"That's Not Food!"

Lately, Andy's behavior has been pretty terrible.  He is quick to throw a fit, perform a malicious act seemingly out of spite, and his response to any sort of scolding or discipline is a play on the following sentence:  "I don't like Mommy anymore."  I have heard, "You are not my mommy anymore," "I don't love you," and "If you're not careful, Mommy, you're going to end up in the Hudson River.  In a sack." So how do you solve a problem like Andy?  Yelling at him until my throat is sore doesn't seem to be working, and sometimes even the best of moms get tired of screaming so much.  Chris is a big proponent of threats and will threaten to banish all happiness from Andy's life unless he, say, takes one more bite of dinner.  "You'd better eat those noodles," Chris might say, "Otherwise you're going to end up alone and unloved and standing in the express line at Jewel with only frozen waffles, chea...

At this point in the lifespan of our years in this home, I am ready to just burn it to the ground and walk away, preferably with my children and maybe a garbage bag or two of my belongings. We have outgrown this awful house and it seems that it's falling apart before my very eyes.  There is no hope of selling this cursed place as we don't have the tens of thousands to bring to the closing table to fill the gap of what we owe and what we can get, and the idea of renting this place out and being a landlord makes our stomach turns.  Who in the right mind wants to be a landlord?  Who wants to get phone calls about the water heater or a leaky roof or have to maintain this dump between tenants while also making up the difference between what we can get in rent and what our mortgage, taxes, and insurance is costing us?  Who wants to do that?  Who is able to do that? I loathe this house.  I hate the cheap vinyl floors that are all knicked up and coming up a...

Alex is attached to the most obnoxious stuffed animal we have in the house- a large grinning baboon that is literally bigger than he is.  He likes to snuggle with it in his crib while sleeping, and I fear that the freakish size of this monkey is on the verge of warping his mattress and/or disrupting the very foundation of our home.  He calls this monkey "mumma" which is a little too close to "mama" for my liking.  Yet I'll admit the similar names work out to my advantage.  Sometimes, when Alex calls out in the night, I don't bother to get up for him because I assume he's wailing for mumma and not mama. That's what I tell myself when I roll over, stick my head under my pillow, and get back to dreaming of watching Bradley Cooper eat soup. When Andy was Alex's age, he had his blankies.  Not one blanky- but seven blankies.  I thought by now Andy would have outgrown carrying a literal pile of blankies around the house, but I also thought that by ...

There was too much chlorine in the hotel pool, and our skin was red, tight and itchy when we emerged from the water. My 3-year-old son Andy cried out, “My legs hurt!” and showed us his patchy shins. Alex, 19-months-old, cried out, “Ball! Ball!” and gestured frantically at the basketball afloat in the deep end of the pool. Throughout our weekend trip, Alex’s only communication regarding the quality of our stay was that somewhere deep inside the walls of this hotel, there lurked a ball. Had he been able to log into Hotels.com, he would have rated the place five stars and issued the following informative, helpful comment: Ball! “It’s a good thing I brought the big thing of lotion,” my husband said semi-smugly. There is always a battle on what’s appropriate to bring on a trip and what’s not. My husband is a pack rat at home, unable to part with the most useless of items, and an overpacker on two-night trips away. He insisted that in addition to the iPad, we should also bring the laptop wit...

This is the winter that will not quit.  To date, we have had 543 inches of snow and forty-nine days with subzero temperatures and twenty-three days in which the wind chill plummeted to less than -50.  I may be slightly off with these numbers, but only slightly.  My children are turning into couch potatoes, which I'm surprisingly not totally okay with considering I am the reigning queen of couch potatoes, local couch potato union 739.  But when I start adding up the hours that the television is on in a day and I hit the double digits... yikes. Even Alex is growing interested in television.  His face brightens when I say the word "Caillou."  It also brightens when Chris cruelly offers him a can of pop as a way to distract him from whatever naughty adventure he is currently embarked on.  "Alex, wanna pop?"  Chris might ask while Alex is in the middle of climbing into the garbage can.  Alex immediately replies, "Yeah," and runs toward Chris loo...