Oy! Motherhood.

vast antiwork conspiracy

thursday sucked ass. the day before the boy had screamed almost non-stop for five hours. i mean really screamed. it got so bad my mother had to come here just to give me a break. i even taped a small snippet of the incident. i didn't lose my marbles, but i had a wicked headache by the time john got home. the boy was fine the minute his father walked in the door. go figger. i should have named him jekyll hyde.

at any rate, i woke up with the same headache and was generally pretty snappy. i insisted that the boy eat his peanut butter sandwich and mid-conversation with john i said, "just a minute," and flew off to the right with a rolled up newspaper to shoo the dog who has decided that it's her god given right to get up on the dining chairs and eat off the plates. i barely missed a beat and re-entered the conversation as though i'd never left. it wasn't until john laughed that i realized how insane i must have seemed at that particular moment. i told him that from now on he could call me "the hammer."

i got the kids fed and dressed and then loaded them in the car to take the boy to his summer "fun club" by 8:15. after i dropped him off i decided to do some quick errands so i could be back home in time for the girl's nap.

got to the store, no wallet.

hi ho hi ho it's back to home i go....

at about 9 i decided to try the girl for a nap. we trit-trotted upstairs, nursed, and plopped her in her crib. the wailing commenced the moment my foot hit the last step. i waited about 5 minutes and went back up to get her because i could tell she wasn't going to settle. brought her back down, put on baby beethoven, and sat down to make some calls. about an hour later i tried her in the crib again. still no luck.

i made a doctor appointment for the boy and then decided that i needed to get a copy of his medical records for the new pediatrician. the request has to be faxed, so i typed up a memo and hooked the computer to the printer. it made all the appropriate whirring sounds, i clicked print, and fzzzzzt. nothing.

computer says the printer is offline. i press all the requisite buttons. still nothing. dead as a doornail.

muttering profanities and determined to accomplish this task i decide that i'm going to hand write the fax. when i finish i head over to the fax machine and notice that none of the lights are on. it takes about five seconds for me to realize the power is out. not only can i not fax this thing, but with no power i can't work either.

i take my paper, pick up the baby, get in the car and head to my parents' house. i faxed my fax and then had to turn around and go get the boy. the power was back on by the time i got home, but alas it was near 5 o'clock and there was dinner to be made, baths to be taken, and stories to be read. by 8:30 i was finished. no way i could put two sentences together.

and so it goes....

birthday parties

i know, i'm a curmudgeon of the highest order, but birthday parties annoy me. it's not because i don't like bounce houses, balloons, screaming kids, cake and ice cream, and a good pinata beating now and again, it's just that i feel like i have to pack for a safari for one of these two hour affairs. for kids the boy's age parents are expected to stay. and when daddies work on saturday mommies get to take both kids, which is FINE, just FINE. i'm FINE, really i AM.

it's hot, sweaty, squirmy, dirty (baby food allllllllllll over me), did i mention sweaty? and the naps are messed up (both morning AND afternoon because we left at 10:30 and didn't come back until after 2 and of course she fell asleep in the car and snoozed long enough not to want to snooze any more). i was angry on the way out the door because i was sweating and carrying 8 million pounds of THINGS and hubby was doing very little to help and we were late as usual. by the time we got a couple of miles and some air conditioning down the road i was in a good enough frame of mind to call and apologize for my apalling behavior. he was sweet and assured me that we had enough leftovers that i wouldn't have to worry about dinner (!).

one might think that a husband would think about all of this craziness and think about what his wife does every day and think think think enough about it all to just DO something around the house so that when the wife came home things wouldn't be nearly as ugly as they were when she left. one might think that, but a wife generally knows that thinking that is just really quite stupid because it's nothing more than a very silly fantasy.

all the way home all i could think was, "if he's taking a nap when we get home i'm going to kill him." or at least feed him to the rat in the back yard.

he says he wasn't napping, that he was just lying down.

right.

don't even get me started.

note to graco

my four year old son has a suggestion about how to fix the cupholders on your booster seat so cups of stuff don't fall out every time mommy hits the brakes:

"make the sides higher."

if a four year old can figger that out, surely one of your high paid engineers can as well.

things to remember

when the boy was a newborn his breath smelled like freshly cut cilantro stems.

the girl touches everything with her thumbs first.

rat

i hate rodents. i mean i.hate.rodents. a single mouse can have me cowering in fear. literally. once i thought i saw a mouse in our bedroom and i screamed and bolted into the bathroom, where john was sitting on the...er...john. he yelled, "get out, get out!!" i flatly refused and stood facing the wall until he finished up. i later stuffed towels under the bedroom door hoping to keep the hideous beast confined until john could get in there and give me the all clear.

strangely, when i saw the rat hanging from the rabbit hutch trying to get some rabbit food two days ago i didn't scream or run or hide in corners or anything. it ran away when it heard us approaching the gate and i calmly ushered The Boy through the gate and the back door.

and then i got mad. i mean, how DARE that rat be in my backyard where my children play?! how DARE it! fucking rat. i even tried to get john on the phone to report the news. of course he wasn't available.

that night i couldn't sleep for thinking of the rat. there were certainly more if there was one. where have they been hiding out? i began to imagine the entire wooded area behind the house teeming with rats, their beady red eyes flashing in the darkness. eventually, i guess, i fell asleep.

the next morning i demanded that john hatch a plan for getting rid of them and i informed The Boy that the rabbit may have to go live at his cousin's house. all through the day i was jumpy. every little squeak had me looking frantically around. i kept a watchful eye on the rabbit hutch. no rat. and i was suddenly very grateful for george, our assdog. surely her presence outdoors would keep the rats at bay.

no rat sightings that day.

or the next.

and john was starting to look like he didn't really believe me about the assrat. he even told The Boy there were no rats. hmph.

now i'm beginning to think maybe it wasn't a rat at all, but some kind of deformed squirrel. it was that big. like a squirrel. the tail was long and thin, but it looked grey, like a squirrel. or maybe it was just a rat on its way somewhere else and it thought it could stop by here for a snack. i mean rats have places to go too, do they not?

infertile myrtle

i am grateful beyond words for these two babies. somehow, though, the burn of infertility continues to sting in a way that forces me to continue reading about it and the women whose suffering i have, if even in the tiniest way, shared. i have no aspirations to have more children and yet my first and instinctive reaction to seeing a pregnant woman is envy. an indescribable sort of pain almost always washes through me, settling in my stomach. it's hard to forget what those months and years were like trying to make babies, soldiering on with no clear diagnosis and no clear plan. lustless, purposeful, sometimes even angry, utterly uninspiring sex and countless hours spent wondering why and how and when, when, WHEN??

it would be impossible for me to compute the number of white sticks with pink and blue lines over which my body bent, eyes squinting in a deliberate slit, hoping for the tiniest hint of a second line. sometimes, thinking i'd seen the faintest of shadows i even broke open the plastic stick, pulled out the paper test strip, and retreated to a room with better or more fluorescent light. for a second my heart would race before i realized that, again, there was nothing there. and then there were the lines that did appear only to disappear five or ten minutes later.

a part of me feels strange walking down the grocery store aisle lined with pregnancy tests without stopping to puzzle over which one might yield the earliest positive response.

the mantle of subfertility/infertility, for now at least, seems impossible to shed, even with two children at my feet. i am grateful now that i no longer have to wish and wait and try and cry. but it's impossible to forget. i don't even think i want to.

zenmama

it's hard to stay calm lately. The Boy is on a bender. every day he finds time to wail, inconsolably, uncontrollably for hours on end. today it started in the car on the way home from a playdate.

he was fine when i got there. and finer still when i said, "10 minutes and we have to go." but then it was time to go and the whining began. it continued as he headed out to the car and fought back tears. big, fat, eye-brimming tears.

and then when we got in the car he whined louder. the wailing, it seemed, wasn't far behind. his friend T made him laugh. and then his friend Z made him laugh. and then the whining came back. and his zenmama made him laugh. and then zenmama hopped in the front seat and started the car and The Boy's mouth opened and a godawful sound issued forth.

the windows went up, the air conditioner on, and zenmama turned the radio up. the wailing got louder. and then was reduced to whines just loud enough for zenmama to hear over the radio. which was turned up again. and again. and again. until zenmama couldn't stand the noise anymore and the radio was turned off. all that was left was the whining. and so zenmama issued a warning. "stop whining or i'll cancel next week's playdate with T and Z." and the whining continued.

more warnings. more whining. zenmama said, "when we get home, if you can't stop whining you'll need to go to your room and work it out." more whining.

arriving at home the waiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnng began in earnest. baby k was scared and zenmama was beginning to lose her cool. luckily a rat (yes, a rat and that's another story for another day) hanging from the rabbit hutch trying to get food or whatever distracted zenmama long enough for her to regain zencontrol as she ushered the wailing fire engine of a boy into the house whereupon she again stated that the boy could stop whining or go to his room and work it out. the boy chose his room. and there he wailed for nigh on two hours until his daddy arrived home.

zenmama stayed zen throughout and all was well.

the end.

child safety

as i was driving around a couple of days ago in this godawful heat i started thinking about kids being outside on playgrounds, which led me to wonder why in hell, when i was a kid living in new orleans and houston, playgrounds were equipped with sheet metal slides and metal monkey bars. i clearly remember sliding as fast as my tiny shorts-covered bottom would carry me because if i stopped i'd probably be scorched and scarred for life. my sister-in-law said she left skin on the monkey bars more times than she can remember. and our playgrounds were paved with asphalt or cement.

car seats? we never had them. in fact, we had a green volvo equipped with a black vinyl-covered bench that filled the gap between the front and back seats so we could roll around unobstructed while our parents happily road-tripped us around listening to loretta lynn on their snazzy eight track tape player. one of my mother's cousins regaled me with stories of driving around with her infant daughter in a laundry basket on the floor of the front seat. it's a wonder any of us have lived long enough to remember anything.

now, of course, we've gone completely in the other direction. everything is a hazard. we tried to find a seesaw for the boy recently and were surprised to find nothing suitable for a four year old. big ugly plastic alligator seesaws lose their charm around the age of 2. we never had one, but our first pediatricians' office did and the boy loved it. then he started asking for a *real* seesaw. we looked around and noticed that there aren't any on playgrounds around here. hmm. and what happened to the merry go rounds? not one merry go round on any playground in at least a 30 mile radius. (i can't be bothered to look any farther than that). we did end up finding him a ketler seesaw, but apparently those, too, have been discontinued. we got it by the skin of our teeth, we did.

no more asphalt--woodchips or rubber faux woodchips are the fillers of choice these days. slides are made of plastic and monkey bars are wooden. car seats are mandatory, as are bicycle helmets in most states. i'm happy about all of these safety measures, but is it really necessary to be afraid of seesaws and merry go rounds? i mean, if we have woodchips and rubber woodchips there's no reason to get rid of perfectly good playground equipment, is there?

Boobs

Mine, to be exact. I'm SICK TO DEATH of them. I've been nursing this baby for more than seven months and they're still absolutely enormous. Not only that, they're lopsided. DD on the left, DDD on the right. So that makes me a 34 dd/ddd and guess what?! They don't make bras in that size.

I was a good solid 34c before I got pregnant with The Girl. I liked those boobs. I know they'll go back to normal, or whatever normal after nursing two babies will be like, but now that we've decided there will be no more babies coming I'm anxious to get the show on the road. I want my body back and I wish it would go back to normal while I nurse this baby. It's 400 degrees here and it's as humid as it can get without raining and these things are a load to haul. They're hot, sweaty, pendulous pains in my ass and I'm done with them.

Weird Kid Ailments

Encopresis: This is something I'd never heard of before I had kids. Call me a slacker. Now I am intimately familiar with this illness. It starts out as the simple withholding of poop and ends up as 7 or more days without actually pooping, skidmarks in kid underpants, and 4 or more feet of poop in a kid's intestines. See, what happens is that the kid holds the poop, say because he is loathe to leave the television while Thomas and Friends: Cranky Bugs runs for the zillionth time. And the next day he holds the poop again. So when he finally does poop it hurts like a bugger. And that leads to more poop holding and more pain and then finally the kid can't poop. He literally can't do it because the poop has gotten too big to come out that tiny poop hole. And so what comes out is leaky liquid poop that sneaks around the hard-giant-been-held-for-ten-days poop.

And mommy thinks she's losing her mind because all of a sudden the kid who has been pooping in the potty since he was 18 months old is having accidents at the age of four. Mommy gets mad, which is never a good thing. There's never any hitting, but wow, mommy can yell.

And then mommy starts wondering whether the kid has emotional problems. I mean, withholding poop is sign of real mental trouble, isn't it?

Finally mommy decides it's time to see the pediatrician and voila! a diagnosis. Encopresis. Very common, especially at age four, wouldn'tcha know. They send us home with a bottle of glycolax and a sticker/reward chart and before you know it the boy is pooping torpedos.

Mastocytoma: This one sent us to Boston for a visit with the gurus of childhood dermatology, where they simply proclaimed, "Aha! Mastocytoma!" gave us a few brochures and sent us on our way. It's a collection of mast cells that get red and irritated. Something to do with histamines. There's a rare form in which the reaction can occur internally and affect vital organs, but "don't worry about it, it's rare." I'm supposed to sit here and not worry about an invisible thing that could kill my kid. Sure. No problem.

Still's Murmur: After many, many instances of doctor's saying, "There's a murmur, but don't worry, he'll most likely grow out of it," we were finally sent to see a cardiologist--"just to be safe." Cardiologist says it's just a musical heart. Nothing to worry about. My boy's heart sings!

Nursemaid's Elbow: This one just happened over the July 4th weekend. I was nursing the baby and her arm was hung up under my big DDD boobie, so I pulled her hand just like all mothers do and she started wailing. She wouldn't use her left arm, not even to flap flap flap like she does when she gets excited/angry/sad about something. Off we rushed to the ER where they did xrays and I felt like a child abuser, but was quickly assured that it happens all the time and was even given a lesson on how to fix it the next time it happens.

Contact Dermatitis: Any bumpy, itchy, red rash the doctors can't explain. Otherwise known as "Mystery Rash."

And did you know that one single kid can have watery-awful-stinky-puddles-around-his-feet diarrhea for fourteen days and live??