Maddie has what I consider to be a pretty good grasp of the concept of time; she’s got the days of the week memorized, and has learned to place them in her daily context to understand how much time is passing or needs to pass for a special date to come up. Saturday, for example, is Waffle Day, when Daddy makes waffles for breakfast; Sunday is Church Day; and Monday is Playgroup Day. If Madeleine’s trying to figure out how long it will be until, say, her birthday, we’ll tell her that she has five more Waffle Days until her birthday. So far this seems to be working well, and Maddie loves to recite through the days of the week until she arrives at something fun.

And invariably, that Something Fun is Wednesday – Gym Day! Gym Day is Maddie’s raison d’etre, that activity which makes all other life worthwhile. At random points in the week, she’ll stop whatever she’s doing and say, “What day is it today? And then what day is it tomorrow? And the day after that?” and so on, until we hit Wednesday, at which point Maddie says, “And that’s the day we go to the gym!”

Cora wants to be just like her big sister in all she does, and eating is no exception. Cora cries and kicks when she sees Maddie eating strawberries but I’ve held fast, determined to wait until her birthday as suggested by doctors for allergy reasons. Strawberries are just coming into season in New York, and I’d anticipated finding a pick-your-own-strawberries farm here right after Cora’s birthday and turning her loose in the fields – a sort of coming-of-age amongst the strawberry patch thing.

Then I found out last Thursday that the growing season in Texas is a wee bit different than New York’s, and last weekend was pretty much the last hurrah for strawberries here.

So on Friday, I packed the girls in the car, threw the allergy wait-list out the window, said a small prayer, and drove to the strawberry farm.

Maddie was, of course, ecstatic about getting a chance to pick her own strawberries, and chatted the whole way down about how many she was going to pick, then eat, and bring home to show Daddy. She speculated about what sort of bucket she’d be given to use and how fast she was going to pick. Cora was, of course, clueless that her life was about to change.

When the subject of Mother’s Day came up a few weeks ago, I told Brian I had three requests: I wanted time to go to my favorite used bookstore – ALONE; I wanted to take a nap; and I wanted a day off from feeding the kids – all the dicing, shredding, steaming, cajoling, spooning, snack preparing, the whole thing.

And the visit to the bookstore was negotiable.

So for Mother’s Day weekend we came up with a plan. Since taking an entire day to yourself simply isn’t practical when you’ve got a nursing child, we split my “day” up into two days and I went to my bookstore on Saturday while the girls were napping. And yes, they were napping when I left, but no, they didn’t stay that way for long, so that definitely counts as a gift.

That left Sunday for my napping and break from food duties.

You know the separation anxiety is getting bad when your daughter cries because you’re going to the grocery store.

Your older daughter, that is.

Since we’ve moved to Texas, both girls have become only more clingy, more anxious when away from me. I expected it a bit when we first moved – new environment, no friends, and so on. And when we moved in January Cora was 8 months old and four months into her official separation anxiety stage, so I was trying to grit my teeth and deal with that as well. I kept thinking it would get better – that gradually Cora would begin to become more confident without me, let me go to the bathroom by myself, for pete’s sake!