girlfiend

I would like to thank Clifford the Big Red Dog for anesthetizing my children. This is the first time in two hours that one of more of them has not been in tears.

I would also like to thank the brisket recipe for calling for a half cup of red wine, allowing me to drink the other half cup. It has been a long day.

Feast or famine with the blog posts around here. Pun intended.

Working my way through two roasted pumpkins. Two batches of muffins- pumpkin cheese and pumpkin chocolate chip. I prefer the pumpkin cheese, F only likes the chocolate chip.

Dueling bread machine breads today. I have two hand me down bread machines now, two different breadman models, so I’m making two loaves of pan de mie to see which machine makes the better loaf. I set them both for a 1 1/2 lb loaf of white bread. One machine has a longer cycle than the other. I should do another test with whole wheat.

Last night I cooked a meal that everyone in the family ate. There were no noodles involved. Shocking, I know. Somehow, everyone ate and enjoyed a Thai green curry. The boys needed the chicken and veggies on the side, and T wouldn’t touch most of the vegetables, sticking with the chicken. F said the broccoli was too spicy, but ate it and more anyway. I was so grateful not have to make someone toast before bed.

For the first time in 5 years I’m not cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I’m a little sad about it.

dinners for the week:
Chicken and cheese quesadillas with black beans, corn and rice
Spaghetti with meat sauce, roasted kohlrabi
brisket, mashed potatoes, broccoli
leftover brisket, stuffed acorn squash
homemade pizza

Preschool bakesale tomorrow to pay for a field trip. Should I make cookies? Brownies? Cupcakes? rice krispy/cocoa pebble treats?

I should unload the groceries from the car now that the two small children are fed.

No one gives a shit about your brand new mommy blog. Your 3 weeks worth of posts that you’re emailing about, posting on facebook, and shoving down everyone’s throats are boring. No one cares that you’re one of the idiots that actually purchased a time out chair and a timer to go with it. No one is impressed by your list of best books for children. We’ve all read those books to our own children and if we were to pass that list on to our friends we most certainly would not give you credit for a list that you compiled from other people’s Amazon lists. It’s especially annoying that you are asking for credit for your list, as though everyone who clicks on your daily links out of boredom is going to laud you as an expert in children’s literature. Speaking of Amazon lists, we don’t give a shit about your holiday toy guide either. Thanks for taking all of the magazine picks (that you haven’t tried for yourself) and compiling them in one Amazon list and taking the credit for yourself. And your parenting advice is annoying. How about some anecdotes with your didacticism, a little something to entertain while you shove your advice down our throats.

Sorry, had to get that off of my chest. I turned off her facebook updates and I’m still getting this shit. Time to unfriend.

I don’t know how it has been six months already. I don’t know how my sweet, squishy, sleepy newborn has turned into a giant baby who sits, grabs, squeals, babbles, stands holding onto a couch or table, chews and gives sloppy wet baby kisses. She wants to play more than sit, she loves her brothers and plays games with them, and since she doesn’t quite know how to reach out for someone yet, she uses both arms and legs to try to “swim” over to B.

She’s in the middle of the giant, developmental stretch that lasts from 4 months to 9 months, and she’s probably teething too, so the sleep has been pretty lousy. She went from going to bed at 7, waking up at 5 to eat, then sleeping again until 9 to going to bed at 11, waking randomly to cry and eat 2 or 3 times throughout the night, and getting up when it is the least convenient for me to nurse her/diaper her/dress her. But last night she went to sleep at 11 and slept until the boys woke her up a little after 6, so I trust that she like her brother T will be a good sleeper once she gets through all of the shit. At least she doesn’t take after F who never slept through the night, ever.

I’ve been a little smarter this time around, too. Instead of moving her to her own room where I’d have to get up several times throughout the night to tend to her, she still sleeps in ours in the borrowed cosleeper beside the bed. Last night, since I know she wants to be a good sleeper despite it all, when she didn’t want to go to sleep I just put her to bed beside me and she slept all night (unlike F who would have used me as a pacifier.) I had a mole on my chest removed, so I don’t have to deal with another baby trying to pick it off, and I bought a nursing necklace for me to wear so she can tug at it instead of trying to pull out my hair, non-baby safe necklace, or chunks of skin.

She blows bubbles and sticks out her tongue. She smiles at everyone who talks to her. She is pleasant and easy-going and seems to have a very similar temperament to T, which is the kind of baby temperament you want. (Not that F wasn’t a good baby. He was a sweet, wonderful baby. He just never slept and was attached to my boob around the clock for more than a year. But this post is about Miss N, not T or my sweet F.)

So, six months. Six. I can’t believe it.

T’s speech therapist is a fucking idiot. My cell phone was in my coat pocket so I didn’t hear the text alert that she was waiting outside. Or the text alert that she was leaving 40 minutes later. Keep in mind the first text message was received 40 minutes after she was supposed to get here.

1. Why can’t the bitch ever be on time?
2. Why doesn’t she knock on the door? There is still a note on the broken doorbell to knock, but does she really need the reminder after 6+ months?
3. Why didn’t she call? Clearly she has my phone number if can text. Why would you wait outside for 40 fucking minutes without knocking or calling?

Idiot.

I know I’ve mentioned T’s language explosion. He went from nothing to talking in what seems like no time at all. Along with the actual words he’s had a developmental spurt. He doesn’t simply push the trains along the track now; he narrates the stories. Last night in the bath he started yelling “Help! Help,” and crying, “Thomas fell into the water! Get Sir Topham Hatt to help.” Now I have two competing Thomas episodes going on at any given moment. Three if you count the TV. At two and half it doesn’t sound that impressive. The talking and narratives, I mean. But considering that a few months ago he was still just barely saying mama and dada, we are both so proud and pleased and relieved. We knew he was smart, but the speech delay was troubling.

One of T’s favorite phrases is hot dog bun. I’m not sure why. He generally doesn’t eat hot dog buns, handing them to me so he can concentrate on the actual hot dog. But he likes to say it, often using it as a way to express displeasure or disagree. For example, F will say something like, “No, T. That’s my train. Give it to me.” T will respond with “hot dog bun.” Or F will say, “Look T, it’s an elephant.” T will reply, “No. Hot dog bun.” “Mom, T says it’s a hot dog bun, but it’s an elephant.” “NOooooooo. Hot dog bun.”

Halloween was the best yet. The Fiendling is now old enough to really get it, and loved walking around the neighborhood saying, “Trick or Treat,” and “Thank you. Happy Halloween” at every house. He was excited to see all of the costumes and the candy and decorations. “Look, mama! I got a chocolate bar! I LOVE chocolate bars!” He was so much fun. Most of the time he’s not that much fun. He’s been whiny and disagreeable and all sorts of other words I shouldn’t use to describe my kid. But on Halloween he was at his best, and I had the best time with him. T liked it too, but mostly just for the lollipops he double fisted all night.

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.

Around 4pm yesterday I got a call from my mother. She said, “Your father told me you were very upset about being excluded from dinner tonight. It’s the new year and I think we should put everything behind us. It’s time to move on.”

I wasn’t sure where she was going with this so I didn’t say much. She continued, “I hope you understand why you weren’t invited. It’s a holiday and other people shouldn’t be made to feel uncomfortable by your anger.”

I stayed quiet. “It’s time to move forward. You are my daughter and I love you. I want to see you and my grandchildren. Can we put this all behind us now?”

I wasn’t really pleased with her approach. I said, “Yes, if you are ready to apologize I am ready to put it all behind us and move forward.”

She did not like this. She said that she didn’t do anything wrong and she had no reason to apologize. We were the ones who excluded her and we kicked her out of our house and that we need to apologize to her. I reminded her that we apologized to her on more than one occasion and that she refused to apologize in return. She said she had no reason to apologize. I reminded her that the last time we had a discussion she called me a fucking idiot, and if nothing else she should apologize for that. She told me that we all said things we didn’t mean. I said I want an apology. She said she did nothing wrong.

I told her that twice, once after T’s birth and then again after Miss N’s birth, she had a fight with my husband and left when she was supposed to stay and help. I said that she was not truthful about many things. I told her that I apologized to her several times since May and my apologies have never been accepted. I have reached out trying to resolve our issues and gotten nowhere. I said that I called my aunt because I wanted to come to dinner with my family to move forward and that I was denied. She said, ” I hope you’ve learned a lesson. You feel excluded just like I’ve felt when you have excluded me. Now you know what it feels like.”

Furious, I said, “Are you serious? You excluded me from dinner to teach me a lesson? You felt badly so you decided that I should be made to feel badly too? You thought this was an appropriate teachable moment, to exclude me to prove a point? How is that a way to resolve things?”

This point was not lost on her. After I told her nothing was going to happen unless she apologized, she apologized in a general way that only clarified that she felt that she did nothing wrong. She told me that she is selling her house at the shore and that she’s moving back to the city. Now that everything is behind us she wants to sit for the kids and she is looking forward to being useful to me. I should call her when I need a hand. She said she is going back to the shore tomorrow (today) but she’ll back next week and we’ll break the fast together. I said, sure, fine and we said goodbye.

Somewhere during the end of the conversation B got home from work. Almost immediately afterward the notary person doing the refi paperwork with us showed up. The kids were running around like maniacs and the baby was fussy. I didn’t really have time to process.

Later it occurred to me that I got exactly what I wanted and I don’t feel better at all. I got my shitty apology that doesn’t mean a goddamn thing except that she is not going to change and she will never see how she could possibly be even partially to blame for anything. She is going to come back into our lives, that, frankly, were easier and more pleasant without her in them. She will want to babysit and I won’t let her. She will want to be alone with my kids and I won’t let her. She won’t understand why and will become unreasonably enraged and the bullshit will probably start all over again. I am going to have to keep her at arms’ length because I will be miserable if she is any closer. The older she gets, the more unreasonable she becomes. The older she gets, the more apparent her narcissism and utter disregard for others.

So, fuck, here we go again.