Backyard-igans

We have a pretty magical backyard. But “magical” can always be made “magical-er,” right? So, when Nana and Boom came up for a recent visit, we started in on some backyard improvement projects.

I can’t believe I just typed the phrase “backyard improvement projects.”

BUT, making our backyard a little more magical made sense, for a couple of reasons. Both of those reasons, of course, center around our kids.

REASON #1: Now that it’s summer again, much of my time is spent outside trying to keep the woods a respectful distance from our house. Note that I didn’t say “spare time,” or “free time,” because that kind of time doesn’t exist for me right now. Having a few added entertainment options in the yard to amuse our girls buys me some time. Two minutes of additional distraction for them = two minutes of additional productivity for me.

REASON #2: I could care less about keeping up with the Joneses, but the truth is that our yard is fairly boring as yards go around here. The other night, we went to dinner at a house that featured — just in the yard itself — chickens, baby goats, a tire swing, a trampoline, and a canoe rigged up as a pirate ship. I’d say that’s about typical in these parts. Our yard, as of springtime, had rocks and a little empty shed as its only attractions. Clearly, if I wanted my children to stay at home, I needed to up the ante just a little.

And it didn’t take much.

BACKYARD IMPROVEMENT, PHASE 1: The Quarry

Our girls call it “The Quarry,” which I take as a sign that they’re becoming true New Englanders. (Central Vermont, like much of northern New England, is dotted with quarries both active and defunct). But really, it’s a gravel pit. Thanks to Boom, we have a more upscale version: a gravel BOX. These are pretty popular around here; gravel is more durable than sand when it comes to withstanding the rain and snow that we get in large amounts, it’s cheaper, and it also doesn’t so easily get lodged in the kids’ clothes and tracked all over the house. Here’s what it took to create our gravel box:

4 – 2″ x 8″ x 6′ spruce boards (for the sides)

1 – 2″x 6″x 8′ spruce board (for the bench/seats — this is just if you’re being fancy)

9 – 60 lb. bags of small marble chips

Assorted shovels, rakes, buckets, and dump trucks

Nana and Boom clearing and leveling the ground for the gravel box.

That’s it! Years’ worth of entertainment for under $100.

BACKYARD IMPROVEMENT, PHASE 2: The Hammock

My parents gave me a hammock for Mother’s Day, and it’s a HUGE hit with all three Gong girls. My dad strung it up between two trees in the same corner of the yard as the shed and The Quarry, so when the girls need a break from frenzied digging or games of fairy princess, they lounge in the hammock. They have snacks in the hammock, read in the hammock, snuggle in the hammock. It’s been a great addition. (The hardest part of the installation was digging out the rocks from the ground underneath the hammock, so that a tumble doesn’t immediately result in paralysis).

BACKYARD IMPROVEMENT, PHASE 3: Aesthetics for Adults

A couple of new things in our yard have nothing to do with the girls. The first is a beautiful birdhouse that my dad built and hung on a tree facing our sunroom windows.

The second is a new flowerbed along the side of the house. When we moved here a year ago, the previous owners left us a decaying woodpile that stretched half the length of the side yard, and a major project last summer was moving any use-able wood to a better spot. This left a big, bare spot. And, while I tend to have more of a “let it go native” and “who gets to decide what’s a weed, anyway?” approach to gardening, this seemed like a spot that was just crying out for beautification.

Enter our friends Matt and Nicolle, whose son goes to preschool with Fiona. When Nicolle put out a notice on Facebook that she was looking to give away some extra plants from her garden, I jumped. And thankfully, it worked out so that Nicolle and Matt could drop off the plants while my parents were visiting, since my parents know waaaaay more about gardening than I ever will. Here’s the scene when Matt and Nicolle arrived with the plants:

-me, in dirty gardening clothes

-my parents, also in dirty gardening clothes

-6 kids running around like maniacs (our 3 girls, their two friends, and Matt and Nicolle’s son)

-1 dog (Brinkley)

-and, at one point, 2 neighbors (Brinkley’s owners)

Here’s who was NOT there: Erick, who was out in San Francisco for a wedding, sleeping in and grabbing brunch with high school friends. (Did I mention this was Mother’s Day weekend? I should get some mileage out of that for a while….)

ANYWAY, given that scenario, you’ll understand why I was not 100% fully in the moment when Matt and Nicolle arrived (I was more like 300% in the moment), which is why it was surprising and incredibly helpful and just all around amazing when they not only dropped off the plants, but started putting the plants in the ground for us! Over the course of about two hours, Matt, Nicolle, and my parents created this lovely little garden. I think I contributed about half a hole to the project.

People are really lovely, especially Matt and Nicolle. THANK YOU, MATT AND NICOLLE!

And THANK YOU, NANA AND BOOM!

AND, THANK YOU, GRANDMOMMY AND GRANDDADDY, who just wrapped up a two-week visit during which they helped us with our most recent backyard improvement projects: stacking 4 cords of wood in our new woodshed and getting our backyard chicken coop into place. (Uncle Wesley helped stack wood, too, during the week he was here: THANK YOU, UNCLE WESLEY!)

Four cords of neatly stacked wood in our new woodshed (beautifully constructed by our friend Cris).

Erick securing the fence around our chicken coop.

We’re enjoying our beautiful and FUN backyard. And it’s even more beautiful because, when we look at it, we are really seeing the beautiful people who helped create it.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, but especially to my Dad (Boom), my Father-in-Law (Granddaddy), and my husband (Erick): Three men who have the difficult lot of often being surrounded by talkative, emotional females, and handle it with aplomb. We love you!

I’ll Be Selfless in Just a Minute….

Portrait by Fiona. This is usually how I look by the end of the day.

I’ve started sneaking into the girls’ bedroom at night to watch them while they’re sleeping.

This isn’t something I’ve ever done before. As first time parents for whom a sleeping baby seemed like a magical accomplishment, then second and third time parents with increasing numbers of children — and always one baby — sharing a room, once the girls’ room goes quiet it’s never something we want to risk disturbing. But now we have three pretty sound sleepers, all over the age of one, and I feel fairly confident that if I tiptoe into their room after 9:30 PM, nobody will wake.

I watch them while they’re sleeping to remind myself how much I love them.

There is nothing more sweetly innocent than the sight of a child — or anybody, really — asleep. Their faces are peacefully blank slates, wiped clear of the tantrums, whining, anger, and sullenness that might have been written across them during the day. These are my girls: sprawled out in ridiculous poses (on top of the covers, turned completely upside down in bed, arms stretched out towards each other), and when I watch them sleep like this, emptied of the emotion and action of the day, I can re-center myself in my love for them. I can feel that night really is the time when we hit “Reset,” that tomorrow really is a chance to make a fresh start. It always amazes me that, no matter how difficult the day, no matter how contentious the bedtime, when everybody wakes up first thing in the morning, it’s like we’re each returning from a long journey and we’re all SO happy to see each other. Watching my girls sleep helps me pick at these threads of hope: that I love these girls, and that tomorrow we have a new chance to do things better than we did today.

I need those threads of hope, because I am struggling with what I currently consider to be the hardest part of parenting, the thing I was least prepared to handle: my annoyance at how intrusive kids can be.

I was expecting to be tired. I was expecting to have my heart busted open. I was expecting to be confused about discipline. I was even expecting to be angry – once in a while.

I never expected that I’d grind my teeth and feel like tearing out my hair whenever their needs intrude into my time.

To be clear: I did expect that motherhood would push me to make sacrifices, to be more selfless. And as hard as it is to make sacrifices and be more selfless, those are ultimately the challenges that I most appreciate about motherhood; I’ve written before about how miserable I was back when I had too much time for myself. Motherhood is helping shape me into a happier, more caring person. So I think my problem is this: I prefer to be selfless on a predictable schedule.

Whenever I’ve taken a personality assessment, like the Meyers-Briggs test, I’m branded an introvert. Introverts find their strength and sanity by being alone. Certainly true in my case: if I don’t have some chunk of quiet time every day to read, write, or just wash the dishes in peace, I’m a frazzled mess.

And it’s endlessly frustrating how my 1-year-old, 2-year-old, and 4-year-old don’t seem to understand this.

I don’t think I ask for too much. I expect to be on duty when the girls are awake and active; I only hope for some predictable quiet, “selfish” time during the pre-scheduled blocks when they’re (supposed to be) asleep.

For instance: Naptime. Our two youngest girls still need at least a couple hours of sleep each afternoon. They go down without a fight, and every day I’m guaranteed a good chunk of quiet time while they sleep or talk happily to themselves in their beds. The challenge is our oldest: she’s always been our weakest sleeper, and at four years old she’s about ready to abandon naptime all together. But I force her to have “quiet rest time” while her sisters are sleeping, because she still has to nap at preschool and — I’ll be honest — I need the break.

Now I find myself dreading the days when she’s not in preschool, because almost without fail it means 90 minutes of continuous interruptions and frustration for me. She goes to bed with a stack of books, markers, and paper. We’ve tried books on CD. We’ve tried a “sleep ticket” that entitles her to call me ONE TIME and one time only, with penalties for repeated call-backs. I set the clock alarm so that she doesn’t have to call every 5 minutes to ask how much longer until 3:00. NOTHING WORKS.

Then there’s: Bedtime. This is slightly better than naptime, because at least we know that all three girls will eventually fall asleep. They love sharing a room together, so most of the noises we hear after closing the door are happy noises. Still, that last “Goodnight” is never the LAST “Goodnight.” There always seems to be something — on average, FOUR things — that require our immediate presence. Which means that the hour after we’ve put them to bed is completely unpredictable.

I’ve even tried this: Waking up 90 minutes earlier each morning in order to have some quiet time to write. I need to write daily, if possible, both because I love doing it and because it helps clear out my brain. I figured that if I had a guaranteed, predictable time to write every morning, I’d feel less frustrated by inconvenient, unpredictable interruptions throughout the rest of the day.

But I tell you, those girls are like heat-seeking missiles! It’s as if they can SENSE that I’m awake somewhere in the house, no matter how early it is or how quiet I am. And down they come. They’re supposed to stay in their room until the clock reads 7:00 — another attempt at creating a predictable schedule — and sometimes it’s possible to send them back upstairs until then. But if they’ve woken up the baby in the process, it’s all over.

And then there are those times when I’m not being selfish at all: I just need five uninterrupted minutes — FIVE MINUTES — to do something for the greater good of the family, like cook dinner or schedule a check-up or pay a bill. Even then –– always then — it’s urgent that I do or watch or wipe something. Right now!

By the end of the scenarios listed above — which means at least once a day — I feel like I’m reduced to some unrecognizable Mommie Dearest caricature: “What?!? WHAT?!? What do you need NOW?!? What’s so important?!? WHAT?!?“ And sometimes even, ridiculously: “Mommy needs this time to rest and get things done!”

Not that it’s wrong for Mommy to need time to rest and get things done, but it’s probably a waste of breath to try and make a four-year-old understand that.

I sometimes imagine that if you sliced me open, my insides would look like an onion: layers and layers of the next thing I have to work on. Peel away one thing (patience, say, or perfectionism), and there’s another flaw just waiting to be tackled. I’ve decided that this annoyance with my children’s inconvenient demands is the next thing I need to deal with.

So I tell myself that it’s not wrong to want quiet, to need “selfish” time, but that perhaps I should stop expecting these times to be predictable and convenient — for now. I tell myself that it’s okay to work on laying down boundaries, to help my daughters understand that their parents also need rest, but that maybe I could lose some of my annoyance with the process. I tell myself that this is a finite season, that soon enough I’ll have three daughters in school all day long, and soon after that I’ll have an empty house. And, as blissful as those things seem right now, I’m told that one actually misses the inconvenient, unpredictable interruptions.

And I sneak into their room at night to watch them sleeping. In order to remind myself how much I love them, in order to grasp at the thread of hope that we (I) can do better tomorrow. And because when I do this, it means I’m choosing to spend some of my precious “selfish” time not reading, not writing, not even washing dishes, but just being near my girls when they don’t even need me. I figure that’s a start.

Writing in Public

Hello! Just wanted to let you all know that On The Willows published my piece on gifts vs. fame, as interpreted through Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. (Yes, I know: another post in which I draw heavily on children’s literature for my philosophy. Sorry, but that’s about as highbrow as my references get these days!) Click here to read it.

It’s been crazy busy here in the woods lately: last week we had 5 family members from California staying with us — Erick’s parents, his brother, sister-in-law, and our almost-two-year-old nephew. We dragged them all over central Vermont and had a blast. Now we’re down to grandparents-only for the next week, but the weather’s beautiful which means we’re usually outdoors in the wading pool, with three girls, three chicks, a dog or two, maybe a couple of friends…and a partridge in a pear tree.

Here’s a picture of the Gong Girls leading their beloved cousin Aiden into Green Mountain National Forest:

Hope you’re all enjoying the outdoors in your neck of the woods!

The Jumping Couch

We chose not to know the gender of any of our babies before they were born, because surprises are fun. Then, about three weeks before Fiona’s birth, I had a pregnancy massage. Towards the end, the masseuse asked if I wanted her to “read the baby’s energy” to predict whether it was a boy or girl. (Remember, this was in Berkeley). Sure, what the heck, I thought. Based on the amount of rock ‘n roll that was happening in utero, Erick and I expected (for admittedly stereotypical reasons) that the baby would be a boy. Based on the way I was carrying the baby — all in front — everybody else predicted it would be a boy, too. Unsolicited opinions were flying my way daily; what was the harm in one more?

The masseuse held her hands above my stomach and concentrated very, very hard.

“Huh,” she said, “I think it’s a girl, but I’m also getting a lot of boy energy.”

And there you have it. To this day, I can’t think of a better way of describing all three of our daughters than “Girls with boy energy.”

Which leads me to the problem of the jumping.

Like most kids, our daughters like to jump. And, presumably because they have “boy energy,” they like to jump A LOT. Get them near any bouncy house or trampoline, and they’re happy for upwards of an hour. Unfortunately, all that our house has to offer are beds and couches.

I know some moms who have very strict rules about their big-ticket possessions: there are couches in their houses that the kids can’t even sit on, entire rooms that are off-limits, cars that can’t be eaten in, etc. etc. I am not that kind of mom, and even if I wanted to be, it’s too late — it would be like announcing one morning that from now on, we’re all going to be speaking Greek. The bottom line is: I just don’t care that much about stuff. It’s only stuff, subject to entropy like everything else. I don’t want our kids to care too much about stuff, either, and I want them to feel cozy and comfortable in their own home. But my bottom line is actually a fine line to walk: even if you don’t care much about stuff, there’s still a basic level of care or maintenance required for your stuff — otherwise it gets trashed quickly and you end up having to buy more stuff.

Getting our girls to understand that fine line has been a challenge.

Here’s how it is: I let the girls jump on their beds. They’re not allowed to jump on my bed, because it’s my bed and I said so. But I figure that in their own room, they deserve a measure of autonomy. So far, nobody’s gotten hurt, and the beds (cheap Ikea deals) have held up. But that’s because they don’t really want to jump on their beds; they want to jump on the couch.

In all honesty, it’s couches since we moved to Vermont, which still seems crazy to me. When Erick and I got married, his boss gave us the brown suede couch that had been in Erick’s office. Or, not so much “gave” as “begged us to take it,” since the thing was covered with drool stains from all the naps Erick took on it. And that was our couch, in our New York City apartment and all three of our Berkeley homes. We’ve all recuperated on it when we were sick, I napped on it when I was pregnant and exhausted, and Erick and I both took turns sleeping on it while holding newborn Fiona when she was fussy and couldn’t settle down. It’s been a great couch for almost a decade. And, when we lived in Berkeley, in a 900-square-foot bungalow with no yard, I wasn’t too strict about not jumping on it.

Our original couch. (I think the dark spot on the right is from repeated rubbing by Erick’s head during his many naps).

Then we moved to Vermont, where, in addition to a living room, we also have a sun room — a whole other family space that needed furniture. Our old couch ended up in the living room, and I ordered a slip-covered sofa and loveseat from Ikea for the sun room. I used the move to attempt to hit “reset” on our jumping policy: their beds were still okay, but there was to be no jumping on the couches in our new home. After all, we now had plenty of space to run, jump, and play.

It hasn’t worked. Every day I have to tell our girls to stop jumping on one of the couches. They’re getting older and smarter, so they’re starting to use semantics to try and get around the rules: “I wasn’t jumping, Mommy, I was diving/dancing/walking/practicing my cartwheels.” It reminds me of when we had a cat (pre-kids) who would always jump up on the dining room table. We tried everything to make her stop, and finally resorted to getting a “Scat Mat” — a plastic mat that delivers a little electric shock to the paws. Needless to say, she didn’t like the Scat Mat at all, but did it stop her from jumping on the table? No, it did not; she just jumped on the table and carefully walked around the mat.

There is a point, of sorts, to this post, and I’m coming to it now. Probably due to a combination of years of Erick’s naps, scratching by our former cat, jumping by our daughters, and neglect by me, our good old living room couch started to die earlier this year. It started as a teeny-tiny hole, which became a bigger hole, which suddenly became three large, gaping holes spilling white fuzz. Even Erick admitted that it was time for a new couch.

Given the amount of wear-and-tear that our furniture takes in a day, it didn’t make sense to get anything too fine to replace our old couch. So, based on a quick calculation of what would be cheap but durable, look nice but withstand three kids, and simplest for me (a combination of easy to find, quality assured, and delivered to my door), we settled on a basic light brown slip-covered couch from Pottery Barn. It arrived last month, and it looks great.

The ridiculous thing is that we now have three couches in our house — four if you count the loveseat. (Which is probably what I deserve after years of trying to keep life simple and downsized, and for probably judging people who live in big houses and own a lot of stuff just a little too harshly). This plethora of couches might just be the solution to our jumping problem, however. (Aside: Does anybody else out there have trouble using the word “plethora” without hearing El Guapo from The Three Amigos: “What ees a plethora?” Anybody?!? Besides my dad, I mean?)

So, here’s the plan: the old couch, the one with the holes in it, will be moved up to the rec room the next time we have family or friends visiting (family or friends who haven’t already broken multiple bones helping us with house projects, that is), where it will become “The Jumping Couch.” All other couches in the house, especially the new couch, are “No Jumping Allowed” couches. This has been clearly explained to the girls, who seem to understand. Fiona even proclaimed that the new couch was “too hard for jumping — you’d break your head on it!”

I hope this works, or else I’m going to start researching child-sized Scat Mats.

I’ll Know My Name As It’s Called Again

This is a long one, and a little rambling, but that’s because it’s our One Year in Vermont Anniversary Post!

“Wake up! It’s time to move to Vermont!” (Fiona and Campbell one year ago, on the morning we flew out of San Francisco to the East Coast).

Songs are the road markers for my personal history. Like most people, I have very strong associations between certain songs and specific moments or people. Alphaville’s “Forever Young” immediately transports me back to high school. “Omaha” by The Counting Crows reminds me of the football player who lived next door in my freshman dorm and used to belt out that song on sunny Sunday afternoons. And almost any song by the Indigo Girls, Elvis Costello, or Diana Krall will recall various memories from my relationship with Erick.

Each of our girls has their own song. Georgia’s is the most obvious, since we named her after Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind.” Fiona’s song is “And She Was” by Talking Heads — a song that I heard repeatedly on the radio when I was pregnant with her, to the extent that I finally said, “If the baby’s a girl, this will have to be her song.” And she was. Campbell’s song is a little trickier (figures). I’ll always associate her with U2’s “Yahweh,” which I was listening to as I started labor with her, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows in Kaiser Hospital as the sun rose over downtown Oakland. But this past year, our family was listening to Ray Charles sing Georgia’s song, and the next song to play was “Hit the Road, Jack.” Fiona turned to me and asked, “Is this Campbell’s song?” And I thought, Yup, that’s a much better fit.

*****

Erick and I tend to make multiple major life transitions all at once, and then I look back and wonder, How did we do all of that?!? The craziest time in our family’s history was a two-week period in February 2011. During those two weeks, Erick flew to the East Coast to do four consecutive second-round interviews at various colleges, universities, and organizations (including a certain small liberal arts college in Vermont). These were the interviews that would ultimately land him a post-PhD job (we hoped), and thus would determine where our family would spend roughly the next decade of our lives. I stayed at home, nine months pregnant with Georgia, caring for a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old, and finishing out my part-time job. It felt like we’d thrown all the puzzle pieces of our lives up in the air, and whichever piece landed first would determine our entire future. In other words, everything felt unknown, and everything felt hugely important.

Erick, on his first visit to Vermont, finds his long-lost twin: the orange safety cone. (Picture courtesy of kind passing stranger).

The song I associate with those two weeks is “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons. (You can watch the original music video here, or see a breathtaking live performance here). I first heard this song on the car radio, on one of the rare times during those 14 days when I was running child-less errands (Thanks, Grandmommy & Granddaddy!). I listened to it and said, “WOW.” And I immediately felt like everything was going to be okay.

I can’t tell you exactly why this song spoke to where I was at that precise moment. I couldn’t even tell you what all the lyrics mean, or what the songwriters’ original intent was. But to me, at least, this song is all about hope. The music itself, as it swells at the end (Those chiming guitars! Those trumpets!) is hopeful, uplifting. And my favorite part is the chorus, particularly the last line:

But I will hold on hope

And I won’t let you choke

On the noose around your neck

And I’ll find strength in pain

And I will change my ways

I’ll know my name as it’s called again

Isn’t that really what we’re all after in life? To know our names as they’re called again? Isn’t that basically the point?

I suppose another phrase for what I’m talking about is “finding yourself,” but I prefer the idea of knowing your name. Names are slippery things; to a large degree they completely define us – we are called by our names, sign our names, we are our names — but do our names describe the truth of us? You may like your name just fine, but chances are that it was bestowed upon you within days of your birth, out of some combination of family history and parental inclination. Through repeated use, our given names tend to lose all meaning; most of us probably never think about our names — we take them for granted. Names don’t really tell you all that much about a person; I can recall all sorts of facts about someone I’ve just met, but their name is always the hardest thing to remember.

Of course, we acquire other names throughout our lives: daughter, sister, Mrs., Program Director, B.A., M.D., Mommy, Nana. These names describe parts of who we are, but I doubt that any of these names, or even all of them together, accurately describe the totality of who we are — our core selves.

And who ARE we? I suspect that most of us feel that we aren’t quite the people we should be; we don’t fully know our names. We spend our lives circling the goal of being who we are, and everything we do gets us nearer to or farther from that goal.

*****

One year ago today, June 6, a green minivan carrying the five members of the Gong family pulled into Vermont for the first time. The 9-months-pregnant me who listened to “The Cave” while running errands around Berkeley feels like a character from another life. The song still speaks to me, though. And looking back over the past year, I see that moving to Vermont brought us all a little closer to knowing our names.

Last supper in California. (Georgia’s under there somewhere).

I think of 2011-12 as the year we finally became grown-ups. For starters, it’s the first year since our marriage that neither Erick nor myself has been in graduate school, so it lacked the sense of impermanence that goes along with student-hood. Erick has a real job, and we came here to settle. We have three very real kids. This year was our first experience with home-ownership, and all that responsibility and hilarity. It was also a year book-ended by loss: the death of a friend we were just getting to know right after we moved here, and the death of a friend’s baby last month. Both deaths were untimely, unfair, and hit close to home — and our girls were aware of them, so we had to figure out how to quickly process these losses through the filter of what we believe.

In brief, this was the year we bought instead of renting, in every sense of the word.

Here’s how I’ve come closer to knowing my name this year:

I‘ve learned the importance of being honest about who I am. When we moved to Vermont, we had no prior history here. We didn’t know a single person in our town, and we have no family anywhere nearby. Clean slate. So it would have been easy for me to fool everybody by constructing a perfect front, by pretending to have it all together, by trying to make everybody like me.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t do that. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t. Partly, I’m just too exhausted to bother. Writing also helped; as I tell my stories on this blog, it’s the most honest ones — the ones that are scariest to publish — that tend to get the warmest response. I think this carries over to life: the more honest we are about ourselves, the more open we are to honest relationships. So I’m learning that it’s not a virtue to put up a good front. I’m supposed to love my neighbor, which does not mean that I have to please my neighbor.

This fresh start in Vermont also helped me realize that I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels over what I should do. What should I be doing with my kids? Should I be volunteering? Looking for a job? Staying home full time? Finally, one of the wise women whom I’ve gotten to know here said to me (well, she said it to God, but really to me) something like: “I hope that Faith won’t worry so much about what she does, as about who she is.”

Huh. That brought me up short. And she’s RIGHT. If I don’t know WHO I AM — if I don’t know my name — then it follows that I won’t be doing whatever I DO very well. It matters less what I do with my daughters than that I provide them with an example of a woman who knows her name. And whatever future work or volunteer duties I take on will also benefit from me knowing who I am. It’s like one of my favorite Anne Lamott quotes: “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”

Here’s who I am after a year in Vermont: I’m a wife, and I love my husband. I’m a mom, and I love my kids — most of the time. I’m a daughter, and I wish I were a better one, but I’m working on it. I believe in God and Jesus, and I’m working on that, too. I’m kind of a flaky friend right now, but I trust that’ll improve once I can sustain conversations for longer than 2 minutes. I don’t particularly excel at anything around the house — cooking, housekeeping, crafting — but I try to enjoy all these things while keeping them in their place. I have a messy, imperfect past, mostly because I was trying to be too perfect and kept falling on my face (I may write more about this soon, but it’s scary). I have a messy, imperfect present, too, but at least I know it’s covered by grace (God’s, mine, others’).

I LOVE to write and to tell stories, and rediscovering that through this blog has been one of my favorite things about the past year. Thank you so much for reading.

GongGirls21 — Me, with the girls, in town this spring. (Another beautiful photo by Zoe Reyes).

Crafty, Continued…

So as not to leave a narrative thread dangling, I want to follow up on my original post about my efforts to become more “crafty” by sewing a birthday dress for Fiona.

As it happens, I did succeed in sewing a dress for Campbell out of the remaining fabric.

Then, with winter winding down, I figured my crafting would slow down, too. Dark, cold nights at the sewing machine would be replaced by light, warm nights sipping margaritas on the deck.

I was wrong. My crafty days were just beginning.

Four-year-old girls and fashion are a funny combination. It amazes me how opinionated and stubborn Fiona is about her wardrobe; what she deigns to wear or rejects as unwearable follows no logic that I can discern. This can be heartbreaking for parents who have bought or made special clothes. Case in point: the mother of one of Fiona’s friends sewed her daughter an absolutely gorgeous dress — this is a dress that I would wear in a heartbeat. Her daughter refuses to wear it.

As the mother of daughters, you learn not to take their fashion choices too personally.

Fiona has loving and generous grandparents, and she’s also benefited from the generosity of friends here in Vermont who pass along clothes from their older daughters (figuring that, in our house, these clothes will get worn at least three times over). In other words, Fiona has a LOT of clothes for a little person. And I’d estimate that she wears about 1% of what’s in her closet.

A quick peek into the girls’ ridiculous (and horrifying) closet.

Fortunately, the dress I sewed for her made the cut.

Just as I’ve learned not to take the refusal to wear certain clothes personally, I also don’t take Fiona’s love for this dress personally. She wears her “pink Mommy dress” not out of any sentimentality over the fact that I made it with my own hands, or because it’s a unique one-of-a-kind creation just for her. No: she wears it because it’s the longest dress in her closet.

I used a 5T pattern for Fiona’s dress — a full size larger than what she’s currently wearing — because, frankly, if I’m going to the effort of sewing her a dress, that dress had better fit her for longer than 6 months. The dress does fit her, if a bit generously, but because Fiona is kind of a peanut for her age the skirt reaches nearly to her ankles. And the length of this dress happens to correspond with Fiona’s latest fashion goal: to popularize the maxi-dress for preschoolers.

Around the time of her third birthday, just about when life became all about princesses, Fiona decided to wear only dresses. And then, a funny thing happened: due to some curious combination of increased modesty and a desire to look as princess-y as possible, the acceptable hem length for these dresses became longer and longer.

They don’t make many long dresses for preschoolers, for the obvious reason that they’re completely impractical for running, climbing, bike riding, or most other preschooler activities. Then my dress showed up in the closet, and Fiona had suddenly found her fashion ideal.

“Fashion” joins “eating” and “Disney princesses/Barbies” on my (alarmingly) growing list of “Things Not Worth Fighting Over.” I don’t much care whether my girls match or look ridiculous; as long as they’re properly covered, my inclination is to let them make their own fashion choices. Being “properly covered” was not an issue with this dress; what became an issue was the 72-hour stretch during which Fiona refused to wear anything else. At all. She’d sleep in the dress, and then wake up and announce that she was going to wear the dress to school. At bedtime that night, she’d insist that the dress wasn’t dirty and was her only choice for sleepwear.

Clearly something had to be done.

So, I made another dress.

I used the exact same pattern, so that the skirt length would match. And I’m particularly excited about the fabric, which is recycled/found material from our house: the top is from the pillow shams that came with the girls’ bedding set (our family doesn’t do pillow shams), and the skirt is made from the duvet cover that Erick and I have used since we were first married, but recently replaced due to massive holes that kept tangling around our feet while we slept.

The plan worked: now, Fiona rotates between the two dresses. There was just one thing left to do:

Make a matching dress for Campbell.

Our Rock Friends

Fiona in our backyard on “Slide Rock.” (Baby added for scale).

Naming things is a common human activity. According to Genesis, naming things was the first human activity: before Adam got friendly with Eve, or made some poor choices, or had to deal with his sons’ sibling rivalry, his job was to name all the living things.

As it happens, naming things is also an important part of our family culture. Our family tends to name things, even inanimate objects that don’t really need names.

It seems to me that humans name things for two main reasons. The first is out of a feeling of affection, or gratitude, or ownership. We name our children, of course — there’s a whole industry built up around that. In our family, we’ve named our car “Greenie” and our wood stove “Woody” because we feel an affection for them born of gratitude and frequent usage.

The second reason we name things is more practical: for ease of navigation through our geography. It’s much more clear if I tell you, “Drive over the Green Mountains, follow Route 7 north to Burlington, park in the lot by Lake Champlain,” as opposed to “Drive over those rounded mountains, follow the big road north to the biggest city, and park by the biggest lake.”

It’s probably due to a combination of these two reasons — affection and geography — that our girls have named the rocks in our yard.

Our backyard looks peaceful enough right now. As I sit here typing, I can see beyond my computer screen to a thickly woven tapestry of tree trunks and branches springing up from the rock-strewn yard. Everything — the rocks, the trees, the mossy leafy ground — looks reassuringly strong and solid. But those rocks, some of which are deeply rooted in the earth and only extend a few inches above its surface, some of which tower over me at heights of 7 feet or more and might more appropriately be called “boulders,” are like clues left behind at a crime scene. These rocks are evidence that acts of great drama and violence once took place in our own backyard.

Our house sits on a geological border zone, a rocky ridge from which the Green Mountains slope up to the east, and the Champlain Valley spreads out to the west. This area of Vermont has been under glacial ice a mile thick, and then under water as Lake Vermont and the Champlain Sea formed when the glaciers melted about 12,000 years ago. The glaciers left behind the rocks and boulders that squat atop our yard. Any exposed bedrock we can see is part of a much older story, dating from the Precambrian and Cambrian periods (roughly 700-500 million years ago) when the proto-Atlantic ocean began opening, releasing sediments and volcanic material, and then reversed its motion in a collision of continental plates that formed the Green Mountains. The rocks in our area are a combination of Precambrian basement rocks, schists, and shelf sediments. (If you’re into this sort of thing, many detailed resources are available on the Vermont Geological Survey website).

Of course, I wasn’t thinking about geological drama the first time I saw this yard; I was thinking, “Our girls are going to have a blast climbing all over these rocks!” And they do. They’ve also given names to their favorite rocks, and it’s my pleasure to introduce you to those rocks now.

The most important front yard rock is Firecracker Rock.

Firecracker Rock is named after the original Firecracker Rock, which juts out over Merrymeeting Lake in New Hampshire on a camp property that’s been in Nana’s family for generations.

With Boom and Nana on the original Firecracker Rock, circa 2010.

The original Firecracker Rock comes by its name honestly: it’s the site where firecrackers are set off over the lake on July 4th. There have been no firecrackers released from our Firecracker Rock — yet — but it’s the girls’ favorite rock to climb. The two oldest Gong girls can scale it by themselves in a matter of seconds; then they like to stand on top and survey their kingdom.

The other significant front yard rock is Chair Rock, so named because of its shape: it has a deep crease right across the middle, which makes it look like an overstuffed easy chair. On nice sunny days, the girls and I will take books out to Chair Rock and have our storytime snuggled into its warm lap.

Now, let’s move around to the backyard. The rock that dominates the backyard landscape is also the most fun to climb: Pride Rock. Pride Rock is named, of course, for the rock that towered above the African savannahs in The Lion King. Campbell is so enamored with lions, and so steeped in the story of The Lion King, that she spends most of each day pretending to be Simba the lion cub. She gets the whole family in on the action, and Pride Rock is the perfect place to stage these scenarios. Pride Rock has a gradual slope on one side, and a steep drop-off on the other, which makes it exciting to climb and slide down in all weather — when it’s covered in snow, it becomes a mini sledding hill.

Fiona at the steep end of Pride Rock, for scale.

Pride Rock has some nice satellite rocks. Right next to it is Castle Rock, which has a flat top with a small tree growing out of it. This creates the perfect setup for lion-princess interaction. Just assuming, of course, that you like to pretend to be a lion and your big sister always wants to be a princess.

Then, there’s Boat Rock, which stands on the other side of Pride Rock and is the rock you’d usually step on after descending Pride Rock. For this reason, it’s a handy rock to use as a boat if you need to make a speedy getaway from Pride Rock or Castle Rock. Speedy getaways by boat are crucial if you’re being chased by witches or mean lion uncles.

Across from Boat Rock is Refrigerator Rock. I am told, with a slightly disgusted expression which suggests it was silly to even ask, that Refrigerator Rock was named for its resemblance to a refrigerator. Obviously.

A stone’s throw from Pride Rock and its satellites is the rock that Campbell calls Pride Rock’s Cousin With The House On It. This is a mossy, flat-topped rock close to our house, so in the warm months we put a little bird house on top of it. The girls don’t usually play on this rock, but I suppose it makes a good landmark.

If you walk much further back in the woods behind our house — deep enough to require an immediate tick check afterwards — right at the edge of our property you’ll find Campbell’s Cave. Campbell discovered this little nook in the base of a large boulder during a family hike this past winter. Now that the weather is warmer, she and Fiona are fixing up the cave for fairies or bears to use. Apparently fairies and bears LOVE big piles of dead leaves and pine cones.

As I sit here writing, Pride Rock, Pride Rock’s Cousin With The House On It, Boat Rock, and Refrigerator Rock are all clearly visible, grey-green in the early morning light. I’m thinking how fortunate we are to have this yard full of rocks, and this house full of girls who love to climb them. I’m also thinking about the similarities between these girls and these rocks: that to create something beautiful, and strong, and fun usually requires some explosions, collisions, and erosion.

Some Spider!

Over at On the Willows today: my little reflection on Charlotte’s Web, or: how to change the world, one web at a time. Click here to read.

As a bonus, here are a couple Memorial Day weekend photos of Fiona and Campbell. (Georgia is covered in mosquito bites and looks kind of leprous right now, so we’re hiding her).

Preparing to march in the Middlebury Memorial Day Parade with the Public Library group. (It was WAY more fun than it looks).

New Additions

Here’s a hypothetical situation for you:

Let’s say that, for a couple of years, you’d been considering raising a few chickens. This started back when you lived in California, where the backyard chicken craze was really taking off. But between three kids and no yard at all, it didn’t seem like a possibility. Then — hypothetically, of course — you moved to a small town in Vermont where everyone, it seemed, was raising chickens (among other things). You still had the three kids, but a much bigger yard. Chickens seemed like more of a possibility, albeit a remote one.

And then, right at the end of your first year in Vermont, when things with the kids and the house and the yard seemed to be getting under control, your daughter’s preschool class obtained an incubator full of eggs for hatching. Back when you were in preschool, your class hatched eggs, too, but you never really considered what happened to the chicks after they’d hatched and been cooed over by the class. No doubt they were driven out to the country somewhere. But NOW, YOU live in the country, so here’s what happens at your daughter’s preschool: Near the end of the 21-day incubation period, a sign-up sheet appears on a large poster, decorated by your daughter’s class with adorable chick pictures, which says, “HELP US FIND GOOD HOMES FOR OUR CHICKS!” The pick-up day is in one week.

Well, what would you do?!?

Here’s what I did: Called my husband, of course. Called him at his office, where he was busy fielding panicked undergraduates (whose entire lives apparently hung on their final grades in Introductory Statistics), when he wasn’t researching how to rid the world of poverty and disease.

“Free chicks,” I said.

“Um, okay, I guess so,” he replied.

And so I signed us up for three chicks. (Three, of course: one per girl).

Here’s what I did next: Rushed to the library to check out all the books I could find about raising chickens. The week in between signing up for the chicks and picking them up felt kind of like preparing for the arrival of three newborn babies…in seven days. We read, we looked online, we talked to our real live friends who raise chickens, we dragged the girls around to Agway and the Paris Farmers Union. Many times, we thought — and said — “What have we gotten ourselves into?” And Erick helpfully pointed out that my original declaration of “Free chicks!” was not, in fact accurate; that we’d fallen prey to the classic pet-store scam of giving away free goldfish, because the fish aren’t the expensive part.

But the girls had already picked names for their chicks. There was no going back.

So, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to our newest additions, the other three Gong Girls: Grace, Simba, and Hermione:

They are currently living in a box under a heat lamp in our garage, while we scramble to build a backyard chicken coop in less than a month. (Helpers welcome!)

Our hope is to have three laying hens who will provide us with fresh eggs, eat the ticks in our yard, and somehow manage to survive the owls, hawks, foxes, skunks, possums, raccoons, weasels, dogs, and small children that our backyard has to offer. The problem is, it’s too early to tell if they’re hens or roosters, so please cross your fingers that they really do turn out to be the three Gong Girls.

“What if one — or more than one — turns out to be a rooster?” I asked one of our chicken-savvy friends.

“That,” she said, “is what you call ‘dinner.'”

How to Talk to a Mom

Since becoming a mom, I have become a terrible conversationalist.

As with anything I write here, I can only speak for myself. So this may be particular to a mother of three young children who is a recovering social perfectionist, doesn’t work outside the home, and has moved cross-country within the past year. I’m also not sure that I was a master of sparkling conversation before having children. I can’t remember those days very well; if I had to guess, I’d say I was only average with the chit-chat back then.

Which is much, much better than what I am now.

If you attempt a conversation with me these days, you will find me in one of two modes, neither of them eloquent. Whichever mode I’m in depends entirely upon external circumstances: whether or not my kids are with me.

Scenario #1: The Kids Are With Me.

I will be able to have, at most, two minute blocks of uninterrupted conversation with you. I will probably never make eye contact; instead, I’ll be scanning the room continuously to make sure I keep tabs on all three children. My side of the conversation will go something like this: “Uh-huh… yeah…. Excuse me just a minute. Campbell, SHARE!… Sorry, where were we?… Oh, right….Excuse me. Fiona, I’m talking with a grown-up. Just a minute, please…. So, wait, you were saying…? Oh, yup….Sorry, hang on. Oh, Georgia, what’s wrong?”

And so on. The conversation will end in one of two ways: either I’ll become engrossed in our conversation and establish eye contact for four seconds, in which case I will inevitably lose one of the kids (Campbell) and have to excuse myself to search frantically for her, OR one of the kids will have a complete melt-down (this is more likely the closer it gets to mealtime) and I’ll have to make a quick exit with a screaming child. I will smile apologetically and say, “I’ll catch up with you later.” (“Later,” I believe, is code for “in about five years”).

Scenario #2: The Kids are NOT With Me

This is a very rare occurrence. These days, this scenario applies mostly to occasional Moms’ Nights Out, or to doctor appointments. You’d think that being free of the kids, free of distractions, would liberate me to spread my wings and emerge as a conversational butterfly. Not the case, unfortunately for you.

First of all, I’m used to conversations that have to be crammed into two-minute time slots. It’s like eating: I usually bolt down my food as quickly as possible in order to deal with the numerous crises that happen every meal with three children, but if I’m eating without my children, I still bolt down my food in a matter of seconds. It’s become a habit. The same habit applies to conversation: I’m used to rushing in order to get the most conversational bang for the time I have, so even without children around I talk waaay too fast. And I start to feel panicked if the conversation extends beyond two minutes.

Also, you may be the first adult, aside from my husband, whom I’ve spoken with in over a week. (Not counting harried two-minute exchanges with other moms or brief pleasantries with check-out clerks). If we’re standing face-to-face and I’m looking you in the eyes and none of my kids are on the premises, this is an Event. And I have so much to say; all of the me that I can’t share with my kids will come gushing out like a horrible case of verbal Montezuma’s revenge. I can’t help it. I suspect that this is why so many moms have blogs: so they’ll have an outlet for those spillover thoughts and will talk less in social situations. It kind of works.

Finally, I’m really tired. I can’t claim that mind-numbing exhaustion that you have with a newborn; I’m fortunate that all three of our kids now sleep through the night. But I’m still really, really tired. Which just exacerbates the speedy talking, the verbal runs, and possibly some bizarre comments or tripping over words, because I’m lacking my full filtering capacities.

So, How to Talk to a Mom?

First, even if all of the above scares your pants off, you definitely should talk to moms. Because it’s a nice thing to do. Moms are usually starved for conversation with other grown-ups. Look at it as your act of charity for the week. But here are a few tips to get you through it:

1. Be patient, merciful, and understanding. Remember that you’re talking with someone who’s used to having to rush through all interactions, who may not have had a sustained social conversation with another adult in quite some time, and who is probably exhausted. If the mom rattles on or overshares, give her the benefit of the doubt.

2. Don’t feel like you have to ask about the kids. If you ask me about my kids, I’m going to have to tell you about my kids. And that might become a conversational snowball, rolling downhill out of my control. I can tell you a lot about my kids, but while I’m doing it I’ll be feeling horrible remembering how much I used to hate having to listen to other people talk about their kids (before I had kids, of course). So, I promise that I won’t be offended if you don’t ask about my kids. And I’ll be delighted if you treat me like any other normal person who thinks about things other than her kids. Because I do. Ask what I’ve read lately, ask about current events, ask about my vacation plans, whatever.

3. Talk about yourself. These days, if you ask me about what I’ve read lately, current events, or my vacation plans, I may have nothing much to say. In this case, I suggest that you talk about yourself. Usually, talking too much about oneself is frowned upon in social situations, but talking with a mom is an exception. I say: Please feel free to rattle on about yourself. Give me the whole monologue — you’ll be doing me a favor. In talking about yourself, you’re taking the pressure off of me. I won’t worry about talking too long or too fast or too much about my kids if I can’t get a word in, and I’ll feel like I’m doing a swell job holding up my end of the conversation by just smiling, nodding, and asking the occasional question. I may be fascinated by what you’re saying, or I may zone out and plan what I’ll make for dinner the next week, but either thing is a gift to me.

Okay, then. I’ll catch up with you later!