Potty Payola

Dear Hagen,

When your sister turned 2, we decided we would start the potty-training process. For a year, we bribed her with M&Ms, made up songs about how AWESOME it is to use the potty, and did lots and lots and lots of laundry. Then, the day before she turned 3, she shrugged and decided she'd had enough of wet pants and started using the potty. No accidents, no looking back. 

With you, we decided not to work so hard and just let you get around to it when you were ready. But your third birthday came and went and you showed no signs of interest. 

Your preschool was closed for Spring Break a few weeks ago. Laney went to camp at the Y. You and your best friend Finley were too little to attend camp, so Finley's mom and I decided to hire one of your teachers from school to watch you and Finley at Finley's house for the week. Finley's mom told me that your teacher - Miss Jenn - was known as "The Potty Whisperer," and had trained more kids than anyone Finley's mom had ever known. 

I am not proud of this next part:

After writing Miss Jenn a check for her services for the week, I said, "If Hagen is potty-trained by the end of the week, I'll give you an extra hundred dollars cash money." I was kinda joking, but Miss Jenn said she was ON IT. And she was. 

Basically, if anyone asks you what you did for Spring Break, you can tell them you went to potty camp. Miss Jenn had you and Finley on matching potty chairs every half hour all week long. If you used the potty, she gave you an animal cracker and made the sound of the animal on the cracker.

About halfway through the week, you really got the hang of it. By the end of the week, you were potty trained.

Best money I ever spent. 

Love,

Mom

Celebrity Student

Dear Laney,

At kindergarten orientation almost a year ago, your teacher told us that once every few weeks, she would choose a "Celebrity Student" who would be highlighted at the school assembly, and would get to decorate a wall in the classroom with his/her art and photos from home.

"We've got this thing sewn up, " I thought. "No way Laney isn't going to be first."

A side note here: There's lots of talk in the media and popular culture about "Tiger Moms" - typically Asian-American mothers who are hyper-competitive and never stop pushing their children to excel.
Not that this is a competition I should hope to win, but I would submit that Southern mamas can be way crazier when they feel like their children are being overlooked...although our brand of crazy is usually concentrated in the areas of pageants, cheerleading, and football.  In college, I had a good friend named Brent who was from Mississippi. He understood the crazy Southern mama effect. I was a drama major, and every time I auditioned for a role in a show, he would joke, "If you don't get it, I'm going to call up that office and holler, 'WHADDYA MEAN, TELLIN' MY LITTLE GIRL SHE CAN'T BE IN THE SCHOOL PLAY?!?'" Exactly.

So when the first Celebrity Student was chosen, and it wasn't you, I was shocked. "WHADDYA MEAN TELLIN' MY LITLE GIRL SHE AIN'T THE CELEBRITY STUDENT?!?"And when it wasn't you the second or third time, I became suspicious. Then I started volunteering in your classroom and I realized that "Celebrity Student" wasn't an acknowledgement of who had the best behavior or work ethic. Instead, because your teacher is a far, far sweeter person than I will ever be, she seemed to be giving the title to kids who could most use a little boost of confidence. It's this kind of thinking that will probably make the world a better place, even if it results in less baton twirling. Since "crisis of confidence" is not a condition suffered by anyone I've given birth to, it made sense that you weren't getting it.

With one month to go in the school year, she got around to picking you. So I went to the assembly.

(Yes, the man-bun trend is in full effect here in Missoula.)

You got a certificate for being Celebrity Student, and your student teacher gave a little speech at the assembly about how funny and nice you are, and how you tell the best stories.

That part didn't surprise me, because last week, you went to camp at the Y over spring break, and came home and wrote a 10-page book about it. 5 pages were drawings and descriptions of things you actually did, and the other 5 were things you included in the book though they didn't actually happen. For example, "I am playing dodgeball" is a fabrication.

Then, the principal gave you a second certificate for perfect attendance for the month.

Thank God your confidence has been boosted.

Love,
Mom

February With a Dash Of March

Hey y'all - 

Happy Valentine's Day. (We'll just ignore that I'm writing this in April.)

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: Kindergarten is exhausting. Did I tell you about the time we had to "disguise" a turkey at Thanksgiving so it could escape the plate, so we made a full cheerleading uniform for a dang paper bird, complete with tissue paper skirt and pompoms? And then Laney took it to school and gave it to the substitute who thought Laney had made it for HER instead of for an assignment and took it home? I swear I wanted to find that substitute's house and beat her with a hose. Instead, we got to make a second turkey - this time, disguised as an astronaut with a tinfoil helmet and moon boots. A pain, to be sure, but I'm happy the turkey is so upwardly mobile.  

So Valentine's Day rolled around, and our kitchen became the place dinosaur puns go to die. I really wanted to do an "I'm raptor 'round your finger" version, but I didn't have any rubber raptors. 

Laney's Valentine's Day party at school was set for Friday, Feb 13th, but she woke up that morning sick as a dog. There was a strange, rampant "Missoula virus" that swept through town in February that caused exhaustion, constant cough and an earache. Everyone in our house got it but me, because Moms aren't allowed to get sick. Laney had to miss her school party, and was beyond upset.  

The next day, everyone had recovered enough to at least be vertical, so we went for a walk in the woods. 

in February, Laney also celebrated the 100th Day of the School Year, which is apparently a thing people do now. We didn't do this kind of thing back in the early 80's...we just ate our baloney on white bread out of our Dukes of Hazzard lunch box and tried to behave until our mamas picked us up in a Datsun hatchback. And we only got to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings and we didn't have all these themed dress-up days at school and extra holidays because our mamas didn't have Pinterest. 

According to my fitbit doohickey, in February, I hit the million-steps mark while on a walk around town. Bought myself a new pair of shoes to celebrate.

The March rolled around, and our toilet stopped flushing. Nothing would flush, nothing would drain. Water backed up everywhere. Your dad tried the normal unclogging steps, including snaking the drain, then said, "The only way I'm going to figure out what the problem is is to take up the floor." In the time it took me to walk up the stairs to my computer and yell, "I'm just going to look up the number for a plumber so we can get a profess-," your dad had started demoing the bathroom. By the end of the afternoon, it was a stripped concrete box. We don't need no stinkin' bathroom.

Your dad doesn't mess around.

For the first few days after our house became a 3 bedroom, zero bath, I rented us a cute little house up the street. But moving our stuff back and forth and keeping everyone's school and work stuff together and figuring out where we were going to eat became a bigger hassle than just tee-teeing in the yard. Three days in, when a cold front took the temperatures down to the teens, Laney said, "I'm just going to go in Hagen's potty." We showered at the Y and made the best of it, and resorted to some things we shall not speak of again.

We learned that our ancient plumbing had been leaking into the wall for who knows how many years, and the walls were rotten. Everything had to go and everything had to be rebuilt. Your dad re-plumbed the bathroom and taught me how to lay tile. Halfway through, I called your Grandpops in Missouri to report I was learning really advanced construction techniques from his son, like, "If it isn't going where you want it to, hit it harder, with a bigger hammer."

photo by Laney

It's possible your dad had TOO much help with this project.

I am pleased to report that as of last week, we have a working shower and toilet and are once again living like civilized people who don't have to tinkle behind the hot tub. 

Love,

Mom

Walking It Out

Hey y'all,

This has very little to do with you, and instead is all about me.

As 2015 began, I realized I had a lot of unnecessary stress in my life. And it wasn't the kind of stress that can be productive - I mean, I'm not an elected official going to bed fretting about how I'm going to improve the situation in the Middle East. I'm a mom who was waking up in the middle of the night irritated by what a girl I haven't seen since the 10th grade posted about the measles vaccine on Facebook. I mean, that's the kind of thing that didn't/doesn't even need to be on my radar. I didn't feel particularly healthy, and I just felt mentally exhausted all the time. 

So I started making incremental changes that soon paid big dividends. Over the years, I'd gotten myself subscribed to dozens of e-mail lists; it seemed every store in America was e-mailing me every day about a sale. So Step One was unsubscribing to all of those. 30 fewer e-mails a day in the inbox. Great.  I've all but quit Facebook... Cute pictures of my friends and their kiddos? Great. A constant stream of news stories about everything that was wrong in every quarter of the world? Not great - for me. 

Then I got one of those Fitbit fitness tracker/watch thingies and a hipster headband and I started walking. At first, my goal was 10,000 steps a day. Then some of my friends also got the Fitbit and we could sync our walks on our phones and challenge each other and joke with each other as we exercised. Every week, we do a "Workweek Hustle" challenge to see which one of us can take the most steps from Mon-Fri, and the winner gets to pick a prize. Because my perky friend Julie won a few weeks ago, we're all scheduled to karaoke tonight at a bowling alley. Awful. 

Then your dad gave me some earphones and I figured out how to put comedy albums and podcasts on my phone, and now I walk around town listening to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR and giggling to myself. Or listening to the great interviews on Nerdist.  Or books on tape that I'd been meaning to get to for years. Or just talking to Peg Peg as I hustle around town. I'm walking about 7-10 miles a day lately. Since I started tracking my walks on Dec 1st, I've accomplished this:

I went two months (I think) without taking a single picture. I had taken so many photos between Oct and Dec of last year that the photographer portion of my brain was fried and I just needed to set my camera aside for a while. Instead, I started gradually taking photos with my phone on my walks - more to entertain myself than anything else. Then, just to kinda share my love of Missoula and its various nooks and crannies, I started posting the photos on Instagram. (If you're an Instagram kind of person, you can find me here).

I have no idea if this is all going to last, but in the meantime, I'm happier, healthier, more centered, and constantly on the lookout for things I can jettison from my life in order to make me more focused and present. 

There's probably more New Agey/self helpy words in that last sentence than I've used in my whole life. 

Love,

Mom

Q, R, S, T, U, B...

Dear Hagen,

I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have become your sister's trained monkey. You guys play so well together these days, because she concocts these elaborate scenarios and then gives you your line reading - "What if you said, 'I can't go under that bridge - there's a troll down there?'" - and you mimic it exactly. Recently, she's added musical performances to your repertoire; she sings a little and then points to you when it's your time to chime in. She is Gladys Knight and you are all the Pips.

Your dad and I have decided to let all this slide, because:

1) It doesn't seem to bother you.
2) You're actually learning songs in record time.
3) One day, you are going to be the World's Most Patient Husband (and your sister will turn up at all your romantic anniversary dinners to remind your future spouse, "I taught him that!")

Love,
Mom

School Pictures

Hey y'all,

Months ago, Laney came home with a cheesy little info packet about school pictures. Your dad thought it was ridiculous that I was even considering paying for school pictures, since you're already possibly the most over-photographed children in the world. But school pictures seem like one of those awful rites of passage that everyone must endure, so I signed Laney up for the cheapest option ($20), just so we could say we did. 

Peg Peg likes to complain about her school pictures. She says that Granny Jack would always curl her hair with bobby pins the night before, so her hair always looked ridiculous in her pictures. Granny Jack always acts like she doesn't know what Peg is talking about, but last night, I found these pictures:

Woo-wee.

Laney, I decided we would keep things simple; you could pick out any shirt you wanted, and I wouldn't curl your hair. You're absolutely beautiful, inside and out, and there's no way to make you look like less than a million bucks. What could possibly go wrong, yada yada yada. 

This is what we got back, and I have to be honest - it made me laugh out loud:

Just so weird and awkward and sweaty and orange (not you, the picture). I don't know who that girl is, but it's not you.

So I put up an backdrop in our living room and we had a little re-shoot.

As the guy on the rental car commercial says, "I'm not a control freak. I'm a control enthusiast."

I took the school pictures at Hagen's preschool, and on Hagen's picture day, he decided that he was not Hagen, he was a lion, and would only pose as such. I probably have a dozen photos on my hard drive now that are variations on Lion, roaring.

Then you went to lunch, spilled spaghetti on your clothes, changed into some old play clothes, took a nap, and came back as a human boy:

I had forgotten about all of this until last night when I found those pictures of my mama and realized I needed to come up with a blog post that would give me an excuse to put them online for the world to enjoy. You're welcome, world!

Love,
Mom

Happy Birthday, Hagen

Dear Hagen,

Two days after Christmas, you turned three. 

Determined not to let this birthday sneak up on me, I started soliciting your input about possible birthday activities weeks in advance. And this is how it finally went down:

Mom: Hagen, do you want to have a party?

Hagen: No t'anks. 

Mom: No pinata? No games?

Hagen: No. 

Mom: You want to go to the Carousel?

Hagen: No. 

Mom: The library?

Hagen: No.

Mom: The gymnastics place?

Hagen: No. 'ont want to imnassics. 

Mom: Well, I know you don't like swimming or sledding or skiing, and you're too small for the bounce house place. Hell, I don't know...want to just invite your friend Finley over and play blocks and have a piece of cake and call it a day?

Hagen: Yeah. OK. 

So that's just what we did. 

And just like you, it was low-key, special and perfectly fun. 

Love,

Mom