It's been a long time since one of my blog posts has had as much text as it had pictures. Now, of course, pictures are often more fun, but it's a bit of an indication yet again, I think, that my job is too busy when I'm not on maternity leave... There's not enough time to think anything interesting (except for work, which is interesting in and of itself), much less write it down. Actually this maternity leave has been pretty nicely balanced, I think. With Eytan, where I had an actual maternity leave, it was good but I was a little bored/antsy. With Li'el, where there was no real maternity leave, and I was way too busy. But with Oren, I'm kind of working part time, from home, and then also doing kid stuff, and it's not a bad balance. So, we'll take it while we've got it.
Meanwhile, I have to admit I'm glad we're headed towards spring. I didn't mind the winter, really, although I was probably too belly-heavy for most of it to really get to enjoy the snow. But the last 4-5 weeks, we've all been sick with bad colds and sinus infections and ear infections and throat infections and pink eyes and who knows what else, and so I'm glad, with antibiotics now done for most of us, that we're (hopefully) just about done with all that.
Oren is doing well, 6 weeks old by now, pretty chill, a sleeper in the style of Eytan (i.e. a lot), and, more than either of the other kids, a burrower and scruncher-down-on-your-chest-to-sleep-er, but one who also is pretty skilled at sleeping lying down (rather than in a carrier). So that all makes the balance of the three kiddos work a little easier so far.
Li'el is running and running and talking and talking and talking, narrating everything she's doing or recently did -- "I used scissors!" "I took a rest and said good morning!" "I pooped!" "I ate peas!" Often she makes sure to tell everyone individually what's been going on, i.e. she goes around the table and individually tells each person one by one that she ate or pooped or waved or whatever. She also seems to have this crazy sound memory, where she'll ask to hear a book or a song, for example, over and over. And then a week or two later will come out and recite the whole thing back to you -- sometimes without even understanding half the words, but with a sound memory that just replicates it right on. "Water water everywhere, water near and far. Let's use our hands and feet to count how many kinds there are. Great vast oceans, tiny tears, soft clouds ripe with rain. There's even water in your bath, splashing over you" and on and on.
And we're just recently starting to see her and Eytan start to actually play together a little. Sometimes it's still just playing independently, or more pushing and yelling "No, mine!" but sometimes it's giggling and playing games together, collaboratively even. Makes me think that we might be almost at the point of having them be able to independently entertain each other here and there -- which was part of the hope in having kids close-ish in age -- but we'll see...
Meanwhile, I've been thinking about babies and baby stages recently, unsurprisingly. Mostly because, if you look on the internet (which I try not to do too often), there are all these stories about older people running into people with younger children and saying things like, "Enjoy it now, your kids are only small for so long" and the parents with young children saying "Grrrr... of course I appreciate it, but right now I'm also exhausted and frazzled and busy." And it's sort of an (understandable but) odd debate -- i.e. of course little kids keep you tired and busy, and of course that doesn't mean you don't appreciate them, and of course selective memory is such that when you're older you may remember, for example, baby smell more than baby crying, and of course seeing a little baby might make you nostalgic for when your kids were small too...
But I was wondering if part of what creates this sense of nostalgia and this kind of interaction is 1. that spending time with babies puts you back in touch with the basics (food, sleep, poop) in a way that's harder to access at some other points in life. And 2. because it's hard to notice babies growing into toddlers and kids and grownups when you see them regularly, it's easier to notice the "gains" -- learning to crawl and walk and talk and drive stick shift and fly airplanes (or whatever) -- and miss the losses. As in, you don't know exactly when the baby stopped wrinkling his eyebrows in a certain way, or when she stopped burrowing, or mispronouncing something in a way you were fond of... because it disappears gradually. And maybe you don't even realize you had lost it until you see someone else's baby, and it reminds you of what yours used to do, and what s/he hasn't done in months or years or decades; maybe it reminds you of the loss you didn't even feel at the time, or maybe you didn't even feel it until right then.
Result: nostalgia (in a good way), but sometimes, too, this phenomenon of trying to help other people pre-emptively appreciate things that are inherently more nostalgic after the fact. In other words, maybe the nostalgia is nice for the person feeling it precisely because it's removed from the everyday. And so, while you can (and I'd argue should of course) very much appreciate the present, you can't (and shouldn't really be asked to) feel nostalgic for it at the same time. Anyway, I probably have been thinking about it because it seems that (for me and for Mike at least) having several small kids is nice in that you get both at once --you get to see in new babies bits and pieces that remind you of when your other kids were babies, but before you're already well past the point of experiencing them as still little kids...
What else? Being on maternity leave has meant we've had some time to do things we don't normally do -- like we went out to eat, went to the Science Center and Children's Museum, went to some birthday parties (as Li'el and Eytan have both gotten to the age where daycare kids are having parties and inviting their whole class to them), and even (weirdly enough) went to the mall. My excuse is that we had gotten an Oren present that we went to go exchange, but wow, it made me realize that we probably go to clothing stores almost never, and to the mall even less often. And yet, even on a Friday midday, it was bustling -- there were people there walking around, for entertainment and shopping and all sorts of stuff.
I'm not really a mall person, and of course lots of people aren't either, but it did suddenly remind Mike and I that we're perhaps more out of the mainstream than I remember on a day-to-day basis. Living here in fairly suburban Western PA, near supermarkets and Targets, and not up a dry canyon surrounded by hills and goats, I feel like we're much more back in "mainstream, modern" America (whatever that means, but still) that we would probably prefer to be. And then we go to the mall, and I realize we're actually still in somewhat of a bubble at home.
And then we go to a birthday party where most of the kids have been in a big play gym before, or to the Science Center where kids have seen a planetarium or Sesame Street on a moving screen before (or both in this case), or we buy ice cream in the supermarket and open the container and Eytan goes, "Wow, the ice cream is already made and ready to eat from the box!" and I realize again that our kids too are in a bit of a bubble. I don't see it as a bad thing, really, everyone's environment is a little different, and it's not like we're keeping them in an ideological state of sensory deprivation or anything. After all, exposure to "modern" America is probably easier to come by these days than exposure to milking goats, so they might as well get the goats at home. They'll have plenty of opportunities down the line, I hope, to realize that most ice cream eaten comes out of a box rather than being made at home.
Anyway, blah blah blah... for now, a few last pictures -- for those interested in unlikely carseat configurations in cars, here are three in a Subaru, and then two pictures from the Children's Museum and two from a concert at daycare and a gym day at daycare...
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