question eleven: the kids

In this collection, Jen asked me about Beezus and Thor, so I answered her questions and posted some pictures of them. Just thought I would put that out there, if you want to skip this post.

 Here We Go AJen: If I think of a better question, I will come back later, but for now I want to hear about what Beezus and Thor are up to lately. What are their favorite things? How do they do sharing a room?


Jen, thank you for asking about Beezus and Thor. They are doing really good. Thor is one year and five months old and Beezus is four years and five months old. Well, they were doing good. A few days ago, we pulled about a dozen deer ticks off of Beezus after a hike in the woods. They had been on there for a few days. Deer ticks are the size of poppy seeds, and I had no idea they were behind her ears, and in her hairline and under her arms. All being said, she is not sick and she is acting fine, but she is being treated for 21 days with antibiotics for Lyme's disease. Knock on wood, she has only ever had antibiotics once in her life, so I am hoping this knocks out the nasty Lyme's disease. She is very good-natured about the whole ordeal, and I kept a deer tick in a babyfood jar to show the doctor. Turns out it was still alive and now a kind of morbid pet.

In the last few weeks, Beezus and Thor have really begun playing together, which is amazing. Someone gave us one of those Flintstone-looking cars, and they have been playing with it non-stop. Beezus gets the bike pump and pretends he has come into her gas station, and he pays her. That is their favorite combination toy right now. Beezus likes to play coffeeshop too.

Beezus is really into getting ready for her first year of pre-K (tomorrow, gulp) so she loves her unicorn bag and working on her letters. She is getting pretty good. She also draws rainbows all over the friggin' place. Thor is obsessed with hammers and fixing things. He is always carrying around a little hammer, thunking people on the head, putting spells on things (He makes this whooosh sound and aims it at people, for some reason), and just hammering whatever needs to be hammered.

Thor's hammer. I know. Heh heh.

They are doing great sharing a room. It was kind of challenging to find a decor that is both boy and girl, but I think we did a good job. Thank the heavens for Ikea, because they do this sort of thing really well. We found Ikea bunk beds at the Re-Store for fifty bucks, and that is how the bunks came to be. We have a bungalow, so we have two bedrooms downstairs and two upstairs. It is our master bedroom, a jack and jill bathroom, and then their room. So they are sort of forced to share a room for a good long while if we want to all be on the same floor. And we do. Their room is also not the biggest room, nor is it the most ergonomically sound room. There are three doors, for example.--bathroom, closet and hallway door. We kind of had to go bunks.
Both of them are good at falling asleep, so we let them each pick a book and we read together, then into their own beds. Beezus is finally starting to say "Come on, Thomas, let's go into our room" rather than "Come on, Thomas, let's play in MY room." They are usually asleep in a few minutes after lights out. Thor rolls out of bed an awful lot, but he is only a few inches off the floor, so he doesn’t even cry.

Beezus never stirs when he cries or wakes up, so for her, life is same old thing, except she is higher off the ground. I think it is good because the height of her bunk gives her privacy and a whole new level of protection from the Thor's breaking-precious-things superpower. Usually, if he rolls off the bed into the pillows, he will just sleep on the floor for a while. I come in and check on them before I go to bed, and then I realize he is on the floor. I think I mentioned that I found him asleep in the bathroom one evening. He was crawling into our room, or sleep crawling and just fell asleep on the rug in the bathroom. At some point in the evening, he either screams, "MAMA! Go!" Because he wants to sleep in our room and have the Panamanian buffet all night. Get all chi-chi faced. Or he just gets up silently, walks into our room, and tugs on my arm until I pick him up. So sleep is still slightly challenging with him, but it is better in his own bed. He seems to respect and love the space he has, and they love sharing a room.

I am really enjoying blogging about every day life with them on still life everyday, and the projects we do. I still might do a post on still life everyday about decorating their room together, because it was a fun project. The cool thing about their room redesign is that they have a table up there to color and write, and I can close the doors to the hallway and take a shower. They don't even notice I'm gone. I often walk out and Thomas is sitting at the table reading a tall book, and Beezus has a pad of paper and they are playing restaurant. Thor always throws his food at the waitress and she cries. It is like the first place I worked in college.

Here We Go AJen: How do you feel about the spacing between Lucy and Thor? Do you think it was too soon, not soon enough? And did the spacing between Beatrice change that at all?

It's a great question. I began trying to get pregnant with Lucy when Beezus was nine months old. I am an identical twin, which I am pretty sure I state every friggin' post, and I wanted Beatrice and Lucia to be close. See, I always wanted girls. Two girls. It was how I saw myself as a mother. It didn't even occur to me that Lucy could be a boy. I knew she was Lucy from the moment I knew there was another member of our family. When she died, I grieved very deeply for the loss of that closeness in age, for the kind of relationship I imagined they would have. It just breaks my heart that Beezus lost her sister. And that she will never grow up with a sister. That she won't share clothes with her. That she won't get to call her and bitch about me.

The MFM, Maternal Fetal Medicine doctor, or the high-risk OB that does not deliver babies (Shout out, ELAINE!), told us to wait six months before trying again, but a year was better. As you probably all know, I am 37 years old, I was 35 when Lucia died. And putting off having another child seemed slightly illogical, even though I didn't want to go into a pregnancy right away. I think being pregnant six months after Lucia died was confusing and hard emotionally. And yet, I was also in the throes of grief and probably was already confused and emotionally hard. I don't know. 

In some ways, I feel like if I waited any longer, I wouldn't have had another baby at all. So, in the end, I guess the answer to my question is that six months was a good amount of time to wait. Lucy and Thor are one year, four months apart. And Beezus and Thor are exactly three years apart. Three years and five days. That turned out to be an incredibly nice time spread between children, because Beezus was never jealous of Thor, or never lashed out at him. She also never remembers a time without Thomas in our lives, or definitely without Lucy. I love watching them play together now. It makes me miss Lucy in a whole different way. Both comforting and heartbreaking.

And so, some pictures of the kids...

This is a picture after the rains. Beezus was jumping in puddles, and Thor is cleaning off the bottom of his feet from the little maple pods. He is not a happy baby and will soon thunk someone on the head with a little xylophone hammer, I suspect.

And there is my boy after fingerpainting his belly, and what a belly, eh?

And a picture of them together, after eating breakfast bagels. The boy ate it upside down and I had to clean cream cheese out of his nostrils and eyelashes.