She was the narrator. She was supposed to run onto the stage and start the play. Instead of running, though she tripped, or so my mother and husband told me. She went down hard, they said, hitting her side and her face. Amazingly, she got right back up again and started saying her lines. She didn’t cry. She didn’t fuss. She took the old stage adage — the show must go on — to heart, I guess. She is six. That’s pretty incredible in my book.

I wonder how she would have reacted if I was there. I get so nervous when stuff like that happens. My heart would have twisted just like it did when I heard about the mishap. It would have shown it on my face, too. I may have gotten a bit misty, my heart hurting for her. Maybe she would have cried if she saw me cry? Probably.

I got to go to the 7 p.m. show. I got there super-early so I could grab a front row center seat. I sat and watched her read her lines and was in awe of that little girl. When did she become so articulate? When did she get so BIG? And even later, when a huge crash of thunder and lightening caused the lights to flicker and I saw fear cross my baby’s face, I was still impressed. She is not a fan of the dark. (I wasn’t, either, well into my 20s, actually.) Her hands went up to her mouth. Her eyes got big. She fidgeted. I could tell all she wanted to do was run into my arms. But she continued. She finished the play. With the thunder booming all around us and the threat of a black out very real, and yet she did it.

At the end of the show she came to stand in front of me and I grabbed her and pulled her onto my lap, squeezing her extra tight and telling her how proud I was of her. She beamed. We left that school two very happy people. On the way home she got quiet, though. She sighed and said how sorry she was that the play was over. She loved doing it, she said. And then she asked if we could get ices. I was sorry it was over, too, I told her. And yes, we could get ices. I didn’t tell her that I was tearing up realizing that another year was over and there was no way to stop time to keep her a little girl for a little while longer.

Are you looking forward to the summer? Have any teary moments with your kids lately? Would love to hear about them.

Second, my big girl inherited my “love” of the water. I did not do this to her. My husband, a water loving guy who spends his life on boats and in pools, encouraged her to swim as a baby. But she never liked it until last year when she joined a local swim team. Third: My big girl attended swim lessons for four years. The combination of intense fear and a rudimentary knowledge of what to do if she fell in meant my big girl was relatively safe around water. She would never go in alone, and if she fell in she knew, after hours and hours of lessons, what to do to save herself.

My little girl is the complete opposite of her sister. She has absolutely no fear of the water. My big girl would scream if she got even a sprinkle of water on her face. The little one screams to go into the shower and, once there, looks up into the falling water laughing and smiling. In the bathtub the big one always asked to have a washcloth close by to dry her eyes should they get wet. The little one ages me every time she throws herself under the water trying to swim. It’s so bad I have to sit on the edge of the tub with my feet in the water while I am bathing her. With my feet in I can move more swiftly to pull her out. She wants to swim and doesn’t care if, when she submerges her entire head, she drinks a little water. (Which she does several times during every bath.) This is why I was especially interested in the updated guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) related to swimming. (It’s also why she takes a lot of showers.)

The AAP’s stance used to be that toddlers — kids between the ages of 1 and 3 — shouldn’t take organized swim lessons, a fact that haunted me every time my big girl stepped into the swim class. Today, however, it reversed its stance saying that everyone over a year should take a swim class. From the press release: “New evidence shows that children ages 1 to 4 may be less likely to drown if they have had formal swimming instruction. The studies are small, and they don’t define what type of lessons work best, so the AAP is not recommending mandatory swim lessons for all children ages 1 to 4 at this time. Instead, the new guidance recommends that parents should decide whether to enroll an individual child in swim lessons based on the child’s frequency of exposure to water, emotional development, physical abilities, and certain health concerns related to pool water infections and pool chemicals.”

So someone like my little girl, who lives in a beach community, rides on a boat every weekend and is so strong that she can do a basket hang on the uneven bars BY HERSELF should absolutely be learning to swim. And she will be. I had enrolled her a while back, but work got in the way. I had a credit that I needed to use so I recently signed her up for classes. One-on-one once a week for six weeks. I’m sure we’ll have to continue them, too, since she’s intent on spending the entire summer splashing around in a pool.

Of course, even with the lessons I intend on following the AAP’s other guidance: never leaving her alone for a second and keeping her in a life preserver while we’re on the boat — stuff that’s even more important for my little fearless swimming wanna be.

Do you swim? Do your kids? How am I going to spend the summer in the pool when I hate it…sigh…

My personal playground.

Take a look at the photo above. Ignore the fact that it is an obvious attempt to give my kids all the stuff I never had as a child. Also, that it looks like a daycare or a school. Then take another look. Know how much I paid for everything? About $300 total including the swingset. Amazing, right?

The swingset came from a garage sale. The woman just wanted it out of her backyard. I paid about $250 including the cost of having her “man” disassemble it there, drive it to my house and re-assemble it. I had Wood Kingdom, the place she bought it from, come and give it a good tune up, which included tightening all the screws, staining it and checking it all to make sure it was in good working condition. While I was there paying for the appointment I found the nice rock climbing wall. It was on clearance. My mom (and maybe my in-laws) picked it up for Katelyn’s birthday a few years ago.

The Little Tikes 8-in-one tube and slide combo was free. A neighbor was throwing it away. I got the first half of the pieces on Monday night. I brought it home and my husband was mad since there were so many pieces missing. He wanted to know why I brought home a bunch of junk. Don’t worry, I told him, I’ll be stalking the house on Thursday night. They will put the rest of the pieces out there and I’ll be there to grab them. They did, and we got a cool, much-sought-after item. That big playhouse in the back? $40 at a garage sale. The guy even dropped it off in my driveway. The triangle climber was $8. Another garage sale. I picked up the merry-go-round off Freecycle for free, of course. The sit and spin thingy was a Craigslist find. $20. I got the castle on Craigslist, too. I can’t remember what I paid, but it wasn’t too much. The two rollercoasters? I got one in the garbage and paid $5 for the other. Everything else was free from the trash.

The see-saw from last night's trash collection.

Last night I added another piece to my playground. I was driving home when I spotted a Kettler see-saw out with someone’s trash. It was beautiful except for a bent center piece. Knowing how wonderful that company is I grabbed it. This morning we called Kettler. Once I pay for a replacement piece I will have a beautiful quality piece of equipment that Keira has already pronounced, “Mine!”

Okay, so who cares that I am feeding my childhood issues with garbage? Everyone should. More than half of the items in my backyard were earmarked for the trash, including the steel seesaw. It makes me sick at heart to see how much stuff is just tossed out without a thought as to where it’s going to end up. You know where it goes, right? It all ends up in a landfill somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio. Lots of plastic that will never degrade. Metal, too. The sad part is that most of the items could have been put out on recycling day where they would have found new life as decking or building supports or whatever they would have been made into.

Anyway, I write this post to remind people to think before tossing. Can that item be put out to recycle? If it’s metal, does your town have a scrap recycling program? Mine does, and I’m calling it to pick up my old metal glider that rusted and broke in the big hurricane-that-wasn’t. Again, I’m not trying to make anyone crazy. I’d just love to see more of us think about our waste stream with a little more care. Recycle, reduce, reuse, right?

How’s your week going? Do you ever garbage pick? If so, what was your best find?

BookSwim. Last week I bought The Red Tent. It was our book club selection. I wanted to take it out of the library or nab it on BookMooch, but after waiting patiently I finally gave up. Wish I would have known about BookSwim before I made my purchase. The service, which charges you between $9.95 and $59.95 per month depending on how many books you want to borrow per month, will mail books directly to you and take them back when you’re done.

Safety Assessments for playgrounds. How safe is your school’s playground? How about the one at your park? The University of Alabama at Birmingham has created playground safety checklists that can be downloaded here. (Click on Supporting Documents at the bottom of the page.) A wonderful free resource for any parent or grandparent.

Child Online Safety Guide. With accounts of cyberbullying and cyberstalking making the news all the time I decided I would pass along this resource, which a PR person passed along to me. Good list of dos and don’ts related to online safety for kids. (I plan on using it next year as the basis for a a Girl Scout Brownie Try-it patch.)

Open Center Online Learning. The New York Open Center is a holistic learning center located in — where else?– New York. So if you want to attend one of the more than 500 programs it runs you need to come this way. Until now. This month the Center launched an online repository of downloadable podcasts that include subjects like Reiki, meditation, reflexology, Feng Shui and Chinese Medicine, among other topics. Some are free; others require payment. (I’m planning on downloading some to my iPod the next time I have to go into the city.)

That’s it for now. Hope everyone has a good weekend. I plan on blogging over the weekend since I am starting WordCount’s Blogathon 2010, which requires daily blogging from May 1 to May 31. Not sure how coherent my weekend posts will be — my weekends are crazy with more events and chores than time to do them — but we’ll see! Hope you’ll stop by to check it out.

She got on the bike tentatively. She was nervous. She was upset. It was like she was starting over. She kept stopping and dropping her bike. Once so hard that the reflector popped off. She often let the bike fall on her, scratching up her legs. Another time she got a huge scrape on her knee because she just stopped riding and jumped off instead of making the turn. I didn’t handle any of that very well. I was aggravated to begin with since the weekend was piled up with events and appointments. I just wanted Katelyn to get it then and there so we could ride off into the sunset together. My expectations were a little flawed. I can see that now, but at the time it was so frustrating.

So terrible mommy that I am, what did I do? I sighed. I rolled my eyes. I acted impatient. She finally let me know what she thought of my teaching and parenting skills. She stopped, dropped the bike again, and wailed. “You don’t love me because I can’t do this. You are all, ‘Sigh. Sigh.’” she said, acting out my infantile behavior. She was right. I was acting like a baby. I stopped and apologized. I told her she could do it. And that she was doing a great job. I was the one who was doing the wrong thing. I was not being a good teacher. And I was sorry. (As usual.) Once we ironed out the fact that I thought she was doing a good job and I reinforced that fact with a hug and kiss, her confidence seemed to reappear. She started doing her turns. Then doing circles. Then working on starting up without help. We still need to work on the last part, but she got the idea of making turns and circles really quickly. She was beaming from ear to ear. Another mini milestone. And for me? Another failed parenting moment.

We are who we are. Katelyn was born, I am convinced, with my perfectionist leanings and super-high standards for herself. (I say that because I look at my two girls and they are completely different. Keira could care less about pleasing people. For Katelyn it’s one of her main goals.) And because I was born with the same I expect at all times that I will be a great teacher and my kids will get things automatically. Expectations are often wrong, though, and the pressure that those expectations put on both kids and everyone around me is wrong, too. I am sure this won’t be the last time I confess to being a sucky parent, but at least I’m trying to be a better one, right? That, like Katelyn’s efforts to start her bike on her own, should could for something.

What’s your parenting style? How do you teach your kids without getting frustrated? Was your parent like I am? If so, how many years did you spend in therapy? I’d like to know.

Two second later there she was. My little girl riding her bike. Alone. I felt so proud. So amazed. In my mind I heard a link breaking. One of the ones connecting her to what I once thought was an unbreakable chain. You know, the chain that keeps her close by my side.

She grew up a little today. She took one more step towards independence. I am so awed by this process. And so very blessed to be along for the ride.

And since I’m writing: What is it that makes everyone who passes in the car break out in a huge smile when they see a kid learning how to ride a bike. All those smiles, all that positive energy. I’m thinking it’s either they are remembering what it was like to learn how to ride. Or maybe they are remembering teaching their own kids. Whatever. All those smiles become part of what is a truly beautiful memory.

Keira running away with Bitty Baby.

Katelyn got her American Girl Bitty Baby when she was about three. I was in the city for a girls’ weekend with three of my good friends. We went to American Girl to look around. I ended up walking out with a set of Bitty Twins. I took one, while my friend, who has a little girl a month younger than Katelyn, took the other. I don’t know who was more excited when I handed over that doll: Me or Katelyn. It was a great purchase, though.

The doll, named Sally-o, has been tossed around a bit — literally — and played with over the years. She had a small clump of hair cut off during one especially harrowing playdate. What’s left is fairly messy. One of her eyes are stuck open or closed — depending on how she’s held. If you look closely you can see the black ink from when she was a victim of a write-and-run attack. She’s missing her socks. Maybe a nicer way of describing her is that she is a much-loved doll. So much so that she often shares a pillow with her red-headed owner.

I am reminiscing about how she came to live here because I have American Girls on my mind. Earlier this week a friend posted on Facebook that she was selling her daughter’s American Girl dolls — the real ones, not the Bitty Babies. I was considering caving in and buying them. Right now we’ve still got about 20 months before I have to shell out that kind of cash. You see, American Girl dolls are made for girls eight and up, according to the company’s site and ubiquitous catalogs. This is a fact I was only too happy to pass along to Katelyn. In effect, it bought me a little more time. Of course, my strict adherence to American Girl’s suggested age is backfiring on me.

Poor Keira loves Katelyn’s Bitty Baby. LOVES it. Carries it around. Kisses it. Tries to take its many beautiful outfits to put on her own plain Jane doll. (We recently had an issue with a Bitty Baby dog costume. Keira loves dogs even more than Bitty. Thank goodness small children have very short memories.) But as always, I digress.

Last weekend I was looking at the American Girl Web site with Katelyn contemplating a purchase for Keira’s second birthday in June. Which one would she like, I wanted to know. (I was leaning towards the little blond one.) Katelyn jumped right on it. “But Mommy, you CAN’T get Keira a Bitty. She’s only going to be TWO. You have to be THREE to buy a Bitty Baby.” Damn. Drat. Sigh. She’s right. It says so right on the product specifications. Ages 3 and up.

So now I’m trapped. I can’t get Keira a Bitty unless I want to get called out by a 6-year-old for being a hypocrite. But I am torn. If ever there was a year to buy an American Girl, it’s this one. This year’s doll is Lanie. She’s interested in the environment. The American Girl parent company is partnering with the National Wildlife Federation to get girls outside and back to nature. There’s even a Web site dedicated to helping parents help kids to do just that — Be Out There. I’m so temped to tell Katelyn that the suggested age is just that — a suggested age. But then again I feel like I should stick to my first instinct and make them both wait until they’re actually old enough to own their respective dolls. Arggg. Such a tough decision. Good thing I don’t live in New York City.

What do you think of American Girl dolls? Would you buy them for your child? HAVE you bought them for your child? Aside from American Girl dolls, what are the best toys out there that you’ve seen? Do you know of any eco-dolls that might make my baby toss the Bitty love out the door?

A friend just e-mailed an article to me and a few other friends. The Washington Post has a story written about some time management stats out of the University of Maryland. According to John Robinson, a researcher and time management guru, moms and dads have plenty of free time. More than 30 hours a week, to be exact.

I’ll bet a lot of parents would balk at that number, as the Washington Post writer did, too. How could that be? We all work so hard. Kids make us crazy. Housework, bills, yard work. Where does 30 hours come from? You know what? I think Robinson is right. Even in this house, where we work really hard, we have downtime.

I go to the gym. I go to yoga. I see friends. I’m in a book club. I read. I watch television. I go to playdates. I take my little one to classes. I play Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. I read blogs — lots of them. I write this blog. I read to my girls. I play with my girls. I laugh with them. I am on a bowling league. I go to volunteer meetings at my local beach club. I go out for coffee or dinner with my husband. We play board games. We have our alone time. All those things add up in terms of hours. Just last night I went to an hour of spin and, when yoga was canceled, ended up meeting two friends at a local coffee house. I got home and watched an hour of TV with my husband. That was almost five hours of downtime. Granted, I stay up way too late, and I work a lot, but I’m still getting in plenty of me-time.

If you take the time to read through the entire Washington Post article you see that the author, who was resistant to the idea in the beginning, slowly comes to realize that she has more time than she thinks she does. When she first starts out, some of the folks in the story — including the author herself — bemoan the fact that a good portion of so-called “leisure time” is actually spent exercising or spending time with kids, which doesn’t always feel like leisure. But as the story unfolds the folks that she interviews help her to realize that to-do lists often don’t need to get done, and leisure time is what we make of it. The author wrote that she, as a working mom, did actually have close to those 30 hours of time — she had about 28 — but that it didn’t feel like leisure because she was too busy worrying and thinking about other things that needed to get done. “Even during a so-called leisure activity, mothers are more likely to be worried about something, planning what to pull together for dinner or strategizing. Sociologists call that ‘contaminated time,’ ” she quotes Rachel Connelly, a labor economist at Bowdoin College in Maine as saying.

I think this story is pretty interesting, and hopefully something that will give readers hope. As someone who has always been selfish and self-centered when it comes to taking me-time, I can say it helped me re-discover the fact that it’s a wonderful thing that I do take that extra time for myself. That it’s important. That it helps me feel like me and be a better journalist, wife, mother, and friend. How about you? what have you done for yourself lately? What do you count among your 30 hours of weekly leisure time?

The first one was drawing with creamy crayons on a piece of paper. I couldn’t find the ingredients online, but I can tell you that they were not organic, and they definitely weren’t going to last very long with ten 18-month to 30-month kids playing with them. Impact: About 30 small plastic lipstick-like tubes. The teacher then brought around foam rollers, asking the kids to “create a rainy day scene” by rolling water over the creamy crayons. She handed out more construction paper to put underneath the original drawings. So now we’re up to two pieces of paper times ten kids or 20 pieces of paper. Then we all washed our hands and dried them using paper towels. Two towels per parent/child pair.

Once we were done with our very wet, very colorful painting, we went back to the table where ten napkins and ten paper cups had been laid out for snack. The kids ate pretzels and drank juice while listening to a book. Once that was done, the smocks went back on. The teacher handed out more construction paper and more paper cups — this time, the cups were filled with glue. (Plus 10 pieces of paper, plus 10 more cups.) She also gave us cut up cotton balls, felt, and yup, about 10 more napkins torn to shreds. Once we glued the assorted felt and napkin “clouds” to our paper, everyone needed their hands washed again. (Using 20 more paper towels.) When we came back to the table we got another cup filled with blue paint. The kids then painted rain coming out of our “clouds.” Blue paint everywhere, we all filed back to the sink to wash hands yet again. At the end of the class, here was our approximate environmental impact without the paint and the glue included:

• Construction paper: 30 pieces
• Paper towels: 80 pieces
• Napkins: 20 pieces
• Paper cups: 30 cups
• Felt: About a foot
• Cotton balls: About 40

Most of the projects were super-gluey and super-wet from paint. They were left behind and, according to the teacher, they would be thrown out if they weren’t picked up by the following week. As much as I love going to that class, and really think art is an important part of a child’s development, I left the place feeling as blue as the paint now smeared all over Keira’s pretty leopard-print top. Especially when I saw the once-empty-but-now-overflowing garbage can. What’s a mom to do? Seriously?

I want Keira to have the same fun experiences as Katelyn did, but I want to be more mindful of the environmental impact of our fun, which is why I’m asking my readers this: How can I balance fun with being green? How have you handled this type of experience? Am I simply taking my quest to be greener too far? Sound off and let me know what you think.

#10yearsago I was just starting my freelance career. In grad school. Getting ready to go to a hall for a glam NYE celebration.

Back then I was a selfish, bratty 20-something who worked hard, and played just as hard. I didn’t have to take care of anyone except myself, my pets, and occasionally, my husband. My weekends were Friday nights out with the girls, spending all morning Saturday working out (step class, Pilates/yoga, karate class — maybe two), going out again Saturday night with my husband, and sleeping in Sunday. I didn’t do much else. Lots of exercising. Lots of me time. Lots of dinners and clubs and dancing. And lots of work. I was working maybe 50 or 60 hours a week back then because I could, so why not? I remember that New Year’s Eve like it was yesterday. I wore a little black dress — the same one I wore to my ten year high school reunion. We paid too much to dance the night away at a catering hall. We had lots of fun, and slept very, very late the next day.

This year we were supposed to go away with the kids and some friends. My husband is still having health issues, though, so we decided to stay home instead. No sense spending money when he’s in pain, and not able to enjoy himself. We went out east to visit my in-laws. When we got there, they sent us out to dinner, keeping the kids for us. We didn’t drink. We ate light. Our total bill: $35 including tip. We ended the evening playing Wii Just Dance with some dear friends. My husband was in bed by 1:30. I stayed up cleaning for an extra hour or so. Yesterday we hosted a brunch here for our families. Two very quiet days.

I always hear people say that they wish they could go back in time and relive younger days. In fact, yesterday I asked my husband when we had become irrelevant. We’re parents now. We’re not exciting. We don’t set trends. Sure, we’re still in the coveted advertising demographic, but truth be told we’re not the ones buying the Mustangs (my husband’s second car) or the new china sets anymore. But you know what? Even though we’re not exactly movers and shakers, I wouldn’t trade this year’s celebration for that year’s celebration. I wouldn’t go back. (Although I would change my husband’s current intestines and bowels for the ones in his 26-year-old body.) I am so blessed with my children, my friends, my family, my fabulous husband, I think I’ll stay right here in 2010. Besides, once you’ve spent New Year’s Eve in Times Square (did it in 1998) everything else is sort of anticlimactic anyway.

Back to my regular schedule starting Monday. I was a little lax with the postings over the past two weeks. What did you do for New Year’s? Would you ever turn back the clock? If so, would you change anything? I’d love to know. –KB (who, on second thought, might go back for two minutes so she could hug her kitties and dog, and tell a few people how much she truly loved them.)