(This is a crazy-long post. It’s not mushy, but it is inclusive. Which in this case just means long.)

Dear Abigail, Owen, Audrey, and Sadie,

Sometimes I think Valentine’s Day is more fun to celebrate with kids than with grown-up people.

Drinking tea and doing crafts. What’s not to love?

There’s the plotting and planning: what to make? where to hide it once it’s made? and how to put your grand vision down onto a folded half-sheet of paper?  There’s the week-long frenzy of crafting (scissors! colored paper! needles and thread! glue! coloredpencils-markers-crayons-watercolors-pastels!) to produce, in the end, one perfect valentine apiece. And all of this makes you happy, which makes me happy, too.

Embroidering the truth. Or the valentines.

But I know that what you’d like, more than this note from me, more than a box of chocolates that I’d only let you eat one of at a time (unless you’re Audrey or Sadie, in which case: none), more than a bouquet of flowers (though you think those are pretty cool, especially if you get to find them and pick them yourself)—more than any of that, I know that what you’d like is for me to STOP WRITING THAT LETTER ALREADY MOM and come have more crafty fun with you. So I will. Because I love you.

Yes, I hold a monster book in my lap while doing needlework. Doesn’t everybody?

Love,
The Mom

Dear Sadie especially,

I know you won’t remember this when you’re bigger, so I’m going to write it down. In our family, we like to sing songs but make up our own words to them. (That part you’ll remember when you’re older. Because we’re not likely to have stopped by then. In fact, by then, we’ll probably be driving you crazy with it.) This week, you’ve started doing it, too. I don’t know if you’re inventing lyrics or just repeating what you think we mean, but either way, I like it.

You’ve sung repeatedly that you are my sunshine (“I am your sunshine, your little sunshine, and we are happy, every day”), and yesterday you sang this song from Sesame Street:

But instead of “Me and My Llama,” you sang “Me and my mama, stay in our pajamas, yes it’s just my mama and me.”

I can’t imagine a better valentine.

I love you.

Mama

Dear New Baby-to-be,

We are going to have so much fun together. I hope you like scissors and paste and crayons, because I guarantee your sisters and brother will try to get you to make your own valentines next year. Even if you’re not yet crawling. Don’t worry, it’s going to be awesome. Or at least crayon-y.

Love,
The woman on the other side of the belly

Dear Dane,

You make life more fun. Even the parts of life where the floor is covered with eight thousand tiny bits of cut-up construction paper and six thousand tiny hole-punched bits of computer paper and a thousand tiny scraps of thread and untold amounts of glitter and also one glue smear that you just stepped in. Even those parts. (Especially those parts!) More fun. Because you’re there.

I love you. And I love how you wield that broom to rid the world—or at least the floor under the kitchen table—of leftover valentine-i-ness. You rock.

Love,
Me

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Jen and Sarah are collecting lovely love notes over at Momalom.
Check them out and add your own.

Um. Is there a point at which the amount of packaging begins to negate the organic-ness of the apple? The fruit’s got a belt on it. That’s all I’m saying.

(I know, I know, not as exciting as yesterday’s post. But dude, nothing’s as exciting as yesterday’s post. Well, hardly anything. Very very few things. This isn’t one of them. I know. I’m sorry.)

One thing about having four kids is that they (mostly) all have a lot of practice at being the big sibling. And they know how awesome little brothers and sisters are, at least until they get to be big enough to pull apart your train tracks and/or eat the pages out of your books. But they grow out of that before too long, and my kids know that too.

Which is why, when we told them (like I’m now telling you) that we’re going to have another baby, the older three shrieked with a combination of joy/excitement/disbelief/excitement again. The youngest is only two, so she just kind of smiled and nodded and didn’t really grasp the full meaning of the announcement.

“Can we name it Stinkydoodlemonster?” Audrey asked immediately. (This, oddly, is a term of endearment rather than an insult.) There is a reason that our kids are not involved in the baby-naming process. Ever.

My brother has since suggested that we consider calling the baby Owen #2, or maybe Matilda. (His dog is named Matilda.) There is a reason that no one but Dane and I is involved in the baby-naming process. Ever.

To fill in the details: we expect the baby very late in the summer, or early in the fall. Abigail will be ten by then, Owen will be seven, Audrey will be four, and Sadie will be almost three. This baby, like all of our others, will be born at home, barring any unforeseen—and highly unlikely—circumstances. We won’t know if it’s a boy or a girl until the birth, at which point we will totally let you know. Promise.

So. You got any good name suggestions? Because you see what I get around here.

We had rain all afternoon yesterday, so Owen spent those hours asking if he could ride his bike. I tell you, that boy has optimism. Why be daunted by the 846 times I’ve already said no? Maybe #847 will be a yes!

At the time I was tempted to think of that as pestering, but later (say, once he was asleep for the night) I could see calling it persistence. Persistence! Persistence is a good thing. A useful life skill. One that I also happen to have some practice at. And if it rains again all day today, I bet I’ll get more practice still. Because nope, you can’t ride your bike in the rain the 1412th time you ask, either.

I’m thinking I’ll need to encourage some other useful life skills if the weather stays this way. Like assembling jigsaw puzzles. That’s a skill, right? Maybe not as all-purpose-useful as persistence, but it has its uses. Also: tidying up the toy shelves. That’s a useful life skill! And, um, reading a book quietly. We can always practice that more. We could even, one might say, persist at it.

ME: What to blog, what to blog…

DANE: Blog about usury. It makes a good post title.

ME: Wha?

HIM: It’s not blogged about nearly enough. Not for my taste, anyhow.

ME: Um. Yeah…

(He’s reading Mere Christianity. That’s the only explanation I have to offer. But I’m not blogging about usury. Dude can get his own blog for that. I am not reading Mere Christianity at present, but I just finished Olive Kitteridge, at Kitchen Witch’s suggestion, and now I’m reading Where the Mountain Meets the Moon before handing it over to Abigail. Both highly recommended, though they have nothing in common, one being a collection of interrelated short stories for adults and the other being a novel for young people. See? I had something to talk about that had nothing whatsoever to do with usury.)

My mother sometimes says that babies (toddlers, children) should come with instruction manuals. I’m thinking they should also come with indicator lights. Just maybe a row of them down the kid’s back. Getting sick: red light! About to have a growth spurt, don’t buy new clothes this week: green light! No longer needs a nap: yellow light! Like that.

Because the non-sleeping toddler? Who was not teething? Is now sleeping at night. She just stopped napping. Last week, with the nap, she was getting maybe nine hours of sleep total out of twenty-four (three at nap, six at night). The last several days, no nap, she’s sleeping twelve hours straight at night. And she’s cheerful all day.

I think that may be a chorus of angels I hear singing over us right now. Or maybe it’s just me.

Our oldest two kids stopped napping by the time they turned two, so I guess Sadie not needing a nap anymore shouldn’t have been a surprise. Except! Except! Audrey stopped napping regularly… about six weeks ago. She’s almost four. So you can see how I didn’t think to encourage the two-year-old to skip her nap. Even though I’ve done this whole parenting-a-toddler thing a couple of times before. Even though maybe I should have a handle on the details by now. Yeah, no.

The thing is, the less sleep I get, the less I am able to think of logical solutions for getting more sleep. So it’s good that we stumbled onto an answer there, because otherwise we might have kept getting less and less sleep every week until I withered up and died. (Yes, just me. Neither the toddler nor the husband are the withering kind.)

Like I said: indicator lights. That would help.

It’s Friday? It’s Friday! Where did this week go? Oh right, it went to NOT SLEEPING. I remember now. But I have hope, I tell you, hope for the weekend and/or the indefinite future, wherein there will be sleep again. I think. Or hope. Maybe both. Whatever.

In other news, Abigail managed to lose a tooth this evening. The tooth fairy would appreciate if my kids lost teeth earlier in the day, for planning purposes, but that doesn’t tend to happen. Usually it’s right at bedtime. This makes the tooth fairy anxious, see, because at our house the tooth fairy trades the tooth for a book, and she doesn’t really keep piles of secret new books on hand. Luckily the tooth fairy’s default bookstore doesn’t close until 11:00. And they had exactly one book off our wishlist in stock. The tooth fairy heaves a sigh of relief. Good thing it was just the one tooth.

Is it the eensy weensy spider, or the itsy bitsy spider? Which one went up the water spout?

Some days I think I may have lost my mind, just set it down somewhere like a sack of marbles and wandered away from it.

How can I not remember such a little thing like that? (Could it be the sleep deprivation? Or the having eight million other things to remember at all times? Or maybe my brain has run out of space, and nursery rhymes were at the top of the to-go list.) And why does it bother me, not remembering such a trivial little fact? Nothing, I think, depends on my accurately singing the lyrics of a four-line song.

And yet.

Itsy bitsy? Or eensy weensy? I think it’s itsy bitsy.

Sometimes I think teeth are the poor maligned organs of modern childhood. But then they aren’t really organs at all, are they? My dictionary says they are “hard, bony appendages.” Well, the poor maligned appendages, then.

They’re the first culprit when anything is amiss in the non-speaking set. Babies hit the four-month sleep regression, and people start saying it: I think he’s teething. Fussy nine-month old? She must be getting new teeth. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Babies get more teeth all the time; if you claim that yours is teething long enough, it ought to become true after a while.

Sadie, I mentioned before, has not been sleeping well. Or hardly at all. I want to say it’s getting better. Certainly the last couple of nights were nothing compared to the horror of sleeplessness that defined last week, but she’s nowhere close to sleeping normally. She has also been—to phrase this politely—a wee bit cranky during the day. All day. Every day.

“Is she teething?” People keep asking. “Maybe it’s her teeth.”

Oddly enough, in nine and a half years of parenting, I have not developed x-ray vision. I have no idea if it’s her teeth. All I know is that I haven’t slept more than five hours a night in almost two weeks.

I haven’t seen any evidence of teething. She’s not been drooling, or refusing hard or cold or hot foods, or rubbing her gums. But two-year-olds do get molars. Anything’s possible.

Tonight at dinner she refused to eat, spent the whole time rubbing her gums.

I think it took me three seconds to leap to the teething theory.

“I think it’s her teeth,” I told Dane.

“Could be,” he said.

I took her out of her chair and set her in my lap. And then she took her fingers out of her mouth and ate her dinner without further complaint.

I’m back to my original theory: she’s two. Her teeth may or may not be involved in that. I have no idea. Poor maligned teeth.

Sometimes I worry that I don’t have enough pictures of my kids in outfits that will make them cringe when they look back on them.

And then I wonder if that means I don’t have enough important things to worry about, or if it means I have such a well-trained worry mechanism that I can always find something to worry over. Hmm.

Perhaps more legitimately, I worry about not taking enough pictures of any sort. Weeks slip by without any photographic record whatsoever, and when the kids are little, weeks can represent a lot of change, right? And we don’t even necessarily remember to capture the big stuff. There are whole birthday parties that we’ve missed documenting somehow. Plus, even when we take pictures, we never manage to have them printed, so my kids’ childhoods are only virtually documented. Not really documented. You know?

On the other hand, the pictures I do have in print—from that long-ago time before digital cameras—even those are in a box in the top of my closet. Not organized or looked-through, ever. But at least we have them. I think I’m okay with just having the potential to organize our memories at some later date, even if I’m not getting to enjoy the pictures right now.

But that does mean I have to take pictures. Now. So that I have them later. And now I’ll worry about that for a while, until I forget (and thus forget to take more pictures, perpetuating the cycle of worry. Which is something else to worry about).

I’d like to think that 1) it’s more important to enjoy what’s happening right now than to photograph what’s happening right now; and 2) the children could, at least theoretically, grow up to be well-adjusted adults even without any childhood photographs whatsoever. But those are just theories. Possibly I’m wrong on both counts. (Okay, I’m probably right on at least the first count, but enjoying and photographing aren’t mutually exclusive, so it’s not really a fair comparison.) (And on the second count: I’d hate to be wrong and only figure it out in retrospect.) Hmm. So. Picture-taking it is, then. As a bit of parenting insurance, if nothing else.