OK, I am not so calm as to be a Zen mama, but boy, could I relate to this article. This part really made me feel better about my laissez-faire parenting, since something fairly close to this has happened to one or the other of my boys at some point:
This year, Bryn didn't have a Moon Bounce or a clown for her birthday. Because it falls just three weeks after Christmas, I hadn't pulled everything together quickly enough for even a low-key party. Instead, she and I decided to bake a banana cake together. We chose the recipe out of a magazine, shopped for the ingredients together at the corner bodega, and spent a long snowy afternoon mixing the batter and baking it in the oven. There were no elaborate parlor games, no goody bags. We just blew out the candles and gorged ourselves on buttercream frosting. It was perfect enough.
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I love Mimi Smartypants again, just for this story:
Finger puppets are very popular at our house right now. However, in Nora's hands, puppet shows are always exactly the same:
Skunk puppet: Hello, I am a skunk.
Monkey puppet: Hello, I am a monkey.
Cow puppet: Hello, I am a cow.
You get the idea.
Last night I sat on the couch watching Nora run the full production of her Absurdist puppet show: hello I am a bear, hello I am a penguin, hello I am a skunk/monkey/cow/whatever. Then she thought for a minute, stuck a finger up her nostril, and said, "Hello, I am a nose." However much I ever thought I could love a sticky-faced, stained-shirted, messy-haired toddler with her finger up her nose: it doubled right then.
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