Drew robot

Drew wore this box around the house all day Saturday. He told me he was Drew Robot (complete with robot voice). Drew Robot has been an off and on inhabitant of our house for some time, but it’s the first time he had an outfit. I admit to only adding the eye and arm holes after a couple of hours. I wanted to see how long he’d walk around the house, blind and armless, bumping into walls and furniture. The second time I caught the lamp (my gorgeous, tacky, gypsy beaded lamp) right before it crashed to the floor I decided the eye hole was a good idea. There were a couple of cry worthy bumps – primarily because he’d put his robot box on my bed, and then crawl into it and try to move around. The cardboard would start to slip, and he’d careen out of control off the bed into the wall or the nightstand or whatever else was in his way. Not that it slowed him down one bit – just a kiss on the booboo, a mechanical “tank yew, mommy!”, and he was back in the box. After the eye and arm holes were taken care of and a strict No Robots On Mommy’s Bed policy was enacted, it was just good times for all. I did refuse to make robot boxes for Zachary or the dog. It just seemed best.

And I have started to think about Halloween. A smaller box (the head) stacked on a larger box (the body)? Covered in tin foil? Clothes dryer ductwork for arms and legs? Hello?!?!?!?

Where being a dork in high school finally pays off. Kind of. I think.

Last night Cliff arranged a get together for my friends at a local restaurant and arcade type place for my birthday. Dinner was fun, and I got a turtle ice cream cake. Not too shabby. Once we had kids (and certainly since we had two!) time spent with friends out of the house is in short supply, and I had a really great time catching up and eating hot food, without having to get up to refill a sippy cup or grab another fork or share my plate with anyone. Even though Cliff did steal my last bite of cheese stick.

My game of choice at the ol’ arcade is trivia. I know, I know. Hello, bookworm/dork/geek/nerd/total tool. Nevertheless, I suck at everything else, and I enjoy trading my tickets for value-inflated crappy trinkets I would never, ever buy outside of that situation. As a cursory nod to maturity, I now trade them for crap I can give to my kids. Mostly because I can no longer get away with fake tattoos and glitter hair gel.

There were six slots at the trivia game. Five were full – three with some sort of family group, and a couple that was about as drunk as could possibly be seemly at 6pm on a Sunday evening. The guy was your average frat boy, plus 10 years. But still sporting the backwards baseball cap. In other words, kind of a douchebag, you could tell just by looking at him. But you knew he had played his drunken charm for all it was worth – he had that weird sense of entitlement about him. He had clearly been dominating the game up to that point, and when I took a seat, he called out to me “Are you ready to play?”

Well, yeah. I sat down didn’t I? I said “yeah, sure I am”. I thought he was just being polite and making sure I was in the game before the time limit to join in had passed. Apparently not. He leaned further forward and asked again, louder “Yeah, but are you ready to PLAY?” Oh sure, DrunkMan. It’s on.

I totally kicked his ass. It was awesome, and I am a geek enough to admit I enjoyed each and every time I got an answer right and heard his groan of defeat. After one game, he leaned over to his ladyfriend and drunk-whispered that he wanted to leave and do something else, that he didn’t like losing. After two games, he stood up, ripped off her string of tickets*, and told me “I don’t like playing with you. You are smarter than me. Do you know how that makes me feel?” and took off. I suppose I was supposed to…………….what? Coddle his ego and lose so that he could impress his way into LadyFriends drawers? Sorry, dude. My payoff for being a total wallflower dweeb from the ages of 13 until, well…..STILL NOW while you no doubt played big man on campus and had, you know, DATES comes now. Boo-yah!

So there’s your lesson, kids. Read a bunch of books, skip those keggers, and one day in your mid thirties you, too, can kick some drunk guys ass at video trivia. Do you really need a better reason to do well in school?

*My advice to the scantily clad LadyFriend? Bail, honey. And bail fast. No dude who would reach across you and rip off your tickets and walk away with them can be any good for you. :P

My old room was.......

My old room was messy. Thats’ what everyone who ever saw my old room would say. My room now, too, for that matter. I describe my room currently as “cluttered but not dirty”. My teenager room, though……..yeah, dirty works. Piles of clothes and shoes and papers and the detrius of high school and part time jobs and drama and angst. It was a particularly noxious shade of purple, with darker, even purple-er baseboards. I loved that color. It was like being inside a marshmallow peep, and it gave my parents indigestion, which made it even more appealing. I had a drafting table as a desk, just because I thought that was cool. In reality, it was a horrible desk functionally, with no drawers or places to put things, covered in magazines and old homework and makeup. My bed was a twin (OH! the indignity! I thought at the time a full would be so much more promising, wink-wink), and generally covered with clothes that had to be shoved down to the foot of the bed when it was time to sleep. That was it for furniture. No drawers. For some reason, my family was vehemently anti-dresser drawer, or at least it seemed so to me. There was no manifesto against them or anything, but not even my parents had dressers. My sisters and I had one at one time when we shared a room, but it did not end up in my room when we separated. Cindy would have wanted the drawer, as she was unfailingly neat and organized and tidy, and I would have wanted it and been denied on the basis of doubts I was capable of putting it to good use. I can hear my mother now “you don’t put your clothes in the closet, what makes you think you will put them in a drawer?”. I am sure it sounded totally unfair at the time, but since I currently have both dresser drawers AND piles of clothes all over the room, I forgive her in retrospect. There wasn’t room in there anyway, really.

I had one window, which I never snuck out of. I snuck a boy or two in, but I never left. Somehow my thought process led me to believe that if I were caught with a boy in my room it would be Bad, no doubt, but if I was just missing and they didn’t know where I was……..well, I’d not only have to pay for whatever it was I’d been off doing and also the wrath of the worried parent. Thanks, but no thanks. I was in enough trouble for the things I really did, I was in no mood to get in trouble for all The Things That Might Have Happened. Of course, I say that with ease because I never did get caught with a boy in my room. And no, mom, I won’t tell you who.

Bag Lady

Six. A half dozen.

That’s the MINIMUM number of bags it takes me to get out of the house in the morning.
Breastpump, Drew’s daycare gear, Zachary’s daycare gear, laptop bag, my lunch, Zachary’s bottles. I stopped carrying a purse a long time ago, or it might be seven. I am not including the baby carrier (complete with baby), nor the random one off things like food for daycare parties, extra clothes for splash day, or items for show and tell. That is insane. I am loaded down like a pack mule, and I watch my husband leave for work in the morning with ………………….KEYS. And maybe a coffee. (COFFEE!?!?!?!?)

I have done all that I can to pare down what I take along, but I can genuinely say that I need every bag I have. I’d like to think that someday I will be able to shed a bag or two, but I know full well that the diaper bag will give way to a bag of cleats and shin guards for soccer practice, the breast pump will morph into the kids school bags, the kids will need their own lunches, and so on and so forth. I can do almost any job in the world one handed, and I can carry a totally unseemly number of grocery bags into the house at one time. Is it any wonder my back is killing me?

When you see commericals and talk shows that talk about the modern working mother, struggling to juggle a bunch of different balls, don’t be fooled. They aren’t balls. They are BAGS.

Zachary

Our honeymoon is over and it is back to Real Life. I have to go back to work tomorrow, and our little days of one on one cuddles come to an end. I will miss that so much.

You have grown SO much since we brought you home, a wee little (well, not SO little!) thing who never cried, just mewled like a cat when he was hungry, whose eyes we delighted in seeing open because it happened so rarely. Now you are really coming into your personality – you babble and talk happily all the time and the smiles and giggles are plentiful. You are such a happy little man. We prop you up in the corner of the couch and you hang out, watching your big brother’s shenanigans and occasionally getting sucked in my the mesmerizing twirl of the ceiling fan. You sleep wonderfully. I am trying not to get too cocky about that, since your brother was a great sleeper till I went back to work, too. We will see, but I’d appreciate it if you’d keep in mind that Mommy likes to sleep foe 6 or so hours in a row. She likes it a LOT.

You are going to your big brothers school, and the same ladies who watched him as a baby will have and love you. I know you will be well cared for, but I will worry and fret and think of you every second anyway.

I am going to miss you so much. Your leg chub, the little fat rolls under your baby chin, your gummy smile and laugh, your milky baby smell.

Buyer Beware

If, perchance, you have a GIANT FUCKING SNAKE, it would behoove you to warn prospective buyers that come to look at your house “Hey, just so you know, behind the door in bedroom number three there is a GIANT FUCKING SNAKE”. This way, you avoid the possibility that someone is going to have a massive coronary in the door way of bedroom number three, and possibly be devoured by the GIANT FUCKING SNAKE before you realize they never came back downstairs.
Just, you know, FYI.

Are kids psychic?

How do they know the ONE behavior that will drive you up the frigging wall.
I do a good job with most of the behavior stuff. I’d go so far as to say I am a really patient parent. I keep my cool, I stay calm, I’m not a shouter or a hitter or a name caller. I can address the behavior without targeting the child, I try and understand that most of these foibles are perfectly developmentally appropriate and respond accordingly. Hitting, throwing things, general defiance…………..I’m pretty much ok with those. I can redirect, I can take toys away, I can put him in timeout for egregious offenses. What can I not handle without going crosseyed and seeing RED?

Spitting. OhSweetBabyJesus, SPITTING. Not even spitting-spitting, just blowing raspberries spitting, but it make me absolutley bonkers. I’d rather he just haul off and smack me in the head, honestly. Because that I can at last handle calmly. Sometimes it’s innocent and he’s playing, and I can blow it off, even while secretly being totally grossed out. Because toddlers are, well, excessively MOIST, and while a grown up can stick his tongue out and blow relatively dryly, a toddler raspberry is as best a little like a summer rainshower. At worst, you feel like you are on the front row at a Gallagher show. Only it’s SPIT, the worlds most revolting substance. Even writing this, I am grossed out by the spit in my own mouth. I have not shared a beverage with another person (even my husband!) since middle school. I can’t even eat lollypops or hard candy or gum – it’s just swallowing flavored spit! EEWWWWW!!
So, with my saliva issues, it’s no wonder that when he spits aggressively, to show his displeasure or defiance, it takes every ounce of control in my body not to just come undone. Last night he was in a benign spitting mode, playing games, and while it was generally annoying it was not vindictive and I just bit my tongue, ducked and diverted, and was sorry nursing was preventing me from a nice big glass of merlot. Later, though, he was angry because it was bedtime and I crouched down on his level and was telling him “Sorry, but it’s time for books and then bed.” Little demon blew a big ol’ wet raspberry right in my face. I have never in his whole life even been tempted to spank or strike him, honestly. But there were a few fleeting seconds there where I could see myself smacking him, and I could see it feeling satisfying to be making him as unhappy as I was right in that moment. It would have been totally counterproductive, and it absolutely would have been out of line with my general parenting philosophy, but the vision was there. I suspect he saw it, too, as I found myself adopting the dead calm, flat voice I heard from my father as a child when I had *really* crossed the line.
“Books. Bed. NOW.”
He scrambled to bed with no further incident. But I know it’s a momentary reprieve. No toddler would ever give up such a sure way to get a rise out of a parent. Hell, I am 37 and I still have a few in my pocket in case my folks get out of line!