various transitions

One of Tricksy's best friends is about to move across the country.  When I saw Angelina yesterday, I asked her if she was excited.  She looked at me, pensive.  "I'm excited," she said, throwing me a bone.  "But I'm also a little scared."

I can't imagine a more logical way to feel about moving cross-country at any age.

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Tricksy put all her pacifiers in the trash on Sunday.  We'd been planning it with her for months, and she thought she might be ready to do it on Saturday, but then backed off.  She was got to throw them away in the morning, but then the prospect of napping was pretty traumatic.  I held her, singing songs different from those we usually sing, until she fell asleep.  Bedtime was fine.

Bedtime since was been rocky with both girls.  Lots of requests for water, for additional hugs and kisses, lots of complaints that they aren't tired (Squiss) or don't waaant to go to bed (Tricksy).  Two nights ago, at NINE!, I told them the time and that they needed to pull it together.  Although she doesn't ask for it in advance, as she gets increasingly upset that she actually has to go to sleep, Tricksy starts moaning: "I miss my . . . " and runs through every extended family member she's seen in the last month.  (It's a long list.)  Then she collapses into "I miss my doux-y" with tears and sobs.  At that point, we pull her into a cuddle and talk about how growing up is hard, and how proud of her we are.  If she were waking up overnight, or if it were taking her more than 45 minutes to fall settle and fall asleep, it might seem like we needed to reconsider. 

(That makes us both sound more blase about the difficulty of the transition than we are, I think.  At one point last night as I was cuddling Tricksy and Squiss was trying to understand, I made an analogy to the adjustment to becoming a big sister that Squiss had to make at about this age.  It's not small, but she's been napping with a pacifier at school for more than six months.  And she seems to miss it most when she just wants to veg, rather than when she needs to go to sleep.  So we're trying to help her learn new vegging out strategies.)

She's trying to use the "but now I'm big" angle on everything.  Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't.

A smaller loss: When she concentrates, Tricksy can now make a "th" sound.  So instead of "sanks" for thank you, she can say "thanks."  But only when she concentrates.  As with the "r" sound that may soon replace "w", I'll miss the toddlerhood pronunciation.

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I always -- always! -- have difficulty with transitions.  The transition from academic year to summer work is a particularly tricky one.  It's about finding a new working pace without simply overloading with plans and resolves and projects.  (The current dilemma -- for the last two years, at least -- is that I look at the summer and think that I'll be able to 1) spend more time with my kids doing fun things, 2) work out regularly, 3) move at a generally slower, more relaxed pace, and 4) make massive headway on my various scholarly and other projects.  You do the math.)

When M. l'O still worked a bazillion hours a week in an office far, far away -- which was also before we had kids and before I lived spitting distance from my office with lots of friends nearby -- this was even harder.  I suddenly went from all the social input of the academic year to near isolation from 8:30 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night.  It wasn't a pretty couple of weeks.

Now, it's more a question of finding the rhythm.  We got back from vacation in mid-June last year, but I don't think that I felt it until early July.  I'm hoping to make it more quickly this year, on the writing teacherish grounds that if I become more aware of my process I'll be better able to work with it rather than against it.  So I've tried both to set smaller goals and to forgive myself for the perhaps necessary inefficiency of this particular week.

Some examples,

• I've not resolved to pick up both daughters at 3 every day so that we can swim before dinner.  Instead, I've picked them up between 4 and 4:30 and we've moved homeward leisurely.  Squiss swims many afternoons at camp, so I may start getting Tricksy earlier and taking her for a swim on those days -- but at most two days per week, to protect my time.
• I had a great conversation with W2 last week about setting reasonable exercise, etc. goals.  She worked as a personal trainer a few years ago, and one point she made was that there seems to be consensus that it takes eight weeks to build a habit.  So, we decided, my goal for the summer should be to build a *reasonable* habit -- one that I might be able to sustain over the academic year.  So far, so good, and it feels like a more manageable goal both for the moment and for the long haul than my usual summer oh-my-god-maybe-I-can-totally-transform-myself bullsh*t.
• Because I met with my beloved co-authors two weeks ago, I have a very concrete sense of what I need to do and the immediate time-frame.  The great thing about our book is that it's feeding all of our interests -- we kept joking, as we looked at some of the data together, that it was hard to tell when it was research and when it was gossip.  I'm having the same sense now, as I dig through the historical record.  Who *knew* that Bryn Mawr had the first named professorship in rhetoric and composition that was held by a woman (from 1917 to 1933)?  And . . . hmmm . . . what happened in 1950 that the fund seems to have been redirected into a scholarship fund?

Comments

[dr]

that was "she's been napping withOUT a pacifier at school for months." Incredibly misleading typo, that.

[dr]

I do think that we often over-estimate how challenging transitions are going to be. When we were getting ready to move the girls into bunkbeds, we talked to Squiss about how being in the top bunk would mean that we couldn't lie down with her in bed to cuddle her anymore. She looked at me with a tolerant expression, "Oh, I'll be fine with that, Mama." Umm . . . okay.

[Janice]

We'd spoken with our elder daughter about giving up her pacifiers when she was four. The morning of her fourth birthday, we woke up to find that she'd taken all of her pacifiers (that she could find) and thrown them in the trash, herself. Except for one or two comments, that was it. I was a little bit humbled!

[dr]

Yeah, I was a competitive swimmer as a kid and teenager, so water jogging will never do it for me, unless a doctor recommends it as rehab. Even then ... it's like the cruelest of cruel teases. Generally, I don't get exercise when I swim with the girls -- except for lifting Tricksy out so that she can jump back in over and over again. But our pool has a daycare, so I theoretically could drop them there first, swim laps, and then pick them up for family swimming. I may try that on Sunday, since M. l'O will be out of town.

[Kyla]

"it's"

[Kyla]

So its my theory that water jogging is the perfect parent and child exercise: you burn the same calories as real jogging and you can push or pull a kid at the same time. How are you getting the exercise in at the pool? Tagged you at my blog, btw...