It's What I Do

My daily life with two children is a series of twists and turns, negotiations and ultimatums that eventually turn into nothing after I've wrestled them both into bed.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

It's A Boy!

I've known this for some time, but now it's official: Rex is a boy.  What am I going to do?

Today he licked the bathroom floor, wiggled himself halfway under the bed and tried to hump the toilet, all in the space of about twenty minutes ... while screeching joyfully at the top of his lungs. He's not technically crawling yet, but he's almost crawling, and he's devised a way to get where he wants to go:  he gets up on all fours and rocks back and forth faster and faster until his forward momentum shoots him forward a few feet.  He usually lands on his face, which makes him laugh. (Not to worry - he has plenty of cheek fat to absorb the impact.)  Rex is one crazy baby.  He prefers to operate in the nude.

The good news is that his antics have made him interesting to Veronica, whose favorite game is to sit on top of Rex.  She tries to ride him like a horse.  He doesn't seem to mind, but he does twist around so that he can grab a handful of her hair when she tackles him.  It's his only defense, and it works:  the harder she pulls away, the more forcefully he holds on, giggling the whole time.  I don't have to say a word, although the dog probably has an opinion on their wrestling matches.  The other day Rex tried to eat one of Sanchi's paws, and there I drew the line.  It was disgusting.  The bathroom floor is one thing, but the dog?  Verboten.

I hate to stereotype, but Veronica never did anything remotely disgusting when she was Rex's age, and she could have.  She got the same amount of naked time, crawled at about the same age, was exposed to the same toys and furniture layout, the same parenting (more or less). Same dog, too.  She never tried to jump out of her high chair or bang on stuff.  She was civilized and calculating; she had grace and a certain elegance to her cavorting.  Don't get me wrong - she was a baby, and did typical baby stuff, but she did it with finesse.  She's still like that.  If Rex actually does let her ride him at some point, she'll ride sidesaddle wearing a flouncy hat.

Crawling

Cary and Veronica have been teaching Rex to crawl.  For my part, I have been trying to teach Rex to simply lay there, like an overfed baby seal, but so far my efforts are in vain, because Rex is hell bent on moving.  Any day now he's going to be motoring down the hallway.  The dog is in big trouble.

The other night I found Cary down on all fours, demonstrating the proper crawling technique (hand, knee, hand, knee) to a very engaged, very interested Rex, who showed he understood by getting up on all fours and rocking back and forth.  That's his newest baby move, and it's very cute.  He likes to do it while pushing his face down into his rubber giraffe toy Sophie, who is new best friend.  Sophie doesn't mind being dry-humped and slobbered on.  In fact, I'm pretty sure Veronica did the same thing to her back when they were best friends.

The Return of the Broken Toe

So it's once again the middle of the night, and for a change everything is quiet.  Rex has started sleeping through the night more or less, although he still wakes up every night to practice his rolling and crawling techniques.  Veronica did the same thing at this age, and I remember thinking, What the hell is wrong with her? when her antics woke me up.  So now we hear Rex at night, strumming the bars of his crib in the dark, babbling to himself, grunting and squeaking, doing arabesques.  I don't mind.  At least I'm not having to feed him at night any more.

But tonight I'm up, because I have a cold that makes my nose feel like it's full of pepper, and I'm extremely pissed that a cold, of all stupid things, is keeping me up at night now that Rex is sleeping better.  And what's more, both the kids are sick, so we've put a humidifier in each of their bedrooms.  It's to make sure their little noses don't dry out, or their lungs don't burst into flames, that sort of thing, which apparently is the worst that can happen.  Whatever.  You have to put a dash of salt into the water that goes into the humidifier, and the salt helps make the steam come out.  The instructions actually say a dash, or maybe it was a pinch, of salt.  Both measurements are equally ridiculous, and I never get the amount right. The most offensive part is that the humidifier wasn't made in China.  It was made in the good old USA.  

So I'm up because it seems Rex's humidifier isn't making enough steam, and I'm worried that his antics will cause enough dry friction in his crib to actually make him combust, or something like that.  I go to the kitchen and put what seems like a pinch (because a dash apparently wasn't enough) into my hand.  I'm navigating the dark of his bedroom, heading for the red glinty light of the humidifier, when one of my toes catches on the footstool, and I stumble onto the bed.  I almost scream out loud.  Shit, shit, shit fuckety fuck yeow!  Ouch.  I'm certain my toe is broken. The silver lining is that I've managed to hang onto the salt, so I toss it into the humidifier and stumble back to the kitchen.  I put a grape popsicle from the freezer on my toe.  It doesn't help the pain. I eat the popsicle in bed.  

The funny thing is I've broken this toe before, also in the middle of the night, about eight years ago. It's the middle toe on my left foot, my 'Wednesday' toe, as Veronica would say.  I banged it on the wall in the hallway while running naked back to my room from the bathroom after I realized, mid-pee, that my in-laws were sleeping down the hall and might see me naked. I'd forgotten they were visiting and this was before kids, before pajamas and my hideous feeding smock and Cary's ratty brown-beaver bathrobe that makes him look like a homeless Joe Namath.  Before all of it, I used to sleep nude because it was easy and fun and I rarely had to get up in the night, so I was never cold.  And that night I really did break my toe, so Cary had to piggy-back me to the Emergency Room that is thankfully just a few blocks from our house.  (That really comes in handy.)  The kicker was that we were due to leave at 5 am that morning for our honeymoon in Mexico, so we had the taxi pick us up at the hospital, after we spent $500 to learn that there is really nothing you can do for a broken toe.

Red Velvet in a Bowl

Last night I had a dream that Rex was in bed with me.  I used to pull him into bed with me when he was a baby, or should I say a smaller baby, but those days are history (thank god).  In my dream, I had no idea how he got into my bed:  Did my husband put him there as a joke?  Did I?  Or did Rex jump out of his crib?  He's almost capable of it.

Speaking of jumping out, in high school my brother had an amazing fish called Agamemnon. This fish was amazing because he lived a really long time for a fish, like ten years or something, but the most incredible part was that Agamemnon survived multiple, regular suicide attempts.  My parents would often come home (my brother was well into college at that point) to find Agamemnon flopping around on the floor, behind the television or on the bookshelf, having propelled himself up and out of his fishbowl.  

This is even more miraculous because we had two cats.  They were obese and lazy beyond words, but they could probably have gotten a fish laying prone on the floor.  Eventually they got wise to Agamemnon and would wait patiently like Sphinxes, staring up at his bowl, unblinking, for hours.  Jump Motherfucker, jump!  They never got him, but eventually Agamemnon did himself in.  I like to think it was a spectacular, splashy and beautiful death, but most likely he just flopped out.  I think my mom found him stuck to the back of the TV.

Anyway, the whole point here is that I am writing again after a mini-hiatus.  Rex is so big and so active that holding him is like wrangling a chimpanzee.  Feeding him is an Olympic sport requiring all my limbs and brain power to keep him still, or at least latched on.  My wrists have been killing me, so I've been avoiding the keyboard.  But lately I've just been putting Rex on the floor, because like Agamemnon he keeps trying to jump down and out.  Crawling is on the horizon and then Rex will put everything he finds - Polly Pockets, sequins, dog food and other dog items, into his mouth.  I hope he doesn't get H1N1.  If there was a canine flu that people could get, it would be all over our house. It's a good thing we don't own swine.  For a lot of reasons.

Speaking of swine flu, last Sunday night I was convinced Veronica had it for sure.  She had a cold and had been sneezing all day, but it wasn't enough to keep us from going to a barbecue that afternoon.  When we got home, shoehorned Rex into his pajamas and wrestled Veronica into bed, all was quiet until I heard barfing sounds coming from Veronica's room.  Usually when she's sick she moans and groans and says she has to throw up, on and off for hours, whether she has to puke or not.  (Actually, whether she's sick or not.)  But this time sounded like the real thing, so I ran in with the nearest bowl I could find.  Sure enough, blammo! I made it to the bed just in time to catch a huge watery projection of red, nasty, B-movie vomit coming out of my kid.  It was so gross I almost threw up in my mouth, but even worse, I thought she was puking blood!  Sure, it looked like fake blood, but still.  So I screamed for my husband, who came running.  

"I think it's the swine flu," I stage-whispered to him, my eyes growing wide and terrified in the dark.

"Nope," he said. "It was the red velvet cupcake she ate."

Oh.  Well that makes it all better.

Finally, Chaos

Today these things all happened at once, in the following order. Apparently the chaos that happens when you have two kids has finally arrived.

Rex, who is now eating solid food, spit his rice cereal all over me and began to scream.

The doorbell rang.

I tripped over the dog.

Rex dangling from one arm, I answered the door.  It was the lady who was buying something I posted on Craigslist, but she forgot cash. I sent her to the ATM at the corner. What is it about 'cash only' that makes people only bring checks?

Next, Sanchi licked up two Advil that he found on the floor. I was able to get them out of his mouth. (I was briefly tempted to transfer them right into my mouth, as I was developing a massive headache from everything that was going on.)

As I was tossing the Advil in the trash, Veronica swiped an open bag of flour off the counter and began to dance around the kitchen with it.

The doorbell rang again. 

The Craigslist lady was back, asking if I would please help her out to her car because she couldn't carry everything. Apparently she did not notice I was carrying an enormous screaming baby covered in flour. What a dipshit.

The Lunatic Fringe

"I don't want my scissors for a whole week," Veronica says, solemnly handing me a chunk of her hair.  She's just given herself bangs, only these bangs are on the side of her head, and she looks ridiculous.  I believe the French used to call bangs 'the lunatic fringe', back in the 1880s when they were invented.  Bangs, not the French.  

So now she's doling out her own punishments, or as we call them in my house, consequences. We're New-Agey like that around here.  I'm not sure what to do, so I take the scissors, and the hair, and say, "Ok."  Really, what else is there to say?  Or to do?  My precocious kid has taken all the fun out of parenting.  I'm sure by the time she's thirteen she'll be handing down her own sentence for shoplifting and driving herself to juvie, all cigarettes and tattoos.  Great.  Looking forward to it.

The reason I am up at 1:23 am is that I had to change Rex after I fed him, and that woke him up, so now I am waiting for him to stop grunting and go back to sleep.  Thank goodness he is no longer pooping at night, but now he's peeing what seems like quarts (is he drinking Gatorade when I'm not looking?) and I have to give him a new diaper around midnight or he wakes up soaked to his neck.  I'm not kidding.  That has happened exactly twice, when I've attempted to let him go twelve hours at night on just one diaper.  Not good.  Eventually I'll stop feeding him at night and maybe one diaper will do, or maybe I'll have to start using adult Depends on him.  And on myself, so then I won't have to get up either.  I'll just pee my pants, smile peacefully and go back to sleep.  Like Rex does right now.  In theory.

More to come in the morning ...