Outnumbered Two to One

It didn’t take a crystal ball to foretell that one sick and contagious child was only the beginning of my woes. Especially when said plague bearer was continually hacking unrestrained bits of toxic phlegm in to his younger brother’s previously healthy face. Not to mention the inadvertent cup sharing, face licking, and finger sucking.

The  dominoes are falling, one by one, into influenza’s sinister clutches.

The two-year-old, my diapered bundle of harnessed electricity, is currently a bleary eyed feverish mess. It is compounded by the fact that his ability to communicate is not quite as evolved as his older brother’s. Complaints and requests are usually shrieked at an inaudible pitch, possibly one only dogs can hear. Trying to decipher the words is another thing altogether. It’s almost like playing a really angry version of charades with someone from another country where language and hand gestures are completely reversed - holding your stomach means you want to be carried, rubbing your eyes means you’re cold, throwing up in Mommy’s bed means…well, that one is self explanatory.

So of course, mostly capable Mom, is for the interim, reduced to a worried, neurotic, scatterbrained lunatic. I’m agonizing over every cough, every whimper, every uneaten bite of Jello and unsipped cup of water. It makes me short tempered and irritable and generally unpleasant to live with…just ask the rest of the family.

It’s going to be a long weekend.

Since tomorrow is my son’s 6th birthday, we thought we’d include his Kindergarten class in on the celebration by bringing cupcakes to school for everyone to partake in. Luckily Publix has this nifty creation called a pull-apart cake, which is basically individual cupcakes set up in rectangular formation then iced and decorated like a normal sheet cake would be. Any decorated cake they offer can be set up in this fashion.

My son, the dino nut, opted for a prehistoric theme…

Lovely, isn’t it?

The great thing about this cake is that there are roughly two and a half inches of butter-cream frosting smothering the tops of these 30 cupcakes.

In case you don’t know, most 5 to 6 year olds will only eat the frosting off the top of their cupcake, the actual cake part will end up (still wrapped neatly in its paper liner) face-down in the garbage can. Then said children will promptly ask for a second cupcake they can similarly lick clean.

Seems kind of like a waste of $40 but look at these faces…

Tomorrow, we embark on a birthday safari…stay tuned.

I know I’m not the only one who obsesses about their children eating enough. If I could have liquefied his pizza and fed it to him intravenously I would have.

And why is it that food that’s all the rave to my two year old one day, is completely unacceptable sustenance the next day. He won’t even let it pass his lips. He won’t even lick a single crumb off the plate. Instead he shrieks, gags, and pushes said delicacy away with all the played out melodrama of a soap opera actress.

Seriously, he can’t live off soy milk and Hershey’s kisses forever.

I’ve borrowed this idea from Helene over at I’m Living Proof that God has a Sense of Humor, she’s a list girl and consistently cracks me up with her twin tales, so I figured I’d use her as inspiration this Friday. Also check out Elizabeth at Three Channels who also did a great version of this list.

1. By all means, the toilet and the sink are completely interchangeable, feel free to wash your hands in the commode since it is already at your level. If I was shorter, I might opt to freshen up in there as well.
2. Of course Hershey’s kisses are an acceptable meal substitute. Calories are calories right? Who needs fiber? Nutrients are way overrated.
3. Please, tell your friends they can call at any time of day or night to gossip about what some long haired boy did or didn’t say to them. I don’t mind waking up at 3 am to answer the phone in an agitated haze, expecting to hear that someone in the family had died a horrible fiery death. Finding out it’s just a bored teenager on the other end is like a fabulous punch line to a hilarious joke.
4. Absolutely I’ll buy you that $75 Godzilla plush toy imported directly from Tokyo, but only if you ask me 35 times in rapid succession.
5. No, really, I love it when you ask me a series of questions in the middle of a climactic scene of a movie I’ve never watched. I love being jarred out of the moment.
6. Whenever you have to pee in the early predawn hours of a school day, please be sure to wake me from my peaceful slumber just to let me know. Knowledge is power.
7. Don’t ever, ever, do things the first time I ask. That would just take the fun out of me repeating myself thirty times before finally bellowing so loudly I burst a blood vessel in my eye. I don’t get enough opportunities to yell at you.
8. Aw, it’s so cute when you rip off your diaper and run around naked before accidentally peeing on the tile and slipping in it. It’s like living my own AFV clip, except I get to wash pee out of your hair which makes it that much better.
9. Yay, splash more of your dirty bathwater at me, especially when I’m nice and dry and ready for bed myself. If you can, wait until my mouth is open.
10. More whining, please, I can’t get enough of it. If all four of you can do it at the same time in varying pitches, it’s almost musical, like you’re all performing a beautiful new age opera just for me. Ah, what a tribute.

Today my neighbor came by with her brand spanking new baby.

She also let me hold her brand spanking new baby. For a good ten minutes.

I think new babies are like new cars, when someone you know gets one, you’re immediately overcome with the urge to follow suit and snag one of your own regardless of your financial situation. I mean they smell soooo good…both cars and babies.

So here I was holding this tiny, squishy, sweet faced, sleeping baby and it’s like there was a short circuit in my brain. Colic, middle of the night feedings, projectile vomiting, and ear infection memories were all filed in my mental trashcan. All I could do was suck in the smell of new baby (because I can finally breathe through my nostrils thanks my effective antibiotics prescription) and swoon and see this in my head…

This was my youngest mere days after we got him home from the hospital. My neighbor, who’s a great photographer, was nice enough to shoot these for me since our hospital picture taker ditched work early on the day of our departure. This sweet little newborn has turned in to this…

Which, don’t get me wrong, is always hugely entertaining and delicious in its own right, but…well, his feet will never be this small again…

Please, folks, convince me I don’t need a fifth baby. For sure, we can’t afford one. Nor can we fit another kid in our tiny shoebox house. But I need your help to clear the scramble that newborn left in my brain, that hardwired signal he triggered that tells me I need to reproduce yet again.

Tell me how awful new babies are. How unbearable those nine months of pregnancy can be.  How hard it is to give up sleep again. How gross baby barf smells when you unknowingly walk out of the house with it on your shirt.

It will help, trust me.

Now, for the record, I generally do not delight in torturing my children and broadcasting their misery on the internet. Mostly.

But yesterday, after an exceptionally long day of two-dler tantrums, my darling son took it upon himself to flip out because his big brother was eating a left over Valentine’s day party cupcake, while he was stuck with a measly sugar cookie. He tried for a good long while to snatch the cupcake out of his older brother’s hands, to no avail.

When that didn’t work he proceeded to demonstrate his frustration the following way. Being the diligent blogger that I am, I decided to capture the moment on video. Ignore my nasal tone as I try to provoke my son in to continuing his outburst, ignore also my five year old’s out of control giggling because he thought this was absolutely the funniest thing on the planet and was very proud to be a part of it.

I swear I’m not a bad mother.

• I believe the post office is one of the outer circles of hell. The one near us is always jam packed and still they have only two unhappy employees working the counter. These people only have one speed and it’s not snappy. Also they tend to speak in a monotone even when they’re being friendly, which makes it a little difficult to know when they’re telling a joke.
• I also believe one of hell’s circles is a never ending carousel ride.
• I have a cold again, which makes me a little angry. I just want to lie down and close my eyes, which with four kids in the house is not exactly possible. Even when Mr. Bear is at the helm they sneak in here to pull at my eyelids and shriek unintelligibly in my face…I’m going to take that as a sign of love.
• Also being sick makes it harder to shout when certain children are gratuitously flushing the toilet or pitching a tantrum because Yo Gabba Gabba is not coming on fast enough.
• My two year old is obsessed with his right nipple. Whenever he is shirtless, he picks at it unconsciously with one finger while he goes about his business. I’m scared he’s going to scrape it off. I can’t get him to quit so I tried suggesting he scratch at the other one. No dice. He’s got a favorite nipple apparently.
• A two year old without a diaper will always find the one square of rug in the house to take a pee on.
• My neighbor is getting her baby delivered via c-section this afternoon. It’s always exciting to me when someone else is having a baby because I get to soak in that new baby smell without the midnight feedings and postpartum depression.
• Don’t worry, I’m not taking my head-cold plague and spreading it on someone else’s new baby. I’ve got plenty of my own kids I can make sick, but then I’d just have to listen to them whine and clean up there puke, which I should be exempt from since I am sick myself.
• I am so not cleaning up my own puke.

You know you want in on the randomness. See Keely The Un Mom , she’ll hook you up.

My two year old isn’t afraid of anything.

Scratch that.

My two year old wasn’t afraid of anything.

Recently we discovered his fear of the dark during one of our routine bed time rituals.

A couple of weeks ago we unmasked yet another fear during an evening bath.

Okay, I might be partially to blame for this phobia he’s developed.

This guy shoulders the rest of the responsibility…

It was a quiet night in the Bear house. The boys were getting washed up before bed. There were soap suds and lathering and scrubbing of the several layers of dirt and stink they’d accumulated, when all of a sudden my five year old said, “Mom, there’s a bug in the tub.”

The bug in question was a teeny tiny black speck of a cockroach floating leg up in the bath water.

“Get a grip,” I mentally prepared myself.

I decided to scoop up the obviously dead insect in my cupped palms and flush it down the nearby toilet. Great idea in theory.

Great idea until the creepy little mutant demon spawn faker cockroach miraculously resurrected and started CRAWLING up my arm.

So I did what any grown adult woman would do.

I screamed like a girl and flung the cockroach on to my two year old son, who just happened to be within flinging range.

Wait, it gets better.

I flung the no longer dead cockroach on to my two year old son’s PRIVATES and by privates I mean his genitals.

I threw a cockroach at my son’s genitals. Which made him scream like a girl. Which made me hop up and down for a good five seconds while I regrouped before finally snatching the bug and brushing it off my hand in to the toilet at last.

Talk about terror. Not mine, the boy’s.

He screeched, he cried, he climbed sopping wet on to my lap and buried his damp face in to my shirt and I felt like a heel.

Maybe some day, after years of therapy, he’ll learn to forgive me. Or at least channel his fear in to something productive, like a blockbuster screenplay or a really cool blog.

If you haven’t already, check out my 200th post giveaway. Guaranteed to satisfy the wild thing or zombie hunter in your life.

It’s been years since I’ve written poetry. I used to. Pretty often, in fact. But somewhere, somehow the inspiration left me. Inspiration, motivation, it’s all the same isn’t it? If I’m willing to skip a shower for some one on one time with my DVR, is it reasonable to assume I’d be capable of formulating powerful metaphors?

That would be a big fat negative.

When this week’s Spin Cycle assignment was dispatched, I was actually kind of excited. I figured I’d stretch those creative muscles once again and wow you all with my talents. As the week progressed though, it was pretty apparent I was procrastinating (and that my writing muscles had turned to writing cellulite). I was banking on that great intangible “inspiration” to walk right up to me and punch me in the jaw with a great idea. Unfortunately in a house full of four bickering monkeys, that fickle friend “inspiration” wouldn’t even grace me with a post card. She’s off visiting somewhere they have hor d’oerves, soft music, and glasses of red wine.

So here I am on a Friday, smack up on a deadline, wondering what the heck I’m going to write about, and how the heck I’m going to make it look like a poem. I’ve never been much for rhymes, I was more of a brooding free form kind of gal, but of late, darkness is usurped by exhaustion. Rather than brood, I snore. It works for me.

But what about the poem…

I want to write about motherhood and love’s ethereal glow
(insert shrieking child here)
About the difficulties and challenges and how little we actually know
(insert loud children’s programming here)
I want to tell you with eloquence about the light in my children’s eyes
(insert loud bang that might be a child walking in to a table edge here)
I want to tell you truthfully about the insecurities I despise
(insert crying, shrieking child with a bruise here)
I want to form a poem that will summon a tear or two
(insert child kicking their tiny bare feet at the laptop computer here)
I want to paint a picture of the hard work we mothers do
(insert child crying because you asked them a little too forcefully to stop kicking the computer here)
I want to say how some days things just don’t follow a plan
(insert small crying child throwing a paper plate full of pancake pieces at their mother here)
And I want to say it all in as few words as I can
(insert mother picking syruppy breakfast foods out of her hair here)
In the end all I can do is show this picture I have made
(insert sleepy child burying his face in his mother chest here)
And tell you with perfect honesty that there’s nothing I would trade
(insert napping toddler here)

Isn’t he sweet when he’s asleep?

When I joined up with club HASAY I fully expected to follow through with my goals to improve my eating habits, exercise daily, get leaner, and become stronger. Unfortunately sometime in December I got sidetracked. Not even a new year with all its bright shiny optimism could lure me from my funk. It was a funky funk, complete with junk food binges, apathy, and couch-potato-ish laziness.

I’m honestly out of excuses. Or am I?

I couldn’t exercise this week because…

all my workout DVDs spontaneously combusted.

my only pair of cross training sneakers were stolen from my closet by a band of doughy masked bandits.

mind controlling aliens have confined me to my sofa and sapped all the strength from my legs.

my children are holding me hostage and forcing me to play Lego Batman on the PS2 against my will.

my muscles have formed a strange alliance with my cellulite and are working against me to increase my pant size.

I’m severely allergic to my own sweat.

Truth be told an awkward encounter with a complete stranger has served as somewhat of a reality check for me. While there’s nothing wrong with sporting a second trimester swell when you’re a beautiful, glowing, pregnant woman. Having someone assume you’re carrying around another person in your pants does nothing for your self-esteem.

So this week, rather than resign myself to a life of poor eating and flaccid musculature, I will once again climb on the HASAY wagon with the rest of the club’s more determined members and resolve to make some permanent changes. Starting Monday I will begin to log in to my Sparkpeople food journal and keep track of what I’m putting in my mouth on a daily basis. I’m also cutting out the junk…goldfish, cupcakes, potato chips and dip…you get the idea. And the revised exercise goal is minimum three days a week of activity to start. Hopefully I’ll be able to increase that goal somewhat but I’ve got to start small lest I get discouraged yet again.

I’m on it people. Now if I could just figure out what those bandits did with my sneakers.

Advice to myself this week…