Shoo!

When I was single and aspired to be Carrie Bradshaw, I bought shoes anytime I faced life transitions. A breakup, a move, an argument...I had a closet full of stress-induced footwear. 

Now that Parenting in the Suburbs has replaced Sex and the City, there are way more transitions than shoes. And we’re on the brink of a big one.

Amelia just told me to “Shoo!” 

That's right, complete with dismissive hand gestures. She's having a sleepover, and after a day of asking what time it is and how much longer she has to wait, her friend has arrived and my company is no longer needed.

Sometimes she wants to be alone.

This isn’t the first time. Amelia has taken to running to her room after school, closing the door and telling me not to follow her—until she calls me, hungry for a snack. She proudly walks herself to and from neighbors’ houses for playdates, boldly rides her bike beyond our predetermined boundaries, and I’ve noticed lots of whispering and secrets between Amelia and her friends when adults are around. Last week she was playing with our neighbors, and they took their dog for a walk. As they passed our house, Bentley saw his Girl so I took him out to join the walk. Amelia was mortified. She pulled me aside and whispered in my ear “GO HOME.” Ouch.

Reading to themselves

I know she still needs me, and this is all very normal stuff. But it’s happening just as I’ve settled into this mostly-at-home-mama stuff. Now that I’m available, she’d prefer I’m invisible. As I write this, Amelia and her sleepover friend are playing in the next room. I’ve been called to repair a game piece, inflate an air mattress, bring the dog and take the dog away, make dinner, and reach things on high shelves. I’m on call, but I’m not invited.

I’ve got a little time on my hands. It's a good thing, because I’m going to need to buy shoes.
  

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Go Fry an Egg!

A few weeks ago, I heard Lenore Skenazy speak. If you don’t know who Lenore Skenazy is, search Google for “world’s worst mom” and you’ll learn all about the New York City woman who let her 8-year-old son ride the subway home from Macy’s all by himself. He asked to do it, they studied a map, and practiced the route. On the big day, they said goodbye in the handbag department and he went on his way with a subway pass. He made it home, couldn’t have been more proud of himself, and she never looked back. Until her blog post about this little rite of passage went viral and she became the World’s Worst Mom, exposing her son to all kinds of stranger dangers, germs, and death by giant subway rats. When the dust settled, she wrote a book called Free Range Kids and has become a national superhero of courage to banquet rooms of moms like me who are terrified to let our kids out of our sight.

So last week, when Amelia asked to make her own egg, I thought about Lenore Skenazy. 

What’s the worst that could happen? It’s an egg in our kitchen, not a Manhattan subway. So I gave her an egg and a bowl, and clearly I’ve made her terrified of breaking an egg, because she tapped it about a dozen times so gently it barely made a sound, let alone crack.  She finally whacked it harder, and surprise! Fingers in the eggshell.  Salmonella?  No, I told myself… let her keep going.  She proudly and carefully separated the shell and slid the yolk into the bowl.  Phew!  She did it right. Actually, she did it exactly as she’s seen me do it about a million times.  Hmmm.  
 

number 6 is Amelia's - ready to cook?

But back to the salmonella…go wash your hands twice, with soap. 

Only we weren’t finished. She also wanted to drop the egg into the pan and watch it sizzle. OK. We positioned a stepstool in front of the stove, and I placed a pan on the burner to heat. She climbed up, duly warned about NOT TOUCHING ANYTHING.  Raw eggs were no longer the biggest danger in the room, now we had EXTREME HEAT and I didn’t want to mention the potential for PAINFUL BURNS.  From about 2 feet away, she poured the egg from the bowl into the pan and got a satisfying sizzle. And that was it. She wasn’t interested in watching it cook, flipping it (thank God!) or anything else. She was off to play until it was safely on a plate on the table. 

Well, that wasn’t so bad. 

Before I had a kid, I read an article about having difficult conversations with children. It said to answer only what the child is really asking – so “where do babies come from?” for a preschooler is probably a pretty direct answer, without all the discussion a teenager (doesn’t) want.  Tell the truth, and be ready for her to change the subject.  Crack an egg, then go get the My Little Ponies.  Amelia’s growing up, sure, but this 5-year-old still has the attention span of, well, a 5-year-old.

She’s asking to do the things she’s ready to do, and I’m glad. Because coming up are a bunch of things that I’m not ready for her to do, so we’d better ease in. Things like ride a school bus by herself to kindergarten. Buy (and choose!) her own lunch. Go on playdates without me. Well, maybe that last one is OK.

So for now, when there is an egg to be cracked, Amelia is in charge. She hasn’t dropped one yet.

Thank you, Lenore.  You’re not the world’s worst mom. In fact, you're a lot like my own mom. Thanks, mom. And Happy Mother's Day!

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We didn’t break Amelia

Phew.  Because on Friday, we thought we might have.

Amelia came home from school and refused to walk, stand, or put any weight at all on her left leg.  Two urgent care clinics and a pediatric orthopedic specialist later, we’ve seen some cool x-rays of our daughter’s hips, legs and knees, and we’ve learned some new vocabulary: Transient synovitis.

Did she hurt her hip
falling off this bike?

It’s not serious – basically a virus that settled in her hip joint, causing inflammation. Painful but temporary, and the cure is a few days of Advil.  She’s back at school today and mostly back to normal.  But all weekend until we had a firm diagnosis, we worried. And felt guilty.  For what, you ask? Everything. First of all, we didn’t believe her. How could she have been fine all day and then, with no injury, suddenly become immobilized? Clearly she just wanted to be carried, right?  We thought she was just being lazy, and told her so.  We tried to trick her into walking.  We waited two hours before going to urgent care, we were so sure this wasn’t real.  Oy, the guilt.

And then, on the advice of our pediatrician, we took her in for x-rays.  What? Checking for broken bones?  How could our precious baby have broken a bone without anybody noticing an injury?   More guilt.  She’s out of our sight in preschool.  Is there enough supervision there?  She fell on her bike a week ago – could she have had a fracture all week and we didn’t notice?  Oh, how stoic she must be and how guilty we must be! I considered homeschooling.

Not fun in urgent care

Fun in urgent care

Seriously, this is the stuff that goes through my head in the middle of the night.  While sitting in urgent care.

Well, no break.  No injury.  No reason for guilt.  No need to homeschool. A head cold a month ago settled in her joint and for a few days she had a bum hip and got to satisfy her inner princess by requesting that we fetch things and carry her around…all 52 pounds of her.

hard at work

Once the drama was over, we entertained ourselves with a few days of sitting still projects. You know, to fill the time left in between me obsessively asking Amelia whether her hip hurt every time she moved.  Filled with residual guilt and general overprotectiveness, I planned projects to fill our days together at home.  But the most fun we had? Totally driven by Princess Bum Hip.  While I ran around in an overcompensating frenzy, Amelia picked up a pair of scissors left on the table and an abandoned ad from our lawn care service. She started cutting.  And she asked for glue.  And yarn.  I offered help, and she declined.  I asked what she was making, and she wouldn't answer.  She intently cut and glued for about 15 minutes, and then proudly presented me with a collage, of a woman with long hair and yarn fingers reaching for a perfectly triangular slice of watermelon on a table.  She knew exactly what she was doing and how to do it.

In an instant, Amelia's recent insistence that "I can do it myself" was proven. I may need to carry her once in a while, but I don’t need to watch her every minute.  

I hope she won’t break if I don’t.

Woman reaching for a snack on a table. Do you see the watermelon in her hand?