Mendolonium

It’s midnight, between Theodore and Anna we’ve had five wake-ups already since bedtime.  I am guessing we’ll have at least five more calls in the night before dawn breaks.  But I vowed to blog every day of November and damn it I am not going to be foiled by the children! I am tired, punchy, and not feeling particularly creative right now so I will take the easy way out and blog about them.  Perhaps that would get them to sleep…”If you don’t stay asleep, Mama’s going to blog about you…”  Somehow I doubt that would work.

Last night was just as bad.  I can’t blame Anna’s wake-ups on anything.  This is, unfortunately, par for the course for her.  She sucks at sleeping.  I can blame Theodore’s poor sleep on illness; he’s been fighting a virus for the past couple of weeks and based on his complaints the past two nights it appears to have taken a turn for the worse (or more accurately, the bacterial); a persistent cough, fever of 102, crying of ear pain, and complaints of body aches.  I think our Sunday morning plans will now include a Daddy-son visit to urgent care.

Make that six wake-ups…I sent Jeff in, gotta blog.

 Normally, Theodore is relatively quiet and reserved.  His fever tonight seems to be making him deliriously chatty.  This last time he woke up I went in to give him Tylenol and he nattered on about the awesomeness of fruit juice “We should get some with berries and pears in it Mama!  That would be so good!”  The conversation then took a turn for the crazy when Theodore started to cheerily exclaim, “We had a bloodbath!  We were in a bloodbath!”  I thought that in my exhaustion I must have misheard him.  But no, he kept going on about the bloodbath he had been in and how much fun it had been.  I wondered, had his fever spiked and made him completely delirious (and apparently murderous)?  I took Theo’s temp again, 102.1; I don’t think high enough to turn him into a delusional psychopath.  He then went on to explain that the bath had been pink but Thomas had thought it looked red like blood so they called it a “blood bath”.  Oh thank god.  I realized, he was talking about the colored bath tablets that we let the boys put in their bath occasionally; they had chosen a pink tablet last night.  And then I started laughing and couldn’t stop. My three year old is not going to murder me in my sleep, he’s just going to wake up every thirty minutes.  Slightly better.

I missed posting last night; only two days into NaBloPoMo.  I was working on a long, and I like to think interesting, post but Annie woke up every half hour or so from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am – with a lovely wide awake and So! Excited! About! Life! stretch from about 11:00 pm to 12:30 am.  So not so much for the writing.  I am going to try to post twice today to make up for it but no guarantees.

I’ve really been enjoying what comes out of my kids mouths lately.

Yesterday morning Theodore stood up on the couch and announced “I am Sabrina, God of rainbows!”  I have no idea where that came from but enjoyed it immensely.  Sabrina then commanded me to curtsey to him because “Ladies curtsey and gentlemen bow.”  He followed that up with, “You know, ladies are loud and gentlemen are quiet.”  A couple of days ago he called me over in a hushed whisper to “tell me a secret.”  The secret was that “Boys are tougher than girls.”  I asked him what gave him that idea and he told me he heard it at school.  I asked him if he thought that it was true and he smiled and whispered “No” to me.

Thomas continues with his insanely adult lines of questioning.  The Saturday morning farmers market we go to is right next to a Marine Corps reserve center.  This sparked a conversation on the military, who serves in it, whether or not they ever die, if people in “our Army” are dying right now, what wars we have been involved in, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why we went to war, misinterpretation/fabrication of evidence by the Bush administration, the fact no matter what side of the political debate you are on everyone pretty much thinks that Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy, what happened to Saddam, why people think that about Saddam, free speech and political freedom, and the fact that we are allowed to call our president a big fat idiot if we want.  Thomas has spent the rest of the day telling me that he thinks Saddam was a big fat idiot – worse than an idiot really – “evil like Voldemort, but without the magic”.  I had to agree with him on that one.

Anna and I aren’t having conversations, per se, but she is incredibly chatty and loud and I expect that a year from now she will be talking my ear off.  She currently has a handful of words:  Mama, Dada, kitty, fish, shoes, banana, water, together (her word for Legos), and more, but it is clear that her receptive language is far beyond what she can speak, and she follows our conversations by pointing enthusiastically to whatever we are talking about.  I think my favorites are her reactions to shoes and the cat.  She literally squeals with delight as I hold her in one arm and open the door to my shoe closet.  She cannot get enough of shoes and likes to rifle through our shoe basket matching up pairs and then distributing them to their rightful owner.  Anna goes crazy over the sight of the cat like teenaged girls used to go mad over The Beatles.  She squeals, falls over with excitement, and then chases after our cat while shrieking “Kitty!”  And if she actually manages to lay a hand on the cat she actually vibrates with happiness.  Last night when it was very late, I was very tired, and Anna was very fussy I came up with a brilliant plan to make Anna happy in my sleep-deprived stupor:  I need to find some tiny shoes to put on the cat.

If you look in my drafts folder on wordpress I’ve got seventeen unfinished blog posts.  In my head, I probably have another three dozen more posts rattling around.  But alas, I only have two hands, and they are almost always full of baby these days.   Life is very, very full.  Sometimes more than full – overflowing – with constant childcare, minor crises like ear infections, obligations to work at Thomas’ new school, getting the house re-roofed, my rheumatoid arthritis acting up.  I am living in a demilitarized zone of exhaustion and excitement.  But it is, for the most part, a happy chaos.  I most love the days we spend at home doing what is normal for us – keeping the kids outside until darkness falls and then herding them inside for a quick bath and bed, baking a spectacular dessert just because, blasting 80s music and having a family dance party.  And through it all the kids keep growing like the proverbial weeds and making us laugh.

Thomas continues to ask questions that challenge me on a daily basis.  This week as we walked home from school a police car drove past and I was peppered with a barrage of inquiries, “Do police officers ever break the law?”  “Who arrests a police officer?”  “Do police officers have to follow the law or can they do what they want because the other police are their friends?”

Theodore’s love affair with all things vehicular continues with unbridled passion.  The one mile walk to and from Thomas’ school is along a busy four lane boulevard and, for Theo, it is a walk of awesomeness.  He still manages to shout with glee every time he sees a Honda, which here in Southern California is about every fourth car.  He is very good at identifying cars and other pedestrians smile at the little boy yelling  “Mazda”, “Nissan!”, “Old Lexus!”  Earlier this week I caught Theo looking out of our front window calling wistfully “Porsche…Porsche, come here Porsche?   Porsche a cool car.  Me have a Porsche when I grow up.”  He carries around a bucket of toy cars all day long and I find tiny cars stashed under his pillow.  It’s fun to see him so obsessed with something.

Anna is flying through her infant milestones at breakneck speed.  She sits up on her own perfectly now – but not long before she lunges forward and pushes up trying to crawl.  This past weekend she learned to scoot backwards and today I watched as she delighted in scooting backwards through the living room, into the entry, and beyond until she backed into the front door and could go no further.  She is an expressive baby; chattering on for hours, screaming in fury when she backs herself under the couch, crying with loud shrieks when Jeff dares torture her by attempting to convince her to take a bottle (so far Anna is winning  that fight and absolutely refuses the bottle).  She’s also, for about the past 10 days, refused to sleep in the evenings.  Instead of going to sleep at 8:00 or 9:00 pm and staying asleep, mostly in our  arms – but asleep – she is now waking up from a “nap” at 10:00 pm and then gleefully trying to play with us until 1:00 am or so.  She is, of course, ridiculously cute and laughs easily during these late nights – as if she knows she has to be charming to get us to put up with this sleep bullshit.   After three children, I am quite aware that this is a developmental phase and that it (hopefully) won’t be long before she’s back sleeping at night (not through the night, but at least sleeping).  And you know what, insanely, I’ll bet that when she does I’ll miss our 10:30 pm runs to Target together, her midnight baths in the kitchen sink, and our late night dances.

The blog posts will just have to keep.  I am too busy partying with my baby.

It’s funny, Theo is now the middle child, but perhaps because he is my youngest boy or perhaps because he came into this world three weeks before I expected him, weighing only five and a half pounds, I still think of him as the baby.  I think that, to some extent, I always will.

Theodore turned three a little over a week ago.  Per his requests we threw him a “dance party” and served a birthday dessert of brownies topped with ice cream, m and m’s, and whipped cream.  Despite the party occurring during a three hour downpour, it was a perfect afternoon.  It made me so happy to see Theo’s realization that it was his special day; that we will all there to celebrate him.  I woke him from his afternoon nap just before the party started; his eyes fluttered open and a smile spread across his face as thoughts of his party danced in his head.

My baby is now obsessed with cars.  We walk down the street and he yells “Acura”, “Mitsubishi” and “Toyota” with glee – thrilled when we come across a type of car he’s never seen before.  He is particularly fond of Volkswagen Bugs and Hondas.  Our neighbors have two Hondas and he stands in front of our bay window and gazes at them longingly.  We were walking across a parking lot last week and he started to break away from us shouting “Honda!!!” after a blue Civic.  Jeff grabbed him and then turned to me and said, “Well, we know what his last words will be.”  I suppose I shouldn’t find the potential demise of my son funny, but I could not stop laughing.

Lately I have been feeling both closer to and more confounded by Theo than ever before; he alternates between delighting me and utterly frustrating me. Nearly every day he asks, hopefully, “bake with Mama?”  I am sure that some of that has to do with me letting him lick the beater, and the spoon, and the bowl (what can I say, I’m a pushover when it comes to sampling desserts) but I also think some of it is that he truly enjoys being in the warm kitchen with me laughing over spilled flour; bonding over a bowl of dough.

And every day I spend most of the time while he and Anna are awake together trying to protect her from him.  Theodore has had a hard time with the arrival of his baby sister.  I don’t know that he has found natural sibling jealousy any more difficult than Thomas did, when Theo himself was born.  But the way that Theodore expresses his emotions is much more challenging for me to deal with.  Thomas used to ask me if it was ok to “break Theo’s head?” when he was feeling frustrated with Baby Theo, but those questions led me to quickly defuse the moment of jealous passion.  I actually can’t recall any instances of Thomas being physically rough with Baby Theo (now on the other hand…).  But Theo acts first and asks questions later.  True to his typical form, he is incredibly physical with Anna – insisting “Baby want to hold my finger!” while it appears to me he is trying to rip her little index finger off, “teaching” her how to roll over by shoving her across the blanket.  He is constantly testing his limits with her; taking a flying leap out of nowhere to land an inch from her head (thankfully he is coordinated and lands where he intends to) or throwing a ball across the room so that it grazes the top of her head.  We’ve tried time-outs, time-ins (snuggling with Mama), taking away privileges – but I just don’t think at barely three years old he has developed the impulse control not to act on his urges.  Right now I just insert myself  between Anna and Theo to provide as much of a physical barrier as possible but I am getting really frustrated because such a position doesn’t allow me interact well with either child.  I want to be a mother, not a goalie.  I hope that as Annie grows and become more mobile and robust they can work out some of their issues with Theodore’s preferred puppy-like method – roughhousing and then sharing a treat.

Theodore’s physical nature has a positive side to it as well.  He is incredibly snuggly and can melt his 27 pound frame against me so that he feels much younger than his three years.  Theodore is also a sight to behold when it comes to physical feats.  He can execute a perfect forward roll, do a back roll off of a chair, do a bridge, hop on one foot, jump off of surfaces taller than him and land on two feet.  And if you ever run into him ask him the difference between an arabesque and an attitude.  He’s got style and grace.  I washed his feet before bedtime one night last week (we were out late with no time for a bath and the kids needed to go to bed now, but I could not, in good conscience let him sleep with feet that dirty) and I was amazed looking at his feet and legs how beat up they were.  His shins were a rainbow of bruises.  His feet looked like he never even wore shoes.  I wonder what happened to that beautiful baby skin – I can’t recall when it turned from baby into boy.

It was clear early on that Theo and I looked rather alike with our long faces and dark eyes.  It was also clear that in some of the fundamentals of his personality he did not take after me.  Theo has always been a stellar sleeper, a morning person, an intrepid explorer, comfortable around people.  I, on the other hand, am a chronic insomniac, a night owl, risk-averse, and finally felt comfortable in social situations somewhere around age 30.  I find myself noticing more subtle aspects of Theo’s personality now and I see myself in him like I never have before.  I really sympathize with him when he claps his hands over his ears, scowls, and tells us “too loud”.  I understand completely his need to put some sort of spread or dip on his bread and crackers and chips (plain carbs = blah, carbs + dairy = good).  And it makes me more than a little happy to walk into a room and find that he has taken out the art supplies or pastry tips or diapers and is anally stacking and lining everything up by size and color.

It is all too easy for us to put people in a box, saying “the adventurous one” or “the artistic one” or “just like Daddy”.  I don’t care if my children grow up to be a doctor, a farmer, a stay-at-home parent, or what have you.  I do care, deeply, that my children are allowed to be themselves. Kids receive so many messages from their families and society about who they should be and how they should act.  I’ve noticed that Theo seems to get more of these messages than Thomas and Anna.  His physical behavior is challenging in a school setting or around siblings and friends and he is spends a lot of time being redirected from rough play.  It breaks my heart to hear Theo think of himself as “bad” based on really just needing an incredible amount of physical activity.  And for some reason people tend to comment often on his middle child status and his resemblance (both personality-wise and physically) to other family members far more than they do for Anna or for Thomas.  I’ve been guilty of it too; thinking of him as “my looks with Jeff’s personality”.  Thankfully Theo is an independent, charismatic little guy and is more likely to lead than to follow.  But I want to make sure that he always knows that he is loved for who he is and I am so happy that I have him as a son.