Yes, he is.
Henry: I'm cute, too.
Me: Yes, you are.
Henry: You're not cute. Daddy's not cute.
Me: No, we're not.
Henry: You're not like us.

***

James has developed a little shtick that is somewhere between fantasy play and an extended joke. It involves a little gray stuffed cat that he has grown attached to. "MY kitty-kitty," he says. When he wants to nurse, he says, "Kitty nuh (nurse)" and holds the toy to my chest before he takes a turn. This tickles him greatly. But last night, he didn't have the cat at hand. "Meow," he said. "Kitty nuh." He started to nurse, then pulled away to say again, "Meow," to make sure I got it.

***

We are sick again. Peter and I were knocked off our feet for the better part of a week, and James is awake 10 or more times each night, coughing. We were sick this time last year too, for weeks. I used to love winter, but right now, it feels like little more than a season of sickness and sorrow. I'm looking forward to spring, and also to one day loving winter again.

Fun with language acquisition

James is learning new words all the time, so he is full of surprises. Take yesterday, when I was reading one of his current favorite books, Each Peach Pear Plum, in which the reader hunts for hidden nursery rhyme characters. He found Mother Hubbard, who is bending over in her cottage kitchen so only her fairly voluminous backside is in view.
"Dere-ya-go, Mama!" crowed James. "Butthole!"

A good thing

When we went out this morning to take care of the dogs, Henry and James picked up a trowel and a hammer and started hacking away at the patches of ice left in the yard as the big snow melts. After a quarter of an hour, and with very cold hands, they were ready to come in.

"It,s a good thing there's ice for us to break up," said Henry. 

He seemed to find that wasn't quite what he meant to say.

"It's a good thing," he tried again, "there are people like me to keep the neighborhood safe."

I'll take it

The other morning, Henry asked me, "Mama, doesn't no sometimes mean yes?"

I have been spending too much time on Facebook lately looking at articles about rape culture, and thinking--well, no, thinking is not the word for it--that this was an opportune moment to teach my four-year-old a valuable lesson, I said reflexively, "Oh, no, sweetie, no means no." 

"No," Henry said, "I think no sometimes mean yes. Because when I asked James, 'Do you love me?' he said 'no.' But I think he does love me. So no might mean yes."

Tonight we revisited the same topic, and Henry had clearly been thinking about it in the meantime. "I think that no sometimes means yes," he began again. "I asked Jamie if he loved me and he said no, but I think he does love me. I think sometime he just doesn't want to tell me he does."

That nuanced assessment came at the end of the first really nice day we've had since Christmas. Whether it was the excitement, the irregular schedule and diet, my own tensions spilling over, or just the spark of Tonka trucks applied to the tinder of a child's bottomless desire, Christmas seemed to unleash a monster in Henry: he is not, in the ordinary way, an easy-going boy, but he has always regulated his aggressive acts--he may make James cry, and like it, but he clearly is capable of inflicting real injury, and doesn't. Except that for the week or so after Christmas, he did. Certainly not life-threatening, but it was real violence, and he was turning it on me, too, kicking with all his strength, and once or twice biting me--things he has never done before. I was, frankly, in despair. Peter's patience and sense of humor, which are usually my touchstone when I am frayed after long, difficult days, were more or less absent (it didn't help that he had come down with pink eye). My efforts at connected, respectful parenting seemed risible, and I was screaming, threatening, or bursting into tears almost as often as Henry. 

By New Year's Eve, though, I could see he was settling back down, and for the past week he has been back to his old passionate self--still volatile, and sometimes aggressive and demanding, but once again moderating the extremity of his reactions to James and to me, and lavishing us with sweetness and occasional acts of heroic generosity ("Look! I'm letting James play with my crane. Doesn't that make you happy, Mama?"). 

Today, though, was pretty much great. I don't think anybody screamed once, at least until bedtime (and that was Henry, not me!). I said to Henry as we were settling in to read a chapter of Farmer Boy that I had enjoyed the day with him very much.

"Yes," he said, "I was very friendly with James all day today."

"Yes, you were," I said, "And it was so nice! We were all so happy. Why did you decide to be friendlier with him?"

"Because it makes grownups happy. And it makes James friendlier with me, too."

Christmas family picture outtakes

Which one would YOU put on YOUR Christmas card?