Bad Choice

I’m working on my discipline techniques with Abbie. I know spanking or otherwise hitting is a no-no. I’ve discovered that time-outs are still useless at this age as she’s unable to make the connection between the punishment and her misbehavior and hops off her pedestal immediately, then she thinks it’s a great game as daddy repeatedly lifts her back on to her pedestal. I’m weaning away from yelling since that just intimidates her without helping her understand what she did wrong, although it does help me feel better. Plus it could teach her to yell, assuming she learns to talk.

That leaves me with the standbys of keeping her out of situations where she could misbehave, redirecting her when she does misbehave, and telling her in simple terms that she’s done something wrong. Ellie likes to say she made a “bad choice,” implying that she could have made a better choice by coloring on paper instead of the china cabinet.

Abbie made a particularly bad choice yesterday morning, which gave me a chance to practice my disciplinary techniques. The boys were napping, Abbie was happily watching television, and I had laundry to do. I knew the boys would wake for lunch soon, so I prepared their lunch in anticipation of halting my laundry sorting and rushing to feed screaming little men if need be. I poured water in their bottles, dropped frozen food cubes in their dish, and prepared Abbie’s pre-lunch snack of sliced to placate her while the boys eat. Then I retreated to the laundry room.

This was my first mistake; I left Abbie in a situation where she could misbehave. I heard banging in the kitchen as I sorted, but I assumed, or possibly hoped, Abbie was throwing an approved toy across the floor. I heard the boys stirring as I returned to the kitchen, and I knew I needed to microwave food quickly, but instead I discovered what was clunking in the kitchen.

The first thing I saw was Abbie’s nose in the refrigerator. The child lock I installed on it works great to deter her, assuming I remember to lock it, which I could have sworn I did. Abbie’s frigid fingers revealed that I did not lock it. Fortunately, with all of the messy things contained with the coldness that she could have spread across the floor, she opted to eat the peaches I prepared for her earlier. She spilled a couple peach chunks and a little juice, but otherwise the only consequence was she had fewer peaches to eat during pre-lunch. No big deal.

There rest of the kitchen was a big deal. Those bottles of water I’d carefully poured for the increasingly fidgeting boys were now on the floor. Abbie had reached onto the counter and pulled them to the floor to drink from them, play with their lids, or possibly practice her pouring skills by dumping water on the floor. She also grabbed the formula can, which I could have sworn I left out of her reach, and tried mixing formula in the bottles. Not knowing the correct number of scoops to use, she dumped too much powder in the bottles, and then apparently poured powder on the floor to mix with the spilled water. The result was she wasted a quarter of a can of formula, the floors were a sticky mess, I had to redo the bottle preparations, and the boys were starting to complain.

I ran down the disciplinary options in my head. Scream? No, I need to stop doing that. Hyperventilate? Already doing it, but I need to retain consciousness. Cry? No, that will just let her know she broke me.

I told her she made a bad choice once I regained my breath. Then I kicked her outside while I cleaned up, letting her back inside as I returned to preparing lunch. The food cubes stayed in the microwave too long while I poured water in the bottles, and overheated to a dangerous temperature. I popped their container in the freezer to cool them, and watched the container fall right back out as the freezer’s more permanent residents reclaimed their space.

The resulting mess could have been worse. A third of the scalding hot peas landed on the floor. Another third stayed in the container. The final third splattered across my bare arm.

I ran down the pain-coping options in my head. Scream? Ordinarily no, but I’m not screaming at Abbie, so go for it. I let out a yell that sounded like the word “God,” but remembered that cursing around Abbie is a bad choice. The rest of my screaming was unintelligible until the pain subsided. I hope she learned from my good choice.

The Bedtime Grind

Our bedtime routine starts with the bedtime feeding. You could count the periodically preceding bath as the beginning of the routine, but we only bathe them every other night, and there’s too much splashing and screaming involved in the bath for it to relate to any bedtime preparation ideology.

All three children eat before bedtime. Ian and Tory get bottles, while Abbie snacks on a glass of milk and any Tasteeos she stashed away earlier in the day. I keep thinking she should be old enough to go through the night without a bedtime snack, but she thinks otherwise, as evidenced by the way she hovers under my feet like our dog at dinnertime while I prepare the boys’ bottles. Our dog would probably get a lot more table scraps if she could learn to tug on my pant leg like Abbie.

The standard feeding procedure is I hold one boy, Ellie holds the other, or a Boppy stands in if she’s at work. While we feed, Abbie takes a couple sips of milk, chases the dog for 20 minutes, and then finishes her milk at our prodding.

We rotate children depending on which one is infuriating momma more by squirming in her lap instead of eating. I may be more patient with their writhing, or I may just have a better lap to contain them while they fidget.

Ellie and I are exhausted by the time this feeding rolls around, me from chasing the kids all day, and Ellie from spending an evening listening to me complain about it. This is often our first chance to sit since supper, and even that is frequently interrupted by trips to refill the Tasteeo bowl or protecting our plate from Abbie’s prying fingers. After the boys finish eating, I usually sit motionless for a couple minutes while children crawl around me. I’m waiting for my second (at least) wind to hit, which usually happens about the time the television program we’re watching goes to commercial.

As Ian crawled on me last night, he grabbed his bottle from my lap. It was empty; I think he just enjoys chewing on the nipple because it reminds him of happier times when he still had room to eat. He rocked back with the bottle in his mouth, setting both feet on the ground. He continued rocking back, lifting his front off my knee, and finally achieving a vertical position that could best be described as “standing unassisted.” He stayed this way, chewing on his bottle for I’d guess a solid ten seconds before falling back to the floor. Ellie witnessed about half of it as she spent the first five seconds ensuring the dog didn’t hurt Abbie while cavorting about the room, and vice versa.

This is the longest he’s stood unassisted. He’s stood for a couple seconds at a time in the past, but that was after I stood him up. I could also make a spoon stand upright for a couple seconds at a time if I balanced it right before letting go. This was him pushing up to standing and letting go of his own accord, and correcting his balance once he got up there.

This is a scary milestone; they’re on the cusp of walking. Once they can walk, a new world will open. They’ll have free range of the house. They’ll be able to move in three directions simultaneously while I’m trying to round them up. They’ll be able to hover under my feet while I prepare their bedtime feeding.

Library Learning

I need to take the kids out of the house more often. We go to the big-box store about once a week, and that exposes them to new things like sounds, material goods they just discovered that they need, and germs. The kids just sit in a stroller or shopping cart in the store, though, missing the opportunity to exercise or socialize, unless wailing counts as socializing. We also go to the park frequently, and that lets them exercise and socialize. The experience gets repetitive, though, as the kids play on the same equipment, ignore the same neighborhood children, and chew on the same woodchips every day. Plus the weather is turning colder, so I won’t be able to take them outside to play while I ignore them and read my newspaper in peace for much longer.

What we need is some sort building in our community that houses a vast collection of materials for the public good, like books and videos, with one department specifically geared for children that runs programs to entertain child and caregiver, preferably at no cost to the user. If only such a place existed, with branches throughout the city for easier access.

I wish I had recognized the existence of libraries sooner. I have my reasons for not noticing them. My hometown of Sioux City had a grand downtown library several miles from my home, and dank branch libraries in strip malls that were also several miles from my home, so visiting the library wasn’t a common occurrence for me growing up unless I had a paper to research in those pre-Internet days, or possibly after discovering a dusty library book under my bed. We have two branch libraries near our home now, one serving the inner city and another serving the nicer part of town a couple miles away that doesn’t want to have to mingle with the inner city folk. I visited both branches a couple times before the twins were born in an unfocused search for board books for Abbie, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, and therefore didn’t find anything of interest. Then, once the twins were born, I stopped driving with the children unless the destination was essential, such as a doctor’s office or a frozen custard shop on the way home from the doctor’s office.

The twins are now easier to handle, and I’m feeling ready to leave the house for non-vital reasons, such as child entertainment. While reading the newspaper the other day, I saw something about a young children’s program in the main library. After searching on the Internet, I discovered the branch libraries offer similar programs, as do the libraries in the various suburbs surrounding Des Moines. I checked their schedules, checked my schedules, and decided to visit the branch near me in the nicer part of town, though I swear I picked them just because they fit our schedule better.

The first program we attended was yesterday morning. This was a toddler program meant for children ages 2-4. At 28-months, Abbie was the target audience, though the boys are about half the ideal age. I snuck them in anyway since it’s not like they could prove they weren’t 2 just because they can’t walk. Or talk. Or stand. The library offers a program for the youngest children, but Abbie is far too old for it, plus it requires the children to sit in an adult’s lap, and no one short of Vishnu could keep all three of my children in one lap.*

The program involved a woman, presumably a librarian, leading a roomful of cheerful children and caretakers in various states of consciousness through a series of books, songs, and flannel board activities. I’d estimate 40 children were present with 20 caretakers. Interesting nugget: At 28, I was one of the youngest caretakers in attendance, with most of the rest of them stay-at-home moms in their 30’s and 40’s along with plenty of grandparents.

We were in a large room, and the children spread out accordingly. Some clung to their caretakers around the edges, others moshed for position under the presenter. We hung out at the back, partially because Abbie needed to warm up to the room, and partially because the boys needed room to roam freely.

Abbie took her time soaking in the atmosphere. She didn’t get much out of the books since we were too far away, or maybe just because she couldn’t hold it while the woman read it. The song “I’m a Little Teapot” scared the snot out of her as she went running for the door crying, but I coaxed her back to the group’s fringes. Eventually she seemed to enjoy the counting, pointing, and chanting. I tried to get the boys into it, but they mostly crawled around, poking in other people’s bags for interesting toys. I found the program relatively entertaining, though I was a bit disturbed that they were singing and doing hand motions to songs I’d never heard before. Obviously I missed a parenting memo somewhere.

The program lasted 20 minutes, or exactly as long as a toddler can tolerate such a thing. All the kids were well behaved throughout, with everyone sitting quietly except for all those outbursts you expect from children ages 2-4. We made it back home in time for the boys to nap. I used their nap to check that the library was offering the same program next week.

* Just out of curiosity, could God create a toddler so squirmy not even He could keep the child in His lap?

Good Morning

I have a set order for Abbie’s bedtime routine. First we change the diaper and into pajamas, then we brush teeth and hair, finally we read before going to bed. It’s important to put the reading last to help calm her down; the other parts of the routine rile her up, especially when we hit some snags during the hair brushing, and can lead to her banging around the room for a half-hour after I turn out the lights before falling asleep. With this routine she only bangs around the room for 20 minutes.

Her routine has changed recently. Now we do the diaper changing right before reading the final bedtime book. I’ve made this change to leave her in the overnight diaper for the shortest time possible because she’s been peeing through the diaper by morning, assuming that she leaves it on all night. In my twisted parenting mind, ten minutes can make the difference between leaks and no leaks on a diaper worn for 11 hours.

I’m also experimenting with a different overnight diaper. Since birth, I devised an ingenious system of putting the children in cheap diapers during the day, and a Supreme Cruiser* overnight. Plus I put the child in one size bigger than recommended, because if that diaper can handle a 24- to 36-pound baby, surely it can handle my 20-pound baby.

This system worked great for Abbie’s first two years, and I still use it with the boys. Abbie is running out of larger sized diapers to wear, though. She’s already in the largest size diaper, which is probably nature’s way of telling me it’s time to potty train her, but I wish nature wouldn’t send me mixed messages by sending twins that drain too much time to devote to potty training.

Instead of putting Abbie in the largest size of the premium diapers, I’m experimenting with putting her in the largest size of the Sam’s Club generics, which unintuitively seem to stop leaks better. The premium diapers may just be more comfortable with their stretch tabs and recognizable licensed characters. This isn’t really a plus in an overnight diaper since Abbie is asleep most of the time she wears it, and by morning any diaper that sodden would be uncomfortable.

I’ve only been experimenting with the cheap overnight diapers for a few nights, but we’ve had no leaks so far. The secret may be the diaper’s hard plastic non-breathable shell that locks moisture inside. I hope these diapers work, because the next step up is to use formal “overnight diapers,” which are so named because the child wears them overnight, and the parent may need to take an overnight job to afford them.

The change in routine also seems to be going well. We still read one book between the stimulating diaper change and the lights going out, so she gets a couple minutes to unwind. The later diaper change may or may not help her wake up dryer. I know it helped last night because she peed on the changing table after I removed the diaper. She peed a lot, possibly enough to overflow a diaper by itself. Better on the changing pad than on the sheets.

* I use both brands, depending on who’s on sale and who sent me the latest batch of coupons.

Support a Multi-Dad

Scott, a father of twins, is having a rough time. If you have a couple minutes, drop by, read his story, and leave some support in the comments. He's stopped updating his blog, but hopefully he's still reading comments. Thanks to Becky for alerting me.

Good Night

My kids are great sleepers. I have nothing to complain about, and plenty to brag. All three share a room, and despite the potential for screaming and poking related shenanigans, all three fall asleep and stay asleep easily at night. Meanwhile, other unfortunate parents share their beds and/or endure children waking in the middle of the night well into year two and beyond. One of our neighbors has a son about as old as our boys, and he still regularly wakes up in the middle of the night, staying awake for as long as a couple hours. I know this is mostly the result of me winning the baby lottery while others hope to salvage a free play out of their losing ticket. Still, I’d like to think their sleep habits are a result of my superior parenting skills, summed up by the philosophy “that kid had better figure out how to fall asleep because I’m not getting up.”

Even though I still keep the monitor on overnight, they usually don’t wake me. I don’t even judge a “good night” as one where everyone sleeps all night, but classify a “good night” as one when Abbie leaves her diaper on until morning.

Last night, though, the kids gave me a rough time. I don’t know what the impetus was. Teething and nightmares could have played a part, as could their knowledge that I stumbled into bed late.

It started around 1am when Abbie woke up screaming. I walked into her room and found her resting comfortably in bed, surrounded by stuffed animals, and screaming hysterically. Her diaper was still attached and non-poopy, so that wasn’t a problem. I tried giving her the burp cloth she needs to fall asleep, but couldn’t find it in the dark. I walked out of the room to retrieve one, and severely ticked her off in the process. All was forgiven as she snuggled with her new burp cloth and immediately set about falling asleep. I stayed in the room for a minute to ensure she didn’t need anything else like the stuffed animal she was using as a pillow fluffed, or that the twins rustling in their cribs didn’t need pacified. Abbie stared at me the whole time, wondering why I was still bothering her.

About four hours later, I heard Ian complaining. I tried ignoring him, hoping he’d whimper himself back to sleep, but the amplitude of his screams steadily increased. I walked into their room as he approached full-blown wail. I tried giving him a pacifier, but he refused it. He seems to be outgrowing the pacifier as he nears his first birthday, which is generally a good thing but not when I want him to calm down at 5:30am. Not wanting to wake his roommates any more than they already were, I picked him up and carried him out of the room. I was prepared to set him in the Pack ‘N Play in our room and let him scream himself back to sleep, but he immediately calmed down when I picked him up. We took an early morning tour of the house, bid mommy bye-bye on her way to work, and I returned him to his crib. While his roommates complained for a few minutes at the disruption, Ian fell right back to sleep, or at least stayed quiet.

I returned to my bed, hoping to salvage something from the night. I awoke promptly at their wake time to the sounds of Abbie banging on the door. I had hoped everybody would sleep in after a night of commotion, but no luck. I opened the door, saw Abbie’s diaper was still attached, and realized it had still been a good night. Never mind that she’d emptied every shirt out of her dresser sometime overnight.

"I didn't know you, Jay Leno, and a monkey were bathing a clown."

Before the boys could sit up unassisted, bath time took a long time. I had to bathe each child individually, the boys one at a time in their infant tub, and Abbie separately in the regular tub. Each child would get soaped up individually, rinsed off individually, and dried off individually, though they would get ticked off as a group when so much attention would be focused on one child.

Once the boys could sit up, I could throw everybody in the tub at once and wash all three simultaneously. I only had to run the bath water once, soap up the washcloth once, and drag out the carpet cleaner once after someone peed without wearing a diaper.

My idyllic days of consolidating bathing are over I fear. While growth in children is great for mental development and getting that car seat turned around, it’s tough on bathtub real estate. That’s especially true with three growing children taking up space with three growing bath toy collections. It also doesn’t help that, ever since we went swimming in that hotel pool, Abbie insists on lying down in the tub to simulate that pool experience.

We’d still be in good shape if everybody could sit still, or at least migrate to separate tub regions in an orderly fashion. One child could play with cups on the right side, another could play with the penguin stacker in the middle, and the other could play with the pirate ship on the left side. Every couple minutes they could move one spot to the left with the pirate ship player moving to the cups, and everybody sticking to their left as they walk or crawl. It’s perfect, and I don’t know why children with a combined four years of experience can’t understand it.

Instead, everybody jumbles under the faucet, occasionally dragging a toy into the wriggling mass of pink skin. The boys think that water pouring out of the faucet is the coolest thing in the world, much better than an overturned box of Tasteeos. Even when the faucet is off, it makes a handy chew toy. Abbie likes hanging out by the faucet to play with the shower control, and to make sure the drain is closed and the tub stays full. The result is children crawl all over each other to be closest to the fountain, shoving appendages into various body parts, pushing faces into running or standing water, and causing children to fall face first in close proximity to the protruding metal faucet.

The solution is to start giving separate baths again. The boys should still be okay together, and Abbie will get the privilege of not having to fight over the bath cups. I was going to have to do this eventually anyway, what with the different equipment and all, I was just hoping it could wait until Abbie develops a sense of shame. It’s just as well that I do it now, because I can’t shake the feeling that I’m causing long-term damage to someone when Abbie plays the “point to a body part, and daddy will name it” game.

So we’re halfway back to separate baths. It’ll take more time, but I was looking for a way to fill that post-supper lull anyway now that it gets too dark too early to go to the park.

"I got the idea when I noticed the refrigerator was cold."

Abbie has made a nuisance of herself in the kitchen for most of her life. It started with the dishwasher. She’d crawl to it at top speed when she saw it open, pulling on the dish racks, poking around the silverware tray, and pulling out and chewing on utensils like the spoon I used for cereal six hours ago or that fork I used to hold raw chicken while cutting it last night. I clearly remember how annoying this phase was because the boys are at it right now.* Fortunately this phase ended after a couple months, as soon as she realized that moving dishes in and out of the washer qualified as a “chore.”

She has since taken her poking around tendencies to the cabinets and countertops. She loves to explore new places, examine the objects she finds, and leave them strewn about the kitchen floor. I learned to keep her out of the cabinets with cabinet locks, and off the counters by removing anything from the room that could be used as a stepstool, such as kitchen chairs, highchairs, or sleeping pets. For most of her life, though, there was one place in the kitchen that she hadn’t tried breaking into: The refrigerator.**

That changed a couple months ago when I walked into the kitchen and found her sitting on the floor with an open leftover container at her feet. She was snacking on last night’s spaghetti noodles. I laughed, put the container back in the fridge, and sent Abbie back to the living room to resume strewing her toys about the floor. I figured that if that’s the worst she does in the refrigerator, I’m in good shape.

Of course that wasn’t the worst she’s done. Toddlers always find a way to top their previous bad behavior. Today she opens the refrigerator door several times a day to remove all manner of food. She grabs milk, usually leftover from the sippy cup that I put back in the fridge after her last meal, but she’ll also grab the gallon jug, remove the lid, and drink from the carton if necessary. If there’s an open yogurt container leftover from lunch, she’ll dig her fingers into that, making a slightly smaller mess than she usually does at lunch. She likes to remove containers of whipped topping and eat from the tub with her fingers, which would make me angrier if Ellie and I hadn’t done the same thing as children. When she sees grapes, she likes to move them to the front of the fridge in a more convenient position for Ian, who has already learned to scramble for the fridge as soon as the door opens to gnaw on grapes.

When she tires of the refrigerator, she opens the freezer. The freezer door is up top, so in order to reach it she needs to slide a chair up to the unit, carrying one from another room if necessary. Inside she indulges her sweet tooth, usually on marshmallows.*** Recently she found my bag of chocolate chips inside the door. I pray she never finds my secret ice cream stash.

We’re doing our best to keep her out of there. I can hear the air circulating differently when the door is open, and often barge into the kitchen, sternly asking what she’s doing. I try to keep all chairs and lazy pets out of the kitchen. We just put an appliance lock on the door, so hopefully that’ll help until she removes the adhesive. Maybe I can make her believe that rearranging food qualifies as work.

* Well, they’re not at it right now. They’re sleeping right now, but there’s a good chance they’d wake up if they heard the dishwasher door click.
** Actually she hasn’t tried breaking into the oven, possibly because there’s nothing interesting in the oven. Even if she does, I’m not worried because there’s little she can do that’s harmful or annoying in the oven, unless I’m baking something, and with three young children in the house the odds of that happening are zilch.
*** Yes, we keep marshmallows in the freezer. It keeps them from melting into a quasi-congealed super marshmallow. Plus the texture of frozen marshmallows makes them an excellent snack.

Bucket Brigade

Last night, I was preparing the kids for their bath. Ellie was stuck at work, leaving me to give the bath unassisted. That usually isn’t a problem, it just complicates the process a little. I have to round up everything I need for the pre-bath, bath, and post-bath phases before running any water. I usually do this by grabbing everything I need, stripping down one child, finding the towels I forgot, stripping another child, locating the soap, stripping the third child, and beginning the bath.

I thought I had everything I needed, and deposited three naked children in the tub. I reached for the faucet, and remembered Abbie’s pajamas were still in the dryer. She needs to wear her pajamas immediately after adorning her diaper. Otherwise the diaper is exposed, creating too much temptation for her to play with the straps that go “shrip” when she pulls on them.

I gave the kids bath toys, and turned to run to the dryer for one last post-bath item.* As I turned past the door, I noticed Abbie climbing out of the tub, possibly to follow me, but more likely she wanted to run around the house naked. Not wanting her to mark any territory, I sighed and gave her the most powerful bath toy known: A glass of water. She could drink from it, pour it on her bath toys, or just dump it on a brother. That should be enough to keep her in the tub until I returned.

I ran to the dryer, grabbed her pajamas, and ran back to the bathroom. When I returned, Abbie was out of the tub, and standing at the sink next to the tub. She can’t operate the faucet in the tub, but she can operate the faucet in the sink. Apparently distraught that the tub held no water, she was standing at the sink with the water running, filling her cup, and pouring it into the tub. I saw her do this three times, presumably in an effort to fill the bathtub the only way she knew how. I have to give credit to those problem solving skills.

* I’d like to stress that the bathtub had no water in it at this point, and the drain was open just in case someone did add a little liquid to the tub.

The Parents Magazine Rant

“Are we going to renew our subscription to Parents Magazine?” Ellie asked me the other night. I had always assumed the answer was yes, especially since I’d already sent in the renewal card, though that was mostly out of habit. I found useful advice on childrearing in its pages, along with tips on beauty aids and pregnancy pains just in case I’m ever feeling empathetic. It has good and unique recipes, although with some of the recipes, like the stir-fry that uses ketchup, there’s a reason I hadn’t seen them before. It has great stories about the wacky things kids say, helping me to imagine what life would be like if I had a child who talked.

Ellie saw things differently. The advice is mostly for dealing with babies. More than half its content is advertising for ridiculously overpriced and unnecessary items, usually clothing. The articles are alarmist, almost to the point of parody.

I couldn’t disagree with her assessment. Most of the advice does deal with babies, and a lot of it is of the commiserating, “babies sure can be annoying sometimes” variety to help new parents feel better about that gnawing resentment they feel toward their little bundle of responsibility. I’ve moved on in my life, both in terms of not needing advice for dealing with infants, and in learning to accept that parenting isn’t always a lot of fun so deal with it. The magazine carries a lot of advertising, and heaven knows the last thing we need is reason to waste money and space on more material goods.

I could add more reasons to stop getting the magazine, such as its obvious tilt toward women. Most of its information is gender-neutral, but it also often assumes the reader belongs to a specific gender, and that gender is a mother who’s reading the magazine for tips to share with her deadbeat husband who won’t turn the game off long enough to help get the kids out of the tub.* Plus my time to read the magazine is limited, as evidenced by the fact that I just finished reading last month’s issue.

I still find enough reason to keep the subscription going, though. The advice goes up to 12-year-olds, so I can theoretically keep finding useful information for the next 11 years. Plus a subscription is cheap, about $.50 an issue thanks to the 100 pages of ads each month plus the occasional mailing from “partner companies.”

Her line about alarmist articles stuck with me, though, especially after reading the one in the September issue with the subtle title on the cover, “EXERCISE: WHY YOUR CHILD ISN’T GETTING NEARLY ENOUGH.

I’m big into a healthy lifestyle. I carve out exercise time every day. I drink skim milk. I eat tofu. I want to pass these values onto my kids and am always looking for advice on how to do so, but this “Total Guide to Raising Active Healthy Kids” was wacky. First of all, it covered 13 pages (24 if you count ads). That’s a lot of space to waste on advice that can be summed up with “consume fewer calories, burn more calories.” Most of the advice revolved around turning off the television and computer, and what to do to pass the time. To motivate you, they liberally sprinkle information about how children are getting fat, getting sick, and will die from it you horrible parent.

They could just advise you to kick the kids outside, but that would be violating their advice from an earlier issue about avoiding cancer-inducing sunshine. Instead they advocate more structured physical activities. This passage especially bugged me:

It’s absolutely key to put more exercise right at the top of your kids’ to-do list…

Often, (schedules are) filled with after-school commitments like art and music classes, which don’t provide any physical activity. It’s great to raise a well-rounded child, of course, but overbooking her may not leave ample time to play sports and go to the playground.

This advice is reinforced later with the featured children later in the magazine who dropped piano lessons for karate and an arts and crafts class for soccer. As a former child who took music lessons and tae kwon do concurrently, a part of me dies to hear about a child who had to make a choice between them. There’s something wrong when a child can’t fit cultural education and physical activity into his life. Everyone has their limits, though, and there comes a point when a child can’t do everything, and has to pick an activity. Seeing a magazine seemingly advocate the physical choice bothers me. Of course 50 pages later they have an article about how to encourage that slovenly activity of reading in your child, so maybe they’re just confused.

Then there are the ads within this special report. Most of these are full-page food ads. I would think that if they were serious about encouraging a healthy lifestyle, they’d be more discerning about whom they let advertise opposite their advocation. Instead the ads are for: (1) Quaker “granola and breakfast snacks,” which I guess are healthy because they contain “25% less sugar,” (2) America’s Healthy Sandwich Showdown, with a picture of two slices of apparently nutritionally devoid white bread, (3) Cheerios, which are great as long as you’re not worried about sodium, (4) a two-page ad for the Nissan Quest minivan, and Nissan couldn’t have been happy that one of those pages was opposite the advice “leave the car in the driveway,” (5) Bagel Bites, which are apparently healthy since they contain “real cheese,” have “0g trans fat/serving,” and are “baked, not fried, (6) The Coca-Cola Company, telling us how committed they are to health and nutrition right above logos for their sugary and not-so-sugary drinks, and (7) Flintstones products, including their vitamins (good choice), and their Pebbles Cereals (maybe not such a good choice, even if they are “a good source of fiber”).

I’m keeping the subscription. I get enough out of the magazine to justify it. I’ll just be sure not to take it too seriously. And if I do, I’ll just skip ahead to the baby bloopers. Kids really do say the darndest things.

* But they do have one page in every issue directed at dads, usually with a makeup ad on the opposite page, so it evens out.

Testing ... 1, 2

I took the boys to get their hearing checked yesterday. I took Abbie too since she’s too immature to stay home alone even though she can apparently remove her diaper when she’s dirty and pull things out of the refrigerator when she’s hungry or just feeling the need to eat out of boredom.

This turned out to be a major problem. The boys had to get their hearing checked. I had to come to hold the boys during the examination. Abbie had to come because I couldn’t leave her alone. Therefore, since Ellie was stuck at work, occasional commenter and close personal friend Patty had to come to watch Abbie and the boy who wasn’t being examined while I held a boy in another room. Patty’s 1-year-old daughter also had to come for the same reason Abbie had to come, especially since her girl hasn’t yet figured out how to attain and drink milk straight from the jug like Abbie has. That works out to a support system of four mostly extraneous people arriving in two vehicles so two babies can have their hearing checked. And just so I don’t forget, THANK YOU PATTY!

The boys aren’t showing any signs of hearing problems. When I talk to them, say their names, or yell at them when they’re misbehaving, they behave exactly like I expect 10-month-olds to do, which is to say they mostly ignore me, but they at least look in my direction long enough that I know they’re choosing not to listen to me. The hearing test is just a formality that all NICU babies are encouraged to undergo, especially when they received supplemental oxygen like our guys did.

I arrived at the test center about five minutes before Patty, which worked out great since I had ten minutes worth of paperwork to complete before the tests. One of the first things anyone said to me upon arrival, right after the obligatory “you’ve got your hands full” comment, was “you wouldn’t by any chance have another adult coming to help watch the kids, would you?” When they sent that letter proclaiming they do not provide childcare for children not actively being tested, they meant it.

When Patty arrived, they whisked us all to a conference room because my double-stroller alone took up most of their waiting area. After finishing the paperwork, they took me with one boy at a time into the hearing booth for the testing.

This was the same center that checked Abbie’s hearing a couple months ago, so I knew the routine. The test on the boys was almost identical to the test on Abbie, except the boys lacked the coordination to pull equipment from their ears. First the audiologist stuck implements in their ears to measure their physical response to sounds and pressures in the canal. Then the audiologist went into a separate room while her voice came through speakers to the left or right of the baby. When he turned his head to the sound, we knew he was hearing it properly, and a darkened box containing a stuffed animal would suddenly illuminate and the toy would spring to mechanical life. The animal was supposed to be a reward for the baby, though by the end I think both boys were whipping their heads back and forth to try to figure out what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks those things were, and whether or not they were about to kill us.

As I expected, both boys passed the test, so I know they can hear me just fine when I tell them to quit playing in the pet water. When I returned to the conference room, Patty swore everybody did great without me, though she did admit that every toy was out of her diaper bag and every child’s song she knew had been sung. Perhaps Abbie would have been more easily occupied with a refrigerator in the room.

Shrip

Abbie is making diaper changes difficult. She’s always made them challenging, but, like world leaders delivering crazy speeches in the UN, she’s taking the experience up to a new level.

Perhaps she feels the need to one-up her brothers. They’ve mastered the old standby of rolling on the changing table, thrashing about like a washing machine agitator with legs, as Ellie likes to say. They wreak havoc on changing routine as I remove the diaper, reposition the baby to keep him from rolling off the table, open the diaper, reposition the baby to keep him from crawling off the table, position the diaper under the baby, flip the baby, reposition the diaper, and attempt to hold the baby in place to attach the diaper while he tries to roll over and I realize that a 10-month-old has surprisingly strong neck muscles.

That technique is so 18 months ago for Abbie. She’s moved on to more maddening maneuvers, such as removing the diaper. She’s been removing her diaper during non-changing times for months, looking down, seeing those tantalizing fastening straps, hearing that satisfying “shrip,” being very disappointed that she’s run out of straps to pull, and then getting yelled at by daddy for some reason, possibly because he missed getting to hear the straps go “shrip.” Fortunately she only does that if she has access to the diaper, and keeping pants on her is usually enough to keep the “shrip” out of mind.

Recently she’s started undoing the straps while I’m changing her. My changing routine is to attach the right strap, attach the left strap, tighten the right strap, and tighten the left strap. Abbie now has the finger dexterity to detach each strap as quickly as I can attach the other one, creating an endless cycle of “shrip” and attach. Sometimes she’ll leave the straps alone just long enough for me to reach to the side to grab her pants, and when I return I find both straps resting at the side, and a toddler with a satisfied smile.

Even when I reach the pantsing stage with the diaper still successfully attached, Abbie has one last surprise. She’s recently started kicking furiously as I try to slip her pants over her feet. The result is I pull one foot through the pants, and watch it slip back out as I try to pull the other through. She’s smiling as she does it, so I don’t think she’s trying to boycott pants or anything radical, she’s just creating a game, just like that unfortunate game she plays where she slaps people in the face and laughs. It started about the time I switched her from shorts to pants, so maybe she discovered that she can disrupt my routine much easier with pants than shorts.

My current solution to her insolence is to ask her to point the parts of her upper body. This diverts her attention to an activity that’s benign, even educational, while more importantly keeping her fingers far away from her diaper. Plus she’s learning all about the body from the chest up, though I’m running out of parts to quiz her on. I may need to break out mommy’s anatomy books to find new parts and keep it fresh.*

The more long-term solution is to make her take charge of things. I need to make her pull on her pants, or better yet potty train her and completely eliminate all diaper changing worries. I’ve been avoiding potty training because it’s a major time investment in the short term, but it’ll save me time in the long run. I’ll need the time by then because the boys will have doubtlessly discovered new ways to make diaper changing challenging.

* “Point to your nasojugal fold. Good!”

"The cow says ... the sheep say ... the pig s ... the ... the ... th ..."

One of Abbie’s favorite toys is the See ‘N Say. That’s the circular toy with the giant spinning arrow in the middle. Point the arrow to a picture (the “see” part), pull the lever on the side down,* and the toy will make a corresponding sound to what it was pointing to (the “say” part). It might make an animal noise, or announce a letter, or implore you to buy more quality Fisher Price toys.

Abbie has two See ‘N Say’s. She got her first one at Christmas. It’s a new-fangled version with all of the latest advancements in toy technology available in a $10 contraption. Unlike the older versions, it’s electronic and runs on batteries. This provides several advantages such as longer sounds and an interactive quiz mode. Best of all, the sounds never distort or go bad, at least not until the batteries die, which should take months, or until a child spits up on the speaker and fries the electronics, rendering the toy useless unless a child really enjoys watching an arrow spin. That last one took about ten weeks in our household. The toy has been in a closet ever since in hopes that the speaker will spontaneously heal itself.

Abbie’s other See ‘N Say is a classic model, by which I mean I bought it for a quarter at a garage sale and it has the year “1989” imprinted on the back. It uses no batteries, instead relying on child-power and magic gnomes, or however it is they make those things work. It’s a Mickey Mouse ABC version, meaning Mickey announces “A, apple,” “Z, zipper,” and everything in between. Or at least he would if Abbie would use it correctly. Instead of pulling the handle and listening to the sound in its entirety, Abbie prefers yanking on the handle as fast as it pops up. This means Mickey can only say a letter or letter fragments before being forced onto the next letter, giving him the toy a stuttering problem that makes it sound like it’s voiced by Mickey’s and Porky Pig’s love child.

Ellie found the toy at the garage sale, and had to talk me into buying it. It may have only been a quarter, but the sounds were distorted beyond recognition. If it weren’t for the sticker around the circle telling the sound, I wouldn’t know what the thing was supposed to be saying. This became an issue after Abbie actually ripped the sticker off, but fortunately by then she’d pulled the lever so many times that I’d memorized each utterance.

Abbie got way more than a quarter’s worth of fun out of this See ‘N Say. She would sit at it for minutes at a time, pulling the lever, listening to the sounds, and shoving her brothers away who were also interested in it. I appreciated the fact that the children could spit up or drool on it all day, which they’ve done, without damaging it. Plus, I could launch it into the toy box from across the room without breaking it.

Then it broke. I don’t know what happened, but the arrow doesn’t spin and the lever doesn’t retract. I’m guessing that a spring came loose and lodged itself into the spinning mechanism, or perhaps the magic gnomes went searching for a more patient little girl to entertain. Regardless, the toy now sits busted on the floor, taunting Abbie with memories of lever pulling and waiting for me to remember to throw it out. Someday I’m going to replace it, preferably after the boys have passed this spitting up phase.

* Or pull the string out in the old-fashioned strangulation-hazard edition.

Second Lunch

Yesterday morning was busy. It was so busy, I was 45 minutes late feeding the children their lunch. Generally, nothing short of a catastrophic yogurt shortage could make me late with a child’s meal, but the boys were sleeping, Abbie was watching TV, and we had stuff to do, so I let them go.

By 1pm, the boys were starting on solids, Abbie had finished, and no one in the house over the age of three had eaten yet. Ellie suggested we take the kids to the local big-box store and eat lunch on the way.

I’ve taken the form of a budget hawk recently as we’re trying to save for a house, but this seemed like a reasonable request. I don’t like visiting the big-box store often since we always wind up buying something we don’t need, like a squeaky baby toy or a clearanced dog toy that squeaks and could double as a baby toy. I have a formula to estimate how much we’ll spend on each trip to the store, $30 + $5D, where “D” is the number of days since our last visit to the store. If we visit every day for a week, we’ll find something to blow $250 on; if we visit once in that span, we’ll spend $50 on cleaning supplies, bathroom provisions, formula, and other essentials plus another $15 on clearanced clothing. It had been about two weeks since our last visit, which meant we were about to drop $100, but it also meant that we were running dangerously low on baby wipes.

The lunch stop was frivolous. We could have had a great cheap lunch with sandwiches made from that tub of eggless egg salad I keep in the refrigerator. Still, I felt that we had worked hard enough to deserve a $5 meal, especially since I couldn’t remember the last time we ate out. Sure, we ate out twice a day while we were out of town earlier in the week, but those were vacation meals, which don’t count.

We stopped at Quizno’s for lunch. That’s a highly preferred spot because their food is good, they’re next to the big-box store, and they send coupons approximately twice month. The only drawback is they serve sandwiches, which Abbie still doesn’t recognize as fit for human consumption, so feeding her there can be challenging. Feeding her wasn’t an issue at that time since she had just eaten at home, so we could give the boys their bottles in the stroller while Abbie amuses herself, and enjoy lunch in peace.

Except Abbie doesn’t work like that. Abbie is pretty sure that she should be eating anytime anyone nearby is eating, and that includes pets. As we settled the boys in with their bottles and ordered our food, we realized Abbie wouldn’t leave us alone while we ate. She’d poke at us the whole time, wanting to examine our sandwiches, convinced that we were hiding something edible, and otherwise reaching for our drinks.

Ellie suggested a bag of chips to keep her occupied. Actually she suggested a bag of Cheetos, which I immediately nixed after envisioning a toddler coating all nearby fabrics with a nuclear orange dusting of cheese powder residue. Wanting to be a quasi-responsible parent, I picked out something baked, and set her in a high chair with a bag of chips while the adults enjoyed a substantial meal.

I wonder what the other patrons thought of our arrangement. Did they question why our daughter was eating nothing but a bag of chips for lunch? Did they wonder how we could be so heartless while enjoying our sandwiches? Did they at least notice that she was eating something healthier than Cheetos?

After lunch, we drove the 500 feet to the nearby big-box store. Inside we burned off lunch by walking through housewares, electronics, and racks of clothing that had gone on clearance since our last visit.

Free Range Torys. And Ians.

I crammed a lot of useful stuff into my brain during vacation. Most of that brain detritus is memories, such as the time we went to the zoo, the time we went to the other zoo, and the time I lost my mind after being trapped in a single-room hotel room with three small children for days on end.

I also discovered some helpful parenting techniques. For example, I realized that I could feed the boys solids without strapping them into high chairs or otherwise restraining them, although sometimes I wish I had a couple size 12-month straightjackets to keep their arms down.

When we left on vacation I had to make a difficult decision: Pare down the amount of stuff we needed to pack, or take two vehicles. I suppose we could have rented a trailer as well. I took a hard look at our high chairs while packing. They’re the portable type that straps onto a normal dining chair and takes up less space as long as you don’t mind that you can’t push your chair back into the dining table because there’s a giant plastic seat strapped to it. Even without a chair attached to it, they still take up a fair chunk of real estate, especially when trying to fit two of them into the back of a Subaru. I decided they weren’t worth it, that we had enough other stuff to load into and out of the car, and then find space for in our hotel room. I could strap the boys into the double-stroller for mealtimes, which basically functions exactly like a double-high chair anyway, except it’s harder to clean.

A funny thing happened on the trip, though. When we pulled back into the hotel lot after an exhausting day of chasing the kids around a learning opportunity while trying to force some pleasant memories, we just didn’t have the energy to lug the stroller back to the room. We already had three children to herd, a diaper bag, feeding paraphernalia, and a bag full of souvenirs to take upstairs. So I found myself at mealtime ready to feed two hungry babies, but lacking anything to strap them into.

The solution was to slap bibs around their necks and let them roam free. This proved to be a challenge because, well, they were roaming free. Sometimes that meant they were more interested in the toys littering the room than the food, and I had to constantly reposition them so their mouths were facing me. Other times they were more interested in the food than life itself, and I had to fend off babies climbing all over me to get to the jar. Sometimes a baby, most often Ian, would grab the spoon and attempt to bypass my pathetically slow spoon wielding and feed himself. Usually it meant that I had one baby with zero interest in eating, and another baby ready to mug me for the jar. It also meant they’re mouths were moving targets, which resulted in lots of food ending up around their mouths or on the carpet, which would have been tragic if I had to clean those carpets.

Despite these headaches, I found a benefit to free-range feeding: The boys were calmer than usual. Too often at home, spoon-feeding degenerates into screaming and the boys refuse to swallow. I assumed they didn’t like my cooking, but on vacation I realized they didn’t like being restrained. They became frustrated that they couldn’t climb to a toy or all over me, and started screaming.

When we returned home, I tried never strapping them into their high chairs for spoon-feeding. That experiment lasted for two meals before I became too frustrated at constantly repositioning both of them, and I developed a compromise. I know they’re about to suffer a mealtime meltdown when they’re unhappy before the feeding even begins. Maybe they didn’t nap well. Maybe they’re extremely hungry. Maybe they know I’m making spinach. Whatever the reason, they’ll start screaming secure three of the harness’s five points. If I just leave them on the floor, they stay happy enough to finish a steaming bowl of creamed carrots.

I use both high chair and non-high chair techniques, and have good success. Now, trying to watch TV while the children sleep on the other side of the hotel room; that I never did figure out how to do.

Vacation Recap Day 4 (Tuesday)

Day 4 was our last day in Kansas City. Our plan was to pack the car back up and hit the road, hopefully getting everything crammed back into the car before noon. We had one final stop planned on our way out of town: The Children’s Museum of Kansas City.

I knew nothing about this museum. While planning the trip, I googled “Kansas City children’s museum” and found this place without knowing it existed. We figured that nothing called a “children’s museum” could be bad for children, so we decided to make it our last impression of Kansas City. For all we knew, it could have been a wondrous hands-on journey to knowledge for children ages 1-100, or a museum about children, possibly filled with creepy wax sculptures of famous children throughout history.

We checked out of the hotel shortly after 9am, and followed the directions I printed from MapQuest from home. We followed the directions across interstates, through major thoroughfares, and onto busy streets, eventually arriving at the given address where we found … nothing. Well, not exactly nothing; we found a strip mall. And blight.

We scratched our heads for a minute, and concluded that something went wrong. Either MapQuest gave us poor directions, or I typed in the wrong address because the buildings we were staring at clearly had nothing to do with museums or children.* Not wanting our vacation to end on a downer, we brainstormed ideas for something else we could do before going home. My best idea was finding a good mall to wander around for a couple hours, giving us the thrill of shopping in a Gymboree located in a completely different state. Ellie had a more radical idea: Since we spent the previous day bemoaning how everything in the Kansas City Zoo was inferior to the Omaha Zoo, why not drive to Omaha and see the real thing before driving back home? I estimated we were about two hours away from Omaha at the time, which would put us at the McDonald’s right outside the zoo at lunchtime.** I put the hammer down on the Subaru, determined to make it to Omaha in record time.

We arrived at the zoo shortly after 1pm. The boys napped off and on along the way, and Abbie’s scheduled nap was only two hours away, so we didn’t know how the kids would tolerate the zoo experience. As long as we made it through the aquarium, though, we’d be happy.

I’d never been to the Omaha Zoo on a weekday afternoon in late summer. Usually we go on a mid-summer weekend day, or maybe on a summer holiday when we’re feeling masochistic. The zoo was amazingly uncrowded with only a few school field trip groups plus fellow preschoolers and their guardians wandering the grounds. This allowed us to see the exhibits at our pace, letting Abbie bounce around at her leisure. It also let us see something we’d never seen.


That’s the octopus. We’ve never seen it out in the open. I assume that the throngs of visitors drive it into a hiding space between the rocks so that you have to squint and use your imagination to see a tentacle poking out. It was cool. Trust me.

We also had the opportunity to snap important pictures, useful for bringing out when meeting future dates:








Those pictures are Ian, Abbie doing her “Abbie Kong” routine, Tory, and Abbie.

The kids tolerated the zoo well. We saw the aquarium, the primates, the bears, the big cats, and experienced the joy of being the only child in the petting zoo. On the way out, I wanted to see the desert dome because it was filled with creatures we hadn’t seen in the past two days, plus it’s a pretty cool geodesic dome. This last detour turned out to be a mistake as the boys were tired and whined through the entire dome. Plus the exhibits were wide open with lots of open water and thorny plants for Abbie to stumble into. We wound up briskly walking through the dome, barely acknowledging the animals as we zoomed past.

We continued our brisk pace out the gate and to our car. We left shortly after 4pm, and drove two hours straight back home. I was worried that we might need to stop for screaming children, but the kids slept long enough to return home with minimal fuss. And now I’ve caught up on all the chores that piled up while we were out of town.

* After checking their website after returning home, I discovered we were in the right place. I failed to notice the site says it’s in “suite 92” and “in the lower level of Indian Springs Business Center.” My closed mind envisions museums being in grand, stately buildings, not the lower level of a dilapidated and poorly marked strip mall.
** We were actually three hours away. Oops.

Vacation Recap Day 3 (Monday)

Everybody slept in until about 8:30 on day 3. This was important after the previous day’s minimal napping capped with a total three-child meltdown over dinner. Day 3 was to be more laid-back, featuring a simple trip to the zoo and maybe some take-out for supper.

A trip to the Kansas City Zoo was a shot in the dark. We knew nothing about it other than a) it’s a zoo, and b) children generally like zoos. We did know that Omaha has a world-class zoo a few hours away that was likely to sap much of the region’s zoo mojo (zoojo?). Why bother seeing rainforest animals roam in pens littered with local vegetation at your local zoo when you can drive a couple hours to see a grand indoor rainforest stuffed with native flora and fauna in a mechanically controlled environment plus a café overlooking it all?

The Kansas City Zoo wasn’t as nice as Omaha’s, but it was still good. It may have lagged behind Omaha in every possible area, but the animals were healthy and varied. They even tried hard to recreate an African nature reserve with signs in native languages and vast distances between animals to represent to enormity of the continent. It would have been more realistic without the cottonwoods everywhere, but it had its moments.

The best part about the zoo, and the area where it surpassed Omaha’s, was its preschool-age attractions. It had a series of structures designed to appeal to the youngest kids right inside the entrance so little ones could enjoy them without having to trek across the park. They had a zoo-themed playground where kids could learn about animals, jump around like animals, and climb a giant tree. They also had a two-story tall tube-slide, which I thought was a lot cooler before Abbie emerged from it backwards and screaming. They had a normal set of playground equipment nearby that you might find outside any well-funded preschool, which seemed a little out of place, but Abbie enjoyed it.

The best part was the lorikeet cage. The zoo invites groups of small children with parents inside at regular intervals to feed the birds from cups of nectar.


Abbie thought this was pretty cool, as you can tell from the above picture. Some other children didn’t enjoy the experience, like the girl right behind Abbie flailing in her mother’s arms. Ellie didn’t enjoy it as much with birds crawling all over her, and she enjoyed it a lot less when I informed her that a bird left a souvenir on her left shoulder.


The boys were a little young to get much out of the zoo, but they enjoyed getting out of their stroller. They seemed to like watching the giraffe at least as much as the giraffe seemed to like watching them.


I think Abbie’s favorite animals were the meerkats. The zoo had a cage with about a dozen of them scampering about the ground. She liked them so much she was willing to share her fish rattle with them.

The boys didn’t nap much at the zoo, proving we don’t learn our lessons well. They were ready to leave by the time we went back to the hotel in early afternoon. Everyone took a good nap, and we awoke feeling the need for dinner. Ellie found the phone number for a place coworkers recommended, Jack Stack Barbecue, and I bravely volunteered to bring it back for us. I don’t know much about Kansas City traffic patterns, but I do know that going downtown in any city at 5:30pm is generally a bad idea.

Fortunately MapQuest gave succinct directions from the hotel to the restaurant, and traffic was mostly headed in the opposite direction, so I reached the food with ease. Unfortunately once I had the food, I was now driving with the throngs of people desperate to leave downtown at the end of the workday, plus I had no idea how to get back to the interstate I took downtown. It seems that Kansas City doesn’t like letting people back on the interstate once they exit in downtown since the road that provided my exit didn’t have an entrance. I was able to drive parallel to the interstate for a couple miles until I found a valid entrance while, in an even more difficult task, resisted eating the source of the smoked goodness wafting through my car.

The return trip to the hotel took about twice as long as the initial trip, but it was worth it as the meat was fall-off-the-bone good, plus Ellie couldn’t finish hers so I picked up a couple extra ribs, and probably a little extra meat around my ribs. It was the best meal I had on vacation, which may not say much since every other meal was fast food or eaten in non-optimal conditions, but it was still good.

In blatant disregard of our childhood teachings, we went swimming after our heavy meal. Abbie again like jumping in and out of the pool while the boys floated about and tried to chew on each other’s floaties. We tried dipping Abbie under the water a few times, and she generally emerged without sputtering too badly. All three children hated leaving the pool, which made leaving a challenge as two adults tried to prevent three children of varying mobility levels from reentering the water.

Eventually we toweled off and returned to the room for bedtime. It was our last night in the hotel, and we needed to prepare for departure in the morning. We still had one more attraction to visit before returning home, though, so we needed our sleep.

Vacation Recap Day 3 (Monday)

Everybody slept in until about 8:30 on day 3. This was important after the previous day’s minimal napping capped with a total three-child meltdown over dinner. Day 3 was to be more laid-back, featuring a simple trip to the zoo and maybe some take-out for supper.

A trip to the Kansas City Zoo was a shot in the dark. We knew nothing about it other than a) it’s a zoo, and b) children generally like zoos. We did know that Omaha has a world-class zoo a few hours away that was likely to sap much of the region’s zoo mojo (zoojo?). Why bother seeing rainforest animals roam in pens littered with local vegetation at your local zoo when you can drive a couple hours to see a grand indoor rainforest stuffed with native flora and fauna in a mechanically controlled environment plus a café overlooking it all?

The Kansas City Zoo wasn’t as nice as Omaha’s, but it was still good. It may have lagged behind Omaha in every possible area, but the animals were healthy and varied. They even tried hard to recreate an African nature reserve with signs in native languages and vast distances between animals to represent to enormity of the continent. It would have been more realistic without the cottonwoods everywhere, but it had its moments.

The best part about the zoo, and the area where it surpassed Omaha’s, was its preschool-age attractions. It had a series of structures designed to appeal to the youngest kids right inside the entrance so little ones could enjoy them without having to trek across the park. They had a zoo-themed playground where kids could learn about animals, jump around like animals, and climb a giant tree. They also had a two-story tall tube-slide, which I thought was a lot cooler before Abbie emerged from it backwards and screaming. They had a normal set of playground equipment nearby that you might find outside any well-funded preschool, which seemed a little out of place, but Abbie enjoyed it.

The best part was the lorikeet cage. The zoo invites groups of small children with parents inside at regular intervals to feed the birds from cups of nectar.


Abbie thought this was pretty cool, as you can tell from the above picture. Some other children didn’t enjoy the experience, like the girl right behind Abbie flailing in her mother’s arms. Ellie didn’t enjoy it as much with birds crawling all over her, and she enjoyed it a lot less when I informed her that a bird left a souvenir on her left shoulder.


The boys were a little young to get much out of the zoo, but they enjoyed getting out of their stroller. They seemed to like watching the giraffe at least as much as the giraffe seemed to like watching them.


I think Abbie’s favorite animals were the meerkats. The zoo had a cage with about a dozen of them scampering about the ground. She liked them so much she was willing to share her fish rattle with them.

The boys didn’t nap much at the zoo, proving we don’t learn our lessons well. They were ready to leave by the time we went back to the hotel in early afternoon. Everyone took a good nap, and we awoke feeling the need for dinner. Ellie found the phone number for a place coworkers recommended, Jack Stack Barbecue, and I bravely volunteered to bring it back for us. I don’t know much about Kansas City traffic patterns, but I do know that going downtown in any city at 5:30pm is generally a bad idea.

Fortunately MapQuest gave succinct directions from the hotel to the restaurant, and traffic was mostly headed in the opposite direction, so I reached the food with ease. Unfortunately once I had the food, I was now driving with the throngs of people desperate to leave downtown at the end of the workday, plus I had no idea how to get back to the interstate I took downtown. It seems that Kansas City doesn’t like letting people back on the interstate once they exit in downtown since the road that provided my exit didn’t have an entrance. I was able to drive parallel to the interstate for a couple miles until I found a valid entrance while, in an even more difficult task, resisted eating the source of the smoked goodness wafting through my car.

The return trip to the hotel took about twice as long as the initial trip, but it was worth it as the meat was fall-off-the-bone good, plus Ellie couldn’t finish hers so I picked up a couple extra ribs, and probably a little extra meat around my ribs. It was the best meal I had on vacation, which may not say much since every other meal was fast food or eaten in non-optimal conditions, but it was still good.

In blatant disregard of our childhood teachings, we went swimming after our heavy meal. Abbie again like jumping in and out of the pool while the boys floated about and tried to chew on each other’s floaties. We tried dipping Abbie under the water a few times, and she generally emerged without sputtering too badly. All three children hated leaving the pool, which made leaving a challenge as two adults tried to prevent three children of varying mobility levels from reentering the water.

Eventually we toweled off and returned to the room for bedtime. It was our last night in the hotel, and we needed to prepare for departure in the morning. We still had one more attraction to visit before returning home, though, so we needed our sleep.

Vacation Recap Day 2 (Sunday)

We tried to schedule one activity per day on vacation. Yesterday we drove. On day 2, we went to the Chiefs-Bengals game. The game started at noon, and our hotel was about 10 miles from the stadium. Therefore to arrive in time to find our seats before kickoff, we needed to wake up, oh, about 6am.

It’s not like we’re insane fans who need to do something silly before going to the game like apply body paint, gas up the tailgating bus, or grill with charcoal. We needed to drop the kids off at a babysitter because there’s no conceivable way to take three small children to an NFL game. We’d spend the entire game juggling children, trying to make someone nap in an environment that prides itself on producing a noise level equivalent to a jet engine, and trying to quiet someone else while the offense was on the field.

We spent hour #1 preparing ourselves, showering, eating, and adorning red shirts. We spent hour #2 preparing the kids earlier than they’re used to waking up, but we figured it would be okay since they could sleep on the way to the babysitter. Hour #3 was spent driving to the babysitter.

Ellie has family in the Kansas City, MO, area that graciously agreed to watch our angels while we went to the football game. The only catch was we had to drive from our hotel, which was in the northern part of Kansas City, to their home, which was in Kansas. I thought they lived in a southern suburb of Kansas City, but it was actually more of a western suburb of Bucyrus, KS, pop. 1964. Their country home was 40 miles from our hotel, and while it wasn’t on a gravel road, the pavement did stop at their driveway.

We dropped off the kids, took a tour of their lovely home, helped everyone get settled in, and returned to the road two hours before kickoff. We wanted to tailgate in our own, lame, parents-of-three-small-children way, so we stopped for barbecue along the way. We parked the car an hour before kickoff, sat in folding chairs beneath the opened tailgate for protection from the rain, and munched on smoked pork cut in every conceivable fashion. For a brief moment, we were tailgaters.

The game was mostly a dud. The Chief offense was listless, the Bengal offense was methodically overpowering, and the fans insisted on doing the tomahawk chop. It was a two-touchdown game at half, but felt like a blowout. The highlight was a second-half downpour that soaked fans in the first 33 rows while we sat in dry comfort in row 36, protected by the overhang from the upper deck. Oh, and we got to watch what may be Trent Green’s last game. The final score was 23-10, though we left before the Chiefs’ only touchdown.

We returned to the kids to find them awake and in good spirits. The boys barely napped in our six-hour absence, and Abbie didn’t nap. We felt confident everyone would sleep for the entire car ride, so Ellie decided to make the ride a little longer by visiting Stephenson’s Restaurant, which was an extra 15 minutes past our hotel. This is Ellie’s favorite Kansas City area restaurant, and even though I wasn’t hungry after tailgating, I wanted to see what it was like.

Unfortunately, it was much nicer than I expected. I felt underdressed walking around in Chiefs paraphernalia, but felt better when some patrons asked us how the game went. More unfortunately, our children were not cooperative in this fine establishment despite sleeping for the entire drive. The boys screamed while I prepared their bottles, sucked them dry, and kept screaming. I hastily prepared an extra few ounces of formula with water from our drinking glasses, and that settled them into a dull murmur.

As bad as the boys were, Abbie was much worse, screaming most of the time she was in the dining room. The only things that quieted her were walks around the lobby and sippy cups full of complimentary cider. Our waitress put Abbie’s order in as soon as we arrived, but she even refused to eat most of it, pushing away the marshmallow fluff and the chicken strips. She was so upset that she could barely eat her fries.

While Ellie walked Abbie about the lobby and I sat with the boys barely keeping them content, I asked the waitress to bring us the rest of our food in boxes, and we’d return to the hotel. We were doubtlessly annoying the other patrons, and weren’t exactly enjoying our experience either. The waitress graciously complied. I felt so guilty I left an extra generous tip on the check. Ellie felt so guilty she bought a jug of cider and some seasonings from the lobby. I wish we had coordinated our guilt assuaging.

The kids all fell back asleep on the short drive back to the hotel. We returned in time to start the bedtime routine. It involved a lot of screaming, but all children fell asleep. I fell asleep shortly afterwards, comforted by the promise of a more laid-back day 3.

Vacation Recap Day 1 (Saturday)

Before leaving for vacation, Ellie and I made a pact to be loose with the schedule. She experienced many schedule-dominated vacations as a child, and was eager to escape the world of needing to leave early enough to eat breakfast in Illinois. My family was the opposite, taking the time to visit various wads of Americana before reaching the destination, which often infuriated me, especially when they forgot to tell me what the ultimate destination was.

We didn’t care when we left in the morning as long as it was early enough to put some miles on the road before stopping for lunch. This was supposed to be a vacation, or as close as we could get with three small children; there’s no sense in adding the pressure of an itinerary. I hoped for a 10am departure, Ellie hoped for 11am. We split the difference and pulled the Wagonqueen Family Truckster out of the driveway at 10:30, a time that provided an added bonus of being close to the boys’ scheduled naptime.

I was concerned about the probability of screaming during the drive. The last time I tried driving solo with them in the back on an extended journey, somebody screamed for most of the drive no matter how much I stopped for a break, tossed them toys, or begged them to fall asleep. A little more maturity on their part and a co-pilot to change the movie in the DVD player helped keep everyone content, as we made it to the noon lunch stop with minimal complaining.

We stopped at a McDonald’s. I had hoped they’d have a McPlayland so Abbie could McRun off some McEnergy while we were stopped, but no luck. Our interstate exit used to have a Burger King that I think had a playground, but the building was now ironically a candy store dispensing hyperactivity inducing-chocolate. Abbie had a kid’s meal, which I took as a bad sign that she was already eating a kid’s meal (with fries!) at our first stop. Afterward, she and the twins McRan around their outdoor seating, burning off McEnergy by dodging raindrops.

The rest of the drive to Kansas City went surprisingly calmly, and we pulled into our hotel around 3pm. The boys didn’t nap much in the car and Abbie didn’t nap at all, so our first family activity after checking in was to take a nap. I brought only the essentials up from the car* and set things up for a 4pm nap. The boys were exhausted, and screamed the obligatory exhausted screaming before falling asleep. Abbie was exhausted, looked at her inflatable bed, looked at mommy and daddy’s king-size bed, and moved all of her stuffies and blankies onto our bed, declaring it to be the place she would fall asleep. We were too tired to care, even though she managed to take up most of a king-sized bed with her 36-inch frame.

Supper was pizza for us, and, since she still has a conscientious objection to pizza, a second chicken nugget kid’s meal for Abbie. Afterwards we went swimming in the hotel’s indoor pool. Abbie spent most of her time running in and out of the pool. I wasn’t sure if she enjoyed it, but she spent the rest of the stay running up to the pool window and staring longingly every time we walked past it in the hotel lobby. The boys sat in floaties, and were content enough to not scream. At least they didn’t scream until close to bedtime when they couldn’t stay awake anymore.

I prepared everyone for bed as close to the home bedtime routine as possible. The boys got bedtime formula. Abbie got a bedtime vitamin and, since we forgot to get her some milk, a sippy cup of bedtime formula. That may sound morally wrong to give formula to a toddler, but she complained until she got a sippy cup, and didn’t complain while sucking down her three ounces of DHA, ARA, and lipils.

Finally we read and put everyone to bed, and I mean everyone. The went in their Pack ‘N Plays, Abbie went in her inflatable bed, and Ellie and I, unable to do anything else in the hotel room without waking the children, went to our bed. Abbie joined us a short time later, but it was early enough that I still had enough energy to pull out the room’s sofa sleeper, toss the inflatable bed to the side, and moved Abbie with her stuffies and blankies into the sleeper. We had to return her to the sleeper a few times, usually taking toys or forbidden objects from her, but she eventually fell asleep and stayed there, giving everyone a full night’s sleep for Day 2. We actually have a tight schedule for that day.

* Two Pack ‘N Plays, an inflatable bed, pillows, pacifiers, blankies, and stuffies. Oh, and three children.

Back Home

I'm too busy getting settled back in to write much, but I can leave this photographic evidence that the children enjoyed the zoo, or at least the aquarium.

Checking Out

I’m taking a break from blogging for a few days as we’re going on vacation. Here “vacation” refers to an extended weekend in Kansas City. This should be a big trip. It’s the longest trip the twins have ever taken, the first time the boys have been out of the state, and the first time any of our children will have been to Missouri. I expect we’ll make lots of memories, and I’m hoping they’re happy ones.

We’re going to visit the zoo, see some museums, eat out a lot, and otherwise lounge around a hotel room doing the same stuff we do at home, except someone else has to clean up after us. We’re also going to the Chiefs-Bengals game on Sunday. If you watch the game on TV, look for us; we’ll be the ones wearing red.

Herding Abbie

I can’t control Abbie; I can only hope to contain her. When we’re outside the home, she’s too good at going in her own direction, doing her own thing, finding someone else’s ball and calling it her own. If I’m not pushing a stroller while directing her, I can hold her hand or even carry her. I usually don’t have the luxury of a 2-to-3 adult-to-child ratio to help corral the kids, and Abbie is too good at squirming out of a one-handed grip, so I need to use some tricks to walk us to our destination quickly and safely, and I’ve already discovered that yelling doesn’t work.

Holding her hand also doesn’t work well. She is too talented at making a nuisance of herself when I hold her hand. She might stop cold, almost daring me to drag her by her feeble arm joints. She might twist, pry, and squirm out of my grip before running in the opposite direction. Her favorite tactic, though, is to turn around and walk backwards while I hold her hand. She does this partially to stare at and presumably enjoy a little more whatever it is I’m dragging her away from, usually the neighbor’s sidewalk chalk. Mostly she does this because she can’t walk backwards very fast, so I have to cut her some slack and let her move slowly. Sometimes I’ll even let go of her hand and walk ahead of her since I’m in a hurry, which allows to her run back to the sidewalk chalk.

If I’m serious about keeping her moving, I’ll put the palm of my hand to the back of her hand and push her along the way. I’d think it would be easy for her to escape my hand by spinning away like a defensive lineman or collapsing into a toddler tantrum ball, but she hasn’t discovered these tricks yet, possibly because she doesn’t pay attention when daddy turns on a football game. She just keeps moving in the direction I’m pushing her, all the while holding a facial expression that says I’m going to pay when she gets access to a credit card and a mall.

In certain situations I can use a prop. When we’re walking to and from the park, I use her bouncy ball to keep her by my side. Sometimes I can hold it out in front of her like a donkey chasing a carrot, and she’ll run all the way from the car to the swings. She’s smarter than a donkey, which I suppose is a good thing, so I usually have to work harder to move her where I want. Usually this involves bouncing the ball just in front of her as we move, though she can move fast enough to catch the ball, or at least inadvertently kick it under a parked car. Sometimes I’ll kick the ball and implore her to “go get it.” This works great for getting her into the park, except for when I shank it into the tree.

When we’re in the backyard, I can use the dog as the prop. Sometimes Abbie wanders too far from our house, and with the few hundred feet of fenced in shared backyard that’s not hard to do. When she does, I need to direct her back to the house, often while carrying a brother to keep him from eating backyard flora. The best way to do this is to command our dog, which’s never far from Abbie due to the frequent potential for dropped food, to go back to the house. When she takes off, I implore Abbie to “go get the dog.” She always starts chasing the dog on her way back to the house, giggling the whole way, and forgetting about the sidewalk chalk. It helps that our dog stops when she runs too far ahead, possibly because she’s waiting for us to catch up, but probably because she wants to be sure I’m serious about making her go back to the house.

When all else fails I can try yelling. It doesn’t make her move in the desired direction, but it at least helps me feel better.

Flipper

I used to sit down when I wanted to relax. I could turn on a game, grab an artery-impacting snack, and stare at the television motionless for upwards of 90 seconds before flipping to a different game to see if anything more pivotal is happening.

Nowadays when I sit on the couch, I’m immediately mauled by at least one child. Abbie is the most common perpetrator, probably because she has the best mobility and can reach me the quickest, though the boys are doubtlessly taking notes on their sister’s behavior as they search for things within arm’s reach to shove in their mouths.

Sometimes she bugs me to play the bounce game. That’s the one where she climbs into my lap, straddles me with her knees on the couch, and bounces up and down while I lean forward to protect sensitive anatomy from being crushed on the rebound. Inevitably I wrap my hands under her arms to support her, give her extra oomph on the way up, and soften the blow to my crotch on the way down.

Usually when she climbs into my lap she wants to flip. That’s where she straddles my lap as in the bounce game, grabs my hands for support, and leans back until she rolls off my knees and tumbles onto the floor landing feet-first. She then immediately climbs back into my lap generally giggling the entire time like a schoolgirl.

We discovered flipping while in a waiting room a couple months ago. The wait was longer than advertised, the boys were sleeping precariously, and Abbie had bounced off every wall in the room. Desperate for a way to keep her occupied that didn’t involve disturbing other parents or their infinitely better behaved children, I set her on my lap for the bounce game. She didn’t care for my lap, tried to squirm off, and wound up flipping onto the ground. She spent the rest of the wait flipping while I wondered how an office could be a half-hour behind schedule at 10am.

She still loves flipping, and I’m happy to flip her, especially during commercials. At least I was happy to flip her until a couple weeks ago. Recall the post about me worrying that I dislocated her wrist after grabbing it wrong. Despite her screaming, she didn’t suffer any serious injury, though apparently it weakened and has yet to heal. The last couple of flipping sessions have ended with her wrist popping in mid-flip. She then grabs her wrist and screams of agony from a pain that can only be soothed by Goldfish. Sesame Street helps, too.

I’ve tried modifying the flip by holding her higher on the arm, but something keeps popping, and she keeps collapsing in pain. Now I forbid her from flipping for her own good, but she keeps climbing into my lap, grabbing my hands, and slinking backwards. Sometimes I ease her down onto her head, which doesn’t discourage her as much as you might think. Sometimes I just give up and let her flip anyway. It’s endangering her joints, but she enjoys it so much and is so insistent that it can be worth risking a meltdown. Plus that’s the easiest way to get her off my lap when the game comes back from a commercial.

"I'm makin' waffles."

We took the kids out for brunch yesterday. I’m not a big brunch kind of guy; more of a three square meals punctuated by frequent snacks kind of guy. For this reason, we don’t do brunch very often, so I need a good reason to go out, like a fully stocked waffle bar on the brunch line.

Our good reason for going out was to meet with family members. With our family living three hours away from most of the rest of our families, we plotted to meet grandparents, great-grandparents, and a few other people that Ellie says we’re related to at a restaurant half way between us in rural Iowa. That way, relatives can see the kids without taxing anyone’s nap schedule too much.

I’m finally learning that leaving the house always takes longer than I think it will. I started prepping the kids an hour before our scheduled departure time of 10am, packing feeding paraphernalia, picking out suitable car entertainment, and frequently checking all three children for their inevitable morning poop. 15 minutes before departure, everything non-human going on the journey was in the car, every child had pooped, and I started loading children. Through my efforts, I put the car in reverse at precisely 10am. Not that we arrived on time since the drive took 15 minutes longer than we thought, but our lateness was small enough to blame on the kids, so everything worked out.

I thought the drive down would be a problem even though it fell during the boys’ naptime, but it went smoothly. The boys napped almost the entire drive, or at least sat quietly, while Abbie watched her DVDs. She complained periodically, but once we found her Sesame Street DVD, we had clear and quiet driving the rest of the way.

I’ve been to our targeted restaurant for brunch before. It’s a magical eatery that only appears in rural America. The seating is folding chairs around circular card tables covered with white linen. The wait staff is almost entirely kids from the local high school. The brunch buffet is magnificent with fresh carved ham and roast beef, salmon, eggs prepared in multiple styles, a dessert table filled with confections that could have come straight from the town church’s bake sale, and of course a waffle bar.

At least that’s the way it used to be. Now they have permanent seating, a full-time wait staff, and doughnuts that look like they came from the next town’s gas station. They also eliminated the “unch” part of the buffet, focusing on breakfast, so no more beef or desserts, and the ham is in hunks in a steam table. Sadly the waffle bar must have been too “unch” because it’s gone as well.

I didn’t have to worry about feeding the boys because we had relatives to care for them. I’m assuming they fed them because the boys disappeared soon after arrival in a flurry of aunt and grandmother hugs and kisses, and they seemed content when they reappeared shortly before departure. We scrounged up a meal for Abbie from the “br” line. I thought she’d pig out since they had some of her favorites like yogurt, papaya, and ham. Instead she treated the yogurt like finger paint, spit out the papaya, and threw the ham. I forgot that she turns into a picky eater* outside the home. She wasn’t even very interested in the fries, although in her defense they were waffle-cut. I think we snuck enough yogurt supplemented with the occasional chocolate milk into her to call it a meal.

We continued our family visit at a nearby park afterwards, allowing me to run off some ham, and Abbie to plain run. This being rural Iowa, everything on the playground was old and crafted with a metal motif. With the 10-foot tall slides and swings so high up that I had to jump to sit on them, it was decidedly non-toddler safe. They did have a well-oiled metal merry-go-round and large open spaces, so we found things to do while relatives fawned over how well behaved the children are after a meal, and how furious they can be as naptime approaches.

We left shortly after the boys hit meltdown in anticipation of their nap. I thought they might have trouble sleeping in the car, but again they slept or at least stayed quiet for the entire drive. Even Abbie napped.

We returned home in time for supper. I fed the children their normal meal. My meal was a few light foods scrounged from the fridge. I was still too full to eat a real meal, though if I were hungry, I probably would have made waffles.

* More so than normal.

H2Whoa

I heard a knock on the door the other day. Actually, it wasn’t the knock I heard, but the dog tearing through the house barking warnings on the chance that this might finally be an intruder or someone else generally meaning us harm like that guy who mows our backyard. It was one of the neighbor moms. She needed help carrying something into her home, and since her husband was at work, she looked to me for help. You’d think this would be a common occurrence since I’m the only male who’s home most weekdays, but fortunately for me there are apparently few heavy objects that desperately need moved during weekdays.

The boys were playing happily on the floor and Abbie was still finishing her lunch, so I had a couple minutes before a boy would fall and bonk his head or Abbie would give her sign for “all done,” which is throwing her remaining lunch onto the floor. I slipped outside to her car not knowing what was to be lifted. As soon as that Taurus trunk flipped open, I knew exactly what she had: A Banzai Falls Water Slide! It’s a ten-foot tall inflatable water slide, suitable for hours of fun and games until somebody gets hurt. We’d had our eye on one for a couple months, but opted against purchasing one since its durability was questionable, and it seemed immorally and possibly illegally dangerous to expose our young children to a product that combines pools of water with consciousness-drainingly high speeds.

But now the slide is clearanced. In fact, everything is clearanced at the nearby big box store. The good stuff won’t last long, though, because all the families with children who can actually get out during the day are buying it right now. I immediately called Ellie to inform her that we were going out that night on the closest thing we get to a date anymore: Buying heavily discounted merchandise.

We’d been waiting for to clearance their outdoor merchandise all summer. We’re moving into a house next spring, and now is the time to stock up on outdoor goods for our still unknown house. We need a swing set, and patio furniture, and a lawnmower, and a Banzai Falls Water Slide…

Unfortunately our family vehicle can only haul the water slide while the kids are in the car, a fact I didn’t realize until we were in the store and I noticed that my desired swing set was about as long as a Subaru.* We bought the water slide for Abbie’s birthday party in a year or two along with a few garden supplies, and went back home to put the kids down for the night. Then we recruited a neighbor to stay in the house with the kids and returned with our pickup.

Surprisingly, the store didn’t have a clerk in the outdoor department eager to help pull enormous heavily discounted merchandise off the shelves at 10pm. I had to ask at customer service for someone to help. After a minute, they pointed me to an associate. I calmly explained my situation, and quickly discovered he was deaf. Literally, he couldn’t hear a thing, and I couldn’t get him to understand what I needed.** Fortunately one of the nearby associates who explained to me that he was deaf was also able to help us pull merchandise in the outdoor department.

We didn’t buy as much as I anticipated that night. We bought a swing set, a longtime must-have for me, and an outdoor playhouse, which we didn’t know we needed until we saw its price was two-thirds off. They loaded everything into our truck, and we drove home to unload it. Fortunately one of the neighbor dads was around to help me unload our haul.

* Literally.
** If I needed help with a cat or a ball, I could have signed my need to him. None of the baby sign language materials I’ve seen have covered “patio furniture,” though.

Nine Months

The boys had their nine-month checkup the other day. This was the regular pediatric checkup that all kids endure, not one of the special preemie checkups that the everyone with an interest in the boys is trying to schedule; the NICU wants to be sure they’re developing properly after discharge, the school system wants to be sure they’re developing properly in anticipation of school, and the fast food industry that wants to employ them in 15 years wants to be sure they’ll be able to work the registers.

I learn a lot from these appointments. The first thing I learn is no matter how early we start getting ready to leave, it’s never early enough. I thought we were in good shape when the kids joined in three-part harmony a half-hour before I usually fetch them in the morning. An early start would let me take my time in the morning and avoid the rush I had planned of spoon-feeding the boys with one hand, pouring Abbie’s cereal with the other hand, and shoveling cereal into my mouth with, um, I guess a foot. Now I could enjoy breakfast, read a little newspaper, and maybe even fully chew my food before swallowing.

I dumped my bowl in the sink with 15 minutes to pack up the kids and walk out the door. 15 minutes later I had the boys packed up, and Abbie was on our front step getting her shoes on. I tied the final knot, checked my watch, and stood up in celebration. Then I noticed she had a poopy diaper. We wound up checking in five minutes late, but it was a good five minutes late because the room was empty and the staff was waiting for us, as opposed to the bad kind of five minutes late where they give your appointment to the people scheduled after you because they had the decency to show up early, probably because they’re one of those soft families with only one child.

The nurse ran the standard checks for temperature, chest sounds, and general baby-ness. Then she took their measurements, and found that both are up to 27-inches long. This was a surprise since Ian has been shorter than Tory since birth by a half- to full-inch. Even more surprising was her initial measurement that showed Tory as a half-inch shorter. She then carefully remeasured both of them to ensure that they had the correct size, or maybe she was appeasing the deranged father who couldn’t accept that Ian was now taller.

Next they moved onto the scale. Tory weighed a shade over 18.5 pounds, and Ian weighed a shade less than 16.5 pounds. This reflects the weight disparity that’s been present every since Tory found the good end of the amniotic fluid. Tory continues to grow well, although Ian’s weight is troublesome. We’re not worried there’s anything wrong Ian, he’s just going to have an isolated trip back to see the grandparents for the holidays if he doesn’t pack on enough pounds to turn his car seat forward-facing.

Finally the doctor arrived. He handed me a sheet of nine-month milestones that hadn’t changed in the 18 months since Abbie’s visit. The boys hit most of the milestones, though I had to call to one of them in the office to see if they respond to their names.* They hadn’t hit the waving milestone, but Abbie didn’t do that until she was 18-months, and her communication skills have … turned … out … never mind.

When the doctor plotted their growth curve, both are moving fine although Tory had surprisingly dropped a couple percentiles in weight. The doctor wasn’t concerned because his height had jumped a couple percentiles, meaning he was growing up not out. That must also mean that Ian is growing straight up since he caught Tory’s height.

As the doctor finished, I snuck in a question about Abbie. It turns out I can switch her to 1% or even skim milk. I was concerned because her growing up-to-out ratio seems a little low lately. Our next Abbie milk purchase will be 1%, and skim in a couple months when the boys start whole cow’s milk. That way I’ll only need to stock two kinds of milk in our fridge instead of keeping three kinds on tap. I have a feeling the boys are going to need to stay on whole milk for a while with their plummeting weight-percentile and insufficient size to sit forward-facing.

* Ian did. I didn’t try it with Tory, but yelling his name doesn’t seem to do much good when he’s sitting outside stuffing his face with grass.