the pieces of my life

Did everyone have a happy Mother’s Day (well, at least all you mothers out there)? My mother’s day was the best anyone could hope for–a new running PR! I ran a woman’s race , 3.5 miles, and I finished in 26:44, for a record shattering 7:39 minute miles (my first race with under 8 minute miles). I finished 36 out of 396, 17 in my division (of 121). As a point of comparison, when I ran this race in 2004, I was thrilled to have run it in 33:38 (9:37 minute miles).

I know, I know. Who cares? Well, I do and it’s my blog! You don’t like it, just try and catch me.

With Doodles, there was never much to do. An occasional, “No, Doodles!” or the shutting of a gate, and things were just hunky dory.

Not so with the Pie. Suddenly, I’m laughing at the idea of babyproofing. Who needs to babyproof? What the heck is a baby going to do? Now, toddlerproofing, that’s another story! My God, is that girl into everything! Nothing is safe! The phone that has sat by my bed for the past four years? Now removed from the charger and placed every morning on an extra-tall dresser. My wallet on the kitchen counter? She’ll pull the newspaper that she can grab a corner of and use it to knock of the twelve items it takes until the wallet comes crashing to the floor. We tell her she can’t jump on the bed/couch/chair? She pushes toys over so she can climb on top of them and climb up and jump anyway. Not allowed to touch the stereo? That’s fine. She’ll go for the TV. Denied a nursing for three minutes. Drop on the floor, crying, screaming, “Miiiiiiiing Miiiiiiiiing! Mommy, Miiiiiiiiiinnnnnnng Miiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnng!” (In case anyone was wondering how that old weaning thing was going.) I don’t respond fast enough. Duck! Anything within reach is going to be flying in seconds.

Protect your valuables. Lock up your maidens. Gird your loins. There’s a Pie on the loose.

Me: You know, you guys are having some issues tonight. I’d like for you to keep your hands off of each other in the bath tonight.
More touching ensues.
Me: If one more person touches the other, there won’t be a show tonigt.
Doodles and Pie are playing with their bath letters. I look down at my magazine, and look up when Pie is shrieking. She has a K and an M on her back and she’s straining to get them off.
Me: How did those letters get on Pie’s back?
Doodles: She put them there.
Me: Look at her. She can’t reach them. There’s no way she put them on herself. How, I repeat, did Pie get those letters on her back?
Doodles: Oh, that’s right. There was a machine in the bathtub that put that on Pie’s back.

Going to the playground, Pie let me put on her sandals sans socks. However, she had to be carrying with her at all times her socks, her sun hat, and a random green pair of shorts.

Doodles: I’d like to see a v*agina.
Me: No. V*aginas are private parts. You don’t get to look at people’s v*aginas.
Doodles: But I want to look at one!
Me: Remember we talked about how everyone has private parts that are just for them? V*aginas are private parts.
Doodles: Private?
Me: It’s just like your p*enis is private and people can’t look at it.
Doodles: No, but it’s okay!! It’s okay if people look at my p*enis!

After bath, I go for the moisturizer.
Doodles: NO! No! NO! I like dry skin! Don’t take away my dry skin!

My little baby sister has been in school for the past three decades. Seriously. She started kindergarten in 1976 and this fall she’ll be finishing up her Ph.D. And now? Now she is gainfully employed. My little baby sister is venturing out into the real world with a real job. My odds were on Pie finishing school and starting work first, but there you go. The Tweedle Twirp surprised me. Tenure track and everything! Yeah Tweedle Twirp! Can I have an A?

Doodles has a serious Band-Aid fetish. He loves to decorate his body with them. He usually has one or two on his belly, one on his forehead, perhaps one on an arm or leg. Adam called to me the other morning. “You’ve got to come see this!” I come upstairs to find my son happily playing away… with one of my maxipads stuck on his forehead. “Look, Mommy!” he said proudly. “I found a big Band-Aid!”

A new dinnertime tactic:
Doodles: Mommy, I can’t eat my rockamole cracker!
Me: Why not?
Doodles: I’m scared of it! The cracker is scaring me!

Pie on the other hand has become the total prima donna during meals. She loves to eat, and I love that about her. But she’s lazy as all get out. At dinner, she quit eating way before I would have thought she was full. “Don’t you want more, Pie?” I asked as I picked up a piece of beef and brought it to her mouth. The little mouth instantly opened and she took the piece. Then she pointed to a pepper. And then a piece of zucchini. And then more beef. What a little princess! Demanding to be fed! And if I didn’t move fast enough, wailing was involved. That girl should have been born to royalty.

Please note that this is Pie. Please note there is nothing beneath her feet. Please note that this does not dissuade her from going for the choking hazard I thought I had placed far out of her reach. She climbed the chair, reached for something in the middle of the table, accidentally pushed the chair away with her feet, but refused to stop her mission so she just hung there until she was able to grasp the choking-hazard that apparently was exactly within her reach. Apparently, “out of her reach” no longer exists. How is it she is so lazy when it comes to almost everything else, but she’s willing to put in that extra effort when it means causing great trouble for others or potential injury for herself?

We had friends over for dinner on Saturday. Friends with a daughter three months older than Doodles and a daughter one month younger than Pie. Dinner was a disaster. My son was on a roll. Refused to eat. We warned him, no energy food, no dessert. Did he listen? Of course not. He did try to regale his friend with stories while she was eating, being quite distracting.
Me: Doodles, please either eat your dinner or excuse yourself from the table.
Doodles: [waving a finger at me] No! I’m talking to O.!
Me: Doodles, O. is trying to eat her dinner. Please either finish your dinner or excuse yourself.
Doodles: I just need one more minute!
Me: Doo–
Doodles: No! No! NO! I just need one more minute! [finger is going crazy and O. is staring ahead, pretending like she doesn’t hear anything because she doesn’t want to get into trouble] I just need ONE MORE MINUTE!
Me: Doodles, you need to excuse yourself right–
Doodles: No! Listen to my words! Listen to my words! I need one more minute! If I have to say it again, you lose a show!

No one likes my singing. We’ve now reached the point where if I sing along to the ipod, Doodles complains, “I can’t hear the words!” If I sing to the Pie, she just screams and yells, “No no no no no!”

Doodles: I don’t like having a sister.
Me: You don’t?
Doodles: No. I don’t want a sister anymore.
Me: Okay.
D: Okay?
Me: Okay. We’ll take her back to the hospital.
D: We will?
Me: Sure. If you don’t want her anymore, we’ll take her back to the hospital.
D: Will they throw her away?!?
Me: No. They’ll give her to another family.
D: Oh. What about her crib?
Me: We’ll give that away, too.
D: Why?
Me: If Pie doesn’t live here anymore, we don’t need her crib anymore.
D: Oh.
Me: We’ll probably have to send all her toys away with her, too.
D: Her toys!
Me: Yeah. The family that takes Pie will need her toys.
D: Oh.
Me: Do you think maybe we should keep her?
D: Yeah. I think we should keep her.
Me: That’s good. Because I really wasn’t going to get rid of her anyway.
D: You weren’t?
Me: Nah. You guys are stuck with us. Forever!
D: Oh. Okay.

From the other room…
D: Heeeelp! Helllp!
I walk in and see his T-shirt halfway off but stuck over his head.
Me: What are you doing?
D: I need help taking this off.
Me: I see that. But what are you doing?
Doodles succeeds in getting the shirt off and proceeds to start taking off his pants.
D:I’m taking off my clothes, but not my underwear.
Me: Why?
D: Because that way I won’t have problems with a lot of stuff.

And then on another occasion:
D: I don’t poop anymore.
Me: What?
D: I don’t poop anymore. I just hold it in till I don’t have to poop anymore.
Me: Sweetie, that’s not healthy. When you have to poop, you should go to a potty and poop.
D: No. When I’ll just hold it in until my belly is filled up.

I’d like you all to know that my husband not only watches America’s Next Top Model, but he has an opinion on it. No, seriously.

Little Miss Pie has had a bad cough. A dry cough. She wakes up a bunch at night with it. She has it during the day, but we wrote it off because half the time she seems to be faking the cough. Doodles coughs for real. Pie mimics. Doodles mimics back. A little coughing fit, half real, half fake ensues.

Except that the other night, Pie coughed her way through the night. And when Adam went to retrieve her in the morning, there was blood all over her sheets. Three large patches of blood. Like the size of a CD. So of course I got those two out of the door in record time to make the walk-in at our doctor’s office. (Have I ever told you how much I love our peditrician? Her office has a walk-in every morning at 8 a.m. where you can just show up for all those little ailments that have cropped up in the night; perfect for those day care days where you just don’t know if your child is healthy enough to go in.) Doodles was thrilled to go: he adores the toys there.

So one of the docs sees Pie right away. I tell him about the cough. The nose that’s been running forever. The pools of blood in her crib. “Mmm hmm,” he says. “Mmm hmmm.” He has on a large “One Fish Two Fish” tie and Pie is fascinated by it. He’s quite good with her and even though he’s not Pie’s normal doctor, she’s taken with him and his silly antics.

I’m waiting. TB? Pneumonia? A scary diseases I’ve never heard of?

The verdict finally comes: “Well,” he says, “she definitely has a little bit of a wheeze to her. I can give her something for the cough if it’s bugging her too much. Her chest, though, sounds clear.”

“What about the blood?” I ask.

“Take a look at this,” he says, taking a tongue depressor to her mouth. “See that?” He points to the inside of her cheek.

“Eww! What is that?” My daughter is diseased. She has a nasty growth inside her mouth. What kind of evil oral disease has my daughter wrought?

The doctor breaks it to me: “She’s been chewing on the inside of the cheek. The blood is from her cheek.”

I know that girl will eat anything, but this is ridiculous! We’ll start giving her a bone to chew on before she goes to bed to help keep her from cannibalizing herself.

Let’s talk about what I’ve brought to Adam in this marriage: my wit, charm, and beauty; a house; the means for him to get an M.B.A.; two wonderful children; a huge and eclectic DVD collection; an appreciation for Indian food; to name but a few.

Let’s talk about what Adam has given me: allergies. No seriously. Allergies. Don’t give me crap that allergies aren’t contagious. Adam has given me his allergies.

Twice this week I’ve woken up and thought, “Damn! Evil hangover!” only to realize that I hadn’t had anything stronger than a glass of water the previous night. But my head is aching, my brain is fuzzy, and my face feels like its stuffed with cotton. I’d write it off to a cold except this is the third spring this has happened.

Cough cough. Bastard.

Pie is obsessed with socks in general and a pair of hand-me-down socks that have a cat on each one over the toes in particular. “Kitty cat! Kitty cat! Meow! Meow!” The socks, dirty after a day of play, come off for bath. In her pretty clean pajamas, she demands, “Socks! Socks! Kitty cats!” and goes rifling through the dirty laundry I’ve just removed from her, querying, “Where’d it go? Where’d it go?” till she finds said socks and demands I put them on her feet. Then she plays, periodically stopping to lift her toes and admire her kitty cats. Unfortunately, the socks are already too small, so we better find another pair of kitty cat socks, and fast!

While washing his hands at his friend’s house after using the bathroom, Doodles tried to look into the mirror, but even on the stepstool, he was too short. “Mommy,” he complained. “The mirror isn’t repeating me!”

I’m pretty sure my daughter is a German. She refuses to wear her sandals without her socks on.

Pie was getting up every day at 5 a.m. I’d pick her and bring her into Doodles’s bed (since he was in our bed anyway). She’d demand, “Blankets!” so after covering her with his blankets, I’d nurse her. When she was done, she’d slide out of bed and waddle into our room to wake Adam up with a string of babble, indicating that she was ready to be taken downstairs and entertained. These days, though, I’ve been able to put her back in her crib after her Ming Ming, and she’ll go back to sleep for anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. However, some days she doesn’t want to go down, and I’ve finally figured out the key. If, after nursing, she makes random small talk (like today–Doodles came into our room without Boy Bear, which was still in his bed. She picked up Boy Bear and asked, “Where’s Brother?” I said, “Doodles is still sleeping.” She said, “Oh, Brother sleeping.”), then I can safely put her back to bed and she’ll sleep. If, however, she demands her socks, then she’s up for the day. I have to say, breaking this code has really made life a whole lot easier.

Sometimes I ask Adam what we should have for dinner. “I don’t know,” is his invariable reply. “Well, what do you feel like?” I’ll ask him.
A: I’m not in the mood for anything.
Me: You have to be in the mood for something.
A: I dunno.
Me: Okay, close your eyes and go like this [I make a tasting motion with my mouth]. What do you taste?
This always makes Adam crazy as he claims this doesn’t work, whereas I swear by it.
The other day, Doodles said to me: “Do we have anymore plain matzah?”
Me: Yes, we do.
Doodles: I want matzah! Plain matzah! My tongue is telling me it wants to taste plain matzah!
Definitely my son!

I feel like our house is becoming somewhat of a fortress these days, battened down to protect us from invading armies. Unfortunately, the invading armies happen to live within this fortress, making our house somewhat of a war zone. Take for instance, Medros the Younger. If the bathroom door isn’t closed, she’s standing high upon the step stool, filling the sink with hot water from which she likes to bath, brush her teeth, and generally make a big mess. Which isn’t as bad as finding her with her arm in the toilet. Then there’s Medros the Older, who knows he isn’t allowed outside by himself, yet constantly claims to want to just “take a peek” outside, which means exiting the premises. With this bout of warm weather we finally have, I’ve been leaving the front door open, however, I have to make sure the lock is on the patio door or else my child will be halfway down the block. Of course, there’s also Medros the Elder. From him the remote needs to be hidden. I can be watching any show, leave the room for exactly 3.4 seconds to grab a drink in the next room and by the time I’ve returned, the Red Sox are on. Happens all the time! I had no idea that the Red Sox were now playing 24-hours a day but that’s what it seems to be.

Speaking of Red Sox, Adam went to the game last night (even after a conversation with Doodles in which I said, “Is it okay if Daddy goes to the game?” and he slowly shook his head and said, “Noooo…. Not without me!”). Doodles goes to bed every night at 7. Pie at 7:30. Our evenings are pretty regimented: 5 p.m. bath; 5:45 show while I make dinner; 6:15 p.m. dinner; 6:40 brushing teeth and potty; 6:45 stories; 7 first one to bed; 7:05 Ming Ming; 7:15 teeth brushing; 7:20 stories; 7:30 second child to bed. Pretty much the routine every single night, day in, day out. So Adam is out. Having a good time. Company meeting, at the Museum of Science no less. Then a baseball game. It’s a beautiful night. And he decides to call and check in. So, of course, he called at 4:45 just before we started our routine. Oh, wait, he didn’t do that. He called at 7:45 just after the last monkey was put to bed. No, no. That’s not right either. Oh, yeah. He called at 6:50 p.m. Right in the middle of child wig out/getting ready for bedtime. And then asks me, “What do you sound so tense and annoyed?” Um, HELLO? I had a day that involved two trips to playgrounds, one music class, one screaming fit over the reapplication of sunscreen, one pizza dinner out in which Doodles decided he needed to use the potty right when Pie had maximum pasta mess on her and was not about to leave the table in the middle of her meal for her brother, four temper tantrums (three of them from the kids), six books read seven times, and I am a mere 40 minutes away from freedom if I can just keep either kid from losing it again and he wants to know why I sound annoyed? Can one of your people please explain it to him because I’m going to go have a martini.