Weeping and gnashing of teeth

I used to think people were overreacting when they described their kids' teething woes. The stories of the crankiness (for both the baby and the parent), the sleepless nights, the sheer misery of it all just never resonated with me. But now I know the truth. And the truth is that my first two were champion teethers, pushing right through without so much as a peep as sharp incisors thrust themselves up through soft baby gums.

Jacob, I'm beginning to understand, is a much more normal baby. I'm sure the stomach virus (or whatever that wretched illness was that wreaked havoc on his body for 12 days and caused him to lose two pounds) had a lot to do with it. He was so pitiful at one point that I caved in and bought him a teething toy and a brand new walker. I don't buy my kids new toys. Ever. If we have to take something out of the box and put it together for the first time, I know something's wrong.

Maybe it has something to with the fact that he's teething so excruciatingly slowly. We've been to the doctor a lot lately. And she agrees with me that his mouth looks like a war zone. And she asks the same question every time she peeks in his mouth: "Those teeth haven't come through yet?"

Nope, what started with a song on Abby's fourth birthday over a month ago (Happy Birthday to her, Happy Toothday to Jacob) still drags on today. Those first two teeth that we spotted that morning had almost completed their ascent by the time we sat down for cupcakes that evening. Five more soon promised to follow in quick succession.

Or not.

A month later, the top two teeth have finally broken through the gums. Three lateral incisors are still lurking just below the surface, taunting my poor son with their total lack of progress.

So we continue to wait, and apply Tylenol and Oragel as needed. The new teething toy was not a hit, but chewing on the corners of matchbox cars and the edges of my furniture seems to bring him some relief. So do frozen chicken nuggets.

I can see we have a long road ahead of us.

Table for three

I wasn't invited, so I have no idea what happened. But I think it's safe to say that Abby's special lunch with Nana at the American Girl bistro was a fantastic outing for my little girl and her little doll, Sally.

What I do know, according the recollection of my four-year-old, is this:

• The waitress brought her a sticker when she sat down. She asked if she could have one to bring home for her brother, and got one more. But she left hers behind when lunch was over. So Caleb has a sticker, but Abby doesn't. But that's okay, because she doesn't want him to be sad that he didn't get to come.
• They had a special high chair for her baby Sally that attached to the table, just like the one we have for Jacob. But Sally didn't make a huge mess in hers.
• Abby ate a hot dog for lunch. Or two hot dogs. She's not sure. But she's certain she drank pink lemonade.
• The waitress brought Sally lunch, too. But Sally didn't eat real food. Just pretend food. Because she's not a real baby like Jacob. (This explains the lack of mess.)

Thanks for a fun time, Nana! Abby's already looking forward to your next date.

Keeping it real

Last week, one of my friends told me I seem to have it all together.

This week, we're working to prove her wrong.

My youngest is teething. Or has a stomach virus. Or both. Either way, horrendous things are coming out of both ends of him, and he's miserable. Which is making the rest of us miserable. Because honestly, you can only listen to the unending shrill cry of a ten month old for so long before you stop feeling sorry for him and start feeling sorry for yourself.

I know, I know. Poor baby. Teething is no fun. Especially when you're getting five teeth at one time. And nobody likes a stomach virus. I feel for him, I really do. But the crying had gone on so long and so loud this morning that I couldn't think straight anymore and had to call for help to do some basic math adjusting a dosage of ibuprofen for his weight.

Turns out it didn't matter. He threw it up anyway.

So I did the next logical thing. I changed shirts for the fourth time since he started throwing up on me two hours earlier, put a change of clothes for everyone else in a beach bag, told the older siblings that the three bites of breakfast they'd had was plenty, and put everyone in the car in their pajamas to head to the doctors office. For the second time in four days.

Then I stopped, went back inside to get shoes for everyone, and we were on our way.

By noon, the one with the virus and swollen gums was feeling a little better, thanks to some prescription anti-nausea medicine, a new teething toy and a big sippy cup of pediatric electrolyte solution.

The other two were starving (apparently 16 cheerios is not a sufficient breakfast) and waiting impatiently for me to clear their cereal bowls from the table and make them some lunch.

For reasons I still do not know, there were about 40 sheets of white construction paper strewn all over the kitchen floor. This seemed unimportant at the time, but would come to matter later.

I sat my kids down to a delicious and highly nutritious lunch of Nutella sandwiches and blackberries. Then I threw a big handful of cheerios on their plates, to make up for breakfast. I filled their cups with 2% milk instead of whole, because the gallon of whole milk doesn't expire until next week, and I noticed my 2% milk expires on Saturday. Abby was not fooled, and demanded to know why her milk tasted "skinny."

Really Abby? I'm feeding you chocolate and cheerios for lunch, and you're complaining about 2% milk?

Jacob would not drink his off-brand Pedialyte at the table, so I let him down in hopes that he'd stop screaming again so I could eat my lunch in peace.

That's when I realized I hadn't made myself any lunch. I reached for a rice krispie treat to hold me over until the kids are napping and I can make myself a sandwich. I'm pretty sure I forgot to eat breakfast, what with the loading the kids in the car in their pajamas in a hurry and everything. So I grabbed one more rice krispie treat, for good measure.

Jacob chooses this moment to begin eating the construction paper that I had decided to clean up later. I apologized profusely to my youngest for taking a moment to myself, removed the paper from his hands, and convinced myself that whatever he swallowed didn't matter, since he'd probably throw it up anyway.

When lunch was over (marked by the high-pitched wailing of the infant and game of air hockey Abby and Caleb had begun playing with their cheerios) I left the remains of both our pitiful breakfast and our pitiful lunch littered from the table to the sink. I shuffled the kids upstairs to get ready for naps and noticed that they have destroyed whatever organization I once had going on with their toys in the living room. And since we were out of the house all morning, I'm still puzzled as to how they did this. Broken and half-chewed cheerios are scattered throughout the downstairs. Overturned cars and trucks have been abandoned in the foyer. There is a trail of princess shoes and hair ribbons lining both sides of the stairs.

Abby's big comfy rocker is overturned, and the cushions are in her brother's closet. I don't know how it got this way, but I know the only adequate punishment is to remove the chair from her room completely.

"But...but..." she screams, big heavy sobs shaking her little body as she watches me drag her chair down the hallway, "this is very, very sad!"

Yes, it is.

In the bathroom, I find a makeshift shelter that Caleb has set up to sleep in. I instruct him to take his pillow and all his blankets and animals back into his room and put his comfy clothes on for naps. Soon he is naked, and running laps through the upstairs bedrooms, and I realize that in my weakened state I've lost whatever authority I had over these little people.

Jacob is finally in his crib for his nap, but has decided today is the day he'll start throwing his blankie and puppy and dinosaur out of his bed, get upset because he can't reach them, and then scream until I give them back. Babies are not the most logical creatures I've ever met.

Eventually Caleb and Abby are clothed and kissed and read to, and are quiet in their rooms for what I hope is the next three hours.

My downstairs looks like a suburban mommy war zone, with Target bags piled high, butter knives sticking up at odd angles from jars of peanut butter and Nutella, sippy cups laying on their sides, soiled baby clothes in the sink, crayons and coloring books scattered around the kids' craft table and a few dirty diapers here and there that haven't quite made it to the trash can. My unfinished mocha sits on the edge of the counter, a sad reminder of how my day started.

Maybe next week I'll get my act together. Today, I'm just hoping to not be thrown up on again.

A fate worse than glitter

Jacob has the Midas touch. Except instead of gold, everything he touches turns to crumbs.

Crumbs that get flung from his tiny baby fists across the expanse of my dining room.

Crumbs that stick to his clothes and spread throughout the house with every move he makes.

Crumbs that get dropped, rolled or pushed from the table because babies love that game.

So for the majority of the day, this is what my floor looks like. Because there are only a few hours between breakfast and lunch, and not much more between lunch and dinner. And it seems silly to waste time sweeping between meals when the crumb harvest is so much more rewarding if we wait until evening.

Someday, I'll look back on this and laugh. Today, it makes me cringe a little.

An amphibious adventure

Abby only wanted to pet a frog.

She started asking months ago, around the time her dad pointed out that the croaking she heard in the backyard was evidence that there were frogs back there. Seeing and hearing them wasn't enough.

My daughter needed to touch one. I know, because the plea went something like this: "Mommy...I need to pet a frog. A real frog." It wasn't really up for debate. So I contacted the Department of Natural Resources, the state Amphibian and Reptile Society, and a few small-scale rescue organizations to see if I could make Abby's dreams come true. When they all gave the same answer, I knew exactly where we'd be making our next field trip.

And that is how we found ourselves wandering through the Botanical Gardens, hunting for the giant bullfrogs that lurk in their ponds, admiring the vivid colors of the the poison dart frogs in the conservatory, and enjoying the many displays and learning stations set up for the Garden's homeschool day.

Caleb was fascinated by the demonstration on plants that eat bugs, and enjoyed sticking his finger in a few Venus Flytraps when our guide wasn't looking. He was briefly enthralled by a display of native leaves and tree rings until an enormous red Mack truck drove directly under us. After that, all the excitement of the natural world was pretty much lost.

Jacob dozed in the stroller through the rain forest, the desert, the children's garden, the edible garden and the entire canopy walk through the trees. He woke in time to crawl around the fountain for a while before we headed home. He wasn't so into the scavenger hunt or the chasing of quail through the conservatory like his brother and sister.

And Abby got her wish. At the edge of an enormous pond, we spotted two big eyes staring up at us. They were attached to a frog approximately the size of my kids' heads. Ignoring my advice to make a slow and quiet approach, Abby and Caleb crept forward, flung their bodies across the edge of the pond, and plunged their hands down into the murky water. The frog did not disappoint, and held still long enough for multiple pettings and multiple pictures before beginning a brief ascent up Abby's outstretched arm.

It was, in Abby's words, "the greatest field trip ever."

Secondary colors

Today, we experimented with colors. We talked about things that are green, we colored with green, and then we mixed flour, water, and blue and yellow paint in a bag to make green.

But more importantly, we created an altogether new surface over which Caleb could drive his monster truck.

And Abby insisted on documenting the process with her little camera, and carefully posed her bag of green goo to get just the right shot of our final product.

I don't know where she got that idea.

Fun, with a side of crazy

Sometimes things get a little nutty at the School of Mommy. I have only one official pupil. Abby's the only one who's really supposed to be playing Pre-K this year. But Caleb pretty much has to do everything his big sister does, so I have to prepare two of everything when it comes to crafts, activities and experiments.

And Jacob, though quite advanced for his 10 months, is not quite old enough to play quietly in the corner by himself while I instruct the older two in the fine arts of scribbling and crafting.

So we do our best, and we squeeze in school time whenever the little guy is napping, or when the big kids start to get out of hand and need some calm sitting still activities to keep them from killing each other.

Abby and I butt heads often. We're still working hard on her perfectionist tendencies and trying to come up with some frustration-management techniques that don't involve sobbing whenever the letter she tries to draw doesn't look exactly like the example. I've explained to her that we have to practice before we're able to do something right, but she has a stubborn personality (mine) and she wants to do it right the first time, or not at all.

Honestly, I am in awe of how well she really is doing. She's doing phenomenal with her letter writing and phonics and I'm looking forward to diving into our reading curriculum soon. The coloring, shape and pattern recognition activities we do are mostly a review for her, and she usually takes the time to instruct and assist Caleb since, as she points out, "I already know all this stuff, Mommy."

She loves to use our set of wooden train tracks to play a pattern recognition game she calls "What comes next?" and her complicated patterns of straight and curved pieces yield some odd polygons that she insists on knowing the proper names for. I'm not sure how many people know that a seven-sided shape is called a heptagon. My 4-year-old does.

Most of what we do rates pretty highly on my kids' fun meter. But every once in a while one of my craft ideas just doesn't pan out. Like this rainy-day craft that I was so looking forward to.

Dropping food coloring on construction paper and letting it get rained on to make a cool tie-dyed picture might have been a lot more fun to watch if we were getting more than a mist. Eventually I sent the kids inside and dashed out to hit our artwork with the hose when they weren't looking. I achieved the same effect in the end, but it wasn't nearly the attention-getter I thought it would be.

After listening to me gently remind Abby to try to stay in the lines, Caleb is catching on to the fact that this must be pretty important. So his coloring is a lot more meticulous these days, and not nearly so erratic as it was a few weeks ago. He insists on only ever using a blue crayon, so I broke down and bought one of those enormous Crayola boxes so that he could mix things up a little with colors like blizzard blue, aquamarine, denim, manatee and wild blue yonder.

With fall just around the corner, the weather has been just perfect for spending lots and lots of time outside. We're loving our Berenstain Bears' Big Book of Science and Nature, and learning plenty about the world around us in catchy little rhymes. I wish all science curriculum was this fun! We've memorized the seasons and months of the year, identified signs of summer and fall, looked for wildlife and pretty plants like the ones the Berenstains talk about, and we took the opportunity to do some leaf rubbings when the trees started to provide us with some good material in the backyard.

Abby pretty much thought leaf rubbing was the greatest thing ever, and colored about a thousand pink leaves that she insisted I needed to cut out and laminate for her. We bargained down to nine, including the one blue one that Caleb made before he lost interest, and the kids agreed to let me hang them in the kitchen so my walls would be prettier.

I'm really enjoying school this year. I think the kids feel the same.

Ready for takeoff

Perfect weather, clear skies, and an evening of fun on the swings?

Yes, please.

Hands-on learning

For the past month, Caleb and I have read one book, and one book only before his daily naps. It's appropriately named Diggers and Dumpers, and as far as my two and a half year old is concerned, it's a work of literary genius. We've read it so much that he has the whole thing memorized. Word for word.

He can tell you without hesitation that a bulldozer has a massive steel blade to push earth into piles.

He knows that the bucket on the back of a dump truck is called a skip, and he can tell the difference between a front end loader and a back hoe loader.

He understands that tractor tires have deep grooves to help the tractor grip the muddy earth.

He's learned that skid steers are often used instead of bigger machines because they can turn around in small spaces.

And now he knows that when the tree trimming service leaves a Bobcat unattended in the neighbor's yard overnight, it's pretty much a sure thing that we're going to go over there and sit in it.

Breaking a sweat

No, I don't work out. But once a year, I attempt a kind of "first day of school" type photoshoot with my uncooperative kiddos before we head out the door for our first day of Community Bible Study. And I always break a sweat.

This year, I took 172 pictures. Inside. And none of them turned out. So I took the kids outside, let them run off all that pent-up anger that comes from being told to sit still and imagine various types of made up creatures perched atop mom's ahead in an effort to get them to smile, then posed them again. Fifty-three frames later, I managed to snap a shot that meets my low standards of decent family photo: at least 2/3 of the children are looking toward the camera, at least 1/3 is smiling, and no one is screaming or falling over.

First day of CBS

September 2011

Abby (4), Caleb (2.5), Jacob (10 months)

Abby couldn't wait to meet the new kids in her class this year, and adorned herself with a bunch of smiley face stickers she found that she planned to give away to all her new friends. "I'll give each friend a sticker," she explained, "and tell them 'Hi, I'm Abby. What's your name?'" After class, she informed that she needed more pink stickers next time. Apparently there are more girls in her class than she'd anticipated.

Caleb reassured me over and over again that he would not cry in his class this year. Not even during music time, which was a particular point of angst last year. True to his word, he marched right in without so much as a wave goodbye for dear old mom. I guess he meant it. There are lots of trucks in his classroom, and their memory verse was one he knew from last year, so he's feeling pretty good about going back.

Jacob, being the good third child that he is, was content to ride around on my back in his comfy Ergo while I got all the other kids settled, and didn't seem to mind being dropped off with some hurried instructions about naps and bottles before I headed out to my class. My, how things have changed since the days of leaving just one little one in childcare.

September 2010

Abby (3), Caleb (1.5), Jacob (-2 months)

September 2009

Abby (2), Caleb (7 months)

September 2008

Abby (13 months), Caleb (-4 months)

Boys will be...

Jacob's going to be okay. He's got a big brother that will make sure of it.

I've seen Caleb really start to take ownership of this older brother stuff this summer. I still referee my fair share of shouting matches, and I have yet to figure out how in the world to explain to an upset 2.5 year old that he must speak quietly and respectfully to his baby brother, even when his baby brother is screaming at the top of his lungs and knocking over his towers. But in general, Caleb's turning out to be a really decent kid. And it's tons of fun to watch him navigate the world of boy stuff after being made to tag along with Abby's idea of fun for so long.

When they woke from their naps, Abby announced she would stay in her room and be lonely, which is my kids' way of saying they want to be alone. So we left her up there, and I carried Jacob downstairs and sat him in the middle of the empty floor while I prepared his bottle. Caleb followed close behind. Jacob looked around, then took off in the direction of the only thing within reach: Abby's doll stroller.

And that's when his big brother swooped in to save the day.

"No Jacob!" he yelled, rushing to stand between Jacob and the stroller. "That's girl things!" He turned to retrieve the box labeled cars & trucks from the second shelf. "We like trucks. I'm gonna let you play with my teeny tiny dump truck."

And in a moment of pure altruism, he dumped the entire contents of the cars & trucks box onto the floor and began separating them into two piles: "These ones Jacob will like to play with" and "These are Caleb's trucks."

Caleb proceeded to drive his trucks around his brother, over Jacob's legs and up and down the front of his face while Jacob laughed and flailed, an ice cream truck in one hand and teeny tiny dump truck in the other.

These are the moments that make all that refereeing seem worth it.