Catherine Newman Weekly Blog: 4.7.08

Dalai Mama Weekly Blog

Catherine Newman chronicles life parenting Ben, 8, and Birdy, 5

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April 7, 2008

Spring Fever

more in dalai mama:

3.31.08 : Poor Comprehension

3.24.08 : This Many Fingers

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Listen to Catherine

Because it's such a lovely evening — a rainy blue twilight, the birds trailing banners behind them with the word SPRING written in flowery loops, yet still chilly enough for a crackly-cozy fire in the woodstove — the children are, naturally, feeling a bit cantankerous. All the obvious problems arise. For example, this urgent question: Who is better at the kazoo version of "Oh My Darling Clementine," but performed with no actual kazoos, just honked, lyricless, out your nose? That's a hard one. Oh wait — I won't judge yet, since Birdy got interrupted somehow at the very end of her turn, and is now starting over from the beginning and yes it is fair, Ben, it is. Okay. Let's see...Birdy's sounds more consistent, and with a wonderfully deep tone to it? But Ben's has the excellent vibrato, that great nasal twang. I'm going to have go with: tie. "Well Ben's was a little bit screechy?" "Well Birdy's sounded more like a person — a person just honking something out their nose." Heaven forefend! But I am steadfast: tie.

With this debate settled to nobody's satisfaction, Birdy wanders over to snuggle with me on the kitchen couch, in the warming glow of the fire. "I like your flower, Mama!" she says brightly. I am learning to embroider, and have spent the better part of a thousand hours embellishing a dishtowel with a purple daisy the size of a...uh...daisy. "I think you should cut it out," Birdy says, and moves her finger in a circle around the flower. "It looks a little bit plain on this big towel." I explain that I'm still hoping to use the dishtowel as a dishtowel, just with a nice little flower to look at. She thinks about this for a moment. "Well then maybe you should embroider some more? I mean, so it doesn't look so plain." That's a great idea, assuming I live to be a million years old. "Also?" She points to the flower's center. "You said that color was gold? But gold is my favorite color, and that is so not my favorite color. I like the shiny kind. That's more like brownish-yellow. Not my favorite color. Definitely." I get this. I used to feel the same way about Sunshine Fruit Bars: "fruit" means pineapple, peaches, cherries; you want to make a cracker filled with raisins, fine, but call it a Raisin Cracker. "And Mama? Not to hurt your feelings? But your sewing looks kind of messy on the back."

I tease her a little bit — "Hang on a sec, Birdy, let me get a pen so I can write down all the things you don't like about my embroidery!" — but it's a mistake, because she turns red with shame. "Don't!" she cries. "I like your sewing! I was just saying different things." "Oh, I know," I say, and kiss her on the top of the head. It's stopped raining now, and Birdy is squinting out the window at the noisy tumult of birds gathered to feed in the last of the light. "I love the male cardinal?" she says. "But the female is the exact color brown that is so not my favorite."

Michael gets out his guitar, and everyone's mood changes instantly. We sing a moody something from the Once soundtrack — a song we all love, even though none of us really understands the lyrics — then we sing "Worrisome Years," Ben's favorite Greg Brown song, and "Birds," my favorite Neil Young song. By the time we head up to bed, we are bursting with love, and only when Ben looks up from writing in his journal and says, "What?" do I realize that I'm gazing at him with a kind of wild fondness. "Have a hissing contest with me," he says, and so I do, and Ben smiles and hisses lispily through his gappy teeth and laughs and cries, "Oh my God — I cheated, and you still won!" He wonders if there's a world record for hissing, and when I tell him about the Guinness Book, which he's never heard of, he mis-hears my example. "How would they even decide that?" he wonders. "Saddest person? Like, 'My dog died, I'm the saddest person.' 'No, both my cats died, I'm sadder than you.'" "Fattest," I say, laughing, and he laughs too: "Now that makes more sense!"

Nobody can fall asleep. There's practically a current of electricity running through the dark. We hear Birdy climb out of her bed, and then she's running, leaping onto us and laughing, and maybe the kids can't sleep because their legs are growing like something from a horror movie, uncoiling like vines and sending tendrils out past the bottoms of their pants legs, the covers, the window, the county...Everything is alive. "Kiss me!" Birdy demands, kissing me, and then cries, "Oooh! Your mustache tickled me!" But then she remembers her manners and says, encouragingly, "I mean — not your mustache. Your whiskers."

Editor's Note:
You can also find Catherine's column on Family.com, where you can post comments and she can join the conversation, too.

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir,
Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic
Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family,
available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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