Sundays with Stretchy Pants

We have this sweet, goofy baby girl who is suddenly a five year old. Huh? I mean that with the utmost sincerity. Seriously…huh? She was a baby, I remember that. And now she’s a kid? Not a preschooler. Not a toddler. A kid. I’d like to be all poetic about her as a person, but since this is the the first birthday post for Maya, you get a birth story. Lucky you!

Five years ago yesterday, I woke up in labor at 5:00am. I was having a dream that I had a new baby boy and I was taking him to the IGA and introducing him to the check-out lady. “His name is Judah,” I said very sheepishly. Back then, that would’ve been kind of an odd name in my area and I guess I had a lot of anxiety about using it, because all of my baby dreams were about introducing the baby by name and cringeing while somebody said, “Judah? What kind of a name is that?” Anyway, I woke up with a cramp that hurt so bad, it made me roll off the couch and get on all fours. I went to the bathroom, found bloody show, and figured the baby was coming. My mom and my sister, with 6 kids between them, never labored for more than 5 hours so I didn’t think I would be any different. Stupid uterus. I was having a super-secret homebirth so I called my midwife and she got there at about 10:00 am. I don’t really remember what my contractions did all day except they were there and they were, like, whatever, and I had this midwife and her apprentice over, and my friend was visiting from Maine, but I had to cancel her visit because I thought I was having a baby, but then later that night, her parents saw Bryan grilling barbecued chicken outside and they were like, “I don’t think Abby’s having the baby because I saw Bryan outside grilling.” And my friend was all, “Weird.” Maybe she knew about the super-secret homebirth. I don’t know. I don’t remember the few people I spilled the beans to in those last couple of weeks. But I do remember demanding barbecued chicken while we waited for the slow-ass baby.

Nothing really happened all day long and it wasn’t fair. Throughout my pregnancy, we took bets about when the baby would be born and I CHOSE THE 16th! When I woke up at 5:00am on the frickin’ 16th, I thought I just won myself $65. At the time, I had a neighbor who had been my high school English teacher and he bet the baby would be born on the 17th because that was his birthday. He put his $5 on the 17th and he would say with such smug, English-teacher conviction, “I’m not gambling because I know that the baby will be born on the 17th.” Bryan even saw the English teacher in the grocery store that morning and said, “It looks like today’s going to be the day. I guess the baby couldn’t wait until your birthday.” That was at 9:00 in the morning and my neighbor very coolly replied, “There are 15 hours left in this day, so I wouldn’t get over confident about anything just yet.” All I knew is that I didn’t want to have the baby on the 17th because that would have been my midwife and her husband’s 30th wedding anniversary, only her husband had died in June. Two months before. Yeah, and you know what else? She was supposed to come for my first home visit in June and when she didn’t show up, I called her and you know why she didn’t show up? Um, because It was the day of her husband’s funeral. I called her at home to see where she was and her son answered and he actually put her on the phone and she was crying and apologizing and explaining that she forgot to call me and she was ever so sorry, but her husband died and, well, she had to bury him. And then I went and had the baby on what would have been their 30th anniversary. I’m so selfish.

Somehow, 23 hours later (some not-so-hard hours, several really hard hours), Maya was born right in our bedroom. Bryan cried, I cried, my midwife cried (probably for other reasons). My sister was there with me, having forgiven me for waking her up at 6:00am the day before with promises of babies and then failing to deliver any new babies to her in a timely manner, and she cried too. We were happy. It was cool. Maya rocks. And the neighbor gave the $65 to Maya for a birth day gift. Sweet.

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Me too! Do they constantly ask for stuff? Mine too! Have they already learned that commercials aimed at children lie better than a horny politician? Yeah? Then check out our new site, Kids Know Stuff:

9-year old Lena says, “Buy us stuff we like only!” And, I don’t know why, but her identical twin sister Liberty says, “And don’t pee on the stuff you buy us.” (In case you’re wondering, it’s Nature’s fault she is the way she is; Nurture didn’t have anything to do with it. Science proves it. Not my fault.)

Anyway, with those directives in mind, we created Kids Know Stuff because, well, adults don’t know stuff. Kids are practically people and they have their own ideas about what they like and don’t like.

As a old lady mother, I have no idea what goes on in the brains of tweens and teens and especially those little ones who don’t talk right yet. And since I believe I’m not alone in being the type of mother for whom kids’ whining over crappy stuff makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a citrus peeler, I decided it might be healthier for everybody if we let the kids tell us what they want and don’t want.

Lena and Liberty, along with their friends and family, will use this site to rant or rave about the stuff they hate, the stuff they love, the stuff they’re indifferent toward, and any other stuff that comes to mind. Kids are whiny when they get crappy stuff, so come here first to find out the stuff they like only.

Dawn has great ideas, but she has a real job so she gave this idea to us and then helped us make it pretty. Your kids might like to watch the short videos and you might learn about kid stuff. And you can tell us about your kids’ stuff. And your kids can tell us how they feel about their stuff. And we’ll have giveaways! Yay!

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ETA: I put the right video on this time; I don’t know how that other RATM vid got on there. FAIL!

My brother will be proud.

My children think they can tell me what songs to listen to when we’re in the car. This might be because I usually let them listen to what they want to listen to. These days, I generally only provide songs that I enjoy, but back when Lena and Liberty were babies and young toddlers, I let them listen to Barney and Raffi and Sesame Street. It couldn’t be helped. They were car cry-ers and I wanted them to shut it. Barney works so well because he makes little kids stop and go, “What the f*ck is this sh*t?” I wanted them to shut their traps, so I listened to what they wanted to hear over and over and over. Then they grew a bit and decided that car rides were just a touch more tolerable than a trip to the dentist, so the need to make them shut it was less. And they learned to fear me, so they shut it no matter what was on the radio. I’m kidding, gosh! These days, we generally listen to a rotation of CDs that are agreeable to everyone in the car.

Now to the part where my brother will be proud: The other day when we were driving home from the pool in Bryan’s car without our previously-agreed upon CDs, I was repeatedly hitting the seek button in order to find something, anything to listen to. Every time the radio stopped on a song, it was a light and poppy little diddy and I heard 2 light and poppy little voices yell, “NO!” from the backseat. This went on for song after song until the radio finally stopped and I heard no objections. Then one of the little voices said, “Leave it here!” What was the song? I’m glad you asked. It was “Renegades of Funk” by Rage Against the Machine. What happened to my timid little girls who were soothed by Barney’s voice? When I was a little girl, I thought the mixture of screaming and loud guitar and drums coming from my brother’s hi-fi was dangerous and scary. I preferred gentler music like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna and Debbie Gibson. Some people might argue that that was because those artists are who was marketed to me, but I think it’s because they weren’t screaming at me. My taste for grunge and heavier stuff only came later when I was a hard-livin’ young lady. My brother always tried to introduce me to new, better music, but it never stuck. Now his nieces are following in his footsteps musically. Of course, his joy may be short-lived because I will surely ruin Lena and Liberty’s love of this song by turning it into the Best History Lesson Ever! Lookie:

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As of two days ago, if you come across Maya she’s very likely to say something like, “I gotta show you sumfin. It’s cool!” And then she will take you out to the swingset and show you how she can get herself swinging and keep herself going by pumping her legs. And then when you give her the appropriate props for that, she’ll say, “CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?CanWeGoToThePool?” where she will show you her other brand-new feat of jumping in and going under the water. Under it! “Where people can’t even breeeeve, so I have to hold my breff! Isn’t dat cool?” And then she’ll swim around under the water with a great big smile on her face and tell you over and over that she doesn’t need her life jacket anymore and she’s ready for swimming lessons. You’ll agree with her that she’s cool, because she is.

It’s been a big weekend for amazing feats of pool bravery for all of the girls. Lena has been regularly jumping off of the 8-foot springboard after previously going off of it once and deciding to never, ever do it again. Over the weekend, she jumped off of it for about 2 hours straight, adding little tricks like a half-twist with a peace sign flash. Liberty (after the horrible influence of Dawn’s older kid) has been going off of the 16-foot platform. She went off it for the first time when Noah was there a few days ago and I really thought she wouldn’t do it again, but she did it several times yesterday. All my girls are bad asses. Watch out for them.

One teensy hard part about this is trying to convince Lena that she can be proud of jumping off of the 8-foot board. An age difference of more than a minute would come in handy here. I think Lena might feel like it’s not a big deal anymore because her sister, who is the exact same age as she is, jumped off of the 16-foot platform. Indeed, when Liberty went off the platform, Bryan and I walked all the way over there to congratulate her. We did that with Lena when she went off the 8-foot for the first time, too, but that had been days earlier and I’m pretty sure the glow from that moment had worn off. It’s tough to balance one girl’s feel-good feelings with the other’s feelings that her good thing isn’t good enough, when it really is good enough. This is one of those times when being a twin would so suck. We try to teach them that they can’t compare themselves to each other or to any other people, there’s always going to be somebody who can do more or less, blah, blah, blah. But I think it’s hard to live that lesson sometimes. I think it’s sinking in, but I just think it’s hard. Still, they’re bad asses. Total bad asses.

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I’m not the mom that you think I am if you think that post about Lena is the kind of mom I always am. If it were Liberty who had the trade remorse that Lena suffered through the other night, I would not have had the same compassion. Liberty is very susceptible to advertising and slick packaging. Her middle name is “impulse buy” (it’s a family name) and if she would have been in the same situation, I would have said, “That sucks. Go to bed,” because I would have felt like, yes, this is a lesson you needed to learn. Goodbye. By the same token, if Lena missed out on purchasing something because she waited and wondered and waited and wondered so long that it went out of stock, I would say, “That sucks. Go to bed,” because it might be helpful for her to learn that sometimes you just have to jump in and do it.

This is how money works with Liberty: She gets some and she spends it within 5 minutes. Usually she buys Another Effin’ W3bkinz. She always says she wants to save for 2 allowance days in order to get a DS game or something like that, but that would take “4 whole weeeeeeks!” So she, without fail, opts for spending over saving. Last allowance day, she decided she was going to spend some gift money and save her allowance money to pool it with Lena’s so they could buy a used Gamecube together. This was established before we went to the store to spend her gift money. While we were at the store, Liberty decided she didn’t want to pool the rest of her money with Lena. Instead, she wanted to spend every last penny buying several W3bkinz, which meant that Lena wouldn’t have had enough money on her own to get the Gamecube, which we were planning to get that night. We try to not be controlling when it comes to their very own money (as evidenced by the number of Effin’ W3bkinz in this house), but we felt that it was unfair of Liberty to renege on her deal with Lena and we told her so. She responded by very calmly paying for her solitary W3bkinz and then as soon as we walked out into the parking lot, she crumbled into a quivering mess of hysterics and screamed in a pitch that was so painful to hear that it could be used to question suspects at Guantanamo Bay, “IT’S NOT FAIR! YOU’RE MEAN! IT’S MY MONEY!” over and over with a red face and tears and flailing to boot. So I yelled back with my mean mommy tone, “I’ll tell you what’s not fair: promising to pool your money with your sister and then deciding not to and leaving her hanging. I’ll tell you what else isn’t fair: how about if Maya and Lena continue to get allowance money and you get NOTHING? How about that? That sounds fun to me! Yup, let’s do that. Now quit yer cryin’ and suck it up! You made a deal.”

Ahem.

They’re different kids, that’s all. I know it’s confusing, what with them being identical twins and all, but as much as I try to make them the same, it doesn’t work. My different reaction to them all comes down to my different fears for them. I don’t worry about Liberty over-analyzing everything to death and missing out on life. I worry about her leaping before she looks and getting seriously hurt in the process. Writing that, it seems like these girls just can’t win with me and that’s probably true. I am, after all, the mom. There’s just no pleasing the mom. I’m just looking for a bit of middle ground. I don’t constantly harangue Liberty about the fact that she will be bored with her W3bkinz within minutes of getting it home. It’s her money. That’s her lesson to learn and she’s not going to learn it with me rolling my eyes at her every time she buys something. I will step in, though, if her spending habits hurt another person.

Now I have to go because today is allowance day and Liberty is already at the other computer looking at “exclusive items” she can buy on the W3bkinz website. Commercials were made for kids like her.

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Maya was singing, “If you poop, you have to wipe yours butt,” to the tune of the Veggie Tales theme song all day yesterday. And then last night we had major storms and tornado warnings. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. She’s been checking out CDs from the library lately and she must have grabbed a whole stack from the kids’ gospel section because she has the Veggie Tales one and about 3 other kids’ greatest worship and gospel thingies. I thought it was totally random that she pulled CDs from that section, but now I think she checked them out for the sole purpose of making bathroom joke parodies out of the songs. She knows Christians hate that shit. And God punished us with bad storms. God always knows what your filthy little heart is up to.

The title of this post is a shout out to Bryan’s dementia-addled grandmother who lives with my in-laws. A few years ago when she was just starting to go downhill, she would constantly laugh at Maya and say over and over, “That little one is funny! Look at him! There he goes! Look at him! He’s funny!” Maya could be doing something as simple as walking through the living room and Grandma would crack up, which I think means she was seeing into Maya’s soul, and she was trying to tell us that Maya’s very being is funny.

Grandma is still a laugher, but she doesn’t really put words together anymore. When we were visiting there last month, it was really sad to see how far she had deteriorated in less than a year. And, we feel guilty about it, but it was also funny. The deterioration is not funny, but she is a funny, funny lady. She thinks my father-in-law is her husband and she gets jealous when he pays attention to my mother-in-law (her daughter). That’s funny. She can’t get many words out at once, but she managed to call my father-in-law fat when he took food away from her. He is pretty fat. If there is any food within arm’s reach of Grandma, she will put it in her mouth. My father-in-law kind of has the same affliction, so his taking food away from her was a bit hypocritical and I think she knew that, so she called him out on it. That’s funny. She’s just having a little fun with her dementia, that’s all. I think it’s very nice of her to decide to have the funny kind and not the mean kind.

It’s time to get the day going. I think the lightening is all over, but Maya is working on getting the melody to Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus down so I better get out and run before her parody is finished and the lightening starts again.

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Lena got out of bed in a screaming panic the other night because she traded a video game to somebody and then decided she wanted it back. This is a child who doesn’t do anything on impulse so I knew she didn’t take this trade lightly and I knew it was going to be that much more painful for her to find out she had to stick with the trade. She is so cautious that I worry that she misses out on things because of the fear of what-if. And because I tend to think in extremes, I think that if she is like this at 9, she’ll be like this at 39 and she might miss lots of really good stuff and her life will be an empty, antiseptic, white room of nothingness in order to stave off regret.

Through her sobs she explained the situation to me and begged me to help her convince the kid to trade back. Basically, she wanted me to use my mom powers for evil. I very gently explained the ethics of playground trading and how it’s not really kosher to demand the game back. This explanation was followed by more tears and louder wailiing, which I encouraged. There was also a significant amount of flailing of various body parts, which I also encouraged from a safe distance. This child is extremely long in the limbs, so when she flailed around in this fit of regret, she looked like one of those giant promotional inflatables in the shape of a guy. The one with arms that don’t inflate, so they just go whipping wildly around. Her elbows and knees can be deadly in this state so I comforted her from across the room.

While Lena worked on getting out her sadness, all I could think about was how this is a kid who did not need to learn the lesson of the impulsive trade. Again, my mind went to the bleakness of a future with no risk. She already misses out on a lot of fun things because of her sense of caution and this wasn’t even an impulsive trade for her. She’d had the game since April and she didn’t like it. It wasn’t fun. She had been sitting on it for 2 months and when the opportunity to trade it with a friend came up, she thought it over and went for it.

After about 45 minutes of there-theres and I-know-it’s-so-hards, she calmed down and I let her sleep in my bed just like the good ol’ days and we talked about how much fun the good ol’ days were and how much fun these right-now days are and she started to talk about selling her fresh trade to the used game store in order to save for a certain Mario Brothers game, and she decided that there was a bright side to her trade after all.

Taking her lead, I decided I would also look on the bright side. Lena definitely did not need to learn to be more cautious, so I am going to cling to the hope that the part of her brain that encourages caution was already all filled up, so that this little experience wouldn’t even register with the be-careful gremlins in there. I’m going to choose to believe that what is really imprinted on her little brain is the fact that when she has regret, nobody that loves her is going to tell her to suck it up and move on. Nobody will ever tell her to lie in her freshly-made bed. I hope she learned to treat the people she loves with the same respect and I hope she learned that she deserves the same from the people in her life. Instead of imagining a risk-free, gain-free life for her, I’m going to imagine that she’ll always be surrounded by people who will support her through her successes and failures. People who will encourage her to fill her white rooom of nothingness type life with color and fun, and people who will teach her that experiencing regret isn’t the scariest thing in life. People who will risk their own soft tissue in order to let her flail her bony elbows all around while she wails. And people who will let her come to the bright side all on her own.

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Today was Thursday pretty much all day and it was my turn to host the Thursday potluck. Now I’m riding high on caffeine and socializing, and instead of cleaning my house I’m blogging. Yay.

As sometimes happens on Thursdays, we did a lot of talking about parenting and how we suck at it. I’ve been thinking about something in particular that I struggle with and I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf. I have a serious problem with regard to how I react to the children when they’re having difficulty with a craft or math or rollerblading or opening a cereal box or a new DS game or a maze or whatever. It’s not the fact that they struggle, it’s the fact that they have to whine about the struggling that just sends me over the edge every time. It finally occurred to me that I have an extremely unreasonable expectation that when they have some kind of difficulty, that they’ll say in a normal tone of voice, “Mother, I am having trouble and I would be ever so grateful if you would assist me.” Instead, they usually use their whiniest voice to say, “I caaan’t doooo iiiiitttt!” and then they stomp and flail. I don’t like that. If I were a mature adult I would hear that and calmly reply, “There, there, let me see if I can help you.” Instead, I have an extremely immature nervous system which reacts with a fight-or-flight response when faced with super-deadly whining. I usually say, “Stop whining and I can help you,” which looks fine in print, but if you heard the tone of my voice and you were a very sensitive lass, you might pee your pants from the fear that my words were actually going to choke you. This is my least favorite thing about myself. First of all, it just escalates the problem and, most importantly, it goes against everything I believe in as far as emotional health. I would never tell them to stop feeling mad or sad or anything like that. In this house, we share our feelings and our feelings are respected. But when it comes to their whining because of having difficulty with something, I feel like they should understand that it’s ok to struggle and they should have an attitude of, “Huh. This is hard. I guess I’ll have to ask for help.” When in reality, nobody acts like that when they’re having a problem. We all whine and stomp in our own way. My asking them to stop whining doesn’t work because then they think I’m mad at them and that freaks them out and then they can’t relax and then they cry and whine more. It’s really quite the opposite of helpful. So I’m turning over a new leaf and I think it’s going to be life-changing. You know, like Jesus and The Secret. Only with less bloodshed. Hopefully.

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Am I the only mom who is unable to put band-aids on the right way? You know, by holding the paper thingies and deftly peeling them apart while sticking the adhesive parts to the skin at the very same time. Like magic. Whenever I try to do that, I get the sticky parts too close together, so the non-adhesive part that is supposed to be on the cut sticks way up in the air. It looks like this ___-___ It makes me feel bad about myself. Isn’t part of the fun of getting a new band-aid the thrill of seeing your mom perform that fancy magic trick? I can’t remember the last time I had to put a band-aid on Maya because she just does it herself. My technique bores her.

I have to peel the paper off of both sides before I can even think about trying to stick it to the skin. Even then, the amount of concentration needed for me to do that causes my brow to furrow and my tongue to hang out of my mouth. I’m pretty sure this indicates a deeper, more troubling issue with my mothering skills in general.

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She’s addicted to the self-scan checkout thing at the library, which is fine, but I don’t have a truck with which to haul her freshly-scanned books home. She walks into the library, card in hand, and randomly grabs and tosses books at me to shove in the library bag as if the bag is like a magic, bottomless bag that can never be filled to capacity. There are usually 3-4 other people who need to shove books into the bag, too, but she hogs it up all for herself. And then I strain my shoulder trying to carry it. And then I take her home and force her to listen to every single book over and over until she cries. I’m passive-aggressive that way.

Maya isn’t the only one who got a new card; all of the girls updated their cards to the fancy new color ones and we got my niece all signed up with one of her very own, too. I really don’t mind lugging home a giant bag of books. I do mind the fact that each child has her very own library bag, but they all claim their bags are “toooooo heeeeaaavvvvyyyyy” *whine, stomp* and when I make them carry their own, they check out books based on weight and ease of carrying. Not cool.

You might have noticed by how rarely I update my sidebar that It takes me forever to finish a book, but that doesn’t stop me from adding books to my pile. I’m a fast reader, but I really only have time to read my own stuff at bedtime. If I’m reading during the day, it’s kid stuff. You know, to the kids. Or toilet stuff, like magazines. You know, on the toilet. (What? Is that TMI? But Everyone Poops. It’s no big deal.)

We usually have a family book going at all times and I used to let Lena and Liberty read ahead if they wanted to, but that got too annoying and hard to keep track of and then they would fight over who got to read it first and I like to have them not fighting and not annoying me at all times, so now they can’t read ahead in the family book, which makes them a little desperate. If I sit down on my own bed, behind closed doors and start to read my own book, it’s only a matter of a few minutes before somebody comes in and says, “Oh, you’re reading? Then you won’t mind reading this to us,” as if my piteous life has no purpose unless I’m serving them in some capacity. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

I long for the days when I had a breastfeeding infant/toddler/pre-schooler and I could retire to my bed with just that wee little one and, under the guise of trying to get the baby to sleep, just read and read and read to my heart’s content, only to emerge from the bedroom hours later with a shrug for Bryan that said, “Whaddya gonna do? Darn baby didn’t wanna sleep. What’s for dinner?” Now the darn baby has her own library card and, even worse, if I tried to take her to bed and put her down for a nap, her mouth wouldn’t stop running long enough for me to read a sentence. Darn baby with her fancy new library card.

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