Dear Jacob: Summer 2009

Dear Jacob,

This post is called Summer, but it's actually halfway through fall now. It's been well over four months since I've written one of these for you and I'm sorry for that. It just becomes such a big task to write a Dear Jacob. You're such a person now, your own person, that it's hard for me to capture your essence in writing. It feels like if I can't get it perfect there's no use trying at all. And I don't know how to do things part-way. I want things to be perfect and I don't like having loose ends. Also, I want things in our life to be perfect when I sit down to gather our memories in writing. Things are never perfect though, so I'm just going to go ahead and tell the truth: Lately, you've been a big pain in the butt!

Jacob, why do you do so many annoying things all the time? Why are you doing this to me? Why did you just do that to her? Was there a reason you just did wrote on the couch like that? Why can't you calm yourself down? Do you get the fact that our going to (insert cool place) hinges on your behavior right now?

These are the questions that we've been asking you. You must be sick of it. You must be wondering why we can't let you be the person you are. Is that who you are? Do you really enjoy doing annoying things, or are you acting out for some reason? I don't understand it all anymore. And sometimes I say stupid things that I promised myself I wouldn't say. For instance, why are you doing this to me? I don't want to be the parent who blames their mood on their child's behavior. I don't want to make you responsible for how I feel. I don't want guilt to be the over-riding emotion of our relationship.
Jacob, I wish I could just let it go, let you be the person you are, ignore the annoying stuff and never wish away any moment of your behavior, but I think with any parent there's this fear of what if this is who my kid is, and I don't like him? I like you, I love you, there's nothing you can ever do that will take that away.

Anyway, on the the important stuff. Yesterday you turned six! I can't believe it. I can't believe how high you come up to me when we stand next to one another. I'm constantly misjudging your clothing size when I'm not with you. I hold something up and think it will fit you, but no, it's two sized too big. You continue to be the responsible little kid that you've always been. You still help so much with Sabine, and when she cries you are the first person to jump up and make it to her. You scoop her up and she wraps her little stick legs around you.

This year for your birthday we wanted to make a bigger deal than in the past. Daddy and I don't like to emphasize gifts, but we just really felt like you were so deserving this year. We started with your friend party on Sunday. On Monday you got a pie in the face, or rather a pie tin full of whipped cream. Just like the Yankees - apparently the owner of the game-winning hit gets a pie in his face. You actually requested this. So we waited and then picked a time where you would be surprised. You were out playing baseball in the backyard with Daddy and I snuck it out at the right time and POW Daddy got you right in the face. Mango enjoyed cleaning up the mess.
Daddy and I strive to be 'cool' parents; I hope we did you proud.

Baseball in the backyard with Daddy is probably your favorite thing right now. You've gotten really good in the past few months. We're all looking forward to next baseball season to see how you do in your first year of real baseball.
Other stuff for your birthday included cool orange Sauconies, a Yankees t-shirt - Shwisher (#33), some cool games, a trip to Friendly's (as requested by you), and dinner at the Diner with both sets of grandparents. I told the waitress it was your birthday and you got a candle atop a dessert, they announced that it was your birthday over the loudspeaker and then the staff sang Happy Birthday to you. You were sooooo embarrassed. You pulled your hat over you head and tried to hide!
You've also been really into running. Rather, you were all summer long. Seeing Daddy and I both get back into it, and seeing us run our races really put you in the mood. Most days you'd request to go for a run and you'd change into your tank top, 'running' shorts and sneakers. We'd head up the driveway and through the woods for your run and that's also how we met Dorothy. You've been so sweet to her. You're always asking to visit her and it really makes her day. You are very sweet and helpful with Dorothy. I encourage our going there because I think it's teaching you kindness and compassion.
Anyway, we picked a race, I ran the 5K and you ran the kids' mile. Daddy ran it with you. He said you ran the whole thing without stopping. We were so proud of you!

One of my favorite things to do with you is sit down and read. We read Jack and Annie (The Magic Tree House series) together. Or rather, we were reading them for a long time, then we took a break to read some other chapter books. If it weren't for my tendency to fall asleep when I'm reading aloud, I might just sit there and read to you forever. I love reading with you and snuggling. It's one time where I can forget about you age, and stop wondering for how many more years I might get this kind of quality time with you.
Over the summer you went to Peck Road (the 'farm') with MamMa and Papa all the time. you would stay there for hours 'working the land', transferring piles of dirt, riding the mower with Papa, gathering brush to be burned, and cool things like that. I think you would spend entire days there if you could. It's very cool to see you doing this stuff, to know that you're five (at the time) and so capable. It's awesome having a kid who would rather be outside, close to nature, doing any old thing, than indoors watching TV.
As we moved into fall and it was time to start wearing warmer clothes, you had tons of trouble transitioning to that. You always do. You refuse to wear cooler clothes at the beginning of the warm season, and vice versa for warm clothes in the cooler months. This year was particularly bad and we had huge fights about it. I'm sorry about the disappearance of your shorts. I admit here that I actually do know what happened to them. I hid them away one-by-one as they came out of the clean laundry. It was the only way to preserve our relationship.
I think a lot of the difficulty we were having in the earlier part of the fall was about control. You want more control over your own decisions, but as your parents, there are certain decisions that Daddy and I have to make. A balance has to be struck between those two things, and that's a difficult thing for us all - maintaining a balance. For the past week or two things have been much better. I don't know if you just came out of that phase all on your own, or if I finally thought about the problem enough that I got some insight into the situation. I still feel like I'm walking on eggshells around you, and I don't remember if that feeling ever goes away after we've been through a rough patch. This one was so long that I'd forgotten what it was like to not be fighting with you all the time.

What I do know is that when things are going well with us, my heart just wants to jump out and gobble you up you're so cute. I know you have a growing need for independence and I want you to know I'm working on ways to help us out in this regard. And I want you to know that I will always, always love you, no matter what.
And I think the last thing I expected to feel as a mother, is the deep longing to one day answer the phone and hear my grown child ask, "Mom? Did I act like THIS when I was a kid?" But you know, I think having you experience this one day will be the only rightful payback I can hope for.

Love,

Mommy

It's Facebook's Fault

I miss my little blog and I'm constantly telling myself that today will be the day I catch up. There's just so many things I want to post about, I don't know where to start, and it feels hopeless anyway because there's never enough time. I don't entirely know how it happened that I've been so inattentive to blogging, but I do know that Facebook is mostly responsible.

I've been on Facebook for a couple years, with waxing and waning interest, but I guess our relationship (mine and Facebook's) turned serious when Jacob and I started playing Farmville. I thought it would be a cute game for us to play together, because farming is his thing and maybe it would teach him problem solving skills and some other life concepts, numbers and spelling and whatnot, motivate him to learn to read, etc. It did do all that, and it might sound cheesey, but since I was sitting down with him to play and we were talking about it together I think he was learning things. I don't think it's so much what kind of tools you use to teach your kids, as much as it is you sit down with them and spend that time together talking it over.

I also used Farmville as a bribe to get Jacob to get dressed in the morning, get ready for bed, help me with certain tasks, but then he just memorized how to log on himself and started playing without me at times. He'd always get caught and warned not to do that again, etc, etc, but he'd always do it again. The weeks went by and it became an obsession. So I've phased out our crops and weaned us off this week. We're going to be taking a break from it for a while. It's feels liberating. I'm going to have to start hiding the computer from him though.

Anyway, being on Farmville meant I was logged onto Facebook at least a couple times a day, and so naturally I started posting more and more on facebook. It's like an abbreviated form of blog posts and is an outlet for me when time is sparse and I don't have time to blog. A lot of the things I would have ended up blogging just ended up as a status post on Facebook, and helped alleviate whatever stress was building up from not being able to get my thoughts out - but not all of it. And there's far more people I'm in contact with on Facebook than will ever read my blog. It's just a better way to keep up.

In no particular order, here is some stuff that happened over the last couple months in status posts copied from Facebook:

is teaching Jacob how to play Uno. Oh my God for the 80th time, no, you can't put a that RED 5 on that BLUE 8. I seriously underestimated the difficulty a five year would have with this concept!!! Holy crap, nooooo that Draw 2 can't go on that GREEN 6!!!!!!!

Ran the half marathon this morning. 1:56:30's. I'm happy with that and I don't think I ever want to do it again....

Just got home from the movies...Saw The Time Traveler's Wife. You definitely have to have read the book to follow the movie.

BIG DAY today. Zach met the president, shook his hand, told him his name and got his picture taken with him! AND I was on national television breastfeeding!

To mark the official start of homeschooling, Jacob and I just made frosting (science and math), but with nothing to eat it on, we're just having it spread on bread!

Sabine took two 10 minute naps today. That's it.

I am celebrating the last birthday of my 20's in my home, alone, cleaning like a madwoman. Believe it or not, this is an often sought-after fantasy of mine!

is trying to get Zach to sit still and look at people of walmart. I can't get enough of this!!!

ran the 5k today and Jacob ran his first kids' run. He also won the Wii they had up for raffle! It seems luck follows wherever he goes.

This one is a post from Zach: Happy 5th Anniversary...We are still alive...and so are the kids! Looking forward to today and the weekend...

Just finished reading Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Very interesting book.

Jacob and I couldn't stop watching the puke scene today from The Office wedding episode....hilarious!

Well there you have it, Facebook. Now that our relationship is out in the open, I have to break it off. Well, not completely, but I think we need to see other people and I need to visit other internet playgrounds for a while. Get some perspective. Some 'me' time. Don't worry, I'll still be visiting. Just a lot less. Well, at least a little less. I still care about you, but it's just that my blog is more of a long-term relationship, and we're a little more serious than you and I can ever be.

Where's Beanie II

I rarely use paper towels, and instead have a big stack of old washcloths and such that I use for any job I might have used a paper towel on. On this occasion Jacob had dropped one of our (glass) bottles of just-delivered milk while he was carrying it to the fridge. It shattered; only the second time this has happened to him in the years we've been getting farm milk delivered. So I figured it was an urgent enough situation, what with broken glass and all, that it was time to break out the bad boys. Sabine apparently thought they were the greatest thing ever and I let her go to town 'cuz that was the better option off the two choices at hand - the second being playing in the glass shards as I cleaned up the mess.

Bigger Red (for now)

By August Zach had finally saved enough to buy his work truck and a nice one showed up on craigslist. Here it is. We don't know what to call it because the best name for a big, red truck (Big Red) has already been taken by Jamie's truck. Since they're always in (joking) competition for whose tools are bigger and better, or some such thing like that, we all joked that Big Red is the new truck's little brother and so Zach's should be named Bigger Red.

All the other names he's come up with haven't really taken. Jacob's been calling it the Big Rig but Zach says that doesn't fit. I told him he should just call it Diesel, or maybe Big D, but he didn't like that either. So we're in the market for a name...any ideas?