Month: December 2009

The annual Fourth of July parade and celebration of my mother’s birthday. The WW2 veterans, in their dwindling numbers, make me cry as usual. Whit sits on a tractor at Home Depot wearing camouflage fleece, lobster-embroidered khaki shorts, red Old Navy girls’ flip-flops, and Mardi Gras beads. I take them both to see Up in the pouring rain.

I start to realize the pain in my knee is something real. Big bummer. I have a cortisone shot which hurts like hell but doesn’t much help.

We hike on Mount Washington and camp overnight. With five adults and six children. Getting six kids to bed in a room with four triple-decker bunk beds is a challenge. Crazy thunder and lightning all night long another challenge. Pouring rain and snow in the morning for the hike down a route that is very difficult even in good weather is a third challenge.

Judith Warner’s column about the resentment and pressure to be silent that educated and privileged women face touched off an interesting blogosphere conversation. For me the real questions were around judgments we make about others based on superficial indicators. I then wondered about how this is a short leap from interviewing, which is a big part of what I do for work.

I read Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks, Perfect Life by Jessica Shattuck, and Home Game by Michael Lewis.

Whit starts to swim on his own, wearing his lucky hot pink swim shirt (hand me down from his sister. and ultra manly). Oddly, but in a way that echoes his contrarian approach to life, he is only able to swim underwater.

We have a birthday dinner to celebrate my 35th birthday with three of my very dearest friends and their husbands. It is a wonderful evening filled with love and laughter.

Grace acts (as a pirate) in her first play, the camp production of Peter Pan.

Grace graduates from kindergarten. I spend the graduation ceremony wiping away tears, and feel my heart crack a little at how grown up she all of a sudden appears.

Whit leaves the nursery school that I’ve been a parent at for five straight years. That’s bittersweet too: the first school experience that either of my children had, and that I had as a mother.

We have a happy weekend visit in Marion with Hilary and her family. The four cousins have a ball together.

Grace takes a Boston Coach from Laguardia to visit her godmother, an hour away, and then flies home two days later on the Delta Shuttle alone. Her independence makes me feel mostly proud and slightly sad

We enjoy a weekend in Marion with my godsister and her three children, celebrating Margot’s third birthday and the third generation of the Godfamily. Pirate hats and Mardi Gras beads abound.

On a weekend in New Hampshire, Grace and I ride Segways. And then we have a very rough night together.

The children start at their respective camps. Grace’s favorite thing about camp for sure is the lunch room. Very old-school high school cafeteria. Plastic trays and rotating meal of spaghetti, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, etc.

My goddaughter is christened on a glorious May Sunday. My children were hilarious when they took their first communion (which I learned in godmother class was the right thing to do). Whit asked the priest in a whisper whether the wafers had nuts in them, and Grace asked me if the next time I could ask them to use white wine because I told her it was better than red.

Elizabeth and I have a sunny pizza lunch in the park with our five children (!).

Start the summer with a weekend in Manchester with Hadley & family, celebrating my godson’s birthday.

The kids have a blast at our school spring fair and that of their friends Clem and Campbell. Grace and Clem dress up as witches, complete with black hair paint. Removing said hair paint in the bath is an epic job.

Lisa Belkin spurs me to think yet more about the tension between pushing our children ahead and holding them back.

I read Free Range Kids (loved it), Bad Mother (liked it), It Happens Every Day (adored it).

Grace starts writing poetry and blows me away with her insistence, both pedantic and inspirational, that she is going to “look at things a new way.”

Easter in Marion with two of my oldest and best friends from Princeton and their children. And my son wore his new tie (his obsession) for the occasion (see above).

Had a Mummy & Kids Saturday with a visit to a friend’s store, pizza lunch, and trip to the movies. There was a photographer at the store who managed to get the best photographs that were taken of the kids all year long in about four snaps.

The Susan Boyle video (which I watched while in California for work – divine) affected me as it did millions of others.

Enjoyed our urban life for an afternoon of grumpy children, haircuts, car inspections, and toys made out of old beer cans and pebbles in the back “yard.”

Grace and I have a wonderful visit with Hadley & family

Whit’s exercise pants consumed his attention and affection.

I read more of the Twilight books and Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center.

Had a conversation with the children about their dreams. Grace described wanting to be sure the world had food, and the ways she could volunteer to help that (all hail the Pleaser Child). Whit had a two word answer to “What is your dream?”: “racing cars.”

I posted my thoughts on fragility and danger and about my instinctive unwillingness to parent in a way that is hamstrung by awareness of them. Later that same day, Whit went to the ER in an ambulance with an anaphylactic reaction to a chocolate Easter egg I’d given him. I try to be attuned to the universe’s messages, but I guess I had been doing a bad job, since it apparently felt I needed this unusually loud and neon message. Not super fun.

Grace went to Florida with her grandparents.