A diet of worms

After a visit to my parents' house this past weekend where we celebrated my nephew's 13th birthday, my stepmom told the story of my 3-year-old nephew's recent sojourn as THE GREAT WORM HUNTER. Evidently with great intensity, he dressed up in full-on safari gear and headed out to hunt the great North American Earthworm, which was absolutely fine until he accidentally FOUND one, which was not apparently on his plan. We had a good laugh over this very serious and resolute child freaking out entirely when he actually found his quarry.
And that would be a funny story all by itself. But it's even funnier in combination with Noah's encounter with a worm on Sunday.

We'd gone to the synagogue for Sunday school and the book fair, and Noah was enjoying a chance to run around the halls, particularly the long stretch of hall between the sanctuary and the rabbi's office. Now, nobody really expects to find an earthworm halfway down a carpeted hallway, but perhaps this one had a contribution to the tzedakah box, because he was well on his way down the hall when he and Noah crossed paths, and Noah stepped on him. Mr. Worm coiled up in indignation, while Noah levitated about 2 feet above him and screamed in abject horror, like he'd just seen the most terrifying thing that ever walked the face of the earth. Well, this seems to be the case -- and I carried a shrieking, horrified, full-body-tense child out of the hallway into the lobby to get away from the Terror-Worm. We found Daddy and requested that Daddy please remove the evil monster from the building to protect us, which he promptly did -- but then didn't come back in, but got waved in to take part in a blood drive, leaving Noah absolutely convinced that the Death-Worm had "gotten" Daddy.

After a few minutes, though, I distracted him and thought we were making good progress to a full worm recovery, but silly me -- I was experiencing a false sense of accomplishment. Because about every 20 minutes, Noah tensed up and began reliving the whole worm experience, telling me very seriously and shrill that "Mommy! A worm! I step onna WORM! STEP on him! He SKEERED me!" and then went into wailing again.

This lasted all day. At 10:00 last night, the last hurdle to going to bed, WELL after his normal bedtime, was a quick check around the bedroom to make sure ONE MORE TIME that there were no evil child-eating worms lurking in wait for him to go to sleep. And NO worms in the bed.

Worms. Who knew? Well at least I know that he's not going to go eat them if something doesn't go his way....

I am my son's "pink blanket."

This morning, as I dropped my little boy off at day care, he demanded that I "sit inna chair!" -- and seemed to think that this command should last all day. He turned to one of his fellow daycarites and said "Where you Mommy, Nonathan?" They discussed this for a moment, and concluded "Mommy at working." Pretty good chatting, I thought. "Honey, Mommy has to go to work too -- I'll see you tonight," I told him. "No! You sit inna chair!" He climbed up onto me, to make sure I didn't go anywhere.

And then the snuggling began. Now, how is it that he knows to snuggle just when I'm most resolute to leave? It starts by pulling my arms around him, and rubbing his face against my inner arm. Soon he rivals the cat in his face-rubbing and purring routine -- he spins and climbs up on me and rubs his cheek on my face, or turns upside down and begins rubbing his face on my leg, while his feet flail around my head. He is a skin-rubbing fool. When we're home and my shoes are off, eventually there's a moment when I fear that he's going to gouge his own eyes out with my toes -- that's where I continue to draw the line. No toes in eyes. But the rest of the face-rubbing? Pure bliss.

I remember when he was a tiny little 7-pound bit of goo, formed into human shape by the footie-outfit that contained him, and couldn't remember how to go to sleep. Something told me that he needed a physical sensation, to help him remember to relax and succumb. I began to stand next to his bassinet, which was on our dresser, and very gently stroke his face from his forehead to his chin, and murmur quietly to him to go to sleep. Slowly, slowly, the pressure of my fingers got lighter and lighter, and my voice quieter and quieter, and eventually he was out. More than once, I feel asleep myself, and awoke as I hit the ground, standing there next to his bassinet, stroking his face.

I guess this instinct came from my own childhood. I, you see, was a Linus-child. There is a story that the infamous "pink blanket" was the blanket I came home from the hospital in, a gift from my grandmother's employer and close family friend. It was pink and very thick, and had a silky border that was pulled off and discarded over time, and without it I could not exist. I remember taking it with me on trips, folded up in my suitcase on airplanes for safekeeping. I remember as a girl of sleepover-age deciding that it was necessary to cut a section the size of a handkerchief out of one corner that I could hide in my sleeping bag, because I simply couldn't sleep without it. I remember visiting my grandmother one time and catching a cold, and having a visiting friend of my grandmother's say "she's just got fluff from that blanket in her nose." And there was the time we headed off on a long car trip, and were over an hour away before I realized that it wasn't in the car. My father pleaded with me: "If you can go without the blanket for this trip, I will buy you the biggest stuffed animal we can find." I was a very literalistic child. That gingerbread man was probably as big as I am now, and may very well still be in my parents' basement. Nevertheless, I was glad to get home to my blanket.

Because there was something that was brainstem-level soothing about having it, about putting my face against it. Something very much like rubbing my face against a person I loved.... Almost like going into a meditative state, or being hypnotized. It opened up the twilight between awake and asleep, something that we're pretty familiar with in my family, to last an eternity -- that blissful feeling of "Ooooh, I'm about to fall asleep but I can enjoy hovering here for another minute...."

And so in the great scheme of "things I've given my son," one of the ones that gives me the most satisfaction, really, is that sensation. That feeling of rubbing your face against something that makes you feel safe and secure and loved. I've been worried that he didn't develop a "lovey" like so many toddlers do -- but I get it now. *I* am his lovey. His "pink blanket."

I can't think of a better thing to be.

Halloween is "skeery" and evil.

Last year's Halloween was unmemorable, except for a little boy half-dressed in a Piglet costume sliding around on the hardwood floors in little padded pigletfeet. This year, though, he knew what he was into, I think.

Dressed as Mr. Bones, Noah struck out to "git canny." And get candy he did. Our entire block did their darndest to send us home with more candy that we had to give out, I think, and he wasn't done yet -- we headed off to the next street, and he gamely walked up to a strange door... And then the severed head in the bowl spoke to him. It wasn't just "dross," it became "skeery."

Back home, he poured his earnings onto the floor like a tiny miser and in a moment when no one was watching, he picked the ONE THING that he could unwrap himself and ate it, and that was it. "CANNY!" Oh, the screaming when we explained that he couldn't eat all of it right then, and indeed we did want him to eat dinner. Oh, the wailing when we emptied the plastic pumpkin and gave him back two or three pieces that he could at, and then evil Mommy wouldn't let him refill the pumpkin from the bowl she was using to give candy to other kids we DIDN'T EVEN KNOW who came to the door! Oh the gnashing of teeth each time someone came to the door and more candy left!

After a short stint of screaming it out alone in his bedroom, a huffing little boy came back downstairs to join us, and there was no more discussion of candy -- he ate a little dinner, watched JUNGLE BOOK with me while I caught up with missed work from earlier in the day, and trundled upstairs to crawl into bed.

But it's clear to me now -- chocolate is the work of the devil.

Strange Bedfellows

This weekend, the spherical frictionless family headed to my alma mater for my (eek) 20 year college reunion. I have no contact with anyone from my class at this point, don't have a strong urge to go back half a lifetime to find friends - mostly it became an excuse to go see how things have progressed in the little town that was my home away from home, lo these 20 years ago.

Friday night, we trundled everything through the pouring rain to the car and headed out, with Noah watching ICE AGE on a portable DVD player strapped to the back of spherical frictionless hubby's headrest, and we were off. An hour later, he peered at the dashboard and muttered "well, okay - we've gone 13 miles now."

It was a long drive.

Our hotel room turned out to be a frightening thing to a 2 year old, when we arrived there at 11:00 that night, but eventually we lured him to sleep in one full-size bed, while SFHubby and I attempted to fit into the other one, and woke each time Noah moved, to make sure he hadn't fallen down into the pit between the bed and the wall just big enough for a toddler to get wedged in. And attempted to remain silent, so we didn't wake him up.

And I listened to the rain pour on the hotel window, and thought "Oh dear God, if it rains all weekend and I've dragged them down here and we're stuck in this room for two days, they're going to torch me."

Morning dawned soggy and torential, but as we got showered, it seems there might be a break in the clouds, or was it wishful thinking? Hard to tell -- but my most vivid memories of college involve the constant but subtle worry that I was covered with a thin layer of mold, so it seems right somehow. We had a fabulous breakfast at my old pancake house haunt, and then made our way to campus to find out what they would do about the scheduled picnic, if the lawn had slid off the alumni house property and into the nearby stadium parking lot as we thought it might, arriving just in time to watch the parade, then stomp in puddles all over campus before the picnic -- and somehow during that time, it became a glorious and beautiful weekend.

But I'm not really here to talk about my reunion, which was mostly just silly, or the weekend, which was lovely -- I'm here to talk about sleeping with a two-year-old.

After dinner, where in his two-year-old way he forced us to eat at Hooter's, the only place we figured we didn't really CARE if he made a ruckus, we went back to the dreaded hotel room, where we began the arduous task of getting him to go to sleep in a strange place. In our pajamas, Noah and I cuddled up on one bed to watch the closest thing to childrens' television I could find, the latest Harry Potter movie, and SFHubby promptly fell asleep on the other. Eventually I realized that Noah wasn't used to a television on at bedtime, so I turned it off, and promptly fell asleep myself. I woke up half an hour later to a small hand patting my cheek, and a little voice insistantly saying "Mommy!"

"What?" I replied.

"Mommy!" More patting.

"Go to sleep!" I grumbled.

He cuddled back up to me and began rubbing my arm. All 800,000 BTUs of him, pressed firmly against my chest, fell alseep.

I lay there and sweated, and wondered if I could move my arm without waking him. I didn't need to worry, though, because I've learned one important thing. A toddler in sleep is a toddler in motion. He moved every 30 seconds for the next 8 solid hours, like a small toddler rotisserie, taking the bedclothes and pillows with him, and incrementally invading my half of the bed, micron by micron, for the rest of the night. Like a Mommy-seeking missile. Even when I moved to the other side of the bed, to get some space -- he did a 180 and went back into full pursuit. All the while, rubbing his little hot feet on the tops of my thighs. Patting my arm. Headbutting me on the mouth and leaving me with a knot the size of a tangerine in my lip at 11:00. Waking me again with his little hot feet on my face at 2am so that I'd remember to go change the clocks, so that I'd know exactly how early it was when he woke up, fully rested, at 5:30 am, and began suggesting that we "go home."

I stood for a long moment at the foot of the bed, right around 2am, and looked longingly from my husband, asleep diagonally on one bed, to my son, asleep diagonally on the other, and marveled that a 2-year-old can take up as much of a bed as a 48-year-old man, and nearly half as much as a well-trained cat. And thought about going to the car to get some actual sleep. And then thought, "you really don't get the chance very often to get those hot feet on your face in the middle of the night." And shoved him over and climbed back in for Round 2.

And when a little hand patted my face at 5:30 (thank you, end daylight savings time...) and a little voice said " Mommy! Breakfast!" I thought, MAN it's going to be a long day...." And then I knocked him over and tickled those little feet.

Which were, really, the best part of the entire weekend.

Where has the buddha-belly gone?

Two weeks ago, my son had a huge, fabulous, middle-aged-man-style buddha-belly that draped down over the front of his pants, so that you had to push it out of the way to snap his jeans closed. His 14-year-old brother had a nasty tendency to call him "fatty." He still had the little line of toddler fat-roll on his thigh.

And then, Sunday night before last, he got into the bathtub, and it was gone.

"Noah! Who has stolen your belly?" I demanded to know.

Little brown eyes looked back up at me in confusion.

"Your belly! Where's your belly?"

He pulled his tummy in -- this did not help things -- and pointed out his belly button for me. "Beebo?"

"Yes, it's your beebo, but where's your big buddha belly?"

Brown eyes, blinking.

Someone has stolen my son's buddha-belly. It's true. But in the last two weeks, his sleek two-and-almost-a-half-year-old self has gone shopping with me with no stroller, and has walked (WALKED!) all the way to the playground, and singlehandedly climbed the Very! Big! Hill!

I watched him run toward Very! Big! Hill! in his little jeans and enormous shoes and Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, and felt myself looking back at this moment from the sidelines of a soccer game sometime in the future, and watched the sheer gorgeousness of his little body running and little bell-clear voice laughing.

"Come ON, Mommy! Climb Very Big Hill!" Who could say no?

It's so hard to be 2....

<i>I'm cross-posting this from a parenting forum where I originally wrote the following dialog; it so perfectly summarized the difficulties of being a 2-year-old that I wanted to have it here, as well.</i>

 

Oh, the trials of being two....  Noah's been in a phase of wanting his waffle WHOLE in the morning, so I didn't cut it, I just buttered it and put a light drizzle of syrup on it, and gave it to him.

HIM: SCREAMSCREAMSCREAM! Much waving of fork!

Me: Darling, do you want me to cut it?

HIM: CUTITCUTITCUTIT! SCREAMSCREAMSCREAM! Continued waving of fork!

Me: <cuts one strip of waffle, and then into bites.>

HIM: YESCUTCUTCUT!

Me: <cuts second strip of waffle>

HIM: WAFFLEBROKEN! WAFFLEBROKEN! <crying as if heart would break/>

Me: Huh?

HIM: <Hysterical meltdown/>

Me: Befuddled...

I think I ended with a big hug and explanation that it's so hard to be a 2-year-old and not be able to explain what you want, and I want to give him what he wants, but sometimes I just can't tell -- do you want a new waffle? And then a new waffle, which he carried into the car and ate, sniffling, with nothing on it, and then a little quiet voice in that perfect little bell-tone says "Thank you, Mommy!"

I never get over how fast he shifts gears.

L'Shannah Tovah

Tonight we begin the observance of Rosh Hashanah, and I believe it will be my son's first memorable experience with a religious holiday. He was practically born into our synagogue; he was born at 5:00 on a Friday, and was at the Friday night service with me a week later -- granted, I was sitting in a super-cushioned chair that had been brought into the sanctuary just for me.... And let's face it -- that's appropriate for a boy whose parents met in that sanctuary, and were married there.

The last year has been particularly hard for me, in a religious sense. We haven't mastered Tot Shabbat, much less the ability to sit through a Friday night or Saturday morning service, which means that my spiritual life has been relegated to "things we can do at home," and "occasions when it would be inappropriate not to attend and so one of us goes alone and the other stays home," plus the occasional "bar or bat mitzvah warranting a babysitter." I feel like I've taken a year-long vacation from God, and it feels weird. I was tight with God for a long time, and I feel like I've had to set Him aside in favor of maternal responsibilities.

So tonight, I've planned to stay home with my boy while my husband and stepson attend services, and the wee boy and I can start to create our own Rosh Hashanah tradition. Ideally, I'd like it to exclude television, no matter how educational, and include some rituals that may create a memory for him that will guide him into the natural flow of the religious year for us. Tonight, we'll eat all the apples we want, I think, and honey right off the spoon. We'll make a honeycake for tomorrow's dinner, and we'll light candles. I think I'll read him some of the prayers from the service we'll be missing, and maybe I can work on teaching him some new songs.

When I was a teenager, watching my parents prepare for Christmas for me and my younger brother, I often wondered how they could get so excited about setting up for a holiday that was fairly one-sided -- they did all these preparations and worked so hard to create an environment that made such an impression on us, and apparently got so little out of it. I hadn't realized, of course, how much joy there could be in creating especially these first impressions of these important family moments that would form our visceral memories of childhood, and create such magic for us.

Tonight I feel the responsibility for creating that magic, in a tradition that I came to and was not born and raised into. I'm hoping that I can do it justice, and create the same kind of magic for my little boy that my parents created for me and my brothers. It's an awesome responsibility, when you get down to it, made complex by having to occasionally pull out reference materials to make sure that I'm doing it "right."

Good Lord, what HAVE I done?

So this morning, I was brushing my teeth, and as I was leaning over the sink to spit, I felt the unusual sensation of being goosed by something rubbery and flexible and small. I look back behind me and there is my little boy, very intently attempting to stick his pacifier, let's be candid, into my butt. I believe my exact words were "precisely WHAT makes you think THAT'S a good idea, child?" and he scurried out of the room with the same focused intent with which he entered it. It's clear that he planned this -- it was a premeditated goosing gone wrong, and he needed to leave the scene and regroup.

Some days, I worry about what I've done, bringing this sweet little boy into this world. Maybe it's because I read the news today, and maybe it's because colleagues of mine and I got into a debate about the fate of the "free world" after lunch, and maybe it's because I read the summary of that book about the last election... Our President is "the devil." Bits are falling off the Space Shuttle and getting in the way of reentry. It didn't help that I saw news just a few minutes ago gleefully announcing that the new partical smasher they're building isn't going to create a black hole so big it'll destroy the earth... they don't think... You know, if you have to TELL me that? I'm nervous about it, even if you're trying to be reassuring.

There was just so much negative to see in the world today that it makes me wonder if having a baby wasn't the most selfish thing I could ever have done. It makes me think in some kind of stark way that someday I'm going to be forced to leave him alone here on this planet with mutant attack e.coli in the spinach and with most of the rest of the world thinking his nation is the collective set of the biggest assholes on the planet. "Hey, kid, I've got a great planet for you here -- good luck." Some days, life just feels that fast, too. I'm springing this on him; he didn't even get a vote in the thing.

And then I watch his little mind operate and all I can do is pray that he'll do just fine and keep his spirit intact. Because you'd hate to lose the kind of spirit that could put together a plan like the one he launched on me this morning. Frankly, the world needs a little more of that, and a lot less of what it's got.

Tonight, in celebration....

...I bought my son underwear.

Certain events of the last few days left me with an unprecedented 2 hours of totally free time, and cause for celebration. The best use of it that I could think of? Going to the Disney store to buy my son Finding Nemo underwear.

A year ago during our summer vacation, he demanded to "go potty," and we thought "Yippee!" -- and that was the end of it. The potty I got for him last spring sits unused in the corner of the bathroom, generally with a book on it. All invitations to sit on the potty go unaffirmed -- I think he thinks that if he ignores me long enough, I'll give it up.

And that's the way he's been his whole life. If you try to force a change, it never goes well, but if you give him a little bit of time, he comes to it on his own. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm here to help, but HE's the one who's growing up.

So he has a half a dozen pairs of underwear now, and we've looked at them and the pictures of Nemo and Gill and Crush and Bruce, and the one pair that has little tiny blue sillouhette fish all over it, and so he knows that they're there. My job, now, is clearly to shut up about it and let him decide when he's ready to take the next big step toward growing up.

Oh, please, little boy -- not too fast.

..and then my mind went blank

Tonight, as I was listening to some show on the television with half an ear, I had the flash of inspiration for The! Very! Thing! that I could write, become famous on, put my child through college on -- the concept that was my very reason for existing on this earth to communicate. Brilliant! I couldn't believe it -- here it was! And in just a moment, I would get up, come to the computer, start outlining it, and begin to make my mark in the world.

But then my mind went blank. Utterly and completely blank, like a big magnet had come down from the sky and erased the last 2 minutes of tape in my head. Gone. Completely and utterly gone. Like that dream that you have that's so funny that you just have to wake up and tell someone, and you turn to your spouse and say "I just had the most amazing dream -- there were mice in it, and ... well, a wall. Mice, and a wall, and it was so amazing and insightful, and funny! Oh, it was such a wonderful dream!" And your spouse, who has to get up in 45 minutes for work and really didn't need this, looks at you and says "You woke me up. At 3:45 in the morning. To tell me. That you had a dream. About mice. And a WALL?"

"Well, it wasn't just a wall, it was a kind of third dimension, and if you went through it, well, there were mice there too. But NICE mice." It begins to sound stupid, even to you, and you wrack your brain to remember why you felt compelled, again, to shake your beloved from slumber to hear this lame-ass excuse for something interesting. There was something else in it, something so huge that you had to wake up... But what WAS IT?

It was like that, really. The idea was just here -- can I recreate it? So I dashed madly to the basement to catch the Tivo before the program went off the schedule, to see if I could Tivo it and watch it again, and maybe have the idea again, and with 20 seconds to spare I find the spot in the schedule listing and it's ...

Educational programming from the local community college. No information on the episode at all that would let me identify it on the schedule to record. Nothing, but the list of sponsors at the end of the show. But wait! It's based on a grant from the Annenberg Foundation! Hooray -- a clue! So I ran up here to the office, hunted down the Annenberg Foundation, found the program, signed up for their video on demand program, found the very episode, fast-forwarded to the very moment where I had the very important revelation, and...

Nothing. No amazing idea. Cute program on Romantic Comedy. Nothing amazing. No insight. Certainly nothing that will put my son through college.

Maybe I just drifted off to sleep briefly during the show and dreamed the idea.... It had something to do with mice, I think. And a wall. Perhaps I should go wake my beloved husband and tell him about it...

Nah.

The jokes continue....

This weekend, he came up with another one. His first play on words. It came out during a wrestling match, when he very sincerely said "No, Mommy -- not tickle... TACKLE!" And tried to knock me over. It must be the Dr. Seuss. I knew that man was a genius....

My son's first joke....

For mother's day, when my son was just about a year old, I took myself to the mall, made the rounds of the jewelry stores, and found myself a small mother-and-child pendant, so that I would have something that connected me to him during the day when I'm at work. Little did I know that his day care provider has the exact same necklace.

So when he began to play with it, I asked him, "Who is that?" It was rhetorical, of course -- I was fully prepared to explain to him that it was Mommy and Noah, and that I wore it because I miss him during the day -- but he had an answer. "CAR-CAR!" which is, of course, the nickname he calls his day care provider. "WHAT?" I replied. "It's not! It's Mommy! Mommy and Noah!" "It's Car-Car," he replied. This went on for some time.

When I told her about it later, she told me that she's had other parents really uncomfortable that she became a part of their child's mental life like that -- that she's actually lost children because the parents were a little too jealous of the love the child felt for this woman who cares for them all day. It made me a little sad, really, and I resolutely put aside any negative feeling I had about Noah associating the necklace with her.

It's been several months, and we still have the conversation. "Noah, who is this?" I point to my necklace. See, now he knows that he can make me nuts with his answers -- it's quite a game. "Daddy!" he yells. "DADDY? DADDY? It's NOT!" I shout back. "Now, seriously who is it?" "LUCY!" he cries, indicating the dog, of all things. "WHAT? That is NOT the dog! Who is it?" "Brother!" The list gets longer. He adds to it; I act as dramatically incensed as I can that he doesn't say that it's me, and then smother him with kisses in all his ticklish spots. And ask again. And very quietly, he whispers, "Car-Car!" and then tries to cover his entire body with his hands in preparation for the onslaught, and snorts with laughter.

His first joke. At my expense. I feel so special.

Things I never thought I'd hear myself say...

Last night, I heard myself yell at my son for something I never anticipated. After a long, exhausted work day, I arrived home to my 2-year-old wanting nothing more than to sit with me on the sofa watching a cartoon and to rub his eyes on my big toe. I felt my not-perfectly polished nails scraping against the skin of his eyelid, and then heard the voice of a worn-out working Mommy shout "SON! GET OFF MY TOES!" My husband dismissed me for a "timeout" and suggested that I put on some shoes.

There are some things you just don't expect to hear yourself saying. Yelling at your son for shoving your big toe into his eyesocket happens to be one, at least for me.

Let us assume that the cow is spherical....

The name of the blog comes from my favorite joke-that-I-can't-really-remember, where a chemist, a biologist, and a physicist are trying to figure out what's wrong with a cow, and the physicist begins his assessment by saying "Let us assume that the cow is spherical and frictionless." Something about that always makes me laugh.

I've rarely had a problem overcoming the blank page, but this blog thing has utterly silenced me. What could I possibly have to say that isn't being said somewhere else? In particular, the blog "Antique Mommy" always leaves me thinking that really, I have nothing new to add to the world. When I voiced this to her, she reminded me that she started her blog not to speak to the world, but to record her thoughts to share with her son when he's old enough to understand them. And that makes more sense to me.

So for today, I thought I'd try to conquer the blank page.