An Alex Morning

So, this morning Alex was up after the littlest guys and Garrett, so when i went upstairs to find clothes for people he was there in bed ready to give me lecture on the Bionicle guy he was playing with. He got dressed and came to find me plopped in a chair in the red room, having gotten underwear for Dunc and given in momentarily to feeling yucky. Alex walked in and said, "What're you doing?"

"Sitting."

"Why?"

"You know the baby growing in my belly? It's making me a little sick."

"Are you going to die?" I wish I could flatter myself and say there was fear and concern in his voice, but it was all straightforward, matter-of-fact curiosity.

"No, it's not that kind of sick. It's actually a good sick, it means the bay is growing nicely. You know when you're sick and feel like throwing up?"

Alex made an excellent sound effect to indicate he understood throwing up and could act it out, which helped bring me just one step closer to doing it in reality.

"Well, it's just that kid of sick feeling, that's all. See, when..."

"OK, let's go have breafkast now, come on..." So much for any lessons on babies and hormones or concerns for my health.

On the way down the stairs, though, he returned to the topic: "I don't want it to be a girl baby."

"You don't? Why not?

"Because I only like boy babies."

"Why?"

"Because boy babies are cute."

"Girl babies are cute, too."

"Okaaaaaayyyy...." In that tone which says he won't argue with me but he isn't really buying it, either. I have little desire to prolong any conversations on which gender folks want, as there is nothing any of us can do about it except wait three months to find out what it is, and if anyone is disappointed in the results *I* am the one who's going to hear the complaints and have my belly glared at accusingly--no one ever glares at Jake, even though it's his fault, so I changed the topic myself and took him to watch the last ten minutes of Sesame Street. Once that was done, we returned to breafkast issue.

"Well, what do you want for breakfast, then? Cherry or strawberry Pop Tarts?" Jake had gotten a variety of flavors when he took them shopping, including the one that was about to do me in:

"What about the SMORES Pop Tarts?"

"Sorry, you guys finished those yesterday."

Usual sulking ensued, as not having the food option he was looking forward to is one of Alex's greatest miseries in life, but I would not let him leave the kitchen to go do it forever. I made him sit until he decided what he would have instead. Finally, he got verbal again and asked what the options were. "Cheerios, cherry, strawberry or raspberry Pop Tarts, or pancakes."

HUGE sigh. "I guess I'll have pancakes." So I turned on the oven and found a bowl to mix up the batter, since we do our pancakes in the big bar pan nowadays, one big rectangle of pancake baked in 15 minutes.

Then Alex says, "Mom, I would like ROUND pancakes, please."

"Oh, but Alex, those take so much longer to make!"

"That's OK, I like waiting. I can wait for round pancakes, it's OK."

Fine, I know I didn't have to give in, but the sulking the second disappointment around was going to be a lot longer and he was being very cute and after all, he did put a blanket over me when we were watching Sesame Street because to Alex all ailments are made better by the application of a blanket, and pancakes off the griddle *are* tastier that the baked version and I was starting to want some, so he had his round pancakes. But I made no guarantees about the baby brother thing, and I expect some sulking the likes of which Smores Pop Tarts never saw if Bot gets his way and the baby is a girl.

Seasoned Mom Moment

...can also be a Stupid Mom moment.

So the other morning Jake was annoyingly disciplined and got up an hour early to write, or work, or do something other than sleep. Me, I chose to sleep to the late hour of 7am, but then, I'm sleeping for two. Duncan came in at 6:45 or so and said something about Timmy being poopy, and being determinedly half-asleep I said something about go downstairs and tell Daddy. He went downstairs and Jake said something about going to play in the playroom, and off went Duncan to the playroom, Jake went back to his computer, and I went back to sleep, which meant when Jake jumped up to get ready for work and I jumped up to go walk my neighbor's dogs before Jake left for work, neither of us with time to spare, it was less than fun to discover poor Timmy, with a poopy diaper that was only half attached to his bottom.

Of course, the extra time we all spent sleeping and writing and playing in the playroom gave Tim plenty of time to roll around (silently, I might add--there was not a peep from to even indicate he was awake before I walked in) and get lots of poop on himself and the crib sheet and, horror of horrors, the Beloved Blanket. I told Jake to start the bath running on his way into the bathroom to shave, and for some reason he felt that a poopy baby meant it was necessary to protect the non-slip mat in the tub from coming in contact with a messy baby, instead of leaving the mat there to protect the very poopy baby from slip-sliding away all over the tub while I tried to scrub dried poop off him. So I had to stand there holding the poopy baby out in front of me to try and maintain my poop-free status while telling Jake in as few words as possible that he should replace the @&#^!*&% tub mat so I could put Timmy down. Luckily, Tim had managed to coat mostly the lower half of his body, with only a small amount on his hands and cheek. The latter parts were scrubbed first, and then I showed him how neat it was to play in the running water so that the hands kept nice and rinsed while I went to work on the rest of him.

Needless to say I did not make it up the hill to walk the dogs before Jake had to leave, but Tim was cleaned up in short order (without the unhelpful panic attack I would have had back in my Baby Liam days about baby in contact with poop and the bacterial nightmare my imagination would blow out of proportion--seasoned motherhood knows that yucky as poop is, the gameplan is still to turn messy baby into clean baby ASAP and panic, though helpful in other situations, usually does not significantly speed along a bath), and then Garrett made some excellent comments about Dad not leaving yet for work and asked to drive him to the railroad station. Driving Jake would give him an extra ten minutes to hang around, would get me and the kids in the car for a loop up the hill to let my friend's dogs out to pee, and would of course, of COURSE, allow us to get some Cait and Abby's, our bakery by the train station which magically yields cookies or muffins or chocolate croissants to Daddy when we drop him off and wait for his return from the pastry-filled depths of the station before heading to wait for his train.

So, we all hop in the car, we go to the station, Daddy gets out, Daddy comes back with a bag containing two smiley face cookies (for Alex and Bot) and two dinosaur cookies (for Dunc and G) a mini muffin (for Tim) and a chocolate croissant (there's a reason I never lost the baby weight from Timmy--and a lot of the baby weight came in the first place from the mysterious way chocolate croissants appease the queasy tummy). If you're wondering about Liam and Cory, they were off at a sleepover and therefore did not qualify for bakery privileges. Off we went to let out the dogs up the hill and then back home, where i settled everyone who went with me with their treats and when Alex and Bot appeared from sleeping in presented them with theirs. (Don't worry, Uncle Mark was home sleeping in as well, I didn't leave the dogs babysitting.) I put the Beloved blanket right in the washer so it might have a shot of getting clean and dry in time for Tim's nap, having thrown out the poopy crib sheet, Jake and I agreeing that a crib sheet that we've probably had since Liam was born was not worth the effort when we had plenty more of both cribs sheets and other laundry to expend the effort to redeem this one item (though once i realized that we really hadn't bought new crib sheets in forever and it might very well be one of our first crib sheets I did wonder if it should have some status as an antique and be restored.)

Timmy ate his muffin, but since he isn't an idiot and is my child he did not fail to notice that his treat had no chocolate and mine did, so he did convince me to part with a small piece to appease him and send him toddling off. I finished, took heart in my momentarily content tummy, and made the rounds of the ground floor. Collected a few plates, ordered G and Dunc to pick up the popsicle sticks they had dumped all over the playroom floor in order to recreate a crash scene out of a Thomas story, and came across a Tim with stuff on his face.

Now, in the past Jake's made fun of my tendency to check a baby's diaper by sticking my finger in the diaper. "That's one seasoned mom, to just stick her finger in there knowing what she might encounter..." I never thought much of it--it was often faster than getting a good view of the interior of a diaper, and if the child is poopy what better way to force yourself to change him promptly than to end up with poop on your finger? Changing the diaper involves poop anyway, so take child and finger to the baby wipes and everythign gets clean....

But this time I found myself picking up Timmy and, looking at his smudged face, I rubbed my finger at a smudge and licked it before I even realized that I was essentially making sure that this brown stuff was chocolate and not poop, and I was doing it in a most stupid of ways. Now, instinctively I'm sure I knew that this was surely chocolate because getting poop on the face is not a common toddler occurrence, gifted as they are for getting themselves into trouble and mess. But he did wake up covered in poop that morning, and the fact is I did check--by TASTING it.

Thank goodness it was chocolate.

Bot's Self-Esteem

It has been a little while since Sue has posted anything, so I'm putting out this email from January 2008. "Bot", of course, is Richard, our fourth child (of seven), who was seven when this was written. --Jake

OK, I admit I sometimes worry about my middle child--he truly is the forgotten child sometimes, and seems easily brought to tears, whether it's because he knows he did something he shouldn't, because Liam won't share Lego parts with him, because he's convinced that he will NEVER manage to buy the cool Bionicle Liam has when HE is twelve because he might never earn enough money and in five years Lego might not even MAKE that one anymore, because his world is miserable because he has to do homework, or because Duncan is crying and so Bot cries because I might just decide it's Bot's fault. So I tell him I love him even when he puts his shirt on backwards, skips brushing his teeth to get in more time reading Peanuts strips, and puts an extra juice box and four extra fruit snacks into his lunchbox, I make a point of fawning over his long eyelashes (from MY side of the family, I tell him) and the cute faint freckles on his nose, I tell him that he is quite good at saving his money and if Lego doesn't make that one by the time he has the money for it, I'll search eBay (which really means I'll dig it out of Liam's stuff and stick it in a shipping box), and otherwise try to find ways to bolster his confidence with comments on his intelligence, cuteness, kindness to babies, insightful questions, etc. (This makes it sound like I'm a much better mom than I am, because you may assume I do all this ego-boosting *regularly*, when in fact I'm lucky if I've done any of the lovely deeds I've listed more than once each--and when it comes to the HW tears, I have pretty much barked that HW is a part of life and these particular tears are forbidden till he's out of college because I'm not going through this melodrama four times a week. In fact, one time when he started with the whole, "WHY do we have to do homework? I don't think we should have to do it if we already know this stuff from doing it already IN SCHOOL! This isn't FAIR! Why do *I* always have homework, and for the next TEN YEARS!" I spat back that if he really wanted to debate the philosophy of homework he should take it up with Mrs. Carmody or Sister Lena and I'd be happy to schedule an appointment with them for that purpose right now if he said one more word to ME on the topic--and by the way, he didn't take into account college in his tally of homework years. He did his homework quietly, but as he went to put it in his backpack he muttered under his breath that if there was more homework involved he wasn't going to college, he'd be an adult by then and he'd have RIGHTS... Fine, I thought, one less tuition to pay and one more grunt for the USMC if you're *lucky*, or I'll throw you in the they-even-took-Uncle-Joe-the-dancer-so-go-cry-there Army, you little twerp...where was I? Oh, self esteem and my loving style of mothering Bot--see, I only thought it, I didn't say it OUT LOUD. Pretty darn loving given that he was whining about twenty subtraction problems while I was making his dinner, feeding his brother, doing his laundry, and putting up with his father.)

Anyway, it turns out that in all this focus on his intelligence and cuteness and his ability to make Tim smile and his finally being able to put his clothes on not-backwards after seven-point-five years on earth and my general love and fondness for my fourth-born, it seems I might have missed the trait that is the real key to his self-esteem...

Today was Bot's First Reconciliation, and I took him all alone to the service since juggling seven kids by myself (yes, Jake is at the annual sales meeting again, hopefully taking the time to read this so he remembers that Bot was introduced to another sacrament today and he should comment on such to the child when he returns) was not my idea of supporting and focusing on Bot--plus they designate each pew for two about-to-confess kids and their respective family members, and there's no way we'd fit in half a pew. All went well, Bot was adorably pleased and happy about the whole thing and says he got used to it while doing it this first time already and now that he's used to it we should go all the time. Good little Catholic boy! Since it wasn't a traditional throw-a-party occasion, still, it was an event in his life and Grandpa was over watching everyone else and so we stopped at the bakery on the way home to pick up a cake, just because. While we were backing out of the new pay-by-space-number parking by the train station, Bot was just blurting out words with gusto and randomness: "Credit card! Attention! No parking! Parking! Cake filling!" I was only half-listening as I was trying to navigate the crowded parking lot (so much easier in my dad's zippy little car--he has an Odyssey), and absently asked, "Is this just a random word-association thing you're doing?"

"Yes!"

"You're weird, you know that?"

He responded with such matter-of-fact pride: "Yes. It's what I like best about myself."

Apparently Bot has done some serious reflection between comic strip readings and has come to this bit of self-awareness. Weirdness--makes so much sense now that I know...So now all I have to do is keep pointing out how weird Bot is--a very simple task, way easier than giving compliments--and he should be happy, right?