Empty.

So, we’re driving home from school and The Who is trying to negotiate his way into eating the cookie I had gotten him. (I had told him he could have it with his dinner, which I believe to be more than fair.)

“But I am so hungry now, Mama!” Try a diversion, said the little voice in my head. (The same voice that’s been helping me remember to go with the flow and try “time-in” instead of time-out, which, incidentally, is totally working so far.)

So, I say, “Is your belly full or empty?”
“Empty!”
“Perfect! It’s nearly dinnertime! That’s the best time for your belly to be empty!” (I’m hoping that he’s biting, but he’s kind of not. Because, see, he’s hungry for a cookie. This dinner business is pretty much bullshit.)

“Are your shoes empty or full?”
[giggle.]
Score!
“Full!”
“Full of feet?”
[giggle]
“Are your pants empty or full?”
“Full!”
“Full of legs?”
[giggle!]

And on and on. He did some. I did some more. As we turned the corner onto our street, I was running out of options. I said, “Is your bladder empty or full?”

Crickets.

“Because mine is full,” I said.
“What does that mean?”

I explained what a bladder is. He didn’t say much and we pulled into the driveway and started talking about which side of the car he was going to get out. He asked if the house was empty or full (which, c’mon, that’s a pretty clever way to ask if his mommy was home yet, right?)

Inside, he ate his dinner (yes, the cookie first), chatted about his day (“We had circle time and then we played and that’s all I remember”), and we called Grandma to make sure her plane landed. Then he took his ritual after-dinner trip to the bathroom and after some reading and alone-time, he called me in, triumphant.

“Mama!” he told me. “My platter is empty!”

Bella.

Tonight, at 7:30pm after having just said goodbye to our 5 playgroup friends who spent the afternoon at our house, I laid down on the couch next to The Who and watched as Sister opened a teddy bear birthday present on an episode of Berenstain Bears.

Teddy bear, I thought. That’s cute. Like Bella.

Shit. Bella.

I sat up and heaved a sigh. “I gotta go get Bella,” I told my wife. And so, at 7:40pm, when I should have been bathing The Who and easing him into bed after a fun, wild afternoon, I was getting in the car to go back to the grocery store to retrieve The Who’s beloved little puppy, whom he had left in the passenger seat of the car cart.

This was just the kind of thing we tried to avoid.

When The Who was an infant, we used cloth diapers as his “lovey.” We tucked one into his crib with him (with the pediatrician’s blessing), carried at least two with us in the diaper bag, sent one to day care with him, and kept one in the car seat. We thought we were so smart. A replaceable lovey! We won’t be those parents paying $200 for some no-longer-produced rare, random stuffed animal. We have “di-di”! (The name came from my little cousin, who, 19 years ago, also used a cloth diaper as her lovey. She called it “di” and so when we introduced it to The Who, we called it “di” also. At some point, a teacher in school referred to it as “di-di” and that stuck.)

Early Di-love. 2.5 months old, chillin’ with cousin E.

Yeah, well. Please see paragraph 3 above.

Bella has actually been around for The Who’s whole life; she was a baby gift from my aunt (ironically, the mother of the original di-girl.) She has spent time in and out of the crib, has always been enjoyed, but never particularly loved over anything else. And then right around the time that The Who gave up his binky, he latched onto this little dog. Di-di is fine and good. And she’ll do in a pinch (all the loveys seem to be “she”) but Bella — Bella is the shit. She is the it-man. She is the top banana. Bella is the one who comes out of bed with The Who in the morning. Bella is the one who gets regaled with stories “from when she was a little girl” when The Who feels like chatting at night, and Bella is the one who, unfortunately, comes on out-of-the-house adventures.

Bella travels on trains.

And so now I am that parent. Googling this little dog, thinking of buying a second one, frantically calling the grocery store and hoping that some kind soul turned her in, and running out at bedtime to retrieve her from the lost-and-found drawer behind the customer service desk. Damn.

Fireman’s Hall.

I can already tell that we’re in for a fun summer. We’re adventuring all over the place and it’s not even mid-May yet. (Although, I don’t know if the weather got that memo; today it’s a blazing 90 degrees. May the fourth be with you indeed.)

Since The Who is really into trains lately, we took the train from our little suburb into the Big, Big City and took a tour of Fireman’s Hall, which is a very cool museum for what it is, but I do wish (and I think The Who wished also) that it was more interactive. More things to climb on, touch, play with. There were some fun exhibits like an old rotary telephone set up on a wooden desk, presumably to simulate where the dispatcher took fire calls. The Who desperately wanted to sit in the big swivel chair and pretend to triage emergencies, but it was cordoned off with big brass chains, upon which hung a sign: “Do Not Touch The Brass.” (I did let him sneak under there once or twice at the end, though.) There were also awesome old horse-drawn fire wagons, including an early coal-powered engine with coal to shovel. Of course, “Do Not Touch The Coal” was posted. (And of course I let him touch it a little.)

Here’s a big fire engine. You may touch the bumper only.

You also weren’t allowed to climb on any of the old wagons and I understand why — preservation and everything — but I think if you’re catering to children (which, to an extent, they are, as evidenced by the big display of fire-related-toys for sale in their gift shop) then you need to have more for them to climb on and explore. To their credit, they did have big fire boots and jackets to try on, which The Who found hilarious.

Here, our young hero is completely collapsed in a fit of giggles, unable to stand up. His ever-so-empathetic mother took a photo before helping him up from under 17 pounds of gear.

It was a very educational trip, when all was said and done. Our walk to Fireman’s Hall from the train station took us past both Benjamin Franklin’s burial spot and the Betsy Ross house. I explained both the best I could to a 3-year-old. He seemed to understand the concept of “the body of a very old and important man, for whom your cousins’ hometown is named after, is under the ground here so people can visit this spot and remember how much he did for our country” and “the woman who sewed our very first flag lived here in this little house.” I suppose the history lessons will get a little more complex as he gets older. I didn’t even attempt to explain the Liberty Bell. The onslaught of questions would have done me in. (“Why is it broken, Mama? Why is it in this building, Mama? Why can’t people touch it, Mama? Why do so many people want to see it, Mama?”)

“F-R-A-N-K-L-I-N”

The day was long and fun. I do my fair share of complaining, but the kid is really a dreamboat when it comes to outings and compliance and listening and tolerance. I can’t wait to see what other wacky adventures we can dream up in the next few months.

Despite no nap and a very long day of listening and obeying, The Who never let even the tips of his toes touch the yellow line.

****PS: As an unrelated follow-up to my last post, we’ve had three dry nights in a row without waking him up to pee! We’ve stopped the dinnertime water (allowing a sip if he asks for it) and stopped the routine drinks at bathtime (again, allowing a sip if he asks for it.) Fingers (and legs!) crossed…

Pee.

Well that was a friggen nightmare.

The Who has been wetting the bed, quite out of the blue, after almost a year of not doing that and we discovered that limiting his water (cutting it off before dinner) seemed to nip it in the bud. (We did visit his pediatrician today to be sure, but she was unconcerned.)

Tonight, though, after two nights of resigned compliance, he spent hours whining at me that he was thirsty and I subsequently spent hours denying him a drink in the name of dry nights. When he was finally in bed, quietly whimpering about his thirst, I decided that it was nuts to be telling him on one hand to honor, respect, and listen to his body and on the other hand telling him to ignore what his body wanted (which was just a sip of lukewarm tap water, so it’s not like he was trying to score a can of Sprite or anything.) The wife and I decided to let him have a drink and wake him when I went to bed for a “dream pee.”

Well. I don’t know for whom this actually works or how you get it to work, but it was all I could do not to snap his arms off and drop-kick him back to his bed.

Whine whine whine whine whine. Refusal to pee. Loud complaints. Wouldn’t stand, wouldn’t sit, wouldn’t give up and go back to bed. And all this in the room next to my sleep-disordered wife for whom a good night’s sleep is not a luxury, but a necessity. At one point I actually stage-whispered to him, “I am begging you. Please stop crying so Mommy doesn’t wake up.” But trying to reason with a half-asleep, angry three year old in the middle of the night is like, well, trying to reason with a half-asleep, angry three year old in the middle of the night.

I did finally get him to pee by just saying, “here it comes; it’s coming” and just willing it to be true. Then there was the insistence of hand-washing, which seemed to be done from within a body-case of molasses and then — ready for this? (Of corse you are, but I, naively, was not–) he asked for a drink of water.

I quietly denied it, urging him to his room, hoping he would get there before the Grand Poobah of meltdowns, which I knew was coming, but instead he lost his ever loving marbles right there in the hall in front of Mommy’s room.

I snatched him up under his armpits and carried him down the hall, where the middle-of-the-night tantrum reached its pinnacle. Because he, of course, wanted to walk down the hall to his room, not be carried. He wanted to walk, thank you very much.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose as now, a mere 30 minutes later, he is snug in his bed asleep again (after walking back to he bathroom and then back to his room again in a classic do-over) and I am sitting here wondering what the hell my options are. Deny him beverage? Sadio-masochistically continue to wake him to pee at midnight? Resign mysel to 3am sheet-changes?

Remember when I said three was not so bad? (Ok, I can’t remember if I said it out loud or not, but in fact, just yesterday, I was thinking it.) Anyway, yeah. Not so much.

List.

It’s been so long since I posted that WordPress asked for my password again.

Sigh.

I have a lot of posts brewing and have been saving up pictures for those posts, but then I end up posting some pithy little thing on Facebook or a couple of shots on Instagram and I’m done. What I can give you tonight is a list. And a promise that I’ll be back to more regular posting soon.

1. I’ve had this crazy windfall of freelance work lately (some paid and some not) and although I am grateful for the work, finding the time to fit it into my schedule will be challenging. But, yes! Work! More money to spend on pajamas and sneakers for The Who!
2. Pajamas and sneakers, indeed! The kid is growing like mad. We think he actually had a growth spurt last week (which I somehow thought ended in babyhood, but it turns out no.) He slept for what seems like days, felt a little warm, ate little, and then his toes burst through the tops of his sneakers and all of his jammies started riding up over his bellybutton. I’m not even exaggerating. When I finally got him to the shoe store, I found that he was poking the rubber right off the soles of his size 9s. I guess that’s because he’s supposed to be wearing a 10.5. Oops. Kid’s been running everywhere since he got his new kicks. “My knees can go up so high when I run in my new sneakers, Mama!”
3. Went to the Please Touch Museum, Fireman’s Hall Museum, and Smith Playground. He’s getting more daring and more adventurous. There’s a video of the two of us careening down a 40-foot slippery wooden slide on a burlap sack at the playground. There’s a video of him laughing hysterically, trying to get his feet into grown-up-sized firefighter boots. There’s a video of him chasing his little pal around the museum. They’re awesome. Take my word for it.
4. I’m way behind in my Draw Something and Scramble games and, frankly, this bullet point should not come before the next one, which is
5. I’m behind on grading. Not way behind, but certainly not on top of it. Also, see number 1 above. Knowing that I have all this stuff to do does not motivate me to get it done. In fact, just the opposite. It kind of immobilizes me.
6. Speaking of immobile, I should have been in bed an hour ago. Maybe more.

Pesach.

Having a kid has made me a better Jew.

For example: Passover (which I now feel compelled to only call “Pesach” because apparently “Passover” is really just an English substitution for the actual name for the holiday.) We always “kept” Passover as a kid. My recollection is that we had lots of matzoh, missed bread intensely, and had a big family meal on the first night. I also recall the looooong seder at my grandparents’, trying to contain explosive giggles shared with my brother and cousins while my grandfather rambled in Hebrew, telling the story, which I never learned (or at least never fully committed to memory.)

I ate bread during Passover once I was an adult on my own. I think maybe for a few years, I tried to keep it, but with no one looking over my shoulder, no belief in God, and no one else to feed, I always lapsed. (Also, my birthday often falls during Passover and having suffered through many horrible excuses for a birthday cake as a kid, I have always felt justified in my enjoyment of a totally trayf birthday cake, regardless of whether it fell during Passover or not. This is true this year. My birthday is tomorrow and the plan has been to have my favorite cake from my favorite bakery tomorrow night.)

The Who, as I might have mentioned before, goes to a Jewish daycare/preschool and has since he was 13 months old. He has “Jewish Instruction” and knows more about some of the Jewish holidays than I do. Last week, a rabbi came to his class with his  “Matzoh Bakery” and they made their own matzoh. He came home telling me that “we don’t eat bread during Passover.”

Well, shit.

How am I supposed to have birthday cake in the middle of Passover when my 3-year-old knows better because of his fine Jewish education? (To my credit, I had already switched our weekly menu so that we weren’t making pizza on the first night of Passover. But, I had only moved it ahead a day, so, well…)

At some point during the day yesterday, m* and I looked at each other and both realized at almost the same time that we needed to rethink it all. We couldn’t have pizza on Saturday. And we couldn’t have birthday cake on Sunday. In fact, we really couldn’t eat bread all week. And, well, damn. We had better get some matzoh in the house. I came home and started googling kid-appropriate Passover stories and, finding nothing I really liked that was available immediately, I just opted to write my own. I bought a Seder plate, made a shopping list, and we picked up my favorite birthday cake yesterday. (Since we eat dinner well before sundown, we decided it would be ok to eat it last night, which we did, freezing the rest of it to be thawed after the holiday.)

All of a sudden, I’m a pretty good Jew. I know the whole story of Passover and I have already eaten two sheets of matzoh** (with the requisite shmear of whipped cream cheese.) It’ll be fun to hide the afikomen tonight and who knows; maybe next fall we’ll even build our own sukkah! (Or, y’know, maybe not.)

__________________________
**I am only a “pretty good Jew” because I bought the “not for Passover” matzoh. It’s totally made with flour.*** The real stuff tastes like packing material. Baby steps.

__________________________
***ETA: Based on the first comment to this post, I did a little search and saw that it’s not the flour that makes it chametz. It’s the egg. And the possibility that there are both egg and water in the dough. I still feel ok with eating it. But I’ll get the “right” kind for out Seder tonight.

Rammy.

Oh, the boy. He’s a menace lately. Chalk it up to giving up the binky four days ago. Or not being able to nap at school. Or starting to wrangle himself into a daily poop. Or the big-boy bed that came last week. A whole lot of change in not a whole lot of time. He’s handling it all as well as can be expected, really.

But, still.

He climbed onto the dining room table after dinner. On to the table. Just thought that might be an appropriate or good idea. And when we wrangled him back down and gave him our sternest looks, he did it again. And then, after the bath, when we’re supposed to be quietly and sweetly getting into jammies, winding down, reading stories, he looked me square in the eye and started singing at the top of his lungs. Right in my face.

The Dr. Jekyll counterpart to this Baby Hyde is that he has been doing a lot more independent play. He’s really into the train table and has committed the Thomas theme song to memory. This morning he sang it seven times in a row on the way to school in the backseat. (To my delight, he invited me to join in once or twice. Usually he silences me.) He’s also really digging playing in the sandbox lately. (Sorry. Pun intended.)

What I keep thinking is, “Ah, well. I guess you take the good with the bad,” except I’d really rather not label his behavior with those extremes. So, in the meantime, I guess we’ll just keep taking the really-appreciated with the less-than-desirable.

At least he’s back to sleeping through the night. Knock wood. At least there’s that.

Living.

I’m sweating like it’s July, which makes me really glad that I did what I did today, instead of in, say, July. Because if it’s 80 in the sun in mid-March, I don’t even want to think about life two months from now. (Thankfully, at least, we’ve secured that pool membership. If we can do nothing else, at least we can submerge ourselves in water with 400 of our neighbors.)

Anyway. What I did today fills me so much I-am-woman-hear-me-roar pride that I just want to write it all down for the three of you who read this. First, yesterday, I moved a leather-and-steel, double-reclining oversized loveseat from our living room to our porch. Alone. Then I rearranged the entire living room and hauled an extra large, heavy duty file cabinet to the basement (along with assorted other things: table, barstool, returned-to-me baby gear that I loaned out, which is is soon to be re-loaned to someone else. I love being the pregnancy Fairy Godmother.) Then I accepted delivery of the new couch. (This required, as you might imagine, very little from me aside from sitting on the old couch and sipping an iced coffee.)

Today, I drove an hour and a half round trip, procured a sizable refund of delivery cost, and hauled home the big leather ottoman that the delivery people forgot yesterday. And then — because I am either a glutton for punishment or energized by how cool this room is going to look when we’re done — I stopped at Home Goods and bought a 7′ x 10′ rug. I just WonderWomaned it all inside myself (with the exception of the little bit of help I received from a kind, strapping passer-by) and as soon as I stop dripping with this is-it-even-Spring-yet sweat, I’ll unfurl the rug, roll up the old one, tighten the legs on the ottoman, and bask in the glory of the singlehanded transformation of our space. (Although, in the name of credit where credit is due, m* and I did pick out the couch together after two days of sitting on  — and hauling ourselves up off  — almost every piece of furniture in the tri-state area.)

I had anticipated spending this day grading on the porch. Alas, I’ll have to get to that tonight, lounging all over all the new stuff in here.

To-Do.

I hadn’t painted in a long time and I missed it. And then when I got this little handful of orders, I kept putting it off. Because I am me and that’s what I do. Oh, hi, Me. I see you have a shit-ton of things to do. What’s say we just lay around and watch TV every night and spend all of our free time at Panera. Wanna? That’ll help the shit-ton of things get done.

Tonight, because the first thing I had to paint is “due” on Sunday (having already been granted an extension on the one that was due tomorrow by a gracious and forgiving friend) I holed myself up in the basement with Vitamin Water (or, as The Who calls it: Lello Juice) and the trusty Netflix. And, as always, once I was in the throes of designing and painting with episode after episode of Parenthood playing in the background, I found my mojo. As soon as I finished that project, I immediately wanted to paint another one (which I am ultimately too tired to do) and I am reluctant to leave my cozy basement studio (despite the cold cement floor and rumbling of the water heater.) (Of course, my reluctance to go upstairs may also have something to do with the mouse we semi-discovered** in our house the other night, but it’s also totally because I am still grooving on the feeling of having accomplished something. Accomplishment with a side of creative release. I’ll have two of those; one for here and one to go.)

I need to clean off The Who’s art table, which is right beside mine, but covered in my crap. I want to make this space more inviting. I want to spend more time down here with him and have it be a space where he can come spend time on his own. Perhaps that will be my summer project: create an actual studio for us. Line the walls with shelving to hold supplies that he can have easy access to. Put up a decorative screen to shield our Happy Place from the rest of the basement storage. Lay down a rug. Set up an iPod dock. I’m doing it. I’m totally doing it. As soon as I get to the rest of that shit-ton of things.

———————
**We didn’t actually see the mouse. We just discovered his droppings on the counter (ew, ew, EW) two mornings in a row. We imagine he came in through one of the holes that were in the wall when we were having some electrical work done a couple of weeks ago. Orkin’s coming tomorrow. Because Mama don’t lay traps.

Hate it.

There are a few things that I really hate. Here they are:

All things Disney. Here’s the gig with Disney: In college, I took a class taught by a radical feminist/socialist. An entire section of the course was devoted to an analysis of Disney movies and how they were sexist and racist. Probably classist too. And ableist. And all the other ists. I bought it all and although I had been a big Disney-lover up until that point, I denounced it. Since then, I have fallen out of touch with all of the things we studied and I can’t necessarily put my finger on the specific examples (if I tried hard, I could. But we are such a Disney-loving culture that it’s a constant battle to try to explain my position to my fellow moms.) But also since then, I have become more and more enraged by the insidious ways in which the Disney corporation infects popular culture. It’s just everywhere and it’s such a money-sucking scam. I especially hate the ways in which Disney aligns itself with McDonald’s. Every other Happy Meal is paired with some plastic cheapo Disney toy that kids are just clamoring for. It feels so gross to me. So yes, Disney. I hate the princesses and their near-synonymy with little girlhood. I hate the not-at-all subtle messages that the “classics” send (e.g. Beauty is supposed to love the Beast despite his “hideousness.” And when she does, she is rewarded by his “handsomeness.”) And, above all, I hate its ruthless business practice of capturing very young children before they have any opportunity to make their own informed decisions. I do not plan to take my child to Disneyworld. I do not encourage Disney-themed toys or character-emblazoned clothing. I try to steer him away from Disney Channel shows (although he really loves Handy Manny…) and I will not step foot in the Disney Store. If you ask me why, I will refer you, from now on, to this post.

Plastic toys. They’re very hard to avoid and I’d be lying if I told you that we don’t have any plastic toys in our house. In fact, we’ve got lots, but they are not my favorites. First, there’s the whole lead-paint-from-China aspect. Plastic toys are covered in that crap. Second, plastic toys are cheap. When they naturally wear (as well-loved toys are wont to do) they crack and break and drop paint chips. I much prefer (and have been endlessly mocked for preferring) wooden toys. Have you seen a wooden toy wear? It gets soft and faded. It looks loved instead of broken. I’m very lucky that Melissa and Doug exists and is so readily available and affordable, but in large part, wooden toys are hard to find and cost a jillion dollars. We were fortunate enough to get gifted with some beautiful stuff when The Who was a baby, but as his interests grow, it’s harder to sate his desires with wooden toys. I still try, though.

Food. All goodamn food because, unless you grow it yourself, it all sucks now. Even the supposedly wholesome, delicious organic things are now laced with arsenic. Red dye makes kids crazy. Hormone-injected milk gives girls breasts at age three. Vegetables are all bathed in neurotoxins. Meat-fed meat is all fatty and horrible. I try to feed my family well on some semblance of a budget, but it just keeps getting harder. I don’t even have anything else to say about that.

Also, in no particular order: light-up sneakers, scratchy polyester jammies, “Trix” flavored yogurt, and Fruit Roll-ups.