Back in the saddle. Or potty seat, as it were.

Remember this post? Ha! What a joke. Unfortunately, the joke is on mommy. Since that post, almost a year ago, Harper has managed to make zero progress, unless we really want to be honest and assess negative progress, in which case her progress has been impressive, indeed.

Oh, I'm sorry. Harper just walked in and told me she pooped in her underpants. Hang on.

(I swear on Baby Jesus that she really did come in and say that when I was typing that.)

So I don't know if Harper has inherited my distaste for public restrooms (which borders on an actual phobia), but if that's the case, then it wouldn't make sense that it would carry over to home, too. It also wouldn't make sense because despite never using a potty for anything other than dropping plastic toys into, she still wants to visit and sit bare bottom on any public toilet she sees. I think that part might just be so she can get me to face my fears, because as I hiss a constant refrain of "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING! Do not TOUCH that!", she does things like put her hands right on the toilet seat, drags her hands along the walls, shoves her hands in the toilet paper dispenser, and asks (via demonstration) what that funny box is on the wall next to the potty, and is that for those band-aids mommies put in their pants? This is all while I'm cursing myself for being duped into yet another unproductive trip to a public restroom and wondering if it's appropriate to carry a spray bottle of bleach with me for exactly these moments.

If that's not enough to make you refill your birth control, then this most certainly will be, and if I had a tag of "Too Much Information", it would absolutely apply to this post, so I highly recommend not reading this if you're settling into a meal of any sort.

Last week we went to a birthday party at what can only be described as a VERY SWANKY country club. We walk in and get handed our towels, walk past the restaurants and main pool, walk past the outdoor bar, and then down a terraced lawn to the secondary pool, which is absolutely amazing. Slides that are three stories tall, beach entry, gorgeous lounge chairs and umbrellas and outdoor fans, and teenage lifeguards that look marginally less bored than the ones at my YMCA. We're playing in the water for a little bit, and then Harper decides to throw a big fit and refuse to do anything other than sit in my lap and be sullen to anyone who tries to speak to her. (This is partially because, I'm sure, that the party, held from 12-2PM at the VERY SWANKY country club, decided to provide us with the Very Swanky nourishment of water or tea, which was delivered by waiters, but without a side of chicken fingers, so tempers were starting to flare). About 1:30, Harper decides to get back in the pool again, and is playing happily, probably because she needed a few minutes in the Very Swanky pool water to really get her bowels moving. She walks out and happily announces to anyone in earshot (Ha! I typed "earshit" until my browser corrected me) that she had pooped and needed someone to clean her up. Nobody else volunteered, so I ended up gritting my teeth and walking Harper to the bathroom to deal with not only my hatred of public restrooms, but even worse, a dirty swim diaper. I'm surprised nobody had a clown in there, or maybe my 10th grade Biology teacher, just to really top things off. Maybe if I could have driven over a bridge to get to the bathroom, I could have completed my trifecta of Things I Hate the Most.

Once we get in the bathroom, even I, veteran of dirty swim diapers, was astonished at the mess confronting me. I honestly had no idea what to do. It was EVERYWHERE, like she exploded or something. I had a pack of wipes and her towel, and those were my only tools. After I had exhausted the wipes, with no noticeable improvement, I went to paper towel after paper towel, soaked in the sink, wipe, throw away. (And even in the midst of this, I was thinking 'thank GOD that I got a single bathroom unit, so I have access to the sink and nobody is here to bear witness/ call the Very Swanky country club police.") Finally I remembered that right outside the bathroom was a water cooler with a supply of plastic cups, so my final effort was to stand her up naked over the floor drain and pour cups of water on her, which seemed effective enough.

I washed her suit out in the sink, and balled it into some paper towels. I had one diaper with me, so I put it on her, and then balled up the Very Swanky towel so that only the clean part was showing, all 14 square inches of it. I wiped up the bathroom as best I could, cementing forever in my head that public restrooms are the most horrid places on earth. And then I held Harper's hand and walked out of the restroom, carrying my disgusting load of, well, crap, and towing a three year old dressed in a diaper and crocs (fake crocs, at that!), which is about as un-swanky as you can get. I found a towel bin, and disposed of the Very Swanky towel, although it was better served going into an incinerator, but I figure (hope) that they probably use some (a lot) of Very Swanky bleach when they wash those things.

The rest of the party had left by this point, kindly taking my bag with them, so I got to extend our walk of shame through both pools and into the restaurant where I could get my hands on Harper's cover-up. (And as I'm putting it on, I notice there are still flecks of, well, you know, down her back, and wonder if there is any limit to the amount of shame one person can feel). I assume at this point that even if I had an extra $60,000 laying around to pay my initiation, that I have probably guaranteed I will never get an invitation to become a member, because Harper is obviously swank-deficient.

We washed our hands again and then sat down to 10 cupcakes for the 8 kids. I guess the 12 adults were supposed to split the other two cupcakes, but I gave up my share because my appetite was pretty much gone.

We finally left and Harper declared it a wonderful party, but I think the moral here is clear. If you have a party at a mealtime, you should feed people, or someone might poop in your $60,000 share of your pool.

Problem Child

So, I was embracing our new routine, all ready to start on the next few years of Aaron being in school while Harper's at home, figuring out how to spend our time. I was thinking of what I'd write for blog posts, maybe something about how I got totally immersed in teenage vampire love stories, or how I got even more immersed in reading bloggers who summarize teenage vampire love stories. Maybe I'd write about my new goal to perfect the application of self tanner, so that my friend Cindy doesn't look at my streaky ankles, shake her head, and sigh.

But then, after a solid three days at school, I got an email from Aaron's kindergarten teacher. Here's an excerpt:

Im sorry to bother you on a Tuesday evening, but I wanted to bring something to
your attention. As we are transitioning in the building (mainly as we are coming
in from playground) Aaron i having issues keeping his hands to himself. On
Friday we had a minor pushing incident and today Aaron was pushing and hitting
the boy in front of him. When i speak with him he can tell me that his hands
belong to himself but he struggles with doing so. Can you please speak with him
about this? I don't him or anyone else to get hurt.

Isn't that nice? And in the two days since that email, Aaron has contined to not only push and hit other kids, but he's escalated his desired target number, since today I asked how many kids he hit/ pushed, and his estimate was "probably ten". And it's not like I'm not addressing it; short of medicating him prior to getting on the bus, I am at a complete and total loss, to say nothing of being so angry and humiliated I could scream. He's currently sitting in his room while I grit my teeth and try to take deep breaths.

Kindergarten is totally kicking my ass.

Bathing Beauty

I read somewhere once that if your kids don't humiliate you at least once a day, then you're not getting your money's worth. There is no question that my kids were a bargain in that department, because if we leave the house, I'm guaranteed at least two public humiliations, and that's on a slow day.

We were at the pool today and the kids were fine, but the longer we're there, the sassier Harper gets. Eventually she was spending an average of two minutes in Time Out for every one minute she was in the pool. While she was sitting next to me right by the pool edge, she was amusing herself doing whatever; I wasn't really paying attention since I was watching Aaron. At least, I wasn't paying attention until a little girl about 6 or 7 walks out of the pool, looks at Harper, and makes a face that would lead one to believe she had seen something unpleasant. And I look at Harper and realize that she has barfed up the gallon of pool water she had consumed, as well as the lunch she had eaten shortly beforehand. And it's all down her stomach and crotch, all over the chair, and all over the pool deck.

Hoo, boy, let me tell you, you haven't LIVED until you get the opportunity to wrangle a towel out from under your soggy (and, of course, dirty diapered) toddler and get on your hands and knees wiping up vomit from concrete, calling over your five year old because you have to get out of there RIGHT NOW. Because as other pool moms know, when someone barfs in the pool, the entire thing is shut down for an hour and everyone has to get out, which makes you not very popular at all. Since no barf had actually gotten into the water, I don't know how it would have been handled, but I didn't particularly want to find out. So I wiped up the barf and took Senorita Soggy Stink and Captain Yell and hightailed it out of there and didn't notify a single authority, because the only thing that could have made this more humiliating was me having to tell the perpetually bored and annoyed 17 year old lifeguard that we had a vomit issue that needed to be addressed.

At least let me defend the dirty diaper- I didn't *know* it was dirty, it must have happened while she was in time out, maybe in the midst of all of puking (that I wasn't paying attention to. Where's that mother of the year application again?) Clearly, though, that wasn't the time to deal with it; we needed to make a speedy exit, not get caught in the locker room where we would have potentially been lynched if the pool was, in fact, closed. Thank heavens we live just a couple of miles from the pool, because by the time this diaper got home, I was hanging my head out the window and gagging, and I rationalized that while I had committed a parenting sin by running out on public puke, my penance was addressing that diaper (and I'm not going to go into details, but any parent who has dealt with swim diapers should understand the mechanics of the nastiness I was dealing with).

So, you might want to wait until it rains to visit our pool. Or at the very least, wear your shoes on the pool deck. I'm sorry for the situation, but I know if I had to do it over again, I'd make the same coward choice, so my apologies to anyone who runs into my kids and their blinder-wearing, rationalizing mother.

Selective Memory

Last summer we had a severe drought, and trying to be a responsible eco-citizen, I told Aaron precisely once "if it's just tinkle, don't flush it". Once! I realized as soon as the words came out of my mouth that it would create more problems than it was worth to save a few gallons of water, so I told him "nevermind that, just flush every time". He hears "please keep lips together when you chew" forty times a day and hasn't mastered it, but he sure clung to that "don't flush it" suggestion.

My apologies in advance to whatever you might find in our toilets if you should visit.

Code Harper

Thursday afternoon Aaron came home from daycare with a fever of 103 something. Friday morning, it was up to 104.7, and he was really out of it- confused, disoriented, talking nonsense. That freaked me out, so I called the pediatrician and they told me what to do, what to look for, and what would warrant a doctor visit. So I drugged him up all day Friday and we hung around the house. Saturday morning he woke up, another 104.5 fever, drugged him again. Sunday morning, more of the same. Once he hit 72 hours with a fever, we needed to go to the doctor, so this morning I took his temperature, and again, 104.6. Called the pediatrician, got an appointment, and rushed getting Harper up and in the car, throwing a pop-tart and some milk at her to keep her quiet. Nothing like keeping her on a healthy diet to keep *her* immune system up, right?

Aaron was kind of enjoying this attention- the breakfasts in bed, the back scratches, the limitless popsicles, and finally a doctor visit that revolved all around him. Once we got to the doctor, he changed his mind about enjoying his patient status once he realized there was going to be a needle involved. My ears are still ringing from the hysterics.

I should note that at this point I'm going moderately insane. I've been stuck in the house with the kids for three solid days, and the best I can tell, they're training for the Screaming and Arguing Olympics, in which they would surely take gold. With each new chorus of "NO, I'M NOT!", "YES, YOU ARE!", I can feel my brain liquefy just a little bit more. I was tempted to withhold the Tylenol and ibuprofen from Aaron just so he'd get all feverish again and maybe calm down.

At the pediatrician, after swabs and questions and bloodwork and an hour and a half of keeping the littles occupied in an 8x10 room, we had no answers as to what is making Aaron so sick (although miraculously not lowering his volume). I was given a prescription for an antibiotic, off to Target we go.

Of course the mindnumbing bickering starts before I even get them into their carseats, and driving to Target I felt like I was in a fog, and starting to really get depressed that my role as a parent seems to involve nothing more than fixing meals and saying "stop it. ignore her. come back here. leave him alone. be quiet." Waiting for the prescription confirms this, because as I spend approximately 60 seconds talking with another mom, they manage to get unruly to the point of literally dragging each other around on the floor by their arms and running behind the counter at the snack bar. (And, of course, screaming. Always the screaming.) By the time I go to pay for the prescription, I'm absolutely numb. So numb I feel like I barely even registered the shock of how much the antibiotic cost. But I must have been somewhat shocked, because for a half second I apparently gave all of my attention to the ridiculous number on the register at the pharmacy. And when that half second was up, I looked up, and Harper was gone.

Aaron said "she ran off! she went down this way!", and I start looking down aisle after aisle, calling her name louder and louder each time. Within a minute, I'm calling so loudly and frantically that the Target employees (whom I like to think of as family, I'm there so much) figure out what's going on and I hear them call through their radios that there's a CODE YELLOW, and I can hear it echoing through all of the radios around me. Other customers are coming up to me and telling me they just saw her, she went that way, so I head that way, and someone tells me they saw her go the other way, and it seemed like everywhere I turned someone was telling me they had seen her somewhere else. At this point, I am in full on panic, and halfway afraid I'm about to black out. I'm screaming her name and hysterically crying, to the point that when someone asked what she looked like I couldn't even speak, except to choke out "she's little, and she's got a little ponytail on top, and she's without me". I'm just walking down the aisles, sobbing and yelling her name at the top of my lungs with Aaron running next to me asking why I'm crying, and a Target employee right behind me, assuring me we'll find her. I hear crackles over the radios that "we've found her in the men's department", and then "she's in electronics", and then "oh, wait, now she's in the infant section". If you're as familiar with Target as I am, you should know how far those sections are from the pharmacy, and part of me is absolutely horrified at how far she got in that short amount of time, and some little tiny part of me thinks "yep, that's definitely her". I finally walked up to infants and there is a human dragnet of Target employees trying to corral her. When I saw her I went from hysterical to absolutely mortified, although way in the back of my brain I was thinking "see? you guys had a hard time pinning her down with 12 of you! do you know how hard it is with just one of me?"

Harper was thoroughly annoyed that her adventure was over. I picked her up and carried her out, still crying (me, not her), embarrassed at how hysterical I had gotten, and sobbing out thanks to every Target employee I saw. (And at this point they're all still ridiculously nice, offering me help, offering to get me a cart, patting my shoulder and telling me it's okay. I should send them all a Target giftcard.)

We walked out to my car and as I'm tightening the straps on Aaron's carseat, I realize he's been silent for almost 5 minutes, which is unheard of. Probably because no matter what that poor kid does, Harper manages to steal the show.

Nipped in the Bud

Harper has all sorts of "skeeter bites" on her legs and arms. She spends time counting them and showing them off to anyone who will look. The other day she was sitting on my lap with no shirt on while counting her skeeter bites, and looked at her chest and tummy to see if she had any there.

I should add here that I hate the word "nipples". When I was in middle school we had to read out loud in health class, and I got the section where I had to say- in front of a class of 7th graders- nipples. I hated the word before then, but I think that really sealed the deal.

So Harper looks at these two unusual patches of flesh on her chest, and asks "what's that? what is that on my chest?"

Maybe because of my disdain for the word, and my reluctance at hearing it come out of the mouth of a two year old, I couldn't decide if I actually wanted to tell her what they were. I've never been a parent to use proper terminology for body parts with little kids. I'm sure I'm harming them in some way, but I don't really care, because I don't want to hear anyone other than a gynecologist say "vagina", and even then it makes me uncomfortable.

So I asked her "hmm, what do you think they are?"

And she thought for a minute, and said "I think it's schmutz. One, two schmutz", and I laughed out of relief that I got a cute story as opposed to having to say the word nipple.

The next day we were at the pool, and I'm watching Harper from a few feet away have a conversation with one of the dads that was sitting in the pool. She was looking at him pretty closely, and as I walk over to stop her from interrogating the poor man, she leans over and pets the man on his tummy, which is already weird and bordering on inappropriate.

And as I'm a step away, she reaches up and grabs his nipples, and tells him "Look! You got schmutz, too!"

The Oldest Profession

Being a contractor, you end up more at the mercy of the economy than most people are comfortable with. That being the case, you're willing to do work you normally wouldn't have considered before. Work that might be completely out of the question under normal circumstances becomes a necessary evil, something you just try to endure and not dwell on too much.

Namely, working for your husband.

Jason and I have one of those partnership types of marriages. He tends to be more of a silent partner, largely because between me and the kids, he doesn't have much of a chance to get a word in anyhow, but he's pretty agreeable and doesn't seem to be bothered by it. If he has an opinion about something that differs from mine, he'll state his case, I'll inform him how wrong he is, and it becomes a fun argument to bring up every few weeks when things get boring. He can think whatever he wants, and I don't have to agree with him or even respect his opinion, because he's not the boss of me, right?

He wasn't, until now. And now he is legitimately, irrefutably, annoyingly, the boss of me for the near future.

Jason is such an easygoing person, and he's actually taken really well to this "boss" thing, has been very kind and patient and calm, and I am mildly ashamed to admit that I don't like it one little bit. And I have one reason, and one reason only, and that's my massive, overwhelming ego.

I used to think it was really sexy when he'd spout off his engineering stuff. I'd ask him to tell me the equation for determining torque or momentum practically as foreplay. But the reason I find it so appealing that he understands these things is because I absolutely do not, and so when he tries to explain something science-y to me that I'm being paid to understand and then execute, and I don't understand, I get so frustrated I don't know what to do with myself. Well, I do know what to do with myself; I fly off the handle and roll my eyes and revert to every bad relationship habit I have developed in our decade together. I manage to goad him with all of them, until he says "maybe we should walk away from this for a while?", which is his calm and rational way of saying "you are an absolute lunatic, and I'm going to do something more appealing, like pick up the dog poop from the yard."

Desperate times.

The forgotten child

Well, you'd think so according to the posts on here. Trust me, when she's around, she's brilliant at making her presence known.

Anyhow, I have yet another kid who's a talker (although they come by it honestly). The unfortunate part is that far more of your family life is revealed to strangers than you'd really care for.

Her daycare teachers were telling us that Harper was giving them the lowdown on everyone in our family.
"Daddy's at work!"
"That's right! Do you know where Mommy is?"
"Mommy's sleeping."
"What about Aaron?"
"Aaron's in trouble."