the pieces of my life

Thanks to Diane for passing this amazing translation of The Little Golden Treasures: My Little Book About God.

Don’t get me wrong. I really appreciate everything Adam does. From what I hear, he does significantly more than most Dads out there. But there are days (today among them) when I long to post a sign on my child that says, “Daddy Dressed Me!”

I’ve decided that trying to have conversations with my son is really like trying to have a conversation with a Magic 8 Ball (Oooo, find out the secrets of the Magic Eight Ball!). I always get one of six answers from him, and it seems to be 100 percent, completely random which response I’ll get. For instance, a questions as simple as, “Doodles, would you like to put on your jacket?” can elicit:

1) Yeah–Note, this has no bearing on what the question was and he shows surprise when I try to follow through with whatever action I asked about.
2) No–Usually this answer is dead on, accompanied by violent shaking of the head.
3) No Reply–This is accompanied by a willful turn of the head as my child ignores me to run across the room and become suddenly busy elsewhere.
4) Reply Hazy–This comes when I ask my child a question, he looks me straight in the eye and responds in some babble that I have yet to decode. It’s usually a very long explanation and at the end of it, he looks up at me expectantly and hopefully, waiting for my response to which I generally shrug and hand him some Goldfish.
5) Bish–No clue as to what this is. It’s said in great earnest, frequently and neither Adam nor I can interpret it.
6) Up!–Said when Doodles doesn’t give a hoot to what we asked but he wants yet another Barney book read.

Smarter than a monkey, almost. Smarter than a Magic 8 Ball? I long for the day!

–All of my mom friends have e-mail. And at about 8 p.m., e-mail suddenly comes to life. All day long, I get one, maybe two e-mails. But once all those kiddies have been put to bed, suddenly I get six, eight, or ten e-mails at a time.

–Doodles’s poops smell worse than other kids’ poops. I unfortunately have empirical proof of this.

–Finally new videos up (if you want to see them but don’t have the password, just drop me an e-mail). But in looking at what videos to post, I see that a good half of our videos have extremely abrupt endings. Generally as you hear me saying, “Doodles! No touch!” or you see Doodles do something like grab the telephone and start to dial and then suddenly, bam! the tape stops.

–I no longer believe in Darwinism. It’s the natural selection part that’s done me in. By the laws of natural selection (basically that nature selects the best adapted varieties to survive and to reproduce), there’s no way my child would still be alive. Let’s take his Sit N Spin. We have the same conversation multiple times a day. “Doodles,” I say, “that’s a Sit N Spin. Not a Stand N Spin. Remember what happened five minutes ago when you stood on it?” But apparently he doesn’t because he flashes me one of his melt-me Doodle grins and proceeds to stand on it. And, hey, what a look of shock on his face when he goes flying off and hits his head on the floor!

–I rue the day I put batteries in his toys. In any of the toys. Truth be told, the toys taken individually don’t bother me. It’s when I have a CD on and Doodles runs to push the song on his Sit N Spin and then runs over to one of his song books and hits the button and then he sets off his Laugh and Learn Home at the same time. That reminds me: I need to put Tylenol on the shopping list.

–Aha! More evidence that the rules of natural selection do not apply in our household. I’m sitting at the dining room table typing. All of a sudden I looked up and saw my child’s grinning head above the table, grabbing for my keys. Okay. He’s allowed to have my keys. Except my child is quite short. About 30 inches. He’s never been above the 25th percentile for his height. And the table is about 36 inches tall. I peek beneath the table. Did my child grab some books to stand on? Nah. What about his Lego Table? Not that either. Try his plastic rocking horse (I call it a horse; I’m not sure what it is. Rocking Blob would probably be most accurate. Most of these toys mentioned have been generous hand-me-downs from neighbors). He’s standing on the one thing that doesn’t have a flat bottom. Hey, guess who was surprised when he fell? Will wonders never cease?

How am I posting mid-day, you might be asking. I tend to be a late night poster, once the Doodles is safely off to bed. Well, Doodles got a present today from my mother. And suddenly, I can bring my laptop out and get work done, because there are no little hands begging for my keyboard. I’m not sure how healthy it is to feed Doodles’s addiction, but hey, if it buys me five minutes of peace, I’m all for it. The computer is old and doesn’t work too well. It does have Windows 95 on it. As soon as Doodles figures out that a computer turned off isn’t that interesting, then I’ll plug it in for him. However, at the rate he’s going, I think that won’t be for another few years.

He’s wearing me out. Simply wearing me out. So many new milestones. So few of them restful.

–Playgroup at our house, Doodles, as usual, climbs the bottom rung of his high chair so he can latch the straps. One of the mothers says, “Is he allowed to do that?” “Oh, yeah,” I reassure. “He can’t climb up.” In two seconds the kid had scaled the high chair and was happily climbing up the seat back. You know, whenever I say things like that, they bite me in the butt. You’d think I could harness this power and make it work for me. But apparently it only works selectively. For instance, just now I said out loud to no one, “Oh Doodles never does the dishes by himself.” And lo and behold, the dishes are still not done.

–At the same playgroup, we had our first experience of Doodles trying to grab a toy from a child. Doodles pulled, the child resisted. Doodles had a full-scale meltdown of screams and lying on the floor hollering. It was so attractive.

–A positive thing: he now points. If you ask where something is in a book, he’ll now point at it. He also has started putting things away. In music class, he happily put the instruments back in the bin.

–He’s becoming a creature of habit. For the longest time, we couldn’t get him to wear a hat. Finally, we won the battle with his red Old Navy winter hat. My in-laws came over and brought him an adorable new LL Bean winter hat. Very cute. Doodles had fun playing with it. And then it came time for all of us to go out to lunch. We put on Doodles’s shoes. We put on his jacket. And then we put on his new hat. Or tried to. The kid ripped it off his head the second we got it on and dug into the pile of our jackets until he found his red hat. And refused to go out without the red hat on. I’m starting to see shades of my father in him, not necessarily a good thing… (Peter, don’t even ask why that’s like you. You are a creature of habit. Mom, back me up on this.)

–He says “ashes, ashes, dooooowwwwn!” when he wants to play Ring Around the Rosie. Although he hasn’t mastered walking in the circle. Or falling down (on purpose; he is a pro on the accidental falling).

When I was a child in Miami, once a year, usually on a “cold” (read 50 degrees) day in January or February, my elementary school would truck in a load of snow and dump it in the playing field for us to play in. My mother–as probably most of the mothers did (and in those days, it was always the mothers)–had to scrounge up gloves and scarves for us kids who never wore a glove or a scarf before in our lives. I had heard of this magical thing called a “snow day” where it snowed hard enough that the schools closed and kids got to play all day in the snow! Wow! What a concept. Of course, I only liked playing in the mountain of snow for about five minutes, because then my face hurt, but hey, I was still sure this “snow day” was a marvelous thing.

At the age of ten, my family moved for a brief time to Boulder, Colorado. Now Boulder is a hearty city. A little snow never stopped anyone. I don’t think once, in all my four years in that town, we ever had a snow day. The city was prepared. Plows, sand, dedicated teachers all added up to no snow days. Oh how I longed for the mythical snow day!

And then, it was back to Miami Beach for us, where once again I tossed away all winter gear. Never a snow day. However, back in 1984, we did get one or two riot days, which has none of the cachet of a snow day but does have the same desired result: no school and a day to play. I spent mine at E.’s house with a bunch of schoolmates, eating raw cookie dough and watching The World According to Garp on cable.

So now I am a grown-up. I live in New England. And what do I live in fear of? Snow days. Ugh, how I detest snow days! It didn’t start out that way. I was actually quite excited for a snow day last Sunday. This past Saturday, the whole town was on edge knowing that a storm was headed our way. I casually headed out to Whole Foods to get a few things we needed and was stunned by what greeted me. The check-out lines were so bad, they reached through every aisle of the store to the milk case on the back wall and curved around. Shopping was difficult to say the least. But I bought the essentials plus a few fun extras to get us through the Patriots game (okay, get Adam through the game; when the Dolphins aren’t on, I don’t watch) and to make for a cozy afternoon.

And on Sunday it was indeed a white, slushy, snowy day. We had a lovely twenty-six inches or so of snow surrounding us. We huddled inside. I baked banana bread and made a big pot of red beans and rice. We watched movies. We, unfortunately, didn’t read the papers, because they were never delivered. We even took a very short walk outside, although it was cold enough to chill my little Doodles, and we’d like to keep him a Doodlebug, not a Doodlesicle. We muddled through just fine. Until… the moment of terror hit. The one phone call no parent ever wants to hear. Day care would be closed on Monday. ARRRRRGGGG! Okay, okay, I can handle another full twenty-four hours inside the house with my energetic toddler. No problem. So we stayed home. All day. Luckily, we have two friends also in the day care with us who are not petrified of driving in the snow and one came to play in the morning and the other in the afternoon. I was a little stir crazy, but it was fine. Both agreed the roads were terrible.

Then, on Tuesday, I was looking forward to our Music Together class like I never have before. I was desperate–desperate, I tell you!–to leave our house. Except… class was cancelled. Because the public schools were all closed, so was class. Thank goodness the library came through with its singalong. I drove five miles an hour to get there, but get there I did. “I can do this snow thing!” I thought.

And I could. Until this morning. When we woke up to even more snow. On the ground, swirling in the wind, coming down. Snow, snow, snow. The road was ugly. No plows. Adam called me from his way into work to report that the main highways were not plowed.

So what to do? Time to evaluate. Which is worse? My absolute deathly fear of driving in the snow especially on unplowed streets? Or my fear of being trapped in the house for yet another day with Doodles? I’m sure you know the answer. So at 9:30 this morning, I bundled my child into his snow jacket and hat; wrangled him into the car seat (having to climb across one seat to get to the other seat because his seat is on the passenger side; and the snow bank on that side is too tall to get around), get the car out of the driveway (no easy feat given the snow plows have created a wall around our driveway that’s as tall as I am); and drive five mph to the toddler gym. Very few morons were out on the road today. Definitely no plows in site. But eventually, we made it to the toddler gym. I get my child out of the car, make small talk with a dad bringing his son to the gym and make my way upstairs only to find… the director closing up the gym early. Too much snow and not enough folks to come out. Although to our credit, there were about four of us parents out there. I felt so ridiculously depressed. I let Doodles run around for twenty minutes before getting him bundled back up and heading back home, this time driving at three mph because the weather was that much worse.

What’s the point of all this? Really not much. I just needed to complain a little. And rue the day I ever longed for a snow day.

You know how much fun it is going to the dentist? Well imagine lying back in the chair, the dentist’s pointy thing scrapping the tartar off your teeth, picking at your gums until they bleed, that annoying light shining in your eyes. Now, at the same time, picture your hands reaching out in front of you to grab the legs of the wriggling toddler who is sitting on your lap because he refused to play nicely on the floor, trying to keep him as well as the book and toy phone also on your stomach from flying off of you, while also trying to prevent said toddler from placing his hand in the spittoon. Yeah. That kind of fun.

Glazed eyes glued to the stage. Crowd screaming in ecstasy. Munchies hitting wide. The oddly arrhythmic sway of the dancing. The out-of-hand mosh pit, with bumps, grinds, and waving arms. A few true fans holding up a banner, shrieking wildly when it was noticed.

Okay, so the banner read “SteveSongs Rule!,” the munchies were being fulfilled with Goldfish, and no one in the mosh pit was taller than three and a half feet, but, man, I can see these kids in fifteen years, lighters in hand, following Phish around the country.

We took Doodles to his very first concert. Granted it was a fundraiser for a preschool, but let me tell you, these kids know how to rock. When Steve sang the mice song, those kids were chanting along “Cheddar or Swiss! Provolone is bliss!”

To his credit, Steve actually can sing and the music was enjoyable for grown-ups, too. My little munchkin was entranced, sitting patiently in my lap for the first forty-five minutes of the concert and then he had a field day the last half hour running back and forth across the back of the auditorium as Adam chased him.

This year SteveSongs. Next year… oh God, next year it’s going to be Brittney Spears, isn’t it? We are so screwed.

Many kids form attachments. Usually to something soft. Frequently something stuffed. They’ll carry around a ratty bear or a filthy dog until stuffing is coming out of the seams and panicked parents have to find a replacement.

Doodles has an attachment. And yes, it is soft. And often stuffed. But it is, I’m afraid, my belly button. He loves to stick his left index finger in his mouth and his right index finger in my belly button. He does this when he’s upset. When he’s tired. When he’s bored. Pretty much all the time.

You laughed at me when I worried about it before, but it’s still going on and I’ve decided it’s time to wean my child from my belly button. Only it’s not so easy. Sure, I could wear overalls 24-7, but I’m not a big fan of overalls; I simply have too small a bladder to manage them comfortably. I need a pair of grown-up onesies, but I grew out of my leotard phase when I was eight. Other than that, there’s no good way to keep my child close, but my belly button out of reach. He’s adept at untucking my shirts and just helping himself to a fingerful of belly.

And it’s getting worse. Before he used to just come up and stick his finger in his belly (and let me tell you, that’s incentive to keep his fingernails short; I’ve got plenty of scratch marks on my belly from when he was belly button hunting). But this past weekend he started something new. Now, as he’s walking over to me, he wants me to prep for him. “Belly belly belly belly,” he says as he walks over and lifts my shirt.

Tonight, we were snuggling in the armchair, watching a little Sesame Street together. “Belly belly,” he said.

I pulled my shirt down and refused the finger. “The belly button is closed, sweetie,” I said. “The belly button is closed for the night.”

He looked at me with those big eyes and said, “Open.”

How could I refuse? I think losing the belly button is going to be a considerably harder time than we had losing the bottle. Ugh.