Adventures in Potty-Training

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.

The Three Rules

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?"

The Sheet and The Horn

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,

Today's Quotes

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.

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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.

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

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

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.