Beauty Unsurpassed

I just came home from the grocery store, and a great Ani Difranco song (Half-Assed) was playing. As I pitched down the hill and rounded the corner onto my street, Ani sang the chorus:

Just show me a moment that is mine
Its beauty blinding and unsurpassed
Make me forget every moment that went by
And left me so half-hearted
Cuz i felt it so half-assed

and there before me, in the slanting late afternoon sunlight, were my girls playing happily together. Yes indeed.

A piece of me is missing!

Today I dropped Lily off at Camp Downer (named for its location in Downer State Forest, not for the effect it has on campers!) - a major milestone. We've been apart for five nights before, when I went on work trips or Fritz and I attended Courtney's high school graduation, but we were connected via phone, family and friends. I was actually sick to my stomach as we made the turn into the camp, a mix of my own dread at leaving my girl with strangers and a reaction to Lily's own palpable anxiety. Lily doesn't know a soul at Camp Downer - a point that was driven home for me when we discovered that half of her cabin mates are good friends who planned this adventure together. Why didn't I think of that? So I found myself playing social director, pulling Lily aside and suggesting that the friendly looking girl on the bunk adjacent to hers looked like she wanted to find a pal. I'm so worried about that queen bee and wannabee stuff...hold on, gotta go breathe in a paper bag for a minute. No, no, no. It's going to be fine. Lily is the most outgoing person I know - able to make fast friends with adults and children alike.

It was fun going back to Camp Downer - I was a camper there for four years - must have been 1980-1983. They clearly haven't done a thing to the cabins - I was tempted to visit my old haunts and check for familiar grafitti. Fritz had to work today, so the girls and I made the trek alone. Hazel wanted to stay - she would have gladly traded places with her very anxious sister. Here's a shot of Lily and Hazel in the bunk - I think their faces say it all:
And here's one of the little angel when I asked her to pretend she was happy to be there:

I promised Lily I wouldn't leave until she was comfortable, and sure enough, I was one of the last parents to leave. What a spectacle, in my tie dye shirt, digging through the minivan for a snack for my "starving" daughter. The only thing I could find - the dregs of a bag of trail mix of unknown origins - just didn't cut it next to the buffet of treats the other girls had. Tomorrow I'll put together a care package to make up for the shameful lack of snacks I brought along for her today. And on Wednesday the camp will post some pictures - I'll be eagerly awaiting some proof that my girl is doing okay.

What to Do?

As of now, I have no child care provider. I have known for a week and a half that my provider was closing, and have even visited two programs, but I feel paralyzed to be in this position again. This will make the fifth child care situation in Hazel's four short years of life - not counting the piecemeal care I have had to use when my regular providers closed for family health emergencies. Here is a brief summary of our child care history:

• Nice elderly lady next door. Pros: good food, $5/day; cons: antique toys, soap operas .
• Home based provider #1- good program, nutritious meals, good philosophical match...until her husband was diagnosed with an aggressive malignant brain tumor (39 yrs old). Complicated situation, but a simple decision after I arrived to find my 2 yr old shrieking, shut in a dark, windowless bathroom.
• Home based provider #2 - Constantly on the road, dragging Hazel on errands. Became a real issue when Lily got off the school bus and had no one to meet her.
• Licensed Center - another parent referred to it as feeling like you are dropping your kid off at Walmart, complete with teenagers in belly shirts. Pulled the girls when Hazel started throttling her dolls and saying "YOU GO TO TIME OUT!" through clenched teeth.
• Registered Home #3 - Nice environment, good curriculum. There was spam - yes, the mystery meat in can - and I was working up the courage to discuss this with my provider when unbelievably her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor (34 yrs old). Could my kids be carcinogenic? She wisely took time off when she needed to tend to her family and her own needs (as opposed to locking toddlers in dark rooms), but this creates financial hardship, so she understandably found steady employment with benefits.

So here I am again. Gunshy thanks to my horrific track record, finding the knowledge I have as the director of a child care resource and referral agency to be more of a liability than an asset. If I didn't know what quality care looked like, I wouldn't have all these nagging doubts. I'd be like every other parent with no options, find the least problematic place to leave my "baby" (Lily now attends the after school program, which simplifies things), and try not to think about it. I half-jokingly asked Fritz if he'd like to be a stay at home dad for a while. Not sure we could swing it (actually pretty sure we can't), but it's only for a year until H is in kindergarten...Maybe a parent cooperative?

I don't want to rush my girls' childhoods, but I can't wait to be done with the child care conundrum. This system needs help!

Oh say can you see?

One of my paternal inheritances is a love of (and sensitive eye for) wild animals. In recent years, I've become much more attuned to birds. I'm not a bird watcher, really, more of a bird noticer. I think it got started during the weeks following my younger daughter's birth. She was born May 11th, 2004, just as Vermont starts to come alive and birds appear from points south. Three days after Hazel's birth, we moved into a house along a river, with a beautiful maple tree just outside our bedroom window. During my maternity leave, two families of birds moved in and out of a single nest high in the tree - robins and cedar waxwings. I loved the waxwings. The following spring they came through, kind of an old home week. I was hoping that would become an annual ritual, but we haven't been graced with a visit since.

Ever since spotting a pair of bald eagles soaring along the Connecticut River a few miles from our house, I've become comically hyper-vigilant about eagles. The joke in our house is that bird identifications start at bald eagle and work back from there. A couple days ago I saw a large bird quite high up and there was a gleam to its head, and well...you can guess. It was actually a great blue heron - my favorite bird of all, and a sort of totem animal for me. On several other occasions, my "eagles" have turned out to be crows. Oh well, it gives my husband something to tease me about.

Misidentifying birds seems to run in our family, as my stepdaughter famously asked her dad if the bat that he'd chased out of her room was a great blue heron (she was 3). I hate it when great blue herons get in the house!

Good Morning Sunshine! No? Oh.

So no rays of sun awoke me this morning, but I had a happy awakening anyway, thanks to these two:

Jasper, 90 pounds of curly brown love - mama's boy.

Hazel, 33 pounds of chatty happiness - mama's girl (one of 'em, anyway).

Most mornings involve a nose poke from the big brown one, Jasper. Some lucky days include full on cuddling. Jasper waits until "dad" vacates, then moves in. He likes to be spooned. Haze, the blue eyed beauty, has been my joybaby since the moment she emerged, red and velvety, more than four years ago. She is a love-bug, but does not always permit snuggling. On more than one occasion when I think I'll cuddle her to sleep at night, I've been dismissed with a sweet but firm "you can go now, mama." So this morning, when she curled up beside me with her head on my chest and drifted back to sleep, I was in nirvana.

No Stones in my Pocket

Just returned from picking up my CSA basket for the week, and it put me in a much better mood. I feel a bit bad for Maryellen, the farmer/attorney upon whom I unleashed a torrent of woe and angst. Next week I'll let her know how her cucumbers turned my world around. If I can't have summer sun, I can enjoy the tastes of summer - cukes and tomatoes plucked from the vine this morning.

I'm cooking up a curry with the potatoes from last week's basket, and roasting the beautiful broccoli. Oh, and my love just delivered a glass of wine. A very, very good man.

Later, I think I will tie dye. Or maybe bead. Something creative!

Miss Misery

I am about 3/4 through my vacation, and after hoping, meditating, and even briefly finding Jesus, I have given up on having any sunny days. So my vision of mountain biking, hiking, kayaking and lounging on the beach has been replaced with a sullen retreat into a fantasy novel given to me by my pal Z, The Fifth Sacred Thing, which is basically new age porn. Seriously, the volume and variety of sex in this book borders on ridiculous.

Oh, and my child care is closed again, so I'm housebound with two loud, energetic kiddos. I tried playing Susie homemaker today - I vacuumed and steamed the rugs, and made cookies with the girls. All the while, I feel a sense of injustice rising in me like the muddy river outside my window. I am so miserable. This is how I feel:

I have also developed a theory about the 10 day forecast on weather.com. Everytime I've checked it over the past week or so, there has been 7 or 8 days of rain, with some tantalizing "partly cloudy" days dangled like rewards at the end. Those 7-8 days just keep creeping ahead, so we never reach the promised sun. Maybe they are trying to keep people from pulling a Virginia Woolf. Or maybe the joke is that we actually think we can forecast the weather that far in advance. They probably have computer models for a week or so, and for the other 3 days they just spin a wheel that has a variety of options.

Something's gotta give!