cat named pig

I still have a blog. It’s still sitting here, just waiting for updates. And the weird thing is, the longer I go without updating, the harder it seems. I used to post about anything from messes my kids made to cat barf, and I never cared. Now it seems like, if I’m only going to post once a month, it better be good. Yet the content life throws at me (messes, cat barf) never seems to yield anything that would make for a “good” post.

Actually, that’s not totally true. The cat barf thing reminds me — I do have a quick story and in the interest of not over-thinking my little parenting blog, here it is:

A while back, before school ended for the summer (also known as the Good Old Days, when Siena had somewhere — somewhere free — to go each day where she was happy and entertained) we were at the bus stop and Siena’s usual bus stop buddy was not there because she was sick. Her mom had called me that morning, so I told the kids she wasn’t coming to school because she had thrown up.

(Actually, I said “barfed” because I’m all colloquial like that.)

Anyway, as soon as I said that, Elliot looked at me with wide eyes.

“Is she a CAT?”

Because in his little world, only cats barf. And they (well, ours) do so with such frequency and aplomb (loud, dramatic meowing followed by revolting gagging noises following by frantic devouring of the vomitus, because hey! bonus food! score!) that I guess it makes sense he would associate barfing with cats. Sadly.

And on that lovely note, we are heading out to go swimming. But there will be more posting soon, because I am now on break from work for the month of July and we went to Philadelphia and saw good friends get married and Siena wore fairy wings and it was all very exciting and would actually make a much better story than the above. Yet the cat barf, as so often happens, is what’s getting posted for now. Because I’m out of time and people need sunscreen.

It’s been a while since Halloween, so why not break out the costumes for Father’s Day?

I love how I wrote that last post about working from home and how I more or less have it all figured out and it’s going just fine, and then today Siena is home sick and I am just now sitting down to work for the first time at 2:46 p.m., which probably means I will be up until 2:46 a.m. finishing the work that hasn’t gotten done all day. (Yeah, you’re right — technically I still have not yet sat down to work, since I felt the need to blog about it before actually doing it. I always do this — deliberately waste time on trivial stuff when I’m really busy — and knowing I’m doing it does nothing to stop me from doing it. Apparently there is some masochistic part of me that goes “Yeah, this is bad, but let’s make it a little worse and see what that’s like.” Dear Self: It is NOT exciting! It will never be exciting to be up late trying to meet a deadline! It will only ever be stressful and crappy and you will be tired and hate yourself for doing this to yourself. Just do the damn work already!)

So I guess I’ll go do some work now. And in lieu of a decent blog post, I will leave you the promise of a longer post coming soon — a story about Elliot and a medical appointment and a temper tantrum heard on Jupiter. I’ll do my best to make it entertaining, because some good, somehow, has to come out of those excruciatingly loud forty-five minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. I’m all about the silver lining.

Oh, and one more thing before I really get to work: did I mention that a mere two months into the whole working from home thing, Elliot has decided to give up napping? So I have a grumpy, tired, yet decidedly not sleeping little shadow who follows me from room to room messing up my stacks of paper and kvetching about not being tired even though GAHRR YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY TIRED OR YOU WOULDN’T BE ACTING LIKE THIS JUST GO TAKE A DAMN NAP ALREADY!

I guess we all have our self-defeating behavior patterns.

Every year, we have the kids dictate letters to Santa. This year, Siena wrote her own, complete with phonetic spelling and inventive punctuation. Elliot dictated his and then signed it with a bunch of capital E’s. Because if one is good, several more are better. Kind of how I feel about chocolates, or hundred dollar bills.

Anyway, here are their letters, painstakingly tapped out with two fingers onto my iPhone (random capital letters by Elliot and extraneous hyphens and apostrophes by Siena included as seen in the originals).

Elliot:

Dear Santa,

I have a Wall-e and I want Eve. I have been a good boy. I I OOO t
E E E EVE

Siena:

Dear Santa,
I want ‘ Eve. I want my one [read: own] computer. And I also want a magniflying glass. I love- you.

Love – Siena

Yeah. I think they’re getting Wall-e’s girlfriend Eve. And I don’t think Siena’s getting her own computer, although it would be kind of nice not to be pestered about PBSKids.org while I’m doing something important. Like scanning Facebook and giving the thumb’s up to people’s pictures of kids in holiday outfits, while ignoring the fact that I still need to order our stupid holiday cards that I made back in October and even bragged about in a fit of smugness on this very blog, before ignoring their existence for six weeks and oh, crap, they’re going to be late again and WHEN will I learn? Smug never works out for me.

In which I reveal my idiocy for your entertainment. Once again.

I realize it’s only Wednesday, so of course, there’s still plenty of time for bigger, more dramatic parenting FAILS, but the last couple days have just been a little off. Witness:

1.  Sending a whole apple to school for snack for a child with one missing tooth and one loose one.

2.  Giving same child stern lecture on need to keep better track of personal possessions (i.e. brand new mittens) while at school, only to reach into backpack and pull out missing mitten.

3.  Leaving small child’s extremely wet and messy handprint turkey at Spanish class. I am actually OK with this one, given the aforementioned wet-and-messiness, but he will be upset when he realizes it.

4.  Asking child’s Spanish teacher, in Spanish, if there is a place to change diapers. Except I say “handkerchiefs” instead of “diapers.” And, as I’m asking, I reflexively use the baby sign-language sign for “change diaper handkerchief” because I think it is somehow helping me communicate. (Note to self: It’s not. And you look like an idiot.)

5.  Falling, once again, for the fallacy that sunny skies automatically equal a warm day. Failing to dress anyone adequately for leaving the house, and failing to leave enough time to scrape frost off windshield, making us almost late to the Spanish Class of Forgetfulness and Humiliation. STUPID WEATHER. You continue to mess with me.

There are more, there are always more, but the small child is awake from his nap now and I have to go try not to screw up getting his snack and changing his handkerchief diaper.

Yeah, I know. November 17th today. And not that anyone even cares about Halloween anymore at this point, but here are some pictures anyway. I would hate to deprive anyone of seeing this sad chicken:

[Only one word of the day in this here family lexicon update: humidifier. It continues to baffle (children) and amuse (me), so it gets a whole post.]

Elliot had a stuffy nose the other night, so we got out the humidifier.

OK, fine: to be totally accurate I had gotten it out a few days earlier and cleaned it with bleach to get rid of any germs/dust that might have settled on it over the summer. Because I just knew.

You see, I am cursed to go through life as a modern-day Cassandra of minor pediatric discomforts, always prophesying colds! or ear infections! yet never believed until we are handing over the co-pays and filling the prescriptions. My prophesies are often met with eye-rolling and derision, which is unfair when you consider that they are really just based on common sense. (If the month is not July, and if one or both children have been a) inside a building and b) in the presence of one or more other children, then one of them will get a cold. And if one of my children gets a cold, then he or she will develop an ear infection. Also true: if one of my children gets a cold, then the other one will also have a cold within five minutes. And within ten minutes of that, I will have a sore throat and lose all ability to perceive nuance of flavor in food and wine. After which point, why even bother drinking wine at all? Except to dull my senses as I listen to all the cold- and ear-infection-related keening, of course.)

I seem to have lost myself in a paragraph that got swallowed by the world’s longest parenthetical aside. Where was I? Oh, yes, the whole seeing-the-future thing: if you’re not prophesying colds and ear infections, you’re just not really paying attention. Ahem, Husband.

So I had the humidifier at the ready, which was convenient when Elliot came out of his room snuffling and saying he couldn’t sleep. OH YES YOU CAN. Here, have some steam.

Poor sweet Elliot had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I said I would bring in the humidifier. He had no idea what word I was even saying.

“Fire?” he asked, looking worried as I plugged it in. “Dat FIRE in dere?”

“No, sweetie. No fire. It has water in it, and it makes steam to help you breathe.”

“Why it called FIRE?”

“It’s called a hu-MID-i-FI– Oh, never mind. There’s no fire in it. It’s OK. Now lie down.”

As I left his room I recalled how Siena, at about the same age, thought the humidifier was called “Human Fire.”

“I need some Human Fire,” she would say when she wasn’t feeling well, but also sometimes when she just felt tired. I think her mystical-sounding interpretation of its name led her to envision it misting out magical vapors of energy and good health — the Human Fire that fuels us all. I also just thought it was cute.

I kind of miss those days. Last night she told me she knew exactly what it would feel like to be in a cloud — cold and wet — because clouds are made of water vapor that condenses. OK, maybe she didn’t use the word condenses; I think she said “turns back into water” but still. Pretty impressive for a kid who thought the humidifier was magic just a few short years ago. Go kindergarten! Or go PBS Kids! Whichever. As long as she’s learning stuff.

Elliot is on a Nap Strike right now. Like, literally right now, as in, at this moment he’s supposed to be napping and I’ve put him down twice but I hear him tip-toeing not-so-quietly up the stairs to see what I am doing. And what I am doing is ignoring him and hoping the situation will resolve itself without me having to get up.

Darn it.

…..

Aaaand I’m back. He’s in bed again but still on strike. His demands are unclear: he wants cereal (”CEE-YAY-YUL”) after nap but refuses to take the nap itself. (Note: I would be more than happy to meet this demand, provided some actual napping takes place first.) His rationale for the strike is also unclear. Reasons given have included: “I too sick to nap,” “I NOT TIRED” (those two seem to contradict each other; either you’re sick and you need rest OR you’re bursting with energy, but not both), and the simple yet firmly stated “I NOT DOING THAT.”

Hard to argue with logic like that.

If this continues much longer I’m going to be forced to give up on the nap and put on WALL-E, thereby revealing my ultimate weakness as a Nap Enforcer: I don’t actually care if you sleep or not. Naptime is for dinner prep, e-mail, laundry, and Twitter — not for round after round of failed negotiations.

A few months ago I decided to start a new family tradition: Pizza Friday. I love that I can just do that, just start a new tradition whenever I want, because I am one of two adults supposedly in charge here. There’s a lot of power in being a so-called adult (and most of the time I use my power for good, as in the case of Pizza Friday).

It’s a very convenient tradition, given that we all love pizza and by the end of the week no one feels like cooking (or hearing Siena yelp, “NO! NOT [insert any food I might have made that is not pizza/quesadillas/pasta with butter and Parmesan]!!” when she sees what we’re having for dinner).

Pizza Friday has been a great success so far. (How could it not be? The name itself contains two of the nicest words in the English language.) Sometimes we order in, sometimes we go out, sometimes we make our own, and occasionally we just heat up some frozen pizzas and call it a night. This week we had Matt’s sister, her husband, and our sweet baby nephew coming over so we were scanning menus trying to decide what to order.

Matt read a list of toppings out loud, one of which was anchovies.

Siena [making a face]: “Eew — anchovies!”

Matt: “Siena, do you even know what anchovies are?”

Siena: “Yeah, they’re gross bugs!”

Never one to be left out of a conversation, Elliot pipes up: “Yeah, they gross BUMBLEBEES!”

I decided it was time to translate a few frequently-used family expressions into plain English, for anyone who might want to converse with any of us in the near future. As Elliot talks more and more (often without stopping for air, it would seem), we seem to be developing our own local dialect.

1. Bah-do Booty

-Noun, verb, adjective, salutation, etc. Can really be used as any part of speech, in any context.

Origin: Unknown. Somewhere in the depths of Elliot’s crazy two-year-old mind, we guess.

Synonyms: bah-do BAH-do booty; booty bah-do; and bah-do bah-do beak).

Definition: This phrase does not actually mean anything. Yet we find it inserted into almost every conversation, usually to uproarious laughter. (Bonus points if you are talking to a nice elderly lady at the gym and she asks you a nice simple question like, “How old are you?”)

Usage: See previous. Also works in response to any other perfectly normal question or as a call-and-response chant. (Siena: “Bah-DO!” Elliot: “Boo-TY!” and so on and so on, forever.)

2. Old Maybe

Elliot’s name for the clothing store, Old Navy. Siena adopted it because she thought it was funny; I have started using it because I think it pretty accurately describes that particular shopping experience. Maybe I’ll get a cute  sweater and some socks for the kids, or a puffy chicken costume for under $20 — maybe I won’t. Maybe Elliot will make it through an entire outing there without knocking over that fake-dog mannequin in the front — maybe he won’t. Maybe I’ll go stark raving mad if I have to listen to another one of their commercials — maybe I won’t. Old Maybe.

3.  Bebot

What I still call the tea pot even though Siena has been pronouncing it correctly for, oh, four years now.

4. Monkey Bar

Nope, not those things at the playground. Monkey bars in our house are what a normal person might call a cereal bar or granola bar. Another Elliot-ism. (Commonly heard used in the following phrase, “NO! Not the ONION monkey bar!” as shrieked by Siena when you go to offer her a Trader Joe’s Fig Bar. Apparently the Fig cartoon looks like an onion to her. And apparently it’s not on her ever-changing list of Top 5 Acceptable Foods.)

Feel free to print this and keep it in your pocket for reference next time you come over. Of course there are many other strange expressions and uniquely, uh, customized pronunciations in our little spin on the English language, but this makes a good starting point.