The Color Shiny

Yesterday was the 4th of July, so we went to the parade in Sausalito. We do it every year. This was the first year that Rex was able to contain himself and not dash right into the middle of the antique fire trucks to join the parade. He sat relatively calmly next to his sister on the curb, both of them wielding huge paper bags to collect the candy that gets tossed off the floats. On the way to the parade we had to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, which Rex loves. He said, "Look at the sea!  It's so shiny!  My favorite color is shiny." 

It was interesting to watch the different ways my kids geared up to compete for the thrown candy. For days before the parade, Veronica planned her strategy, which was to get the most candy by boxing out the little kids who got in her way and not attempting to eat any candy -- a surefire distraction -- during the parade. Her plan was all about maximizing volume and then tallying her loot later (I can hear Kenny Rogers warbling, "You never count your money / While you're sittin' at the table" -- my child took a page straight out of that book.) Veronica had bouts of anxiety all week, mostly because she was afraid she wouldn't get enough candy. (I explained to her that even if she got a million pieces of candy, we would only let her eat two or three.  It didn't matter.)

Rex's strategy, on the other hand, was all about rapid consumption. He didn't care how much candy he got, as long as he could eat it all immediately and as quickly as possible. When the goodies started raining down I was shocked that he didn't simply open his mouth and let them fall in, wrappers and all. He had gobbled two rolls of smarties and some Nerds before I could even register what was happening. Twice he attempted to escape into the crowd with his bag of candy so he could binge in private without being monitored. (This is something he has learned from the dog, who runs away and hides under the dining room table every time he swipes our leftovers off of the counter. Two or three times we've pried full sandwiches out of his throat while he's still on the run.)  

Anyway, eventually I had to confiscate Rex's candy bag. There was surprisingly little candy left in it, but I did fish out six or seven slobbery plastic wrappers. I'm sure a few more remain in his digestive tract today, but I'm confident Rex's military-style stomach and bowels can handle it. He's an efficient eating and food-processing machine.

Not so much his skin, which was pretty blotchy yesterday. Rex's face especially gets all rashy on occasion because he just can't keep from rubbing himself all over everything he sees. Mainly he rubs himself on the dog. The other day I caught him dry humping Sanchi with his face. I'm still not completely sure what was happening, but they both appeared to be enjoying it. Rex isn't allergic to the dog per se, but he is allergic to most of the dogs in Sanchi's posse and to some of the grasses they run through on their romps with our dogwalker.  

All this means is that yesterday Rex was amped on sugar, bitter he couldn't hold his candy in the backseat on the way home from the parade like his sister could (that girl has incredible self-restraint and hoarding tendencies, no doubt inherited from my brother who once kept his Halloween candy, untouched, under his bed until the following Easter) and rashy from rubbing his face all over everything. It was not pleasant. Things got a little better when we decided to take the kids to Benihana for dinner, because it's always fun for a three year-old boy to watch knives being thrown all over the place. The 'chef' (whose name was Jesus) even made a cool little volcano out of onion slices with water lava that bubbled out of the top.    

They always take a picture of you when you eat at Benihana, and they took ours during dessert. In the photo, Veronica still has a full bowl of ice cream in front of her, which she took about half an hour to eat. Rex's face is mostly obscured by his ice cream bowl because he's tipping it back to drink the remains. He ate his ice cream in two minutes. I'm surprised he didn't try to eat it under the table.  

The Cutest Thing Ever

I'm not one of those moms who posts blog entries titled "The Cutest Thing Ever".

Ever.

But tonight something so incredibly sweet happened that I'm able to use 'Cute' in a title, without irony. I was checking on my sleeping kids before taking the dog out for the night, and when I went into Rex's room he was sprawled sideways in his bed, with one hand up over the guardrail. (He's not what you'd call a 'normal-position' sleeper.) I straightened him out a bit and when I bent over to give him a kiss, for some reason I felt like smelling his breath. I'm not sure why -- he hadn't been drinking, obviously -- but it was something I absolutely felt compelled to do.

(Maybe it was because he will eventually have horrible man-breath and I want to inhale as much of his fresh, little-boy breath as I can while I still have time, the way I still smell his feet and kiss his toes for fun because I know it's just a matter of time before they begin to give off that rancid cheese-smell and are rife with fungus. You won't catch my face anywhere near those feet once he hits puberty, that I guarantee.)

Anyway, as I inhaled his sweet breath tonight my nostrils got a little too close to his lips. Without waking up, he opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue and tried to latch on to the tip of my nose. He was trying to nurse! The boy has been weaned for two years (and was I glad when that ship had finally sailed, let me tell you) and still, even with his big boy bed, preschool friends and mastery of stand-up peeing firmly under his belt, his mouth remembers how to suckle. It was so adorable I had to try it again. I just had to.

This time when I touched my nose to his lips, he opened his mouth even wider and tried to get most of my nose into his mouth, again without waking up. I was enchanted. It was like getting a glimpse of my baby again, without all the mess and hassle of actual breastfeeding. I could have kept playing this game all night.

The third time I tried it, Rex spit at me, groaned and rolled over. So much for nostalgia. It was cute while it lasted; I'll even go as far as to say it warmed my heart. Got me all happy and tingly for a moment. But I'm fairly sure that if I try it again I'll get my nose bitten by Rex's huge and super sharp choppers, so I'm not going to risk it.

What If I'm Crazy?

I spend a lot of my time with my children.  I'm not sure that I should, because sometimes it doesn't seem like it's good for me or for them. Other times, well, it's not so bad. Sometimes it's even fun, or it looks like it was fun, when I'm reviewing the pictures I took on my phone at the end of the day. On the good days, the children hamming for the camera look creative, mischievous and just the right shade of imperfect -- the way I want them to look (I worry if they look too clean; it's like they're not really my children or something.) But despite the good stuff, and often there is a lot of good stuff, there are are some days when I can't believe I'm home with two children on what seems to be a permanent assignment. My younger, I'm-going-to-save-the-world 25 year-old self would be choking on her watertight idealism if she could see me now.

This post should probably be called "How Can I Tell If I'm Crazy?"

Not everyone has the temperament and stamina to be a stay-at-home parent. When you make a Venn diagram that puts together the people who are actually built, from the inside out, to stay at home with their kids with the people that actually stay home with their kids, you end up with a very skinny little slice of overlap. I'm not sure I know of anyone who lives in that overlap, at least not for very long. I'm pretty sure I lived there once for a day when my son was one and my daughter was four, but here's how it went down: She was in preschool, he was with the nanny, my parents were in town cooking and shopping and being generally helpful, the dog walker took Sanchi to the beach and the housekeeper -- and gardeners -- had just left. I was the ultimate stay-at-home mom that day.

It's easy, even a pleasure, to make mudpies with your kids when someone else is going to clean it all up.

To be continued after I've checked today's pictures to make sure my kids are dirty enough.

Humpty Dumpty

It's 3:30 in the morning, and I can't sleep. This doesn't happen very much now that the kids are older and I'm not waking up a million times a night, but still, every so often I'll find myself up during the wee hours for no apparent reason. This time the cause is very obvious though, and it gives me a good hour of comedy to chew on while I'm trying to go back to sleep. It's my husband's kicky legs again.  Most people call it Restless Leg Syndrome, but whatever. It's kicky legs to me.  

So what happened this morning was that I got up to pee, and when I got back into bed I could tell that it was one of those nights when my husband's feet quickly scissor back and forth -- and back and forth, and back and forth -- precisely every 56 seconds. I know the interval exactly because I've timed it before. Oh yes, I've counted. I've videotaped his legs flailing underneath the sheets on several occasions, the most poignant being two nights before I had Rex when I was amped on raging pre-birth hormones and strawberry Haagen-Dazs. The next morning I triumphantly waved the Flip in my husband's face -- "There!  You see?"-- but had little time to savor my victory because I was soon in labor and kicky legs were the last thing on my mind.  

Fast forward to this morning, and for some reason I get the giggles while I'm laying in bed. The kicky legs churn away faithfully, rhythmically on time -- but all I can think of is the fabled character Humpty Dumpty, archly sitting atop his stone wall in my mind, his skinny legs dangling there like black licorice whips. Maybe he's just perched there, or maybe he's whistling. Whatever. But soon it happens:  predictably, conveniently, even -- his pointy booted feet begin to joggle in time with my husband's kicking. The bed jounces, and Humpty's feet flail about. The bed is still, and Humpty's black boots hang limply. Looking up to his enormous solid white, shiny head, I realize that there is a creepy smile on Humpty's face. He's mocking me in his merriment. His eyes, normally as vacuous as those in the Little Orphan Annie comic strips, have taken on a judgmental glare. Go back to sleep, you petty, whiny person, he mouths. Let us get on with our kicking.

Although it's dark, I open my own eyes wide to wipe the villain's image away. I admit it takes more than a few moments. After a while I start to think about the 'real' Humpty Dumpty. First of all, I decide he must have been conceited. With a head that big? Seriously? And how did he truly fall off of the wall? I become convinced he must have been gazing down into a rain puddle -- preening at his own reflection a la Narcissis -- when the enormous weight of his egg head conspired with gravity to bring him tumbling down. I pause, imagining it. Savoring it. Then I realize that even a disillusioned cartoon-man could never bear to peek more than a few seconds into any mirror, if he looked like Humpty Dumpty looked. It couldn't have been vanity.  

So maybe one of the King's Men shot him accidentally during flaming-arrow target practice (I mean, with a head like that, it was bound to happen) and pushed him off the wall to make it look like an accident. I can just hear the guilty knight now -- "I tried, Your 'ighness, I really tried, but even me and me 'orses and a shit load o' super glue couldn't put the poor bastard together again!"-- and it makes me chuckle. (By the way, I would pay a lot of money to mix medieval times with a few modern technologies and then watch it play out as the squires and maidens get their minds blown by an automatic toothbrush or glow-in-the-dark condom. None of that stuff in the thirteenth century, folks.)  

I run through a few more Humpty Dumpty murder scenarios in my head as I start to drift back to sleep. It's starting to get blurry, but I'm pretty sure one of them involves Humpty gallantly sipping hemlock potion through a long orange straw after spoiling a maiden princess. There's one scenario with hot lava flowing from the castle gate and another involving a flock of feathery white chickens, but that's all I remember. In the end, it's all the same. I go back to sleep and forget about the kicking, real and imagined. Humpty Dumpty is gone.  

I'm glad he's dead.  

The next t-shirt I buy must say 'Laundry Happens'.

It's All Coming Apart

Rex had his first official time out today, for hitting me (slapping me, really) across the face when I was giving his sister more attention. He's just starting to become competitive with her on most levels, and since I am a huge piece of real estate they both have to share, my kids usually take out their anger with each other on me. It's what I get for having two kids, I guess.

So lately if Veronica gets hurt (stubbing her toe landing on a metal toy airplane falling onto the ground after tripping over absolutely nothing) Rex will reenact the entire scene in order to get a little love, or a bandaid. (WHY will kids do just about anything for a bandaid? We have a rule: No blood, no bandaid. Maybe I shouldn't be so stingy, but I don't want to raise a pack of whiners and hypochondriacs, either.) Anyway, it's fun to watch Rex act out his pretend injuries. He will carefully fall to the floor, roll around clutching his foot, moaning in feigned agony. It makes me laugh, which then makes Veronica mad, because she thinks I am laughing at her real injury. (Which sometimes, I am. I am planning to pay for her therapy some day.)

Today Veronica was having one of her 'mornings', where she gets out of bed and absolutely everything in her life is totally wrong. She could get a huge chocolate bar and it would be too big, that sort of thing -- something that normally isn't an issue. So she was screaming in my lap for the tenth time over a thing I can't even remember (and don't have the energy now to fabricate) and over comes Rex. I didn't even see it coming, but the slap knocked me a little sideways.

And then the little bastard laughed.

I didn't even blink ... I just picked him up and put him in the big bathroom (one of the only rooms left that has a baby gate) and said, "That's your time out. No hitting Mommy!"

I think it worked, although I'm going to have to find a better spot for his time outs because we all need the bathroom. We have two other bathrooms but Veronica likes the big bathroom, and when she is in a 'mood' the last thing I need is for her not to have her freaking big bathroom available when she needs it.

I'm pretty psyched about having given Rex his first time out. We're going to start doing it for biting, too, which he does in spades, but only to people he really loves. (Me, again.) I'm already rehearsing it in my head: "No biting Mommy!"

It's Eerie

Both of my children can read my mind. I am not kidding. Either they are truly clairvoyant or they're so multi-channel perceptive they can simply sense what I am going to say next. Maybe it's because we live in a relatively small world (home-park-school-home) with a shared set of memories and experiences. Maybe it's because we're so big on routines at our house any dummy could guess what will happen next, but I doubt it. Maybe my kids are just extra-special. Do I sound ridiculous or what?

It happens at least once a day, with one child or the other. For instance, I will be thinking about how I really should make chicken for dinner, and Veronica will run in shouting "Chicken!" and flapping her arms. Or Rex will say "Nana, Grandpa?" the minute before the phone rings (guess who). This all started happening when Veronica was around one year old, and at first I thought maybe I had said my thoughts out loud and then forgotten I'd said them, and she was just babbling my thoughts back to me. Then it started to happen all the time, to other people who happened to be with Veronica when she did it. And these people would later say to me, "You'll never guess what Veronica blah blah so-and-so such-and-such etc. today!" and I would just nod. After a while we all got used to it.

Now it's the same way with Rex. He seems to take everything Veronica ever did when she was his age to the nth degree, and I am happy to see that he's got one of her more charming traits. I'm sure I will feel this way until the kids hit adolescence and become way smarter than me (this may be happening already) and the mind-reading thing will backfire. For now, it's just very cute, and I remain in awe of my kids' mental abilities.

Yes, I know I still sound ridiculous.