The Coolest Kid in the Class

When I first started this blog, I wrote about how my hopes for Isabel being "cool" (as I defined it) were being replaced with the realization that she, at then three, defined cool in a very different way. Well, shiver me timbers, the kid is changing again and is developing a cool streak larger and deeper than I could have imagined.

I should warn you that my idea of cool may be much different than anyone else's. But Izzy is learning to wrap her bubble gum pink around a stark sense of realism that is at once surprising and yet, as I said too many times already, very cool. Take, for example, the Izzy-ceratops that she drew for a school project last week. Izzy and her classmates were asked to imagine themselves as dinosaurs and then draw a picture of what they might be doing. Inevitably, the girls in her class couldn't do it, so they drew themselves "cute," usually involving eggs or simply as they are as people. Izzy relished the project and drew herself as a dinosaur as well as Ryan and I and Lottie who had yet to hatch. My favorite part, tho, was my role in this picture. I was off cooking dinner. When her teacher asked what I was cooking, she said, "People stew, of course." The other day I asked her if she enjoyed her salisbury steak for lunch and she replied, "actually mom, I had cow for lunch." Um, ok, so you did.

Her realism is also accompanied by a new sense of compassion, which is in itself very cool as well. She told me very solemnly over the weekend as I was trying to get us home without vomiting on myself again that it was Lottie's and her job to take care of me while I was sick. And then she encouraged her sister to sing a little song with her to take my mind off being sick.

Where did this little person come from? Don't get me wrong, she's not 4 going on 40 quite yet. This flashes of brilliance are still mixed in with random yelling and talking in a language that I can only describe as being comparable to the black Smurf disease (i.e., "GNAP"). But I really like this little person. At the risk of sounding a bit off, it's one thing to love your kids, and another to like them in the toddler stage when the goofiness is so fetching, but it's quite another thing to like them when they have budding personalities. Izzy is becoming someone I'd really like to know. And I hope she feels the same about me.

Dammit!

Isabel was home sick from school last week. The stomach bug, which I, of course, caught literally 12 hours after Ryan boarded his plane for a 10 day business trip. But that's a story for another day. Ryan and I split the day that Izzy was sick and, despite the vomiting episode the night before, she was perfectly fine by the time I took over sick duty. So of course she and I went shopping. On the car ride over to World Market, Izzy was commenting on something and in the middle of her soliloquy, I distinctly heard her say "dammit." Like most moms, I was thrown for a loop for about a second and then asked her where she had learned that word. Visions of me driving or Ryan swearing at his never-ending house projects raced through my mind. Izzy, ever nonplussed, said "Oh my friends and I say it at school all the time." My reaction: relief. At least I could blame someone else for the parenting skills that lead to the bad language this time.

There are days that the whole parenting experience can be numbing, but I've been finding it a curious journey of self and small fry discovery lately. As Lottie was having one of her "demanding" episodes at bedtime the other night, I heard a fire engine siren off in the distance that was getting closer by the moment. Of course it was never as close as the wailing in the bedroom next door to mine. As I heard the dueling noises a little voice in my head was compelling me to tell Lottie that that siren was coming for her if she didn't pipe down. As soon as I thought it I was shocked and appalled that I thought it at all and that I thought it was funny. Memories of my own mom threatening me with the alligator at the bottom of the tub drain if I didn't get out came flooding back to me. It made me realize that all those "lofty aspirations" I had about what kind of parent I was going to be before I was a parent are really a bunch of horse poop. There's nothing like having a child of your own to help you get over yourself. We all go into the parenting experience with the best intentions and we all end up in the same place our parents were largely because we all need to survive with a shred of sanity and a sense of humor left to our names when it's all said and done.

Gosh I love my kids!