MamaStories

Yeah. You are seeing that right.

See, there was no hairband close by. Or close enough by.

We’re no longer wearing summer hats and baggy pajamas when we go outside now, so I am putting away the Fall banner of Amie throwing the stone into Walden Pond.

The new banner honors Amie’s Little Bird, and Winter.

Keep warm, everyone.

Amie’s auntie, my sister-in-law, whom Amie calls Toot-Toot-Pishi (”Pishi” is the Bengali word for aunt-on-the-paternal-side), so very generously gave us a wonderful cd of English nursery rhymes as sung by Preeti Sagar, an Indian singer (see insert on cd cover above).

Well! Thanks a bunch!

The problem is not that Preeti, who is otherwise sweet-voiced, pronounces “heatlhy, wealthy” as “healdy, wealdy” - I’m used to that by now. Or that she changes the alphabet song and ends it with “zed”, which is sure to confuse my American kid…

No, it’s that those darned songs have invaded my skull and glued themselves to every neuron in my brain! That I find myself walking in the street singing “Little Jack Horner”. I have the same problem with the “Family Music Makers” cd that was gifted to us by our daycare, and which mercifully has not been requested in this household for several weeks now. Those are the only two children’s music cds we own… and I’d like to keep it that way.

Amie loves that music, of course, but I wonder if it has an equally dementing effect on her brain as it does on mine. Has anyone done research on this?

I think with envy of that good soul, Catherine Newman. In Waiting for Birdie (the book that saved me from the clutches of the baby-blues in my first month of motherhood), she writes that her three-year-old son, who was never introduced to children music, sang along with Led Zeppelin etc. Sigh! I tried that, but outside forces conspired against me.

I really should be napping with Amie right now, to combat my jetlag, but I know I’d only be lying awake reheasing “Georgy Porgy”.

Cooking really helped me settle back in domestically. I made a hearty potato-leek soup and a Flemish soup/stew called “Gentse Waterzooi”, which means “watery mess from Ghent”. Both are essentially winter and comfort foods (served hot, with heavy cream and lots of potatoes), so that also took care of our climatic shock (Singapore 85 F, 90% humidity / Boston 18F, 60%)! The dishes turned out so good, I posted their recipes on Suite101, here and here.

Another effective way of getting back in the groove is finding out what has happened in blogland while I was away.

1. Turns out Zane from Lichenology has taken his first concrete steps in local ecological activism (he lives on Vancouver Island). I always thought he was already a local activist, simply by his lifestyle.
2. Congratulations to James Kochalka of American Elf on his becoming father a second time, to Oliver. I can’t believe I missed the event! I’m a daily reader of his comic, of which each current strip can be viewed for free. I will gladly pay the the small subscription so I can catch up!
3. Rebecca at Irish Sally Gardens has broken out their homemade air dried ham and it was a success, though not on first sight. What a commitment to sustainable homesteading!
4. At A Foothill Home Companion, little Aidan is struggling with school - something I relate to with Amie, who still can’t be her own little self when at daycare. I’m holding my breath about what preschool will bring (we are interviewing for one this Friday). I’m sure we’ll be taking mental health days too.
5. Winter has set in at SouleMama’s, where the christmas tree is getting decorated by many hands. Here we won’t have a tree (no room), but we will have some decorations and lights. But first we are going to a Sinterklaas party. 
6. Madeline at Barn-Raising and Angie at Children in the Corn are each dealing with Christmas in their own ways.
7. I love the winter shots at Little Red Caboose: kids in winter are so photogenic.
8. Ryder at BlueYonder turned 3. I love reading about kids a little bit older than Amie: it helps me see what’s around the corner!
9. And Chase at Swallowfield turned 7, wow (can’t imagine that, yet)! i love Jennifer’s artwork (look at this spread). In fact, all these Mamas are so incredibly creative!
10. I’ll have to take the mitten tutorial at Write, Mama. Write very soon, as none of Amie’s gloves seem to stay on for very long.
11. I made a new friend: Anja at Middlemonth. Het little Thumki is full of surprises! Amie also went to see dolphins, you know, in Singapore. She had the same look Thumki that had when watching them.
12. On the home front, MamaStories got a Page Rank! Yeay! I guess over three weeks of absence improves once ranking.
13. On the downside, not one good sentence was written on my novel - those darn monkeys!

Now if only our sleeping pattern normalized! We’ve been waking up around 4:30 am and getting up around 5. I don’t really mind, because those early morning hours are kind of cosy, and thankfully the heating in our condo is already on, so down here in the basement it’s warm and cosy. If only I weren’t a wreck by 8 pm.

Next post: what Amie learned, and what Mama learned, of airplanes and airports, malls in Singapore and money in India, and so much more.

We returned on Friday evening from Singapore (that’s a non-stop 18-hour flight to Newark, a 3-hour layover, a 36-minute flight to Boston and a 30-minute cabride to Brookline… it tires me out all over again, writing this!). Singapore, by the way, is 13 hours ahead of Boston.

The last two nights Amie has been waking up at 2 am, to play and chatter, wide-awake, until 5 am, when we can “force” her to sleep. About the jetlag, one thing is for sure, that coming  back to the States is harder than going to Singapore: it’s easier to will yourself awake, to keep Amie up and to regulate a short mid-day nap when you arrive in the early morning, than to will yourself and to get Amie to sleep when you arrive in the late evening. The two of us slept for perhaps 4 hours during the trip, but Amie slept more, so we’re not on the same track.

First up in terms of shock was the weather: moving from sultry Singapore to cold and blustery Boston was painful, especially since we missed the run-up to winter.

Second, our basement flat felt warm and cosy, but so dark compared to the 22nd floor where my parents-in-law stay. And it was, most of all of course, empty. Amie doesn’t talk about them not being here with us, but she calls them up on her “phone” and has long conversations with them, so they are on her mind.

And I dislike unpacking, dealing (or not) with the stuff and junk and laundry, the food gone bad in the fridge, the lack of milk for a comforting cup of tea.

Clearing away the junk, shopping for food, and cooking are the best ways to settle back in. Today I cooked a hearty leek-and-potato soup and also “Gentse waterzooi”: a chicken soup-stew. Recipes and more about our trip soon!

Amie had a blast as a spider yelling “trick or treat” and “boo!”. She insisted that the day was called “Halloween Party”, not plain “Halloween”.

I managed to keep her exposure to candy to a minimum, and she still thinks it means just chocolate. Someone offered her a lollipop and she looked at it with amazement - she had never seen one before, and probably even its unnatural neon-ish color came as a shock. I succeeded in wisking it away as “never mind, something for older kids”.

For those of you who want to learn more about Halloween, over a year ago I wrote a whole series of articles on Suite101.com about its origins, its place amongst the Fall Festivals of Death, the European take on Halloween and European alternatives. It was a fun topic to research.

Happy Halloween!

Depending on whether we make it to the party at Amie’s daycare tonight, there will be more pictures tomorrow. In the meantime, a bonus:

From this:

To this:

In just a week! 

I’ve already said it a couple of times: it’s Fall. Then I had to swallow my words when the next day it was steaming hot. Here, in Boston, near the end of October!

But now I think I can with (weatherish) certainty say that it is, this time, now, finally Fall. Hooray!

But oh shucks, we’ll miss most of the season. Next week we’re off for three weeks, to warmer climes (Singapore and Calcutta, India). By the time we return, it will already be winter around here. Though I might have to swallow those words as well…

This is a closer shot of the felt flower on Amie’s hat. Isn’t it gorgeous! My sister bought the hat for her for last winter, when it was too big. Now it is just right.

We love that creepy lullaby, “Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby“. It’s featured on the O Brother Where Art Thou cd, where it’s sung by Alison Krauss, but I like Emmylou Harris’ rendition more. It’s easy to sing softly and quite monotonous and thus (one hopes) sleep-inducing. Amie requests for it to be sung every naptime and every night time.

But of course the original lyrics are too depressing.  It is, after all, a Depression Era song by a father to his baby, whose mother has left.  At the end the baby is implored to “Come and lay your bones on the alabaster stones”.

The line “Your mama’s gone away and your daddy’s gonna stay” would just freak Amie out. Also “You and me and the devil makes three”, however clever (it just rolls off the tongue!) is rather problematic. I can imagine Amie asking one day: “Who is the devil, Mama?” My first impulse would be to say: “A very, very bad man”. But then of course there would be a “very, very bad man” in her lullaby, evening after evening…

So I adapt some of the lyrics… you’ll see which ones. I leave the line “She’s long gone with her red shoes on” in because it seems to intrigue Amie a lot. She sometimes adapts it herself to “She’s long gone with the squeaky shoes on”, because she used to have red shoes that squeaked each time she put a foot down.

Here’s our own version of “Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby”:

You’re sweet little babe
You’re sweet little babe
We’re all here so no need to fear
You are my chunky-monkey baby

Go to sleep you little babe
Go to sleep you little babe
You and me and Baba makes three
You are my happy-snappy baby

Don’t you weep pretty babe
Don’t you weep pretty babe
She’s long gone with her red shoes on
You are my tired-wired baby

Go to sleep you little babe
Go to sleep you little babe
Come and lay your head on your big girl bed
And be my ever-lovin’ baby

Go to sleep you little babe
Go to sleep you little babe
Everybody’s gonna yawn then sleep till dawn
You are my billy-belly baby

Go to sleep you little babe
Go to sleep you little babe
Sure does seem like a sweet sweety dream
You are my sleepy-peepy baby

Today was a crazy day, for all three of us but for Amie most of all. I would divide it into four parts:

• Part one, in which we speak of doctors!

Amie returned to daycare after over a week of absence because of a cold. I picked her up in the middle of her lunch and we headed straight for a doctor’s appointment at 1. That took over an hour and was rather inconclusive.

At the Dr’s office she wrote on the blackboard with the chalk. She made one long vertical line and then several small horizontal lines next to it, taking care to make each start at the vertical line while muttering: “Here! And here! And here!” The result was a tall and very skinny E with too many little arms.

- Mama: “What is that, Amie?”

- Amie: “A huge airplane!” (Oh, those airplanes again!)

When I asked her to replicate it on a piece of paper, she didn’t seem to have a clue what I was talking about, and just drew her usual long, parallel-ish lines.

Then we rushed her to DH’s office where a colleague (also a Doctor, though of the “wrong” kind) wanted to do a little speech experiment with her. Due to her lack of nap and hunger, it didn’t fare so well. We promised to return after her next doctor’s appoinment, which was at 3.

This was an allergist and she got two sets of pricks. She was upset for a minute, then forgot all about it thanks to the sixties-looking psychedelic blue chair in the room. The tests were all negative - which apparently means nothing. Ha!

• Part two, in which we tell some more about the experiment

Then back to the speech experiment, which she now enjoyed.

- Even Steven (experimenter): ”Can you say ‘a heed’?”

- Amie: ”I’m not sure.”

- Even Steven: “How tall are you? Are you eight feet tall?”

- Amie: “Nooooo!” (as in: Are you crazy?!) “I’m a little girl. I’m a little bit big and a little bit small.”

• Part three, which concerns dinner 

She napped for an hour in the car on our way back - we took advantage by visiting the library and some shops on our way. But her whole routine was upset. So at dinner she didn’t want to eat. We set no less than SIX foods in front of her. Usually we don’t do this, but we felt sorry for having messed around with her so much.

1. Tortellini with pesto, lovingly prepared just with her in mind (Mama: “Mmm, smells good!”, Baba: “It’s not for you!”) She tasted one and spat it out. It’s usually her favorite.
2. Panda (soy) chocolate pudding. Also a favorite. She asked for it but hardly had a spoonful.
3. A muffin, asked for in the following manner: “I want a candle.” (It’s how we give her muffins: always with a candle for her to blow out.) “Put it on the muffin? It’s in that white bag, Mama.” Me: “Are you going to eat the muffin?” “Yah,” she nods her head, “I want the muffin for the candle.” I, the fool, gave her the muffin, candle and all. I pulled her back just in time before she thrust her face squarely into the flame. She blew out the candle. Didn’t touch the muffin.
4. Blueberry yoghurt. Okay, she ate some of that.
5. The whole wheat bagel with cream cheese left over from lunch, of which she finally ate quite a bit.

• Part five, in which the title of this post is hopefully explained

Then, it was time to go to sleep, but not before she and I had the following mind-blowing conversation.

- Amie: “I want to play with the yellow doorway.”

- Me: “The yellow doorway? Where is that?”

- Amie: “The door” (pronounced like ”do-wa” - like “dinoso-wa”). She points in direction of rest of our apartment.

- Me: “We don’t have a yellow door.”

Amie looks at me strangely.

- Me: “Where is it?”

- Amie: “The door. Dough. Dough.”

- Me: “Dough? Yellow playdough?”

We used to have yellow playdough, but I threw it out half a year ago, after it had sat around outside the can for a while and failed to reconstitute.

- Amie: “Door. Yellow door.”

- Me: “Where is it, sweetie? The yellow door?”

- Amie: “Dough. Dough! Yellow dough!”

She was confused and getting a bit upset, but whether at herself of at me, I don’t know. Baba called from the other room: ”Are you joking with her?”

- Mama: ”You want to play with the yellow playdough?”

- Amie: “I want to play with the dough.”

I gave her the playdough (red) and it lasted less than a minute.

Life with a toddler is surreal!