Although the thought of traveling with a young country kid to the big city seems daunting, cities are full of young kids. They’re scootering down the sidewalks ahead of their parents, climbing on the playhouse at the park, and taking advantage of all the fun things a city has to offer.
As the helmeted drivers made their introductory laps to the wild cheers of the crowd, I realized I’d never been to the derby before. I must have been too busy being aggressively uncool in high school. Too bad – this was GREAT.
Hello from North Haven! By the light of a pink and purple sunset, the Hebrew calendar ticked over last night from 5777 to 5778. My husband and three-year-old daughter and I invited a few other families – none of them Jewish – to share the evening with us, and we laughed as the kids took […]
Later that evening, as I kept Pen company in the bathroom, she turned to me and said, “You and daddy are such frustrating babies!”
Aha!
For that back-to-school scourge, hand, foot and mouth disease, has broken out in the midcoast, and that includes North Haven. My three-year-old hasn’t escaped.
And so, that first summer, wondering whether outing ourselves as weirdos would earn us a one-way ticket back to the mainland, we donned leotards and wigs, spray-painted water pistols gold, teetered around on platform heels…
Dining out with a toddler can be hard. Let me rephrase that: dining out with a toddler is like dining with an alarm clock, set to an unknown hour, with a centrifuge that activates to fling food in a maximal radius when it goes off.
All right, kid. If you’re chill on stage with us, there’s a little bag of gummy bears in it for you.”
That’s right. Extrinsic motivation for the win, again.
Bill put her back on the paddleboard to distract her, and she sat on the front in stony silence, a disapproving figurehead. As they pulled up alongside me, she wanted to hold my hand. “You swam AWAY from me, Mama,” she said accusingly.
Pen’s friends excitedly lined up at the edge of the pool. When the instructors beckoned them towards the water, Penrose turned from child to koala, clinging fiercely to my leg and whimpering. Five kids gradually entered the pool to practice bobbing and kicking. One child eventually sat with her toes in the water, poking the surface and muttering to herself.
