Pop Quiz, Hot Moms

So you’re at a minor league baseball game with your no-nap toddler, when she poops her diaper. Upon reaching the not-crazy-clean restrooms, you discover:

1. You’ve forgotten to pack wet wipes in the transfer from small diaper bag appropriate for church to large diaper bag appropriate for baseball.

2. The poop is not the solid, easily handled by a paper towel kind. It is the runny, seedy, already crusted-on-her-butt kind.

3. The changing table, on which you have already partially disrobed your child and opened her diaper, has no safety strap.

4. She’s already taken off her shoes and dropped them to the floor.

What do you do?

What I did was disgusting and involved saliva and two extra diapers. And a good cleansing when we got home. I won’t elaborate. It even makes me a little sick to my stomach.

Even the bottled water is called “quench”

So I’m in San Diego, and I’ve never been here before. And I’m about to expose you Big City Dwellers to my charming Midwestern naivete because MYGAWD this hotel is fancy/trendy/CRAYZEE. We are staying at the W San Diego, which is kind of like having a role as an extra in an episode of Private Practice or Nip/Tuck.

Everything is fancy and modern  and shiny and mostly black and white with pithy little names like “wet” (the pool) or “sweat” (the gym, closed for renovations) or “wired” (business center). Instead of a picture of flowers or some picturesque countryside in my room, there is a chalkboard. Should I leave a nice note for housekeeping? The elevators have actual real floormats that have to be physically changed according to the time of day. Right now, they say “Good evening.”

I have a down pillow shaped like a beachball in my room and am currently playing my ipod through the state-of-the-art system that is ipod compatible. Each room has a dvd player and small dvd library, with rentals available upon request. There is 24-hour room service (which provided me with a Kobe beef cheeseburger at midnight this morning), and I was a little self-conscious taking a shower because the door only goes halfway across the shower… and it’s clear glass. The girl who checked me in was wearing a half-shirt.

Everyone who works here is constantly saying things like “everyone at the W is a VIP” and “whatever/whenever!” Seriously. The customer service is phenomenal. PHENOMENAL, I SAY.

The hotel bar, from whence I just arrived, is called beach (lower case) and purports to have heated sand. I stepped in the sand and inquired Jeremy the bartender about its temperature. He exposed the hotel managers for the lying bastards they are, telling me that the sand was only heated for the first two weeks the hotel was open, and then they turned it off because it was crazy expensive and kept shorting out the power to the kitchen. HA!

So Jeremy supplied me with my second rather-large pomegranate martini (expense account! which also paid for my split of champagne at dinner!) to carry up to my lovely room with the view of the harbor, and here I am, missing R and Dave and wanting to go home. As always on these trips.

This was the first trip that R truly understood that I was going away. She begged me not to get on the airplane. She didn’t want me to go “play with Diego” (San Diego). She wanted me to stay there and eat hot dogs and play with her new Barbie horsie with her.

But she’s doing great with her dad. It’s great that they have this time together. And good that I have a chance to get away, too, I guess. But there’s only so much loneliness that champagne, a Padres game and two pomegranate martinis can take care of. Even if I do get to listen to my ipod in my hotel room.

I-L-L…I-N-I

Jennie often writes passionately about her love of her alma mater, Texas A&M, and how, as a child, she hadn’t imagined herself becoming an Aggie.

I graduated from the University of Illinois ten years, six weeks and four days ago. In some ways, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. In other ways, it seems like longer. I loved my time in Urbana-Champaign. I spent three years at the Daily Illini, the last year as campus editor. I made some wonderful friends there.

I spent two years entangled in a difficult and sometimes abusive romance with a man who I thought I might one day marry and who broke my heart a little bit every day we were together and for a good year after I got the strength to tell him we shouldn’t be together anymore.

I spent my senior year with my best friend, a woman I felt such a connection with I just knew we would be friends forever – until she became involved with the man who was still breaking my heart.

Senior year was joyful and complicated and bittersweet. I was on my own – no roommates, no boyfriend, no parents directing my every move. That was when I found myself, found who I really was; found the girl who could stay home on a Friday night to write papers for her English 300 20^th Century American Women Authors class and play Flip Cups with the hockey team and  flirt with the goalie on Saturday night. I found the girl who believed passionately in President Bill Clinton and the injustice of a mascot that parodies Native Americans. I found the girl who learned to love herself for who she was, not who she was with. I found the girl who was a loyal friend to a fault. And I discovered the girl who loved cold white wine on a hot summer night, the Chicago Cubs, Old Style beer and the Beastie Boys.

For some reason, I was thinking about all this last night when I was pushing R around the neighborhood in her stroller, her little blonde curls bouncing as she urged me forward, forward, further away from home – don’t go home Mommy! Don’t go home! Someday she will go to college (sob!), but I hope I can put her on a path to independence before that. I hope I can teach her to find herself – and love herself – before she turns 21.

She’s already on her way.

Potty training, part one of what will probably so many parts you never come back here again

R will be 2 ½ next week. We’ve been potty-training her in a casual sort of way for a few months now. I’ve had a pretty laissez-faire attitude about the whole thing – all my friends say it will happen when she’s ready, it will be sudden and then it will be done.

We have a little bit of history here – she showed some interest early last fall, and we got a potty and started sitting her on it with some regularity. Within six weeks, she developed a bladder infection, kidney reflux and sustained some damage to her kidneys. She’s now on medication that supposedly makes her urine sterile. After that episode last October, we backed off on the potty training.

We’ve recently started again with some vigor – sticker charts and prizes for using the potty. Last Saturday (on the fateful trip to Target), I bought a second potty to keep on our ground floor and some Little Mermaid and Dora panties that she picked out. She went diaperless from late afternoon until bed time Saturday, with no accidents. Sunday morning, I took off her diaper and she continued to use her potty… until she pooped her pants. (When I showed her what happened when she pooped in her pants without a diaper on, she instructed me: “Mommy, you clean it.”)

Because it was Father’s Day and her grandparents were in town, I cleaned her up, dressed her in a pretty sundress – and a diaper.

Now, when I went to pick her up yesterday, she ran to me with joy and jumped into my arms. But she was followed by some of the kids in the four-year-old class who were chanting “Baby Poopypants” repetitiously and wagging their fingers at her. I was horrified.

I looked down at these children and told them, particularly their leader (a little blonde boy in an orange basketball jersey) that calling names wasn’t nice and they could hurt people’s feelings. He immediately justified himself by saying he wore underwear and she wore diapers and pooped in her pants. I told him he was a lot older than her and that he used to wear diapers too. He didn’t care, and the trio went back to chanting. I walked away, wondering a little bit where the teachers were.

R seemed okay, and we played and had a nice evening. Then, when her father was putting her to bed, she said, “Daddy, C called me a big baby and said I pooped my pants.” She remembered. It made an impression. Dave told her that if he did it again to tell him that wasn’t very nice and she wasn’t going to play with him anymore. I thought that was good advice.

I wanted to kick that kid. I wanted to call his parents and tell them what a bully he was being. I wanted to demand that the teachers step in and do something. But I didn’t do any of that. Dave’s advice – letting her handle it – was perfect. And I hope it works.

When I went to pour out the pool after her swim, it was a lot heavier than I remembered…

I lost my temper with R on Saturday. I mean, over-the-top, out-of-control crazy, scene-stealing anger. While it was going on, it was like I was watching myself, tossing back some popcorn and thinking how entertaining this would be if it weren’t actually me all screaming and red-faced.

I’ve found myself justifying my anger since then. But it’s not like R did anything so terrible to warrant the first Mommy Meltdown of her life. She was sassy and whiny and defiant, refusing to get into her carseat to go to Target. On the way to the car, she had spied the kiddie pool I had filled in the backyard while she napped. She decided she would much rather go swimming than shopping. And she told me so, physically and verbally.  After ten minutes of arguing with her, I pulled her out of the car and told her fine, we weren’t going shopping (even though I needed to go to buy things for breakfast for my in-laws). But she also wasn’t going swimming.

The tantrum continued, this time with tears and flailing about. That only revved my RPMs even higher. I picked her up, carried in her into the backyard and made her watch while I adopted superhuman strength and in mere moments emptied her pool into the lawn and shoved it back into the shed. Then I put her inside on the naughty step and flopped on the couch for a little timeout of my own.

The crazy thing? It worked. After a few minutes, she stopped the godawful tantrum. A few minutes more passed, and I went to sit next to her. She looked up at me with her big blue eyes and tear-stained face and said, “Mommy, let’s go shopping, then swimming. I’ll be good.”

I told her that sounded great. She watched as I filled the pool back up so the water could warm while we were at the store. And all was right with the world. I keep telling myself that even though sometimes it hurts or is difficult to discipline her or make her do things she doesn’t want to do, in the long run, it will be better for everybody. She’ll be better behaved (for me), and she’ll learn that life doesn’t always go her way (for her).

But I can’t say that I didn’t feel just a teensy-weensy bit of satisfaction dumping that pool water onto the grass. It felt good to be two years old again and expressing my anger in such dramatic fashion. Most of the time, I fight my anger or suppress it or feel like I have no right to it. But the glimpse of her face as I marched back from the shed, heartbroken and crushed, really took the wind out of my sails. I almost relented right there. But the timeout was necessary. And out of it, we both got what we wanted.

And she still loves me. And I still love her.

The Talk

Sometimes, giving R her bath and putting her to bed can feel like such a chore. She hates having her hair washed, won’t get in the tub, won’t get out of the tub, wants to be read to but turns the pages faster than you can read them, won’t get in bed, won’t let you leave quietly… it can all be exhausting.

But I try to find little moments of pleasure in the hour+ the bedtime ritual takes: Singing silly songs in the bath, her clean smell, her enthusiastic application of lotion to her arms and legs, the snuggles, the bedtime kisses.

Last night, she was perusing the bookshelf in her room when she realized LO! There is an entire top shelf to this thing, full of big, thick books with no pictures (Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables and Mary Poppins series and other books from my youth). She reached for the tiniest book on the shelf – a kid-size directory to Catholic saints related in some way to children. I got the book as a gift for my first communion, and I know that because I wrote my name and the date inside the front cover.

As I read different “saint profiles,” she became more and more interested in what I was talking about. Even when I thought she was asleep, she’d perk up at a name (Ursula! Sea witch from the Little Mermaid! Or Joseph! Jesus’ Daddy!).

When I paused to turn a page, she looked up at me and asked, “Mommy, Where’s God?”

Wow. I was pretty quick on my feet and answered that a little bit of God was in each one of us – in R, in Mommy, in Daddy.

“Mommy, I’m God!”

Not exactly the response I was hoping for, but I worked with it, telling her again God was in everybody: her friends, her teachers at school, Uncle Kris and Aunt Lisa and Baby I, her grandparents.

“What God look like?”

I told her everyone had their own idea of what God looks like, we could all imagine him any way we wanted. R decided God looks like a butterfly. Sensing an opportunity, I asked her if she wanted to say her bedtime prayers. So we went through the classic bedtime prayer a couple of times, and by the third time, she was repeating some of it with me.

Raising this child may sometimes make me want to scream, yell and throw things. But sometimes, she shows me what grace really is.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!

Some of you may know that I live in Indianapolis. For those of you who didn’t know that, I live in Indianapolis. Every May, starting with the half-marathon the first weekend (all the cool kids simply call it  “The Mini”) and stretching until the Indy 500 on Memorial Day weekend, much of the city is festooned in checkered flags and various racing paraphernalia.

The Zoo hosts an event, there’s a parade and lots of alcohol-saturated VIP events. The first year we lived here, Dave and I attended qualifyinglaps at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and had a pretty good time. For $20 (TOTAL FOR BOTH OF US), we got hot dogs, sodas, chips and a seat pretty much anywhere we wanted because no one goes to qualifying.

But this year, the race took on a whole new meaning for us, beginning in late April when R’s school asked us to bring in a plain white T-shirt for the “Little 500.” We had no idea what this would entail. Last week, were asked to indicate whether R’s parents would be attending the event, whether we would be staying for lunch and whether R would stay for the afternoon. Still not really sure what was going on, (and since Dave already had the whole day off to attend grown-up festivities at the track), I put in for a half day off and we made it a whole-family affair.

Last Wednesday, we were given instructions on where to leave R’s “decorated” bicycle and helmet on Friday morning. OOOOOO - it’s a bike race!

And a bike race it was. Each class had a theme, with t-shirts and a banner to match, and got to march around the simulated, parking-lot race track in a parade. After a bit of a rain delay - and an adorable version of the Pledge of Allegiance by the four- and five-year-olds, each class “raced” on their bikes. Of course there were no winners.

R was thrilled to simply be chosen to carry the banner. She was so excited and happy to have Mommy AND Daddy at school to eat lunch - and have fun - that she didn’t want to take a nap when we got home. But here, you can see for yourself:

  

 

 

 

Winken, Blinken and nodzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Why is it that just when you feel you’re getting the hang of this parenting thing, that maybe Super Nanny should start taking some tips from you and you’re starting to pull a muscle from all the patting yourself on the back, something always comes up to turn the back-patting into forehead-slapping?

The little sleep problem I mentioned last week, then in only its second week and still seeming like “just a phase,” has not dissipated. We seem to have reached the root of it: She’s tired, her bedtime is appropriate, she has a well-established night-time routine. But she suddenly can not bear to be separated from a parent.

Last night, Dave’s night to put her down, she wanted only Mommy. So I took her to her room, read her the Bearnstein Bear’s Papa’s Day Surprise for what felt like the five cajillionth time since we brought it home from the library two weeks ago (my GAWD could that book BE any longer?), and snuggled with her for five minutes. I laid her in her bed, and as I went to leave, she lost her mind.

The only thing that would calm her was me lying down on the floor next to her bed – where I had spent all but two hours of the previous night. She fell asleep in less than ten minutes and I was able to make a hasty exit. But less than three hours later she was awake, needing comfort, needing to be held, needing Mommy.

We slept in the guest room. I was so tired after the night before that I just wanted rest. I knew that if we lay down together in the guest room, she would fall right back asleep and stay that way until morning. I was right (or rather, Dave was right, he learned that little trick one night last week).

Something has got to give here. I’m not quite as sleep deprived as I was in 2006, but I’m starting to feel crabby all the time and nearly drift off if I close my eyes at my desk just for a minute. I’ve always been covetous of my shut-eye, which was what made the first few months of R’s life so excruciating. Now, I know what the problem is, I just don’t know how to solve it.

Sunnier days

Not sure what the whole painting-the-shovel thing was about. Before the shovel was available, she would paint her hand. Future in pottery painting perhaps?

Look, Mommy, at how creative and talented and MESSY I am. Also: adorable
 And finally: the artiste at work. Much concentration required.
It’s so cold and grey and drizzly outside. These pictures make me happy. Even though she has decided that she is not much interested in sleep anymore. Last night, after nearly 2 hours of our “bedtime routine” (i.e. bath, books, bed), Dave brought a triumphant R downstairs. She looked at me, smiled broadly, raised her arms over her head as though she had just won the Tour de France and announced, “Mommy! I’m BACK!”

At least it forced me to clean it out

Christina showed us all the contents of her purse earlier this week, and I was instantly inspired to try it myself. When Sarah did it too, my fate was sealed.  After all, I wasn’t sure what was in there myself. My bag, purchased in Chinatown in New York City in 2004 (I never said I was an accessories maven), isn’t as big as many these days, but it holds a lot.

Enjoy the lovely painting done by R as the backdrop.

First, the pile off to the left there contains a variety of items I threw away, including approximately 11,000 grocery lists and receipts for Super Target. Interestingly, it also contains a prescription bottle of Naproxin from when I had thumb tendinitis. Expiration date: May 26, 2007. Also in that stack was my plane ticket for my connection from Atlanta to Savannah back in February and a plastic container from the cheese samples R ate at the grocery store on Sunday morning. And all the political paraphernalia acquired before I went in to vote on Tuesday.

The other stack? Beyond the normal cell phone, keys, BlackBerry and wallet, I have the mom staples of fruit snacks, baby wipes, a Sesame Street juice box, hand sanitizer, three suckers, a plastic Boots action figure from R’s second birthday cake and (call me Kelly Ripa) a tide-to-go pen. I also have the woman must-haves: tampon, maxi pad, lip gloss, hand lotion, pens, cough drops, cold medicine, pack of gum, etc.

Among the more random items: wine cork from a dinner in Las Vegas (January 2007), a ticket to the August 5, 2006 baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers at Busch Stadium (R’s first MLB game), three suckers, a press pass to a Barack Obama event in Indianapolis, a Wendy’s gift card from the summer they introduced the Baconater and were cris-crossing the country giving away free hamburgers and they coerced me to put on the Wendy’s wig and pose for a picture that ended up on their Web site all for a lousy $5 gift card and a picture of Dave and I on our first canoeing trip to the Ozarks as we came triumphantly out of a “rapid.”

That’s pretty much me - sentimental and practical all in one. One thing I don’t carry that I wish I did? A little pad of paper. That would really help when I get blog post ideas whilst driving home from work.