not that you asked...

Ordinary Tuesday

Asher had his second swim lesson today. It's a group lesson, and I'm allowed in the water with him (not sure he would have done it any other way) and I don't expect it to be a Major Breakthrough in terms of his resistance to getting any part of his face or head wet, but I do think it will help him be somewhat more comfortable in the water, even if that translates to him just being able to hang on to the side all by himself while I pull his sister out of the deep end. Because Lucy thinks she has gills. Gills and A DEATH WISH.

Our instructor is a college-age girl with the personality of a tree stump, but Asher hasn't seemed to notice. Nor has he noticed that out of the four children in the class, he's probably the one who is the most rigid and anxious, which makes me happy. I'm obviously not happy that he's rigid and anxious; I'm happy that he doesn't know that the other kids aren't. I suppose this is because his rigidity and anxiety keep him from noticing anything other than how close I am letting the water get to his FACE, MAMA, HOLD ONTO ME, but I am so glad that we are doing this swimming thing before he gets older and figures out that your weak points can make you a target for ridicule. Before he gets old enough to be embarrassed.

During one exercise, I had to make him jump off the side of the pool while holding both of his hands and I kid you not, this child was so STIFF and FRIGHTENED going into the water that his body was as rigid as a yardstick and when he hit the water, his toes got caught in my swimsuit bottoms and PULLED THEM DOWN TO MY KNEES. I was extra thankful that he was able to hold onto the wall all by himself at that point, you know, while I rearranged my lower half and hid my private lady areas from view.

After swim class, we went to Target. I needed concealer, and I had a coupon. Want to know how I usually feel about coupons? I hate coupons. I hate how small they are, and flimsy, and I hate that clipping them makes me feel guilty if I don't use them and I am still at a loss as to how you are supposed to ORGANIZE coupons so that you know what coupons you are currently in possession of that aren't expired (somehow mine are always expired). I refuse to even get INVOLVED with Internet coupons, but this might be because we don't have a working printer and I can't exactly tote my laptop along and open it up at the register for proof of a discount. So the only coupons I can tolerate are the ones that come in those little Target circulars, because (NO JOKE) they are printed on paper that doesn't shred into little teensy pieces in my purse and because they're actually USEFUL.

Example of Target coupon: “$2 off jumbo size or larger Luvs diapers.”

SEE? See how EASY that is? I go to Target, where I usually buy Luvs diapers (we are never going to graduate from size 3, EVER) and if I remember to give the cashier my coupon, I get $2 off. The end.

Unfortunately, MOST coupons are for rich people. Ok ok, so maybe not RICH people, necessarily, but people who have enough money to buy/rent a place big enough to PUT all this crap.

Example of coupon seen in newspaper circular: “Save $1 when you buy any FOUR (4) Cool Whip Whipped Topping.”

FOUR. FOUR COOL WHIPS. Pray tell, WHERE am I going to put FOUR tubs of Cool Whip if I don't have an extra freezer and the freezer I do have is actually filled with things like FOOD? Frankly, I am appalled at the idea of having to buy FOUR of something just to save a measly dollar. That's a freaking SCAM, you guys. Cool Whip lasts for, like, 18 years or something anyway. Who is using THAT MUCH Cool Whip?

Coupons and places like Costco aren't money savers for us, because we don't have the extra space for bulk items. We don't have an extra freezer for meat, we don't have cupboard space for vats of olive oil or jumbo rolls of paper towels, we don't have room in the bathroom or anywhere else in the house for a 24-pack of toilet paper. OR EVEN A FOUR-PACK OF TOOTHPASTE. However much money it might save us in the long run to shop at these places, it just isn't feasible until we live somewhere with a little more storage space. For pete's sake, I CAN'T EVEN OPEN MY DRYER DOOR ALL THE WAY, because it's wedged up against the HVAC unit. Do you think I have room in my house for a bucket of roasted peanuts and a crate of Frosted Flakes, even if it saves me $13? Unless it becomes fashionable to use the Frosted Flakes as an ottoman and the peanuts as an end table, I have to refrain from shopping anywhere things are sold in large quantities. Which sucks, honestly, because grocery shopping and meal planning is pretty much the Worst Chore Ever and if I could go twice a month instead of every four days I would be a much happier person. I think a person is only granted so much patience to deal with children who fight despite being housed together in a grocery cart very loosely disguised as a fire truck WITH LOLLIPOPS IN THEIR HANDS and I'm afraid mine is about two shopping trips away from running out altogether.

Quick Takes

One: I am trying to make friends with a squirrel who frequents my deck. It's pretty slow going, but I suspect this is mostly because I haven't been very consistent with our getting-to-know-you routine. Obviously, I know that if you want a squirrel to trust you, you have to be consistently calm and quiet and slow moving and always offer them something they really really want like a big handful of delicious delicious nuts but sometimes when he's creeping up to the sliding glass door with that little gleam of hope in his eyes I get a way bigger kick out of throwing the door open and letting the dog chase him back up a tree. So yes. Slow going.

Two: Speaking of the dog, can you find him in this picture?

 

Three: Lucy has a cold. I can barely even classify it as a cold – she's not sniffling or sneezing, she doesn't have a runny nose or a fever - but everyone else in the family had a brief stint of feeling crappy and now because it's her turn, she is up ALL NIGHT LONG complaining about it and wanting us to comfort her. It amazes me how quickly I got used to sleeping seven or eight straight hours a night. Over the last week, as soon as I heard her crying and fussing over the monitor, I could immediately feel all those old feelings of anxiety and desperation rushing back, and my stomach would get queasy and my fists would clench in frustration and in the morning, there's my old friend Sticky Burny Eyelids to remind me how little time I spent lying horizontal on my own mattress. The thing is, she's SICK. And she's been doing this less than A WEEK, so I figure I've got a learned response going on. I'm not frustrated and anxious because she's waking up sick (I do feel badly for her); I'm frustrated and anxious because that's how I felt for more than a year and I think my body is CONDITIONED to feel it.

Four: Right now Asher is doing his very first Quiet Time in his room. You guys, sometimes I can't believe how LITERAL I can be about things. It may actually be physically impossible for me to think outside the box. When I said I couldn't figure out how to get Asher to play quietly in his room, I WAS BEING AN IDIOT. I was picturing him in his room, playing with whatever he wanted to play with. Free-roaming, like a zebra at a wildlife park. I figured he'd be bored without access to all his toys, and he'd demand my attention. But it never occurred to me that this might be TOO MUCH freedom for him to handle, or that I might try weaning him slowly into the new routine. So right now he is in his room, IN HIS BED, where he is to stay until I come and get him. He was allowed to take one train and one train car into his bed with him (he chose James and his tender, for those indoctrinated Thomas people following along at home) and he can reach and read any of the books that are beside his bed in the book bin. And he is perfectly happy in there. He's resting, he's playing quietly, I'm getting a break to do a few personal things. Like tell you about it.

Five: Lucy is now 18 months old and a FIRECRACKER. For the most part, she's an easy kid (just let her do whatever it is her brother is doing), but trust me when I say: you don't want to cross her. Yesterday I was holding her, and she asked for a lollipop (“l-l-pup”) and when I told her no, that kid whacked me hard in the chest. Slapped me like she meant BUSINESS, and then did it again. She got put in her crib for that (technically a time out, though she doesn't really know it) but she didn't care about that either, and when I went in to get her a few minutes later, she was cackling and running laps on the mattress. She thought it was HILARIOUS, this “time out” crap. Then in the afternoon, I took both kids over to my mom's house (where I LEFT THEM). Lucy insisted on wearing a backpack over there, but when I told her she had to take it off to ride in her carseat, she went absolutely BALLISTIC. She threw herself onto the concrete and kicked and screamed and when I ignored her, she stood up, waited until I turned around to look at her, AND DID IT AGAIN. It was an EXCELLENT performance, and I'm kind of sorry I had to totally ignore it and carry on with putting her into the carseat (SANS BACKPACK) because it would have been worth a round of applause and I'd have thrown flowers, too, if I'd had any.

Six: Last night (after I left the kids with my mom), Dave and I went to a concert. It turned out that President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, was attending, too and while it was interesting to see how a venue handles someone of importance, I left thinking it must really suck to be Mr. Emanuel, in a lot of respects. Sure, he got to go backstage and he got a reserved table and I'm guessing he never had to stand in line for the urinal or pay for his nachos but he also had to get up something like THIRTY TIMES during the show to answer his Blackberry. That's the kind of job I NEVER want to have – the kind where you can't just let it go to voicemail JUST THIS ONCE, even if you're enjoying a show with your wife and your kids and eating tasty nachos and drinking a beer and trying to be NORMAL for ninety minutes. I also think it would take a lot (A WHOLE LOT) for me to overlook that kind of stuff if I was married to someone that important. You'd feel like you never got his undivided attention, you know? I'd have to pull an Asher and pee all over myself every once in a while, just for a reaction.

Seven: Oh, WHY NOT. Have some kid pictures. IT'S FRIDAY, after all.

 

 

The power of suggestion

Yesterday Asher peed his pants twice. TWICE. And it was a lot of pee, too – like, an entire BLADDER'S worth of pee, not a “whoops! Better get to the toilet and FAST” kind of pee. I was willing to let it go once; after all, he's a little kid. I get that little kids aren't perfect and I know that accidents are to be expected, especially if getting up and going to the bathroom means interrupting the Very Serious Train Situation that's happening on the floor. So my issue lies not with the fact that he had accidents, but with the fact that he had accidents because he refused to use the bathroom when it was suggested to him that he should.

I know what the Pee Pee Dance looks like, you guys. I'M NO FOOL. But this child is going through a Stubborn Phase (I like to call it a phase in the hopes that he might grow out of it) (PLEASE, GOD) and Dave and I have to be very careful about what we suggest or show a preference for because, no lie, this kid will demand the exact opposite one hundred percent of the time. Sometimes, when presented with a choice of two things, he will actually say, “I want Mama to pick,” which is just a dirty trap because whatever I pick, he immediately decides he wants the other thing AND THROWS A FIT ABOUT IT. Like, the fit is just there on tap, waiting, and he's just looking for a good reason to go ahead with it. It's so SNEAKY and EVIL.

So anyway, yesterday, Asher was going to walk down to the creek with Grandpa, so Dave suggested that he try to use the bathroom before they left. Does this sound like the most unreasonable request in the world? Life is more comfortable with an empty bladder, children of the world! Also, my best guess is that helping you pee in the woods isn't exactly Grandpa's idea of a good time, especially once he finds out how much of it you get on your shoes! But NOOOOOOO. Asher would have no part of this simple process of RELIEVING HIMSELF IN A NICE CLEAN ENVIRONMENT. Tantrum thrown! Kicking! Screaming! Numerous “YOU DON'T WANT TOOOOOO”s. So Dave said forget it, just go already before my eardrums burst or I throw you out a window and ten minutes later Asher and Grandpa were back, and one of them had a big wet stain on the front of his pants.

(As far as I know, Grandpa has excellent bladder control skills.)

We try, we really really try, to trust Asher with the potty thing. We try not to suggest that he go (as hard as that is) but lately his track record is pretty shoddy and for Pete's sake, it's not like we have unlimited pairs of shorts in the house. I guess I just chalk this up as our Official Regression and try to be patient? Is it wrong of me to say things like, “Dude, quit peeing your pants or you're going back into diapers”? I'm also not totally an idiot: Lucy has just started talking, and I know we have been making such a big fuss over her lately (because she's so unbelievably adorable) and I know he's looking for attention. He's started talking in baby talk and being more demanding than usual and it makes sense. But aren't we taking it too far with the peeing? I DRAW THE LINE AT ATTENTION GARNERED BY BODILY FUNCTIONS.

I think it's funny that whenever Asher goes through one of these Stubborn Phases, Dave and I have numerous arguments over who he got this special trait from. Dave swears it's me; I have actual EVIDENCE that it's him. According to his mother, when Dave was 8 or 9 years old, the family had made big, exciting plans to go to the pet store on a Saturday morning and pick out fish for a new aquarium. This was a Very Big Deal and Dave and his two brothers were so excited about it and had been looking forward to it for weeks and then... Dave did something mean to his younger brother, and his mom requested that he apologize.

My husband refused. Would not do it. And at some point, his mother told him if he did not apologize, he was not going to get to go with everyone to the pet store on Saturday morning to help pick out the fish. I think she thought this was her ace in the hole; he was SO looking forward to this new aquarium and being a part of the process of choosing fish.

But do you know what Dave did? HE REFUSED. And he continued to refuse, and his mother had to GET A BABYSITTER for that Saturday morning so that they could leave him behind to go to the pet store. A BABYSITTER.

SUUUUUUURE, he gets that stubborn streak from me. RIIIIIIGHT. (As an aside, how much do you love that woman for sticking to her guns? She's a genius.)

Eighteen months

At some point, I stopped writing much about Lucy altogether, because I was seemingly unable to write anything positive. It's not that there wasn't anything positive to say about her (quite the opposite), but every time I sat down to write about her, her sleeping issues (sixteen entire months' worth of them) eclipsed most of my joy and all I could manage to convey with my fingertips were complaints. Whining. Paragraph after paragraph after long-winded paragraph of frustration. Physically, I didn't treat her differently or hold grudges against her or love her any less during that period, but it probably seemed like it on screen.

I started wondering which approach would be more detrimental: writing about her in a way that could be perceived as hurtful? Or not writing about her at all? I regret that I chose to not write much about her at all. I don't necessarily want to look back at her early months and only see desperation and exhaustion, but that was reality. And now I don't even really have a record of reality, even if it was a reality I struggled through; a reality that stretched my marriage and clouded my judgment and repeatedly sucker-punched me in the gut.

Some of it, though, is just that Lucy is my second child. I had so much to write about when I had Asher because everything was so new and scary and exciting. Watching Lucy grow up has been just as – if not MORE - exciting as watching Asher was, but it's much less scary; much less worrisome. It's much less bloggable. I mean, you've been to this website before, right? So you know I'm not the kind of person who writes flowery descriptions of the intensely beautiful love I have for my amazingly wonderful baybeeeees. I don't write it and frankly, I don't read much of it, either. I have always held the belief that it is the trials and tribulations and the DIFFICULTIES of parenthood that brings people together and creates community, and not the eighteen back-to-back posts filled with declarations of mushy gushy love. Blogging, at least for me, is about admitting that I struggle; admitting that I am not perfect. And then putting it out there, in public, even if it invokes shame or humiliation. Most of the time, it elicits comments and emails brimming with thanks and commiseration.

The tricky part is knowing when I've said enough, and making sure I don't say too much. It's a balancing act, making sure one's words are honest and truthful for the benefit of this community of mothers and one's own sanity, while also ensuring they don't end up hurting the person they've been written about.

If Lucy someday reads all that I've written about her, my heart's most fervent, utmost desire is that no matter what she reads - the frustration, the anger, the hopelessness, the desperation, though all of it truthful – that I will have loved her so fiercely and exceptionally and wholly that those entries won't even give her pause. That she'll see them as a history, not as an explanation. That she'll never doubt. That she'll trust me. That she'll believe me; believe every single instance of the million upon millions of times I've told her that I love her and that I'll ALWAYS love her, no matter what, just because she's mine.

And I won't even say that part about how she should just wait until HER kids don't sleep and see how crazy she gets, I WON'T EVEN SAY THAT PART.

She turned 18 months old today, and not only does she sleep but she's brilliant and charming and amazing and beautiful and what would this world be like without her in it?

   
 
It's not a place I'd ever want to be. 

I think it's fitting that he chose to get in the pink car, not the red one.

Despite all my previous blogging experience, which is more than 99 percent positive, I was still pretty sure that I was pushing my luck by pressing Publish on that last post. I thought it sounded whiney and annoying, even if it was honest, but you guys came through AGAIN and not only did you leave kind, helpful comments, SOME OF YOU HAVE CHILDREN LIKE MINE. Oh what a balm to the soul it is to know that someone else out there has a kid who tries them just like mine tries me. Some of our days are more difficult than others, but I have some excellent ideas to go on and a list of preschools to wade through in the next few weeks.

Now, what did I promise you in return? OH YES. Grown men and a slip n slide!

This was our Big Idea over Memorial Day weekend. We had originally planned to go to a local beach for Memorial Day, but then my sister-in-law, OVERACHIEVER THAT SHE IS, had to go and be hospitalized for preterm labor the Friday before, so we called that trip off and instead, set up lawn chairs and a baby pool and a slip n slide in my parents' front yard. It was such a redneck set up, especially considering two of the three children in attendance napped for an enormous chunk of the afternoon and the other one went inside to watch a Thomas movie by himself because he's already planning to grow up and do things like build his own computer and avoid going outside at all costs, to maintain the pasty complexion that lends him technological credibility. So that means there were six fully-grown adults sitting in beach chairs around a baby pool and a plastic tarp in front yard of a nice suburban subdivision. I think CLASSY is the word you were looking for, were you not?

 
Anyway, the real kicker was that we set up everything in my parents' front lawn while they weren't home. My mom was out of town and my dad was playing golf, but would be returning in the early afternoon. My dad, the same man who NEVER let us have a slip n slide when we were kids, NEVER EVER NEVER because of his PRECIOUS GRASS and the fact that slipping and sliding down a big plastic tarp on top of it all day long would KILL IT.

If he'd always been afraid of what CHILDREN on a slip n slide could do to his lawn, I wasn't sure he would respond well to three grown men who, in addition to each weighing the equivalent of three or four children each, had strung two slip n slides together, then augmented them with a nice length of trash bags that they'd duct-taped together. Now we weren't going to just kill the grass with a slip n slide, we were going to kill it with THREE slip n slides TAPED TOGETHER. Three times the killing, without any of the permission required to do so!

My father has softened in his old age and did not care much about the dead grass, even though now, three weeks later, it's still kind of dead. Oh yes, it most certainly died, in the form of two big, brown skid marks down the side yard. At one point we moved the whole contraption over a few feet, thinking we were doing the right thing and possibly preventing lasting damage when really, we were just making it twice as bad. And then after a while, when just sliding down the slip n slide was getting too straightforward (this is the natural progression of things where men are concerned; if you don't believe me, you should turn on America's Funniest Videos once in a while – the entire show is men taking things one step too far), they decided to try to jump over chairs and into pools and that only happened twice because first they broke the chair and then they broke the pool.

I think they would have stopped way earlier if they knew what they looked like doing it.

  
And they never told me why they liked to go down the slide one right after the other, but I assumed it was some kind of Schmitts Gay water fantasy. (Thank you, YouTube user who filmed his television screen.)

Also, I give you the two photos below. He saw this on America's Funniest Videos, you guys, I know he did. But he is a MAN, so instead of seeing it as, "Huh, that sure seems idiotic," he saw it as "MUST REPLICATE AT FIRST OPPORTUNITY." Back off, ladies, he's taken, because I MARRIED HIM.

  

Existing separately

Linda wrote a post last week that made me want to WEEP with jealousy after I read it. She has a child (an adorable one, at that) who isn't even THREE yet who has started to enter the Giving Up of the Nap Phase and therefore, Linda is instituting a daily Quiet Time instead of forcing the kid to sleep. No big shocker there, right? Here's the part I'm weepingly jealous of: her kid stays in her room. And plays quietly by herself. And if she needs to pee? SHE WILL JUST GET UP AND PEE AND THEN GO BACK INTO HER ROOM. Well, okay, so that's the best case scenario. I think they just started this new routine, so I suppose it could all go down the toilet tomorrow, no pun intended. (Not that I'm hoping for that, despite my OBVIOUS SEETHING JEALOUSY at their happy arrangement.)

I have maybe mentioned it here before, like, say, A MILLION AND ELEVEN TIMES, that I do not have a very independent older child. Asher is COMPLETELY potty trained, but still demands that we help him pull his shorts up or down, and 90 percent of the time, he wants us to join him in the bathroom for the entire procedure. Sometimes he will announce that he needs to pee and that he can do it BY HIMSELF, but as soon as he gets into the bathroom, he folds under the enormous pressure of having to pull down his elastic-waist pants and starts whining for assistance. He would still gladly allow us to spoon-feed him anything remotely messy (yogurt, macaroni and cheese, ice cream) despite the fact that his 17-month-old sister is using a fork like a freaking pro right across the table from him. And he refuses – downright REFUSES – to be left alone anywhere in the house. And we have a very small house - I can actually see into every single room from the upstairs hallway. This would be a very bad house in which to make out with your teenage girlfriend, is what I'm saying. I SEE ALL.

He'll be four in October, so we're definitely in the thick of that same no-nap transition period that Linda's kid is (some weeks he takes four naps, some weeks two) but on the days he doesn't nap, I don't get a break. I suppose I could confine him to his bed (and I probably should, because he would stay in it if I told him to) but on the days when I know he won't sleep even if I can get him in there, I'd rather just bypass the whole “You don't WAAAAANT to take a rest!” argument and the wailing and whining and stomping that goes along with it. I like to pick my battles, and that isn't a battle I particularly like to fight. I have mentioned on Twitter before that something that is almost as bad as getting him to take a nap, is when he wakes up from one. He's crabby and angry and I can't get him to agree to do anything without jumping through hoops and then he doesn't go to sleep at night until almost 10 which is exactly when I happen to want to hit the sack. Not a lot of down time built in there, you know?

But he is not the kind of kid who is going to play quietly in his room. SIGH. If I want peace and quiet, I have to turn on the television for him, and I don't WANT to turn on the television for peace and quiet, you know? We already have a set routine where we watch two shows in the morning and another while I fix dinner and I don't want him to spend another hour or two in front of the TV just so I can get a break. I mean, occasionally, yes, it's fine. I don't want anyone thinking I am anti-TV because TV SAVES LIVES. But I DO want him to learn how to exist separately from me. I don't want to be at his beck and call every hour of the day, which I currently am. I don't want to walk into the utility room to switch the clothes from the washer to the dryer and hear a panicked voice coming from the living room, which is SIX ENTIRE FEET AWAY: “Mama, I don't want to be here by myself. Mama, are you coming back in a minute? Mama, where are you going? Mama! Mama? MAMA!”

I struggle with whether this is a temperament thing that I am unlikely to be able to change about him, or whether this is a behavior I can teach him to correct. And if it IS something I can teach him, how do I go about doing that? Or is it just a phase? And then sometimes, I worry that he's totally manipulating me. After all, he is perfectly fine being left alone to fall asleep at bedtime, and then sometimes I need to dry my hair in the morning so I take Lucy upstairs with me and leave him in front of Team Umizoomi and he's also totally fine with that. (Well, until the show ends and he remembers that I went upstairs, which is when he whines pitifully about how he doesn't want to be by himself and how he wants me to come downstairs and join him and I say no, I have to do some things upstairs and then he pitches a huge fit.) (Yes. It happens often.) I just have to figure out how to get him to a point where he can be alone in his room/somewhere else in the house while I get some things done. Any suggestions? Seriously, ANY? I mean, HONESTLY, you guys, sometimes, even while Dave is home and RIGHT THERE, I try to take a shower and Asher and Lucy are throwing themselves against the bathroom door and YELLING AT ME FOR LOCKING IT.

I don't mean to really complain, because my kids are wonderful and all that, but this issue is my Button. This is why I yell the most, because this kid wants me by his side at all times of the day to the point where it becomes a hassle to try to move from one floor to the other without running smack into a full-fledged tantrum about it. He doesn't want to remain upstairs by himself, and he doesn't want to come downstairs with me. And it makes me SERIOUSLY frustrated, and SERIOUSLY angry and I am so tired of dealing with it. SO! TIRED!

Not to mention that a little bit more independence might make it a TAD BIT easier to make great strides towards Nighttime Potty Training. You guys, he still doesn't get out of bed by himself. EVER. Not in the morning, not at naptime. He always ALWAYS waits for us to come and get him. How am I going to get him to get out of bed and PEE?

Be kind and sweet and helpful in the comments and I will show you a video of grown (shirtless) men using a makeshift slip n slide in my parents' front yard over Memorial Day. (GARBAGE BAGS AND DUCT TAPE. I KID YOU NOT.)

Other things that can be steam trains: Shopping carts, strollers, laundry baskets

One thing I DO love about three-year-olds are their imaginations. Asher doesn't even have a particularly zealous one but I could listen to him give train play-by-plays while he lies on his belly on the floor all afternoon. I find it particularly interesting that most of the plots and dialogues he comes up with are gleaned from books we've read and television shows we've watched – I don't know if that's pretty standard for his age and gender, or whether he's just destined for the left-brain fast track and lacks a strong creative side. My niece, who is just a few months younger than Asher, is capable of coming up with all kinds of bizarre stuff (lies, really) and I am frequently amazed by the world of difference between how their little weensy brains work. I don't think Asher could come up with something other than Actual Reality for all the Thomas trains in the world.

What I really find hilarious is what he chooses to imagine. Like, we'll be driving in the car, right? And he'll loudly announce THIS CAR IS A STEAM TRAIN and then tell me all about how the steam train is running out of coal! and he needs to shovel more coal in to make more steam! and could I roll the window down for him so he could shovel in the coal and oh! look out there's a cow on the tracks and Mama, could you blow the whistle so the cow will move?

I'm all, Waitwaitwait, why aren't YOU blowing the whistle? And he gets all irritated with me, and says, Mama, YOU are the one driving the train. And I'm all, SERIOUSLY? So you can imagine ALLLLLLLL that other stuff – cows on the tracks and shoveling coal into the firebox and the very minor thing about how this Honda CR-V is actually a STEAM TRAIN – but you can't imagine that YOU'RE the driver and not me? So I “blow the whistle” by which I mean I make a wooo! wooo! noise with my mouth and he gets frustrated with me and says, NO THAT'S NOT RIGHT, it's like this, wooo wooo wooooooooooo and I swear, you guys, it is all I can do not to bang my head on the steering wheel WHILE THE CAR IS MOVING because really? You'd rather correct my woo-ing than do it YOURSELF to PERFECTION? Then he asks me to ring the bell. Occasionally he yells at me to STOP THE TRAAAAAAAIN!!!!! and the first 15 times I would go into this lengthy explanation about how we can't stop because we're on a road and other cars – I mean, steam trains – could hit us and blah-de-blah blah but I stopped doing that and now I just say SORRY, but the POLICE will get us if I do that, so why don't you look out the window for horses or deer?

He does not WANT to look out the window for horses or deer, just so you know. Either we play Steam Train or we pout.

I really don't enjoy pretending to be the driver of a steam train, frankly, and today I was concentrating so hard on getting my train whistle right the first time that I almost DROVE INTO ANOTHER CAR. That's exactly the kind of police report that makes it into the media: “Woman pretending to blow a train whistle at fault for collision.” GREAT.

Yesterday he talked about trains so much and for so long that I actually begged him to stop talking. And I remembered, back when Asher was turning two and still not putting two words together, how I promised I would never say something like that because I had been waiting for him to talk for SO LONG (he was easily two-and-a-half years old before he said his first sentence) but I have to take back that promise because now he talks CONSTANTLY and it is driving me bonkers insane. I suppose I wouldn't mind so much if we talked about anything other than machinery that stopped being relevant back in the 1800s but around here it is All Trains, All The Time, except for a few pockets of precious, precious time where we talk about Team Umizoomi.

Dave and I went out last night and we were talking about how much we were looking forward to being to go out to dinner as a family in the future, when our kids might actually stay in their chairs and eat the food we put in front of them and we can all have productive conversations, like the kind that don't revolve around whether Percy and Thomas need a bath after getting stuck in the mud, but maybe about what they did in class that day or learned in Sunday school. Doesn't that sound nice? I thought it did too, and for a few quiet moments I had this tiny little perfect-family fantasy, and then I remembered the Actual Reality of My Youth, which was that neither my brother or I or anyone we actually knew ever WANTED to talk to their parents about school or their friends or anything else once they hit nine years old. “Oh, our kids will be different,” said Dave.

(Yeah, I had a good laugh over that one, too.)

Hey, in ultra-squeeable-super-exciting news, we are hosting The Blathering again this year, this time in Chicago, from November 5th through the 7th! For those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, the brief version is that last year a bunch of us who, for the most part, only knew each other through blogs and comments, decided we really didn't care to attend a blogging conference to learn monetize our websites or market ourselves more effectively, we just wanted to hang out, talk and shop. So nearly 20 of us from all over the country gathered in Sacramento, California for a fantastic weekend, and it was SO RIDICULOUSLY fantastic that we're doing it again this year. Things are a little different this time around (there will be a registration deadline and fee so that we can plan a couple of activities more effectively), but the official website will have all the details. And you can always ALWAYS email me or another of the organizers with questions (although try not to bombard Elizabeth, since she's having a baby in like, three hours or something). We would love to have you join us!