Jack: 2 Years 11 month (AKA 3 years old) snapshot.

Jack you're almost three. That's bananas. You are your own person now. You have definitive opinions on life. You know the way you want things. You know exactly what you like and what you don't like. You talk from sun up to sun down. You're inquisitive, smart, humorous and exhausting. You're a fan of telling people how to do things. If I had a sudden amnesiac fugue I have no doubt you would put me straight and tell me exactly how to prepare your chicken nuggets, tie my shoes, drive the car, sleep etc. Speaking of sleep.....

Sleep: You go to bed at 8:30. Ok I'm lying. We PUT you to bed at 8:30 and a lot of the time you have reasons why you can't go to bed. You need a tissue. You need a drink. The smoke detectors beeping. P.S its not beeping. Your closet door is open. We left your shoes in your room. You don't have the right book in bed. You have a boo-boo on your left leg that needs repeated kissing. I am happy to report you are getting a lot better with this though. We know it's a lot. You are in a new place, you have a new brother, you don't go to daycare anymore, we took away your pacifier 4 months ago. We are cutting you some slack. It seems to be working. Either way we love you but seriously GO TO SLEEP. Oh and when you wake up in the morning? You come running into our room and make us watch Cars. Is it that you think we are missing out because we are sleeping? "Mom, open your eyes, you need to watch this!" Jack, I am going to let you in on a little secret. I have watched Cars 3,948,576,903,857,600 times. I close my eyes and see Cars. I wake up in the middle of the night and have the urge to belt out, "LIFE IS A HIGHWAY, I WANT TO RIDE IT ALLLLL NIGHT LONG!"

Play: You just discovered Legos on the Xbox. You love to play with your Dad. You are insanely good for not knowing what the hell you are doing. You have erased the game from our hard drive 3 times. You love to build with your blocks, paint, color, blow bubbles. You also love to dust. You are the best big brother. You like to play with Wes. You are gentle and kind. you like to make Wes laugh. It makes my heart melt.

Eating:
Foods you eat:
chicken nuggets
vanilla yogurt (all other flavors apparently have bugs in them)
homemade waffles (but not pancakes or french toast and syrup is gross)
hot dogs
bananas
french fries (but not the ones I make you....sigh)
bread
cheese (American only. That sound you hear is your mother banging her head on the table)
pasta (don't look now but your eating whole wheat pasta kid. Mooohahahaha)
english muffins
peanut butter
watermelon
crackers
mac and cheese
calimari (I think you would eat a shoe if it were deep fried)

Foods you wont eat:
everything else ever invented.

Mostly I sort of wring my hands at your food situation. I have tried virtually all tricks and sneaky attempts to increase your nutrition and you have thwarted my every attempt. You won't eat ketchup, ranch, ice cream, banana bread, or juices. You won't drink smoothies because they are too cold. You told me that you only eat raisins at Neema's house. I worry that you'll get rickets or scurvy or some weird medieval disease.

Speech: You talk a lot. You are learning all your letters and numbers. You can pretty accurately tell me what each letter is. Sometimes you are easier to understand than other times. Sometimes I think you speak Finnish...or maybe you're secretly German. Your favorite word right now is "Schtum." We don't know what it means. I am fairly certain you don't know what it means either. It has become our households catch all word. "Pass me that schtum will ya?" "Will you get this schtum out of my way?" "Ouch I stubbed my schtum!" You get the picture. Schtum gets a lot of use around this joint. Watch it be some totally crass swear word and we are yelling it from sun up to sun down. Oh well. this week we had a ten minute argument about how something wasn't your fault. It suddenly dawned on me that you wanted it to be your fault because you thought it was a good thing.

Me: "Its ok its not your fault. "
You: "No it's MY fault."

Lather, rinse, repeat. I am embarrassed at how long we argued about this.

Here are my favorite Jack-isms from this week.
"Mom are you having a wrong day?"
"Mom is cranky. She needs coffee. That make her feel better."
"I'm not bossy, I'm bratty!

I love you Jack. Never change. Keep being you. Keep your curiosity and love of the world.

Boys will be boys

I know that I am outnumbered in my home. The male to female ratio in my house is not in my favor. It's not like I want to watch The Notebook, have tea parties, and put the boys in pink tutus, but it would be nice to every once in awhile have a conversation about something other than farts, cars, poop and Legos. I actually really love being a Mom to two boys. I love the way they are starting to play together. I get all warm and fuzzy thinking about them playing catch in the back yard. That being said there are times that the reality of being out numbered smacks me right in the face. Yesterday Jack walked by a magnet we have had on our fridge forever. He apparently had never noticed it before and yesterday it caught his eye. He walked by the fridge and then did a double take said, "Look Dad, a boob!" Classic male. This afternoon while putting him down for his nap I was about to leave his room when he said, "wait, wait, wait, Mom! I have to fart and I want you to hear it before you leave." Wow. Oh wow. Its like I suddenly felt the house get more male. I swear the house grunted, blew a snot rocket and started barbecuing. Get me some pink nail polish and a kitten, stat! We need some estrogen in this joint.

Wes: 5 month snapshot of life

No, I haven't perfected my nap time tranq dart that's just Wes being Wes. Oh Wes, my darling sweet Wes. You are such an easy going baby that you didn't even make a peep when you were tired and you just conked out right in the jumperoo. Sometimes I wish my life were that simple again. Then again I like being able to coordinate my movements, talk, and well, I am pretty attached to using the bathroom rather than voiding myself every 30 minutes.

Sleep: You like it but you don't LOVE it. You sleep three hour stretches at night if I am lucky. Sometimes you wake up and just want to chat. Sometimes I want to explain to you that its 3am and not time to discuss world events. Or sing. You mostly don't care. Here is the good news: You are totally content to just talk to yourself! Or maybe you are secretly carrying on with the walls of your co-sleeper. Who knows. As long as I can sleep in three hour stretches I am happy. You're still swaddled every night. We flirted with taking the swaddle away but you kept punching yourself and scratching your eyes out. You will be 35 before we experiment with removing your restraint garment.

Play: You like your jumperoo but mostly you love your brother. You also like my hair. Or hate it. Either way you grab it a lot. You love your hands and sometimes eat them so much that you make yourself gag and then you puke. You don't seem to mind. You like to play on your play mat. You would eat paper if I let you. I don't.

Eating: You haven't started solids yet but they're coming. No, paper doesn't count as a food. Hair doesn't either. Oh, and that cheese from in between your little chubby hands? Sorry that isn't considered edible either.

You are the sweetest baby that ever existed. You are happy as a clam 99% of the time and when you aren't its pretty easily resolved. I love you, hand cheese and all.

Lesson #6 Guilt...virtual and otherwise

Lesson #6


I can feel guilty about anything. Anything. I feel guilty that I have pairs of socks I don't wear often enough. They're perfectly good I tell myself why don't I wear them more often? Are they lonely in that drawer? Am I really having this conversation with myself about socks? Oh my God its come to this. I am having internal conversations about SOCKS. I need a hobby. I know! A hobby where I can wear more socks!

Guilt can have a stunningly cumulative effect on ones life. My experience with guilt is that it's a slippery slope. Before you know it you are feeling guilty about having a name no one can ever spell correctly (it's not that hard people!), apologizing to your children for not cutting the crusts off their sandwiches, watering the plants (“You're going to feel bad when the Earth has no water in 2034 and be all, “I shouldn't have watered the damn plants”) and so on. When I became a mom my love hate relationship with guilt intensified. There is nothing like parental guilt. You can easily be consumed by the hundreds of decisions you have to make each and every day about the well being of your child and come to grips with the reality that you just can't control everything. Sometimes you can't control one thing, let alone everything. As a parent, I know I have felt guilt over the minor to the major including delaying solids, getting vaccines, daycare, diaper rashes, pacifier use, falls etc. The list could go on and on. I have become keenly aware that there are no do overs and as Eminem would say, “success is my only option.” I just quoted Eminem in a post about parenting. "And the parent of the year award goes to: …......." I did edit it though. He used some other colorful language. He's right though. Success is your only option when you are a parent so I think that plays a large part in my recurrent guilt about the job I am doing. Recently, I have been experiencing two recurrent guilt trips. One seems valid and the other seems insane. I feel guilty that I haven't kept up the boys baby books. I haven't been dutifully cataloging important life events in the way a doting mother should. I started a baby book when I had Jack but stopped at the part that wanted me to chart his teeth and when they grew in. I still feel guilty that I stopped. I imagine him picking the book up one day and looking at me and with a choked voice saying, “Mom, when did my left incisor grow in? You just stopped right here in the book.....I have no documentation of molar growth! You are the worst mother ever!” And then he would go cry and hide in the bushes or something. Ok so while I know that sounds completely asinine I do picture him being disappointed that I wasn’t more caring. More attentive to documentation. Cue the blog! This has been my virtual attempt at guilt reversal. My other and less valid guilt trip has been that I don't spend enough time with my children. In case you don't know I am now a stay at home mom. I spend virtually all waking time with my children. I have a 5 month old who doesn't go more than 2-3 hours in between feedings around the clock and yet I feel guilty that I don't spend enough time with my kids? There is no explanation other than: Guilt is a crazy beast, man. It can crawl inside your head and just set up shop. My guilt monster is pretty happy these days and quite frankly I need to kick his sorry ass to the curb. My plan to avoid baby book guilt is to just document the crap out of stuff here. The things that looking back my kids would want to know about. The funny things they say, the milestones, and even the times they drove me to the brink and back. Every time the guilt beast starts up I just remind myself that I CAN feel guilty about something but I don't have to. In the words of a dear old friend, you just don't have to believe everything you think. Amen.

Lesson #5 Animals are weird....but so are we

One of my earliest childhood memories is a trip I must have taken to a zoo. I remember riding on some sort of double-decker tour bus and I distinctly remember feeling the wind in my hair. The bus stopped in front of the gorilla exhibit and the tour guide started to tell us about the gorillas. One gorilla, who was clearly the head honcho, had mostly gray hair. He was running back and forth in his cage. He wanted us to know he was pretty awesome. I think gorilla for awesome is running back in forth in your cage. Either way he was definitely strutting his stuff. Suddenly he stopped running and he cocked his head to the side as if he was listening to the tour guide. He then put his hand to his butt and proceeded to defecate in his hand. Its what memories are made of people. Gorillas, feces, you know, the good stuff. So Gramps the gorilla then takes said handful and starts to smell it, and then, wait for it......wait for it........takes a bite. I remember feeling so confused and baffled. What in the sam hell was this dude doing? Gramps's grand finale was to hurl said handful at the tour bus. Pretty sure that wasn't in the brochure but maybe I didn't read the back. I learned pretty clearly that day that animals can be really weird. I mean really weird. Over the years I have learned that people can be weirder. The thing is we are all weird. I am not saying we are all secretly shit slingers, pardon my French, but that really no one is immune from being human. We are all weird. It's true, some weirder than others, but weird none the less. I spent a lot of my teen and adults years thinking that I was the only one who was weird and that most people were normal. I thought for a very long time that people were effortlessly put together and as nice as pie first thing in the morning. For a time I struggled with feeling like a failure because I wasn't like everyone else. I didn't have shiny hair, I didn't look cute first thing in the morning, I would forget to floss, I looked retarded in skinny jeans, I didn't get jazz, and the list could just go on and on. Accepting that we all are human and therefore imperfect was a hard lesson for me to learn and one I am still learning. So every time you start to beat yourself up about being weird just remind yourself that as long as your not hurling human waste there are other beings in this world weirder than you, in fact being weird is probably more normal than you think!

Since when do turtles have hair?

You know how they say that people start to look like their pets? Or is it that people pick pets that look like them? Well either way I think Wes and his toy turtle are seeing the same hair stylist. While I am willing to suspend reality enough to allow for the turtle to have a mirror in his belly, I just can't get on board with the hair. Wes sure does love his little hairy turtle buddy though.

File this under things I shouldn't have to say twice...or once

Ever have those moments where you can't really believe you just said that? I routinely find myself saying something and then thinking, "did that really just come out of my mouth?" Inevitably when you find yourself spouting random sentences at your little one someone is bound to be listening. Those people will invariably give you weird looks. Ignore them.

"We don't monkey with butts in this house!" (So people in other houses monkey with butts? What in the hell was I thinking on this one...I used the word butt AND I had just opened the window and I am sure someone on the block heard me holler this delightful number.)

"We don't lick fans." (brothers, socks, floors)

"No I didn't just poop, I said I AM pooped. Never mind. I'm tired.

"Let's not discuss your butt in Target."