Out with the old

We donated our old Volvo yesterday.  We had it for four years, ever since my uncle and aunt so generously gifted it to us when they got a new car of their own.  We were just barely pregnant with Mateo and they didn't know it yet, but we were going to need another car and the Volvo came to us just at the right time.  It has been a great car for us, and extremely reliable despite its high mileage. 

We knew our time with it was coming to an end when the headliner (fabric lining on the top of the inside of the car) started to come off and it would have cost more than the car was worth to fix it.  Then, when we decided to buy our swagger wagon, it was really time to let the Volvo go.  We tried to find someone to give it to, in the interests of paying it forward, but had no luck.  So, we went with donating it and decided on the Oregon Food Bank.  With the exception of having to go to the DMV to fill out a couple of forms, the process was easy and quick. 

The thing I wasn't expecting was how sad the kids would be so see the old car go.  We had at least two weeks with the new van before the Volvo went away, so I thought the transition would be easy, but they were both sad and upset when it finally went away on the tow truck.  I guess I should have expected it, especially remembering how I felt when my parents sold their old car when I was a kid.  Still, I wish I had thought to prepare them better.  Mateo wanted to spend the rest of the morning intermittently telling the story of how we got the Volvo and how we decided to give it away.   He's all about storytelling to process things.  Good to remember.

Anyway, as part of them saying goodbye to the car, I got this photo.  I thought it was a perfect image for saying out with the old and in with the new!

23 weeks

Here's Sacha at 23 weeks, looking gorgeous as always :)

Slow learner

That's me. Apparently, I am a VERY slow learner, because I took the kids out this morning, again, without a change of clothes for the littler one.  We've been working on potty training forever, but I've been more focused on it lately and she's been doing so well, so...well, you know where this is going.  I took them to the Children's Museum for a morning of fun while Sacha helped a friend out with some business stuff.  The Museum was very quiet, which was awesome, although I did feel slightly guilty that we had decided again not to attempt church this morning.  She's been doing so well that I thought we were fine in leaving with nothing but ourselves and our jackets.

Anyway, we were having fun and I had even snapped this photo of my erstwhile face painters, who were apparently preparing to go out on the warpath, or to some bizarre argyle hipster costume party...

...when I heard Tali say, in her tiny little voice, "Mama, I have to go pee pee."  She had already gone, of course, and luckily there were paper towels and sanitizer right there, so I didn't have to call a staff person or something.  She was soaked right through to her shoes and I hadn't brought a change of clothes.  I actually meant to, but forgot.  I was just kicking myself, because a change of clothes would have translated to a whole morning at the museum, whereas instead we had to leave right away because there was nothing to be done. 

I accomplished getting them both out of the museum without massive crying and outright rebellion (well, that happened briefly, from Mateo, who quite rightly didn't want to leave) only by bribing them with fruit snacks from the little cafe.  I think I'm going to pack a backpack with an extra outfit and just leave it in the car from now on.  Actually, I guess it won't be long until we're carting around a diaper bag anyway, so we'll have lots of room for an extra pair of pants!

Boys and girls

Mateo got his first social rejection last night, although he doesn't know it (and won't until he reads this in about 15 years or so).  There's a family going through some stuff at his preschool and the director had sent out an email awhile back saying that extra playdates for their little girl would help take some stress off at home.  So, I emailed the mom and said that I didn't know if our two kids knew each other very well, but that we'd be more than happy to set up a time for them to play together.  I didn't hear anything for awhile and totally forgot about it until last night, when I got an email back from the mom, saying thanks but that her daughter "isn't ready for playdates with boys yet." 

First of all, I was surprised by how totally enraged this made me.  I recognize that the family is going through hard times and the mom probably just dashed off the message without thinking about how it would sound, but still, it apparently brought out my mama bear instincts.  Mateo is so sweet, so loving, so imaginative, and to see him dismissed as friend material because of his boyness just dismayed me. 

Now, don't get me wrong.  I don't buy into the whole thing about how boys are getting overlooked in school and how schools are really geared toward girls and all that stuff.  If that's really true, why are men still earning more than women?  So, I'm not at all implying that Mateo was facing gender discrimination.  I was just sad that somehow him being a boy disqualified him from being considered.  And we don't even know them; we were just trying to help.   Sigh.

Sacha and I were talking about it as we went to bed and we got to talking about how a three-year-old would not be ready for a playdate with a kid of the opposite sex.  Our kids both have friends of both sexes and it has never, and I mean NEVER, been an issue.  They've had one-on-one playdates with kids of the opposite sex and group playdates and (obviously) Mateo's preschool has both boys and girls in it.  I wonder what kind of messages that little girl is getting about girls and boys and who should play with whom.  Or, if the mom herself was uncomfortable with her daughter playing with a boy alone, although why that would be the case at their ages is beyond me, and had unconsciously or consciously passed that on to her kid. 

In any case, if that's the way they think about things, we probably don't want to hang out with them anyway, but it still made me really mad.  I almost wrote about it last night, but then I thought I should probably get over wanting to punch something before I committed words to paper, or, in this case, the screen.

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Speaking of girls:  as you know, we are lesbians.  There is a lesbian moms group in Portland that has many families on a listserve and some families that come to monthly gatherings at various places.  We attended many of these gatherings when Mateo was a baby, and even after Talia was born, but haven't had much luck making friends through the group.  This has been really surprising to us, because you would think it would be a friend gold mine.  It's not like we haven't made any friends, just not as many as we thought we would.  We probably have three families that we met through this group that we're close with, which is wonderful.  We love them!  We just expected to connect with more people throgh the group over the course of four years.

(In fact, as an aside, we had an absolutely lovely playdate with one of these families yesterday afternoon.  They have a son who is also named Mateo and we went to the library together and our Mateos hit it off fabulously!  I normally get together with them and these friends, who we also met through the lesbian moms group, every week, but it's while Te Te is in preschool, so the two Mateos hadn't seen each other since babyhood.  Anyway, we had a really great time and coincidentally ended up at the same burger place for dinner afterward, so we had an impromptu meal together, too.  It was awesome.)

So, with the exception of a few families, it turns out that it is easier to meet lesbian parents on the street than at a designated group.  Literally.  A couple of weeks ago, I was putting Natalia in the car to take her to the hardware store (which has popcorn, which is like crack to our kids) when it started to rain hard and a woman and her baby were walking by in a stroller.  The stroller didn't have a rain cover and the baby was pretty little.  Before I knew it, the mom was asking if we could give them a ride home, as we had an extra car seat (because Mateo was at preschool) and they lived just a few blocks down our same street. 

She seemed nice and not scary, so I said sure, and we had a great little chat on the way to her house.  After establishing that we were both lesbian stay-at-home moms, we talked about a bunch of stuff and ended up exchanging numbers.  Then, she and her partner and their adorable baby (can you tell that I have baby fever?) came over to hang out today.  I think more playdates are in our future.  I'm so excited to have made some new friends, especially of this particular variety!   And, in the future, if you see me trolling the streets looking for androgynous women with strollers, now you'll know why.

Confession

I have to admit it. I shopped at Target. I avoided it like the plague for several months after that whole thing with their donation to the right wing crazies, and I do have an excuse, but I still spent my money there. Argh.

Here's my excuse: I was going to another big box store that didn't open until 10 and I had some time to kill and needed new jeans and thought there was an Old Navy in the same giant shopping development, only to find out that there was not. Just Target.

And so I went there and was immediately seduced not only by their jeans (which fit! perfectly!) but also their kids' clothes. I'm not planning on going there again anytime soon, but I have admit I love what I got. Oh, the ethical dilemmas of modern life. How can I despise the corporation but love some of their products (which I'm sure are produced in some horribly unethical way, so I can't actually love them, either)?

Anyway, the thing that really got me was the sweatshirt I saw that I knew Mateo would love. And he does. And we love him, our pink-loving boy. And, our cozy-sweatshirt-loving girl. Don't they totally look alike in this photo? Maybe it's the exact same expressions and hand positions, but they are too cute, our little munchkins.

Castles

We have this one neighbor (well, among many neighbors) who is of the old guard of the neighborhood. She has lived here forever, long before the area started to gentrify, and she's got several generations of her family living in her house. Unlike many such families in the area, her house is the nicest on its block and she clearly does a lot of work to keep it up. She had breast cancer a few years ago, beat it, and is generally a really nice lady.

I don't know what she thought about us at first, as it has recently come to our attention that many of the older residents think we are sisters, but she clearly got what was going on when she found out Sacha was pregnant with Natalia. We told her the news as she passed by our house one day on a walk, and she said something that I don't remember in an extremely disappointed voice and just shook her head in a way that was not positive. Now that I look back on it, it wasn't that big of a deal. It's not like we haven't gotten those looks before. But it was pretty demoralizing at the time, because we had gotten to know her a little bit, which is supposed to help people not be so judgmental when they find out about someone being gay or any other closet-like thing, and yet she still acted that way.

Anyway, I don't know if she changed her mind or if she's just a nice lady in spite of her opinions, but she started randomly dropping off toys at our house that she didn't need anymore. They would just appear on our porch - a baby gate here, another toy there. She kept mentioning these blocks that she was going to give us, probably for a year at least, and then eventually they appeared on our porch, too. At first, Mateo had no interest in them and Tali was too little, but suddenly the blocks have become Very Cool. Mateo calls them Loretta's Blocks for obvious reasons and has started to construct castles and other things out of them. Of course, Tali always wants to get in and break things up, but that's a story for another time.

The point is, the whole thing got me thinking about castles and that saying that your home is your castle. Loretta's home is clearly her castle, and ours is ours, in the sense that it's the place where we feel most safe and comfortable and able to be ourselves. It makes me feel really good that she was able to reach outside of her comfort zone to give us those blocks. In turn, I feel good about us that we were able to accept them without getting caught up in the hurt of her unpleasant comments. This may be the most generic thing I've ever said (this one's for you, Uncle G), but it reminds me that we're all just people trying to live our lives and, in this case, a difference of opinion didn't need to stop a connection from being made. In fact, it went beyond that to give Mateo and Natalia a great set of blocks to play with, and a good association with a friend in the neighborhood who is a person of color, of whom they know too few.

I have to post these photos because of several things. First, Mateo's castle. It hasn't developed beyond the perimeter yet, but I'm sure it will. This is the first time he's ever really wanted to build something, so I'm curious to see what he'll come up with. Then, him and Tali in their new hats that I just bought them at a local store. M's is a cars hat and Tali's is a cupcake hat that she mostly refuses to wear. Still, I think they're cute.

Finally, our son in his favorite pose of late: gnawing at his fingernails. I remember biting my nails as a kid, but not this constant thing like he does. Maybe my mom can chime in and refresh my memory. What I do remember is a bunch of things being tried to get me to stop, and the end result is that I still bite my nails to this day. If I have to have a vice, I consider this one to be very mild. So, in light of that, I have done nothing at all to stop Mateo from biting his nails, but I do often ask him to take his hand out of his mouth for photos or in public places with lots of germs. This is a much more typical pose than most of our photos, though:

I just got back from this book group I'm in with some of the moms from Mateo's preschool and I had so much fun! Now I'm feeling all chatty, so I thought I'd write something. We had a big day, complete with preschool for Mateo, massive errand-running and then new-dresser-assembling for Natalia, and then naptime and a new workout for me. I tried a kettle ball for the first time and I think I'm going to be very sore tomorrow. Then, a trip to the soaking pool with friends, dinner, and some quick playtime at home with Mommy before bedtime. Tomorrow, I'm going to help Sacha out at school and we're going to do the paperwork to donate our old car, and then it will be the weekend! And now I must go to bed. I think I might have had a little too much dark chocolate at the book club, because I am feeling wide awake at a time when I am normally comatose....

Indoors

The rainy season has hit us again, and so we've been doing a lot of two things.  First, we've been playing a lot of games in the house, and especially in the basement.  We have a really cool (if I may say so myself) play area down there and it's moderately well heated, so it's comfortable to spend a few minutes or even a couple of hours down there.  Also, all of our storage stuff is down there, so if the kids start playing on their own, I can work on the never-ending project of purging our old crap!

As well, we've been looking for ways to get out as much as possible.  Mateo's preschool is a big blessing in this regard, as he gets a guaranteed fun morning twice a week.  Other than that, I've been very pleasantly surprised to find more options of things to do around here than I knew about last year.  Last year, with the swine flu going around, we spent a LOT of time at our house or friends' houses and didn't venture out much to places like OMSI or the Children's Museum.  

This year, I've thrown caution to the wind for those places, but also have found new places, like the Forestry Center, that are new and fun for the kids and me.  The Forestry Center is especially cool because it has a small exhibit of people who were influential in Oregon's forestry history, and my grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather all have little bios in it.

And, thanks to adventurous friends, we've found new play places that I didn't even know existed.  There are several newish cafes that cater to families and kids and often have music or storytimes or just awesome play areas for the kids to play in. 

I don't know if Portland is having a baby boom, but it sure feels like it.  Of course, everywhere we go is a kid-type place, so families with kids are all we see!  Anyway, it just feels like an embarrassment of riches in terms of rainy-day things to do.  

All it took was one visit to my brother's place in eastern Oregon to show me that.  We went to the nearby dam across the Columbia River and went into the fish-watching room, where you can watch the fish swim up fish ladders and over the dam.  There was a woman there with her kids who seemed to know everything about every fish, and when we thanked her for telling us about the place, she said that they came there nearly every day.   Because that was one of the only places to take the kids to get them out. 

That was a big aha! moment for me and I feel very grateful to live in the big city where there's so much to do.   I'm sure the kids will be SO BORED with it when they're teenagers, but there sure is a lot for them to do now!