Fitting, but not wearing

Today two girls came over: one Hannah’s age, one about a year younger than Eli. All the little girls went outside to play “Cinderella”. Eli stayed inside, and, sitting on the kitchen floor, shoved every last one of his small toy cars through the neck of an empty gallon jug which we use for purified water refills. I had to cut the jug open to get them out. He could not understand my exasperation.

At lunch, with the girls’ encouragement, Eli took off his shirt. As Eli and Hannah’s friend Lydia explained, he did it because they giggled and screamed.

I feel like he is too young to be stripping to the shrieks of young girls. Should I be worried?

Nunerwear

This morning Eli put on every single pair of underwear in his drawer. I had just done laundry; I counted eleven on his bottom, and one on his head. Then he put his “icky, sticky frog” shirt on…backwards.

I think he gets his fashion sense from his father.

After Afton.

Twenty minutes after I wrote the “Afton” post, my sense of humor evaporated and did not return for another ten hours.  Lunch was a disaster.  Afton ripped apart her food and threw each piece on the floor.  In a phone conversation with her mom, she said Afton does that every day.  She called it cute.  If my child did that every day, “cute” would not be the adjective that I would first use.  Nor would it happen every day. My child would probably not have a full count of fingers either.

Afton finally went home with her Mommy shortly after “lunch.” I tried to put her down for a nap. She climbed out of the crib and riffled through the drawers in my night stand. Then her mom came and she (Afton) shoved her hand too far down her throat (she chews on it a lot), gagged, and threw up. She does that a lot too. She has a high tolerance of pain and has no problem throwing up a few times a day. Like any normal kid.

Eli took notes from Afton, and added his own bit of creativity over lunch.  He shredded his meal as well as Nayah’s (why???!) and threw it on the floor.  Then the four-year-olds ran into the kitchen and stepped on food, and tracked it into the kitchen and living room.  Eli poured his milk on the floor. He said oops.

The 4s washed dishes.  Eli joined them.  They spilled water and emptied the dish soap dispenser.  Eli got into the flax seed flour sitting next to the sink.  It turned into cement.  All over the counter, sinks, cupboards, floor, his shirt, his sister’s shirt, and her friend’s shirt. Cement. Cement. Flaxseed cement. I would rather clean up poop.

Eli removed the padding from his sister’s baby stroller and “washed” it in the bathroom.  He needed to use a half a bottle of soap to wash it.  There was soap all over the bathroom floor. I slipped in it. I am very glad we have a foaming dispenser or my soap bill might be in the thousands instead of hundreds of dollars a month.

Eli removed the marker caps so Nayah could paint her naked body with them and also chew on their soft tips.

Eli was naked most of the day because he kept drenching his shirt (soap, milk, flaxseed paste, water…), then going potty.  Naturally after he pees he does not put his underwear and pants on again. Please tell me why one would do that. He had the nerve to get mad at me when I told him firmly, in certain specific terms, to get dressed.

Nayah teethed really badly today.  She cried most of the day when she was not nursing or being carried. I have NOTHING BETTER to do than carry around a ten-month-old while trudging around the house cleaning up like a teenager with Attention Deficit Disorder. I pick up three toys in the living room, deposit them on the kitchen table, put a dish in the dishwasher, take the toys from the kitchen table and deposit them next to the door of the kids’ room, walk by the bathroom then enter it and throw the wad of soggy toilet paper into the toilet, walk into my bedroom and grab a pillow to scream into, walk back into the living room, look at Livi and Hannah playing on the floor, walk into the kitchen and put away the silverware from the pile of clean dishes in the sink, pick up the broom, sweep a small section of kitchen floor, set the broom against the refrigerator door, pull the garbage bag up to get ready to pull it out of the garbage, reach under the kitchen table and pick up another toy, bring the toy into the living room throw it roughly towards the kids’ room, go back to the kitchen, organize a few dishes around the counter so it is easier to load them into the dishwasher, see the broom and start to sweep a little more, hear Eli in the bathroom, pick up his pants, follow him around the house carrying them for a bit, find a rag towel and wipe up some of the wet soapy bathroom floor, put the soap back up on the vanity next to the sink, go back to the living room, put the Dora chair back in its corner in the kids’ room, straighten the blankets on the kids’ beds, look at the mess of books and toys scattered across the floor, walk back into the living room, look at the girls and Eli making a new mess, walk into the kitchen, bang head against the wall repeatedly….

To top it off, n8 was almost an hour late home from work, I had to go pick him up from the bus station, and I had a meeting fifteen minutes later. One I should arrive at un-sweaty and without dried flaxseed powder coating my hair and the front of my shirt.

I decided my sanity was more important than my punctuality (instead of talking to other adults, I would rock back and forth screaming, “Afton, NOOOOOOO!” to the air). I cleaned a couple rooms so I could look at a space, breathe deeply and say, “This is clean and no small child is available to destroy this right now!”

Today I learned that crises are what teaches us to look up and rest in the unrelenting grace of God instead of trying to run uphill lickety-split, carrying five children on my back. I should have heard that on Thursday. (Of course I couldn’t, though, because my ipod broke and the radio wouldn’t hold an uplifting station without a great deal of static…)

Note on “The Whole Name” Post

Just to clarify, n8 literally said, “effin.” Not what it stands for. He only pseudo-swore. And so, of course, did Hannah. As my mother pointed out, though, “pseudo-swearing” is close enough and not something good Christians like us should be doing. I apologize for n8.

Other People’s Kids.

“Of course bring them over tomorrow!” I told the mom on the phone. “The almost-four-year-olds will play great together and be SO easy, and as for Afton (the 19 month old), my house is well baby-proofed!” I confidently bragged. She gave a puff of disbelief, as if no house in the world were baby-proofed sufficiently for her youngest.

“It’ll be fun, ” I continued enthusiastically. “In fact, I won’t let you take them home after you’re done. You’ll have to leave them here for at least four hours. Run some errands. Watch a movie. Do something fun. We’ll have a great time! It’ll be NO PROBLEM!”

The first ten minutes of Afton’s arrival (and her sister’s, but her older sister barely counts), I had graduated to smacking her hand, which is not something I usually do to other people’s children. She had run upstairs twice, despite me telling her throughly and with great firmness that she was not to go up there. Our two renters live up there, I would not be up there to supervise, there are no toys for her to play with there, and it is not “baby-proofed.” I eventually had to create an un-climbable barrier.

• Next she emptied a box of Kleenexes that she had climbed furniture to reach.
• She went through the glass containers in my kitchen cupboards.
• She pulled out half the pots and pans from another kitchen cupboard.
• She pulled out bottles and soaps and containers underneath the bathroom sink and tried to swish them in the toilet.
• “NO! AFTON!” is now a phrase that is stuck in my mind like a song.
• She used a stool to climb up on the bathroom vanity and was going to go through the “out-of-reach” medicine cabinet above the sink before I arrested that motion.
• She ran back to the kitchen and grabbed the broom and began bonking toddlers in the head with its handle.
• She fled to our bedroom and commenced to dig through our stuffed closet.
• Back to the bathroom to swish in the toilet.
• She climbed up on the kitchen table and grabbed the Sharpie and wrote on herself (thankfully not the wall this time!).
• I tied her up.

OK. Not literally. I strapped her into a solid and constraining high chair and put food in front of her. That was just in the first twenty minutes. I cannot wait to see what the rest of the day holds.

The Whole Name

n8 took care of the kids by himself for a day last week.  The girls were shining for him.  Hannah blurted out, “F-Bomb!” during supper.

“What did you say?!”
“I said, ‘F-Bomb.’  F-Bomb! F-Bomb!  F-Bomb!  F-Bomb!  F-Bomb!”  n8, not sure how to handle this new vocabulary word of his daughter’s, ignored her and continued feeding Nayah.  We blamed in on my (Bett’s) two sisters.

Later, he fed Nayah supper.  Now Navayah Emeth has this nasty habit of biting the spoon when we try to feed her.  In great exasperation and also inspiration from Hannah, n8 yelled: “STOP BITING THE ‘EFFIN’ SPOON!”

Fast forward to tonight.  Again, n8 was feeding Nayah (her mommy gets more than enough of that frustrating experience–see “Winning” post–to shuffle the job to others as often as possible).  He got up to get the spoon.

Hannah: Daddy, what is its name?
Nate: It’s a spoon.
Hannah: No, what’s it’s whole name?
Nate: Do you mean “baby spoon”?
Hannah: No.  What’s it’s whole name?
Nate [no sense of humor for this unpleasant task of feeding the baby]: That is it’s whole name.

He shovelled a couple spoonfuls of food into Nayah’s stubborn mouth.

“No, Daddy.  Isn’t it called an ‘effin’ spoon?”

Oops.

Confessions

Sometimes I laugh at the wrong things. Eli and Hannah put a mesh, see-though net over their heads and ran full tilt around the house, back and forth from kitchen to bedroom. I watched Eli run as fast as he could straight into the railing on our stairs. No swerving, wavering, or hesitation. Full force into a post that he could see.

He cried. I laughed.

Later that night he tried to remove a washcloth from his sister’s mouth. Hannah clamped her jaws down on the washcloth… and also his finger which he stupidly had stuck in her mouth. The bite drew blood.

He cried. I thought it was funny.

A friend of mine told me that kids have a “reflex” till age two to hold their breath when their head plunges under water. A few weeks ago our whole family went swimming at a lake. I dunked Nayah under, and watched her perfect face stare up at me, surprised but placid. Three times. Once for me, once to show n8, and once because I just thought it was really cool. Nate told me it was likely not a great idea. It might be considered somewhat abusive. I had not thought of that. My curiosity had eclipsed common sense.

Sometimes when Hannah and Eli chase each other in anger around the house, an arm arched back to whack the other, I watch them and do not immediately step in to stop the sin. Instead of hating and feeling sorrow over their sinful natures, I find their pummeling of each other quite hilarious. Sometimes I even tell them to hit the other harder.

When Hannah hits Eli’s wrist on the table and he cries, I do not spend several minutes talking over her sin and parenting her in a biblical fashion. I tell Eli to take Hannah’s wrist and whack it against the table. Then I turn around so they cannot see me smile.

Please do not tell anyone who would take my children from me. They really are safe and I really do like them.

Five Kids in the House

Eli is naked right now.

After swimming, he stripped (naturally) and opened the car door and climbed in. I do not know why. He sat in his car seat, wearing only his seat belt for over an hour. I finally finished taking care of Nayah, Hannah, and two other kids who are here (everyone “needed” a second bath and braided hair), then made lunch. I went out to get him. Just as I rounded the car, he opened the door and stood there.

“Mommy, I went potty wight he-eh, not inda cah.” And sure enough, there was a puddle right next to the car, dripping into the small platform next to its back seat. I was not sure if I should praise or scold him. Given the alternative was him shooting his pee into the front seat of the car, I chose to praise him.

Inside, he sat next to his friend Elise, the one-and-a-half-year-old. Elise also is naked. She never got clothed after her bath, because she ran away from me and she is not as loud and continuously demanding as the two almost four-year-olds.

“E-weess is naked!”
“So are you.”
Looks down at himself (honestly, how could he have forgotten that his body is bare?), “We’re matching!”
Oh dear.

“Weess, where’s your potty thtick?”

Somedays, I am just not sure what to do.