Where do they get that ...

Is it worse to wonder where your kid got an idea, or to know exactly where he got it?
Two examples:
Big Boy's new thing is to run away from me when it comes time to put his diaper on. So yesterday morning, he's running away from me, I'm chasing him, and he runs between the coffee table and the couch. He's laughing, "Ha ha ha, ha ha ha," and then he says, "God damn it," and then keeps laughing. "Ha ha ha."
In this case I know exactly where he got that. It's MrDartt's standard exclamation, whenever something happens. He drops an ice cube when filling his glass. (Every single time he fills his glass.) "God damn it." He hits his hand with a hammer. "God damn it." He is mad at Big Boy. "God damn it."
The second example comes from one of my closest friends. Her son is three, and they also have a seven-month-old girl. Well, to speed up the bathing process, one parent sometimes jumps in the shower with both kids. The baby sits in her little bathtub on a big step in their shower. They use a little cup to rinse her. The other day when my friend's husband was bathing the kids, the three-year-old, who's been potty-trained for quite some time, picked up the baby's rinsing cup and peed in it! He set it down, full of pee.
The worst part, my friend said, was that the baby would have gotten rinsed off with it if my friend hadn't seen the whole event and dumped the pee.
She has no idea where her son got that idea.

Getting Beat on Thinking Ahead

Isn't it awful when you think you're thinking ahead, but despite your best intentions, things don't turn out as you expected them to?
Here's what happened: we've been hunting for a kid-sized table for Big Boy (and Little Boy, when he gets bigger). We wanted to put it in the play area so he could sit there and color, or so he could play with his big castle or his blocks there.
We debated about which kind to get -- should we get a wooden table with four little chairs? Or should we get one of those inexpensive fold-up card tables with two chairs?
Finally, we decided on a little picnic bench whose seats are attached -- we were thinking that way, Big Boy wouldn't cart the little chairs all over the house. He already carts the big barstools all over the house, so he can climb on them to reach things. You go to sit down at the barstool and it's not there; you then find it in the bathroom (no idea).
So anyway, we bought this little picnic bench that's supposed to seat four kids. We put it in the play area.
And despite our best intentions, Big Boy is dragging it, benches and all, all over the house!
I keep finding it haphazardly placed between the play area and the living room, half on the wood floor and half on the carpet. Or in the kitchen.
"Why do you keep moving the table?"
"Because I want to."
So much for thinking ahead.

Rubbernecker Mother

I am officially a Rubbernecker Mother.
The other day at the store, Big Boy wanted to ride in the shopping cart that looks like a car and has steering wheels. The problem: this car had only one steering wheel. My mom was with us. She put Big Boy on the side of the car that had the steering wheel and I put Little Boy on the other side. Of course, Little Boy kept trying to touch the steering wheel and Big Boy was getting pretty mad about it. He kept pushing Little Boy's hands off the wheel, saying things like, "That's MY steering wheel, Little Boy!" or "No, Little Boy!"
I kept saying things like, "If you want to ride in this car, you have to share. Otherwise we can get a regular basket and you can ride in there."
He really doesn't like riding in regular baskets -- he prefers to walk, but only gets to walk if he's behaving.
The grabbing and pushing continued as we neared the apples. I thought it was so funny, I started digging around in my purse for my mobile phone so I could take a picture and upload it to my Facebook. Because I was so busy digging for the phone, I didn't notice Big Boy's frustration escalating until I looked up as he kneed Little Boy in the arm, knocking the arm out of the way, making way for Big Boy's knee to hit Little Boy's forehead before Little Boy's forehead hit the steering wheel.
Screaming ensued.
My mom took Little Boy out of the car and I took Big Boy. I got another cart and forced Big Boy into it, all the while speaking in a calm voice about being nice to Little Boy and sharing and terrible behavior and getting into the regular cart.
My mom walked off to another part of the store to avoid the commotion.
Big Boy continued to scream.
Finally, a man (probably a grandpa) walked by and said to Big Boy, "You don't look very happy."
That shut him up and he behaved the rest of the time.
But I have to wonder: would the kneeing have occurred if I hadn't been rubbernecking?

Jobs

Some people say that being a stay-at-home mom is one of the hardest jobs in the world.
I disagree. I mean, I know of a lot of harder jobs out there. For example, I'd take stay-at-home mom over big-city-firefighter or police officer any day. I know, I know, there's all these jokes about firefighters sitting around in recliners watching TV and about police officers eating donuts all day long, but really. Would you want to be a firefighter and march right into a burning building? Would you want to be a police officer and run toward gunfire rather than away from it? Or how about a human resources person who has to lay off people they really care about, who are depending on their jobs? No thanks.
Anyway, I don't think stay-at-home mom is the hardest job in the world. It takes more patience than some jobs, and sometimes it's frustrating. And it is hard work, because it's so constant.
Here's an example:
Yesterday my mom and I took both my kids to the mall to buy a birthday present for a friend. Big Boy had a meltdown when I made him get off the toy cars so we could leave. I was carrying him and he was throwing a tantrum and slapping my face repeatedly. I'm sure any parent, stay-at-home or not, has dealt with something like this.
Then MrDartt called and said he probably would not be home for dinner. So I fed Big Boy some pizza (I know, not the healthiest meal ever) at the mall. And then my mom asked if I wanted to go to dinner with her and my dad on the way home. I REALLY wanted to. But I couldn't because Little Boy had been crying off and on for the whole mall trip and Big Boy's disposition hadn't improved too much since the slapping my face repeatedly incident. So then, I had to head home. I dropped my mom off so my dad could pick her up, and then Big Boy screamed, at the top of his lungs, the rest of the way home. Screamed. Why?
My point is that sometimes it would be so much easier to put my own needs and desires first. And sometimes I do, like just now, Little Boy was crying in his bedroom (just woke up from his nap) and I was just going to finish my blog first. But MrDartt said that wasn't very nice. So I went and got him while MrDartt finished up what he was doing. Then he took Little Boy so I could blog.
As a stay-at-home mom, my schedule is based around the kids' schedules, like eating and naps and stuff. So I can't get on Facebook or my e-mail and send messages to my friends in the middle of the day, because then I'd be ignoring my kids. I can't just schedule a lunch date with a friend -- I have to decide what time will work for naps, what place is good for strollers, high chairs and kids, or what place has a good kids' menu.
But I'm not out in the work world, having packed up my kids early in the morning, then going to lay people off, or stand outside in the heat directing traffic, or dealing with other people's sick kids all day, or telling my patients that they have cancer and probably will die within a year, or opening up someone's skull to cut a tumor out of their brain.
I think saying stat-at-home parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the world is kind of cliche. I enjoy it (even though it's frustrating), and I think it's fun to get to teach my kids all the lessons of the world -- like to say "excuse me" if you want to go down the slide and someone's sitting at the bottom, or, as one of my old friends had to do the other day -- convince her two-year-old not to pick her poopie up out of the potty to show off that she'd finally pooped on the potty. You can't beat that!

A Dad at the Park

Yesterday, we went to playgroup at the park, and one of my friends, we'll call her "B", learned two things: a) never have five kids and b) never leave the husband alone with five kids.
I concur.
Playgroup started at 10:30. When I arrived at 10:45, B was already there -- she'd been there since about 10 a.m. She pointed out a dad who was there with his five, yes FIVE, kids. They ranged in age from about 6 or 7 to an infant in a carrier. B told me that the dad had been there since right after her 10 a.m. arrival, and had just then, at 10:45, taken the infant out of the car. She'd been in the car with the door open, screaming. B had told the dad, who had nonchalantly gone over to hush the baby up, and then leave her in the car again. Finally, he brought her out and set her carrier in the shade at the edge of the playground.
At one point, I could see Big Boy's feet on the ladder, and a pair of little arms around both of his ankles, leaning back against his body weight. Upon further inspection, my concern was validated: one of the dad's five children, a girl of about 5, was indeed trying to pull Big Boy's feet off the ladder, while he clung to a higher rung with his little fists closed as hard as he could close them. The dad was watching, but not saying anything. That's right. Watching, but not saying anything as my two-year-old struggles not to lose his footing on a metal ladder and fall because this dad's little girl is pulling on his feet.
As soon as I notice what's going on, Big Boy starts calling for me. So I'm walking over and the dad says, "Good morning." That's it. "Good morning."
"Good morning."?
How about "Sorry my kid's trying to kill your kid."?
I walk over to the kids and say, "What's going on over here?"
"She's pulling me," says Big Boy.
"He pulled me first," the girl said. Yeah, right. Big Boy hardly interacts with other kids at the park, unless his mother forces him to say hello, good-bye, or excuse me, I'd like to go down the slide.
And I'm positive that the little girl never held still long enough for my kid to pull on her feet, especially when the dad was watching her and her little sister climb up the slide while other kids waited to go down.
Anyway, I ask Big Boy if he'd pulled the girl. He says, "No, I didn't."
"Yes, he did," the girl says.
I believe him, because it's just not his style.
So I say, "Okay, no pulling, okay? Nobody pull anybody. Now go up the ladder and play."
As I walk away, the dad smiles at me. Seriously.
I'm not against people having five kids. But I concur with what B told me as soon as I arrived at the park: I will never have five kids. So I don't have to worry about sending my husband to the park with said kids. Thank goodness.

Big Boy's "Reading"

Why is it that when you want your kid to come up with something to do on his own for a few minutes while you put the dishes away, he wants to play in the dishwasher, but when you want him to go to sleep, he wants to sit quietly and read to himself for 30 minutes?
Big Boy is only 2.5 years old, so yesterday at naptime when he said he wanted to read himself, I figured he would just look at the pictures in the Curious George book before going to sleep. So I left him to it. But when I went back downstairs to put Little Boy to bed a half-hour later, I heard Big Boy in there, reciting perfectly the words from one of the Curious George stories.
Mind you, I'd tried to get him to watch TV for a few minutes while I wrote on the blog yesterday. To no avail -- he wanted to sit in my lap and push buttons on the computer. At dinner at a restaurant, I tried to get him to color for five minutes while we waited for our food. But he wanted to get in and out of his booster seat about eight hundred times.
Then, after dinner (this is not related, it's just what happened after our food finally arrived and Big Boy ate his pizza, with ketchup on it, upside down), I was trying to get him into the car but he wanted to lean up against the wall at the side of the parking lot. He said, "I'm busy. I'm poopin'." His new thing is that he can't sit down while he's pooping or after he's pooped.
So I waited. My dad (we'd gone to dinner with my parents) was laughing and saying this would be a good subject for the blog. I think he was joking, but whatever!
So then Big Boy is running along that wall in the parking lot, trying to get away from me (don't worry, there's a big landscaped swath between cars and wall, so he was running in that). He was alarmed and delighted when I jumped over a bush to catch him. I realized then that he hadn't pooped after all, so I loaded him up and off we went.
Before bed, he wanted to sit and listen to music. Of course. I'm trying to get him ready for bed and he wants to sit still and listen to music for 10 minutes. And then, we're downstairs in his room, trying to get him into bed, and he wants to sit and read again for 10 minutes. By himself. I just can't win! But I was very impressed that he got about 60 percent of the words exactly right -- despite MrDartt and my abbreviated versions of the very long stories!

Challenges from Big Boy

Big Boy notices everything.
He notices when I change the color of my toenail polish. He notices when I'm wearing my heart pajama bottoms and a blue tank top rather than the heart pajama bottoms and the proper heart pajama top. He notices when I put my hair up (and it's driven him to tantrums). He notices if I switch purses. He notices if I've put on mascara.
So I should not have been surprised this morning when we were watching Dora and he said, "Mommy, Dora is brown. Why Dora's brown, Mommy?"
But I WAS surprised!
I said, "Well, some people just have darker skin and some people have lighter skin."
He said, "We have lighter skin, Mommy. I wish I was brown like Dora."
"Well," I said, "You just have lighter skin and that's okay."
He said, "She has brown eyes. I wish I had brown eyes like Dora. You have green eyes, Mommy. I have blue eyes. I wish I had brown eyes like Dora."
"Well," I said, "Your eyes can see and that's important. It doesn't matter what color they are."
WHAT DO YOU SAY?
I'm finding, increasingly, that motherhood is requiring me to think a lot faster than I anticipated, and to question what I say more frequently.
I want to give Big Boy straight answers, but I don't want to say too much so he doesn't understand. But geez, he sure comes up with some challenging ones!

Annoying Cute Kid stories...sorry!

It's so funny what a parent finds endearing about her own children. And probably kind of weird.
Example: the other morning when Big Boy got up, he came out of his bedroom (I heard his door close) and he was calling me. I walked to the top of the stairs -- his room is downstairs -- and he was standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding his giraffe and elephan-ant, wearing his sunglasses. He had this little sneer on his face, where his lips are kind of pursed but one side of his upper lip is up. He has that little sneer every time he wears his sunglasses, I think, to hold them on. Think Sylvester Stallone, three feet tall, with spiky strawberry blond hair, Superman pajamas, a huge stuffed elephant and a swaddled giraffe (yes, ever since we had Little Boy, the giraffe must be swaddled full-time). I saw my little boy down there, and he was just so cute, tears sprung to my eyes and I just wanted to run down and squeeze him.
Here's another one. The pediatrician told me to start letting Little Boy eat Cheerios. So since I'm a paranoid freak about choking, I give him half-Cheerios. He has finally learned to pick them up off his high chair tray, and knows they're supposed to go in his mouth, but can't figure out how to do that. So he picks them up and puts his whole little fist in his mouth. Then he sits there, fist in mouth, ears sticking out, looking at me like, "Now what?" It's just so cute!
Here's another one. (I know I'm doing that thing moms do where they talk about how darn cute their kids are, and I apologize, but they ARE!) The other night before bed, Big Boy wanted to read this one book, "The Word Book" that has all these pictures in it. Naturally, they're pictures of things a kid should know about, like "door," "potty," "soap," "house," etc. He calls it "The Potty Book." When we read it, I make up stories depending on the words/pictures on the page, so I'll talk about how Big Boy went to the park and saw his friends there and they looked at the pond and there was a duck on the pond and they fed the duck some bread but the duck wanted their soda or whatever. Anyway, he loves reading that book. So he wanted to keep reading it, and I said we were done reading but we could read more in the morning. So he pointed out all the pictures on the cover that he wanted to read about in the morning. He went to bed. The next morning, I hear his door open, and then I hear all this thumping. Then he starts crying. Then he's yelling, "Mommy! Mommy! I need help!" So I go downstairs and he's crying, trying to get through the door with his huge elephant, his giraffe, and that darn book, all of which he's dropped on the floor. First I hug him and say, "It's okay, I'll help you. That's a lot to carry." Then we gather up the stuff and I carry him upstairs to the couch. I just thought it was so cute that he remembered we were going to read that book, and then he remembered which order he wanted to read the stories in.
Last example: I took both boys to Home Depot yesterday because I wanted to buy some flowers. Spring Fever and all that. Since MrDartt wasn't there (driving his mom and her hubby to the airport), I put both boys in the seat of one of those car carts they have. Little Boy has never sat in one of those before; usually he's just getting carried or is in his infant carrier. So he's sitting there, all proud, with his hands on the steering wheel. Then he's getting bored, so he's reaching over and touching Big Boy. He's touching Big Boy's shirt, his seatbelt, his steering wheel. Then he's reaching down to touch Big Boy's leg, to grab onto his pants, whatever. Then, suddenly, he turns around, looks at me, and bursts into tears. Guess he wasn't ready for the big time. So I carried him the rest of the way and pushed that darn car cart (it's HUGE!) with one hand. Normally I run the hard line and the kids stay in the cart or their seats while we're shopping (give an inch, they take a mile, right?). But Little Boy was just so cute, I couldn't resist.
Okay, that's it for now. I'll give you a break from my cute kid stories.

Childhood

Sometimes I feel guilty about my childhood.
I'm always hearing about people's terrible childhoods, about the trauma they experienced because they had six toes or because their parents locked them in their bedrooms and fed them bread crumbs under the door. Or maybe because their parents made them play sports, particularly synchronized swimming, and they hated it.
Okay, so some people really did have hard childhoods -- and I don't want to take anything away from that. I was joking about the synchronized swimming.
But I had such a fun childhood.
We lived in a nice neighborhood, between two other families with kids our age. The kids would spend weekends walking riding bikes down to the market to get Koala soda or New York Seltzer. We'd run between houses, spending entire weekends barefoot, swinging on the neighbors' rope swing, building space ships and dressing our brothers up like girls.
(If I can find a picture I will definitely post it here just to embarrass my brothers who are now grown up and very manly. My youngest brother expressed grave concern yesterday when Big Boy asked, "Mommy, when I get bigger, can I borrow your skirt?" But he forgets that I have photographic evidence of him in pigtails wearing a dress, lipstick and blush. And high heels, I'm sure.)
Anyway, my parents gave us lots of opportunities to try new things. I played soccer and was always volunteering to come out to the sideline. My parents made me finish the season. I played baseball. I could run fast, but pretty much was terrible at baseball. My brothers played football and baseball. They both tried swimming but it didn't stick. They wrestled, too.
Primarily, I danced -- tap, jazz, and ballet. Now that I'm an adult, I realize how much my parents must have sacrificed to pay my monthly dues, pay for costumes, pay competition fees and pay for hotels during competitions. Not to mention the family time they sacrificed going on all the dance and sports trips.
I danced four or five days a week for most of my childhood and had strong friendships and lots of fun with the other dance kids. We always had a blast -- and I'm sure our moms did too -- on dance competition trips. I went with three other girls from my studio to Australia with a national performance team when I was 15.
In high school I became more involved with school friends, and did homecoming activities. I even was on the track team my senior year. My parents let me go to Hawaii with five girlfriends after graduation.
Thinking about it now, I can't believe some of the stuff my parents let me do. Galavanting off to Hawaii at 17 with five girlfriends!?!?! We were all straight-A students and pretty nerdy, I guess, but still...I cringe thinking about my kids, at 8 or 9 or 10 riding their bikes down to the market -- what if they get hit by a car? What if a bad guy gets them? What if they get bullied and another bigger kid steals their money and soda? What if they're drinking too much soda? What if they fall on their bikes? What if they don't know how to ride bikes?
All through childhood, I was a happy kid. I liked my parents (even if my dad was dorky and drove a red truck with a blue camper shell -- one time he drove into my high school to pick me up, and he was wearing a paper bag over his head with a smiley face cut out of it).
I just hope that when my two boys are older, they look back on their childhoods and remember them as fondly as I remember mine. I am grateful to my parents for encouraging us to try new things, to play hard, and to be independent.
I just hope I can do the same in the years to come.

Potty Training

I’m not sure if I will make it through potty training. We just started, thinking Big Boy might be ready because he’s recently shown a lot of interest. He’s been waking up dry from naps. He knows before he goes.

Sometimes after he pees in the potty he wants to run around “naked,” which means he just wears a shirt. The other day he was “naked” and getting himself some water from the fridge. I saw that he was starting to make his pooping face so I asked if he had to go.
“I’m poopy, Mommy,” he said, freezing mid-water-dispensing at the fridge, spilling water on the floor.

So, thinking I was thinking fast, I quickly put the baby down and grabbed Big Boy’s hand, telling him this was a great time to go poop on the potty. So we rushed to his potty where he sat down and said he couldn’t do it and needed my help.

He never did poop in the potty but when I got back to the kitchen, I noticed a little turd on the floor.

“Is that my poopie, Mommy?”

“Yep!” (Remain calm. Pick up poopie with paper towel and carry to toilet to flush).

“What did you do with my poopie, Mommy?” (Near tears).

“I flushed it!”

Later, he wanted to pee on the potty. By the time I’d arrived there to monitor him, he’d removed the little shield thing from the potty and sprayed pee all over the floor and his pants and the bathroom rug. Remain calm. The books say you’re not supposed to say anything about pee or poop being yucky.

Remain calm.

“Well, looks like we need to leave that shield on there, huh?”

“Why’s that a shield, Mommy?”

“To keep your pee in the potty.”

“Why, Mommy?”

“So we don’t get pee on the floor.”

“Why we don’t get pee on the floor?”

“Because it’s … sticky!”

“Why’s it sticky, Mommy?”

Big Boy, the wallflower -- yeah, right!

My mother-in-law and her husband came into town yesterday from Alaska. We don't get to see them as often as we like (no, I'm serious, I really like them both), and I was worried about Big Boy's reaction to them, since the last time he saw grandma was a year ago and a year's a long time in a two-year-old's life.

So I really talked up their visit in the days leading up to their arrival. Turns out I had no cause to worry. Right when they got to our house, he took grandma downstairs to show her the bed she'd be sleeping in. He told her she was tired, so she laid down and he covered her up.

Then last night at dinner, Big Boy finished eating before we did, so we let him down from his high chair and he decided he wanted some undies (long story short: he REALLY wanted pull-up diapers and we got them on the condition that he had to go potty in the big boy potty, which lasted about two days so we put him back in regular diapers). So we still had one pull-up diaper in the car in the diaper bag.

He ran out to the garage while all the adults were still eating, and ran back into the dining room, yanked his pants down, tore off the tabs on the diaper, and flung the diaper off. Then he ran around the house with just his shirt on, until he decided to put on his undies. Later, my niece was opening some birthday presents and he took a pack of hairties she'd gotten and started taking one off the package. MrDartt told him those were his cousin's, and he tossed them aside, grabbed a stuffed bunny and started hitting our eight-year-old nephew with it (they'd been wrestling all night, so I guess Big Boy was wound up). I got up to take the bunny from Big Boy, and he quickly stuffed it under his shirt. As grandma's husband pointed out, it's hard to discipline when everyone, including mom, is laughing. But I held it together and put the bunny in toy timeout with the fan Big Boy had used earlier to hit Little Boy in the head.

And to think I'd been worried that he'd turn into a wallflower and not want anything to do with anyone. Ha!

Throughout the night, Big Boy had been asking, "Should we have cake now?" FINALLY, after presents, Big Boy went to ask grandma and Papa R if we could have cake. They said okay, so he went to ask Aunt L and Uncle S. Uncle S said he had to have a hug first. Then grandma and Papa R said they needed hugs too. So then Big Boy ran over to Uncle B and said, "Should we have cake?" and flung his arms around him before planting a kiss on his lips -- kid learns fast, I guess. Or kid really wanted cake.

Anyway, it was a fun night. And grandma and Aunt L did the dishes. Awesome.