Miss Crankypants

Pebbles may have had the swine flu this week. All I know is, she started to come down with something on Friday, when she coughed a little and cheerfully told me she needed to go to "the coughing doctor."
That was the last cheerful thing we heard out of her until yesterday.
She coughed, she developed a fever, she refused what tiny bits of food she usually ingests, but worst of all -- for us -- she turned into a raging bee-yatch. I mean, really, you could not be around this kid for 5 minutes without your brain boiling and escaping from your ears in the form of vapor.
OK, that was hyperbole. It's what I WISH had happened to me when the cranky first started because with no brain, I'd have been insensible to the extreme annoyance of listening to a tiny person try to order me around and crumpling into pitious tears anytime my responses betrayed the tiniest bit of annoyance.
Yesterday, Pebbles woke up MUCH better: sort of hungry, with enough energy to walk down the stairs and play on the playground, and back to her old cheerful self. She even made it through a quick trip to Jewel with me and her siblings without a meltdown. She helped Nutmeg run all the groceries for my latest deal through the self checkout.
We were so happy and relieved to get our old Pebbles back. At naptime and bedtime, the crankiness returned, but we just solved that be putting her to bed.
Or so we thought. Last night it took her hours to get to sleep -- my fault; I let her nap for four hours instead of her usual three because I felt like she needed the rest -- and this morning she woke up back on the cranky train.
So what did Epu and I do with her? We dumped her on a neighbor. Actually, we had already planned to have one of the moms in our coop babysit the girls for 3 hours so we could go to this big furniture sale. I considered cancelling when I saw what a snot Pebbles was being, but I honsetly felt like I could not withstand one more morning of the Toddler From Hell without doing something unspeakable like buying 40 rolls of paper towels and 24 cans of soup and using them to build a pyramid on my dining room table. And, to be honest, I had already done that.

So we dumped the kids, hit the sale, which did not really live up to its hype, and treated ourselves to breakfast out at a sunny sidewalk table in Bucktown*. Paradise.
Paradise, that is, until Epu called to let them know we'd be half an hour late, and asked if they were behaving OK. Apparently Epu had dropped the girls off without a single word of warning, so my poor neighbor was baffled trying to deal with all the fire and brimstone shooting out of my kid's mouth.

"Finally we gave her a lollipop and she was quiet for awhile," my neighbor told him.

So we hastily finished our meal and hurried back to pick up our hellchild and put her down for a nap. I have maybe 3 hours until it all starts again.

Only 10 months until we can enroll her in preschool!

* While in Bucktown, we stopped into a hip salon because I wanted to see if they might have had a cancellation to open a slot for them to chop all my hair off. They didn't, but they complimented me on my new boots and asked where I got them. That pretty much made my day, cranky toddler or not. Walking away from that salon, I was all like, "I'm a suburban matron. And they like my boots!"
Best $99 I ever spent.

An Almost Perfect Halloween

Regular readers here know that Nutmeg loves Halloween even better than Christmas or her birthday. Halloween is IT, as far as she's concerned. She generally begins discussing next year's costume around Nov. 2 and plots her entertaining and decorating plans for the holiday throughout the year.
This year our celebration started a couple weeks ago when Epu carved the girls' designs into their pumpkins (I don't know why my camera is taking such hazy pics; I have tried cleaning the lens with a cotton cloth.)

Then Nutmeg made and distributed invitations to a Halloween party to six of her new school friends. Since Halloween fell on a Saturday this year, I thought this was a great idea -- kill a couple of hours of the long wait for trick-or-treating to start.
On Friday, Nutmeg's school had the traditional Halloween parade. Usually all the kids march around the school grounds; we'd been over there to see it when she was a preschooler. This year it was pouring so they had to parade around the gym, which was fine.
When I saw Nutmeg marching, she looked surprisingly subdued. When I picked her up from school a couple hours later, she said she wanted to take a nap. She slept for three hours and by the time she woke up, she was, you guessed it, burning up with fever.
She burst into tears when I felt her head and insisted that she felt fine. After she went to bed, Epu and I held a little conference in the kitchen. We knew we should probably notify the other parents now that our 11 a.m. party would be cancelled. And yet, what if Nutmeg woke up in the morning chipper and fever free? That kind of thing has happened to her before.
On one hand, I worried that even if she was better she might still be contagious if she wasn't fever-free for 24 hours before being with other kids. On the other hand, everyone at school seemed to be getting sick anyway -- would taking precautions really be worth it when these kids were exposed to each other every day anyway?
We decided, a little guiltily, to hold off on calling the parents. I slept fitfully, because I felt so bad that it looked like Nutmeg would miss all the festivities on her favorite holiday. And also because Toth keeps waking me up for marathon nursing sessions.
At 3 a.m. I crept into her room and felt her head. She was still hot. She felt my hand on her forhead and growled, "Mom, I'm fine!" without even opening her eyes.
Five hours later, we woke up and found a chipper, fever-free Nutmeg all ready to get ready for her party. So we had it. The refreshments were mummy dogs, "spooks on a stick" and "candy ants on a log," a Nutmeg invention.

In true Nutmeg style, there was of course a pinata.

Partway through the party, one of the guests developed the same symptoms Nutmeg had had yesterday -- she became mopy and lethargic and spent most of the party in an armchair under a blanket. Her mom called later with profuse apologies and reported that she had a fever. Pebbles was struck after getting her Dorothy costume on and came home to hit the couch after trick-or-treating at about 2 houses.
So, you know, if/when the other 2 kids who were at the party get sick, it _might_ not be our fault.
At least Nutmeg and Pebbles were both well enough to pose for pictures:

We dressed Toth up as the Cowardly Lion, but I think I was getting him dressed when this picture was taken. Yep, not only do we spread contagion among local children, we failed to take a picture of our son on his first Halloween. Don't worry, I have a plan: Next time he wears his lion sleeper, I'll snap a picture and no one will be the wiser.

Except you. Please don't tell anyway, kay Internet?

Toth Is Now a Regular Baby, Level 2

Toth turned 3 months old and overnight he moved to the next stage. He's no longer a snuggleworm, he's a little guy looking all around and trying to grab things and trying sooo hard to crawl that it just breaks your heart. I want to tell him, "Baby, take it easy! You have a couple of months before you can reasonably expect to start hauling that body across the floor." But he's all like, I need to move across this floor NOW, TODAY. Oh, toddlerhood will be fun with this one, won't it?

He's leveled up, as his video-game making daddy would say.

He has been concentrating really hard on trying to get his little fist to touch my face. I thought, "Oh, my sweet boy wants to lovingly stroke the cheek of this mama who has been caring for him round the clock his entire life."

Right?

Finally yesterday he succeeded in his endeavor: He grabbed my glasses off my face.

Oh yeah, right. For a second I had forgotten that baby's world is all about baby. And all babies yearn to hold eyeglasses in their hands.

Maybe I should start wearing some of those disposable contacts sitting in my medicine cabinet.

Also, I've got a yen to get my hair cut short, short, short. I'm talking this short. He's already grabbed it a couple of times, and I am not into the prospect of six months or a year of hair pulling.

Toth is also carrying on little conversations with people and laughing and laughing. I brought him to a little talk for parents of gifted children the other night, and Miss Lori (formerly of PBS Kids) was there, and that woman had him going on and on as if he was watching a Three Stooges movie.

Everywhere I go with him now, people remark how bright-eyed and alert he is, and they can't believe he's only 3 months.

The only thing he doesn't have going on is a nice sleep schedule. I take that back -- he'll sleep almost whenever I want him to as long as he's slung across my chest with his mouth attached to my boob. That's where he is right now, in fact. But lay him down in a lovely little basinnette, and it's so not on. Day or night. He's taken to spending a lot of the night in our bed instead of in the co-sleeper right next to it. And I wouldn't mind that so much if it weren't for the extremely long nursing sessions he wants to include in our nighttime schedule.

So, there. I've complained about Toth's sleep habits in the hope that the Blog Effect will swoop in and immediately change them. For the BETTER, please, Oh Might Blog Effect.

Why do I have a feeling I'm about to swap quiet nights of less than ideal sleep with 8 hours of screaming while it's dark out?

Anyway, Toth, you get an A+ for your first post-fourth-trimester level. Keep up the good work.

Fwendly Pebbles

Can you believe these two kids were born the same week? To be fair, I think Pebbles' "best fwend" on the right may be sitting on her knees, but still. Pebbles is a midget.
A friendly midget. Everywhere we go, she's telling me that kids she plays with or sometimes even complete strangers are her fwends. She is full of complimentary gossip about her fwends, frequently noting that they are nice to her. Pebbles went a step further after this fwend -- let's call her Jeb -- went home.
While Jeb was visiting with her family, good friends of ours, she casually showed Pebbles the waistband of her brand new underpants. That's right, Jeb has successfully been potty trained.
That evening, Pebbles was using the potty, something she does sometimes several times a day now despite her total lack of interest in staying dry between visits.
"Jeb is my best fwend," she declared from her throne. "She showed me how to use the potty."
After a few minutes quiet contemplation, she added, "Jeb potty trained me."
Oh that it were. Nutmeg was potty trained by this age -- Pebbles is 2 and 2/3 now. But every day of Pebbles life shows me just how much two sisters in the same family can differ.
The nicest stamp that Pebbles puts on toddlerhood is how nice and social she is. At this age, Nutmeg had trouble playing with other kids. She'd want the play area all to herself, no matter if we were in a public place -- and she'd make a "growling face" at any kid who dared enter her turf. Once I dropped her off at a playschool and took baby Pebbles down the block with my laptop to a cafe. Within half an hour, the teacher had called me back because Nutmeg had gotten into a fight with a boy.
Pebbles, on the other hand, plays at the local drop-in play center three times a week, and has never had an incident with another kid. According to her, they are all her fwends and are nice to her.
I've been enjoying spending one-on-one time with Pebbles since Nutmeg went off to school. Well, Toth is with us too, but he doesn't butt into the conversation much.
As Nutmeg comes home full of spelling and writing and school library books, Pebbles has experienced a surge in interest in these things too. She loves to turn the pages of books and "read" them out loud, she makes valiant attempts to sing the ABCs, and she can count to something like 12 or 13.
She's also a pretty competent child at practical skills, washing her hands with soap and drying them on her own, brushing her teeth, putting on her own shoes, and -- my favorite -- taking a wet diaper off her own butt, throwing it in the trash, and bringing me a fresh one to put on her. And of course she loves to help me -- every time she sees Toth on the changing table she charges over to hand me a diaper.
I can barely write all this about Pebbles without running across the hall to kiss her about a thousand times in her sleep. She's such a huggable little moppet, despite all the contrariness and melodrama that goes with being 2.
It's parental taboo to typecast your children, but it's also impossible not to, as far as I know. So I'll go ahead and share my image of these two sisters 10 or 12 years from now. Nutmeg is the brainy kid who, like so many brains might have social problems or might be tight with a small group of artsy rebels. Pebbles is the bubbly one with all the friends, maybe is on the cheer squad (she has such great balance) or in sports, gets good grades but isn't exactly reading Nietzche at the lunch table.
I could be so wrong, in fact I hope I'm wrong in lots of ways because watching the surprising ways that things turn out is one of the only dividends this gruelling parenting gig pays. But I don't think I'm wrong in thinking that anyone who meets Pebbles at anytime in her life is going to want to be her fwend.

Nutmeg at School

Nutmeg got her first report card this week. Can you imagine, the kindergarten report card?

What's more important, we got to sit down with her teacher for her first parent/teacher conference. The result is that I am very impressed with Nutmeg's teacher, "Miss Binney."

During the early weeks of school, Epu and I volunteered to staple some "books" that the kids would be using to learn to read. They were actually four page readers, each stapled into a little book, and the kids were supposed to spend one week on each of them.

The text read like, "Jump. Joe jumps. Jump, Joe!" You know the type. Dick and Jane sans Dick or Jane.

At the time Nutmeg was reading Junie B. Jones; she's sinced finished those, read about 30 Boxcar Children mysteries, and her latest conquest was Anne of Green Gables. (OK, the vocabulary in that book is waaaay beyond her comprehension, and yet she seems to have gotten something out of reading it since she didn't want to put it down at bedtime.)

So we were concerned about her spending part of each day for a whole week staring at these little booklets. Her teacher told us it would be no problem, that she'd give her other stuff to read too, but still, we worried.

At the parent teacher conference, we found out how it really goes down. First Nutmeg reads the booklet out loud to her teacher. Then she -- and her one friend who also can read all the booklets at first glance -- get to pick out other easy-to-read books to read while the other kids work on learning the booklets.

Now she's almost through all the available easy-to-read books, and she'll be starting regular kids' books (still picture books, but that's fine with her) and getting reading comprehension questions to write out the answers to. These sheets come from the "differentiation" (i.e. gifted) specialist who vists the class once a week.

They also have another reading program they work on for 20 minutes a day that allows kids to progress at their own rate through literacy activities like rhyming and replacing one sound with another.

After hearing some other parents fret that their children's kindergarten teachers were not even aware that their kids could read, I was very impressed with Miss Binney. She knew just where Nutmeg's skills were at, and she is providing her with new challenges as she goes along.

Nutmeg's report card has all "S"s for "satisfactory, except for one category: Respects the feelings of others.

This is because, Miss Binney said, Nutmeg has had several incidents when she is poking other kids or otherwise invading their personal space. However, Nutmeg has been improving in this area and the teacher fully expects her to get an S in this category next term.

I asked Nutmeg about these incidents last night while I was combing out her hair after a bath. She said she had bothered the other kids because they were being "bad" -- breaking rules while Miss Binney was not watching. I asked why she coudln't ignore the other kids, and Nutmeg said it was because she was staring out into space and they were right in front of her eyes.

And why wasn't she looking at her work instead of out into space?

"We were reading a book that you would read to a toddler," she said. "It was about shadows. I already know about shadows."

Sigh. Our big fear with Nutmeg in school was that she would get bored because she already knows the material, then act out. So maybe she isn't getting challenged enough after all.

However, I really think the thing that needs to change in this situation is Nutmeg. A smart kid like her is going to have lots of times in school -- and in life -- when she has to sit through material she already knows. She's going to need to learn to handle herself during that time, and I'm very hopeful that her smart young teacher is going to be able to teach her how to do that.

As far as I'm concerned, respecting the feelings of others is the MOST IMPORTANT line on that report card. Without scolding her, I told Nutmeg as much.

That said, the kid adores kindergarten and kindergarten seems to love her. She's off to a good start.

Let Me Stop Watching Balloon Boy and Get Back to the Beyonce Baby

Oh Balloon Boy saga, how I wish I could quit you.
I wish I could report that I did not go out of my way to watch the poor kid barf on live tv (via YouTube). Or that I could forget about this poor 6-year-old child under so much pressure to lie. Or stop wondering why the a cameraman would pan out to make sure America sees the barf, or why the mom at least couldn't get that poor puking kid unmiked and out of there?
Most of all, I can't stop marveling at how the parents of three young children could be so ignorant about the very nature of children. Have you ever tried to tell even a tiny fib in front of a 4- or 5- or 6-year-old kid?
I have. I have to confess that, because otherwise Nutmeg would surely out me one of these days. Because, pay attention now, Balloon Boy parents, little kids are not good liars.
Like the time we went to Monkey Island, a warehouse full of jump houses, and I said that Pebbles was under 2.
"But I REMEMBER her 2nd birthday party!" Nutmeg kept insisting as I paid and dragged them past the uncaring cashier.
Heh. I'm sure that cashier hears the same conversation every single day.
So now child welfare people are investigating the Balloon Boy family. I don't know what they'll do -- is it child abuse to be a comlete asshole and stress your kids out? If so at least half the families in America are going to have to relinquish their kids, even if the lies we drag them into and the stresses we heap upon them are a little less spectacular.
I suppose some would say I'm no better than the Balloon Boy parents, because a lie is a lie. I guess it's not such a great lesson to show Nutmeg that my integrity is worth nothing more than a $7 entry fee.
Well, I hope I'm a little better. I do promise that the next time Nutmeg barfs while getting interviewed on national TV, I'll make sure that that's the last national TV interview she has to do that particular day.
What about you guys? Have your kids outed you for lying? Are you ok with telling little fibs, like about how old someone is, even if it means making your chidren complicit?
Also, you have seen the Beyonce baby, right? "All the Single Babies?" If not, you must watch it because it will crack you up. No lie.

Wordless Wednesday: Brother and Sister, and Best Friends as Well

If you know what that title is from, you, too watch too much PBS Kids. Also, you probably will not be able to get that song out of your head for the next 30 days or so.

Sorry.