You can have my truck, but you can't have my hugs!

To watch a child become more independent is bittersweet. This past weekend my son stayed in the church nursery all by himself for the hour our pastor delivered his sermon. Anytime we tried to do this in the past it failed miserably: he would become hysterical.

He has never been in a daycare situation before, so I am sure he felt insecure about whether his needs would be met if neither his mommy nor daddy were with him. Being touched by other children would upset him greatly; another kid could snatch his toy and he would be fine, but if he were hugged he’d freak out! If another child started to cry or became agitated it would send my son to the roof! He’s very sensitive like that.

Over the last few weeks I have watched him grow more confident and show a healthy interest in playing with other children. It was time to try the nursery again. This time he settled in quickly; he explained to his new little friend that her doll was wearing a “shirt”, and then he began to drive some trucks up and down the table. When I told him that I was going to go back upstairs with Daddy he looked at me briefly and continued with his game. I stood outside of the nursery door for a couple of minutes watching him play: he didn’t look around for me once. His number did not appear on the LCD screen during the whole sermon and I am told that he was totally fine. When we went downstairs to collect him he didn’t even throw himself at my feet and say, “oh, Mother, how good of you to come for me. I missed you so!” He just looked at me with an expression that said, “oh, there’s Mommy, I knew she was around here somewhere. I think I’ll go find another truck to play with.”

While part of me is excited to be able to listen to our pastor teach here and there as the baby allows when she doesn’t need to nurse, part of me is wondering where I left the portion of my little boy that was stuck in “I NEED MOMMY AROUND ALL THE TIME WHEN STRANGERS ARE PRESENT” mode.

It is important to me that my children grow into healthy adults with their bag full of marbles, so I guess I’ll just have to cope. My son recently entered the “I love to give Mommy kisses” stage. That helps.

The loves of my life

There is something enchanting about being a mommy. For that first tender year of life mommy is the center of the universe. I love when friends and family hold my little girl: mainly because she squeals with excitement each and every time I look in her direction or speak to her! Even when she is lounging around in her bouncy chair she follows me with her eyes, turning her head to keep me in her line of sight. As babies get older and grow into toddlers the delight over mommy dims a little, but mommy is still the one they run to when a boo-boo needs kissing. One of my cherished memories is of my son playing with a friend while his family was visiting with us in our home; as I peeked around the corner to check on them my son pointed toward me, with a huge smile on his face, and told his friend, “that’s momma!” in the most adoring manner. Moments like that make everything else about being a mommy so worth it.

And so, technology dies.

After the invention of cell phones many of us wondered how in the heck we got along without them. We could now call the friend we were meeting at the mall instead of walking around for hours trying to locate them because they thought you were going to meet at the store entrance into the mall while you were under the impression that you were gathering at the store entrance to the parking lot. Instead of dropping by unannounced to visit a pal you could now phone first to make sure that you wouldn’t be interrupting anything, or to verify that you would not be going fifteen minutes out of your way just to find their car gone and no one at home. And, of course, they offer a certain amount of security when lost or having car troubles.

Microwaves are a similarly wonderful piece of technology. They are not the best for making scintillating home-cooked sit down dinners, but boy are they great to heat up leftovers or fix a quick snack. The amount of time to boil water for one cup of tea or to pop popcorn is greatly diminished with a microwave when compared to a stovetop. This sort of operation generally dirties fewer dishes as well.

Nine-thirty last night found me in the midst of an attempt to will the microwave to heat some leftovers as I had yet to eat any form of dinner. The appliance had warmed up leftover chili for my husband hours before and also a bit of leftover noodles for my son. The baby was in her crib sound asleep with a tummy full of milk. I alone was starving! I found myself unable to channel my Jedi mind-powers properly for lack of food; the microwave gave one final sputter and touted its triumph over my hungry stomach by refusing to abide by my attempt to force it into submission by repeatedly jabbing the Quick Min button.

In my desperation I had to resort to boiling water on the stove for some good old-fashioned macaroni and cheese in a box because I had already had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that day and on top of that I had a hankerin’ for hot food. What should have taken two minutes turned into about twenty minutes of listening to my belly grumble before I was able to eat.

Ah, the things we take for granted. If, dear reader, you have yet to acquire the sniffles as the cold weather sets in thank the Lord above for a chap-less nose, and give your microwave a pat on the back so that it will not decide to give its notice and force you to stand over the stove with a tissue coiled up your nose stirring chicken soup when the time to be sick does come.

I'm so confused!

When I was a little girl my music collection consisted of Sunday school songs and other assorted Christian tapes for little people. I really enjoyed listening to them. My son has about half a dozen Veggie Tales’ compact discs, and an equal number of discs containing the more standard nursery rhymes.

As I listened along with him when he was a newborn it quickly came to my attention that other than the customary “Pat-a-Cake” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” I knew few of the others. How mortifying! Here I was, a grown adult, hearing many of these nursery rhyme classics for the very first time!

The really wonderful part of all of this was that my son and I were able to sit with each other and have a “first-time” experience together while choosing favorites. What makes my situation truly hilarious is that there were a few songs whose lyrics were new to me while their melodies were familiar because they were the same as some of the church songs that I grew up with. At times I feel like an individual who has grown up in a bilingual home: I begin with one set of lyrics and inevitably end with another. For example, just last night I began a rousing chorus of “The Old Gray Mare” and ended with some lovely lines from “I’m in the Lord’s Army”. Now that’s something one doesn’t hear everyday.

And then there’s my husband. He thinks he can just arbitrarily change whatever words he chooses whenever he chooses. If someone were to ask my son if he knows how to sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” he may not deign to sing that, but he sure knows the words to “The Itsy Bitsy Lobster”.

My husband was recently asked how a lobster managed to squeeze into the water-spout; he replied that he did not realize the spider was inside the spout, and had always been under the impression that the spider climbed up the outside of the spout. Regardless of the fact that the spider is washed out in the song, I would still like to know how a lobster finds himself able to climb a vertical pipe in the first place.

O Christmas Tree

With the thought that the next couple of weeks leading up to Thanksgiving will quickly be over, it occurred to me that we do not have a normal sized (artificial) Christmas tree for our new house. After a stroll down holiday lane in the local craft store it became pretty obvious that we would have to rob a bank in order to buy one brand spankin’ new. Evidently my husband was already on task because he came home from work on Saturday, the same day of my excursion to the craft store, with a tree. He found it at the Goodwill for a mere $25. This was a considerable deal what with the going rate of artificial trees. A comparable fir would have set us back somewhere in the ballpark of $199.

Informed that we needed to make sure all of the pieces were accounted for, we set to work assembling our new treasure. We fluffed and we set and we straightened branches. As the Douglas fir grew before our eyes I quickly became aware that this wonderful tree would not fit into the wonderful-tree-designated-area. How wide is this tree? I asked my husband. Five and a half feet, came his reply. Sure, that’ll fit into a space three feet wide.

The poor man was so excited about finally being able to celebrate Christmas with a seven foot tree instead of the three foot tree that we’ve been decorating since we got married five years ago that I really tried to maintain my Christmas cheer through the whole ordeal (I think someone needs to sing a Christmas carol). I really couldn’t say how many branches I stuck into that tree; neither can I begin to account for the number of times the fir stuck me; nor can I remember how many times I told my son that, no, he could not climb the tree. But, suddenly, there it was, towering over the whole living room like a jolly green giant. A guest entering the house through the front door would think they had stumbled into Narnia with the way the tree loomed over and in front of the entryway.

My husband insisted, and rightly so, that it would be asinine to take the tree down just to put it up again in three weeks. (The tradition in the family is to put the tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving). I’m not claustrophobic, but I just knew that I couldn’t live in my shrunken living space for two whole months with the limbs hugging the light from the windows. So, I came up with a plan: we needed to prune the monster and coax it peacefully into the corner designated to be its residence. I set to work removing a branch here and there from the mechanism as my husband half slid, half squashed the tree into submission in the corner.

It worked. From one angle it appears as though some thing took a rather large bite out of the boughs, but from another it simply look as if it is growing around the couch. We had to temporarily relocate some of the kid’s toys and it’s nearly impossible to close the curtains properly, but I’m sure we are the first people on the street and maybe in the whole city to put up a Christmas tree.

Santa has something for everyone on your list

My girlfriend and I took the kids to the mall yesterday to walk around and so that my son could look at the Christmas trees. This is becoming a favorite past time of his already. It was a pleasant surprise to see that the little mall elves had put up the huge mall tree already. The little man did not like this one as much as the smaller trees in the department stores because this one had a rope around it making it off-limits to small hands.

He is at the age where the days of walking past the toy store without going in are over. I enjoy watching him explore all of the different toys. This may cease to be enjoyable if he reaches the temper-throwing stage because he cannot take everything he sees home with him, but right now all he wants to do is browse and mash buttons. Kids these days must be born with a button-seeking sensor; he can locate a push button in no time flat.

We spend most of our time in the car/truck aisle. Yesterday was no exception. If this is any indication of what to expect when holiday shopping this year I am a little frightened: in between the fire engines and the racecars sat a jeep with two bobble-headed hunters sitting in it. How did I know they were hunters, you may ask? It was a pretty safe guess for the reason that both were sporting orange vests. However, the dead buck roped to the hood of the vehicle was what clinched it for me. A jab to the button started a song (for the life of me I can’t remember what it was) to which the hunters’ heads bobbled and their mouths snapped open and shut as if in song. Once the lifeless deer lifted its head and joined in the song the toy completed its journey into the part of my brain that registers the ridiculous.

What will those builders of toys think of next? If toys like this can be made my husband would quickly rise to the top of the field if he were employed as a Toy-Thinker-Upper. So, dear shopper, keep your eyes peeled for strange and unexpected playthings this holiday season as you comb a toy store near you for that one-of-a-kind Christmas present.

Apparently, dirt can get anywhere.

My vacuum cleaner has been sucking up dirt, dust, and messes for about four years now. The dirt sensor does not work so well anymore; I just thought that perhaps my floors were incapable of becoming clean enough for the sensor to turn from red to green. I learned something today: it is wise to occasionally check the underneath of the carpet head for dust/dirt buildup. I am sure at some point my mother imparted this wisdom to me, but I had forgotten it.

To some this may seem like common sense. If it is then there must be a block on vacuum cleaners in my common sense faculties. Things like: don’t provoke bears, the underwear goes underneath the pants, and wearing a cape does not make one capable of flight are common sense.

I think that I removed about a pound of compacted yuck from the cleaner head. Some of it was so stuck I had to use my fingernails to scrape it off. :::shudder::: At least I got a chuckle out of imagining my husband trying to complete this task. Whenever he inhales dry air or touches something dry or dusty his throat begins to uncontrollably produce what can only be referred to as a complex bird call/squawking sound. Repeatedly. It appears to be a type of gag because he claims it renders him unable to breathe. This can happen when he sits in front of a heating vent or touches a wool sweater, among other things. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life.

Hopefully my vacuum cleaner will be back to full operating capacity now. Who would have thought that tools specifically designed to clean would need to be cleaned themselves?