October 14, 2005

what have I been doing? well, let’s see . . .

Wade has gone fishing this weekend, so my parents are here to help. How is it that having TWO extra adults to ‘help’ just makes it that much harder to get out of the house in the morning? Go figure. Anyway, no one went to school yesterday (Henry was out for Yom Kippur and Charlie ran a fever, for no good reason, on Wednesday afternoon) which really messed up my whole map of the day. Today, I’m hoping for better things. Or at least more coffee. And my housekeeper is coming, which always makes it good (although it does mean that I will have not only my kids but both my parents in tow during the two hours we are trying to stay out of Joanna’s way. Sigh).

But I DO have this for you: last night I dreamt that Misfit and I were at boarding school together; we were in the tenth grade. She had a locker near mine and was giving me really good advice about choosing a college. Because that was REALLY important in the dream.

I’ll be back later with something more exciting, I promise. Right now I have to go clean before the cleaning lady comes.

October 12, 2005

hear no evil (or anything else)

During the course of a day, I find myself saying a variety of Things Henry Would Rather Not Hear (for example, ‘Use your walking feet!’ and ‘I think that’s an outside game’ and ‘Let’s NOT play superheros right now’). So he does this:

I can’t wait until he’s a teenager.

October 11, 2005

booze, shoes, and a question for the daddies (scroll down, guys, it’s under the shoes)

Booze first: in case you missed it in the comments, Mary P. sent me the link to the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (slogan: ‘dismantling the patriarchy one drink at a time’). If nothing else, this will make you want to put on a nice dress and some great shoes and break out the vintage barware. And toast the end of infant potty training!

So about those great shoes: remember how I was going on and on about shoes? Blah blah blah pointy toes blah blah blah too expensive blah blah blah my huge ass. Oh, sure. Who could forget?

Well, I think I’m out of my mommy funk, for now at least, and I have solved my shoe dilemmas with not one but TWO only marginally practical pairs. Behold, the apple green Mary Jane!

I just love these. They have a great rubber tread on the bottom, perfect for running to the potty, and those cute little bows on the sides, which have no function whatsoever. AND they are actual SHOES, not mules, so I think I will be able to wear them when it gets cold. (Oh, who are we kidding–I’ll still be wearing the mules when it’s cold. I’m stupid like that.) And they’re GREEN–how fun is that? I think everyone should have some green shoes. Because, you know, they go with everything.

Shoe dilemma #2 was that I needed some ‘nice’ brown shoes, but I hate brown shoes (no, seriously. I think it’s some residual scarring from too many years of Catholic school). So after trying on a thousand pairs of boring brown flats (and that one really beautiful camel flannel pair at 9 West), I went with gold.

See, the flats are gold but the flowers and the beads are brown! So they’re like brown shoes, but prettier. And yes, these are round toed flats, and yes, they make my ass look big, but what doesn’t these days! And I am assuming that the flowers and beads will distract from the ass. And if not, well, keep it to yourself. I tried, I really did, to find pointy flats, but they just aren’t out there for a reasonable price. And really, pointy shoes are just dressy, all the time. And I am just not.

But the absolute BEST part? The total for BOTH pairs of shoes was $34.00 and change. So they basically cost what I would have spent at Starbucks last week, except that I never got to GO to Starbucks, because of potty camp. Ta da! I earned them.

Don’t argue with me–just revel in my new shoes. And roll out the cocktail cart!

Finally, a little help from the daddies: the other day, Henry and I were at the park and he wanted to play on the teeter-totter. As he was climbing on, it teetered when he thought it was going to totter and . . . well, you get the picture. So he hopped around holding his boy parts and I tried to distract him, which was the only thing I could think to do, being a girl and all and having no experience with this sort of thing. But WHAT DO I DO when that happens? Ice? Heat? WHAT? Because you KNOW it will happen again. And unless I’m wearing those flowery shoes and sipping a Singapore Sling, it will leave me feeling like a terrible mommy. HELP ME.

October 9, 2005

what I don’t understand is how you keep the baby from falling in

As you all know, we are in the throes of potty camp at our house. The current program goes like this: when Charlie is at home and awake, he wears Big Boy Underwear. At nap time and bed time, and any time we leave the house, he wears a diaper. After a full week, it’s going well; Charlie is having more successes and fewer accidents, and he seems to feel good about the whole thing. This morning, while he was getting dressed (a thirty minute process that involves taking EVERY SINGLE item of clothing out of his dresser, holding each piece up, and rejecting all of them for various reasons only he can understand), he said, ‘I have to go potty!’ and raced off to the bathroom. I got him settled on the big potty (we use the seat that fits on the big toilet; no potty chairs for us) and went to get a clean hand towel from my bathroom. When I returned, Charlie had peed. There was extensive naked dancing and hugging and high-fiving, and when we finally got around to hand washing,he said, ‘I sat on the potty and you went out of the bathroom and when you came back I had gone pee pee and you were proud of me!’ And that’s pretty much how it happened.

This afternoon, as we were basking in the glow of the light at the end of the potty training tunnel (I can see it! I truly can!), I read an article in the New York Times on potty training your infant. And I thought, great, NOW I hear about this. I will be the first to admit that we waited too long with Charlie; he has been talking since he was 18 months old and was probably ready to start the whole potty thing last winter. But we were sidetracked by various things with Henry and chose, for better or worse, to deal with those first. So here we are now.

But as interesting as I find the idea of early potty training, and as much as I wish we were through this particular parenting ordeal, I just don’t buy this. It strikes me as one more form of attachment parenting, one more way to compel women to subjugate themselves to their children in order to prove that they are Good Mommies. I can’t imagine how you leave a potty-training eight-month-old with a sitter. Or how you ever leave the house. Or what your day is like when you are nursing on demand AND pottying on cue. And forget going back to work. Or going out to lunch. Or reading the paper. Or . . . having any sort of life apart from the baby. Because apparently the REALLY Good Mommies don’t do any of that.

This week of potty camp has, at times, made me want to poke myself in the head with a sharp object, but that moment of dancing and celebrating in the bathroom this morning made it all worthwhile. Because, yes, potty training is about not buying or changing any more diapers, but it is so much more about Charlie feeling good about himself. And I think he does, because he is able to understand this as an accomplishment. And that makes me feel like maybe I’m not a terrible mother after all.

At least for a little while.

oh the salty goodness . . .

Wade went out to get the mail yesterday and came in with a nice sized box. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, but it’s for you,’ he said.

The box was from Adria and contained Manna from Heaven: Tim’s Cascade Style sea salt and vinegar potato chips. When I was pregnant with Henry, these chips were the only thing I could eat in the first trimester. Ironically, he doesn’t like them; Wade thinks it’s because I ate so many while I was gestating. When we moved to Oklahoma, we couldn’t get them any more. I’ve bought every imaginable brand of salt and vinegar chips in the past five years, but none even comes close to the flavor of Tim’s. Recently I mentioned here how much I missed these particular chips. And now, thanks to my Favorite Former Student EVER, I have a full 18 ounces of salty goodness in the pantry! (Okay, 15 ounces; I ate one bag last night. Can you blame me?) Hooray for Adria!

But wait! There was more! Adria makes the best chocolate chip cookies in the world, and it’s a good thing because no way was I sharing those chips with anyone in this house. So the boys all had a cookie; Charlie announced, ‘Chocolate chip is my FAVORITE cookie!’ and Henry said, ‘These are the best cookies ever! Can I have two more?’ Hooray!

Of course, eventually Charlie figured out that there were CHIPS, and that they were ’salt and minegar’, which he loves (no, that’s not a typo–he calles them salt and MINEGAR, with an M, and he would eat them until he made himself sick if I would let him. Which I don’t, usually), so I was forced to share. But only a couple of chips–these are precious, after all.

So we’re sending a big Friday Playdate THANK YOU to Adria. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have me some Tim’s chips. And now, if you will excuse me, I’m off to eat myself into a salt and vinegar induced coma.

Hooray!

October 7, 2005

count on me

Lately, I’ve been hearing stories of two- and three-year-olds who can recognize all their letters! and count to one hundred! and play Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle on the violin! And I’ve started to wonder about Charlie.

Henry likes to ask us how to spell things; Charlie, on the other hand, TELLS us how to spell things, as in ‘CHARLIE is spelled E-O-Y-O-E-O-Y-E-O’ (he’s partial to E, O, and Y, for whatever reason). He CAN count properly to 10, but he prefers to count like this: ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 20!’ He does it that way EVERY SINGLE TIME (although sometimes he says ‘eleventeen’ instead of eleven, just to mix it up). I’m not sure how worried I should be about this; right now I just want him to stop peeing on the floor, and then we’ll tackle math and reading.

The counting thing, however, comes in handy at the dinner table. Wade says that watching Charlie eat is like watching ice melt; he takes FOREVER and makes a HUGE mess. When we go to a restaurant, Charlie will wait until the check comes and THEN start eating his meal. One night, when we had gone to dinner with my in-laws, we had settled the bill and Wade and Bob had actually taken Henry to the car, but Charlie was still sitting at the table, slowly and carefully feeding himself spaghetti with meat sauce. My mother-in-law said, ‘Doll baby, are you ready to go home?’ He held his hand up like a STOP sign and said very seriously, ‘No, Mimi, I still eating.’ It was painful to watch.

But back to the counting–when we eat at home (which we do most of the time), Henry inevitably finishes his dinner before Charlie. We require a certain amount of sit-and-be-social time during family dinner, but the boy is five and he’s hyperactive, so really you can only keep him at the table for so long before he winds up hitting his head on a plate or something. And of course when Henry has been excused, Charlie also wants to leave the table, even though he has typically eaten only a raisin and half of a chicken nugget. So we make deals with him about how much food he has to eat before he can go play with Henry. ‘Take three more bites,’ we say.

And here is why we don’t really want him to learn to count: he ALWAYS says, ‘No, no, no, FIVE bites,’ like he’s making some great deal with us. And we sigh and say, ‘Okay, FIVE bites and then you can get down.’ So he starts eating, and after every bite he says, ‘Am I done?’ and we say ‘Two more bites!’ and he takes two more bites and says, ‘Am I done?’ and we say, ‘Two more bites!’ and he takes two more bites and . . . you get the idea. We can get him to eat his entire dinner this way nearly every night. Because he’s cute, but he’s not that bright.

At least he’s a good eater. And I suppose he COULD still learn to play the violin.