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Evie Jo is nearly four years old and a subject has come up that neither my hubby, Rand, nor I were expecting to deal with for a while… money. It’s not the subject of money itself as much as the things Evie Jo insists she needs and wants - things that require money to buy. click here for entire essay

One Dog Over the Line - December 2000

My baby, Kaman, is just five weeks old. I have to admit I have been feeling a bit cocky about how well I’ve adjusted to being the mother of three. Two to three is certainly less of an adjustment than one to two was. Or maybe I really am just a darn good mom. click here for entire essay

The Cute One in the Middle - April 2001

Some time ago, Maddie, nearly three, and I made a solo trip to the grocery store. I enjoy spending time with my kids one on one as they always surprise me with their behavior and observations. Maddie was feeling particularly chatty that day so we were conversing on just about everything under the sun. click here for entire essay

The Birds and The Bees... And Giraffes - April 2001

Life is Story is Life - April 2001

My dad recently brought over a folder of items my mother had saved. In it was possibly the first story I ever wrote as a child. I don't remember writing it. From the spelling and illustrations, I would guess the copyright, had I known about things like that then, was circa 1976. click here for entire essay

Walking - August 2001

My baby, Kaman, is now walking. I denied the inevitable for the longest time. "He’s not really walking, he just takes a step or two now and then,” I would tell people. click here for entire essay

The Doody - August 2004

When your three-and-a-half year old son says, “Mom, there’s a doody on your chair,” there would seem to be enough reason to be alarmed. But then he asks, “Did you know I kissed the doody?” click here for entire essay

Lipstick

Rand and I have this practice of giving ourselves spending cash once a month when his check comes in. We decided that maybe it was time to let Evie Jo “manage” her own spending cash, as well, with the hope this will help her prioritize her wants.

Having lost her tube of lipstick to a close-encounter with her little sister, Maddie, Evie Jo was absolutely positive she needed a new one. I don’t wear makeup so I couldn’t even help her out with a loaner. She decided she wanted to take her very first five-dollar bill, a Valentine gift from Oma and Opa (grandparents), and buy a tube of lipstick. Whatever was left was going to her savings account.

On the way to the store she was concerned, first, that she only had one dollar bill. I explained that it was a five-dollar bill and we used our fingers for comparison.

See, this is a one-dollar bill (hold up one finger) and this is a five-dollar bill (hold up five fingers) So one, five-dollar bill is worth five, one-dollar bills.

We arrived at the makeup section and I am shocked to find lipstick tubes priced six to eight dollars each. Remember, I don’t wear makeup. Evie Jo starts pointing to the tubes she likes, so I pull my fingers out to explain.

You only have (hold up five fingers) five dollars, remember? This red one, “Berry Bouquet” costs (round off and hold up 7 fingers) and this pink one, “Winter Frost” costs (hold up 8 fingers).

She understands. We explore, looking for cheaper tubes of lipstick. I am relieved when we come to the two to three dollar range. Okay… much better.

I point out the selection and show her the price on my fingers. She sees that with these tubes of lipstick, she will have two to three dollars left over to put in her savings account. She takes her time picking a color. Meanwhile, I find a basket of sample tubes for 97-cents each.

“Evie Jo, look!” I say. “If you buy one of these (pulling out the fingers again). You’ll have four dollars to put in savings instead of just two.”

Evie Jo contemplates. She has picked out a three-dollar tube but sorts through the one-dollar basket. She examines my finger illustrations again. Okay, sounds good to her… she’ll take a one-dollar tube.

We head for the cash register. I am beaming… thinking only of my wise and frugal child.

“Purple!” I hear her yell out behind me. “Mom look! They have purple lipstick!”

I turn to look. Yes, they do have “Very Violet Frost” – four dollars a tube. I try to explain to Evie Jo (fingers again). If you buy this one (four fingers) it will only leave one finger for saving. Remember that this tube (trying to redirect her to the pretty red, 97-cent tube) will leave you with four fingers for your savings account.

Evie Jo tosses the cheap tube back in the basket and says, “That’s okay, Mom, I REALLY want the purple one.”

One Dog Over the Line

Anyhow, today my pride was taken down a few notches. We had to take the dog, Naisey, to the veterinarian.

We pulled up to the clinic and I instructed my four-year-old, Evie Jo, to get the leash on the dog. Naisey was already bouncing wildly on the seat and getting dog boogers on the windows. The girls were tripping over each other, excited about being able to take the dog somewhere. I open the car door only to be greeted by that wonderful (and far too familiar) smell – SKUNK. Naisey went wild.

Four times this year, a skunk has sprayed our little black mutt. She has declared herself an official skunk hunter - protector of our house, yard, AND the neighboring acreage. She is beyond excited to find one here - far too hyper for Evie Jo to keep a hold on her chain.

I managed to get the baby in the sling while pinning the dog’s chain up against the door with my knee. Kaman woke from his car-induced nap, went rigid, and began to scream. Maddie, my two-year-old, and Evie Jo began fighting over who was going to “help” hold Naisey’s chain. We ended up falling over each other all the way into the clinic.

In the waiting room, the dog was going nuts – barking, whining and wrapping her chain around anyone and everything. Kaman continued screaming at the top of his lungs. Maddie and Evie Jo were practically fist fighting and falling over the dog’s chain between punches. Me? What was I doing? Grinning like some numb, overwhelmed mom who had no power over her offspring… or her dog.

I hummed to the baby. I shushed the dog. I attempted the silent “I mean it” stare with the girls who were taking turns complaining to me after each whack. I bounced the baby. I tried to pet and calm the dog...

In my mind, I kept going over my choices - go postal or put myself into a deep, meditative stupor. I decided on the stupor and hoped to get the dog’s damned shots in a hurry so we could get the hell out of there.

The receptionist, who was been on the phone all this time, was giving me that look that makes it obvious her own children were never this unruly. Finally, we got the attention of the veterinarian and, bless his heart, he carried the dog to the car for us after we were done.

The Cute One in the Middle

Oma said something along the lines of, “Look at you! You’re getting so big.”

Maddie’s smile immediately turned into a frown, “I’m not big! Evie’s big.”

My middle daughter really has a way of putting on a pout. She narrows her big, brown eyes and sticks her lip out. It’s almost always complete with crossed arms.

Oma corrected herself saying, “Well, you are still little but your getting…”

A couple of days later I heard her describing hairstyles to her daddy. “Evie Jo has long hair. You and Kaman have short hair. Momma and I have cute hair.”

That’s when it became clear to me. Maddie had adopted the word “cute” to mean something not so big and not so little. The cute one is in the middle.

“I am little, but Kaman is littlest,” she said getting the -est sound wrapped around her tongue. “You are bigger than me, Evie.”

I waited for the cute description, but it never came. I’ll admit it made me a little sad. She really is growing up. In my heart, however, she’ll always be the cute one in the middle.

The Birds and The Bees... And Giraffes

Luckily for me, I was in the middle of scrubbing egg out of a skillet when Evie Jo, age five, posed this question. I’m always glad to have something to occupy me when the really tough questions arise. Somehow, having something to do with my hands makes my answers appear more nonchalant. While I want to take my children’s questions about the birds and bees seriously, it’s also important to me to answer them casually and with honesty.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve rehearsed answers to “sex” questions in my head. Evie Jo has been through the births of two siblings now and we have talked about babies and birth at some length.

This question, however, was never in any of my rehearsed scenarios. I was glad to have only the skillet to witness the emotions that must have registered clearly on my face – shock, amusement, and utter cluelessness.

While I was picturing two giraffes having sex and trying to determine a tasteful way of answering, Maddie, nearly three, supplied Evie Jo with an answer.

Still thankful to that stubborn egg in the skillet, I was now pondering just how much my two-year-old knew about chickens having sex.

“Well, yeah,” I finally managed my own line in the conversation, “I suppose it would be kind of similar to a rooster and a hen.”

I couldn’t help but feel that I was failing miserably, mostly because I had no idea where to begin.

I wondered, briefly, if the library might have a video on the subject. That would be making way too much of the question, I was sure. I could do a search on the internet -- keywords “giraffe” and “sex.” It’s hard telling what I would come up with. In all probability, it wouldn’t be appropriate material for my five-year-old.

I decided to follow Maddie’s lead. We talked about chickens, roosters and had a lively dialogue about eggs. It was interesting. I’d even say educational. I found myself able to turn away from my skillet (I was about to scrub through the finish) and look my girls in the eyes while we advanced to comparative anatomy… boy chicken parts, boy pig parts, boy people parts, and, yes, even boy giraffe parts.

Admittedly, I had little to offer as far as actual visual descriptions of many of these parts. I could suppose, with some amount of certainty, that a boy giraffe was more similar to a boy cow than say… Daddy.

Eventually the talk moved on to other subjects and I was more relieved than I probably should have been.

Since then, I have been adding new scenarios to my rehearsals. With enough practice, I’ll someday be prepared to answer anything… right?

Life is Story is Life

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

The story eerily resembles the easy reader, Stop That Ball! by Mike McClintock. I added, of course, a few elements of my own. The ball in my story, for instance, goes down a hole and I have to enter to retrieve the ball myself. I meet a man in the hole, and though the story doesn't explain this, I know in my mind that he was homeless. I am sure I was dealing with plot and character my pencil had not yet mastered.

This story was proof to me that I've been telling stories most of my life. I went through my childhood writing down the stories that my cousins and I invented when we played. There were the Martians that attacked while we built our playhouse of bricks in their back yard. There were stories of the orphaned prairie girls who hunted buffalo and picked wildflowers in the meadow. A childhood friend still talks about one of her favorites - the living, breathing barn, which haunts the author (that barn still spooks me).

Even when I grew too busy to commit my stories to paper, I continued to write them in my head. All through college I collected characters and events for stories I would someday write. I almost always had an on-going novel being written in my head that managed to get me through some of the more tedious aspects of college jobs. I could spend hours filing newspapers in the college library because it gave me time to construct the plot for my first "best-selling" novel.

Now I'm a mom and I find myself writing stories about and for my kids. The stories in my head still greatly outnumber those I've managed to commit to paper. There's just not enough time in the day to write it all down. Like those picture-perfect moments that are missed because you left your camera in the house - I know many of my stories will never break the boundaries of my imagination.

It's okay. Sometimes I have to give myself a gentle kick to remember this. Life is not about what I commit to paper. Life is about what I do each day.

Riding bikes with Evie Jo is far more important than writing about the time she donned her white, ruffled dress and black cowboy boots and rocketed up and down the driveway with handlebar streamers flying.

Looking into Kaman's baby blue eyes and listening to him giggle over my rendition of Kermit the Frog's rainbow song is far more important that writing about his first attempts to crawl.

Saying, "Who's there?" to Maddie's knock-knock joke is far more important than writing down each silly little thing she says. Even when she says, "Knock-knock," again and again and again and again...

Plenty of stories will find their way to paper in time. Who knows, maybe that novel will eventually pour out of my head to find itself on the best-seller list, or just any old list, one day. The characters, after all, are so well developed by now they seem almost real.

It's all about having priorities and figuring out when one is more important than the other. There may not be time for everything, but everything has its time.

I guess that's life when you are a writer. Or maybe I should say, "That's writing when you have a life."

Walking

“He’s not really walking, he just takes a step or two now and then,” I would tell people.

I watched him cross the floor about a dozen times today. Not once did he resort to knees. He just sauntered back and forth, stopping to check out something on the carpet or something on the wall.

Each time he looked at me he’d just grin, showing off those two bottom teeth of his.

With walking comes all the mischief I remember the girls getting into. Today it was the toilet bowl… I have to remember, once again, to keep that bathroom door shut.

Then there were the arguments with Maddie over lego blocks. I’m happy to report that Kaman seems to be able to hold his own.

I am loosing track of the number of times Evie Jo has lugged him out of their play area, lately.

Kaman just grins a little wider. That, or yells to let them know he’s not going to be put off so easily.

Another of my babies has found their legs. Now we’ll see just where they take him…

The Doody

When your three-and-a-half year old son says, “Mom, there’s a doody on your chair,” there would seem to be enough reason to be alarmed. But then he asks, “Did you know I kissed the doody?”

The doody, it turns out, is Howdy Doody, the redheaded cowboy ventriloquist’s doll that has somehow surfaced from my own childhood. Kaman has come out of his room each morning that his big sister, Maddie, has been gone, with a long-neglected toy under his arm. Yesterday it was a white teddy bear he claimed was his friend. Today it was Doody, who sat on Kaman’s lap at the table, shared his breakfast, and joined him in watching Blue’s Clues.

Maddie, nearly six, is visiting the grandparents. The house is strangely quiet in her absence, as it was three weekends ago when Evie Jo, eight, was away on the same visit. Kaman seems to miss each of them equally even though he seems to be more central to the activities when one of them is gone. He and Evie Jo spent much of Saturday playing computer games together and reading books. When I returned home from work, they were cuddled on the couch together watching a movie. He and Maddie, when Evie Jo was gone, spent an entire day together creating lego critters and playing with Barbie dolls. None-the-less, at bedtime he got that teary look in his eye when he asked, “When is Evie coming home?”

It seems to be early morning that he really feels Maddie’s absence. He cuddled the teddy bear and Doody doll and looked wistfully around for his missing sister. She’s his match, the one who usually shares the chair with him and often, these days, shares his shoes. While Evie Jo is mature enough she often takes the role of advisor or mentor, Maddie is still peer enough to play and get lost in a world of super heroes.

I think Maddie would have appreciated the doody on the chair comment this morning. “You did what on the chair?” I can imagine her exclaiming. “Kaman!” For now old Doody is just a poor substitute for a well-missed sibling. I imagine he’ll find his way back up on the shelf when Maddie returns. She returns the cuddles, after all… and she kisses back.

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Lipstick - February 2000