The Fish Pond

Weekend Plans - Wordless Wednesday

My inlaws are coming for dinner tomorrow, and my FIL might drink 1 glass of wine. MIL won't drink at all. I'm not drugging my kids.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I am thankful each and every day for all my wonderful friends who I would never have met if it weren't for this blog, and for my crazy kids who give me such wonderful material.

The Mother of All Poop Stories

Motherhood is not for the weak stomached. I've caught puke in my bare hands as the kids threw up and couldn't get to the bathroom. I've been peed on and pooped on, and cleaned up a spectacular mess made by Little Man when he had projectile poop across the NICU. I've been spit up all over and been puked on in my hair and down my shirt. Nothing I couldn't handle. I've never had a kid get into poop artwork, and I've only had one incidence of poop in the tub. The worst poop problem we've had here is Sunny taking off her poopy diaper and throwing it at me. It was bound to happen sooner or later. So really, I shouldn't have been surprised (NOTE: If you have a weak stomach, read no further. You have been warned).

Sunny attends preschool in the next town south of here, a distance of about 10 miles that takes about a 20 minute drive. I like to leave a bit early to pick her up at her 1pm dismissal, because Nemo falls asleep in the car and that's the best way to ensure he gets a decent nap before we go meet BigDaddyFish for lunch. I usually leave about 12:15, after Nemo has had a chance to watch his favorite Noggin show, Oswald.

This morning, I was in the kitchen looking at porn reading blogs doing the dishes, and Nemo came up to our kitchen gate, crying and spitting and saying something about "Chock-lit." He held something in his hand, and I figured he picked up a piece of stray chocolate from the floor or in the couch cushions that I hadn't found on my cleaning binge and was trying to eat it.

"No! Dirty, Nemo, dirty, don't eat that! Spit it out!" I told him as I ran from the sink to the kitchen gate. He continued sputtering and coughing and gagged and threw up a bit. I reached him and the stench was unbearable.

"Nemo! What did you do? Are you okay? What did you eat?!?" I shrieked as he shoved his hand down the front of his pants again, muttering about the chocklit and "messy". That's when it hit me.

Nemo has developed a habit lately of putting his hand down his diaper and playing with himself. Today, he apparently grabbed a turd and pulled it out of his diaper, and thought it looked an awful lot like chocolate. He learned the folly in that pretty quick.

Choking down my own puke, I grabbed the wipes and stripped him. He had apparently been squishing around in there and in an effort to clean the mess off his hands, he'd wiped them on his sweatshirt. I went at him with about eleventy million wipes (and I pride myself on my two-wipe diaper changes, so that's saying something) and finally decided it was just too much of a mess and made a dash for the tub.

One emergency bath later, I crammed him in clean clothes at 12:35, anxiously watching the clock. Although he was clean he still had poopbreath, so I grabbed a couple of Grasshopper cookies to deal with that. BDF had said he would pick up Sunny and meet me in the parking lot, so I wasn't too worried, but still wanted to make it. I got in the car at 12:43 and BDF texted me that he had a meeting and couldn't make it to pick up Sunny. So I skedaddled. I pulled into the parking lot at 12:58.

And that is why I will be having tequila tonight. The end.

Indeed

BigDaddyFish changed offices so he's close to the preschool that Sunny attends three days a week. We've been meeting him for lunch every day after I pick her up from school. BDF drives me a bit crazy, in that he won't kiss me in public, even a quick peck as he goes back to work. Today, I was frustrated with him about that, and this conversation was the result.

"That's it. I'm going home to go look at porn."

"Don't do that. I need 24 hours advance notice for that. I'll give you assignments, what to watch."

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, then you could do book reports on them."

"Um, if they're about movies, wouldn't that make them movie reviews?"

"No, actually, I guess more like After Action Reports."

Pictures

"Does he go up and down stairs okay?"

"Oh, yes, of course. Actually, he jumps down the stairs."

A cocked eyebrow. "Jumps?"

"Yes, he jumps down each step. When he hits the bottom, he either falls down on the floor in a heap of giggles, or usually he throws his hands up in the air like a gymnast who just stuck the landing. He can jump up and down on the bed, too."

"Both feet off the ground?"

"Yup."

"That's rather..." a long pause as he struggles to find the words, "advanced. Anything else he can do? How's his vocabulary? Does he put together two and three word sentences?"

"Four words, actually. And he has a wicked arm, as several of us have found out when we were on the receiving end of some toy he's thrown at us."

"Watch him. You don't want to end up in the ER, and his understanding is far behind his ability to understand the risks."

"We kinda don't know how we haven't been there already. He's just trying to keep up with his big brother and sisters; he doesn't know he's not big like them."
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"Mom! See this tower I built? It's an owd tower, from back before Granddaddy died, and when he died and went up to heaven it all fell down, but now I rebuilded it."

She sits in front of our dollhouse, duplo creations on every floor, with small pieces of play money in front of each one.

"This one? This is a flower tree. And this one is a owd owd cabin from when I was owd, way back when I was borned, when I was a baby. This one is Granddaddy. This one is a tweehouse."

I marvel that somehow, a year and a half after my grandfather died, over a third of her life ago, she is still, somewhere, processing things, and I start to ask her if she wants to talk about Granddaddy, if she's sad, and she interrupts me.

"Smell that, Mom? I faaawted." She giggles like it's the funniest thing ever.

Alrighty then. I guess it is the funniest thing ever.

Transitions

I never intended to have a family bed. To the best of my knowledge, I never, ever slept with my parents, and I fully intended that my babies would spend a short amount of time in my room in a bassinet and then transition to their own cribs in their own rooms when they outgrew the bassinet. (I also never intended to have four kids, so the own rooms thing worked well.)

Everything went according to plan until Trout was three months old, when she developed RSV. We spent three days not sleeping at all, just staying up all night staring at her to make sure she kept breathing. Once she recovered, I went back to putting her to sleep in the crib, but BigDaddyFish had a little Daddy Freakout and decided he couldn't sleep with her so far away from us, so he went and got her and brought her to our bed. I argued against it for a while, but frankly it was easier to nurse, and she was a good kid to share a bed with - she pretty much stayed put all night long, no kicking or shoving. She shared our bed until she was 16 months old and we knew her brother was on his way.

The move from our bed and room to the crib in her own room was wrenching but thankfully over in a week. The first night she screamed and cried for three hours. BDF slept on the floor beside the crib so he could soothe her periodically and she could adjust to the crib before she was alone. The second night, she cried for 45 minutes, and then sat in the crib giving us the stinkeye every time we walked by the room to check on her for about four hours. The third night she cried maybe ten minutes, then went to sleep after about an hour. Within a week, BDF was out of her room and back in our bed and Trout was sleeping by herself. She didn't stay in the crib very long, because we needed the crib for her brother and we didn't want to kick her out of the crib when he was born. We were idiots, and in hindsight we should have just bought another crib. But we moved her to a toddler bed instead.

Then we had the two hour ritual of me reading book after book and then sitting beside her bed so she could fondle her favorite comfort object as she drifted off to sleep, my hair being that comfort object. After too many nights of me dozing off and waking with a crick in my neck three hours later, I wised up and bought her a doll with hair, and she learned to fondle it instead of me. She later got another doll with hair, which she still sleeps with every night.

Little Man was easy, because he really didn't do well sleeping with us. He helicopters around, wanders all over the place, and talks in his sleep. It didn't take us long at all to discover that we all slept better with him in the crib. By the time he had outgrown the bassinet we had finally relaxed about his birth circumstances, so the transition to the crib at about four months went smoothly.

Sunny was a champion nurser, so she slept with us for years. We started trying to make the transition to her own bed when she was just shy of two and we bought her a toddler bed. We set it up in the corner of our bedroom, and went through an agonizing six month process to get her actually moved to the bed and then the bed moved from our room to the room she shares with her sister. She was still nursing at the time for a part of it, though she had weaned down to once a day. BDF and I went on a trip just before her second birthday and through that we were able to cut her off and finally wean. She still tries to come to our bed at least one night a week, but now I'm able to promise her a sticker in the morning if she stays in her bed all night and that works.

Which brings us to Nemo. I have been trying desperately to get him weaned; I want my body back, after three full years of pregnancy and more than 70 months of nursing, but he has other ideas. I also want some sleep, and I don't think that's asking too much.

Nemo has been sleeping in our bed with us since he was born. It was easier to nurse, and really, we had no place to put him. We have a three bedroom townhouse. The house itself is huge, and we have a lot of living space, and the master bedroom is a good size. But the other two bedrooms are really small. Trout and Sunny are crammed into one room, Sunny still in her toddler bed, Trout in a twin bed, but with the windows in that room we can't really make any changes in there - the windows come down to within 24 inches of the floor. Beds can't go underneath them because my kids would find it rather too easy to jump through the window. Little Man is crammed into a bedroom little bigger than your average walk-in closet, with a closet that is only 6 inches deep for most of its width. At about age 1 I set the crib up at the foot of our bed, and we tried to get Nemo to sleep in it, but he decided it was baby prison rather than a comfy, cozy place to sleep, and he would scream til he puked. Crying it out, which I certainly would have considered, wasn't really an option because sooner or later, we had to come to our own room to sleep, and he'd just start back up where he left off. So back into our bed with us. No one has been getting much sleep because Nemo will wake up in the night and need us to help him get back to sleep, either through playing or through nursing, and he wanders all over the bed and kicks and shoves and is a lot stronger than his brother. I want my bed back to just me and my husband.

Over time, I've been putting him in the crib at other times than bedtime, just to get him used to it. I'd fold laundry on my bed while he played in the crib. A couple of times Superbabysitter was able to get him to go to sleep in the crib, though he really won't reveal his secrets as to how. I'd been asking BDF to put Nemo to bed, because if the Nummies were around he asked for them, but was okay without them if they weren't an option. Slowly, over a course of months, BDF worked on getting Nemo to sleep in the crib. And in a stroke of genius that only a dad would think of, I think, one night he gave Nemo the Gameboy with a Little Einsteins game in it, a game so easy that you really only have to push one button to make it do anything and Nemo can manage to play it well enough to keep it going. He kissed Nemo goodnight, layed him down in the crib, covered him up, and let him play the Gameboy til he fell asleep. And he did.

So now, a couple of nights a week my son sleeps through the night. Yes, he's two (yeah, he had a birthday this past weekend) and should have been doing it all along, but he'd wakeup in the night and wow - Nummies! Think I'll grab a snack! and sit up and smack me in the face (literally!) shouting "Mom! Mom! Nummies!" until I rolled over and ponied up. He doesn't do that now, because they aren't right there in his face. Some nights he'll get up and yell at us until one of us brings him into bed with us, but sometimes BDF is able to get him to lay back down and go back to sleep by rubbing his back and telling him to go back to sleep. We also discovered a deep affinity for glowsticks, so sometimes we mix it up with the Gameboy and give him a glowstick. Best of all, as long as I keep the girls covered up, I can put him to bed without him asking to nurse, provided he didn't nap too late during the day.

Now, I'm getting more sleep, though thanks to my husband, still not enough. But more than I used to. It's been so nice that BDF is now thinking more seriously about what we need to do in this economy to get moved to a bigger house, where Little Man and Nemo can share a room and the hormones girls can have their own rooms, because he's liking being able to snuggle his wife with something other than his foot since there's no kid in the way. His wife's kinda liking it, too.

Hallo-what? Elect-huh?

Indeed, we have had both a holiday and a momentous day in our history, but I have largely missed them (though I did exercise my civic duty on Tuesday). Where the hell have I been? Um.

Well, first I had the bright idea that since Trout's birthday was three days before Halloween and Halloween was on a Friday, that we could have her birthday party on Halloween and BigDaddyFish could take all the guests trick or treating with our kids while I handed out candy, and then when they got back to our house we could have cake, play a couple of games, and then send them all home on a sugar high. No fuss, no muss, little mess, and no dad-burned treat bags. Brilliant idea, right? Not so much. First one parent called and asked if she could stay and bring her 4 year old. I have a 4 year old, so no problem. Then another parent called to ask if her younger child could come. He's five. Thinking that the parents would be staying, I said yes. That would mean 11 kids to at least four parents - no problem.

BDF was supposed to work from home, but he decided to go in and come home early. My job was to clean the house.

I got the house cleaned, but I still needed to go to the store to get balloons and a cake. BDF was supposed to leave at 3. 3 goes by. 4 goes by. Frantic text messages ensued, to no avail. He got home at 5, at which point I blew out as fast as I could to go get balloons and cake. I live under a rock, so I did not know that the shopping center with the party store was having trick or treating there. The store was mobbed. I got the balloons, but it easily took 35 minutes for them to get them done, and I still had to hit the grocery store for a cake. It was on the way home, but I was still driving when BDF started calling asking where I was at 6:15. The party started at 6.

When I got back, I discovered that the parents of one of the extra kids had not, in fact, stayed. Later on BDF told me that they asked if they could go out to dinner and he said yes. There were kids running all over with no one asserting control of the situation. I tried to get them to eat dinner, but they were too spun up. BDF finally put on the Charlie Brown halloween DVD, and that kept them a little calm, but they were still a bit rambunctious. In particular, the set of kids whose parents didn't stay were running all over, climbing on the furniture, and trying to pull out all the toys I had spent half the afternoon cleaning up. The last two guests finally arrived, and everyone tumbled out the door for trick or treating.

Except Nemo. He was overwhelmed with all the people he didn't know, he hated his costume (Yoda. Little Man was Darth Vader. Great in concept, but the Jedi Master pleased was not.), and just freaked. So he stayed with me to hand out candy. I tried to get him to go just to our next door neighbors, good friends of ours, but he wouldn't go past our property line, which isn't very far when you are in a townhouse. I took his bag and put some candy in it to show him how to trick or treat, and he thought that was great, but he didn't want to leave our property. So I held him on my lap outside, with our big bowl of candy, and he slowly warmed up to putting things in other people's bags.

We didn't have very many trick or treaters this year, but I really have to commend the ones we did. We had a bunch of older kids, old enough that I usually get pissed off and only give a single lollipop to. To a one, they were considerate of Nemo and if they were wearing a scary mask, they flipped them up so he could see their faces before approaching us, or they let him come walking rightuptothem and look up their masks to see their faces. I was impressed and rewarded them generously. We still had tons of candy left.

When the kids got back I fed them and did the cake. Kids refused to eat cake (!) and persisted in trying to take out the toys. So I distracted them with the opening of the presents, and then we played some games, games specifically chosen with 8 and 9 year olds in mind, not 5 year old. Our extra child couldn't cope with losing, even though everyone got prizes no matter what. I guess that being in an unfamiliar house, on an out-of-the-ordinary night, possibly past his normal bedtime, and playing with kids that didn't want to let him lose so he wouldn't freak out was just too much. He had a screaming crying meltdown in my living room for an interminable amount of time but probably only 15 minutes before his parents arrived and helped him calm down. I felt sorry for the kid, but was profoundly relieved to send him home. Then it took me all weekend to recover.

Speaking of the weekend, my husband, we'll call him "Randy," enlightened me that he has recently fallen in love with me again*, and seems to be under some sort of delusion that he is, in fact, 21 years old again. I haven't slept in days, dear Lord help me the man is going to kill me with all this lovin'. I realize I could have worse problems, but it's only recently that I've been able to sleep at all without a two year old mauling me while I tried to get comfortable. I was kind of enjoying sleeping more than 4 hours a night. Still, it was an amazing thing to be able to go together to go vote on Tuesday.

I think from being run down due to the birthday party and Randy, I developed a cold that is morphing into bronchitis, hence the absence. I can currently sing bass. It's...interesting.

So how was your week?

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New post up at DC Metro Moms about why I won't tell my kids who I voted for.

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*When you've been married as long as we have, this is what happens. You don't wake up every day loving, or even liking, the person you're with. It takes a strong commitment to the marriage to stay sometimes. I like to say that I'm lazy and stubborn and that has come in handy to weather the hard times, but in truth it's mostly that my husband is my friend, my best friend, and that's what sustains you when he asks you what you do all day while he's at work because your job is so easy and you really, really just want to ram your fist into his left nostril. Then one day he takes the kids for you and lets you sleep in for four hours and you overhear him telling his friend that he understands why you can't get anything done because gah! and you feel secure that he GETS it and you love him all over again. Plus, it doesn't hurt that he's hot.