Apparently Elizabeth has babies on the brain, as yesterday when we were stuck on Mopac, she suddenly asked, “How do you make a baby?”

Thankfully, traffic was at a dead stop, or I might have swerved off the road. This would be multi-tasking at its finest.

In a brilliant extension of my previous tactic, I answered with another question. “What do you mean?”

She would not be thwarted. “I mean, what makes a baby?”

Deep breath. “Well, inside a daddy is a part that makes the baby. And in the mother is the other part. When they come together, they make a baby start to grow in the mother’s tummy.”

“But how does he get it in there?”

Arrrghhh! My nine-year-old was mercifully silent, hunched in the back seat as though she could disappear into the cushion.

I decided to evade, not wanting to get into technical aspects. “He puts it inside the mom. And then it grows for over nine months, and then it comes out.” Genius use of ambiguous pronouns, thank you very much.

She still wanted details. “But how does he get it IN there?”

Traffic inched forward another three feet, then stopped. My mind raced. No McDonald’s nearby. No ice cream shops. What I wouldn’t give for a Chuck E. Cheese at the moment! Here, kids, tokens! Anything but The Talk!

But I was trapped.

“How does it, Mama, how does it?”

“Well, the mom and dad just decide it is time, and so they…” Oh, someone get me out of this. “They decide to make the baby.”

The cars nudged past the on ramp that was slowing us down, and we cruised a little faster.

“Almost there!” I said, lying like a toddler with a fistful of stolen cookie. We had another twenty minutes easy. “Who wants gelato when we get to Mandola’s?”

They girls chorused “Me, me!”

“Which flavor is best?” I asked.

“Chocolate!” Elizabeth shouted.

“No lemon!” Emily said.

“Nuh uh!”

“Is too!”

My work here was done.

“So, Mama, can I have a baby before I’m married?”

I had to think for a minute. These questions are never what they seem, like the time the big horrid bad word she heard at school, that started with “s,” turned out to be “stupid.” My big anti-censorship lecture, wasted.

I decided the best tactic was to answer the question with another question.

“Do you think it’s happened already?”

“NO!” She laughed at me.

“Then clarify, please.”

“What if you have a baby in your tummy, but you aren’t married?”

I’m about to wax poetic on how one does not need to marry someone just because he fathered a child, when she went on. “I mean, does it get stuck in there until you’re married? Can it not come out?”

I feigned a coughing fit so I could compose myself. AND figure out how to answer.

“Well,” I began, with no idea where I was going to take it. “No. The baby will come out whether you get married or not.”

She looked puzzled at this. “But how?”

“Well there are two ways a baby can come out–”

“No!” Exasperation. “Does it have to stay in there longer? How does it stay in there?” 

“Are you asking me how a baby gets INTO the mother?” Please, please say no. I can’t manage this in first grade terminology. I suddenly remembered the infamous line from Kindergarten Cop, “Boys have a penis, and a girls have a vagina!”

“NO!” She gripped the blankets on my bed, frustrated.

“I know this is a real mystery,” I said. “It’s hard to understand.”

“So I can have a baby before I’m married?” Back to square one.

“Yes,” I said. “It might be harder, being a single mom, but people do it all the time.” I gave examples of friends whose moms were raising them, dads gone or moved away.

“But the dad was there when the baby came out.” This is still a sticking point.

“The dad really only has to be there when it goes in,” I said. Although actually, with sperm banks, even that might be optional.

“The dad puts the baby in?” She seems shocked, and I can see her mental image of the dad somehow inserting an infant.

Enough. Bring on the mom cop out. “Time for bed,” I said. “We can talk about this some more tomorrow.”

I herded her to the bedroom. Hopefully tomorrow she’d have easier questions. Like the cost effectiveness of the bank bailout and the economic flow of the stimulus package. Or tips on a successful exit strategy in Iraq.

Quite possibly, it won’t come up again until her wedding day. Or when she tells me I’m going to be a grandma. Whichever comes first.

She speaks. “Mama, you’re up!”

She rolls on top of me, putting her small hands on either side of my jaw. “I’m hungry!”

Her smile reveals the gap in her mouth. Her first tooth fell out yesterday. A pink tongue finds the hole. She isn’t used to the sensation, an empty space, the spongy gum.

She wriggles impatiently. “Get up!”

“You’re on me!” I say.

She slides off easily in her slippery nightgown. “Can we have cake?” Last night we baked a lemon one, creamy yellow with frosting like sunshine.

“Does that sound like a healthy start to your day?”

“Mama! That’s a commercial!”

She gets yogurt instead, with a promise of cake later. Her sister stirs in her room. Soon the television punctures the quiet, a cacophony of cartoon shouts and sound effects clattering through the room.

Emily arrives, crying. “What happened?” I ask.

“I scraped my arm on the bed.”

I examine the wound, a long pink mark with a bit of skin peeling back. “It will only hurt a minute,” I assure her, pulling her into a hug. She’s nine now, and I only get to hold her this close when she’s hurt or sick.

Within minutes, she’s eating cheerios. Elizabeth has already tired of cartoons and sits on the floor to her room, reassembling her Betty Spaghetti doll. She starts humming, then when she gets to the part of the song she knows, bursts out with, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow!” She’s mad about Annie right now. We’ve had to limit how many times we will play the song in the car.

The day off is a relief to them after two weeks of school, early mornings, strains to make the bus, homework and due dates and pressure. We all stretch out in our free morning, lounging in pajamas, not doing our hair, wandering about the house to look for something to do.

I know these days are fleeting. Already they shift into the young women they will become. They cry less, fight more, and don’t tell me everything.

But today is our day, they are still little, and I capture this passing ordinary moment of their childhood, a picture of our life together while they are still at home, I am still their daily influence, and they are mine.

Now it’s time to eat cake.

As a former teacher of both middle and high school, I know fervent language is a rite of passage among even the most well behaved kids. While I didn’t allow it in my classroom, we had a rule in the darkroom. While in the pitch black, holding sensitive but squirrelly rolls of film in our hands, trying to load the tight coils on a wheel for development, we agreed that “if the film hits the floor, any words you say cannot and will not be held against you.”

Teacher included.

I’ve been wondering myself when and how to let the kids get exposed to language. It crops up unexpectedly, even in movies targeted for small children. I remember well the shocking moment in Stuart Little when an alley cat uttered a four-letter word. Kids pick up on new sounds and often roll them around their mouths, or tuck an interesting sounding word away to repeat at a bad moment.

So we sat at Jason’s Deli, and I asked them if they knew any bad words. Emily insisted she didn’t, although in 4th grade, I felt certain she had been exposed.

“Really?” I pressed her. “Nothing? It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve heard everything and you won’t be in trouble.”

Still, she shook her head.

“I have!” piped up Elizabeth, newly minted in 1st grade. This did not surprise me at all.

“Well, out with it!” I said. “I want to hear which one!”

She dropped her eyes to her mac and cheese. “No.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “I’d really like to hear it.”

She still said no.

“Well, what does it start with?”

Elizabeth thought for a moment, straining to recall her spelling, which was still new. “S,” she said finally.

“Well, is it ‘s’ like snake or ‘sh’ like share?”

She seemed confused by this.

“Is the next letter ‘u’?” I asked.

She didn’t want to answer anything. So I pondered s-bombs for a bit, then suddenly realized the word. “Elizabeth, is the word stupid?”

She snapped her head up. “Don’t say that!” she hissed.

I honestly tried not to laugh. “Stupid is not a bad word!”

When she continued to scowl, I persisted. “You shouldn’t call someone stupid, and that is not nice. But stupid is just a word to describe something you find to be less than smart. Like a stupid rule.” (As in a rule about not using stupid, I thought, but didn’t say. It’s one thing to keep children playing nice, another to remove language to accomplish that. Makes me think of Newspeak.)

She still flinched every time I used the word. We finished dinner, me trying not to laugh and wondering how to get across the difference between actual swearing and mean words. I guess I have a bit of time left before the true four-letter words start to fly.

Maybe I should get them some good books.

Maybe I was in denial, but she seemed fine to me. Her dad insisted she wasn’t seeing well, though, and so I took her last week.

She wasn’t happy about it, and neither was I.

She breezed through the glaucoma air-puffs much better than I do — it always takes ten tries and then they just give up. She seemed uncertain on the blind spot tests, but managed well for a nine-year-old who was obediently doing what she was told, even if she didn’t want to.

The exam itself was harder, as she hesitated on every choice between 1 and 2, better or worse. I sat quietly, not speaking for her or urging her to decide. This was her moment.

I was also nine years old when I got my glasses. My dad had come to school one day and noticed me walking up to the board to copy problems. I remember picking up my first pair from TSO and being astonished — birds sit on telephone wires! Signs have more than just the big pictures — they say stuff!

My happy view of the world crashed quickly. On the bus the next morning, I no more stepped into the aisle when someone shouted, “Four eyes!”

Being a shy and emotional girl, I immediately sat down and started crying. The day would get worse, boys stealing the glasses from me, the sweaty slide of plastic frames down my nose at recess, the pinch behind my ears. None of this seemed worth not having to walk to the board anymore. I vowed to lose or break the crummy things.

But we were poor, and glasses were expensive, and I feared the wrath of my parents if nothing else. So I learned, for the next five years until I got contacts, to hunker down and endure. I hated the way I looked. I clearly recall the day in seventh grade when I read a book that said, “No one should wear long hair and glasses!” I grabbed handfuls of my waist-length hair and yanked hard, as if I could tear it out. No wonder boys didn’t like me! I felt endless jealousy of glasses-free girls. So I read and studied and kept to myself.

Sitting in an optometrist’s office as the doctor rattled off the news was harrowing for me. Emily got her pale blue frames and we immediately bought her a super cute glasses case to store them — turns out she only needs them for distances and will actually see better without them up close and on the computer.

I tried to breathe easier. Even though I know more children wear glasses now, and teasing is something we all have to learn to manage, I still want to protect her as long as I can. All of us parents want our children’s lives to be better than our own, and this was one thing I couldn’t stop from happening — her genes being half mine. But you can bet I’ll be watching her closely for any signs of upset two weeks from now when school starts. And I won’t ignore any withdrawal she might go through. We remind her how cute she looks, how smart and fun — and it’s true. But I worry about her, and I can’t help it.

We called her “Spike.”

Since then, she’s mostly grown her hair out, and boy did it grow. This morning when we took her picture, she could almost sit on her blonde “princess hair.”

But today she decided to cut it all off — letting the hairdresser do it this time — and give it to Locks of Love, who provide natural hair wigs to children with illnesses.

She was very upbeat as she sat in the chair and showed Suzie from Kid Clips how much to cut, angling her tiny hand near her chin. I was worried she would cry as the hair came off, but she was laughing the whole time, amazed at the instant change in how she looked.

The girls have two friends at their elementary school who use Locks of Love hairpieces. I’m amazed that when I mention the organization, everyone seems to know about it. It’s a great way for children to understand the challenges their peers face, and instead of feeling strange about seeing other kids without hair, this gives them a way to relate.

Elizabeth’s graduation song is now on YouTube.

I didn’t blog about the veggie wars for a while because I was, well, despondent. Failing.

But I regrouped, and with some luck in the form of Luby’s veggie plates, we went through vegetable after vegetable to find something, anything, this child would eat.

Our next breakthrough was sweet potatoes, a favorite of Elizabeth’s when she was little, but somewhere around age 3, she lost her way. Around then, actually, we lost everything that wasn’t yellow–mac and cheese, bananas, apple sauce, and chicken nuggets were our only friends.

The trick to the sweet potatoes was to let her make them. We boiled the fresh sweet potatoes, peeled them, mashed them up, then added a little bit of butter and just a touch of brown sugar (literally a teaspoon per potato), and topped them with just a few marshmallows. Bake it for about 15 minutes, and yep, she’d eat it. With relish.

We’ve added french fries and mashed potatoes to our veggies as well, even though fries aren’t my favorite. She’ll also eat some whole kernel corn. We no longer offer carrots after discovering the stash of dried ones. Too easy to hide.

Elizabeth is six now and I never thought we’d be fighting this hard, this long. Emily is an excellent eater, adding a new food to her diet every few weeks. But we keep plugging at it, enduring the dinner time tears when necessary, breaking out the dessert bribes without guilt, and wishing Deceptively Delicious was just a tad more deceptive, as it hasn’t worked once on this little princess who may not be able to feel a pea under a mattress, but can spot a veggie at 20 paces.

Elizabeth’s Libby Lu fete was quite the bash. My little diva took the fact they were out of “Rock Star” make overs in stride and went the princess route. It took over an hour to turn nine six-year-olds into royalty, but the girls knew exactly how to party down while they waited for their up dos.

Emily’s bowling party was also great fun. Highland Lane has a great set up and it’s easy on everyone.

Now I just have three weeks until summer and full-time mom-ness again! Ack!�

We sat around the table, arranging a board game for our Friday game night. As we’re doling out the cards for Hands Down, I notice something in the corner under a low table. Flower petals? Strips of paper?

I go over to investigate, feeling mildly alarmed.

What I saw made my stomach turn over.

A pile of dried baby carrots.

Elizabeth has not been eating her vegetables effortlessly and without complaint.

She has been HIDING THEM.

I turned to my five-year-old angel, whose eyes were large and dark. “Go to your room this instant,” I said.

She did not whine or cry. Just set down her cards and walked calmly away, as though she’d already imagined this moment many times over.

The rest of us played the game, and she occasionally called out to ask when she could come out.

About ten minutes later, I went to her room. I asked her if she knew what she had done.

“Didn’t eat my vegetables,” she said.

“But what else?”

She lay there in the half-dark. “I didn’t tell you.”

Like many moms, the bigger problem was the dishonesty, not so much the original mistake. I asked her if she wanted to play any games.

She nodded.

“Then you have to eat five carrots.”

She shook her head.

“No?” I asked. “You’d rather lie in bed than eat your carrots and play games?”

She nodded again.

And she did. I sometimes heard her singing to her stuffed dog. I checked on her once or twice, and she asked if she could turn on the light or come watch. I said no. She simply accepted her punishment.

What a long hard fall this has been.