One Ordinary Moment

 “We should never even try to leave the house,” I think. Adalyn is at the marvelous age (3) when she suddenly thinks she can do whatever she wants. What she wants to do is color on her bed, not get ready to go. After forcibly taking her markers and coercing her into the other room, she stares blankly at her socks as if she has never seen such a thing before.

Juliana is remarkably ready, standing at the door, whine-crying about how long it is taking everyone and how her foot is itching so bad and it is the worst thing that has ever happened to her. Nadia is half-dressed, crying on the floor as I run back to the kitchen to fill up water-bottles.

Boots, coats, hats and 20 minutes later we finally close the door behind us. On Tuesday nights we usually meet students for dinner in the cafeteria after Kevin's class. The third floor offers good tasting, cooked to order food, slightly more expensive than the other floors ($1.50). It is an easy opportunity to connect with students and a night without cooking. But still, sometimes the effort of getting three children out and fed seems ridiculous.

We arrive at the cafeteria, students exclaiming over the children as we climb the stairs. Kevin has ordered and is waiting with three students who are equally delighted to see the children. Nadia offers a half smile; Juliana and Adalyn look at them with shy suspicion. They ask Adalyn her age. She looks at them blankly.  “You tell them,” she mumbles to me. They ask Juliana to say something in Chinese. She finally tells them her name, under coercion.

We leave on our coats. Even though the cafeteria is technically heated, it is always freezing up here, due to the full wall of windows. These windows look out over the whole campus and (on clear days) the mountains beyond. Tonight, the sky is already darkening and all we see are the lights flooding the basketball and tennis courts below.

I start doling out bowls and kid chopsticks and water-bottles and noodles. The girls notice these are not exactly the same kind of noodles they usually get, ergo obviously gross and weird. They are unusually long noodles, and on the journey from bowl to mouth, half end up on the not quite clean table. Adalyn keeps choking on every other bite and Juliana complains that she wants a hot dog.

Kevin balances Nadia on one knee, feeding her with one hand and wielding chopsticks with the other. He talks to the students in between doling out bites. I sit down and take two bites of my eggplant and chicken when Adalyn decides she needs to go potty. I take her to the other end of the cafeteria where she checks out each stall deciding which squattie-potty is calling her name.

We return and douse with hand cleaner. I'm certainly not a germaphobe, but a Chinese public bathroom will definitely send you searching for the Purell. In between bites and helping with noodles and feeding a sleepy baby, we find out that two of the three students are twins! Not with each other – one girl's twin also attends our university, where they routinely confuse classmates who see them around campus.

By this point, it is late enough that most students have already cleared out.

Ten minutes later, Adalyn decides she needs to go potty again. As we head across the cafeteria once more, Juliana comes running behind yelling, “WAIT FOR ME! I'M COMING TOO!” The cafeteria workers, waiting behind their food stall windows, are not at all sad to see us traipse through again. They call to the girls, who ignore them. Back to the smelly bathroom to help a small child balance over a large hole and try to convince her not to touch anything. She manages to touch everything.

We parade back across the cafeteria expanse, students turning in their seats to watch. Adalyn runs off to crawl under tables and watch TV. Juliana runs after to call her back. I sit down to eat cold rice remains. “This is not worth it,” I think. “Life with children is ridiculous.”

Suddenly we hear a yell from across the cafeteria. Juliana comes running, waving something in her hand.

“IT CAME OUT!! IT CAME OUT!!”

We know exactly what she was talking about; her very first loose tooth, stubbornly hanging on for two weeks. Juliana bounces around, ecstatic. She proudly shows off the hole in her mouth, and the tooth, and the little bit of blood, to us and the students.

“In China,” they say, “You throw your tooth on top of the roof so you (or your tooth?) will grow up faster.”

I still remember losing my first tooth (sitting in church, entertaining myself with hours of wiggling). How strange to think that Juliana will likely remember as well – this moment on the third floor of a Chinese cafeteria. This ordinary moment, which was achieved with so much effort and inconvenience. I'm sure she thinks it was worth it.

Autumn Pause

Nadia is taking a rare long nap, the 2 hour kind that only happen when I am planning to go somewhere. I need to buy some more bread for lunch, to support our daily PB&J habit. Our ayi is at our home this morning, so I decide to just take the girls. After a few rounds of “put your socks on or else,” we head down the stairs.

The sky is gray – not “factory town” gray but “blustery autumn” gray. Despite the absence of any visible sun, the girls don pink Hello Kitty and racer flame sunglasses. We have good sandwich bread available at our nearby campus shop, so the girls climb on scooters and balance bikes to ride through campus.

People watch us everywhere we go, something I almost forget about it has become so normal. Students kindly dodge out of the way of swerving children with cries of “How cute! The little foreign dolls!” When we walk in the store the shop ladies and shopping students all smile indulgently. They no longer blink when we pile 5 packages of bread onto the counter, (about the equivalent of one loaf). They already know the crazy foreigners apparently live on bread alone.

We need to get back home, but the girls want to stop in the little copse of trees to find some leaves. I often hurry them along, driven by my own relentless internal clock, but today we pause. Maybe it is the crispness in the wind, or the autumn sky, or the sight of yellowing leaves, but I want to stop and soak in this moment when I am actually enjoying life instead of slogging through it.

We delight in yellow leaves in perfect heart shape and shudder at strange wiggly mushrooms. The girls fill the scooter basket with leaves and dandelions. Just as the wind blows the sun clear in the sky we walk and scooter and bike back home.

Nadia has just woken up from her nap and greets us with sleepy eyes. Adalyn grabs her hands and makes silly faces. Juliana finds a play milk bottle for the flowers and sits down to make leaf rubbings. I settle in to nurse Nadia. For this moment, no one is whining or screaming. The world pauses to appreciate the first tastes of Autumn.

One Word 2016: Moment

It's not even the end of February and I've already had a baby and written about my word for the year. So yeah, I'm pretty on top of things.

Life with a newborn is all about the present moment. Nothing can really be planned - as soon as you sit down to eat or lie down to sleep, baby is suddenly ravenously hungry. For her there is no future. Either she is nursing or starving. She is cuddled with mama or she is unfathomably alone.

The needs of a two year old are less constant but nearly as changeable. One moment she is giving sweet kisses and the next she is screaming bloody bedtime murder because she wants her blanket on but doesn't want her blanket on and it's the wrong person doing it in the wrong way. There will be moments of silliness and toddler slyness and far too many moments of potty training and running away screaming and then suddenly one day Baby Addie isn't even a toddler anymore, she's a threenager (cue ominous music).

It's so easy to get tied up in the minutes of the day. Minutes of sleep and sleeplessness. Minutes til everyone needs shoes on walking out the door. Minutes until the next nursing, until dinner is supposed to be ready, and how many minutes will this tantrum last? Minutes til bedtime and not nearly enough minutes until morning.  This year will be filled with a lot of loud, in your face, strain your patience, labor intense minutes. I won't treasure every minute. Some minutes are just not that good.

The minutes can go by slowly, in the middle of the night, or in the third hour of nursing, but the moments speed fast. Baby squeaks and curled frog legs turn to searching eyes and first flashing smiles. When I look back I want to remember the floppiness of a satisfied sleeping baby.  I want to notice the  toddler's mischievous grin as she wraps arms around my neck, I want to appreciate the dancing five year old yet to discover self-consciousness. 

As this our presumably last baby already moves through new stages, I realize how brief this season of life really is.  I don't want to rush through or begrudge this season.  But in the midst of it all, it can be hard to see beyond. My life looks to be an endless procession of one handed tasks and days divided by a series of catnaps. Any non-mothering dreams will stay on the back shelf. I will be quietly buried under a pile of laundry.

I want to remember that these moments are important. When I am accomplishing nothing and haven't made it outside the apartment because it would take five hours to get everyone ready, when I have been doing and saying the same things over and over with no measurable progress, I want to remember that these days still matter.

These are the moments of nourishing my baby and teaching her to trust. These are the moments of sternness, of gentleness, of silliness - of letting my middle child know she is seen and not forgotten. These are the moments of teaching my oldest how to read and to love reading, of helping her adjust to changes at school and loneliness over losing her classmate-best friend. These moments shape lives.