The Post About Swimming Lessons With Jamie

I thought swimming lessons were going to be fun. I have indulgently fond memories of swimming lessons as a child (plus not so fond memories of mean lifeguards), and so like any good parent... I wanted my kids to have the same opportunities I had. In this case it meant group lessons at the local city pool. At first I only signed Jamie up, but that was before I realized I would have to contain Charlie in a small little caged space next to the pool while we watched and waited for Jamie. Anyone with a two year old can attest, it would have been like trying to contain a popped balloon (or in Charlie's case... like putting his hands in mittens next to a bowl of m&m's). Painful for me and deafening to everyone else.

So I signed both of them up for swimming lessons, with the blissful ignorance that it would be Jamie scarring everyone for life and turning innocent, helpful people into child-hating cynics.

Yes, Jamie is rather reticent around adults... and yes, he can take a little while to warm up to most situations, but he'd never pulled a full on unicorns-are-dying, while someone-is-pouring-seething-green-poison-down-my-throat and poking-me-with-lava-dipped-needles before.... until now of course. Even that might be a bit understated. He managed to ward off four swim instructors with sheer, muscle and lung power that granted him super power to cling to the pool wall like his scrawny arms had become part of the cement. Meanwhile, I bobbed a happy Charlie up and down in the Mommy & Me class and pretended like Charlie was an only child.

It was going to be a very long two weeks. The weird thing was, Jamie was absolutely stoked about swimming lessons, he loves the water, and pretty much thinks he can live at the bottom of the pool like a hippopotamus. So we tried again. At home we practiced coping techniques, bought magical gummy bears for positive reinforcement and prayed for courage. Nothing doing. In his defense, he got an A- for effort. I'd drop him off with his eyes as wide as saucers... he'd start to hyperventilate and then catch himself...take a few deep breaths, square his shoulders and make his way to the pool with his peers. Then one of the instructors would pick him up to put him in the pool and it was like all the screws came loose. Calm breaths were replaced by wild eyes and terrifying screams of "DON'T TOUCH ME LIKE THAT" (which is of course what every adult wants to hear when they pick up a minor).

We didn't make it very many days before Jamie hurtled out of the pool at the end of his lesson and begged me to let him take lessons with Mrs. Smith. Since we were gaining quite the reputation and people were wincing when we showed up, I agreed with Jamie on this one and called Mrs. Smith to beg for mercy (she's a close family friend).



She deserves sainthood. She turned my stubborn, hysterical, puddle of a son into a swimmer in just two short weeks. There is more patience in her pinkie finger than I contain in my entire being on a good day.



Plus, she has a cool underwater camera.

I blinked.

One day this...



The next day this...



Happy Birthday Jamie. Remember what your daddy and I said about growing? Take your shrinking pills babe.

The Post In Which Weddings Are Like Childbirth

(photo credit KevinCharles)

It starts out innocent enough... you look at wedding magazines, ooh and ahhh over all the pretty pictures at greenweddingshoes. So many perfect details and sweet moments, you save your favorites and start a massive folder titled "inspiration".

Turning that into a wedding is tricky business and not for the faint of heart. When I planned my wedding, I was 19 and could have gotten married under a bridge with dragonflies for attendants and I would have been happy.

This time I tried much harder for my sister's wedding.


We worked and... sewed napkins and... cried and.... then rallied. Over and over again.



I swore I never wanted to help plan another shindig like this again.

And then the wedding came.

And it was pretty and fun.


So now I'm planning a Christmas Party.



Some people never learn.

Sprite Baby 2.0

My baby turned two this weekend.



He's not quite sure what he thinks of being so old.


But that's only because he doesn't know he's one of the lucky ones with a Summer birthday and pool party


He thinks he's very grown up.



But not quite so grown up yet that he won't wear hats while half asleep.



Happy Birthday Charlie. Please sleep in tomorrow.

The Case of The Missing Pacifier

When your scrunchy, little, tomato faced newborn is wailing like a broken smoke detector, you feel like the whole world would be a better placed if your darn offspring would just take a damn pacifier. When (and if) they do take a liking to the succulent little morsel you keep shoving in their mouth, suddenly life looks a whole lot more manageable. You get three whole hours of sleep at a time (perhaps) and you fantasize about duct taping the pacifier to your baby's mouth. Bliss.

Fast forward 2 years...

You're crawling around on the floor at 1 am in a deranged panic looking for a tiny bit of rubber and plastic that is sure to give your child braces, a speech impediment and cancer. What seemed like an innocent and adorable little soothing device is actually a deal with the devil because now your baby can't sleep without it. Awesome.

We stayed the weekend at Jeff and Gabrielle's, and somewhere between lunch and bedtime, we lost The-Item-Of-Utmost-Importance. The one that is attached to Charlie at all times via a chord and safety pin. I put him to bed with much fear and trepidation, but after an evening of running around Torrey Pines, and eating dinner on the boardwalk in Del Mar, he was so out of energy he didn't even notice his pacifier was missing when I laid his downy curly head, on his soft pillow in his crib pack'n'play. Staying asleep however, was not something his fairy godmother fated his poor, tuckered out mum, and without his ability to self soothe, it was shaping up to be a really. long. night. I tried ignoring him, I tried readjusting his blanket, I tried patting him on the head and assuring him that life would go on without his paci... but it was like trying to reassure teenager they could live without texting.

After waking up out of a dead sleep for the fifth time, there was not a shred of logic left in my brain. Despite the fact that I'm nearly blind without contacts or glasses, and despite it being pitch black in a large house that wasn't my own, I grabbed my cell phone and started crawling through the house on my hands and knees, vowing not to give up until I found The-Thing-Of-Utmost-Importance. How I thought I would be able to find it sightless and in the dark when I couldn't find it during daylight was not allowed to cross my mind. I got the brilliant idea that maybe it had gotten caught on a couch cushion or under a piece of furniture, so as I prowled around the living room in my striped pajama pants and purple cell phone, I came across a pair of shoes, a wallet...then a cell phone, but no pacifier. I ran my hands underneath the couch and could have sworn I heard someone breathing deeply, when I felt someone's breath, hot on my face as I went to scour the cushions, I almost chalked it up to hyperbolic imagination (such was the intensity of my one sighted focus on the quest) but then my hopelessly malfunctioning vision came to the alarming realization I was nose to nose with a strange man who was sleeping on aforementioned couch. While I was trying to decide whether to scream or die of embarrassment, my brain caught up with my mental freak out and I remembered that I had met this man before and been told he would be sleeping on the couch. Which was good. What would not have been good... him waking up to see a wild, blue haired woman staring at him from inches away. So I crawled my mortified, delirious self back to bed...

And found Charlie's pacifier along the way.
In a different couch.

Outgrown Cribs In The Land Filled WIth Snakes

Turns out 4-almost-5-year-olds can move furniture. I wouldn't have discovered this hidden talent if I hadn't nearly slid a bunk bed onto Charlie. Sometimes I think I'm bigger and stronger than I really am, like today when I made a spur of the moment decision to get rid of Charlie's crib and put bunk beds in the kid's room. How I thought I could balance precariously on a tower of tires while I wiggled apart two bunk beds stacked on top of each other, is beyond me. My back is telling me it was a lesson of folly, but my head says well done. Charlie is still alive, and the dog only got squished once, so I maintain it was a success. Jamie navigated the corners and lifted his fair share of the burden, snatching his little brother from the jaws of death every time I started screeching "grab Charlie....grab Charlie quick.

Because you see, Charlie discovered his crib is really just a facade. Those bars that used to look formidable, suddenly transformed into a jungle gym begging to be climbed. Sometimes my kids move to new stages without me knowing it, I'll look at them and think... when did he learn to pedal a bike, or... has that child always been three shades browner than me? Other times like today, a new stage is ushered in with bells ringing and change staring me down with his ugly bushy eyebrows. I don't like facing change nor staring at his ugly face, so I threw myself recklessly into cleaning out the kids room, taking out Charlie's crib and moving in the aforementioned bunk bed. So yes I heard him, Change can go away now (unless he plans on taking away the diapers and leaving a potty trained boy, in which case he can stay).



Charlie was rather ambivalent about the whole process. He went to bed very relieved looking, like he didn't care where or what his bed was as long as someone was still kissing his head, handing him his bottle and praying for him (ha! bottle...he's still got a bit of baby in him left). Jamie on the other hand was ecstatic. He had a few worried moments when his mama wasn't sure the bunk bed was sturdy, but Uncle Vern came to the rescue and fixed the wobblies. Jamie spent the rest of the evening airbending off the bed until he turned the ceiling fan on and promptly whacked himself in the head. Some things you just have to learn by experience. No matter what your parents say, it doesn't make sense until you're rubbing a goose egg on your head.

The other thing Jamie's ecstatic about it snakes. He's obsessed with classifying all snakes as either good or bad. Rattlesnakes=bad, King snake= good. The snakes have decided our house is Disneyland or something, which is seriously about to give me a heart attack. The first time Jamie told me there was a snake on our front door mat, I thought he was pretending... monsters in the closet and all that, but no, there was truly a full grown rattlesnake coiled up against my front door like it was a park bench at the beach. No freaking thank you. I even like snakes. I'm just not sure my kids could survive a bite from a rattler long enough for me to get them off of our remote commune and to a hospital. These things worry me (and now I've convinced everyone to never visit, but honestly, they aren't normally this bad). Two days later I gave Jamie strict orders to stay on the patio and not venture into the tall weeds, he went out to play and came running back in telling me there was another rattlesnake on the patio. Sure enough, he was right again. Thankfully both times Barnabas was between the snake and my children, but still, I have them hog tied and apron stringed whenever we go out now.

A few days and a few good snakes later (this is the story that never ends), Barnabas went out to pee and nearly sat on a rattlesnake. It was a big snake and had a tail that sounded like a Pepsi can full of pebbles, so the dog quickly got wise and skedaddled, and Jamie named it Tricksy (with the help of his Uncle Lulu who is actually his aunt).

I finally had time to take a picture of this one, as it seemed content to hiss and rattle at us instead of dive for the bushes like the other ones did.


So this is what we get for having perfect weather all the time. As long as we stay stuck in 70's and sunny, we're stuck with rattlesnakes as backyard (or front yard) pets.

How To Talk To The Kamikaze Bugs In Your Head

Jamie: Mom, my ear is buzzing.
*pulls ear...yelps...then tries to give his ear the evil eye*
Jamie: Hello? Hello bugs! Please go away, you're annoying me.
*no response from offending party*
Jamie: Get out of my ear right now.
*bangs head against wall*
Jamie: Mom, there are bugs in my ear and they are punching me.

Me: I know babe, but they can't hear you.

You'd think I would have figured it out earlier. The cold that set up camp in his sinuses, the return of a slight fever, the huddled moaning in the corner, but instead I always feel like I'm late to the mommy instincts game, coming to the brilliant deduction my son had an ear infection only after he was sobbing uncontrollably and talking to himself like some sort of deranged narcissist who was directing a symphony of bees.

Even though I seem to be the type of person who needs to see something like jagged bones poking out of arms to be convinced of a fracture... once I get worried, I really get worried. How do you console a distraught four year old? Particularly a four year old that doesn't get distraught very often. The last time Jamie sobbed uncontrollably for any length of time was when he was a colicky infant. So I did what I used to do when he was a baby--I rocked and sang to him and just hoped it would go away soon-- completely bewildered as to what else to do. We are not a family prone to ear infections and my mom's old remedy of garlic oil in the ear was not an option. (mostly because I don't have any, since I was desperate enough to try it, despite its propensity for turning one's house into a rancid Italian restaurant.)

In a brief stroke of brilliance I called on my friends. I remembered Kat had more than her fair share of ear infections as a child. She came to my rescue with the heated rice sock idea, back rubs and anything else that would help him calm down and thus relieve some of the throbbing. Bethany said she always watched Dr. Doolittle and Willy Wonka when she had ear infections, so we turned on the TV, asked daddy to pick up the antibiotics, and settled in for an afternoon/evening of movies, books and cuddles.

May that amoxicillin do its job quickly.