Inspirations from cheese in a can. joey, kelly, danny, and charlie

danyellewon
3:29
do they have military school for 4 year olds?

Kelly Rutledge
3:29
hey good question
maybe you could start one

danyellewon
3:29
riiiighht
because i have such disciplined children to show off and advertise…
like the one sucking on a mustard packet on my sofa

Kelly Rutledge
3:30
lmao

danyellewon
3:30
how ’bout the one in the ds-induced coma, upside down on my sofa?
3:31 HOOO-AAAAH

Last night, after we dragged ourselves to bed, settling in to go to sleep:

Him:  ”Did you eat dinner?”
Me:  ”Not really. I had some leftover turkey salad and some fruit. You?”
Him:  ”A piece of cake and a shot of tequila.”

I realize my last posts have been heavy on the whine, so I’m going to swing to the polar opposite. Just look at my beautiful children. I love them, and they are mine. And Joey’s. 95% sure. HA!

He loves to have her sit right beside him. “I hole baysissa?”

Hear no evil, speak no evil……he just needs a blindfold, I guess.

These are mine, mine….somebody pinch me.

She is quite tasty, I can’t fault him.

She sleeps a lot, thank God.

He’s a little engineer, no kidding.

Just another member of his menagerie.

MINE

…..to go with the cheese in a can. Get it? Yeah, weak.

Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to whine now, and hopefully get it all out of my system. And since this is already going to be obnoxious to read, I’m going to go ahead and put it in list format, because what do I have to lose?

1. Summer. Summer’s great, except for: the heat, the fleas, the sweat, the grass, the bugs, the sunburns, the rain, the dirt, the stench of the dishwasher, the fleas, the smell of dog fresh in from outside, and the vehicle-as-oven effect.

2. Fleas. They have invaded my sofa corner. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT, as that one kid on Little Einsteins says. Though he always says it with awestruck wonder. Anyway, wherever the dogs hang out, there are fleas. And since my son routinely terrorizes them, they hang out a lot of different places, most of which happen to be directly under my feet. Also, they still eat poop.

3. Food. Makes me fat, everybody is always expecting me to make it appear for them, I have to go buy it (thanks, Joey, for going for me on Sunday), it costs a lot, it’s exhausting to think about, and I’m feeding my child marshmallows for lunch, I think. Well, just the one. The smaller one is easier to feed, much less thinking. If I could just keep up with which mother-loving side we’re on. And yes, there’s an app for that.

4. Clothing. Nothing fits, nothing looks good, and I don’t want to buy more to fit this body. I plan on having a different one soon. So I just look frumpy all the time. Meanwhile, clothing for males and females of 10 different sizes is piled in every corner, oozing from every shelf, mocking me. Drowning in clothes, nothing to wear.

5. Maintenance. Of everything. Dishes, laundry, walls, floors, linens, children, vision, lawn, finances, hair, fingernails, vehicles, relationships, vajayjays, responsibilities, teeth, food, appliances, and on and on and on.

Now I’ll carry on with my day and see how that worked.

This is going to be quick and dirty, y’all, because honestly I should really be cleaning, napping, or more fully parenting right now instead of blogging. But I feel I have a civic duty to fulfill, a little something I like to call “walking birth control.” I’ll try and make this a regular feature. We’ll see. I at least need to tell you about last week’s outing to the pizza place with three under three. Remind me: that story alone should provide a good two-three months worth of free, totally organic birth control.

As I’ve mentioned before, my strategy to make it through having a toddler and a newborn with all of our faces intact is to keep moving. To that end, I signed Danny up for a gymnastics class through the county. We had our first class this morning, and I have to say: what a deal. I’ve taken him to a similar class, privately run. Not Gymboree, but similar. Today’s class was much like that class, for about one fifth the cost. Awesome. Here’s where it becomes slightly less than awesome: when you are expected to corral your young gymnast, handicapped by a 15 pound lozenge of irritability taped to your front side. I didn’t think to take a picture of the top of Charlie’s head, but here’s Danny enjoying an interpretive dance:

Danny was extremely excited by all this class had to offer…he was surrounded by the glory of Cobb County’s gymnastic facility. He didn’t want to be confined to the “baby” stuff, oh no. Kid thinks he’s Mitch Gaylord. Also, he’s a very independent two (read: the teacher already knows his name, halfway through the first class). Sooooo, by the end of this class, I am red-faced and sweating more than he is, and twice he completely vanished in the gymnastic complex before I even knew he was missing. And before you think that this class will provide me with some aerobic health benefit, let me assure you I destroyed any possible benefit by going immediately to Dunkin’ Donuts to get an iced coffee, a bagel with cream cheese, and a few Munchkins just to round out the meal. But I digress….fortunately, his playgroup signed up for this class en masse, so I had plenty of help chasing his naughty little butt around. Otherwise, he would probably still be hanging from the rings that he was begging to use. Or perhaps he would still be in the foam pit (Miss “Wegan” didn’t get in there for her own health, I assure you.)

And it’s not like Miss “Wegan” didn’t have her own bundle of happy fun to be corraling….here’s Tinkerbelle herself in time out:

So, kids, in summary: try to avoid producing more children than you can control personally. Unless you just can’t help it because they’re so stinking cute that you want forty-leven in a row. Go ahead, procreate if you must. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, when you end up red-faced and sweating in the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through.

Zoe says: GO FOR IT.

In about 10 minutes, I’m on my way to the gym. Yep, I joined the gym again. So later today, more tomorrow, and to an unbearable degree on Tuesday, I will be whining about how my entire body hurts. “OH MY LEGS.” “Wow, I wish my arms would fall off.” “And that tiny muscle directly above my left ear, yeah that too.” Stay tuned on Facebook and/or Twitter for that.

What had happened was, Joey and I agreed that I needed something regular and scheduled in order to get out of the house. Once you throw another kid in the mix, it doesn’t just happen on its own, I assure you. He plays the guitar in the church band; that’s his thing that gets him out of the house a couple times a week. I had no thing. I do have several extra pounds of fat and not as much muscle as I once did, though, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. Danny is with his father, and I’m going to leave Charlie with a neighbor, and I’m going to the gym, where I have already paid them to hurt me. And all this seems like a great idea. See how kids will change you?

Happy birthday week, Princess Ivy Mae.

No adorable baby or toddler pictures here, though I’m working on that. This is a rant. It involves breasts and bathrooms. If you are extremely offended by either, you may continue reading or move along, your choice.

Now that I have a toddler and a newborn, I don’t have certain luxuries that I had the first time around, when I had just a newborn. Like sitting on the sofa all day because the baby wanted to be held, and that’s really the easiest way to do it. Or, when I did venture out, the ability to plan the entire day around the newborn’s “schedule.” This time, I have to balance the urge to stay at home on the sofa all day with the need to create an environment in which neither I nor the toddler tear each other’s face off by the end of the day. Generally, that includes leaving the house at some point. So, we go places. And when the baby is hungry (read: just short of always), I feed her. Charlie, like her brother before her, is exclusively breastfed. Therefore feeding her involves using my breasts, pretty much wherever we are.

This doesn’t sound like a rant, you might be thinking. And so far, it’s not. Just a lady talking about feeding her baby and trying to keep her and her toddler’s faces intact. Here’s the rub: apparently, reader, some people are deeply offended by the sight of an infant feeding. Shocking, right? I could hardly believe it myself. My jaw actually dropped when Joey related the following conversation to me: He’s at the mall with his friend, the father of a toddler himself. They’re walking through the foodcourt, and his friend says, “Oh, man, I’m glad you didn’t have to see that. That lady was breastfeeding her baby. That’s what bathrooms are for.”

Now….I’ll confess, mainly because I was afraid of people with a similar opinion, I have done more than my fair share of feedings in bathrooms. When it was just Danny, occasionally I would happen across a bathroom that didn’t completely suck for this purpose. The best of these was at the Dillard’s in Arbor Place Mall, which had a little room off to the side, with upholstered armchairs. And hey, that was nice….very rare, and not nice enough to let my toddler run around and lick every square inch while I’m otherwise occupied, but nice. But guess what? I never saw anyone else feeding a baby there, but I did notice a whole lot of people seemed to go there to poop. That and the rest of my 34 years of experience with bathrooms lead me to think that actually, feeding babies is absolutely not what bathrooms are for. That said, unnamed friend of Joey’s, who as far as I know doesn’t even read this blog: if you would like to take your Chick-Fil-A sandwich or your gyro into the bathroom to enjoy it when next you are at the mall, I fully support you. In fact, I’d love it if you did.

My nephew Desmond came to visit a few weeks ago. He is tres adorable and enormous. His baby fat is not melting away as quickly as it does for some, so he lumbers around like a big ole sumo wrestler. Actually, he’s quite nimble. But it makes me laugh to think of him as a sumo wrestler, so I do.

Completely unrelated: we have several LOST names in our family. My oldest nephew Emmett came up with this list: Benjamin, Desmond, and Charlie. Also, of course, Jack. (I just dug up that link faster by Googling “easycheese banana sandwiches” than I could have by looking in the easycheese archives. Fun.) A happy weekend to you.

UPDATE: I knew I was failing to think of an important one: Daniel, duh.

UPDATED AGAIN: And Amy. I have to think of them all before Leigh
Anne gets here.

IT’S 4:30 AM AND I’M STARTING TO FEEL A LITTLE CRAZY: Danielle (Rousseau), Michael, Vincent, Frank (Lapidus), and Jacob

Once, when I worked in the emergency room (as a registrar, nothing exciting or well-paid), one of the nurses would say when asked how he was doing: “I’m busier than a one-legged mule in an ass-kicking contest.” I think that pretty well sums up life around here with a lung-Olympian newborn and a wall-climbing toddler. But ain’t we cute?