"That's Not Food!"

Here are the people that Andy loves the most.  Mommy.  Emily.  Daddy.  Then there is a long pause in which Andy sets his mouth into a defiant straight line.  "What about Alex?" the astute observer might reply to this list.  "I only love Alex a little bit," Andy will say back.  "He pretends to snore at night and keeps me up.  He's always breaking my Lego buildings.  He bothers me. And he gives me kisses. I DON'T WANT HIS KISSES." Oh, it is hard to be the older sibling.  On one superficial level, I sympathize with my older boy. The plight of an older sibling involves constantly trying to dodge and outwit the peskier younger sibling. It's a war that must be constantly strategized, a battle that can only be won by deflecting the unconditional adoration that emanates like sweet rays of poison from the younger sibling.  It's not easy to be so loved and bothered.  And it is true that Alex bothers Andy.  It is also true that he ...

Reasons Why I Don't Have Time To Blog: 1 .  Emily is waking up most nights, and even though many nights I don't get up out of bed to go get her, I still have to lay there awake and listen to her screaming.  And I would scream back except then there is a distinct possibility that the boys might wake up, which would be bad since Andy was already up once to exchange out his peed in underwear and pajamas for fresh ones.  Clang! went the door to the laundry chute.  Which was originally a selling point to this house (A laundry chute!  How very "Home Alone!") and is now nothing more than one more thing to manage.  Who put a pooped in Pull-Up down the laundry chute??  Who tried to stick a whole comforter down there?  Who didn't empty the basket at the bottom and got the whole thing clogged up with dirty clothes that fell on my head when I tried to de-clog?  Who was clanging the damn little laundry chute door at three in the morning because they wet...

Six Flags?  Well, I haven't been there in fifteen years!  The last time I went, it was with this guy that I had a mild crush on.  Oh and his parents went, too.  The whole thing was very strange.  I called out sick to work and ended up getting in trouble because the manager could tell I was on my cell phone and not my parents' home phone. Imagine!  Your boss thinking you were lying about being sick because you were calling from a cell phone !  As if anybody has any other means of communication these days!  I believe next time I need to call out sick (from the same company, unbelievably fifteen years later with about a decade hiatus in between), I will probably just text. And the time before that?  Well, it was my senior trip!  Or was it my junior trip?  Or, crap, was it my eighth grade trip ??? We took the big old yellow bus and I won a humongous stuffed dolphin from one of the carnie games.  That's about all I can reme...

Andy has been using the baby monitor to play psychological games on Alex.  Andy and I will be up in Emily's room while Alex is downstairs innocently eating breakfast next to the receiver.  Andy will whisper so softly into the transmitter that Alex's only guess will be that the voices are in his head and not aloud in the actual, living world.  "Alex," Andy will intone quietly.  "You smell like a butt, Alex. Alex, you smell like one butt, two feet, and three boogers.  Oh Alex.  You stink." The first time I witnessed this, I thought it was hilarious and brilliant.  By the fourth or fifth time, I was no longer entertained, believing Andy's soft-spoken head games to be gently spouted from the mind of a psychopath.  There are moments when I look at and/or listen to my kids, and I am deeply troubled.  Last night, for instance, we read the book "Babar," the original story.  This is one of those books that I should have pre-read first, as the s...

Alex is obsessed with You-Tube.  One day, I will sit him down and tell him about the prehistoric era/ household in which I grew up, where there was only UHF TV and VHF TV, and in order to watch UHF, there was a bottom knob that needed to be turned and only a parental figure was allowed to turn this knob, which happened about once every month or so.  I spent weeks at a time being able to watch ONLY 32 or ONLY 50, and I certainly couldn't pause, rewind, or speak into the TV and say such search terms as "Batman Motorcycle" or "Surprise Eggs." I've tried to explain to Andy and Alex just how awful it was to grow up in the 1980's.  The only thing Andy seems to understand about my youth was that I once had two grandpas and I voted for George Washington for president.  Some of his facts are a little screwed up, but who am I to correct him.  I've got three kids; I'm too busy to repeatedly explain how old I am.  But they do know that I'm old enoug...

Andy boarded the kindergarten bus without a single glance backwards.  We waved pointlessly in his general direction as the bus rode off, but he was too busy beginning his new life as a big man about campus to bother to look our way.  That's it.  Armed with a bag of Teddy Grahams that I carefully pre-cut open for him (just a little snip to get you started, son) and the confidence of someone who has never truly been told no, he was completely ready to get the day going.  Later, he would act annoyed by my thousand questions, but the answers were so deeply unsatisfying that I could barely stand it. What do you mean, you didn't make any new friends?  How can you not remember what you did all day?  Did you miss me at all?  You didn't miss me AT ALL? People warned me about the first weeks of full day kindergarten.  They said: He will come home and be so very exhausted.  False.  He comes home and begs to go the playground. He will be too ...

I've had a daughter for almost eight weeks now.  As a mother of mostly sons (fully 67% of my spawn), there's been a slight learning curve to the mothering of a (very) young girl. For instance, if you put her in a ducky onesie and cover her up with a truck blankie, people are going to automatically assume you are some poor soul with three sons and treat you thusly.  "Oh, three boys!" they might remark with a better-you-than-me type smirk on their face.  That's when you have to dig around in the car seat looking for that pink bow that you just know is in there somewhere.  One must never forget the gender-defining headband bow.  "Oh no!" you'll have to reassure that nosy stranger.  "Two boys and a girl!"  And then they will go on with a suddenly genuine smile to say how spoiled that little girl is going to be, and before you know it, it's all princess this and princess that. Of course, I have called her "princess" myself.  It...

It's Andy's fifth birthday!  He swears he's grown overnight and that he knows he's taller.  Maybe he is.  I tell him he's getting bigger everyday and that one day he'll be taller than me, to which he emits a nervous laugh, as if the prospect of being bigger than mommy is rather unlikely and also quite terrifying. Today, in honor of Andy turning five, I am copying and pasting the first blog entry that I wrote after Andy was born.  It's from the blog I had before this one, which I keep buried in the unsearchable realms of the World Wide Whatnot.  I apologize in advance for my blatant usage of the phrase "lady junk." Jul 21, 2010 My baby Andy is nine days old today. I've been meaning to write a blog entry about the labor, delivery, and our first few days, but time has been getting away from me. At this rate, I'm going to be back at work before I know it. How is time going by so quickly when all we do is nap, eat, poop, and cudd...

Andy and Alex started swim lessons this week.  Andy is doing great.  There is no story about Andy and swim lessons other than how adorable he is scuttling off to the diving board to ensure that he gets to be first in line.  But, Alex, on the other hand.  Oh, Alex. One of these boys is about to get banned from the park district. I was afraid that it would be hard to get three kids out of the house in time to make our 9:10 swim lesson each day, but turns out all I had to do was just set an alarm.  Boom.  We're on time.  It's not easy to wake up at 7:00 am when you've been up every three or four hours and the baby is still fast asleep when that clock starts buzzing, but kids need to swim, and so we do it.  I haul all three of them to the park district, and Andy runs off with his class, and then there's Alex in the preschool swim group.  And to my great chagrin, he is the worst kid in the class. I'd like to think it's because he's bored,...

Alex turns three tomorrow!  He was to be my last baby, and here we are three years later with Alex already firmly planted into his position as "middle child" and our new addition, the picture perfect definition of Little Sister.  Now, if for some reason, I am writing about Emily turning three in three years and there's ANOTHER baby in that role, then let me be the first to admit that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.  But, in this case, things are horribly right.  I mean, wonderfully right.  And Alex, since the arrival of Emily, is suddenly back to his old self.  I would like to qualify that last statement by saying that that's a good thing. Alex's behavior up until Emily's birth was awful.  Then something magical happened.  We brought home that little sister, and suddenly I feel like Alex is okay again.  He is back to being my good, sweet, albeit mischievous little boy.  Now, how does that make any sense?  Bringing hom...

And so it seems that the system starts to break down when the third child is ready to arrive.  The nurses basically leave you alone for your entire hospital stay, and not even the doctor seems to really take it seriously.  "I was in the shower when the nurse said you were ready," my own doctor said, strolling into my delivery room with wet hair. "Let's get this baby out before my conditioner needs to be rinsed." Chris was unfazed by the entire ordeal as well.  At one point, the nurse had her whole arm up my birth canal while Chris stood less than three feet away casually mixing cream and sugar into his coffee.  When Dr. Straight-From-The-Shower showed up, he stood off to the side eating a granola bar and silently doing the math on how soon we could check out of the hospital if the baby was born in the next ten minutes.   Jackie could be home in time to cook us dinner tomorrow , I heard him think. I had my elective induction.  I made it!  However, w...

Andy's preschool graduation is on Wednesday.  The director sent an email today stating that, as parents, we will look back on these preschool years with an "indescribable fondness."  I'm sure that's putting it lightly.  I can't believe Andy is almost in kindergarten, that he's flown through these first stages so quickly.  Baby, toddler, preschooler.  And now he's going to walk across that stage and leave it all behind.  I can already see his smile.  I know how proud he will be, and I know that he will wave to me in that uninhibited way of his. That's Andy, the only boy I ever hear at the park to shout his love for his mother across six yards of mulch.  That will end at some point soon, I'm sure.  And it's a good thing I can picture his smile and walk across that preschool stage in my mind, because I might miss the actual event due to the blur of tears in my eyes.  Or because I'm in labor (fingers crossed that I don't go into labor a...

Today I threatened to send Alex to live with the neighbors if he goes into the baby's room again.  I have told these two boys countless times to leave that damn room alone- that room that is reserved for the baby but is in such an embarrassing state of disarray that one would assume I have three months of pregnancy left instead of closer to three weeks.  (I am technically four weeks away from 40 weeks, but I have started practicing in front of the mirror the many, tearful ways in which I will beg for my third elective induction on the very first day of week 39.  Unless I go before then, which at times seems like a distinct possibility and other times seems completely outside the realm of reality.  Go into labor at home?  Do people actually do that?) How do you solve a problem like Alex? The bedroom contains 84 pieces of crib that need to be somehow assembled without the aid of any sort of instruction manual.  Today, I found Alex sitting in a pile of l...

We're all settled in our new house, and I am finding the boys not quite as infuriating as the week we moved in.  Of course, my pregnancy hormones are still raging hard, but the boys seemed to have calmed down in their new abode, and some of the novelty has already become commonplace.  I don't hear as much ruckus from the basement, they're not as obsessed as climbing on their bunk beds like some kind of poor man's jungle gym, and neither of my so-called brilliant children have yet figured out that other things can go down the laundry chute aside from laundry.  I mean, really, boys?  Little Teddy hasn't wanted a ride?  Nobody's thought to shove an iron down there a la "Home Alone" (one of their favorite movies)?  I'm almost disappointed I haven't had to pull Alex out by his foot. Two intelligent, well-behaved (ish) boys completing a puzzle. I took Andy for his kindergarten assessment yesterday.  What a feeling, to enter this big building an...

Wal-mart sells donuts.  They're pretty good, and they're only 54 cents.  In the realm of sweet things that can be bought with spare change, the Wal-mart donuts reign supreme.  They are also excellent tools for bribery and are to be used the opposite of the Starbuck cake pops in Target.  At Target, I let the kids eat a cake pop while I do my shopping as a way to keep them busy and sitting still in the cart. This technique is good, but not great, as before long they are holding only a stick and I'm still on the top of my list trying to get my phone battery back in because I dropped the whole damn thing while scanning underwear with the Cartwheel app.  At Wal-mart, the donuts are for the end, to be eaten on the way home, a treat to be deserved if you are being good as opposed to having been handed out preemptively in the blind, foolish hopes that all will go okay. Have I mentioned that I loathe the amount of sugar my kids eat and will rant for days about how hol...

Alex really wants to go to the Monster Truck Tractor Show.  I don't know what the Monster Truck Tractor Show is, but he can't stop talking about it.  I can only imagine it might entail huge, fire-emblazoned monster trucks rolling over innocent farmers sitting around in their tractors.  He asks us to go at least ten times per day.  If you see an advertisement for such an event, be sure to let me know. Andy- whose lucky number is 1,000- has informed me that he has two super powers.  One, seeing through his t-shirt (only thin cotton blends, not anything thick).  Two, riding his bike and waving with one hand at the same time.  A superhero is born, and perhaps one day the combination of these two powers will save countless human lives.

Our new house is conveniently located near the park.  It's right around the block, the perfect walking distance for one waddling mother, one overly confident four year old who wants to rule the world with a single twig, and one clumsy, two-left-footed two year old.  We've been going almost daily, right after our laughably loud quiet time comes to an end, and it's the perfect way to round out the afternoon. This little boy just wants to make some friends. The same group of junior high kids (I'm terrible with judging the ages of children; they could be college students for all I know) show up at about the same time we do. They do the kinds of things that older kids like to do.  Pee behind bushes.  Use swear words.  Loop the swings up over the top bar. They also engage in some game that utilizes the field right next to the park.  Being the star athlete I am, I'd like to say it's either touch football or Red Rover.  Not really sure. Of course, Andy...

We moved. It's been one of those situations that feels like a nightmare the whole time you're in it, and then you wake up and find out that things are mostly okay except for a strange booming sound in your "new" furnace and that the carpet feels a little more thin and crunchy than you're used to.  Other than that, everything is mostly ideal.  We did the unthinkable.  We sold our old house and moved into a bigger one.  All of this while gestating a fetus and refraining from spanking two disobedient children. The move has made me a less perfect parent.  I think that's putting it as delicately as I can.  I have been stressed out for over a month now, culminating in a stretch of days where I truly thought I was going to lose my mind.  Packing everything we own.  Repairing damage caused by our movers ninety minutes before the buyer was to do his final walk-through.  Waking up the day of our move-in to three inches of snow and more that just ke...