Backwards and Forwards

When we put our dining room table on the free page of craigslist a few months ago, a church's social services person snapped it up, and asked us to please call them if we ever had any other items to donate. So today Jim, after calling them and arranging the pickup, put out on the front patio the crib, the changing table, the toddler bed, and about twenty bags of baby and toddler clothes. So long, babyhood! We didn't think anything of it, but when we were actually moving the things out this morning, we both felt a bit of a pang. There was this cute striped shirt that had been Muriel's, and was so Muriel, right on top of one of the bags. Not to mention the legion of little fuzzy sleepers. (I had kind of been hoarding the old clothes, too lazy for a trip to Goodwill.) Aw!

Through a random turn of fate known as a dead car battery, I had to work from home today, so when the church guy came to pick up the stuff, I was at the kitchen window, listening to my weekly install writers' meeting on the speaker phone. He took a few things down to the van, then I heard him talking on the phone, and the stuff just sat outside the window for the longest time. After a while I looked out, and I could see him crouched in the front yard, pulling tiny baby clothes out of a bag, one at a time, examining each article, and laying it on the ground. He did this for quite a while.

Finally, bested by my curiosity, I went out there to ask him if he needed help sorting, if perhaps he had been instructed to make sure he got only clothing for a certain age, something like that. He explained in his eastern European accent that he had been holding the key to the van in his hand, picked up one of the bags, and the key had fallen somewhere, he was pretty sure into the bag, but he had searched through every tiny item in the bag, and still no key. I started looking around with him, had one of those momentary realizations that this is exactly how women get themselves kidnapped- helping a gigantic stranger look for some missing thing right outside the open door of a van... We didn't find the key. He said someone was coming with the backup key, so he would just start loading the other things. I asked him if he needed help with the toddler bed, which was not heavy but a little unwieldy. He laughed. "I am former coal miner," he said. So, no then?

So the part of parenting that involves cribs has officially come to a close. And what lies ahead? Kindergarten. Last night I went to an open house for a Spanish immersion school, where kids learn completely in Spanish for all six years of elementary. I could understand the benefits they presented, enabling your child to be fluent in another language, earning college language credits in high school, experiencing other cultures, it all made sense. But I could tell that if we chose this school, it would mean a lot of challenges, and frankly, inconveniences to our family. And here's where it begins, where we have to start choosing things or not choosing things, knowing it's good or great for our kids, knowing that we might not love it (or we might). I bet for some parents this kind of choice is easy- you always choose what's best for your kid, in the long run. But it didn't seem obvious to me.

We'll be visiting the neighborhood school, too, to see how we feel about that one. I see this kind of thing stretching ahead of us, the stakes of our decisions raised a little more each year. I am not usually nostalgic for the bleary sleepiness of the baby years (though I loved them very much), but the heaviness of parenting older children makes me long for that feeling that I was a superhero just for managing to feed and diaper and soothe to sleep a tiny human just a few weeks old.

Although it didn't make me feel old, exactly, here's something that did: on the way home from the open house, hearing a U2 song... on the OLDIES station. Sigh.