Tag: limerick

Posted in family life, musings

therapy as playground ladders

Posted on by kristinabean

On Monday, I took the kids to a park near our house and let Aubade sleep in the stroller while the boys and I played on the playground. It was a challenging playground, a bit above their skill level, and it was fascinating to watch them attempt the various ladders, steps, and climbing walls. They would climb up as high as they were comfortable, then climb back down, then come back and repeat the process, over and over again, until they finally made it to the top – and then they would climb it still more times, until that piece of equipment was no longer a daunting challenge but a mastered skill.

I’ve noticed the same things when the boys are building Duplos, or drawing, or various other activities – if they have a goal in mind, they don’t want to stop trying until they’ve attained it, and once they’ve attained it they’ll repeat it countless times until it is so easy and familiar that they lose interest and move on. (Right now, for example, our home is filled with large 3’s made out of Duplos… it was 8’s for a few weeks but those are no longer challenging for them to build.)

Seeing that drive for mastery and motivation to persevere has made a big impression on me. The boys aspire for perfection in the sense of having a goal and working towards full accomplishment of that goal, but they are more than ready to fail countless times along the path towards their goal. Each failure, each unsuccessful attempt, is seen as a part of the learning process rather than as a setback or a sign of inadequacy – which is radically different from the way I, as a dyed-in-the-wool perfectionist, tend to view my own failures, but much healthier and more rational! So as I struggle with the techniques my therapist has given me, to retrain my brain into more positive habits of thought, I am going to try to keep those playground ladders in my mind: as I climb toward joy, it’s going to be hard, and I might get scared, and I will probably have to come back down and start over a few times – but that’s no reason to give up! Every attempt will make me stronger and bring me closer to mastery of the skills I desire, and maybe someday I’ll be running up from my depressive triggers just like those boys were scampering up rope ladders and rock walls by the end.

Posted in family life, sqt

{SQT} – up in the mountains

Posted on by kristinabean

Taking advantage of the overlap between my husband’s last spring break and my maternity leave, we went on our first vacation ever as just our own little family this week, renting a cabin up in the mountains. It’s been a bit cold for us desert rats, but overall really great. So my seven quick takes this week are from our trip!

  1. I’m lucky my husband is a logistics master 🙂 He found the cabin online, he contacted the owner and scheduled the rental, he bought and packed all the food for the trip, and he calmed me down and gave me specific tasks to complete when I melted down in the overwhelming mess of packing everything for the kids and worrying that I’d forget something essential.
  2. The drive from Phoenix to Payson is gorgeous. I had forgotten just how beautiful the Sonoran desert can be, especially in the spring time when wildflowers are popping their vibrant heads up in every corner and the mountains are shaded green among the saguaros. And Payson itself, perched just below the Mogollan Rim with the high pine-covered, snow-topped ridges behind it, is breath-taking even when the deciduous trees are bare. It has been reminding me that, despite all the brokenness in the world, there is still quite a bit of beauty in it as well.

    IMG_6549
    Our cabin backs up to a creek!
  3. The simplest things are full of wonder and joy to a child. The boys have spent hours throwing rocks and pinecones into the water, digging in the dirt, and lugging sticks and logs across the yard. It is that pleasure in the everyday and elemental that I strive to hold on to as an adult, now that the cares of life are capable of dulling my senses entirely to the beauty of the small and mundane.

    (Limerick is wondering, in this picture, why he can no longer see the other pinecone he threw into the water. It took him a few trials to understand how the moving water carries the floating pinecones away – what a good way to begin understanding the physics of the natural world!)

  4. A two-year-old in a hoodie is one of the most adorable things in the world, especially when he sticks both hands in his pockets and wanders aimlessly around giving things sideways glances…
  5. A baby who happily lies there watching her brothers play, gazing at the interplay of sun and shade, observing the trees stark against the blue sky, is also high on the adorableness scale. As long as it isn’t too cold and windy, she’s quite content to just take it all in.
    IMG_6698
    Lying on the wrap by the river

     

    IMG_6652
    (Aubade is rediscovering her favorite sucking hand after having lost it to the IV bandages during her second hospital stay, and can get very focused on it!)
  6. Time away from normal routines and away from all the other people we normally see during the week seems to have brought Rondel and Limerick even closer together as brothers. They’ve begun to play much more interactively, instead of just in parallel: they deliberately make sounds or movements that they know will make the other one laugh; they make plans for digging or building and help each other with them; they prefer playing with each other to playing alone; they fight, but are figuring out how to make up and keep going together. They follow each other around, entertain each other, and generally fall apart laughing at each other most of the day. And one of the nights here we found them both snuggled up in the same bed ❤
  7. I realized how beautiful it is to watch a child explore the natural world, in his own way, at his own pace: running, jumping, climbing, digging, building with sticks, baking mud cookies, collecting pinecones, or throwing rocks into the river. IMG_6682

Visit the link up at This Ain’t the Lyceum!

Posted in family life

Welcome baby!

Posted on by kristinabean

Birth stories are a love it/hate it kind of thing and I’m not that good at writing them anyway, so I’ll spare you the details and just announce the arrival of Aubade, the newest member of our family!

(As with the boys, this isn’t her real name. It is instead the name of a type of poem, in this case one which celebrates the dawn – quite fitting for this little girl who waited at 9.5cm all night long just to be born as the sun rose in the morning.)


I’m honestly not sure how to express all my thoughts about the pregnancy, the labor, the birth, or even baby Aubade herself. It was intense and overwhelming, full of unexpected twists and turns, punctuated by great pain, and only endured through much prayer and the support of people who love me. But there is something exquisitely precious in holding a newborn, sticky and screaming, to your chest and feeling her tension subside; there is something inexpressibly beautiful about watching your sons shower their sister with kisses and giggle over her tiny toes; there is even an undefinable sweetness in the sleep-deprived snuggle a new mother offers to her infant.


And so our lives unfold and deepen and begin to change in unknown and unforeseable ways, through this new life entering into ours, and we are so grateful for this gift of love in our hearts and our home.

Posted in family life

brothers and friends

Posted on by kristinabean

Rondel and I were playing outside during Limerick’s nap, with his dinosaur figurines. One of them had put another one down to bed, only to wake him back up a few minutes later.

“Why isn’t he just letting him sleep?” I asked. We never intentionally wake the boys up so I was wondering why his toys were modeling that.

Rondel had his dinosaur grumpily explain that he wanted to play. That gave me a suspicion.

“Do you wish Limerick would wake up to play with you?” I asked. “Do you miss him?”

“I do” Rondel answered sadly.

Even one-on-one playtime with Mommy is lacking without his little sidekick and accomplice, these days – and it makes me so happy to see their friendship deepening.

Posted in family life

park remodels and random thoughts about playgrounds

Posted on by kristinabean

Our hometown recently updated one of the city parks in a more disability-friendly way (if you’re local, check out this article for more details!), and since it had been one of our favorite cool-weather parks last year we were excited to see how it had been transformed over the few months it was out of commission. Of course the ducks and the library were still there, so it’s hard to go very far wrong…

While none of my kids have physical disabilities right now, several of my friends have siblings or children who do, so accessibility is something I try to be aware of (although I obviously don’t have the personal experience to really evaluate whether or not something is truly accessible). It’s also something I want to encourage and seek out, so that my kids don’t grow up feeling uncomfortable and awkward around people who are physically different than them. If they grow up playing at the park with people with disabilities, it’s just going to be another permutation of normal in their minds, which is exactly how I think it should be.

(One of my favorite moments with Rondel at a park was about six months ago, at the big splash pad near our home, on a Friday morning when a group from a facility for severely disabled individuals came to enjoy the water as well. One older teenager was just sitting in the water, under the spray, splashing with his arms and laughing and laughing, a look of pure happiness on his face. Rondel watched him for a few minutes, then sat down in the water a few feet away and started doing the exact same thing. To him, there was nothing strange about seeing a “big person” acting like that – it was just another way to enjoy the park, and one he could enter into and enjoy also.)

Anyway, the new playground has a few attractions specifically geared toward children with physical issues – a zip-line that has a seat and harness instead of just a pole to hang onto, ramp accessibility on the play structure, a two-person swing, and rubber matting over a large part of the playground so wheels don’t get stuck – but it also has a lot of generally fun things for any kid to engage with: slides, ropes, ladders, a sand table/digging area, and so on. We’ve been there twice in the past couple weeks and had a great time on both occasions.

Rondel particularly appreciates the seated zip-line – he hasn’t mastered holding on to the more traditional seat, but he loves zooming back and forth:

img_6200

Seriously, the kid just can’t contain his laughter every time he soars backwards on that seat!

Limerick was a bit more apprehensive of the zip line (he liked it, but at a slower pace), but he loved the sand and the ladders:

img_6217

There is only one small sand area at the park (so it can easily be avoided if you don’t like the mess or if your child has sensory issues with the sand), and it only has one digging shovel – both times we went, we brought our buckets and shovels, and they were much appreciated by the other kids at the park. The other non-rubber areas have wood chips.

They also have a neat piece of equipment I hadn’t seen before: basically a series of rolling plastic tubes underneath a sort of tunnel of railings. The little kids were scooting and crawling over the rollers underneath the railings, and some of the bigger kids were holding onto the railings and “running” on the rollers with a sort of treadmill effect. Limerick went though that one over and over again:

img_6224

I like the random playground equipment that, unlike ladders and slides, doesn’t have an obvious “right way” to be used; I think it facilitates open-ended play and experimentation, and it cuts down on all the parental rules for play that I notice every time I go to the park (at least at parks with attentive, hovering/engaged, middle-class white parents… the parks by our home, in much poorer neighborhoods, are far less parentally supervised).

Anyway, I think the changes at this park were for the better, and we’ll be coming back to play, feed the ducks, and maybe even do story time at the library! If any of you are local, it’d be a great place to meet up and spend a morning getting to know each other.

Posted in family life

christmas apples and brotherly love

Posted on by kristinabean

It all began when Rondel hung an apple ornament on my parents’ Christmas tree (we don’t have space for one, so we are vicariously enjoying theirs and stopped by to help decorate it!).

Limerick noticed this apple, hanging alone on its branch, and found an apple of his own. Diligently, despite the slippery nature of pine branches (especially ones that are already supporting ornaments), he attempted to hook his apple right next to his brother’s, and finally succeeded. He was so proud of himself!

It’s those little things that show me how much Limerick loves and looks up to his big brother. He wants to be like him, to do the things he does, to be with him – even to the point of hanging his little apple on the same branch as Rondel’s big apple. This is the spirit that causes him to greet Rondel with a hug the moment we pick him up from his Sunday School class, or look to Rondel for a reaction whenever he says something silly, hoping to elicit a laugh from his big brother.

When they hit each other, take each other’s toys, and knock down each other’s towers, and the screams and cries fill the air, I don’t despair of their love and future relationship, because I can remember these other things, the moments of appreciation for and enjoyment of each other, that are woven in the very fabric of their lives. With that backdrop, the conflict itself can become a source of greater strength and depth in their relationship, a thread essential to the tapestry of their growing characters.

Posted in family life, Uncategorized

oobleck!

Posted on by kristinabean

After discovering Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss, by sheer random luck at the library last week, and enjoying it on the basis of its story alone for several days, I told Rondel that oobleck was actually something we could make at home. I wasn’t sure if he would want to, but he spent the whole next day (while I was at work) telling my husband how he was going to get to make oobleck with Mommy, so at that point it was going to have to happen!

And happen it did:

img_5927

Oobleck is, in its simplest form, a mixture of cornstarch and water. We added some food coloring to try to make it green like it is in the Dr. Seuss book, but we obviously should have added more! The proportions of the two ingredients have to be just right (approximately a 1:2 water:cornstarch ratio), but when they are, the mixture stops behaving like a liquid or a solid and becomes a non-Newtonian fluid. In other words, the way it responds is based on the force you apply. Let your hand sink down slowly into the bowl and it feels like water; try to pull your hand back out quickly and the substance instantly hardens around you. (For a good overview of the science, check out this article from Cornell).

I spent a lot of time just playing around with it on my own before I could convince the boys to touch it, but after they got over the initial weirdness of it they didn’t want to stop. Rondel in particular enjoyed the odd sensation of it and kept immersing his hands in and pulling them out again over and over and over. In fact, because our air is so dry, I had to keep adding water to the oobleck so he could keep playing with it as long as his interest held – which ended up being about an hour and a half, and would have been longer if we hadn’t desperately needed to put Limerick down for a nap.

Oobleck is definitely a messy activity. Because of the way it sticks to your skin, it’s not going to stay nicely contained in a mixing bowl! However, since it’s just cornstarch, it does hose off of everything fairly easily (much to my neighbors’ relief… the newly returned snowbirds aren’t used to the kids playing in the common area and were worried about the mess). It will also dry out your skin, so it might be good to have lotion on hand for after the clean-up. This was my first time playing with it as well, although I’ve read about it before, and I highly recommend it (and the book!) for both you and your kids!

Posted in family life

happy birthday, limerick!

Posted on by kristinabean

Dear Limerick,

Today, you are two years old.

You are very proud of this fact. You have been telling me for weeks that you are only one now, but that you will be two soon! The prospect of having a number “2” on your birthday cake is also quite tantalizing for you, ever since you found your old number “1” candle in the pantry. I won’t be surprised if you start asking about a number “3” candle in short order, though – you like keeping those numbers together!

It’s hard to remember sometimes that you are just now barely two years old. You speak in long, fluent, clearly understandable sentences; you can write all the letters of the alphabet in both lower and upper case; you can count up to 10 and write most of the numbers; and you have several books memorized to the point where you will sit and “read” them to me instead of the other way around. On top of that, you run, jump, hop, and wrestle right along with your older brother, and climb with incredible balance, coordination, and lack of caution (you’ve almost given me a heart attack several times, up on ladders and bridges higher than my head, but you’ve also made me proud of the way you focus on your goal and keep trying until you accomplish it).

Most of the time you seem like a fairly laid-back little guy – you take the yelling and pushing and bouncing dished out by your three-year-old big brother in good grace (and often provoke it with a big grin on your face!). You try whatever crazy new food I come up with, and usually eat a decent amount of it even if you don’t really like it all that much. If another kid takes the toy you’re playing with, you typically just find another and keep playing and exploring the world around you happily. You banter and laugh and do ridiculous things with me and Rondel and Daddy that make us all fall over laughing together!

However, you can be extremely intense when you’re concentrating on something that you want to be able to do! When you’ve decided that you’re going to open a door or pick up an object (no matter how high the handle or how heavy the item), you won’t give up until you’ve figured out some way to do it all by yourself. “You want to do it! You want to do it!” is the cry we hear all day long, since you’ve picked up Rondel’s habit of referring to yourself as “you” – and while it can lead you to great frustration, your perseverance and desire for independence also empower and strengthen you. “You did it!” I tell you: and the joy on your face at doing it, whatever “it” was, is deep and authentic and beautiful. In the same way, when you play independently, you are often serious and unsmiling, intent on the task at hand, focused on discovering or accomplishing something to which you’ve set your mind.

The physical world around you is your easel and paint, the clay in your hands, tools and raw material for you to work with and shape. You inhabit that world with an ease I still don’t have, absorbing its power and potential with uncanny natural ability, creating, building, making with talent beyond your years. It amazes me to watch you practice and develop those abilities even more, with no more motivation than your own internal joy in the process of it.

You are two years old today, little man with the deep blue eyes and charming smile, two years old, and I can hardly believe how much we’ve already gotten to do together! I can’t wait to see what all the years ahead of you will bring.

I love you,

Mommy

Posted in book lists, family life, Uncategorized

books for the youngest dinosaur lovers

Posted on by kristinabean

When Rondel fell in love with dinosaurs this fall (with Limerick close on his heels, as always), I was at a bit of a loss at first as to how to feed this love with good books. I spent a lot of time searching through recommended book lists online, as well as combing through the library catalog, and ended up bringing home quite a few of various genres, lengths, and reading levels. While I think that all of the books we ended up trying out were good books, some were definitely better than others for a young preschooler and a toddler! Two important aspects that stood out to me were quality illustrations and accurate but accessible information. In other words, mediocre art or dumbed-down language made a book annoying to me and, what mattered more, less captivating or engaging for the boys. Drawings that captured the wonder and drama of the dinosaurs could keep them riveted, and detailed information at an accessible level answered their questions and gave them a foundation for their own imaginative dinosaur play. All of the books we ended up truly loving had at least one if not both of these attributes.

disfordinosaur

D is for Dinosaur: A Prehistoric Alphabet, by Todd Chapman and Lita Judge

This book was one of the best. The alphabet format allowed it to move through a wide range of dinosaur topics (some pages focused on types of dinosaurs, others on specific species, others on basic scientific concepts, and still more on fossil discoveries and paleontologists) without becoming overly long and unwieldy. Each page had a short poem to go with the letter and a well-crafted illustration to accompany the poem, but the unexpected bonus on each page was the extensive sidebar of supplemental information. I never read a full sidebar to the boys, but I almost always grabbed one or two sentences from them to give them more information about the drawings (which were incredibly detailed and thus led to detailed questions from the boys). This book also spent some time on extinction and what happened to the dinosaurs, which helped Rondel understand why he couldn’t just go out and find some real dinosaurs!

monsterbones

Monster Bones: The Story of a Dinosaur Fossil by Jacqui Bailey

This book tells the story of a dinosaur who comes to an untimely end, slowly fossilizes, and is eventually discovered and reassembled. The science is good (one section describes how bone turns into stone at a microscopic level!) and punctuated by humorous thought bubbles from the dinosaur himself; information is broken up into segments and sidebars so that the discerning adult reader can add more or less information and time to the story as is appropriate for the listeners’ attention span at the moment. Sometimes we read them all and sometimes we skipped most of them… But more than any other book we found, this book explained fossilization and described paleontology in a way that a very young child could understand and get excited about. And since it’s rather incomplete, at least in my opinion as a scientist, to just learn about dinosaurs without understanding how we’ve obtained that knowledge, this was an invaluable resource (not to mention that most other dinosaur books will just casually mention “dinosaur fossils” and expect the reader to know what that means). It was an enjoyable book for me to read aloud and surprisingly to me, since I thought it might be a few years beyond them still, it was enjoyable for the boys as well. They even asked for it at bedtime!

In addition to these books, we had a few Eyewitness/Atlas type of books that gave broad overviews of the dinosaur era; they weren’t the sort of thing we could read straight through, but they tended to have excellent illustrations and exposed the boys to the vast spectrum of dinosaur species that existed. We also borrowed the Wee Sing Dinosaurs CD from the library and Rondel begged for it every car ride to the point of tears… but while it was a huge success with him, it drove my husband absolutely crazy! The songs are cute but far from high musical quality, and they will be stuck in your head forever once you’ve heard them a few times…

The rest of the books we brought home were either over the boys’ heads or not really at the same level as the two above. I am looking forward to reading the Magic School Bus books with them when they’re older, as I loved them when I was a kid and the dinosaur one seemed quite good when I skimmed through it this time around, but so far the boys have very little interest in them. It would also be nice to find some decent dinosaur fiction! Rondel doesn’t need the storyline aspect to stay engaged, because the dinosaurs themselves are the draw and poorly done stories detract from that, but I would enjoy it and I believe Limerick would as well (and a book that appeals to both of them is always welcome).

So there is my very short list of excellent recommended books for the very young dinosaur lover! With these, some dinosaur atlases, and some dinosaur figurines (accurate ones of course!), you should be set. Even your one-year-old may go around saying things like “metriacanthosaurus” and correcting you if you don’t pronounce “parasaurolophus” correctly, and your three-year-old should be prepared for months of dinosaur pretend play involving such things as turning into a dinosaur fossil (by being buried under pillows and blankets for “millions of years”), hatching from a dinosaur egg, roaring like a giganotosaurus, being eaten by a T. rex, and ramming his head into everyone like a pachycephalosaurus. (Results not guaranteed).

Posted in family life

at the pumpkin farm

Posted on by kristinabean

This post is a bit out-dated already, since we went to the pumpkin farm in time to get our Halloween pumpkins 🙂 but since we were all hit by the stomach flu starting the evening of our visit, we’ve been a bit distracted by laundry, bathroom-cleaning, and attempting to carry on normal life with lingering fatigue and nausea. I think we’re all better now – but the boys are starting in with sniffles and hoarse voices so I guess we’re in for a round of something new. Ah, fall with toddlers 🙂

The pumpkin farm we visited has a huge variety of attractions and activities available, but we honestly only made it to a few of them; I wanted the boys to be able to just enjoy themselves on their schedule instead of having to rush from thing to thing to thing just to say we did it all. Rondel especially takes some time to acclimate himself to a new place, and I wanted to give him that time so he could enjoy the morning as much as possible.

Unsurprisingly, the first thing they wanted to do was snack 😛 so we spent some time eating, taking in all the sights and sounds and smells around us, and deciding what we should do next. Also unsurprisingly, they both ran to the bounce pad first of all, and since we were there on Tuesday for the farm’s toddler discount day, we didn’t have to worry about a bunch of older kids bouncing around and making it dangerous or intimidating for the little ones. I even got on and jumped around for a bit, regardless of how silly  must have looked with this huge pregnant belly! It was so much fun 🙂

As is typical for each of them, Limerick instantly ran out into the middle of the bounce pad, while Rondel sat with me on the edge for the first five minutes or so watching everyone else, talking to me about life, and occasionally snuggling up to me.

img_5841
Look at those beautiful eyes! He’s probably thinking, “Stop taking pictures and pay attention to me, Mom! I’m talking to you!”

But after that, Rondel joined in as well and had an amazing time jumping, running, rolling, and more; the boys are at an age where their sheer physical energy astounds me, and I’m always looking for fun ways to burn it off – this was definitely a good one.

We spent most of our time here, but did walk around a bit more of the farm and took a little train tour around it as well.

img_5902
Limerick investigating some straw from a hay bale 🙂
img_5905
Some unripe grapes growing along the fence – Rondel and I tried a few anyways 🙂 I’ve enjoyed the dry-sour tang of unripe grapes since childhood.

Finally, on our way out, we stopped to choose a pumpkin for each of the boys. While they each picked one just slightly too large for them to lift independently, Rondel simply asked me to put his in the stroller for him, while Limerick struggled for a long time to lift his off the ground and onto the hay bale. I eventually had to take it away from him because he was falling apart in tears of frustration and we needed to head home for nap time – I felt so bad for him 😦

Overall, though, it was a good experience (though cooler weather would have been nice), and a special part of fall in a place that doesn’t get most of the traditional autumnal highlights.