Celebrating the children

I don’t think I’ve ever had this much unscheduled time with my children. No, I’m sure of that. There were months when Aidan was a newborn and Naomi was in preschool when the rhythm of my life wasn’t so different from this—when Michael had a full time job and I had a full time mothering position. But having these two kids home with me for weeks at a time while Michael is at work, that’s an experience I’ve never had before. And we’re just home together. We don’t go to the zoo together, don’t go on outings, don’t do much of anything. We play in the yard, bake bread, read books, go for walks on the beach. We spend lots of time just sharing space as I skype with colleagues or work on this blog or do other work things and they listen to Harry Potter books on their MP3 players. Sometimes Naomi will have a friend over. Sometimes Trish takes Aidan for hot chocolate at the café. But mostly it’s the three of us together.

There are times when I get really impatient about the whole thing and deeply crave adult conversation. I get frustrated with the occasional fighting and snippiness (I can’t believe my spell check let that word through). Sometimes I count the days left until the kids go back to school and I can actually be alone again and shower without small people opening and closing the bathroom door (it’s 18 week days until school begins again on 7 February). But these feelings are outside the norm for me.

More usual for me is the sense that the kids are very nearly the most interesting people I’ve ever met. I love talking with them, watching them play, learning about the way they see the world. They read or listen to Harry Potter nearly constantly (we don’t have a TV) and their vocabularies are growing enormous. In the dark at bedtime tonight Naomi asked, “This is the time for our small conversation, right? What shall we converse about?” And this morning Aidan asked, “Is it ok if the door is ajar?” which is not a sentence I associate with a five-and-a-half year old (thank you JK Rowling). The children are teaching me about this world, teaching me about what driftwood looks like and what magical lands can be found in and outside our house. Today at the beach, Naomi named her boogie board and created a whole life experience for it as she “walked” it down the beach. At dusk Aidan showed me the figures he sees in the ngaio tree outside his window. I watch them watch this new place, navigate the new people, get confused about the accents, find secret paths in the hills. I love them more each day.

Today in NZ and tomorrow in the US, it’s Aidan’s half birthday (which we’ll celebrate tomorrow, since I lost track of the date today). We used to celebrate half birthdays because the kids used to have summer birthdays and they’d never get a chance to get cupcakes in class with their friends—so we’d bring them in during their half birthdays, in winter. Now we’ve turned our worlds—and the calendar—upside down so that their birthdays are in winter (one of Naomi’s first questions upon moving here was whether she would finally have school on her birthday this year (the answer is yes)) and their half birthdays are in the summer. So this year, we won’t celebrate half birthdays with classmates. This year we’ll bake his half cake in the summer rain (as it’s forecast) and eat it around a table all the way around the world from our old home. And we’ll do it to celebrate the passing of time, to celebrate Aidan and his reading (and his healing face) and Naomi and her love of horses and her wonderful big-sistering. We’ll know that there won’t be so many more years of our lives when the children want to cuddle for a long time before bed, when they tell me, as Aidan did on the beach today, “You know, Mom, sometimes I just prefer spending my time with adults” or when they climb into my bed in the morning and beg to be tickled. It’s as wonderful that Aidan is growing and changing as it is that he’s still a little boy who likes to be in my lap as much as possible. We’ll celebrate both things—the growing up, and the being young still. Happy half birthday, Aidan.

NOTE: For those of you tired of pictures of children on the beach, relief is ahead. Monday Perry arrives at last, and you can believe that for the first several days of his homecoming, the blog will be mostly filled with pictures of a dog on the beach. Good news?