It's Only June...

...and the toddler's sandals already have holes in them.

It's My Birthday and I'll Eat What I Want To

My baby girl tried to do every fun thing that she could think of to celebrate her first birthday. She climbed onto the chair and trapped herself under the table many, many times. She put her face in the path of her brother’s back swing and was consequently hit in the face by his plastic golf iron. An attempt was made to tip over the garbage can, and she tried to eat some mulch while out in the backyard. She insisted on crawling on the sidewalk instead of in the grass, even though she didn’t have shoes on, and she scraped one of her toes all up. Tops on the list, however, was the inquisitive sampling of a piece of fungus found outside.

Every day I am more convinced that I am going to die of stress: and I am quite sure that this child is going to be the death of me. During the minute it took for me to address whatever request it was that her brother made that caused me to turn my back, she plucked a mushroom out of the ground and as I again turned in her direction she took a bite.

It is rather unfortunate that I have, as of yet, not been given the chance to purchase, steal or otherwise gain any super-powers through skill, osmosis, or freak-accident. The longer that I am a mother, the more I realize that being able to fly or have laser vision wouldn’t be the wisest choice: having stretchy elastic arms would be, that way one’s child would always be within arms reach.

Needless to say, I called my friends at Poison Control. The other two times I found myself in need of their expertise, I was instructed to give milk to the child so I thought it would be a good place to start. The baby wasn’t interested in drinking milk; she wanted to go back outside and forage some more. I spoke to a very reassuring nurse, named Mimi, who informed me that since mushrooms are so hard to identify they treat them all as poisonous, just to be on the safe side.

Since the child had enough sense to spit out the fungi, Mimi didn’t think that she needed emergency care. (If a child actually ingests a mushroom found elsewhere than the refrigerator or the produce section of the grocery store, they need to be taken to the emergency room and given activated charcoal.) Instead, she cautioned me to be on the lookout for the usual signs: nausea, vomiting, abnormal behavior. Since fungal poisoning can manifest itself in many different ways, depending on the type of mushroom, she couldn’t be any more specific. She also informed me that Poison Control would be in touch over the next twenty-four hours to help monitor the birthday girl.

I’m sure that I do not need to expound upon the tension and anxiety that plagued me over the next few hours. Every time the baby cried or fussed, a great hand clenched and twisted all the organs in my chest. It didn’t help that the picture I found on the Internet that most resembled the slimy fungal antagonist had the label poisonous underneath it. When Mimi called during the afternoon she calmed my fears and told me not to let the incident ruin the birthday: “Write it down in her baby book,” she said, “it’s just going to be a birthday to remember.” Business as usual.

Okay.

We read some books.

I killed a freaky looking cricket (or something) in the kitchen.

Both of the kids fought over toys and grabbed and screamed.

The toddler commandeered the baby’s birthday present.

We ate; I cleaned; we slept.

The twenty-four hour mark has passed now, and the baby is no worse for wear. Poison control has placed their last phone call to check up on her. Another day, another disaster averted. Thank God for that. Now, on to year number two for the little monkey. I am quite sure that it would be foolish of me to hope that it’s not too exciting.

I Want to Hold Your Hand

People passing by my friend, our kids, and me at the mall would have seen a brown haired two-and-a-half year old little boy happily holding hands with a curly blond haired little girl of three years. The little boy wore a plush monkey backpack (with the leash detached), and the little girl clutched a soft stuffed puppy to her chest.

As they bounded along like two little adults on a window-shopping trip, the little boy pointed out the different sights to his friend. In the pet store he showed her the lizards and the snakes. They sat together in the coin-operated ice cream truck and the compact blue racecar.

While their mommies shopped, the little kids sang into the atomizer bulbs of perfume bottles (because they look like microphones); they played in the racks of hanging clothes (because it’s fun); and they giggled shrilly for no reason at all (because…well, why not?).

The blue-eyed friends tried to listen to their mommies, but they were having so much fun that they sometimes forgot. When it was time to go they shared a very grownup hug, where no arms got tangled or confused as to where they should go. And always, they were holding hands. Because if the little girl let go, the little boy got mad.

Popcorn Tastes Better in a BIG Bowl

Coffee is Supposed to be Hot?

Mommies eat last. That’s just the nature of the job. Everyone else gets fed first, and then, if no one is screaming, bleeding or otherwise needing anything, we eat. And usually we have to eat fast, if we want to finish our food while it is hot or cold or whatever temperature it should be for optimal enjoyment.

Sometimes it may appear that we actually eat first: that is only because our lunch is so late that it tends to correlate with everyone else’s dinner. I’m not really sure what hot coffee tastes like anymore. I pour it, hot and steaming, into my mug, add a couple grains of sugar, a dollop of cream and then off I go to rescue a screaming infant from the perch she has found herself unable to climb down from. On my way back to the caffeine I so desperately need, I find the toddler crouched in a corner valiantly trying not to pee in his pants.

After many minutes spent coercing him away from the line of matchbox cars he is meticulously parking I take him to the bathroom. During that time, the baby has found her way atop one of the dining room chairs again and is trapped beneath the table. After liberating her, someone usually decides that a snack is in order; by the time the snack is prepared the baby is once again screeching from her roost beneath the table. At this point my coffee is only lukewarm.

I remembered that there was some rhubarb in the refrigerator, patiently awaiting my culinary prowess. In my folly, I thought I would try and end its chilly stay in the crisper by whipping up something yummy. I called my mother, the person usually responsible for cooking all things rhubarb, and got the recipe she generally uses to make rhubarb crumb.

During the short call I had to juggle a paring knife and continuously cut strawberries to feed the baby, so that she would forget that she was pinned in the highchair, while simultaneously jotting down instructions that I only heard the half of. My son employed his knowledge of the answering machine to record a new message. Instead of the comprehensible voice of my husband singing the state capitals or telling callers they have reached the city morgue or something else along those lines, callers will now be greeted by my son’s toddler voice making a single incomprehensible sound before the familiar beep.

After all of that, I decided to use a recipe from the cookbook instead. I cut a few rhubarb stalks, broke up a fight, cut a few more, told my son to stop forcing his sister to play peek-a-boo, mixed flour, sugar, baking powder and cinnamon, removed the baby from her brother’s stunt diving zone, beat an egg and some milk, stopped the baby from mounting the dining room table, etc.

Other than the fact that God is so totally awesome, I also believe in miracles because I was able to get the cobbler into the oven before any serious you-need-to-stop-playing-chef-and-be-mommy-right-now crying started. As if that happening alone didn’t denote that there is indeed a God, the baby took a nap and slept for over two hours instead of her customary thirty minutes! As someone somewhere in the history of the world once said, “a mother must have some compensations”.

An Infant's Guide: How to Straddle a Bicycle

And the Cat Came Back

My eyesight isn’t all that bad. It wasn’t until after I could no longer watch black and white movies (because everything melted into a murky gray color and looked like a rippling muddy puddle) at age eighteen or nineteen that I decided to invest in a pair of glasses.

We are the rather chagrined owners of two cats. These kitties were our “children” until our actual babies came along. They were loved, petted, played with; now they have become more of a menace, leaving their fur lying around the house and tracking litter into the kids’ bedroom.

I don’t generally wear my glasses to bed because it just isn’t comfortable and I don’t think it is good for the frames. Very often, late at night or in the morning they are sitting on my dresser while I plod around the house. Many have been the times that I have come across a fluff of fur or a tiny wad of cat hair that seems to be placed just so as to give it the illusion of being something other than hair.

The other morning I stumbled into the bathroom and drew back from the toilet repulsed by what looked to be a small black spider on its back in the throes of death. Knowing my propensity for thinking every speck to be some sort of bug on its way to market, I squinted and peered more closely at it. Definitely not an arachnid; just a bit of kitty fur.

Sometimes the fluffs masquerade as stink bugs. I always very gingerly check for possible bugness before I pluck the hair off of the floor and throw it in the garbage can. Except for the one time it actually was a dead stink bug peacefully stretched out on the carpet; that time I bravely steeled myself and declared that I would not be silly and treat cat fur as something to be feared and would simply pick it up and toss it without checking it for legs first. Needless to say, I’ll never do that again.

For the most part my toddler has learned that cat food and cat fur are not good for eating. I can’t remember that last time he put something that belongs to the cats in his mouth. Ironically, as I was typing this he came to me with his mouth open because a wad of cat fur and fuzz had wound itself around some of his teeth and he had ground it into his molars.

Notwithstanding all of this, the beasts have wormed their way into our hearts and to some degree they feel like part of the family. I find this really annoying, because as much as I would like to pack them up and give them to some other family I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Yet.