The Greatest Love of My Life

I have lost more card and board games to preschoolers than is respectable, I believe. It's just one of the perks of being a stay-at-home mom. My days right now are full of matches. I play some combination of mini pool, Skip-Bo, Sorry, UNO, Doodle Dice, and Brain Quest every single day of my life.

A friend, in talking about phone apps and online games, said to me recently, "Nobody plays board games anymore." I didn't contradict her, but I was thankful that I actually do. Through board games I have taught colors, numbers, math, the alphabet, and fair play to all my children. Daniel is the only one at home now, and he loves them. (I like to think they're keeping my brain sharp as well.)

But my stay-at-home life has been full of more than those awkward folding boards and tactile game pieces of days gone by. A great many parks have I explored in this town, trying to give my city kids a taste of freedom as I scrambled on the play equipment behind them, and many green spaces are familiar old pals now after regular visits. Library story times, play dates, nap times and community classes have also been my friends in child rearing. I will not deny PBS, either, for I love its lessons and have always said very loyally and half-jokingly, "I have raised my kids on PBS - hours and hours of it!"

I realize my luck as a stay-at-home mom. I realize it when I am losing my temper after losing my patience. Then the kids say or do something goofy or karma smacks me in my ludicrous face by making me stub my toe or trip on toys, and I crack up before we all burst out laughing. The discipline goes out the window, but my sanity is saved by laughter. I know my blessings when I can watch my child's sleeping face for a moment during naptime quiet  - missing them right after I was so desperate for them to sleep - or hear them laugh with that childhood laugh that is pure magic for inspiring joy but disappears somewhere around kindergarten. I know it when I'm there to silently hold them as they nurse a booboo. Every time we dance around the living room like apes, and I marvel at their agile, carefree moves I am aware of my good fortune.

Every week at least I find myself staring at my children's faces as they laugh, concentrate or tell a story, just marveling at the gift of knowing them and raising them and watching them grow. I get to experience all of these small but incalculably beautiful moments in time with them.

How miraculous is it? And yet sometimes I forget my luck, like in the morning rush to school when my kids decide to do anything rather than what I, like a drill sergeant, have barked out at them countless times, "Eat breakfast, shower, get dressed completely, brush hair, brush teeth, pack lunches!" It makes me want to rip out my freshly washed but wildly uncombed hair on the drive to school when they've done nothing but squabble from the time they woke up. Frustration prickles me when Daniel, who finally gave up naps this last busy December, comes to me continually as I'm writing and demands to be entertained despite the dozens of educational, creative toys cluttering our home. Irritation threatens to rule when I have chores to do or items to collect before we can leave the house for errands, and my little guy waits by the door and asks repeatedly in boredom, "Can we go yet?" I forget when I pick up the kids from school, and they seem to have been waiting all day just to resume their squabbles, or when I turn around at the grocery store to see my youngest ones scaling a stack of prepackaged food like it's El Capitan.

I have a selfish, unadventurous love of home, peace and quiet, so I have sadly been known to declare before my kids, "The constant fighting is my least favorite part of being a mom." And lately, I am ashamed to say, I have balked at all the running around we will have to do every day of our week save Sunday with the my kids' spring sports schedules. Amid the consistent disagreements between siblings, I have even cried out occasionally, "I just want peace and quiet. Can't I have peace and quiet?"

But instantaneously I feel like arresting my own words and trying them for ingratitude. No, I don't want peace and quiet, God knows. Thank God for my children's laughter, their interesting morning conversation for which we have so little time, all our child-parent dialogue on important issues, every cry of surprise, laughter or triumph as they play some rowdy game together while brutalizing the furniture. Thank God for it all, for he knows full well that I cannot imagine my life without my children. And it is true as well that I, if left to myself as a lover of home and quiet, would have far less interesting things to write about without all the energy, clamor, pain, joy, busyness and laughter wrapped up in the greatest love of my life: family.

Memory

My son just walloped me at Memory again, and this time I was really trying.

Of course, the first game I helped the little fellar out by regularly interjecting, "Um, no, I don't think so...wait! now think...you just turned it over!" I may have even given up a couple matches that I actually remembered correctly. He beat me 10-7. Before the second game, however, I clearly stated, "Daniel, I'm not playing around this time. Mama's really going to try to win. I'm going to play hard and try to beat you."

I was defeated, and the score was identical: 10-7.

Gosh, I don't know how that happened, and maybe that's the problem. Perhaps the day will come when I lose at Memory, not because I have fewer matches, but because I can't quite recall what the game is about. I have chronic Mommy brain. At least, I think that's what is. It's better than another diagnosis.

Do you have Mommy's brain, too? Here are possible symptoms:

Taking your husband sippy cups of milk when the toddler asks for something to drink
Trying to hand your kids steaming cups of coffee on Sunday mornings
Standing in any room of your house, but most often the kitchen, and asking yourself repeatedly, "Now, why am I in here? What was I doing?"
Tapping your head like Winnie the Pooh and repeating, "Think, think, think."
Asking desperately every school morning, "Has anyone seen my purse?!
Forgetting to pick up your kids on a half day
Gray hair

Here are the causes, as far as I can tell:

Wildly fluctuating hormones due to multiple pregnancies
Toddlers knocking your head about too many times after sneaking into your bed at night for years
The inability to concentrate, truly concentrate, on just one of your children, because The Others insist on interrupting
Indulging in too many unfinished chocolate cupcakes from kids' birthday parties
Not enough adult interaction
No good sleep


At present there is no known cure. Perhaps one day they'll discover it in some miracle plant in the Amazon. For now, I'm afraid, the only proper precautions to take against it growing steadily worse are to play endless games of Memory with your preschooler before his nap to keep your brain sharpish, and then, after you lose again, to promptly zonk out with him in order to forget the humiliation as you rock him to sleep.

Just don't forget to pick up your older kids from school.

My Little Card Shark

Every day, every single live-long day, I am locked in a card tournament with a tenacious opponent. He's not the best sport - yet. He throws cards around in frustration and tries to pull the wool over my eyes occasionally, but he trusts me a lot; he always has me deal. I hope every hand to lose. Not because he's so cute with his frosty blond hair and his sweet blue eyes, but because it seems unfair to win too often when the boy doesn't even have a firm grasp on colors and numbers yet.

I'm speaking of playing Uno with my preschooler. He loves the game and demands at least three to ten hands of it every day before naptime. Though his appetite for cards is voracious, we never gamble with Hot Wheels, and we don't swig inordinate amounts of cool-aide or chocolate milk while wrinkling our brow at our opponent's Draw 4 or Skip cards.

He doesn't always like the rules, and he doesn't understand how to court Lady Luck. He'll keep his residual cards from a losing hand rather than have me shuffle them, and it never turns out well, poor fellow. In such circumstances, I'm likely to win several hands in a row though I give him prodigious help. Once he finally pulls one off, I breath easier, and we drag out Candy Land as a nice way to unwind from all the tension. He always goes first at that, and he almost always wins.

He's not my first child to monopolize my late morning or afternoon hours with games. I have encouraged my kids in this, because I grew up on board games and card games myself. My brother and I invented many versions of Uno in our quest for excitement, and we named them all after cultures and countries about which we knew very little: Indian Uno, Chinese Uno, Russian Uno, African Uno, and so on. I remember playing Rummy with my siblings for possibly hours in the summertime. And I have taught my kids their numbers and colors and basic reading through card or board games - an oft-overlooked and entertaining teaching tool.

All four of my kids have had their favorite games. With my eldest, Berto, it was Sorry!, and my husband and I complained often that the Sorry! leprechauns were with him; he nearly always creamed us. Ana, my first girl, liked Barbie Memory Match with numbers when she wasn't quietly entertaining herself with drawing whimsical birds or looking over books. Ella could embarrass us all in a match of Memory when she was three; after that, she developed an all-consuming love of puzzles - the only one to do so. We did several a day sometimes, and she quickly conquered the 100 piece at age 4.

And now it's my Danny Sammy, my littlest, with interminable games of Uno - carrying on the family tradition. And, honestly, except for some anxiety over engineering him a win, I feel very lucky to have this quiet time with him on the living room rug each day, every day. If he could stop mixing up his yellow and blue, I'd be willing to bet some sweet Hot Wheels and cool Little People that he could beat any kindergartener out there.

As for me I'm going to see if there's any money in this Uno thing, some Las Vegas high-stakes tournament, perhaps. I'd be a shoe-in for the jackpot. I've had years of practice.