Puppy love

Beloved called me at work last Friday after he dropped the boys off at daycare. There’s a little girl named Madison who is there two of their three days, and has been for at least two years now. Beloved said as soon as they came in the door, Madison was saying, “Take off your coat and come and play with me, Tristan!” She was practically dancing in her enthusiasm.

I “awwww”ed appropriately, and promptly forgot about it. That afternoon, I was on pickup duty. I had Tristan’s coat, boots and hat on and was struggling to do the same for Simon when I noticed Tristan and Madison standing by the front door, holding hands and smiling serenely.

After I picked my jaw up of the floor, I caught Bobbie’s eye and asked her how long that had been going on. She gave me one of those, “I am as surprised as you” looks and said they’d been like that all day.

His first girlfriend, and he’s not even four. Truly, is that not adorable?

It’s the blissfully innocent smiles they had on their faces, not looking at each other but standing side by side staring off into space that is so exquisitely cute. I remember my first crush. (Don’t roll your eyes – my blog, my sap. Deal with it.) His name was Mark Neci-Ghirri or something like that, and we were in the first grade together. My mother still tells the story of how I came home one day and announced that when we got married, Mark and I would come and live with Mommy and Daddy.

Tristan hasn’t mentioned Madison at all this week, so I’m wondering how things are going over at Bobbie’s place today. I’m hoping she comes from money – it’s about time somebody in the family learned to marry for money instead of love. She seems like good daughter-in-law material, though. He could do much worse.

100% arrogant!

As seen at Angry Pregnant Lawyer

Starving Artist
You are 42% Rational, 42% Extroverted, 36% Brutal, and 100% Arrogant.

You are the Starving Artist! You are more intuitive than logical, and are primarily guided by your heart and emotions. You are also very introverted and gentle. Of course, this does not mean that you do not have an ego. In fact, you are surprisingly arrogant for someone so emotional and gentle. This is why you are best described as a starving artist. You are very introspective and quite sure of yourself, as any accomplished artist is, yet your views are impractical, guided by feelings, and overly gentle. You probably find math, logic, and similar intellectual pursuits offensive to your artistic sensibilities, and you prefer the open-endedness of artistry because then you know you can never truly have a wrong answer. So really you have no reason to be arrogant, you big doofus, because the skills you value (emotion, spirit, art, etc.) in yourself are valuable only on a subjective level, meaning your arrogance is purely masturbatory. In short, your personality is defective because you are arrogant, introverted, introspective, gentle, and thoroughly irrational…posessing most of the traits needed to be a starving–and useless–artist. So get out there, write a few short stories that are allegories for the spirit, and starve!

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more INTUITIVE than rational.
2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.
4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Capitalist Pig.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Haughty Intellectual, the Televangelist, and the Emo Kid.

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well.

The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

The great escape

When I stepped out of the shower this morning, Beloved was still dozing and I could hear Tristan talking to Simon. I poked Beloved and reminded him that if he left Simon in his crib too long, Simon might take it into his head to crawl out of it – something we have thus far avoided.

I am in denial over the fact that Simon might some day move from his crib to a bed. In fact, I dread the day. We turfed Tristan from his crib when he was 20 months old, entirely because we needed the crib for Simon’s impending arrival. At the time, he seemed plenty old enough, and he made the transition without complaint. He loved his big boy bed.

Except he wouldn’t stay in it. I was 11 months pregnant (or so it seemed), still working, it was Christmas, and Tristan would be running around the house every night from midnight until 3 am. It was, in a word, horrendous. It got so bad, and I was so desperate for sleep, that a few times I made sure everything was safe, checked the baby gate at the top of the stairs, and locked my door. I’d find him asleep on the floor outside my door when guilt woke me up a few hours later. Bad mommy memories.

I am therefore endlessly grateful that although Simon is a monkey in almost every way, and manages to find trouble other kids couldn’t conceive in their wildest dreams, it hasn’t yet occured to him that he might be able to escape his crib.

All this flashed through my head in a heartbeat this morning as I wandered down the hallway, following the sounds of Tristan and Simon’s laughter. Tristan had turned on the light in Simon’s room, and I nudged open the door to see both of them, plus an assortment of Thomas trains, in Simon’s crib. Together.

Trying very hard not to shriek, I explained to Tristan how climbing into Simon’s crib was a very very very bad idea. “But Mommy,” he said, his blue eyes wounded, “I was just trying to make Simon happy.”

Sigh.

Maybe it won’t occur to Simon that the ingress is an egress too?

The preschool teenager

What happened to my baby?

Tristan’s new favourite hobby is to go into his room, shut his door, turn on his CD player and listen to music at eardrum-piercing levels. He’s not even FOUR YEARS OLD, fercrissake. At least he isn’t listening to Fiddy. The CD he is blaring is (quelle surprise) Thomas the Tank Engine.

Hmm, maybe Fiddy would be better…

2006 Banished Words

Lake Superior State University in Michigan has released its annual list of banned words and phrases. This year chose 17 of the more than 2000 nominations they received. Phew, none of them seem to form a part of my regular vernacular. Here’s the list:

  • Surreal
  • Hunker down
  • Person of interest
  • Community of learners
  • Up-or-down vote (I’m not sure I even know what this means)
  • Breaking news
  • Designer breed
  • FEMA (notable quote: “If they don’t do anything, we don’t need their acronym.”
  • First-time caller (notable quote: “I am serious in asking: who in any universe gives a care?”)
  • Pass the savings on to you!
  • 97 per cent fat-free
  • An accident that didn’t have to happen
  • Junk science
  • Git-r-done (again, I think I missed something on this one)
  • Dawg
  • Talking points (I may be out of a job if this one gets banned)
  • Holiday tree (I say a big ‘hallellujah’ to this one!)

It’s fun (in the geekiest definition of the word) to flip through their archives and see the banished words of years past (they’ve been at this since 1976). 1990’s list included fax and messenger as verbs (“Could you fax me that?”), so I don’t think the banishment ‘took’!

What words or phrases would you banish? I’m thinking “whatever” has definitely had more than its 15 minutes of fame, and we’ve had more than our share of “(insert trend here) is the new black”. I’m sure there are more, but I have two preschoolers crawling on me and I haven’t had my first coffee yet. I’m amazed I can still type in sentences!

My least favourite holiday

Ugh. Maybe it’s because it comes after Christmas and everything after Christmas but before spring is a bit of a cold, grey bore, but I’ve always hated New Year’s Eve. No New Year’s Eve has ever lived up to the hype for me.

Midnight countdown? Bah, I’d rather sleep.
End of year reviews? Been there, done that.
New Year’s resolutions? Why bother?

And no, I’m not just bitter because my in-laws are visiting. But they are. They’re not so bad, actually. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually kind of like them. So long as they don’t expect me to stay up until midnight on Saturday or watch any lame “Best of 2005” shows on TV.

So I won’t be making any New Year’s resolutions this year. But I suppose I can stop kvetching long enough to wish you a Happy New Year – as long as I can do it while the sun still shines.

Holiday review

I’m back!

Sorry I haven’t posted anything. I’d like to tell you it’s because I was doing something exciting, or was somewhere exotic. I can’t even tell you I was busy revelling with family and friends. Nope, I was just too busy doing nothing to blog.

Ah, sweet nothing.

Can I tell you a secret? In the last three nights I’ve averaged nine hours of sleep. That’s AVERAGE, mind you. Contrast that to the week before Christmas, when I was averaging around six hours sleep. This morning when my alarm went off at a quarter to six, I was so deeply perplexed by the sound of the radio waking me up I had to stop and think about what it was. My boys have had me up before the alarm for probably the entire month of December.

What’s behind this copious amount of slumber time? I have no idea. Simon is still waking a couple of times a night looking for his soother, but for whatever reason they’ve started to creep toward dawn with their morning wake-ups, and whatever the reason I’m happy with the results.

So, did you have a nice holiday? (I am using the past tense because I am one of the five civil servants in the entire national capital region who are actually at work today.) We had a lovely, truly lovely, family Christmas. My brother and his wife were over with my adorable one-year-old son Noah, and my cousin and his mom, his wife and their four-year-old came by on Christmas Eve, along with my parents. That’s my entire side of the family, all in one house. It doesn’t happen often, but I am thrilled when it does.

It was that happy, noisy kind of pandemonium that I love. The boys were wired, the grown-ups were chatting, the salmon and cream-cheese ring and peppercorn chevre were delicious. I love my family, I really do.

The boys loved their Christmas presents. Tristan was so cute; as he opened every gift his voice lifted about two octaves as he said, “WOW! It’s the most best Christmas present I ever got that I always wanted!” Simon said, “Pretty neat” and “Coo-ooo-ool!” every time he saw something being opened. The Wiggles and Thomas the Tank Engine were the heroes of the day. That, and GeoTrax and the Little People ABC Zoo were the big hits. And we played about an hour of Hullabaloo yesterday – highly recommended for the preschool set. Although Simon didn’t quite understand the concept, he did love running around in between us just because he could.

You know what, I think it was one of the best Christmases ever. Not because of anything in particular that happened, but just because it was all good. There were no bad moments.

And there was sleep. Any time there are 11 hours of sleep in 24 hours has got to be good.

Any Christmas stories to share? C’mon, somebody has to be out there to keep me company today!

Christmas tactical error #1

Made my first serious tactical error of the holiday season, and it seemed only fitting I share it with you!

As I posted, today was the kids’ Christmas party at work. There were movies in the board room, junk foods of every description, colouring books and treats and a posse of very excited children. I have to laugh about what Tristan will be picturing in his mind from now on when I tell him I’m going off to ‘work’, that land of endless sugary treats and cartoons.

Simon seemed to like the water fountain (“waterfall”, he called it) the best. That, and the elevator buttons. And exploring the cube farm.

Santa came, but apparently Santa’s helper elf didn’t think through his gifts very carefully. Santa brought Simon the Wiggles Big Red Car flashlight, which has, for the record, the most difficult-to-open packaging I’ve encountered in nearly four years of excessive presents. Simon loved this gift with an exhuberance that surprised all of us.

Santa brought for Tristan a very cool I Spy book, because Tristan loves to play I Spy lately, and Santa’s elf knew he would like something like that. What Santa’s elf didn’t think of was the relative playability of a book, no matter what the subject, versus a singing car-shaped flashlight. So, for five hours we have been battling over whose turn it is to play with the Big Red Car. Currently, Simon is upstairs sleeping with it in his crib, because he would sooner part with his hair than release it from his sweaty little grasp. Getting an almost two-year-old to share is difficult on the best of days; getting an almost two-year-old to share what has instantly become his most prized possession is turning into a Herculean feat of mothering.

If only Santa’s elf had had the foresight to send along one of the five dozen Thomas the Tank Engine related toys that will be making an appearance some time in the next 48 hours. Chalk it up to another parenting lesson learned the hard way!