On Matryoshkas and going bonkers

The girls received a Matryoshka doll from granny. It’s a Russian nesting doll. Really nice and colourful toys, but chokable. Highly chokable, especially when you have a 9-month old crawling around, sticking everything in her mouth (but who mysteriously cannot manage to find her mouth when it comes to eating real food). Anyways.



So my eldest was playing with the matryoshkas, trying to figure out how to stack them. I’m hovering like a hawk, to make sure the youngest doesn’t get her hands (and mouth) on them. At some point, No.1 starts playing “supermarket” and brings the dolls to me (at the computer/cash register), to check them out so she can pay them. She brings the first two dolls, the tiniest. I beep them on my fake cash register, she takes the dolls and, for a half a second, I turn my eyes away.

And they are GONE. The teeny tiny wooden-peanut of a doll is gone. Her bigger sister too (bigger, so to speak – it’s about the size of a slightly larger cherry). Two choking hazards are AWOL and I cannot see them anywhere. I freeze.

“Honey, where are the two dolls that were just here a second ago? The ones I asked you not to let out of your sight?”
“Mmmmmm, dunno” (thinking really hard)
“Honey, they were just here. You took them from the desk and then…”
“Well, I don’t know”
“Did you take them anywhere”
“I can’t remember” (rubbing her chin)

I’m starting to boil. Where in the world are they???? How hard can it be???

“Honey, they were here, you took them and now they’re gone. Come on, help me find them”
“Ok, let’s find the dolls”. She takes her hide-and-seek tone (the mommy-go-hind-behind-the-curtain-and-i’ll-find-you tone). “Are the dolls here, in the potty? Noooooo. Are they here, in this book? No, mommy, they’re not here.”

Steam is already bursting out of my ears. Yes, she’s as cute as it gets, but I just want the two wooden fugitives locked back into the biggest matryoshka and out of the baby’s way.

So I try to cool down and try again.

“Honey, can you please focus and try to remember where the dolls are?”
“Oh, I remember! (index finger straight in the air, Sherlock look on her face). They are here, in the matyoshka drawer” and she points to thin air, giggling.

Arghhhhh, silly silly pretend play! Sure, it’s useful when your kid wants to go on a boat trip and all you have is a cardboard box and a broomstick. But when you don’t need the pretend-matryoshka from the pretend-matryoshka drawer, it’s not so fun anymore.

So we’re back to the drawing board. We have to do this the hard way. Half an hour later, after taking apart every piece of furniture in the room, I found the two silly dolls hiding behind some books. I’m still not sure how they got there, but I locked them up tight where they belong.

Love languages

I read about the 5 love languages some time ago, but I was not fully convinced about the whole theory until a couple of days ago, after a talk with my mom.

It went something like this:

“You know I’ve given you all I could until now and I’ll do my best to send you money in the future.”

For me, it was never about the money. It’s been quite some time since I’ve started to support myself financially and since I’ve started feeling that I do not want her to send me money anymore, because I was all grown up (married and two kids = pretty grown up, if you ask me).

I was getting more and more frustrated as she continued. At the point when my inside voice was almost yelling “I don’t need your money, I just want you to hug me and tell me you’re proud of me” it struck me: maybe my mom’s way of expressing love might be very different from my own. I took a step back, calmed down and started to pay attention.

Come to think of it, ever since I can remember, my mom was always running small (or larger) errands for family and friends: baking cakes, cooking for weddings, babysitting, sewing, cleaning, you name it. She was always restless if she could not express herself by doing something for the people she cared about, until she was exhausted.

It started to make sense why she would get angry if I said I didn’t need her to send me more food, more stuff, that I did not want her to work more for me, to bake for hours on end and to exhaust herself to give/send me something. Why we would always get into fights about the fact that she had no limits in the amount of food and groceries she would send when I was pregnant with our first baby. It still wasn’t clear to me that she would get really upset when we did not let her express her love for us in the only way she knew how: by acts of service.

The other day we had a conversation that sealed it for me:
“Do you need me send you some food? So you won’t have to cook?”
“No, thanks, I actually love spending time in the kitchen and there are some new recipes I want to try anyway.”
“OK. Maybe I should send you some cash instead. “
“We’re good, thanks!”
“Listen, are you upset with me?”
I started laughing. This time I was prepared.
“No, mom, we just don’t need food or money. But how about you sew us those curtains we’ve been talking about? The ones for the family room?”
Her voice became cheerful again.
“Sure thing, I’ll get right on that. And while I’m at it, I think I’ll knit some scarves for the girls.”

Needless to say, our daughters do not need any new scarves, but what can I do?