Valentine's Day, First Grade-Style

"Our family is just obsessed with valentines," the Little Supervisor told me the other night. Homework be darned--it was valentine-making season, and she'd decided to make valentines for all her classmates.

All 22 of them.

I dug through my still-packed boxes of craft supplies to discover a shocking shortage of pink cardstock, but the Little Supervisor didn't mind. Boys would like orange and blue better anyway, she told me, reserving the cranberry cardstock for the girls in her class.

Several nights later, those distinctions had evaporated. Her box of valentines contained cards of all sizes and colors, from giant hearts wearing eyeglasses to white folded squares decorated with red doilies and purple marker. The one consistent piece? The handwritten message inside, carefully printed with black marker: "I love you [classmate]. Love, Lucy."

The valentine she made for herself was no exception. After all, her name was on the class list too, and her teacher did say that if they wanted to give Valentines, they needed to bring one for every student in the class....

Meet Two

Hello, have you met Scooter at age 2? 

I am so cute. You would never guess that earlier today I declared "No want Santa!" and deprived my mother of an absolutely adorable holiday photo of me and the Little Supervisor with Santa.

Scooter at 2 is frighteningly cute, with a head full of sometimes blond, sometimes strawberry-blond soft curls that become tight spirals on rainy days. Scooter at 2 still has the delicate skin of an infant, but the irresistible  tiny rolls of baby fat have started to melt away, leaving long, strong, fast legs that carry her down the hallway of her big sister's elementary school with shocking speed.

Little Supervisor and Scooter "shout it out, just like a rock star" before church.

Scooter at 2 is full  of love and affection. "C'mon, Mommy! Cuddle up!" she declares, offering me space on her monkey Pillow Pet and a piece of fleecy blanket as we prepare to read the night's stories. And how Scooter at 2 loves her stories. "I wan' mor'. I wan' storees mor' . I wan' mor' storees. I wan' mor' storees, peeeease. Mommy, I wan' mor' stories peeeeeese," she requests, improving her grammar with each declaration as I laugh hysterically at her (uncharacteristically polite ) insistence  on "storees mor'." 

Her vocabulary, which is full of words like dog, cow, moon, ghost, crocodile, and ladders, has a few words of her own making. "Eecy" is her name for her sister. "Ama" is what she calls all of the Little Supervisor's friends. "Egert" or "yaygurt" is "yogurt." And "picken" (rhymes with "chicken") is what she says when she wants to be picked up. 

  Aww.

That level of adorableness is a good thing, because it has kept me from shipping her off to either or both pairs of her adoring grandparents until she's old enough to go to college.

For Scooter at 2 has also attained full membership in the Terrible Two's Society.  (All you who are shuddering at this moment, consider yourself associate members: You know what it's like.) That means her favorite word is "no," regardless of the context. 

"No want pictures!At dinner: "Scooter, do you want applesauce?" "No! No want 'sauce!" Uh-oh. It's going to be one of those nights, huh?

At the pediatrician's: "Scooter, is this your mama?" "No!" For the record, kid, I was there when you were born, and yes, I am definitely your mother. 

At church: "Scooter, please be quiet." "No! No want quiet!" Lord, forgive her, for she knows not what she does.

At the playground: "Scooter, please hold onto the swing. It's not safe to let go." "No! No want safe!" Shocker.

At home: "Scooter, it's time for bed." "No! No want beddie!" Yes, but Mommy does.

After being told she needs to hold a parent's hand when crossing the street: "No! I no like it! I no like you!" Well, kid, right now I don't particularly like how YOU are acting either, so let's call it even and keep walking so we don't get clipped by a distracted driver checking Facebook.

While playing with a toy telephone, that asks: "Hi. Wanna come out to play?" "No! No want play!" I'm kinda cracking up that you're yelling at a talking toy phone. I wonder how Siri would respond to you.
Must try that the next time you tantrum. Which will probably be in, oh, an hour.

After a timeout for slugging her older sister, who is crushed emotionally by the incident and still sniffling in the next room: "Scooter, please say sorry to your sister and give her a hug." "No! No sorry! No want huggy!" What the heck? Is your motto "I did the crime, and now I can do the time"?????

After certain, ahem, events occur: "Scooter, I think you need a change." "No! No change! No want diaper change!" Sweetheart, this fact is indisputable, even by you.

Luckily, membership in the Terrible Two's Society also comes with an infinite ability to suddenly change one's mind, sometimes in mid-declaration. "No want Mommy!" turns into "I wan' Mommy. I wan' picken." "No want milk!" quickly becomes "I wan' milk! I wan' milk! Waaaahhhhh!!"  "No want bath!" transforms into "I wan' bubbles. I wan' bubbles now. I wan' bubbles now peeeeese." 

It makes my head spin and me wonder WHAT THE HECK I AM DOING AND HOW IN THE WORLD IS IT POSSIBLE THAT MY SISTER AND I DID NOT DRIVE OUR MOTHER CRAZY AND IS IT TOO EARLY FOR A GLASS OF WINE? IT MUST BE FIVE O'CLOCK SOMEWHERE, RIGHT?

As I quickly return to reality, I finish making Scooter the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that she says she wants. I hand it to her, and she takes it with delight. "Sammich!" she says. "T'ank yoo!"

Yep, that's Scooter at 2. 

 "Peekaboo!"

No More

I don't want to send condolence notes. I don't want to cut out snowflakes. What I want is for the laws to change.

Every day, I feel a little more sick to my stomach about what happened in Connecticut. I imagine those Sandy Hook parents, opening their front doors this week to find a package of Legos or a pair of pajamas, intended as Christmas presents for children who are now gone forever. I think of the teachers and administrators who lost their lives trying to protect those kids--and I wonder, just when did being willing to take a bullet become part of the job description for a public elementary school teacher today? I am grateful for those teachers who herded their students into closets and bathrooms and somehow distracted and comforted them while something so awful was happening in their school. And yes, I think of those first graders.

Those 20 kids should be making their own snowflakes. They should be baking holiday cookies with their grandmothers. They should be informing their classmates that they celebrate Hanukkah and get presents for eight nights straight. They should be putting their lumpy, tacky, and totally precious handmade preschool ornaments on their family's Christmas tree. They should be eagerly awaiting the first snow, begging for another story at bedtime, and refusing to eat their vegetables at dinner.

But they are not.

Instead, we are learning about their favorite colors, their favorite sports, and their favorite foods. (First graders are big on favorites.) We are seeing photographs of them, with their adorably mussed hair and gap-toothed smiles that surely melted their grandparents' hearts. We are reading their obituaries.

This is so terribly, terribly wrong.

I don't know how to fix this, but we cannot let this keep happening. The framework we have in place for dealing with all the individual issues--guns, violence, mental illness, and more--involved in the Sandy Hook shooting has been proven tragically inadequate.  Maybe we need metal detectors at the entrances of all schools. Maybe we need an armed security officer in every school, not just high schools. Maybe we need better--and more affordable--mental health treatment for people. Maybe we need to get better at identifying those who are emotionally unstable. Maybe we need more restrictions on violence on TV or movies. And yes, maybe, just maybe, we need to deal with assault weapons.

Because we cannot continue to believe that there is nothing we can do to prevent a mentally disturbed person from causing this type of damage to a community, to our country, and to children who had absolutely no chance once he started shooting.

Election Day

Fourteen years ago--and no, I cannot believe it has been that long--I spent the first Tuesday in November in a downtown Chicago newsroom covering local and state elections. I called in voting results from a now-forgotten-in-my-mind government office  that belonged to the monolith that is the ThompsonCenter/DaleyCenter/CityHall/CookCounty collection of buildings in the South Loop.

It felt strange to be in a government building so very late at night--and with so many other people. I remember realizing that one of the journalists crowded into that room was an on-air reporter for a local TV station, who periodically did a stand-up to update viewers at home on the vote. As always, I uneasily wondered just how friendly I was supposed to be with those who surrounded me--we were all reporters, sure, but we were also competitors.

The next day, after a late night of reporting, writing, and yes, celebrating at a nearby bar, I went back to the newsroom at what seemed like an ungodly early hour after such a short night. I'm sure I suspended my strict graduate school budget in favor of a latte fix to get me through the day: a classmate and I had to write a story  about the results for the next day's paper.

As we reviewed our assignment, my classmate, who was smart, thoughtful, and incredibly nice even for a Midwesterner, seemed to get a wee nervous about everything that needed to happen to get our story done. Shockingly, I did not, which would have been far more in character. After all, I'd been waking up at 1:30 a.m. nearly every night for the previous two years, thanks to the stress (much of it self-imposed) of being a schools reporter for a weekly paper in small-town Virginia. Not surprisingly given such lovely work-related sleep habits, I had decided that I clearly was not meant to be a daily newspaper reporter.

Yet here I was, on the day after the election, doing just that--writing and reporting a daily story on deadline like it was no big deal.  I talked my classmate off the journalistic ledge. We made a reporting plan. We called people. We shared notes. And yes, we filed our story on time . As we worked on the piece, I realized something had changed during my journey from Virginia to Chicago. Gone was the familiar feeling of white-knuckled dread that had become my very unwelcome but persistent deadline companion. Gone were the doubts that had absolutely plagued me since I left my "safe" job as an associate magazine editor for the opportunity--and challenge--of being a small-town newspaper reporter.

In their place, I found a truly unexpected faith in my abilities to make a story happen, even when so much was unknown and uncontrollable. Maybe my dream of being a journalist wasn't so crazy after all.

Sisters

I marvel daily at the relationship that has developed between the Little Supervisor and Scooter. When we learned we would be having another baby, we all—family and friends alike—wondered how the Little Supervisor would adjust to no longer being Super Grandchild of the Galaxy and Beyond. After all when you are the first and only grandchild on both sides and have two grandfathers, two grandmothers, and two GREAT-grandmothers, well, let’s just say you get adequate attention on your birthday, Christmas, and every day in between.

So we were braced for the tantrums, the wish that the new baby would get back in her rocketship and go back to the planet she came from, and more.

It never really came. What has emerged instead is an affectionate, sharing, and frequently-full-of-giggles sister/friendship that we never expected. They “dance” in their car seats to (brace yourself) Savage Garden and KT Tunstall. They squawk like a flock of chickens on the way to church. (“Bawk! Baw baw baw SQUAWK!!!!”) They crack each other up with their giggles. They give each other big chubby hugs.

Yes, Scooter does think that Dora the Explorer bubble bath bottle is a dolly. Thanks so much for noticing.

The Little Supervisor also feels it’s her job to help her sister adjust to polite company as well. She picked out an all-too-relevant book at the library the other day and read it aloud as soon as we got home. “Scooter, teeth are not for biting,” Little Supervisor informed the curly-headed little dickens otherwise known as Scooter, who, yes, has taken excited/angry/playful chomps out of our heads, knees, and shoulders. “Ouch! Biting hurts!”)

She shows Scooter how to cuddle the babies in their collection of dolls.

And when it’s time to leave the house, the Little Supervisor even cheerfully puts her baby sister’s sandals on those very wriggly toddler feet.

  "Scooter, it's not every day you have a princess put on your shoes."