Ketchup

When the DeBoni Family visited us in Maplewood in the summer of 2009, Bruno spent an ENTIRE morning cleaning the old condiments, of which we had many, out of our refrigerator. I kinda feel like it's time for me to do that with some blog entries I've been storing up in my head: it's time for me to catch up.

BALLERAY!

A few weeks ago, Sadie started taking ballet at the local Community Center (not to be confused with the local Leisure Center, which is essentially in the same building.) From what I can tell she is the youngest in the 45 minute class of 2-and-a-half to 4-year-olds. There really isn't much dancing taking place, but there seems to be the basis for some formal ballet moves being woven in. Hysterically, she is required to wear the full get-up: leotard, tights, skirt, slippers. During her first two classes she was befriended by another 2-and-a-half-year-old who fancied herself qualified to assist the instructors in keeping the stragglers (including Sadie) in line. This prompted several chuckles by me and each and every time I would let out said chuckle, Sadie would yell from across the room, "Mommy, what's so funny?" It's hard to know whether she enjoys this new Saturday morning ritual, but this is what people do here. Kids start ballet, or football (soccer), or piano lessons, or yoga, or swimming, or all of the above, at a VERY young age. For your amusement:

POTTY TIME!

As mentioned in a previous post, we started actively potty training Sadie. No one warned me just how stressful and messy this process can be. Almost a full year ago, we started putting her on her potty once she started showing some "readiness signs" - I'll spare you the details of what those were.We took a hiatus from it though because we knew the move would be a difficult enough transition, and because the potty took a nice leisurely journey across the Atlantic with the rest of our belongings. In retrospect it might have been a mistake to have waited. I guess hindsight is 20-20 (there's a REALLY bad pun in there somewhere). So, I bought a book, I took Sadie shopping for some big girl underwear, and the next day - POTTY TIME!

The big girl underwear proved to be a bit of a mistake actually. On day 1 - Sadie very excitedly donned a new pair and like the excited little puppy that she was, peed all over the place within five minutes. No worries - look at all these other new pairs of underwear!!!!! For Sadie, soaking through a pair of underwear simply meant she got to wear ANOTHER pair with some fun cartoon character or flowers or butterflies on it.

OK - Day 2 - change of plan. Sorry Sadie, there's only one pair of underwear here. At this point however, she started to actually say, I have to go to the potty. Unfortunately that usually meant it was too late. I considered this progress - at least she knew she had gone. She spent most of that week with the nanny Andrea - bless her patient soul. She was more than willing to persist with this seemingly monumental task. And Andrea was not deterred from leaving the house with the underwear-clad Sadie AND Parker while this process was going on. Which meant dragging poor Parker along to the loo with Sadie every 15 minutes when out in public. It also meant returning home with a wet Sadie and at least one extra pair of wet pants. For about a week Sadie wore almost every pair of pants and every pair of underwear daily.

So I resorted to bribery. A piece of candy every time she went pee-pee in the potty (thankfully Halloween had passed and we had lots of smarties, gummi bears and lollipops lying around) and a LOLLIPOP for a successful poop. Not surprisingly things suddenly seemed to have clicked with her. She started going to the potty herself (sometimes) and on more than one occasion has perched on the pot for more than an hour waiting for something to happen.

It's been about 3 or 4 weeks and we're by no means done with this, but dryer days await. Now, if only it would stop raining....

NURSERY SCHOOL!

Perhaps foolishly, I started potty training Sadie at roughly the same time she started "school" at the Belsize Square Synagogue. That's right, Synangogue. Sadie just came home from a playgroup one day and declared, "Mom, Dad, you never had me baptized, so I've decided to become Jewish." Not really, but had she done so, I might have been a little surprised about her knowledge of religion, but I wouldn't have minded. Thus far her only exposure to religion has been a few passes through a church here and there - where she points to various statues and exclaims, "Look! It's Grandpa Pete!"; and our nightly attempt to say grace before dinner. So her exposure to any sort of religion is just fine by me.

There were a lot of emotionally difficult things about leaving the life we had built in Maplewood, but perhaps the most difficult thing was having to pull Sadie out of her "school", Buzzing Bees. This was a delightful in-home daycare run by a Guyanese woman Sandy, and her 20-something daughter, Ginny. Sadie absolutely LOVED Sandy and Ginny and very much looked forward to going there every day, for 8 or 9 hours a day. She never once cried when I dropped her off there. Oftentimes, I felt that she was better cared for there than at home.

I didn't expect that she would have a problem attending a nursery school daily for only 3 hours a day. When we went to visit the school, they insisted that I stay or an hour or so at drop-off during Sadie's first week while she "settled in" to the routine of nursery school. I knew immediately that this was a bad idea. After the first day it was clear that Sadie believed this nursery was MY school as well. I tried to explain to the head teacher that this gentle settling-in period was not going to work on Sadie and she looked aghast when I told her that I had never even set foot in Buzzing Bees: Sadie and I said a quick goodbye at the door and that was it. As expected, extricating myself from Sadie's grasp on days 2 and 3 was EXTREMELY difficult and I could hear her screaming and crying from down the street.

Since I had already had some success with bribery,

I thought I'd give it another chance. I promised Sadie that if she didn't cry on Monday morning when I dropped her at school, she could have "pink milk" (a la "Charlie and Lola" - a British cartoon) when I picked her up. We also developed a goodbye ritual whereby she chooses the type of kiss I give her when I drop her off (monster kisses, tiger kisses, a certain number of kisses: usually 40...) Well, lo and behold - this WORKED! Come Monday morning, we arrived there...took off hat, gloves, coat...put our fruit for snack time in the communal fruit basket...and Sadie looked up at me with a huge grin and said, "Look Mommy! I'm HAPPY!!!" We did our monster kiss (to the horror and disbelief of some of the other mothers and the head teacher), I promised her the pink milk (again - looks of horror and disbelief), and she was off to go play with the train set that had been laid out. For those of you wondering, monsters give each other raspberries on the nose...