Her Hand Is Bigger Now

No longer plump with the extra pudge of toddlerhood when tiny fingers and cushy palms slipped - sweaty and small into my thin, bony mitts.  Thick around the knuckles but delicate in the digit, I took photos of her hand in mine in those early years with the idea to record its growth with this comparison shot every year.  Along the way somewhere I forgot my vow.

Now, today, she seems so grown, her thoughts rife with complexity, she astounds me.  I notice her hands as she fashions a shadow puppet on the wall.  Thinner, much thinner than those toddler hands, longer, more dextrous, still they are a child's hands with extra flesh and the stubby blunt fingernails easier for climbing.  They meet in small ways as she constructs ephemeral art with them.  Bracelets of colored elastic adorn her wrists still her fingers are too small for proper rings.  Her nails she keeps short and only occasionally polished.  

I am grateful to know in all her maturity, in all her distance from that cherub I attachment parented with momma gorilla-like ferocity, she is still a girl, my child, an angel of heart-rending proximity for at least a few more years.  

Too Much Screen Time

Every parenting manual, pediatrician, psychologist, school teacher recommends limiting screen time for kids - but what about their parents?  I spent my day on the computer - working, writing, researching and when I was done I was sick to my stomach and more than a little depressed at having been so disconnected from humanity while connected through a machine with some virtually existing world.  OMG - get me back in the playground!!  

Back-to-School??

Back-to-school is just around the corner.  As an NYC public school family we are back to the grind the day after Labor Day - just 12 days away.  I'm not ready.  I still have all those plans I made for this amazing summer with my kids - going to the beach, visiting the museum once a week in some great scheme I had to create a science curriculum with the summer and they are still not done.   They all just sort of fell by the wayside between my new found work obligations and those lazy, hazy days of summer at the pool.  But still I  wish I'd done something - I wish I'd really accomplished one amazing summer activity with my kids.  We played games, we read books, they built things and drew things and made up games but still somehow something seems a little "not done" as we are about to get back to the reality of school days.

Is it just that summer is so short now that my ennui had not really begun to set in and then it's over?  When I was a kid summer was a solid two weeks longer than it is for my kids.  Or am I just a poor planner?  Never really getting ahead of the game enough to make a real plan for the summer - yeah - that's probably more like it.  And what will my kids remember of this summer - will they say that was the most boring summer ever??!!  Or will they remember it like I'm going to chose to - as the summer we as a family really spent some time together - in the playground, out on the fire escape, playing the Wii and just hanging out.  Because while I regret that the summer is coming to an end and we don't have any grand anything to show for it, it's been the little things that have made this summer special.  Like when my sweet pook discovered all my old earrings and started wearing them around like she had precious jewels in her ears.  Or when my dear boy beat my husband in a remote control car race and gloated a little but did not cry when later he lost in Wii baseball.  

So yeah, we don't have any grand vacation photos and my kids haven't learned the Latin name for horse but still we've got the little moments and sometimes those are the best.