Claudine’s kindergarten class had the sweetest holiday party at school this week. The class parents decorated the room and set out a packet of confetti for each child to throw up in the air when we all counted down from 10 to yell “Happy New Year!” (ok, Miss C elected to just dump hers from the bag onto the floor in a most uncelebratory way).
 
A Christmas cracker filled with homemade silly putty, an organic lollipop (haaa, this is Park Slope, Brooklyn after all), and a tiny origami crane was set at each desk, and we made an edible craft project with bananas and tiny chocolate chips.
 
The kids made the parents Christmas cards (I’m the one in the yellow dress reaching up to the light switch to turn the tree lights on!) and bookmarks.
 
I am so thrilled at how well Claudine has adjusted to Kindergarten and so happy with her class and 2 teachers, but now that I realize Christmas vacation is a mere few hours away, the school year is nearly half over? How can that be?
 
I spent a few hours yesterday picking up last minute gifts and wrapping them all. I picked up the girls and we took a bus over to the Flea to visit Mark on the last day since the girls hadn’t seen him at all the last 2 days. Mia kept saying that she was so excited that Christmas was a few days away. I asked her what she was excited for and of course she blurted out “presents!”. It made me think about what Christmas means, what we’re doing for the kids. I’m not going to lie. I’m one of those people who get a bit melancholy over the holidays. I guess there have been enough unhappy and strange Christmases in my childhood that it sort of fills me with some level of anxiety and dread. But I do remember that sheer excitement as a kid, and getting together with our whole extended family on Christmas Eve for a party with all my cousins is what defined my childhood holiday memories.
 
I’m still trying to figure out how to make the holidays special for the girls. It used to be that Mark would work every Christmas when he was still a Pastry Chef. It made Christmas rather depressing, actually, to be alone with 2 babies on that day. Now that we have the business, it’s all craziness up until Christmas Eve. There isn’t a big family gathering. Christmas is often quiet. We’re still trying to figure out our own traditions, the ones that define the holidays when the girls look back on their childhoods.

Can’t leave you without a cornified version of the class photos now, can I?
And past random quotes here (scroll past this entry).
 

We’ve built up a nice collection of ornaments the past couple of years and it’s fun to pull them out and have the girls get excited about each one.
 
I have to fight from having guilty feelings every year for being so busy in December that the girls don’t get to do any fun holiday activities until Christmas Eve – or even have our attention, for that matter. This season so far has been particularly hard and it seems so unfair to them, but they don’t really know December as being anything else I guess. Family helps. Grandma comes to visit for a week to give them the attention we can’t give them and Mark’s sister has started the tradition of giving each of them little presents to open all month.
 
We also make sure to get a tree (thank god for free delivery in the neighborhood!) and little things like seeing Claudine’s face completely light up when she comes into the living room to see christmas lights strung around the mirror above our couch remind me that we probably don’t need to do any of that other stuff like visiting Santa (C would probably get scared anyway). But seeing her cry because neither of us have time to play a game of cards with her because we are up to our stressed eyeballs in getting these orders out and work deadlines met makes me sad.
 
December schedules are brutal. Any small business owner who is busy during the holidays knows this. It’s not just us. We’re at the point where we’re pretty delirious from sleep deprivation and working 18-19 hours a day. It’s a game of playing catch up so you don’t fall behind (disastrous!) and through it all, thoughts on how to make next holiday season easier start swirling around. We’re a few days away from a more sane schedule (I hope).

It’s so interesting to see the young girl that she’s becoming. This age, 7-8, is also an interesting one to parent. They are still little girls who like to play hide and seek, reach for hugs and tucking in at bedtime, but they are also growing into their own person every day.
 
She has opinions about everything, dispenses little pearls of wisdom every once in a while, gets into moody phases, and talks about the future.
 
We want time to slow down, but she wants time to speed up, always looking towards the next holiday, the next birthday.
 
But in a lot of ways, I feel like she is more of a little girl still than maybe some of her peers. There is no curiosity whatsoever about boys, any particular interest in clothes or popular music. This was clear when at a recent birthday party I was floored when ALL the girls knew all the words to every pop song that came on the ipod. My 2 girls were oblivious and just sat on the couch and watched as everyone else sang along. It was pretty eye opening. But she’s kind of different like that. She’s been known to sit in a corner reading a book at a party or making up her own little imaginary game when everyone else is dancing and singing along to music. She likes to “look pretty”, but she’s perfectly content, at age 7, for me to pick out her clothes every morning. It’s not that I’m such a control freak that I won’t let her choose what to wear. It’s just that in the morning rush, it’s just easier for me to pick for her as she is indecisive when put to the task of choosing something (and we aren’t that together that this happens in the evening before bedtime). My choices are never met with contention or disagreement and she doesn’t really care what she wears. From speaking with other parents, I think this might be slightly unusual at this age.
 
I admire her ability to be confident enough that she’s not influenced by what everyone else around her is doing – she’s not one to be peer-pressured into anything or go along with what’s popular (except she really wants to get her ears pierced!). She always does her own thing. It’s always been this way since she was small. This has never changed. I hope it never changes.

It’s no secret that the girls are very attached to Mark. It might be because he is the cook, the baker, and the bedtime story reader, but the “traditional” roles of mother/father are fairly blurred at our house. I don’t think you necessarily plan out these roles when you first become parents. Maybe subconsciously these roles are shaped by our childhoods – certainly, neither Mark nor I grew up with fathers who were so involved; our mothers were our everything – but over the years these roles naturally and organically settled in.
 
So when Mark told the kids that he had to drive upstate to visit grandpa who was sick in the hospital again and that he couldn’t spend Thanksgiving with us, the first thing the kids asked was, “who’s going to cook dinner?”.
 
I found that both hilarious and kind of sad. Truth is, we are never away from our kids. The first time Mark traveled away from the girls was last year, to visit his dad in the hospital the first time. Do you remember this? It was awful, only because I was suffering from a 6 week back to back bronchial infection and I strained or cracked a rib from coughing so hard. I could barely move let only take care of the kids, but we all survived. I’ve only ever been away from my family once, when Mia was 18 months old, to attend the CES trade shows in Vegas for 4 days (incidentally I was miscarrying a baby on that trip, though I didn’t know it for sure at the time). That was it though. Not surprisingly the girls get nervous at the thought of either of us going away. I’m not sure what they’d do if we went away together without them. It hasn’t happened yet.
 
Maybe it might surprise you to know that it’s Mia, and not Claudine who stresses out the most on the rare occasions that we do leave them with a babysitter at night. She gets really nervous, frets and cries during the hours leading up to our departure. She is usually fine a half hour in after we leave, however she gets very stressed the moment she knows of the plans. Sometimes I think the kids need to get over it because they should feel lucky that we spend so much time with them, but really…it’s no fault of theirs…they don’t know anything else.
 
Mark left this morning after dropping them off at school. Surprisingly they took it well, though both teachers told me they talked about it, often. They spent the evening writing notes for him. That is something sweet that they like to do, whenever I go out for the evening, they leave a good night note and place it on my computer.
 
So far so good…till Saturday…happy thanksgiving.

It’s not uncommon in grade school for each student to be assigned a class job that rotates every week, but some of the jobs in Claudine’s kindergarten class have been a bit unusual. See her up there at a recent field trip to the park to sketch some trees? She’s the “class comforter”. What’s that you ask? She comforts her fellow classmates when they need comforting, of course. When I asked her what the job entailed she told me,”well, I take care of them if they are crying or sad and pat them on the back and say ‘it’s ok’.”
 
Damn. I think we all could use a class comforter by our side right about now.

Now that Miss C is in Kindergarten, this is the first time Claudine has had friends of her own – not the little siblings of Mia’s friends or neighbors in the building, but friends of her very own. For the past 3 weeks she’s been telling Mia all about them, planning her little gathering of a few friends from her class and drawing their names and pictures on paper over and over again. Being as shy as she is, it’s sort of a big deal to watch her pal around with her new friends at school, seeing her run to catch up with another girl, and walking and talking about whatever it is two 5 year olds talk about.
 
All day before the party Mia kept saying “I can’t believe the house is going to be full of little Kindergarteners! They’re so cute!”. You kind of forget how big a deal age is when you’re a little kid. Even being older than someone by a few months means that you’re older than them.
 
As it turns out, it was pretty cute to have a bunch of kindergarten girls in the house. We made tiaras and bracelets, iced and decorated cupcakes. It was Claudine’s first real birthday party where she chose the guest list. A pretty good makeup birthday to Miss C’s original sick birthday, an illness that lingered for the better part of a week and one that both of us can’t quite shake off. In the end, maybe the excitement was a bit too much because she sort of broke down at the end of the day, having missed a nap that she’s been taking every day since she’s been sick. Early bedtime. Another day of being 5 tomorrow.

It’s a good thing we had cake and presents the day before, because Miss C. got sick on Sunday, her actual birthday, with a fever and a sore throat. We tried to lift her spirits by taking a short outing to look at leaves, which are peak out in Long island, but she just wanted to go back to my parent’s house for a nap. So far, being 5 hasn’t been fun at all and Claudine saids she wants to go back to being 4 because 5 doesn’t feel good.

I have to say, we’ve been really lucky with our health. The kids in particular, rarely get sick despite all that goes around at school. It’s like the health and dental insurance gods are looking over us (oh wait, what dental insurance? hahaha) and making sure we stay healthy and cavity-free so we don’t get screwed. I thought about this as I was sitting with Claudine, who was still sick with a fever, today. I thought about how insanely busy I was for the last 3 weeks, often working 16 hour days and how I would have been stressed if I had Claudine home from school with me, trying to find a way to work on these work deadlines. As it turned out, my Monday wasn’t so bad aside from 2 conference calls. We had lots of cuddle times. Makes me really believe that things sometimes just work out.

PS. Thanks for all your birthday comments. For those who have asked, yes…Mark baked the cake. He always bakes our birthday cakes. He asks the girls what kind of cakes they want and bakes according to their requests. Claudine wanted a vanilla cake with passionfruit frosting. Someone also asked whether the girls ever want like a Dora cake or something. The answer is no. I’m not sure they know that a cake like that exists!

She is five today. A weekend with family this sunny brilliant weekend, a small party next weekend. Happy birthday Miss C. You are so big.

Lucked out this year with the costumes as the girls picked things that were easy to assemble. Claudine decided that she was going to be a cat, which is what Mia was last year and Mia is going to be a vampire bat so we’re recycling the bat wings I made for her a few years ago with the perfect black velvet goth dress that we just got as a hand me down from a friend. Just in time too as Halloween in the city really lasts for 2 weeks since there are at least a dozen events each weekend day around town leading up to Halloween itself. Since December is so crazy for us and we don’t have time to participate in any holiday merrymaking then (sucks, huh?), we try to front load all the Fall activities as much as possible. Good thing there’s so much going on. The Northeast was made for Fall!