Addy Indy Article: It’s That [cough, cough, sneeze] Time of Year

Flu season is upon us yet again.

I can afford to be a little smug about flu season, because in our house – with a four-month-old baby around – we’ve all had our flu vaccines. My husband got his flu shot in the quiet peace of the Middlebury College flu clinic. I got my flu shot on a whim during a shopping trip to Hannafords, because the baby was asleep in her carrier and the 2-year-old was being unusually compliant. My two middle daughters received the FluMist nasal spray during a visit to their pediatrician. And my oldest daughter decided she wanted a flu shot because she hadn’t liked the FluMist last year, then panicked when she saw the needle and demanded the nasal spray, then panicked at the memory of having a mist sprayed up her nose, and finally had to be held down in order to get the shot. So, in our own ways, we’re all covered.

It’s not the flu I’m concerned about this flu season; it’s everything else.

Continue reading about everything else in this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

While You Were Sleeping…

I love my bed.

It wasn’t always this way. Growing up, I equated sleep with struggle. I was never a napper, and I remember some fierce bedtime battles with my parents. Even after I stopped throwing tantrums at bedtime (probably at a much later age than most children!), I found that I could function pretty well on less than eight hours of sleep. Sleep, in my opinion, was wasted time.

But these days, it often feels like the best part of the day is when I lay my head down on my pillow and pull up the comforter. And the worst part of the day is when the alarm wakes me at 5:30 in the morning, and I stumble out into the cold darkness to fix breakfast and lunches, and contemplate how little rest I got the night before.

These days, I’m exhausted.

I expected to be exhausted right after Abigail was born this summer; those every-two-hour-round-the-clock newborn feedings warp time in a way I never understood until I had children. I look back on the months following the births of each of our daughters like I’m seeing them through a glass of water; they’re all blurred and I can’t remember much of what I said or did.

But I wasn’t expecting to be this crushingly exhausted four months after Abigail’s birth. Abigail’s a pretty easy baby and a good sleeper, logging in two solid naps during the day and roughly 11 hours of sleep overnight. The problem is that she’s still waking up to nurse several times a night. And sleep deprivation, I’m coming to find, is cumulative. Other factors may be that I have three other children to take care of, and I’m getting older. Whatever the reason, when Abigail wakes up twice a night to eat — as she usually does — I feel wrecked in the morning. When Abigail wakes up THREE TIMES a night to eat — as she occasionally does — I lose the will to live.

I know we’ll get through this; we have before. I know some people have it much worse. I know that my exhaustion is partly my own fault; if I could just NAP during the day, that might make things better, but I’m still a terrible napper.

So right now I’m like a dehydrated person who can only think about water; sleep is my obsession. For instance, I’ve noticed that every member of our family has their own “sleep profile,” just as they each have their own personality and role in the family.

First, there’s Erick. Historically, Erick has been the sleep yin to my yang: He needs sleep, at least eight hours. If Erick had his own way, he would go to bed early and sleep late, and then throw in a couple of naps during the day. He can fall asleep anytime, anywhere. He’ll drop into a deep slumber while in a plane that’s taking off (How is that possible?!? I’m always gripping the armrests in an effort to keep the plane aloft). He always falls asleep during bedtime stories with the girls (“Daddy, wake UP!”). He once fell asleep at the table in the middle of dessert with friends at a crowded NYC restaurant (he’ll tell you that it was a late dessert, which is true but beside the point).

Fiona is the most like me, sleep-wise; she doesn’t need much sleep in order to function. She hasn’t napped in years, and it used to be a battle to put her to bed each night. We’d give babysitters instructions like they were Jason about to face the sirens: “Stuff your ears with cotton, lash yourself to the couch, and no matter what she says or how loud she screams, do NOT let her out of that room!” Things got much better once she had sisters sharing her room, and have only improved since she started school full-time. Now she’s pretty easy-breezy at bedtime: she’ll look at a few books and then drop off to sleep. A little slow in the mornings, but not a beast.

Campbell is the most like Erick as a sleeper; she needs a lot of it. She’s still a great napper, she regularly konks out in the car, and she falls asleep almost immediately at bedtime. One key difference between her and her dad: Campbell is our morning person. She’s the first sister awake in the morning (often we’ll hear her crowing like a rooster in an attempt to wake her sisters), and she bounces out of bed cheerful and ready to go.

Then there’s Georgia. Georgia equates sleep with party time. She never complains about naptime or bedtime — but neither does she sleep. Instead, we hear her thumping around upstairs, talking and singing to herself. I never know where I’ll find Georgia when I go in to get her from a nap: sometimes she’s on top of the changing table (where she may have changed her own diaper several times), sometimes she’s in a sister’s bed, sometimes she’s collapsed on the floor in a pile of blankets and stuffed animals. And because she stays up so late partying, Georgia is NOT a morning person. Usually we have to carry her downstairs, rumpled and half-asleep. We prop her up at the breakfast table, where she’ll sit and sob for the next ten minutes.

I find it interesting that members of the same family, who’ve been raised with roughly the same schedule, can have such vastly different sleep habits. When it comes to sleep, I’m definitely a believer in nature over nurture. Another interesting thing is that all three of these girls share a bedroom, and all six of us (including Abigail, whose sleep patterns are still too newborn to be determined) have to share a house. So, that’s fun.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s miles to go before I sleep.

Teenage Wasteland

"Happy Sweet 16! Here are your wheels!" — “Happy Sweet 16! Here are your wheels!”

Our fourth daughter was born this summer. We now have four girls, aged 5, 4, 2, and 3 months.

Which means that in 13 years, we will have four teenaged girls.

I didn’t consider that scenario when we were planning our family, for the very simple reason that we didn’t plan our family. It all just happened, fast and furious, and when the dust settled this past July we suddenly had four daughters staring at us.

But I’m reminded of our teenaged future almost daily now, because whenever I venture into public with my daughters, someone will inevitably look at us and say, “Four daughters?!? Wow, that’s going to be interesting when they’re all teenagers!” And instead of “interesting,” they sometimes use words like “challenging,” “crazy,” or “horrible.”

Click here to continue reading at On the Willows.

The War on Fruit Chews

We’re almost a month into Fiona and Campbell’s school year, and the update is: it’s been the BEST back-to-school experience in our family’s history. This year, there was no Second Day trauma; everything went as smoothly as we’d hoped and prayed for (Please don’t hate me; I know I’m lucky and it’s probably just this year. But of all years, with a new baby at home, I’m grateful that the universe decided to kick an easy transition our way!)

I was never particularly concerned about Campbell. To start with, Campbell barely notices where she is as long as there are toy animals to play with. Also, she was returning to the same preschool she attended last year, for the same three days a week.

But Fiona started Kindergarten at our town’s public elementary school. That seemed like a BIG DEAL: new school, new teachers, new kids, new routine, and riding the school bus home. She loves all of it.

And we — Erick and I — love it, too. Whenever someone asks us how Kindergarten is going, we respond in unison, “We LOVE Kindergarten!!” I realize that they’re probably asking how Fiona likes Kindergarten, but whatever. As far as I’m concerned, Kindergarten is the best invention on the planet, and I don’t know why nobody told us earlier.

Get this: Kindergarten takes my child all day long, five days a week! And they return her to me filled with newly acquired knowledge! Just the other day, Fiona asked me to play school with her; she was the teacher, I was the student. And out of nowhere, she writes on the board: 17-0=17. My jaw dropped. Yes, ma’am, that’s MY daughter doing double-digit subtraction! Where’d she learn it? Not from me — from Kindergarten!!

The thing about Kindergarten is that I feel much more distant from the classroom than I did when Fiona was in preschool. I had to drop her off and pick her up from preschool, so I was in her classroom twice a day. I’d exchange greetings with her teacher and hear immediately if anything notable had happened.

Now that Fiona’s in Kindergarten, Erick drops her off on his way to work in the morning (it’s on his way, in the opposite direction from the preschool where I drop Campbell), and she takes the bus home in the afternoon. Fiona does a decent job of reporting on her day, and her teacher sends home a weekly newsletter, but that’s all I have to go on.

In the middle of second week of school, Fiona came home and announced, “I can’t have fruit chews in my lunch anymore.”

I’ve written before about fruit chews: small packets officially labeled “Fruit Flavored Snacks,” known to most non-Gong children as “gummies.” I’m not quite sure how fruit chews became a staple of my children’s diet, since I never ate them as a child and wouldn’t have purchased them on my own. I’m guessing they were introduced to our girls by friends, or even (gasp!) grandparents. I feel vaguely shameful about giving my children daily fruit chew snacks, since I’m aware that they’re probably bad for the teeth and have little nutritional value. But I’ve continued to buy them because my daughters have to eat something, and I figure that if you can’t eat a little junk when you’re a kid, when can you???

I was baffled by this anti-fruit chew edict that Fiona had proclaimed, but far be it from me to show disrespect to her teachers. Instead, I remained calm and mature, and asked, “Okay…why can’t you have fruit chews in your lunch?”

“Because,” she said, “the teachers want us to have nutritious food in our lunches, and fruit chews are just a little bit of fruit juice and mostly colored sugar.”

BAM!

Okay, so it’s quite possible that I’m not getting the full story from my five-year-old. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that she’d misunderstood something and given me information that was slightly off. I’m choosing to believe that’s the case here, because…

WHY, out of all the nutritionally-challenged lunchbox options, would the teachers choose to pick on fruit chews??? Certainly they’ve seen worse, right?

In a good faith effort to determine how bad fruit chews really are, I took a closer look at the box. Right there on the front, it said: “Made with Real Fruit Juice*”

That’s right: an asterisk. Uh-oh.

But that asterisk just leads to a statement that these snacks are made from fruit juice concentrate, and aren’t supposed to replace actual fruit in the diet. Well, duh!

So here’s the skinny: Fruit chews are mostly artificial colors and sugars, including corn starch. But they’re also only 80 calories, and they provide 20% of the recommended daily value of Vitamin C.

That’s not great, but it’s not terrible. In a lineup of snack foods, fruit chews strike me as fairly innocuous. Which begs the question: If you ban fruit chews, where do you draw the line? What about fruit chews’ flat cousin, the Fruit Roll-Up? Potato chips and Fritos? Cheez-Its and Goldfish? What about those “Pizza Fridays” in the school cafeteria? What about a cookie for dessert? (Fiona tells me that baked desserts are okay, but not chocolate bars — another fine line, it seems).

But let’s assume the teachers are okay with their morally ambiguous food restrictions: WHY wouldn’t they draft a letter to the parents informing us of what’s on the banned list? I never received any written instructions as to what I could or couldn’t pack in Fiona’s lunch. Which leaves me, now, in the anxiety-prone position of having to second-guess whether the lunches I pack meet some unknown nutritional standard.

Do I seem overly defensive here?!?!

I suppose I am. In truth, I’m embarrassed that Fiona’s teachers have seen my shame and refused to look away.

That, in a nutshell, is probably the biggest challenge for parents entering this new world of school: We’re sending out our most precious things — these little beings in whom we’ve invested so much of ourselves — into a larger world where they’ll be judged according to standards that are not always clear or fair. And we have no control over it.

If we don’t watch ourselves, we may end up getting defensive over silly things like fruit chews.

Little Women

Since the birth of our fourth daughter, several people have made the comparison between the four Gong Girls and the four March sisters — protagonists of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, Little Women. It happens that our daughters are familiar with Little Women (in the form of an abridged version by Usborne Books), and the comparison is not lost on them. “Which one is Georgia?” they’ll ask whenever I read it to them, “Which one am I?”

Louisa May Alcott divided the March sisters into easily identifiable types; the types you might expect based on the conventional wisdom of birth order. Meg, the oldest, is responsible and steady, with a weakness for fashion. Second-born Jo is the tomboy, a temperamental writer. Beth is sweet, sickly, self-sacrificing, and prefers quietly playing her piano. The youngest, Amy, is a spoiled, petulant, artistic type.

In families with multiple children, each sibling tends to carve out a distinct role. But when we read Little Women and they ask, “Which one am I?” the most honest response would be: “Not the one you think!”

Our girls don’t conform to the sisterly types created by Louisa May Alcott. Sure, the Gong girls are still in the process of becoming, and Abigail’s still an unknown quantity, but I’m fairly confident that our family has no sweet, quiet, sickly Beth. Most days it feels like we have four Jo-Amy hybrids: independent, temperamental, outspoken bundles of energy.

The thing is: None of my girls is turning out to be whom I thought she’d be.

Like most parents, I brought certain expectations to the table based on my own upbringing, the birth order archetypes I’d learned in college psychology classes, and sibling characters like those in Little Women. But I’m finding that one of the most fun and rewarding parts of parenting is setting those expectations aside and watching as my children are gradually revealed to me. I know that some parents never let go of their expectations and force their children into molds of their own making. To me, parenting feels more like archaeology: My children came to me already themselves, like fossils embedded in rock, and it’s my delight to gently chip and brush away the extraneous dirt to uncover who they really are. (And hopefully instill some manners along the way).

Take my first- and second-borns, for instance. Fiona: a sweet people-pleaser with a strong dramatic streak and a love of all things pink and princess-y; I’d pegged her for the shy, girly girl who’d gravitate towards dance and theater. And Campbell, who’s always been a little bit of a rebel, who loves yellow and lions and seemed tougher than her older sister; I assumed she’d be the outgoing, sporty one.

It looks like, in both of these cases, my first assumptions were totally wrong. Fiona is definitely the classic firstborn responsible people-pleaser, but she’s not particularly shy. And she’s not interested in dance or theater; her love is sports, something I never saw coming. She’s already a solid swimmer, she’s proud of her fast running and will race anything that moves, and she’s looking forward to playing soccer next year (although apparently, despite never having picked up a racket, she’s “mostly interested in tennis.”)

Campbell has little interest in sports. She’s certainly independent and “tough,” in the sense that she doesn’t care what others think of her. But she’s also the most introverted of all my daughters. She loves animals and nature: She’s happiest playing ponies by herself, or picking a bouquet of flowers. and her career plans at the moment vary between veterinarian, florist, artist, and mountaineer.

And then there’s Georgia. It’s hilarious that Georgia is the one in the “sweet third daughter” position, because she bears absolutely zero resemblance to Louisa May Alcott’s Beth. Georgia is a fireball: She’s outgoing, never stops talking, fiercely independent, afraid of nothing, and she loves to eat. She’s only two, so it’s still hard to separate the essential Georgia from the terrible two-ness, but she seems inclined to grab life by the neck and throttle it. (Or maybe the frequency with which she bites her sisters is really an indication that she wants to take a big bite out of life).

The poet Sylvia Plath wrote in “Morning Song:” “I’m no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand.” I used to think Plath had a detached view of motherhood because she was depressed, but now I understand that line differently. I don’t know where these kids came from. Sure, there are certain aspects of their personalities that I recognize as coming from me or Erick, but there are other, HUGE parts of who they are that I can’t even relate to. One of Fiona’s favorite parts of kindergarten is P.E., which was exactly what I dreaded for my entire school career. Where did THAT come from???

Of course, my girls are still very young, and all of the things I’ve just written about them are subject to change in the coming years. The essential point remains, and here’s an illustration: Now that Campbell and Fiona are attending separate schools, Campbell is emerging from her big sister’s shadow and into her own. This mostly means horrible fights, but the other day when Fiona was getting a little too bossy, Campbell looked at her and said: “I am NOT you! I am A DIFFERENT PERSON!”

And that’s just the thing about parenting: Our children are, and always have been, different people. That’s either scary or exciting. At the moment, I’m choosing to focus on the exciting.

Secrets and Truths

Shortly after this picture was taken, I imposed a “bottoms must be worn at all times” rule in our house. (Because really, you never know when the Queen might drop by).

When I feel guilty as a mother, it usually stems from the vast distance between the parent I thought I’d be, the parent I’d LIKE to be, the parent I present myself as in public and on Facebook — and the reality. I know I’m not alone here, but because I try to keep certain parts of my parenting under wraps, it sometimes feels like I’m alone. In an effort to correct this, here are some of my guilty parenting secrets:

-We have a drawer full of Barbies in our living room. We also have Barbie books, and the girls check out Barbie movies from the library on a weekly basis. I don’t love this, but I’ve allowed it.

-Speaking of the library: I live in fear that someday our local library will be able to trace all of the books that are repaired with packing tape back to our family, and we’ll have our library cards revoked for life.

-While I make feeble attempts to provide a variety of healthy food options, my daughters essentially live on a diet of Cheez-Its and what I optimistically refer to as “fruit chews.” Every non-Gong child I know calls “fruit chews” “gummies,” which is a more accurate term, since these processed snacks contain absolutely no natural fruit products.

-My daughters drink a lot of water, and each one has a personal water bottle — a stainless steel bottle with a plastic flip-top and rubber straw. I tote these bottles around in our diaper bag, and if you were to take one apart you would probably be appalled at the musty odor and visible mold on the rubber straw. I blame Thermos for creating a water bottle that’s a pain in the neck to clean, but I also credit Thermos with my daughters’ hardy immune systems.

-I have an iPod, but it’s no longer really mine; it now contains more Tinkerbell, Sesame Street, and My Little Pony games than my own apps. That’s because the only way I’ve been able to get my oldest daughter to stay out of my hair while her younger sisters nap is to hand her the iPod. She probably spends way too much time on it, and I’ve had to limit her to downloading one new game per week. But without that iPod, this blog wouldn’t exist.

-We don’t own a T.V., but the portable DVD player we received last Christmas has saved my sanity many times — and not just during long road trips. In an attempt to be a good mother, I limit the girls to 30 minutes of daily “screen time,” watching DVDs they choose at the library. This means that, especially during the summer months, they almost always watch 30 minutes of videos per day. How did anyone cook dinner before videos existed?

-I usually forget to give Abigail her daily vitamin D drops. She rarely gets daily “tummy time.” Abigail spends most of her time in her carseat or in the Moby wrap.

-On the first day of school, when every other parent is putting up Facebook posts about how they cried while dropping off their kids, I am gripped by the fear that I don’t love my kids enough. I have never once, not EVER, even become mildly choked up when dropping my kids off on the first day of school. Instead, I fly out the door with arms spread wide yelling, “FREEEEDOM!!!!” (Then I buckle the remaining 2 kids into their carseats and go grocery shopping).

-While we’re on the subject of school attendance: On those rare days (thank you, Thermos!) when a daughter is sick and can’t attend school, I don’t feel sympathy so much as I feel wrathful and vengeance-seeking.

Well, it felt good to get THAT off my chest. Who’s with me?

A Cure for August Annoyance

I once heard that Facebook, the social media site originally founded as a way for college students to connect, has found its target audience in a new demographic: 30-something stay-at-home moms. That certainly rings true to me; on those days when we don’t leave the house and my only adult conversation happens after my husband returns from work, it can feel like a refreshing little escape to log on to Facebook and see that there’s a whole other world out there: a world of friends, my age, who are eating ribs RIGHT NOW!

I’ve been logging on to Facebook more often than usual this summer. The major reason for this is that we have a new baby, which increases the number of days when we don’t leave the house. I’m spending about 12 hours a day feeding the baby. Half of the time I’ll feed the baby with one hand while with the other I cook dinner. change another child’s diaper, or repair the transmission on our minivan. But that still leaves almost 6 hours when I’m feeding the baby in peace; the perfect time to check Facebook.

I’ve particularly needed the escape of Facebook during August. Why? Well, as of the moment this post publishes, there is one day until school starts. Want to know how many hours? 19! Anybody else counting down to the first day of school? Can I get an “Amen!”?

Yes, in August we entered the “Countdown to School” portion of our summer: that time when summer starts to lose its glow, when we’ve all spent too much time together, when the girls are bickering constantly with each other and driving me nuts.

The first week of August was the worst, because my two oldest girls spent every morning at an outdoor nature camp. They loved this camp, and then they’d come home filthy and exhausted and be terrible people until bedtime. One daughter chose this same week to become obsessive-compulsive about her clothes; she’d change outfits 20 times a day until we finally responded by moving all of her clothes to the basement. There was eye-rolling and door slamming and angst; nobody warned me that adolescence starts at kindergarten.

I was grouchy and annoyed with my kids. I sought solace in Facebook.

The thing is, that wasn’t a very happy time on Facebook, either. For a couple of weeks, I couldn’t log on to Facebook without encountering some tragedy, and all of these incidents involved parents or their children. I won’t go into detail here, because these are not my tragedies to share — they involved my friends’ friends or family: toddlers dying, newborns dying, parents dying in childbirth or just prior to the birth of their children. The kind of things we like to tune out, to pretend don’t happen anymore in this time and place. The kind of things that remind us of how we’re all walking around with pianos dangling over our heads, and it’s just a matter of time until the rope snaps. That could have been MY child. That could have been ME.

One afternoon, I logged on to Facebook during naptime as an alternative to clawing my eyebrows out after a particularly frustrating encounter with a daughter. I found myself choking back tears while reading the account of a baby who’d died days after birth. Then it hit me:

It is a LUXURY — a BLESSING — to be annoyed by my kids.

Annoyance means that they’re here, and I’m here, and we’ve had the gift of enough time together to really get under each others’ skin.

I’m still counting down the days, hours, and seconds until school starts. I don’t expect that I’ll stop feeling annoyed with my kids anytime soon. But when I do, I will remind myself that annoyance is a by-product of time, and time is a gift that not everybody gets.

Kindergarten and Community

My oldest daughter begins kindergarten at our town’s public elementary school next week, so last spring I attended the school’s “Parent Information Night.” More than anything else in the past five years, attending a kindergarten information night made me feel like a grown up, like a MOM, …old. It’s one thing to have children and be responsible for their upbringing; it’s another thing to sit on plastic chairs in a stuffy music room and realize that you’re about to become part of an entirely new community: a school community, with its teachers and administrators and volunteer commitments and dates-to-remember.

Click here to continue reading at The Addison Independent.

Downwardly Mobile

Last month, Erick and I celebrated our 11-year anniversary. That’s the Steel Anniversary, if you’re the type who follows these things. I’m not, but Erick is; last year, he went to a great deal of trouble to track down aluminum jewelry as a gift for our 10th (Aluminum) anniversary. Yes, it turns out, there is such a thing as aluminum jewelry. The bracelet and earrings that Erick gave me are beautiful, and just about as durable as you’d expect (think aluminum foil….).

I much prefer the symbolism of steel over aluminum when it comes to marriage. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon (and other elements), and it’s made by blasting iron with extreme heat so that its impurities burn off and carbon is distributed evenly. The result is greatly improved strength. Sounds a lot like marriage to me.

Anyway, Erick and I didn’t exchange steel gifts for our 11th anniversary, because we weren’t actually together on our anniversary: Erick was thousands of miles away in Kenya, setting up a research project. Since I was celebrating my marriage at a distance from my husband, I spent some time reflecting. I thought back to where we were in July 2002, in contrast with where we are now. And I realized that, if our marriage has a unifying theme, it’s that we’ve spent these past 11 years being downwardly mobile: scaling back our lifestyle and ambitions in a way that might look crazy to an outside observer.

Actually, it looks crazy to us, too. We didn’t plan any of this. So little of where you end up in life is intentional.

Here are the specifics:

When we first met, Erick and I held degrees from prestigious, private (expensive) Williams College, and prestigious, public (less expensive) UC Berkeley. I also had a Master’s Degree in education, and was living in Manhattan and teaching at the prestigious, private (VERY expensive) Nightingale-Bamford School. Erick was living in the upscale, exclusive suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he worked at a hedge fund making more money for the already-super-rich.

Dating a hedge fund manager brings certain perks. For the two years leading up to our marriage, Erick and I led a pretty fancy life: we went to fancy parties with fancy people, ate in fancy restaurants, and got free tickets to concerts and sporting events. Our wedding was pretty fancy, too: in a church right on Park Avenue, with a reception just up the block at the Colony Club. After honeymooning in Bora Bora (yes, really), we moved into the apartment we’d bought on the Upper East Side. It was on the 28th floor, with views of the East River. Our first major purchase, after the apartment, was a king-sized four-poster bed.

Things started going downhill almost immediately. Just before our wedding, Erick’s boss decided to get out while he was ahead and close down the hedge fund. Erick stayed on for a couple of years to manage the shut-down, which gave him enough time to return to school for a Master’s Degree in economics. Inspired by a trip we took to Africa, he chose to focus on development economics — NOT the money-making kind of economics. At the same time, I quit my teaching job and went back to school to study photography — definitely NOT a money-making move.

When Erick’s job at the hedge fund finally ended for good and he received his M.A., he decided to keep going for a PhD. in economics. Thus began his five years as a professional student. We moved to Berkeley, California. We rented a tiny, dark apartment that I always thought of as our “Hobbit hole.”. The king-sized four-poster bed was the first thing to go: it wouldn’t have fit in any of the three places we rented in Berkeley. Inspired by that same trip to Africa, I worked for two nonprofit organizations that offered minimal pay and no benefits.

Then, we started having children.

That history might come as a surprise to people who know us now. NOW we live off of a single assistant professor’s salary. I stay at home with our four daughters because a) I’d have to love any job I took, since all of my income would go towards childcare at this point, and b) there aren’t many jobs I’d love available in Middlebury, Vermont. Our house is the largest we’ve ever inhabited, but that’s due to a combination of our family’s size and the low cost of Vermont real estate. We sleep in a full-sized bed with a dust ruffle that’s ripped from our daughters climbing up to snuggle. And just the other day, Erick and I had a budgeting discussion in which we concluded that it’s neither affordable nor logical just now for us to buy a slipcover for the armchair with stuffing-spilling holes in both arms.

I’m not making a value judgement on our life then or our life now; I’m just stating facts. But this trajectory that our lives have taken isn’t what you’d have predicted if you’d met us 11 years ago. What should have happened is this: Erick should’ve continued to work in investment banking, making ridiculous amounts of money. I should’ve continued to teach at fancy prep schools, or maybe gone into administration. We should’ve moved to a fancy New York suburb (with that king-sized four-poster bed) and had two children. We should’ve continued to go to Broadway shows and sit courtside at Knicks games and take exotic vacations.

I can’t take pride in being a pioneer who went against the tide, because it turns out that the downwardly mobile course my life has taken is something of a trend. There’s even a book about it: Homeward Bound by Emily Matcher which, according to a blurb in The New Yorker, “follows college-educated, middle-class American women who have rejected cities, consumerism, and corporate culture in favor of very old-fashioned house- and family-keeping.”

Actually, I can’t even claim to be one of Emily Matcher’s women, either, because the blurb goes on to say, “They grow their own vegetables, knit their own clothes, and homeschool their children. Some run their own farms.” Good Lord, I do none of those things.

Which leaves me stuck in downwardly mobile limbo. I’m sitting here with the phantom of my earlier promise hanging over my head (high school valedictorian, $100,000 liberal arts education, two graduate degrees), and I’m not even canning my own beets or doing flashcards with my kids. I bailed on the workplace in favor of home, but am I failing on the home front, as well?

Sometimes I feel guilty about these things, about my place in society’s big picture. But mostly I’m just grateful for my life right now, and happy. I think that’s the story of our marriage, and of this blog, too: There’s a sort of sweet bafflement about where life has taken us. Never did I expect to be a stay-at-home mother of four in small-town Vermont. But never did I expect that downward mobility would bring so much joy upward.

What I’m Reading in the Middle of the Night

Photo by Fiona: Not exactly how I read at night, but it’ll give you an idea of how I’m writing this blog these days. Can you spot the baby in this picture?

My very favorite thing about nursing a newborn is that it gives me the chance to catch up on my reading.

That may seem counter-intuitive; you’d expect babies would put an end to maternal reading. But in my experience, the reading moratorium only happens once my children start sleeping through the night; when they’re up every two hours all night long, I tear through books faster than a bag of popcorn.

That’s right: I read in the middle of the night while I’m feeding the baby. While this might not be necessary for all mothers, it’s necessary for me. In fact, it’s necessary for me to get out of bed, sit up in a chair, and read while feeding the baby. Why? Because two babies ago, I fell asleep while nursing (and reading) in bed, and dropped the baby. Sitting in a chair with a text is my insurance policy against that ever happening again.

So, in preparation for Abigail’s birth, I went to the Vermont Book Shop and loaded up on books. Unfortunately, Abigail was 10 days late, so I read through most of those books during the agonizing wait before her birth. No matter: This time around, my nighttime reading has been revolutionized by a Kindle, a gift from my high-tech mother-in-law after she upgraded her own model. The Kindle is brilliant for reading-while-nursing because you don’t even need to hold it in order to read.

Books that will keep your attention at roughly 12:30, 2:30, 4:30, and 6:30 AM are worth sharing, so here’s a list of my favorites from the past couple of months:

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

This book reads like silk — it’s so beautifully written and compelling that I found myself looking forward to frequent feeding times! The subject matter is a little rough, about a girl who’s come out on the wrong side of the foster care system and has difficulty forming relationships. But it’s ultimately a redemptive story about families — mothers and daughters, in particular — that taught me something new: the Victorian concept that every flower expresses a certain emotion or idea, which is the method the heroine uses to communicate.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

NOT necessarily an easy read, but more of an, “Oh my gosh, how did he WRITE this?!?” kind of book. Mitchell weaves together stories spanning from the past into the future, and each story is written using a completely different style and dialect. Thematically, there’s so much going on that I’d need to take a 24-hour meditation retreat in order to get my brain around it all. But the over-arching themes of good vs. evil, interconnectedness, and reincarnation are breathtaking enough.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen

I picked this up because I’d never read a book by Anna Quindlen before and wanted to check her out. It’s a series of essays about womanhood, written from Quindlen’s point of view as a 60-something wife, mother, daughter, and writer. (Right up my alley, in other words). I thoroughly enjoyed her humor, optimism, and balanced perspective as someone who fought to have a career as a female journalist during the 1970s, but also wanted to have a quality family life.

The Dinner by Herman Koch

This was my book club’s July selection, and it was almost impossible to put down. I believe it’s also the first book I’ve read by a Dutch author, which was interesting; I’m suddenly much more aware of The Netherlands. Most of the “action” takes place in the form of one character’s interior monologue during a dinner with his brother. It starts off innocuous enough, then evolves into a psychological thriller. A great summer read if you’re prepared to suspend some disbelief.

Crazy Salad by Nora Ephron

I’d read somewhere that this collection of Ephron’s women’s columns for Esquire from the 1970s was a “must-read” for all women. So I read it. It’s sort of like a prequel to Anna Quindlen’s book: the book Quindlen might have written back when she was fighting for a career as a female journalist in the 1970s. It’s a little angry (verging on nasty, at times) for my taste, but it made me appreciate how ferociously the early feminists fought for things that we take for granted today.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite authors. I’ve read all of her previous novels — Abide With Me, Amy and Isabelle, and Olive Kitteridge (which won the Pulitzer Prize). Each of these books is set in small-town Maine, and Strout has a gift for capturing life in a small-town community, the intricacies of family relationships, and moments of small but soul-stirring grace. The Burgess Boys is her latest novel, and it’s my least favorite. It centers on the shockwaves that shake the lives of three grown siblings when one of their sons commits a hate crime against the new community of Somali immigrants in a small Maine town. Strout’s trying to do a little too much in this book — it feels Tom Wolfe-ish in its collection of numerous, thinly-drawn character types. But it’s still a compelling read, with some important things to say about the changes happening in contemporary New England.

There you have it: books that will keep you awake no matter what the time! As summer winds down, I hope that you’re all enjoying the last days of summer reading. Feel free to share some of your favorites; I still have a few months to go before I’m sleeping through the night!