pink pajama mama

A few months ago, Henry and Annabelle became interested in butterflies. They love to watch them flutter around the park. We read The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and decided we would like to see exactly how a caterpillar would become a butterfly.We ordered some caterpillars and put them in a cage. We fed them and watched the miraculous process of growing, cocooning, and becoming Monarch Butterflies. We fed them oranges and set them free. Henry and Annabelle were fascinated.

We spent weeks exploring the worlds of butterflies. We listened to different kinds of musical instruments and talked about which ones sounded the most like butterflies. We danced with silk veils and with wings on our back and even wore wings around the house, just feeling what it might feel like to be a butterfly.

We made sculptures of caterpillars and butterflies out of different materials like homemade playdough, beeswax, clay, pipe cleaners and tissue paper, and unspun sheep’s wool. We painted caterpillars and butterflies with pastels, fingerpaints, tempera, chalk, and watercolors on different kinds of textured papers, rocks, tissues, even the porch. We watered  and weeded our butterfly bushes, and spent lot’s of time watching the butterflies land on the blooms.

After several weeks of living in butterfly world, we came to Martha’s Vineyard and I gave nets to the kids so they could catch eels and tadpoles in the creek. The immediately went outside to try to catch butterflies at the butterfly bushes, but once they reached the bushes, they decided they’d rather catch blueberries instead. There were only two blueberries left on our bushes as the rest had been eaten by the deer and the wild turkeys. Annabelle helped Henry put one blueberry into his net, and she put one berry into her own net. She quickly ate hers, but Henry kept his to make a pie.

Later in the day, Henry and Annabelle made a berry pie with their Dad. They kneaded the dough, mixed up the berries, and were so thrilled to watch their pie bake. In the end it was beautiful, and a quest for butterflies turned into a quest for blueberries…

I couldn’t help but shake my head in wonder tonight as two-year-old Henry took the whisk from out of the kitchen drawer, stuck it between his legs, and started to ride it around the kitchen making clip-clop noises with his tongue. “Look a’ me, Abelle” he said and continued to gallop and clip-clop. When he says “Abelle”, it sounds like Apple. George was making a grilled cheese sandwich for Abelle while this went on, and he flipped the spatula in the air and caught it. This amazed the kids, so he did it again, this time it landed on the floor with a great clatter. This delighted Henry, and he threw the whisk up in the air. It flew over his head and down the hallway about four feet behind him. (I was just glad it hadn’t landed back on his head, like the big heavy rock he carefully placed on the end of a stick today, flipped it in the air, where it landed right on his head. George immediately picked him up, grabbed the rock, and said, “Let me show you what I’m going to do with this rock. I’m going to throw it so far and say don’t hurt Henry!” Henry loved this.)But back to the whisk. It’s next incarnation was a violin. He placed the handle under his chin, picked up one of Annabelle’s Hannah Montana playing cards, and used it for the bow, strumming it across the “strings” of the whisk, while making a humming ‘violin’ noise. I said, “What are you playing Henry?” and he said, “Vi’lin,”: and kept singing softly to himself.And the last transformation of the whisk, the most obvious I suppose, was into a weapon designed to clobber Annabelle over the head. She dodged the blow (her reflexes get quicker and quicker every day), but he managed to swoop the whisk through her hair. He was overjoyed at this and the chase began, both of them giggling and laughing and running in circles around the house before getting distracted and putting on George’s shoes, like giant boats on his tiny feet. This impaired his chasing and I found the whisk later under the dining room table.Annabelle quickly moved on too. She handles his clobbering amazingly well. We’re trying to train him to give high fives instead of hitting. Sometimes he just feels compelled to clobber something–usually Annabelle. She has taken to calling him Mark Benry for some unknown reason.The other day I told her we needed to cut her bangs because she looked like a ragamuffin. She said, “a rafmuffin?” I said “a ragamuffin.” She said “a rabbit muffin?” I said “a ragamuffin!” We went back and forth for a while. She then told me this story: “Someone ate a duck in my family when they were 15. But I had a little duck and I wouldn’t let anyone eat it. I kept it in a cage, and fed it, and took care of it, and let it out in the water.” I have no idea where she got this story from, except it seems similar to the story of Ping, that little chinese duck.It never ceases to amaze me the things they pick up when you think they’re not paying attention. Like me explaining to Annabelle that when humans are very tiny in their mommy’s tummies, they have tails (I’ve been wishing I had a big fluffy tail lately), and a few days later, we were at the ER again after pulling a tick off Henry, and we were talking about being in the hospital when Henry was born, and Henry said, “I had a tail in Mommy’s tummy!” He then proceeded to shake his invisible tail. He’s incredible, when he’s not squirting himself in the face with kitchen cleaner–thank goodness it was non-toxic.These two are a barrel of monkeys. I love watching how they play, the things their minds concoct, their beautiful sweet sweet world. 

Well, well, well, I was sitting in the car in the parking lot at the beach, trying to open Annabelle’s squeezy yogurt. I spent about five minutes trying to open it like a lady, ripping it with my fingers. I was now resorting to trying to open it like an animal, sinking my teeth into it and tearing, but no, it wasn’t budging. As I was sitting there, I felt something hit me in the back of the head, then I felt a spattering of something else all over me.”What in the world was that?” I asked, running my fingers through an inch of goop on the crown of my head. I heard a diabolical laugh from my two year old in the back seat.  ”Funny, Mama!” he said.”Henry!!” I said, looking down adn seeing that he had crumpled up his own yogurt squeezy, made a ball out of it and threw it at my head. “Henry! That’s not funny! You don’t throw things at mama!” My response delighted him. “Mama! Funny!” he said again, laughing and laughing.George had to stick his head out of the car so the kids wouldn’t see him laughing. I guess it could have been worse.  I could have been wearing a silk dress instead of my swimming suit. Or I could have had my nice hair destroyed, instead of my hair sticking out in every direction from my yoga class and the beach.This is my life right now. Spending the last two hours trying to get two giggling wrestling monkeys to sleep. Everytime I tried to get stern with Henry and tell him to go to sleep instead of doing flips over my legs and laughing hysterically, he gathers his energy and shouts, “No! Mama!” Annabelle tried to help me by telling him to settle down, and he says, “No Babelle! Throw out window!” When he gets really mad and is prevented from hitting, he threatens to throw Annabelle out a window.A two hour bedtime!! By the time they finally succumb, I’m so tired and out of my mind I can’t accomplish anything!But I have to say, I love every minute of it.  Even when Annabelle belches like a frat boy in front of Carly Simon, even when I notice the joyful artwork on our newly painted walls, even when Henry takes off running with my $20 lipstick trying to get his little pudgy finger in there to squish it before I take it away from him, and yes, even when I’m combing pink yogurt out of my hair, I love it.