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!

I’m not much of a wedding person and I really haven’t been to that many to be honest, but I will say that my cousin’s wedding a few weekends ago was fun, mainly because we got to hang out with all my cousins. The girls, on the other hand, were excited about the whole thing – from getting to wear their most fanciest dresses, to the cocktail buffet before dinner, and to the dancing. We didn’t stay for cake because it was a really long wedding and after awhile the girls complained that they were really tired. What is it about little girls and weddings? I really don’t recall being so interested in them when I was young. The girls aren’t obsessive about them at all or anything, but all the neighbor kids held a fake wedding the other day on the stoop. They’ve been talking about it forever and they got all dressed up and had a wedding. Who was the bride? Mia.

Mark’s mom had the foresight to hold on to the legos that Mark and his sister played with as kids, just in case either of them wanted to pass it down to their kids. We decided on our last trip to Seattle this August that the girls would like to have them. These are vintage legos from the 70s and 80s – you can tell because the colors of the pieces are in the classic primary colors – and there are a lot of them.

The girls have literally played with these legos every single day and I love how they’ve integrated them with their other toys, like this.

Really not sure what’s going on here with the legomen and the Hello Kitties. It sort of makes me feel uncomfortable.

Claudine started Kindergarten last week. I know, I know, already? I mean look at how she was a baby when I started this blog (btw, that’s the FAQ page. Did you know about it? You should check it out before emailing me a question because maybe the answer is there. Not that I don’t like getting emails, but it’s taking me a lot longer these days to answer them. I’m not ignoring you.)

I could tell Claudine was starting to get anxious about the start of Kindergarten as we neared the end of our trip, which made me very anxious about dropping her off at school. Separation for her has never been easy. Mia would try to tell her all about the fun things to look forward to, but she’d just shut down every time we’d talk about it and say that she didn’t want to go.

When I sorted through our big pile of mail when we got home from our trip, I found 2 letters for the girls sent by their new teachers. Claudine seemed thrilled to get that piece of mail and started catching on to Mia’s enthusiasm about the first day of school (Mia was literally bouncing off the walls like it was Christmas because she was so excited). The girls schemed ways in which they could bump into each other in the bathrooms and hallways. By the time Thursday morning finally rolled around Claudine started saying that she couldn’t wait. The walk to school was fine. There was no drama. We got to her classroom and she immediately took some crayons and started decorating the cut out heart that was at each seat (I’ve since figured out that drawing calms her and helps her cope in unfamiliar, stressful situations). She did say very quietly, “I want you to stay”, but only once. After a few minutes more, she gave me a kiss and I left. No big deal. I peeked in through the door a minute later and saw her sitting there quietly, looking slowly around the classroom. And that was it. More of the same the next day.

Whaaat?? No drama? Sheesh. Just when you thought you knew your kids they turn things upside down just to prove you wrong. Not that I’m complaining, of course, but this was a kid who would put a death grip on my shirt as I tried to peel her away at drop off, even as recently as a few weeks ago at camp. I couldn’t be more proud of her and just like that, we have 2 girls in the same school, full time, for the very first time.

She’s not bad at folding the laundry. And I got Mia doing the dishes now too. They think it’s “fun”. But nobody’s touching the vacuum. Oh hell no. The most satisfying chore ever and it’s mine.

I’m taking the concept of cleaning the house before a vacation to the next level. I’m usually obsessive about it, but who else cleans out every junk drawer AND touches up baseboard paint AND caulks the kitchen backsplash AND organizes the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator before a trip? Yeah, thought so…