She Laughs at the Days

My wonderful genius husband gets up and goes to work everyday even though he doesn’t want to, even though he is tired and sick and his back won’t stop hurting and it is raining out side and he has to work in it. “Nuff said” except there’s more. When I first got married I fully expected to pull my weight in the income department for a while. My solid mid-western upbringing allows me no rest if I’m not “contributing”. Add to this the conflicts I viewed between my father and mother over the fact that she chose to stay at home and care for us, and he chose to follow his dream of becoming a professional artist by starting a studio in our basement, and the very little money that resulted. I’m proud of my mom for sticking to her guns and making her kids priority, and I’m proud of my dad for pursuing his dreams, I just wish I hadn’t had to live through the sometimes hell that resulted from our pecuniary situation and the way they both despised each other because of it. My mom eventually cav

Six is the number of times I have cleaned pee out of the carpet in the past two days. The girl decided to forget how to use the potty yesterday and instead go wherever she chooses. Once while sitting on my lap nursing. Once after sitting down on the ground next to the kitchen so a stream could puddle on the carpet and spray the linoleum all at once. Another time she stood in the bedroom next to my bed staring stupidly at a spot on the wall as it ran down her pants and into more carpet. (I am a walking commercial for Nature’s Miracle; it really works.) But she's still learning how to do this and I have some patience for her. Then, this morning, the boy comes into my room to tell me that he pooed, so I go to help him, which is when I notice the tiny spatters of liquid poo all over the bathroom floor. He apparently mistook a little diarrhea for a fart and it came out on the floor. Slightly irritated but realizing it's not really his fault, I help him to wipe up all of the spla

Conversation with the Girl while she's pooping on the potty. I go poo mommymommyIgopooIgopoomommy..... (distracted silence) Mommy! I go Poo! Yes honey you're going poo. Good job. I don't eat poo mommy. hmm? I don't eat poo mommy, it's nasty. Yes poo is yucky, we don't eat poo. [triumphantly] I don't yike poo, iss yucky. [Giggling] Oh... mommy, I go poo. MmHmm. I go poo in potty. Good job sweety. I go POOOO!!!! [sighing] Are you finished? Nope. Okay, call mommy when you're done so we can wipe. [leaves bathroom] MOMMY!!! I have MORE pooo. Are you finished. Uh huh. Okay get up. Mommy I goed poo. I all done. Talking to the Boy Mommy are you a lady. Yes honey I'm a lady. But I'm not because I'm a BOY! Yes, you are a boy. And my sister is a little girl. Mmhmm And daddy isn't a lady he's a MAN! That's right. Mommy why aren't the Girl a boy? Because she's a girl. B

My kids are still naked. I bathed them this morning and then it is their job to get themselves dressed. Some days they do this right away, especially my two year old. If she thinks we are going somewhere exciting she will go and get her pull-ups on, and her pants and shirt and shoes and sweater and purse and put her babies in the stroller and wait at the door. I of course haven’t even gotten to the shower part of the day yet and am nowhere near dressed. Some days she forgets the clothing part and heads straight for the shoes and purse and babies, which looks really funny. My son will stay naked all day if I don’t insist on clothing at some point. Except for the few days he has surprised me by getting dressed before I am even out of bed, one day he even put on underpants. (He never wears underpants; he prefers to free ball it like his father.) We had made a big deal about how when he stops peeing in his sleep he’ll get a huge big boy pants party and I guess that got him excited en

It’s been awhile I should post something. I wrote something last Thursday night and I didn’t post it because some rational part of my brain was telling me that maybe I should wait a little bit and reread before showing that one to people. The reason emerged the next day. I was in the throes of PMS when I wrote it. I’m still surprised and knocked sideways every month by this hormonal rollercoaster that sneaks up on me. Sneaks because I am kind of new to this monthly cycle thing after two babies and breast feeding, I went almost four years without one and didn’t start again until just recently. I feel like I’m 14 again. I guess it’s time to have another baby. We haven’t yet because although I’ve reached the point where the whole misery of 9 months of sickness and a year of recovery afterward are just a hazy sentimental blur, my genius husband’s memories of me being moody and sad and bitchy and needy and then dealing with post partum depression after the last one have not become fon

I have this fantasy that things were easier for women in my position before the advent of women’s lib. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy the almost equal footing with men that I enjoy in our culture. I’m glad that there are women running companies and pursuing careers and using their minds and talents in ways that are interesting and satisfying to them. I just think it must have been much easier to be a stay at home mom let’s say one hundred years ago. Let me explain. Assuming that I even received an education, the fact that I am intelligent, was a good student, and talented in the arts would have placed little more expectation upon me than to marry well or at least comfortably. I would not, and neither would my instructors, have put any pressure on myself to do anything with my education other than marry and produce children whom I could educate. I was however schooled on the heels of the triumphant woman’s liberation movement of the 70’s into which I was born. My mother, though she elec

Some people make lists of things they would like to get done before they die, or turn a certain age, or get married. I just have a running list of things I would like to be able to do everyday before I go to bed at night. 1.) Rinse with Lysterine TWICE a day as the directions on the bottle say I should do, and wait a full half hour before eating or drinking. 2.) Floss. 3.) Do 15 minutes of a cardio workout and then stretch for another ten. 4.) Shower 5.) Apply moisturizer to legs and arms and face before getting dressed. (My kids must be getting older, two years ago this would have been far too much to attempt.) 6.) Do a little bit of work on the sweater I am knitting for my daughter so that it is finished before she outgrows it, and before the California summer hits and makes sweaters pointless. 7.) Eat a real lunch with a salad in it and not leftover peanut butter crusts that I find laying around when I clean up after the kids. 8.) Take my kids outside to play and be silly.

Boys play strange games. At least they are strange to me. The games my son has been playing with his uncles, and his dad, usually involve cutting things off. They use lengths of foam as swords, or light sabers, and beat on each other and then narrate the amount of damage they are doing to the other person. One will cut off the others leg and declare them self the winner but the other will counter by cutting off his opponent’s head, to which the other will reply with disembowelment, and it goes on and on. They have also introduced him to a variation of “I got your nose” that involves removing any body part and pretending that you can’t walk because uncle A has your legs, eyes, whatever. The Boy has been playing this game with the Girl and sometimes she gets really worried because she can’t tell that it’s just pretend. One night I put her to bed and she said to me in a little worried voice, “Boy take my nose.” I helped her to feel her nose and realize that it was still there, and the

The Boy is an incredibly built little guy. He has the kind of muscle definition grownup male supermodels would envy if they saw him. There is no fat on him anywhere and every muscle he has stands out. It’s pretty impressive. From time to time we will get him to show off his muscles for us. He loves to do this so he’ll take off his shirt and do this funny little boy imitation of a bicep flex and we will all exclaim over how strong he is and how big his muscles are. It makes him so proud. Today the Girl stopped in the hallway and pulled up her shirt. While rubbing her chubby little girl tummy she said, “Oh, I have stong mussos!” “Do you have big muscles like the Boy?” “Uh huh, I hab big big mussos in my back too.” She turns around and points to it for me. The Boy hears us and comes running out, strips off his shirt, and starts flexing so I can admire him too.

1.) Decide that you need a new bra after going almost three years without purchasing one, (except for the splurge on the really nice nursing bra two years ago after the second baby.) 2.) Get excited that there is Fredericks of Hollywood in the strip mall near your house, decide to walk there with the kids. 3.) Enter a sexy lingerie boutique with a 4-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl. 4.) Ask the nice sales rep named Dee for black bras in a 34DD. (This is why I shop at Fredericks, they carry my size.) 5.) Enter the change room with previously mentioned boy and girl in tow. 6.) Stop for a moment and consider whether your boy is now too old to watch you try on bras. 7.) Realize that he still sees your breasts all the time when walking in on you in the shower, while changing, nursing his sister and that he may as well watch you change yet again. 8.) Pull first bra off of the hanger as little girl reaches up, “Mommy, I yant it on.” 9.) Hand her your bra to play with as your son chi

When I met my husband he somehow managed to make me think that he was different from the typical male. I do not think this was intentional on his part, definitely not malicious, but it happened nevertheless. I am also to blame for my incredible naiveté and unrealistic optimism. We met a week before he was scheduled to leave for a year and go to India. He got on that plane with the thought that he may marry me when he returned. So he wrote me long, intimate, romantic letters online for 8 months. He wrote poetry, he gushed, he was a man in the initial stages of love. I thought it was a sign of things to come. (All the married women reading this are snorting into their coffee right now.) He expressed interest in things that I talked about through out our courtship and engagement. He held forth on topics that I now would not try to drag him into a conversation about unless my life depended on it because I now know they are often tedious for him. And so I imagined that he would go on caring

Today the Boy asked me to make him food because he was hungry, for the tenth time since breakfast. Kid must be on a growth spurt. Since it was after four and I was about to start dinner prep I told him to wait until dinner. After the usual round of “but I’m hungry now" and several renewed requests hoping the answer would change this time, or that he would wear me down with persistence, and the attempts at fake tears once or twice, he walked away and I thought that was the end of it. He comes back into the room a few minutes later, a solemn look on his face and announces, “Mommy, if you don’t make me a quesadilla I will stop loving you and I will never love you again.” The kid is four, where the heck did he get that? Do they think it up all by themselves, or do they learn it from someone? As far as I know he has never heard any one say that. He didn’t get the quesadilla.