Yeah, Me!

I had a conversation with a friend this week about the importance of self-recognition. Too often we rely on the approval of others to feel good about what we've accomplished. What's wrong with approving of ourselves? For me and my Catholic sensibilities, self-congratulation feels like pride--and pride is a sin. But it shouldn't be sinful to motivate yourself through your own appreciation of a job well done.

It's definitely not sinful when a two-year-old does it. I was helping our daughter this morning with a huge 24-piece fire truck puzzle. As she was assembling first the wheels and then the ladder, I was encouraging her with good-mommy comments like, "That's it!" and "There you go!" I must have started slacking on the job, though, because after she fitted the front of the truck's cab in place, she said, "That's right! Yeah, me!"

Wouldn't it be nice if we could all say, "Yeah, me!" and believe it?

Other points of note from today:

- For those of you following our daughter's rock-collecting habits, she garnered two more from the post office today along with two from in front of big brother's preschool. I'm not sure what this means. Is she a kleptomaniac, or is she simply documenting her travels with these souvenirs?

- Child #1 told us a joke at dinner tonight. It went like this:

"Why did the clown...why did the clown...(long pause; looks at Daddy dumping the last of his Negra Modelo from the bottle into a pilsner glass)...why did the clown pour BEER on his foot?"

His punchline? "Because he wanted to make a flower!" And then he went wild laughing at himself.

How Much Inattentiveness Is Too Much?

As I've told many of my friends, I believe in leaving my kids to their own devices until medical assistance, physical intervention, or adult-level negotiation is required.

The upside of that approach is that my children play very well by themselves. Both are content "reading" a pile of books for 20 minutes at a stretch; each has personal interests to fill time as well. Our four-year-old will spend half an hour making a giant parking lot (which we have to step carefully over so as not to disturb any of the parked vehicles), and our two-year-old invents jovial conversations between Fisher-Price Little People, stuffed animals, and even cars stolen from said parking lot.

The downside? Every now and then, I don't get involved quite as early as I should. Yesterday before lunch, we were preparing to make cookies. For me, this was both a physical (clear kitchen counter, retrieve mixer from closet) and a mental (breathe deeply, store up patience) endeavor. So with my body and mind engaged in other activities, I was oblivious on a conscious level to what was happening around me.

I thought the kids were happily munching on oyster crackers (the snack situation here is dire at present...if I don't get to the store soon, we'll move on to uncooked pasta and cherry pie filling). It wasn't until I asked them to wash their hands so we could dig into the cookie-making that I noticed a problem.

Our youngest had been sitting at the butcher block table in our kitchen. When the hand-washing decree went out, she got off her stool and moved it to the sink (all with my back turned). When I heard the water come on, I spun on my heel to see if she needed any help with the soap, and that's when I noticed that she was wearing neither pants nor diaper.

"Where's your diaper, sweetie?" I asked, a note of concern in my voice. Had this been just a whim of fancy, or was there a big mess somewhere?

"In the garbage," she said, continuing to wash up.

"Why is it in the garbage?" I asked, making my way to the trash bin to peer inside.

"It was wet," she said, "so I took it off."

So perhaps it's time I start thinking of potty training. Guess I'd better get involved and pay attention...

Relaxing Before My Spanish Lesson

We had a very pleasant (but very brief) visit last night and this morning from my husband's aunt from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and her friend from Ventura, California. The two of them are vacationing together, seeing Wisconsin in its post-summer serenity.

They attempted to spread a bit of serenity here, too. Our beloved aunt brought a wonderful salmon dinner with her so that I wouldn't have to cook, and she treated me to a little hand reflexology (her retirement career) before we ate. Heaven.

My relaxation continued this morning, when I spent 90 minutes talking with a market researcher about toilet tissue. Yes, that's right. If you need an adjective to describe one of life's most underappreciated conveniences, just ask me. I thought of about 700 of them today. And I enjoyed it. It's sort of sad when you're excited about spending an hour and a half in a room with a total stranger discussing toilet paper simply because you know that no one is going to interrupt you.

Anyway, when I returned home, a couple of other rejuvenating spa treatments were proffered, which I happily accepted. Relaxation for a mother of two small children, though, is hard to come by and short-lived. Just as my brain balancing began, a little girl thrust a book into my hands and begged me to read it. My mini-massage was cut short by a phone call. And all my chakras were turned on and my stress receptors turned off just in time for our visitors to depart to Door County and for me to dash off to pick up big brother at preschool.

When we got home, he gave me the perfunctory after-school stack of papers and sullen expression that I so anticipate. I tried to ignore the latter as I looked over the former while watching the kids play in the back yard. A letter from his Spanish teacher (who makes a weekly guest appearance) explained that this week, they were focusing on the question, "Como estas?" (How are you?) When I read, "Your child should be able to respond to this question either verbally or with a hand or facial gesture," I looked up from the paper to check it out.

"Hey, buddy," I said to the little boy hiding behind our garage. "Como estas?"

He furrowed his brow, pointed his index finger (thank goodness) at me, and said, "UnnhhHHH!"

And I thought, 'Verbal response with a hand AND facial gesture. Guess he IS learning something at preschool.'

Scenes from a Shopping Trip

My little girl and I ran some errands while big brother was at preschool this morning. Having grown up with three sisters, I recall the magic of mother-daughter shopping trips and am experiencing it from the "mother" side for the first time now that I have about seven hours a week without my four-year-old boy. I walk through a store and she follows me, pointing out this or that as we go ("Look at that cute chair, Mommy!"). There's no running, no hiding beneath clothing racks, and no whining about wanting to leave. It's beautiful.

Our first stop today was the post office. There she stooped outside the entrance to claim a small piece of granite from the landscaping bed. (It's still in my pocket, as a matter of fact.) She selected it to accompany the larger one she brought home from Fox Valley Nursery last week when we picked out shrubs for our hedge. Both rocks will join the sizeable pile that had been stowed in the stroller at Quarry Quest last weekend. Apparently she's a collector.

Next, we made a return at Kohl's Department Store and browsed the boys' clothing for some fall-weather shirts for Child #1. As I spent ten minutes looking at a clearance rack full of polos, she tried on various hats and visors, which she carefully put back when I was ready to move on. Another stark contrast from shopping with a boy.

Our last stop was (I hate to admit this) Wal*Mart, where I shop only when I'm: (1) right next door at Kohl's, or (2) short on time and in need of both grocery and household items. Today, both justifications held true, along with an additional one: our curly girl needed her bangs trimmed, and there's a handy Cost Cutters right inside...along with a handy nail salon, a handy Subway, and a handy automotive center. I guess once they've got you, they want to keep you.

Child #2 sat perfectly still as her hair was cut, and the greeter just outside the salon door had observed this from his post. He rewarded her with a big smile and a small sheet of yellow-smiley-face Wal*Mart stickers torn from his roll. These stickers are used to mark both bags containing returns and the children of mothers who would rather not declare to the whole world that they'd been to Wal*Mart that morning. And now the child in question was wearing six of them. Oh, well.

I discovered as I picked up the two things we needed most--breakfast cereal and milk--that boxes of our staple morning meal are a full dollar less at Wal*Mart than they are at Pick 'N Save, where I normally shop for food. That's one full dollar times two boxes per week times 52 weeks per year, adding up to a $104 annual savings on cereal alone. How do they do that? The magnitude of the savings potential leaves my principles and my pocketbook in conflict. Pesky principles.

The Sound and the Fury

I've never read any Faulkner (sorry, Oprah), so I must admit I have no idea what this title really means. But it was the phrase that came to mind as I stood in the kitchen around lunchtime today, shoving one strawberry after another into my mouth (thank God there was no candy corn in the house!) and wondering how things had gone so far south in such a hurry. Oh, the sound, the fury of a four-year-old scorned!

Our day had had an enchanting start. It began as most mornings do, with the kids pushing open our door and crawling into our bed, one on either side. Normally, they chat and shift about until we're too frustrated to sleep anymore. Today, however, I almost immediately asked them if they wanted some breakfast, mostly because I was hungry myself.

It was then that they broke into a Broadway-style duet of "Let's Go Have Some Breakfast." With voicings for alto and soprano and only those five words as lyrics, the song went on for a good minute-and-a-half before Daddy and I both burst out laughing. It was one of those priceless moments that one assumes forebodes a perfect, Brady-bunch sort of day.

Not so, my friend. Not so.

Besides eating cereal and getting dressed, the only things we did between the bedroom serenade and my strawberry binge were bid Grandpa farewell and go to church. While Grandpa's departure may have given rise to some grief in the kids, it seemed to have been tempered by their getting thoroughly muddy in the newly mulched hedge bed in our backyard just before we left for Sunday school. And church itself can only be an uplifting, mellowing experience, right? Uhhh...no.

It was raining when we arrived home around 11:30 AM, and the kids wanted to get wet. Wet and dirty. What could be better when you're two and four? But Mommy wanted the kids to come in so she could fix lunch, and she was ineffectually urging them to bend to her will. When Daddy observes this type of pleading in Mommy with no response from the kids, his tendency is to blow a small gasket, which, in this case, he did. Our four-year-old was swept into the house and up to his room, screeching as though he were being branded the whole way. By some miracle, he fell asleep before his time-out had expired.

While one temper had been quelled (or at least rendered semi-conscious), another was still raging. Daddy reappeared in the kitchen looking a bit like a bull in a cartoon, nostrils flaring as it faced the matador and marked the ground with its hoof. Clearly our son was not the only one with whom he was frustrated.

I asked him calmly, "What's wrong?" It could have been a red cape I had waved, because a full-fledged charge followed.

The gist of his complaint was that he felt unappreciated for all the work he had done the previous day on the hedge. I responded that I had indeed told him how great it looked and how nice it would be to see something green and growing out the kitchen window rather than the rotting old fence that had stood in its place. And as the statement rolled off my tongue, I realized that he was right--it did not contain the words "thank you" in any form.

In a knee-jerk defense, I argued that I, too, often felt unappreciated. Had anyone thanked me for making dinner and going out to buy six-packs of the workers' favorite beers to celebrate? But this is a familiar conflict, one that never reaches permanent resolution. I say no one thanks me for doing all the laundry; he says no one thanks him for earning all the money that we live on. We both make valid points, and for a while afterward, we verbalize our gratitude to each other openly and often. But it inevitably comes back to this: the sound and the fury of two individuals who have lost, perhaps forever, at least a portion of their individuality and their partner's recognition of it.

Or maybe it's that we didn't need that much recognition before for things that we just did: work, clean, pick up after ourselves. Now, there's so much else to handle that the daily tasks we didn't mind doing before steal the precious little time we have to be ourselves. They become noble acts of sacrifice, and when it comes right down to it, I'm not all that noble. Martyrdom is so much more attractive.

Look At Me!

My father-in-law has been visiting all week. Visiting is the wrong word, really. Some of our neighbors refer to him as "the gardener" given that he spends 85% of his waking hours here pruning this and planting that. This trip he's making the stretch into hard-core landscaping, installing a hedge at the back of our lot. This has required chopping out tree roots, loosening nearly a cubic yard of soil, and, most notably, removing a sad old picket fence. Nearly ten trips have been made to the city dump and the local hardware store as various steps of the process have been completed and as unforeseen challenges requiring new tools have arisen.

During the time that he's been slaving away in our yard, his son (and my beloved) has been at work, meaning that it's been just the four of us here all day...my father-in-law, the kids, and me. And stereotypical in-law relationships aside, we've been getting along just smashingly. I mostly keep doing what I always do with periodic interruptions to consult on landscape aesthetics.

I've been surprised by how much easier mothering has seemed during his visit. Sure, he spent his first day here lavishing the kids with attention and has entertained them (or at least tolerated them) at the work site for short periods of time. But for the most part, they're under my jurisdiction all day. So why does it feel so much different, I've wondered?

A lightbulb came on for me in that regard this morning as my little one and I left preschool after dropping off big brother. She refused my hand in making her way down the long flight of stairs to the exit. "Look at me!" she said, grasping the railing. "I can do it all by myself!"

It made me think of a conversation I had a few months ago with one of my dearest friends. She is perhaps the most contented stay-at-home mom that I will ever meet, and I've openly envied her for that. As we were marveling over lunch at the endless variety and sheer number of things we do in the course of a day's work, she said, "I really think I could have been a pioneer woman, out fending for myself and my family."

Her comment painted a clear picture of a theretofore unfocused image I had of being a mother out of the mainstream workforce. It's sort of like pioneering...and pioneering is lonely. No one to encourage you, no one to cheer you on for your intrepid and creative spirit.

That's why having another adult around, one who isn't directly involved in my activites but who observes them throughout the day, has been so helpful. When I said last night at dinner, "I can't believe I'm still in my gym clothes," his response was, "I can with the way your days go." It was a simple acknowledgment of the complex and fluid nature of mothering, the effective handling of which is a point of pride for all moms. And I hadn't even had to say, "Look at me! I can do it all by myself!"

You're Not the Boss of Me

I had a little lesson in the psychology of birth order today. It started at breakfast with a conversation between the kids. Child #1 initiated the chat based on his current and forcible desire to be in charge, which he demonstrates with infuriating pointing and threats primarily aimed at me. Here's how the exchange went:

Child #1: There's only one boss in this house, and it's me!

Child #2: No, there's TWO bosses in this house!

Child #1: No, one!

Child #2: Two!

Child #1: One!

Child #2: Two!

That's as much as I caught. I left the room to get a cup of coffee and to ponder walking out the back door and not coming back until dinnertime.

After I got over the implication that they had completely ruled me out as boss, I considered what their differing opinions on this matter suggested about their worldview. When Child #1 arrived, the sun, moon, and stars all revolved around him. Everything he did was a miracle worthy of phone calls to grandparents and applause and affection from Mom and Dad. Child #2 entered a very different world, in which the sharing of her parents' attention was a given and the presence of a larger, stronger, louder version of herself was the status quo. She realized from the beginning that she was not generally going to have the upper hand in the goings-on of this particular collection of people, and she rolled with it.

Sure, she knows being boss is a good thing, but she accepts that it's not her exclusive right. Contrast that with her tyrant of a brother. Today, as he was "helping" Grandpa investigate the possibility of removing the stone-and-concrete retaining wall at our rear property line, he held a crowbar menacingly in my direction in a clear power play that landed him squarely in a time-out. As he had proclaimed at breakfast, there's only one boss in his mind.

A scene from the bathtub in which I used one of a mother's prime motivational instruments added another layer to my birth order lesson. The instrument in question? The race. "Who's going to stand up and get their bottom washed first?" I asked enthusiastically. Child #2 took the bait and scrambled to her feet, which threw Child #1 into action too late to win.

As Child #2 stood calmly, Child #1 whined and complained. I asked Child #2 if it was OK for me to wash Child #1's bottom first even though she had won. She said sweetly, "Sure!" When I coaxed a sheepish "thank you" out of Child #1, his little sister smilingly said, "You're welcome." It was a moment that made me wish I wasn't a Child #1 myself.

You're So Vain...You Prob'ly Think This Shiner's About You

Our two-year-old girl has her second shiner in as many weeks. She reacts pretty strongly to mosquito bites, it seems, and in the last 14 days or so, she's had one right on the bridge of her nose and, as of yesterday, one high on her left cheek. What was a red spot just below the outer corner of her eye at dinnertime yesterday was a rosy circle beneath it this morning and a swelling that had swallowed her lower eyelashes this afternoon.

Needless to say, she looks pretty tough and a little bit strange. The swelling has misshapen her eye just enough to give her an alien appearance, a setback that didn't bother her in the least. But it did bother me.

When we dropped big brother off at preschool this morning, I found myself offering the other moms a generally unsolicited explanation that Little Bruiser had been bitten or stung, not brutalized by a member of her family. I did the same when I bumped into a friend as we retrieved the schoolboy. The injured party remained relatively oblivious to the attention--or so I thought.

In the afternoon, we were playing outside when our neighbor approached to chat. Again, I immediately pointed out the eye, but this time, instead of looking up to show off the shiner, the poor little peanut ducked her chin to her chest and tucked her head between my neck and shoulder. She did the same thing when the waitress at the restaurant where we had dinner tried to take a peek.

It's difficult to sort out whether the gradually increasing inflammation around her eye or my incessant apologies for its appearance had the greater effect, but I do know this: over the course of 10 hours, my little girl's attitude about this temporary facial deformity of hers went from unfazed to uncomfortable. And it's evident that my vanity helped beget her self-consciousness--a realization that has me choking on humble pie.

The line between mother and child is a fine one, and it's all too easy to ignore when I selfishly expect my kids to fit into my vision of who they are--and who I am. I'm the mom with the cute little girl, not the mom with the girl who looks a little weird. How ironic that vanity, centered as it is on being beautiful, is such an ugly thing.

Sink or Swim

Our four-year-old had a swimming lesson today. I remembered this about 35 minutes before it was to start. (I'm not getting into the autumn/school year routine very smoothly.) He's a Kipper now (I assume this is some type of fish) after graduating from Shrimp on his third or fourth attempt.

The successful Shrimp session was clearly different from the ones that preceded it. I'm amazed at how certain skills, like potty use, drawing, and (apparently) putting one's face in the water, just sort of click one day. Gradual development in these arenas may have happened under the surface, but to the naked eye, it seemed like our little guy just woke up one day and (1) decided to use the toilet, (2) figured out that he could make pictures that actually represented something, and (3) wasn't afraid to get water in his eyes anymore. (Note: This did not all happen in a single day. He is not the spawn of Superman (no offense, dear).)

Anyway, Kipper and Shrimp are very different creatures, and I mean that figuratively. I suppose it has to happen sometime, but it's in Kipper that the safety net is rolled up and tossed aside. There are no more plastic barbells with huge white floaty marshmallows at each end, no applauding for holding one's head underwater for half a second; this is where the rubber hits the road, or, more literally, where the stomach hits the surface. Proficiency in semi-rhythmic breathing and a sophisticated relative of the doggie paddle are expected before a passing grade will be given. We're not talkin' "water readiness" anymore. This is swimming.

It's simultaneously remarkable and terrifying to watch your small son attempting for the first time ever to make his way from instructor's arms to pool edge all by his lonesome. 'Shouldn't she be helping him a bit more?' I wonder. 'Isn't she leaving him to struggle just a tad too long?' I worry. There's a desperation, a striving for survival in the mad paddling of those little arms and legs as they, in their uncoordinated preschool fashion, try to propel a body that's much too heavy through a medium that's much too resistant.

I thought about all this as I pruned my lavender this afternoon. It was consuming the tarragon beside it and was spilling over onto the patio, a profuse jumble of leafy green boughs on its perimeter and stark spokes of woody stems at its center. I hadn't been sure how and when to approach this project; since it was still blooming, I figured cutting it back might not be the best idea. However, when my father-in-law visits us, as he is at present, our yard gets a zealous overhaul, so I shurgged and figured now was as good a time as any.

The scent of lavender is a reputed mood-lifter, so it's no surprise that I was calmed to the point of free association in uncertainly snipping at the plant. As I trimmed away the extra weight at the ends of the branches, my lavender began to look more like a little mounded shrub and less like an anvil had been dropped on it. 'Look at me!' I thought. 'I know what I'm doing here!' I hadn't when I started (which is truthfully why I hadn't started weeks ago), but as I just dove into it, it became clear what it was that I needed to do.

I guess that's what being a Kipper is about, too, and why my two-year-old insists on zipping her jacket and putting her toothpaste on the brush, as she says so insistently, "all by myself!" Learning and growing is often a sink-or-swim proposition.

The Other Woman

Today after the Sunday service, we headed to a local park for our church's annual picnic. This enjoyable event, with sandwiches provided and side dishes a potluck smorgasbord, is an almost inaudible cry from the raucous, weekend-long festivals I recall from my Catholic youth, and I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. If you're going to get drunk with church friends, it's probably better to do so in a private, more controlled environment than the shady wings of the beer tent.

As we approached the park's picnic shelter, I coached the kids to look for our exceptional fourteen-year-old babysitter and her younger sister (also exceptional babysitter material). Their mother is a good friend of mine and co-chairs the committee that coordinates the picnic, so I expected they'd be there dishing out barbequed beef sandwiches or arranging desserts on the buffet table. But as is so often the case when you give kids notice of something exciting, they were disappointed. The girls were occupied with other activities and thus not present.

Not long into the picnic, our four-year-old began clinging to my leg and mumbling, the unmistakable signal that he wants to ask me something I may or may not endorse. "Cnn rrrr bbeestr cmm ovrr tda, Mmma?" he asked.

Since I speak his language even when he's not actually speaking it, I responded, "Well, I don't know if our babysitter can come over today. We'll have to call her when we get home. Would you like for her to come over today?"

He nodded, a big grin on his face. He grinned even more when we arrived home and Daddy helped him find the sitter's phone number in the church directory. Then he stood on a stool in front of the telephone and wondered aloud, "Now how do we make the bell ring in the phone at the babysitter's house, Daddy?"

After our not-so-little boy dialed the phone himself and received an answer, he said, "Hi. It's me." There was a pause, then, "I'm good." Big smile. I imagined him 10 years from now calling a girl he'd met in biology. As Daddy coaxed the suitor to ask whether his intended could come over later, the little guy shoved the phone at him and said, "YOU do it, Daddy." Just what we all wanted to do the first time we asked someone on a date.

He was pleased to learn that she was indeed available to babysit, but he found it an incredible injustice that she wouldn't be free for another THREE HOURS. He wanted to see her NOW.

Were I not anxious to have an unanticipated hour alone with my husband, I might have been offended by his intense desire to be with this sweet girl, the one he has told me at least once or twice he likes better than me. How could there be, at his tender age, a star shining brighter in his eye than his own mother?

I comfort myself by acknowledging that: (1) she is a very attentive sitter, (2) she adores our kids, and (3) she has won our son's affection in part through one of the best-recognized means in the book--his stomach. Each time she visits, she creates what she calls "Story Snacks" with the kids, a practice I learned of through the "Our Story Snack Cookbook" published to memorialize each one. These treats typically consist of a complex and variable parfait of Life cereal, Cool Whip, Hershey's strawberry syrup, yogurt, Teddy Grahams, and peanut butter. According to the text accompanying the illustrations, the Teddy Grahams are generally engaged in some sort of water sport which is either disrupted or enhanced by precipitation in solid or liquid form. Tonight, some "singing" grapes were tossed in, possibly for nutritional value.

There aren't many moms who could top that, even on their best, most creative days. And why would we want to? It seems a good idea to let innocent love bloom where it may. Assuming the enchantment is mutual, I'm thrilled to have someone watch the kids who cares about them so, and our sitter's mom is no doubt glad to have her daughter engaged in a courtship far safer than the ones pursued by many of her high school peers.

Sand In My Shoes

I have that spent, too-much-time-in-the-sun feeling tonight following one of the biggest events of the year for our family and our community--Quarry Quest, an annual fundraiser for children's causes held in a huge, bilevel limestone bowl. It was my first time attending since this has historically been a father-son bonding thing, but with Child #2 over the age of two, I had no excuse to stay home.

I'm glad for that, actually. It was quite an experience to see a quarry with a larger population than that of our small city. Really. This festival of sand and stone draws over 40,000 people most years, and with the bright sun and fine temperature we had today, total attendance surely topped that.

We spent nearly six hours there, and, as you can probably guess, that was about 15 minutes too many. I gauge that by the manner in which our tired, tantrum-throwing boy had to be forcibly removed from the asphalt to which he'd collapsed in chagrin at having to split the giant ice cream sandwich Daddy had purchased with his sister. Despite that dramatic finale, there were moments of peace during the day, particularly for the lucky one (me!) who got to stay in the shade of the "mess hall" tent with our napping toddler for almost an hour.

While I was stationed there, I did what everyone sitting in a densely populated space with nothing else to do does--I people-watched. The specimens in this setting were a bit more uniform than one might see while munching nachos at the Chili's in O'Hare--pretty much everyone at Quarry Quest had a child with them--but that did not make for less interesting viewing.

I saw one mother clad in overall shorts with two smallish boys in tow. Her charges had picked up clear plastic drawstring bags full of treasures at one of the dozens of activity booths in the quarry and had apparently grown weary of carrying them, because this poor woman had one bag hanging by the drawstring from each of her overall buttons. The weight of the bags pulled the buttons downward until they were more or less dead-center on her breasts. She looked like some sort of fully-clothed exotic dancer with whacked-out pasties, and I felt for her. I, too, have been (in fact, almost always am) the pack mule for an entire family.

I thought about her as I looked around the place at thousands and thousands of moms and dads in flimsy yellow souvenir hard hats, hauling bags and pushing strollers and carrying children, shaking the sand out of little shoes and doling out sippy cups full of juice and sanitizing small hands that had just finished using porta-potties. I imagined the quarry on Monday, back to normal, full of workers moving rock and driving heavy equipment and sweating in the heat of the day. Maybe it was the sun, maybe it was my unusually mellow state of mind at having nothing specific to do, but it occurred to me that the toil of these two groups was not so different. In each case, it involved hard, physical labor, was utterly exhausting, and could be dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing. And who does?

Eyes in the Back of My Head

Yesterday as he left for work, someone in our household who will remain nameless backed over the wheels of our tiny neighbor's red Radio Flyer tricycle, and let me tell you, it ain't flyin' anymore. No one on either side of our shared driveway was too bothered by this incident; the sound of a small, usually plastic vehicle being pushed along the concrete behind a larger, usually metal one is all too familiar for those of us around here with driver's licenses. There are no fewer than eight child-sized wheeled contraptions belonging to the three children occupying our adjacent homes, and since we have a total of three garage stalls and six adult-sized vehicles between us, you can imagine the square footage problem we have. Combine that with sheer laziness at the end of a long day, and it starts to look pretty redneck in these parts.

Being a good fellow, the anonymous perpetrator of the hit-and-run made an emergency trip to Fleet Farm last night to pick up a replacement tricycle. He assembled it in our kitchen as we shared the three or so glasses of wine that remained in the bottle I'd opened to celebrate/inspire my new internet enterprise. Everything came together pretty smoothly, but when all was said and done, there was one itty-bitty red hubcap (do tricycles have hubcaps?) left over. This, like so many other random items, took up temporary residence on our butcher block table, where the kids discovered it this morning.

They had just finished breakfast (prior to which they had argued, as they do with the rising of the sun each and every day, over who was to eat from the green bowl) and were puttering about the kitchen with their sticky milk hands as I stood at the sink doing dishes, when Child #1 said, "Look, Mommy! I have a red toe!"

I turned my head over my shoulder just enough to see that he was shuffling along with the hubcap (we're just going to keep calling it that) over his biggest piggie. "Ha ha," I responded, fighting my morning Mommy monotone, "you sure do!" Then I turned back to the dishes.

Not ten seconds later, a slightly younger, higher-pitched voice said, "Look, Mommy!" And before she could go on and without my turning around, I said, "You have a red toe, too!"

There was a momentary silence as I rinsed the pot I had in my hand, and then big brother said, a hint of wonder in his voice, "How can you see without looking at us, Mommy?"

I couldn't do anything but laugh at his comment, of course, given that he seemed completely awed by his (and every) mother's secret weapon: her eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head intuition, born of inane repetition, subconscious sensory awareness, and just plain magic. So struck was I by what he'd said that I have no idea how I responded, but I'm sure my retort wasn't nearly as perceptive as his question.

The real answer, when I think about it, is that I can't see without looking, and in truth, I spend precious little time looking--really looking--at my kids each day.

The Sleep Fairy Pays a Visit

I read several months ago of a book titled "Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Side of the Road and Other Lies I Tell My Kids." I don't recall who wrote it, but she was a smart (and, ironically, honest) woman. The idea of always being truthful with our children may be noble but is neither convenient nor much fun.

Take, by way of illustration, the manner in which I finally got our two-year-old daughter to sleep in her bed after about three weeks of her crashing on the floor just inside the baby gate at the top of the stairs. This habit arose when another deeply addictive one--sleepytime pacifier use--was eliminated. For a while, I mostly ignored it (my initial approach to virtually every behavioral problem), but 20 days in, I figured it was time to take action (go me!). That's where the lie comes in.

The way I see it, getting children to listen is simply a matter of motivating them with something compelling. M&Ms worked when potty-training our older child; something similar would probably do the trick in this situation, I reasoned. But what? You can't very well reward a child who is still awake for falling asleep in her bed by herself. That would be putting the cart before the horse, since she'd most certainly take her reward, plop down in the hall with it and her blankie, and get comfy there. No, this had to be delayed gratification, which isn't easy to sell to a two-year-old.

That's why I decided to let the Sleep Fairy do the selling. You haven't heard of the Sleep Fairy? She flies through the homes of little girls and boys who are having trouble staying in their own beds at night, checks to see where they've fallen asleep, and then leaves something wonderful beside the beds of the children who've stayed put from dusk 'til dawn. If they wake up under their own cozy covers, the Sleep Fairy's gift will be the very first thing they see in the morning.

In our case, the "something wonderful" was a tiny bowl with three Jelly Bellys inside. Not earth-shattering to you or me, but what child wouldn't love to have a tiny bite of candy before she even has breakfast? How unorthodox! How sublime! How worth staying in bed for!

Given what went on with our eldest and his bowels today, I ought to have stayed in bed myself. Looking back, I may have fed us a bad cucumber for lunch yesterday, but whatever the case, things were messy around here. When I picked the kids up from the drop-in child care center at the gym, there was a telltale blue plastic sack tied to the strap of my diaper bag. Upon spotting it, I quickly turned my head in search of our four-year-old, who I then saw was wearing unfamiliar shorts. When I inquired into the nature of the problem he'd had, the queen of the care providers called it a "juicy toot." I thought of this as I was cleaning up the offending garments after we'd returned home and decided that I'll never look at that Wrigley's gum in the yellow wrapper the same way again.

Birth of a Blog

I received a lengthy email from my mother-in-law today chock-full of family news, personal updates, and requests. Requests for Christmas lists, for our interest level in traveling to be with her for Thanksgiving, and for an update on the first week of preschool. Her final request was kindly worded but direct: she wanted to hear from me/us.

Things have become...hectic? is that strong enough a word?...in the last couple of months, and I've fallen off the keeping-in-touch wagon on several fronts. Local friends call and ask if they've offended me. Relatives suspect that our mail service has been disrupted. There are phone calls received during our July vacation to New Jersey that I have yet to return. I have shifted from uber-connected to barely hanging on in some relationships.

In desperation, I'm turning to this. I'm a cliche of the internet. "Many people are using blogs to keep in touch with their families and friends." Now I'm one of many, a simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable position to occupy. Well, who cares? At least now my mother-in-law will know what her grandchildren are up to.

As far as that goes, preschool is at the top of the list right now. We just started this week and are two class days in. The term "class day" is a bit deceiving, given that the day's program is a measly two hours and ten minutes long. I barely had time today to drop my little pupil off, get to the grocery store with my not-so-baby girl, smash a jar of tomato-basil pasta sauce on the floor (oops), and return home to stuff the fridge and freezer with a week's worth of food before I had to hustle back to the Y to pick him up. He looked a little dazed as he handed me not the paper-plate mask the other moms were getting but rather a narrow strip of manila folder with some random green crayon marks inside. I'm still not sure what that's about, but I suspect it suggests that the little guy is mildly overwhelmed by his first structured educational experience.

I've been asked by at least three acquaintances whether I cried on his first day. Another cliche. The truth is that I left after dropping him off with a smile on my face. He had run into the room without looking back and seemed glad to be there, which was reassuring, but that's not the real reason for my contentment. I was in part happy to have my first-ever alone time with my daughter, but mostly I was relieved to have a brief hiatus from the four-year-old opposition machine. If I say it, he contradicts it. And it's not just verbal retorts, either, which would be hard enough to handle. His self-assertion is a full-body experience in which he throws himself to the floor, ground, or driveway, clamps his eyelids shut, and rolls his eyeballs to the back of his head in a pseudo-sleep of protest. What do you do with that?

I also feel compelled to say that parenting under these circumstances is strongly contraindicated by PMS. But I suppose what human interaction isn't?