apparently

I expected that having kids would make me vastly more sentimental. I've always been pretty sentimental (and I am much more likely to cry at tire commercials or funny you tube videos) since having kids.

However, in fact, I recycle art and drawings with a light heart. The reason sentimentality can't overwhelm one as a parent is that the kids you love keep disappearing. I sat next to a 6 month old baby recently, all proud with her sitting up and ability to reach out and touch things. I remember enjoying that time, but I haven't had a baby in the house in some time. What I loved about my six month old was gone and replaced with things to love about an aspiring crawler, which was replaced by the cool dangerousness of an accomplished crawler, which rapidly disappeared into a walker, ... and so on.

I find that if I just stack all the art up in a box (after taking it off of the wall) and waiting a while, I am no longer so interested in the art - the artist has moved onto such new and complex stuff in the meanwhile, that I can take a few representative samples and drop the rest into the paper stream. Recycle these splashes of color? Why, haven't you seen the latest picture with circles and lines in it? Seen that subtle commentary on our family complete with some of our lovely birds that live in the bushes?

I loved my 5 year old but she is gone, gone, gone away. Currently we have a seven year old sharing her wit and wisdom. I've been in many conversations about whether it's the "Terrible Twos" or the "Terrible Threes," but in fact I don't really see what a stage is like until it's disappearing already. Aside from the fact that it doesn't make anything easier to think "I really like this about three year olds" or "I don't like this about three year olds," the change is just so constant that with only two kids you never can really know if there is a difference between stages or between your two individual kids or between their genders or whatever. As my second child goes through the same number of years of life that his sister went through before, I find that my seeing of his life often has an implicit comparison to it, while his big sister continues her push through the edge of my parenting experience and skill.

I don't even know if my kids have a favorite breakfast, much less what it is. I give them a choice each morning from the standard and currently available breakfasts (despite a dietitian's instruction that a special distinct cuisine for breakfast is a bizarre modern innovation, we stick with toast/eggs/cereal/oatmeal/pancakes and keep the sandwiches/pasta/candy for later). But I'm often surprised by what they choose. They'll have only oatmeal for months but then spend a week back at eggs, then have a week with different things each day, including oatmeal. This year is the first that my three year old is venturing to ask for different food than his big sister (he's always actually eaten different stuff, but he used to loyally ask for the same as her). The choices change, but I'm not sure what they change with. I can only hope that hunger has something to do with it.

I do get funny stares when we travel and people ask me "What is their favorite breakfast" and I have no reasonable answer. They seem to assume that as a stay at home parent, I should know their favorite breakfast. Can I start to deconstruct the notion of "favorite breakfast" as though this question is a good opportunity for some philosophy? Should I share the ocean of observations I have, and how I'm not sure the question has a permanent answer? Should I just immediately ask the kids what they want? Ask the host what the choices are?

What they want is unique to each situation, and how they are is constantly changing; my adult stiffness and ostensible "favorites" have to stretch constantly to keep up, or I find myself trying to insist that we do something again that was fun four months ago; "What do you mean, you don't want to go to the underdog park?". Not that I don't know that a back-hoe will always delight my son and a horse will always delight my daughter and that a trip to the potomac for catching fish will please us all. But no doubt in a year or two that'll have changed as well. I wonder what it will be like to have loved all these different people by the time they are 18. I smile wistfully when I see a baby, but I find myself so fascinated by my son's current burst of linguistic growth that I don't miss his old self when I am with his current reality.