Parfumeur

"Mommy, you smell good-- look, smell yourself! That's why I like you better than Daddy, because you smell gooder than Daddy. Daddy smells like a planet dipped in sauce. You smell like ice cream!"

birthday hell

Does anyone but me freak out about their children's birthdays? My mother used to make birthday cakes in the shapes of animals: horses, elephants, rabbits. The neighborhood kids would be invited, along with local family members: aunts, uncles, cousins. We would all wear those cardboard birthday hats with the slightly painful elastic string under our chins, sing "Happy Birthday to you!" and watch the birthday kid blow out candles and open presents. It was fairly simple. Nowadays, the parents host their birthday parties at children's gyms, amusement parks, bowling alleys, fire stations. They hire magicians or clowns or storytellers. They invited not three or four but twenty kids. I have taken my kid to these parties. The birthday kid is often looking a little shy, holding back. The whole scene looks like a class on a field trip, rather than an individual kid's party. That would make more sense for an eight-, or even six-year-old. But three-going-on-four? Too young, I think.

Last year, I invited the entirety of Little Man's playgroup from my pre-back-to-work days, all of whom he saw regularly for a year or so. It was maybe six kids and their siblings and moms (and, in one case, a palpably bored dad). Not so big, right? And yet, Little Man was overwhelmed, and mostly sat anxiously in my lap while I chatted with one or two of the moms. Granted, we have a tiny house, and it felt very cramped, but I was still surprised, since he had known these kids most of his life. It was only after the cake part was over, when many of them left, and it was only two kids and their moms in the backyard, that he started having a good time, running around and giggling with the two kids who were still there.

So I was thinking, this year for my kid's birthday (in two weeks), No. How about, instead, inviting two of his closest friends, and some (adult) family friends that he adores, letting the kids play in the local playground and them bringing them home to the house for pizza and cake? I did look into other options: a local indoor kid's gym, etc., but they seem to expect a big party, and I wanted to avoid that. So I'm planning this very low-key event, pleased with myself for staying so sane, when Little Man starts telling me in no uncertain terms, "I don't want my birthday to be at home! I want it to be somewhere special!" Did I mention his birthday is in two weeks? Well, I planned the party a week early, because his dad has to go out of town the weekend of his actual birthday. So, one week.

So, what I do now is, well, what? Keep the small event, and plan something bigger for sometime next month? And who would I invite to a bigger party, in a more fun place than our little cramped cave of a house? His entire preschool class? He's only been at his new school for a month and doesn't seem yet to have made individual friends. There are 25 kids in his class. He barely remembers his playgroup friends, and we've only stayed in contact with one kid from his old school.

Now that I'm writing about it, I realize that the problem is really numbers. I don't want a party of 20 kids, because I know my kid, and it's too much. He wouldn't like it. He does want it to be in a special place. So, maybe I call the local firehouse and see if they'll host a 3-kid party? In a week?

Young and big, old and small

It's the blending of big-guy independence and little-guy vulnerability that shivers my heart into splinters at unexpected moments. Not the independence itself ("I can do it, Mama!" he insists as he squirts something close to his body weight in soap onto his hand), nor his not-infrequent moments of wanting to be a baby again ("Can I cuddle you, Mommy?" he says sleepily, sliding his bare feet over the wood floor to my chair at the dinner table, his hands already preparing to grip my arms as he climbs up into my lap, all forty-some-odd pounds of him). Both of these make me smile and grimace at the same time, amused and touched. They happen daily, so frequently that they barely register in the crowds of other, needlessly anxious thoughts about work to get done, money to scramble for, character flaws to worry over, small annoyances to dwell on. (Who was it who said "My mind is a bad neighborhood I shouldn't go into alone"?) Rather, the eerie, minor-key overlay of one perspective on the other.

This morning, I drove Little Man to his new school (which I love: it's a Montessori school, much more suited to his quiet temperament than his old school was). It's a beautiful autumn morning, the first chilly day, a little cloudy, but in that pretty autumn way that makes you want to build a wood fire and eat apples while wearing hand-knit sweaters. Little Man is getting over a cold, so his voice is a little rough, he's a little less chatty on the way to school. He's wearing his new back-to-school clothes: a long-sleeved shirt, tan cargo pants, froggy rain boots, carrying his dinosaur lunchbox. When he's climbing into my lap at home, or pretending that I'm the big bad wolf and he's the woodsman who cuts me open to save Little Red Riding Hood and her hapless grandmother, he seems huge, strong, ferocious even, able to withstand anything. In this moment, on the way to school, he seems so small, so vulnerable, so open to anything. I ask him if he wants a handful of Kleenex to stuff into his pants pocket, in case his nose gets runny, and he nods, having admitted that he would feel shy about asking his new teacher for one. His hand as I put the Kleenex into it feels warm, silky, and very small.

I pull up to the door to drop him off. One of the teachers comes to the car to retrieve him from his car seat. He's very business-like about this: hands her his lunchbox, pauses to push the Kleenex deeper into his pocket, takes her hand to step out of the car in his green froggy boots, barely pausing to respond to my "Bye sweetie! I love you!" with a quick waved hand. He's preoccupied with getting out of the car, following the teacher's directions; he's in his school mode now. The teacher leads him to the steps to wait while she retrieves another child from the car waiting behind mine, so I have to go, but as I start driving away I look back to see Little Man standing on the steps, not watching me leave, looking strangely small against the gray stone steps, his cheeks a little flushed with the morning chill. Not clinging to me or begging me to stay, as he used to do, just waiting for the next stage in his school day.

I surprised myself by blinking back tears as I pulled into traffic. Do I want him to stay a baby? Well, yes, of course I do, in a way. The idea of his growing up and leaving home eventually is awful and wonderful at the same time. But it's the small sensualities I'm afraid of losing: not only the "Can I cuddle you, Mama?" moments, but also the "karate-chop!" moments when he pretends to cut off my arm. All of it, the profound and the mundane.

The other night, in my pre-bedtime sleepiness, I was sitting at the kitchen table, idly looking through the newspaper before starting bedtime rituals, and Little Man came in, engrossed in examining the wheel of one of his trains, to see why it wasn't turning anymore. He saw me sitting there and came over close and leaned against my arm, still fiddling with the train wheel. My arm came out and went around him and I kissed the top of his head as I went on paging through the newspaper. We stayed like that for several moments, until he wandered away to find a different train car. I wanted to call after him, "Honey, will you still do that when you're forty? Promise me!"

If he does -- if when he's forty and living in his own house with his own family, and I am visiting him, and I am sitting creakily at the kitchen table, paging with arthritic crone-like fingers through whatever freaky digital form of newspaper they will have by then (maybe floating slightly above the floor because we will be living on a space station, having caused too much destruction to earth to live there anymore), and he comes in idly tinkering with his kid's toy and leans against me for a moment, unconsciously, before wandering away again -- if he does, I will be grateful.

See, I could be an advice columnist!

A word of advice: if you're a slightly overtired parent who accidentally got into the shower with her glasses on, and you then took them off and placed them carefully on the shelf over the toilet while you finished your shower, don't -- and I repeat, don't -- wait until you've slathered your hands with moisturizer before you attempt to retrieve them from the shelf.

Which, as I say, is over the toilet.

I'll leave it at that.

Little Man's recipe for homemade bread

"I know how they make bread. First they pop the popcorn. Then they put the bread on top. Then they plant it outside in the garden. Then they put the crust on. Then they put it in the oven. And then it comes out really tasty and yummy!"

I hope you're taking notes.

Why?

Little Man: Why can I walk now?
Me: What do you think?
Little Man: Because my knees are all better.
Me: That's right!

Jumping from the arm of the couch into a pile of pillows. Hopping from one foot to the other across the room. Explaining that the reason he didn't fly when he jumped from the second highest rung of the playground ladder is because "I forgot to flap my wings!" Disappearing for a few minutes, and then yelling from the bathroom, "Mommy, I'm pooping!"

I am grateful to be on the road to taking these things for granted again. It's a strange age, 3-going-on-4. He is articulate for his age, but he is still a three-year-old, who doesn't like talking about boo-boos very much, because talking leads to looking, and looking leads to bandaids, and bandaids leads to the horrible taking off of bandaids, which is best avoided. He will answer differently at different times, because he lives zennishly in the moment; so, in the morning he will say "I'm not standing because it hurts" and in the afternoon he will say "I'm not standing because it feels weird, but it doesn't hurt."

All of which brings to mind the time I had him in the doctor's office with some minor virus or other, and a trainee doctor asked him whether his ears hurt, and he said "yes" and Dr. Trainee looked at me and asked me, in so many words, whether to believe him or not. I thought for a minute, and then looked at Little Man and asked, "Honey, did you vote in the last election?" and he said with easy-going assurance, "Yes I did!" Language is fluid, definitions are foggy, assurances are creative. This is not lying so much as practicing the grownup art of conversing, as when Michael and I are talking about something boringly grownup at dinner, some kind of long-term financial planning or whatever, and Little Man will pipe up and say something like "I think life insurance is due at the library!"

He wants to be a part of adult conversation, and he's feeling his way, just as he did with learning to walk, or feed himself. It's a beautiful thing to watch, but it makes it hard to judge whether an injury is scary or not. So you develop the ability to wait and watch without panicking. Well, without panicking too much.

Whew!

The surreal experience of Little man's enigmatic injury got a little bit worse before it got better. When we finally got to talk to his doctor at 10:30 pm. the day after the x-rays, she said they were inconclusive ("ossification on the patella -- injury to the knee can't be ruled out") and that we should go to a pediatric orthopedist for a bone scan. "Pediatric bone scan" -- not a reassuring phrase.

The next morning, she had her office staff call around everywhere to see where they could get us in that day, since it had already been so long since the fall, and her receptionist called and asked "So tell me, are you on skates?" This was 10:30, and we had to be in Wilmington, Delaware by noon, with the x-rays in hand. We zoomed out the door with uncharacteristic efficiency and were there half an hour early, starving but armed with the box of power bars my husband keeps in his office to stave off hunger pangs. (We each had one in the car on the way. Michael reading to me from the map quest printout: "Was that exit 8 or exit 9? Get into the right lane!" while L.M., chewing, musing: "Ack-chooly, I don't really like these. Can I have another one?")

Little Man got very interested in the huge fish tank in the colorful waiting room of the children's hospital ("Is that big orange one playing hide and seek? What's that big pink thing? Why is there bubbles? Did he just eat a rock? Why did he spit it out?") while Michael and I stood around chewing our nails. Finally we were called in to a "room" which was not so much a room as an area (it was instantly clear this was a hospital and not simply a doctor's office: the weird pastel-striped curtain hanging from the ceiling on little metal tracks was a dead giveaway, plus the shuddering flashbacks I was having to my appendectomy and also my ovarian cystectomy).

The first doctor who came in was very nice, despite looking alarmingly like Doogey Houser, M.D. -- too young and too earnest to actually know anything. He had us go in for more x-rays down the hall and then come back, and when we came back we waited and waited, and the only reason we figured out what we were waiting for was because little chipper L.M. (as far as he was concerned, we were on a mildly entertaining adventure of some kind) got bored and wanted me to carry him around for a walk, where we happened to run into Doogy, who mentioned as an aside that he had called in his boss and was waiting for a reply. Gee, thanks for letting us know!

When at last the long-awaited authority figure came in -- an older tall, thin man with a nearly cadaverous face and owlish wire-rimmed glasses, very grim-looking and expressionless -- I thought to myself, Uh-oh, let's make this quick and get out of here before he scares Little Man to death. But he didn't. He spoke with us quickly, efficiently, and then crouched on the floor to address Little Man directly where he sat on my lap. "So what stickers do you have there?" he asked him conversationally, matter-of-factly, as if he took it for granted that Nemo stickers constituted reasonable adult conversation. Little Man told him a little bit about the stickers the nurses had given him, and answered each question thoughtfully, seriously, backtracking as needed to correct his own statements: "I think this is Nemo. No, I haven't seen the movie but I know about him. He's orange and he's a fish. This other one has stars I think. I think they're stars. No, here's a butterfly. Butterflies can fly but they don't sting." The doctor looked calmly into L.M's eyes and peppered him with questions, and it took me a minute to notice that both of the doctor's hands were gently manipulating and exploring L.M.'s knees with efficient, practiced fingertips, as if he were reading Braille. L.M. did not react to the doctor's fingers except here and there, and the doctor seemingly paid no attention but kept his fingers moving while continually asking questions, "Does Nemo eat fruit? What do butterflies eat? Did you ever see a butterfly that was orange?" And L.M. answered him, responding comfortably to the doctor's conversational tone and respectful eye contact.

I was a little bit in awe. When Dr. Cadaver finally stood up and reported his findings to us ("he's not reacting to any discomfort except in one area of the left kneecap, and there's no swelling or any evidence of a fracture. I think it's a bad contusion, and he's being intuitively careful to let it heal..."), it became clear to me that he had been purposefully engaging L.M's conscious mind in order to gauge his bodily reactions. This is probably pretty standard stuff for a doctor, particularly one who works with kids all day, particularly one who works with kids with broken bones all day -- and it occurs to me that I've probably watched our regular pediatrician do it here and there, but still. What I liked about it was that I came expecting a bone scan with fancy machines and lots of lights and beeps and buttons, and what I got was a sixties-ish guy's skinny hands, massaging my kid's knees while speaking directly into his eyes.

It seemed a very old-fashioned kind of medicine, like a medieval midwife or a tribal healer, and I liked it. His recommendation was that we watch him: "Don't force him to stand, but don't stop him. If things don't improve in one week, bring him back to me." In other words, trust him and leave him alone. Geez, trust the 3-year-old patient? what is this, some kind of voodoo? Michael and I were grinning all the way home.

And L.M. straightened both legs by bedtime, and the next morning tentatively half-stood on both legs. "How does it feel?" I asked him. "A little weak," he said ruefully, and smiled at me. He's still not walking -- and tomorrow will be a week since he fell -- but I am entirely comfortable with it.