Adios amigos

This has been a very trying week, to say the least. But it ended on a high note: both of the children were in bed, asleep, at 6:50 p.m. They have never in their lives gone to bed before 7 p.m., but because Jack took no nap and Emmie took only a morning nap and they both woke up before 7 this morning, this unprecedented step was necessary.

I thank everyone for their comments re: The Terrible Threes. Clearly, someone needs to get the word out that 3 sucks ass. It won't get better no matter what you do and you should just muddle through. Now we know why previous generations of stay-at-home moms were drinking at 4 in the afternoon.

So in honor of that, I plan to spend 10 days drinking during the day and not parenting my children. On Monday, Josh and I will jet off to the Maldives. We'll be staying here and to say I am excited would be an understatement. Seven days of relaxing, reading, lolling on beach chairs, snorkeling off our overwater bungalow and sleeping in.

We'll also do a two-day stop in Dubai on the way there and one day on the way back. I am pretending I'm just visiting a desert and not the Middle East. Because thinking about visiting the Middle East makes me a teeny bit nervous. I know, I know -- it's Dubai, not Gaza. But still. The white girl with the camera might look a little out of place.

So posting will be sporadic the next two weeks. I might feel compelled to post a picture of paradise, just because, but otherwise I am taking a vacation from blogging. I shall return March 6, rested and revitalized, which will be a big help for both my parenting and my creativity.

At my wit's end

I heard all about how the Terrible 3s are the new Terrible 2s. About how awful 3 is because the child, he has an opinion and the need to express it and the ability to express it. Couple that with the insistence on doing everything himself from putting on his shoes (thank you Velcro) to brushing his own teeth (hello, tooth decay) to deciding how many minutes he will play before gracing us with his presence at the table ("One minute, Mommy, one minute") to getting in his own carseat (which only happens after he first crawls in the front seat and opens the passenger door and raises my blood pressure 75 points) and you have a recipe for Mommy Meltdown.

Three might kill me.

Oh the battles we have had lately. A perfect example: Jack fools around before naptime with the same routine everyday. We go upstairs and he morphs into Devil Child on the way up the stairs. He starts laughing and runs into the bathroom, slamming the door. He runs the length of the room to the tub and then emits a high-pitched scream. I ask him nicely to get on the potty and he runs by me, screaming, out into the hall. I pick him up and bring him back in the bathroom, where he goes noodle on me and refuses to stand up. I end up pulling his pants off and telling him to stand up and get on the potty. He refuses. I pick him up and put him on, but he slides off screaming, "NO, JACK DO IT." After he refuses again, I pick him up and take him in his room where I start to put his naptime diaper on him. He then freaks out and says "Pee potty! Pee potty!" so I take him back in the bathroom and he finally climbs on and does the job. Washing hands is more of the same, and ends with me physically pinning him between me and the counter and shoving his hands under the water. After that, he runs into his room and I finally get him in bed.

At the end of this 10-minute process, I am exhausted physically and mentally. I can't keep butting heads with him all day and I am coming to the realization that I am never going to win the battle with a 3-year-old. This is the boy who chanted, literally nonstop, for 90 minutes at naptime, "Mommy come in." He has a one-track mind and will not be deterred.

I can't take it anymore. It's like this with almost everything we do. I have tried everything: reward charts, timeouts, positive reinforcement, 1-2-3 Magic. Nothing works. They say to be consistent, but it's hard to be consistent when you don't see results. When your child laughs at you and runs out of timeout for the fifth time in three minutes, you just feel defeated. Ditto with him checking the reward chart to see if he has one more star to waste on some bad behavior before whalloping his sister. (Yes, he actually looked at the damn chart to see if he could get away with something and still watch a video. It's scary the forsight he used.) I spend the timeouts either threatening him to get back on the mat/in his room or holding him in my lap or holding the door shut. And it's not fair to Emmie to take attention away from her when she didn't do anything wrong so I can make sure his punishment is being meted out correctly.

I need advice. But I don't need to hear: "I guess my kid just has an easygoing personality because he never misbehaves." Or, "I just give him lots of extra hugs and attention and that solves the problem." Or, "I give her a good whack on the backside and she doesn't backtalk me no more."

Please. If there's anyone out there going through this or on the other side of it looking back with sympathy, just tell me what to do. I am desperate.

Kick me when I'm down

Jack has this new awesome trick where he loses his mind and runs around like a maniac before naptime. Getting him on the potty, washing hands and into bed is torture. Really. This could be used on prisoners to obtain information.

Today he added the fantastic element of kicking me in the face. One minute I was getting his pullup on him and the next, his foot connected with my chin. Hard. It brought tears to my eyes and a yell to my throat.

I raised my voice to a decible he has never heard before and you know what he did? He laughed at me.

Who does that? Who gets screamed at mere inches from his face and just laughs?

Serenity now, serenity now.

Again? Really?

No time to blog because I have to go upstairs and comfort Emmie again. She's been trying to fall asleep for almost three hours now, but every time she gets quiet, she wakes up screaming. Seeing as she has a horrid yellow snot coming out of her nose, I am guessing ANOTHER EAR INFECTION.

Ohmygod stop with the bed already

Have I told you we bought Jack a big-boy bed? Oh, I've blogged about it a few or eleventy billion times this week? You don't say.

Well this evening marked the first time we put the sheets on and let him sleep in it. There was much fanfare and excitement -- oh, and an injury!

When we were moving the bed into place, he decided he was going to climb out of the bathtub on his own. No we are not neglectful parents who will let their child drown in an inch of water; he was 5 feet down the hall and talking to us the whole time. But he fell flat on his back onto a toy, leaving two puncture wounds directly in line with his spine and an immediate bruise. He cried briefly but then was running and jumping around the bathroom. Josh called the pediatrician and the doc on call said he should be fine, but to watch for him complaining about his legs or arms tingling or hurting.

With the potential paralyzation behind us, we resumed Operation Big Boy Bed as planned. We put his lovey and blanket and bear in bed on top of his new Thomas the Train comforter (not my choice) and organic sheets (my choice) and he laid down on his new pillow. When we kissed him goodnight, he got a little teary and said, "Mommy stay with you," but I assured him he only needed to call for one of us and we would come in and help him.



He is still chattering away up there an hour later, but that's par for the course when it comes to bedtime. I can only hope he STAYS in the bed when he wakes up, but so far, he's not getting out, so that's a good sign.

Oh, and we went with the Summer Infant Sure and Secure Double Bed Rail. It worked just fine with the slats, fit between the mattress and the siderail and meant we didn't have to push the bed up against the wall. It also acts as a barrier to him crawling out, as it covers three-quarters of the length of the bed on both sides. Seemed pretty sturdy too.

So you'll either hear an update about our success next week or you'll read in the news about a crazy mother in Chicago who hadn't slept in three straight days and ran screaming from her house and was hit by a car because she didn't look both ways.

Pillow(top) talk

When we went to Ikea to buy Jack's big-boy bed this weekend, we went with a specific model in mind -- the Hemnes bed.


We liked the style, and we really liked the color. Josh and I like dark wood, and this fit our taste, so screw whatever the kid wants. There will be no racecar beds in this house.

But we didn't have a handle on what size bed we planned to buy. I was going in with the idea that we would buy the full-size bed, because he would grow into it and could keep it for many, many years. Also, Jack likes to sleep sideways in his crib, so I figured this would give him more room to do that without ending up on the floor every night. Josh was going in with the idea that a twin bed would fit better in his room and if we needed to buy him a bigger bed in 10 years, it was only an Ikea bed so we wouldn't break the bank buying another one later.

Unfortunately we didn't square either of our views with the other and debated the topic ad naseum in the bed section at Ikea while Jack ran around like a maniac, rolling on all the beds and throwing himself on the floor.

After the 30th incarnation of "Well I don't know, what do you think?" Josh threw down the gauntlet.

"If we get the full size, we're definitely not having another kid," he said.

I'm sorry, what? Did you just base our future reproductive decisions on an IKEA BED FRAME? I mean I like self-assembled Swedish furniture as much as the next person, but oh my holy hell, you must me kidding me.

His reasoning was that if we have a third child, then the same-sex children would share Jack's current room. Our fourth and fifth bedrooms are in the lowest level of the house, two floors away from our bedroom, and the distance makes us uneasy when it comes to kids sleeping down there. Two full-size beds and two dressers in his room would be quite cramped, but that's also a whole lot of years down the road.

In typical Amy fashion, I got a little huffy with him and said he was ridiculous and I couldn't believe that we were having that discussion in the Ikea bedroom department.

"And I am telling you right now, I AM SO BLOGGING ABOUT THIS," I announced.

That got a smirk out of him. But he stood his ground.

We came home with the twin bed, in case you were wondering.

Readers, I need your help

We bought the big-boy bed from Ikea this weekend. We went with the Hemnes in a twin size, dark wood. We elected to go with the high-quality, natural latex mattress (yay, no chemicals!) and the slats on the bottom, not a boxspring.

But that has caused a major dilemma: we can't find a bed rail for the side away from the wall. Every one I have seen so far slides between the matress and boxspring. Plus, the ones that fold down won't work because the mattress peeks up only about 3 inches from the siderail. So the "elbow" of the bend won't fit between the mattress and the side rail.

Does anyone know what kind of bed rail to recommend? The damn bed is all put together in his room, but he can't sleep in it because he'll fall out.

Success for the second time

Another kid, another year of nursing in the books. Emmie officially weaned herself last week and while I was a little sad, I am mostly pleased the girls did their job for a second time and successfully fed a child for a year.

She decided to start sleeping through the night last week and since her only nursing session for the last couple weeks had been at the 4 a.m. wakeup, Emmie effectively ended her reliance on the boob all by herself.

Because I had eased her back to once a day, I didn't have a single minute of engorgement. (Did you hear that sound? It was the massive clicking of the "delete" key by all my male readers.) I had pumped a little on our trip, just in case she wanted to keep it up, but she was fine with stopping two days after we got back and so was I.

But it's hard to get used to regular bras again. You try spending a year in what amounts to a comfy sports bra and then let me know how it feels going back to underwires and push-ups. Because lord knows, the deflation after almost four combined years of two pregnancies and nursing requires the use of some snappy lingerie.

Despite the loss of volume, I am happy things went so well again. I was definitely much more laid back about nursing this time around. I knew what to expect, what was normal and didn't need to freak out about supply issues. I pumped early and often to build up a freezer supply, which allowed us to take a few trips away from the kids and not worry about whether she would have enough milk. She never got a drop of formula, which was my goal going in. Considering I was chasing a toddler while nursing a baby, I feel really good about the accomplishment.

Of course my attempts to get her to drink from a sippy cup have been met with disdain and outright pissiness by her highness. So she gets her whole milk in a bottle. Yes, my breastfed child won't take anything but a bottle that someone else holds for her. How on earth did that happen?

Jack: Three Years

Dear Jack,

Today you turned 3 years old, but how can that be possible when you were just born yesterday? My wee baby has been replaced by an actual little boy and while I am so excited about you growing up, please stop growing up. Seriously. It's all going so fast. I mean last year you were kind of interested in peeing on the potty once or twice a day and then boom, by July you were fully daytime potty-trained. It's stuff like potty-training that makes me look back on the past year and see how far you've really come.



Last year at this time you barely communicated with us, using one-syllable words and a lot of nonsense. Now, you speak in full sentences with proper verbs, nouns and pronouns. You love to ask us "Why?" and "What's that?" and "Who talking to?" and "What talking for?", which translates to you wanting to know what we are talking about. Just tonight you said, "Where's Daddy? Daddy's getting the quesadillas! Jack have water and quesadilla then go home and play one minute and then take a bath and go night-night!" I would say you definitely have a good grasp on language. You can count to 50, sing your ABCs and have memorized the entire book "Goodnight Moon." You know how to spell Jack and can even read a few words, like Mommy, Daddy, Emmie, Grandma, Grandpa, dog and cat.



I really think school has helped you with a lot of those things. You started preschool last fall, two days a week for two hours, and now you are going two days a week for four hours. When we dropped you off for the first day, all the other kids cried but you ran over and started playing with the trucks right away. You were the only kid who cried when it was time to go home -- you didn't want to leave because you were having so much fun. You play and paint and sing and read and eat lunch and generally have a ball. You absolutely adore your teachers, Miss Liz and Miss Melissa, and have a lot of fun with the other 10 kids in your class. Every day when I pick you up and ask what you did at school, you reply, "Play with the green truck." Glad our tuition dollars are going to good use, seeing as you have about three green trucks you play with here at home.



But at home, you're supposed to share those trucks with Emmie, so maybe that's why you like playing with them at school instead. Back when you were just turning 2, Emmie was still so new that she didn't really interest you too much. She spent most of the time sleeping and the rest of it eating. But over the summer and fall she started crawling around and playing with your toys and all hell broke loose. You are, how shall we say, a little proprietary when it comes to your stuff. And that has resulted in a lot of time-outs for you and rough treatment of your sister. There was a rough period this winter where I didn't even let you touch Emmie or play near her because every time you did, you ended up hitting her or pushing her down. But in the last couple of weeks, you've calmed down about things and have started to actually play with her. You get toys for her and kiss her and hug her and tell her you love her. That's a little more like it. At least now I feel like I can leave you two in a room together and come back to find everyone alive and happy.



That would assume I can actually leave a room. The last month has been Mommy Month. You can't get enough of me. If I leave, you follow me. If Daddy tries to give you dinner or a bath, you sob until I come and do it. You spontaneously hug and kiss me and tell me "I love you Mommy." I am enjoying this while it lasts, as I am sure it will swing the other way and be all about Daddy very soon.



Right now, some of your favorite things are playing with your floor puzzle, parking your cars in pretend garages, playing with trains and watching "Sesame Street." When it comes to food, you've really expanded your horizons this last year. You went from eating baby food veggies to eating actual vegetables. You love peas and carrots and you eat spinach salads every day. Your favorites include almond butter and jelly sandwiches, chicken with dip (barbecue sauce), pizza, oatmeal, meatballs, "ogurt" (yogurt) and quesadillas with guacamole. But your true favorite is sharing a "smoovie" (smoothie) with daddy and we can get you to do almost anything by dangling it in front of you. I never thought I would see the day you would eat vegetables that didn't come pureed in a jar, but one day last spring, you just started eating peas and carrots like you had been doing it all your life.



This past summer you showed us what a big boy you were by being in Aunt Marnie and Uncle Thabu's wedding. Your daddy and I had grave concerns about you taking part, considering you were just a little over 2-and-a-half and had a tendency not to listen. I had fears you would get to the big moment and just refuse to walk down the aisle. But you wowed everyone with your excellent behavior and looked so handsome. You did an awesome job pushing Emmie down the aisle in a wagon and we could not have been prouder of you. You even got to come to the dinner, where you were pretty well-behaved and kept it together until well past your normal bedtime.



This past year has taught me so much about you. I have learned that you are going to do things on your own timetable -- rushing you doesn't make you do it any faster and just gets everyone frustrated. You are definitely still a child who likes to learn by observing, and then jump in once you know what's going on. You play equally well by yourself and with other kids. You are capable of sharing, but sometimes get upset when you have to do it. You like things to be just so, and will spend extra time putting things away to ensure they are to your liking. You are a little creature of habit when it comes to your bedtime routine, so don't even think about skipping a single step from the bath to the stories to what we say when we put you in your crib and close the door.



This was the first year that you really understood it was your birthday. We talked about it for the whole week, and you were so excited for your big party with all your friends. We hosted 24 kids at Pump It Up, a warehouse filled with giant inflatable bounce houses and slides. You had a great time running around and jumping with all the kids and loved being the center of attention, sitting in your inflatable throne eating pizza and cake. You were red-faced and sweaty, laughing and smiling, which was worth all the planning and expense.



Jack, you are an amazing, thoughtful, fascinating, intelligent, frustrating, funny, loving little boy. While there are some days I want to sell you to the highest bidder, never a day goes by that you don't make me laugh. You have the brightest smile and the sweetest face. I can't imagine what my life would look like without your presence. You make me slow down and appreciate little things like bugs on the sidewalk and airplanes in the sky. Your voice is the first thing I hear in the morning, calling, "Mommy come in! Mommy come in!" I love you more than life itself. You are my big boy, my Jackie, my buddy. I hope you know how much joy you have brought us this last year and how much we have to look forward to as we navigate through the world of 3.

Love,
Mommy

That would explain the aggression...

Today I was sitting on the couch downstairs while the kids were playing. Jack threw himself onto my lap and hugged me. Emmie crawled over to investigate and pulled herself up on the couch with a huge smile on her face, causing Jack to freak the hell out.

"No Emmie!" he yelled. "That Jack's mommy!"

Surprised, I quickly said, "No, I am Emmie's mommy too. I am Emmie AND Jack's mommy."

He fired back, "Love only ONE kid. No love Emmie. Love Jack."

What? How on earth does a 3-year-old make that leap?

I said, "No, I love you both. I love Jack and Emmie."

That would explain his loving and respectful treatment of her. Ahhhh, the joys of sibling rivalry have begun early for us. At least he's not trying to sell her on the Internet. Yet.

Bumper cars

This morning we were eating breakfast as we normally do in the dining room. Jack was fooling around like he normally does and looking for an excuse to leave the table like he normally does. I was multi-tasking like I normally do, getting food for him and helping Emmie with hers.

He told me he was done and informed me "I carry applesauce" to the sink to put the dish away. I turned to put his plate in the kitchen and heard the glass bowl of applesauce hit the ground followed by a scream.

I turned around to see him laying on the floor, the chair on its back, in front of the bench we have in there. He clearly had tipped backwards when he tried to push the chair back and I am 99.9 percent sure he whacked his noggin on the edge of the bench.

I scooped him up and expected to see blood everywhere, but found none. Instead, I found an alarmingly large bump already forming. I helped him up and comforted him with some hugs while trying to decide what action to take. I grabbed the phone and called his father, who was of no help whatsoever as he was on a train between Chicago and Bloomington. He did, however, answer the SECOND time I called him. He suggested I call the pediatrician. If nothing else, Jack's timing was impeccable because he fell a mere three minutes after the office opened for the day.

As I was dialing the number, he made a miraculous recovery as evidenced by his crossing the room and throttling his sister. I was describing his fall to the nurse while Emmie was screaming in the background, and when she sympathetically asked if that was him, I breezily replied, "Oh no. That's his sister who he just hit. He's actually in a timeout." Everyone had a good chuckle over that one. Except Emmie, who really found nothing funny about it.

The nurse said we didn't need to worry unless he was vomiting or bleeding, of which he was doing neither. The bump was now so large it was making his hair stick out funny, but she assured me it was probably fine.

So I packed them up and took them to the Children's Museum as planned. I figured if he started puking and passed out, I could always blame it on them and sue for big money.

Thanks, but no thanks

I have decided the milestone I am most looking forward to with these children is not going off to school or getting braces or driving a car. It's the ability to write their own thank-you notes.

I swore after we got married and had an engagement party, three showers and a wedding with a 475-person guest list that I would never write another thank-you note as long as I lived. Because Josh never wrote ONE. I wrote all of them. Myself. His excuse before the wedding: I had better handwriting than him. His excuse later was that he was working on the wedding website so I had to do the thank-yous.

But then we had babies. And lots of people send you gifts for that. Which is awesome. But I had to write them all again, by myself, because SOMEONE said I was the one on maternity leave with Jack and not working outside the home with Emmie and had all this time to get it done. Clearly he never tried to write with a small person latched on your boob for hours on end.

Now the kids have the birthday parties where they get lots of gifts and guess who's writing the thank-you notes again? That would be the stay-at-home mom. You know, the one with all the time on her hands.

Tonight when I dug Emmie's stationary out to send her birthday notes, only two weeks after her party, I found three thank-you notes in my bag that were from gifts she was given when she was born. Oh yes, shitty mom that I am, I wrote the notes but put them in my bag and never sent them. So those are going in the mail a year later. Better late than never, I suppose.

Next year, I might just give them both a pen and paper and let them scribble something and send them out like that. I will still have to address them, but at least I won't have to come up with the text.

Enter Sandman

Someone replaced Emmie with another child while I was on vacation last week. Oh she looks the same and laughs the same and throws food on the floor the same. But she sure doesn't sleep the same.

Last week while we were in Tahoe, she started taking two two-hour naps each day, while still sleeping almost 12 hours overnight. And she's still doing it. I have no idea what precipitated this or why she is continuing this practice. In fact, I would have thought she would be going in the other direction with naps because she is drooling like a faucet and constantly trying to disengage her tongue from her mouth. I don't see any tooth bumps yet, but they must be coming soon considering the evidence and the fact she still has no teeth. Not a single one at a year old! It's like I am raising a geriatric with no dentures here.

These naps are delightful except for the fact that I can't do anything anymore. Leaving the house is almost impossible because she sleeps from 10-12, they both eat lunch at 12:30, Jack sleeps from 1:30ish to 3:30ish and she sleeps from 2:45ish to 4:45ish. As you can see from that schedule, it leaves me 45 minutes to myself during the entire day. That "me time" is when I squeeze in my shower, clean the house, check my e-mail, eat my lunch and volunteer with the underprivileged. Oh hell, who am I kidding? I am online all the time when they're awake and I didn't even shower today. But I do need more of a break during the day or I get a little shrill by dinnertime. (This time Josh would be the one saying "Who are you kidding" as he thinks I am a little shrill all the time.)

This is also new behavior for a child of mine. Jack never slept more than an hour at a time when he was taking two naps, and it was more like 45 minutes. Even switching him to one nap didn't result in routine two-hour breaks until he was well over 18 months old. Who knew -- children in the same family can be different! Someone alert the pediatric medical journals.

If I could only get these two on the same nap schedule, I would have two glorious hours to myself each afternoon. Oh wait, I mean I would be so bummed to miss out on that time with my darling, perfect children. I am sure I will look back on this time, oh say sometime next week, and wistfully remember the good old days before Emmie stopped napping completely.