His 'n' hers

Sleep update: The patter of not-so-tiny feet was deferred till 6.30 this morning. Win! I will now proceed to extrapolate the future from a single data point (as is my wont) and pronounce the early wakings over For Ever. On the down side, I seem to have lost nap time. Must find something better to do with his optimistically-named "quiet time" than watching Super Hero Squad and The Incredibles again.

House update: We've still bought a house. Any time the phone rings I expect it to be the realtor saying that there's a hitch and it's all fallen through, that they meant to sell it to those other people with the same name, that we can only have it if we promise not to change the kitchen in any way, or whatever. But so far, so good.

In other news, Miss was saying "Mine," it turns out. She says it quite a lot, these days. Monkey never ever said "Mine," but then he didn't need to: like Yurtle the Turtle, he was master of all he surveyed. To give him his due, mind you, and in all fairness as they say in the home country, he's a very good sharer. He rarely minds when Miss appropriates something of his, and even little plastic Spider-Man isn't sacrosanct and may have his head chewed on occassion without reprise.

We used to call Monkey "Destructo-Boy," as he was always more interested in tearing down than building up. There was a period where if you left him alone to fall asleep with a book to look at, you'd find the book in shreds 20 minutes later. Miss is a lot more conventional with her toys: she actually plays with them the way the child on the box would - the child I used to be convinced was a fake because mine would just rip up the box, throw away the contents, and then go run around some more and jump off the sofa. Miss puts the hemispheres on the pegs as well as pulling them off, she sticks her bumpy proto-Lego blocks together as well as knocking down the towers, she turns pages without ripping them from the spines of the books.

It's not a motor skills thing, I think; it's more a patience issue. Monkey just didn't want to take the time to build things, to make his hand go to the right place, just as nowadays he doesn't want to slow down enough to follow the dots and write his name, even though he can if he tries carefully. He's just starting to build with the big Lego that he got for his first birthday (using manipulatives, as his teachers said to me), and it's great to see. He's even starting to get the hang of jigsaws, though sometimes he seems to be purposely obtuse and tries to put two straight edges back to back when I point out that they go together.

Of course, the biggest attraction of having more than one child is that they can play together, thus freeing up the parent for fun things like washing up, making dinner, and updating her blog. This works beautifully, for about ten minutes of any given day. The rest of the time playing together is a hair's breadth away from doing permanent damage to each other or the furniture, or both at the same time. Monkey currently enjoys upending the coffee table, with little regard for whose limbs are about to be crushed, and Miss immediately jeopardises her skull to climb into the vertical space created, making a baby-table sandwich that, once safely in, she can't possibly escape from. They also like to ride the tricycle together, which is sweet, until one falls off and the other starts ramming them. While I bleat "Get off her" pointlessly from the safe confines of the kitchen and just keep on stirring.



Ah, the joys.

Idle hands

This weather is terrible. There's still snow on the ground, so even when it's something approaching warm, we can't go to a playground. And on days like today, with the the windchill taking it well below freezing, I don't want to venture out at all once we've been to school and back (twice, in today's case). Which makes for one bored, restless, frustrated kid all afternoon.

The nap problem is part of it, since Monkey's not-napping more frequently right now, so that I'm afraid if we go out in the car after 3pm, he'll fall asleep on the way home. And he's (we're / I'm) terrible at quiet time. How do you make them stay in their room and play quietly? How do you even make a kid play quietly?

Short of dire consequences, which I'm bad at due to lack of imagination and follow-through, I'm really unable to keep him in a different room. I did once say I'd throw Little Spider-Man in the bin if he didn't keep his seatbelt on, and that worked quite well, but it's not something I can use on a regular basis. Threatening no dinner is just pointless for my non-eater, and "witholding side" just sounds like a direct route to therapy. (For me now, him later.) I could lock him in his room by putting the child-safety baffle thingy on the doorknob, but that reduces him to hysterics straight away, and also endangers every other thing in his room. I can imagine that leaving him in his bedroom for an hour of quiet time would result in the contents of the drawers (all his and Miss's clothes) and the closet (all the towels, some clothes to grow into) and the bookshelf being thrown with force all over the room. And leaving him there until he picked them up again is just a non-starter. He's not that kid. Or I'm not that parent.

I try to engage him in some colouring or puzzles when Miss is napping and he's not, but he doesn't care. He'll just watch tv until he's going out of his mind with boredom, and then whine at me. He doesn't want to make things with Lego, he won't play with cars, he's only interested in badgering me to make a machine that will turn him into Spider-Man, usually by gluing a pile of random things together in a totally impractical, not to say impossible, way. Or variations on that theme.



[This is a typical machine. You can see how well glueing all this together - or stapling, or taping, or attaching by any other means - would work.]

Clearly, I'm doing this All Rong. I need to be more proactive in planning playdates for afternoons, but it's hard when I don't know from day to day whether he'll be napping. Also, some of our regular playdates are out of the loop right now due to their own crazy nap schedules, or working moms, or having moved back to Brazil (for instance).

Gentle reader, if you're out there and have your own Monkey, how do you enforce quiet time?

Not so much, no.

We appear to have bought a house. Subject to inspection, yadda yadda. But hey.

Also, Monkey appeared at 3.30 last night. Not much of a success, then. There was some to-ing and fro-ing by all parties and eventually he went back to sleep. And arrived again at my bedside at 6.30 or so. I was not a happy camper.

And despite my best efforts, he didn't nap again today. Maybe it's just going to take a couple of nights to settle and he'll sleep like a baby (someone else's, that is) tonight.

I told you I was an optimist.

Musical beds

That house. The one I saw. We put in an offer today. Who knows what will happen now.

I am determined to go to bed early tonight, after last night's non-sleep-apalooza. Usually when I'm woken at 3am or whenever it is (I can't see the clock without craning, once I'm sleeping with Miss), I'm quite alert - no doubt from however many years it is now of being woken around then by one or t'other. But last night when I moved my arm and it was enough to make her splutter awake, suddenly totally bunged up with an insta-cold, it was only one-something, and I was still in the depths of wanting to be asleep. The exciting new nasal-congestion issue meant it took forever to get her back to sleep and I had to sit up (horrors!) to do it, so she could nurse and breathe at the same time (always a plus). And then gently ease us back down to a horizontal position an inch at a time, ending up with her head elevated on the pillow and mine falling off the back end, ensuring that I couldn't sleep myself.

It felt like 15 minutes later when Monkey appeared on the horizon. Every morning in the grey light I register the pad, pad, pad of his feet through my shallow sleep and raise a grim hand in warning to make sure he knows where his sister is and not to wake her, and hopefully to convey that I'm not at all pleased to see him and would be a much nicer mummy if he would just wait an hour or three. Then he slides under the duvet on my other side and says in an all-too-shrill whisper, and as if I didn't know, "Please may can I have morn-side?" (May can is his ultra-polite asking. I think it's because his father taught him please may I and I went with the simpler - I thought, for some reason - please can I, and both stuck. Sort of.)

His appearance has been getting earlier lately, from a very reasonable 6.30 to 7.00 a while ago to hours with 5s in them lately. This morning I looked at the clock, saw 4.30, and ushered him straight back to his own bed. But then I had to stay there with him, which I did for about half an hour and then, though he still wasn't asleep, I reckoned he should drop off so I left with a quick pat and an excuse about getting back to the baby. I crawled into my own bed once I'd ascertained that Miss was fine, and had 15 minutes or so of trying to get warm when pad, pad, pad, he was back. Lather rinse repeat. This time I fell asleep in his bed and was woken by B telling me very quietly that Miss was awake and looking for me, so then I had to go back to her, long-windedly put her back to sleep... or did she even go back to sleep? Maybe at this point it was 6.30 and I let her get up with her father and took myself back to bed, finally, for an hour's lie in... it's all a blur.

It's probably a blur for you too, in the unlikely event that you're still reading this, and you're no doubt wondering why I let my children walk all over me like this and why their father can't lend a hand. Honestly, I prefer him to get a solid six or seven hours and then be able to get up early with them than to disturb him during the night, when he's usually a lot more comatose than I am and finds it hard to get back to sleep once woken. And really, it's not normally this way: Monkey has been sleeping through the night very reliably for almost two years now, and Miss is having a particularly bad time just now with the stuffy nose and the five - yes, five - teeth she's working on. I just found a molar poking through this evening. The other molars are all right there, bumps under the gum, and the last incisor is so close I can practically see it, but it refuses to break through. Poor girl.

So today I forwent Monkey's nap, at great personal expense (oh all right, I mis-timed our walk and he was still awake at the end of it) and he was in bed early and I hope hope hope this will be enough to break the pattern and get him to sleep a solid twelve hours. Eleven? Ten? What are the chances? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

Also to see whether we're home-owners.

Houses and bloggers

I viewed a house today, and I liked it. I think I consider it a runner. It has the requisite number of bedrooms, the kitchen and family room are connected and on the level, it has a fenced-in yard and a nice deck, it has office space so that we wouldn't have to keep the filing cabinet in our bedroom any more, and it's in the right place, though a bit further up the hill than my absolute ideal house would be. It needs some work but nothing too major: floors refinished, walls painted (wallpaper removed), some windows replaced, closet doors attached. The kitchen is a bit dated but has plenty of space for improvement. We could have an island!

We shall see what happens with that. No chickens are being counted.

*********************

What I wanted to do was expand on my blogroll, because all the people I've linked to down there on the right are really great and you should check them all out. Admittedly, there's a bit of a bias towards bloggers who were pregnant or new mothers when I was also pregnant, because I had a lot of time on my hands at that particular job, and was busy researching my upcoming job i.e. motherhood. But these ones stuck and became the people I read every day because of more than that: they're great, funny, engaging writers (and their kids are cute).

A Girl and a Boy: Leah (not her real name) lives with Simon and their baby, Wombat, in the San Francisco Bay Area. She's tall, blonde, and a book editor; he's dark, handsome, and musical, and Wombat is adorable and just a little younger than Miss.

All and Sundry: Linda provides me with a periodic look ahead thanks to her elder son, who is about six months older than Monkey. She writes with piercing honesty and raucous hilarity, and takes beautiful pictures of life on the other coast.

Amalah: I started reading Amy's blog when her son Noah was tiny and I was pregnant. We got pregnant with our second kids a month apart. She even lives near here. I stalk her sometimes, but she's way too cool for me: she wears skinny jeans and knows a lot more than I do about beauty products, and writes heart-wrenchingly of Noah's particular amazingness as a fabulous kid who just happens to have sensory processing disorder and dyspraxia and some other things going on.

Ask Moxie: This one isn't so much a blog as a vital parenting resource: I recommend it to anyone I know who gets pregnant. Moxie will assure you that nobody knows your kid as well as you, and that nobody can parent them better than you either, and that whatever gets the most people the most sleep most of the time is probably the right thing to be doing. If you're tearing your hair out about that baby of yours, look no further for support and information from Moxie and her great posse of commenters.

Balancing Everything: Jessica is a crazy, crafty, home-schooling, cloth-diapering, flour-grinding Mormon with four beautiful kids in Idaho, and I love her. She'll sew you a custom camera strap, thrill you with her amazing birth stories, inspire you with her love for her children, and have you laughing at her candour about their chaos.

Better Now: Kristen lives in Vancouver with her four-year-old son and her boyfriend's abs. (And the rest of him, but his abs are, um, memorable.) I've been reading since she was debaucherous and dishevilled in Calgary and unexpectedly pregnant. Her life and her blog have imploded and exploded since then, and she writes lyrically about it all.

Dooce: The grand-dame of them all, Mommyblogger extraordinaire, Heather is irreverant and hilarious and has two daughters with the most astonishing eyes you've ever seen. She swears like a sailor, takes amazing photos, and is going to be the new Oprah, I believe.

Finslippy: Alice is a little too good a writer: I can't read her too often or I'll just stop trying. I just re-read her son's birth story and nearly woke the baby laughing: I'll just say that it has Dan Rather and Jerry Orbach, and leave it at that.

Here be Hippogriffs: I have to admit that Julia is probably my favourite. She battled infertility and multiple miscarriages with unbelievable fortitude, and is now mother of three beautiful and precocious children. If she wrote a treatise on the political state of Outer Mongolia in 1436, I would read it because it would be highly entertaining. I want to be her stalker, but she lives in Minnesota, which is a little off my radar.

Secret Agent Josephine: Brenda is a graphic designer who lives near the beach in southern California with her photographer husband and their 4-year-old daughter, Bug. Brenda takes gorgeous pictures, makes free illustrations for you to download, gets crafty with cardboard boxes and her nieces, and made lemon scones the other day.

Tomato Nation: Sars knows a lot about baseball, New York City, movies, and answering random questions about love lives, cats, ethics and books you read a long time ago. Way back when the Internet began I used to read her recaps on Dawson's Wrap, and now I read her opinions on everything else (except the baseball, because I'm just not interested in that).

*************

Am currently sitting on my hands, metaphorically speaking, trying to let B. mull over the concept of this potential house in peace. It's really hard.

Ding!

Congratulations! You have achieved Preferred Parent status. This enables you to collect points that you can most definitely not redeem for fun activities like going out to dinner, going to the cinema, a haircut, a pedicure, or reading a book in peace.

Here are some more great ways to earn even more Preferred Parent Points:

• Being the only one who can make me go back to sleep in the middle of the night, especially while you're the only one who can make my sister go back to sleep too, simultaneously, in another room.
• Being the only one who knows where my stripey blue Spider-Man gloves are, even though I was just wearing them five minutes ago.
• Being the only one who can pour my bowl of cereal to just the right level.
• Being the one with the boobs.
• Somehow never being deemed the yucky one, even though you also quite often put me in my room for endangering my sister.
• Being the one who always has to come to the bathroom with me, especially if you've just sat down to eat your dinner. I have to do it all myself, at half the speed of a glacier, but you must stay and watch and preferably applaud at intervals.
  
• Being the only one whose kisses are scientifically proven to make it better.

Share your point-gathering tips with yuckier parents - but remember, there can only be one Preferred Parent! We'll do our best to make sure it's always you!

That which is not baking

I'm lucky enough to have a husband who's lucky enough not to have to be at his job at any given time, most days. He has a weekly staff meeting on Wednesday mornings, and now and then there's something else, or a conference or what-have-you, but most days he can work from home, or swan in at lunchtime, or work in the middle of the night, and nobody looks twice. Even his boss rarely gets into the office before eleven.

This is lovely, because, coupled with the fact that we live across the road from his work, it means he can let me go back to bed for an hour in the mornings, or come home for lunch, or co-op at the nursery school, or even come back if I ring up and tell him I just can't do it any more (only happened once, so far). It also facilitates him in his hobby: running marathons.

It started when Monkey was about 10 months old and I met my new BFF, who just happens to run marathons, partake in triathlons, and coach first-time marathoners with her running club. I mentioned that my husband had always had a vague ambition to run a marathon, and the damage was done. He joined her club and signed up for the first-time marathoners program. I indulged him just this one time, assuming that once he'd done the deed his urge would be sated and he'd never do such a crazy thing as trying to run 26.2 miles in one go again. I didn't understand about marathons: you always have to beat your best time, so you just have to run another. He's currently training for number seven, which will be his second crack at Boston. He's pretty good, then, and I am in awe of his determination, his sticktoitiveness, his disgusting level of fitness, and his buns of steel.

So if Daddy's not here, then, he's almost always either at work or out running, and this is accepted with equanimity by the children. His return is hailed by them and me with delight and relief, respectively. Any absence of Mummy, however, is a tragedy, an offence against human nature, and probably a contravention of civil liberties; and can usually be remedied by barging into the bathroom. The fact that I seem to be the Preferred Parent for both kids is mostly my own fault: in addition to having the boobs, I'm also always here. (Omnipresent, but - sadly - less and less omnipotent.)

My own relationship with exercise is less impressive. Exercise and I aren't on speaking terms at the moment, really. It's not that we're fighting; it's more that we never really got acquainted. Apart from a few forays into swimming and pilates, I've never had what you'd call a gym habit, never been interested beyond the hypothetical in long hikes up high mountains, never really enjoyed breaking a sweat. When B's running friends ask me if I run too, I reply that if I'm going to miss the bus, I'm going to miss the bus. Luckily, for the moment, my genes and breastfeeding combine to make me delightfully petite, but that won't last for ever. Part of me hopes that I don't have to eat my words and start running after all, and another part of me wants to join the other preschool moms in their sprint triathlon next year. Most of me would just like to find some time to myself on a Sunday morning to go swimming, and maybe a Wednesday evening to go back to my pilates class.

Which would be just the very tip of the iceberg of my not being Always Here, and probably a good thing for all concerned.

Flit, flit

Flit, goes my brain. Must do that, must mail her, must make that appointment, must send that present, must put that load in the dryer, must ignore the washing up if I want to write a post, must just read someone else's blog first...

I had some things to tell you from Monkey:

"Who invented spoons?"

"I like the flavour of my snot."

"Snotstril"

"Thank you very much for the party. Nathan's Mom, I just did a huuuge poo in the toilet." [bursting with pride]

[Sadly] "I have all this Spider-Man stuff, and yet I seem not to be Spider-Man."

Him: ... [stuff about stuff from the back seat... of course I hang on his every word]... Is that great?
Me: Yup, that's great.
Him: Is that amazing?
Me: Yup, that's amazing.
Him: Is it saxy?
Me: Pardon?
Him: Is it ... soxy?
Me: What's soxy, exactly?
Him: Floppy and wiggly, like a supersuit.
Me: Hmmm.

Isn't Tim Gunn great? Don't we all want a Tim Gunn to consult every now and then, and maybe to come shopping with us? Or even to babysit the damn kids and steer us to a shop that only stocks clothes in adult, female, sizes, so that we didn't spend all our precious, precious shopping time picking up cute things for the baby next summer and the kid next winter, and even the husband, whose threads are pretty much just that because in addition to never getting near the shops, he doesn't actually want to and doesn't care about what he's wearing and works in a profession where if you're not wearing socks with your sandals or a Christmas jumper in March, you're probably next in line for promotion. (He doesn't, and yet he isn't. Must be a glitch in my logic there.)

Coherence. I strive for coherence. Also to find out how other women with small children manage to wear jewellery for more than 5 minutes at a time.

I'm too scattered. I think I have to go and do the washing up now.

Vocabulary

Excuse me if I'm a little distracted. While child one is slumbering peacefully on the sofa - as well he should since he woke at 5am, the sod - child two is buzzing around, arms windmilling, pausing now and then to find a new hat (the door to the coat closet fell off / was removed for safety / is no longer there, so the hats are right there for her to grab at will, scattering mittens as she goes), playing with everything at once and telling me "ap-pul, ap-pul" as she points to the apple in the big word book. Now she's got the kid camera out and is saying "jheezz". It's very entertaining but it's not what you'd call taking a nap, exactly.



She's having one of those vocabulary explosions that her brother didn't have till he was 20 months or so. In the past couple of days she's added ball, apple, cheese, down, hi, no, and go-go (for gorilla) to her previous Mummy and Daddy (interchangeable), bye, yes, up, ba for bath and de for dog. I may be going out on a limb here, but I think she'll be an early talker. She also says things that sound suspiciously like "go away" and "mine", but let's give her the benefit of the doubt on those.

She's not sleeping very well just now; I've decided to call it the 15-month sleep regression, but I'm pretty sure the talking has something to do with it. I'll think she's finally dropped off but then she'll lift her head and shout "ball".

(In other news, I think I've made five different sorts of muffins in the past week, since The Snows began. Plain chocolate chip, modified chocolate chip (I used part wholewheat flour and banana baby yogurt instead of plain yogurt; I was at the end of my supplies after Snow Round I), choc choc chip, banana butterscotch, and probably something else I can't remember. As well as banana buttermilk pancakes, a loaf of yeast bread (still not rising properly; must keep trying), french toast, chewy seedy apricot bars, and, you know, dinners.)

Full disclosure

I left a comment on Leah's blog earlier today outing myself as the crazy hippie lady I really am, and thought in full frankness and in all honesty and to be up-front and a decent human being about it all, I should probably explain myself here. I'm not ashamed of it, but at the same time it's not something I go shouting from the rooftops unless I know exactly what sort of company I'm in.

I'm still nursing my son, who will turn four in April.

Yes, that means that he still partakes of his mother's milk, direct from the source, twice daily if not more often; rarely less.

I never intended to do this. My friend and I went to a local attachment-parenting meeting about weaning when our kids were about 10 months old, and there was a mother there who admitted she was still nursing (and co-sleeping with, but that's a different story) her almost-seven-year-old. (I think he was almost seven. I may have added a couple of years as time went by. Maybe he was almost five.) We were shocked. We, with our cute little babbling babies, were nothing like these crazy granola people with the clumpy German shoes. We just wanted to know what to expect as our little darlings naturally and voluntarily weaned themselves over the coming few months.

We are both still nursing our almost-four-year-olds. She's still co-sleeping with hers. I'm not, because I'm co-sleeping with my next one instead.

If I hadn't got pregnant again, I think he would have weaned the summer after he turned two. At least, if I had brought some pressure to bear, it would have happened. But as it was, since I found I could nurse while pregnant, I didn't want to traumatize my wee snowflake by weaning him at that point, and I certainly didn't want to turn him against his baby sister by weaning him once she arrived, so I was sort of stuck with it. By my second trimester I had cut down drastically to just twice a day, but after she was born it all went to heck in a handbasket and he was partaking at all hours. There I was, tandem nursing, just like I'd sworn I'd never do. You live and learn and then you eat your words with a nice chianti and some fava beans. Oh wait.

Anyway. We gradually cut back again and by the time the baby was a year old we were pretty much back to where we'd been before, at just morning and evening, and that's where we've stuck. He appears by my bed as soon as he wakes up demanding his "morn-side" (side is his word for it; his sister seems to be calling it "mumeet", which amuses me because whether it's mum-eat or mum-meat, it seems quite appropriate), and there's much whispered repositioning so he doesn't wake the baby as I long-sufferingly come up with the goods, under the rationale that at least it keeps us all lying down and quiet a little longer, and I don't have to open my eyes. And then after dinner, he must have his "bed-side" before I put his sister to bed and his dad puts him to bed.

It's not really worth the aggro enough to me to push it any further at this point, since I'm still nursing Miss anyway; and have you met my son? Well, probably not, but you've read about the Spider-Man thing, right? All three-year-olds are stubborn, but he's single-minded with the determination of a bulldog whose favourite rubber squeezy toy you're trying to throw away because it's old and smelly. I suspect that both kids will wean together, when Miss is two, maybe. I've told him plenty of times that most of his friends don't have side any more, and that maybe when he's four he'll stop, but he just laughs at my hilarious jape and tells me that he'll still be having side when he's a teenager, and when he's grown up, and when he's married to Helen.

Luckily, Helen tells her mother the same thing, so at least we'll all be crazy hippies together.

**************************

Seriously, though , if you're looking for some good books on this subject, I recommend Mothering Your Nursing Toddler by Norma Jane Bumgarner and Adventures in Tandem Nursing by Hilary Flower. Both were very helpful in making me feel that I wasn't quite as peculiar as I felt, and that many mothers before me have done this and survived to tell the tale.

This is not about the snow

We have snow. All the snow you need. Get your snow here. We've plenty. A surfeit, in fact. An overabundance. We also have the concomitant snow days and stuck-in-the-houseness, added to a three-year-old who sees snow only as an inconvenience you have to go through in order to get hot chocolate, and sometimes you can get the chocolate without even bothering with the snow if your mother has been worn down enough, in just the right way, by multiple viewings of The Incredibles - here, we got you Nemo, watch Nemo, will you? No, you want The Incredibles again? Sigh - and random acts of obedience interposed between terribly noisy antics that endanger the life and limbs of your sibling, who has been running circles round the couch wearing various hats and pracising her new word which just happens to be "No!" What I'm saying is, snow, and more to come. We have not lost power and for that I am grateful, and keeping my fingers crossed; and we have the vital supplies and more, so we'll survive. But it will be nice when it's Spring.



I wasn't going to talk about the snow at all. I was going to tell you about this fascinating thing that's going on with my mouth. I have an inbuilt stress indicator, it seems. All I have to do is open my mouth, and - uh. Hey, I can't bite into this burger. I must be stressed.

Last October at some point I had a sore arm; I pulled something or strained something and it hurt to move it around, even though I could still use it to pick up and hold a 20lb baby while cooking dinner with no problem at all, so that was lucky. I did not take it to the doctor, and it went away. Some time during the arm thing, I started having a mouth thing. I realised I couldn't open my mouth very wide at all. Like, I had to turn my toothbrush sideways to get it in. This seemed, well, not normal. I thought perhaps I'd dislocated my jaw in my sleep. Perhaps. I'm sure you can do that. Then it started to ache a bit, and click when I chewed (my well cut-up pieces of food that had to be inserted carefully through the letterbox of my mouth with a deft fork manoeuvre), so I actually did bring it to the doctor. She diagnosed stress and gave me muscle relaxants, and told me to find a dentist.

I have yet to find a dentist, due to tedious insurance things and the tedious tedium of finding a dentist. And really, either my mouth would be fine and he'd wonder what the problem was or it would be stuck at almost-closed and he wouldn't be able to see inside and find that I'm grinding my molars to dust in my sleep, or whatever it is that's going on. I try to consciously relax when I find that I'm clenching my jaw, which is usually while I'm trying to fall asleep as a small nocturnal animal gnaws rhythmically on my nipple. Any time I want to check my stress levels, I just open wide and see how many fingers I can fit inside.

Now for another cup of tea and some more cut-up muffin.

Obsessions

I may not have mentioned this, but we have a full-blown Spider-Man obsession going on over here. I think this is what three-year-old boys do. When he was two, he quite liked trains, but never developed the mania for wheeled objects, or construction vehicles, or farm animals that some toddlers get. Then, at two and three-quarters, he became obsessed with The Little Mermaid, which we had got for Christmas. Heavily invested. We all took on roles: I was Ariel, the baby was Flounder, Monkey himself was Prince Eric (of course), and most hilariously, B was known as Yucky Octopus, Monkey's name for Ursula the Sea Witch, the villain of the piece. I got quite used to answering to Ariel on the playground, but the culmination was when our Valentine's Day card came back from school dutifully transcribed with the loving message: "To Ariel and Yucky Octopus, love from Prince Eric." The teachers weren't quite sure how we'd take that.

It wore off, I went back to being Mummy some time before the summer, and he decided to call B by his first name instead of Daddy (we're still waiting for that phase to end). But Mermaidgate was quickly replaced by Spider-Man-itis. It all began, I think, with the underpants. In my enthusiasm to toilet train, I bought whatever nasty character-laden underpants excited Monkey's desires. We have Thomas the Tank Engine, Spongebob, Cars, and two sets of Spider-Man. (And some nice plain shorts-style ones that have been rejected out of hand.) This coincided with B finding a small Spidey action figure when out running one day. And then there was a t-shirt on the sale rack in Target, and as a special treat when we were in Germany the belt from H&M ... and thus the costume began to take shape.

Nowadays, full regalia consists of Spider-Man underpants, Spider-Man t-shirt, red long-sleeved top, blue jeans, Spider-Man belt, red-and-blue socks, blue stripey gloves, Spider-Man hat (suddenly H&M is all Spidey-ed up, as if it's not just my kid or something), mask (we caved and got him a mask and web shooter toy thingy after he didn't get to be Spider-Man for halloween), and Spider-Man watch (from Santa). At the moment he keeps his Spider-Man kit - hat, mask, gloves, cape (non-canon, and a bit risky considering what Edna Mode says about capes in The Incredibles) and zoo pen (um?) - in a clear plastic package with a zip that contained fridge-magnet letters or some such. This goes everywhere with Monkey, so that he can transform into Spider-Man at the drop of a hat/tall building. Depending on his mood, it can be very difficult to get him to dress in anything that's not red and/or blue, and the nice brown cords I got for this winter have gone totally unworn.

Until now, any time Monkey has put marker to paper, we've always ended up with an impatient scrawl, a (probably black) swirl of nothing, like as not going through the paper with the force of frustration. But the other day something great happened: he sat down with a piece of paper, took a little time, and found that he could make the pen do what he wanted. And lo, a picture formed, of a blue-and-red man with something extending from each hand...the amazing, astounding, mesmerising, all-powerful Spider-Man.



He is, in fact, going to get a Spider-Man costume for his birthday in April. It arrived the other day, though I haven't actually taken it out of the package yet. I think it's warranted; it's certainly been more than a passing fad. And if he wants to wear it out and about every day, I hope I can let him do that, at least for a while. But I have no illusions that he'll stop pulling out all my red and blue towels and piling them in the middle of the floor with his blue duvet cover and every other red and blue item he can find in the house in order to create the ultimate machine that will turn him into the real deal: Spider-Man in both looks and deeds. I just keep telling him that with great power comes great responsibility.

Fifteen months of Miss

Now I'm here at Blogger, and the view is lovely, thank you. I had fun moving all my entries over one by one - handcrafting it, if you will - and finding photos to retroactively (but still anonymously) populate it. Now I'll just sit back and let the readership roll in.

Ahem.

Miss is 15 months old today. She understands everything, nods emphatically and says "Yyyup!" for yes, and prevaricates with a grimace and a sort of swingy head motion for no. (In contrast to her brother, who said "No" very clearly a long time before he agreed with anything.) She climbs up on the kitchen chairs to sit at the table and demand some food, which is counter-productive since I can't make her anything if I'm constantly having to remove her from danger. She wants very much to brush her teeth if anyone else is brushing theirs. She has just lately fallen in love with Curious George, from the big hardback book we have to the stuffed monkey who I think is becoming her security item.

Monkey had a security item for about a week. The rest of the time it was just my boobs he wanted. But when he was 18 months old he picked up a small chocolate labrador puppy (plush, to my relief) one day and it was bought for him by his doting grandmother, who was visiting. Luckily for him, as I would have just dismissed his wails, said firmly but gently that we can't buy everything we like in the shop, and put it back. And then where would my boobs have been for the next ten days? Being carted around under his uxter, that's where, as Puppy was, barely allowed to be put down for baths or meals. The poor dog still lists to the left because his neck was permently squashed by a small arm for that brief but intense time.

After ten days (and a near miss in Target when I thought I'd have to offer myself in retribution to the gods of losing your child's comfort item - or my firstborn, which might have solved everything all at once but would have upset my mother) Puppy was not quite so elemental to keeping the world spinning on its axis, and in a little while Puppy could easily be taken or left. These days Puppy is called Not Max, to distinguish him from the other stuffed dog, Max. (Max is apparently the only name a dog can have. I think this stems from The Little Mermaid, where Price Eric's dog was Max. Monkey was Prince Eric for a while back there this time last year, to the extent that all the flight attendants on our trip home in March thought his name was Eric. They assumed he was just joking about the honorific.)

Anyway. George is to Miss as Puppy was to MonkeyBoy, or getting to be that way. I wish she'd chosen something smaller, but at least he has long arms and legs to hang onto.

Just checking

Just making sure my fridge works properly.

The case for two

Two is nice. I like two. I like the symmetry. (Have I said this before?) I like having one of each and having one each. I like having one for each arm, each knee, each breast (when pressed) and none over. I'm not sure I could fit more.

Two fit in the car. We can (just about) travel with two: I don't see us galivanting off to Ireland every Christmas and Europe every summer with three. The world is made for families of four.

But apart from that, it's a quality-of-care issue. I'm not sure I could provide the quality of care I want to give if we had another. It's not a case of love - I've read enough mommyblogs to know that your heart expands to love all the children you have, and that's just lovely, really, and I don't doubt it. But how could someone not be ignored, if there was yet another baby taking all my brain, my milk, my arms, my very shaky schedule?

And where would I go? At the moment I have just a tiny toehold on the rest of me, the part that will come back when the kids are in school, the part that will have to find a job, that goes out and parties, that seduces my husband in something more thrilling than just a clean pair of pyjamas and a go-along-with-it attitude. Another baby would send me spinning down into the chasm for two more years, and while in many ways I love the chasm - the crevasse of pregnancy, the valley of post-partum chaos, the windswept plains of extended nursing and broken nights - I like seeing the light at the end of the [um, where is this metaphor going?] - alluvial delta? river mouth? The choppy ocean of what-the-hell-do-I-do-now?

Being three

It's hard being three. I have to remember this.

You're not at all a baby any more, there's no way you can hide under that comforting banner any longer; but you're the very littlest of the little kids. You can talk the hind leg off a donkey, but you keep forgetting that I can't read your mind when you wanted your juice in the other cup. People keep expecting you to be the bigger person, just because you have a little sister, but that's not always fair.

You're pushing, pushing, looking for your boundaries, finding how far you can press us; the last thing you can possibly do is whatever we want you to, which is particularly hard when it's something you physically need to do, like eat, or poop, or sleep. Then your mind and your body are stuck in a battle royal and sometimes you just break down altogether because that's too much to take. Sometimes you have to tell us not to look as you do what we asked, because if we see, you'll probably disappear in a puff of logic. This is a good solution: we like to comply.

You're so busy thinking, all the time. Your grip on the difference between fact and fiction is tenuous - in your mind, everything is possible, you have every superpower ever imagined, and then some. Spider-Man is as real to you as I am, and you honestly don't understand why if you dress like him, you don't become him. Even when you get your long-desired real official Spider-Man costume (sshhh! It'll be a birthday present), I suspect you'll still be making machines out of all the red and blue things in the house that will turn you into real Spider-Man.

You want to know why. You want to know how and when and where, but mostly why. You want to know everything we're talking about, even when we're not talking to you. When you get tired, your need for why goes on autopilot and you just keep asking.
And soon, you'll be four.