My Other Two Daughters!

Yes, I'm a mother of four--not just two! When I 'launched' my blog a couple of weeks ago (that is, I 'came out of the closet' as a blogger, and shared my blog site address with my Honey and my kids), my beloved third daughter called me on mentioning her brother, and telling all about the sister who is WonderBaby's mother, but completely neglecting to mention Other Daughters, # 1 and #3. Rose is my redhead, standing next to me in the photo. (Of course, it's a wedding photo, taken October 7, 2006.) Rose was an Only Child for the first three charmed years of her life, and the absolute belly button of my personal universe for that period of time. I took her to Baby Exercise Class, Water Baby swim lessons, any number of Educational Field Trips, and she even toured Europe with her father and me. I recorded her favorite story books on tape while reading them to her, and she learned to operate the stereo and use the headphones to listen to them around the time when she graduated from diapers to training pants. Before I knew any better, I transformed our kitchen into a little language arts classroom, started her on her own personal picture dictionary, and taught her to read by the age of four. We sang together and painted together. Sometimes it seems a shame that she doesn't remember much about those days of basking in her mother's undivided attention.

And my Rose in 2007? She's my academic daugher, with an undergrad degree in women's studies from the University of Victoria, and she's currently going for a master's degree in social work from Carlton University in Ottawa. She's my away-from-home daughter, who once boasted about how many provinces she resided in, in a single year. She's my daughter with a social conscience, who participated in demonstrations ( . . . which demonstrations were they, Honey?). Rose is my Amazing Knitter daughter; my foreign languages daughter (French and Hebrew--no kidding!). Rose astonishes me with her genius for living on a shoestring--I think I am more surprised at the fact that she chooses to live frugally, than I am at the fact that she manages it so well! Rose and her born-in-Israel-partner, Ze'ev, are off tomorrow to visit that country. I hope they have a wonderful time, and I am so looking forward to hearing about their trip!

Christina is my Baby Daughter--the youngest of my three girls, although her brother is the youngest of the entire brood. She's my blonde daughter; my designer fashions daughter, and for the moment, the only one of my four kids with a full-time job. Christina is the one on the far right in the photo--she had to dash into the frame before the shutter clicked. Yup, she took the picture. We hired her as our wedding photographer. She's a photographer by profession. This came as a tremendous surprise to me, as Christina insisted throughout her childhood and early adolescence that she intended to be a nurse. (I kept asking her, "Why be the nurse when you could be The Doctor?) Photography seems to suit her much, much better than nursing would have--she's always been interested in images; in drawing, and I just can't see her doing physically-demanding work, or any kind of work where she repeatedly has to Touch People! Tina has a day job at McBain Camera in Southgate Mall, and she is a Whiz-Bang Photographer. You can check out her work--heck, you can even hire her!--at her very own web site.

Christina's birthing was the easiest one I ever achieved, she was born on her due-date, and she had a perfect Apgar score. I remember how besotted I was with her when she was born--there was a TV commercial out at that time for Maria Christina wine, a jingle with a floaty melody repeating the name of the wine over and over, and that jingle kept singing itself through my head on my Christina's birth evening. Tina was the only one of my babies that 'planned herself,' her birthday is December 20th, and we named her Christina Louise after Christmas, after her father (Christian), and after her mother. She has always had astonishing eyelashes--thick, black, upward-curving, and the longest you have ever seen. Where, oh where did those eyelashes come from? The first time I had my eyelashes dyed I happened to have Tina with me. I pointed to my small daughter, and said to the cosmetologist, "Make my eyelashes look just like hers!"

Christina is a goal-setter; a purposeful dreamer. She had kind of a ho-hum attitude toward scholastic achievement until the beginning of Grade 5. She shared with me a dream that she walked into her classroom, and there was a gift from her teacher on Tina's desk. The gift had a card that said something like, "I'm so glad you're in my class, Christina. We are going to have a wonderful year together." And that proved to be a strong achievement year for Tina, indeed! Years later, she had a daydream/vision of herself tanning solo on a sandy beach in Australia, her camera set up nearby on a tripod. My Tina manifested that vision by saving up for and organizing a trip, on her own, to Australia, at the age of nineteen (if I'm not mistaken).

How can any parent possibly write about her children without sounding boastful?


My four children represent my Supreme Lifetime Achievement: I have helped bring four magnificent young people into the World.