Better late than never

Allrighty, so, the retail world long ago decided that it is the Christmas season, totally skipping over the lovely holiday that is Thanksgiving. But despite being behind the times, I wanted to share a few Halloween pictures with you. Because my kidlets were really cute, methinks.

First I must share with you that both kids were totally into the pumpkin gutting this year. Bigsy was all in it to win it.


Phook was also onboard this year, after years of trepidation. She pretty much solo gutted her pumpkin, then requested that we carve the face of her gymnastics instructor into the thing. Alas, Big K carved her second choice, a cat.


Big K rocked his classic maneuver of absurd pumpkin art by carving a chupacabra within a pumpkin as designed by Hode. I didn't even know what a chupacabra was, which apparently makes me really lame.


For costumes this year, Big K desperately wanted us to go as The Flintstones, because he thought Bigs was the perfect BamBam. Well, he was on point on that count, however I couldn't figure out how to get us all in costumes that are essentially scant animal-print rags without making a major investment in insulated flesh-colored body suits, so we went with two witches and two mad scientists. I think it was hott.


I really loved the mad scientists:


And this was supposed to be the witches-only picture, but a mad mad scientist snuck in:

Let's check out the cutest mad scientist in close-up:

And my favorite witch:

Man, this Halloween was really, really, really just fun. It was the first time for Phook that the holiday was all fun, no fear. She was into trick-or-treating bigtime, had the whole routine locked up, and really enjoyed herself. Bigsy was his jovial self and ate like 19 pounds of candy before we even got home. Just a good old time. I hope yours was fun as well. Now get out there and finish that Christmas shopping, you slackers! (Eff that noise, I say.)

Quote of the Day x 2: The Potty Humor and International Relations Edition

Quote of the Day - Potty Humor Edition

So the other day we were driving to gymnastics. I asked Phook if she needed to go potty or if she could hold it all the way to gymnastics. She said, "No, I don't need to go potty. The potty at quastics (her adopted word for gymnastics) is real big. And all the kids fall down the hole into the poop and into the pee. And then they get real mad."

And I said, "Really buddy, they do? What kids do that?"

And Phook said, "Nobody. I just teasin' you."

I thought that was good bathroom comedy.


Quote of the Day - International Relations Edition

Today we were in the car in a nearby town. There is a camo-painted Army tank permanently parked and displayed in sort of a town square area in this town. Phook spotted it and asked what it was. I found myself struggling to give a reasonably detailed answer, because reasonably detailed answers are what she is going for these days, to the point where I sometimes have to invoke the "We'll have to ask Daddy when he gets home" response because we're getting to some grade level in science that exceeds my personal knowledge base. What I ultimately came up with was something like, "Well, Phook, that's a real big 'chine that's like a big tough car. And sometimes countries, like the big place where we live, get in fights with other countries. And those big fights are called wars. And when our country is in a war, we need to use big 'chine cars like that to help us win our fights."

And Phook said, I shit you not, "Those guys need to change their attitudes. They need a new attitude."

Seriously. My recently minted three-year-old is able to figure out what the world's heads of state are incapable of realizing, based simply on the most ridiculous, most elementary description of the concept of war.

That made my day. Maybe my year. Phook, budding diplomat?

And one step back...

In parenting circles, you hear the term "regression" not uncommonly. People talk about their kids regressing after the birth of a sibling...wanting to use a bottle or sleep in a crib after they've graduated from these things. Or regressing in their potty training when they move to a new house. Or something like that. I've also heard about kids randomly regressing in some way in conjunction with a growth spurt or some developmental leap. I dunno. I kind of thought all that was bunk, since I'd never witnessed it here in the House of K and I'm narrow-minded like that. I mean, I've witnessed ear-splitting naughty and maddeningly emotional outbursts and all those joys. But I've never seen one of my kids very markedly go backward in their behavior. Until now. Let's discuss.

Phook. Phook is mid-regress. It's weird. She is not being especially naughty or especially confrontational or especially difficult. But she is definitely doing some things that are so 6 months ago. Or maybe even a year ago.

Not the pottying. Thank everybody's god, not the pottying. The pottying is intact.

The first thing I noticed was that she was asking to be carried, particularly up the stairs to bed. And not just in a random way, but she wants to be carried slung across the front of the carrier's body, "over the threshold" style, let's call it. This is a child who has been walking miles on her own since her first birthday. Also a child who is a big fan of the "I want to do it ALL BY MYSELF" school of fun. So I noticed this. She does it with me and with Big K. We simply comply. No harm, no foul.

The second thing is her language. Now Phook has never been known for her pristine diction. Not by a long shot. But she had gotten to a point where there was less than one percent purposeful gibberish in her speech. I would have called it a rarity. I would go so far as to say she was at the all-English all the time phase of linguistic development. But the last few weeks, we have gibberish again. Yesterday, she was sitting against the wall waiting for her turn at the gymnastics class she's taking, and all of a sudden she just burst forth at me across the gym with a not angry but not entirely pleasant streak of something resembling, "Jock a pee a pall a peen a pop a pood a pep!" I smiled and nodded, looked around for her real parents, shoved a handful of craisins in Bigsy's mouth, and moved on. She is spouting a streak of gibberish at least 15 times per day at this juncture.

Her overall pronunciation is intact with the exception of her brother's name. When he was first born and she was 21 months old, she still had a significant amount of difficulty with the ending consonant sound in words. For example, she would say "ca" instead of "cat" and "cu" instead of "cup." Her brother's name ends in a hard sound and when he was born she couldn't say that ending consonant. A couple months later, that part of her pronunciation developed both with Bigsy's name and with other words. The last few weeks, she is back to calling him just the first sound of his name about 70% of the time. So odd.

She has also been very, very clingy with me. Today at storytime at the library, she chose to sit with me (I was on the floor monitoring Bigsy's ill-conceived attempt at squishy juice box consumption anyhow), instead of on her carpet square. When I left her with my sister last week to go play volleyball one evening when Big K had an evening meeting, she for some reason thought I hadn't given her a hug and a kiss before I left (I had) and launched into a meltdown the likes of which I could not even imagine her engaging in as my sister described it. Really. And this child, while healthily attached to me, has been able to casually wave and say "bye" when I leave since at least her first birthday. If I am sitting on the love seat and she on the couch, she comes over to sit by me...something I would normally have to beg her to do. Very, very odd.

So I can't figure it out. Heaven help us if it's a growth spurt because between her two-year and three-year checkups she jumped from 75th percentile in height and 50th in weight to off the charts in both measures. The child just turned 3 and she is wearing a 5T. So I think the growth spurt has to have already happened.

My only theory, and it is a shaky one, is that it has something to do with her social development. As I mentioned, she started taking a weekly gymnastics class about two months ago. She really likes it. There are like 5 kids in the class with an instructor. They do all sorts of cool stuff. Headstands, somersaults, launching themselves onto foamy pads, getting in a harness and jumping on a trampoline, walking on a beam, etc. All lovely. A couple weeks ago, Big K got home from work early so I was able to take her by myself and leave Bigsy at home with Big K. On the way there, I was making conversation about the class, asking her if she liked it, etc. She does. I asked her if she liked her teacher. She does. I asked her if she liked the other kids in her class. Her response stunned me. She said, "I like Jake. Not the Sarahs." (There are two girls named Sarah in the class.) Maybe for those of you with kids in daycare who have formed little friendships since they could crawl, this is not noteworthy. But for Phook it is. She has met and played with about 9 billion little kids - kids of my friends, playgroup kids, etc. It always goes pretty much fine and without incident. This gymnastics class is the first time she has been engaged with a consistent group of other kids regularly, so maybe that's what has her forming firm opinions on her peers. Whatever, it is new. She informed me that she does not like The Sarahs simply because they are "real weird." She will not elaborate.

But I know she does really truly like Jake. She is worried that he won't arrive if we get there first. Yesterday, she didn't want to play in the warm-up area until he got there. Halfway through the class yesterday I looked up to see her very gently clasping his cheeks with both hands, staring into his face. When she left, they hugged each other warmly. I would say it is the first time she has formed--or has had a chance to form--what seems to be something of a meaningful relationship with another kid.

So I'm wondering if this new development of friendship outside our family has the other half of her wanting to cling to her family more than usual. It is the only big change I can see when I sit around and theorize about this.

That's probably a crackpot theory. I don't even really believe it. I just thought I'd throw it out there. Big K simply says, "Child development is not linear" and dumps an entire bag of M&M peanuts from the kids' trick-or-treat candy in his mouth. I sit around and think about it. Of course.

So tell me, have your kids gone through seemingly random regressions? What did they end up being linked to, if anything?

(Let me be clear than I'm not hoping to "fix" this or even lamenting it so much as I am just feeling curious about it. I don't mind extra snuggling. For all I care, I'll carry her up the stairs when she's 16 if she asks me to. I'm a sucker like that.)

XO,
Big W

your daily nonsense

People ask how the cats are getting along with The Hound.


Fine. Just fine.

***

Also, my son can fly.


Word to Big Bird.

Wiping Noses

A huge part of caring for little children is tending to their personal care. Clothing, feeding, dressing, brushing teeth, bathing, all of it. I spend a huge portion of my day physically caring for my children's bodily needs. It's a huge amount of work, obviously. And you have to do it every day, all day. It repeats constantly. They're clean and then two minutes later they're dirty again. So you clean them again. And on and on and on until you realize that the crux of your life has been a cycle of these repetitive, mundane tasks for years on end.

A lot of moms I talk to talk about how difficult this is. And it is.

When you run into grandmas in the grocery store, a lot of them say, "Enjoy it, because it goes so fast!" Some days, there is a temptation to say, "Thank God for that!" But when I embarked on this mom gig, I somehow managed to take to it with the understanding that this phase of my life would be a very difficult span of exhausted years, but that it is the blink of an eye in the span of my life. That knowledge is what got me through Bigsy's difficult first months. The months I can barely even remember only a year later.

I don't know if you read this famous blog, written by a mother of four who takes great joy in motherhood but is now working to build a new life for herself after she and her husband were horribly burned in a plane crash a year ago. Or this awesome blog, written by her similarly-minded sister. If you don't read them, you should. You should start at the beginning, and read every word they have said. The word "inspiring" is overused. But if anything you can read is truly inspiring, you will find it there. It is particularly inspiring for a mother. Her outlook on mothering prior to her accident was inspiring, in and of itself, because she utterly delighted in it. All of it. Even the mundane, the repetitive, the draining. She knew how wonderful her life was and she cherished every moment of it, even before she was given the cruel reminder of the precariousness of life.

I try extremely hard to mother in that mold. I try not to get bogged down by the constant cook-feed-clean of my day. When I pick a child out of a high chair and they leave an avocado smudge down my shirt, I try not to let it frustrate me. When I am trying to accomplish something around the house and there are little people undoing everything in my wake, I try to power through and just eventually get it done and not attempt to figure out how quickly I would have been able to accomplish the task if the children weren't around. When I'm trying to get out of the house and a child removes the shoes I just finished wedging onto their feet, I try to just calmly get the shoes and put them on again. The simple fact that this is my goal and that I usually get pretty close to succeeding is something I am proud of.

But sometimes I fail. One occasion on which I fail to appreciate my children and the gift of my ability to care for them is when they have colds. Runny noses. It is hard to derive joy from tending to children's runny noses. A kid with a good head cold seemingly generates a gallon of slime per day from their various orifices. Two children = two gallons. And every drop of it has to be handled by me. I walk around with tissues or other wiping devices wedged in every pocket, up every sleeve, tucked into the waistband of my pocketless pants. (I now know why my mom always has a stash of Kleenex on her person, and always will.) Having children with colds makes the grossness of my day even grosser. It makes the endless cycle of keeping the children even modestly tidy even more of a chore. And I don't like it. At my worst, I even resent it. I think smugly about how damned smart I am, and I get a little huffy that my purpose on the earth seems to be Snot Patrol.

But she reminds me.

It is a gift. Wiping noses is a gift. I am not being melodramatic. I mean that, completely. Caring for your children, even when they are sick and nasty, is an incalculably huge gift. It means you were blessed with children. It means that you are able-bodied. It means that your children are healthy enough that a cold counts as a sickness. In my case, it means I am lucky enough to be the person who cares for them all day long. I do not need to worry that someone else is letting their nose run, or wiping it carelessly, or wiping it too harshly. I am the one wiping their noses. The noses I grew within my own body. The noses God gave me to care for.

Recently, she was featured on Oprah. They did a piece where a weary mother followed her through her daily struggle to care for her children. How she couldn't pick them up out of the bathtub because of her burns. How hard it was to open a bag of carrots for their lunches. The weary mother predictably lost it and realized how much she takes for granted in her own life. And Oprah, with whom I have a volatile relationship, said something that actually rang very true for me. She called the mundane tasks of caring for little children "sacred." That is the perfect word. They are sacred. Because in the grand scheme of raising a child and then being their parent after they reach adulthood, the moment during which you carry them up the stairs to bed exhausted on your shoulder after a long day is a grain of sand on the beach of their life. And it is an honor and privilege to be granted that moment.

I need to remember that.

I need to remember it always. Not just when Phook is feeding Bigsy ice cream off a spoon and we're all laughing and enjoying each other, but every time I pull a tissue out of my pocket. I need to remember.

All clear

To those of you who read my post about Bigsy's health scare before I pulled it down on Wednesday, I am writing simply to say that he got a clean bill of health yesterday. For those of you who knew about this and sent your thoughts and prayers our way, thank you.

A letter to Phookie on her 3rd birthday

Dear Phookie,

Here we are. Three. Your momma has been so busy the past couple weeks and is so tired and is so sorry that this letter may not be able to express much of anything of value. But here we go.

Phook, Phook, Phook. The "terrible twos" officially came to a close for you today, but I'm pleased to say that for you, it was the "terrific twos." Sure, you went gonzo your share of times and we've had our highly unpleasant battles of wills, but all in all, this year has been pretty awesome.

There was a shift this year. In the past, I've written about your shyness and your "slow to warm up" tendencies, but that has begun to fade away. Two weeks ago, storytime at the library started up after the summer break, and the lady who reads the stories could not believe you were the same child. Rather than quietly sitting on your carpet square sipping your juice box, you were leaping up to answer each of her questions. "That's a hippopominus!" you shouted in one of your awesome mispronunciations. You were eager. You were confident. You were engaged. You knew all the answers. You were something so very different than you were a year ago. And I was so proud.

This year, something also shifted in the way I viewed you. Rather than viewing you as vulnerable, I came to view you as strong. So incredibly strong. And you are so incredibly responsible for your age. And sensible. And reasonable. And thoughtful. And empathetic. And observant. And funny. And beautiful. You, my little girl, are amazing. You are amazing as a person who has just turned three. I do not know exactly what you will do with yourself as an adult (other than your proclamation that you will be driving airplanes), but you will be something. Something fierce. Something fantastic.

I do not worry how you will turn out. I think about your future all the time, but I don't worry how you will turn out.

I know.

You are an incredible little person with capabilities and traits that don't belong on someone your age. You will never be anything other than amazing. So I don't wonder. I know.

I love you, Phook. I am amazed by you, Phook. You are three, which is mind blowing but somehow not as devastating as I once felt the loss of your babyhood was. I am just loving watching you grow. Watching you learn. Watching you soar.


I was so lucky to have you be my baby. But I am far luckier to have you be my daughter.

Love,
Momma