Be Calm and Keep Your Perspective

by Cathy

Life is a lot like that proverbial half glass of water: you can view it as half empty or half full. It's all in your perspective.

Perspective is such a key component to life; how we view things in relation to something else. You can get lost in your own world of seemingly gargantuan problems until you hear about the problems of others and suddenly, yours don't seem so big. You can feel like you don't have enough, or feel lucky enough to have a lot, depending on how you look at things based on what others have/don't have. The same logic can be applied to the size of the house you live in, the job you are lucky to have and in this case, the age of your children and how fast they are growing.

This past year has been a milestone of sorts for my girls. This was the first year they attended the same school together as Ari started kindergarten; this coming school year will be a huge deal for Bella as she takes on middle school (or junior high as she pointedly refers to it); and last week, Ari turned six.

Since the 1st of July she has been excited about her birthday. "Mommy! It's July! It's my birthday!" I've heard since July 1st. She's requested to hold meetings on how we will celebrate her birthday, who will be invited, what will be on her cake and in the goody bags. I even received gift requests: "Mommy, let me tell you what I want for my birthday," she mused as she crossed her little arms behind her head contemplatively at bedtime, her mind drifting.

I would lie if I said that I wasn't sad that my girls are growing up. MIDDLE SCHOOL?! Attitude. More serious conversations and issues. Essays on the The Illiad and The Odyssey for homework. Hormones. Bigger kids = bigger problems. On the other hand, it could be worse...they could be off to college.

So, I just keep my perspective to help me through these milestones: they are getting older but they are not "old" yet; compared to the feather-weight size of my five-month old niece, they look "old" and giant and adult-like and heavy when I carry them, with lanky limbs and long arms that don't fit as perfectly around my neck anymore, but when I compare them to other people's grown kids with braces and pimples and drivers licenses and proms and college, they are still babies.

Bella, my 11-year old who still sleeps with her favorite stuffed animals tells me all the time as she sighs towards the direction of her goofy, carefree sister, "I wish I was still little."

"What do you mean?!" I practically shriek. "You ARE still little!"
"No, I mean little like Ari, you know...little."
I decided to throw some perspective her way. "Honey, one day when Ari will be 11 and you will be 16, you will look at her and say, 'I wish I was still little like Ari.'"

She paused as she took that in, my conviction registering just enough for her approval, and she cocks her head to the side and nods, mouth turned downward in that 'you may be right' sort of way.
"So enjoy your years now!!" I finish her off with a cheer.

The night before Ari's birthday, I cuddled up close to her and held my little five-year old for the last time, for tomorrow, she would be six - an age that can no longer be counted on one hand, an age where she's not a toddler but not yet a girl, an age where she is still in limbo enough for me to balance the scales backwards towards my preference.

I tucked her in as a toddler and the next morning, she woke up a little girl. They literally do grow overnight - in a series of nights that meld into days and into months and into years. But if I keep my perspective, I'll see that they will always be my little girls.

Clean Weep

by Cathy

My kids are on spring break this week. Since we're not traveling anywhere, I decided to take this time to focus on where we live: our house. Although virtually every closet needs to be overhauled and organized, my main focus, with the girls at home this week, was going to be their room, which by the way, is the master bedroom of our two-bedroom condo. They have so much more stuff than Joe and I so it made perfect sense that three years ago, we trade bedrooms and give them the master with the attached bathroom while Joe and I downgraded to the smaller bedroom. The sacrifices we make for our kids, eh?

The only problem with having more space - and I know this would be the case if we move to a bigger house - is that you automatically accumulate more stuff. You say to yourself, 'I'll just keep this. We have the space. I'll just put it right here.' Luckily, we don't have that scenario playing out where we live because we are four people living in a two bedroom, two bath condo with one storage room allotted to us. So whatever doesn't fit in any of those spaces? Gets tossed or donated. We are forced to weed out crap and stuff we no longer have a use for and I'm perfectly okay with that, otherwise, our stuff would swallow us up whole.

As the days approached for Operation Pink Declutter, I was counting the days, the hours, the minutes. I was about to crawl out of my skin with anticipation for the big cleanup every single time I walked into that Disaster of a Master, stepping on paper, markers, erasers, American Girl dolls, clothes, trinkets, purses, princess wands, books, balls, stuffed animals, blankets, rubber bracelets, scarves, chalk, hats, Barbies, Lego pieces, miniscule Lalaloopsy decor that pokes holes in the bottom of your feet... I couldn't take it one minute longer.

Finally, the big day arrived! Actually, we ended up dividing up the room into sections and conquering it as such:
Day 1 - bookshelves and drawer cleanout
Day 2 - under the beds, cabinets and closet floor (containing games, bins and toys)
Day 3 - closet upper shelves and hanging clothes
Day 4 - Toy chest

Yes, it takes FOUR days to clean up the crap in that room. Day one was a battle in itself while I had to ask the hard questions:

"Can you try this on to see if it still fits?"
"Do you still want this?"
"Will you EVER wear this?"

Whereupon I got one of the following responses:

"Uuuhhhhhhgggggg...I'm too tired."
"I don't like that."
"NO! Don't donate that!! I love it!" (item they haven't touched in years)
"That's mine! Not hers! That goes in my drawer!"
"Why are you taking this to storage??"

Operation Pink Declutter is halfway done at this point with barely any help from my kids. I forget that my five-year old's attention span is that of a fruit fly and my ten-year old gets easily distracted when said fruit fly buzzes continuously around her, tempting her, tackling her, tickling her, asking her to come get her out from her pop-up tent trappings - basically anything to get her attention while I'm on my hands and knees mancaving. As you may have guessed, there was A LOT going on.

Once they did what they could to help, I let the girls go off and play and I quietly tackled what remained  for the day. (This way, I could throw away what they don't know will ever go missing and get rid of the garbage bag before they find it and start snooping around to see what was tossed. I learned that lesson the hard way.)

When I was clearing out Ari's little preschool pants and tops (the same ones that Bella wore), I suddenly and surprisingly was overcome with emotion. I was saddened at the memories these little clothes brought back for me ('Aw, I have a picture of Bella playing school in this top' or 'Aw, this is what Ari was wearing when she...) And what's more? These clothes will never be worn by my kids EVER. AGAIN. That that phase in their little lives is over. That they are all "growed up," like Ari says. I wept as I lovingly folded these little clothes up and carefully placed them in my "KEEP" pile.

No sooner had I composed myself from that unexpected scenario...it happened again. This time, my husband was laying on one of the girls' beds in the room and we were chatting about various things, when I opened up a purple Dora backpack and found that Ari had stuffed it to the hilt with her plastic Disney tea set, which should be stored in the Mrs. Potts tea container.

"Wow, I never realized how much stuff they had," commented my husband.

"Yeah, and the sad thing will be, that one day, Ari won't ask us to play tea set with her anymore." I don't know where this response came from (well, actually I do, and I surprised even myself by blurting it out) but I could feel my tears working their way back up to my eyes. "She asks us now and we do the best we can but half the time we blow her off because we are too busy doing God knows what while our kids are busy growing up." My eyes starting brimming over at this point. Joe tried to soften this large blow of a realization.

"Yeah, but she still plays with her tea set," he said comfortingly.

"Yeah but one day she won't. One day, she'll stop asking if we want to have a tea party with her because she will outgrow that phase and get bored with it and she'll be too old to want to do that, just like Bella, who never plays tea party with her now."

There was a long pause and all that could be heard was the plastic clanking of the tea set pieces going into Mrs. Potts.

"I know, it's all going so fast," was all he said.

Towards the end of the day and long after I had my mini meltdowns, I was picking up the remains of the cleanup off their floor when Ari, who had earlier found her newly put together tea set, came skipping in, jangling Mrs. Potts about.

"Mommy? Can you play tea party with me?"

As if God had felt my motherly pain from earlier, he sent my little angel in to truly help soften that blow and give me another chance to make things up; those were the best-sounding words I could ever hear right at that moment. "OF COURSE I CAN!!"

"Yay!" she squealed as she was rambling on about how she'll go set it up on the blanket sprawled on the living room floor. I literally dropped everything and followed her, passing our bedroom door where my husband was laying. "See? How ironic," he said half smiling.

"I know, riiiiight?" I yelled back happily as I crossed my legs and sat on the teddy bear blanket. "I still have a lot to do but I'm not doing it. I'm playing tea set with her. That's all I'm going to do now."

"I'll join you," said Joe.

A Time and a Place

by Cathy

I have a confession to make; I have mom guilt.
Surprise!
Yes, I know, it happens so often to us moms that it becomes interlaced within our psyche, but allow me to share with you one of my most recent guilty conscience-abusers.

This past weekend, as you may have read, we had our third annual trip to Michigan with our daughters. We moms, (Patti, Michelle and I) each bring our daughters  for a slumber party-esque, marshmallow-roasting, game-playing, shopping, movie-watching, pretend-playing, sledding (weather permitting) good time.

I bring Bella, my 10-year old, who is the same age as the other girls, therefore, technically making these other girls HER friends. She met them through ballet and they have been friends for several years now. It's a given that they have much in common.

However, I am the only mom in this scenario that has TWO girls; my younger one, Ari, is five years younger than Bella. Over the last several years, we've become so tight with these girls and their families that Ari basically grew up viewing them as her "older sisters". Herewithin, lies my dilemma.

Ari was three years old when we started our Michigan excursion tradition - the older girls were eight. At those ages, there are some definite disparities in social development, behavior and maturity. Now, they are almost six and 11 years of age. Ari has matured into a thoughtful, playful, wise, fun and funny little GIRL (not baby) old enough to grasp what's going on and intuit when she is being fibbed to and because of this, I struggled deeply with not bringing her on this annual girls trip with us this time around. If I told her where we were going (she has heard us talking about the Michigan trips in the past) she would have been upset if I didn't include her. And how do I explain all of this to a five-year old? So I had to lie.

I had a separate talk with Bella on this before the trip, during which she quickly pointed out her feelings on the possibility of bringing Ari: she wants her own thing with her friends; Ari would just annoy them; they couldn't share any of their big girl secrets; she wouldn't let them play their own games; she would whine and spoil their fun. I get all of this and completely understand where she is coming from. After all, her little sister has put a wrench in the lifestyle she was accustomed to having for five years before Ari was born and now she has had to endure five long years of sharing EVERYTHING with her -including her friends - and even sometimes letting her get her way because, "She's little." I get that she still wants some things just for herself. That's how she sees it.

How do I see it? I see it as a girls getaway where the moms can connect and the girls can play. The games concocted by the girls this weekend consisted of iCarly spoofs, karaoke, fashion shows and parachuting Barbies off the loft balcony - hardly a secretive, big-girls-only, private-time needed weekend on their part.
Ari would have easily been able to partake in all of that without any drama - unless the drama was specifically targeted and sought out by the older girls, "just because we're older and she's little". Come bedtime, Ari would sleep with me in the guest room on the first floor as the girls whispered and gossiped the night away amongst themselves and their secretive little worlds upstairs all alone and just fine.

What will happen for the next trip, I can't say for sure but I do know that I can't and won't fib to Ari anymore, or deny her an experience that is meant to be shared by us GIRLS. I hope I can also make Bella understand that if the tables were turned, she wouldn't want to be left out of all the fun. And the bottom line is, if she really needed to have her big girl time with her own friends on her own time, then that is something that can be arranged separately, at any other time of the year and within the intimate confines of her own circumstances. There can be a time and a place for that, which will make it all the more special.

But this trip? It's not the time or the place for a one-on-one on any level. It's a big, fun, slumber party that all the girls in our families can experience together - regardless of our age.