Wildlife in Our Bathroom

Just when it seemed like Kate’s alligator had evacuated our pink bathroom, it appears a new resident has moved in.

Yesterday when Kate was on her potty and me on mine (yes, the tandem tinkle), she said, “There a blue baby elephant in here, Mama. He scared of you.” So she stood up, toddled over toward me with her pants around her ankles, picked him up and brought him back with her to her potty, arranging him comfortably on her lap–safely away from me. Then she claimed, “He tinkle too.”

What I want to know is, why was he scared of me? I’m nice, right? I mean, how scary can an exhausted 9-month prego with unwashed hair who’s peeing look?

Wait, don’t answer that.

Anyway, I’m started to think Kate’s sixth sense is seeing dead animals. And for some reason, they’re flocking to our bathroom.

Making Space for a Growing Family

Once the mayhem of work died down, it was immediately replaced with an endless stream of household chores based around the displacement of the office for Kate’s Big Girl Room.

It’s been nothing short of maddening not being able to roll up my sleeves and do my fare share of the work. But the half that doesn’t involve lugging heavy boxes, furniture and electronics involved dismantling and re-establishing computer equipment, wireless internet service, etc. So either advanced pregnancy or lack of tech know-how has stymied my usefulness. And turbo-charged with the nesting instinct as I am, this leaves me to just pester Mark, sit and watch, and pipe up with occasional undoubtedly aggravating suggestions.

The whole endeavor has been extremely stressful on Mark, since A) I’m nagging, B) he’d doing all the work and C) he’s wedging it into whatever free time he has on weekends. Also because this process entails adding more stuff to a small house and trying to figure out where the hell to squirrel away the stuff we already have.

Can we jimmy another human into this space–replete with its own wardrobe and cavalcade of gear–and still be able to find our 2006 tax returns? At this juncture, that remains to be seen–though we seem to be close to emerging on the side of success. Everything is still not in its final resting place. For example, all our important (and some not-so important) documents still reside in a towering 5-drawer file cabinet in Kate’s new Big Girl Room. Good to have them at hand for her in the event that she wants to review our life insurance policy, or check out some detail of Mark’s birth certificate on some sleepless night.

And just when you think it’s the adults who are in charge of the house-space wrangling, Little Miss Toddler has to get into the mix. When I recently came home from a long car ride and was making my way to the bathroom, Kate stood in my way. “No use this bathroom, Mama,” she said sternly. “Why not, honey?” I asked, trying to be patient and not sweep her aside as my pea-sized prego bladder prepared to burst.

“My alligator in this bathroom,” she explained. “My alligator need privacy.”

Little Miss Observant

We are learning that we are living with a small person who is taking copious notes on everything we say and do, and everything anyone who visits us does. It’s like living with Big Brother, if he were two, giggled a lot, and had cute blond pigtails.

Thursday was my morning to wake up early with Kate. Last weekend we had The Ruzich/Johnson clan visiting and Kate was enthralled by everything related to Baby Vivy (something we hope she keeps up when her own little sibling comes ’round). This meant inspecting the diaper changing process, sticking her nose into the baby food jars, and standing two inches away from Daryl’s breasts in order to monitor the nursing process.

So the other day I took her for her morning potty sesh, and while sitting there, PJs down around her ankles, she held her stuffed doggie up to her breast. “Doggie drink milk from my nipple,” she explained while pressing it’s nose carefully onto her. She held the animal there for a minute or so, then announced flatly, “Other side,” and moved him to her other breast.

Thankfully she’s being careful to nurse evenly on each side. La Leche League would approve.

On Friday we were driving away from the movie rental store and the car in front of me was going all of 15 MPH. I sighed and hit the horn, causing Kate to exclaim from her car seat, “Come on, dude!” This, a clear Mark-ism.

Evidently, picking up on parental road rage is in Kate’s genes, since as the story goes, some of Mark’s first words were, “Oh shit!” when his mother had to slam on the breaks.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise to us that Kate is picking up on things that she sees adults do and say. It’s got me thinking that we should be trying harder to leverage it somehow. So in an effort to improve our parenting, as of tomorrow night, Mark and my dinner conversation will be centered around a recitation of the multiplication tables.

Project Managing the McCluskys

Turns out that my past life as a project manager has served me well for parenting. At least in terms of the schedule management. Or so I thought.

So in 11 weeks or so New Baby arrives. Got that down as a milestone. There are a few dependencies associated with that, such moving Kate’s room into what’s now the office to free up the crib for the young’un. And to do that we need to move the office downstairs into this weird little basement room, which means that Mark needs to move all his bike stuff from the weird basement room (multiple bikes, a bureau of cycling clothes, cases of Gatorade, bike tools, helmets, shoes, and a gazillion water bottles) along with tents, beach towels, and sleeping bags, into the the garage.

Mark has already started the bike stuff migration, but the office is still very much intact, and very much teeming with bookcases, books, computers, file cabinets and a bunch of musical equipment.

Every project manager worth their MS Project Plan knows that it sometimes takes completion of one task to spur on the onset of another one. And as it happens I got a flyer in the mail announcing that a huge kid-stuff store is having a furniture warehouse sale tomorrow. So Kate and I are going big girl bed shopping. A field trip which, if fruitful, will result in more urgency around the need to make way in the office for Kate’s new swingin’ big girl boudoir.

And, of course, in my manic state of nesting, I can’t wait to obsess over what all I’ll need to get and do to make Kate’s new room appealing for her, but moreover cute as the Dickens in my own eyes. The potential for endless runs to Ikea and Target to meet this objective makes me giddy with delight. This because I have already overhauled and or re-organized almost every other room in the past two months due to Crazy Lady Nesting, and it seems silly to do them all over again. I need a new outlet for this beyond-my-ability-to-control animalistic phase.

Back on my gantt chart of What Needs Happenin’ Before Bay Comes, is the issue of Kate and preschool. At one point a few months ago, in the productive early morning hours of prenatal insomnia I realized with intense clarity that what I’d need more than anything was for Kate to have a place to go (a nanny share or preschool) 2-3 mornings a week when I was tending to the new baby.

And driven Mama that I am, I somehow took that middle-of-the-night self-assigned action item and made good on it. So now Kate is in preschool. And since no sudden moves can descend on the project plan of family dynamics, we were lucky enough to get her started with plenty of time to acclimate before her little sibling started sucking parental attention away from her like a vacuum cleaner.

And initially it seemed Kate was going to oblige us neatly with little to no transitional issues or new school trauma. But then the “outside time” at the school started to overwhelm her. The kids from her classroom and a couple others pour into the school’s playground all at once and the mayhem and unstructured time seems to throw our Little Miss for a loop.

Give her noodles to glue to a paper plate and she’s fine. But in the wilds of the outdoors she’s been coming undone.

One of the teachers has told us when Kate starts bumming out outside, she takes her in and they hang out and play in the classroom. And at the end of the day when you ask Kate about playing outside, she cheerily reports, “I cry outside,” as if she’s telling you, “We had muffins at snack time.”

Hearing about this has been heart wrenching for Mark. But, especially with the unemotional way she reports this to us, I wasn’t too concerned. By all other reports Kate seems to find preschool pretty groovy. And to be honest, it seemed to me that it wasn’t in the plan for Mark to get waylaid by this little development. It will work out! We will move on! I will buy new curtains for the basement office room and everything will be okay. See how well we are moving through our tasks?

Today the nanny is on vacation. (Selfish.) So I blasted out of the office at noon, feeling a certain amount of work-neglect guilt, to fetch Kate from school. Surprisingly for the time of day I got enmeshed in traffic and drive 15MPH for a solid 30 minutes. I realized I’d be late to get Kate. All the kids who spend the full day there would be lying down for their naps. Then the gas tank went from kinda low to the red light going on. I decided the traffic hold-up left me no time to get gas, but the longer I sat in traffic the lower the indicator needle moved to the bottom of the last white line. (It’s never a good sign when you find yourself rationalizing about where on that last line of tank emptiness you are.) Add to this my desperate need to pee.

Suffice it to say I wasn’t feeling at one with the universe when I skidded into Kate’s classroom 10 minutes late, and then saw she had a big scrape on her nose and a bloody upper lip. When I asked the teacher who was with her what happened it seemed like she was on a slow record speed responding to me. I mean, I think she just said hello to me or something before starting to tell me, but I was already in Crazy Mode and just wanted to know right away what the $^%(# happened to Kate?

The fact is, Kate was fine. Yes, she’d fallen off a log, and sure she cried for a while afterwards, but she was over it. But for me, I felt a disturbing inner lurch as I went from feeling great about our latest foray into preschool into a mode of “wait, this might not all be perfect and settled in my mind after all.” There are some things that I’m going to need to get used to here.

I’d heard that after a couple good weeks an otherwise “adjusted” preschooler may backslide into some transitional issues. But no one prepared me for the fact that that could happen to me as well.

When Kate registered my presence, she started to wimper and demanded a kiss on her owie. And the teacher, after finally sputtering out what happened, decided to launch into details of how she comforted Kate and then what they did, and this is how she was the rest of the day which was really very happy and doing well for the most part blah blah blah, which I suddenly had no interest in hearing about. I just wanted to get Kate and get out of there. (And I wanted to pee.) The thought of Kate having had a bad experience outside, which was already the Bad Place for her, just seemed unbearable. We needed to go home home home.

I struggled down the sidewalk holding the car seat Mark left me when he dropped Kate off against my big belly, and trying not to drop my keys or Kate’s sweater and extra pair of pants. Ten paces behind me Kate dawdled along, dangling her lunch box and looking like a pathetic waif with her barrettes sagging in her hair and her face scraped up and bloody. It seemed like miles to the car and worlds away from our dear sweet home, as Kate announced she wanted to walk on the “crunchy leaves” and slowed down even further. It was all I could do to not sit down on the sidewalk and bawl.

In any given project there is always the unexpected unplanned for snafu that jumps out at you, invariably when you’re also having a bad hair day. And no matter how much of a bad-ass you are, you can’t always rally on the spot and regain your firm grasp. For some project managers the lack of control is probably a fairly familiar feeling, but for others, knowing it could have been avoided devours us.

In all my transitional strategizing and well-laid plans to ensure everyone moved through all there is to do before the new baby arrives, I totally overlooked the potential for me to put a kink in the plans. Without expecting it, and certainly without wanting it, it became apparent that it was going to take me a little longer to adjust to preschool than I’d planned for. It’s not that I suddenly felt like it wasn’t a safe place for Kate to be, or that I even really had any misgivings about the place. It was just its utter newness.

Finally at the car, I heaved the car seat in and was preparing forlornly to climb in with my big belly and crouch over it to install it. My internal dialog was chanting “Home, home, home.” When I looked out at Kate to make sure she was staying safely by the car, she peered up at me and said “I don’t want to go, Mama. I want to stay preschool!”

Toddler Fashion Commentary

Last night Mark put on his red long-sleeved AIDS Ride t-shirt when he came home from work.

Kate: “What that say, Dada?”

Mark: “Ride to end AIDS.”

Kate: “I love it! That is so cute!”

Kate Becomes a Duckling

Kate started preschool on Tuesday. As a 2-year-old, she’s considered a Duckling, and in future years will be a Gosling, a Mallard, etc. It’s a classroom naming metaphor my mother–the self-appointed patron saint of ducks–would no doubt embrace.

Carrying her lunch box and decked in her new school clothes–a tan corduroy jumper, orange quilted vest, leggings and white sneaks–she could have been me going off to what what was then called nursery school, circa 1970. Of course, she wasn’t proudly toting her new Trapper Keeper. Then again, I didn’t have one until I was a bit older too. (But who can think about back-to-school without thoughts of Trapper Keepers dancing in your head?)

Since Kate’s filling a mysterious and miraculous last-minute opening in a highly-demanded preschool, she’s joining the school year midstream. All the other kids have already played out their adjustment issues. And now they’re clued into what to do at circle time, know the words to a handful of songs, and have likely already exchanged some germs, bites, and good times.

From the parental perspective, the spate of stories about parents who had to peel their kids off them to leave, or whose kids nonchalantly waved them off but the mother still bawled in her car in the parking lot over the fact that “little Jordan is such a big boy now”–all those stories have waned by now too.

I couldn’t help but wonder how Kate and I would play out this milestone duet.

After a constant stream of “preschool this/preschool that” banter in the drive over, once inside Kate held my hand with eyes wide open and mouth clamped shut. But after a tour of her cubbie hole and the sign-in sheet, a teacher easily lured Kate over to a table to decorate a mini-pumpkin with one part glitter and three parts paste. With a quick smooch I was outta there with no drama in sight.

As I fumbled through the labyrinth of classrooms to find a door out I passed by a window into the room where Kate was showing the craft gods who was boss. For a second I wondered if this would be my emotional moment–looking in on her blond pigtailed cuteness when she was oblivious to my presence.

Nope. No tears, no “there’s my little girl gettin’ so big heartache.” I’d figured she would groove on the preschool scene, and I was right. Teacher Lilia even gushed to me when I picked up Kate four hours later that she’d never seen a toddler transition so well on their first day–something she tells all parents?

Oh Miss Kate you continue to amaze and impress us. Muttering the alphabet–all the letters, and in all the right places!–while I give you a bath. Commending me after I pee with a “Good job, Mama!” Telling me about your new school friend, Ben, who you’ve likely already hug-tackled with your unbridled toddler glee.

Before we know it you’ll be questioning our politics, despairing our technical ineptitude and no longer volunteering information on Ben, or Henry, or whoever it is who has captured your attention.

Even though I made it through your first day of preschool, I still have plenty of parking lot crying in me for other times in your life. So prepare to be embarrassed.

Keepin’ it Real for the Kids

Kate is a busy mother. And it’s no wonder. She has on the order of 6 babies. All who need her vigilant attention.

Of course, there’s the diaper changing. Which involves finding her own diaper bag, ferreting out a diaper or two and the package of wipes. Then, no less than 20 wipes need to be extricated from the box. You can find fault with the girl’s diapering prowess, but I’ll say this: She’s a thorough butt-wiper.

And she works lovingly. She hardly slaps that baby down on the changing pad–did I forget to mention she gets that out too? No, she loving holds the baby’s head as she lowers it down to the floor, while quietly commanding, “Now lie down.”

When not dealing with what’s coming out (in her imagination at least), Kate busies herself with the input. Snapping the straps on the booster seat has long been an entertaining pastime, since the time when we bought a small booster seat for her to use at Grandpa’s house. When her high chair became too cumbersome and babyish for Kate, we got our own booster seat and it wasn’t long before she realized that it was perfectly suitable for her own babies mealtimes. Invariably when you go to put Kate in it, it’s already occupied.

Sure, she gets them seated. But the actual feeding comes in fits and starts, truth be told. At times they get a sip from her own sippy cup. And more recently they get a drink of “owange juice” from a bottle that came with a doll she got for her birthday. Not sure why they sell toy baby bottles that appear to be filled with Tang, though I’m probably too hardcore about rarely giving Kate anything more than water or milk. But like all of us, you want for your children what you didn’t (or don’t) have, right? So, for Kate’s babies, owange juice it is.

There’s also much time spent putting the babies “night-night” in either her crib (which requires them to be flung over the side railing, hopefully landing comfortably on the mattress) or arranged carefully in their doll cradle. This involves lots of smoothing down of their blankets, kisses on their heads, and the repeated incantation, “Babies go night-night. Babies go night-night.”

The hairdressing takes a good deal of time too: putting barrettes on and off, struggling with pony tail holders, and attempting to brush or comb even the hairless babies’ heads.

Yesterday I was cooking dinner for friends who recently had a baby. With all the cooking Mark does for us it’s a wonder I even remember where the stove is. Thankfully I get practice whenever a friend has a baby and I whip up some easy-to-freeze one-dish meal.

Kate’s got this new step stool that I bought her for a buck at a garage sale. Best money I ever spent. She’s got the fancy stool Grandpa made her stationed at the bathroom sink, but this crappy plywood one is her vehicle for checking out everything that’s going down in the kitchen. And she slings that thing around with a flick of her wrist like a spry oldster with their walker. It’s funny, but can be annoying when she’s tracking your every move one second behind you. You’re at the cutting board and need something from the fridge and before you know it there she is teetering on her tiptoes on the stool’s top step, gravely inspecting whatever it is you’re taking out.

After 20 minutes of her being my little shadow I encouraged her to check in on her dolls. Surely one of them needs a diaper change at this point, no? And sweet relief, she took the bait. But as these things tend to go, after a while it was growing a little too quiet in the living room, requiring me to investigate.

What I saw was no less than seven of her shirts and several pair of pants spread out on the carpet near her soon-not-to-be-naked babies. And with serious determination she was heading back to her bedroom to purloin more. I was onto her and followed her into her room.

As she’s leaning into her dresser drawer to scoop up another armload of clothes she looked at me and stopped. She extracted herself and turned towards me with her arms straight out like a traffic cop. “No come in my room, Mama! No come in my room!”

My God, I thought. Isn’t the whole “do not enter” culture supposed to emerge years from now? Have I got a toddler or a teen here?

At any rate, I didn’t take it too much to heart. Sure she was making a terrific mess, and dragging perfectly clean (and anal-retentively folded) clothes throughout the house. But I know as well as the next mother, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do for your babies. And ain’t nobody going to get in your way.

Boy Crazy 101

In what must count as a small miracle, we were offered a space for Kate in what seems to be a great preschool. This presented itself when I called them to get on their waiting list for next September, and meekly asked if by any chance they might have any openings in January. After the woman suppressed pitying laughter, she took my name down in the event that “a family moves–which does happen sometimes.”

Then a couple weeks later she leaves me a message that a space has opened up.

Did I mention it’s also just a 3.5 minute drive from our house? Though, who’s counting.

We’ve worked out a deal with the nanny so she’s not docked for the hours Kate’s at school, and until I’m on maternity leave she’ll pick Kate up. A deal our hard-driving dealmaker of a nanny actually went for!

All this certainly adds up to such a great bestowal of luck and karma, that Mark and I really shouldn’t be allowed to ask for birthday or Christmas presents for at least a year or so.

The hope is that going off to school a couple mornings a week will be a good thing for Kate when the new baby comes. She’ll be able to roll with some kids her own age and not be trapped in the house in the middle of rainy season with a bleary-eyed mother and squalling new sibling. Plus, having only one wee one to mind will make it easier for me to do glamorous things like shop for groceries and take weekly showers.

Kate always has a lot to talk about, but the impending adventures in preschool provide lots of fresh new fodder.

Tonight as she ate dinner, we delved into the virtues of preschool.

Me: “This week we are going to visit the preschool.”

Kate: “Mama come?”

Me: “Yes, Kate and Mama will go and see the preschool.”

Kate: “Preschool have little swings?”

Me: “I know there is a playground, but I don’t remember if there are swings.”

Kate: “Preschool have sand?”

Me: “Yes, there is a sandbox, and a garden, and lots of toys.”

Kate: “Oh.”

Me: “And there are lots of boys and girls for you to be friends with. And Owen will be there. He goes to the same preschool.”

Kate: [face lights up and she tries to stand up while strapped into her booster seat] “I HUG BOYS!”

Me: “You want to hug boys at preschool?”

Kate: “YES! Hug boys! HUG BOYS!”

And later…

Me: “There are also chickens at the preschool, and they are going to get a bunny rabbit.”

Kate: “Bunny rabbit? Bunny rabbit DANCE! Dance, dance, dance!”

This discussion clearly illuminates some of the educational objectives Kate is setting for herself in anticipation of her foray into academia. We’re so proud of her.

I just hope for their sakes those bunny rabbits know how to cut a rug. As for the boys, they’re on their own.

Kate Takes a Stand

Okay, so I know that kids are getting cell phones these days at an age when I was still enthralled by Sesame Street. The timeline for when girls first wear make-up, have their maiden make-out session and even get their period seems to have moved up. But I never dreamed Our Kate would be representative of this modern day turbo-maturing process–or at least that we’d see any signs of it at this point in her life.

But today, walking to the parking lot after a lovely outdoor lunch at Picante, our favorite Mexican restaurant, Kate turned to Mark and proclaimed, “I not eating meat any more, Dada.”

Oh great. Here we go with the “no food with faces” attitude and her turning up her nose when Mark tosses a steak on the grill. Next thing you know she’ll be papering her room with Greenpeace posters and starting a compost worm farm in the backyard.

I mean, in my day one didn’t going through the swearing off of meat products until college. These days I’ve heard about teenagers deciding to go vegetarian. But at age two? I know Kate is advanced and all, but sheesh!

Well it’s what we get for living so close to Berkeley, I guess.

Conversations with Kate

Kate: “Where we going, Mama?”

Me: “To the grocery store.”

Kate: “No grocery store!”

Me: “No grocery store? Why?”

Kate: “Comic book store! We go comic book store!”

Me: “Ah, I see your father has been influencing you.”

Kate: “No grocery store, Mama! Bike shop! Bike shop!”

* * *

Me: “I love you, Kate. Do you love me?”

Kate: “Yes Mama.”

Me: “Do you know what love is, Kate?”

Kate: “Yes.”

Me: “What is love?”

Kate: “Uhhh… Dada!”

* * *

Kate: “Where are you Mama?” [A new perpetual question, often asked when I'm standing right next to her. This time we were walking down the sidewalk.]

Me: “I’m in the sink. Where are you, Kate?”

Kate: “The laundry basket.”