Turtle is 2!

Little Turtle is 2! As per tradition, I filled the hall with streamers so he could run up and down. His sister gave him his very own box of Band-Aids, and he indicated that he wanted them on his pj's and nose.
It's looking like his speech won't be delayed, as happened with two of his siblings. Unlike the other sibling, though, who spoke very early (that would be Princess, of course), he's talking very much like a baby at this point. Still, he's putting two words together and trying to copy what we say, so that's good. I'm really hoping not to spend hours in the observation booth of a speech therapy clinic. Oof. BTDT.
Gameboy and Turtle were sitting together the other day as Gameboy played a video game. I was thinking about how, when Turtle is 13, the age Gameboy is now, Turtle will be the only kid left in the house. I'm so glad to have him around!
Being the co-sleeping breast-feeder that I am, I walk around sleep-deprived most days. But on the night of his birthday, I was thinking about how, a year from now, chances are, he'll be out of diapers, out of my bed and won't nurse anymore. I have one more year of this baby stuff, and that will be it. I hope the journey to his third birthday goes slowly.

Gun-toting

I would just like to point out that there are plenty of baby dolls in the house, but he chooses to give this squirt gun a ride instead. 

Mr. Independent goes sliding

I saw Turtle climbing the stairs inside our house the other day. About five seconds later, everything seemed a little too quiet, and I immediately went outside on the remote chance he had let himself out.
Yep. There he was, walking across the backyard all by himself.

He looked back when he knew he'd been busted. My mom has a picture of me in a similar situation at this same age with that exact look on my face. I know what's going through his mind: "Mom, I can DO this!"

 
So there you go; he did it! And I am keeping a closer eye on the door.

(Side note: It's crazy that the snow melted already. It's usually still knee-deep at this time of year and hangs around until May. Or June. I know global warming is bad, but it might suit my purpose just a little.)

Playtime for Mom

  The kids were in another play last fall. It was a pretty relaxed deal, with both of them playing small parts as townsfolk in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

  Then Princess got a pretty awesome role as the empress who shows up at the end of "The NeverEnding Story." She liked her costume very much. "I usually play a rodent or a dirty little boy," she said. In truth, she only played a dirty little boy once, as one of the little helper kids in a "Sherlock Holmes" story. But there have been several rodents, apparently a common theme in children's theater.
  Gameboy has another project coming up, so he wasn't in this play. I think Princess kind of liked being out on her own, no big brother in the show.

  I admit I envy them a little as I'm dropping them off at the playhouse. But I recently got the chance to be in a show, too, and took some time off work to do it. The term "opportunity cost" kept coming up in my mind, as I thought of one of the few concepts I remembered from my college economics class. It cost me a lot of money to be goofing around at the playhouse instead of working. And my poor husband had a lot of work to do, watching four kids — toddler included — as I spent two months with the show.
  He agreed I looked pretty awesome, though. I was in the ensemble for "Amadeus," which included playing Mrs. Salieri. Mr. Salieri is the lead part, and although my role was non-speaking, I figured I should ride his coattails as much as possible, mentioning numerous times to my friends that I was Mrs. Salieri.
  I was in a show three years ago. I hope it's not another three years before I do something again. I think sometimes to organize homeschoolers to do a play, but honestly, I'm afraid I'd have a bad attitude if they didn't take it pretty seriously. It's not that I don't want to have fun. It's just that in my opinion, you can't have fun if you don't put in the work. It would be pretty embarrassing to be on stage unprepared. I wonder if the kids who are interested in theater are already down at the playhouse doing it. There might not be other homeschoolers who want to.
  So anyway, I'm left with driving the kids to their rehearsals now. That's fun, too. I volunteer in the greenroom, sewing on buttons and painting noses — when rodents are required.

Mama's little — ouch! — boy

  Turtle will be 18 months old next week, which means he's almost my pretty much least favorite age. Taking care of toddlers is hard. I don't agree that the 2's are terrible; it's the 1's that getcha. I'm reminded of a quote from the movie "The Terminator": "It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ..."
  Turtle can go up and down the stairs, he opens doors, he has a wicked throwing arm and will fling his head around like a wrecking ball. And it's beyond his imagination that other people can be hurt. It's beyond his comprehension that there are things he's not allowed to do. He's just too young to understand, despite his advancing physical abilities.
  Today he hit Princess in the face with a toy. Hit her right between the eyes with a hard, plastic thing. (Half of a dragon egg, to be exact.) She cried and tried to pull it together, knowing that he doesn't understand. I scolded him and told him "You made her cry." "You hurt her." "No throwing things." "Blah, blah, blah," like that "Far Side" cartoon where the man is talking to the dog, and all it hears is its name.

  (Do a google image search of "blah blah dog 'Gary Larson'" and it comes right up!)

  So where was I? Scolding the baby, right. "You hurt her," I said. "No throwing at people." He looked at me blankly — and then threw something at me. Princess and I were stifling laughs. I told her if he ends up being a millionaire baseball pitcher, he totally owes her.
  Aside from his violent throwing arm, I'm also amazed at how quickly Turtle has learned — from his siblings, no doubt — how to pretend to shoot people, sword fight, fall over dead and spring back up to fight some more. "Gah-gah-gah" is the noise his pretend guns make. Just about anything gets turned into a sword. Animals fight each other with roars and growls.
  He's such a little boy!

Surprisingly, my first sick baby

  I didn't talk much about it to my friends when a stomach virus went through the house a few weeks ago. In 13 years of being a parent, I've never been so grossed out. I think it will help me to write about it here.
  You can stop reading if you want to; I won't mind.
  It started with Turtle, poor little 17-month-old baby. I've never had a kid so young throw up. I've always figured breastfeeding helps protect their tummies from vomit-inducing germs. In this case, although he breastfeeds a lot, he got sick. I discovered he was sick when he threw up all over me in the middle of the night.
  This post is not going to encourage people to co-sleep. I can only say that a month later, he's still sleeping with us, so that's the only endorsement I can muster at present.
  It was mostly potatoes. I had been out that evening, so my husband fed him. Must have been potatoes. Turtle retched about five times before he was done, me trying to keep it all in the same place — on me. It was stinky. It was voluminous. I'm pretty sure some of it came out his nose.
  I had to wake up my husband. (!) We totally stripped the bed. Put in as much laundry as we could. I threw Turtle's footed, fleece pajamas onto the porch, out into the frozen night. They were coated with potato puke, and I couldn't deal with it yet. (By morning, they had turned into a puke popcicle. Kind of made me wonder what I had been thinking the night before.)
  Poor Turtle cried and cried. He threw up lots more, much more than you'd think a baby could. The only thing that comforted him was nursing, and then he'd throw it up. I didn't deny him, however. I thought it best he keep hydrated, even if he kept it down for only 20 minutes.
  After a couple hours, he still couldn't settle back to sleep. Not in bed, not in my arms, rocking, sitting still; nothing worked. In desperation, I set him on the floor by the toilet for a moment. He instantly fell asleep. Literally, the second his head hit the floor, he was out. Curious, right? When I'm sick, I often feel best lying in that same spot.
  I watched him for a few minutes. I took a picture. He kept sleeping, so I didn't want to move him. Or leave him alone. I got a pillow and blanket and lay down beside him. I got about 90 minutes of fitful sleep that night.
  I ate almost nothing for two days. It's possible that I had the virus, too, and didn't eat enough to get sick. Or it's possible I was just too grossed out to eat. But as the rest of the family got sick, in turn, I did not. That was the saving grace at the end of the ordeal.

Technology makes me tired

  Today I discovered that for some time, I've been updating my facebook status with the setting at "Only Me." This explains why none of my friends commented on or "liked" my humorous and intelligent remarks.
  Ahem.
  Why facebook would have the option to update my status for myself and myself alone is a mystery. I suppose it could serve a similar purpose as a private blog, something one writes for herself, like a diary. But if that were my goal, I'd write a private blog. I wouldn't use facebook for that.
  I'm pretty sure it was switching over to the "timeline" format that changed my settings. Every time facebook changes, I move a little further away from liking it. I'm very, very old, you see, and there's a limit to how many times I can relearn the same thing.
  For example, when I was much younger, but apparently still very old, I got my first car, a used car, and it had license plates, the number on which I proudly memorized. About a year later, a new set of plates arrived in the mail. That's when I learned the state gives you new plates, with a new number, every seven years. "Well, that's it," I thought. "I'm not memorizing a new number every seven years!"
  I have never known my license plate number since. Nor do I know my husband's Social Security number, not even the last four digits, which often would be helpful. It's not that his number changes, of course, but it's just more stuff in my head that I don't need.
  We still don't have cell phones. It's partly because of the expense, though I know there are cheap, pay-as-you go options that would be good. It's partly that I don't want to learn how to use the phone, too. Mostly, though, I'm exhausted at the thought of everyone in the house having his or her own phone number. Yes, yes, I know you program the numbers into the phone. But still. It's too much.
  Saturday Night Live had a skit last night about Verizon, and its being an "old person's nightmare." I could relate.

Save the crazy robins

  This is a story of life and death, pit-in-the-stomach anxiety, and a baby. It takes a few turns, but please bear with me.
  My story begins last spring when a crazy pair of robins kept building nests in our shed. "I don't want a robin's nest in the shed," I told my husband. But he felt kind of sorry for them, and after taking six fresh nests out of the rafters, I, too, started to admire their persistence, although I continued to use words such as "crazy," "nuts" and "insane" to describe the birds.
  You only count four nests here because I didn't get a photo of the other two nests. I photographed the four and continued to save more nests for a big group shot, but my husband disposed of them, not realizing that a big pile of crazy robin's nests is the kind of thing I like to keep around.

  The next character I'll introduce is this section of stove pipe, another thing I probably have referred to as "crazy" because it continued to sit around our shed for years after my husband added on to our house. This piece wasn't needed but cost, like, 40 dollars, so he didn't want to get rid of it. So there it sat, like a little chimney of its own, vertical and shiny, in the shed, amongst bicycles, a wheelbarrow, garden cart, bags of potting soil, toys, etc.

  After leaving robin's nest number seven alone, we soon had a family of robins. This photo is as good as I could do without upsetting everybody. The parents flew around like they owned the place; the babies peeped loudly and ate worms. One time, a hawk sat itself on top of a dead birch tree and really got things stirred things up. But eventually, the peeping stopped; the nest was empty; and the parents left.
  I don't know how many days later it was that I heard a peeping sound in the shed. It was at least several days after last seeing the parents. I didn't understand what I was hearing at first.

  I thought it was a mouse, peep, peep, peep. But the noise got louder as I started to dig around. The peeping got louder, frantic. I soon saw what it was.
  A little baby robin had fallen into the stove pipe, a narrow, slippery, silver canyon of death. I picked up the pipe, and the frail little thing was sitting in its own poop, finally getting brave — and reckless — enough to call for help, no matter who happened to be out there.
  I, of course, started to cry, 'cause, you know — baby. Sure, the robins bother me every year, but I felt just awful. I should have known a baby bird would topple to its doom! That's how I felt at the time, anyway.

  I felt responsible to save this bird. And this is exactly the reason, by the way, I don't want robins building nests around the house. We've had two nests of babies under our deck, and predators got them. I thought this shed bunch had made it, but there we were, losing another.
  But not this time! I got a cardboard box and water. I found an old plunger from some baby medicine. I forced a little water into the bird, which seemed to go down. Then I dug up a worm, chopped it up (ew) and tried feeding that to the little guy. No luck. Then I realized because I had my own baby, I also had a jar of baby-food beef in the kitchen. That's like worms, right? I diluted the beef in some water, and the baby robin ate several plungers full. I pushed the plunger down his throat a bit, and he glug-glug-glugged it right down.
  Once I knew the bird had some food and water in him, I took down his nest from the rafters (the one he'd been born in), put it in an old hamster cage (another thing sitting in the shed)and left him alone, covered, hoping he'd rest. About an hour passed, and I couldn't believe what happened next.
  One of the parents came back! An adult robin started making a fuss, flittering around the tree outside the nest, chirping and chirping. I took the top off the hamster cage and left the birds alone. When I checked later, parent and baby were gone.
  Of course, it's possible the little guy didn't make it. But he made it back to nature with his mom or day, and didn't die in the shed at the bottom of the stove pipe. He didn't die on my watch, and that's all I was hoping for.
  When those crazy robins return this spring, I should build them a little shelf high in a tree to nest in. They insist on coming back here, and I'd like to be a better host.
  And yes, that stove pipe made its way to the metal recycling place. Finally.