Baby Poop and Business Suits

Kyra - 6 years, 1 months and 12 days old

Situation: Riding in the volvo. Gerah driving. Kyra in back seat.

Kyra:     "I have some skin on the side of my nail, and I DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT!"

Me:     "Hahahahahahahahaha!!!!"

Kyra:     "IT'S NOT. FUNNY."

Her final days as our One and Only

HUH? WHA? HMPH? HEH?

We used to claim that my father had "selective hearing". Often, (no, not all the time, DAD) when my mother spoke to him, he would only hear the things he wanted to, and tune out everything else. No offense to the good-men-listeners out there, but I think many, many, many men practice this "selective hearing". I used to think it was just a man thing, limited only to people with testicles, but, I've recently learned that little two and a half year old girls know how to use it just the same as any fully grown man. Take this morning, for example:

ME: Kyra, we need to get ready to go. Please brush your teeth.

KYRA: HUH?

ME: Do you want to go to the farmer's market? If you want to go to the farmer's market, you need to brush your teeth.

KYRA: WHA?

ME: Farmers market. You and me. Teeth. Brush them. Now.

KYRA: HMPH?

ME: Pick up the toothbrush. This one here. Right here. Here's the toothpaste. Put it on this toothbrush. Yes, this one. Move it around inside your mouth. Like this. Now spit.

KYRA: HEH?

My lord. What's it going to be like when she's sixteen?

Hmph. At Least The Milk's Organic.

Behold the image of a very happy child. Why is this child so happy? Well, because, if you look closely, you can see the remainder of a bowl of "Trix" cereal and chocolate pudding that was this child's lunch. What child wouldn't be happy to have a lunch consisting of countless grams of sugar and artificial coloring and flavoring!? It's a two year old's heaven on earth!

So what's my point? I find this lunch interesting because I used to think I was a healthy-food-kinda parent. Some of you may have noticed my link on the right sidebar beneath the Flickr photos that yells,

"QUIT BUYING ALL THOSE JARS OF BABY FOOD!"

and links you to a page at www.freshbaby.com which features a "make your own baby food" kit. It's healthier, it's natural, it's cheaper, yadayadayada.

When I was a new mom, I used to puree asparagus and garbanzo beans, then freeze them in little cube trays for my precious baby. I was so proud of myself. Jeremy and I used to fight over who got to do the carrots next because it's fun to make baby food. Now, I feed my kid Trix cereal and pudding. Because she likes it.

It all started when she started demanding certain products at the supermarket. Dora yogurt. Care Bears Fruit Snacks. Top shelf Tequila. Most the time, I'll stomp my foot and say "NO!", but, once in a while, like with the yogurt, I'll cave in and just buy it to stop the nagging little voice coming from the grocery cart seat. It's just yogurt, right?

Then one thing leads to another and next thing we know she's eating jelly beans and Cadbury eggs from her Easter basket for breakfast in front of the TV.

This makes me wonder what my bun in the oven is in for. Does the second child even stand a chance? Should I just forget breastfeeding altogether and start filling bottles with Mountain Dew? Okay, okay, I'm being overly dramatic. I'll still breastfeed. I'll save the Mountain Dew for sippy cups.

She Who Hath Mastered The Throne!

I vaguely recall a time in my life when pooping and peeing by ones self was just something that we all did. It was only part of being a human - nothing special, really. Nothing to make a big deal about... No different than breathing or sneezing or coughing while alone in a room...

It's just a function of the body. Sometimes you just feel the need, and... There. Done.

Nowadays, using the toilet is cause for celebration. When the wee lass whom resides in our home walks into the bathroom on her own accord, shuts the door, does her duty, and finishes up without assistance from an adult, it's as if the clouds opened up and Jesus himself descended from heaven right before our very eyes. It's a blessed miracle.

"Mommy! I POOPED in DA PODDY!" a small voice yells from the bathroom, as I sweep the kitchen floor after dinner...

Time stands still. I drop the broom and the dustpan. I gasp. "You POOPED!!? All by yourself!!?"

I dance a happy jig into the stinky bathroom while I sing congratulations. "Kyra went-a-poopie, Kyra went-a-poopie! Yippee! Let's bake a cake! Hooray! What a big girl you are!!"

Oh. It doesn't stop there. Usually after I hop and sing and congratulate, I have to tell her how extraordinarily wonderful she is. We gather round the toilet bowl, look inside together, and bask in the afterglow.

"Kyra. Have I ever told you that you are the best gosh darn kid on the planet? Just look in that toilet. Look at what a good job you did. You're spectacular. You're fantastic. You're supercalafragalisticexpealadocious. Honestly - you might be a genius. Have you considered Harvard? Yale? Shall we flush now?"

As I place my adult sized hand on the handle, she places her smaller hand atop mine, and together, as one, we flush.

And then, like almost every time she does a #2, we watch as the water slowly recedes, but then instead of emptying completely, begins to rise again due to the enormous turd that has just clogged the siphon. When she GOES, well, she goes.

How a person her size can produce that much poop in one sitting is beyond me. I won't lie. I've never seen anything like it. She looks like me and acts like me, but, um, I think this trait she gets from her father.

Just PUT ON YOUR UNDERWEAR.

Wednesday morning at 3:30 a.m., I awoke to the sound of Kyra's voice yelling at me through the baby monitor next to my bed. "MoooOOOOOOOM! Sit in the rocking chair, mom! Moooom!"

(There is a rocking chair outside her bedroom door. We get her to go to sleep on her own each night by promising we'll "sit in the rocking chair" while she dozes off... Of course, we don't really sit there. We walk out of her bedroom door, stand next to the chair and movie it back and forth for about 10 seconds so it makes that old-squeaky-rocking-chair-sound, then we go downstairs. What the kid doesn't know won't kill her.)

So, upon The Royal Highness's request, I got up in the middle of the night, and walked down the hall to her room. Kyra was sitting up in bed, looked at me, and said:

"Mom, sit in the rock-

Mom. Put on your PANTS."

I had gone to bed that night in my sweatshirt. I'm usually a full-jammies kinda gal, and that's usually how she sees me. Apparently, Kyra wasn't impressed with my pant-less look.

I went back to bed and tossed and turned. After an hour or so, my stomach started growling.

"I will NOT be the pregnant woman who gets up in the middle of the night to eat." I told myself. "But I'm HUNGRY. And I can't sleep. Hmm. Sex? That might help me forget about food..."

Now. Without being too obvious, how do you wake a sleeping husband up from a deep sleep to, um, ah-hem?

I tried spooning. He continued to snore. I tried coughing, sniffing loudly, and then wiggling around while spooning. Still, nothing.

A few moments later I was downstairs, in the dark, at 4:30 a.m. eating frosted mini-wheats. That's some good cereal, there.

Jeremy's alarm went off around five or so. I think I finally fell asleep around 5:30. At 5:45 I awoke again to the CAT I ONCE LOVED BUT NOW MOSTLY HATE pawing at the blinds and meowing. That bastard.

I threw a pillow at the cat and he finally quit. My alarm went off at 6:15. Kyra woke promptly afterward. I begged Kyra 25 times while I showered and got myself ready for work to put on her underwear by herself.

PUT ON YOUR UNDERWEAR, CHILD. THAT'S ALL I ASK. She will dress herself in secret, or when we don't have to go anywhere. She'll even pick out her own clothes, put them all on, brush her teeth, apply lip gloss, comb her hair, and offer to do the dishes when we're in no hurry...  But when asked to dress herself when I have to go to work in fifteen minutes? She reverts to a six month old, falls on the floor and flops around naked, only speaks in jibber-jabberish, and refuses to let me come within 10 feet of her while I'm holding a comb or toothbrush.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Somehow, I made it to work on time. Yes, I nearly called Jeremy in sleep-deprived frustration to yell, "GOD DAMMIT, I NEED YOU HERE TO HELP ME IN THE MORNINGS IF I AM GOING TO BE A WORKING MOTHER!!! AND BY THE WAY, I'M STILL HORNEY!!!!",

but I didn't.

And you know what? The day only got better from there. It was one of those moments where I'm glad I work. I whine a lot in my writing about how I don't know if I should work, or how I love to stay home, but I have a feeling a day by myself at home with Kyra might have gotten really ugly. There would have been crying. And spanking. From both of us. I love my child SO MUCH it hurts, but at that moment, I also realized why some women choose to work away from home. Work can be rewarding. Some days, it can make things better. And, on a day like Wednesday, it can make a hormonal pregnant woman forget about sex.

Watch the Little Pony

Damn those Wiggles have some catchy tunes. I find myself craving fruit salad and humming "D.O.R.O.T.H.Y the Dinosaur" when I least expect it. I really, truly liked most of their songs the first five thousand times I heard them. Now, I mostly would like to strangle each Wiggle with my bare hands.

My brain isn't working properly today, so I'll pass on actually writing anything. Instead, here's a little experiment with posting videos to my blog. PC users - I think you have to have Quicktime or RealPlayer installed to play this. Not quite sure, really. Let me know if it won't play.

So, CLICK HERE: Watch Kyra Dance.mov

This Little Child Of Mine

My mother recently gave Kyra her first canisters of Play-Doh. Who doesn't love Play-Doh, right? As soon as I got a whiff of that official Play-Doh smell and smooshed my fingers inside it, all the childhood memories came flooding back...

(Did anyone else have the one where the monsters grow Play-Doh hair? Anyone?)

Every evening, after dinner, for the last two weeks, Jeremy and I find ourselves seated around Kyra's toddler-sized table with our great big adult butts seated in teeny-tiny little two year old chairs like a couple of idiots...

"Look, Gerah!" says Jeremy, hunched over the iddybiddy table. "We made a snow man, a bowl of fruit, a dog, and a pelvis!"

My specialty is elephants. I can sculpt one hell of an elephant.

The bowl of fruit. That's Jeremy's favorite. He's a master.

But. Despite my love of the Play-Doh, I secretly despise it. The little bits get everywhere. Kyra doesn't understand that when you're playing with the Play-Doh, you ROLL THE BIG CLUMP AROUND over the little bits so it all stays together. And you KEEP THE COLORS APART!!!

It seems my life is now ruled by Play-Doh and the constant clean up of it. And all day long, I hear myself saying things like:

"KYRA! TAKE. THE. PLAY-DOH. OUT. OF. YOUR. MOUTH."

or

"Nooooooooo!!!! Play-doh does NOT belong on the sofa!!! Give me that. Give! Me! THAT!"

or

"KYRA!? How the heck did you get the Play-Doh down from the top of that seven foot tall shelf where I hid it!!? Give it to me. I'm hiding it again."

The child, she must be part monkey. (Jeremy's side of the family.)

I've also decided she's a conspirator. Cute as the dickens, she is, and she's pulled the wool over our eyes. She pretends to be a normal two year old. But she is not.

For example: When using the toilet, she insists I help her with the undies and pants, the wiping, and then the undies and pants again. Most of the time she even makes me flush. I guess I assumed she truly needed help, until today. We were at the local elementary school for a toddler playgroup and she and I went into the bathroom. As I began to follow her into a stall to help her with the potty, she slammed the stall door in my face and yelled from the other side,

"NO MOM! I DO IT MYSELF!"

Oh. How silly of me.

Then I hear the stall door lock click. Shit, I thought. She just locked herself in there... and she doesn't know how to get her pants down by herself... and she'll pee all over the place... and I'll have to call the fire department to get her out...

Instead of freaking or climbing under the stall, I patiently waited a moment. I heard tinkles. I waited some more. I heard shuffling around inside the stall. After another moment, CLICK! Door flies open and there she was, neatly dressed...

...and all this time I've been doing the wiping. (Of course, I'll never REALLY know if she wiped in there.)

Same with getting dressed. And setting the table. This morning she set the breakfast table - removed placemats from the cabinet, neatly arranged the forks, carried two bowls of fruit, two plates of pancakes, and two glasses of orange juice to the table and positioned both her spot and mine exactly alike...

My eyes have been opened. I am no longer the fool.

Now, if I could JUST teach her how to use the vaccum... and shave my legs.

Boot Lickin'

My mom often reminds me of the time I was at my grandmother's house and took a dead, floating, goldfish out of her aquarium and ate it whole.

NO, THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN LAST WEEK... I was just a kid when I ate the fish. A young kid. Like two or three years old.

And I was fine. Didn't get sick. Kids do gross stuff all the time, right? They're kids! Live and learn! How are they supposed to know that certain things are good other things are bad? They just haven't lived long enough yet to figure everything out. Last night for dinner we put a bowl of burn-your-throat spicy "Chili Blanco Nero" in front of Kyra, and from the look on her face after she tasted it, a cold, dead goldfish probably would have seemed like a feast in comparison!

After work, on the drive home from daycare yesterday, I glanced in the rear view mirror at Kyra in her car seat, and noticed that she had removed her boots and was holding one of them in her lap. Not only was she holding the boot, but she had turned it upside down and was licking it with looooong swipes of her tongue from the top to the bottom of the sole.

"Kyra! Stop that! STOP IT!" I said, trying to drive down the icy roads and reach into the back seat to grab the boot from it's toddler tongue massage session...

She just smiled at me, and calmly continued licking the bottom of the boot, most likely thinking, "There's SNOW on these boots, mom. It's cold. It's wet. It's better than a damn popsicle on a hot summer day. It's NATURE'S POPSICLE. You're going to have to crash this car and pry this tasty boot from my chubby, wet fingers before I just hand it over to you."

And so, rather than crashing the car and dying, we safely drove home, while Kyra licked the boot clean. I just hope she hadn't stepped in any dog poo on the way to the car.

Cute kid. Cute. Kid.

Photo Evidence That My Child Will One Day Spend Way Too Much Money At The Clinique Counter

When I was pregnant with Kyra and found out we were having a girl, I SWORE I would raise my child in a child gender-neutral manner.

I would not decorate her room in pink, frilly lace, and flowers.

I would not buy her baby dolls, strollers, kitchen sets, and barbies.

I would not speak to her in a stupid high pitched girly voice and say things like, "Oh, you're such a pretty pretty baby girl! Yes you are! You're so pretty!!!!!"

So, as she's turned into more of a kid, I find myself shocked when she wants to carry around baby dolls, or runs toward the dress-up clothes in the toy store. I can't understand WHY she wants to put on my lipstick or try on every bracelet I own...

I couldn't understand, that is, until the picture below was taken. Here is photographic evidence that it's me who's nurtured my little girl into, well, a girl. On one hand I say that I won't force girliness onto her, but then, by example - by just by being me, I've turned my daughter into a priss. A makeup-loving, dress-up clothes-wearing, baby-doll carrying mini-me girly child.

For the sake of my daughter, I'd give up makeup, but I think I'd feel sorry for the people that have to look at me every day.

(And yes, I'm making a really stupid face in this photo. It's the "eyelash curling face.")