Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Early tomorrow morning Sydney will catch a flight to Ithaca, where he’ll be giving a paper at a conference later this week.  He is, as you might expect, working furiously to get the logistics taken care of and the paper ready to go.  I think he’s quite happy to return “home,” but he might wish he could do it under less work pressure.  Meanwhile, I’m looking at a solid week of childcare and hoping that I will have enough resources to keep the house running without getting tense in the process.  I know that we will have the most fun if I put in some effort to make our time together special, with lots of outings to parks and playgrounds so that I’m not torn between playing with them and house chores, but it does definitely take some energy (and reckless disregard for public humiliation?) to get us rounded up and out the door.

Wish us both luck 🙂

Erin

– Although Katherine appears to be standing in the middle of a prairie, she is, in fact, standing in our back yard.  The guy who mows the college properties appeared about a month ago (when it was raining incessantly), saw short grass, said he’d leave it for a bit, and hasn’t returned since.  I hope he doesn’t: the kids love the tall grass, and they’re quite excited by the tiny flowers that are growing up amongst the grasses as well.

– Nathaniel has been pulling off his socks (and stuffing them in the radiator, throwing them in the bathtub, you name it) for the past month, so I’m quite happy that he no longer need to wear them very often.  I have been letting him sit in the front seat in the stroller, so as we make our way down the streets of Oxford his bare toes lead the way.

– Although we have a lovely grassy patch in the back garden, both kids insist on spending most of their time exploring the concrete and crumbling brick at the very front.  Go figure.  Although I love having a garden (my kitchen windows overlook it, so I can keep an eye on them while cooking or step out to intervene), their love of all things not kid-proof means I more often than not just pack them up and take them to the parks nearby.  There we find bigger expanses of grass and fewer fungi.

Erin

I would love to be the voice for audio books.  I have listened to very few audio books, and I have a fierce devotion to books as printed text on paper, but my fancy is taken by the thought of many non-readers learning to love books by listening to them, and I love reading and hearing books read aloud by friends and family.

I also know that the best thing I can do in a classroom full of students who are staring down a daunting reading assignment is to take class time to read, slowly, some of the tricky bits, and to have them read to me.  I am not a good reader, and I envy those who are, but I love hearing students mutter, “Ohhhhh” when hearing it aloud disentangles one or two knots that lie between them and comprehension.  And I like hearing my students tackle it themselves, from the confident I-was-in-theatre-and-can-even-sing-it-while-pirouetting students to those for whom reading it aloud just adds one more sack of flour to the burden on their back as they trudge toward the final page.  I learn a lot about how they understand the book from hearing them read.  And I also get the sense that they understand a bit more about me in hearing me read: my love of books, the precise depth of my sarcasm, and the years of education and life experience that allow me to flub a phrase without blushing as though I’ve exposed myself as a rube.

Several good friends of mine are creative writers, and I’ve spent more time going to “readings” by authors whose books I love.  Although I still don’t think I quite get it (I mean, I can read it myself, so why don’t they tell me something that’s not in the book?), I will not soon be forgetting Toni Morrison’s voice reading A Mercy at Cornell, or the voices of other authors that come back when I open their books now.  I admire the poet friends who, when asked to give a public reading, take the time to read slowly and carefully; I would never have the courage to create that much space around the words, to demand that much attention from the audience.  But it is, of course, just what is needed.

So, if I could read well and slowly, if I could catch the nuances and deliver those to listeners, I would love to have a job where I served as an intermediary for readers and writers.  Years of music experience taught me that performance is no small task.  Meanwhile, I’m going to add audio books to my list of things to gather for my kids in the near future, and more reading aloud for us as a family even after the kids are old enough to read for themselves.

Erin

Life has been a bit like the weather around here recently: a smattering of rain and clouds each day, but with bits of sunshine and bliss whenever and wherever you least expect them.  Sydney’s gearing up for another conference presentation, this time in Ithaca at the end of the month, so he’s working hard to juggle school demands (Oxford is in term through the end of June) with writing.  I’ve been compiling a teaching portfolio for the job market, a task that is both a nice break from normal research and a lot more work than I can afford to give right now, thus endangering the short paper I also need to write by the end of the month.

The kids have both succumbed to an eye infection that has had a number of trickle-down effects: a lot less sleep at night for everyone in the house, Nathaniel now howls when I approach him with a washcloth, neither child has enough energy to really enjoy a long outing so we have had few “big” adventures outside, and yesterday Katherine was so tired she fell off a chair and bit her tongue hard enough to make the doctor consider stitches.  Needless to say, this has done a number on our morale!  I do have to wonder what doctors make of a family like ours: two kids with terrible-looking eyes, both covered in bruises, one with a fairly serious mouth injury from the night before.  Are all kids this crazy?  Or am I unusually negligent?

But, despite the endless loop of lethargy and hyperactivity that inevitably comes with sick kids (yes, those things apply both to them and to me), we have made a few nice discoveries.  Although I would have thought that we had the university parks “mastered,” since we walk around them every day, the kids have recently shown me new ways to play there.  We’ve hidden under the giant weeping beech, had a picnic in the prairie grass, and run after bubbles in large expanses of green.  Both kids are now very keen on getting out of the stroller at some point, and it’s always interesting to see how they play once they’re finally let loose.  Some days they run like mad, in every direction and twice over, and other days they wander like lost sheep, trail after some amused jogger, or settle down to inspect flowers and blades of grass.

Erin

I was recently given a pass for two free swimming sessions at a local pool, so I took the opportunity to get the kids some swimsuits and introduce them to something bigger than our bathtub.  Unfortunately, the pool close to our house was in a fancy fitness club, and we were a bit of a spectacle among the super-fit members there . . . as well as those doing lap after lap of the butterfly in the pool.  The pool didn’t have any shallow areas, so I just carried the kids in my arms down the length of the pool and back, over and over again, and gave Katherine a chance to practice kicking a bit.  Although I felt highly conspicuous, both kids were good and we had a good time.  We’ll see if I have the nerve to go back for a second session!

Erin

Trying to inflate the air mattress:

Dragging around my laptop bag:

The vacuum cleaner:

And weightlifting. For a while he was very impressively holding it above his head in one hand, but it came down the instant he saw the camera.

On our way to a new playground, two miles from our home, I asked Katherine to get out and walk, rather than make me push a fully-loaded stroller up an interminable hill.  She dutifully joined me, holding tightly to the stroller handle, and Nathaniel reached up from within his perch to touch her.  She giggled, looked down at him, and said, “I like you very much.”  Surprised, I asked her, “What was that, honey?”  She looked up and repeated, “I like him very much, “and then added, “I like him all the TIME.”

I was very surprised, and very happy.  It would be cute coming from any older sister, but it is particularly surprising in a little girl who has really struggled when putting together sentences, who only recently started referring to herself as “I” or “me” instead of “you,” and who often pushes Nathaniel down when he invades her territory.

A day or two later, when the kids and I were at the park, running through the grass, Katherine carefully took Nathaniel by the hand to lead him in a circle around a large, old tree.  When they reached a particularly high root, she gave me a bit of a guilty look and then put her arms around his middle to hoist him over.  Nathaniel, usually quick to sound the alarm when Katherine interferes with his independence (his screech really turns heads), was unusually docile, and quite focused on rounding the tree.  Then the two kids, hand in hand, ran to join me on the path.

Last year it rarely felt like I was really the mother of two children.  I had one baby, and I had one little kid, and those two things were so different that it was hard to see similarities between the two.  But now, with two runners, two climbers, and two cute talkers, I am really enjoying watching them play alongside one another, and, occasionally, together.  The difference between the times of squabbling and the times of working together can usually be summed up by the difference between being cooped up at home and playing outside.  We’ll try to make the most of it this summer.

Erin

Every spring Sydney succumbs to an unusual illness.  He starts making regular references to dirt, looks wistfully at birds and out windows, and utters an only slightly more sophisticated version of Nathaniel’s “Out, out, out!”  Most people get spring fever, but Sydney’s comes with very particular desires to play in the dirt and chase after birds.

This morning, after a half-hearted attempt to figure out which of us was going to work and which was going to take care of the children, Sydney suggested that none of us work, so we took a walk in the mist-turned-rain to Port Meadow.  It was an unusual day at Sydney’s favorite birding spot: 33 swans dotted the water, and many, many, many swifts and swallows swooped and dived over our heads.  At some point they got close enough for Sydney to feel the wind from their wings.  Outings like this help, but at this time of year he just wants to camp outside permanently, abandoning papers, students, and house alike.  Ithaca’s long winters helped to keep the spring fever at bay for awhile (though never until the end of the spring semester), but here, where spring starts in March, rather than May, and the school year runs through June, he’s really struggling to keep his head inside!

Erin

Sydney and I are in the kitchen, making breakfast and loading the washer, respectively, and the kids are in the living room, jumping on the air mattress.  After about a minute of joint fun, Katherine starts laying down the law: “‘thaniel, no jumping on the bed!”

“Katherine, Nathaniel is allowed to jump, too.”

“‘thaniel, no jumping.  No, no, no, no.”

Here Sydney interjects to point out that she’s not unaware of my stance, just disagreeing.

“‘thaniel, Katherine said ‘NO’!”  [Hmm, so she clearly heard me in those rounds of “Mama said ‘no'” but apparently missed that “Mama” is the source of authority in them]

“NO!” Nathaniel chimes in, jumping around gleefully to the reverberating “Nos.”

At times like these I  feel like I’m living in a fun house at an amusement park, but we did eventually get around to breakfast and on with our day.

Erin