The Gift of the Magi

1.  I have two pair of dressy black pants I wear to work.  Two.  Sometimes I might want to wear these pants to, say, a family party.

2.  One of these pants is that type of cotton where you can wash and dry them, but if you don't remove them immediately from the dryer they are beyond wrinkled.  I don't iron much.  So I have to either remove these pants from the dryer immediately which really can never happen or I have to save them until I want to wear them and put them in the dryer for 10 fluff minutes.  Then remove them immediately.  This is a bit more reasonable since I am usually in the process of getting ready to go somewhere important, like work, and the fact that I am applying mascara in my underwear is a pretty good reminder that I have some pants somewhere - ah ha!  in the dryer.

3.  We have a hamper in our bedroom.  There is also a plastic laundry basket on top of the dryer, in the laundry room obviously, where we put "nasty" stuff such as dishrags, napkins, pee pee stained little pants, etc.

Now that you know all this, do you know where my story is heading?

I found my black insta-wrinkle pants in the dryer when unloading it.  So I folded them neatly and draped them over the edge of the laundry basket, which was empty.  My thought was, "I am going to wear these to the Zellerbration on Saturday so I'll fluff them when we are getting ready to go."

Saturday morning, Luna decided she wanted to wear underpants.  This is a "thing" going on right now.  She was about 90% successfully wearing underpants by the end of summer but then Mama went back to work and the puddles starting appearing so we switched to full-time pull-ups and those of you moms in my position can totally sympathize...right?  When she says she wants to wear underpants, I put her in underpants and attempt to begin all over again with the "You tell Mama when you have to go potty and you can sit on your potty" and "Remember, you are wearing underpants.  No pee pee in your underpants" and "How are those underpants?  Are they wet or dry?  Still dry!  Hooray!" and,  of course "Do you have to go potty?" every 5 minutes and at 4:23 minutes a puddle appears.

And this is what happened.  As I was helping Tulip put on her shin guards because she had a soccer game and I was taking only her because Wolfie and Luna were staying home with Papa and when Tulip and I were to get home we would all have a quick lunch and then get ready to go to the family party (aforementioned Zellerbration) and then we would go and arrive on time looking like a sharp, put-together stylish family and it would all happen just like I dreamed...Luna peed.  Which is a funny looking word when you type it.  It's not so funny when it's one of those waterfall pee pee in your pants moments.  I mean, the underpants absorbed nothing.  She was standing on the step stool in the bathroom pretending to brush her teeth and a torrential amount of pee gushed down and it really was like a waterfall because we could all hear it cascading down the step stool onto the tile.

"I make pee pee!"

I've got a shin guard tucked under my armpit and I'm heading into the girls' room to get a pull-up and a cloth diaper to clean up the puddle.  Gabe to the rescue.  I toss him the cloth diaper, air kisses, thank you's, I love you's, have a good soccer game, and off we go.

After lunch, I go to get my black pants out of the laundry basket to "fluff" dry and see some objects in the basket that were not there this morning.  I see a dish towel, a wash cloth, and a cloth diaper.  A soaking wet cloth diaper which had been touching my black cotton pants.

In addition to being insta-wrinkle cotton, these pants are also mega-absorb pants.  My pants have a wet pee stain the size of a pot roast serving platter.

This is my life...and perhaps a little bit like yours too, huh.

The Soundtrack of My Life

It starts with a conversation I have with myself, in my head, that goes something like, "Hey June, now would be a good time to take that second dose of eye drops."  I've had a nasty eye infection all week and I'm taking antibiotic eye drops three times a day.

So, of course, because I need a moment to myself, a moment I prefer to be uninterrupted, I notice Luna putting stickers on the wood floor while I'm en route to the bathroom.  I decide to deal with the sticker situation "real quick" and don't notice Tulip run into the bathroom.  I set Luna up at the table with paper because, "Stickers are for paper."

"Mama, I'm ready for you to wipe my butt....."

Gabe is cooking dinner.  He has two hard and fast rules while he's cooking dinner.  1) No one plays near the stove, and 2) He will not wipe a butt (unless he is the only home who can wipe a butt).

I take care of Tulip and proceed to wash my hands for longer than necessary because, darn it, I'm about to put in some eye drops.  But there is screaming.  Distress.  I mean, what is going on?  Did Luna pinch her finger in the piano lid?

Luna has a sticker on her finger and she can't get it off.  It gets stuck to her other finger.  And back and forth.  I successfully remove the sticker and place it on the paper I gave her.  I turn because, don't you know, I'm about to go put in those eye drops and Luna squeals, "No, Mama.  Don't go!"  She is so distraught over the stickers; she can't get them off the backing, she doesn't like that orange piece of construction paper I gave her.

I quickly make a grid out of post it notes.  It's genius, really.  Stick individual post it notes on the table.  Stick stickers on the post it notes.  Re-stick the post it notes on the construction paper or just on other surfaces.  Stickers on stickers that can stick and stick again.  Luna is completely satisfied.

I am putting in eye drops.  I hear Wolfie and Tulip playing some game in his room where they take turns spinning on a chair.

"After you, My Damn."

"After you, My Handsome."

I giggle with my eyes and squeeze out the eye drops.  Ineffective.  I put in two more drops.

Luna announces, "Hey guys.  Here I am!'

I've Done This

I've left for work in the morning, only to have already secretly called in sick, checked into a hotel room for the day just so I could take an uninterrupted nap.

Okay...so I've never actually done this.  But I have fantasized about it.

Join me folks - what is one of your parenting fantasies?

The Negotiator

Having grown up an only child, my children's behaviors towards their siblings are sometimes foreign to me.  They make me think, "Oh, so that's how brothers and sisters do things..."

For example, I never ever had to negotiate.  I also never had to tattle or get tattled on.  Any directing I did was aimed towards my dolls so my make-believe always went the way I wanted it.

Tulip and Luna were playing and sooner or later Tulip hollered, "Mama, Luna won't blabbety blab."  I'm not diminishing Tulip's concern, but it wasn't really a thing.  I've learned to say, "You two will have to work it out."  As a mom with limited personal experience in sibling disagreements, I am apt to jump right in with an incredibly appropriate, gentle, forward-thinking though creative parental tactic.  But one day it hit me...I don't have to do it all.  They are going to be siblings a lot longer than I am going to be their mother.

I overheard Tulip say, "Luna, don't you want to go see Papa?"  How clever.  Send the baby away.  Humph.

Tulip is funny.  She has this tactic where she tells the other person what to say while they're playing.  For example, she might be creating something in the pretend kitchen and she'll say to Wolfie, "Wolfie, I want you to say 'I wish I had some Parmesan toast.'"  Wolfie will say just that and she'll swoop in as the waitress-chef with a fresh batch of Parmesan toast.  She'll follow up with, "Wolfie, I want you to say 'Do you have any tomatoes?'"  while she holds some wooden tomatoes behind her back.

Later today I heard her say, "Wolfie, I want you to say 'Tulip, don't you want to be the first to be served dessert?'"  Oh she is a clever one.

I've Done This

I have, kind of sort of, not fully supervised my children in the bathtub to save my sanity.

Let me explain a few things.  First of all, I have diligently supervised my babies in the bathtub.  Secondly, kind of sort of not supervising does not mean that I leave the area or put on headphones.

So what's this all about, you ask.  It starts with an old friend in Chicago.  Tracy and her husband lived in the same condo building as me and Gabe.  They were the first couple to have a baby, then they moved to Italy.  They had a massive garage sale the summer I found out I was pregnant so naturally I was very curious to see all their baby stuff.  Tracy had tons of SIDS prevention gear.  She touted her gear, all of it - "you definitely need one of these foam wedges for the crib" - that sort of thing.  I was dumbfounded.  I was probably looking at her, dumbfounded, in the middle of a "you need..." rant when she finally just sighed, dropped her shoulders and said, "Okay, what you really need is to know that all mothers have their thing.  You know, a mother's fear.  Mine was SIDS so I bought every anti-SIDS creation out there."

Okay, 6 1/2 years later I get it.  But SIDS was never my thing.  The bathroom is my thing.  And I'm not even all that fearful of drowning as you would imagine a mother's fear of the bathroom might be.  I'm just so anxious about all that hard stuff.  The toilet, the entire toilet, is hard.  Seat, bowl, tank.  The sink it hard.  And it has corners.  The floor is ceramic - it's so damn hard.  The tub is hard.  I just picture children slipping and knocking out their teeth.  Oh!  and that faucet.  Talk about your head-banging, backside-scraping welt maker.  Egads!

Knock on wood (if you can find any in that bathroom) none of my children have ever had a terrible bathroom accident.  But as they multiply and grow larger, the bathroom and bath time becomes a night at the water park.  They are splashing and stomping and diving and sliding.  Literally sliding.  One side of our tub is slightly curved so they stand up, lean their slippery butts against the wall, lift up both feet  simultaneously and whoosh! it's a slide.  It's a total lip-biter for me, that's for sure.

And you know what happens when I'm in there...supervising.  "Look mama!"  "Watch this Mama!"  And it just intensifies.  Each new bathtub stunt has to be grander than the last.  I don't need to watch my children do a jack-knife off the towel rack into the tub.  No no no.

So I wander around the hall, listening and listening and, oh who am I kidding, checking in on them every 2 1/2 seconds and trying again and again to sit on the toilet and watch them play so I really am supervising them.  You worry not.  But I'm just so eager for two things to happen:

1) Splashing only games.  Splash!  Splash like crazy.  Even though I'm irrationally fearful of you slipping, I've got tons of rugs and towels with which to cover the floor so you just go crazy in there and I can sop up the puddles.  Just keep your rear ends and feet down.  (You can even play that game where you pretend to sip bath water, or um, actually drink bath water and you can even, um, play that game where you actually sip bath water and spit it because all of those activities are typically conducted while seated.)
2) The end.  One last, "Be careful, it's slipper!" and then I can breathe a sigh of relief, but not until they are safely traversing the carpeted hallway.

Sugar Booger

Tulip has a stuffed animal, a pink sugar glider, that she named Sugar Booger.  We got it at the Children Museum (in Indianapolis and that place is awesome!) so the name "sugar booger" has been in our family for about two years.

This afternoon I wanted to scoop Luna up onto my lap so I said, "Come here sugar booger."
She said, "I not booger?" with some concern.

I said, "No, no of course you are not a booger.  But you are sweet."
She said, "I sweet.  I sooooooooo sweet!"

Oh, if only I had a nickel for every time I had to hide a giggle when my children were being serious.

The short a

Wolfie explain how bees make honey

Wolfie's reading and spelling homework featured words with the short a sound.

Is it a bag or a bat?

Is it a man or a map?

He had to read questions like this and write the word that matched the picture.

The final question asked him to write his own word with a short a sound.  Now, for some reason one of the first words Wolfie could spell was "bed".  I don't recall doing anything special with this word, or these letters, or this concept.  One day he announced, "I know how to spell bed...b - e - d."  He was also able to spell "go" and "zoo", thus these three words, and his name, became his beginning repertoire of words-I-can-spell.

Now, a year and a half later, he could finally put that special word, bed, to use.  Sort of.

Wolfie said, "Well I know a word, 'bed', and maybe I can put a short a sound in that word."  I asked him to sound it out and he said, "bad" and then smiled for he just made a correct choice, then looked a little concerned and said, "Well maybe I should chose a different word because that word is...uh...a bad word."  And then we laughed and he went with "man".