Johnny Babcock's Revenge

I do believe I've mentioned something about W's rather intriguing past.

As a kid, he was quite the successful small-time con man. By 7, he had defrauded the Boy Scouts of America. By 9, he had rigged his school's science fair (and won). By 13, he'd enterprisingly cheated his school band out of hundreds of fundraising dollars.

At age 16, he pulled off his most daring swindle ever, here referred to as the Johnny Babcock Affair. The targets: his own parents. I won't go into too many details here, seeings as it's all rather involved, but this long con basically enabled him to get into all sorts of shenanigans, including driving from Las Vegas to Idaho to go and see some girls, all without his dear old Mom and Dad being any the wiser.

The core secret to his success in these (sometimes criminal) endeavors was simple. W realized, much younger than most, that grown ups are people, too. They are susceptible to flattery, hurt feelings, and misjudged pride.

Therefore, they are susceptible to manipulation.

Playing on their human-side, he used that knowledge for all it was worth to get himself out of trouble and into whatever monkey business he happened to have his eye on.

For years, I've worried this master ability for trouble making is genetic, but W always shrugs it off. Never kid a kidder, he says. You can't pull anything over on the man who pulled it all off, he says.

Bologna. And I've got proof.

Sure, Little Miss and Birdie are only getting into the regular pint-sized amount of trouble now, but that innate understanding adults' foibles is going to come back and bite us for sure.

It was a peaceful sort of morning. I'd just spent a half hour or so snuggling in with Birdie and reading her books while she sucked her thumb contentedly. I laid her down for her morning nap and blissed out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind me.

And there she was: Little Miss, sitting in a pile of squirted out shampoo. The empty bottles floated on top of an inch thick gob of the pink goop, all soaking into my brand new cream-colored carpet.

My nostrils flared. "Missy!" I roared. "What are you DOING?!"

Like any good toddler, she made a run for it. She bolted to her room and shut the door, leaving me to deal with the soapy mess.

She waited there until the sounds of the running sink and carpet cleaner shut off and I was done mopping up. Then, wide-eyed, she popped her head out.

She took a tentative step toward me and took a deep breath.

"You a good Mama," she said, drawing out the word for emphasis and nodding her head vigorously. Her voice was as sweet and thick as icing.

I paused, then snorted. I threw down my rag and held out my arms for a hug. She ran happily into them and gave me a quick squeeze.

"Love you, Mama," she whispered in my ear.

I smiled and rolled my eyes. "Oh, I love you too, Johnny."

Good Days

"Today's going to be a good day," I announced to Little Miss and Birdie over cereal this morning. "I can feel it."

Little Miss didn't bother to look up from her careful elimination of any non-marshmallow Lucky Charms in her cereal bowl, but Birdie gave me a sticky grin.

"That's right," I said, grinning back at my little Bird.

After all, we had things to do and places to go. I got a good night's sleep. My favorite shirt was washed and ready. Life was going to treat me right today.

We finished up breakfast, then did a half hour of Pilates. Little Miss tried to do the movements with me. Birdie helped make my workout more intense by sitting on my hips and making what I'm sure was meant to be encouraging noises. (Ever tried to do the Hundred while determinedly NOT laughing at a baby blowing bloopers on her hand?)

The girls ate some more peaches and bananas while I cleaned out the litter box in the garage. I came back into the dining room to find them having a competition to see who could dump the most food onto the floor.

Not a problem, I think cheerfully. I needed to clean that, anyway.

I change some diapers, play a few rounds of hide and seek, lay Birdie down for her morning nap, and am in the shower by 10. (Score!)

I hop out of the shower, grab a towel, and find Little Miss trying to paint the cat's toenails.

Save the cat, clean up the bathroom, and get Little Miss into some new clothes. Start the laundry. Do my makeup. Try something new with my hair, with some degree of success, and tug on a clean pair of jeans.

Forgot to cordon off Birdie's room. I realize it just in time to hear Little Miss open her sister's door and say, "Time to be awake now!" in the loudest tones possible.

Calm Birdie down. Change her out of her pajamas, pack a snack, and buckle everybody into the car.

We head for the grocery store, where Little Miss pushes around a miniature shopping cart next to my regular one and helpfully pulls things like cookies and Pop Tarts off the shelves.

Can't find the blasted peanut butter. Little Miss gets tired of walking and abandons her cart. Birdie starts crying.

Little Miss climbs onto the side of the cart and shouts, "Don't be sad! Be happy!" and starts making funny faces at her sister. Birdie stops sobbing just long enough to giggle.

Find the peanut butter. Finally.

Head for the checkout, only to be stuck behind a chatty old lady with lots to say to the cashier. Birdie starts to cry again. Finally get up to the register and check out.

Drive home. I get a little over-confident in just how much I can carry, and a bag splits. Jars of pickles and spaghetti sauce smash everywhere. Now the garage smells like vinegar and tomatoes. Super. I pick out the shards of glass and pickle spears and hose the rest down the driveway.

Nap time. Both girls go down fighting, but I win in the end.

Do a few chores, then catch a quick catnap before the girls wake up and we start playing, playing, playing.

W calls to say he's running late, which means I'm on my own for Birdie's bedtime. Finally get her settled in, then I turn on a little Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for Little Miss while I cook dinner.

Get shrieked at when I turn off Mickey after one episode and insist we do something else. Offer to play Little Miss' favorite matching game as a peace offering. It's accepted with a sniff.

Sigh.

W gets home. Little Miss sets the table, and insists on giving W a giant serving fork instead of a normal one because, "It's big like Daddy!"

After swallowing a few mouthfuls of pork chops and peas, W asks me, "So, how was you girl's day?"

First, I think of the messy floor, the terrorized cat, the smelly pickles, and the stupid peanut butter.

Then I think about hide and seek, two girls splashing in the bathtub, and hot showers before noon. I think of Birdie's bloopers. I think about how adorable Little Miss looked as she pushed around her shopping cart with a purse slung on her shoulder, just like Mama. I think of the sound of them making each other laugh in the backseat. I think of that giant fork on the table.

"You know? It was actually really, really good."

Failure

The trouble with being a full-time mom is that you really start to believe in what you're doing.

You see the importance of your job. You're glad you don't have to hand over your kid to some daycare worker on days when they're sick or scared or feeling a little extra shy, to be looked after by four or five adults in a room full of other children. You count it as an enormous blessing that you have the opportunity to be the one to bandage boo-boos and listen to half-hysterical explanations of how Bunny was accidentally left in the car. You're lucky, really, to be one of the few who get to read the same wordy story about the Little Blue Engine over and over and over and over again to your kids every single day, because it means you're the one who's there for your kids, every single day.

So you try to do it all-out, giving every day every ounce of your energy. You put all of your brainpower and emotional control into being patient and careful and loving. You work on being protective without being a hellicopter, teaching without taking away their own unique style. You try, and you try, and you try.

And sometimes, unlike that Little Blue Engine, you fail.

And because you believe in what you are doing, because you think it's the most important thing you'll ever do, because you love the funny little people you are doing it for so fiercely that you would do anything, ANYTHING, to succeed for them--

Well...failing sucks.

Birdie has been inconsolable lately, and I don't know why. She is normally such an intensely joyful little person that I honestly don't get it.

She isn't wet. She isn't hungry. She isn't teething. She isn't sick.

I try feeding her. She doesn't want it. I try feeding her something else. She only gets more frustrated.

She screams when I lay her down for naps. Maybe she's ready to give one of them up. I cut out the morning nap.

Definitely NOT ready to give up the morning nap.

I change diaper brands, thinking maybe the old kind was scratching her. She cries. I try bringing around her Mimi (a blanket, for those not fluent in Birdian) with her everywhere we go. She calms down for a minute, then cries again.

Little Miss went through this, too. Am I crazy? Am I that horrible at understanding what my kids need? Am I just such a lousy mom that my children end up shrieking in fury at my incompetency?

I know no one is perfect. I know that lots of kids probably go through this. I know that. Of course I do. But it's like changing diapers or cleaning up vomit or wiping noses--it's different when it's your kid. When you've devoted your life to them, any failure, big or small, feels crushing.

The worst part is that I feel so ridiculously helpless. Here's my beautiful baby girl, screaming like someone is stabbing her, and I can't do a darn thing.

I tried for an hour tonight to get Birdie to eat something before bedtime. She'd barely touched any food all day, and I didn't want her to be hungry. That's a reasonable thing for a mom to want, right? She wasn't interested in eating, though. She was only interested in sobbing.

Finally, I did the only thing left I could think of and laid her down in her crib. I gave her a kiss, closed the door behind me, and went into our bedroom and did a little sobbing of my own. Then, I knelt down and prayed.

And the answer?

You're doing a good job. Just keep trying, trying, trying, trying, trying.

The Trouble with Delays

Here's the deal.

I promised you good stuff when we got back online. I promised you regaling tales of Christmas. I promised you the oh-so tragically funny story of our holiday trip to the E.R. I promised tales of sibling manipulation.

But now, here I am, a new computer on my lap (thank you, Apple!) and I've kind of moved on already. Like holly wreaths and kitschy Santa dolls and strings of colored twinkle lights, Christmas stories have an expiration date. By the time December is over, I'm always ready to tuck them back up in the attic (or throw them out the window) and take my life back, already.

So, I would like to propose a compromise. Rather than a full blown blog post on each of the above topics, I'll tell you the short version of the best one. Then, we can all move on to other exciting topics, like world debt and my masochistic refusal to go to bed early.

Christmas at the E.R.
Every year on Christmas Eve, we get all gussied up in our nicest clothes and have a fancy dinner. Then, before opening up our new Christmas pajamas, we have a dance. Now, none of us are dancers. None of us are even close to being dancers. It's sort of an occupational hazard of growing up tall and lanky with huge noggins. It's sort of like putting a grape on the end of a toothpick and expecting it to dance the rumba. We're not exactly a graceful bunch.

That's OK, though, since the dance is just for us. We skip and stand on toes and pretend to tango and are generally as silly as can be. I'm sure we all look like idiots, but that's sort of the fun of it.

So there we were, dancing a rather overly-enthusiastic conga around the dining room table, when Little Miss tried a little pirouette and wound up slipping and cracking her chin on our new hardwood floor.

Thus ended the festivities. One ruined party dress, one blood stained Daddy-shirt, and a tearful trip to the emergency room later, we had a stitched up chin and a lesson learned: grapes don't make for very good Ginger Rogers'.

To Be Continued...

Yep. I'm still alive.

My computer, not so much.

I'm typing this now on a borrowed laptop--a laptop I need to return to its rightful owner all too soon. My computer--my poor, lovely computer--has succumbed to some tech disease or another and is refusing to even so much as turn on. It sits there, it's computer screen black with mourning, bemoaning the blogs that might have been.

And oh--the stories are good. You'll see, once I get around to telling them. They're totally worth checking back soon. Sibling manipulation. The E.R. on Christmas Eve. It's good stuff, I tell you. Good stuff.

But until then, there may have to be radio (or blogger) silence, since my only options are typing on my iPod touch or prying W's work computer from his stiff, workaholic fingers. (Love you, honey! Love your laptop, too! Thanks for soloing the whole bringing-home-the-bacon bit!) Neither option ends pretty.

And so, I'm off to the Apple Store. Cross your fingers for me. Toes, too, if you're able. And then send me a picture, 'cause that'd be a trick you don't see every day.