Assumptions and Rituals

I have learned that the "very brown college girl" at my tanning store does not lead the simple carefree college life I imagined for her.

When I arrived this morning for my spray-on tan, she appeared at the front desk with a pink-cheeked toddler wrapped in a blanket. Her little boy. He was sick and couldn't go to daycare, so she was taking care of him while she tried to find someone to cover for her at work. He was adorable, all soft and big-eyed, with those creases at the wrist that only toddlers have. I just wanted to gather him up and snuggle him. He had eyes just like his mother's.

It just goes to show how far off base our assumptions about people can be. Here I figured she was a goofy college girl, and she's a working mom.

Another thing I've been thinking about this morning is the rituals and habits that make up our daily lives. I've been noticing several in our family routines lately.

Dogs and kids in particular like rituals. Bedtime is a ritual for Grayson. From the call for jammies to "books in bed," (often the same ones over and over) then toothbrushing and footdragging until he comes leaping up onto our bed and calls "TAXI!" Then Gray comes in and carries him, generally upside down and backwards, into his room for bed. Then there is a drink of water, a vitamin, kisses and hugs and generally some horsing around involving Gray laying on him and pretending to sleep. Then Gray leaves and turns out the light and I lay down with Grayson for a minute to snuggle and tell him how wonderful he is and how much we love him before saying goodnight. Sometimes we lay there together and talk and give each other the giggles. For some reason at bedtime everything seems funny to us. Those are the best nights.

In the morning, usually in the wee hours, Grayson crawls into our bed with us. When the alarm goes off I pat the boys and tell them it's time to start being awake, and gradually, while I'm making coffee and letting the dogs out, Grayson will snuggle over to Gray's side of the bed. This is when the waking-up rituals begin. These consist first of Grayson snuggling close to Gray, then Gray throws an arm over him and hugs him, which gradually changes into some form of annoyance. Either he rolls over onto Grayson to squish him, or he starts tickling him, or something, to make him start to giggle and squirm. Usually I hear shrieking of laughter within about 5 minutes, and sometimes Gray pulls Grayson's socks off and throws them down the stairs, or yanks his pajama bottoms down, or wrestles him off the bed onto the floor... with Grayson squealing with delight the whole time. Generally I end up putting a stop to all the shenanigans by bringing Grayson his clothes and requesting that he get dressed. Whereupon my loving family refers to me as "the fun sponge" or "the fun vampire."

It's not surprising that he's generally a few minutes late for school, with all of this going on.

The dogs have rituals, too. When I'm going down the stairs in the morning to let them out, Kobi charges ahead, but Flower comes down the stairs at my left side. About five or six steps down the stairs, she stops and looks up at me, waiting for me to pet her face and neck. I give her some love and we start down again. Usually she stops one more time before we reach the landing to receive her love. Then she switches around to my right side and follows me into the kitchen to go out the back door.

When Gray comes to bed, Kobi eagerly waits for him to start pulling up the covers. Then she climbs up onto them and "surfs" the blankets as he pulls them up, ending on his chest where she can lick his chin and get her ears scratched before bed.

Little rituals that give our lives a predictable shape and texture.

First shoe-wetting of spring

I took the last two days of Spring Break off to spend with Grayson. He spent the early part of the week with his Big Mama and Papa, being spoiled rotten. So I figured they needed some recovery time and it might be good for Grayson to spend some time in an environment with rules before he has to go back to school next week.

We meant to go to the zoo on Thursday, but weren't able to round up any of his friends to go along, so we opted instead for an afternoon at Martin Nature Park, a wildlife preserve up on the north side of the city.

Grayson loves to go there, and so do I. They have three nature trails, a wild prairie dog town, a pond full of all kinds of turtles, and a stream full of ginormous carp. We always take a bag of dog food to feed the turtles and the fish. And once we saw a six or eight foot snake swimming down the stream.

There's one point where the stream makes a hairpin turn through some sandstone and has created a perfect wading and splashing point, where the water rushes over the stones and into a pool. Grayson always wades here, and in the summer gets completely soaked, playing in the water.

However, the water this early in the season is COLD, and though he took his shoes and socks off, he didn't get much more into the water than his big toe before he had them back on. That didn't keep him from wading on the rocks and getting his shoes completely soaked, but I guess it made him feel like his feet weren't getting as cold, if he kept his shoes on.

The shoes, by the way, were less than an hour old. I'd just bought them at Target. Every spring I buy a cheap pair for him to wear through the summer and essentially trash. He definitely got a head start on that at the creek.

Later I heard that there were something like a million people at the zoo on Thursday, so I'm really glad we didn't go.

Yesterday he spent most of the day with his friend Sam from down the street. Sam is nine, but they still really have a good time together. At first, Grayson worshipped Sam, but I've noticed that since Christmas, the friendship is a little less one-sided. It's good to see that Grayson can lose his infatuation with an older kid, and still be his friend.

Sam is a bright and good-looking boy, a little small for his age, and his mom tells me he has some sensory and behavioral problems that stem from a case of lead poisoning when he was a baby. You woudn't know it to meet him, until you spend a little time with him and begin to realize he has trouble dealing with frustration and anger. Grayson takes it all in stride, however, doesn't get his feelings hurt if Sam snaps at him or changes mood suddenly. And Sam seems to have a real affection for Grayson, if a little condescending. It's got to be good to be the older kid. I'm glad that Sam doesn't take too much advantage of it.

Grayson is generous to a fault. He gives his toys away all the time, even ones he just got. I'm not so open handed with his stuff, though, and several times have intervened when Grayson is giving his toys away. His friends know that if they ask for a toy, Grayson will probably give it to them, and I am always watching out for him so he doesn't get taken advantage of. Probably I don't need to... it's Grayson's stuff after all. But it bugs me to see kids working him to get things off of him just because he has a generous nature and very little attachment to things. Thursday night my friend Jin was here with her boys and they were all playing with some new toys Grayson got just that day. Levi asked if he could "borrow" one of them (that's code for "have") and I said no, those were new and Grayson wasn't going to loan them out just yet. Levi got grumpy with me and said "I was asking Grayson." And then was trying really hard to get Grayson alone so he could make his request again.

I would never have given my toys away when I was a kid. Most kids I know wouldn't. But it never phases Grayson to give his stuff away. It's possible that it's because he has more stuff than any single child needs, which is certainly true. But also he has never had much of an attachment to things. If a toy was broken, he would put it in the trash, even if the damage was minor. He might shed a tear over a favorite stuffed animal that got chewed up by the dogs, but he never wanted to save it, and was soon over its loss.

Now when I was a kid, I was completely the opposite, I had a passionate attachment to things, particularly stuffed animals. They were like real people to me. If a dog had chewed one of them up, we probably would have had to have a full funeral. I still have a bag of them from when I was a kid: those that I was closest to. I have no idea what to do with them. I still can't let them go.

This is Pooh bear. I've had him for as long as I can remember. He sits on top of the VCR in our bedroom.

When I got a new stuffed animal, I would go through them all very carefully, looking for one that was slightly damaged or imperfect. I always wanted to give a loving home to the one that nobody else would want. Consequently, most of my favorite toys were a little wonky in some way. I'm sure this says something about my character or my psychological condition, but I don't know what it is. I always adopt stray dogs, too.

The price of beauty

Grayson was up and ready to go at 7 a.m. today, knowing that it is the last day of school before Spring Break and he is leaving with his Big Mama and Papa for the lake right after school. This will be his longest stay there without us: Three nights. In the past he has been ready to come home after two, so we're all hoping he will not start missing us on Sunday and have to come back.

Gray and I are looking forward to some serious laziness.

Now that the sun is out and my skin has to see the light of day again, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for Mystic Tan. I'm way too sun-shy to do real tanning, but I am about the same color as a fish's belly right now, and rub-on tanner is a pain. So I signed up and went and had myself sprayed this morning. I'm definitely darker. We'll see if my husband notices.

I've been on a campaign to try to be more girly. I'm not naturally a girly-girl, so I'm a bit out of my depth, here. But I figure as I get older I should probably start putting more effort into not looking like I fell out of bed into my clothes. I'm also trying to get into better shape.

So I had my nails done last week, and I spend some time in the morning actually putting my makeup on in front of a stationary mirror (not in the rear-view mirror of my car as I drive to work, as I have done it hitherto), and now I'm tan...er. And (here's the point of all this), I bought a pair of high-heeled sandals to wear with jeans.

I've never been one for wearing heels with jeans. My heels are all of the lady-like, sensible wear-to-work variety. Not a stilletto in the bunch. And I never wear them if I don't have to. Certainly not with jeans. But I see everyone and their fat aunt doing it these days so I finally crumbled to peer pressure and bought a suitable pair. Now, I know how to walk in heels, I've been doing it every weekday for more than 20 years. But walking in high-heeled slides is a different game, and I feel self-conscious about wearing jeans with heels because I know, if no-one else does, that I'm totally faking it.

So I'm at the tanning place this morning, in my heels, and the very brown college girl behind the counter takes me back to see the tanning booth and give me the low-down, and as we're walking out of the booth, I turn my heel wrong and WHOOOMP! I'm on the floor. My purse spills and my phone, my checkbook, a handful of beads from a broken necklace, and a Happy Meal toy go skittering across the floor.

Very cool.

Hell, after that performance I had to buy a membership, just to save face. The college girl was very kind – worried over me, asked if I was okay, handed me my Happy Meal toy and said "well, I can tell you're a mom."

I took off my heels and tiptoed gingerly to the front desk to pay.

Do other women fall down in heels? Do they have Happy Meal toys in their chic little designer bags? Do they have spilled coffee in their car consoles and a back seat full of receipts and crumbs and plastic bags and soup cans carried home from work to recycle? Do they have to tear off pencil erasers to use in place of the earring backs they lose? Why is it so hard just to keep it all together? Much less make it look like you know what you're doing and did it deliberately. I feel like I always look like an accident, either about to happen or the terrible aftermath.

It's also expensive to look girly. Between the nails, the tan and the gym membership, I'm up to nearly $100 a month just for maintenance. I haven't broken into the pedicure market yet. I'm just not up to it. Besides, I'm way too ticklish.

But, maybe it will become a habit and by the time I'm 50 I'll be used to working a little harder at it. Course by then I probably won't give a damn. I hope so, anyway.