cat named pig

A few months ago I decided to start a new family tradition: Pizza Friday. I love that I can just do that, just start a new tradition whenever I want, because I am one of two adults supposedly in charge here. There’s a lot of power in being a so-called adult (and most of the time I use my power for good, as in the case of Pizza Friday).

It’s a very convenient tradition, given that we all love pizza and by the end of the week no one feels like cooking (or hearing Siena yelp, “NO! NOT [insert any food I might have made that is not pizza/quesadillas/pasta with butter and Parmesan]!!” when she sees what we’re having for dinner).

Pizza Friday has been a great success so far. (How could it not be? The name itself contains two of the nicest words in the English language.) Sometimes we order in, sometimes we go out, sometimes we make our own, and occasionally we just heat up some frozen pizzas and call it a night. This week we had Matt’s sister, her husband, and our sweet baby nephew coming over so we were scanning menus trying to decide what to order.

Matt read a list of toppings out loud, one of which was anchovies.

Siena [making a face]: “Eew — anchovies!”

Matt: “Siena, do you even know what anchovies are?”

Siena: “Yeah, they’re gross bugs!”

Never one to be left out of a conversation, Elliot pipes up: “Yeah, they gross BUMBLEBEES!”

I decided it was time to translate a few frequently-used family expressions into plain English, for anyone who might want to converse with any of us in the near future. As Elliot talks more and more (often without stopping for air, it would seem), we seem to be developing our own local dialect.

1. Bah-do Booty

-Noun, verb, adjective, salutation, etc. Can really be used as any part of speech, in any context.

Origin: Unknown. Somewhere in the depths of Elliot’s crazy two-year-old mind, we guess.

Synonyms: bah-do BAH-do booty; booty bah-do; and bah-do bah-do beak).

Definition: This phrase does not actually mean anything. Yet we find it inserted into almost every conversation, usually to uproarious laughter. (Bonus points if you are talking to a nice elderly lady at the gym and she asks you a nice simple question like, “How old are you?”)

Usage: See previous. Also works in response to any other perfectly normal question or as a call-and-response chant. (Siena: “Bah-DO!” Elliot: “Boo-TY!” and so on and so on, forever.)

2. Old Maybe

Elliot’s name for the clothing store, Old Navy. Siena adopted it because she thought it was funny; I have started using it because I think it pretty accurately describes that particular shopping experience. Maybe I’ll get a cute  sweater and some socks for the kids, or a puffy chicken costume for under $20 — maybe I won’t. Maybe Elliot will make it through an entire outing there without knocking over that fake-dog mannequin in the front — maybe he won’t. Maybe I’ll go stark raving mad if I have to listen to another one of their commercials — maybe I won’t. Old Maybe.

3.  Bebot

What I still call the tea pot even though Siena has been pronouncing it correctly for, oh, four years now.

4. Monkey Bar

Nope, not those things at the playground. Monkey bars in our house are what a normal person might call a cereal bar or granola bar. Another Elliot-ism. (Commonly heard used in the following phrase, “NO! Not the ONION monkey bar!” as shrieked by Siena when you go to offer her a Trader Joe’s Fig Bar. Apparently the Fig cartoon looks like an onion to her. And apparently it’s not on her ever-changing list of Top 5 Acceptable Foods.)

Feel free to print this and keep it in your pocket for reference next time you come over. Of course there are many other strange expressions and uniquely, uh, customized pronunciations in our little spin on the English language, but this makes a good starting point.

The other night we went to Fat Lorenzo’s for pizza. It was crowded, as always, in the tiny little entrance/waiting area/gelateria, but somehow we lucked into a few chairs. Elliot, however, had no use for the chairs as they interfered with his plans to run around like he was being chased by angry bees. After about thirty seconds of that — enough time to bump every single person in the area at least twice, and by “area” I could mean either the space we were in or a certain “area” of the anatomy and the sentence would be accurate either way — I pulled him onto my lap and whispered that I had a story for him.

He leaned in and miraculously held still while I made up the following cautionary tale, in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm but with a happy ending:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Elliot. He was at a restaurant with his family and he was acting very wild, running all over and bumping into people. And nobody liked that. Then the door opened and a man came in with a very large backpack. He scooped Elliot up and stuffed him into the backpack, then zipped it shut and took him far, far away. When he unzipped it again, Elliot looked around and said,

“Where are my mama and my daddy and my sister Siena? Please, take me back to them!”

The man said, “I will take you back to them, on one condition. You must not run around in the restaurant ever again. You must go back and sit nicely, and then you must eat your pizza nicely when it comes. Do you promise?”

Elliot promised to be good, so the man brought him back to his mama and daddy and sister, and they all ate a huge pizza and lived happily ever after.

Laugh as you may (yes, this is why I stick to non-fiction in my writing), Elliot loved this story and asked me to repeat it five more times before we were seated. Tonight at dinner, he asked me to tell it again. Siena laughed when she heard it and Matt, well, Matt probably thought it was dumb. (To which I would say, “Yeah? Dumb? It got him to sit still didn’t it? So is my story dumb, or is it dumb like a FOX?” Or something. I haven’t worked it out yet.)

And then. . . Elliot announced that he wanted to tell a story. The following is an approximation of what he told, minus a whole bunch of adorable and hilarious that doesn’t quite translate to the written paragraph:

One upon a time, there was a girl named NANA [this is what he calls Siena]. And she real bad and a big man came and put her in he backpack. And threw her in the GARBAGE. And Nana say, “Where mine mama and daddy and mine little brother EL-LI-OT?” And he taked her out of the garbage and she seed her mama and daddy and her brother El-li-ot and dey all eat pizza.

He totally needs to take over this blog. The GARBAGE twist puts my version of the story to shame.

I feel like I fell asleep in mid-July, woke up long enough to hit “snooze” in early August, blinked, rubbed my eyes, and now it’s almost October. In other words, whoa. Slow down there, Time.

On the other hand, I’m surprised how quickly we’ve settled into our new fall routine — it feels like we’ve been doing the whole elementary school thing for much longer than three weeks. Siena loves kindergarten, which we expected, but she also gets herself ready every morning without any coaxing, hand-wringing or muttered cursing on my part, which no one expected. For the first time in our lives — and for once I am not exaggerating — we seem to be consistently getting out the door on time and on speaking terms with each other. Preschool last year, though only three days a week, was much more challenging in this regard.

So I spend my days alternately shaking my head in bewilderment at how summer can be over already and crossing my fingers that the mornings continue to go this smoothly, that we’re not just experiencing a “honeymoon period” where everything to do with school is great and easy.

Meanwhile, Siena and Elliot continue to grapple with the notion of time in their own ways.

Elliot wakes up every morning (earlier and earlier, I might add, which makes no sense when you consider that the sun is rising later and later) and announces, “I wake up at TEN MINUTES again.” We don’t know whether he means after ten minutes, or that he slept for ten hours, or that he’s been awake for ten minutes already and WHERE’S MY CEE-YAY-YUL? But he is emphatic and consistent enough with this phrase that now we just respond, “Oh, you woke up at ten minutes again, huh? Well, how about some cereal?” and that seems to go over pretty well.

Siena actually has a pretty realistic sense of what time of day things take place, what day of the week it is, and even how long it will be until something happens. Sometimes. Other times, her flair for drama interferes with her ability to comprehend. Or to be more accurate, she chooses drama over comprehension, because the drama is, I don’t know, louder.

For example, the following conversation takes place in some form several times a day:

“Mama, when are we going to [insert any fun thing here -- visit Avery in South Dakota/see Beauty and the Beast the musical/get my driver's license/eat candy, etc.]?”

“Well, today [is Wednesday/is in September/you are five/it's not even dinner time yet] and you’ll do that [next weekend/around Christmas time/when you're sixteen/maybe for dessert], so, you know, not right this second.”

“WHAT?!?! You mean I’m NEVER going to [see Avery EVER AGAIN/see a musical EVER/drive a car EVER in my LIFE/eat candy EVER AGAIN]?!?!? This is TERRIBLE!!!”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I said.”

*Sigh.*

And that’s exactly what I would say, over and over, if I were hanging out in your living room right now. Side note: why does my blog voice sound so Valley Girl sometimes? But, like, seriously, you guys, it’s all just kind of hitting me now. Kindergarten.

Maybe it’s because we had so much going on the week she started school (travel, a wedding, a new city’s public transportation to explore), or maybe it’s because she got sick last week and had to miss two days (no, it was not H1N1, but don’t think I didn’t ask). Or maybe it’s because she just hops on the bus so casually every morning, like she’s been doing it for years.

Whatever the reason, it really just hit me tonight that Siena has started kindergarten. I have a kindergartner.

A kindergartner who carries a backpack,

who gets taller by the minute, who picked out an awesome sparkly Super Girl t-shirt to wear on the first day of school,

who hugged us all tightly at the bus stop that first morning but then today just gave me the quickest of squeezes and a slightly exasperated “Mo-OM!” as I tried to hold on a second longer.

…..

Which, I guess, pretty well sums up this whole experience.

…..

…..

I’m trying to stop holding on so much, I promise. But, you guys, it’s like, totally hard to let go.

…..

(I shouldn’t have used that title, as I now have the incredibly grating Little Einsteins theme song in my head and probably will for the rest of the day.)

But the fact is, Siena and I are on a mission this week. Mission: Ratatouille.

We have the Pixar movie and Siena’s been on quite a kick of watching it during “Rest Time” every day lately. (Her Rest Time this summer is Elliot’s Nap Time, both of which could just as easily be called Mama Needs A Break Time, but that doesn’t sound as nice. So Elliot sleeps and Siena watches a movie and/or asks me for a snack every 6 seconds, and we all just chill out a little [during the moments when I am not fixing snacks]. It’s great.)

Anyway, Mission: Ratatouille came about when Siena asked me, after her umpteenth viewing of Remy’s culinary triumph, if she could try ratatouille sometime.

My inner monologue jumped into hyperspeed with excitement at this request. [OMG my daughter wants to try something new*! A dish with multiple different ingredients visibly touching each other! And it's made of vegetables that are in season at this very moment! We even have most of them in our fridge!]

I did a little happy dance and got busy researching recipes. Since there’s only a slim chance that she will actually eat this once she sees how very much the ingredients all touch each other, I knew my only hope was to find a recipe resembled the elegant ratatouille served in the movie. And then I found this recipe at Smitten Kitchen. Perfect.

I’m off to the kitchen to start slicing veggies. Place your bets now on whether or not Siena will allow a single bite to cross her lips tonight. (The smart money’s on NO, but hey, I’m excited to eat it.)
…..

*Siena has become quite the picky eater this summer. Two or three years ago, we were those annoying parents who bragged about their toddler eating sushi and whatnot, but now she gives us flak for anything outside the holy trinity of pasta/sandwiches/Mexican food (and even the Mexican food better not “look weird” or contain too many ingredients). Sigh.

[Update: The ratatouille turned out great -- I thought. It resembled the dish in the movie and it was a great way to use up some of the veggies we got from our friends' CSA box, which they asked us to pick up while they're out of town. Siena, however, was devastated when she saw it and realized that is was just. vegetables. It turned out she had thought the disc of parchment paper Remy lifts from the dish in the movie was a tortilla, so she had been expecting something very different. That still doesn't address what she thought the obviously vegetable-looking things were under the "tortilla," or why she thought she wouldn't mind all those different things touching each other. It turned out she did mind, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Elliot, on the other hand, ate a couple bites quite happily before he realized that his sister deemed this food unfit to eat; then he wanted nothing to do with it. Fortunately, I had accidentally opened a much nicer bottle of wine than we normally drink (read: more expensive than $4; I hadn't realized Matt had been saving it) and was so busy saying things like, "Wow, this wine is really good. Is this from Trader Joe's?" to care whether the kids were eating the ratatouille. And thus concludes the saga of What We Had For Dinner Last Night. The end.]

[In the car, on the way to preschool, completely out of the blue]:

Siena: “Mama, how would you get a firefly clean if it had been skunked?”

Yeah.

That one had me stumped, too.

So, if you’re having a really slow day at work and you just got done reading Part 1 of this little blogathon and you’re still around, here is Part 2.

Siena had started crying over a reference to dying in the song “Dixie” at the end of Little House on the Prairie. I mean, crying. Sobbing. And then she told me she didn’t want to hear the song lyric about dying because she doesn’t want to die. And she knows she is going to die one day and she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to go in the ground.

It was at this point that my eyes threatened to overflow with tears.

She went on, “I don’t want you and Daddy and Elliot to die. And what if you and Daddy die while Elliot and I are still little and we have to get new parents?”

Before I could swallow the giant lump in my throat and formulate some sort of response, she kept going:

“And Grandma is really old. And Grandpa and the other Grandma and Grandpa. They’re going to die soon because they’re old and I don’t want them to die because I love them.”

[Apologies here to my parents and parents-in-law. It's not like Matt and I regularly discuss your old age or decrepitude in front of the kids or anything. We think you are all very young and healthy and we look forward to many years of asking you to babysit, which we know takes energy -- we wouldn't ask you if we thought you were too "old."]

The conversation continued in this vein for some time. I choked back my own tears and did my best to reassure Siena, without lying to her, that all her loved ones would be around for quite some time and that she herself had many years of playing princess (and reading more age-appropriate bedtime stories?) before she needed to reflect on her own mortality.

But when I had finally closed her door, I walked upstairs to where Matt was watching videos on Comedy Central and burst into tears as I relayed the conversation to him.

…..

A few days later, I came across this post in the NY Times Motherlode blog. And I thought about this reluctance to discuss hard subjects with our kids, as I had just experienced so vividly. Matt and I have always taken the approach that it’s best to be open and honest about everything that comes up. (At the same time, it’s not like we’ve gone looking for opportunities to introduce topics such as death or where babies come from — but we’ve agreed not to shy away from honest answers if our kids ask the questions.)

So, while I wanted to lie to her (”You’re not going to die! And Daddy and I will never die! We’ll always be here for you!”), I didn’t.

I told her that everyone dies, but most people live for a long time first and get to do many great and exciting things. I told her that when I think about dying, I remind myself of all the neat things I get to do first. Of all the wonderful people we have in our lives, friends and family we get to spend time with.

I talked about my Grandpa Charles, whose funeral she remembers attending, and Matt’s Grandpa Butch, who passed away when she was Elliot’s age. I told her that, yes, it was very sad and we miss them very much. But they were old, much older than her grandparents are now. They had seen wars and careers and children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They had traveled. They had had great adventures. And we still tell stories about them, so they are still with us in our memories. And when someone dies, that’s what you do — you keep them with you in your memory, in your heart.

Siena seemed somewhat reassured by all this (or maybe just too tired to keep talking). But I came away full of doubts and second-guessing. Maybe I should have just gone for easy reassurance, for now, and saved all the honesty for when she’s old enough to handle it better? (When is old enough to handle it better? I don’t want to die! I don’t want my loved ones to die! Agh! Where’s the chocolate?)

Maybe being matter-of-fact is not the best way to handle these hard topics with my sensitive daughter. But she’s perceptive, too — maybe if I hid too much she would see that I was being evasive and then the whole thing would be even more stressful for her. I don’t know.

All I know is, I went with my gut, which has been responsible for pretty much every other parenting decision I’ve made so far, from deciding to get pregnant in the first place to making waaay too many Wall-e cupcakes for Elliot’s second birthday. And while some decisions have been better (having the kids) than others (going up a pants size in a week), it feels better to me to be as honest-yet-reassuring as possible rather than hiding grandma’s china out of sight and praying my kids never think to ask where my grandmas are.

I guess my question to anyone still reading, if you can prop your eyelids open long enough to type a response, is what do you think when it comes to talking about death with kids? And seriously, where’s the chocolate beer?