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.
Last Christmas: Everyone scrunched around the old dining table.
Now that I’m at home with four children in a climate that sometimes keeps us housebound, I’m grateful every day for our house. When Erick and I worked with Habitat for Humanity in Tanzania, their motto was: “Nyuma ni Mama,” which is Swahili for “A house is a mother.” I never really thought about what that meant until I became a mother and bought a house in Vermont; now I realize that our house performs much the same functions for our family as I do: it shelters us, and by its very layout it guides our activities and helps shape our family culture.
If a house is a mother, I think that the beating heart of that house is the dining table.
All of which is a wordy and roundabout way of getting to this point: We have a new dining table!!
In Chinese culture, it’s typical to get generous amounts of cash as wedding gifts. After Erick and I were married, we took our wedding cash over to Macy’s and used it to buy two things: an oversized armchair and a dining set. Both purchases were made quickly; we just needed a place to sit and a place to eat in our new apartment. We had no vision of a future in which we’d live in a house and have children, so we took neither scenario into account when making our selections.
The dining table we chose seemed absurdly large: It came with six upholstered chairs. It wasn’t exactly “real” wood, but had a dark cherry finish. Eleven years later, the seat cushions bore crusty stains from our girls’ daily spills, the dark finish showed every fork gouge, and six chairs were only enough to seat our immediate family.
Remember that oversized armchair that we bought at the same time as the dining table? Eleven years later it, too, wasn’t looking its best. I even wrote about it here. The cat we’d had when we were first married had scratched up its base, Gracie the dog lay across its top whenever we left the house, our children had contributed numerous food and marker stains, and both arms were ripped and spilling stuffing.
That was liveable. Then I cut Gracie’s nails.
(Okay, clearly this whole post is going to be kind of wordy and roundabout. Brace yourselves.)
I cut Gracie’s nails because they had gotten so long that whenever she walked within six inches of one of our girls, they’d collapse on the floor wailing, “Gracie scratched me!” (We raise ’em tough around here). I don’t cut her nails often (obviously), so I failed to realize that cutting a dog’s nails is very different from cutting a cat’s nails. When we had a cat, I’d pin her down and chop away. Dogs’ nails have capillaries running through all but the very tip. So I cut Gracie’s nails — not too short, in my opinion — and she seemed fine and went about her business. But then I noticed pools of blood on the floor.
I mopped up the floor and Gracie, and then rushed off to pick up one of the girls from school. Another failure: I should have also bandaged Gracie’s paw. When we returned home, it looked like somebody had been murdered in our armchair: blood everywhere. Gracie had laid across the top, as is her habit, and licked at her cut nail until it opened up again.
Thankfully, my mother was visiting that weekend. If you know my mother, then you know that she can clean anything. (If she’d been alive back in MacBeth’s day, that play would have had a very different ending because Lady MacBeth wouldn’t have gotten all hung up over any “damn’d spot.”)
So, my mother worked her magic and got the blood out of the upholstery. Then she said, in her tactful Mom way, “Isn’t there somewhere we could go to look for a new armchair?”
In most places in the U.S., that would be a simple question to answer. But remember, we live in Vermont. There are no Ikeas or Crate & Barrels in this state. (And the few times I’ve attempted to order Ikea furniture online, the shipping costs exceeded the price of the furniture). There are furniture stores in Vermont, but to reach most of them I’d have to drive at least 45 minutes, at which point I’d just have to sit down and feed the baby. And even if I found a replacement armchair, I’d probably have to spend a lot of money to buy it and have it delivered 45 minutes away.
But then I remembered that a friend had told me about a used furniture store the next town over. I looked it up on Google, searching under “Vermont used furniture.” I was not at all hopeful, but there it was. Turns out its name is “Vermont Used Furniture,” it was a 15 minute drive away, and it was open right then.
Still not particularly hopeful, I agreed to check out Vermont Used Furniture, mostly because I love my mom.
We pulled up at the “store,” which is more like a hangar in the front yard of the couple that owns and operates it. We walked in, and there was the armchair — the same dimensions as our old armchair, but a little fancier and without the rips and dog blood — priced at approximately 1/4 of what we spend on groceries each week.
I walked a little farther into the hangar, and there was the dining table. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was our table. It was a slab of solid pine, and it glowed. It was large enough to easily seat 8 (possibly 10), which meant it could accommodate our whole family, plus a couple of guests. I wasn’t even looking for a dining table, but it was priced so that, together with the armchair and a set of (uncushioned!) dining chairs, it cost us less than a new slipcover for the old armchair. The guy from Vermont Used Furniture delivered them both to our house for free, and even bought our old dining table off of us.
So, we have a new dining table, and it’s made both Erick and me happier than you might imagine. Remember what I wrote way back, about a dining table being a house’s beating heart? That’s because we all sit at the dining table together at least twice a day. It’s the only space in our house that seats all of us, and it forces us to look at each other. We share food and conversation at this table, both of which keep our family healthy. During non-mealtimes, Erick and I often work at the table, the girls have snack at the table, Fiona does her “homework” at the table, we read books around the table.
The new table!
I look at this dining table, and I see what I want our family to be. Sometimes (okay, MOST times) it’s still a struggle to keep all the girls seated for an entire meal, or to keep conversations from devolving into potty talk. But I look at our new table and imagine all of the life that will happen around it; it’s solid enough to be our table for the rest of our family’s time together. It’s not perfect; the wood has some knotholes and cracks, and pine is soft enough to show the inevitable marks that we’ll put in it. All of which is fine by me, because that’s also how I want our family to be: solid, but not perfect.
Shortly after we installed our wonderful new table, I sat across from the girls during dinner and said, “Girls, here’s a little advice for you: Someday you’ll probably settle down with families of your own. And when you do, the most important thing is to invest in a dining table that you LOVE.”
My daughters stared at me for a moment, and then they said:
The October 14 print issue of this newspaper featured the headline, “Transitional apartments offered in Vergennes,” about a shelter that’s helping the homeless to become independent. Directly beneath it was a story about the Charter House Coalition’s Community Supper. The sidebar directed readers to articles about local weddings, and a rubber ducky race fundraiser for Mt. Abraham High School’s fall musical.
At the very bottom of the front page, below the fold, under an enormous photo of a tractor crossing a field amidst glorious fall foliage, was the headline that many of us were really thinking about that week: “Mt. Abe rocked by student suicide.”
This year, signs of fall started appearing in our part of Vermont around early September: splashes of colored leaves in the trees, the apple orchard open for business, the grocery store’s Back-to-School display gradually giving way to Halloween. The sunlight turned a deeper gold, and the nights became crisp enough to sleep under the comforter. As the month wore on, squirrels and chipmunks got busy in our yard laying aside acorns for the winter – and driving our dog to fits of frenzied barking at the windows. Channeling my own inner chipmunk, I started baking like a maniac.
The last week of September was glorious: the mountaintops were red-orange, and driving home each afternoon I felt like I was living inside a scenic Vermont calendar. Tour buses full of “leaf peepers” pulled into town; tour groups of fluorescent-spandexed bikers made driving backcountry roads an exercise in caution. The foliage wasn’t quite at its peak, but clearly we were in for some spectacular color over the next couple of weeks.
On October 2, I woke up and noticed that there were leaves covering the ground.
[Cue sound effect: brakes squealing as my fall euphoria turned to realism]. Oh, right…RAKING.
Shortly after the birth of our fourth daughter, with a brain grown mushy from sleep deprivation and a newspaper column deadline looming, I posted a plea on Facebook asking people to send me their questions, particularly questions about life in Vermont. I received a variety of responses, which I answered in the subsequent column.
But one astute reader sent this comment: Four little girls so close in age made me think about hand-me-downs.
Clearly this person understands. Because a major, daily facet of life with “four little girls so close in age” is The Clothing Situation.
You may assume that I’m talking about laundry.
Although laundry has now become something I do daily without thinking, like brushing my teeth, I am not talking about laundry.
There are two components of The Clothing Situation: Input and Storage.
INPUT
Let’s say you have a baby. Chances are that you get a large, up-front influx of clothes for that baby. These clothes come from friends and family as baby shower and “Welcome, Baby!” gifts. Some may also be hand-me-downs. All of this is great; you need baby clothes, and the apparel flood usually slows after a month or two.
But the grandparents keep going. If you’re lucky, you have some loving and generous grandparents who continue buying clothes for your child on a regular basis. This is helpful, because 1) your child keeps growing and needs new clothes long after the baby clothes are in storage, and 2) clothes are expensive.
So far, so good. But complications arise when you have the next baby. And the next. And the next.
Because with the birth of each new baby, you will again receive an influx of clothes (though fewer each time, it’s true) from well-wishers who say, “Thought it’d be nice for baby to have some clothes that aren’t hand-me-downs!” The grandparents will continue to buy clothes for Child #1, but they’ll also buy clothes for Children #2, 3, and 4, despite the fact that these children are all receiving hand-me-downs from the ones who came before. You can try telling the grandparents that Child #1 — the oldest — is the only one who needs new clothes, but they’ll ignore you and buy new clothes for everyone, “because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.”
Now let’s assume that all of your children turn out to be of the same gender. Good news! That means they can all wear the clothes you’ve been receiving since Child #1 was born. You see where this is leading? By the time Child #4 comes along, she has four babies’ worth of clothing in her wardrobe!
Around this time, people with slightly older children of the same gender as your children will start to take notice. Hey, Faith and Erick have four girls, they’ll think. That means they’ll be able to use our hand-me-downs FOUR TIMES! Because you offer such good bang-for-the-buck, bags full of fantastic, gently-used clothing will begin arriving on your doorstep. (**We love these friends, and we’re genuinely grateful for these clothes!)
You may be thinking: But surely, by the time clothes trickle down to Child #4, a good many of them can be discarded due to wear and tear. It’s true that some of the baby clothes — particularly those worn around the time solid foods are introduced — become irreparably stained and have to be tossed. But if your children are anything like mine, each child tends to rotate through only four or five favorite outfits, and those favorite outfits are different for each child. So despite the clothing needs of four children, there are plenty of clothes in every size that have never, ever been worn.
To put it succinctly: We have a lot of clothes. And that’s where the storage problem comes in.
STORAGE
When Fiona was born, we bought a small bureau with a changing table on top. Simple and efficient: we stored her clothes in the drawers below, and changed her diapers above.
Then Campbell was born, and it made sense to store her clothes in the bureau, since we’d be changing her diapers on top. What to do with Fiona’s clothes? There wasn’t space in their small, shared room for another bureau. Also, Fiona was beginning to select her own clothes, which I wanted to encourage without having to deal with bureau drawers left open or pinching little fingers. My solution: I went to Target and bought some cloth bins — one each for tops, bottoms, pajamas, socks, and underwear. The bins fit perfectly into the bottom shelf of a bookcase, where Fiona could easily pull them out to grab her clothes.
When we moved to Vermont, the clothing storage problem followed us. Because our girls all share a room, they got the largest room in our new house — the former master bedroom. Because our girls all share a room, however, there still wasn’t space for additional bureaus. No matter: this room included one of the biggest closets I’d ever seen. I decided to continue my strategy of baby’s clothes in the bureau/changing table, big girls’ clothes in cloth bins.
So now we have one child’s clothing in the bureau, and three children’s clothing in bins on the floor. Which is why their closet looks like this:
Mind you, those are just the clothes they’re wearing right now. What you don’t see are the storage bags filled with clothes that don’t fit anybody at this moment, or the garbage bags stuffed with hand-me-downs that are waiting for Fiona to grow into them.
There is no bigger point here; The Clothing Situation isn’t a metaphor for anything more meaningful. I freely admit that this is a very minor first-world problem. It’s just one of those things that I never anticipated when I signed up for parenthood; who knew that closet organizing would be such an important life skill?
I do have hope that things will improve. After all, we’re finished having children — and to make sure of that, I’ve already started donating all of our maternity and newborn clothes. As the girls get older, they’ll be able to stay in each clothing size a little longer. Before too long, all four of them will probably be able to share the same clothes, and then we’ll just have to deal with screaming clothing battles every morning….
In closing, a warning to any local friends who recently had/will have baby girls: I willbe dropping garbage bags full of clothes on your doorsteps in the near future. Be prepared.
Our family rarely goes out to eat these days. It’s not so much a matter of expense (although that’s certainly a factor with six mouths to feed); the expense of eating out is counterbalanced by the benefit of having a break from cooking. My economist husband would put it in terms of “opportunity cost:” a few extra dollars may be worth it if it saves you the time, energy and stress of preparing a meal.
No, we eat at home because taking four young children to a restaurant sounds something like this: “Okay, we’re leaving in TWO minutes! Get on your shoes, everyone. Get on your shoes! Where are your shoes?!? Into the car! C’mon, we’re leaving! Into the car!!! NO, you can’t have your sister’s car seat if she wants to sit in it! NO, you can’t have a snack, because we’re going to dinner! Sit DOWN!”
And that’s all before we’ve left the driveway. In terms of opportunity cost, by the time the evening is over I may as well have cooked a banquet.
One of my favorite things about living in Vermont is that my daughters have become lake swimmers.
I was raised with the belief that the world is divided into two types of people: lake people and ocean people. My mother, who grew up spending summers at her family’s camp on New Hampshire’s Merrymeeting Lake, is a lake person. My father, who grew up escaping industrial Lawrence, Massachusetts, by packing into a car with friends and heading for the New Hampshire beaches, is an ocean person. Since as a daughter it was my job to reject everything relating to my mother, I grew up proclaiming myself an ocean person.
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?
When we first moved to Vermont, my husband noticed something unusual about the news coverage on our local NPR affiliate: there was never any traffic report. To compensate, the weather forecast often ran as long as ten minutes.
Our dog suffers from anxiety issues and low self-esteem.
Before owning a dog, it never occurred to me that dogs could suffer from anxiety and low self-esteem. There are a LOT of things that never occur to non-dog-owners; then you get a dog, and the next thing you know you’re consulting a dog whisperer and shelling out $16 at the natural food co-op for “Rescue Remedy,” a plant-based stress-reliever with which to lace the doggie bowl water.
The Pickle Patch 