At the end of the summer, I got some great news. One of my fights with The Bife produced something other than tears, shouts, and replies I imagine sounded good only in my head. The essay that I wrote detailing our fight while on vacation was accepted in the anthology The Clash of the Couples. 

That snake could charm the non-existent panties off Eve.

I was really lucky to get in to begin with: I missed the deadline while on vacation and just happened to send in my late submission moments after a contributor backed out. As I met the other contributors, a veritable Who’s Who of the blogging world, I realized how lucky and honored I am to be included with such awesome, hilarious writers. And all of them are sharing their hilarious stories of fights with their significant others.

As I’ve said before, The Bife and I love hearing about other people’s marriages, and this book is perfect for that. This synopsis from Blue Lobster Books says it better than I ever could. . .

Clash of the Couples is a new anthology featuring a collection of absurd lovers’ quarrels and relationship spats. Couples just starting their journeys and those who have been together “forever” will relate to dozens of short stories running the “one said, the other said” gamut—from disagreements over furniture, to who gets the last beer, to where to store the placenta (yes, you read that right).

Subscribe now and you’ll be entered to win an autographed copy of the book by yours truly. I’ll even sign it as the blogger of your choice. Hell, I’ll even sign it as Ernest Hemingway if you’d like.

Buy a copy here! And feel free to use the hashtag #ClashoftheCouples on Twitter.

With The Boy starting school yesterday, I feared that his transition would be as painful, difficult, and protracted as The Girl’s was two years are ago. Thankfully he had a great time and seemed to see kindergarten as an extension of preschool. But reminiscing about The Girl’s struggle reminded me that no matter how bad those first first days of school are, it does get better.

Two of these are elementary school students now.

Dear Parent(s) of a Kindergartner,

It gets better. It really does.  Both for you and for your little student starting his educational journey. I know it might not seem like it on these first few days (or weeks), when she cries while getting dressed, or he cries when you ask him to put on his shoes, or she cries when you say it is time to leave for school. Or when you cry because your baby is leaving you for the first time, and, when you watch him walk into school, he doesn’t look back once. Or when you are both crying and you are really, really considering quitting your job and homeschooling, even though you don’t know how to teach reading, you don’t understand how letters can be involved in math, and you don’t know that photosynthesis isn’t a scrapbooking term.

It will get better. It really does.  Trust me, because I know.

Last year, my oldest started kindergarten. She was super, super, super, super excited!!!! All summer long, all she talked about was school. School!!!!!! The first day came, and she was still super, uper, duper excited! We walked her to her classroom, gave her a hug and a kiss, and she ran in to talk to the teacher. No tears from either student or parents. 

When we picked her up that day, she said, “It was the best day ever!”  Then half a block later, she asked, “Do I have to go back?”

The next three days were easily among my worst as a parent.  She cried through dinner, and through the next morning. She clung to my legs, screaming at me to not let her go.  The day after that, she tried to run home during recess. She spat on her teacher when asked to stop screaming. (If you want all the gory details, see this post). 

Her trying to run home brought tears to my eyes. The fact that she was so frantic to leave school  that she would try to make a break for it even though she had only a rough idea of where she was, told me how desperate she felt.

Together with the school, we worked out a transition plan.  We set goals for the amount of crying that was allowed each day, and she got a sticker reward when she met her goal.  First 15 minutes, then 10, 5, 1 and eventually none.  Every morning, we loaded up a Care Bear doll with hugs and kisses and she carried it with her throughout the day.  She took a picture of her family in her backpack to look at if/when she got sad. And I came to have lunch with her so that she didn’t have to go more than three hours without seeing a parent.

And it got better. Slowly, it did.

Certainly not immediately, but eventually.  Slowly the crying decreased.  The bear moved from being touted around all day to mostly living in her backpack.  The lunch dates changed from daily to 3x a week, 2x a week, and then eventually, there were no lunch dates.

I’d like to think that everything we did helped, but probably the thing that helped the most was time.  Time to get used to the school, time to learn that being away from her family was not the end of the world, time to learn the new daily schedule.

And it got better for her mother and me too.

As things got better for my daughter, my heart  didn’t ache each day when she would hug me fiercely before going into the school with a look on her face like she was about to be fed to the lions. Eventually, she got to the point where she would give me a hug and walk in with a smile on her face. My last glimpse of her each day would be of her enormous princess backpack covering her petite frame from shoulders to hips; it always seemed to me just like the life packs the Apollo astronauts wore on the moon, happy explorers in a new world, just like my daughter.

Just give it some time, and trust me, this will happen for you too.  Eventually.

-Almost Coherent Parent

I’m on vacation at the beach this week. Digging for sand crabs today reminded me of this post from three years ago. I really like this one, and it helps me remember one reason we leave the comforts of home occasionally.

The Routine Routine and the Not-so-routine Routine

This month, my kids dug for sand fleas while being tickled by the waters of the Atlantic. Eight days later, they dug for the same little crustacean–now called a sand crab–while avoiding the hypothermia-inducing waves of the Pacific at San Gregorio Beach, California. In a three day span they saw the wild horses of Assateague Island, Maryland and got to walk the Earthquake Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco. In twelve days, they slept at home once.

In those twelve days, we visited family and friends, saw both Bay Bridges (Chesapeake first, then the San Francisco-Oakland), ate roasted marshmallows, watched a woodpecker eat the acorns it had hidden in the bark of a Douglas fir, and slept both in a tent and my childhood home. At the end of these adventures, I’ve realized how important routines are to children’s lives. And how occasionally breaking the routine is important too.

The weekend before we flew to California, we camped at the beach in Assateague Island. We had a great time, even if it was a beach trip with small children. When you go to the beach before kids, you get to sleep late, wander to the beach, swim, read a book or magazine, doze, swim, doze, repeating as often as you like. With small kids, it’s different.

Instead of spending a leisurely day at the beach, you spend 2.5 hours fighting to put sun screen on screaming kids, you walk to the beach, see the waves, touch the waves, have at least one child get knocked down by a wave, then soothe said child as they cry about being wet; you get to play with sand, help the child that then gets sand in his eyes, watch sensitive baby skin burn even under SPF 22 million sunscreen, hear children complain about being bored after forty minutes, walk back to camp, and finally get pestered about when we are going back to the beach. Then it’s time for the kids’ 9 a.m. snack.

Through it all, the kids were troopers. They helped set up the tent, and didn’t mind sleeping in it at night, despite it not being their beds at home. They loved getting to roast marshmallows after every meal, even breakfast: for most of the weekend they both looked like a marshmallow had exploded in their mouths, with ‘mallow splatter spreading outward over their faces. Over the course of the morning, their sticky white faces slowly turned tan, then brown, then black as they were covered with sand and dirt. Thank goodness the ocean was close enough to knock them down and wash everything off two minutes after we returned to the beach.

While at the beach, The Girl loved digging for sand crabs (see caption), which The Bife remembered how to do from childhood. I thought The Girl might be afraid of these strange creatures—which look like the love-child of a crab, a flea,

and an armadillo ménage a trois—but she thought it was hilarious to watch them try and dig into her hand.

“It tickles!” she screamed about a hundred times over the weekend, before putting the crab into her brother’s hand. He would look at it for a second and laugh, but then when it started digging, he’d freak and throw it onto the wet sand like Barry Bonds trying to throw Sid Bream out at the plate in the 1992 NLCS. At the beach, he mostly was just interested in dumping water on the sand and digging with his shovel. And digging. And then digging some more.

Assateague Island is not only home to sand crabs, but also to wild horses, which The Girl also loved to search for all weekend. How did horses end up on an island several hundred yards off the Maryland coast? Using my extensive knowledge of both local history and semi-famous ungulates, I came to two highly unscientific conclusions: 1) the horses were evidently left behind by Spanish explorers who realized just what a pain in the ass keeping horses on a tiny boat can be, especially when the sailors spend most of their time counting their remaining teeth before scurvy claims them all, and 2) the horses know how to swim from the mainland. (The swimming would surely make a great reality show: Michael Phelps swims the 400 IM against Mr. Ed; Phelps, though, would have the edge, especially since Mr. Ed has been glue for forty-five years.)

While the horses are beautiful creatures when you are passing them in the safety of your car, they are a little more intimidating when you see these large-teethed animals wandering the path between campground and beach. The horses are wild, and not wild in the sense of “a free spirit just waiting for the right little girl to brush my mane and feed me sugar cubes” but in the feral, “get too close and I’ll bite your face” way. There are pictures posted everywhere to warn you of the consequences of getting too close to these huge animals that look peaceful grazing next to a marsh, but really just want to either bite you (both sexes) or rape you (just the male horses).

In fact, there are four rules printed on big road signs around Assateague, for your safety and the horses. 1) Do not feed the horses. 2) Do not get too close and/or touch the horses. 3) Don’t tease the horses. 4) Don’t attract the horses. The first two make sense, but I rather enjoy the latter two. While I didn’t get too close to the horses, I did break rule #4 by dousing myself with a gallon of horse urine before we went hiking. Then I broke #3 by not going all the way with one of the male horses I took back to our tent.

Aside from a little too much sun on the last day, everyone had a good time camping at the beach, even if it meant a break in the normal routine. The kids, amazingly, were fine with not having the normal bedtime routine. Instead, they got to stay up as long as they wanted eating roasted marshmallows, watch a campfire instead of a movie, and get a spit bath before they heard stories in the tent. And it was nice not to be a slave to the same activities around the same time every day. Every single day of the week. (Just try explaining to a 17-month-old why weekend mornings are different so Mommy and Daddy get to sleep in.)

The break in routine was exciting for them too. Marshmallows after breakfast!  Waves that aren’t in our basement after a storm! Sand crabs! But the excitement wore off after the first 24 hours. Then their desire for the normal routine returned. The second night, after eating half a marshmallow at the camp fire, The Boy toddled over to the tent and started wailing “Want to sleep in here, Mommy! Want to sleep in heeeerrrrreeeee! RIGHT NOW!”

After only a day, the new, exotic events become the new routine that the kids want to turn into the old routine. As my wise friend Mary once told me, “Routines are the hooks that kids hang their reality from.” A metaphor so true, I wish I’d said it myself.

And the desire for a return to their normal schedules happened again during our trip to visit family and friends in California a few days later. This development surprised me more than it did while camping: I expected kids to get sick of camping at the beach and having sand in their food for two days, but I didn’t expect it to happen while staying at their grandparents’ house, where sand is in your food only when my father cooks. In fact, The Girl was so excited, at least once a day for weeks prior to the trip, she talked to the picture of her cousins from last year’s family reunion. “Hi Theresa, and Tommy, and Timmy, and Tina, and I’m going to see all of you in California!”

But after spending a few days with her cousins, including a memorable day spent playing all day at their house, even The Girl was over seeing her cousins. The night before we left, my brother and sister-in-law brought the kids over to say goodbye to The Girl and The Boy. The Boy could have cared less since the routine must be observed: he demanded to be put to bed right after dinner, about an hour before his cousins arrived. And despite saying she wanted to stay up to see her cousins and play with them, The Girl gave them each a hug when they arrived before she too asked to go to bed.

Both these trips helped me stop worrying about how the kids will do when taken out of their normal routine. I now realize the importance of mixing up the routine in a major way so they can experience something new and worthy of remembering. But no matter how exciting the experience, after a little while, they really just want to return to normal.

I saw this most clearly as soon as we walked in the door after each trip. Both kids spent their first ten minutes home running up and down the hallway upstairs, from The Girl’s room to the Boy’s and back again, screaming “Home! Home! Home! Hoooooooommmmmmeeeee!”

In those moments, wild horses couldn’t drag them away.