Category: Caitlyn

Caitlyn

Eavesdropping in the car

I’m providing the transportation for Caitlyn and her friend to and from circus class these days. Which means I get to overhear some of the things the girls say to each other. Caitlyn’s friend apparently can’t decide if she wants to be a teacher (both girls adore their teacher) or a nurse (the friend’s mom’s new job) when she grows up. But she’s only going to do either one on the weekdays; weekends are for skiing. And nights are for reading and knitting. Caitlyn wanted to know when her friend would sleep and received a superior-sounding reminder: “You know how …

Caitlyn, parenting

Ah ha! I mean, Duh!

Everyone I encounter has a certain base package of knowledge, right? People generally eat with a fork, wait their turn before speaking, can approximate their feelings in words. Only with a mature brain, apparently. Which has been simultaneously both an “Ah-ha!” moment and a “Duh!” moment. Humans are born unfinished; it’s something about the angle needed by a pelvis for walking upright being incompatible with the size of a head with a completed brain. I knew that already. But what I didn’t know was how the brain was unfinished. And now that I think about it, of course, it makes …

Caitlyn

Of Hair Ties and Health

 

After the strangest stomach flu I’ve ever encountered (who knew that you could have a stomach flu and only throw up sporadically?), Caitlyn went back to school today. Rumor is that whatever it was went around and around the kindergarten classes last week, with kids going back to school too soon only to throw up and be sent home again. Glad to have missed out on that! And, really, it’s not a bit too soon. Caitlyn was positively devastated when she realized that she would be missing Kimball‘s Lunar New Year celebration with lion dances; she threw herself into my …

Caitlyn

Priorities

 

School called this morning before 10am to report that Caitlyn had been ill, would I please come get her? She’d complained a bit of an upset tummy at breakfast but insisted that she would be fine and would go to school. I should have known something was not right when she came back for an extra hug before getting on the bus. I found her in the school office, fingering the fringe on the state flag, a little dried sick on the front of her dress. Eventually I had to scoop her up and carry her outside as she sobbed. …

Caitlyn, sewing

Rainbow Skirt

This was Caitlyn’s Christmas present from me this year. I guess sometimes I don’t know how to make a decision. I had picked up a spectrum of 8 fat quarters with the idea that I’d make a skirt for Caitlyn out of maybe four of them. But when the time came, I couldn’t decide which four to use. And what was supposed to be a “throw it together in an afternoon” kind of thing turned into a full-blown design project. Because once you know you are going to use all eight pieces of fabric, you have to decide how much …

Caitlyn, parenting

Gratitude and Learning to Share

Kids like things and people like themselves. Caitlyn has a marked preference for me based mostly, I think, on the fact that we are both female. At 5 1/2, she seems to view boys her age as bizarre creatures with strange tastes while girls are vastly superior. Perhaps it’s that the boys all want to play Clone Wars and the girls will pretend they are flying horses with starry coats and silver manes. Perhaps it’s only human nature, given how most people I know, myself included, seem to prefer spending time with people who have similar tastes and opinions. I …