Accommodating the Inchworm

Adventures in Potty-Training

2010-04-12T13:56:00.000-04:00

OK, we've had some interesting moments over the years, given that the boys all were tough nuts to crack (mostly because they couldn't care less about being wet or poopy, which made them less than motivated to stop thinking whatever grand Freivald thoughts they were thinking in order to figure out a path to a toilet) and G took four years or so to train, so I've had my share of wet and/or poopy predicaments.

Today's, however, was unusual in that I was snatching pee and poop from the jaws of success. sort of. Timmy is a little mimic, always wanting to do, eat, drink, see, go, hear, whatever anyone else is doing. (Those who say, "Well, in a big family I'm sure the little ones learn a lot from the older ones" have clearly not spent much time around Dunc or Alex, who were/are quite stubborn about not doing what others are doing or want them to do and quite shy for people who grew up in a crowd. Trust me, Tim is unique as a child in THIS large family, whether or not he's unique for a young child in A large family.) So it was not that hard to get him to sit on the toilet and to figure out that he was to pee while sitting there. I haven't pushed the underwear/self-initiating part of it, because when school is in I would rather wait till everyone is off and when everyone is off I want to wait until they're back at school--really, in which situation would I *choose* to spend my week cleaning and changing messy underwear? Roughly, the situation in which the child is with someone else that week is pretty much the only time I like to make that choice. Unless you want to come and take even a two-hour stint of an Underwear Watch, don't criticize.

But anyway, today I got K down for a nap while to boys were having lunch, and came down to find Tim just a couple feet from the bathroom in the classic "I'm way pooping in my diaper now" stance.

"Timmy, are you pooping?" I was so excited to catch him in the act.

"No." He was not so excited, but a peek in his diaper revealed that he had in fact just started a nice little poop and so I decided to be more proactive than I have been and plucked him up and plopped him on the toilet.

"See, you can poop on the potty! THIS is where the poop goes. You can do the rest in the potty!"

"Oh, yeah!" Long pause.

"Tim, are you done?"

"Yeah. I done." He seemed pretty done, so I started to wipe him--and couldn't figure out why I wasn't making any progress until on the next swipe he pretty much pooped right into the handful of toilet paper. Not the cute little poop that he'd started in his diaper, either, but nice, messy, mushy stuff that smeared all over his little toddler tush.

"OH, OK, so you're not done. Let's wait a bit." Nothing. Nothing at all. We both sat there and stared down into the toilet.

"Ready for me to wipe you?"

"Yup!" So I did. And once I got to the point where I felt he was pretty much cleaned up, I gave one last pass and--yup, right in my hand, which was moving, so it got smeared back all over his bottom.

"Hey, Tim?" Subtle grab of toilet paper and wiping of hand. "Stay here, don't move, finish peeing and pooping. I think I need some wipes at this point." (Note that I did add in the "peeing.") As i walked across the house, hand still poopy (I am nothing if not practical--I still have a messy bottom to wipe, and at this point I'm not discounting further contamination when I go to do it yet again, so why would I stop to wash the hand yet?), Alex was in ask- repetitively mode.

"Mom? Excuse me, Mom? Mom? Excuse me, Mom? Can I have chocolate milk? Mom? Excuse me, Mom, can I have chocolate milk? Uh, Mom?" One would think he'd bother to find me, see where I was, what I was doing, anything, but no, he was just wandering around the house fiddling with some Lego guy in his hands and asking and asking and asking. He does that, though, gets stuck in a loop and forgets what he was doing. I would bet he no longer even wanted chocolate milk at that point.

"Alex, I'm dealing with poop right now, don't ask me at this moment."

"OH, OK, Mom." I stripped off my sweatshirt--this was officially a Poop Incident now, and OK, I admit that I noted a pathetic glimmer of pride that I could get off a sweatshirt around a poopy hand while in motion and maintain hygenic clothing conditions--got the wipes with the clean hand, and made my way back to the bathroom just in time for it to no longer be Right This Moment anymore. "Hey, Mom? Excuse me, Mom? Can I have....Um, can I have....Um, excuse me, Mom can I have, um, uhhhh---"

"Chocolate milk, Alex? No, you can't. Still dealing with poop here." Alex couldn't decide whether to be happy he now knew what he'd wanted or disappointed that I still couldn't get it for him.

Into the bathroom, wipe off Tim, ask him one last time if he's REALLY done, and then I declared it time to wash hands (especially mine) and get him on the step stool. I was making a big fuss about what a big boy he is to poop on the potty and how nice and sudsy I can get our hands, when Tim started saying, "Oh, no! Oh, no!" And a sound that the back of my mind had registered just ten seconds before was belatedly identified and brought to the front on my mind--the sound of a stream of liquid on wood. Of COURSE. In all that pooping and wiping and sitting, of course he'd wait for the handwashing to PEE, even though I HAD MENTIONED that he should finish peeing AND pooping. I did. I really did.

"Tim, did you just pee on the sink door, honey?" (Note to self--once again tell Liam when he gets home that I'm sorry he's the first. If this had been my first and not my seventh, I would have been sobbing in frustration and disgust and generally flipping out over the need to sanitize half the house and bleach my hand.)

"No. I pee on my SOCKS. They WET--I need NEW socks. Oh no!"

So, I took off the socks, wiped down the sink cabinet, and found that the floor wasn't too bad because the pee had dribbled down onto Tim's pants. Washed hands again, plopped his wet stuff in the basement, found Tim a diaper, and took him up for a nap, where he and Bear and I had a nice talk about what kind of underpants he'd like to wear soon now that he's pooping on the potty and all.

I define "soon" as "some time before kindergarten if hell freezes over." Though if I can get poopy when he's sitting ON the toilet in what still qualifies as a mom-mitigated success, then I don't think I've got much to lose at this point.

Someday...

2010-03-31T15:57:00.001-04:00

Someday I'm going to be that old lady in church who waits until the second the harried mother who just finished an hour-long wrestling match with an infant and toddler while playing vacuum to every stray Cheerio and using long arms to tap various kids to either stand up, sit down, kneel, keep kneeling, stop stripping pieces off their blessed palms during the silent parts of Palm Sunday's gospel, sing, stop singing loudly while changing the lyrics to a Thomas the Tank Engine song, stop yawning, stop stretching, fold hands, look forward, do what I do, *don't* do what I do when I'm sitting to nurse the baby when everyone else is standing, or in general pretend to pay attention or LOOK more like they're paying attention if they actually are--yes, just one tap and a look can accurately convey the correct message, at least when you have God helping you on Sunday in church (think about it--outside of church you get kids saying, "What? I thought you meant that I shouldn't throw Legos at my brother ON PURPOSE, not that I couldn't throw them at ALL!" Inside church, a tap, a look, and the hands fold or the knees bend--if that isn't because of the grace of God I don't know what is)--anyway, after an hour of watching the mother struggle and feeling her embarrassment as her kids catapult themselves backward into my folded hands or use their palm to pretend to shoot laser rays up at me, I'm going to wait until that moment after the final song is done when she is about to tell them exactly how displeased she is, and then I'm going smile sweetly and say, "I just have to tell you what a *lovely* family you have. And they were all SO GOOD!"

I'm going to know that that mother knows that I'm full of it--she's going to look at my face and see it written right there, all the things I'd be annoyed at if I were her--but I won't be her anymore, I'll be the old lady making up for what I piled on my own kids by sparing some other frazzled mom's kids a scolding even though they don't deserve it (what's more Palm-Sunday-appropriate than that?), and I'll know that she'll have no choice but to force a smile, which after a moment won't be forced because she's going to have a second to think, yeah, they are a cute bunch, and they DID make it through the whole hour, after all, and well, gee, it's Sunday, maybe she should just not scold them right after church. And she will walk her kids to the car with a smile and maybe tell them "It's a good thing for you guys that lady stopped to say nice things about you! I was ready to explode!" And me, I'll go home and call my kids and tell them that I saw a mom who looked fit to be tied in church that day trying to deal with her kids, even though her kids were not being NEARLY as tough to deal with as my own were. IN fact, I'll probably ask them if they remember Palm Sunday in 2010, when Dad sang with the choir and Liam served Mass and I was stuck squashed into a pew with the younger seven on my own? And no one would have made it to the car alive, let alone have McDonald's that day, if it weren't for the old lady behind us stopping me after Mass...

How to take up running

2010-03-05T19:47:00.000-05:00

1. Put the baby in the stroller

2. Put the leash of the over-eager dog into the hands of your over-eager autistic teen

3. Realize your mistake for a split second as they immediately run yards and yards ahead of you up the hill

4. Race to catch up to, or at least keep within shouting distance of, the dog and the boy-with-much-longer-legs-than-yours

5. Keep the panic out of what's left of your voice as you tell the baby in the stroller in front of you that this is fun and your butt bouncing along three feet behind you that it had better try to keep up.

6. Continue for half an hour

Sue :)

P.S. My butt still hasn't made it home.

The Three Rules

2010-01-24T22:15:00.001-05:00

When Jake walked in the door today, I had just been drilling the kids on the new Three Rules For Dinner so they could recite them to him:

One: No talking with your mouth full
Two: No eating with your fingers
Three: No sticking forks in your diaper

It's been a day.

Since today is Tuesday, it started as every fourth Tuesday starts-- with a moment of mourning for how far downhill the house has gone just a week after its monthly cleaning. I then attempted to marshal some energy--Kay, after teasing me with a few days of sleeping through the night back when she was just three or four months old, is not sleeping through the night. It doesn't help that it's winter--in the middle of the cold dark night when one hardly wants to budge from under the covers oneself, there is something maternally primal about cuddling an infant close in a warm bed, protecting her from the harsh cold (though if a sixty-three degree bedroom can be considered harsh weather conditions by one's primal instincts, evolution is certainly heading in a wimpy direction.) So I was indulging in letting her sleep in bed next to me when she woke to nurse in the night--until she started to teethe. There is something primal about protecting one's body parts from sharp little infant teeth, too, you see.

So, lacking any energy or brain cells but also lacking a nanny or a school to send my first and fourth grader to, I proceeded with serving breakfast ("Bot, make your own oatmeal"), dressing and potty training ("OK Timmy, I've got your shirt and pants, you bring your penis and let's go to the bathroom"), laundry ("Alex, find me _Understood Betsy_ while I put this laundry in the washer,") reading ("Alex, where is Molly? And what's Betsy going to do? Good-- remember, if you can't tell me what's going on when I ask you, you are barred from Legos till dinner."), writing ("Alex, keep writing. Alex, keep writing. Alex, write the next letter without stopping-- withOUT stopping!"), and then, when three phone calls came in concerning the parent advocacy group I help head in our school district, I proceeded with changing and nursing K and confiscating all writing and drawing utensils from Timmy (since he will scribble on anything that isn't paper but especially favors permanent surfaces like tables, walls and floors) while talking on the phone. Then, remembering that it was Tuesday, which meant Messy Artist, which meant a chunk of the afternoon taken away, which meant this only mildly school-productive morning was even more irritating because we didn't have time to make up for it in the afternoon, it was now time for prepping lunch and scolding ("OK, back to school next week if you guys can't stop complaining whenever you have to write something or manage to stay on task when I have to walk away--Alex, are you listening? So show me you can finish that sentence...ALEX, I'm still sitting right here and you're still stopping! Alex, if you don't finish that sentence in the next five minutes there will be no Legos for the rest of the--wow, I'm impressed you can write that neatly when you write that fast, see, if you can do that when TIMOTHY JACOB NO MARKERS ON DOORS!" I do do positive reinforcement, really, but not on days when it took Alex 45 minutes to write one sentence but Timmy only 45 seconds to put pink marker on the glass door to the playroom and black pen on the dining room table in between dispersing crumbled green playdough to the four corners of the first floor.)

Off we went to Messy Artist, where Dunc's teacher agreed to give Timmy a test run for an hour. I took K out for a walk, going uphill to go by the duck pond, until it abruptly began to rain--and me with no hood, though K was covered well. Quickly went back downhill, and it stopped raining. In the meantime, Liam called because he'd arrived home from his midterms at noon and found no one home, and being the wonderful mom I am, I told him that since he'd just finished two exams, he could play Xbox once he had lunch since there were no little kids in the house--he had a little over an hour. In my house. Alone. And here I had paid a TERRIFICALLY HIGH amount, according to one grandma, just so I could walk in the rain with a baby. *sigh*

Only when we arrived home, Richard presented Liam with what he thought would be an appreciated gesture--Bot had found Liam's Buckyballs on the dining room floor this morning and picked them up to keep them away from Timmy. Buckyballs are little silver natural magnets, pretty darn strong little magnetic balls sold, of course, in the ThinkGeek catalog--Liam got them as a Christmas gift from a friend. Within seconds of Bot handing them over, I heard Liam grousing because six were missing and he wanted someone to grumble at over it. Now, there are 216 balls in a set of Buckyballs, and Liam was acting like his world had ended over six. In the meantime, I'm thinking, "There are six little magnetic balls likely on my floor, with a newly-crawling baby in the house."

So I called Liam over: "Liam T, there are six little magnetic balls likely on my floor, with a newly-crawling baby in the house. Forget trying to find out who is to blame for the loss of your Buckyballs and FIND them."

"But I thought I left them upstairs, and--"

"Clearly, you did not. They were downstairs."

"But I was SURE--"

"Liam, no one went up on the third floor, took them, then brought them down here and lost six. You left them downstairs, and chances are the person responsible for them ending up on the floor is two years old and you won't get any meaningful information from him. But I need to know they aren't on the floor right now, so go LOOK. And remember to check anything metallic they might be sticking to." When he groaned, I pointed out, rather pointedly, that he had just had two hours of no studying and hanging out in my house alone which happens to me almost, um, NEVER, so the loss of six little magnet balls out of a few dozens is not cause to claim a bad day and groan about it.

Then I got another phone call, just as G's bus was pulling up, so I got to cut the phone call short due to the bus' arrival but then had to deal with the fact that G had once again picked at his fingernails until they were bleeding. While going to clean up his hands, I got a call about carpooling for Bot and a friend--the other mom had a sleeping younger child, and since I had Liam and Cory home and the drive was literally two minutes down the road, I could drive there without taking all the kids.

While explaining over the phone upstairs (while pouring peroxide over G's fingers) that I'd be there in ten minutes to pick up Bot's buddy, however, Liam had concluded that his missing six Buckyballs MUST be behind the piano. (Subsequent debriefing revealed that Liam came to this conclusion not because he remembered leaving the balls there, but because he'd left OTHER items on the piano last night. To some extent this made sense, because as he pointed out, since he didn't remember leaving the balls downstairs at all, the fact that he didn't remember leaving them on the piano doesn't mean he didn't. Of course, it also didn't exclude anywhere else downstairs.) How best to get little magnetic balls that had fallen behind a piano? By making a string with the other 210 and hanging it down behind the piano so the hypothetically lost Buckyballs would be attracted to their brethren and then hauled to safety.

Not a bad plan, actually. Of course, he was hanging a string of magnets blindly down behind the piano with no clue what might be down there. And what was behind the piano?

An outlet with no outlet cover.

By the time I have come downstairs to explain to Liam that I was taking K and G with me to drive Bot and he had to keep the rest of his siblings alive for ten minutes, the piano was pulled out from the wall so that Liam could confirm that two Buckyballs had slid into the outlet where they could not be retrieved without probable electrocution and I could see that there were plenty miscellaneous items that had fallen behind the piano that were affected only by gravitational forces. I was quickly filled in on the situation, and as I was just trying to figure out if Liam had come close to being electrocuted and how high the "Oh. My. God." factor should be here, Liam melodramatically declared,"That's EIGHT missing now! I'm going to need a new set!"

Now, don't ask me why this, of all things, should have driven me nuts, but between time pressure for the carpool, not getting enough school done, not being able to get G to stop biting or picking at his fingers after many months, not being able to get the phone to stop ringing, and not being able to control the rain, I guess Liam's melodrama seemed like something I could actually control. Maybe.

"REALLY?!?! No, you do not NEED anything of the sort! You can LOOK for the six that were lost, we can shut off the circuit and get out, maybe, the two that are in the wall, but," and here I thought I could throw my closing comment out as I left to carpool and be done, "since you survived up until this past Christmas without Buckyballs, clearly you don't NEED them."

But Liam couldn't help himself from speaking. "Well, I didn't KNOW about them before Christmas, but now that I DO--"

"EXCUSE ME?" Liam turned around with a face that clearly showed that he knew he'd stepped in it. "Are you seriously contending that as of this past Christmas, when you got the Buckyballs, that they became a *necessity*? Do you really mean to say that you NEED a bunch of little magnets, and not just a bunch, but AT LEAST TWO HUNDRED OF THEM?"

"Well, I think it's 208 or 216, but, um, well..."

"There's no 'Um, well.' The answer is either, 'No, Mom, I don't actually need Buckyballs to survive' or it's 'Yes, I do need them to survive.' "

"Wull, I GUESS--"

"Guess? Shall we go through everything in your room so I can demonstrate to you just which things are truly NEEDED and which are NOT? Do you not understand what 'need' means or do we NEED to do that?"

"No, we don't."

"Clearly, you are overreacting. Clearly, so am I, but I do think that might not have happened if you had managed to not let your world, and mine in the process, get turned upside down because of EIGHT TINY MAGNETS. I don't want any more attempted inquisitions of any more of my children except Timmy--because you deserve the insanity that is trying to get an answer out of Timmy--about these Buckyballs. Bot kept the ones he found safe, you should thank him for that, you should sweep up all that stuff behind the piano and then push the piano BACK. You WILL NOT stomp, complain, yell, or otherwise carry on while I am gone because I WILL know about it. And when *I* decide Dad has nothing better he needs to do, we will tend to the magnets in the wall--until then, I do not want to HEAR about Buckyballs!"

"OK."

"Good." I glared at him, he frowned back, but it was fairly respectful frowning, so I took a deep breath and said, "I am going to leave now, and I will return calm, and I will find you calm, and this will be over." Always an optimist,I am. I left, with the remaining 208 Buckyballs in my pocket. And you know, once you start playing with them, they are pretty darn neat and addicting.

When I explained to Bot's buddy's mom that there were magnets in my wall, she burst out laughing, and then I realized that it really was funny but I could see Liam's frustration, too, because after all, who would have guessed there was a hole in the wall to suck up magnets? And he no doubt felt dumb that his idea wasn't as smart as he thought it was and then I came along and chewed him out. Poor kid...so I went home and made nice with him. If I could just remember what it was like to be 15 BEFORE I felt the frustration of being 38, he and I would be best friends. (I have SO much more empathy for my parents of 25 years ago now!)

So Liam and I were on good terms by the time Bot got dropped back off, and good thing, too, because Timmy had not napped and was being a total bear to all of us. When i told him that no, it was not time for chocolate chips, and no, he could not have the pasta yet because it was still cooking, and no, he could NOT write on the counter (at this point, all writing instruments were under lock and key, so where he kept finding them I don't know) and no, he could not whack Duncan with a dinosaur and call it "playing Star Wars," he ended up just howling in time out while I turned to Bot and Liam and actually said, hoping for some sort of humorous uplift, "Tell me, did we need a sixth boy? Is there something redeeming about Timmy right now that makes having a seventh kid worth it?"

Liam grinned, but Bot pretended to look thoughtful and said, "Nnnnnno, not that I can think of. Maybe when he was small and cute, but no, nothing now."

I looked at Liam. "You've got to have SOMETHING you can think of, right? I mean, he's our Timmy, it was worth having him for some reason--" A look at howling Timmy kicking the floor--"Right?"

Liam looked at me, "Well, I know there MUST be, but....Umm...Ummm..." We stared at him and thought.

"Well, when in doubt, look to Social Security. He'll still be paying taxes when you're getting benefits, right? There you go. He's worth it because in theory, he will help to pay for your Social Security."

The boys didn't look too sure--and i don't blame them, because at that moment Tim hardly looked like a future wage-earner or responsible taxpayer--but it was time for dinner, which is when Tim turned happy.

Only he was so happy that he was just spastic at the table, and while managing grace and the serving of the pasta while Tim was being loud and silly and goofy and just waaaaayyyyy too Timmish, the phone started ringing. I decided to ignore it, figuring it was just Jake telling what train he was or wasn't taking or a telemarketer, only it KEPT ringing, so Cory ran to get it as I barked at Tim, who was pounding his fork tines-down on the table over the exciting Parmesan cheese, and looked at the caller ID. It was in fact Jake. So I answered the phone.

"TIM-othy JA-cob. STOP pounding the TA-ble! WHAT?!? WHY did you have to call me TWICE? Don't you know I'm not answering the phone because Timmy is destroying our table?"

"But I only called once," poor Jake said. This was not the phone call he intended.

"It rang eight or more times! That has to be more than one attempted call, right?"

"Well, but, I only called once--to tell you I'm at Mountain Station but I don't need a ride." See, Mountain Station is only a 10 minute walk from us, closer than South Orange where Jake usually gets off because most rush-hour Midtown Direct trains don't stop at Mountain.

"Good, because a ride is not exactly what I was ready to give you, and why are you at Mountain, anyway? Bot, hand this plate down to Cory, and Liam, get Timmy his water before he drowns us all."

"I'm here because..,.this is closer, and the train stopped here." I was starting to figure out that Jake had come home a train earlier than his usual earliest, and was playing coy about it.

"Wait, but it was only five a little while ago, did you come home early?"

This is the part Jake was waiting for, the part when I melt with unexpected joy and gratitude because he's come home EARLY. You could hear his grin over the phone.

"Well, yes, I di--"

"TIMMY! GET THAT FORK *OUT* OF YOUR DIAPER!" All the kids looked at Tim, who was spinning around with the fork sticking tines-out, thank goodness, from the back of his diaper like a tail. Everyone laughed, and I told Jake, "It's been a day. Not all a bad day, mind you, but certainly a day, and I should get off the phone.

"OK, well, try to keep it not all bad until I get there, then." I unceremoniously hung up, got Tim in his seat, and proceeded to restore order by making each kid recite the Three Rules before i would hand over his or her plate. When it was Bot's turn to say, "No sticking forks in your diaper!" Cory got an evil grin on her face and said, "She didn't say anything about knives!"

"Corinne Elizabeth, if any of your little brothers now sticks a knife in his diaper or underwear, ever, you will be stuck accompanying me to the ER, even if I have to stop and pick you up from school on the way or wake you in the middle of the night!" So we were all laughing by the time Jake walked in.

"OK, guys, what are the Three Rules?"

Bot's Sense of Math

2010-01-08T15:17:00.001-05:00

I don't know how we got on the topic, but Bot told me how he and Cory had been talking about the time when Bot was in second grade and the school was rehearsing for the big Christmas concert. They were singing the Allelujah Chorus or whatever and Bot was basically not singing much at all, basically giving a half-hearted "Ah" once in a while, and since he was standing right by his teacher she caught on and instructed him during a pause between run-throughs, "Richard, you have to SING."

So Bot promptly burst out by himself, "AHHH! Lay LEW. YAH! AHHH! Lay-lew. YAH!" I pointed out that clearly his problem was not fear of having his singing heard if he could do that solo in front of everyone, and asked if Mrs. C had laughed at him. He said no, she had given him the "One more time and I'm giving you a white slip!" warning--and rightly so, given that this was a full-primary-department rehearsal and some maintaining of order was necessary.

But Cory had pointed out that if Mrs. K had heard that, she would have been rolling on the floor, which got us talking about when he DID get Mrs. K to laugh.

Mrs. K was Cory and then Bot's third grade teacher, and she was THE teacher at Aquinas--she was funny, unpredictable, enthusiastic, demanding, motivating, respected and VERY well-loved. And she passed away last year part-way through Bot's year with her, so the kids are still fond of reminiscing about her.

He began telling me a story about a time when she was doing her "Sister Jeannette" thing (her first name was Jeannette) in which she acted like a stereotypical old-fashioned nun, smacking her ruler on her desk and barking out multiplication facts, expecting immediate answers.

So when she smacked her ruler down and barked, "Seven time nine IS?"

Bot responded immediately, "Y plus 26!" and she howled.

Who Needs Fancy Kick Toys?

2010-01-07T10:05:00.001-05:00

Go to Toys R Us and you will no shortage of toys that are dedicated to, or include in part the capability to "stimulate gross motor development" by giving the baby something to kick. We once had one such device that tied onto the side of the crib and featured huge piano keys that played different notes when the child kicked them (it could also be laid flat for the child to smack at or step on.) The colors and sounds were supposed to elicit and reinforce the act of kicking--and when you think about it, what every new parent needs is for the child they have to change up to a dozen times a day to be really good at kicking his legs while on his back in diaper changing position, right?

When we had this toy, it was one of Liam's ten toys--I swear, all the toys Liam had to play with his first year fit into one 18-inch wide shelf area in the entertainment center, plus the swing, walker and the piano-keys-kick-encourager. And the kid had little or no interest in the piano keys--what I'm supposed to take away from that is that he might have been a super athlete in some sport if I'd encouraged this activity, but I just remember that he was an angel to change except that he tended to pee when his diaper was opened. (Someone should come up with a musical toy that encourages parental dryness during diaper changes in infancy. Maybe an air horn sounded just before the diaper is opened that shocks the child into voiding immediately into the diaper and then lying still in shock during the changing process. What? What did I say?) Now we have lots more baby and other toys accumulated over the years and the kids play with approximately 3682 of them--all of which are Legos.

I can't say the subsequent babies are any more interested in the various toys than LT was--the best things are still the swing, the walker, and the silicone spatula. But I admit, it's hard to look at all those bulky baby toys and not be tempted. "Oh, it's so colorful, and maybe she'll grow up to be a lying-down-on-her-back soccer star!" I mean, once in a while a toy catches their interest and pays off--Duncan and Tim as infants like the playmat with the arches from which cute toys hung to give them something to look up at until they figured out how to roll over about ten minutes later, for example. K is now placed on that mat, without the arches, in the kitchen because it's small enough to fit in the kitchen and gives her some traction for getting up on all fours, something that's tough to do on a smooth floor when one is covered in winter baby clothes with no exposed knees or feet to use as non-skid surfaces.

It was while on that mat, flipping all around, that she found her own excellent kick-encourager. It doesn't play music, it isn't colorful, it just moves out and snaps back. It's the cat door to the basement. (Picture below--the blur in her left hand is the trusty spatula.) She hit it accidentally, and has been kicking and kicking and kicking it in over and over. All I need to do is start tossing a mini-soccer ball at the door from the other side and her athletic training is begun. Her other favorite activity during her kitchen floor time this morning has been peeling off the paper tape on a box in the corner, just out of sight in the picture--this not only encourages fine motor skills with her hands but also social interaction with her mother, as I have to get up every 1.3 minutes to take away the bit she peeled during the 1.73 seconds it takes her to realize it's free, look at it, and starts to move it toward her mouth, and do it while being so cheerfully distracting that she isn't pissed that I'm taking something out of her hands. (Which begs the question, which one of us is being trained here?) One might argue that I should have her play with something that is not an ingestion or choking hazard, but all that pretty plastic stuff is just not as challenging or enticing as a brown box with paper tape, and I DO want her to be a genius, right?

Alex's Latest Thing

2009-12-30T00:10:00.001-05:00

Alex's latest thing, other than SCOLDING HIS BROTHERS IN ALL CAPS when they infringe on his Legos (and, since he shares his room with a 2-yr-old and keeps Legos in that room to play with in the morning when he wakes ups and his hollering at Tim wakes ME up, this is a frequent and very wrath-inducing occurrence) is to complain as if the world is ending in earshot of someone who might be able to give him the answers or items he seeks, instead of, say, asking politely.

For example, "I'll bet we'll NEVER have dinner ever again!" subs for "Mom, could you please tell me when we'll be eating dinner?" And I'm sure you can all guess how much patience I have for such a combination of complaint and melodrama.

So tonight when he wandered into the kitchen and muttered, "I wonder WHEN dinner will be!" I coached him along.

"Well, you'll have to keep wondering since you can't seem to find anyone to ask politely about dinner time."

He gave a huge sigh and said, "Mom, could you please tell me when dinner is?"

I looked at the timer. "In twenty-eight minutes."

A pause, another sigh. "Mom, could you please tell me how long 28 minutes is?"

I admit, I was stumped.

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(I eventually told him, "Long enough for you to have an apple while you're waiting." Hey, dinner was Spaghetti Pie, so I knew he'd eat it, plus he loves apples and apples are fruit and healthier than the spag pie he was waiting on, and there is probably no other non-Lego item that could keep him occupied for even a fraction of 28 minutes...)

Interfaith Playdates, 2009 (or 5770, if you like)

2009-12-06T21:21:00.002-05:00

Across the street we have a cute Bot-aged little guy who USED TO COME OVER AND SPEAK IN ALL CAPS AS HIS WAY OF MAKING SURE HE WAS HEARD AND HEEDED AT ALL TIMES. Sometime between now and Jake sitting at the Blue and Gold Cub Scout dinner at the same table with the kid and worrying that three feet was not outside the spitting-bread-while-TALKING-IN-ALL-CAPS range of this child, he has matured in all respects and is even known to speak in quieter tones -- when I can hear him over Bot, who has TAKEN TO TALKING IN CAPS WHEN HIS FRIENDS ARE OVER.

Anyway, back when we first met him, he and Liam has a lengthy discussion in the back of the van one day about the differences between Jews and Christians. I can't remember the details, but I remember they were adorably serious to the point of hilarity. The kid clearly is well aware that he is Jewish and that Christians and Jews are different, and is eager to point out and mention these differences at every opportunity.

So yesterday, after sending the boys outside....Well, I sent them outside under some duress. You see, joining these Friday playdates recently are Chris and Gabe, our beloved buddies from our old house on Gregory. Since Nikki picks them up from school, she can also pick up Truman so I don't have to drive up the to the school and retrieve him from the After School program after Garrett's bus comes in. One Friday, Nikki went to pick up Tru as she'd been doing for three Fridays and Truman insisted that his dad was picking him up and he was not coming to my house that day. I called to inform the dad of this, since After School only goes to a certain point in the afternoon and I didn't want him to miss the closing time and get charged for late pick-up because he thought Tru was with me. The dad informed me that no doubt his son simply wanted to play on the computer in the computer lab, but he had plenty enough time on the computer in general and he should have more time with his friends playing and running and using his imagination, and that he would inform his son that if Nikki or I ever came to pick him up, he should go with us.

So when they showed up at my house with Chris and Truman extolling the virtues of Club Penguin, some children's online thing I've heard about because Truman lent his Club Penguin Handbook to Bot and Bot kept leaving it all over the house and I kept carefully putting it aside because it was not one of our books and I knew the kid would want it back when I was least expecting it, I put off letting them go on the computer by telling them that they should go outside now while it was not yet dark to see the two plastic playhouses we recently acquired (Kayleigh made friends with a lady in line at Bed Bath and Beyond who had one fourteen-yr-old and was getting rid of the little-kid toys in her yard, so she gave me her number and we went and got a little plastic log cabin from her. While Jake was heroically taking the thing apart, a friend of hers called and asked what she was doing, so she told her about this guy with eight kids taking her log cabin apart and the friend said, "Hey, we have a cute little house like that in our yard the kids don't play with anymore, do you think he wants another one?" I'm set to open a daycare in our yard if my own kids didn't already put me over the required child/adult ratios...)

"So, we have to go outside?"

"Yeah, you can go outside! One of the houses has a doorbell! And I'll bring your snack out there--hurry up, before it gets dark, you only have a little while before it gets dark!"

Out they went. When they came in and stated solemnly, "Um, Sue?

It's getting dark, so...."

I knew they were looking to get on the computer, but I put on a clueless look. "It is? OK, here!" and handed them a flashlight.

The conversation didn't go they way they expected, but hey, they had a flashlight, so back out they went. When they finally came in for good, I let them go on the computer, but after half an hour I called in to Bot that they only had five minutes. Chris came out and said, "Wow, and Bot hasn't even had a chance yet!"

Turns out Truman had "helped" Bot get a few items for his penguin, and play a few games, and such, and so when I explained that if your hand is on the mouse, it's your turn, so if it's not your turn, your hand must be off the mouse, and so on. Then I got a long litany of "And then I.....And then I....And then I....." concluding with "And now the screen is just sitting here and won't DO anything!"

"Oh, well, gee, I'm sure Liam could help you but he and Nick are playing Xbox and Nick has to leave soon for his hockey game, so I hate to interrupt them. Go do something else until the older boys are free." No way I was going to let on that *I* could possibly be of any help.

Then lots of complaining and whining started about who did what wrong to mess up whose turn (and yes, Truman, in his painful withdrawal from the computer, began to complain that he never even GOT his BOOK back), so I walked by, handed them the book, and pointedly and loudly commented, "WOW, if this is what it's like when you guys get on the computer, maybe we should avoid the computer from now on, or even things with any screen at all..." Suddenly people got a lot more cheerful-sounding.

So while I was making a lame Friday night dinner with Garrett--hot dogs wrapped in crescent roll dough--I heard some more imaginative play, and was happy. But then I began to hear lots of references to "Jewish people" and "Christians" coming from the living room, so I finally got to a stopping point and went around the corner to listen in.

Truman was sitting in the chair with a Santa hat, and Bot was just hopping off "Santa's" lap. "OK, now pretend you're Jewish!" Truman ordered.

Bot hammed it up with a melodramatic, "I'm Jewish, but I want presents, too, Santa!"

"Santa" then directed, "Then I tell you that I'm Jewish, too, and you kick me in the balls."

Needless to say, this is when I began to SPEAK IN ALL CAPS FOR A WHILE.

The Sheet and The Horn

2009-12-02T21:52:00.002-05:00

No, this is not a new way to wake Jake. In fact, these days Jake is much earlier and quicker out of bed than I am, but then, that's only if you don't count the multiple night feedings of Miss Kayliegh, who is so darn cute and good that we kind of overlook the fact that she isn't all that into solid foods--though we got pumpkin pie into her over Thanksgiving and I might just have to start making it regularly if it's all she'll eat--and that she wants to cuddle in a nice warm bed at night firmly attached to her milk supply and getting in 2/3 of her nourishment while she's too half-asleep to get distracted as happens during the daytime. Plus, let's face it, Jake's making up for about five years of travel days and a decade or so of sleeping in every morning because it never occurred to either of us that Jake could get a child up and out the door to school by himself unless I was in the hospital having a baby and my folks were around to help. Now, of course, his job consists of getting up, waking Cory and Liam, crawling back into bed while they get themselves dressed and fed, then getting up to walk down the street to wait with Cory at the corner for a couple minutes and coming back and crawling back into bed. It was not so simple when Liam was 5, 6, 7...

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Once upon a time, when Liam and Garrett were tiny little people, Jake was reading about language development. Nothing, of course, of any real practical value to raising a toddler and infant, but interesting anyway. One of the bits of trivia was that when a child was still too young to pronounce words correctly, he still knew how the word SHOULD sound. And so, if a child was pointing at a fish and said, "Tish!" and you repeated, "You see a tish?" the child would get mad or say no, because they knew they weren't looking at a "tish" but at a "fish." Over the years, we have seen this displayed in toddler after toddler--the challenge is to figure out what they're saying, so you keep making educated guesses based on context and the sounds coming from the child until the child stops his frustrated, "NO!" and finally says, "Yeah!" For example, trying, "You want to prune the hedges?"

"NO!"

"I think he means the music, Mom," a helpful brother suggests.

"Oh! You want to hear Michael Hedges?"

"YEAH!"

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The thing is, Timmy doesn't do the "NO!" part. I think in his mind he assumes that we also don't know how to pronounce things properly, and so just like we accept his mispronunciations, he accepts ours. Problem is, this does absolutely nothing to further our understanding of what the heck he's talking about.

"Mom, Mom, we tach de ooving umna timmas tee dif marlee bounds fends im payoom."

"You took the Christmas tree to the playroom?"

"Yeah!"

"Oh, great!" Hmmm, we have no Christmas tree yet, so what is going on in that playroom? Well, what's going on is simply that they are going to watch the movie about the Christmas tree with Charlie Brown's friends, in the playroom. And he needs me to figure out the correct input for the DVD player so the thing starts. But I have no clue my help is needed, because I think Tim bought a Christmas tree and put it on the playroom and he's perfectly happy with this. Five minutes later, the movie is not working and he's distraught.

"Is it the Christmas tree?"

"YEAH!"

If the kid would just stop answering in the affirmative every time we're not denying him chocolate chips (he knows how to howl NO then, trust me) life would be much simpler.

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So this morning, there's Timmy, holding a play sword--oh no! A weapon toy! It occurred to me recently, as I was instructing my kids on the rules regarding Nerf guns, including "Never point one of them at anyone's face, even if you think it's not loaded" that practicing such caution and respect for the Nerf was not a bad thing to practice. But some of my enlightened friends are strictly anti-gun, anti-play-weapon of any sort, under the idea that that this would teach them to be violent and any contact with guns would predispose them to using guns in the future and desensitize them to the serious harm they could do with a weapon. My assertion that kids tend to use sticks or whatever's around to play-fight anyway, so why not let them play while teaching ground rules, fall on stubborn "violent games are evil, we must shelter them" ears. (Let's leave aside that their kids hit, bite and punch each other as much, if not more so, than mine do--yeah, the violence is all in the toys!) And yet these same folks think early sex education is important because after all, they're going to have sex one way or another, right? Might as well teach them all they need to know to do it safely. (The question is, have I just shot down their attitudes toward weapon toys or my own attitude toward early sex ed?)

However, one of the biggest "No guns" people commented to me when her then-5-yr-old came over and Liam made him and Bot long "guns" made out of Legos and then took them outside to play with them: "At first he came home and said he wanted to build guns and play war outside, and I was thinking, 'Oh, no, the Freivalds have brought guns into the house!'" Like we were known for guns before that? "But then my husband realized that this game pretty much involved Child making a gun by himself for an hour or two, then sitting his dad down in a chair in the backyard while Child pretended to shoot him from behind trees. So my husband took a book out to his designated chair and decided this was the best game ever!" It appears we're not such a bad influence when we further other people's benign neglect of their children and leisure reading time. They're welcome, but don't thank us. Thank guns.

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Anyway, Timmy had a sword, and he held it up and announced, "I de sheet and da HORN!" There was NO mistaking the "h" sound in the "horn," it was clearly pronounced.

"You have a sheet and a horn?"

"Yeah!" And he gave me a fierce look and held up the sword like we were facing off to do battle.

"A horn, Timmy?"

"Yeah, da SHEET and the HORN!" Brandishing his weapon again.

"You sure about that?"

He looked a little uncertain, and lowered his sword. "Sheet and horn, Mom."

OK, let's look at context. Nothing like a sheet around. Let's work with horn. He's holding a sword, there's the "or" sound in both, but he was very clearly saying "horn."

I pointed to it. "Is this your horn, Timmy?"

"Oh, yeah." He looked at the sword. "Horn."

"It's a sword."

"Oh, yeah, thord." No indication that he found anything wrong with the fact that five seconds ago that thing was a "horn." Maybe he was just mildly impressed I'd learned to pronounce it.

"So, you have a sheet and sword?"

"Yeah, SHEET and THORD!"

Ah! "SHIELD and sword? Is that what you're talking about?"

He gives me a DUH! look and says, "Yeah, sheed and thord. I hab da SHEED and da THORD!" Revert to fierce face, sword out, looking as intimidating as one can be at two feet tall in bare feet and a penguin shirt. Someone want to tell me how the child can manage a "th" and "sh" and not a basic "s" sound? Linguistically, Tim is just confusing.

Let's leave aside the fact that he had no shield, and that toys, most especially swinging-around things like swords in the hands of toddlers, are not allowed in the kitchen where hot things, sharp things, and the remnants of Mom's sanity live. The kid is too darn cute and way too willing to accept our mistakes in interpretation to help me figure out a lot faster that he's pretending to be a knight. A knight that says, "sheet," no less.

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OK, now Alex is asking of we're taking to day off from school (and he looks so truly shocked when I say no!), I suppose I should go pretend to teach them something,

Conserving Water

2009-11-17T22:13:00.001-05:00

So, when we got this front-loading washer way back when in the old house, we found out that it used much less water per load than the old top-loader we had, even though it had a much larger capacity. This is a very good thing.

In part, of course, because it conserves water, leaving more water for the fishies in the ocean and for all of us to drink and blah blah blah.

In part because as our family grew, and the number of loads of laundry done in a month increased, those gallons saved each load added up to a difference in our water bill, I'm sure, though I've never done the math to figure out just how much more we'd be spending if we still had the top loader. (If i knew exactly how many loads of laundry I did in a month, I would either immediately feel exhausted at the thought, despair that even with that many trips up and down the stairs with laundry baskets I'm still in awful shape, lord it over anyone I know who thinks about laundry in a weekly instead of daily sense, or realize that I'm more justified than ever in getting one of the even larger washers currently on the market and would immediately spend our Christmas budget on one. At least the kids would be crying in clothes washed in fewer separate loads, right?)

But most of all, it's a good thing because when one tries to figure out why the laundry coming out of the washer feels just a bit more sodden than it usually does and eliminates the lint trap as the culprit by putting on a new one, and then checks the drainy-thingy by taking the front panel off and unscrewing the cap at the bottom of the washer to check the drain for baby socks and Legos and then replaces it but forgets to twist it one last time to *completely* seal it and then starts the washer because a set of queen size sheets is needed before the cleaning ladies come, then the number of gallons of water that drain onto the basement floor because of the not-quite-totally-screwed-on-cap-thing is not more than can be absorbed by a pile made up of two-plus loads of clothes generated yesterday just because all ten of us managed to walk around dressed plus nine beds' worth of sheets plus four week's worth of "Gee, I haven't looked under here since the last time the cleaning ladies came!" found laundry. (Yeah, they only come once a month now--that, plus cutting down on pizza plus cutting down on tuition by homeschooling two of the urchins is how we're swinging Liam's high school right now. Did you know that one can find over $200 a month just by not ordering pizza for ten every week? And that when you can no longer call for pizza at least once a week the copay for therapy still leaves a decent monthly savings, though when you order pizza just twice a month and forego therapy in lieu of just a few more maternal tantrums it pretty much comes out the same and you still get to indulge in garlic knots?) A few more gallons and even Mount Laundry might not have soaked it all up....

At least having all the laundry sopping wet now will motivate me to get it all washed as quickly as possible. Which I could do much more efficiently if I had an even larger washer and dryer....

Alex is Soooo Learning

2009-11-11T06:53:00.000-05:00

Alex does, I admit, often seem pretty darn clueless. He's bright enough, but if his mind is elsewhere getting it HERE can be exasperating. So today we were supposed to go over verb tenses, concentrating only on the three most graspable for first graders: past, present and future. So I explained what each was, and then used the verb "play" as indicated in the helpful little notes to show the tenses. "So I would say, 'Yesterday I PLAYED.' Right?"

He stopped looking off into space and said, "Oh, yesterday is in the PAST, right?"

"Yes, I just said that. So I would say 'Yesterday I....' I what?"

Alex just stared up slightly to my left. "I don't know." *sigh*

"OK, past tense, I would say, 'Yesterday I PLAYED.' Present tense is right now: 'Today we play.' Then future is :'Tomorrow we will play.' See? Past, present, future. See, right now is present, so I'd say, 'Duncan is sitting on the couch because he took the cushions off the playroom sofa which made my very mad.' Later, we can say, 'Duncan sat on the couch this morning because he took all the cushions off the playroom sofa,' because this will be in the past by then. Or we could say, 'Tomorrow Duncan will sit on the couch when he takes the cushions off the playroom sofa again.' See?"

At least I had him smiling now (though Duncan was glaring at me from his time-out on the couch), but I had no idea if he was actually absorbing any of this.

"So, your assignment is to take what you copied yesterday for handwriting and make it past tense. What does this say?"

He read the passage. " 'I will give you wisdom,' God said. 'I will also give you riches and honor.' "

"So, what tense is that?"

He gave a bored look and half-yawned, "Pres--" then he suddenly went alert and said, "Ah, future! It's future!"

I was actually surprised. "Yes! And so what would it say if it was past?"

"It would be, 'I GAVE you wisdom!' " he stated confidently.

"Great! And the second part?"

" 'I also GAVE you riches and honor.' "

"That's right! So your assignment is just to write that." I was kind of feeling guilty that I had doubted he could get it that easily, when he twisted the knife even more.

The little imp gave a hint of a grin as he looked sideways at me and asked, "OK, but can that be FUTURE?"

"Future?"

Slowly his smile grew because he knew he was being an imp, so he tried to keep turned away as he shot quick sideways glances at me. "Like future tense, so I WILL write it LAY-ter?"

OK, if the kid had whined, complained, begged, or flat-out asked if he could do it later, I would not have entertained it for a second. But for that little hesitant bit of wit, with that self-conscious, sly little smile? Well, I'm a bit starved for wit, you know, being married to Jake, so here it is, 11pm and I still haven't decided that the future is now present.

Cory's Learning

2009-11-09T22:34:00.000-05:00

Cory was offered her first mother's helper job for tomorrow--all we need to do is figure out how much to tell the mom to pay her. Having it brought to my attention that Cory is more than capable of handling children (something I know but was not thinking about specifically until we got the email), while I was bobbling K at the kitchen table and doing homework with G and having Cory making baby talk at K, I asked her if she felt up to putting K down to bed.

"All you do is lay her down, and she'll probably smile at you and stick up her feet."

Kay gave a grin and a chuckle to demonstrate.

"Then you give her her sheep, and she'll grab it and shove her face into it and stick up her feet and roll over on her side, all happy, and so--"

Cory then went into a high-pitched Russian accent for no real reason I could see, as she grinned down at K and said, "And zen you valk avay and try to ignore her pitiful cries of desperation! Right?"

I agreed that yes, she pretty much had the basic idea, I just didn't see while such melodramatic descriptions called for Russian accents. And I handed the baby right over.

Concerns about Cory's Confidence

2009-11-08T22:09:00.001-05:00

So, I took Cory to her 11-yr-old well-child. Yes, she's 11.5 and her birthday is in April, but since the old pediatrician's office was convinced that all insurance companies would only cover well-child visits if it was at least 12 months after the last one (which may have been true for our insurance, who knows) and since the same pediatrician's office was always booked into the next month or beyond, and also in part because maybe the mom in question (that would be me) wouldn't always be thinking eight weeks in advance for well-child visits and would be calling just before or after the anniversary of her last check-up, over a decade or so the physical got pushed later and later in the year. Then it got pushed back two extra weeks because after I arranged for Grandpa to come down on a Tuesday to watch the other kids so I could go and pick her up from school at 2:40 to make a 3:00 appointment which would get done in time to pick up Liam from jazz ensemble practice (his school is conveniently located close to the doctor's office) and have us home by 4ish, all very efficient, Cory called me while I stood in the parking lot waiting for her to come out of school to tell me she had forgotten I was picking her up and was on her bus heading home, oops. So, after a $50 no-show fee and a quick reschedule, we got Cory in on a Monday at 3pm--which is a kind of stinky day since my dad babysits my niece on Monday and everyone else in the world has to pick up their own kids from schools at that time, BUT at least G has an after school program so I would not have to worry about him getting off the bus while I took everyone else along to the doctor.

Then I did my once-monthly glance at Facebook and saw a friend list her status as "Trying to find childcare for a not-very-sick toddler so I can make a meeting tomorrow morning. He doesn't have a fever, but these germophobic days I might bother other moms taking a coughing kid in to preschool..." I figured that this could be either a plea for assurances that a coughing kid could go to preschool or a subtle fish for someone who might take her toddler during this meeting, and so I called to offer to watch the little one the next morning if Bot, Alex and Dunc could hang at their house while I took Cory to the doc's. It was a deal, especially since her husband was working from home that day and--he could go grab her kids from school while she let our boys hang out and play Legos. (Someone ELSE'S Legos are even BETTER than the regular kind!)

So, this is a long way of getting to the part about how I ended up in the pediatrician's office with just Cory, Timmy, and Kayleigh (on a Monday--which, stinky day as it is logistically it worked out pretty well and is totally irrelevant to the story.) All the doctors in this practice ask the same standard questions at well-child visits to check on the social/emotional well-being of the kids--since my kids only go to a physical once a year (or so) and we've only been with this practice for two years, they aren't so familiar with these questions (though one mom times six verbal-well-child's a year means *I* am very familiar with these questions) and so are either taken aback or take way too much time to answer accurately and thoroughly when the purpose could be served with a simpler, shorter answer. For example, when they ask, "How are you doing in school?" a simple, "Fine, my grades are good" would suffice, but Liam might answer, "Well, let's see, in Biology I'm doing fine, really fine! But I'm not doing so well in World History--I mean, I'm not failing, but I did miss a homework and so that pulled my grade below a 90 and so my mom won't let me watch TV or use my computer for games and stuff-- they have to let me use it at least somewhat because my school is laptop-based and I need to either email in my assignments or use the internet for research or use Edline to look up my assignments and grades--but they won't let me play games on my computer or watch TV until I get the grade back up to a 90 for the quarter, which will be easy since it's early in the quarter, y'know, so there aren't many grades yet so the 97 I just got on today's test will pull that way up easily, I just need my teacher to post it online so my parents can confirm it...So, that's Bio and World History, what's left? Um, Latin--"

"Well, that's OK, it sounds like you're doing fine as long as you remember your homework. What's your favorite subject?"

"Oh, my favorite? Hmm, well, that's kind of a toss up between geometry, religion, and biology. I'd have to really think about that, because actually I like World History a lot, too--"

"That's fine, you like more than one subject--great! Do you take part in activities at school, too?"

"Yeah, I do the jazz ensemble--only not many people are showing up for that and it would be really great if we could get a drummer to come consistently--and Ultimate, though that's not through school because we don't HAVE an Ultimate Frisbee team at my school, but I'm hoping to start one in the spring. I play with the team in South Orange, you know, Columbia High School? Then I have Boy Scouts, though that's ALSO not through school, that's in my town, and I still do origami--I was probably doing that last year when I had my last physical, too--"

"Good, you seem to be very well-rounded! And you have a good group of friends?" At this point I could see that she's shifted to a more yes-no slant to her questions in the hopes that Liam would give a short answer, so when he takes a deep breath and starts to explain about his school friends, his West Orange friends, his friends who are not from West Orange OR school, etc I finally have pity on the woman and simply say, "Liam, she just wants to know if you have friends, not who they all are."

"OH! Yeah, uh, I have friends." And so on.

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Cory was a bit more astute at getting the purpose of the questions, but she had me in stitches anyway--only unlike Liam, she set out to entertain. She was all ham that day. It started innocently enough.

"What school do you go to?"

"Aquinas Academy--see?" as she points to the name on her gym sweats.

"Oh, that's in Livingston, right? Do you like it there?"

"Oh yeah, I love it there! It's great." Little shrug, merely a statement of fact.

"Good! And do you have a favorite subject?"

An almost airy, "Eh. I like them all, I guess."

"And how are your grades? You're doing OK?"

"Oh, yeah, yeah, they're all OK." Little wave of her hand to brush off such silly concerns.

"And are you in any activities?"

At this one Cory glanced over at me as I wiggled Timmy on to one leg while holding K on the other because I'd given a little snort. "She certainly IS!" I groaned. Cory grinned, and then looked at the politely perplexed doctor and said, "She has to drive me everywhere. I'm in basketball, and band, and I take piano, and I'm in the principal's council, and Student Council, and Girl Scouts, and Builder's Club--"

"What's that?"

"Oh, Builders Club? That's like a service organization in our school."

"Wow, so you're in a lot of things, and you're doing well in school, I'm guessing you have plenty of friends...?"

I answered, "Yes, she's fine there, too."

And Cory kind of waved her hand and shook her head as she declared matter-of-factly, "Oh, yeah, everyone likes me, I'm awesome."

Totally straight face--the doctor turned and looked at me, uncertain whether Cory was serious or joking or what.

"As you can see, self-esteem is not a problem with her." I gave a wry grin, and the doc grinned back, and then Cory decided to wrap up her act.

"Oh, YEAH, my self-esteem is GRRRREAT! NO problems there." She was able to hold the straight face for about five more seconds, and then finally broke into a smile that revealed that she knew just how much of a cocky little ham she was being.

Today's Quotes

2009-11-02T13:23:00.001-05:00

I was putting Dunc on Lego.com for his ten minutes of privilege, and as the page was loading I told him, "OK, here we go."

Dunc gave me a big smile, stuck one foot up in the air behind him as only he can, and gave me a hammy, "THANK yoooouuu, my lady!"

Alex grumpily answered from where he was reading his assignment, "Duncan, you can't say that. She's not yours."

Duncan gave the effective "Yes, she is!" argument.

"No, she is NOT. She belongs to dad." I was busily "making the window big" for Dunc to buy more time to listen.

"What?" was Dunc's witty reply.

"She's with dad, like they're MARRIED, so she's with him. NOT you."

"Waaaaahh?"

"She's his, not yours, that's what I'm saying."

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You know what else Alex has been saying? "I'm going to kick your butt." I know this not because he's said it to me, but because when I had Tim outside, eating his yogurt out in Nature while he swung in the toddler swing, and his foot bonked into me, he began to giggle and say, "I kick your BUSS! Mom, I KICK you BUSS!" and in the depths of my maternal subconscious audio files I was pretty sure it was Alex saying that in the background recently.

#

And Bot, who has discovered that Mom will pay pretty well for vacuuming and who is, unlike Liam and Cory, a kid who will proactively go after sources of extra income, agreed to vacuum the ground floor today. I made it clear that I wanted this done over the lunch hour(s), so while i was nursing K he came in lugging the vacuum and looked down. "Dang! The kitchen really DOES need to be vacuumed! Look at this floor" I love how having to clean something makes them suddenly un-blind to messiness....Though speaking of vacuuming, my effective get-them-to-pick-up ploy of telling Alex that if they don't pick up, the cleaning ladies (who only come once a month now, but they don't know that) or I will end up vacuuming up Lego pieces is causing Dunc trauma. One morning I told him I would need his help picking up so I could vacuum in the playroom, and he began to pick up while i started to vacuum the dining room and living room. Then I called him in to eat his oatmeal five minutes later when it was done cooking, but once I settled him with his oatmeal and turned the vacuum back on, I saw him go by the other side of the dining room table and head for the playroom.

Stop vacuum. "Dunc, go eat your breakfast before it gets cold."

"OK." Back toward the kitchen.

Start vacuum. Dunc comes by and goes back to the playroom.

Stop vacuum. "Dunc, is your oatmeal done?"

"No."

"Go eat it, then!"

"OK." Heads back to the kitchen. Start vacuum....

I won't tell you how many times I repeated this pattern before deciding to get to the bottom of this. Let's just say that it was more Dunc's increasing distress than my intelligently stopping the pattern that eventually led to a tearful, "But MOM! I didn't finish picking UP the playroom!"

"You can do that after you eat."

"But you're VACUUMING! The pieces will get all sucked up!' That last sentence ended in a practically inaudible little squeak of a cry. Dunc is a master of ending sentences in a pitifully heartbreaking squawk, complete with pathetic frown and big sad eyes and not a trace of phoniness or deliberation.

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh...." So I explained that I understood his concern, but that I would NOT go vacuum in the playroom until he told me everything was all picked up, so he really could go have his breakfast because I promised I would not go in the playroom and suck up any Lego pieces.

He went back into the kitchen. I went back to vacuuming the living room. Dunc went back to the playroom. You can see how much I'm trusted when it comes to Legos.

Today's Bot Quote

2009-10-19T13:15:00.001-04:00

So, I had Bot doing his math in the dining room while Alex was with me in the kitchen because Alex likes to read his word problems out loud and that is excuse enough for Bot to claim he's "too distracted." After washing some pots and getting Alex almost all the way through the lesson, I decided to go to the dining room to see how much Bot had accomplished in twenty minutes. The answer was--not much.

"Is this all you've gotten done?"

Bot turned to stare up at me and said in a very plaintive, tiny voice,"Are you mad at me?"

"Are you manipulating me with those big puppy-eyes?"

He held his puppy-dog stare, then gave a long blink that used his long lashes and big eyes to the best advantage and, with the barest hint of a suppressed smile, said in a sweet little voice,"Trying to....Is it working?"

My Little Ad Man

2009-10-14T15:24:00.001-04:00

Last night, Jake and Liam lugged into the playroom several large boxes and plastic bins full of the fall/winter clothes (which I think only made it up to the third floor in July or so) and I went through them and sorted out clothing for the various kids. Though I fold laundry in the Red Room (on the second floor), the seasonal sorting is a bigger task better done where there is room for all the bins and piles, hence the lugging allllllll the way downstairs to take advantage of the bigger TV and the bigger room (though Sunday is, for the record, a pretty piss-poor TV night once we hit 10pm. I was surprised, however, to discover that though Jake was so engrossed in his computer that he ignored everything i said, he caught every witty line in cable re-runs of Desperate Housewives....Jake likes Desperate Housewives, Jake likes Desperate Housewives!)

In just two hours I had a large bag of discards and the bins refilled with the sorted, folded clothes ready to be lugged upstairs and put into drawers in the morning--when the real challenge becomes figuring out who will be what size in the spring so that the spring/summer clothes get put away in some semblance of order, and how I store two boys' worth of stuff (Liam and Garrett) for the two or three years it takes the next boy (Bot) to grow into them (having Cory between is quite inconvenient) and how to fit two boys' worth of fall clothes into Bot's dresser. There was a whole laundry basket of new baby girl clothes of the next size ready to be washed, gloves and hats in a pile (which is pointless--when it comes time to find gloves and hats they'll all be missing anyway), and bins piled high with clothes. It being past 12:30am, I managed to drag Jake away mid-episode (I had seen the episode before and assured him that we would not find out in this episode what Orson's mother was holding over his head anyway) to go to bed, leaving the clothes in the playroom till morning.

So I was very happy I dealt with the whole thing even though it was after 10pm when I got started last night, because Alex came downstairs on a morning when the heat actually had to kick in dressed in a worn-out short-sleeved t-shirt and thin shorts, declaring he had nothing else in his drawer to wear. I smiled, took him by the hand, and led him into the playroom, telling him I knew where I could find warmer clothes for him.

We walked in the room and he immediately declared, "Boy, you could really use some Space Bags!"

"Really?"

"Yeah. It would sure save a LOTTA space!"

Clearly the ad time the Space Bags people buy on children's channels would be well worth it if seven-yr-olds had credit cards....

Just a Typical School Morning

2009-09-15T13:26:00.000-04:00

So, the good news is that even though Alex wore a Timmy diaper to bed last night because we had no Good Nite. pull ups ("But Alex, last night you wore no pull-up and you didn't wet the bed, right?" "Sure, I wet the bed, Mom!" Maternal glance at the bed where Dunc is already tucked in--"Oh."), he woke and got up at 1am to pee on his own, which is progress.The bad news is that Dunc, who has worn underpants to bed for over a year, wet himself at 1:30am. The worst news is that both these things involved kids thumping to the bathroom at 1am and 1:30am, respectively, and required my help to help a half-asleep kid aim and not get wet or help a half-asleep kid who's wet get dry, but at least the better news is that I was still up anyway since K got up to nurse just around midnight and I knew the night would be something like this because Jake is gone--when he's here, nothing much happens. I was still up at midnight because I had to fill out Cory's emergency cards and a bunch of forms for her and G, and then remembered that on his way to bed around 10 I asked Liam if he had khakis for school tomorrow and he answered, miraculously, "Yup!"
"Great--and they're ironed?"
"Well, no, though they do really need it." The Lord giveth miracles, and he taketh away.
I felt really bad about LT hefting his trombome to the train station (a ten-minute walk with a huge backpack) for the first jazz emsemble rehearsal, so I had him take the earlier train this morning (6:56am instead of 7:31) so that I could drive him and his trombone the three minutes to the station while Cory was still here to technically serve as supervision (in Jake's start-of-school-year-you've-got-to-be-kidding-me absence) for a bunch of sleeping kids and still get back before Cory had to be at the corner for her bus. I found out I could have left a full six minutes later and still gotten him there on time because when we pulled up and he lugged his trombone, music stand, and backpack so full that he'd been unable to fit his lunch inside, I realized I was not seeing the lunch. He left it at home, and it being a lab day he could not buy lunch in the cafeteria because they were supposed to bring lunch and eat it in lab period, because "lab" is his Tuesday lunch period. (How this fits with the rule about "No eating or drinking in the laboratory" he was tested on is another story--Liam tried to explain that part of the room is "classroom" and the lab tables are the "lab" but I opted to only pay attention to the bottom line, which was that we should have bagels or some other lunch food available every Monday night.) So I gave him some cash just in case I didn't make it back in time so that he could attempt to buy lunch today if necessary and made a dash for the lunch box, making it back in six minutes. (For those who are getting ready to lecture me on speeding, rest assured I did not make it to the South Orange station you're probably familiar with, but the much-closer Mountain Station, mere blocks away.) Liam was still there, though apparently I might have been helped by a slightly late train.
Somewhere in here I remembered that if he stayed after school for jazz, he wouldn't have a shuttle bus to take him to the station, which left him with a 1.2 mile walk, so I offered to go pick him up but because G gets off the bus at 3:30 and jazz ends at 3:40 and school is 20 minutes away, I'd be there a little after band ended.
"Fine, I'll wait at After School in the cafeteria."
"Don't I need to send in a form or something for that?"
"I don't think so."
Quick check to Edline (I love Edline) and sure enough, there's a form. Luckily, these being high schoolers, I didn't have to give a full medical and developmental history back to the womb with a list of the social security numbers of anyone who might be picking him up and their security clearances, just a basic signature stating that my son understands the purpose of After School and I would sign him out when I pick him up.
Wait--sign him out? Like, park the car and get out? With up to seven kids along? Ugh...Maybe Grandma would come by a little early for her pre-PhD tea and get G off the bus so I could go get Liam directly from jazz without any after school signing ins/outs, gotta think about that one while standing in front of the house watching Cory at the corner waiting for her bus... And now Dunc is up, telling me knock-knock jokes that all end with me knocking my head into the nearest hard surface because it hurts less, and I have to get up G, and then it's just me and five kids off to Shoprite. But the good news is I just had a four hour nap a little while ago, so I feel quite rested.

Water and phones and... well, just read it.

2009-09-08T22:43:00.003-04:00

Jake here. One of my brothers posted [something like] this to our family email group:

Does anyone have an old cell phone? A young lady dropped [redacted]'s into some Gatorade today at the track meet. Sure we could ask them to replace it, but I figured it's pretty likely that _someone_ has a 3-5 year old phone they are not using. :)

Here's Sue's response:

Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe it's just a Verizon thing, but at any given time folks usually are eligible for free or $10 phone deals from their carrier (with the usual two-year-we-own-you contract or similar thing.) I mean, if my kids were to drop my phone in liquid they'd end up landing on your front lawn after I drop-kicked them, but then I would log in to the wireless folks and see a host of free phones ready and waiting. It's not the cost of replacing, see, it's the fact that Timmy has been TOLD over and OVER and OVER not to TOUCH the dog's water bowl, or the dog's food bowl, or to dump the latter into the former, or to try to carry every mug he finds to some adult who must want "Hot Tea!" or "Hot Coffee!" (I TOLD Jake it wasn't a cute idea to let Timmy have his own plastic mug of lukewarm tea because it would lead to just this sort of stupidity, but did Jake listen? Noooooooo....) or to consider any cup with any amount of liquid in it his personal chance for waterplay, so when of course he once again fails to heed all these Don't Dump, Touch, Dispense, Look At or Stand Near the Water rules while illegally holding my phone it is necessary that he show some remorse so I can mistake his displeasure with my displeasure as some hint that he might actually learn to stop creating puddles in my HOUSE and stop messing with my STUFF, when in fact he is neither truly remorseful or truly learning anything except that next time he needs to make the puddle bigger, faster, because Mom is clearly not happy with the small puddles. The cost of a new phone is not the major factor in my fury.

A Reason for Stay-At-Home Moms to Get Sick Days

2009-08-14T15:02:00.002-04:00

There are many illnesses a person without daycare can "work" through out of sheer necessity--one's spouse only gets so many sick days, after all, and he'll probably need them himself to take a day or two off to recover every time he gets a tummy bug on a weekend that you got to enjoy Thursday night while nursing a baby or while he was off on a business trip. But just as there are valid reasons for taking time off work when ill (not spreading germs to others, being too feverish to think, unable to take the train while having diarrhea, etc), there is a reason why moms should not be left to tend to children when they have a simple cold.

Sense of smell, it turns out, is pretty crucial to this particular line of work.

This morning I dropped of G at camp at 9 and headed right for Verona Park--it was just a few miles up the road from the camp, has a decent playground, and a lake with a mile-long walking path I could use to get in some exercise while killing the time till Toys R Us opened at 10. We had some birthday gifts and such to get, and I saw little point in going home where I'd probably get K settled in for a morning nap and end up heading out just before lunch or cutting into the precious minutes of Tim's nap. We had a lovely time at the playground, though my intentions of letting Tim run off some steam before sitting in a stroller or sitting in a car seat or sitting in a shopping cart were slightly undone by Tim's desire to sit in a toddler swing...for twenty-plus minutes. Did you know that between 9 and 10 am both the toddler and older-kids sections of the playground are shaded at Verona Park, but the swings are still in full sun? The only reason Tim got out of that swing after twenty minutes was because I couldn't hear his protests anymore through my fried brains. I nursed K while he took a few turns down the slide, we walked our mile with Tim declaring his love for every "PUPPY!" we saw along the way, we got in the car and went to TRU, we got our gifts and got out quickly because K was starting to fuss, and then we headed home.

Once there, I had the simultaneous demands of K wanting to nurse/sleep, Tim wanting to eat, and me needing to pee. Going roughly in reverse order I took care of those issues, giving Tim a yogurt which for some reason he took to the bench by the kitchen window instead of to the table, standing by the bench while using it as a table for his yogurt. When I got up to change K, he asked for a yogurt shake, and since we were out of more yogurt I gave him one. I then went to settle K down for a nap, which she did not settle for, when I heard Tim thump and cry. I returned to the kitchen to find him slipping and sliding in spilled yogurt shake (and now that I thought about it, what IS the benefit to making yogurt for kids easier to spill, huh?) and with less sympathy than I would have had if he hadn't spilled yesterday's shake as well, I plopped him on the steps and mopped up the bench and floor and then his feet, and then stripped off his yogurt-soaked shirt and pants. It was after I'd thrown the pants over by the basement door and gone to throw out the paper towels and returned to the scene with the intention of wiping the yogurt off Tim and putting him to bed that I noticed the brown streak on the floor where the pants had slid to a stop...and the brown smudges around Tim's feet...and the brown smears down both legs. It was at this moment that Tim helpfully put his hand to his hip and took it away all brown and informed me, "Mommy, oh, look, I poopy."

No wonder the kid didn't want to sit at the table to eat! Up to the bathroom, where I could change him on a floor that can be bleached before rinsing him in the tub--one rear end, one back, one tummy, two legs, two hips, two floors, four hands and half a box of wipes full of poop by the time we were done, and the dried-on nature of the stuff around the perimeter indicated that this had clearly been here a while. That's why it got so all over--plenty of time for Tim's movements to spread the fragrant stuff all over without Mom having any idea what kind of mess was developing in his pants due to her failing nose....Though I'm SURE folks at Toys R Us knew!

When I can smell, no dirty diaper goes unchanged for long, and even a breast-fed infant poop can be detected across a large room even with AC or fans going, I'm that good. Without my nose, I'm lost, handicapped, unable to perform one of the four vital duties of a mother--keep them alive, keep them fed, keep them in clean diapers, and keep sacred the Nap Time.

Not even vomiting or fever can mess me up as much as a stuffed nose. Jake, I can't work the rest of the day...At least until G comes home and HIS nose can tell me when Tim needs changing.

Shhhh! Don't Tell Liam, I'm Saying This...

2009-07-29T22:09:00.001-04:00

I can't be all bad if my teen is voluntarily calling me from camp, right?

This summer has Liam's first two experiences with sleep-away camp stuff that doesn't involve being at Kandy's or my mom's. Boy Scout Camp was the first, and since he's been with these boys and their dads for several years now and was going with Nick, whom he's known since he was 2, and Nick's dad and little brothers, this was not exactly a hard one. And I pretty much knew that they weren't going to be using their phones much, I didn't expect to get calls. But I did get a call, because Liam sliced his finger and needed stitches, so I got to talk to him twice and of course, when I said "I love you" he gave me the usual, "Yeah, OK." See, there were other people around. At least, I hoped that was the reason. Whenever I get him on his cell, like when he calls to say he made it to his friend's house, I close with an "I love you" and never says it back, but there's almost always people around him, right? Surely that's the reason?

Then he went off to Ultimate Frisbee camp. Here again he was going with a group of boys he'd played Ultimate with for the past three years, but it was a bigger camp, the kids were usually grouped in the dorms to be in geographically diverse groups so they'd meet new people, and believe it or not, we worried that Liam might not be in shape enough for it. Yes, I know, you're thinking "In shape for FRISBEE?" but I'm telling you, watch a game and you'll see that it's as much running as soccer, if not more so. The camp information explicitly states that campers should arrive in good shape and should NOT expect camp to be a getting-in-shape experience--otherwise, the camper will be too tired to fully enjoy and benefit from the camp. So I was not nervous, but was a bit more on edge than I was with Scouts, even though Frisbees have no sharp edges like the knives they use as Boy Scouts.

TO make things even more interesting, we didn't drive him up to Amherst--he went up with his friend Adam and family, and we're doing pick-up. I sent him off all packed up and honestly, once I was convinced he wasn't lacking anything important and Jake would get him to Adam's on time, didn't give it another thought. So Sunday my friend Karen, Adam's mom, called and asked, "I was just calling to let you know how things were up there--or did you hear already from Liam?"

This was when I felt like a bad mom....Liam had his phone, but I hadn't explicitly told him to call and check in. Liam is also blissfully un-addicted to his phone--he doesn't carry it around with him, and unless he's walking to his friend's house or out somewhere that I've required cell phone check-ins, he wouldn't notice a call on it because it's likely to not be in the same room with him. Karen had talked about alllllll the information she'd gotten from both her boys while at jazz camp the week before as well--she had a rule that if she texted them, they had to answer back or she'd start calling, so her oldest would send back one-syllable responses and she'd ask for more detail and he'd ask her to please stop texting him and she'd explain, as one often has to with boys, that if he gave her the information she was asking about in a more thorough way, she wouldn't have to keep asking questions...I admit, the image of a teen being interrupted by a text from Mom doesn't seem conducive to eager communication, but then, it's less intrusive than a phone call. Liam had long ago earned the privilege of a texting plan, but I'd never gotten around to adding it and he hadn't asked, so I figured, "Great, delay the addiction until he remembers and asks us to add it!"

Only now I had my son in Amherst and me in NJ and I was getting my info second- or third-hand from Karen or through Karen from her son because I hadn't told him to call and didn't properly get him attached to his phone so that I was likely to get calls or texts from him. I could call him and hope to get him, but just then I was feeling a bit lonely that my son probably wouldn't think to call home himself. Karen seemed to have minute-by-minute updates on what was going on--I had sent my son off on Friday and here it was Sunday and I hadn't thought to stress about the details of exactly what he was doing--he was at a well-supervised camp, right? I knew he'd be playing frisbee and they'd feed him--but now I was feeling like a pretty lame, bad, un-missed mom.

So imagine our shock when the phone rang at 10:15pm that night, and it was our eldest, calling us from his dorm room single ("Adam's mom says the dorm rooms are kind of old and not that great?" "Eh, they're fine--lots better than the tent at Camp Wakpominee, that's for sure!") to use the last remaining minutes before curfew to tell us about his day. Awwwww....

And when it was time to get off the phone, I said the usual, "I love you." And, sitting alone in his single with no one around to hear, he did not hesitate at all to say, "I love you, too, Mom. Good night!" And he's called every night before bed. I'm a happy mommy.

Never lie

2009-07-25T23:26:00.004-04:00

As Jake was putting the kids to bed, G came up and asked Jake: "Do we lie?"

This is less a moral/ethical question than a backdoor to a toothbrushing topic, namely the fact that Garrett responds to "Did you brush your teeth?" with "I ACTually did!" Eventually I figured out that any time "ACTually" was mentioned in a sentence about what G did or did not do, it was a clear signal that he had not done the task and furthermore, had no desire to. To get around this annoying retort to the twice-daily toothbrushing inquiry, we explained to him that when he says he did something when he had in fact NOT done it, he was not telling the truth, which meant he was lying, and lying was wrong. This led to him connecting lying with "fibbing" (see "Larry Boy and the Fib from Outer Space"), but did not cut down on the "I ACTually did!" statements. He'd say, "I ACTually did!" and whatever our amused, annoyed, pretend-deaf or play-dumb response, he'd follow it up with "Saying I ACTually did is fibbing" or "We should not lie!" or some similar variation.

It was when our beloved Girl Next Door, Liz, (who no longer lives next door because we moved) stayed with G and the littler ones one night and put them to bed that we realized how dumb we were. In our defense, G loves Liz and would not try to be a pain in her butt as much as he enjoys doing it to us, but when he went to get ready for bed, she simply asked him, "Is there anything you forgot?" and he replied, "Yes, I forgot to brush my teeth." So now, when we think about it, we don't ask if he brushed his teeth, we ask if he forgot anything. Still, he misses the old pattern and tries to find ways of referring back to it--hence the inquiry about lying just when it's time to brush teeth.

So, G had just asked Jake, "Do we lie?"

Jake claims he had in his head something like, "It's not usually good to lie" but then thought that that was a stupidly equivocal thing to say. So instead responded with a very clear-cut, "No, we never lie."

That's *exactly* when Alex walked up to him and said, "Dad, what does the Tooth Fairy do if you lose TWO teeth?"

Long, but...

2009-07-23T17:03:00.002-04:00

...I think it's worth it. I just couldn't make up Alex stuff if I tried, seriously.

The other day, I came downstairs to the whole get-Garrett-breakfast- and-out-the-door half hour and found Dunc and Alex already running around, very active and excited. I was less so, having stayed up to do paperwork and nurse babies and yes, OK, watch Scrubs till midnight (being used to the re-runs in the post-11pm time period, when I watched an actual current episode during prime time at some point this past week I just couldn't help thinking that JD's heart just wasn't in the slapstick anymore. Even when he was fake-racing through the hospital hallways, he looked like he was faking faking it. It felt stale--so sad.) Plus K, who has done some very decent stretches at night, slept till morning, at which point I've been getting up to nurse her at 6:30am so she's not hollering for food during the getting-G-going 7-7:30 time frame--only this particular morning she didn't go back to sleep after filling her belly and didn't want to be put down, either. So I was tired and holding a baby (old hat, for me, yes, but it doesn't mean it's my favorite hat, or even a hat I like) and Dunc and Alex were racing around chittering like very very loud squirrels while Garrett was saying, "I'm so tired!", and Alex came by and said something about "decorating the WHOLE HOUSE!" and then chitter-chitter and "So can we have Duncan's SLEEPover BIRTHday party too-MAH-row?"

A distracted: "Um, no." Duncan has been planing and discussing his Sleepover Birthday Party since Cory had her birthday sleepover last April (or maybe it's been since Dunc's last birthday--since we have seven birthdays squished into five months from January to May, everything that happens any spring can be described as since or around X's birthday, where X is a child that is not Alex.) It started as a Thomas Sleepover Party, then his Thomas Sleepover party with Lego Star Wars, then Thomas with Lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones, then Thomas Party with lots of Legos, and then I think the Thomas part dropped out when Dunc very seriously told me that Richard hates Thomas, and I'm not sure which of the 583 Lego variations are to be featured anymore because, honestly, I have five years to go back to listening to this topic before it actually matters. But I told him he couldn't have a sleepover till he was nine.

"AWWWW! Please, Mom? Please, please, PLEEEEEZ? Can we have it tomorrow, pleasepleaseplease PLEEEEEEEZ?"

"No! Don't whine at me, it does NOT work--we do not have parties on one day notice and we don't celebrate Duncan's birthday in July, that is simply NOT how it goes." Yes, I actually went in to how much notice one needs to give invitees.

Alex's shoulders dropped immediately ("schluump" is the proper term, actually) and a pitiful, sad, Alex face pouted as he schluumped away, saying in a tiny voice that was only just below dogs-only range, "But we PLANned it all OUT and EVVrything..."

I felt bad, but was still about to take G out to wait for his bus (which is a minivan), so I threw out: "Why don't you write down all your plans? Go get a piece of paper." This is Alex--if he even decided to get out the piece of paper, the odds of him doing it promptly and then not getting happily distracted while waiting for me to show up were low. This doesn't mean he'd forget about it--if I never did it with him, at bedtime he'd turn to Jake with a forlorn face and wail, "But we didn't write down the plans for the PARTY yet!"

But after G got on his way, Alex did spot me and ask me to write The Rules for Duncan's Sleepover Birthday Party, though he couldn't find any paper. I had a fussy baby ready to nurse and go back to sleep on one arm, so I looked around, couldn't see any blank paper other than the triple-line lettering-practice paper (you know what I mean--the paper with the dotted line between the top and bottom lines to make sure your a's and o's are exactly half the height of your h's and l's that every child uses until about second or third grade), grabbed a sheet and a pencil and asked Alex what I should write down.

"Well..." He looked skeptically at the paper, which was just enough to accommodate five kindergarten renditions of "Alexander Freivald" if the a,l, and d were very skinny. "There will be a LOT of rules to write down..."

"I'm a mom, I get to write small even with big lines, hurry up, tell me what to write." I was jiggling K on my knee to appease her for what I thought would be a couple minutes, and the jiggling lends itself to a rushed mentality.

"OK, these are just THE RULES." RULES went along the top.

"First, Duncan is....." I wrote in nice small print. "Duncan is the...." The. "Duuunnncan iiiiiiis theee OHHHHHHHHHnnnnuhLEEEE wuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnuh....Got that?"

"Yes, 'Duncan is the only one'--Alex, I can write faster, can you just tell me the whole sentence and I can write it all down?"

"K. Duuuuuuuuunnnnnncan iiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssss thee OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHnuhleeeeee wuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnh.....that.

"That what?"

"That......GETS......gets, Ok, you wrote that..." I was just realizing that Alex might just be a good enough reader to follow along with what I was writing, which made me wonder why he couldn't see that I was more than keeping up.

"Alex, just say the WHOLE sentence!"

"Duncan.....is........the......ONly.......one.....that......gets....... toooooooooooo........rrrrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuunnnnnn."

"Run where?"

"Run. Everyone else has to walk, but since he's the birthday boy, he gets to run."

"Oh, OK."

"Second." I dutifully wrote a number 2 and a period and waited. BIG breath....."Ttttthhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuhhh............GUESTS..........aaarrrr rrrrrre....."

"Alex, just say the whole sentence, the whole thing all at once, really."

"OK, second, tttttttthhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuh, um.......GUESTS.....arrrrrreeeee....NOT....uh- LOUD......tooooooo......rrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuunnnnnn."

"Just say, 'The guests are not allowed to run' and I can write that down and this will go a lot faster, OK?"

"OK.'

"Alright, is that it? Are we up to Number Three?"

"Yup. THIRD...Nooooooooo.....Dyyyyyyyyyyye....VING"

"No diving?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"No diving in the pool. Because then," very serious and stern and wide-eyed, "You can BONK your HEAD."

"That's true, if you dive into a pool and it's too shallow, you could bonk your head. But what pool are you talking about?" Maybe he and Duncan had plans for a trip to the town pool, or Grandma's pool?

Again, all wide-eyed seriousness: "OUR pool, Mom." For the record, our pool is four feet across and is usually filled to a depth of about six inches, though on a daring day we may go up to ten inches.

"Oh, well, there certainly should NOT be any diving in our pool. Alright, what's Number Four?"

"Next--this is ALL about Duncanball."

"Ah, OK." Clearly Duncalball is a spin-off of Calvinball, from Calvin and Hobbes, and as we all know, the one rule of Calvin Ball is that there are no rules. I waited.

"IfsomeonetouchestheoppositepolethenDuncanistillinthenosongzone."

"What? If someone what?"

"IfsomeonetouchestheoppositepolethenDuncanistillinthenosongzone." With a look to me like this was clear and simple and obvious.

"Um...." Darn! We went from talking so slowly we were going back in time to supersonic speeds on a topic that was not going to lend itself easily to maternal decoding based in intuition and juvenile predictability patterns. I finally got him to say a whole sentence and it's gobblygook, but if I ask him too blatantly to say it slowly then I have to go one excruciating syllable at a time for the rest of these Rules. "So, if someone touches...the...the what, again? The baby was distracting me." I hoped the baby didn't urp on me for using her as a scapegoat.

"The opposite POLE, Mom!" Could his tone say "DUH" any more clearly?

"Of course--the opposite pole. OK, what happens if they touch the opposite pole?"

"Then DUNcan is still in the NO SONG ZONE." It was at this point that I really wished I had a recorder going.

"Alright, got it."

"Next, if you hit someone with the Duncanball, you have to sing-- except Duncan, because he's the birthday boy."

"Wait--if YOU hit someone with the ball--"

"The DUNcanball!"

"With the Duncanball, do YOU have to sing, or does the person who gets hit have to sing?"

"The one who gets hit has to sing. Except Duncan, because--"

"Because he's the birthday boy, I know, I'm writing it. Is that it for Duncanball?"

"No. Next, in Duncanball, if you STEAL the FLAG, you have to sat, 'Ollywallyumbumpfizz.' " He could not have said that with a more serious face.

"OK....steal flag....What is it again? Ollywally, what?"

"Um-bump-fizz."

"Olly-wally-um-bump-fizz. OK."

"Now, the Flying Disc--DUNcan gets to throw it high up in the air, but no one else can throw it up high."

"There's a flying disc in Duncanball?"

"Nonononononono! This is the FLY-ing DISC part, not the DUNcanball part! After DUNcanball, we do the FLYing DISC part."

I wrote in a number 5 with an arrow to indicate that the indented bullet point under #4, Duncanball, was actually a new rule. Yes, I did indented bullets for rules with sub-rules--how else does one stay organized when planning the rules for a sleepover birthday party five years in advance?

"OK, next--what number is this?"

"Number six."

"OK, no RULES on the PARty stops."

"No rules on when the party stops?"

"Wait, what?"

"You mean when the party stops?"

"The party doesn't end, Mom, it's a sleepover. It ends at midnight or something." Midnight to Alex is pretty much the same as "Never."

"So there's no rule on when the party stops?"

"Well, there's ONE rule on the party stops, which is 'Don't let the dogs out.' "

"What do the dogs have to do with when the party ends?"

"What?"

"You said the one rule on when the party stops is not to let the dogs out--what do the dogs have to do with the party stopping?"

"Nononono, the PARty STOPS. During the Party Stops, you can't let the dogs out."

I had finally figured out that Party Stops was a plural noun of some sort. "Alex, what are Party Stops?"

"It's when you walk around and look at stuff but don't touch anything, except Duncan can touch stuff."

"Because he's the birthday boy?"

"That's RIGHT!" he smiled. I was as proud of myself for getting that as he was.

"No letting the dogs out during the Party Stops, then."

"Now, the next part is when I will tell everyone to go to the living room for a wrestling match and pillow fight."

"Is that a rule?"

"Um, yeah, they have to do that. And THEN the next part is TV Watching. During the TV Watching, no one should get in the way and no one should be fooling around." Gee, funny how that is exactly what we'd like to tell Alex when it's TV Watching NOT during a sleepover birthday party.

"Next, is Dress Up Time. Duncan gets to do whatEVer he WANTS--fool around, be noisy. The OTHers do NOT. THEN, the last part, is.....aNOTHer wrestling match. Same. Rules. Apply."

"Same rules?"

"Like no fooling around or being noisy and stuff." Of course--can't have fooling around and being noisy during a wrestling match, after all. Though I admit, I would like wrestling in the house a lot more if these rules always applied.

"Then...?"

"Then, that's it. Then it's the sleepover part. Those are all the rules."

"Great! So, you have all your rules. It should be a fun party!"

Through all of this, Duncan was hopping all over, occasionally saying stuff like, "EeeeeeYUP! I'll be the Birthday Boy!" Alex came over, took the paper from me, went back to stand between the dining room and living room and, in stark contrast to Duncan jumping from couch to couch behind him, solemnly explained, "*I* am not going to be doing the stuff. *I* will be standing off on the side....Like when it's Pool Time, I won't go in the pool. I'll be over on the side like this--" Took three steps back from an imaginary pool. "-- and I'll say the TWO pool rules. NO diving, and NO....Hmmmm." He was looking at the paper, and I realized he could in fact read a lot of what I'd written and wasn't seeing a second pool-related rule. "Where's the other Pool Rule? I don't see another Pool Rule!" He brought it over to me and pointed to the tiny print under the diving rule. "What's that say?"

"It says, 'Duncanball.' "

"But no, this right here, under 'No diving in our pool,' what does that say?"

"That says Duncanball--those are all the Duncanball rules. I don't see another pool rule. Should there be another one?"

He studied the paper. "Hmm, I guess not." He walked back around the table to stand in his spot off to the side of the imaginary pool again. "No diving in the pool."

"That's an excellent reading of the rules."

"Aw, thanks, Mom!" And he went to hop around on the couches with his Rules in his hand, chatting with Duncan, while I started to nurse Kayleigh. After a minute or two Alex said, "Hey, Mom, what SEAson is Duncan's birthday?"

"Season?"

"Yeah, like...Is it AFter we're in school, or is it, ummmmm...Yeah, what season?"

"It's in the winter, in February, and yes, you guys are in school then. It's after Christmas. But Alex, do you know which birthday this party is for?"

"Duncan's! It's his sleepover birthday party!"

"But do you know WHICH BIRTHDAY? Duncan, which birthday is this for?

Duncan was spinning in circles. "Whaahh?"

"How old will you be when you have your sleepover birthday party?"

Duncan flopped on the couch and sat up with a big smile. "OH! I will be NINE!"

Alex froze and just gave a quiet, "Oh."

He stayed schluumped for about ten seconds. Poor kid, he's now old enough to get that a four-yr-old's ninth birthday is not right around the corner. I felt bad for him, really. But then he matter-of-factly informed me, "I think it should be when Duncan is, um, Matthew's age. I think that will be good." Matthew is a neighborhood kid who's five--well, he's probably six now, but I'm pretty sure Alex was thinking he was five. He then took to following Duncan around the living room, the two of them on an endless loop stepping across couches even though my Rules when it's not a birthday party don't allow walking on couches. It is, I admit, a rule I only enforce when I can see them doing it and care, but perhaps I should write it down on three-lined paper and let Alex stand-to-the-side and read it out for me. As they pranced and hopped, Alex tried out his fledging skills persuasive speech.

"Duncan, don't you want to be FIVE when it's your Sleepover Birthday Party? Don't you want to be Matthew's age? We can do it when you're Matthew's age! You'll be FIVE, it will be fun. Duncan? DUNcan! Let's do it when you're FIVE, OK? Duncanduncanduncan, can we do it when you're five? ANswer me, Duncan!" All I could think about was that there was no way I'd be done nursing the baby in time to write this all down before we left for Bot's check-up...

Where Jake Stands

2009-06-20T15:15:00.001-04:00

I'm sure Liam made some silly rookie-in-charge mistake like using the recent chunks of time he's been left with siblings while I'm out to declare a general authority over Richard, because I overheard Richard say, "NO, you aren't in charge of the kids. MOM is! You're only in charge when Mom's not here."

Pause.

"And usually then it's DAD who's in charge of us."

Got that? It's not "Mom and Dad" who are in charge of the kids, it's Mom and THEN Dad when Mom's not here...and even then, only it's only "usually" Dad.

I personally would argue that if I'm leaving the house and Liam and Jake are both home, I would do best to put Cory in charge. Today G came out of the playroom to tell Jake that Timmy had a poopy diaper-- a REALLY smelly one, too, it's not like Jake should not have been able to smell it. Jake praised G for alerting him about the diaper, called to Tim, "HEY TIMMY! LET'S CHANGE YOUR DIAPER!" and went back to eating his soup. Guess what? Timmy didn't leave what he was playing with in the playroom to come for diaper change. I nursed the baby, came out to lecture G on not scripting in the playroom, couldn't find any oxygen in the playroom due to the methane off- gassing from Tim's diaper, felt Kayliegh do a diaper-bursting expulsion of her own in my arms, and headed to the bathroom to do a total diaper-outfit change, advising Tim that he was next.

Jake poked his head in the bathroom where I was wiping down K and said,"Oh, sorry, I was going to change him, then didn't. Um, I'm ready to take the kids to the library now, you don't need me for anything else, do you? We'll just head out." Jake apparently thinks that even though we have seven packages of baby wipes, two changing tables, plenty of floor space, and different-sized diapers for Tim and K in three different rooms so that one has non-competing stockpiles of diapers for each, and two adults who have diaper- changing experience, clearly changing diapers on two separate kids is a one-at-a-time activity and consecutive changes must be completed by whomever starts the first in line. Cory would be bright enough to get that nothing prevents simultaneous changes, and that attempts to ditch a poopy diaper (that smells like someone brought a cowpie in from a meadow, mixed it with dog poop, boiled it in cat pee and let it simmer on the stove) on me through either real or feigned ignorance of the possibility of simultaneous changes would NOT go over well with me.

So, Jake stands just ahead of Liam--usually--in the chain of command, and, if he's wise, out of my line of fire when I'm holding poopy diapers.

My Work Is Done...

2009-06-03T16:22:00.000-04:00

OK, Timmy is two and a little bit. He is not yet potty-trained, he still spills any cup without a lid on it (less because he isn't able to coordinate but because he likes to observe gravity and the motion of fluids), he makes a red disaster out of himself every time he eats pasta, he still lashes out occasionally to hit Dunc when Dunc pisses him off ("pissing off" defined as "not handing over what Timmy wants", which is frustrating because Dunc is big on the whole look-how-nice-I-am thing and if Timmy asked nicely in front of me, Dunc would hand it over every time just to be fussed over by Mom for his excellent sharing), he has to give the baby her pacifier all the time even if she's sleeping peacefully, has no idea how to whisper (in Freivald-speak "whisper" means "speak so that you can't be heard across the church over the priest, organ, and choir") and in general is not yet at all a civilized human being.

However, there are two developments that tell me that in the ways that count, my work is done. First, he can recognize and join in singing at least three Clancy Brothers Irish folk songs that mention whiskey (yes, believe it or not, some of them don't), and he identifies and verbally begs for any Calvin and Hobbes book. "Skews me, Mom, ree CALveh en HOPS!" Clearly we have set him on the right path early.

(Jake's work is done because he loves Dilbert--he'll watch Dilbert videos over and over, muttering a few phrases after the characters say them with an amused and knowing shake of the head, as if saying, "Hah! Oh man, isn't that just the way it is?!?!)

Why There's A Drawback...

2009-05-24T23:07:00.001-04:00

...to the usual advice to instill in young children a love of reading.

(And of course he was looking for one of the tiniest books in the avalanche!)