If you pee yourself… It is better to do so while at home being tickled by your son. It is also difficult to explain to said son how big boys don’t pee on themselves.

♥Jasmine

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It wasn’t me who gave her son a small cup of coffee this morning, Carmel Macchiato to be exact.

It wasn’t me who was too tired to dress or diaper him all last week, so he played naked all day.

It wasn’t me who told him that  Jolly Rancher candy was medicine, and only for mommy.

(Isaiah talking to our dog, Noelle)

Isaiah: “Hey Nell! Mommy has baby penis.”

Jasmine: “No son, Mommy has a baby in her belly, in my uterus…girls don’t have penis. Well most girls.”

Isaiah: “Zayah penis!”

Jasmine: “Yes! YOU have a penis because you are a boy, women have a vulva and a vagina. The baby is growing in my uterus… can you say vulva?”

Isaiah: (weakly attempts  to pronounce vulva…sounding a lot like “Bulba”.

(Isaiah looks at Noelle and slaps her on the head) Isaiah: “BAD! Bulba!!!”

Isaiah got up this morning acting like his normal bossy self. He ran to fridge and handed me an egg. This not so subtle gesture represented that he wanted breakfast, and this morning he wanted eggs. I sat Isaiah on the counter and gave him a wooden spoon. I allowed him to help stir the eggs as they cooked. It made me giggle when he reached over to the pinch bowl and sprinkled a little salt over the eggs. We served the eggs on Isaiah’s plate and he began to eat.

At this juncture I  need to mention that Isaiah didn’t sleep last night. Our A/C broke and Isaiah, like his mother, couldn’t sleep in an 89 degree house (we are wimps…I know!). Isaiah played in the dark all night he finally collapsed into sleep around 4 this morning….then he woke up, promptly, at 8.

Isaiah ate his eggs. Isaiah looked at his glass of milk. Isaiah screamed like someone was burning him and hurled said glass of milk across the room. The cup had no lid. Isaiah slammed himself down on the floor kicking and screaming and crying. He rubbed his eyes and rolled around.

I took that as a cue that maybe, just maybe, my son was tired and needed to nap. Alas! He is NOW in his room screaming and crying and throwing things and rolling around…. does someone want to translate what THE HELL is wrong with my child?! Too tired to eat, apparently, and too tired to sleep?

♥  Jasmine   TIRED Mommy

Sorry ladies! My life got busy and I totally forgot Bad Mommy Monday! So… we should do it today!

I will start:

1. It wasn’t me who let my son watch 5 hours of TV…because it makes the best babysitter.

2. It wasn’t me who decided that she was going to stop potty training because, DAMN IT! I hate poop and pee.

3. It wasn’t me who decided that telling her son that his toys had died when he wouldn’t stop playing with the annoying things was A GREAT IDEA!

4. It wasn’t me who taught her son to lay a blanket over said “dead” toys to keep him from playing with them, and when he went to touch them— said, “Ewww! Nasty Dead Thing!”

5. It wasn’t me who wondered if I’d like Addison (in utero) better because this pregnancy has been so NICE.

Isaiah has started potty training… himself.  Yeah.

You read right. I started potty training a while ago, then I went back to work and it fell into the “not so super important at the moment” pile. Since the initial tries, however, Isaiah has started removing his diaper and attempting to sit on the potty by himself. He refuses to put his diaper back on once it is off. So all day my little man bounces around the house naked. I ask, like a robot,: “Isaiah potty?  Isaiah pee pee?” Each times he smiles at me and, as coy as ever, responds, “Mom! Noooooo….”

This morning he removed his diaper and watched Sesame Street.  I was busy in the kitchen when I heard Isaiah shout, “Little Stinky MOM!” “Little Stiiiiiiiiiinkkkkkkkyyyyyy!”  I walked in the front room, imagining that it was some new character on Sesame Street. ” What Toad? Can I help…..”  I stood there realizing I was WRONG! Nope! Not a new character….It was literal piles of “little stinky”. Isaiah had polka-dotted the carpet with a bowel movement. He was leaning over one pile pointing and chanting, “stinky, mom, stinky mommy.”

I don’t think I am cut out for this potty training business!

Tips, Suggestions, HAZMAT suit?!!!

♥ Jasmine

Well Jasmine is away working at her fancy job and growing a person in her uterus, and I am sitting at my house surrounded by piles of laundry and diapers so…

I am going to start off Bad Mommy Monday!

It wasn’t me who took an un-napped baby to the  public library.
If anyone asks, it was not my baby that was running through the non-fiction section laughing like a lunatic, hair sticking straight up, only one shoe on. And I am most definitely not the mother of the child who was screaming so loud it echoed off the ceiling tiles.

Nope. Not me. I am much more polite and have a much more calm and mild-mannered child.

(BAHH HAHAHAHAHA!)

I cleaned  my fridge today.

It was a momentous occasion, as I have such a hard time keeping my house even mildly tidy I rarely (and when I say rarely I mean “nearly never”) clean out my fridge. Sure sure, I go through every few weeks and throw out the random leftovers, all the while trying to remember the last time I cooked spaghetti casserole. The two-inch green and hairy mold gives me some indication. We were gone this past weekend and in a rare moment of good housewifery I emptied the leftovers into the trash before we left, that way we would be able to come back to a semi-neat fridge and kitchen.

In a much more characteristic moment of forgetfulness I left a load of clean clothes in the washer (hello my old friend, Mildew), my contact case and toothbrush and face lotion on the bathroom counter, and the leftovers in the trashcan. In the kitchen. For three whole days.

We came back to a house scented with layers of rotten food, mildewed clothes, and cat poop. Awesome.

So today I decided it was high time to actually clean the fridge. The comments from friends (Jasmine!) and the ever-expanding iced tea leakage pushed me even further into my endeavor. I began at the top, as logic has taught me. I wiped and scrubbed and threw away and re-organized until my Frigidaire gleamed with a light from Heaven. I was amazed at the results. The space! The shiny shelves! I should do this more often! (Ha!)

It was a pretty tough task to begin with, spills and crumbs and unidentifiable goop running rampant, but it was made infinitely more challenging by the presence of a certain short, walking, yelping, four-toothed person. I speak, of course, of The Norah.

Its as though the ability to walk has instilled in her the stubbornness and strong will of a cranky rhinoceros. I’m a little frightened by her obstinance and have spent a good portion of my week reading up on toddlers, temper tantrums, toddler behavior, and what to do when you find yourself living with a baby that strangely reminds you of a howler monkey.

I did not fully appreciate how hard baby wrangling and kitchen cleaning could be when done together. Norah was all up in my business, placing her diapered butt exactly where I needed to be. If I needed to stand at the sink to wash a shelf, she needed to stand below the sink and repeatedly try to open the baby-safed cabinet. If I needed to take the eggs off the shelf, Norah needed to play with the egg carton in order to take out an egg and smash it on the floor. She developed a love for the Capri Sun pouches (I don’t even know where those came from) and took the straws out of them. Then she waddled around the house with a shoe and a Capri Sun clutched to her chest. Shortly after she screamed at the vegetable drawer for holding her beloved Capri Sun captive, even though she was the one who dropped it in there in the first place.

By the end of the day I had cleaned the fridge, swept up a pile of flax seed, mopped several milk puddles that resulted from a rebellious sippy cup, and found a shoe in the fruit drawer.

My teeny tiny itty bitty (15 month old) baby is walking. I’ve waxed on about it here.

Really walking. None of this one or two step playing around. She can walk from the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen. She also destroys everything in her path. I guess she has been walking for a while, but I’m just now getting around to writing about it. I needed a little time to sit with it, the walking.

I remember once, when Norah was just a few days old, crying about how fast she was growing. I was sitting on the couch holding her and watching TV and some commercial came on, something about growing up or grandkids or kids getting cars. Or maybe it was a commercial about apple pie. It’s anyone’s guess really, because I cried about everything for a good two weeks after her birth. Anyway, the commercial made me cry because it made me realize that Norah was 5 days old and that was so old and she was only going to be 5 days old for a few more hours and then she would NEVER be 5 days old again! Good gracious, at that rate I was going to be a grandma within the month and I was not ready to be a grandma!

So I just sat there and held my tiny baby and cried about becoming a grandma. It was strange.

Sitting there on that couch over a year ago I didn’t even want to think about Norah walking. I just could not imagine how that could be fun or exciting. I’ve had several people tell me that I would grow up with Norah, that I would eventually get past the weepy stuff, the crying about the growing baby. I thought it was all crazy talk. But I’ve come to find that it is true. I have grown up with Norah, and when I watched her face light up as she walked between Jasmine and me or Rusty and me, crashing into us and giggling, there was nothing but love and awe and excitement. As much as I loved having a newborn, I may love having a 1 year old even more.

Readers, what are your experiences with growing up with your kids?

(This morning): Jasmine drags into work…late…and looking very, very tired. Super cute Supervisor greets Jasmine in the hall with a concerned look, “You okay?” she inquires with her fabulous S. Arkansas accent.

Holy Mother Of Pearl!!!

I went to bed early. I fell asleep promptly. I was sleeping comfortably when I suddenly started to toss and turn. This happend when I heard a bloody banshee style shriek pierce it’s way through my son’s bedroom door. Garrett jumps out of bed, ju jitsu style, trying to get to the howling demon before his ear piercing song wrestles me from my slumber (Daddy knows Mommy will die without sleep…  which explains why Daddy woke up with Baby EVERY night for two years… good, good Husband and Daddy). Too late! I was awakened by the shrieks, though I was content to lay in bed and play possum until my lovely husband runs out of ideas. I am not a bad wife or mother, I am just not human at TWO O’CLOCK in the morning. I wanted to spare them my wrath. He did, finally, run out of ideas. Isaiah is in our bed, by this time, kicking and screaming and howling like some kind of monster.  We try a sippee with milk. We try a graham cracker, we try redirecting, holding him standing up, calming him, encouraging him, holding him sitting down, and I (momentarily) consider a syringe of Ativan…..

I attempt to give Isaiah a graham cracker, concerned that his recently acquired selective palate might be the reason he is trying to destroy our eardrums.  This was about the time He drop kicked me in the face and let out particularly atrocious scream. Garrett giggled as he watched all my compassion melt away. “To HELL with it!!!” I scooped up demon child, marched him to his bedroom (still flailing and screeching), and plopped him in his bed.  “Hmph….good night. Scream and kick in your room, in your own bed….” Not even five minutes after I plopped him in his bed, the screaming subsides and all is well in the world.

WHAT?! I marched to the front room for my laptop. I mean, because what else do you do at two in the morning when your kid kicks your in the face screaming for no obvious reason. Go back to sleep? No! I am too hardcore for that!  You consult Dr. Google… that is what you do.

Answer found: Night Terrors. Developmental in nature.

Intervention: None. Insure child doesn’t injury themselves during tantrum (night terror). DO NOT try to comfort or soothe child, as terror can be worsened by physical interaction.

(Back to this Morning): “Well super cute Supervisor” (Jasmine thinks)… “I have a devil baby who apparently becomes possessed promptly after one o’clock in the morning. He shrieks and his head spins in circles and he climbs the walls all while chanting in Latin…”  “Oh!” I reply, “I didn’t get much sleep last night, Isaiah, apparently has been having night terrors.” She nods her head knowingly, “any changes or transitions can cause those, I think they are developmental..” I chortle… her knowing nod indicated that maybe she, too, had experienced this phenomenon…those damn demon babies.

I don’t really know how to end this post but to say; “Go ahead… envy my amazing life” or ” Don’t be jealous your kid isn’t as hardcore as mine or ” Cute two year old boy with Mohawk hair cut for sale…. screams randomly at night, sold as is.”