All Hallow’s Eve… Eve

There are some days I look at Jack and cannot fathom that already three years have slipped past us… being a mother still feels that new. Even while, at the same time, I feel like I’ve always been his mother and that every single breath up to his existance was all in preparation. It’s hard to explain and yet something that I think most mothers feel.

There’s a lot I don’t know still how to do—I am still apt, for example, to throw up on my son’s little head if he’s vomiting. I’m not good in those moments. My gagging and heaving aren’t the assured, measured capability of my sister’s motherhood. But there are moments when – gloriously—I live up even to my own mother’s long legacy of Mommyness.

Last night—at 2 a.m. I was putting the finishing touches on to Jack’s Wiggles costume. It involves a big red car and heads for all the other Wiggley cast members. It’s cute. I looked up from my flurry of packing tape and Crayola markers to realize that the pup and Robby had long since fallen asleep and I was alone in the night with the only thought of Jack’s surprised face in the morning. And I felt like my Momma. She spent a lot of nights hammering out one thing or another for my sister and I. Momma is in France this month or she would have been painstakingly sewing on Wiggley labels to three shirts by my side. (My wedding veil was finished in tandem the night before I wore it down the aisle—as were my prom dresses, Halloween costumes, and a particularly memorable scale model of the Arc de Triomphe…)

Tomorrow—or the next half hour—I’ll no doubt do something that will put my maternal confidences into peril… but for now—with a napping little red Wiggley boy worn out from visits to Daddy’s Work and AunT’s office—all is well.

Happy Halloween. (And remind me to tell you all about the giant turkey head my mother made one year…)

And these are the others

Sigh.

It’s not been a great 24 hours. It’s the ying to the other day’s yang.

Last night we took Jack down to see my Granny. He loves to visit her– my Aunt (Granny’s baby) keeps a basket of mini-rubber-duckies for Jack and the other little ones to play with… his favorite game is 52 duck pick up… But it keeps him busy. And they’re relatively benign as thrown objects go. He also likes to sort through the many postcards and greeting cards Granny keeps in a neat stack. He knocks when we enter and always leaves Granny with his kiss-hug-Awwww!-kiss routine. She and he are great pals.

But last night he was a wild child. Bouncing off of the furniture and howling at each injustice! Wailing, thrashing, tantrumy. My Granny is serene in the midst of his crisis. She raised 6 babies– three of them boys– and so she’s seen her share of nonsense. Moreover she has a large assortment of Grand, Great-grand, and Great-Great Grand babies.

Still. It’d be nice if he could be sweet and good while we visit.

At home he cried and wailed after waking up in his crib. It took both of us to calm him down again.

Today was up and down and up and down. We went to the grocery store to buy bread (grilled cheese was on the little dicatator’s menu request) and he threw a tantrum when I insisted he not play with the exposed underworkings of the next lane’s conveyer belt… something about Mommy wanting him to retain all 10 of his long fingers. (I know, the insanity of such a request! What was I thinking?) I held him, folded darn near in half, while I finished my debit transaction and avoided the piercing stares of two-thirds of the employees and customers. (Some of the lucky ones, back by the dairy case, didn’t seem to care…)

At home he was up again. We ate a nice lunch. It was pleasant. But naptime had us plundering down to the depths and me completely wiped out.

Enter AunT and the girls who stopped by with their chinese food. He was down then up then Down down down when he took on AunT who scolded him for being so horrid to Mommy. (Poor AunT took the bullet on that one…)

After they left he went up again and sweetly called AunT to apologize for being naughty… even as I could hear the click-click-click of the next hill.

It’s like Space Mountain– you only see a tiny bit in front of you before the bottom drops out and your neck is yanked to the hard left from your spine heading toward the right.

Sigh.

These Are the Days

Some days are better than others. Today was a good day. Jack and I had lunch with AunT at a local diner. They made a really yummy split pea soup so I was a happy girl. The custard pie was icing on the cake. And Jack’s grilled cheese disappeared quickly so he was pleased as well…

Then we went to the grocery store to pick up sweet potatoes and bananas. Jack was delighted that he wasn’t strapped into a cart– that he got to trot along side me on our quick trip. We even picked up a box of yogurt Fruit Loops. A red letter day for a toddler. It was one of those perfect days where the clerks are all nice and Jack is polite to them… where kind old men chuckle and pat Jack on the head as he darts around them… where Jack is enchanting in the produce area naming all the different vegetables and fruits. (His version of cucumber, “coooumber” is especially cute.)

At home he took a good nap and played nicely while I made dinner. After dinner (that he boycotted, but politely) we took a walk in the crisp evening air around the neighborhood to see the house with a blue ghost in their attic. (It’s really cool and spooky but not scary.)

And now he’s being trundled off to bed by his Daddy.

Tomorrow might not be like this so I’ll appreciate it all the more.

For Your Consideration

It’s autumny out tonight. A light, cold mist and a dark, dark sky. All the houses are lit from the inside out with yellowy warmth.

We bundled up Jack in his firefighter raincoat and boots. I put on my rainboots, too. They’re lipstick pink with polkadots so you might imagine how terribly grown up and sophisticated I am in them. I don’t have a cool firefighter raincoat. (I did get to wear a real firefighter raincoat once– It had toggley closures and I loved it.) My raincoat is a black trench that is too big for me but was only $13 on sale at Old Navy. And I have a great rainhat. We got it in England a few years ago– it’s oiled. I love it. Robby just wore his ugly workshirt. It’s really ugly. It makes him look blocky. He refuses to wear raingear unless it’s monsooning out.

We walked to Robby’s parents house. It’s a good length for a stroller-less walk in the inky autumn night. On the way there it had only just started misting so the leaves were still crunchy. Jack and I love crunchy leaves. We waded through them in our rainboots and delighted in their thickness. (The puppy does not like crunch leaves. They freak him out. He’s got a little PTS over some long forgotten incident with leaves.)

Noone was else was out and about so we had the sidewalks to ourselves. Jack likes to run ahead a bit– though we both start calling him back halfway down the block so that he doesn’t ever get to the crossings without our hands holding his.

Anyway. It was a nice way to spend that after-dinner but before-bedtime lull. (Dinner was fried cabbage, onions, potatoes, and sausage… also very autumny.) I highly recommend it.

Mom and pop!

Coming back from a vacation there’s an almost audible pop! of a bubble. I grew up traveling a lot. My parents were keen on getting away from the Usual and finding adventure—be it for a night or a weekend or a week.

Part of a vacation is the anticipation of it. The flurry of planning and packing and imagining. Coming home—albeit to our comfortable bed and to pup and to our wee lot of land is still coming home to the Usual. The dread of work and laundry and the inevitable catching up to the responsibilities we’d shed for the time away.

And pop! there it is—the bubble bursting.

We are all out of sorts for wishing that each day could be spent together and filled with good surprises. No offices or housework or troublesome tasks.

Pop.

It’s a Small After All

[We can cross another Parenting Milestone off the list� we�ve taken Jack to Walt Disney World. Niece Keegy celebrated her 13th birthday there. Robby and I had waffled about whether we should go� we wondered if Jack would be too little to really �get� the Disney experience. The tipping point was the realization that we couldn�t pass up the chance to go to WDW with �our girls��one of these days we�ll blink and they�ll be married with their own babies�]

Perhaps you�ve not visited a Disney land mass. (I pity you.) Or perhaps you�re one of Those People that think it a waste of money or time to happily slap on a set of Mouse Ears. (I am repulsed by you.) But surely you�ve heard of the �It�s a Small World� ride? A boat trip through cavernous rooms of nationalistic little puppets and dollies all singing, over and over, �It�s a Small World� in their native tongue? Each area is a geographical clump of different countries and regions� the last room is a utopian melting pot where all the little dollies are mixed up with each other and all their bright, colorful, distinguishing costumes are subdued in non-distracting pastels. The World becomes not only Small but happy, too.

Old people love IaSW. Stand for a minute near the entrance and take stock of the queuing people�there�s a lot of gray hair in that line. It�s a gentle ride. No flashes or dark waterfalls or explosions� just hundreds of happy little dollies.

And little people love IaSW. Jack�for all his hurtling energy and love for pratfalls and climbing�was as still as a little mouse on his first, second, third, and fourth (yes, fourth) trip through the singsonging, dancing poppets. His little mouth was a perfect o! of color and music and happiness.

The people in-between the Old and the Small get a little jaded and cynical. My two teenaged (!) nieces, my sister, Robby, and I found the dark side of IaSW even as we were enchanted by Jack�s wholehearted appreciation for it. For example�where I saw the Idealized Perfect World of Peace in the finale Robby whispered, �What the hell kind of �perfect� world did Walt invision? Everybody and everything is white in this room� that�s a little sick, isn�t it?�

We In-Betweeners agreed that it�s the song that gets to you. It�s what turns you from delighted and innocent to twitching and narrow eyed. (Jack, and his utter glee, was our salvation and path back to remembering when we delighted in it, too.)

By the fourth (or was it fifth?) trip through I�d come up with a possible drinking game (ironic that I, who rarely drinks, can always come up with a good drinking game, isn�t it?). My proposal was that at 10:30-midnight they run adults only boats where you do a shot for every country represented. By the second room it really might be the �happiest cruise� ever.

And sorry about that song now running through your head. Give it a few days�

Food Fights

The Food Battles continue.

Jack, when sat at the dinner table, can become unbelievably stubborn and strong willed. Other toddlers might be “resistant” to try a new food… Jack is downright dug in against it.

I think of those poor Sufferagette girls and the accounts of them being strapped to chairs and force fed with funnels… and where I used to think, “The horror! The horror!” Now I think, “Hmmmm.”

Tonight’s skirmish was over a plate of cut up sausage (smokey links, actually) and buttery mashed potatoes. (Our plates had peas, too, but I was going for a small victory here and didn’t push them tonight.) “Bangers and Mash! Just like Sir Topham Hatt would eat!” didn’t get us anywhere. He pushed his fork around for the first third of the meal; protested during the second; and in the final third gave way to hysterical crying.

And I ached for him.

Poor baby doesn’t even know what he’s missing. He loves sausage on pizza– little salty, savory smokey links should be a snap… but his overwhelming fear of giving in to us might open him up to Lima Bean Soup, too… So he doesn’t chance it.

In the end we cleared his plate away and sent him off to bed and bath still protesting, “Me no hungry! Me no hungry!” It’s exhausting.

We’ll keep trying. It’s only been a year and a half of People Food… so we’ll remind each other that this, too, will pass. We haven’t given up that a) he won’t starve and b) eventually he’ll try things. We remind each other that strawberries, pizza, and apple slices all came in their own time, too.

And, in the meantime, Rob gets an extra sausage.

Make a (written) note of this

Robby’s PDA is dead. He dropped it at work the other day, shattering whatever is inside the little Etch-a-Sketch window that makes it work.

He’s lost without it. It keeps his schedule neat and tidy… as well as has all the high scores on the games he plays “only” at lunch.

It was one of the last things I bought him when I was still earning a regular paycheck. I can’t replace it with the little dribs and drabs I earn now and I’m sad that I can’t. (I don’t even have the heart to point out that he could manage the way I do– with post-it notes and pencils…)

Yesterday Robby made the rounds of the electronic counters to see what what might be out there… but couldn’t find his make (a Sony Clie) in the newer, shinier displays of Blackberries and iPhones. (“I don’t want wireless internet!,” he cries.) He wants back what is lost.

Me, too– dang if I don’t miss playing Marbles2.

Rest in pieces little piece of technology.

The Vicious Circle of Life

There are the tiniest differences between being Two and being Three– so far. Mostly they are good differences– nanoseconds of Jack understanding a little more of our logic and reasoning…

But he’s still prone to his Terrible Two Modus…

As I type this he’s fending off an afternoon– and much needed– nap. The more he fights it the crankier he gets… (Not to mention that it doesn’t do much for my mood, either.) But there are things we want to do tonight and I’m hoping to have him in a good mood for them. The good mood requires a nap.

This is where being Three is both a help and a hinderance. Part of him gets the idea that a nap is, in the end, a good thing. Jacky feels better. Mommy isn’t so frazzled. But the other part of him is using his acquired knowledge base to (attempt to) negotiate out of the whole venture.

The baby lions have it easier against the hyenas. (Did I mention that I’m the baby lion in this scenerio?)