Category: Parenting

One of these days, we’ll all be old enough to go to the toilet.

It’s a sad fact of life that once you have kids, certain adult things go right out the window. Going to the toilet is one of them. In our house, everyone goes “potty,” including my husband and me. I’m not even sure I can say the word “toilet” anymore because I’ve been saying “potty” for so long.

We do not urinate or have a bowel movement anymore either. We have poo-poo or pee-pee. But that’s okay because nobody in the house has a butt. Somehow we’ve all developed tushies instead.

I don’t know where the baby talk came from. I had no intentions of using it with my kids, but somehow it crept in while I wasn’t looking. It all sounds great when mixed in with my usual swearing, I tell you.

What’s really funny is the fact that Cassie is quite capable of speaking and understanding long words. Lately, she’s been asking me if we can have a “conversation” together. That’s her choice of words, not mine. She sounds so adult when she asks this, but once I say yes, things take a turn for the weird. It goes something like this.

“Mommy, can we have a conversation?”

“Of course, sweetie. What shall we talk about?”

“Hmm… Let’s talk about eating people.”

“Uh, okaaaaay, what about eating people?”

“Monsters eat people. People are crunchy.”

“Who told you this?”

“Aunt Khaki.”

“Remind me to thank Aunt Khaki the next time we talk to her.”

“Okay.”

Of course, the conversation with Aunt Khaki isn’t that much more rational. And I have conversations like this all day long. It’s no wonder I think I’m going crazy.

Man, what a night. Sam is having some tummy trouble (i.e. a really bad case of needing to fart but she can’t). I’m not sure if something I ate is passing through to her via my breast milk or if the problem is that she’s still gorging herself because I overproduce. I only nurse her every three hours now, at the doctor’s suggestion, but she still pulls off half the time and starts to spit up.

Poor Sam grunted and wailed most of the night, but was especially bad from 2:30AM until 5:30AM. I had planned to get up at 6 or 6:30, but you know that went right out the window. Sam’s nighttime feedings are now at 8:30PM, 11:30PM, 2:30PM, and 4:30PM. Each feeding lasts at least half an hour (not including time for diaper changes) and most nights I don’t get to bed until 10:30PM, so you can guess how little sleep I’m getting even when Sam isn’t up screaming in the wee hours of the morning.

The big problem with being up all night is that I also need to be up all day. I don’t have time for a nap. I should probably make time, but as I’ve said before, I can sleep when I’m dead. My waking hours right now are divided between taking care of both children, cleaning the house, and doing my work. Oh, and exercise. Can’t forget that. I’ve been able to keep up with most everything that I need to do, but I do find myself suffering in certain areas. Namely in the creativity department. Not with regards to writing though. I’ve been working on a short story the past two weeks, and it’s been going pretty well. It won’t be the best piece of writing I’ve ever done, but the story is coming together and that makes me feel good.

No, my creativity problems are coming in my drawing and graphics work, which really irks me. I started drawing when I was old enough to hold a crayon. At age three or four, I won a prize in an art contest sponsored by the Wonderful World Of Disney. The prize was a View Master Give-A-Show Projector and I still have it tucked away in Cassie’s closet. It still works too.

I drew my way through elementary school, even though we had no formal art classes there. I drew the intermediate and high school, and was voted “Most Artistic” by my class mates my senior year. In college, I drew a comic strip for the Collegiate Times. It was one of the more popular strips in the paper and it ran for four years. And then after that, for some reason, I sort of stopped drawing.

I kept doing art in some form or other, but not the kind I wanted to do. The comic strip was the last thing I can remember doing that really felt creative before I hit the real world. I had wanted to go to art school when I graduated from high school, but my father said no, I was getting a degree in a real field that would pay me money. Well, I got a degree in broadcast journalism and never worked in a radio or TV station. I did work briefly for a local newspaper… selling advertising. That sucked rocks. But every other job I ever got involved art. I did computer graphics for Radford University’s communications department. I designed t-shirts for a silk-screening company that went belly-up. I worked as a clerk in an arts and crafts store (and hated every minute of it – I firmly believe that arts and crafts stores are designed to suck the life and creativity out of their employees). I spent four years drawing computer graphics and designing briefings for a two-star general at Langley Air Force Base. I did animation and web design for the Air Force as well. But my original love, drawing, sort of fell by the wayside.

I tried to keep my creativity alive with other projects. I costumed. I ran a website called Xena Warrior Milkmaid. I started doing 3D graphics, using Poser, Bryce, Carrara and other programs. I got extremely good at making photo-montage comic books. I even put together some cool animated cartoons. But no drawing. No paper on pencil.

Then about two years before Cassie was born, I signed up for a colored pencil class at a local art museum. I loved it. In two years, I only turned out two drawings, but they were the best, most gorgeous pieces of work I’ve ever produced. One is a crayon drawing of an apple that looks so real I think it’s going to fall off the page and hit someone in the head. The other is a drawing of Mary Queen Of The World, a cathedral in Montreal that Michael and I visited when he attended a conference there. I love both drawings, I loved taking that class, but when Cassie was born, I couldn’t figure out how to get back to drawing. Hell, I couldn’t figure out how to get out the door. Cassie was what Dr. Sears would have called a “high need child.” I just called her a screaming terror. No way could I take her into a classroom full of people to draw for two hours.

So I dropped the classes and that was the last time I really did any drawing. Then in February I picked up a book on fantasy cartooning and decided I needed to pick up the old pencil again and get my rear in gear. I have this secret desire to put together a small selection of my own artwork and put it up for auction at a local science fiction convention. I listed that secret desire on my work goals for this quarter. I’m in the midst of coloring a mermaid I drew after reading the book on fantasy cartooning. It looks beautiful, although it’s taking forever to finish.
But it will get finished, and then I’m faced with a real problem. What the hell do I draw next? This is the question that has been plaguing the last two weeks. It’s what’s been keeping me up at night when Sam isn’t screaming. It’s got me so spun up that I don’t know what to do. It’s a creative block and I hate it.

I never had problems figuring out what to draw when I was a kid. I never lacked for ideas. Now I can’t come up with any. I’ve got to jump start my brain, get my visualization skills back online. It’s crucial to my survival as an artist, and guess what, it’s also crucial to me as a mom. My sanity depends on my ability to work. It always has. If I don’t have anything to do beyond take care of the kids and clean the house, I will go nuts. I’m already half-way there, so why make it worse? I’ll be searching for my creative side until I find it. Until then, sleep can wait.

Michael went back to work yesterday. Actually, I’m not sure he ever really left. The man brought home a flash stick or some such doo-hickey that allowed him to work from his office here. Plus he went in to two meetings while he was on family leave and he spent one morning taking a physical for work. But now he’s really gone daddy gone, back at the office all day and I’m on my own with Cassie and Sam.

I was actually hoping that yesterday would be a complete disaster so that I’d have something funny to report back on this morning. I was certainly expecting it to be a disaster. No such luck. I am sorry to say that yesterday didn’t go badly at all. I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to but I came pretty close, and the house was still in one piece by the time Michael got home so that was good. It took me a little longer than I would have liked to get the chores done, and we didn’t spend nearly enough time outside playing, but I’m sure my schedule will smooth out in another couple of weeks.

The biggest problem I’m having right now is that Sam keeps gorging herself when she nurses, leading to some rather explosive spit-ups and a bad case of the late evening crankies and colicky behavior. Her belly gets tied up in knots with gas, and the only thing that soothes her is nursing some more, which in the end only makes the problem worse. I got her to take a binky for a little while last night, but that only delayed her screaming for fifteen minutes. Sam ended up spending most of the night in bed with me while I patted her back non-stop and tried to say soothing things like, “You know you don’t really want to nurse again. If you keep eating like this, you’ll ruin your girlish figure.” It made it hard to sleep through the night, but with a new baby, what did I expect?

Only one thing of real interest happened yesterday. I gave Cassie a spanking at the dojo. I normally try to avoid spanking her, but there are times when I think a good swat on the behind is the only way to straighten out bad behavior. Yesterday’s offense? Outright defiance and a temper tantrum. I took the kids to the dojo to visit while Michael took the afternoon class. Cassie was pretty good and Sam just sort of snoozed through it. After class was over, Cassie asked to play on the mat. We said she could play until we were ready to leave. Ten minutes later, Michael and I were all packed up and ready to go. I told Cassie to come off the mat and put her shoes on, and she immediately threw herself down on the floor and screamed “NO!”

If I have one rule that Cassie should know by now, it’s this – no temper tantrums allowed in the dojo. The dojo is a place where people come to learn, and the students pay good money to take classes there. They do not pay to hear my child scream. Cassie may sit and watch the class, she may play quietly on the side, she may enjoy a snack and watch a video with the other kids, and she may even talk with people as they come on and off the mat, but she is under no circumstances allowed to throw a tantrum. This is an adult class, taught during the day, and I consider myself extremely lucky to be able to attend. Not a lot of instructors would allow a small child to sit on the sidelines and play by themselves while Mommy takes class. The chance of said child being loud or ill-behaved and distracting the class is just too much for some teachers. So far, though, I’ve only had to haul Cassie out of there once. It was extremely disruptive and embarrassing, and after that one incident I made it clear that temper tantrums in the dojo were an automatic spanking offense.

Well, Cassie apparently forgot the rule about no tantrums. I blame three weeks of enjoying someone else’s style of discipline – not that my parents or Michael did a bad job of disciplining Cassie while I made the adjustment to having Sam. They took good care of my girl. They just don’t rule with an iron fist like I do. So Cassie threw her tantrum, right there in the middle of the mat where everyone could see her. I managed to order her to the sidelines, still screaming, so she could put on her shoes, but then she refused to turn and bow when she stepped off the mat. That’s a big no-no. Everyone, and I mean everyone, bows when coming on and off the mat. Cassie was trained from the get-go to bow, and she knows she’s supposed to do it. When I reminded her to bow, guess what she said? That’s right. “NO!”

I gave her three chances to bow and then the spanking started. Each time Cassie refused to bow, she got a swat on the behind. After the third swat, I put her over my knee, pulled down her underpants and gave her three hard spanks. She was howling by this time, but she still screamed “NO!” when I told her to bow, so she went over my knee again. And she said it again after that, but when I went to spank her again, boy did she move fast. She ran right over to the edge of the mat, bowed, and came back over crying. I got her shoes on and hustled her out the door as quickly as I could.

I sound like a tyrant, I suppose, spanking a child for refusing to bow to a mat, of all things. But there are rules in that dojo, and one of them I’ve already mentioned is that everyone who steps onto that mat has to bow. It’s about respect for the traditions of the martial art, and for the teacher and all the teachers who came before. If Cassie wants on that mat, she has to follow the dojo rules. If she wants to avoid a spanking, she has to follow my rules.

There’s a newspaper columnist, John Rosemond, who talks about raising kids. He’s a conservative, and I don’t always agree with what he has to say (especially not his views on single parenting and how all moms need to stay home rather than work), but I certainly agree with him on one thing. The most important thing you can teach your child is how to be well-behaved. Kids need to be able to say please, thank you, and excuse me. They need to know how to share and how to take turns. They need to understand how to play nice and how not to hit or bite other kids. And they need to understand that they’re choices and actions have consequences, memorable consequences that will leave a lasting impression. In other words, if a child breaks the rules, then they get punished.

I’m pretty strict along those lines. I demand that Cassie speak respectfully and always say please and thank you. I refuse to let my child act like a little monster, and it pays off. The one thing that amazes me when we go out is the number of people who tell me how extremely well behaved Cassie is. Of course she’s well-behaved, but if she’s really that much better behaved than other kids, we’ve got problems. Every child needs to learn respect and obedience, otherwise, how can they learn anything else? I’m not sending my child to school if she can’t behave. Teachers don’t get paid enough for that, thank you very much (and I know this because two of my best friends are teachers).

I try always to make Cassie’s punishments fit the crime. If she won’t help clean up after dinner, then she doesn’t get desert. If she won’t cooperate during her bath, then she doesn’t get stories before bed. If we’re in the toy store and she throws a fit because I won’t buy her everything she wants, she gets absolutely nothing, including whatever I promised to get her in the first place. Time outs work well as punishments for talking back and throwing things. And for temper tantrums? Well, if we’re at home, Cassie is only allowed to throw tempter tantrums up in her room. If we’re out, then we leave and go straight home so she can throw her tantrum in her room. Only a swat on the behind seems to get this kid’s attention. But for all out melt-downs like the one she had the other day, only a swat on the behind seems to get through to her, and yesterday even that took a little time to sink in.

Anyway, as I said at the beginning, Michael is back at work, the grandparents are long gone, and it’s just me and the kids now. It’s time to reinstate the rules and get back to business as usual. Cassie is bouncing back to her normal sunny, respectful self and I predict I’m not going to have to dispense many spankings in the future. We’re on an even keel here, and while that may not make for interesting blog entries, at least I’m not pulling my hair out.

No adventure in parenthood would be complete without a few tales on the three P’s – pee, poop, and puke. It’s a fact that new mothers can spend hours discussing the contents of dirty diapers. They also like to compare the latest spit up stains on their clothes. When a child is sick, moms can spin epic yarns about how much vomit and diarrhea they had to clean up. All of this means one thing.

Motherhood is one hell of a messy job.

I’ve been dealing with the three P’s ever since Cassie was born three and a half years ago. Her first week of life, I obsessed over whether she produced enough poop and pee. The nurses in the maternity ward had given me a neat little form to fill out that listed times I nursed Cassie, times we changed her diaper, and the contents of those diapers. It was sort of an input/output tracking sheet, I guess you could say. The outputs were referred to as “S” (solid) and “W” (wet), and Cassie was expected to produce a certain number of solids and wets per day. I’ll let you figure out what solid and wet stood for.

So I dutifully recorded every little solid and wet my daughter made for the first week, and I sweated over whether she was meeting her quota. Then after the first week, I quit worrying about whether she was making enough so-called solids and wets and began worrying about how to get solid and wet stains out of her clothes. And my clothes. And the carpet. And the bed spread. And off the wall.

Cassie became champ at producing solids and wets, and she liked to show off her talents. I could never change a diaper without getting the “fountain of youth” – a flood of pee that squirted straight up from her little hoo-hoo and flooded the entire changing table. Didn’t matter if I dropped a wash cloth over her while I was changing her. Didn’t matter if I put a clean diaper under her immediately to soak up and messes on the table. She would wait for that fraction of a second when she was unprotected by anything absorbent and that’s when she’d cut loose. I reckon she soaked at least three changing pad covers a day, and usually forced me to change outfits at least once due to her excessive peeing.

The pee, however, was nothing compared to the poop. Early on, we nicknamed Cassie Slurpee Butt. If you have never seen the poop of a breastfed baby, let me tell you, it looks exactly like some fancy brand of mustard blended with a banana slurpee. It’s seedy, yellow, and just thick enough to go splat when it hits the walls. It can also spurt out the rear end like water from a fire hose. I remember one particular afternoon when Michael was changing her, Cassie just let rip and a river of poop came shooting out her tiny behind. I estimate she ejected half her body weight in poop, causing a big, messy, yellow pool to form around her on the changing table. Fortunately, there was a lip on the end of that table that acted as a levee; otherwise our carpet would have taken the brunt of Cassie’s natural disaster, and I don’t think even FEMA would have paid for that.

Sam has similar talents, of course, although she employs different methods. Rather than spray pee in a fountain, she prefers the old Nile River flood plain method, where she very sneakily leaks a stream of pee that you don’t notice until it’s deep enough to grow crops in. As for her pooping skills… well, I’ve taken to calling her “Bullet Butt.” Sam doesn’t give off rivers of poop, but instead shoots out concentrated pellets that fly all the way across the room to her intended target. Frequently, Sam will wait until I’ve lifted her little butt off the pad to slip a diaper under her and then she’ll shoot, using the higher trajectory to aim for more distant targets. So far, she’s managed to hit the bedspread on the far side of our bedroom and yesterday she nearly took out one of the cats.

You’d think between all the pee and the poop that moms would have enough to clean up in the house. Not so! Puke and spit-up, though not as frequent as poop and pee, do make up a considerable amount of mess in a mommy’s life and you never know when they’re going to happen. I remember earlier this winter, Cassie came down with her first case of stomach flu. We didn’t even know she was sick. We just put her to bed that night. Then three hours later, I woke up to hear my daughter crying in her bed. I walked in and was nearly knocked flat by the smell of sour milk and vomit. Cassie had woken up and puked all over herself and her bed. I went in to calm her down and that’s when she puked all over me. I had to carry Cassie up to the office to get Michael. I couldn’t put her down without risking puke dropping all over the floor. Of course, when we walked in, Michael just stared at us like a deer caught in the headlights. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “Well,” I said, trying not to blow my top, “you could help me give Cassie a bath, and then maybe you could change the sheets on her bed, unless you expect her to sleep in a pile of puke tonight!”

It’s then that I came to realize my husband has no idea how to handle messes like that. Michael wasn’t bad with diapers. In fact, he’s really good about doing it when I ask him too. But when confronted with a bucket-load of puke, his brain just turns off. I had to direct my husband in every step of the clean up procedure. First step? Get the sick, screaming child into the tub and undress her. Second step, one parent (Daddy) changes the bed sheets while the second parent (Mommy) bathes the kid. Third step, find clean clothes for everyone who’s been puked on, namely the still-screaming child and the very frustrated mother. Fourth step, take everything that’s been puked on and run it through the washing machine, and no, don’t bother asking if Mommy wants to wash that stuff by hand. The answer is a definite “NO!”

I suppose it wouldn’t have been so bad that night if Cassie had just puked on me once, but right after I got us both cleaned up, she did it again. I was sitting on the bed, holding her and trying to calm her down. She still didn’t feel well, but I couldn’t understand why she was screaming so loudly. Then she opened her mouth extra-wide and out came a gallon of half-digested milk (Cassie drinks a lot of milk, by the way). Michael said it looked like a fat snake of white cheese slowly pouring out of her mouth and onto me. I thought it looked like someone had dumped a bucket of ricotta cheese all over me. It was impressive, to say the least, and extremely messy. Once again, I stood there holding my screaming child, both of us covered in puke. Once again, my husband the aerospace engineer stood there and stared, as slack-jawed and dim-witted as a sitcom husband.

“Well?” I demanded.

“Well what?” he replied.

“Aren’t you going to do something?” I prompted.

“Like what?”

“LIKE GET A TOWEL, YOU MORON!”

With a bit of shouting, I was able to direct Michael through the proper clean-up procedure yet again. This time, I took a bath with Cassie, who was suddenly feeling much better. She danced around in the tub, singing and laughing until she finally wore herself out. I put her to bed and slept on the floor next to her, with a bucket ready just in case.

Sam’s spit-ups have been minor compared to that night, but still pretty stinky and messy. She doesn’t have the capacity to produce a gallon of half-digested food, but she spew a fountain of breast milk at my best friend’s house last week, one big enough to coat her face and ruin my favorite Hawaiian shirt. It reminded me of Linda Blair for some reason. Not to be outdone, Cassie puked the next night at the dinner table. Never fear, she wasn’t ill. She was just talking too fast while eating Chinese and drinking club soda. At least this time she didn’t scream when she was done.

Yep, pee, poop, and puke and the three main messes of a mother’s life. As I wade around in all this mess, I can only blame myself. After all, I’m the one who agreed to have kids. Gotta take the stinky mess that goes with them as well. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. Someone needs her diaper changed.