Weasel Of Doom

Today was our parent-teacher meeting at OldestOne’s school. I am always slightly terrified of the meetings (“What if the teachers hate my kid? What if the teachers hate me? What if my kid is an unholy terror? What if I say something stupid? What if Husband says something stupid? What if everything is going horribly wrong?” – you get the idea), and far, they have always went well. Still, I continue to freak out, because deep down I am sure that the day I have no fears about meeting my kids teachers will be the day when the midden hits the windmill (thank you, Terry Pratchett, for this lovely turn of phrase).

OldestOne has been blessed with lovely teachers; this years’ crop is no exception. They are nice, caring, and seem genuinely invested in helping OldestOne achieve his highest potential. They also don’t seem to think that Husband and I are too weird, which we appreciate.

The meeting went well. OldestOne is making good progress in his academic and social skills; he functions best one-on-one or in a small group; we need to work more on getting him to use appropriate tone of voice (he likes to get loud), and on listening and following directions. We also saw the daily schedule in pictures thingie that they use to help OldestOne navigate his day; I am seriously thinking of adapting it for home use with all three kids.

The best part of these meetings are the stories the teachers tell about OldestOne. The winner, from his Special Ed teacher: OldestOne was not listening and following directions, so she was giving him a spiel about it (not for the first time). OldestOne, not in the mood for a lecture, waived his hands in front of her face and intoned, “You are getting sleepy! You are getting sleepy!”

The runner up: Seeing that OldestOne added arms and legs to the different shapes he had to draw.

On Saturday, DemonChild sat down to watch a movie with HisMelness, BelovedSpouse, and Squeektar. Squeektar got to choose the movie.

[DemonChild, unhappy with his younger brother's choice, muttering]
“Fucking movie”

[BelovedSpouse, unable to believe his ears]
“What did you just say???”

[DemonChild, still muttering]
“Fucking movie”

[me, happily]
“I never used the word ‘fucking’ with the word ‘movie’ ;-)”

[BelovedSpouse, after giving DemonChild a timeout]
“I might have said it the other day, when I was very frustrated”

[me]
“For the foreseeable future, you are picking the kids up at daycare, because I don’t want to explain that one ;-)”

I just find it highly amusing that DemonChild picked up something BelovedSpouse said, and not me. For the record, I am the one with the potty mouth, so I would have expected my kid’s first swear phrase to be “fucking Tom” or “fucking Development” :P

P.S. I was planning to post this yesterday, but fell asleep, so the answer to “NaBloPoMo or bust!” is a resounding “bust.”

Whenever ChairmanMao starts crying, Squeektar pipes in with “Baby is crying! He is hungry! He wants boobies! With milk!”

This one is from a few months back, when Squeek discovered the difference between the sexes: “[Squeektar] has a penis. [DemonChild] has a penis. Papa has a penis. Mommy has a penis?” After being assured that Mommy does not have a penis (but knows where to get one when she needs it), he goes right down the line with “Grandma has a penis?” We got to have this discussion every day for at least a month.

Demonchild to BelovedSpouse, yesterday: “Papa, go away and talk to Mommy!” (Now where is that attitude when we want them to leave us alone? Nowhere to be found, that’s where.)

DemonChild, after farting: “[DemonChild] puknul!” (“puknul” means “farted” in Russian, and is about the only Russian word he remembers). This is followed by five minutes of giggling. Oh, the joys of life with boys.

DemonChild, a week or so ago: “Mommy, I want some nookie!” Me: “You are way to young for that! Maybe in 15 years or so….” BelovedSpouse: “And hopefully never from Mommy, because that’s just wrong!”

Squeektar, during “Meet Your Teacher Night” at daycare. As I sit down next to him, he grabs my boobs, looks at me adoringly, and announces to the whole room, “Nipples! Nipples! Nipples!”

DemonChild, getting into the car on Friday: “I have blue eyes!”
Me: “Yes, you do! What color is Squeektar’s eyes?”
DemonChild (after double-checking): “Blue!”
Me: “What color are Mommy’s eyes?”
DemonChild: “Blue!” Long thoughtful pause. “I don’t LIKE blue eyes! I want BROWN eyes!”

DemonChild had a few firsts lately:

- first shower

- first peeing standing up

- first “accident” at night (he was distressed over it, poor thing)

Last weekend, when I put on my sun dress, he said, “Mommy princess!” I don’t think he has seen me in a skirt before. Today I wore my maternity skirt to work (gotta love limited clothing choices), and he called me princess again. Guess the standards on who qualifies as a princess have been drastically lowered lately.

He loves watching “Tom & Jerry.” We have a 4 DVD collection that my parents brought from Russia. DemonChild would request “Cat & Mouse,” “Cat & Dog,” “Cat on Fire,” “Mouse Pulling Whiskers” (last two from the episode selection screen). While watching, he would gleefully scream “Fred Windy!” Took me a while to figure out that “Fred Windy” is Fred Quimby, the producer (for some reason, in the Russian voiceover, they always say who the producer is. For every single cartoon, we get to hear that Hanna and Barbera were directors, Fred Quimby the producer, and whoever the composer happened to be). Mystery solved.

DemonChild is talking more. We are still not at the point of having conversations, but he is making full sentences on occasion, like “I am SuperDemonChild!”, “Papa drives a minivan!”, “Go away, Squeektar, I am trying to sleep!”, and “I don’t LIKE [whatever it is he is currently not liking; recent objects of derision include his bed, his pillow, and the bath]!”

For Father’s Day, BelovedSpouse took DemonChild to see “Kung Fu Panda.” It was little guy’s first theatre-going experience. According to BelovedSpouse, good time was had by all, and DemonChild only fell asleep for a little bit at the end.

Last Friday morning, I was wondering why it was taking BelovedSpouse forever to get ready, and walked upstairs to discover DemonChild buck-naked and eyeing the shower with anticipation. On Saturday, Squeektar also decided to try that new shower thing, but he wanted Mommy to join in, too. Our tiny shower stall is not big enough, so I had to make an executive decision — “Everybody with a penis, into the shower. Mommy is going to enjoy some peace and quiet.” Squeekinator did not like the shower, so he was out in a minute. DemonChild, on the other hand, now prefers taking a shower to taking a bath.

Squeektar has developed a fondness for the word NO. Both boys also say “Allright” instead of “Yes” – very cute. Squeekinator likes: cars, buses, building with megablocks, reading books, splashing in the water, sitting on Mommy’s head, snuggling. He dislikes: tags on his shirts, waiting more than 5 seconds for whatever it is he wants, being ignored, not being allowed to do things.

Number3 is right on target and head down. He/she enjoys sitting on my bladder, finding painful places to shove at, and going into stealth mode whenever anybody else is trying to feel it move. Our 32 weeks appt is on Thursday. I can’t believe how fast time is going! Need to find out if there is an antidepressant I can take while breastfeeding.

Work is work. Hopefully we will find out who our new fearless leader will be soon, seeing as the current fearless leader is leaving at the end of the month for greener and less stressful pastures which will hopefully suit his personality better. My immediate boss is still an annoying pain. He lost all the power and influence he had a few months ago, and that is not sitting well with him. He does not realize it’s all totally self-inflicted, either. Not a bad guy, just really inept as a manager. In some ways, it would have been easier if he was a total jerk as a person, too.

I am doing OK. Tired a lot (and anemic, too, as we discovered at my last OBGYN appt; need to stop forgetting taking my iron pills; at least I managed to pass the gestational diabetes test somehow.). For a few days, hormones were overcoming the antidepressant, and that was NOT fun. Doing better now. Same old, same old, basically.

My apologies for such a boring post. I miss having a brain, but I strongly suspect my brain does not miss having me.

DemonChild (from the back seat):

“No hitting Keith…… That’s not nice!….. No pushing Tyler…… No hitting Keith!…… No hitting Tyler…. No hitting Keith…. That’s very bad… No hitting Keith….”

Me (taking a stab at parenting):

“Have you been hitting Keith?”

DemonChild (after a long silence, sounding undecided):

“Noooooooooooooooo….”

Me (deciding to play it safe since, after all, we have not had any complaints from daycare):

“You are right. We don’t hit people. Hitting is not nice!”

DemonChild (thoughtfully):

“No hitting Keith….. No pushing Tyler…. No hitting Keith…..”

Squeeker (not to be left out of the conversation):

“Wah wah papa wah wah snow bah bah mama”

EDITED TO ADD:

I am not worried that DemonChild is beating the crap out of poor Keith :-) DemonChild is the runt of the litter in that room, and Keith can stand up for himself. Not to mention that DemonChild’s modus operandi for dealing with adversity is throwing himself on the floor, weeping, wailing, and bashing head on wall for emphasis rather than, you know, actually smacking somebody to get a toy back.

DemonChild also has a habit of repeating sentences that weren’t necessarily addressed to him. “No pooping in the tub!” is one such favorite, told often and with grave emphasis. He has NOT ONCE pooped in the tub. That dubious honor goes to Squeektar.

So there are three possibilities to the whole “no hitting” thing:

(1) Keith is the one doing the hitting, and DemonChild is omitting a crucial comma in his recital (“No hitting, Keith!”)
(2) Keith gets hit a lot, so an imprecation to stop hitting him is heard often (“No hitting Keith!”)
(3) DemonChild was told not to hit Keith. (“No hitting Keith, DemonChild! That’s not nice!”)

Knowing the players involved, (1) or (2) are a lot more likely than (3). I may ask his teachers, just in case, but as I said above, not too worried about it.

[me:] “DemonChild, do you need to go potty?”
[DemonChild:] “No.”
[me:] “OK, Mommy is going to run upstairs and get some laundry quick.”

60 seconds go by. I am coming down the stairs with the laundry. On the edge of the living room carpet, there is a grinning Squeeker, holding the potty. In the background, DemonChild is frantically pulling up his pants.

[Squeeker:] WHEEEEEE!

Squeeker triumphantly wields the potty. Pee splatters all over the tile. As I am frantically trying to mop it up, the happy duo toodles off to the bathroom, and closes the door behind them.

Two minutes later. Disturbing sounds of happiness from the bathroom, accompanied by some splashing. I charge in just in time to see Squeeker attempting to bail water out of the toilet with the potty. DemonChild is laughing his skinny ass off. The only one not amused is Mommy.

….

For the record, they never pull this crap when their dad is around. I feel special, and not in a good way :-)

DemonChild, the child who for almost three years never complained about clothes we put him in, the child who demands pajamas to be put on,who insists on his coat being zipped up and his hat being on, lately developed an aversion to pants.

Almost every morning, he either protests the appearance of pants loudly, or scream “pants off, pants off” as the trousers of doom are being forced onto his skinny legs and non-existent butt. Recently I switched him to 2T pants, because 18 mo ones were getting too short in the leg and the waist. The 2Ts fit better, except when they fall off DemonChild if left belt-less, or are so baggy that both his legs fit into one pant leg, thus opening exciting possibilities of stuffing two children at once into a single pair of pants. Fortunately for all involved, Squeeker is way too short and squirmy for me to actually try the experiment.

BelovedSpouse, sucker that he is, actually lets DemonChild pick out clothes in the morning. DemonChild, however, is truly my child in that if confronted with more than one choice, he freaks out and either (a) keeps rejecting everything or (b) wants everything at once. So it is not uncommon for the brown pants that were the only ones he would consider when Daddy dressed him to become the anathema of the trouser world five minutes later. To avoid these problems, I don’t give DemonChild a choice, unless he is well and truly freaked out by an item of clothing (such as an unexplainable aversion to a very nice Hawaiian button down short-sleeved shirt, or truly cute shorts overalls with a handyman theme, two only such cases before the current pants hate). It’s a good thing we don’t have any 2T skirts around, because I am sure he WOULD wear those to daycare without complaint :-)

Squeeker is going through the sucky sleep stage when he wakes up screaming in his crib and does not calm down until he is in bed with us. (Amazingly, DemonChild sleeps through all the shrieking. I guess he has developed an immunity after going through the same thing himself a while back.) The suckiness is compounded by the fact that Shriektar has a cold (but not, as daycare thought, a case of pink eye as well. So he is going back tomorrow, with a note that says he is pink-eye-free. At the pediatricians office, the nurse joked about him possibly having a case of pink nose, and put “daycare” as reason for the visit, because certainly BelovedSpouse and I would not have taken him in otherwise. Love our daycare, even though they are occasionally a bit paranoid. Love our pediatrician’s office, too, for their nice doctors and extended hours on week nights.) and so he coughs himself awake and it sounds like he is trying to cough up a hairball, or possibly throw up. So far so good, though, we’ve been only getting the sound effects, and not the actual throwing-up.

At any rate, for the last week or so Squeeker has been sleeping with us. Wouldn’t be a bad thing, except he keeps trying to crawl away and explore in the middle of the night, necessitating very light sleep from me, so that I can catch him before he makes a head-first dive off the bed. Also, when he is awake and ready to play, he head-butts unsuspecting sleeping us in the face, which is extremely painful, and not conducive to being loving parents.

Because we often don’t latch the gate after screaming Squeeker removal, sometimes DemonChild wanders in to join us. The other night, I was dreaming we had a dog who was touching me on the hand with its wet nose, only to wake up and realize it was DemonChild’s cold nose. He was snuggling to my hand in preparation to climbing in. Good thing we have a king-size bed, I guess ;P

What’s really surprising is that it had taken this long.

It’s around 5 pm, I am half-asleep on the couch, Alan and his daughter are playing videogames on the PS2, BelovedSpouse is watching the kids and cooking dinner. Kids are roaming around the first floor. Kids get suspiciously quiet. After a brief search, kids are located in the bathroom, giving Squeektar’s hat and DemonChild’s “monkey” (knitted Easter egg) a bath in the toilet bowl. Water everywhere.

BelovedSpouse: “DemonChild, stay RIGHT THERE! Wife, get the camera and take a picture.” So we have photographic evidence. Then BelovedSpouse and I told the kids exactly what we thought about their bathroom activities. BelovedSpouse cleaned up the floor, then the boys got an early bath.

Here’s hoping dunking things into the toilet won’t become their new favorite activity. Little miscreants :-)

(overheard this morning, as BelovedSpouse is getting the kids ready to go to daycare): “NO, Squeeker, NO! This is DemonChild’s poopy, DemonChild gets to flush it!”

Squeeker got a bonus birthday party – Rachel stopped by with her two boys today, and much fun was had. DemonChild and Brycen ran around like the two almost-three-year-old maniacs they are, and Squeeker alternated between joining the big boys and taking advantage of Caden’s not-yet-ambulatory stage to steal his toys. And of course, nobody wanted to take a nap, so by the end of the festivities we had some pretty tired babies. Squeeker finally fell asleep on our way to Target around 5:30 p.m. DemonChild took an hour long nap as soon as we were gone.

Unfortunately, we noticed that one of Squeeker’s eyes was getting a little gunky just as as the impromptu party started. It was just a little bit of gunk at first. However, then the gunk production ramped up. By the time we left for Target, the eye was a lot gunky. By the time I stopped at Office Max on the way home, both eyes were gunky. Poor little guy.

So now we have a one-year-old with two gunky eyes who has been sleeping on and off since 5:30 pm, which quite possibly spells a very sucky night for us, and a two-and-three-fourths year old who stayed up until 1 am on Friday, 10 pm or so on Saturday, and is now lazying around in the swing watching BelovedSpouse play Sly Cooper on the PS2.

And I have to drive back to the laundromat and check how the kids clothes are drying. One of these days, we need to either fix our broken dryer, or buy a new one. The dryer has been broken for a couple of months now. *sigh* I miss drying clothes in the privacy of my home.

Oh, and if any of the kids who came to Squeeker’s party are going to come down with gunky eyes, I am going to feel so guilty. And they will know exactly whom to blame, too.

Squeeker crawled up the stairs all the way to the second floor today. Parental house has the living room and kitchen downstairs, master bedroom and guest bedroom on the second floor, and a craft/relaxation/place-to-hang-clothes-to-dry-out-after-washing room on the third floor. Both boys are beginning to get bored with the downstairs, I suspect.

DemonChild now routinely goes into my room on the pretense of looking for Mommy, and then proceeds to play under the bed, unique little snowflake that he is. Whole colonies of innocent dust bunnies have been wiped out. Attempts to put stickers on floors, TV, and windowsills have been made. Furniture that ought not to be climbed upon was scaled. Things were used for purposes they were not meant for. Plants were endangered, and mattresses trampled. Downstairs, DemonChild managed to get almost all the way into the fireplace. Parental units shoo-ed him out before I could take a picture, alas. I am hoping to convince them to give him another opportunity for a photo moment.

Squeeker makes a beeline for the fireplace any chance he has. If thwarted, he heads to the opposite wall and uses the glass shelves for the dvd player and vcr to pull up, another thing he is not supposed to do, mainly because we worry he will slip and hurt himself on the glass. He not so much crawls as runs around on all fours, very quickly, and takes every opportunity to skitter towards places he should avoid as soon as our attention wanders for a few seconds.

The other day at the park, DemonChild walked quite a ways away from Dad. When captured, he had a fat juicy worm in his hand. “I checked, and it did not look like DemonChild had a chance to take a bite out of it,” reports my father. Some things, I just don’t want to know :-)

On Tuesday, Dad drove me and the boys to the Gulf of Finland. We did not have an auspicious start to our adventure – DemonChild fell asleep in the car, and upon being transferred into the stroller said, “спать!” (Russian for “sleep!”) and proceeded to nap for another half an hour. Squeeker started crying as soon as we got to the beach. Then we woke up DemonChild, and neither of them wanted to enjoy the nice sunshine and sand. I finally dragged DemonChild into the surf, which he loved and had a great time with. Half an hour later, he was “All done.” Back under the beach umbrella, Squeeker found a rock he could love, and finally stopped fussing. DemonChild ran around for a while, picked up and discarded unholy amounts of garbage, then crawled into the front seat of the stroller and informed us that it was “time to go home.” I had no idea he knew the sentence!

Sleep continues to be a problem. It took over an hour to get DemonChild to fall asleep tonight. From 9:30 to 11 pm, my work was punctuated by ear-piercing shrieks at random intervals. Hopefully, he will at least sleep in, instead of waking up at 5:30 like the last time. My poor parents are going to be in a zombie-like state by the time we have to leave, if this keeps up.

DemonChild got a new haircut.

[Aside to beloved spouse: You ask, "Who’s idea was it to cut DemonChilds hair and what was the excuse they used? :-)" That would have been my parents. You, I believe, uttered, "they can cut his hair if they want to" before we left. Well, they wanted to. *grins*]

I stayed home with Squeeker, while Mom and Dad took DemonChild to the special kid’s hair-cut place. They took along our portable DVD player to entertain DemonChild (who at home would not let us do much to his hair). At the salon, they had three hairdressers, toys, TV playing cartoons, etc. Even a live turtle. I am told DemonChild sat through the haircut absorbed in “Lilo and Stitch”, but after the haircut was done he went over and explored the toy shelf and visited with the turtle. It was apparently a very positive experience for all concerned.

What do you think? Everybody is loving the short hair, but I am ambivalent. I think DemonChild looked really cute with his hair long. Guess I was meant to be a redneck parent… Am I totally in the minority by preferring the long hair look?