Acting

(Scene: Abbie just pushed Tory face-first into a kitchen cabinet.)

Daddy: Do you need a time-out?
Abbie: Time-out?
Daddy: Do you need a time-out?
Abbie: Time-out?
Daddy: Do you need a time-out?
Abbie: Time-out.

(I sit Abbie in the time-out chair. She screams in horror at this unexpected occurrence.)

Playing Nice

Abbie made a friend at the mall playground tonight. Abbie and this slightly older redheaded girl played together for the better part of a half-hour. They hugged. They laughed. They ran around the place holding hands. Best of all, Abbie never screamed or tried to run out of the playground.

After we drug her out of the playground screaming, we asked her about her friend. Yes, they had fun she told us. She said they rode the crocodile, which is true. They spent much time sitting on top of a crocodile slide and laughing, possibly because they were preventing any other children from enjoying it. We asked for her friend’s name, and she told us. We couldn’t understand what she said, but she at least had an answer.

Until recently, most of her peer-to-peer interaction has involved stealing toys and finding uninhabited corners to play. It’s good to see her playing with others. Now if only she’d play with her brothers as nicely.

24-Month Check-up

The boys had their 24-month check-up today.

Ian’s Vitals: 32-inches tall. 25.5 pounds.
Tory’s Vitals: 33-inches tall. 28.5 pounds.
% fat in their milk from now on: 0
# of shots for each boy: 0
# of finger pricks for each boy’s lead test: 1
Time until their next check-up: 1 year.

A New Record

You know those adorable Baby’s First Christmas ornaments? Those precious ornaments given to a baby for the first Christmas? The ones that are supposed to go up on the tree throughout childhood as a yearly reminder of those cherished first months? And when the child leaves home and has children, that ornament will spark a continuing tradition as the new parents give Baby’s First Ornaments to their children, and so on?

Abbie had one of those ornaments. It had Winnie the Pooh and Piglet stacking blocks that read “BABY.” Abbie broke it. Several times. On the first full day it was out.

Silver Bells, Red Candy Canes, and Giant Inflatable Penguins

Our Christmas lights are now mostly outside the house. We’re slowly adding to the collection as episodes as Dora provide babysitting.

Our walkway is lined with snowman solar lights. They look good during the day while they charge, and fantastic when the sun goes down and they illuminate an exquisite crackled glass globe at the base of each light. They look pretty crummy an hour after dusk when they’ve lost their charge and they all go dark.

We have a giant inflatable penguin. He was impressive until I tripped over one of the stakes keeping him attached to the ground, ripping the cord from his body. Now he’s a lifeless lump of fabric until I figure out how to reattach his stake.

I outlined a bit of our landscaping with a rope light. That adds class, plus it’ll help illuminate the giant inflatable penguin when he’s back up.

We have candy cane lights lining a front wall. Those look neat, although they’re floppy. They’re held into the ground by a stake on their base, and it turns out that stakes on a flimsy plastic candy cane are really hard to push into the ground when the ground freezes around the holiday season.

Our centerpiece is the 20-foot evergreen in our front yard that we lighted using a ladder, a long pole, and a lot of curse words. The kids noticed it the first night we turned on the lights.



They all took turns running up to the window. When Abbie saw the lights, she named the color pattern. “Red, green, orange, blue, red, green, orange, blue, red…” That tree was hard to decorate this year, and it’s only going to get harder when it becomes a 25-foot tree, and then a 30-foot tree, and so on. Hopefully by then the kids will be able to entertain themselves while mommy and daddy fiddle with the lights, or at least able to watch an entire Disney movie to give a little time to work.

I Hope You Enjoyed Your Present

This is the beautiful Elmo cake mommy baked for the boys’ birthday. She did a great job. I always take a picture of her cakes as soon as she finishes decorating them.


This is the reason why I take a photo of mommy’s cakes as soon as she finishes decorating them. It’s a little disturbing that Ian went right after Elmo’s pupils.

Turkey Day

We're out of town for Thanksgivng. No updates for a few days.

I'm Old

Today was a beautiful mid-November day in Iowa. After a morning fog burned off, the sun shone strong all day, pushing the temperature near 70. Cold and maybe snow is in the forecast, so this is our last chance to take advantage of the warmth for weeks, possibly months.

The kids enjoyed the day by spending the afternoon playing outside on their play set. I enjoyed the day by hanging four loads of laundry outside to dry. I like to think mine was the richer experience, or at least the one that saved us money by not running the dryer.

Dysfunctional Family Dinner

I envision a day when everyone sits down for dinner as a family. Mommy and daddy engage in witty yet educational conversation, while the children sit quietly and add the occasional comment demonstrating their academic acumen. The children eat cleanly and politely, and help clean the table after the meal. The children spend the rest of the evening playing brain-boosting games while the adults tend to the minutiae of keeping a house running. As long as I’m dreaming, I also envision a money tree in the backyard, and a colony of magic elves taking up residence under the floorboards to help clean the house.

Obviously we have a long way to go before realizing my dream dinner. Right now, I’m happy when I finish eating my meal and cleaning the kitchen before the second episode of Dora ends. It’s a bonus if the kids eat a measurable percentage of the food I place in front of them.

I’m tackling things one at a time. The kids deserve credit for eating cleanly. They used to eat meals without shirts, but Abbie has developed a sense of modesty that coincides with her rise in ability to wield a spoon. She insists on wearing a shirt while eating, and she mostly keeps it clean, except when eating something like chili, but that’s so inherently messy it doesn’t count. Tory also does an admirable job staying clean in spite of his limited months of experience. Almost all of his yogurt goes into his mouth. He could eat with a shirt, but he enjoys eating au natural, and I enjoy avoiding the danger of shirt-ruining stains. As for Ian, we love him no matter what.

Now that they seem able to avoid the accidental messes, they need to stop committing the intentional messes. Instead of announcing, “all done” at the end of the meal, Abbie still prefers the throw her dishes method. As soon as she’s done eating, her dishes go on the floor, regardless of the amount of food still on those dishes, or how frantically I’m screaming at her to not throw her dishes. I keep explaining to her that she should simply say “all done” when she’s done, and she keeps demonstrating to me that she’d rather just throw her dishes. The boys, unwilling or unable to see why they should be more responsible than their sister, also throw their dishes when they’re done.

I’m trying a couple things to encourage Abbie to not throw her dishes. If she throws her dishes, I may leave her strapped into her booster seat until I’m good and ready to release her. It may teach her a lesson, and it’s not like she can make a bigger mess with nothing left in front of her. I also make her pick up the dishes and bring them to the sink after she throws them. The idea is to teach her the consequences of her actions, but she picks up her dishes just as happily as she throws them. The lesson of not throwing dishes doesn’t sink in, but she does seem to enjoy hunting down and depositing dishes. I can no longer keep a glass of water within her reach because she will dump it in the sink. That forces me to grab a new glass of water, but at least I can count it as helping to clean the table after the meal.

"To learn more about our developmental products for babies and toddlers..."

We have a DVD player in the car. We mostly use it for long car trips, but it also comes in handy during those trips around town that only feel like they take forever.

We fired up the DVD player today between stops #2 and #3 on the chore route today. Before the feature presentation started, Abbie recited the disclaimer that appeared as the voice-over read along. It may be time to change the disc in the player.

Something We Forgot to Cover

A question you don’t want to hear when the babysitter calls:

“Where do you keep the Lysol spray?”

Good Rules ... for Me to Poop on

Abbie already knows the important rules concerning poop. "Do not touch poop." "Do not play with poop." After watching our dog in action tonight after Ian removed his diaper, she came up with another rule: "Do not eat poop."

North vs South

It’s exciting watching the boys grow and seeing their personalities emerge. Despite their status as twins, I can see they’re different people. Tory is assertive. Ian is more laid back, more willing to take whatever life hands him, more willing to go limp until his sister quits sitting on him.

I can clearly see this difference at the dinner table. Ian will sit anywhere, accept anything on his tray, and sit quietly until he notices that his siblings can escape their chair by screaming. Ian doesn’t eat everything on his tray, or even much of anything, but at least I can trust him to not be the first child to throw a fit at mealtime.

By contrast, Tory has cultivated some quirks at mealtime. It started with his chair position. We have a rectangular dinner table, and I’ve always put Abbie at the head on the east side of the table. There she can set a good example for her brothers, demonstrating how to use a spoon, how to ask for seconds, and how to best throw a plate to grab my attention. The boys’ chairs are on the north and south side. I rotate the boys between these chairs to keep their view moving, and to help them develop individual personalities, specifically the personality traits that come from not knowing exactly where you’ll sit before each meal. Plus I wanted to avoid favoritism because lord knows children can find a reason why one chair is better than the others.

In retrospect, that seemed a little silly. Children thrive on routine, and probably want to sit in the same chair for every meal. Tory tried reminding me of his preference for a routine by walking to the south chair before every meal. I switched him a few times, forcing him to sit in the north chair.

Tory rewarded my efforts to be fair by throwing mealtime tantrums. He would kick, scream, and thrash inconsolably in his chair. These tantrums continued until all his food on the floor, and he’d spent several minutes in room as punishment. I didn’t connect the dots immediately, but eventually I realized that every time he threw a mealtime tantrum, he was sitting in the north chair. I’ve now given up, and started sitting the boys in the same chair for every meal. Until Ian complains, that’s the way it’ll stay.

After a few days, though, Tory resumed throwing his mealtime tantrums. Instead of screaming as soon as I sat him, he screamed as soon as I put the tray in front of him. I dug in, knowing he should be happy in that seat, and let him scream it out. He continued screaming, and asserted his food all over the floor, resulting in the inevitable punishment. After a few meals of this havoc, I noticed that he liked picking off his tray while it sat on the table during my run-around-the-kitchen-cleaning-the-food-before-they-throw-it phase of mealtime.

At the next meal I sat his tray on the table, and let him stand in an adult chair while he picked his entire meal off his tray. He uttered no complaints, and hopped down when done, saving me the trouble of releasing him from his high chair. So it was a win-win all around. I still trying sitting him at meals, but I give up and let him stand as soon as he complains and before he has a chance to launch his plate at me. He’s been watching Abbie, and knows that throwing it in the middle of the floor is the best place to get my attention. Now that Tory has asserted his mealtime preferences, I just need Ian to somehow tell me what sort of food I could place on his tray that he’d eat.

What Do My Favorite Glass Baking Dish and My Internet Connection Have in Common?

We have child locks on all of our kitchen cabinets. These are essential equipment in our house to keep our children out of our kitchen paraphernalia. Without these locks, the kids will throw plastic storage containers all over the house, store our plastic mixing bowls with their toys, and literally beat our pots and pans like a drum. With these locks in place, the doors stay shut, the equipment stays put away, and the kids stay in the hunt for something to play with.

Unlike the baby gate that the boys can already climb over, I know these cabinet locks will remain useful for as long as I need them because they’re almost impossible for an adult to open. To open, a user must push and hold a button on the front and a button on the side while simultaneously pulling on the locking strap. This maneuver needs the dexterity and size of adult hands, or the possession of a third hand, so these locks should hold until the kids start cooperating to open them.

The problem with these locks is I don’t want to put forth the effort to open them unless necessary. In my mind, putting away freshly washed dishes falls short of the “necessary” plateau. I can just stack them on the countertop above the cabinet, which is above the kids’ grasp, and put them away the next time I open the cabinet to pull out a dish. Of course this leads to many dishes being stacked on the countertop, and since I can just pluck a clean dish from the countertop when needed, I wind up rarely opening the cabinet to put anything away.

As of yesterday, my favorite glass baking dish had sat on the countertop for a week. As a parent of three small children, I rarely bake so I had no reason to use it. I didn’t need to put it away either since it was out of the way and out of mind. So there it sat, mostly forgotten, waiting for one of my bi-monthly cleaning urges when I open the cabinets for the express purpose of storing all those collected dishes.


The countertop is at least four feet off the ground, well outside the reach of my children when they’re standing on the floor. Unfortunately, my children know how to drag a chair to the countertop to extend their reach. That’s how Tory was exploring the countertop yesterday, standing on a chair, searching for soda pop cans, fallen food crumbs, shiny objects, or anything else that catches his interest.

Whatever caught his interest yesterday also caught the baking dish. He grabbed something, pulled it toward him, and knocked the dish off the countertop. I was dimly aware that he was standing on a chair at the time; I considered his action to be more “annoying” than “dangerous,” so I stayed focused on keeping the house running. I became very aware of his actions when I heard the glass dish shatter on the floor.

This is (was) a large dish that shattered into many pieces varying in size from “foot slicer” to “foot embedder.” As my children refuse to wear any foot coverings, I immediately banished everyone to their rooms while I spent too many minutes cleaning every last grain of glass.

No one was hurt in the incident. The dish was destroyed, but the important thing was everyone’s feet were intact. It gave me an interesting story to tell, which I meant to share earlier, but my Internet connection has been broken for the past couple of days. If I don’t post again soon, just assume my Internet connection is down. Either that, or the kids found something really big to break and I don’t have time to post after cleaning it.

I'm Going to Be a Magician

Tory removed his diaper this afternoon. That’s nothing unusual. He’d already removed his diaper twice in the morning. What was unusual about the afternoon removal was that he removed his diaper in spite of the onesie I threw on him after the previous diaper removals.

Leaf That Alone

It’s getting harder to do chores with the kids around. If I need to take a break while doing dishes, such as to pull something or someone out of a child’s mouth, I have to pull my dish gloves off my hands, make sure my stacks of clean and dirty dishes won’t topple without me standing next to them for support, find the naughty child, remove the object, and walk back to the sink to return to my gloves and dishes while hoping no one got into any forbidden objects in the kitchen during my absence.

This afternoon I had the kids in the backyard during another suspiciously warm autumn day. My chore was to rake leaves. The kids’ chore was to have fun, but ideally don’t touch any of my stuff. I gave them a toy rake to move leaves, and left them a section of the yard to play. They could pile leaves, spread leaves, eat leaves, or whatever they wanted to do as long as they stayed outside and didn’t bite anybody.

I raked a little section of the yard, filled a yard waste bag, and moved to another section. With a sufficient pile underfoot, I returned to my starting point to grab another yard waste bag. When I turned around I discovered that the boys had grabbed that first yard waste bag, dumped its entire contents on the ground, and were gleefully spreading its leaves about the yard.

I’m almost to the point of playing with the kids whenever they’re awake and doing chores while they sleep. Doing so would be more parentally satisfying, and certainly a more efficient use of my chore energy. If only the kids would sleep 20 hours a day again so I could finish my daily chore list.

Woke Under a Bad Sign

The boys were tired today. They were miserable, cranky, screaming, inconsolable, whining, seemingly-ready-to-collapse-from-exhaustion-at-any-second-but-too-furious-to-let-go tired. And that was at about 9:00 this morning. Imagine what happened when naptime rolled around six hours later.

"This is my room, and this is my dresser. It's where I keep my shirts when I'm not wearing them."

The dresser in the boys’ room wasn’t working out. Their ever-growing clothes were bursting out of it. The once solid seams were falling apart from months of abuse at the hands of toddlers. The boys had discovered how to tip it onto each other. It was time for us to part ways.

This dresser was crafted of particle board so it wasn’t a huge loss beyond the fact that its big box store receipt wasn’t old enough to yellow yet. We would have trouble finding something to replace it, though. I didn’t want to waste money on a nice dresser the boys would destroy in a few more months. Mommy didn’t want to buy some cheap, top heavy contraption that could fall on them.* Mommy spent many days searching the stores and the Internet for a dresser that was wide and short to minimize the chances of the boys tipping it, and cheap to minimize the chances of me freaking out.

We discovered the solution one night in a big box store. It was a storage system made of wire racks. It formed a series of cubbyholes in about 18-inches cubes. We bought two of them, and set them on the floor of their room in a configuration three cubes wide by two cubes tall. We also bought several baskets to hold their clothes and slide into the cubbyholes. The entire purchase cost about the same as the dresser that was now gathering dust in our basement, so it met my cheapness criteria. The systems were also wide and lightweight, so if the boys did manage to tip them onto each other it would cause no more damage than the fall they take off their riding car several times a day. As a bonus, these contraptions are flimsy and held together with tension at the seams, so if/when the boys break them we can easily fix them.

We’ve been using this system for several days now, and so far it meets our initial criteria. They’ve pulled the wire racks apart several times, and we’ve quickly restored them to their cubbyhole glory. They haven’t discovered how to tip them yet, and we appreciate that feature. Indeed, the contraptions are so flimsy that their rarely used self-preservation instincts kick in and suggest that climbing the racks is a bad idea.

This clothes storage system would be perfect except for one thing: We can’t keep clothes in it. Those boxes meant to hold clothes are too alluring for the boys to ignore. They pull the boxes off the shelves, and throw the fabric treasures they contain throughout the room. Sometimes they want to play with the clothes. Sometimes they want an empty box to play with, climbing inside, hiding inside, or just finding creative ways to abuse their seams.

The result is most of their clothes are now on the floor. Their room is a giant mess, but we’ve achieved our dual objectives in finding a new clothing storage system. Dumping all their clothes on the floor is free, and there’s nothing for them to tip onto each other. Now the only danger is someone getting hurt playing King of the Mountain on a clothes pile.

* This cheap vs. safe dynamic mirrors many parental battles we have.

Do You See Swiper?

"Swiper, no swiping. That sneaky fox, he’s always trying to steal our pop.”
-Abbie’s reaction to her brothers trying to steal a can of soda pop from her, a can that she had just stolen off the countertop.

Uh oh

Today Tory reached the most terrifying milestone imaginable this side of a driver’s license. Tory can now crawl over the baby gate. This baby gate goes across the top of the stairway and keeps our children on the upper, childproofed level. The lower level is home to breakables, pretties, and our bedroom as the last bastion of our identities as adults. May heaven help us.

I made this discovery when Abbie returned home from preschool. After walking outside to help Abbie off the bus and into the house, I found Tory wandering the lower level. I could’ve swore that I shut the gate as I walked him back up the stairs. At the top, I discovered the gate was indeed shut. I assumed it was an oversight on my part, that maybe Tory had walked downstairs while the gate was open and I had missed him on the stairs as a result of my critical sleep deficit.

I walked back downstairs to help Abbie remove her coat and backpack after school. I also needed to return several pretties to their rightful location after she’d spent the past 90 seconds touching everything on the lower level with a speed that Santa Claus would covet. When I saw Tory toddling down the stairs a minute later, I knew I had trouble.

With everyone back on the upper level, I watched my children roam free in hopes that I would figure out what was happeing. In between keeping Abbie out of the cupboards and pulling Ian off the furniture, I saw Tory climb the gate. Our gate is made from sturdy white plastic and attached to the wall. Its surface is filled with holes to let air, sound, and light pass from room to room. Those holes are the perfect size for a toddler to grab a toe-hold on his way up the gate. He can apparently climb this gate by using these holes for balance, and then somehow fling himself over the top to the other side of the gate where he can gently climb down to the stairway instead of tumbling down the stairs like I always envision him doing.

I spent the rest of the day watching him closely, and scolding him deeply whenever he approached the gate. By this evening, he had stopped trying to climb the gate, apparently getting the message that he should never, ever, ever climb the gate without making sure that daddy isn’t paying attention. I need to keep him on the upper level for the health of my child, my sanity, and my pretties.

Fall Back Girl

I awoke this morning to the sound of Abbie giggling away in her room. Her normal wake time is 7:30. My alarm clock said 7:10. I hadn’t set my clock back yet, so it was really 6:10. This was after we kept Abbie up late last night.

Before kids, I loved Fall Back Day for the extra hour of sleep it afforded me. Today, I spent Fall Back Day morning wondering how I was going to stay awake an extra hour before naptime.

Fool Me Once

Abbie pulled a gallon of milk from the refrigerator today. This could’ve turned into a bad situation if she had yanked the lid off the top and spilled milk into our kitchen’s various hard to reach nooks. That’s why I try to keep the refrigerator locked. Sometimes I forget to lock it, though, and Abbie has a talent for taking advantage of my forgetfulness by pulling the door open every time.

Fortunately, Abbie was well behaved this time. She handed the jug to me, and said, “I want milk, please.”

I’m trying to encourage her to use regular cups at mealtime again. I give her a tiny splash of milk in a regular cup so if she accidentally or otherwise spills her milk, the damage will be minimal. My intention is to refill her cup every time she empties it the right way, but she rarely drinks it all. The result is she drinks almost no milk at mealtime, so when she asks for milk between meals, I usually oblige. I give it to her in a sippy cup in these between meal snacks, which may explain why she drinks almost no milk at mealtime.

The problem today was she pulled the boys’ whole milk with the red cap from the refrigerator. I explained to her that this was her brothers’ milk, and I would be happy to give her a drink of her skim milk with the pink cap. I poured her a sippy cup of skim milk and offered it to her.

Abbie shook her head no. “I want the red milk, please.”

I explained that that milk was for her brothers, but she wouldn’t listen. She wanted the red milk, and was too smart to settle for anything less.

I pulled the red jug of milk out of the refrigerator in full view of her. I set the sippy cup full of skim milk on the counter, and removed the lid. I then tipped the jug of whole milk over the cup, tilting the spout toward the cup’s opening until the whole milk almost poured out. I returned the lid to the cup and the milk jug to the refrigerator, and offered Abbie the cup of “red” milk. She happily drank it.

I’m still smarter than she is.

SicknessUpdate

It’s autumn. The weather is changing. The leaves are falling. The airways are filling with mucus.

The family is sick. Mommy’s illness peaked a few days ago with a fever and aches. She plugged through her workdays until she reached a couple days off at midweek. After spending those off days sleeping in and napping more than the kids, she’s rejuvenated and ready to return to the soul-crushing grind of the gainfully employed.

I’ve been dealing with a slow march of random symptoms. Yesterday my nose was running. Today I have a cough. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll have morning sickness with a touch of gout. I don’t have anything major enough to slow me down or even convince me to go to sleep at a decent hour; I just keep plugging away at parenting keeping the children close and a box of tissues closer.

Abbie has been snotty for most of this week, and I’m not just referring to her attitude.* The neon green snot streamers have flowed from her nose for a few days now. I checked her preschool handbook for guidelines on when to keep children home from school. If they have a fever, nausea, diarrhea, some highly contagious disease like pinkeye, or generally feel rotten we should keep them home. Since Abbie didn’t seem highly contagious and her spirit was no more rotten than usual, I sent her to school this week. We both could benefit from a day of her learning outside the house. Plus I figured she probably picked up her bug at preschool anyway.

The boys are probably/hopefully moving into the latter stages of their illness. It started in their noses with a lot of sneezing and snotting. The snot has slowed to lo-flo status out their noses, but it’s now probably draining down the back of their throats. The result is a nasty cough that’s threatening to turn into a bark.

Mommy listened to the boys’ lungs and pronounced them healthy.** This eliminated any of the nastier childhood diseases and sent us into a waiting game until their sinuses cleared. There’s little else we can do besides give them medicines that don’t really do anything besides make the parents feel better.

We’ve debated hard to determine which useless medicine to give them. We originally settled on diphenhydramine to help us feel like we’re helping clear their sinuses. Diphenhydramine doesn’t even claim to help a cough, though, so we found a cough suppressant to help quiet them. Hopefully it’ll help their cough so they can sleep better. Even if it doesn’t, I’ll sleep better feeling like I did something to help them.

* This is the 25th time I’ve used that line in this blog. I feel like one of those many onlookers who see me in public with three small children and, feeling compelled to say something but unsure of what exactly to say, tells me “you’ve got your hands full.”
** A couple of mommy’s advantages are a) she has a stethoscope, and b) she knows how to use it.