My 7-year-old really wanted to decorate for the holiday. So, although I’ve never been one for fake spiderwebs and seasonal flags and Mylar balloons, I made some concessions this year.

First, we put those fake spiderwebs all over our home’s entry.

Then we got to crafting. I bought about 15 small pieces of felt (25¢ each) at the craft store yesterday, white and black puffy fabric paint, some tacky glue, and a bag of googly eyes.  The boys and I sat at the kitchen table today for about an hour and a half cutting shapes out of felt and gluing them together. It was really fun! Asher had a hard time working the scissors, but liked the part with the glue!

Lucas made a ghost, skull, vampire bat, orange goblin, and Dracula. I made a bat, three jack-o’-lanterns, haunted house and a witch. Ian came home from work  in time to join us, and he made the light orange ghoulie in the middle. I wish I had a good picture of the piece of yellow felt that Asher completely covered with googly eyes! But such things are fleeting with a 2-year-old around. All the googly eyes ended up on the kitchen floor.

When they are dry, I’ll thread them and hang them.

Much better than any preprinted cardboard decorations from the dollar store, I think!

With the change of seasons, it’s time to move the warm-weather clothing aside to make way in drawers and closets for cold-weather clothing. I spent a couple of hours yesterday doing just that with Asher’s things.

This might be a rather tedious task to perform several times a year, except it makes me feel connected to moms and families all over the world whenever I do it. It doesn’t even matter what hemisphere you’re in. Chances are, if you have kids, you also are busy buying, making, sorting, evaluating, mending, packing, and unpacking belongings for your children because they’re always growing.

Will this fit next summer? Is this shirt still nice enough to save for the baby? Who has a child the right age to get more use out of these boots? Do these pants go into the donation box? These questions are being asked everywhere.

I pulled lots of 18 to 24 month clothes out of Asher’s dresser and filled a big shopping bag and a box full of clothing we no longer need. Some pieces are handmade by Grandma Sydney, including little matching Hawaiian shirts and shorts sets. I’m very happy I know a little boy who will grow into these things soon enough. It feels good to pass them on to dear friends.

We are rather lucky in that we have a mountain of things in our garage waiting patiently for Asher to grow into them. I pulled out the 3T box yesterday and pawed through it. The pants are all too big still, but many of the shirts will be useful this winter and beyond. It was a little like shopping for new things—kind of exciting in that way. But it was more like rediscovering old friends. I sometimes remember who gave the item to Lucas, or who made it for him, or where we were when we bought it. Even some of the stains are familiar. As I pulled out items from the box that was nearly as tall as Lucas is, memories of younger Lucas flooded my mind. It was bittersweet.

Ian has occasionally chafed at the amount of space all this STUFF takes up in his garage. But I know he’s happy to be saving the money because we don’t have to outfit our toddler from scratch. I’m so grateful to have the hand-me-downs, to use them again for Asher. I really like that these clothes get an extended life. What about the things that don’t yet fit? They go back into the garage to wait a bit longer.

Physical play always results in giggles.

Wake up, don your superhero cape over your pajamas, and go outside to dig.

I’m not feeling too great about how things went with Lucas yesterday afternoon. I feel like I ought to know better. I ought to have defused the situation before it escalated into the fight it was. Thing is, Lucas’s behavior is basically bipolar lately. He swings rapidly from adorable “I’m a flower fairy and my magic flower wand will cause all your flowers to bloom beautifully, Mommy” to … well … what I described last night. He went from being totally fine and companionable to hitting me in zero seconds flat.

To all of you who read that and sympathized with me (well, or with Lucas), thank you. I can sum up parenthood by saying this: every day, I wake up and try, try again.

Quoting from Your Six-Year-Old to validate my own experience and remember what’s going on with him:

“Your typical Sx-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game. Whatever he does, he does just the opposite just as readily. In fact, sometimes just the choice of some certain object or course of action immediately triggers an overpowering need for its opposite.

“The Six-year-old is wonderfully complex and intriguing, but life can be complicated for him at times, and what he needs most in the world is parents who understand him. For Six is not just bigger and better than Fve. He is almost entirely different. He is different because he is changing, and changing rapidly. Though many of the changes are for the good—he is, obviously, growing more mature, more independent, more daring, more adventurous—this is not necessarily an easy time for the child.”
…

“One of the many things that makes life difficult for him is that, as earlier at Two-and-a-half, he seems to live at opposite extremes. The typical Six-year-old is extremely ambivalent. He wants both of any two opposites and sometimes finds it almost impossible to choose.”
…

“One of the Six-year-old’s biggest problems is his relationship with his mother. It gives him the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain. Most adore their mother, think the world of her, need to be assured and reassured that she loves them. At the same time, whenever things go wrong, they take things out on her.”
…

“At Five, Mother was the center of the child’s universe. At Six, things have changed drastically. The child is now the center of his own universe. He wants to be first and best. He wants to win. He wants to have the most of everything.

“Six is beginning to separate from his mother. In fact, it is this quite natural move toward more independence and less of the closeness experienced at Five that makes him so aggressive toward her at times. On the other hand, his effort to be free and independent apparently causes him much anxiety. He worries that his mother might be sick or might even die, that she won’t be there when he gets home from school.  And in his typically opposite-extreme way, one minute he says he loves his mother and the next minute he may say he hates her.

“It’s not hard to understand why this strong emotional warmth toward and love for his mother, which occurs at the same time he is trying to learn to stand on his own feet, causes him much confusion and unhappiness. It is fair to say that Six is typically embroiled with his mother. He depends on her so much, and yet part of him wishes he didn’t.”
…

“But, rather sadly and touchingly, often when the child has been at his worst, once his temper calms down he will ask, “Even though I’ve been bad, you like me, don’t you?” Or, somewhat inappropriately, at the end of a very bad day a child will ask his mother, “Have I been good today?” It is an interesting fact about child behavior that the less praise and credit a child deserves, the more he wants and needs. The very difficult child needs a great deal of assurrance that he has been good. 

“We must remember that a Six-year-old isn’t violent, loud, demanding, and often naughty just to be bad. There are so many things he wants to do and be that his choices are not always fortunate. He is so extremely anxious to do well, to be the best, to be first, to be loved and praised, that any failure is very hard for him. 

“He is, part of the time, demanding and difficult because he is still, even at this relatively mature age, extremely insecure, and his emotional needs are great. If, with tremendous patience and effort, you can meet these needs, nobody can be a better, warmer, more enthusiastic companion than your Six-year-old girl or boy.”
…

“The child of this age is really a very vulnerable little person, very sensitive emotionally, especially when he is being good. Very small failures, comments, or criticisms hurt his feelings. But if he is being naughty, once he gets started on a bad tack, he may seem almost impervioust to punishment. That is why he needs so very much protection and understanding from his parents.”

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2008/02/plastic_toys2.html 

I’ve been doing a lot of crawling around on the Interwebs lately. I’ve been learning about some icky stuff that they put in … well … everything, but in particular in children’s toys. Like teething toys. That babies. Put in. Their. Mouths.

Ian, who is smarter than me—or at least better at adding 2 and 2 together—just asked me, “What about pacifiers?”

Oh crap. 

Dear God, 
Please, PLEASE do not let me find out that creepy dangerous chemicals are in the pluggies that I lovingly place in my baby’s eager, sucking mouth multiple times every day. I really cannot live without pluggies. They are the life raft I leap to regularly to save my sinking sanity. They are the balm to my weary, hounded soul. I cannot make it without pacifiers. My nipples won’t survive. My jangled nerves will jangle their last.Please. Please.

Synchronicity is a bitch. Ya know? Just last Friday I bought a book called Toxic Sandbox (http://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Sandbox-Environmental-Toxins-Childrens/dp/039953363X/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203382169&sr=1-8). So far, I’ve read the lead chapter and I’m halfway through the mercury chapter. Guess what the next chapter is! Yep. Plastics, including phthalates. 

It seems phthalates are implicated in smaller scrotums, smaller penises, undescended testicles, reduced sperm count, reduced testosterone, testicular caner, liver cancer, and damaged kidneys IN RODENTS. It seems that these chemicals “feminize” babies and small children. The EU has banned products containing phthalates.

So, my gut reaction right now is to go buy a lead testing kit and to throw away every single plastic item in my home. Not sure how much will be left in my home if I do this. Dammit. 

See? There IS a reason (beyond aesthetics) I’ve been asking for and buying wooden toys for my boys for years.

Last year, I managed to throw together a tiny Solstice celebration. At the last minute, I invited Theresa and Greg and Phoebe over for dinner. I decorated the table with a gold lamé and served only yellow foods (butternut squash soup, oranges, summer squashes cut into disks and sautéed, chicken with a lemon sauce, sparkling cider, and probably other stuff I don’t remember). We had a lovely, silly time, subtly worshipping the sun and its return.

Today I don’t have any such thing planned, but maybe I’ll go to the grocery store for some oranges or something.

Over the course of this month, we’ve been observing Advent, à la Waldorf schools and Anthroposophists rather than Catholics/Christians. The difference is slight, however. We have an Advent Wreath (a real evergreen wreath) and in the center we placed a Celtic-style candleholder that was a gift from Flonkbob (and Chilipantz?) many years ago. Although the candleholder is not a ring, per se, it features three outer candles with a place for one elevated candle in the center. It’s beautiful and works nicely as the symbolic equivalent of the four weeks leading up to Solstice/Christmas, with the fourth being the prominent one signifying the birth of the Sun/Christ. (The Advent wreath we had when I was growing up was a ring, but in the Catholic tradition, we used 3 purple candles and 1 pink candle signifying the climax. Pink/purple are the traditional colors of Advent in the church.) This year, I’ve stuffed it with golden beeswax candles made by lovely dakini_grl.

Each night, we’ve been reciting the following poem, which I believe is traditional for the Anthroposophists:

The first light of Advent,
It is the light of Stones,
Stones that live in crystals, seashells,
And our bones.

The second light of Advent
It is the light of plants,
Plants that reach up to the sun,
And in the breezes dance.

The third light of Advent,
It is the light of Beasts,
The light of hope that we may see
In greatest and in least

The fourth light of Advent,
It is the light of man,
The light of love, the light of thought,
To give and understand.

I like this verse because it’s earth- and human-centered. It’s pagan-sounding to me. But that pagan stuff isn’t quite so important to me as it used to be. I’ve become like Joseph Campbell in my old age. I’ve been meditating on the meaning of Christmas to me and how well I see the lines that connect this holiday with other, older holidays. My need to step apart and define myself as a pagan, as something entirely other than a Christian, is much diminished. I’m finding that this is making me really happy, and is allowing me to enjoy all the religiosity of the season more. Somehow there’s less of a reason to be uptight.

ASIDE:
At one point last year sometime, Ian’s mother expressed concern that Lucas must be educated about the Christian faith so that he can live in our God-fearing, Christian society.  I hardly fear that Lucas will somehow escape learning a basic knowledge of Christianity, just because we don’t define ourselves as Christians. She worried because we were attending the Unitarian Universalist Society services: “Do they even talk about Christ?!”

Anyway, we have been singing the Advent song that mentions the Christ child along with our candle-lighting ritual. Lucas’s face always lights up when we sing “Then comes the Christ child at the door.” I think that he is really captivated by the image of a child being the inspiration of the season.

The other morning, all by myself, I sat down on the couch in my living room with some Christmas carol sheet music and sang my wondering Christian heart out.