It’s Christmas morning and all over the world pajamed kids are clawing at shiny ribbons, their hearts thumping with anticipation. Parents are snapping pictures, in love with their children’s happiness.

In our little house at 6512 feet, Col has just put a cloth diaper on his stuffed dog and Rose is trailing him, munching on something she found in her room. Dan is brewing coffee.

Even though we had a Christmas Eve Dinner last night–elk stew, baguettes and chocolate ice cream–the kids don’t know that today is Christmas. And I sort of love that. As I explained in a previous post, this is our first Christmas and we’ve done it all wrong.

But as my friend Diane told me recently, it’s so cool that we can all make our own family holiday traditions. Our kids are still riding in the backseat of their own lives, relying on us parents to steer, and each family’s drive looks different.

The kids opened their last gift sometime on December 23rd (the Hess race car from Grampa Starks!) in the same fashion that they’ve opened all their gifts: Packages arrive in the mail, get placed under the tree and then get opened ten two minutes later. I know this is crazy, no “magic” of a Christmas morning, no watching the delight on children’s faces as they sit for hours anchored like a boat in a swell of ribbons and wrappings.

But in a way it feels more sane, giving the kids time to absorb each gift, to test drive and remember it, to write a thank you card before the next wave hits.

In the end, we do what feels right for our family, each of us, and that’s all that matters.

Now I will go drink my coffee and make sure the unidentified things Rose is eating are actually food.

And I will be thinking of your children and hoping they are sitting in their sea of lovely, new things–or whatever your tradition calls for–with a big, big smile.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Thanks so much for supporting my business this year, I am very thankful for every one of you!

Special Announcement: nataliewells|photography will be CLOSED December 25th – January 3rd. I will be in Colorado visiting my fiance’s family, and I’ve decided to take this opportunity to take some MUCH NEEDED time off! So I’ll be making snow angels, drinking hot chocolate, and blogging my latest photo shoots (finally!), and of course I’ll be taking lots of pictures of my trip & posting them later. But I won’t be doing much editing, ordering, book-designing or emailing until January 4th. So,….that means if you have any questions, concerns, etc,..feel free to email me, but just keep in mind that I won’t be available to work on anything until January 4th. Thanks again & have a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

I know, I’m FINALLY posting some pictures on this thing! Sorry I’ve been so neglectful, but I’ve been working very hard to make sure my wonderful clients got their pictures in by Christmas!! Thankfully, I’m done with Christmas orders, so now I can finally sit down & blog!

Is this little guy adorable or what?! Jaxon was really fun to photograph, and his outfits were SO CUTE! I never get to take pictures of cute little guys in big-kid clothes, so I was super excited for this session. Here are some of my favorite shots!

Took some piccies of my little nephew for his first christmas cards. Isn’t the suit just gorgeous!

We’ve been dropping the phrase “Winter Solstice” in child company for just the past twenty four hours. And really, we just zipped up our eight nights of Hanukkah (due to menorah misplacement we started one night late) and look out kids, here comes another sacred, meaningful day.

Explaining Winter Solstice to the kids makes me feel like such an adult, or at least that adult in me who has this anticipatory sense of tomorrow, who can flip through my brain’s calendar and console my snow-bound self that in just two months, I’ll be pressing tomato seeds into greenhouse soil. This is to say I like to know what’s happening next and despite the fact that winter holds a secure spot in my heart, that one extra minute (starting tomorrow!) of daylight is simply thrilling.

The kids don’t live like this, with anticipation, plotting, foreseeing. They are just as likely to wake up in the middle of July and feed squash and rice to an orphanage of animals, as they did this 10F degree morning on December 21st.

And I love this about childhood, how Dan and I can plan a trip to New Jersey to see his mom and meanwhile lose a month of life and a modicum of good will to airline websites that change flight prices every time we each pause to consider dates, and then we make our lists and consider housesitters and deliberate over whether to heft Col’s bulky nebulizer to New Jersey and I panic over who will sleep where and what entertainment to cart on the plane and how we’ll transpose our wild life on someone else’s space. And the kids? They simply wake up on the day of travel and get toted here and there like so much carry-on baggage. They’re thrilled to see the giant gumball machine at the Durango airport, and never once say “wait a second, you didn’t tell me we were going to have a four hour layover in Denver.”

And just like that, they wake up and we tell them “today we’re celebrating winter solstice.”

On the solstice, the sky is a symphony of blue, like a wildly uplifting piano note held for eternity. It’s almost ridiculous, comical, this forever blue like the heavens are shaking out a cerulean sheet, trying to dry it on the shortest day of the year. It makes us giddy, that, and the four wild turkey hens we see as we stomp through the calf-high snow to hobo camp.

Dan had taken the kids to hobo camp, a snow-free rectangle inside a metal tunnel under the highway, the previous weekend. Dan is like this. When he has the kids, he’s most likely to take them to the woods, toting a passel of firewood, refreshments, and bows and arrows, while the little people really can’t be relied upon to walk very far. Dan jumps creeks with a kid under each arm, his back loaded like a Sherpa’s. There have been cold little hands, donuts for breakfast and thorny bushwhacking but there have also been bald eagle sightings, cotton-candy sunrises, and eavesdropping on mating deer chasing each other in a frostbitten field.

                                        (Our very own Hobo Camp )

“So, who knows what Winter Solstice is?” We ask the kids as a small juniper fire sweetens the air. Between the occasional car roaring over our metal ceiling, all we hear is the drip of snow melting off the outstretched arms of ponderosa pines, pinyon and junipers.  

“It’s the shortest day of the year.” Col says, pleasing us with his powers of repetition, for which he gets high fives.

Then, Dan draws a picture of the sun’s winter arc, shot across the horizon by a low-aiming arrow; our house, still the center of the children’s universe sits squarely in the middle of the ripped notebook page. Dan starts to explain with his pen how the sun’s trajectory will steadily rise, but it’s just a string of words and Col’s gone off to look for “special things” in the tunnel and Rose delicately unwraps her chocolate Hanukkah gelt, perfect golden suns.

Dan and I smile at the children, at our lucky life. The sun elbows into the tunnel and this is enough warmth on this shortest day.

I’m looking at this Christmas tree in our living room—this baby white fir just slightly taller than Col—selected, sawed, and dragged like a felled animal through the crispy leaves while winter was still a suggestion. The November ground still dry then, except for a few lean snow shapes stretched in north-facing shadows like sleeping animals. 

We stuffed the tree into the Subaru, returned to the forest, made a small fire and watched the sun burst into orange flames over the horizon then ooze into the sharp spines of Baldy peak. (Also, if I remember correctly some female member of the family tried to initiate a little campfire singing until some other, smaller member, always encouraged to be honest, said “can you stop singing please?”)

If you ask Col what he remembers about that late November day, it’s the feel of the handsaw in his 4-year old grip, the metal teeth ripping into the live, grey bark. If you ask Rose, it’s the roasted marshmallows, the gummy remains on her toddler hands, like so much tree sap.

And me? Ambivalence like a sticky place in my own chest.

I grew up in a liberal, Jewish, highly-educated Berkeley family that didn’t think much of religion. We were (to borrow writer Joanna Brooks’ phrase) allergic to Christmas trees. Stockings and caroling brought on hives. And while Dan—across the country and unknown to me then—was tearing into a Christmas ham, his house twinkling with lights and good cheer, my family was scoffing at the hoopla while we ate mushu chicken, alone, at the local Chinese restaurant.

This Christmas allergy—a “social allergy with deep historical roots” says Brooks—had a bit to do with the landfill-marked plastic baubles, the feverish shopping, the list of prescribed activities that seemed as spontaneously joyful as the step-by-step of changing a tire. But break through the surface ice and below lay a thick river of fear. Fear that our own Jewishness might get trampled by boots storming a sale, drowned out by the swell of carols, or simply forgotten. Also, Brooks says “What is the Christmas tree but the mermaid on the prow of the ship of Germanic cultural conquest.” Yes, with family who didn’t survive the Holocaust, that too.

And then I left home and watched my 20-something friends taste the disappointment of their new, anemic adult Christmases, while I smugly continued to scoff at the hoopla and satisfy my late-December mushu chicken craving.

Then I got married to a nice Quaker boy and all Dan ever asked for on Christmas was some egg nog in his coffee. And so passed many December 25^th’s

And then, like a rolling snowball that grows and grows, we had children. The children matured. And one day their bright eyes noticed the VW van-sized inflatable Santa on a neighbor’s lawn and the twinkling lights downtown and the tree at the library stacked with candy canes (one of which has been re-hung with a broken neck due to Rose frantically biting through the plastic while hunched behind the children’s non-fiction stacks).

And I’m realizing—even if a bit late in life—that when it’s 10 degrees outside and the day is just a just a sliver of light sandwiched between two thick, slabs of darkness, I need some brightness. Even if that brightness is the shine of my children’s drool while they ogle the cookies at a Christmas cookie exchange. Even if our clay ornaments came out lumpy and Col insists on sleeping with the ones he made and Rose sneaks nibbles at the salty, rock-hard edges of hers.

And like the Grinch, I’m growing out of my allergy to Christmas. I’m finding there’s room in our house for a small tree decked with the children’s ephemeral art and the menorah my paternal grandfather brought back from Israel. And truthfully? The children seem to think that bending the flaming tip of the Shamash candle towards the wick of the next candle in line is at least as exciting as tearing into a present. Last night, after lighting six candles on the menorah, Col stayed at the table, gazing into the light, in a rare, quiet, still moment.

And maybe most surprising—given that my Christmases were spent passing egg rolls across a shiny red tablecloth trying to ignore the holiday—is how I’m a little taken by Christmas now. Maybe it’s the kids, the way they love the Jesus story. “Was there chicken poop in that barn where he was born?” Col asks. And truthfully, even I’m a little in love with that story. Perhaps it’s the mother in me – what Mama hasn’t stared at her spanking new baby and thought “miracle.” Plus there’s that part of the story where Jesus grows up and teaches kids to share their toys and use their words and be kind to their sisters.

How could I not smile every time we pass twinkling lights and Rose shrieks “there’s Christmas!” (Except it sounds like “Dere’s Cwis-a-mas!”). We’ve spent many a frostbitten day inside, gratefully decorating the tree (which still makes me a little itchy), the kids hanging, re-hanging, dropping and breaking their own handmade ornaments. And what’s not to like about packages arriving in the mail, festive potlucks every weekend, and our friend Natalie dropping off homemade sweets at our door.

It’s beginning to look a lot like confusion, and when your holiday season is a goulash of flavors, none is celebrated perfectly. Sometimes we forget to light the candles until a pajama-ed kid points out the empty menorah right before bedtime. Last night I carried the candles to the menorah while absentmindedly humming “let heaven and nature sing.” And as for Christmas, there will be no bottomless pile of presents to wade through Christmas morn, no Santa myth to uphold. In fact, we recite regularly in our house: “Santa is pretend. Right everyone? Not real.” This weekend we’ll introduce winter solstice to our kids, maybe build a small fire in the woods and eat chocolate Hanukkah gelt. And there’s the Buddha icons sprinkled about the house that embody reminders to be mindful and kind, a religion I can get behind. Perhaps we should hang a bag of locally-roasted, organic coffee at the top of our tree, or a pound of elk meat and a thimbleful of homemade compost, which in the way of spinning banana peels and egg shells into soil, has always seemed a miracle.

And so like my Jewish ancestors thousands of years ago, we trudge through the wilderness (of holiday season), finding our footing, seeking the light and eating the hell out of some Christmas cookies.

How does your family celebrate?

Have you noticed the new banner picture here at 6512 and growing? In the background, behind the faux-cheerful family, is the Animas River, one of the West’s last undamed rivers. This is where you’ll find us most summer days, scrabbling around the shore, investigating the miraculous triumvirate of sand, water, and sun.  Col digs and builds like he’s on the clock, or at field camp for sand engineers with an emphasis on hydrology. Rose makes sand cupcakes and in her confectionary fever, takes a surprising gritty bite and then looks at me, shocked, with these sad, sandy clown lips. And me? As usual, I’m uttering some variation of  “I’m just so happy to be outside where the kids can play and be happy.”

Yesterday when Sabrina (who also took the previous banner photo of us in the autumn leaves, and is supremely talented) shot this picture, we were such a long, long way away from summer’s sand-a-palooza. If this classic picture had volume you’d hear Col whining about how he was soooo cold and could we please go see the model trains now (which are at the Durango mall until Dec 23rd and totally worth seeing even if only for the chance to hob nob with the old-school train aficionados who can answer any question that sparks in a young train-lover’s mind). And you would have heard me telling Rose “that doesn’t feel good” as she grabbed my face with her lobster claws. Then if you were so cursed to actually hear my thoughts, it was along the lines of “Can these kids just smile sweetly for the damn picture!”

And yes, Col does have a really big forehead; for Christmas he would like some hair.

So, thank you Sabrina (whose own two kids were playing quietly and independently in snow drifts, by the way).

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Also, a local reader and Life Coach, Victoria Fitts Milgrim, has a new offering to help moms of kids (any age that are still living at home) to regain their balance and inner sovereignty – it’s called The Breathing Room (www.truelifecoach.net/breathingroom.htm).  It will meet twice a month as a safe place to let off steam, be yourself, be seen and heard AND listened to.  She will offer coaching tools for staying on your authentic path and remembering who you are – including but also beyond the role of ‘Mother.’

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And now, the sneak preview:

If you check in tomorrow I will be explaining what happens around Holiday Season when a girl, raised by a Jew and a Buddhist, co-habitates with a boy raised by a Quaker and a Pagan.

Here is a quick pic from my gorgeous friend and her now not so baby boy from my recent trip to Brissie. Love ya’s

Rose is exactly 2 ½. What’s that like you ask? It’s backwards pants, mismatched shoes, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” puddles of despair and then presto change-o: irrepressible glee over a handful of raisins.

I can’t help but muse about what life would be like if we adults still harbored a little “two” in us. We’d go to a party, see our friend, run over for a hug and then snatch her chicken satay skewer. Maybe we’d apologize; maybe we’d push her down. Next we’d stand under the sign stating “no nudity,” tug off our clothes while making sure everyone is watching.

Rose is such a tween, at 2 ½. She’s no longer on the floor with the lumpy babies marinating in their own drool, but like a pre-teen who plans a wild adventure then remembers she has to ask her mom to drive, Rose needs a lot of help that she doesn’t want.

This makes for tricky times, like when Rose insists on getting in her car seat and buckling up by herself. Great! Except, whoops, she can’t, and when I approach to help she yowls as if I’m baring pliers to pull her tiny teeth out. I’m sure there’s something creative and Montessori-like I could say to her, disarming the two-ness that keeps us stranded in the cold driveway. But the last power struggle, the one over the shoes, three minutes earlier, has chipped away at my polish. I breathe and pace, breathe and pace until Rose finally whines accusingly “I can’t dooooo it,” as if I had set her up all along.

Poor Rose. I know she’s just trying to figure things out, like “if I got Col’s muffin by hitting him and snatching it, will that work with my friend Iris?” It’s a valid question when many of life’s rules must seem so arbitrary (why don’t we eat box elder bugs?). Rose’s friend Chloe says in a fit of toddler indecision “I waaaant that cheese. No, I caaaan’t want that cheese.” I’m sure that’s how it feels: the pink hiking boots they loved yesterday? Can’t be loved today.

Two is really like living with a very short comedian. Like how Rose will peer into her carseat, screw her face up and ask “what all dese crumbs in dere?” Or how she’ll solemnly hand me a plastic bag containing one rubber band and instruct “you put dis up high so Coley don’t get it.” Sometimes I don’t even know how to answer her bizzaro questions, like when she opens a kitchen drawer, points to the rolling pin and asks “what dat rolling pin called?”

But we hardly take Rose seriously, that’s how it is with the second. When Col was all jacked up on being two I was full of “strategies.” When Rose stubbornly sweeps the walls with her small broom and you can hear the piped in toddler music crooning: “I did it myyyy way,” we just shrug and state the obvious: “she’s two.”

*previously published in The Durango Herald

I was making my morning pilgrimage to the chickens, down the long single track path my boots have stamped through the snow.

Just one foot at a time.

I was thinking about these hens we raised from delicate, chirping babies under a grow light in our bathroom. Col loved to hold the chickens (“But oh, careful! Not around the neck honey.”) And Rose, a baby herself then, loved to tap their heads repeatedly with her open palm as if she was dribbling a very small basketball.

I was also thinking about the two children I left alone briefly in the house. Rose had been pushing her doll stroller around containing ducky and baby bear mingling inside of a newborn onesie. Col was wrapping “presents” for Rose in newspaper, announcing loudly “she’s really going to like this towel. And this tinkertoy. And this is a very special fork.”

I tossed last night’s wheat-free spaghetti to the chickens, bits of greenhouse basil still clinging to the rice-y ropes. I sprinkled the gritty crumbs from the bottom of a cereal bag onto the snow in front of their coop. And when the girls bobbed and clucked their way out of the coop it warmed my motherly heart, the way it does when my own children slurp a hearty vegetable soup, or crunch raw carrots under their pearly baby molars.

And then from the top of our stairs I heard Col’s voice: “Hi Mama!” And there were my babies thumping down the stairs in their pajamas and snow boots. They had thought to bring the doll stroller, but not mittens.

It was barely 8:00 AM, and the thermometer read:

But they were insistant that we all go on a walk, exploring.

 ”Zero. Zero degrees.” I pleaded. But these children are not worriers, nor planners. They simply are doers, in the moment, and apparently the moment called for an adventure.

And it was cold, pore-tightening, breath-gasping, fingertip-numbing, nose-redenning, see-your-breath cold. But the kids were warmed by the spark of their own ideas, by their two pajamed feet crunching down the snow-packed street, and by the adventure of their own wild lives.

May you have a warm, fun, adventurous weekend, no matter the weather.

Back in October I got to spend the day with Kiana and her mummy. She was so excited to be having a tea party and was happy to dress up and do whatever I had to offer. I am loving 3 year old girls. They just love to play dress ups! Oh and eat cupcakes of course

I got the shoveling ache and it feels so good.

We’re right in the middle of a Rocky Mountain storm, 20 inches of snow so dry and light that I’ve been sweeping it off the stairs with a broom as if we’ve been accumulating so much white dust.

We haven’t done much in the past 24 hours except shovel, shovel, shovel. No one gets off free. Even the two year old can hold a small broom, brushing snow around and feeling important. Col, at 4, is almost helpful. He grips his shovel, swipes snow from the street and plops it into our driveway. Oops. I spin his bundled body like a giant auger, just one half turn and remind him “let’s get the snow out of the driveway.”

And then I just let Col go for it, sweeping trees and neighbors’ cars because it’s a small miracle that we’re all outside and it feels so good. For days we were this log-jam at the end of the hallway, me wriggling stiff fingers into mittens, Col forlorn over having to take his snow boots off before putting on his snowsuit, Rose stepping on wet floors in the mud room and needing new socks at the eleventh hour. Also, though I am sweating under my layers, I know the kids won’t last long at 32 F.

The chickens have not left their coop since it started snowing and goodness knows what’s going on in there. Dan tossed them some raw, deer liver from the doe our friend Claire hit with her truck two nights ago. The deer’s been hanging, tenderizing, outside on a garden arch while our cat prowls around proprietarily, as if she felled the big animal who’s made a bloody splatter-painting on the snow below her. (By the way, chickens are not vegetarians. They’re very fond of animal protein, be it grasshopper, deer liver, or the dead sparrow I once saw hanging from one hen’s mouth while the other three blocked her every move like defensive guards on the basketball court).

The hanging deer

Do you live where it snows? Do your children eat snow like it contains some mineral they’re desperately lacking? Yesterday, un-suiting after a shoveling session, I unlaced Col’s boots while he picked the remaining snow off my hat and scrabbled it into his mouth. For Rose, whose hobbies include food shopping and having snacks at the park, nibbling snow is pretty much what the whole season is about.

As I’ve mentioned before, the staple weather pattern here at 6512 feet, in the Southern Rocky Mountains, is sun; unadulterated, slabs of sunshine that keep me one step ahead of the winter blues.

But this snow is a wonderland; a glittery, shimmering carnival ride. The

Rose, adventuring through the wilderness

snow seals the town up and fills in the spaces until our backyard is the whole world, our neighborhood: the wilderness. A walk around the block becomes an epic adventure. The blackness of crows tossed across the white sky like dice is poetry in motion. The neighbors are out, getting the good shoveling ache and cheering on the kids for just being outside.

Right now Dan is grinding coffee for the second cup because it’s that kind of day, and the kids are working on more of these:

play clay ornaments

And I am simply grateful, and getting ready to shovel again.

Even in this dark time, there is newness here at the urban homestead.

The Rice Table

It’s winter at 6512 feet, which means the family is spending many hours inside, getting to know each other better and watching—through smudged windows—our four free-ranging chickens standing forlornly around their frozen water. (Everyone loves to break the thick, top layer of ice in their water bucket that forms and reforms all day long. Rose whaps a dry, limp sunflower stalk at the icy surface while Col rummages around for an antler—never far from reach—and picks a beak-sized hole through the glacier).

Here's a couple

Pelvic bones work great too

It’s never more noticeable than in winter that our house is 800 square feet. That’s why in every indoor photo I’ve posted you can see the bathroom in the background. And while it’s useful to never be too far from the bathroom, (like when Rose sounds the poop alarm and you can count on one hand the seconds you’ve got to drop her on the toilet), it’s not so classy when Col announces at dinner that he needs to poop, takes ten kid-steps to the toilet, and sits in full view of the table, grunting and keeping up his end of the conversation (apparently, no one closes the bathroom door around here).

So I’ve been looking for ideas to make home-time more appealing, and because my kids are such Friends of The Sandbox during the summer, I thought an indoor sensory table filled with rice and little shells and rocks and shiny beads would keep little hands busy and engaged.

Looks innocent enough

The kids love the rice table; they mold rice into yogurt container-sized birthday cakes, which they leave under the rice table for baby marmosets (and pity the mother who tries to keep a marmoset from celebrating a birthday). Then someone crawls under the table and accidentally knocks the quart of rice over. Soon, dry rice is skittering around our house like frightened cockroaches. Or it’s like a bride and groom have fled through our living room on the way to their honeymoon with jubilant rice-throwers on their heels. Eventually I march into the playroom and start waving my arms around like a restaurant inspector that’s seen one too many infractions. “That’s it! I’m shutting you down!”

Lily’s Amazing Technicolor Feathercoat

Our freeloading, bullying hen Lily, who last month had just one ragged tail feather, has sprouted this gorgeous new coat of brown, white and green feathers. She still hasn’t produced a single egg in over a month but like a mother who’s done raising kids and finally has time for the gym or money for the spa, Lily’s been putting all her resources towards her new style; she’s done being someone’s slave.

Meanwhile, the three aracauna hens are molting, which makes them look like they’ve wresting raccoons every night, but they still manage to lay one egg a day between the three of them. Here they are celebrating Durango’s new chicken ordinance, thinking perhaps it means they’re entitled to sleep inside.

The 3000 stairs to our 800 sf abode

Greenhouse chard

We share this greenhouse with our downstairs neighbors, most of

Juniper spoons, y'all

whom are in their twenties and have enough time to carve utensils out of juniper or pry pollen out from the tiny crevices in beeswax (this is precisely what Sage and Thea were doing yesterday as I hustled children and bags of groceries upstairs while plagued with the feverish ick).

I can’t remember who planted this greenhouse chard, it could have been me, it could have been Cody and his ferret, or even Sage between basket-weaving and lying in the hammock. But here it is, flourishing in an unheated greenhouse, popping out new leaves while outside temperatures settle at zero. And we love our chard around here.

What’s new at your homestead?

Sisters, Kylie and Dayna, such sweet little ones.  Dayna loved the camera and Kylie was happy to follow her big sister and pose right along side of her!

Little Miss Charlotte.  She provided me with a plethora of wonderful moments!  She was full of spunk and sass!  She was so much fun to photograph!

treasures

Dan regularly comes home with gifts for the heir to the testosterone throne. From the mountains he brings Col flicker feathers and rose quartz. From the jobsite he brings Col old drill bits or a single gleaming, gold roofing screw.

These items are immediately classified as special, which means Col defends them against grabby hands, sleeps with them clutched in his clammy grip, and then several days later loses them. (He’s currently sleeping with a 4-point elk antler Dan brought him; each morning I say a little prayer that Col hasn’t impaled himself during the night).

Today Rose was the recipient of a treat from her Daddy. From the local feed store (where we get grain for our chickens, straw for the garden and seed for our backyard birds), Rose got her own 1/3 oz jar of hoof salve.

Rose, despite her stained and unwashed mother, is a spa girl. She loves anything that smacks of pampering, even if it’s her mother squirting breastmilk in her conjunctivitis-streaked eyes. ”Now dis side too” she tells me, blinking her healthy green eye.

She greets a dinosaur vitamin on her tongue like she’s receiving Holy Communion. She’s the first to line up for sunscreen, closing her eyes serenely as if receiving a luxurious facial with hemp oil pressed by the Dalai Lama’s bare toes.

While Col snaps rubber bands across the house, Rose sneaks q-tips out of the bathroom, humming a happy little jingle while dabbing the dry puff at her tender skin. She’s really not safe alone in the bathroom and she knows it, reminding me to “put dat toofpaste up high so I don’t eat it.”

Someday Rose will search for her Mama’s makeup and find the cupboard is bare. But for now, the girl has her hoof salve, classified: extra special.

After digging her pudgy 2-year old fingers into the jar and painting her cheeks with the sweet-smelling ointment, she removes her socks to rub it onto her hooves, er toes.

The kids seem to have kicked the night-waking habit, thanks to the siren song of sticker charts. And though seven hours of uninterrupted sleep is required for my basic sanity (who knew?), sticker charts have proved to be, well, sticky. Unlike my friend Sue’s daughters, who see the glossy stamp by their name as prize enough, Col and Rose are hustlers for rewards.

I wish “behavior modification” was as easy as it was for my 85 year old friend Alberta instructing her dog Chuck to “go lie down.” If stinky, arthritic Chuck tarried a nanosecond on the way to his bed, Alberta would hoist a rolled up newspaper threateningly above her head. And Chuck’s overgrown toenails would tap-tap across the linoleum as he limped a bit faster to his bed. And as much as it often feels like I’m spending the day with unruly canines (“leave it!” I’ll call to Col as he’s headed right for the unidentifiable puddle of muck), if I were going to stoop to the newspaper trick, I might as well just spray the kids with water bottles for their misdemeanors.

The tricky thing about sticker charts is the whole reward thing. I mean, isn’t it best if Col and Rose sweep up their ticker tape parade of paper shards from their recent “scissor work” for the pure joy of being helpful? And then there’s the nature of the rewards. Rose’s first 3 nights of staying in her bed all through the night netted her a smoothie from a local coffee shop. Turns out Dan treated himself and Col to a smoothie too, and well…$12 later, maybe not such a good idea. Or my snafu of promising the kids a ride on the Polar Express Train for ten stickers, when we actually bought the non-refundable, non-changeable tickets a month earlier, and my parents were scheduled to take the kids while Dan and I had a date, and we sort of needed them to get those ten stickers. Sticky.

Did we miss a week there? Always slightly behind the curve, are we.

But there’s this other shred of hope that they’re learning some self control, some delaying of gratification. I picture them waking in the night and weighing their options on the balance scale of their mind. The Polar Express train ride plummets one metal pan to the ground. And back to sleep they go.

Col recently told me this convoluted story about how sometimes he wakes in the night and goes out to the living room couch and has a little rest. “And then when I’m done with my couch nap, I turn on my light and go back to my room and play.” (Col, 4 years old, is completely unreliable. He told my parents that there was a birthday at his preschool and everyone got cake except him. This was after mentioning to them that the teachers hit him. “They hit everyone!” He relayed cheerfully. His clever grandparents called him on the fib and Col admitted “I just like to say things different sometimes.” God forbid he’s ever on the witness stand).

But then, last night at 2 am, lo and behold, I found his lean body all snaked out on the couch sleeping. And I suppose the temptation to wake us up in the night gets him as far as the living room, and then he thinks better of it and hops up for a “couch nap.” He’s like the reformed bank robber who still likes to wear the ski mask around the house on weekends.

But now that we’ve got night-waking licked (can you believe I said that? It’s like last night when we saw three fat raccoons hump-backing down our street and I said “why haven’t they found our chickens?” And Dan looks at me like: blasphemer!), we’re onto new, exciting issues here; namely the very early waking of a 2 ½ year old girl. What tugs her eyelids open at 5:00 am is a mystery of science, but she’s consistent. And so am I. I haul Rose back to bed, insert her back into her cave of blankets, pat her down in a way that I hope is soothing but may win me a contract with airport security. And at this point she and I both know that there will be no more sleeping.

I burrow back into my bed and place the pillow over my head in that precise location that shuts off my mind. Minutes later Rose is back by my bedside, wondering if “da sun is up,” which means free access to nursing. I scoop her up into our bed, all big-eyed, warm and fluffy like an owl chick puffed out in the night. She scritches around, her fleece covered limbs scratching my bare back in a not altogether unpleasant way. Dan groans, scoots away from us and annoyingly goes back to sleep. Rose snuffles around like a truffle-hunting piglet trying to push past layers of soil, and if she were a teenage boy she’d start chanting “Boobs! Boobs! Boobs!” But that little Rose, she plays her cards right and asks to “hold you hand Mama?”

And I replay the wise words of writer and Zen teacher, Karen Maezen Miller from her manifesto How to Make Childhood Last:

Let your children wake you up. Better yet, let them drag you out of bed. How much of your life – how much of their lives – do you spend in this ceaseless struggle to get more sleep? Give up already. I promise you, one day too soon the house will grow empty. Then sleep will once more evade. Seize the day! Seize the night! This divine mission to bring us into full awareness of our lives is the reason your child has come. So crack a lid and get this party started. If you could just once see the exhilarating potential they wake to every day, you’d know why children don’t want to waste a minute to slumber.

I love these words, and Karen’s inspiring book Momma Zen. But I also sort of want to ask Karen, “did you mean even at 5:00 am?”