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While I was in the shower this morning (a necessity since I skipped yesterday’s), I heard my oldest say something to the effect of: ‘Henners has the laundry stuff,’ in a tattletale singsongy kind of voice.
By ‘laundry stuff’, I assumed he meant…..the bottle of Tide liquid detergent. Which I store in the laundry basket. Because there’s really not another easily accessed place to store it.
I’d scarcely processed the remark; had just begun to utter the commands of the momentarily immobile parent: ‘take it away from him’ or ‘tell him not to touch it’ when the next news bulletin was delivered.
‘Henners has dumped the laundry stuff on the floor.’
And with that bulletin my three minute shower was over.
I stepped into the hallway just in time to see the Tide bottle lying on its side. With the lid off. Clear liquid (I use Tide ‘free’) crawling all over the wood floor. My only recourse: to use my towel in an effort to stop the liquid from traveling to another city.
When your morning starts off like that, it’s hard to regroup; to retain any sense of optimism about how the day is going to go.
I’d managed to get the big boys to the front door on time for our 9.30 departure, both wearing socks and shoes and coats. When we discovered the Hen had lost his ‘da’. His pacifier. The only pacifier he will put in his mouth. The pacifier he insists on taking with him everywhere he goes.
Upstairs, downstairs, bedrooms and bathrooms were searched in an effort to find the pacifier. With no luck.Ten minutes of searching yielded nothing, and at that point I was considerably late. So we had to depart with his ‘ba’ (the infamous ubiquitous white pillowcase) but not his ‘da’. I braced myself for the inevitable tantrum in the car when he realized one of his ‘comforts’ was gone.
We arrived at our destination and I got everyone settled. The tension in my body started to fade as I held the baby on my lap. The only person who had not caused me any trouble. Yet.
His eyes closed, and his face turned a dull red from the strain. Sure enough, the exertion paid off with several loud noises two and three minutes apart. After five or so squirts I decided it was time to investigate.
I was prepared for his soiled clothing. I wasn’t prepared for mine. The kid had literally pooped on me. Through his clothes. It’s the quirky thing about parenthood, I suppose, that someone can defecate upon you and you’ll still talk to them.
Especially if they’re cute and smiley. With a half dimple hidden in their left cheek.
Being a savvy, third-time mom, I had an extra outfit for him. I did not have any extra pants for myself. Charmed, I’m sure.
Fast forward another twenty minutes or so to where my boys were running around in circles with some friends. I’d turned my back to gather my belongings in preparation for exit when I heard giggles and the word ‘banana’.
Sure enough. Someone had found two bananas and had thrown them on the floor and stomped on them. Mushed banana on carpet? Fan-freaking-tastic. ‘Who did this?’ I asked the group of five boys. Fingers pointed in five different directions. I had to assume, since two-fifths of the group belonged to me, at least one Johnson boychild was involved in the banana massacre.
Many pieces of paper towel later I’d removed the biggest chunks of banana from the carpet and the boys’ shoes. And, for the second time, tried to gather my belongings and children for exit. A process that took thirty minutes….from start to finish.
Naturally we got in the car and the Hen, upon realizing he had no ‘da’, started wailing. Right as the baby, who hadn’t been able to take an uninterrupted nap, started wailing from hunger and fatigue. Right as the Gort said: ‘when are we going to have lunch? Are we going to have lunch now?’ Over and over.
It’s days like these that I wonder about people who spout airy platitudes (about children and parenthood) like: ‘don’t blink…it goes so fast’, ’soak it all in’, ‘it’s the greatest thing ever.’ Etcetera.
Did they somehow end up with the world’s only perfect children?
Have they just forgotten the days when they wanted to send their children to boarding schools…in other countries? The days when it seemed like the only words they uttered were: ‘no’, ‘timeout’, ‘go to your room ‘and ‘no candy, presents, toys or television for you until you turn eighteen.’ The days when their kids took hot pink tissue paper, shredded it into nano-particles and dumped it all over the house. All while laughing hysterically. Right before guests were due to arrive
I read a snippet of an interview with a celebrity-who-shall-not-be-named who said , about motherhood, ‘there’s nothing I don’t love, even the sleepless nights believe it or not!’
I’ll file that one in my ‘gems’ folder.
In my previous job, I spent quite a bit of time visiting various elementary schools. As I walked around said schools I couldn’t help but notice that some of the kids looked fairly….shabby. Many looked like they’d basically come to school wearing their pajamas. ‘Why don’t their parents dress them a little better?’ I’d wonder to myself. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I think kids should look ‘presentable’ when they go to school. Maybe it’s because I began my school career wearing an unflattering maroon uniform.
But now that I have a kid in school, I understand why those aforementioned kids looked less than stellar. Because they’d dressed themselves and their parents were tired of fighting about clothes, so they let it go.
The Gort went to Kindergarten yesterday. ‘He looks like someone living under a bridge,’ the professor quipped as we headed out the door.
Which, he kind of did. His ensemble du jour consisted of baggy, too-short fleece pants, a white t-shirt several sizes too big and black snow boots that, upon first glance, looked like ill-fitting ankle boots.
I like to think I support my kid’s creative expressions. After all, I’m the person who let him wear a life jacket to a university function last winter. But there comes a point when ‘creative’ turns into ’sloppy’ or ‘just plain terrible.’
And that’s where we were yesterday, in the ‘just plain terrible’ category.
For starters, the white t-shirt he was wearing….it was a shirt we received as a door prize at an annual University picnic a couple of years ago. It’s emblazoned with a red and white checkered rectangle with ‘Ball State Family Picnic’ printed in the center. And it’s intended for someone much larger than our Kindergartener. Frankly, it’s an ugly t-shirt. One that, if it were mine, I might wear while painting something or using a phenomenally toxic cleaner. That way if I spilled anything on it or ruined it, I wouldn’t care.
But the Gort claims to really like this t-shirt. So until I remember to bury it in his closet, the shirt will continue to make an (unfortunate) appearance.
I’ve tried to preempt the self-selection debacle by presenting him with an outfit to wear; figuring if I remove him from the [clothes selection] equation, he’d end up with a reasonable outfit. But of course it’s not that simple.
The kid has, let’s say, ten long-sleeved cotton t-shirts in different colors. Yet he refuses to wear most of them, claiming they’re ‘too itchy’. It’s a lame excuse that drives me nuts. If the shirts were wool or polyester, I’d buy the itchy argument. If he rejected all of the shirts, I’d buy it too. But the shirts are cotton and tag-less. And he ‘only’ refuses to wear seven of them.
The same goes for pants. One day… jeans are deemed too itchy, the next they’re not. Which means his ‘winter wardrobe’ consists of about three shirts and two pairs of pants.
Last week, disillusioned with his warmer clothes, he dipped into the summer wardrobe and left the house wearing an orange polo short-sleeve t-shirt and navy blue pants with mustard yellow accents. It was a vile combination, not to mention weather inappropriate, and no amount of intercession convinced him otherwise.
This weekend, as I was folding the newly laundered clothes, I came across those blue and yellow pants.
They’ve been enrolled in the witness protection program and are currently living in an undisclosed location…in the dark recesses of the closet.
I don’t have lofty expectations where Halloween is concerned. I’ve never even worn an official costume in my life. All I want for the 31st of October is pumpkins glowing on my doorstep, kids happily dressed in their costumes, making the trick or treating rounds at a few houses and handing out candy to trick or treaters.
In our case, one out of four is bad.
Jason ‘helped’ the boys carve their pumpkins on the 10th of October. Which I thought was a reasonable amount of time before Halloween. Apparently, I made the rookie Calgarian mistake of assuming that last October’s weather would be similar to this October’s weather. As in, last October the weather was balmy, so this October, my pumpkins won’t rot within seconds if I place them on my porch twenty one days before Halloween.
Except last October there wasn’t any snow. And this October. It snowed at least three times. Which means that within forty eight hours of outdoor life, the pumpkins died.
For some reason I also think kids (should) enjoy wearing costumes. And might want to wear their costumes as much as possible. Happily.
Not the case at the Johnson home.
To the Gort’s credit, he’s not prone to changing his mind about what costume he wants to wear. And, unlike some moms, I haven’t had to purchase three costumes in order to get him to wear one. However, I was not prepared for a lame argument about footwear on Halloween. His dad suggested he wear boots with his ensemble. Because it doesn’t seem like a lot of firefighters wear tennis shoes on the job. But, come to think of it, most firefighters don’t wear red and yellow plastic coats made in China either. So in retrospect, we should have dropped the shoe-fight.
And the Hen; the kid who walked around in his ‘Ba-ma’ costume several times before Halloween? Wanted nothing to do with it on actual Halloween. In the end we convinced (forced) him to wear the outfit but not the cape. Seeing as he was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt over it along with green rainboots, I really didn’t expect anyone to know what he was supposed to be. Thus, when a boy at one of the houses said: ‘is he supposed to be Batman?’ I wanted to give him a hug.
I don’t really see the point in stopping at a lot of houses for trick or treating. I mean, the more candy you get…the more candy you have to eat. And since I can’t seem to keep my fingers out of the kids’ stashes, it’s really more troublesome for me.
Last year was the Gort’s first year trick or treating. I nearly died laughing watching my ’shy’ child barge into people’s homes, eager to grab whatever candy was available. This year, his younger brother did the same. The kid who casts his eyes to the ground the minute a stranger even looks at him, boldly walked into homes like a bloodhound following a scent. He almost started watching television on the couch in our neighbors’ home. (The neighbors whose names we barely know).
Strangely, his boldness only extended to homes that weren’t decorated on the outside. If there were pumpkins or skeletons on the porch, he stood behind me, too scared to go to the door. An hour and twelve houses later, I was rather happy to oblige my oldest when he said: ‘okay, we can go home now.’
Our first stop on the trick or treating route had been at our neighbors’ condo. ‘Will we get a lot of trick or treaters?’ I asked her, because I’d only bought one enormous box of mini chocolate bars. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘hardly any. Last year I bought chocolate and I ended up eating it all, so this year I bought sour candies.’
Sour candies. That would have been a smart idea.
And, sure enough. Not a single kid stopped by our house for trick or treating. At the end of the evening, the professor and I had made a substantial dent in the box. ‘You have to take these to work on Monday,’ I insisted. Whilst helping myself to another Crunchie and Caramilk bar.
So, to summarize the evening’s festivities:
0..the number of decent pictures I got of the kids in costume
3….the number of times I threatened to never go trick or treating again (before we’d even left the house)
1…the number of people who stepped in dog poop during trick or treating
125…the number of mini chocolate bars I bought for trick or treating
0….the number of mini chocolates I handed out to trick or treaters
50…the number of mini chocolates Jason and I consumed after trick or treating was over
2…the number of un-potty-trained people who peed on the floor after their post trick or treat baths
It makes me laugh when I read interviews with celebrities on parenting. They say things like ‘we make sure we’re all sitting down for dinner at the end of the day. That’s our time together.’
Well, in my house that ‘time’ together would be about 5 minutes. And it’s not necessarily ‘fun’.
There’s the whole ‘what to have for dinner’ conundrum. Which is its own beast. Maybe if you’re a celebrity you have a chef who takes care of that little issue. I’ve been trying to do better where dinner is concerned. But it’s all dependent on whether the baby needs to be held or will entertain himself in the bouncy seat. Or take a nap. If he doesn’t…it’s toast and sliced apples all around.
Then the dinner plans hinge upon the bigger two: how well they can entertain themselves without drawing blood or rupturing (my) ear drums. Monday night this was particularly heinous, which is why I ended up with flank steak and charred broccoli stirfry. With two sides of tantrums.
I sent each kid to the ‘naughty step’ more times than I care to remember. Except for the baby, who got so tired of all the noise he took a nap on the couch.
For the first half of last night’s entertainment, the older Johnson boys could be found running around in a circle, each holding on to one end of a piece of string. It was rather amusing, initially, the two boys running around in a high tech world with a low tech piece of string. Something you might expect from two young boys running around in poorest Africa. My first thought was ‘cute’ and then…’we should maybe get them a Wii. Or something.’ I can only imagine the Gort inviting a friend from school over for a playdate. And showing him the ins and outs of…string running.
‘You hold this end and I hold this end and now we run around in a circle. Isn’t it fun!’
Of course, ’string running’ is really just a thinly veiled opportunity for the oldest to run into the younger one from behind and push him to the ground. Purely accidental, I’m sure. But, of course, it results in a lot of tears. And a lot of ‘I don’t know why he’s crying’. Even though I kind of know by now how these games go.
When the string game had run its course, they moved on to costumes. A fellow Kindergarten mom brought me a couple of Halloween costumes yesterday, because I’d told her I still didn’t have a costume for the Hen. So she brought me a Batman and Superman outfit. Because her boys are going to be a skeleton and a psycho clown this year.
I’d made the mistake of looking at the costumes in front of the blondies so naturally they were clamoring to change into superhero gear.
The Hen became Batman (‘Ba-ma’). In a costume several sizes too big. It killed me – the way he insisted on wearing the cape, walking around while shaking his head like a circus elephant. Probably because the ‘eye holes’ came to his nose. Instead of his eyes.
The Gort donned the Superman outfit. Even though he’s going to be a firefighter on actual Halloween. It took about ten minutes to get them into the costumes. And they played around happily for about five minutes. And then fought like dogs for the next five.
As I was trying to capture their costumed cuteness, the meatballs (for the meatballs in red curry sauce) were cooked a little longer than necessary. What started out as a twenty minute meal, turned into an hour and a half of intermittent cooking and cleaning and serving.
‘I don’t like that.’ My oldest pronounced. Before he’d even taken a bite. ‘I’ll still try it,’ he compromised when I gave him the evil eye, ‘but I probably won’t like it.’
The professor walked through the door around 6. Right as we were sitting down to eat. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that all his classes go until 6 this semester? I don’t think so. I imagine he specifically talked to his department chair about taking any and all classes occurring over the dinner hour.
‘This is too spicy,’ the Gort announced. ‘How many more bites do I have to eat?’ The Hen ate his meatball but refused the rice. ‘I wan mo’ he declared with a plate full of rice still in front of him. When another meatball did not appear on his plate, he hopped out of his seat and climbed onto my lap. And ate all of my meatballs.
‘How was school today?’ the professor asked his son.
‘I don’t remember’ he replied.
About seven minutes after we started, both boys had left the table.
Family dinner: such a sacred and bonding ritual in our home.
I was reading a fellow mom’s blog a week or two ago, in which she berated herself for being thirty minutes late to pick up her child from school one day.
The first thought that popped in my head was not ‘oh, that could easily be me’ it was ‘wow, what a slacker’. Because I’d never been late for pick-up. Yet. And no sooner had I thought it, but an all-too familiar feeling of doom came over me. A ‘because I judged, I will now commit the same offense’ kind of feeling.
Because that’s just how it goes. The second I think ‘well, I will never do that,’ it happens. Usually the next day.
So this week arrived. On Monday I decided to keep the Gort home from school. He’d been acting kind of sick the previous day, and with the ever-present flu mania, I decided it was better to err on the safe side and keep him at home. Which, admittedly, isn’t the best for my mental health; having three screaming boys confined in my home for eight hours. But in the interest of public health, I figured I’d take one for the team.
Tuesday arrived. I dropped him off at Kindergarten, on time. But I hadn’t fed him any lunch. So I stopped at a convenience store and picked up a bag of chips and some m&m’s. Not sure which food group that falls under. After dropping him off, the Hen and I (and the sleeping babe) stopped at the pizza shop. We ate our slice of Hawaiian in the van. Classy! Afterwards, I stopped at a friend’s house for coffee and, lo and behold, by the time I got in my car-van, it was ‘pick-up time’.
And I still had a five minute drive ahead of me.
I pulled into the parking lot and R-A-N to the pick-up spot. Not caring if I looked like a total weirdo. My inner mantra, which I’ve since passed on to my son (‘run, run like the wind‘) when we’re trying to beat the school bus at drop-off, spurred me on.
My cherub and one of his classmates were waiting listlessly at the school door; the last ones standing. Everyone else had been picked up. He saw me and ran towards me and we walked back to the car, right past his teacher. ‘Was he sick yesterday,’ she asked me. With what I interpreted to be a look of doubt upon her face.
‘Yeah, he had a bit of a cold, so I decided to keep him home.’ She nodded her head. Maybe it was my overactive imagination, but I’m pretty sure she was thinking to herself ’sick? He looks perfectly fine to me..apparently school is just not that important to you. I mean you can’t even pick the kid up on time!’
But maybe she wasn’t thinking any of that. Maybe I was just feeling guilty about the late pick up and lack of lunch.
Wednesday arrived. And somehow I was late for pick-up. Again?! I ran to the door and there stood my son. Solo. The previous day’s fellow slacker mom had gotten her act together.
Thursday arrived. I’d had forty-five minutes to kill before drop-off, so I stopped at a friend’s house for a quick chat and some cake. When I got in the car it was time to drop him off and I still had a ten minute drive to school. As I drove towards the school, I saw all the afternoon Kindergarten parents drive past me. In the opposite direction. Because they’d already dropped their kids off.
I parked the car, and the Gort and I walked into the school. To report for our public flogging in the office. ‘What’s your name,’ she asked him. He offered it enthusiastically, even spelling it for her. ‘Were you at a dentist or doctor’s appointment?’ she asked him.
I wondered why she didn’t address me during any of this. Because I’m clearly a slacker-mom? Because she’s trying to get the Kindergartener to take responsibility? Or to see if she can catch him in a lie….like the weather-balloon-boy saga?
He looked confused by the medical line of questioning, so I intervened: ‘no, we’re just late.’ She handed him his pink slip and sent him on his way.
I contemplated sitting in the parked van with my two sleeping children for the two and a half hours until pick-up.
Our oldest’s plunge into the world of ‘big school’ has prompted a host of new conversations at home.
His ever expanding logical and emotional vocabulary have made for some interesting discussion.
Like when he left for errands with his dad a few weeks ago. He stood at the door and called to me: ‘Bye Nics!’. And, for better or worse, I burst out laughing. Because you just don’t expect a five year old to call you ‘Nics’. Especially when only his father does.
By way of explanation he offered: ‘I call Mommy two names…sometimes I call her Nics. And sometimes I call her Nicola. I just call you Jason,’ he reasoned to his dad. Okay. And, with nothing more to say, they left.
There was also the week where he ordered all of us at one point or another ‘to leave the family’ when we made him mad. Most notably, he said about his brother: ’I want Henners to leave our family.’ Jason felt compelled to defend the little person, countering with: ‘but if he leaves we’d have to go with him because we’re fond of him.’
Momentarily perplexed, the Gort gave the matter some thought and concluded: ’I want you to stay….so you can cook me dinner’
Luckily he dropped the matter, and the Hen was allowed to stay.
We were talking about our dreams the other day and my oldest felt compelled to tell me about the dream he’d had the night before.
‘I dreamed Henners and I were in the car and he was driving and he didn’t crash into anything.’ Alarmed, I had to ask: ‘was he bigger than he is now?’ Aka…of the age to drive a car.
‘It was just a dream,’ he replied, irritated by my interruption. ‘We were driving to get a cheeseburger and two hot chocolate cups.’
A stickler for details, I had to ask: ‘where were you going to get a cheeseburger and two hot chocolate cups?”
‘Starbucks.’ He replied. Duh.
‘Does Starbucks have cheeseburgers?’
‘It was just a dream,’ he concluded. Deflated by my lack of imagination, I suppose.
Privately, the professor and I have had snippets of conversation about where the kid’s abilities lie, what he might be good at, what he should be involved in. That sort of thing. Prompted, I suppose, by our feelings of guilt over the fact that most of his friends are ‘involved’ in something or other.
Maybe we’re delinquent parents, but we just didn’t think too terribly much about this in the pre-Kindergarten years.
We tried soccer when he was 3 and it was something of a disaster. Possibly because his dad was the coach, or he’d just been displaced by a baby brother, or because he was 3 and more interested in the post-game snack than anything else. And that was it.
This year we signed him up for Sportball, which is a one hour weekly introduction to several ball sports.
We thought this might be a good way to gauge his natural interest in any particular sport. Four weeks in we’re no wiser than when we began. But of course, we have our own set of biases and preferences.
‘None of our boys can play football,’ the professor announced this week. Given the Gort’s lanky build, I hadn’t really envisioned him as a football player, anyway. But I was intrigued by my better half’s logic. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because some study has concluded that all the ‘hits’ the players receive can contribute to dementia.’
Okay. ‘Well, I really thought they’d play tennis, anyway.’
‘No,’ he decided,’ you can get stabbed playing tennis.’ (Ah, Monica Seles and the crazy stalker guy.)
So I’m not sure what remains for these boys. Wrestling is a definite no: the singlet, the cauliflower ear business, the ‘moves’. Ice skating: bright sequined jumpsuits. I’d thought about swimming, but the professor put the kabosh on that as well: asthma from the chlorine, apparently. (Not to mention the freakingearly practice times.)
Which leaves soccer, baseball and golf. I can’t imagine the ‘headers’ in soccer are any better than the hits in football where dementia is concerned. And baseball….would it crush my kids if I never went to any games? And golf seems pretty expensive, not to mention neither the professor nor I appear to have any aptitude where that game is concerned. (The professor having achieved something like 25 over par at his annual golf game a few weeks ago.)
‘What about music lessons,’ he finally suggested last night. ‘Maybe guitar or the piano…but nothing weird or expensive like the cello.’
Perhaps they will be professional sandbox players.
I haven’t yet figured out the rhyme or reason for when the Gort and the Hen get along, and when they don’t. Some days they wake up and, from the minute they cross paths, blood-curdling screams fill the air. And some days they figure out a way to peaceably co-exist. At least for fifteen minutes at a time.
On the good days they can be found chasing each other around the house. Wrestling together. Making ‘custard pies’ in the bathtub. Which, as far as I can tell, involves filling vessels of varying sizes with vast amounts of bubbles. And dumping the bubbles on the floor.
It’s I Love Lucy-esque, really.
On the bad days they’re like two aggressive dogs who need to be pulled apart every three minutes. Time passes in a horrendous cycle: brief period of silence, intense wailing from one or both parties, tattling (he hit me, he took my [blank], he’s bugging me, he’s not leaving me alone, he’s not sharing), revenge (more hitting, swiping, tackling, spitting, stealing away of toys), time-out slash punishment, wailing about time-out slash punishment, insincere apology, brief period of silence. Repeat.
A bad day feels like Groundhog’s Day. On crack.
Like yesterday, after our Costco run. When they nearly ripped off one another’s arms and dehydrated themselves from their excessive shedding of tears. Over an empty cardboard box. The Gort had taken possession of an empty Gatorade box. For a ‘boat’. And, seeing his brother’s genius invention, the Hen wanted to get in the boat. Without the captain. Fisticuffs ensued. Eardrums were ruptured (mine). Until, ultimately, the boat was too flat to ‘float’.
This from the same two people who’d summoned me to their chamber at 4am for drinks and who can remember what else. The Gort took the opportunity to ask ‘can we have tomato soup for lunch? Because that’s my favorite.’ Stunned, I managed to utter ’sure…but it’s four o’clock in the morning and lunch isn’t for a very long time.’ As I stumbled back to my room, I could hear the Gort say companionably to his younger brother: ‘do you want tomato soup for lunch?’ ‘Yeth’ the Hen replied.
Quite the pair.
Like on Friday. When I checked on them after breakfast, they were playing together in the basement. Happily. Cars were lined up. They were sharing. I took a picture. It was like the infamous Arafat-Netanyahu photo ops of yore. I just couldn’t believe they were sitting side by side. And not fighting. They moseyed up to the kitchen a while later, dragging behind them a toy bucket filled with various treasures. A Dr Seuss book, among other things. And they sat down on the floor. Together. And ‘read’.
It was ridiculously cute.
The Gort was milking his older brother role for all its worth; speaking to the Hen in hushed, measured tones tinged with a hint of condescension. Sort of like a teacher might talk to an especially dumb student. As I watched them sitting side by side, looking at a book together, my heart filled with pride. I infiltrated their little semi-circle, hugging their collective sweetness. Lingering perhaps a little too long.
‘Goway Mommy,’ the Hen said as he glanced up at me absentmindedly. Lest I didn’t ‘get it’, his older brother turned to me: ‘he wants you to go away.’
Oh, is that what he meant.
That afternoon, the Hen and I picked up our Kindergartener from school. ‘Your brother really missed you today,’ I told the Gort. Which was possibly true, or possibly not. He had asked ‘whe Gaga’ once or twice and he had seemed excited to get in the car for pick-up. But that could be because he just wanted to get out of the house. Either way, it doesn’t hurt either of them if I embellish a bit.
‘Awww, did you miss me?’ the Gort asked his brother as he buckled his seat.
‘Noooooooo’ the Hen replied.
‘That means no,’ I was tempted to tell my oldest.
Dear Girls-in-high-school-who-think-having-a-baby-will-be-really-cool
Babies are cute. That is true.
Except when they scream and don’t sleep at 3am. They’re not cute at all, then. Having a baby will cause you to lose the ability to speak. And you will say strange things. Like when someone asks you ‘do you have 3 boys or girls’, you’ll reply ‘girls’. And look like a weirdo when you have to say. ‘No I don’t, I have boys. I don’t know where that came from!’
Also babies make you look like this.
And, when your baby-daddy goes to the dentist at 8.30 he’ll say things like: ‘do you think they will even let me in, or do I look too much like death?’ And you’re not sure, really, because your eyes can’t focus properly to know if the grayish pallor of his skin is real or imagined.
And when you have babies, they grow up. And they still spend all night howling and crying (see exhibit A in the green pajamas). Miraculously, though, they look a lot better than you. And can even play cars with their older brother.
Any questions?
Balloons
I hate balloons. I’m not sure if it’s connected to a traumatic childhood incident or an OCD-like aversion to the sound and feel of a balloon. Whenever one is near me, I have an irrational fear of it popping in my face, and my ears want to crawl inside my head when I hear the rubbery sound of someone touching its exterior. Also, the presence of a balloon means a sibling fight is less than two minutes away. Someone’s balloon will pop or float away and they will try to take the other’s and fisticuffs will ensue. It’s just a fact.
And yet, Mr. Johnson still accommodates his boys’ requests for balloons. He obligingly takes the empty latex shell and fills it with air and leaves me to walk around the house fearing for my life. Or having to break up the inevitable fights. Like this morning. He went to a meeting. And I got to referee a balloon fight. Also, I have no voice. I may have stomped my feet on the floor at one point to ’stop the insanity’ as Susan Powter would have said. Who’s the kid here, I wonder.
The basement lights
The professor likes to think of himself as a bit of an environmentalist. By ‘bit’ I mean, he recycles roughly one percent of his trash. And occasionally instructs the rest of us to turn off lights when we’re not in a particular room. A suggestion he mostly fails to comply with. Especially when said lights are out of the way…like in the basement.
There was an episode on Everybody Loves Raymond where Ray went on a business trip. He came back and dumped his suitcase right by the front door instead of taking it upstairs. His wife got mad. But she refused to move it. So it became this ‘thing’ where they both refused to take the suitcase upstairs and it stayed there for a long time. Apparently that’s what the basement lights are, for us. To be fair, neither of us uses the downstairs much, it is our offspring who play there. And I understand at the end of a long night, it’s just unthinkable to have to walk downstairs and back up again just to turn off a light or two. I understand because I don’t want to do it either.
But the environment! Last night, after observing he’d left the lights on three nights in a row, I said to him: ‘can you please turn off the basement lights when you go to bed?’ I don’t remember his exact response but I think he agreed. I came downstairs around 3am. Lights on.
Gmail
We have four or five computers in our house at any given time. Roughly one for each member of the family. Herr Johnson rotates between them, depending on his software needs and his location within the abode. I use whatever computer is available for my important work of checking email and facebook and celebrity babies dot com.
For reasons I cannot fathom, Jason likes to leave his gmail ‘open’ all the time. He logs on and doesn’t log out. Apparently so he can know right away when an email enters his inbox. Or something like that. However, it is not possible to log into two different gmail accounts using the same internet browser. So I have to log him off so I can log on. I will not use Mozilla’s Firefox, dangit.
I then check my email and I log off again. I’m just polite that way. And this drives him crazy. To return to a computer only to find his email has been closed. Because by the time he enters his username and password (a 3.5 second process, I’m guessing) he may have missed that email from the Nobel committee saying his important environmental conservation efforts have won him the prize. But he only has two seconds to reply in order to claim the award?
Seriously.
He returned from his meeting this morning and saw me doing my important blog work. ‘What are we fighting about now,’ he asked. ‘The basement lights,’ I said to him, pointedly. ‘What, I went down there with the Hen this morning,’ he offered in his defense. ‘At 3 am?’
‘Oh, maybe not….Well, can you at least talk about how you leave the dresser drawers open and how annoying that is and how when I talk to you about it you say ‘yeah, that makes sense’ but then nothing changes?’
Done.
There’s something not quite right about having three boy-people of various sizes in one’s bed before the clock strikes 7. While the biggest one was snoring, the middle two were engaging in some sort of call and response that can best be described as irritatingly humorous. ‘Whee whee’, announced the Hen and his older brother followed up with ‘whee whee’. ‘Choo choo,’ followed by ‘choo choo’, ‘cha cha’…’cha cha’….’pee pee’….’pee pee’.
It always culminates in pee.
‘Tomorrow is a school day,’ the Gort announced confidentially to his middle brother. Now that he has a calendar on the wall by his bed, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of each day’s activities. A knowledge he insists on sharing with others. Repeatedly.
But, little did he know that ‘tomorrow’ was, in fact, ‘today’. Just because it is pitch black at 7am, doesn’t mean it’s still the night before. But I didn’t correct him because, maybe, if he thought it was still ‘night’ he’d lie in bed for just a little while longer.
The Hen doesn’t have a calendar. Or much of an internal clock, it seems. At 5.56am he stood up in his crib calling ‘daddy’ and ‘mommy’ until someone (me) came and got him. ‘Do you want to sleep in my bed?’ I asked. But what I was really saying was: ‘you can lie in my bed but I am not taking you downstairs to eat breakfast.’ He nodded his head affirmatively. I thought we had a deal.
It didn’t turn out to be much of a deal. He writhed around on our bed, conducting his own form of morning revelry: roll call. ‘Whe baby?’ ‘Baby’s sleeping, shhh’. ‘Whe daddy?’ ‘Daddy’s sleeping…shhh’. ‘Whe Gaga?’ ‘Gaga’s sleeping….shhhh’. ‘Whe Hanho’…’there you are, shh’. ‘Whe mommy?’ ‘Right here. SHHHHH’.
It was barely past 6 and I’d already used up my allotment of shushes for the day. Not a good sign.
I tried everything in my sleepy power to keep him in bed as long as possible. I played ‘this little piggy’ more times than I could count. I’d finish with one foot and, without a word, he’d stick the other foot in my face. Next! For some reason the kid loves ‘this little piggy’. Almost as much as he likes cereal.
‘I wan shee-uhl’ he announced. Once, twice, three times. Fine.
We stumbled down the stairs. In the dark. I got out the frosted mini-wheats and the milk and the juice. He took a bite. ‘I done!’ he announced. No, you’re not. You don’t drag me out of bed under the pretense of your imminent starvation only to eat one bite and pronounce yourself ‘done’. I gave him the evil eye. And sat down at the table with him, eating my own bowl of mini-wheats. Feeling a tad guilty, he sat down again and proceeded to finish the contents of his bowl.
‘Nigh nigh’ he asked-said. ‘You want to go night night?’ I asked. He nodded. Relieved, I escorted him upstairs, where I practically had to pin him in order to get him to lie down on the bed. The clock hadn’t yet struck 7 when big brother joined us. Clearly still tired, but unwilling to miss out on all the ‘fun’.
‘Whe my jew’ the Hen requested. I pointed to the green sippy cup on my nightstand. ‘He’s not allowed to have juice,’ his brother informed me. ‘Juice is only for morning time.’ Little did he know we’d already been downstairs for breakfast.
‘I hunree’ my middle child piped up. I didn’t bother responding. ‘I wan shnack’ he clarified, lest I’d missed it the first time. The kid talks like an old man missing most of his teeth. He was lying in his crib three nights ago, talking to my mom on the phone. ‘Whadyousay’ he asked. For a moment it was as if he was lying in a nursing home bed talking to one of his kids.
When I didn’t respond to his request for additional food, he got off the bed and ran to his dad’s side. ‘Daddy, I hunree…I wan schnack’. No response there. So he ran back over to my side. ‘I hunree…I wan schnack’. It conjured up images of the Israelites marching around the walls of Jericho….in a semi-circle. Before the bed imploded, I gathered my posse and we went downstairs again.
This time for bowls of yogurt and ‘grape nuts’ (All Bran Buds, actually). The Hen didn’t touch his. Quelle surprise! It was still pitch black outside. And there is snow on the ground. And it’s snowing. And it’s October 14. Which means this year we will have eight months of winter instead of seven. And no amount of Chinooks can change that little fact.
I racked my brain for some kind of anything that would make me feel better. Since I’d eaten the last of the (second batch of) pecan pie yesterday, there was nothing but a cup of coffee with a teaspoon of butterscotch sauce for me. Maybe this sounds rather desperate, but I could have used the bourbon I’d bought for the pie instead.
I started pouring the boiling water into my cone filter. I noticed the conspicuous absence of dark grounds in said filter.
Twelve more hours.
