Allow me to express how done I am

People often express surprise that I can manage five children all day. This not only misses a critical point (my elder two frequently escape to my mothers), but misunderstands the nature of children in a large family. It is not about the number of children. It is about the number of chaos-causing children. That means it's really about the number of children five and under. And also, if you happen to have any children who have earned the nickname Honey Badger, that would also be a bad thing, sanity-wise.

This right here is a video about my fourth-born child.

So, third-born is highly sensitive. And I was comforting him, which allowed me to take my eyes off of the Lollipop-Honey Badger child.

This was a terrible mistake.

I allowed her to go an entire five minutes unsupervised. Let us recount how she spent them.

First, she opened the door to the bathroom, as she knows she is not allowed to do. Then she guided her younger brother, Gummy, into the bathroom. He is the reason the bathroom door must be closed, as he is very interested in the toilet. Then she handed him the spare roll of toilet paper and stood back to watch what would happen.

What happened was that infant son shoved (SHOVED) the toilet paper down the toilet and flushed. Or she flushed. Someone flushed, and down went the toilet paper, and up came the toilet water. And it was at this point that I heard a suspicious sound and was roused from my attempts to comfort my third-born over his distress that various other members of the family had had the temerity to leave the house.

Temerity:  the quality of being confident and unafraid of danger or punishment especially in a way that seems rude or foolish

I tried to mop it up. Lollipop kept trying to tramp into the room and wade in the toilet water. After the third attempt I yelled, "Get away!" which set Firefly off into an entirely new emotional meltdown. Lollipop was not too upset. She took the stuffed animal she was holding and tossed it into the toilet water, then ran away.

After I had unplugged the toilet and mopped up the bathroom, I realised that the toilet water had run as far as the girls' room. Where the girls had been constructing a fort. With all of their bedding.

So I'm doing laundry tonight.

The problem with the notion of family planning is that you don't get a brief on a potential child's personality before you get pregnant. Anyone could tell that fourth-born and third-born could not co-exist in the same home without their mother needing to resort to heavy drinking, but how was I to know that before I knew either of them?

Fail Baby

I was reading back in this blog, and I found an entry where I suggested that perhaps I should stop feeding the kids. They make an unholy mess whenever they eat, especially the little ones. In addition, if they were hungry they'd have less energy to destroy things when they're not eating.

My youngest son needs to stop taking me so literally.

I was slightly suspicious when I noticed that my two-month-old was wearing his sister's preemie clothes. It seemed he had been wearing these clothes for, well, a long time. Say, for two months. So I popped him on the kitchen scale (picture some shenanigans with a really big mixing bowl and a receiving blanket) to get an idea. And while my kitchen scale is not as accurate as a baby scale, I don't think it's two pounds off. If it were, my cakes would probably not work out. And my cakes are fine. My baby was not fine.

Well, he was _fine_ in that he was happy, and very pleasant, and really so happy and so pleasant that he was neglecting to mention that he'd really like to be eating a good 50% more milk than he'd been getting.

I generally only find these things out at 4 p.m. Friday, so that I have the whole of Shabbos to fret over them. I dragged the baby over to a pediatrician (it's a synagogue. Of course we have a pediatrician. We have _several_ pediatricians.)

"I'm not telling you not to be concerned," the pediatrician said. "You should be concerned about this."

The next week he approached my husband again. "I think I may not have been emphatic enough with your wife. I didn't want her to be too upset. Maybe I downplayed my concern too much."

Pediatricians are always telling parents not to worry, and here I've got one scared he might not be worrying me enough.

If you ever really want to see a sluggish medical system kick into high gear, show up at your family doctor with a two-month-old wearing preemie clothes. And he was full term.

"You shouldn't feel bad," the various pediatricians told me. "It's not failure."

May I make a humble suggestion? If we want to wash the stench of failure off of this starving-the-baby business, perhaps we could call it something other than "failure to thrive." I'm just saying, maybe we don't need to build the word "failure" _right into the name._ We could call it "exceptional smallness," or "flat growth curve" or "insufficient weight gain." I'm not saying that I would have felt A-Okay about the whole you-are-literally-starving-your-newborn situation if it had had a better name, but I'm saying it wouldn't have hurt.

The lactation consultant is the least exciting place you'll ever be topless. Mine had four different plastic breasts, and an angry looking plastic baby. She told me to go home and institute a feeding regime that would require about 60% of my waking time to be devoted to some part of the baby-feeding supply chain. Nurse, pump, feed the pumped milk, rinse, lather, repeat. So it was totally do-able with four other kids around.

And my mother. Oh, my mother. "I'm failing the baby," I tell her. "You are exactly the mother he needs," my mother said. "He's so lucky. He has a mother who is willing to go the extra mile for him."

I'm not sure that feeding constitutes "the extra mile" in infant care -- I'm pretty sure it's part of the basic package -- but I'll take what I can get.

The baby gained weight. Then he gained a little more weight. Then he went on GERD meds and gained a little more weight still. And he's fine. And he's still got that easy-going personality. You know, the one where he was so easy-going, he didn't mention he was starving.

My Adulthood is Being Spent Running in Place

There's a truth at the heart of adulthood, and it's this: You're going to spend vast amounts of time and money just to maintain things as they are, or slightly worse. You won't move the ball forward. Not at all. At the end of entire days you'll realise all you've done is gotten back to zero. Except poorer.

An example:
I have a dishwasher. I have had the dishwasher for eight years. Some time about a year ago, my dishwasher lost the will to live. Since then, it's been engaged in a concentrated campaign to force me to put it out of its misery. Attempt have included:
- vomiting crud all over the top dishes
- vomiting crud all over the top dishes and baking it on
- no longer drying dishes
- refusing to close without lifting the door up as you latch it
- refusing to open unless you batter the handle with a screwdriver.

Fool you dishwasher. I'm enjoying battering you with a screwdriver.

Each of these various failings requires one or more complicated, time-consuming, and frequently disgusting fixes. I have soaked the arms in vinegar and then in CLR. I have removed the arms and washed them. I have unscrewed all of the dishwasher parts and cleaned the filter. I have done it again. I have tightened the screws for the door. I have run a cycle just with bleach. I have run one just with CLR. I cleaned out two really gross clogs. I feel pretty free to experiment with this dishwasher, because I don't think it's long for this world anyway, so I'm not suggesting you start taking stuff off of your appliances or anything. Each dishwasher hack rendered the dishwasher in a passable, slightly-less-inferior state.

Well, it became obvious that the water pressure was going, and also the opening-up wasn't going to start happening again. We called in the technician. He informed us that the dishwasher is beyond fixing: the top arm lolls forward, a piece has detached from the plastic basin, and a valve is gone. So we are living with the inferior dishwasher.

At some point in the near future I won't be able to stand it, and I will finally get a new dishwasher.

I do not want a new dishwasher. I was happy with my dishwasher of a year ago, before it decided it wanted to die. Dishwasher technology does not excite me, and I do not lust after china cycles or metal basins. So by the end of this I will have spent a number of very unpleasant hours, the cost of a technician visit, and the cost of a new dishwasher. And what will I get from it? Clean dishes. I _had_ clean dishes. I had clean dishes just last year.

My dishwasher situation is a running in place incident. I spend time, I spend money, and I don't get anything I want from it. I get the status quo ante. But with less money. And irritation.

Other popular running in place scenarios include:
- Almost any reason for which one might see a dentist;
- Tickets, parking or moving;
- Redoing knitting I had thought was fine the first time;
- Teaching my child punctuation, again;
- Any missive or instruction from the municipal government;
- Almost all repairs of anything;
- Replacing or locating lost items, especially those lost by children;
- 90% of housework.

See, the problem isn't that so much of what I do is drudgery, even if a lot of it is. It's that it's drudgery in pursuit of making it to zero. And every morning is a new opportunity to let my life be dictated by the appliance that's stopped working, the newest whim of the local government (twice the parking tickets, half the trash pick up), or the discovery that 53 rows back in this sweater I K2 where I should have P2 and now it looks decidedly odd.

Okay, so this is a worse week than usual, and if it ever stopped raining, I might be more chipper. But I know now why my high school will never invite me to give chipper addresses to graduates. My address would be two sentences: "Large parts of your adulthood will be spent trying to get even to where you were yesterday. And by the time you die, you're going to have done an epic amount of housework."

I had a baby, and I had a natural childbirth. I regret one of those things.

I am not a hippie. I like a rainbow baby sling as much as the next person, and it's true that I don't own any presentable shoes. But I'm too lazy to be a natural or alternative or whatever you call people who prefer to eat happy chicken. For starters, I do a lot of baking, and all those extra natural eating rules seem to create a great deal of complication to create something that tastes _almost_ as good as the version with sugar, gluten, and red food dye. And I like epidurals. I wish they didn't take it away after the baby is out.

Well Gummy Dinosaur had other ideas. Specifically, he decided to be done with the whole affair in twenty minutes. It is impossible to set an epidural if the baby is out in twenty minutes. Especially if one is spending that twenty minutes . . . well, making a scene.

The natural childbirth books promise that at the end, one looks at one's baby with a powerful rush of endorphins that bears no relation to the inferior, un-endorphined, medicated bonding process. Maybe this only works for intentional natural childbirth. I felt stunned. I felt stunned by the other babies too (except Genomes; That one I was unconscious for), but less uncomfortable. So that's a thumbs down for that experience, and IYH if I get pregnant again I'm having the epidural sited at the 12 week appointment.

My OB says one isn't allowed to have epidurals sited in the first trimester, which is as good a reason as I've ever heard of for aggressive family planning.

The children have dubbed the baby Gummy Dinosaur.

When my brother went home to tell the children that they had a baby brother, the older ones jumped around cheering, then shook hands. Apparently my children think that having a baby is roughly akin to a successful space launch.

When the children met Gummy Dinosaur, Munchkin adored him. Genome adored him. Lollipop was happy enough to hold him and pose for photos. Firefly hid under the Striker bed. I tried to take a picture of that but couldn't quite get them all in the same shot. Will I never have a family photo that captures the essence of my children?

Firefly went home to my mother's house where he and my mother's dog -- she has one of those small anxious headcases of a lapdog -- sulked around the house until I got out of hospital.

Maybe you're considering having five children in fairly close order. If so, I suggest you get very, very fast at doing up car seats. There are a lot of car seats in your future. And booster seats. Our current tally is two boosters, a forward facing, a convertible, and a bucket seat. Having a baby is not a lot like launching a space shuttle, but getting them all to the doctor's office bears a certain resemblance. The man who comes up with a five-point harness that can be easily buckled with one hand will make a fortune.

Gummy Dinosaur is four weeks old. His expression reminds me of an iguana. He is extremely quiet. He grew on Firefly immediately upon leaving the hospital, but the headcase of a dog is still not a fan.

Let's Visit the Dentist

I feel very anxious when I have to visit the dentist.

This is not made better when I have to take a bunch of tiny people to the dentist. Actually, the addition of four smallish children really doesn't make anything easier.

I showed up on time. I am very good about this kind of thing; I get places on time. I don't think they actually anticipated that I would be on time, because the children were seen late. I know this is the type of thing that makes childfree people hate me, but I do think that whenever possible, large-ish groups of children should be processed promptly. This is for everyone's comfort. I do my best in waiting rooms, but it's often not very good.

This time, Lollipop found herself a little old lady and decided to perform Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for her. She also strewed pompoms all over the waiting room, but close enough.

The oldest child informed the dental hygienist that she does not go to school. In fact, she has _never_ gone to school. But not to worry! Because she can read!

The second child informed the dental hygienist that he has a little sister named Lollipop that he loves-loves-loves. He's getting another sibling. He's excited to meet the new sibling. But he loves Lolly. Lolly is so cute and so fun and she should go to the waiting room and meet Genome's little sister.

The third child. Oh, the third child.

First he wouldn't get in the seat. "He's nervous," I explained to the hygienist. "Very nervous." She looked nervous too. I held his hand. He cried. I was holding a large child in the other arm. The older two were milling about. She moved towards him with a very harmless looking instrument and he clamped his mouth shut. "You'll get a prize. Open your mouth and you can get a prize." He opened it perhaps half an inch.

She almost touched him with the instrument.

"Gaga! Gaga googoo!" he burst out. "Gaga gaga!"

"What's he doing?"

This seemed obvious. "He's pretending to be a baby in the hopes of getting out of this."

"He's pretending to be a baby?"

"I a baby! I a baby! Gaga googoo!"

". . . really?"

"Yes, really."

"Is he always like this?"

Yes. He is always like this. His whole life has been like this.

Does anyone know the minimum age for Valium? Preferably the extended release type? Because one of the two of us is going to need a lot.

Return of the Empire of the Zinc Cream Strikes Back. Part Two.

I remember the first time diaper cream was an issue, I actually thought that one of my other children had doused the baby-now-toddler. Oh, how innocent I was. Little did I know that I had accidentally spawned the most accomplished domestic terrorist yet. And this is after two boys.

So, zinc cream. The mistake I made was in feeding them. It is a mistake to feed children regularly. First, it creates a spectacular mess. I don't know why I put food in bowls rather than scatter it onto the floor, perhaps in a festive design. The people who work at fast food restaurants are magic saints of astonishing efficiency to handle the mess of so many toddlers in short order. Second, it gives the children energy. That permits them to then execute their bad ideas. If I didn't feed them, they'd loll about listlessly and harmlessly, without the energy to  destroy my house.

Then, while clearing the dishes, I dropped one on the tiled kitchen floor, where it shattered. Pro tip: buy open stock white catering dishes. I put the children on the couch in front of the TV, locked them out of the kitchen, set a timer for ten minutes, and tried to clear up my little emergency-room-visit-waiting-to-happen. Then I returned to my angels, who were sitting watching television, where they had been placed not ten minutes before.

No wait. They weren't. Firefly was watching his sister, highly amused. And his sister was elbow deep in what appeared to be a pot of marshmallow fluff.

But we don't have any marshmallow fluff.

In ten minutes -- I was timing this -- she got off of the couch, into the children's room, onto a chair, and into the diaper table. She retrieved the pot of diaper cream, unscrewed the lid, and carried it to the living room. Then she spread it all over part of the couch, the floor, the coffee table, and herself.

Because I am the mother of several children, the very first thing I did was memorialise this episode in pictures.

Then I sent it to my husband. Then I changed clothes. Only after all that did I begin the de-lollification of the area. Did you know that diaper cream washed out with dish detergent smells like fish? You know, like my youngest smells now. And my coffee table, and my couch. See that shirt she's wearing? I gave it up for dead. Good bye, shirt. It was a nice run.

Also, I went on Amazon and ordered a high chair with a five-point harness.

A brief break in the Lollcapades

When you are pregnant the first time, you go get a book or you go online, and you read lists of ninety million symptoms. Most of these symptoms you will never experience. Unless you get pregnant five times in a decade, in which case you're going to collect them like a game of Pregnancy Pokemon. And I'm not sure what happens when you catch a Pokemon, but it's probably more fun than, say, a nosebleed. That's an actual pregnancy symptom. I had it with Genome.

So as we near the home stretch of Pending's in utero time, let's review the way each little angel was special to me, even though I couldn't identify their ultrasound photos from a line up.

What was it? Double vision.
Which kid? First.
Why is it weird? Apparently pregnancy makes your muscles relax. Even the eye muscles. Which you probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about, but just so you know, they exist. And if they get too que pasa you will need to consciously bring things back into photos.

What was it? Nose bleeds.
Which kid? Second.
Why is it weird? Because a fetus in nowhere near the nose. What the heck? Absent a tumor or getting socked in the face, adults should not have bloody noses. It's especially creepy to have one while sleeping and wake up to a pillow that looks like you were murdered on it.

What was it? Going postdates.
Which kid? Third.
Why is it weird? Because no one else even made it to 39 weeks, meaning my third child cooked a full month longer than my average, and %@$(*#$%@ was I ready to get. Him. Out. Then he had colic.  Joke's on me.

What was it? Burns.
Which kid? Fourth.
Why is it weird? With my fourth pregnancy, if I even brushed near a hot pan I'd end up with a burn. FYI: I brush up against pans rather a lot. At least three times in the last trimester alone.

What is it? Numb hands and arms.
Which kid? Fifth.
Why is it weird? I'm not talking about falling asleep on my arms and they go number. The arm I'm _not_ sleeping on goes numb. The doctor promises this is some kind of nerve/positioning problem from carrying an engaged baby for, oh, ten weeks, but I don't see why having most of a person hanging out in my pelvis would make my arms fall asleep.

High Chairs

I didn't expect to spend so much of my time worrying about things inappropriately flushed down toilets.

I just thought I'd throw that out to the universe.



King County produced this video, which is really lame. I'm considering tying my one-year-old into her high chair and making her watch it, Clockwork Orange style, until she learns the error of her ways. Also, if you live in King County, I strongly caution you against looking up how much the video cost to make. It will make you cry over your tax forms.

Two days ago I took apart my high chair to try to get to what I thought was a stain, and what was actually a thriving biological experiment. Taking this high chair apart involved twelve screws, so it's not just that I was negligent in my high chair care.

I also didn't expect my life to involve so many screwdrivers. If it did I would rather they be more of the vodka kind of screwdriver and less of the metal things. Look, I can bake bread. I can make a reasonably good cake. I should not have to know what a hammer does. Where's 1950 when you need it?

Once it came apart I was filled with a deep set of regret for ever having thought that cleaning the high chair was a good idea. The right thing to do would have been to set it on fire. I was committed though. That's a lot of screws. So I dropped the seat and straps in a vat of bleach water and hoped for the best.

The seat and straps came pretty clean, all things considered. Unfortunately cleaning it that thoroughly again will require the screwdriver, which will never happen. So we're going to have to think of some other solution, which may involve just making one-year-old eat outside and hosing her down before she's allowed near the house.

Yet Another Post About Lollipop

A fellow wrote a nice article in the Washington Post about his wife. The upshot was that he used to think that his wife was being lazy because the house wasn't clean. Now, he's realised that the house isn't clean because she has two small kids. Okay, so apparently the writer lives in 1985 and has just had his eyes open to the notion that small children are messy and labour-intensive, but whatever. Nice of him to try.

Remember when newspapers had news?

Anyhow, I should not have read the comments. Never, ever read the comments. I tell my mother this. I tell my friends this. But I still do it.

The comments informed me that if only I were more organised/better/harder working,  my house would look like a centrefold in Better Homes and Gardens and my children would also be deeply fulfilled.

So, let's implement that advice.

Advice: Enlist the children in picking up after themselves.

Implementation: I try to tidy up before Husband gets home so he doesn't, idk. Faint. I mistimed and left a half hour of chaos between tidying and Husband Arrival. I asked the children to please watch preschool television for an hour and please, please, do not destroy the house. So my youngest chose to strew toothpicks all over hell's half acre.

No worries! I assigned my second-born to pick up the toothpicks. And since Genome is an easy-going  love, he hopped to. When I returned ten minutes later, the toothpicks were moved  around, but not a one was back in its  container.

Genome, what happened? "I put the toothpicks  back. But Lolly wants the the toothpicks out, and she is much faster than I am.

Conclusion: Reality remains the same whether the person tidying is six or sixty. Destruction is faster than construction. One-year-olds cannot go a half hour without strewing toothpicks all over. Hide the toothpicks.

Advice: Clean with the children around! Don't leave them out. For example, one could mop up with the toddler on a chair in the being-mopped room.

Implementation: I left Lolly on a stool while I washed down the walls in the bathroom. I do not normally wash walls. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm having some pregnancy crazy here.

She took the opportunity to grab the prefold I was trying to wash with, shove it down the toilet, and flush. Then while I was extracting it, she tracked the toilet water about the house. Then when everything was cleaned up, she decided she needed to relax with a bottle.

I need a bottle too.

Too bad I'm pregnant.

Conclusion: Washing walls? What kind of stupid idea was that anyway? Just be happy prefolds can't fit down toilets.

Knitting

When I was a child people used to say that the problem with being a SAHM was that the mother never got any recognition. As opposed to the accolade-rich environment of the modern office, no one ever told SAHMs what a great job they were doing sweeping up those Cheerios. In retrospect, I think these people may have had a decidedly pre-Dilbert-era view of the office environment, and lots of bosses are at least as unappreciative as three-year-olds. They can't be put into time out either. But this view is wrong for another reason.

My difficulty is not that no one notices the good things I do and comments. The problem is that my best achievements as a mother make absolutely no sense to anyone who isn't me.

Case in point. I mentioned last week that I was knitting a sweater at my daughter's request. It was very pink. It was in very thin yarn. It was in an awful pattern (that she picked). It was a month-long slog of a sweater, of endless pink stockingette. If you don't knit, read that as "extremely boring." But it was fine, because this was the special sweater that my daughter picked out, that she would treasure as an example of how, sure, she may be nearly-the-oldest-of-five, but that doesn't mean her mother doesn't have time to do pointlessly labour-intensive projects just for her.

So I got it off of the needles, she tried it on, and . . . she hated it. It turns out it itches. Yes, it's a wool sweater. Yes, she has worn wool sweaters before. But _this_ wool sweater is itchy.

Did I mention she chose the yarn?

There is no way to redeem the sweater at this point. I can pack it away and hope it goes over better with my now-one-year-old. I couldn't sell the boys on it; We're just not that progressive. If my one-year-old does agree to wear it, it will go in her mental Rolodex as "yet another time my mom gave me Munchkin's hand-me-downs."

So what's my mothering achievement? Not only did I not pitch the toddler-worthy fit that this situation clearly called for, but my eight-year-old does not even know I was upset. Since my eight-year-old has been known to cry if I frown at her, for her to go blissfully along, unbothered by the escapade, is a sign that I have some really epic self control.

It is possible that I was actually secretly perhaps a tiny bit bothered.

So that's the problem with accolades for SAHMs. They're always about the praise-worthy stuff -- knitting a sweater or making the umpteenth batch of cupcakes. No one understands the important stuff I do.

Also, in retrospect, it's probably best that if you can knit, you don't let the children find out about that. I've lost hours of time I'll never get back, and those Judge Judy episodes aren't going to watch themselves.

Tiny Pink Shoes

Someone needs to explain to me what it is about little girls and shoes.

When I was a little girl, back in the dark days of the eighties and nineties, gender neutrality was the thing. The impression I had was that successful mothering involved raising a child who eschewed the doll aisle and demanded an Erector set.

I think it's safe to say that the pendulum has swung on that one. Apparently I could, if I wanted to, purchase every last item for my daughters' entire childhoods in some shade of pink. Pink stacking rings? Check. Find me the bright light in corporate America who decided stacking rings needed to be recast in a pink version. Please. Because I want his job.

Both my daughters like to work those stereotypes. My oldest, for example, requested that I knit her a sweater. It is the pinkest pink that ever pinked. This sweater is visible from space, it is that pink -- gradients of pink. Younger daughter thinks that all activities should be tackled while wearing a tutu. She's got two: her primary light pink tutu, and her emergency back-up neon pink tutu. Because you don't want to be without a tutu when there's a mud puddle to sit in, right? Right.

But I do not get this shoe thing. Recently I was attempting to drive down a large, very busy, very fast street. I was chugging along marginally over the speed limit in the slow lane while cabs ran up behind my bumper to indicate that they were trying to pass in this slow lane, and who was I to insist on going so _slowly_ in it? So it was a mildly stressful situation, even before my one-year-old started making a sound that I'd describe as a combination between a car alarm, an air raid siren, and the sound a nursing mother makes the first time the little nursling takes a bite (don't tell me it never happens. I've nursed four.)

I did not spend a lot of time wondering why she was making that sound, because I was reasonably sure she wasn't being sucked out the window and I needed every last pregnant brain cell to keep us out of a fender-bender with an angry cabbie. So we got to just listen to this ruckus for a good fifteen minutes until I was able to pull over and dislodge the shark/coyote/sewer rat that must surely have  hold of my infant. So which was it?

It was her right shoe. Her right shoe had become un-velcroed. And she was screaming to indicate to me that I must reattach it.

Had we been in an accident and jammed the entire road system, it would have been the fault of the velcro on a sparkly Hello Kitty shoe.

Dearest, dearest child. If you ever make that sound again, I hope for your sake that you are at least under attack by a large stinging insect. It is fine to wear tutus. Rock that tutu. Wear the pinkest sweater that ever minced down the runway. Play with pink stacking rings (you'll have to find someone else to buy them). But please. We need to put tiny pink shoes in the proper perspective.

Epic Zinc Cream

My fourth-born is a grubby child. I'm not sure why, and she certainly doesn't let that stand in the way of dressing entirely in tutus, but she's the sort of child who goes into the bath one colour and comes out another. Every night she goes in a brunette and comes out a blonde. Also, whenever I put the laundry away, the pile for her is the size of all the other laundry put together. I could, and may, write an entire book on Lolly-related stain removal.

When she wandered by with a suspicious white substance in her hair, I assumed that someone had doused her in flour again. It's happened before. Giant bags of flour are like play sand to a certain age of child.

It was not flour. It was diaper cream. Zinc-based, oil product, impenetrable diaper cream. Brand name Desitin; you can get your own.

Do you have any idea how vile that stuff is to get off of anything? Anything! I can't get it off my hands effectively! I struggle to get it off of the change table! The change table has many aspects that make it easier to clean than a one-year-old. For example, it doesn't move. And it doesn't have hair. And it doesn't move. Or scream.

So I stood in the middle of the room, and asked the children calmly -- you could tell I was calm because I preceded my speech with "I'm staying very calm" -- who decided that the baby needed a head full of diaper cream. No one confessed.

On to bigger problems. It was time to dump the entire contents of the pantry on my one-year-old's head. I used shampoo, dawn, baking powder, lemon juice, joke, and Sunlight soap in various combinations. Since you're wondering, the magic combination is a paste of baking soda and coke, leave it in for at least twenty minutes, then lather with dawn detergent and rinse. This will turn a terrible zinc situation into a toddler who looks like she could really use her hair washed.

Hold tight to the child while you're doing this. She won't be impressed.

My husband didn't feel my pain on this. He asked whether I had to use the extra-fine comb to get the cream out. Clearly this is not a man who has spend a vast amount of time thinking about toddler-stain-removal, because no, of course I can't comb oil-based cream out of baby hair.

Later in the day I solved the mystery of the baby-dousing. The baby doused herself in diaper cream. I know this because she, in a failed attempt at stealth, screwed the top back on the Desitin. And when she did that, she was covered in diaper cream. So she left a perfect Lolly-shaped handprint on it. More fool you, baby! This is why cat burglars rarely douse themselves in zinc cream before going out of an evening.

On the plus side, the entire incident nearly erased the traumatic memory of having melted plasticine in the oven yesterday.

Teeny Tiny Little Guy

Dave Barry once wrote a book called Dave Barry's Guide to Guys. You should go to amazon and buy it. It's very funny.

My children work harder than usual to reinforce every gender stereotype,My older daughter went on a clothing strike at seventeen months because not every garment she owned was pink, whereas my sons are hit-and-miss on remembering to wear pants. In my part of the world, all of the cool kids have gender-bending kids, so it's possible that my children are so aggressively conforming to societal norms as part of an elaborate plot to embarrass me.

I was trying to potty train Lollipop today. It was a mistake; she isn't even eighteen months yet, but she kept taking her diaper off and hanging out in the bathroom. After forty minutes sitting together with her on the teeny Baby Bjorn potty, she fussed until I let her leave. She went straight to the children's room, peed on Genome's teddy bear (IT'S NOT A TEDDY BEAR IT'S A PUPPET, he would say), slipped in her own urine, smacked herself on the hard floor, and burst into tears.

Older son had a particularly Guide to Guys moment not half an hour later. He wandered up, casually, and asked, "Did Lollipop poop on the floor?"

I happened to know she hadn't. Like any sane mother, I took the peed-on-a-stuffed-animal as a cue to put the kid in a diaper and retire with a diet coke. That's important, because otherwise this story wouldn't happen; I'd have thrown everyone into the car and sped to the clinic to see if it's possible to have an ebola vaccination. Or e coli. Whichever.

Why would you ask, Genome?

"Because I ate something off of the floor, and it was yucky. I thought maybe Lollipop pooed there."

Remember. I am having a conversation with a child who is mildly curious whether he _just ate feces._

No, Lollipop didn't go on the floor, but why would you eat things off of the floor?

"I like to eat things off of the floor! Sometimes it is good and sometimes it is disgusting."

But . . . you might eat something really disgusting. Like, you know, baby poo.

"Right! So it is a surprise! And that is more fun."

My son is a tiny frat boy who lives in my house. And he's like this dead sober.

He had eaten a cake pop. Apparently not a very good one.

Fights on Facebook, Swimming

I've mostly been posting quips about my kids on facebook lately. See, I was born to tweet, not blog. But I don't have any twitter followers to tweet at. So I use facebook instead. And then my husband suggests that perhaps I could tear myself away from an extremely pressing argument on the treatment of angora rabbits and do something productive, such as write stories about how and why I didn't get anything done today.

The problem with facebook is that unlike in the glory days of chat rooms, one actually knows these people. For a person like me, someone with a broken filter between my brain and my mouth (keyboard?), this leads to getting very carried away over, say, bicycle maintenance. With someone who teaches Sunday school to my kids. Identities have been altered to protect me.

So let's rejoin our cast of characters, shall we?

Munchkin has finally convinced me to take her to swimming lessons. I need to pause here for a moment. Who in all of creation came up with these ridiculous Red Cross swimming levels names? The preschool ones, I mean. Not the proper ones for five-year-olds. They're sensibly numbered 1, 2, 3, you follow. The preschool ones though. Oh, mercy. The first level is Starfish. The second is Duck. Next is Sea Turtle. For all of these, mum needs to get in the water. I'm not paying to teach my kid how to swim so that I can put on a bathing suit. I digress further. At this point children actually get to take lessons, not the type where I am instructed on how to hold my infant in water and not drown him. Sea Otter. Salamander. Sunfish. Crocodile. Whale.

Forgive me. There is absolutely no pattern discernible here. It doesn't move from invertebrates to vertebrates. We don't go from dim animals to intelligent ones. We don't move through families. We don't progress in size. And all of these animals seem to function most adeptly in the water. Exactly how am I to discern that a Sunfish is more adept a swimmer than a sea turtle, but less adept than a whale? They all look pretty damned good to me, especially in comparison than a four-year-old. Clearly this is all a plot to trick me into signing up my children for the wrong level and forfeiting $15 to the community centre when I have to change them due to my error, albeit a completely reasonable error given their ridiculous naming.

So I held off until I could put both older children into Swim Kids 1. This not only fills up my evening and makes dinner rather late, but also rids me of two children long enough to attend the library with a three-year-old and a one-year-old. This is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

I would put the three-year-old into otter or salamander or whatever just to keep him busy, but refer to that aforementioned naming system. Not worth the trouble.

So my oldest has been begging for swim lessons for some two years, and I haven't been able to get it together, and now I have, and she bears no grudges. She travels with an over-the-shoulder bag that she considers sufficiently pink. In it, she packs the novel she was reading (see, I did teach her to read). She carries a Play Mobil princess set. And she carries her swimsuit. You know, just in case. Might need it.

Gnome has gone for a different tack. He travels with a bear puppet (NB: puppet, NOT a teddy bear). The puppet is creatively named Beary. Gnome has decided that Beary needs a swimsuit. That way Beary will be protected in the rain.

It takes a marvelously unobservant child to think that a swimsuit is appropriate Canadian rain gear, even for a puppet.

Odds and Ends

A few miscellaneous thoughts while I wait for my husband to strip the tinfoil from the kitchen and dining area.

After a sunny few days in during Passover, it is absolutely pouring rain. My city is very wet, most of the year. Since it isn't as cold here as it is in most of Canada, we get no sympathy. On the other hand, in other parts of Canada, it rarely drops rain for weeks on end.

Today it is so damp that I keep undressing the little ones to check diapers or underpants. Their butts seem suspiciously humid.

Genome did wet his pants today. He called me and I didn't come fast enough to undo his pant button. "This," he informed me, "is why I take my pants off at the door."

I attempted to get right back into academics after Passover. I sat the boys down for a dear little reading lesson. It all went well until they got to the part where they were supposed to colour things in. They found a facepaint stick with the crayons. There was nothing for it but class had to be adjourned so they could apply war paint to each other.

Genome tired of the game once he had done his and Firefly's faces and hands, but Firefly was not satisfied. He stripped all of his clothes off and covered himself in black designs from head to toe, including (with admirable flexibility) the smll of his back. then he danced around the house.

Appropriately, I had been reading Napoleon Chagnon's new book on the Yanomami.

Today was a disaster. Firefly hid in the closet when I tried to get him ready to go to Munchkin's ballet. He fell asleep in the car and wet his pants. When I pulled him out he screamed and jerked as hard as he could. I strapped him into the Death Stroller. He nearly overturned it into a puddle.

I would not have been sorry.

As we pulled in to the community centre, Genome announced that he had no boots or shoes to wear. I told him that this was not possible, because he must have worn shoes out to the car. He replied that he had worn a single boot, and hopped.

It was true. He had.

I found a single rubber boot to go with the boot he was wearing.

I'm really, really sleepy.

StealthJew's FAQ

I've decided I need a FAQ. After all, these Qs are A'd very F. So frequently that I find it difficult to get anything else done at times. For some reason, everyone wants to know when dinner is, and no one wants to know, say, where they should put their dishes.

Q: How long until dinner?
A: Dinner is at six p.m. The time left to elapse until dinner is the time between now and the next time the clock is at six p.m. For example, if it is one p.m., dinner will be in five hours. If it is nine a.m., dinner will be in nine hours.

Q: Is dinner ready yet?
A: You will know that dinner is ready when I say something appropriate, such as, "time for dinner!" You can also consult any clock. Is it six p.m.? Rest assured that I will not forget to mention to you that dinner is being served.

Q: Can we have X for dinner?
A: No. Especially given that it's half past five and what you asked for is lamb roast.

Q: Why do _I_ have to do this?
A: Because I don't love you as much as the other children/dog. And/or you're the closest person. And/or I do 95% of the home care around here and your father does the other 5%, so stop whining about picking up your own darn socks, or about the possibility that you may put away a toy that belongs to your brother/sister.

Q: Are we there yet?
A: Is the car running? Are we still walking? Yes? Then no.

Q: Do I  _have_ to?
A: . . .

Added by request:

Q: Do I have to go to bed?
A: Child, it is in your own best interests to go to bed. You wouldn't like the person I turn into when the clock strikes eight.

Q: But whhhhhhhhhhhy?
A: The next person who whines is going to boarding school in Siberia. 

Blogging like a boss

TWO ENTRIES THIS WEEK. I blog like a boss, my friends. LIKE A BOSS.

So far, all of my children delight in conforming to gender stereotypes. Yesterday Munchkin complained that Genome kept bothering her while she was in the bathroom. Why, I queried innocently, were you in the bathroom for so long? Are you feeling all right? Well yes, of course. She was experimenting with her hair. She was in the bathroom so that she could stand on the toilet seat and be able to see the back of her head in her father's shaving mirror.

My two sons are close in age. Their primary form of exercise is, like their sister, running from room to room like a craze lunatic housepet. Their secondary form of exercise is wrestling. If no one is crying and no one is injured, this seems healthy enough. My brother and his friends used to play "throw the other guy off of the trampoline. This was in the nineties, before safety was discovered. My mother used to make us sit in booster seats until we were too heavy for them, which for me was some time in second grade. No one used booster seats then, and we had to carpool with them. Nevertheless, even my mother, a woman willing to make her children deeply uncool for safety, even she did not see anything wrong with flinging children off of a backyard trampoline as a regular activity.

We also used to put the sprinkler under the trampoline to make it more exciting. I digress.

Genome and Firefly were wrestling in the community centre play area, on the padded mats. A few other children were running around behaving similarly, or playing a loose version of tag. Some nice, well-meaning motehr admonished the children to all play gently.

Why must children play gently, anyway? What's wrong with consensual, non-injurious roughness?

I am a rock star

Yesterday I was sick. I off-loaded my older children onto my ever-patient mother. I kept the baby and slept a great-deal. Every hour or so I would wake up and find the baby there, starring at me. She's only two months old, but she has absolutely nailed "disapproving." She's mere months away from a career in method acting.

I generally grocery shop on Mondays. And as I think I mentioned in my previous post, flexibility in housekeeping is not a particular virtue of mine. Either I grocery shopped today, or the children were going to be getting their servings of vegetables from a soup made of tomato paste, water, and dried herbs.

In the future I should invest in frozen vegetables.

So, off we go. I dropped Munchkin at piano and took Lollipop, Genome, and Firefly to the gigantic Discount House O'Groceries. Imagine a downscale Wal-Mart with a reasonable kosher meat and dry goods section. I stopped on the way at the baby goods store to purchase a new pacifier chain. I hate lost pacifiers. I opted for the baby goods store in the hopes that a baby-specific store would provide fewer temptations for my volatile two-year-old than a general toy store would.

That previous sentence is what we call "foreshadowing."

I selected a pacifier chain ($6 ) and two of those nifty Lamaze-TOMY toys. Remember Captain Calimari? It turns out there's a whole series of those. We got a new Captain Calimari, and also a Morris Moose. Then Firefly threw himself down on the floor and shrieked at the top of his lungs because he wanted something.

I checked out without him. It's not like anyone was about to steal him. When I went back, a small girl was pointing at him and lisping, "he on floor, on the floor." Her father was trying to lure her away from the spectacle my child was creating. I hauled my gigantic two-year-old up on my hip (left hip, since baby was in a sling on the right hip) and headed for the parking lot.

It is surprisingly difficult to wrestle a two-year-old into a carseat.

When we got to Discount House O'Groceries, Firefly was still screaming. He wasn't consoled by my attempts to put him into a wet grocery cart seat. A nice lady came by and asked if I needed any help.

Many mothers report unkind comments or glares when their children cause a scene in public. I almost always receive sympathy when they're throwing down, and compliments when they're making any semblance of behaving. Either I live in an exceptionally kind city, or I look close enough to the edge that no one is going to give me that last shove.

Firefly was distracted by the attention and stopped screaming. He took up babbling to Morris the Moose instead. We grocery shopped. We got back late to pick her up from piano. I fed everyone. We did home schooling. 

I insisted the lady behind me in line, go in front of me. There's no way I want some poor citizen with a few groceries to be stuck behind me, a crew of children helping me, and a week's worth of food for six people. Discount House O'Groceries is not nearly classy enough to have express lines. It turned out that this lady had been taught Hebrew by my son's great-grandfather.

You can meet the most interesting people while buying kosher meat.

In a victory-induced haze from the successful grocery procurement, I insisted the toddler go to sleep at a reasonable hour in his own bed, even though my husband was at work until past everyone's bedtime. Eight returns-to-bed later, he fell asleep. Before he fell asleep, though, he threw Morris the Moose at me.

The Better Birth Story

This is the best birth story because it doesn't involve dilation or needles or any of the unpleasant part -- basically, any of the business that happens while one is half-naked. You all know that that happens in birth, and we don't need another retelling of it.

This is the best birth story because that stuff is left out. Instead, this is the story of my last day as a mother of three. Would it shock you to know I didn't pass it in an orderly fashion?

I was 37 weeks and 6 days in gestation, and I lay down next to my husband (mysteriously there were no children between us) and told him, you know what dear? I've decided I'm not ready to have a baby. I have too much going on right now. Maybe in six months, we'll have this baby. But definitely not now.

That should have been the first sign.

The next day I decided to do all of the laundry. There was plenty, since I appear to have gone on something of a laundry strike during the last three months of pregnancy. My husband had run out of socks, so I bought more. This was an intense desire not to do laundry that I had been nurturing. So I decided to wash every fabric item in our house -- probably some ten loads -- on this particular Sunday.

Sunday is my slow cooking day. Because I am, well, a touch flaky, I try to set up my life so that it requires as little planning as possible. One way I do this is by cooking the same way every week -- chicken on Tuesday, etc.

I can become very upset if I don't cook chicken on Tuesday.

On Sundays I slow-cook. Not using a slow cooker though, because I've never figured out how to use those without turning the contents to brown mush. I decided to make a complicated sauce for the first time -- coda alla vaccinara. Of course, it required a myriad of substitutions, since oxtail cannot be had kosher in most of the world, and pancetta is never kosher.

From first thing in the morning I was having contractions. I didn't, of course, take this as a sign to stop doing laundry. But I had a vague intention to pack my baby bag.

The last three times I had given birth, I'd neglected to bring spare underwear. They're very stingy with the disposable underwear at the hospital where I give birth. I'm not sure why I can use up some half million dollars of medical technology and expertise and they're going to start nickel-and-diming me over ten cents worth of pretend underwear, but they do. They also don't allow the purchase of pacifiers, which must be sneaked in. So every half hour or so I'd move haphazardly in the direction of my baby things (I keep them under the bed).

They don't allow pacifiers because the nurses believe that pacifiers interfere with successful breastfeeding. Silly hospital! I have no problem with breastfeeding. It's weaning I'm terrible at.

Around noon a friend called and asked whether our kids and her kids wanted a playdate. She had to be at an event, so she'd leave two of her children with three of my children. I thought this sounded like a great idea.

At some point around about now, my husband pulled a muscle in his back and landed himself flat on his back for the rest of the day.

Mysteriously, five kids was easier than three kids, because they formed some sort of child-critical-mass and became a completely independent entity relying on me only for snacks.

By evening I was starting to get somewhat uncomfortable. I decided to call my mother to get a ride to the hospital. I elected, apparently, to just ask for a ride -- without specifying that I wanted to go to the hospital, or that I was in labour. Then I stood on the porch wondering why my mother was being so goshdarn pokey. My mother was probably wondering why I didn't just drive myself wherever I wanted to go. When I'm not in labour, I do actually manage to drive.

A few hours later I had a baby girl. She's cute. We call her Lollipop. She's five weeks old.

Reading

Teaching my daughter to read was about as much fun as stabbing myself to death with a spoon.

I'm surprised she survived it. I'm also surprised I survived it. And we still speak to each other. Amazing. Now that I don't need to teach her to read anymore, life seems a lot less like a Saw movie. She's still working towards reading Hebrew, but for some reason, this is not a hideous life-ruining ordeal for either of us.

Genome is now learning to read -- or rather, learning his alphabet mostly. It is much easier than teaching his sister was. If you are ever given a choice of teaching my daughter to read, or teaching my son to read, you should choose my son. For starters, he kind of wants to do it. My daughter's disinterest in academics is so powerful, you can feel it at a hundred paces. Her disinterest could be a lethal weapon. It's that strong. That's how much she Does Not Care. Or did not care. Now that she can do it, it has some appeal. She also thinks Judaics has appeal.

So, do you have an early reader, and you want them to read things, but you have noticed that everyone's definition of "early" or "easy" or "emerging" is completely different? I found a nifty little tool. Lexile measurements are measurements of reading ease used for standardized testing and such. They maintain a large book database at www.lexile.com. First, find your child's Lexile score by looking up a book or two that they read with relative ease. Then search for similar books by Lexile score. There are about a billion categories as well.