girlfiend

My baby boy has decided to potty train himself. I adore him. As long as he is not wearing pants he goes to the bathroom, pees in the potty then empties it into the toilet and flushes. The emptying part I could live without, considering he splashes urine all over the toilet and floor, but I am still thrilled. The problem is that he can not be without pants at all times and he is happy to use his diaper the rest of the time. I am not sure how to transition to full time potty use with pants on. The other issue is that he is too short to pee in a real toilet standing up and has no desire to pee sitting down. But these problems are minor. He just turned two last month and I am overjoyed that he is peeing in the potty at all. Two kids in cloth diapers is a lot of laundry.

My mother, who I have only seen once since she left the weekend after Miss N’s birth, is still crazy. She sent the boys toys which I wanted to save for later since we are currently at capacity after T’s birthday and N’s birth (for which the boys received big brother gifts from my mother) last month. She was angry that I didn’t give the boys the gifts right away and sent my father over to pick them up RIGHT AWAY. I lied and told him over the phone that I’d felt badly and given the boys the gifts and they were playing with them. HE told me she didn’t care and that he was supposed to get them immediately then call her as soon as he had them in his possession. Fucked up, right? He picked them up and I called my mother who did not answer and left a message of apology. I did not wish to apologize, but B and I figured it was the best approach. She did not return the call or acknowledge the apology. Today, 3 days later I received an email:

Dear Girlfiend:

I have decided not to rent my apt. Instead, i will move back in at the end of September. I will be able to help out with the children several days a week and give you a chance to get out and do your errands, etc.

I look forward to your reply to this as soon as possible.

Love,

Mom

What the hell am I supposed to do with this?

T is currently covering himself in aloe gel. I will have to cut this post short.

I have mastitis again. AGAIN. I had it once on my right breast when Miss N was just a few days old. After a two week run of antibiotics I got it again, on the left side. Now, while I’m still taking the antibiotics from the second round I have it again on the right. WTF?

My OB, who I’m losing patience with, made me come in so she could feel my breasts and tell me yes, I have mastitis again and give me the same freaking antibiotic. I have to get a breast ultrasound to make sure there’s not an abscess at a different testing center in the hospital. She could have just given me the prescription for the ultrasound and not made me scramble to find last minute babysitting to come in so she could confirm that I have mastitis again. I told her I didn’t want to come in because I am now an expert at self diagnosing mastitis, but she made me come in anyway so I had to kill my morning waiting in her office with a baby who would have preferred to be sleeping at home.

And now I have to go back to the hospital Friday for the ultrasound and divide my children among two babysitters because I don’t want to have to leave anyone with all three. Such a pain in the ass. And I’m pretty sure that I don’t have an abscess, I just have bad luck right now and maybe if she’d switch the antibiotics it would stop, because, really, if the first four weeks of antibiotics didn’t work why am I on the same one for another two weeks? But I am not the medical professional. I am just the one with the sore boobs.

Other than that, I am fine. A little over a week before B is done school for the summer and I can get a break. And I bought $40 soap. It better be worth every penny.

I made a stir fry for dinner. Bok choy, green onions, sugar snap peas, carrots and steak over rice. F ate two bowls of the veggies and three servings of rice (separately, of course) and T ate three servings of rice and possibly a vegetable and maybe even a bite of steak. Either way I count it as a success.

Little Miss N is four weeks old today. She is suddenly huge. I had to pack away all of the newborn size clothes that she’s outgrown. She has even grown out of the newborn diapers- I had to switch from orange edge to yellow. She’s waking up some and holds up her head and looks around. I hung a few toys from the play mat today and for a moment, after looking through the rest of the box, I wondered if I should get some new baby toys for her to play with. Then I remembered that she is a baby and will most likely shun 90% of age appropriate toys in favor of choking hazards and my cell phone.

I failed my middle child in two ways today:

1. He wanted to use the potty after his bath while I was giving Miss N her bath. He took the potty seat and tried to put it on the toilet but got it backwards. F fixed it for him, but T needed help getting up to sit. By the time I was able to get to him, at least a minute or two after he told me he wanted the potty, he was peeing on the floor next to the toilet.

2. A few minutes later I was getting Miss N into her pajamas. T followed me in the room and sat on the glider/recliner which was in the reclined position. Somehow he managed to get his leg stuck in the chair’s footrest. Really stuck. I tried to get it out, but couldn’t- I’d already broken one child’s leg and was afraid I’d break his too. I had to call for B to come up and get him unstuck. Nothing was broken, but there is a nasty bruise on both the front and back of his leg.

It’s getting easier. I wouldn’t call it easy, but I’m managing. I keep forcing myself to get out of the house and take the boys places so I can prove that I can do it. Not just the easy places like the library or the playground, but hard places like when I took all three out to get the boys haircuts and when we went to the Please Touch Museum and to the zoo. It’s hard, but it’s not as bad as I’d anticipated. The transition from two children to three isn’t nearly as difficult as the transition from one to two. I wouldn’t recommend having three kids so close in age, ages four, two and zero as F likes to tell people, but it’s okay.

When I ask my mother to help I expect very little from her. She has let me down so many times in the past that my expectations get exponentially lower each time she helps. I expect that my children will be hungry, cranky, and dirty upon my return. I expect that they will eat crap if they eat at all, and that a child in diapers will not be changed until the urine soaks through his pants. I expect that the children will go to sleep well past their bedtime and that my mother will not have the energy to do anything but put them in front of the TV. But still, somewhere deep inside I hope that maybe one of these days she’ll learn how to be a grandmother, not a playmate. That if she’s given specific instructions she will follow them, not ignore them.

When I last spoke to my mother she had several concerns about the way she was treated during her stay here a few weeks ago. She felt that she was treated like a babysitter and a maid. She was upset that I did not have dinner waiting for her when she arrived. She was upset that there was no food in the house to eat. She was upset that no one made her meals and that we wanted her to clean up after herself. She was annoyed that B’s sister was spying on her and brought dinner over one of the nights that she stayed. She also expressed anger that B told her no when she asked if her sister could come over. She felt that she’d been shit on.

First I’ll address the food. We have more food in our house right now than my mother has probably had in her house over the course of the last year. In my downstairs freezer alone I have at least 2 weeks of homemade meals frozen and a week’s worth of meals from Trader Joe’s. We are low on cereal, which means we only have 10 unopened boxes in the basement in addition to the 3 open boxes in the kitchen. There is no shortage of food here. We have bread, meat, fruit, vegetables, rice, pasta, and snack food. There are ingredients to make just about any type of baked good or ethnic meal. The night before we left, with my help she made a list of foods that the boys would eat during her stay. The list consisted of breakfast, lunch and dinner ideas as well as snacks and treats. All of the food on the list was in the house. Very little of the food on the list was actually consumed by the boys in my absence. I suppose that since she didn’t actually feed it to the children it did not occur to her to eat anything on her list. She was probably offended that we did not provide her with Fiddle Faddle or Pepsi. She did have coke and she did finish a box of ice cream sandwiches. Upon our return she was eating a bag of goldfish that she’d swiped from the diaper bag. I later picked up the empty bag from the floor and threw it away.

Her sister was welcomed into our home the day after we got home from the hospital, not the day of our return. B, that asshole, wanted our first night home to be low key.

B’s sister brought dinner (to be helpful) after she was told that the previous evening my mother failed to provide dinner for the boys and B was forced to feed them in the hospital cafeteria. Before leaving the hospital a few hours after Miss N’s birth, B called home and let my mother know that he was coming to get them and could she please feed the children first. After some discussion he told her to order a pizza. When he got home my mother was asleep on the couch, T was upstairs crying in his crib and no pizza had been ordered. The following night B’s sister brought dinner to insult, rather than help, my mother.

For the record, when we asked her to stay here it was to provide two main services. The primary service was to watch the boys while I was in the hospital pushing a baby out of my vagina and recovering. The secondary service was to try and keep the house in order for the two nights I was gone. In other words, we asked invited her into our home to act as a babysitter and maid. In other, other words, we asked her to be a grandmother for two nights.

I will get into the rest another time. The part with the lies and the smoking in the house and her thinly veiled rage. It’s all infuriating. But this, the part where she can’t look outside of herself for one minute, the part where she’s angry with us for not waiting on her when we were so clearly unable to, is it for me. I was in the hospital pushing out a baby. I was not out frolicking in the Caribbean or backpacking through Europe. I wasn’t out banging hookers and snorting cocaine. I was in the hospital with a newborn and a stitch where I tore pushing her out. We asked my mother to watch the boys. She was upset that she was not treated like a guest. I just had a baby, my third in four years. I needed help- help with the baby, help with the housework, help with the boys- not a fight. I’m done. I’m sure I will talk to her and see her on occasion. I have no plans to shut her out entirely since she is my mother and I have some bizarre loyalty to her. But I’m done. We’re better off without her.

Today I took all three kids to the Please Touch Museum. My original plan was to take them to the zoo, but when I heard on the drive over that the forecast called for early afternoon thunderstorms I decided I’d rather be stuck in the germ factory than outside in the sticky heat and rain.

The Fiendling only ran off once and did not have a single tantrum. T only had a tantrum when I had to drag him bodily off of the carousel after unclenching his fingers from horse’s pole. The new baby, Miss N, spent most of the trip eating or sleeping. I did not have a single tantrum, scream, or handle any of the children roughly. We made it home in one piece and I feel like I deserve a medal and/or a giant cocktail. I made myself a strawberry milkshake, but it would have been better with booze.