Tag Archives: kids

Once upon a time…

… a little girl woke up from her nap.

The little girl was very unhappy and very hungry so her mother fed her oranges.

Once she got a handle on all her orange slices..

…and started getting them in her mouth…

…life improved.

Then something startled the little girl causing her to start crying mid-orange.

It just so happened that her mother was taking her picture and caught the orange falling out of her mouth, complete with drool.

This did not make the little girl happy.

Fortunately for the little girl her mothers friend came by to take care of  her while her mother and father went out for the evening.

Recognizing the friend as a woman who would not take pictures of her screaming and drooling and then post them on the internet the little girl leaped into the friends arms and was happy the rest of the night.

The end.

The Plastic Bag

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always up to speed on world events, nation wide trends and pop culture. While I might cruise a political blog or two, I don’t usually make it to a regular news website, and hardly turn on the radio for music anymore much less news. Fortunately my friends know this and are kind enough to do things like call me and tell me if a tornado is on it’s way over as well as other happenings less life threatening but still important.

One of those news items that has filtered it’s way into my cozy life under this rock is that there is a growing trend to ban plastic bags. Madison (unsurprisingly) is on the anti-plastic bag bandwagon with a recycling program and thoughts of banning plastic bags altogether.  I could pontificate on the pros and cons of this as well as the ridiculousness of passing mandates with fines that no one is going to attempt to enforce, but I’ll spare you all. Instead I’ll share an incident  in which a grocery store plastic bag was the hero of the day.

This morning just after breakfast the girls took a bath together and life was good.

Then Clara pooped in the bathtub and full chaos set in.

Ivy jumped from the bathtub ran through the bathroom and into the kitchen yelling.

I removed Clara from the tub and as I was debating the best method of cleaning it up…

…Clara promptly pooped on the bathroom floor.

Ivy showed up freezing and wrapped herself in a towel, but not before dragging it through poop.

Clara, after being cleaned up from the bathroom floor incident escaped to the kitchen. (How you ask? Well I was up to my elbows in a bathtub full of fecal matter that’s how.)

Ivy watches and reports back with “MOM! Clara pooped in the kitchen… It’s really big and nasty!”

I finally got the tub cleaned and threw the girls back in aaannd the super pooper struck again.

Re-clean bathtub.

Put girls in.

Clean girls.

Clean bathroom floor.

Look in kitchen.

Wonder if there is any way someone else is going to clean up the “big and nasty” on the floor.

While I stall Clara starts attempting to leave the bathtub.

Now in a panic with visions of poop footprints all through the house I run for the pantry and grab The Plastic Bag.

Me, a lot of paper towels, some cleaning stuff and The Plastic Bag clean up the “big and nasty” in record time.

I curse our stupid kitchen floor with stupid cracks between all the stupid fake boards the entire time.

I throw a knot in The Plastic Bag toss it out into the mudroom just in time to catch Clara jumping out of the tub.

While drying her off I find more poop on her, or the floor, or me, it is unclear where it came from but the end result is the same…

… clean more stuff, again.

Finally I get the girls dressed and out of the way.

To do this I teach them how to be all American by giving them the computer, an armchair, a bag of popcorn and a cartoon to watch.

I clean more, mop floors, do laundry.

I pick up The Plastic Bag on my way out to do chores and swing by the garbage.

My point:

It takes a pooptastrophe for me to mop my floors and the plastic bag is not necessarily the epitomy of all evil.

Good Sisters

 

They play together.

They run and dance together.

They sometimes cry together.

They giggle together while getting into trouble.

They explore together.

They read together.

When I hear the sounds of scraping and dragging in their room at night and find the furniture a bit rearranged in the morning, I know I don’t need to intervene.

They are only moving Clara’s crib so that they can lay in their beds and hold hands together before they fall asleep.

They are good sisters!

 

Nap Time

I love it and I hate it.

It’s the best part of the day or it’s the very worst.

Every day I look forward to nap time.

In addition to the cuteness factor of the sleeping kids nap time is:

the saver of my sanity,

the part of the day where I can relax and do whatever I’d like with no questions, comments or little helpers,

the part of my day where I can work on projects best left out of the reach of tiny hands, without jumping up every two minutes to keep those little hands away,

the part of the day where grumpy kids are transformed into happy kids.

When it’s over, all three of us are rested and ready to enjoy each others company again.

I love nap time!

Other days nap time brings out all worst parts of stay-at-home-momdom and rolls them into one horrible afternoon.

I turn into:

the schedule keeper,

the enforcer,

the silent gate keeper,

because if I don’t wait quietly, monitoring the situation for escapes or shenanigans, they won’t fall asleep or they’ll escape before they sleep and we’ll all be cranky forever…

… especially me.)

Those days the frustration level builds, the girls get more and more tired and I end up ready to run for the hills by the time John gets home. (Good thing those dogs of ours always need walking!)

Those days the three of us do not enjoy each others company when it’s time to get up.

I hate nap time!

The wonderful happy nap times go like this: I read the girls a pile of books, sing them a song if I feel the need to torture them further, and tuck them in and head off for a bit of whatever kind of rest my day needs.

Ivy is left with these choices:

1) Rest until Clara falls asleep and then get up.

2) Get up after she wakes up.

3) Get up when I come get her.

She’s been great, she knows that the best way to get Clara to fall asleep quickly is to lay quietly and pretend to be asleep herself.

Brilliant, Clara gets a nap, Ivy at minimum takes a bit of a rest and often nods off for a few hours herself.

Unless it doesn’t’ work.

Unless you find both of them in the crib.

Unless Clara throws all her blankets and half her clothes at her sister.

Unless Ivy performs a jail break and you find them coming down the stairs.

Unless you think they finally have really fallen asleep and as you are putting a coat of paint on shutters in the mudroom you hear mysterious noises upstairs and on investigating find them both playing together.

I was happily greeted with a “MOM!” from Clara.

Ivy told me that they were “just plain’ with blocks” as if I would be so excited to see them up and about and “done with our resteses”

I turned around and left the room and as my blood pressure fell back to acceptable levels cleaned up my painting things before heading back upstairs.

Now they have been admonished, separated, and put back in bed and I’m back to being the silent gate keeper.

Here I sit stewing that not only has nap time gone poorly and my shutter painting has been put on hold yet again but that the last of my Christmas chocolate is stuck in the room with Ivy.

Today I hate nap time.

I wrote this post yesterday mid nap time in the midst of internet issues and saved it to post later. Shortly after writing this Ivy came back down stairs and told me that she made her own choice (please note her three choices from above) (please note that the three year old gets to choose a choice, not create one).  Her choice was that she decided she was all done taking a rest. The huge smile on her face when she delivered the news that she could make up her own choice and her insistence that it was the new plan may have pushed me over some mental ledge.

That’s the only explanation I have for the hysterical laughter that I tried to hide from her as I ushered her back upstairs.

That and the fact that she’s awful cute when she tries to be sneaky.

Now much later I can officially say that good substantial naps did eventually occur, and I was able to sneak in to get my chocolate.

Friday naps, a success… eventually!

No Snow

It is winter in Wisconsin and we don’t have any snow at our house.

I hate that.

The dusting that we got overnight is not enough to make a snowman, go sledding on the new sled, or go skiing.

No matter how much a certain almost four year old asks in a day there is only enough snow to make grassy snow angles.

The only benefit that I can find in this nasty circumstance is that Clara can get outside again.

Not that she couldn’t go outside when we had ten inches of the white stuff, it’s just that now she can walk, and when she falls over she can get back up again.

This means that we have been outside for longer than it takes to get ready to go outside.

I count that as a major success!

Even with Clara’s increased outdoor mobility I still hate the cold without the snow, so I’ll keep on wishing for more.

In the meantime I have been thinking about people with little dogs.

In specific the people who shovel trails in their yards so their dogs can get around.

I’m just wondering… …would it work?

The Evil Koala

Here is the thing.

Those changing tables in the bathrooms with the cute little koala bears on them. They look all handy and useful, but really they are evil incarnate.

I will change my kids in the car, in the lawn, or on a floor in the corner before I will chose one of those “helpful” devices.

Why?

I’ll tell you why…

For starters bathrooms in Wisconsin are cold. In the summer they always seem to be air conditioned to death and in the winter all that tile never heats up. Therefore the evil koala bears and their hard, weirdly curved, surfaces are also cold. If I were the type of mother who brought along extra blankets and changing mats, this probably wouldn’t be a problem, but I don’t.  Therefore every time I’ve stuck an infant on one of these no matter what condition the child was  in before we started I had an immediate transition to a child screaming bloody murder. And we haven’t even started the fun of the actual diaper change yet.

It is even worse if you have a child about 15 months old. *note, this age is not a coincidence* This age looks at the plastic monstrosity and sees  some sort of awesome jungle gym. That empty hole that’s supposed to be filled with liners, just an extra handhold to help out while you strive to climb away.

Next we have the size issue.  The tables seem so big, until you have a child all stretched out screaming and kicking held down with one hand and  a diaper bag in the other. Clearly the diaper bag needs to get set down someplace, but unless you want to set your diaper bag on the child and, depending on the age, either risk suffocation or having the contents of the bag thrown all over the floor you need to set it on the floor. This means that if you forgot to pre-pull anything you may need out of the bag before starting the diaper change you will be forced to do crazy contortions in order to get what you need out of the bag that’s been left on the floor as you keep the child from rolling/crawling/jumping from the “cute” little bench. There is of course the handy dandy safety strap that you can strap them in with… right, good luck with that.

The final evil kicker? 75% of the time the changing stations are located in one of the stalls in the bathroom. Why? Why would you do this? So that a mother holding down a screaming child on a cold hard surface is also forced to deal with the dirty looks of the women standing in line to use the actual toilet? Seriously? That had to be a childless man who thought that one up.

Why am I on such a rant about changing stations?

I’ll tell you why…

On the way home on Christmas weekend we stopped for some fast food and a little leg stretching. Clara needed a diaper change and John kindly did the deed. John does not share my complete hatred of the changing stations so he waltzed into the men’s bathroom, changed her diaper and waltzed back out again. Unfortunately approximately 67 seconds after her first change it was very apparent that another was needed. Since we were already inside and the weather was a bit chilly for a front seat of the truck change, I picked up the ready diaper bag and headed to the bathroom.

It was bad.

It was very bad.

That day I added to my list of reasons I  hate bathroom changing stations.

#32 – No matter how bad it is, you can not call your husband into the woman’s bathroom to help. No one is OK with that, except for you, the queen of poop, and apparently, in this case, you don’t count.

I had just finished cleaning the poop off of Clara, the table, the wall and the floor.

I was still trying to pick up my mess and clean the poop off of myself as Clara ran around the bathroom topless (did I mention the poop on the clothes?).

She was near the door trying to figure a jail break which I was mentally encouraging (John was on the outside after all) when a woman came in.  The woman made all sorts of fluttery noises about almost running her over, and then picked her up off the floor and out of the way of the door while I washed my hands.

Nice, right?

Ummm, sort of. There is nice and then there are the noises that women who think a child is being woefully mistreated make when they are pretending to be nice while they are actually appalled at what they see before them and wish they could swoop in to save the poor unfortunate child.

What I didn’t know is that apparently some strangers do actually swoop in and pick up your child.

What I also didn’t know is that I’m not so cool with random people picking up my child if her life is not in mortal danger.

What I do know is that when I see those kolas just one look at their beady little eyes and I can see the evil.

Cheerful Noncompliance

Today Ivy was exercising her mastery of the art of cheerful noncompliance.

Giving any sort of direction she would cheerfully tell me “No thanks!” and dance off in the opposite direction or say things like “I’m writing a Christmas Card to Johny. How do you spell Love Johnny?”

When taking a shower with Clara she cheerfully washed Clara’s hair after I had to her not to, all the while telling me how helpful she was.

When told to get dressed she continued to turn a 70 sheet tablet of colored paper into confetti (also known as dinosaurs, sailboats, and trains) which she would give to Clara (the confetti spreader), while telling me she was putting her clothes on in “just a moment,” all the while turning our house into a colorful fire hazard.

When asked to sign her name on a birthday card under the writing, she smiles and says… “How about over here?”

The worst part is she knows what she is doing, as soon as she pushes things a bit too far she happily dials back down, right before she pushes a few more of my buttons with a big smile plastered on.

The girls are having a lovely time.

Ivy is skating the edge of getting into trouble and squeaking back out of it.

I’m beyond crabby.

Is there anything worse than a kid who cheerfully ignores all suggestions/commands/threats/demands/if/then statements and then at the last second happily complies?

It’s enough to make me want to throw that noisy-smiling-confetti-making little face out in a snow bank.

I think I need more Diet Coke.

Little Christmas Helpers

My little Christmas helpers are sooo… umm… helpful?

Today Ivy was wrapping the present she made for Clara.  Since Ivy has never wrapped anything before I was helping her out. This in itself was sort of a dubious plan. I’m a really bad present wrapper. If you get a nice looking wrapped gift from us it came from John.  Nevertheless we were trying.  We cleared a space on the floor, pulled out the paper, tape and scissors and in a flurry of questions we got to work.  As we unrolled a brand new roll of wrapping paper, (and because if you wait until the 22nd to buy wrapping paper you can get it on sale and get the fancy kind with the squares on the back that you never otherwise would have bought) Ivy stared at all the squares rolling out before her and said:

“MOM, IT LOOKS JUST LIKE A MAP! … Now, Lets see where we live.”

Then we spent a few minutes  finding our imaginary house and all our friends and relatives imaginary houses on an imaginary map.  Ivy couldn’t understand why I was laughing and why on earth I wanted to get back to wrapping a gift when we were having so much fun with our map.

Helpful may not be precisely the word for my Christmas helpers but between Ivy’s involvement in everything, Clara’s tree un-decorating and shooting Rudolph (While I admit to disliking Rudolph it wasn’t my idea. Ivy  suggested the activity and when I questioned it I was told  “He’s a deer”. Hard to argue with such logic… ) it’s been quite a time around here!

We’ve got maps on the wrapping paper and we ate an imaginary Rudolph dinner.

Picture by Ivy!

Yup, Christmas prep. is much more interesting than it used to be, I wonder how I got along without my helpers?!

Yum! Yum!

In the middle of lunch today Ivy stood up on her chair, opened her eyes as wide as they would go, smiled her biggest smile, and threw her arms up and down expressively as she said:

“Mom! Clara is learning to talk!!! She said: ‘Yum! Yum!’!”

The only thing better than watching Clara grow is seeing Ivy’s joy in it.

In addition to saying “yum, yum”  she and Ivy went sledding by themselves today.

They lasted about ten minutes and nobody ran into anything.

The morning was a success.

Until Clara fell and chipped her tooth, that sort of put a damper on the fun.

The last toothy grin!

Have a Little Patience!

At John’s family Christmas last Sunday there was short conversation about how Ivy is of that amazing age where she soaks up information, retains it and then actual feeds it back at appropriate times.  My contribution to the discussion was that while it is amazing to watch her learn and grow,  all this intelligence and parroting has it’s drawbacks! Truly it’s not the information that is the trouble, I watch and wonder at that part of her growth with the best of the sappy-amazed-that-my-kid-is-clearly-the-smartest-kid-ever-parents. It’s the phrases of mine she has picked up that I take issue with.  I mean really if she’s going to copy things I say she could at least make me look like the nice, kind, patient mother that I am…

Most often heard? “Settle down Mom, settle down.”  This is also the one that makes friends and relatives laugh the hardest who hear it… it’s not that funny, trust me!

Yesterday when getting her sister a drink of water I heard: “I’m workin’ on it Clara, I’m workin’ on it.” Which is something I realized I say all the time after I heard Ivy say it to Clara. Unfortunately, I’m fairly certain it’s much cuter when Ivy says it since she’s lacking the whole harassed mother persona.

Also yesterday Ivy “Ya wanna-ed” me.   I have a bad habit of saying things like, “Hey, ya wanna come put away your toys?” “Ya wanna put away silverware?”  “Ya wanna let me comb your hair?” Why do I ask questions when I know the answer will be no? Why is my grammar so terrible?  It’s a bad habit, I’m workin’ on it. Ivy is helping me:  “Hey Mom! Ya wanna wipe my poop?”  Yup, new years resolution, I’m striking “ya wanna” from my vocabulary!

John and I are not immune to accidentally letting loose a bit of foul language in front of Ivy. So far we have escaped having to deal with the consequences of that except for, “DUMB IT!” Which I’m certain is her interpretation of  John yelling “Damn it!” (Definitely John’s fault.  I have other choice words) Since she’s not actually swearing, we are going with not making a big deal of it, letting it slide and trying not to laugh.

Then of course there is the line about needing to have patience. I think that phrase comes standard with the whole mother thing. Congratulations here’s your baby, let me check your car seat and don’t forget to take your  “have a little patience.” But tonight, tonight, Ivy humbled me with her patience. Waiting for John to get home (with dinner) I was getting grumpy (as was Clara, we like to eat on time, dumb it!)  I grumbled something about John being late within Ivy’s hearing. Ivy pipes up with: “You just need to have a little more patience Mom!  Here you can have some of mine.” she says as she hands me a pocket full of imaginary patience.

The moral of this story? Be careful what you say, or your three year old may tell you  – Ya wanna settle down!? I’m workin’ on it, dumb it! Just have a little patience!- and true or not, that’s not something a mother wants to hear!