up to our ears in hats...

We have a lot of hats.

Hats are awesome...they keep the sun off, they keep my ears warm, they keep the world from seeing that I still haven't washed my hair today. (Sadly, they cannot hide the fact that I'm not yet wearing actual pants...)

They also sort of drive me nuts, in that cluttery, never-to-be-found-in-the-same-place kind of way. Most mornings this school year, there's a distinct possibility of me actually getting to school on time, if only I had been able to locate all of the proper hats at the proper time. Our hat collection is impressive. Our organizational system for the hats is not.

In fact, it may be slightly telling to reveal that after that photo, I shoved the majority of those hats back on a shelf sandwiched in between a stray mukluk and a basket full of old batteries and pens that don't work.

I could have a hat storage area, maybe, like a hall closet or a mudroom. Except we don't have either of those, so the hats just sort of flutter down off of heads somewhere in the vicinity of the front door and then filter from there out into the home--landing on various hooks, chair backs, radiators, shelves, floors, and sometimes even toyboxes.

Truthfully, I'm sort of scared to store them too close to each other. What if they multiply?

Painting Pictures

Lazy picture post again today...sorry, I've been working on a new novel, and all my words keep getting diverted to this new creative venture...but we had some fun today while Jabber and David went "rambling" for the afternoon...

monkeying around

Just a quick picture post from today...Jabber and his cousin enjoying our climbing tree.

shackin' up

We moved Monkey's bed into Jabber's room today, and both boys seemed to enjoy the idea of it. Monkey jumped into the bed and pretended to sleep right away, so we let him try it, but the two boys got so wound up that it didn't work. Tomorrow night our niece will be sleeping in there maybe, so Monkey just went to sleep in our bed, like usual.

But here is Jabber showing off his new room. He was so excited by it, he asked me if he could "just sit and look at his room for a while." Luckily he hasn't asked for any of the toys I threw away in the process of cleaning and reorganizing his room!


And here's proof that I did try to organize the bookshelf. The boys each have a treasure chest on top full of all their favorite things!

Jump Right In!

So we got to Jabber's first swimming lesson early. Too early, I guess. The lessons themselves were running late, so when we got there, apparently the older, bigger, more experienced swimmers were still in the pool. Which caused us some drama, but I'll get to that.

First, we arrive and check in, and we are told that adults of the opposite gender cannot accompany children into the locker rooms and that kids over four (actually it says kids who "look four or older" as though if you have an uncommonly tall toddler, he is automatically a pervert or something) can't be in the opposite gender locker room. Okay. So this means I have to drop Jabber off at the door to some weird, labyrinthian locker room, clutching his little bag of stuff, and have him enter alone, get himself changed into his swimming suit alone, take a shower alone, and find his own way to the pool.

"Oh, but there's a locker room attendant, don't worry," she says, beckoning to a boy who might be sixteen. I restrain myself from asking for a copy of his background check. I mean, I'm trying not to be a helicopter parent, but there's also the fact that he's only five years old. He doesn't go into men's rooms alone, and he can't really find his way out of a paper bag by himself, much less find his way through a crowded locker room. (At the restaurant where we ate breakfast, I sent him back to put the tip on the table, and he couldn't find it. It was three tables away from where we were standing at the time.)

Anyway, so I get him dressed in the bathroom instead (in the girls' bathroom, omg I'm such a rebel), and it was a good thing, since he didn't remember that underwear need to be removed first. Then I bring him to the door of the locker room and luckily, a kind grandfather with a small boy of his own offers to help Jabber to the door of the pool. I figure to hell with a shower; do they understand that the child has to be bribed to let us pour water over his head to wash his hair like twice a month?

Then I have to walk all the way around to the other side of the pool and in through the girls' locker room. I find my way through my own labyrinth and emerge in the pool room, only to see my son being taken by the hand toward the water, where those aforementioned bigger kids are splashing away.

"This is Jabber," I hear her say. "Go ahead, Jabber. Jump right in!"

So my son, who is cautious and hesitant about everything in life, jumps right in. And goes right under. And has no clue that he could just stand up, because he has never been alone in that much water before in his life.

(edited to clarify: she did help him to the ladder, and she didn't mean this literally...but he didn't understand how to use the ladder and jumped off the ladder. The pool lady was very sincerely sorry and said that Jabber just seemed so confident, but still. It was scary for everyone.)

At this point, people who have seen me take Jabber swimming (Mary? Ellie? Remember that?) might recall that even when I walked into the water with him, he scrabbled at me like a barnacle and nearly strangled me with his frightened grip and screamed in a way that made me nervous the spectators would call Child Protective Services when I tried to get him to enjoy the water.

Yeah, I was actually pretty proud of him for doing little more than blinking back some tears when the pool lady hauled him back out of the water and set his shivering little self back up on the edge. But in the next fifteen minutes, while we waited for his real beginner lesson, he began to cry and told me he didn't want lessons after all.

In the picture up there, you can see the way he was *supposed* to be introduced to the water, surrounded by two licensed adults who are being careful and supportive. Even so, once his toes hit the water, he latched onto the side and clung to it, shaking and crying, for much of the first lesson. They were really good with him, and got him relaxed and talking, but he still would only go in the water attached to one of the trainers (like a barnacle, with a stranglehold). Now he says he doesn't want to go tomorrow.

I don't know what to do, really. It seems awfully callous to say, "Too bad. I paid forty bucks for this, and you're going." We talked and talked about how he can touch the bottom of the pool (he can), but he doesn't believe me. I asked him one thing he was proud of about today and one thing he wants to try tomorrow, and then I told him six or eight things I am proud of about today and one thing I'd like him to try tomorrow. Right now I'm not even sure he will get in.

On the positive side, he did manage to get himself dried, dressed, and out of the locker room, unlike the other little boy with an opposite-gendered adult; he got lost for a little while. (His mom, carrying a toddler and an infant in a car seat, handled it much better than I would have, I'm sure.)

Yikes.

beach bums

Just a quick picture post today: my boys at the beach, watching some random scuba diver guy braving the freezing cold water and big waves to explore the unknown. The kids were fascinated by watching him wade out and slowly, bit by bit, disappear under the water.

"Hey, Jabber, where did he go?"

"He's under the water, Mom!"

"He just disappeared, though."

"I know! Wouldn't it be weird if he was under there when we were throwing rocks, and then we threw a rock on his head?"

This idea now has me actually worried, a little. I could be happily chucking rocks into the waves and clock some poor diver in the noggin. Oh, dear.

a tough call

Jabber: Mom? Which do you love more, me or your computer?

Me: I love you way more than my computer, sweetheart. Way more. A bazillion times more.

Jabber: Well, if the house was burning down, which one would you grab first, your sons or your computer?

Me: Baby if the house were burning down, the ONLY things I would care about would be you, your brother, and your Daddy.

Jabber: What if your computer burned all up?

Me: As long as my family was safe, it would be okay. What about you?

Jabber: What about me?

Me: If the house were burning down, and you could only save ONE thing, would you save your Mama or your toy cars?

Jabber: I would save you AND my cars.

Me: (laughing) No, no, no, you don’t have time for saving both. Which one would you choose?

Jabber: (also laughing) I would push you out the door and then go back for my cars.

Me: You goofball, you can only choose one.

Jabber: Well, our house would never burn down.

Me: Well, okay, that’s true, but IF you had to make the choice, would you choose me or your cars?

Jabber: I would throw my car out the window while I was saving you.

Well, at least he would save me! :)

The Boys Get New Bikes

Backyard Boys

Before the Big Leaf Burglary Drama that hauled us indoors...

("The sound you make when your little brother steals your pile of leaves should not resemble the sound you make when a rabid alligator tears off both your legs, Jabber. That's enough. Get in the house. NOW.")

...we actually had a nice time this evening hanging out in the backyard. So here are a few pictures proving harmony sometimes happens.


Here's Jabber actually enjoying himself.

Jabber holds the leaves in question, while the perpetrator digs a hole to hide the evidence.


Monkey denies all charges. He is outraged at the accusations.

Elbows off the Table

My kids are currently impossible at the table. Every single meal involves at least five or six occasions of me or David asking them, "Is that good table manners?" and them replying with a reluctant "Noooooo...."

I would like to be able to eat at a restaurant someday, not that we used to eat out all the time or go to super fancy establishments or anything, but we never had to completely abandon restaurants when Jabber was a baby. Sure, we had to bring a lunch from home for him since the odds were extremely high that he would be allergic to everything on their menu, but at least we could bring him places. He would sit, mostly quietly, and color/snack on Cheerios or whatever until it was time to eat, and then he would eat in a way that suggested he was a slightly inexperienced but well-meaning human, and we would clean up, leave a big tip, and go home. No dirty looks or anything.

Now that Monkey has joined us and become mobile, etc., we cannot even handle the most casual of formats for a dinner outside the home. I mean, we can barely keep it together for a meal at McDonald's. Once we went out for a sit-down dinner at a very kid-friendly casual place, and I swear, neither David nor I had a chance to say one word to each other, what with all the trips to the bathroom and the picking things up off the floor and the walking the baby to the windows, etc. That was a year ago, and I cannot even begin to imagine what a restaurant trip would look like today, now that Monkey is firmly entrenched in the terrible twos, so to speak.

Dinner at our home now includes things like constant interruptions (conversation? only if it closely aligns with Jabber's agenda), spitting, tossing, scraping of forks, tipping over of chairs, yelling, funny noises, standing on chairs, food stolen from other people's plates and eaten, food removed from the mouth and placed on my plate, clothing used as napkins, beverages used as fingerpaint, table used as jungle gym...basically it bears little resemblance to dinner.

It's not that we don't value manners; we're constantly trying to show them good manners and enforce/reinforce them. I don't get it, but we've informed them that we'd like to eat out occasionally but can't until we see that they are capable of exhibiting human-like behavior during the course of a normal dinner.

How do you teach your kids manners, or are they just beautiful little darlings who wouldn't ever dream of using yogurt as hair gel?

Fenced In

This is a boring post, unless you're just here to see pictures of my backyard. :)

Last weekend we put a temporary fence up around our backyard, a fact which is causing me some sadness...I liked my yard the way it was, liked the little bit of wildness to it...


Monkey doesn't listen, doesn't stop when I ask him to, doesn't understand about streets and traffic. And this summer they are tearing up our street in front, widening it and such. Traffic in our alley will be heavier because people will all be parking in their garages. There will be lots of opportunities for danger to befall an unruly two-year-old with a general tendency toward monkey-business.

So we put up a cheap fence, just enough to keep the kids a bit contained. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get some flowers to grow around the gate and maybe I'll actually like it when I can read a book while the kids hang out in the sandbox or whatever. Anyway, here are pictures of the building process...

Here they are digging holes for the gate, and I'm looking down at them from the back deck.

Here's Monkey helping Papa with the string.
Jabber drew up some blueprints for the construction project, and he is consulting them on the stairs.

Monkey runs some stakes to Granny along the string.

And here are the boys after their baths last night, showing off the new backyard where they got nice and dirty.

Mood Enhancer

I used to color with crayons all the time. In college, David and I exchanged letters and pictures we drew with crayons (back when people exchanged most of their correspondence via paper and stamps and such...), and David even wrote me a poem that compared me to a box of crayons. (The big kind, with lots of colors...it was cute. He wrote it in crayon on the back of a packet of poetry from a class of his...)
I played around a lot with crayons and watercolor paints--decorating most of my apartments with my own cheaply procured artwork...crayons on freezer paper and such.

I can still remember the first time Jabber drew with crayons; I was kind of crazily thrilled by it, to be honest. I remember watching him stand there with a crayon in his fist, standing there barely able to pull himself up on that blue foot locker that served as our coffee table. I remember watching him select a certain color, draw on a certain part of the page, and I thought, "Oh my god, my child just made an artistic choice. He just looked at the page and made a choice and created art."

I know, it's not really all that magical. He picked up a crayon and scribbled with it. But watching him make the connection in his mind between moving his hand and making colors appear on the page...and deciding between different colors and making those choices...it was just an amazing reminder that he was this whole person--an individual with his own will, his own ability to create beauty. It was so cool!

So tonight the Monkey, Jabberwock, and I all spent about an hour coloring. We spend a lot of time drawing, a process which is sort of stressful at times for Jabber, as he is a perfectionist. But coloring in pictures from a coloring book--how can you go wrong?

All of my stress from the day is gone. Crayon therapy.




Here are the space pictures Jabber and I colored, and below are the boys coloring and cutting out their pictures.

jabber jabbers

Me: Good morning Jabber! How did you sleep?
J: Good…
Me: Awesome! Did you have any good dreams?
J: Noooo…I didn’t have any dreams at all.
Me: Oh, yeah?
J: Yeah, ‘cause you know. Sleep just snuck up on me. And when sleep sneaks up on you, you don’t dream.
Me: Oh, really?
J: Yeah, because sleep, you know. It wants to sneak up on you. And if you dreamed, then you would know you were sleeping. So that’s not really all that sneaky.

surprise!

5:45 a.m.: alarm sounds. Elissa struggles out of bed and hits snooze.

5:46 a.m.: Elissa has figured out that today is Friday and that yes, on Fridays she has a meeting at 7:30, which means she has to leave the house before 7:00 to get the kids to daycare.

5:47 a.m.: Elissa does complicated math problem in her head to determine how many snoozes she can afford before she will be late for the meeting, like usual. Goes back to sleep.

6:20 a.m.: Elissa leaves Monkey sleeping in the bed and stumbles in for shower and dressing.

6:45 a.m.: Elissa is finished getting ready for work and nagging the Jabberwock to get ready. Jabber is lying on bedroom floor, still in pajamas, driving a small toy car around on the rug and insisting that he "IS getting dressed!" and "IS NOT playing!"

6:50 a.m.: Elissa gathers clothes and diaper and goes in to wake the Monkey.

6:55 a.m.: Elissa takes Monkey's temperature.

7:00 a.m.: Elissa calls in to work. Surprise! Sick day. Elissa panics about lesson plans.

--

So you know? Normally there is a very good possibility that I would give him a good dose of Tylenol, call David at work and let him know that the sooner he can get off work and pick up the boys the better, and bring him to daycare anyway. But with this whole swine flu business that has us cleaning our doorknobs and wash wash washing our hands, I guess I just feel like I should keep him home. He has a bad cough, a snotty nose, and a fever, and now he has the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the television.

And I have a chance to update my blog? ha.

Thanks Grammy and Papa!

Look at this amazing book my parents made for the kids. It has the cool eyeball pocket on the outside that holds a magnifying glass, and then inside are pages and pages of pictures with Papa Duck hiding in them, Where's Waldo? style. (Some of them are really super hard, and I'm not actually completely convinced that Papa Duck is really in them...)

Anyway, the boys love these books! And Monkey loves his magnifying glass, as you can see!

conversations with the Jabberwock

Here's Jabber checking his compass on a recent hike through the woods. It's very important to him that we do not get lost, so he checks the compass quite frequently. He also very much dresses himself, right down to the dapper little hat and scarf.

The Jabberwock and I have been having quite a few deep conversations lately. Let's see, there was the moment just before sleep when he demanded to know about how the little daddy cells get into the place where the mama cells are to make a baby. "But how do the cells get OUT of Daddy and INTO you???"

Um. Yeah.

Or this morning he got mad at me--really passionately furious, actually--when I explained to him why he couldn't have a step-dad. And then there was the one in which he informed me that he is actually part feline.

Jabber: Mom, did you know that I'm half human and half puma?

Me: Um, wow. No you did not tell me that.

Jabber: Well, I am. You know every morning I just feel myself, and...there's fur growing all over my chest.

Me: Wow! That's amazing!

Jabber: Yeah, and there are like, black spots on my sides and stuff.

Me: So are you a puma during the day or during the night?

Jabber: *snarls like a crazy wild cat and slashes at me with his sharp claws*

---

Edit:

Moments ago we had this exchange, which just really seemed to fit my theme of the day:

Me: Boys, you're being awfully loud. Those are not really inside voices.

El: Well, they would be if we lived in outer space!

night in review

Photo-of-the-day is from Easter...our hike at the nearby nature area.

So I'm nursing the monkey child and then it's time for bed. We just went for a walk, shot at airplanes (pew! pew!) and trucks, snuggled on the porch swing, ogled street sweepers, chased squirrels, and drew with sidewalk chalk.

That was after we struggled and argued and had meltdowns because brother and Daddy went grocery shopping (certain financial ruin in 3....2....) (not really--I'm sure he'll do just fine...)

Yeah. my night in review, haha. Now I'm off to read Where the Wild Things Are and hope for a speedy dispatch to dreamland for the wee one.

Will I be able to edit tonight?

two tiny updates...

...on my two huge boys.

1. Monkey has apparently perfected what David has referred to as my signature look. "What? What look are you talking about?" I asked him.

"You know. When you lift up one eyebrow and accompany it with that look. The one that says wtf-ever!"

So. A mother feels a special sort of pride and terror when told that her two-year-old has mastered her own unique brand of smart-assery. Yay?

2. Jabber is obsessed with shooting things. "MOM!" he yelled just moments ago. "I JUST SHOT BOTH YOUR LEGS OFF, YOU KNOW!" A pause, and then, "NOW I SHOT YOUR GLASSES OFF, TOO, SO YOU CAN'T SEE WHO'S DOING IT!"

Also, yesterday at daycare he apparently got into quite a scuffle with one of the other children over whether guns have a trigger (demonstrated with a finger motion) or a "Ka-chocka!" (demonstrated by operating something like a pump action shotgun, maybe?)

*is ridiculously ignorant about guns, relative to the rest of this family*

3. In other wild thing news, in the last two days I have seen a coyote and a moose crossing the road in front of lovely daycare provider's home. They were both headed in the same direction--toward her backyard. Wooo, spring!

baby steps

I thought maybe I could handle a photo post.

I really am doing a lot of writing lately, just not here...

Eventually I'll tell you all how I'm doing on my third novel (finishing third draft this week, btw)...when I'm sure it doesn't suck completely.

But for now. Here is my picture of the day, taken on Easter, in our dining room, as the boys were watching for signs of spring in the backyard and eating their candy corn by the double handful.

oh hai!

So I was all set to write this story about how difficult it is to start up something that you stop doing...it was an embarrassing story about me and the gym I once belonged to.

But now I've decided to break the blog silence with a goofy photo instead.

This photograph is titled: "Ooh, Baby is Maaad! GRRROwllll!"


It's even funnier when you can see Monkey staring at this photo on my laptop screen, shouting, "Oh, no! Baby is mad!" and then making his little baby mad faces and noises quite convincingly.

Okay, so I'll maybe post a little more often. 'Cause next time I'll probably be forced to tell the embarrassing story.