Hunger pains.

I’ve often watched my patient, calm, friends lose it with their kids and frankly, there are few things I enjoy watching more. Me, if I can make it to seven pm without going hoarse and/or dismembering a child, I feel like the Great American Hero. But the patient mothers, they don’t let anything ruffle them. Until they do, and then that’s something remarkable to behold. Watching a zen-master-mother threaten to snap her toddler in two like a stick of linguine is far more fun that watching a yeller like me… yell.

I did a lot of yelling today. Some days are long enough, but forgetting to eat until four p.m. takes a day from long to interminable.

When I finally sat down to eat, Francie, who had just eaten, materialized.

“Oooh! Yum.” She said. “Can I have that?”

I told her to bugger off in the best way I knew how, but she wouldn’t relent. “Come on, just one bite? A teensy bite?”

“Francie,” I said. “I  haven’t eaten a thing all day. Do  you want me to die? Because if I don’t eat, I will surely die right before you.” My access to the Jewish Mother Trove of Guilt is nothing if not remarkable. “Let me finish this snack (which, I should note, you don’t even like but only want because I am eating it) and then, should the Almighty let me live, I’ll happily give you something to eat.”

Pause.

“You know,” she said. “The human can go for days without food.”

“That’s right,” chimed in Efram. (Where do these kids come from? I don’t hear them enter, they just appear.) “Like that woman in Bangladesh. What was it? Two weeks?”

“Three!” announced Bennett.

I was getting nowhere fast. I tried to eat quickly but I knew better than to fight it. I pushed my half-finished snack in front of Francie. “Eat up, kid.” I said.

I went in the kitchen to fix myself a cocktail.

I figured I was safe. There are laws against sharing those.

Bombs Away…

Took the boys for much-needed haircuts last week. Haircuts are especially necessary because they are the one time I know that some form of soap goes near their heads. I used to insist on shampoo every day because it trickles down and I was therefore guaranteed that their faces and hands would touch soap daily. But they’ve started locking me out of the bathroom; I can guarantee nothing. Recently, a mother of one of Efram’s friends told me that my sweet boy has been boasting that the secret behind his no-fail mohawk is the fact that he hasn’t used shampoo in three weeks. Apparently dirty hair does more tricks.

Here he is getting his head cleaned.

This is the same boy who recently developed a foot infection because he’d been wearing the same pair of socks for anywhere between eleven and sixteen days. By the time I found the socks, they were so revolting I could have cracked them in half. Lucky socks aren’t all that lucky if they give you leprosy. (He thinks I am sending him to sleep-away camp for two weeks but the boy is a walking infection; how am I supposed to do that?)

The one downside to haircuts is that the place we go is attached to a toy store. It’s actually in back of a toy store, so you can’t avoid the toys. Whoever isn’t getting a haircut bombards me with requests to buy all sorts of things in which I have no interest in buying.

Like these:

XL fart bombs? How much less offensive are the medium ones? And why, oh why, would a mother buy a six pack?

Bennett assured me that he’d only used them outdoors (I’m not as dumb as I look), and told me that buying six of them was a great deal. Luckily for me, the toy store closed before the haircuts were done. So, we left the place with clean heads, and fart-bomb free.

For now.

Mother.

M has been working in the coupon space for a while now, and I thought I’d gotten used to him bringing his work home with him. One Friday evening I was feeling particularly fed up (there’s a special kind of fed up-ness that is unique to Friday evenings in this  house), and I asked for 20 minutes alone, without the kids. There were hours left in my parenting day and I wasn’t sure I could handle another minute if I didn’t escape. I holed up in the bedroom and closed my eyes, if only for a few moments. Seconds later he appears at the door.

“Please tell me this is important. Please tell me one of the kids is on the roof, or just made a smoothie without the lid. Please.”

“Um,” he says.

“M!” I yell. “I now have 17 minutes until I need to be back downstairs with those children of yours. Please share whatever earth shattering news you have, and then let me rest!”

“I see you bought some toothbrushes.” He motions at a pack of 700 toothbrushes I picked up earlier in the day. “Did you buy them on Amazon, because they have a coupon deal right now…”

I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence because I threw the 700 toothbrushes at his head and he quickly left.

Apparently there is a deal on paper towels at the moment, because every day this week, one of these has shown up at my house:

When the UPS man came on Friday, he was chuckling. He just shook his head and dropped the box. I believe I am now in possession of 700 rolls of paper towel as well. Apparently we paid fifty cents for all 700 of them. Please don’t ask me what sort of how-will-I-move-with-this panic this has sent me into. I envision an entire moving van full of paper towels.

This morning, Bennett brought up breakfast on a tray. In addition to a card, he had made me some coupons. One was for breakfast in bed, one was for a nap, and one was for this:

Like father, like son?

Happy mother’s day to me, and to all of you.

Squeeze this.

We just dismantled the final baby gate. It used to live right here:

We have had one of these for as long as we can remember. We don’t really need it anymore. More often than not, it served, as do most things in this house, as a place to put stuff.  So it was usually draped with jackets, wet towels, odd socks and the like. Now we are jettisoning it.

Last week, while I was coming to terms with the passing of the baby era, I was watching a basketball game with the boys. Actually, they were watching the NFL draft. I’ve made a lot of progress. I am now capable of watching and following all sorts of sporting events. I even have a vague clue of what is going on in a football game, which for a boorish sport is remarkably hard to follow. But watching this draft was a test. I suppose it’s like C-Span for sports nuts, but I think even that sounds sexier than the reality of it all.

When the draft was over I blinked and they were watching the end of a basketball game. I believe it was the LA Clippers. There wasn’t much time left on the clock, but I know better than to be fooled by that trick. Eighteen minutes on the clock = six hours of TV.

“Please let us stay up and watched the end!” they begged.

“Ok,” I yielded. “As long as you do something for me,” I said, looking right at Bennett.

“Anything!” he cried.

“Let me pop that.” I said, pointing to the tiny little blackhead that had been perched next to his nose, among a smattering of freckles, for a few weeks. I’d been stalking that blackhead, but he’d refused to let me anywhere near it.

Playing with your own skin is only so much fun, and M doesn’t let me anywhere near his blemishes any more. (Truth be told the man’s blemishes are few and far between. You can add good skin to the list of Geller genetic advantages.) Once I gave him a facial when we were in grad school. He was sitting on the edge of the bathtub as I applied a mask to his face. I think it was after I’d exfoliated but before I did any extractions.

“You do realize I’m not one of your girlfriends, don’t you?” he asked. (At that point I figured it wasn’t worth mentioning the Jane Austen movie marathon I’d planned for us.)

Anyway, I don’t need his random spots anymore. Because Bennett traded his for 20 minutes of an NBA playoff game. And it was awesome. I showed the boys my results and they were sufficiently grossed out/impressed, confirming my suspicion that I may actually have a 10 year old boy lurking within me.

I know that more blackheads are a few years away. But if I’m going to be leaving one era behind me, at least I can be jazzed about the next one.

Bring on the spots.

And bunny makes six (if you don’t count the hamster).

Before I got pregnant with Francie we had a bunny. His name was Louis and although I loved him, his life was short and filled with illness. Before I got pregnant with Fiona we had a guinea pig. His name was Lumpy, and although he was an ugly bugger, he had a full, rich life, and even ended his days shacked up with another guinea pig named Trixie, which is a skanky stripper name, even for a small animal. There have been turtles and hamsters and I can’t remember what I came home with before Sidney, but if I am feeling broody, before I do anything real about it, we get a pet.

Meet Bun-Bun:

While she may not be heralding any new human additions, she does satisfy my need for baby talk. When we picked her up at the pound, her name was ‘Twilight,’ but I wasn’t having any of that. I went through a list of brownish items and Bennett liked ‘Latte,’ but that’s hardly a name, so I starting calling her ‘Lotte,’ which you pronounce “Lottie” — as in the singer Lottie Lenya, who absolutely nobody seems to have heard of other than me. (One day I will update my cultural references, I promise.)  But nobody really took to that, so we followed Sidney’s lead, and she calls her ‘Bun-bun.’

It’s not a particularly dignified name. But neither is eating while you crap, and Bun-bun likes to nibble on fresh hay while she sits in her litter box.

Here is her hutch, which M built with help from the kids.

It stills surprises me to be married to someone who can build things. M was the first Jew I’d ever met who knows the names of all the things in the toolbox, not to mention the different kind of screwdrivers. It doesn’t seem quite kosher to me to use phrases like “two by fours” and “I’ll sodder it later,” but M tells me that Jesus was probably a carpenter and was Jew-ish. Frankly, I find that hard to believe. I think his mother was pushing him to medical school and the carpenter thing was just a phase he went through to piss her off.

And now we are eight… well, nine if you count the hamster.

What’s in YOUR pull-up?

Although Sidney is slowly transitioning from a crib to a bed, the shift is not yet fully complete. Still, the repercussions are being felt by all of us. I used to have the three girls in one room. But now, Sidney has moved in to the bottom bunk that Fiona used to occupy, Fiona moved to the top bunk, and Francie has moved into what used to be the office. She is now the only person in the family to have her own room. I don’t think she loves sleeping alone, but she does like keeping her stuff away from her younger sisters. (She has boxes of treasures: dessicated lollipops from birthday parties she attended years ago, balls of tangled string, random shiny things she’s found around the house. I swear she is part squirrel.) And M and I no longer have an office. The diminution of adult space in my house is a topic for another today, and is rather thesis worthy in its depth and scope… which just means I can’t get my head around it now.

It also means that Sidney is free to roam. In particular, she’s free to roam and mess with Fiona’s treasure stash. Over the weekend I was up before the kids. I was reading the paper on the couch when Fiona walked out of her room. When my kids wake up they do not lie or loll about in bed. The second their eyes open, the bolt out of bed as if something is chasing them. So she was still half asleep and quite wobbly. I immediately noticed a large bulge in the front of her pull-up.

Holy shit, I thought. All this talk of penises and she’s finally gone and grown one. It’s like a Grimm tale gone very, very wrong.

“Um, Fi.” I said nervously. “Can you tell me what’s in your pull-up?” She hazily looked at me, looked down, and then stuck her hands down the front.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s just gum.” And she plucked out a couple of packs of gum she’d been hoarding. “I wanted to make sure Sidney didn’t get it.”

So, to be clear: in order to keep her (stale) gum stash safe from her two year old sister, she slept with it in her pull-up.

This got me thinking. Perhaps I should follow Fiona’s lead. There are certainly a few things in the house I don’t want to the kids to see. Now that they are all free to roam, and now that my “personal space” has been relegated to a desk in the hall outside of my bedroom, and a small corner of Francie’s bedroom, maybe I ought to gather those items and sleep with them shoved down my underwear.

It’s certainly a thought.

Pimp My Crib

M’s first cousin and one of my very favorite people on the entire planet was in town for 22 short hours.

Before she arrived last night, I told the boys: “Listen guys, let me tell you something about the ladies. We like to make our friends jealous. We like it a lot. And what I really want more than anything else is for cousin H to go back to London and say to her own little boys, ‘You won’t believe how well behaved Bennett and Efram are. If only you two would behave half as well as your American cousins. I’m well and truly ashamed of you.’”

I let this thought sit with them for a minute. And then Efram piped up: “But she’ll know better. She’ll know the truth about us. She reads your blog.”

Fair enough.

No amount of cajoling or begging could get Sidney to behave for our visiting dignitary. She, like 3/4 of our other kids, has climbed out of her crib and has started to wreak havoc at bedtime. Last night, forty-five minutes after bedtime, I found her hiding underneath Fiona’s bed. I half expected to find a bottle of vodka in the hand that wasn’t clutching her blanky and bunny. I wish I had the kind of kids that stayed in cribs, kids that saw the crib walls as legitimate boundaries. (I remember finding a two year old Efram perched on the top edge of the crib, his toes curled over the side, arms outstretched, like a wild-eyed surfer.)  I thought longingly about those chickens and wished that I could do what I did with them each night to keep out predators, and close a top over her crib, with a carabiner to seal the deal. Instead, I find myself keeping her up until she can barely stand, and then putting her to sleep when she’s too tired to mount a defense and scale a wall.

What this means is that when the crib goes this weekend, and is replaced by a bed, that we will be crib-less for the first time in over eleven years. Not only have we always had a crib, but there were times when we even had two cribs going on. The crazy thing is that it’s all been so unceremonious. When Bennett moved out of our bed at four months and into a crib in our bedroom, I cried. When he moved into his own room a few months later, I climbed into the crib with him to keep him company. I knew it was crazy at the time, I knew I was behaving like some whacked-out attachment freak, but I think I may have actually been one. And now, little Sidney who goes on playdates without me, is moving into a bed, and none of us even really notice.

When I tried to get her out from under Fi’s bed last night, she looked out at me, her eyes shining like a cat’s in the dark, and said (as she likes to do): “Get your butt out of here right now.” (She says that so much we have set it to music. Sing it to the last line of “You Are My Sunshine.”)

And so I did. I got my butt right out of there and let her make her own way to bed. Blanky, bunny, vodka, and all.

PS: I am still compiling a list of people favorite’s blog entries. If you have any favorites, please let me know!