Alex was in trouble on Sunday. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say the punishment involved the loss of music and movies for a whole week, and he was not happy. He disappeared into the basement for almost an hour, and when he came back up, he was classic five-year-old giggly, standing…
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Special Exposure Wednesday
I realized something this week: It’s never going to end. For the first two and a half years of her life, my sight was focused on getting Julianna mobile. Crawling, pulling up, and all the other steps along the path to walking. I knew that on the far side of walking lay teaching her to…
Read MoreAnd today, he walks
Today, he stands. Holding onto the coffee table, my unhurried child pulls up onto two little feet, flexing ten little toes more accustomed to “This Little Piggy” than to balance, and tentatively lets go. He wobbles for a second, finds his center, and starts forward: pit-pat, pit-pat. But he’s too far from the next point…
Read More7 Quick Takes, the Nicholas Edition
Every so often, I just have to write a Journal entry…because life is more than my own eloquence. Sometimes life is what the munchkins are achieving! 1. As I’ve said before, Nicholas is not a hurried child. Sometimes I have to wonder if that’s because I take a much more live-and-let-live approach to parenting…
Read MoreOrdinary Hysteria
There are times when, as a parent, hysteria reigns. You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, but either way, it’s hysterical. Julianna is giving us quite a few of those lately. On Saturday night, Alex and Nicholas were sharing the bathtub. Julianna was waiting her turn, not so patiently, as witness: While I knelt…
Read MorePartners In Crime
My baby is definitely not a hurried child. No, Nicholas is milking his babyhood for all it’s worth. At 11 months and 20 days, he has one tooth and crawls on all fours…unless he’s in a hurry, in which case he still thinks army crawling is the fastest way to get around. He’s little enough…
Read MoreSpreading Their Wings
It’s been a while since I took the kids to the Mall. What with Alex’s school and Julianna’s school, we haven’t had the time. So this week, when we landed at Kidz Court, I couldn’t even concentrate on doing any writing—it was too mesmerizing to watch them play on the soft oversized sport-themed play…
Read MoreChild of the Moon
Julianna loves books. She loves music. And especially, she adores reading books that can be sung. When Alex was little(r), I used to scour the section of the children’s stacks for books on trains and emergency vehicles. Nowadays, I scour the poetry section for songs I know. One of her favorites is called Child of…
Read MoreCookie Monster
The house smells like gingerbread this morning, which I suppose makes the seven hours spent in the kitchen yesterday worthwhile: 1 ½-batch of gingerbread, double batch of sugar cookies, single batches of chocolate cutouts and peanut butter ball filling…three loaves of bread…and a chicken and rice casserole. We were cookie monsters yesterday. Nicholas spent a…
Read MoreSeven Quick Takes Friday
…hosted by #1. A first word. Well…let’s call it a proto-word. For a chromosomally-gifted 2 3/4-year-old, that is a big deal! We were reading Jeanne Cotter’s Child of the Moon. For weeks, I’ve been trying to get her say “mmm” while pointing to the moon. She’s a very stubborn little lady; she knows exactly what…
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Kathleen M. Basi 