Big & Small

Edie turned three this week.

I could write you a sappy post about what that means to me, about how for the last six weeks we have prepared for the this day by slowly weaning her off the breast, sadly and sometimes catastrophically, and that one night, it was so hard for her to give up the boob that I broke down in tears with her in my arms and apologized to her over and over until she held my face in her hands and said, "Don't cry, Mommy. I'm okay." Gah!

I could also make this post about how she goes to ballet with Lucy every Friday and how she looks in that damn adorable tutu and how, unlike Lucy who does the "kissing hand" ritual with me for like 5 minutes when she says good-bye, little Edie, little secure, confident, nothing-gets-in-my-way Edie just runs into the room without even looking back at me. Not even a wave. Or a thanks for the memories. Or hey, that was cool you did all that laboring and pushing back in July 06. Thumbs up, Ma. Nothing.


Like I'm not even there. She is definitely the kid that is going to break my heart and move half way around the world to Hong Kong when she grows up. I just know it.


And I could tell you about how she graduated from Early Intervention and speech therapy just yesterday. When she started in January, she barely said 20 words. The intake person described her as "nearly mute". Now, we can barely get a word in edge wise. She is a non-stop stream of descriptions, assessments, opinions, ideas and thoughts. She is bursting forth with singing, with nonsensical characters and stories. She is pure imagination unleashed. She has learned from Lucy to narrate everything she does..."I'm washing my hands now. Oh, where's my towel? I think I need soap. Soap is fun. I like soap..." The other day I heard Lucy tell her, "Edie, please stop talking to me so much. You're driving me crazy." Beautiful.


I could also share with you that Edie has her Mommy's temper. The difference between us is that I wage an on-going 24/7 battle to maintain and contain my hairy dragon. Edie feels no need. It doesn't happen everyday, but when just the right measure of tiredness, or frustration mixes with a lost Barbie or a spilled cup or a lost turn, the hairy dragon can come bursting out from nowhere. And it's always a doozy. She goes totally limp, screaming the most high-pitched, ear-shattering scream possible, and lays on the floor kicking in the air and throwing her hands around and begging me to pick her up, only to fight me off when I do and go completely rigid, so I can't gather her up and try to help her calm down.

One time, a few weeks ago, we were on 5th avenue in the 50's. The sidewalk was teeming with people. Edie was tired and we were weaning off the boob and she lost it over something and she screamed so loud and for so long in the middle of the sidewalk, a crowd actually gathered to watch and make sure I wasn't hurting her or kidnapping her or something. The screaming and flailing and bartering and soothing and attempted cuddling went on for almost an hour. Security people came out of their buildings to see if someone needed to be called in to help. I finally had to pick her up, amid stares and pointing and curious concierges coming off their posts to see what all the fuss was about, to sit on the floor of a nearby office building and give her boob.

Then, like that, she was fine and the tears were dried and she was asking to go to the Disney store. Go figure.


All that stuff is real and important, but what I really want this post to be about is how Edie herself characterized perfectly what I think "three" is all about.

The other day, we were at Lucy's friend's house playing. A couple of Lucy's friends still treat Edie like a baby because only recently has she caught up to them developmentally and so they often lag behind a little bit getting the hint that she isn't a baby anymore. In some ways, this works for Edie. They give her a pass on having to share and if she really wants a toy, they give it to her. She also gets to be the patient when they play doctor, the baby when they play house and these are all prime, attention-getting roles.

On the other hand, she is being directed by the other kids, told what to do, where to stand, what game they are playing next and most irritating of all, these kids often feel the need to pick her up without her permission and carry her around the room, as if she were a doll. Did you know four year olds are hard-wired in their DNA to want to pick up kids smaller than themselves and carry them around and look up at you with a proud smile and say, "See? I'm carrying her." And four year olds are also designed to be little narcissists and crap at picking up cues and so all of Edie's protests, like screaming, saying "NO", crying or running away seem to go unheard.


A day of fun and many frustrating attempts to carry Edie around the room, led to an amazing conversation she and I had in the bathroom. I was wiping her bottom. As you know, many important things happen while wiping poop from bottoms and Edie said: " Everybody thinks I'm a baby...And this makes me happy. And this makes me sad."

OH. MY. GOD. Such an abstract and complicated thing for a little kid to articulate. I was thrilled for her. Thrilled she is both big and small. Big enough to tell the four year olds to back the hell up and leave her alone and young enough to still like playing the patient who needs both a stomach bandage and a cast for her broken leg and must be rushed into surgery.

Big enough to have the words to have relationships with older kids and play imaginary games with them about dragons and princes and magical wands and gardens full of Black Eyed Susans. Big enough to be eager to go to school alone, without me. Big enough to eat sushi and love asparagus...and chocolate ice cream and M&Ms. Big enough to tell knock knock jokes and pummel her sister in a wrestling match turned all out pillow fight and say something so weirdly funny that she has Lucy hyper-ventilating and rolling on the floor.

But still small. Small enough to love to go to sleep every night in the pouch with her head on her Daddy's chest. Small enough to miss having boobie and wanting to visit them dancing in the M&M aisle in Duane Reade (that's where she thinks they went. Small enough know exactly how to drive her older sister and their friends bananas and doing it with the most menacing little grin and using that grin to totally get away with it.

Small enough to make me remember that just a minute ago, just a short blink of time ago, she was a tiny, tiny baby that I barely knew and that David and I had made and now she is all kinds of things I had no input in. She is just herself. Just Edie Just perfect. Both big and small.


Happy Birthday to my baby, Edie. God, I love her.

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Harlem's Hungry Kids, NYC 2009

Part One: New York City's Free Summer Lunch Program

Two to three days a week, the girls and I head over to the 145th street pool which I conveniently located directly across the street from our house. It is a lovely, clean, beautifully-maintained pool with a great sprinkler and fountain park.

It also has free lunch.

NYC has a summer free lunch program and every kid in the city is eligible to have a free bag lunch. If you go to the pool around noon, the staff hands out these white bags and the kids hang out by the pool on their towels and eat them. At first, I resisted free lunches since we are not the intended recipients, but there are lots of lunches at the pool and if they don't get eaten they get thrown out, so my kids hop in line.

Well, honestly, you'd think Wolfgang Puck himself was handing out gourmet lunches. My kids LURVE free lunch.


There is something exciting and amazing to them when someone hands them the waxy white bags, the way they are kept in this dark freezer pack and they take the bag to their towels and curl back the paper to see what's inside. It's like opening a Xmas present. All expectation and excitement.

There is always chocolate milk. Always. And this is exciting enough. But there is also a sandwich, usually peanut butter and jelly on wheat or ham and American in a tortilla. They are thin, paltry sandwiches, often without adornment or condiments. There is an over-whelming amount of white in the lunches. But still, they are sandwiches and sandwiches are, oddly enough, exotic to my kids.

We just don't make a lot of sandwiches around here. When David and I first started dating we would lay around the house after making love and leisurely make thick hot sandwiches of Gruyere and ham and local tomatoes and arugula with some special sauce we concocted together in our post-love making haze, naked in the kitchen. We were sandwich whores. There wasn't a sandwich we didn't make and inhale.

Then, we each gained 10 pounds and we decided those sandwiches were the culprit. We never went back. Sandwiches have all but been psychically banned from our thinking. And I kinda regret it, although my waistline is smaller.

For lunch with the kids, we're either butter-poaching flounder, or making pasta and some kind of home-made but thrown-together sauce or other, or scooping up some homemade soup which I always have stashed in the back of the fridge. But no sandwiches. I think I'm, like, neglecting my kids. They are sandwich-deprived.

Every time we have the bag lunch, I feel a little sad that somehow David and I have pummeled what could be the children's life-long love of good, over-stuffed sandwiches. Or even the sheer joy of a peanut butter and fluff sandwich. Uh. What could be better? The free lunch reminds me that our food choices have altered their preferences. Then, I realize we have shaped their little minds in good ways too and I feel the all-powerful rapture and influence that is parenting. It immediately makes me want to marinate something.


Anyway, back to free lunch...every bag lunch has a side dish, sometimes potato salad, or cold string beans in a weird vinaigrette. These tend to fall flat. I watch all the kids eating. About half eat the potato salad. Weird string beans? Nobody.

Oh, but the carrots? A winner. The lunches often include a small bag of carrots. Nothing special. No dip. Just small carrots in a little individually-sized cellophane bag. Well, you'd think my kids had been given a bag of M&Ms. They tear into the little bag and gobble down the carrots and Edie lifts her face to me and begs, "Buy this, Mommy. Buy this."

Do you think I can get them to eat raw carrots as a snack at home? Rarely. But at the pool? It's like the magical bag lunch from Happy Carrot Land.

Part Two: A Little About The Politics of Bag Lunches

That the kids like this lunch and find it so extraordinary is funny and surprising and also a testament to the fact that they are two and nearly three years old and unaware of the stigma of eating a free or subsidized lunch. They are unaware why there is free lunch and all the politics that come with it. They are not marginalized or made fun of because they are eating free lunch. They realize they are affluent to some degree - and probably feel more affluent than we really are, since there isn't a day that goes by that a new crappy plastic toy isn't clutched in their little fists, but they also are unaware that everyone else is not equally affluent. To them, every kid in the neighborhood can pester his mother for a cheap crappy toy from Duane Reade and get it on command.

To them, every child has what they need. And a new Barbie Princess is as necessary as a lunch. The bag lunch is a novelty to my girls. They know if they don't want what's inside, mama will make them something else when we get home.

The free lunch is not a reminder to me that we are surrounded by hungry kids. I don't need to go to a poor, rural community in Alabama to know that children go hungry. It's happening right here. Right down the street.


Don't believe me? Bring a bag of pistachios, a bunch mandarin oranges and a bucket of chalk to our local playground and watch yourself be surrounded by kids who haven't eaten anything but Cheetos in hours and who are so craving structured play and adult attention that they will hang with you - uncool adult - and you'll find that you are supervising an art project with 20 kids. Add one girl who should be in a photography class because she likes taking pictures so much, has your camera and a party on the playground is born. This doesn't happen on the stuffy, eyes-on-the-sidewalk, keep-your-hands-in-the-car, are-you-trying-to-abduct-my-kid?, Upper West Side.

I know kids that I see everyday at the playground and the pool, know them by names, know details about how their mother's last boyfriend used to hit them hard, and have never, not once, seen the parent. Right down the street.


There is much craving, both for food and positive attention, going on this city. The free bag lunch has made me think a lot about Tom Lee and Ezra Klein's discussion of school lunches ever since they came out in response to Alice Waters Op-ed in the Times a few months back. There has been much talk of meals cooked instead of processed and warmed up, gardens grown in public schools, students learning to harvest, cook and enjoy locally-produced, well-cooked food and meals, food as art, not just craft. I love food and cooking, so I'm all for the dream. Alice Waters' ideas are admirable and amazing and completely miss the immediate needs of this community.


We've got bigger issues to tackle here in Harlem. This is bigger than learning about sustainable foods and how to cook on a hot plate in a classroom.

Let's just make sure the kids aren't hungry first. As Tom Lee has said so practically, let's just feed the kids and make sure they are getting the adequate nutrition their bodies need. Let that be our foundation. That, along with all the uphill forces working on them from society, peer pressure and in their homes - will be enough of a challenge. Or an impossible Sisyphean feat. But then, we can build from there. And that's when we give Alice Waters a call and ask her to bring seeds and organic soil.

As for me, I might decide in the Fall that Lucy's bento box lunches at Central Park East II will not suffice and I might channel Alice waters and try to re-invent their whole food sourcing and cooking issues at the school. I might become the Norma Rae of school lunch. Maybe I'll start growing organic corn on the roof of the school. It's possible. I could go that way...

On the other hand, what I might just do is continue to try to influence my little parcel of the universe. I might just focus on making sure my kids eat well, know good food, know where it comes from, learn the value of experimentation and adventurous eating and see the value of cooking instead of pressing the button on a vending machine.

Just doing that is going to be hard work, with lots of successes and failures. And ultimately, I think that's how you change the world anyway, one kid at a time.

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Dear David, Please Come Home & Save My Sorry Ass

I'm generally not one to call David at the office and tell him I'm about to strangle the kids and he should drop everything and come home and bail me out. But I did, in desperation, send him this text message yesterday:

Update: House a wreck. Edie wailing and begging for boob, like, all day. Presents, kisses, abundant amounts of patience and ice cream did not help. More crying. Just poured myself some booze. We adore you and require your serene guidance and wisdom at this difficult juncture. Before your wife's head explodes. xo

God bless him, he came home early.

xo YM


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The Post My Husband Doesn't Want You To Read

Let me set the stage for you...

July 4th weekend. A camp site. The morning. Everyone slept like babies in the tent. David plays with the kids so I have time to write. I sit at my computer at the picnic table with the cord plugged into an outlet in a log that also gave us a steady stream of water...okay, the camping wasn't all that rustic. So, sue me. There is bright sun, blue sky, dew on the grass, parachutes tumbling in the breeze over our heads, the smell of pine and river and grass.

I'm working on the book. David is piling the kids into the car. He is taking them to the mountain store where there is food and supplies and an array of toys in the side yard that they love to play with. This is my time to write. I am excited. Grateful. We are all excited about what we are going to do.


Edie is so excited to go on another adventure with Daddy that she forgets to have boob and I am thrilled because we are trying to totally wean her off by the time she turns three, which is, like, in a couple of weeks. And I tell David to reward her with M&Ms at the mountain store because my tactic has been to give her "three M&M's" (because she is almost three and three is the magic number) every time she chooses to forgo breastfeeding.

Basically, I have been hiding a huge bag of M&M's in the freezer and dolling out little secret rations to her every time she gives up breastfeeding. Yes, I am bribing my child with chocolate as a way to wean her. Someone call La Leche. Or Al-anon. I can give classes on this kind of enabling.

But it's been working, so if you scold me in comments, I'll just swear at you or something. I don't mess with what works. Anyhoo, I tell David to pick up the M&M's and the kids pile in the car and I write for, like, what seems like hours in the big blue day. And it's paradise.

And then, David comes back and the kids are uncharacteristically FREAKING OUT. There are tears in the pool. Screams in in the tent. Agony everywhere. Children are like falling to the ground in uncontrollable spasms and making shrill demands as if we were their servants. They are like small, mangy, growling animals. I barely recognize them. I am ready to trade them for a camel and a good milking cow.

This is when my husband looks at me and says in the most matter-of-fact, tone imaginable, "Look, Kim...we can't do this anymore. They can't have M&M's for breakfast."

Okay, so skip to the conversation where I ask, "Um, they only had M&M's for breakfast?" and he says, "Um yeah, you told me to buy them M&M's" and I say, "Um yeah, but I didn't say they could have M&M's for a breakfast and um, like, I give Edie three, not...30 for a reward." And he says, "Well, you didn't say THAT, you said buy them M&M's and you know, you never said, 'Feed them breakfast and give Edie three M&M's as a treat...You should've said that."

And now I realize it. And I start laughing so hard I can barely talk - I get like that, where something strikes me the right way and I am hysterical with laughter and David has absolutely no idea why - and through the tears I manage to say, "Oh my God, this is going to be THE. BEST. BLOG POST. EVER. You fed the kids M&M's for breakfast. BWAAA-HA-HA..."

And I'm on the ground now. Unable to speak and I'm kind of holding up one finger, telling him to wait, I'll recover momentarily. But I'm gasping for air and clutching my side. And that's when he threatens to withhold sex in protest. And, of course, this is the last thing I want. 'Cause I like the sex with my husband. A lot. But I'm still laughing so hard there is spit coming out the side of my mouth. And I'm already writing the blog post in my head.

xo YM

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Going Camping. God Help Me.

July 4th weekend. Think of of us.

No, think of me.

Think of me in a tent. Sleeping on the hard ground. Cooking over open fire while attempting not to accidentally dip my sleeve into the flame and set myself ablaze. Think of me in a bathing suit. In broad daylight. (No really, this sucks.) Watching my children play with bugs and dirt. And more bugs. And making mud pies out of camp dirt. And bringing it all into the tent to show me and dropping it into my sleeping bag. And more bugs.

And speaking of bugs, think of me defenseless against those big buzzing things that bang up against the tent every time someone so much as turns on a flashlight so they can pee. And speaking of peeing, guess where I'll be doing that? Not in a bathroom. Oh, and I think I'm going to get my period. On yet another camping trip.

And yet I am happy to be dirty with my family, who I know will enjoy this little outdoor adventure. While I'm changing my tampons in the bushes. And even for this, I am grateful.

I wish you the very best Fourth of July. Love to you all.

xo YM


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