My Tush II

The little girl told me she likes everything about my body except — my tush. Sigh.

And to think not long ago she sung the praises of its fluffiness.

Literature

Note to TV anchorman: Yes, “The Diary of a Young Girl” (aka “The Diary of Anne Frank”) is indeed a classic work of literature. It also is widely read and respected in the United States of America. It is not, however, a “classic of American literature.” Its original published title, in Miss Frank’s adopted Dutch language, was “Het Achterhuis: Dogboekbrieven van 12 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (“The Annex: diary notes from 12 June 1942 – 1 August 1944″).

On Daycare and Preschool

I’ve seen some parents insist they want to send their children to a “real preschool,” not a mere daycare. I’m not sure what they’re talking about and am fairly sure they don’t know, either.

Now, I’m referring to the realm of families that need full-time child care because there is no stay-at-home parent. If you’re a stay-at-home mom or dad and have found the mythical preschool that starts at age three and operates for only a few hours a day, possibly for only a few days a week, and your child is happy there, bravo.

If, on the other hand, you’re a parent with another job, and you need to find a good place for your child to spend most of his or her waking hours during the week, I suggest dispensing with labels like preschool and daycare and figure out what happens at these child care centers and which ones will be the happiest, safest, most helpful place for your family.

The little girl spent much of her babyhood and toddlerhood at a daycare with little pretensions of being anything but that. The place was nurturing, the children happy and thriving. While most of the staff did not have advanced degrees, they by and large knew and liked children. The children had circle time, music, activities that helped develop their fine and large motor skills, story time, and free play indoors and outside. The management was flexible, open to suggestions, accommodating to schedules that sometimes had us bringing the little girl to daycare as late as lunchtime or naptime.

Was it perfect? No. No place is, and sometimes I second-guessed whether we should have moved her to one of the preschools in our area that have more buzz. We were pleased overall, though, and she loved her teachers, so we didn’t have many regrets. Then the place underwent a sudden and significant change, and we reluctantly left.

What I have seen since reinforces what I suspected.

There are places with the word “preschool” in their names that operate, essentially, as daycares. They take infants, are open from early morning to the evening, five days a week, and employ staff with backgrounds similar to those at daycare centers. They have similar activities. Some may be superior to daycare centers, or on par with them, or inferior to them, just as all daycare centers are not established and run equally.

These preschools may or may not adhere as well as other daycares to activity schedules, staffing needs, children’s needs. Here are questions to consider. Does a preschool concern itself as much as a daycare with the cleanliness of your newly potty trained child’s bottom? Is it more rigid than a mere daycare about your child’s arrival time? Will it support your busy family’s needs or will you all be rushing about more to meet its requirements?

Visit the daycares/preschools/nursery schools/learning centers, read their parent handbooks, look how the children there behave, interact with each other and their teachers. Would you want to spend your day there?

This Is Not Your Grandpa’s Five & Dime

On the shelf at my local chain drugstore, nestled between the desensitizing ejaculation-delaying product Mandelay and a pleasure-enhancing female condom, sits a DNA paternity test — “for the alleged father, mother and child.” For $19.99. Heartwarming stuff, just in time for Father’s Day.

The creams and gels meant to enhance or tame arousal, facilitate or prevent conception, don’t bother me. If someone is willing to drive to a drugstore far from home, where he or she isn’t a familiar face to the clerks, and buy one of these products, more power to him or her. It’s good these items are easily available. Some people might even be willing to buy them from the friendly gals who regularly sell them toilet paper and milk.

That DNA test, though, is another story. When ya gotta know, ya gotta know, I suppose. And I guess it’s good that Joe Q Public can take his saliva into his own hands and find out if he’s a father or merely alleged, without having to subject himself to a clinic or hospital and red tape. It’s a sad commentary on the American family and culture, however, when the paternity of so many “alleged” children is in doubt that mainstream retailers carry products to determine it.

The box bears an abstract, sweepy drawing of a woman happily lifting a baby into the air.

I don’t want to think about the conversations surrounding the purchase, the sample-taking, the waiting for results. The mistrust. The eagerness, fears, anxiety. Regardless of the outcome, does any of it spell happy, wanted, nurtured baby? Stable environment? Maybe?

Daycare, Preschool, “Real” School

Come fall, she’ll be a newly minted four-year-old (God willing). My baby. That baby I just had, who made me so proud when I held her on my belly, cupped her chin between by thumb and index finger, patted her back and she burped.

She’s been in daycare since she was six months old. Partial weeks — all day — and full weeks, depending on circumstances. Mostly full-time, all day, five days a week, for long stretches.

“It’s too long,” she would tell me about the time she turned three, right before we decided to leave the sweet daycare that had been her home away from home since her infancy. “It’s too long,” she would tell me after we switched to the new place, a preschool that’s really a daycare with a friendly staff.

So her good daddy, whose schedule is more flexible than mine, picks her up a bit early, and she no longer complains that it’s too long.

A good deal of our time together on weekdays consists of eating, dressing, hygiene, grooming and hurrying the girl to school or bed. I walk through the leafy park near my office during lunch and see moms leisurely playing with babies, toddlers and preschoolers.

I’m not ready for my baby to go to real school. I wanted a chance to be more of a stay-at-home mom. Much more of one. Yet, we’re planning to send her to pre-K this fall at a “real” school. I am confident this wonderful school with a great philosophy and mission and reputation will be a good place for her. Were we not sending her there, to this full-time, five-day-a-week school, we’d be sending her to her daycare, almost full-time, anyway. While she is comfortable there, likes her teachers and friends, I don’t want to keep her there for another year. And she’d have less of an opportunity to go to the nice school the following year, because most of the kindergarten slots would be taken with advancing pre-Kers.

I guess this is one of those “nice” complaints. The little girl was invited to attend an excellent school. We plan to send her there. If we didn’t send her there this fall, it’s not as if I’d be stay-at-home mothering her. I think she’ll be excited about her new school. There’s a little twinge in my heart, though. Time passing quickly, an opportunity slipping, my baby heading off to school, and before I know it, grown up, away from me.

Clean Up, Clean Up

Dear teenagers or whoever had sex in the playground last night,

Kindly discard your grape-flavored purple condoms in a proper trash receptacle when you have finished. I know it’s grape because you left the wrapper on the ground as well, right next to the red used condom –cherry, perhaps? — that a young child inspected in her hands.

You do know that the playground, with its swings and slides and monkey bars and climbing contraptions, is meant for very young children, including the kind who crawl and toddle and pick things off the ground and explore the world by placing objects in their mouths, don’t you? If you have no other place but a public park in which to copulate, then in the afterglow, please think of others and throw the condom in the trash.

Um, and congrats for practicing safe sex.

Out of the Mouth

This evening the little girl told her Daddy: I propose that I watch one more “Scooby Doo.”

She told me: “I like princesses and ponies and horses and llamas.”

She told me ponies are her favorite animals. And llamas. And elephants.

She told me that something was “excellent.”

And that her favorite Disney princess is the one in yellow. And that all the princesses are her favorite. And I’m her favorite.

Happy sigh.

Etiquette

I recently made a visit to my hometown across the country. Although I’m a frequent Facebook status updater, I refrained from posting about the trip online, so as not to offend old schoolmates whom I knew I wouldn’t visit there, no matter how much we’ve chatted on Facebook lately. Fairly thoughtful of me, I thought. No one likes to know you’re too busy for them when you come to town.

Right now I’m wondering why some others aren’t as mindful of my feelings. Just a thought: if you’re a mom or dad and hosting a neighborhood get-together in your yard, and you didn’t invite a neighbor who’s on your “friends” list, kindly think before posting photos of the party on Facebook. Or better yet, why not invite us next time.

I always say I’m glad Facebook and the Internet weren’t around when I was a teenager. It’s not always so great when you’re middle-aged either.

Ohhhhhhh

Her little face looked up at me sweetly as I stood near the fridge.

“Pretty eyes,” I heard her say.

“How sweet! Thank you, honey.”

She kept looking up at me, smiling.

“Fruity Ice?”

“Ohhhhhhhhh.”

Friends Found and Lost

The name on the friend request was unfamiliar. The woman quickly reintroduced herself, a blast from the distant past, one of the 11-year-old girls  I oversaw one summer as a teenage camp counselor. Now we’re practically the same age, in different parts of our 40s. I had to look at an old camp photo she had posted on the social networking site to place her. How pleasant for her to get in touch.

There were other familiar faces looking at the camera, too, and ah, there in the photo was a girl I remembered from that summer, the cute kid you have to like because she has a sweet, sunny disposition and a silly giggle. I had stopped at her house in our hometown shortly after camp ended that year to return an item she had left, and she was excited to see her camp counselor there, at her front door.

I couldn’t remember her last name, just her first, which I won’t mention here. I’ll call her Jane. After looking at the picture, I told my husband about Jane, how much I had liked her. I couldn’t even remember exactly why at first, other than she was so likable and sweet-kid-cute and smiled a lot. Later I remembered the giggle. I wondered what had become of her. He suggested I try to find out, as I’m such a successful google sleuth. I dismissed the idea, maybe because I had quickly done a search of the social networking site — less reliable than google, to be sure — and had turned up nothing.

Later, when I returned to the site, I saw that the girl who’d reached out to me had added names to the photo. And there, next to Jane’s name, in parentheses, was the shocking word: deceased. How? When? How could that girl …?

What’s strange is that, for a split second, maybe after I’d done that search that turned up nothing, a barely a thought had crossed my mind that maybe Jane had passed. I don’t know why. I don’t think I’m retrospectively introducing that thought. Could it be that on some level, somehow, we know something, we sense it? There are truths out there and something in us knows it, even though we have not seen or heard it. Perhaps all our souls are connected and our soul knows what our mind doesn’t.

I googled madly to find out what had happened. Within a day, the information unfolded online, though not all the details. I learned that Jane was a married mother of small children, in the prime of young family life, when she died unexpectedly.

This news — news to me — pulls at my insides. I keep thinking of Jane, and her children, and her mother. I feel for her husband and father, too, it’s just, my stomach turns a little, my eyes moisten, for those kids, that mother, that bright girl in the camp photo, the one smiling at her front door.