Get back on the horse, dammit!

It's time to climb back on and start writing. Whatever malodorous dirges run through my mind, it's time to just chat about MZ. Forgive me my rusty prose... Who'm I kidding? My five readers simply crave the MZ update, so here you go...

The thing I find most challenging about raising a girl is how to let her just be, not withholding princess-dom and not proffering it either. This is a girl who loves purple, pink, fire trucks, diggers and cars (preferably comportables), in that order. She's still talking about the fire woman at Station 7.

For months she's been commenting on my toenail colors. Mommy's toes are orange with pink underneath, Miriam's toes are pink with orange underneath. How's that for a concept? On Saturday, her good friend Gabriel had blue-painted toes. I think this was the first time it occured to her that she might also have colored toenails, so the next night we painted them pink. And lo, she did not don a crown and a ruffly skirt and speak volumes about the House of Princess. It might still happen, but it didn't just then.

Pee Me a River

We got MZ a potty several months ago, and at first she was interested, but fairly quickly she stopped wanting to sit on it and we assumed she wasn’t ready for toilet training. But at her two year appointment, her pediatrician told us that two is the average age for American girls to potty train, so we went home and started trying again. Again she balked.

That same week we visited Pugawug, who had just picked out her new toilet seat adapter and step stool, and MZ asked to try it out. She showed more interest and patience than she had previously, if not more pee. So we went out and got her a set of her own, and lo, she’s interested!

The toilet trainer is super-light and has handles, same with the new stool. And she loves to put them in place and put them away. She’s Charles in Charge on the toilet, and she’ll sit for much longer than I would have expected.

After a few days of pre-nap poop-and-pee success, I let her go bottomless before we left the house. Who knew a toddler could pee so much? The puddle on the carpet was deep and wide, and confirmed everything I suspected about my ability to handle a rampantly evacuating child while penned up at home. I just don’t have the disposition for an encampment, and find it a bit hard to great each accident with equanimity when they’re a mere twenty minutes apart. Assuming that my frustration would do more harm than good, I’m resolved that potty training may be a longer process for us than it is for the Potty Party set.

I bought her some cotton training panties. Our friends and neighbors offered mixed reports, some said it was too confusing for the kiddos while others said they saved their sanity. After an accident in her trainers resulted in wet pants but no puddle, I know I fall in the latter camp. These are soft cotton and fairly thin, and MZ seems clear on the difference between these and diapers. And I’m not pulling my hair out trying to manage puddles, piles and the ubiquitous cat barf.

This morning she peed in her training pants, and I told her calmly that she could tell me when she has to pee and we’ll put her on the toilet. Thirty minutes later she told us she was peeing and we said we could go to the potty – she held it and completed the job on the toilet! Thirty minutes later, as I was leaving for work, I heard her telling Bubbie that she had to pee and off they went to the toilet again. Clear progress.

I like the idea of letting her pick out her own undies, but I think we’ll wait on that until she holds it a little longer between trips to the potty. Baby steps…

Art class!

MZ and I started taking an art class, and it occurs to me that it's the first organized class we've ever taken together out of a swimming pool. I take her to playgroups and places where she can do various activities all the time, but my preference has been for unstructured activities, since her grandparents are usually enrolled in art and music with her. But I am not crafty, and MZ seems to like to color and paint and such, and I thought an art class might help me figure out how to do some of these activities with her at home.

So here we are in class and I am blown away by my daughter. She's not shy! She may not be roll-you-over social, but in this small group setting, she piped up with answers, asserted opinions, interacted with the other kids and generally demonstrated total confidence. In a sea of primary colors, she asked for pink, and lo if the teacher didn't go mix up some for her with red and white. And she said Thank you with just a little coaching.

We've decided not to enroll MZ in preschool next year. We looked at the available programs for a 2.5 yr old versus what's open to an older child, and then looked at her week, and the time she spends with her grandparents, and decided there's no rush to get started. And then I considered how much she's come to love her daycare provider, and how sad it would be to yank her away after only one year, and well, the cost of preschool, and it felt like a good decision.

But of course I've second-guessed this, because I am the queen of analysis paralysis. Am I shortchanging her? Am I stifling her development? Will this exacerbate her shyness?

Our art class experience as well as her foray into imaginary play, and recent visits to the park, where she's conquering the Big Kids slide and clambering up ladders, is reinforcing my original decision, but also reminding me that it's much too soon to try to define who MZ is -- or what we should be looking for in a preschool. Much too soon for labels like "shy" or "literal" or "not very physical." I realize she's got a lot more to show us about who she is, and her personality is only beginning to unfold. And wow! I am so totally enamored of this kid! I can't wait to see what else she has in store for us.

Come on in, 2007!

2006 had its share of ups and downs, but really, it was a fantastic year and I'm sorry to see it go. However, the best way to send it out was to witness MZ's captivation with the holidays -- all of them.

First she discovered her Chanukah books and started singing the Dreidel song well before the first night. She was all about the menorahs and the dreidels until she discovered the nutcrackers. Nutcrackers are da bomb. Snowmen are cool, Santas are kinda creepy, but Nutcrackers rock her world. Ironically, the only shop in the area that had a 5' tall lighted Menorah also had 9' tall Nutcrackers, flanking an equally large Mouse King. No contest.

At first that freaked me out a little bit. Did she think Christmas was better than Chanukah? How would we deal with that? Would it break her heart that Santa doesn't visit the Jewish kids? I had gone into the holiday season so blaise, she would get to "visit" Christmas with her maternal grandparents, it was part of her cultural heritage if not her religious tradition. What could be better? And then she got all Christmas-y on me, and I doubted. I feared.

Really, though, I've got to admit that nothing competes with the 10' inflatable Santa that jumps out of a chimney just down the street. What could appeal to a toddler more than a tree with sparkly things all over it? Chanukah is downright reserved in comparison, and it's not even a major holiday.

Over the course of the weeks I began to enjoy Christmas more than I ever had in my life. What a cool tradition our neighbors bring into our lives! How we admire the lights and trees and train sets and tiny towns that zip underneath! After years of agnostic ambivalence, I finally came to feel about Christmas the way I feel about Chinese New Year and Diwali: it's so cool that we live in a multicultural society and I want my daughter to be exposed to all of it. I want her to fully enjoy the traditions practiced by our family and friends and neighbors, and someday when she understands their meaning, to respect their beliefs.

But for now it was just a great time taking her to see those giant Nutcrackers a few times a week, to hang blue and white lights in our windows and witness her anticipation at dusk when they were about to come on, to light candles together each of the eight nights and hear her chant Nun Gimel Hay Shin and the lines from her books (Do you know the reason why? It's Hanukkah tonight!), and then to wake up on Christmas morning to her very own stocking, a blue and white number hand-knitted by her Mana.

And I learned that the best way to raise a Jewish kid is to raise her Jewish. This month she began to shade her eyes during the prayer over the Shabbat candles. It warmed me, possibly no less than it did her Daddy and her Bubbie, because I am the one who has religiously (is there any better term?) taken her to the Shabbat playgroup every Friday. She says L'Chaim and raises her glass when we say our prayer over the wine, and anytime we do cheers. She asks for candles and challah on any given night, she already knows Shabbat is a celebration and she looks forward to it. She asks for her dreidel books even today, a week after Chanukah, and still sings that dreidel song (although I'm not sure how I feel about her Daddy and her Papa putting her dreidels in her new toy oven so that they'll be "dry and ready").

2006 has been an adventure, culminating in my favorite holiday season to date. We keep saying this is her best phase, and then it just gets better, so come on in, 2007! We're glad to see you.