Every good party ends with 'naked time'

Today Mamaw and Dadaw hosted an early birthday party for our Isaac so that his Indy-bound relatives could enjoy him turning four. Mamaw in her utter crazyhood found some place that made a dinosaur cake, replete with candles that roared.



There were also people-dinosaurs who roared, though they didn't get a chance to sit atop the cake.



Speaking of people, everybody who's anybody was there. All direct O'Neal descendants were represented -- us, Aunt Robin & Uncle Joe, Cousins Nate, Emily, and Sarah -- as well as Mamaw's Aunt Midge and Mamaw's sister-in-law Lorraine and her daughters Alicia and Victoria. A whole crowd to cheer on our favorite preschooler.



Even non-O'Neals were invited, that's how serious Mamaw is about her preschooler birthday shindigs.



There was much playing with birthday presents, cousins, and guitars.





Close to 11:00, it may have been time for people to go to bed. Not us! But maybe other people somewhere in the universe. Jacob and Isaac bid goodnight to their favorite ladies.

Dueling laptops: the next generation

After dinner, playing Nick Jr. online games at Meemaw's kitchen table:

Sarah

Meet our cousin Sarah.



She's Daddy's sister's youngest child, at 11 years old. She was at Mamaw and Dadaw's right along with us, and she excelled in playing with and entertaining her baby cousins. She also excels at tree climbing. My boys were jealous.



She showed them that Mamaw's deck could be used as a balance beam. Isaac was quite good...



...and while Jacob was also good on his feet, Sarah helped me spot him.



Sarah taught me that Dadaw's sweatshirts fit us girls remarkably well, and that light-up pacifiers are now totally hip at skating parties. I taught Sarah how to play Chinese checkers. Isaac and Jacob did their best to teach Sarah how to break dance.

A new aunt

Tuesday we headed out for some QT with Mamaw and Dadaw, and to meet the latest addition to the O'Neal side of the family. Her name is Sissy. She's not yet 2 months old.



She's a West Highland White Terrier, just like her older brother Duffy. She is very sweet, but also very into exercising her baby teeth. She spends most of her time chewing socks, especially when people are still inside them. We delight in telling Mamaw and Dadaw how bat-poo crazy they are to have purposefully bought another dog. But it's obvious that they are crazy, crazy in love with their dogs. What can you do?

Sissy also seems to have done Duffy a major favor in teaching him to mellow out. Not once did he try to jump up on my boys, something that used to be his favorite thing to do. Mamaw liked telling me the story of the first night Sissy came home, how she was playing and nibbling at Duffy. When he got annoyed with her, she sunk her teeth into his boy part with her baby teeth and hung on tight while he ran around the room trying to shake her off. Just like a woman.

The future Indy-area homeowners show off

After we swung by to ogle Uncle Chrissy and Aunt Jean's new home-to-be, they took us to a park that is literally 2 blocks from their house. I wouldn't have believed it possible that one could walk from somebody's house to get anywhere fun in the Indianapolis 'burbs if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. You can imagine such a thing would be a big selling point to Chrissy and Jean, what with their canine child and their human child-to-be.



My human children could have cared less about the biting cold. They were violently happy to stretch their little legs after biding their time in their car seats all the live-long day.




They kind of blew Meemaw away with their derring-do and their ability to scatter. She knows we are park fiends, so she turned to me at one point and said, "HOW do you keep up with them?" I'm not really sure I do.

In Indianapolis, Sunday

This week is spring break at Isaac's school. Daddy didn't have to teach, so we're taking a family break in Indianapolis and delighting in all this free food and babysitting.

Since traditionally I am really awful at blogging while we're home, I'll try to post pictures to tell a bit of the story and do my recapping later.

We drove home on Easter Sunday like the heathens we are. There was no traffic at all, none, except for about 20 cops giving out a bazillion tickets. On Easter, the turkeys!

We stopped at this rest stop on the West Virginia side of its border with Maryland. It and the neighboring mountains are probably close to 2500 feet high.





We made it to Indy in a record-breaking 10-1/2 hours. Our first order of business was to drive by Chris and Jean's "new house". They close on it April 4th.

Freehand

Yesterday our resident Dinosaur Enthusiast Isaac pretty much exhausted the supply of ferocious-looking dinosaur coloring pages the internet had to offer. When yet another boring old Yunnanosaurus picture popped up on our typical Google search, the boy took matters into his own hands.

Remember how he can write letters now, suddenly? Turns out he can also draw. Who knew? On his own, he drew a whole stinkin' page of new-to-him dinosaurs to color.



And color he did. Note how they all have little chicken legs. He scribbled black on their tummies to represent either: 1) "This is a mommy dinosaur with eggs growing in her belly" or "This dinosaur ate a Stegosaurus for dinner, and here it is in its belly". The prominent raspberry-colored one is an Allosaurus. The squat little girly purple one behind it is a Deinonychus. He named some of the other ones, I can't remember which... one is a Styracosaurus, but then Isaac thought it best if he name the rest things like Bumposaurus and Flaposaurus and Okerosaurus. As Magic School Bus taught us, if you find the first fossils, you get to name them.

After he drew this dinosaur menagerie, he added the purple things at the top -- "These are Pteradons!" -- and the long green thing at the bottom, lying in the blue sea ("This is a crocodile-like reptile!"). There are also three trees on the right side -- see them, the skinny sticks with a token amount of green on top? -- because his dinosaurs simply must live in the forest.

I just can't get over this, how amazing it is to me to see my son, not yet four years old, doing this stuff that people do. It reminds me of how I felt when he first started walking, like a whole new world of entertainment possibilities suddenly lay right in front of him.

All at once, one day, it's Spring

Yesterday we celebrated the first day of Spring by watching Isaac NOT FUSS in his preschool Spring show! Would you care to see?



His preschool also had an Easter egg hunt and a little party with cookies and popcorn. The last day of "J" madness, they decorated letter J's with jellybeans. Their darling teachers also wrote their names in wax pencil on hard-boiled eggs, and each kid got to dye two. Those ladies, I tell you, they have a special cloud reserved for them in heaven.

After preschool we went to Rita's, a local Italian ice chain. Rita's closes for the winter and re-opens each year on the first day of Spring. As a supremely delicious promo, they give out free ices ALL DAY. The line was surprisingly short, so we braved it and enjoyed a free slushie-esque treat. In our heavy winter coats.

Did I mention how we're supposed to attend another Easter egg hunt tomorrow, when it's supposed to snow? Go Spring!

Building the perfect nerd

I will have you know that, today, both my boys sat with rapt attention through a full 30 minutes of a Nova episode on the evolutionary origins of birds. Nerd power!

Where did they come from -- the birds, I mean? From dinosaurs, of course. Why else would my boys sit so still?

Our newfound love of all things dinosaur blossomed around Jacob's birthday, when we gave Isaac The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs as a brother's-birthday present. It so intrigued our junior Wes Craven with its up-front discussion of Dinosaurs versus Dinner-saurs. There is even one page that shows copious amounts of blood flowing out of a Stegosaurus after suffering a bite from an Allosaurus, who is also shown crunching on the Stegosaur's exposed ribs.

When I first saw this page, I just laughed out loud. For real?? In a kids' book, you show this?!?! I showed it to Daddy and encouraged him to similarly turn his nose up at it. But to my surprise Daddy shrugged. "That's what really happened, wasn't it?" Well, um, er... yes. Yes it was. Okay, fine.

We have read this Magic School Bus book about 25 times, and we all love it to death. It teaches so much in so few pages -- about fossils, paleontologists, geologic time, warm-blooded versus cold-blooded creatures, morphologic differences between the dinosaurs, how they went extinct... I could go on. You learn not just dinosaur names, but also how they came to be called that way. Isaac was thrilled beyond belief when, after a day-long affair with coloring a picture of a Deinonychus, we caught a little sidebar in Magic School Bus that specifically mentioned how Deinonychus got it's name. Now Isaac tells anyone within earshot that "Deinonychus means 'terrible claw'".

Our dinosaur pasttime became more of an obsession during "D" week at preschool, when they talked about and played with dinosaurs. And since Daddy bought me a printer for my birthday, we color dinosaur pictures every day. Jacob always wants to color a Stegosaurus. Isaac always wants to color some kind of ferocious meat-eating dinosaur. Today, after our TV stint with winged dinosaurs, I printed out a Pteradon for Isaac to color.

"Look, Mommy, I colored it green, your favorite color. It's for you."
"Aw, thanks, Isaac!"
"Let's write your name on it. How do you spell your name?"
"'Mommy'? Well, why don't you try to write it? It starts with 'M'."
"I don't think my 'M's are that good."
"Why don't you try it anyway. See what happens."



Did you see what happened? I told him how to spell it, but he did all the writing. He would have tried for the full "Mommy", but Aly walked in the door just as he finished that last 'M'.

"Mommy?" he asked, "How do you spell Aly?"

The first day of the rest of their lives

A few months ago, Uncle Chrissy did some crazy traveling to interview for his residency at 9 different hospitals. When he was done, he filled out a preference form to rank them in the order in which he would most care to spend the next 3 to 5 years of his life there. Simultaneously, the hospitals filled out their own ranking sheets. All parties submitted these numbers to a centralized system where they were ruminated upon by an all-seeing, all-knowing computer, whose job it is to match the student ranking lists with the hospital ranking lists. I imagine it to be much like that fortune-telling machine in the movie Big, where you put in your quarter (as it were) and out comes, instead of your fortune, an inescapable and binding truth.

Today is Match Day, that singular event in a med student's life when, more or less, the rest of his life is decided for him. Today it is revealed to everyone for whom Computor the Magnificent did find a match where they will go to live and work and become a really real doctor. And get paid for it.

Around lunchtime today my beautiful and pregnant sister-in-law texted me to let me know that Uncle Chrissy scored a spot in his first-choice program at Indiana University. I haven't personally spoken to Chrissy and Jean, but I'm pretty sure they are beside themselves with glee. There are many, many more positive ramifications to this news, but immediately this means that they can stay right next to all their family and friends, something particularly important with little Jonas in the works. It also means they won't have to move anywhere far away when Jonas is, like, two weeks old. And perhaps the craziest of all, it also means that they get to proceed full-force with the offer they've already made on their first house (that's been accepted) in Indianapolis.

So yay for Chrissy and Jean!

What to expect the preschool years

After a long day full of whining and sass-mouth from my almost 4-year-old, we are all gathering in the kitchen to enjoy a bedtime snack. I go to assemble the snack Isaac requested and almost instantly he collapses into a fussing mess because -- surprise -- he doesn't want it anymore.

In my exasperated state I turn around and ask him, "Isaac, do you ever just stop and say to yourself, 'I think this time I will not fuss?'"

He collects himself in a half-second. With all the dramatic seriousness in the world he tells me, "No, mommy, I can't say that. I don't have those words."

Talking a blue streak

Anyone who knows my boys (all three of them) will tell you that they are talkers. Even The Jake. Talky, talky, talky, all the live-long day. They have this scheme specially designed to drive me to Xanax where all three of them try to carry on a conversation with me at once.

I shouldn't complain. It's so helpful that Isaac and Jacob can communicate with me effectively. Even my two-year-old can be encouraged to participate in decision-making that is rational and fair.

So what do they talk about? What comes out of the mouths of my babes? I've composed the following pie chart to illustrate the composition of conversations in my house. Perhaps then you can see where our real problem lies.

---

---

You can see from this that they actually don't want to talk about everything. They just want to talk about poop and weiners. I want you to know, seriously, that this is not an exaggeration in the least, and both boys are equal offenders. It's a little shocking to me because, as you know, I am a GIRL, and poop and weiners are not my native language.

Poop-talk is mostly about how they really, really, want to look at poop. His, mine, yours, everybody's. There is the act of pooping, where Jacob simply must tell me, every time he farts, how "I'm pooping my pants." Lovely. Isaac, every time he sits down to do his bidness, wants me to look. He want me to know what he's made: "It's a whole poop family!"

Oh, but the talk of weiners! I am just so OVER it already. You already heard about how planets revolve around Jacob's wee-wee. Isaac is our master storyteller and likes to weave elaborate plots around his wee-wee. Sometimes it's all, "I'm talking about a place called WEE-WEE town where all the WEE-WEEs walk on the sidewalk and drive cars and tell jokes." Other times he's more like a fire fighter: "WEE-WEEs are like fountains, and sometimes the PEE shoots up everywhere like fireworks all over the ceiling."

It's like, what you might in your worst nightmare expect from one boy? To the power of two when there are brothers. Wee-wee synergy.

For whatever blessed reason, they seem to corral their incessant dialogue of poop and weiners outside the house. I suppose my problem is, then, that I don't want to seem like your stereotypical prudish Midwestern girl. Though I already am, since I tell my kids to refer to their penises as wee-wees. I certainly don't want them to think that talking about your poop or your wee-wee is wrong. But at the same time, seriously, could you SHUT UP about your wee-wee already?

A tale of two baby quilts

Once upon a time in Missouri, there lived a soldier and his wife who loved each other very much. They had not been married long when the Korean War came, sending the soldier to Germany for about a year. When he left, his young wife was pregnant with their first child. She would have the baby before he returned.

Somehow the wife just knew she was having a boy. While she carried him in her belly, the young wife and her mother set out to make something nice for her child-to-be -- a lightweight crib quilt, one that was simple but useful.



No fancy patchwork here, just a panel of cute little blue mommy and baby ducks on the front.



The panel is bordered by strips of white cotton, and then the quilt is self-bound with blue polka-dotted fabric from the back layer.



Fifty-one years later, that wife learned that her granddaughter -- her eldest child's eldest child -- was herself expecting a son. And so it was that the quilt with which Poppop once snuggled became Isaac's.

Even though the quilt was as ancient as Poppop himself, it was a fantastic performer as far as blankets go. I think Grandma Ross would agree with me that it wasn't intended to be a decoration. We wore and washed the heck out of it, and it just looks more awesome with time with that faded retro pattern, so popular at fabric stores now. It was the world's most perfect size to use as a nursing cover or a playmat, when it wasn't being used to warm up sleeping children. The key component, though, was how light it was. I could fold it up and it didn't need much space, so I took it everywhere.

I think people tire of hearing me extol the virtues of my dad's baby quilt by now. It is time to show them what I really mean. For example, Aunt Jean is growing me a giant summer-baby nephew right now. You know that kid needs a lightweight blanket upon which to do his lounging. So I made him one, patterned after the Grandma Ross's quilt.



I chose the fabrics to catch little Jonas's eye in a developmentally appropriate way. Lots of faces and pictures of kids on the front, see? (with Woody for scale)



And a red, black, and white pattern in back for lots of contrast.



My craftsmanship is a little ghettofied -- a home-ec major I was not -- but I hope Jonas won't mind too much. I sure had fun making my first quilt, and for such an important person.

J is for Jobs, or lack thereof

I am not gainfully employed, and so a certain portion of my day consists of surfing the internet, not so much for porn as for celebrity gossip. Lately I have purposefully shied away from reading the news. All this recession talk gets one down rather quickly, especially when I see bar charts and graphs and spreadsheets in the New York Times about how the places getting hit the hardest are where I'm from and where most everyone I love lives and works. Fancy math-oriented graphics can drive one to drinking, I tell you.

Then we go home, meaning Indianapolis, to visit our families, and we see unsettling proof that it really is that bad. We visit the fantastic Children's Museum there often. The drive back to Meemaw and Poppop's house takes us along Meridian Street, the most stately and prosperous street in Indianapolis proper. Rarely, if ever, do I remember seeing a for-sale sign in front of these imposing mansions that stayed there for long. And yet in the last year, job cuts and property tax hikes have taken their toll on this landmark street. Last time we were in town, I stopped counting at 15 for-sale signs within 30 blocks, because I was just too sad. What on earth is going on?

With the housing market being so abysmal, Poppop jokes in his stressful way about how long Meemaw and he could possibly last in their jobs. Poppop was the first to tell me how lucky I am, that my professor husband's job is recession-proof. There will always be demand for a college degree. My parents, on the other hand, work in the sector hit hardest by the real estate bust -- Meemaw as an administrative assistant in a large, national property development firm, Poppop as a service manager for a heavy-equipment dealer -- and in a region taking the biggest blows. They are dedicated and honest people who work long hours to do what's needed to be done. Together, they make a tidy income and live in a cute house in an affluent suburb. Not long ago, Meemaw hired a neighbor girl to help clean house once a week. This girl had been babysitting for other families in the neighborhood, who could no longer afford her because they had lost their jobs.

Perhaps you see where this is going.

Thursday afternoon, Meemaw was called into a conference room. She was given a decent severance package and told not to come in to work the next day. If I recall correctly, she was one of 43 let go that day, in the third round of layoffs her company had experienced since November.

Meemaw has had a steady job since she went back to work, when Uncle Chrissy was in kindergarten. I guess that would be 22 years ago. She worked bone-breakingly hard at this job, so much so that I truly think she is thankful for a little break. She wants to look for work eventually, but plans to wait for a bit and do it when the time is right. My dad is the biggest cheapskate most frugal man I know (love you!), and so they will be fine for a long, long time, even if Meemaw decides not to go back to work. The timing of all this is especially interesting in that our new cousin Jonas is due soon, and we all know that Meemaw has years of experience in snuggling babies.

But still, I think this has to be more than a little weird for her. It is incredibly weird for me, that my mom's future is unplanned. She and my dad have been such a rock for me, always there, always up to the same thing. What will happen now? I had an awful dream last night that Meemaw was killed by a car crash. I wonder if she feels a little like that inside that bubbly "I'll be fine" exterior.

J is for Jacobellis

This week at preschool features the letter J, for reasons that are clear only to Miss Susie and Miss Barbara. I assume there will be jumping? Jellybeans? Their spring party is on Thursday. I volunteered to bring popcorn. Perhaps someone else is responsible for the Jello shots.

In the meantime, our lives this week are ripe with J-containing fodder, to be detailed in several installments.

First on my brain is news from tonight -- fresh off the assembly line is my 5th book, on snowboarding goddess Lindsey Jacobellis.



This book was originally due last May, but had to be postponed until her lamewad agent could put me in touch with her for an interview. Oh lordy, he was such a tease. "SURE I'll give her your interview questions, right away!" "Oh, I know Lindsey has time now to do this right now, she's between competitions." "So sorry I forgot about you from last time. I'll get her in touch with you ASAP." For ten months I heard the same shtick from him until finally, FINALLY at the end of October he sent me her answers to my emailed questions. What a turkey.

I can't possibly believe that any of the delay is due to her, because 1) this dude is her agent and it's obviously his responsibility to deliver my questions and then to bug her about them on my behalf, and 2) after writing this book, I am convinced that this girl can walk on water. Seriously, she is that awesome. And have you seen her hair? I think it has magical, if not healing, properties.

And then there's the delay on my part, since I got her interview questions when I was knee-deep in my horse book. I finished that in December and then there was a book to write on Bengal Tigers with a deadline, exclamation point. Finally the dust settled and there was Lindsey, only Lindsey. And now? Now there is nothing. Peace and quiet for awhile, liberally sprinkled with blogging and cleaning. Oh, and making baby quilts. More on that later.

E is for Easter tattoos

Today I took the babies to the city's Easter egg hunt, held at our favorite state park. Turns out everybody who's anybody was there. We saw one of Isaac's classmates and his mommy and brothers, a mommy and her kids from the playgroup Jacob and I attend on Thursdays, and then, unexpectedly, the CarlosAnthony family.



The kids were tasked with loading up on their share of over 3,000 plastic eggs filled with candy, plastic trinkets, and, in an ultimate mindbender, Easter-themed tattoos. But before they could go, the Parks & Rec officials made everybody wait for an odiously loooooong time behind a police-taped barrier, with bazillions of eggs just. sitting. riiiiight. there. It's all good, though. It gave us more time to plot our egg-nabbing strategy.

And then we were off! This was Jacob's first Easter egg hunt, and he got the hang of it quickly.



He and Isaac were both puzzled by their first egg, shaking it, wanting to stop to open it and glory in whatever mysteries it might hold. It's a good thing their psycho mommy was right there to squash that curiosity right out of them. "More eggs, more! Do you hear me? MOOOORE!"

And I will have you know that I am a flunkie mommy who does not own baskets specifically for this occasion. As such, they are each using Longaberger baskets Daddy and I got as wedding presents. They're not just for holding dinner rolls anymore.

On our way out there was an actual Easter Bunny to shake hands and pose with. Isaac was really keen to do this, and I was happy to oblige.

D is for Diapers no more?

Dare I say it?

The boys and I dug up the training potty out a couple of months ago. We were knee-deep in boxes of baby clothes to sort out for their upcoming cousin Jonas when Isaac stumbled across it. Of course they both thought it was cool as anything, if only because they hadn't seen it in at least a year.

I brought it upstairs and occasionally, when I'm thinking about changing Jacob's diaper, I'll ask him to sit on it to see if anything comes out. He is usually quite gracious in obliging me. He can even squeeze out a juicy fart while he's there. But it's obvious that he's just not that into it. He doesn't care to sit for very long. And, bless him, I knew he was only doing it because I was asking.

Enter Wednesday afternoon. Jacob sought me out when I was in a totally different room from him. He told me precisely this:

"Mommy, take diaper off. I want to pee on potty."

I did. And he did, probably about a teaspoon's worth of piddle. BUT not only did he come to me and insist on doing it the Big Boy Way, I will also have you know that his diaper was completely dry. So naturally Isaac and I screamed and shouted and made a huge fuss over how proud we were and Jacob was nearly beside himself with grinning.

Then again tonight at bathtime, when I stripped him down, I suggested he try peeing on the potty again. He promptly sat down and straightaway produced a decent amount of pee. At bedtime, I asked him to try for a repeat performance alongside his brother. Lo and behold, it was the same as before. And I lauded and magnified his glorious Jacob name and told him tales of the beautiful Big Boy Underpants that awaited him if he kept to this path. And his beautiful blue eyes grew with excitement at the possibilities such a future could hold.

Your daughters don't stand a chance

Isaac's school pictures came in the mail today. I think they came out okay, don't you?



Seriously, though. It's so great that my boys are the smartest kids in the known world, but it's like sweet cream cheese frosting on the cake that they are also the prettiest.

D is for Daddy in the Desert

We were all very impressed at Daddy's scheduling, how his research trip to the desert of Death Valley happened during "D" week at Isaac's preschool. Isaac had all manner of D-flavored words with which to impress Miss Susie and Miss Barbara.

Daddy met his friend and former advisor-of-sorts, Alan, at the Las Vegas airport on a Tuesday. From there, they drove to Death Valley and Owens Valley to hang out and look at mountains all day. Lucky for me that there was a camera-happy researcher along for the ride who didn't know that Daddy was allergic to having his picture taken.



In this picture, Daddy is rocking his new favorite field hat, one he has gotten many compliments on. He delighted in telling people that he got it for $2.99 at Walmart. After this trip it was totally stanky and he asked me to wash it. I did. Then I threw it in the dryer. It fits Isaac really well now. Maybe one day Daddy will love me again, but I don't know.

Also in this picture, Daddy is operating his research toy, a scanner that takes detailed 3D pictures. Alan's interests are in remote sensing, a technique that uses different wavelengths of energy and light (from satellites, or, in this case, thermal cameras) to provide all kinds of information about earth surfaces. In Death Valley, Alan and Daddy are collaborating to find out more about how heat alone can break down rocks in the desert. Alan uses thermal imaging to detect which rocks and rock types are hotter when left out in the desert sun, and Daddy uses his LIDAR to make a 3D picture of the different sizes of rocks lying about and how they are distributed. They combine their information to get at an answer.

We find that we can also learn a bit about Daddy from remote sensing. Using the thermal camera, Alan's student took this picture of Daddy hard at work.



The result is a readout of Daddy's thermal energy, where lighter parts are warmer -- like Daddy's dark grey, heat-absorbing shirt -- and darker parts are colder -- like Daddy's sunglasses and the reflective window of the LIDAR. In total nerd form, Daddy told me that this picture was hard, scientific proof that his goatee really IS cool. (insert snorty laugh here)

Even this young, everything revolves around it

Mamaw and Dadaw gave Isaac these glow-in-the-dark planet-balls when they came to visit for Thanksgiving. The planets are designed to hang from the ceiling using fishing line and sticky-tac. They have since come down, some with the help of gravity and others with the help of Daddy. Turns out the sticky-tac was doing a hellacious number on our ceiling drywall. Oh well.

The boys still like playing with the planets, holding them and especially swinging them around by their strings. Friday night as the boys were getting dress after bath, they noticed I had corralled all the planets into a Ziploc bag atop Jakey's dresser, a veritable planet treasure trove. Isaac was first to dive in. He practiced swinging Mars around in a circle, as though it was in orbit.

"Look, Mommy!" he said. "Mars is going around the moon!"

He knows this, but I reminded him, "Actually, Mars goes around the Sun. All the planets go around the Sun."

He stood corrected, "Mars is going around the Sun! And look," he said, picking up Jupiter and whirling it around, "now Jupiter is going around the Sun!"

Jacob was not one to stand by idly, even if he was totally buck nekked. "Look, Mommy!" he says, picking up Saturn and similarly twirling it around. "Saturn going around my wee-wee!"

The letter M

This week was "M" week at Isaac's preschool. "M" for March, and for mini marshmallows arranged to spell out the letter "M". "M" for pictures of mittens colored using melted crayons, for marbles at the activity table, for musical instruments and stories involving mice.

"M" is for our first attended McDonald's birthday party, which happened last night. Isaac's preschool friend Jericho, whose mom knows absolutely everything you ever need to know about preschoolers, invited his entire class to this Mickey D's in Maryland with an enormous playland. The kids chased each other, climbed after each other, and ran each other ragged for an hour and a half nonstop. They all went home sweaty and pink-faced, and it was a total joy to watch them in their determined busyness.

"M" is also for Mommy's 29th birthday, which is tomorrow. Turning 29 (and not 30), I figured now is the perfect time for me to change my look, to shake it up a little. I've been doing the same unfancy college-girl-without-a-budget-for-makeup routine for, well, all of my adult life. Suddenly I find it old. So, for my birthday, I requested a makeover from the usual gift-giving suspects. Bless them, Meemaw and Poppop bought me a trip to a nearby upscale salon. Here I am in their changing room before donning a smock.



Note the washed-out brassy Rachael-esque do (with dishwater highlights!) that I've been sporting for, like, EVER. Lame, lame, lame.

I told this dude Chad that I didn't really know what I wanted. I told him I was so over my stupid hair that I had been thinking of telling him to give me a pixie cut, or even to dye it pink. Seriously. He sighed and shook his head at me. Then I told him that all I really cared about was that it was a nice color, that I looked pretty, and that it just HAD to be a bit edgy or I might die of boredom. Two and a half hours later, I looked like this:



It's brown! Really! And it's stacked in layers in the back. It's the first haircut I've ever had where I walked out of the salon and felt like it belonged on my head. And never will I go back to bottle-blonde again. My hair used to say "Hi, this is Claire. Make sure you focus on her ashy, sleep-deprived face and her teeth yellowed from coffee." Now it says "Hi, this is Claire. Did you know she has green eyes?"

Jacob's 2-year appointment

This past Friday morning was Jacob's 2-year check-up, and the results were a little surprising to someone who watches him regularly scarf down three whole slices of pizza in one sitting.

I suggested to the nurse that we try weighing him on the standing-up big-boy scale, anticipating that he would top 30 pounds for sure. We did, and he didn't. Sitting on the baby scale for the last time, he weighed in at 28 lbs 4 oz, or the 50th percentile for weight. Dude, what happened to my 90th percentile Hulkster of yore?

I'm going to chalk up a little of his scrawniness to the fact that he was barely over his second cold in a month. Dr. M also enlightened me, unobservant mommy that I am, that his last three molars are currently, simultaneously, erupting. Daddy noticed that this was negatively affecting his appetite at mealtime. Whenever he gets a piece of food back there and bites down, he fusses and spits it out and suddenly wants to be done with eating.

Nevertheless, I was shocked because he doesn't look that skinny to me. Not that 50th percentile is skinny, but it is, historically-speaking, skinny for him. Dr. M was not worried, and certainly it could be worse -- we have a friend whose little kids (Isaac and Jacob's ages) have both been diagnosed with "failure to thrive" and have to drink Ensure. A 2-year-old friend of theirs was just admitted to CHOP to get fed through a tube because she was doing so bad at gaining weight on her own. That is some scary stuff. It gives me reason to quit complaining about the nearly $50 a month we spend on milk to keep up with demand from the boys in my house.

Baby Jakey Shaq, while lean, didn't disappoint with the long. At 36 - 3/8 inches, he is in the 90th percentile for height. Dr. M told me that you can use a toddler's height at 2 years to estimate height at adulthood -- you take height in inches and double it to get adult height in inches. For example, Isaac was 35 inches at his 2-year checkup, which means he should end up at 70 inches, or 5-foot-10 at adulthood. This is precisely how tall his father is. By this formula, however, the Jake could eventually sprout to a stately 6-foot-1. "Little" brother no more.

Emily Post I am not

We flaked out on having a birthday party for Jacob. We were considering a low-key get-together with friends at our house, scheduled for the Saturday after his birthday. Then the big people went and caught this ridiculous cold, so we had to call it off. The following Saturday Daddy was gone. This coming Saturday is also no-can-do because we have two birthday parties to go to this weekend, and I don't think my bloodstream will tolerate many more molecules of cake and/or icing. Of course we could keep going, and have his party three weeks after his birthday. In considering all this, though, we realized we never had a party for Isaac's 2nd. And look at him! Not yet a serial killer!

Now Isaac's 4th birthday approaches. The older one is more socially aware and therefore his birthday must be handled with a requisite level of fanfare. I already have the most fantastic idea for a party for him, again at our house. He is such a movie buff that we will host a movie night, replete with pizza, popcorn, and moving of furniture to make way for hordes of squishy things to lean on. As party favors, movie candy and a mix CD of soundtrack songs. I shiver with excitement at the awesomeness of it.

HOWEVER. I am totally stuck as to the guest list. My first thought was to invite our (meaning MY) friends over, the ones we hang out with regularly for playdates. As far as kids go, the tally here is 6, or maybe 8. That's just kids, not including parents. But my thought is that there should also be a place for at least some of his preschool classmates, whom he sees more frequently anyways. There are 9 other kids in his class. He talks about a few of them, but I can't possibly know which ones he hangs out with most. We've been invited to two preschool-kid birthday parties (and not invited to at least one).

I really don't want it to be so many people that it's a melee, because you know that is fun for absolutely no one. I doubt I could comfortably fit more than 20 people at a time in my house.

So, seriously, what should I do? I want it to be a party, but I don't want to invite everyone he knows in the entire universe. I know there are maybe five people who read this blog. Help a girl out and share your birthday party experiences and suggestions.

Sunday, boring Sunday

Daddy lands at Philadelphia sometime after midnight tomorrow night, and we will all be delighted to see him. We are pretty bored without the three-ring circus he adds to our lives.

I am surprised how easy it's been taking care of the ankle biters by myself for a whole week. The secret, I think, is to keep as busy as possible. With preschool Tuesday and Thursday, the babysitter over Tuesday and Friday, playdates with Anthony and Carlos Wednesday for lunch and Thursday for dinner, and a 2-year checkup for Jacob on Friday (more on that later), there's been very little time to be bored until this weekend.

The boys are pretty good about Daddy being gone. At first, when the cat would make some mysterious noise somewhere in the house, Jakey would turn around and scream, "DADDY???" But after 5 days of fake-outs he's over that now. We haven't gotten to talk to Daddy as much as I'd like because apparently there aren't a lot of cell phone towers in Death Valley, but whenever he does get to call the boys want to talk to him and tell him a few sentences about their day.

I am getting lonely for him. It's weird having a full 24-hour stretch where I literally didn't talk to another adult in person. I am not including in that tally the friends of Anthony and Carlos's mommy I saw at JoAnn who told me I was unbelievably brave for taking my two kids to the store, or the retort I threw at the tongue-clucking cashier at JoAnn who suggested I was "forgetting someone" when I walked away from the register expecting Jacob to follow. Ho-beast.

I had all these goals this week, that I would finish my fifth book and accomplish some serious baby quilting. I have worked on both tasks, but when the babies go to bed all I want to do is curl up on the couch under a baby blanket and watch mind-numbing amounts of TV. It doesn't help motivate me to work that Jacob is erupting his last three remaining teeth at the same time and won't stay asleep in the beginning of the night. Sigh.

Today is another day of nothing special. Isaac is playing computer games, Jacob is baking a stink-loaf in his pants. We will go to BJ's and get some groceries. If I get really excited about life we might try to get some stuff together for a donations truck that's stopping by on Wednesday. Whee-hoo. And the clock goes tick-tocking on, but somehow it's only 9 in the morning.

Not just yet

After hearing some serious grunting from Jacob's direction...

"Honey, are you pooping?"
"Yep! Pooping in my pants!"
"Do you want to try to poop on the potty?"
"Ummmmmmmmmmmm... nope."