girlfiend

My mother called to speak to F the other day. Just F. There were no pleasantries. When he answered she did not say hello, or ask how B was doing. He didn’t recognize her voice and had to ask who was calling. Boyfiend told her that F was outside on his bike and to call back later. When she called again I was serving dinner. I said we’d call back but as always, things with 3 children ages 4, 2, and 0 got hectic and I forgot.

Today the boys were outside on their bikes and my mother left a message.

“Hi, I’m calling to speak to F to wish him a Happy Halloween. (pause) And T. (pause) and umm (uncomfortably long pause) Miss N.”

Really? What the hell is that? I know that F is her favorite and all, and the others were clearly an afterthought, but did she actually forget her granddaughter’s name?

Now that he’s talking, and I mean really, really talking, T is even funnier than he was before. He has always had a good sense of humor. (At least we assumed he had a good sense of humor- he was a baby and all.) But now he is outright hilarious. I wish I had video to post of his comedic genius. It’s difficult to get on camera because he’s so aware of it.

Miss N seems to take after T. She is a laid back baby like he was and super-smiley. She is all baby pudge now, eating her toes, blowing raspberries and babbling. Or is it cooing? I don’t know the finer points of baby noises, even with all of my practice. She is so pleasant, so good, that when I took her to the doctor for a rash on her back yesterday I learned she had an ear infection. Or maybe it’s less about her being good and more about me not noticing she was probably up all night for a reason. Hmmm.

F is going through another giant pain in the ass stage. I won’t dwell too much on it because he’s being okay this morning. His pre-k classroom has them ability grouped and I’m proud to say he’s in the top group. Maybe I shouldn’t be too proud. He does have a non-English speaker, several young three year olds, and several kids who look like their parents are a dozen years younger than me in his class. Which means they probably had their pre-kindergartners when they were 16 years old. We were at the Harvest Festival at the park two weekends ago and he was playing in the hay with a bunch of kids. I said to B, “Guess which one is in F’s class.” Jokingly he replied, “the kid in the wifebeater?” But he was right. F goes to school with the kid in the wifebeater. But I’m still proud. He read the entire cereal box last night after dinner. Kid tested, mother approved. He’s still a shit head though. The whining is enough to make me want to punch him in the face. I don’t, because that would be wrong, but I want to. When he is not filling me with rage he is still sweet and polite. He says things like, “Mom, Mama, may you please get me more cereal?”

I need to start writing things down as they happen. There is so much going on that I’m afraid I’ll forget. At the same time I want to experience things as they happen, not photograph and craft blog posts while they are happening.

My (asshole) mother stopped by the other afternoon. I didn’t remember that she was planning to until she called half an hour before I needed to pick up F from school to tell me she’d be here soon. It was B’s birthday. She did not bother to wish him a happy one or tell me to extend the greeting. Instead she took a moment to congratulate me because T was wearing a disposable diaper. He is wearing a disposable diaper because his butt, which has always been large, grew out of all of our diapers. Once I started replacing the elastic I realized they only fit him because of the stretched out elastic. Once repaired, they were tiny on him. A friend gave us a ton of other diapers that her kids grew out of, but the covers were too small so I had to buy disposables to fill the gaps. It was not because cloth was inconvenient or because disposable diapers were easier. He was wearing a stupid Blues Clues paper diaper because I didn’t have enough cloth diapers to get him through the day. Once my mother congratulated me I immediately got on line and ordered more diapers. I don’t want her approval for creating more trash.

F is waking up at night again and wants to sleep in our room. He says he’s having bad dreams. We’re back to a sleeping bag on the floor. Otherwise he’s adjusting to school pretty well. The week or two before it started he had several accidents but that passed pretty quickly. The waking, however, is really interfering with my sleep. So is T’s waking. T isn’t waking as often as F does, but he is waking up in the middle of the night or too early in the morning and, again, really interfering with my sleep. It is totally fucking ridiculous that I have a four month old baby who sleeps through the night and my two year old and four year old do not. I am tired and grumpy this morning.

The schedule is easier than expected. We walk F to school between 8.30 and 9 then walk home. If I had to wake her for the walk I’ll feed and change Miss N before we head out for the morning. We go to story hour, the Y, the playground, the doctor, the supermarket. I clean a little, cook a little, clean a little more. We eat lunch. Sometimes the little ones nap, sometimes they don’t and we drive around for some quiet. Then we pick F up at 3. It feels busier than it is. Probably because of all of the cooking and cleaning I am attempting to squeeze into days where children don’t nap at the same time or at all. Then, of course, there are the days when they do nap and I’m forced with the decision to hand a monitor to a neighbor and run to get F before they wake, or to just wake them up and go. It is a lousy decision to make. My neighbor can basically only be trusted to ensure that the house is not robbed and that it doesn’t burn down. He does not know what to do with a child. But waking a sleeping child is just wrong. It pains me to have to do it.

I started writing this last week. I don’t know why I haven’t come back to it.

Last night T came into our room at 12.30. I had fallen asleep only an hour before and was too groggy to get him back upstairs. He climbed onto the bed and spent the the night with a body part on top of me. Sometimes it was a leg, other times an arm, at one point it was his head. I think he may have been completely on top of me in the morning. I was not well rested today. Even so, by 8.30 I’d made a batch of pancakes, a loaf of bread, mixed (but not baked) a banana bread and gotten the children dressed and F to school. As the day progressed I made it to the Y, the supermarket twice (I forgot my wallet the first time which I was lucky enough to discover before I went in), T’s gym class, and home to cook 3 lbs of sausage to add to a batch of meatballs and sauce I started yesterday and a bunch of quesadillas for us and for B’s pregnant sister-in-law. I don’t know where the motivation is coming from. It won’t last.

Tuesdays are cleaning days. Toilet Tuesday. If nothing else I clean the bathrooms.

Tomorrow T’s speech therapist, who is always late and a little bit crazy, comes. It will be a year since he started services. He talks a lot now, speaking spontaneously and repeating just about everything. F was so advanced language-wise that I don’t know if T is caught up or if he’s still delayed. It is still difficult to understand him, but he’s talking. He talks about things he does and things he’s seen and things he wants. He finally uses complete sentences, only he omits the beginning sound of just about every word he says. “ant osht in ing oom, mama” = “want toast in the dining room, mama.” It’s cute, but it takes a while to get the hang of. If he hadn’t pushed the step stool over to the fridge and gotten it himself I never would have figured out that “ushup urt” meant he wanted a crush cup of yogurt.

F can read now. He’s been flirting with it for months, but never wanted to try until recently. He knows a surprising number of sight words and can sound out multisyllabic words if he concentrates. He’s committed a number of the tricks that I’ve taught him to memory, like if you see “th” put your tongue between your teeth, and “sh” says “shhhhh.’ Right around the time he started reading he started drawing pictures that actually look like things instead of scribbles. He draws people with heads, faces, arms, legs, fingers and toes. His pictures have trees, suns, grass and roads and cars have wheels. He tells stories about his pictures and writes the names of his friends and family. He’s sleeping better now than he was over a week ago when I started this.

Miss N is a real baby now. The lumpy newborn stage is over. I love that she is a happy, giggling, foot-grabbing, toy-eating baby, but I am so sad that it went so quickly. I love the newborn stage. I love her. She rolls way more than her brothers ever did. Every time I turned around this morning she had rolled from her back to her belly then from her belly to her back. She has two teeth and more on the way. She laughs uproariously when you throw her up in the air or tickle her armpit or kiss her under her chin. It took T forever to warm up to F, but Miss N can’t get enough of her brothers. She adores them and they love her too.

We put in two bids on houses in the Poconos. Both were rejected. Now B wants to buy a pop up camper. I don’t relish the idea of having it parked in my driveway, but it’s not a terrible idea. He gives me the rye chips from his chex mix. He’s a good husband.

I’m in the middle of replacing the elastic on our cloth diapers, I’m trying to take free, stupid classes online to get the Act 48 credits I need to keep my teaching certificate (which I should have put on hold 5 years ago) active, I am tired and not always in such a good mood. But I like my kids and I like my husband and it’s all going better than I thought it would.