Crossing Over to the Dark Side

Me, at the Garden State Discovery Center's Silver Diner Play Area

I drove the minivan today. Both kids were off from school, we were going to make a trip to the Garden State Discovery Museum. They both love the automatic doors on the van. In three weeks I'm going to drive it down to my mother's so we can go to the National Lutheran Home's Spring Festival, and before we go Steve will make the rear seats reappear so that Thea can be exiled to the back and my mother's friend Dorothy can come along. She had come with us until November 2007, when Micah's car seat took up the other half of the back seat. There are three seatbelts in the back seat of the CRV but it doesn't accomodate two child safety seats and another passenger. So it was time to practice.

Its console is almost like my car's, there's just a lot more vehicle in the back of the thing. There is a feeling of having so much echo-ey space following behind me. There is also not really any good place to attach the GPS. I tried the left upper window, but the cord issues are just too annoying. I tried the console below the radio/ventilation system but the angle was off and the glare on the screen made it awkward.

The arm rest dug into my side a little, but otherwise it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

The Garden State Discovery Museum was busier than our last visit - parents either coping with the end of their kids' spring breaks or the start, and what better way than to turn their little heathens loose in an interactive play space. This time Micah was much more independent (from me) and followed Thea around, happy to do whatever she was doing.

Thea enjoyed the construction site exihibit the most. It has a house framed out and on the second floor kids can put boards up on walls (the boards have holes on each end and the walls have pegs). She patiently plugged away at trying to get an entire wall covered, facing down the little boys who were just as determined to snatch those boards right out of her hands. I, on the other hand, wanted to take one of those boards and just bop the little brats over the head, but instead I just instructed one of the more aggressive little brats to back down - Thea was too busy hanging on to the boards for dear life to tell him herself.

Eventually she got an entire wall covered, but just as soon as she got it finished, admired her work did another little boy come and grab a few of the boards off the wall and start flinging them down the chute. Fortunately it was time to move on to another play area.

After more than three hours of running through the museum, I decided to call it a day, not wanting to be caught in Cherry Hill rush hour traffic. And as thanks for my efforts to entertain them, Thea treated me to 15 minutes of "MOM-mee, I want to turn around NOW!" After she realized the car was not turning around on command, her relentless whine became "I want to play a game NOW."

And if she hadn't been such a fabulous brat, I probably would have made up a game about counting red cars or something, but I was peeved. So I turned up the radio and listened to NPR. Micah was dead to the world, he made it known that he had had enough by laying down on the floor of the mini hockey rink while Thea and I were batting a puck back and forth.

I give Thea credit, she managed a constant stream of whining for more than 40 minutes. So that by the time we were back in Princeton, I took the Alexander exit and went to Steve's office. With the intention of dropping her off at Steve's office since it was 5:15 pm. He gave her a snap out of it spiel and I heaped on a layer of kiss watching Cyberchase and staying up late good-bye. And she managed to put a sock in it for the remainder of the trip home.

It's going to be a long spring break week, at this rate.

Evil Children

Today was going to be such a good day. A house to myself, errands unencumbered by a little man who thinks that every stuffed animal and Beanie Baby in every store is meant to be his, some time on the laptop getting patient letters re: labs and x-ray results ready to send.

A triptych of annoyances over a relatively short time:


The children came home from school. Thea had to sit on my chair in the living room and then proceed to point out that someone used a ballpoint pen to draw a very large circle on the cushion. Lining up the usual suspects, Micah denied committing this heinous act, saying "only draw on PAY-per. . ." with fierce conviction. Since his artistic talent these days are circles of varying sizes, I remained totally unconvinced of this professed innocence. Fortunately after putting various ballpoint pens through the dryer in 2004, I had hairspray on hand managed to get quite a bit of the mark out.

Micah is now restricted to the kitchen as far as pens go. Which was where he was when Thea wanted to cut paper. So both had scissors (Micah still in the kitchen, if you are on pen restrictions, scissor privileges are even more limited.)

Thea came into the kitchen to ask if she could cut up a magazine "with people on it" from the coffee table. This could have meant my nursing magazines (automatic yes), catalogs (ditto) or a few other things that I would prefer not to have sliced up. This very polite question would have been the right thing to do, if she hadn't already cut half of the cover off of my barely-read April 2009 copy of Washingtonian magazine. And when I saw that she'd already cut it and was a little annoyed with her, she had the gall to tell me that she did it because I didn't tell her not to do it fast enough.

We'd made some popcorn after school for a snack, and Thea hadn't finished it and put the bowl on the counter. She wanted to dump it in the trash but I asked her to ask her father if he'd want it later. Then when I stuck my head out into the living room to see what the answer was I find both she and Steve munching away, as dinner sits ready to serve on the stove and me needing to get on the road to the PTA-ish meeting at Thea's school. I could have clubbed them both over their heads but took the less violent path of yelling my lungs out at them. They deserved it.

Bad day to forget to take the blood pressure medicine.

Satan Invented Velcro. . . .A BAHA Tragicomedy

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday, a day that pretty much passes unnoticed in my life. Other than the grocery aisles and checkouts were packed with more people than usual stocking up on quickly consumable carbohydrates and carbonated high fructose corn syrup laden beverages. If it were the Ravens playing, I'd be a little more interested, but then again just barely.

After I returned grocery shopping and unpacking, Steve got ready to go into work for a few hours. Thea and I had decided to assemble the easel/chalkboard that has been sitting in the foyer for more than a couple weeks. Micah was napping. Since Thea and I work well together we had more than 75% of the easel assembled by the time Steve woke Micah up and deposited him in his high chair (too many pieces still lying around, waiting to be screwed into the frame.)

Once our masterpiece was finished, I said that they could use the chalkboard side while I got dinner started. I am not dumb enough to leave a two year old and tempera paints under the supervision of a five year old. After drawing for a bit, they got bored and went into the costume box and got out the tiger masks. Micah whipped off his BAHAs' band and put it on the ottoman, I retrieved it long enough to turn the dials down to "0", but left it there and went back to chopping up the ingredients for chili.

Micah in the mask that started the whole thing off.

Steve returned for dinner and to watch the game and asked where the BAHAs were. On the ottoman. No BAHAs.

So the dining room table was checked since Micah has removed his band and put it there next to the dehumidifier containers. No BAHAs.

Meanwhile Thea is going about her dinner, completely unaffected by all of this.

I am getting fairly wound up because a) the BAHAs, now that there are two are worth about $8K, b) it was a year ago, but Micah has flushed a non-flushable object down the powder room toilet, and c) the laundry closet door is open and the washer was open (to stop the cycle and allow the whites to soak a bit since someone in the house who is not me decided to change the dial on the machine from cold/cold to warm/warm after depositing his fairly new, very dark jeans in with the load thus rendering all the whites in the load a pathetic shade of grey and necessitating a second wash to attempt to get the whites back to something closer to their original color), Micah's bunny bear got washed this week, and he loves watching the first few rounds of the agitator suck the bear down in the water.

The saving grace is that, unlike most times, Micah has not really been in the kitchen or the laundry closet, both he and Thea have been playing around the easel or in the middle of the living room.

Everything is checked: toy box, diaper bags, backpacks, toy bins, under furniture, in the cushions , the recycling bins, the garbage can, upstairs, and on and on and on.

Thea is still unfazed. "But what about my dessert?" Yes, it's all about you. I am ready to dump her strawberries and whip cream over her head.

How am I going to explain this to the audiologist? It's like the damn thing was beamed out of the house and onto an alien spacecraft.

The Super Bowel is on, no one is really watching.

Finally, after almost two hours of searching, it's time to get the children ready for bed, off to sleep and the search resumes.

The upside is that Thea's craft box got cleaned up and organized, the toy bins got cleaned up, a few things were found along the way and put in their proper places, but still no BAHAs.

I started dusting just to give myself a few minutes to think. I did the end table and the bookcase under the stairs. No brilliant ideas.

I get a chair and check on top of the TV armoire, never mind that I put Thea on my shouldes to look and then made Steve get on a chair to look again. Then I pulled the games and puzzles off the shelf above the TV and all the puzzles, the Leapster, and other junk from around the TV and start dusting. Swiffer rocks it as far as collecting large quantities of dust. While I'm putting stuff back and reorganizing a little bit, Steve comes over and points at my feet, where the Leapster is. My glasses are off at the moment, so it just looks like a black backpack strap. With a mesh BAHA band and two BAHAs attached.

Exactly WHAT happened will probably remain a mystery. What I do know is that Thea's Backyardigans Leapster cartridge was on the computer table, and I asked her to put it away. And I found it again in another location and asked her to put it away. Then when I checked and zipped the Leapster backpack, the cartridges were there, but no Leapsters. (She claimed they were in Steve's car.) On one of the first searches of the TV armoire, I found one of the Leapsters behind the TV, and put it in the back, but if the BAHAs were dangling from the Velcro, I failed to notice because I didn't pull the backpack out, I just stuffed the Leapster in while it was still in the armoire. When I pulled it out to dust, I just pulled and dumped stuff on the floor without scrutinizing it, I was looking for a mesh band with two little rectangular black boxes on it, not all of the above attached to a small backpack's Velcro strap.

BAHAs missing: 6:30 pm, BAHAs found: 12:30 am. Years off my life: 3-6.

Then, once order is restored, I'm packing up various cables and wires for Thea's Fisher-Price camera to stuff the container back behind the TV where it has languished for a couple of years. There are a few other cables for the Leapster so I dropped them all into the F-P camera's container. And just after I do this an eerie, deep voice emerges from the container reciting the alphabet. I kid you not.

I pull out everything from the container and it's a keychain burp/joke thing-y that Steve got as a gag gift at Christmas. The button pushed was supposed to be the voice of someone burping the ABCs. So not funny, and how it got into the camera container I haven't a clue. I should've taken a hammer to it.

Where are superheroes when you need them most?

Stuck at Home

Sometime around 6:30 am Liu Laoshi from Thea's school called to say no school due to the snowstorm, then around 7:30 am Ela called letting us know Summit was also closed and Group was cancelled. What happened to getting up around 8 am and confirming at NJ 101.5's web site the schools were not opening?

On the other hand, Princeton University is business as usual. You'd think that a major university could do the humane thing and give its employees some extra time to chisel and scrape their cars clear of the ice. (I'm on a major rant about that because I was stuck last week behind one of our across-the-street neighbors who was driving his or her white SUV in front of us down River Road at a crawl because he or she had just scraped a small opening in the ice and was hoping the defroster would do the rest. Moron, moron, moron. Thank you for thinking yourself so much more important than the rest of us. I don't give a fig if you endanger yourself, but do it when I'm not sharing the road with you and you are slowing me down.)

It is not that much snow, complete over-reaction. If I was still living in Illinois it would be business as usual. I remember the first major snowstorm after we moved to Bolingbrook, it was deep enough and had enough drifting for my brother to construct tunnels in the backyard. After school, because the buses ran and we went to school as usual. Reason #1 to want to move back to the East Coast in the mind of a 14 year old. (Not that anyone cares what any of the other reasons are, but #2 would be the combo platter of Long John Silver and Red Lobster are not authentic seafood restaurants and no crab cakes to be found until you drive about 750 miles to the east. #3 would be flat, flat, flat and more flat, like living on a topographical ironing board. The only good thing was that I learned to drive in snow and ice during the time we lived there.)

So now I am stuck with the brat who spent 10 minutes yelling, "I WANT MY BREAKFAST NOW!" a few hundred times despite being told she had to maintain a civil tone of voice and add a please to the end of that sentence to guarantee my immediate departure from the warm covers, and her brother who is walking around in a t-shirt and diaper proclaiming, "MI-cah's nay-KEE!"

So the plan to throw him in a snowdrift when he gets on my nerves and dig him out in the spring thaw isn't going to work on two counts: the snow is turning into freezing rain or sleet, and I don't think it would much bother him being out in the elements without proper clothing.

On Their Way. . .

Photos, that is. Christmas is coming, too - but so far I'm ignoring it and hoping for the best. I am beginning to feel that Christmas should be like the Olympics, on an every two or four year basis, so maybe we'd appreciate it.

But I digress. Yesterday, I had time to find the cable to connect the camera to the computer and upload photos slooooooooowly. Kodak EasyShare seems to work at the speed of that Tim Conway character from the old Carol Burnett Show. Next step is to get a few of them onto the blog. Maybe Sunday or Monday.

Friday after speech thereapy, Micah and I went to Freehold Mall to meet with Bobbi, our former social worker for both kids' adoptions. I had baby quilts to hand off to her, purchased from my mother's friend and she had a check for me. And the mall had a carousel that fascinated Micah. I financed two rides, one on the lower level, one on the upper level. Yes, there are such things as bi-level carousels, be still the two-year old's heart. Micah was sufficiently awed that he held onto both handles from the moment the bell rang and the ride started to the second it came to a stop, and did not protest at having the seat belt put around him.

There was also a neat little kids play area directly in front of the carousel, and Micah loved that as well. It had seating for parents around the edges and stroller parking by the opening, so I was suitably impressed. Until a bratty little blonde heathen (a girl of about four years old) grabbed Micah's band holding the BAHA off his head as he was climbing up the tiny little slide.

For being old, having arthritic knees, and being somewhat reluctant to yell at children who are not my own, when it concerns a little device that is worth much more than its $4K price tag, I was amazingly fast and loud as I got to the crime scene, telling the little monster, "NOOOOOO, you don't touch that!" She barely had time to curl her evil little fingers around the headband part before I took it away from her.

And for those of you who are ready to spring to her defense, it wasn't simple curiosity, this child looked around, then made her grab. She was being horrible, I saw the evil gleam in her eye so she knew full well that she was doing something wrong.

Of course her oblivious mother was sitting outside of the play area at a food court table, having a half-caff double latte with another mommy-type, both with strollers for infants with them. (Nice supervision, can we say "Amber Alert?") I nearly went over to have a quick word with them, but thought the better of it since I still was in the "Excuuuse me, the ill-mannered spawn that I believe is yours just yanked my precious son's hearing aid off his head. If it happens again, she will feel my wrath and so will you" mode. The BAHA was unharmed, poor Micah was a little rattled thinking that he had done something wrong, and that little brat went off to torment others, smirking at me while I loaded our stroller.

I could have cheerfully wrung her neck, but wished upon her a horrible adolescence filled with acne and menstrual cramps. Somehow having a degree of specificity like that makes it easier to just get over it. That, and blogging about it.

Update

Today would have been my Dad's 78th birthday, so Happy Birthday, Dad, hope you're celebrating.

The first week back from vacation is always tough, mostly for Micah. He who loves his babysitter, Lisa, almost as much as his family wailed piteously both Tuesday and Thursday when I dropped him off. So I got to go off to work cloaked in that mist of Mommy-guilt. Of course when I checked up on him, he snapped out of it once I was out of sight and got into playing with the other children. I don't know if it was truly traumatic for him, or if he was just being a bit of a Drama Queen, which he does seem to have a certain flair for.

Last Wednesday Thea and I had a wonderful afternoon on the beach and playing in the water -we had to stick pretty close to the water's edge or be eaten alive by green-head flies. I have never, ever had the experience of seeing a small dot of blood well up from a fly bite and if there was a system of voting on next species to be wiped off the planet, these pests would get my vote. We made sand castles, buried each other in the sand (to hide from the aforementioned blood-sucking pests) and collected shells. Thea started getting brave about letting the surf come up and wash over her legs. When Steve and Micah came down to the beach, Steve brought our bottle of Off!, but this brand of insect repellant seemed to be more of a marinade/condiment or aphrodisiac for the damn flies because there were more bites rather than fewer after applying the stuff.

Friday we were back at the beach, after going on a fruitless quest to both Seaside and Point Pleasant looking for miniature golf. Despite threatening skies, we had Kite-y with us, and I managed to get it airborne, though with the sky greying and a few drops of rain falling, Thea's vote was for reeling Kite-y in and going back to the beach house. Fortunately, even though we reeled Kite-y in, we stayed on the beach and the clouds and sprinkles passed and the kids had a blast terrorizing two abandoned sand heaps complete with moat and throwing shells back into the waves. And since most of the wind was coming off on the water, the green-heads were not out en masse.

Since I worked last week while commuting from the beach, getting back into the routine wasn't too hard - and the drive was cut in half even with two separate drop-offs for school/daycare. Tuesday I had a patient with a really angry sebaceous cyst between the shoulder blades. With just a little help from a #11 blade and despite being covered with two gauze 4x4s, it blew, spewing its contents three or more feet at which point it splatted on the wall. Then I covered it even better and reapplied a little pressure. And again it spewed a swath through the room. It was simply amazing. Unfortunately, our rather small exam room soon smelled like someone opened a Limburger cheese shop, and the aroma lingered even though we washed down the wall, the exam table and sprayed enough air freshener to asphixiate half the office. Even Micah knew something was up, because I got "Mommy stinky" when he put his head on my shoulder when I picked him up from the babysitter's.

And somehow word must've made it back to the Sebaceous Cyst Fairy, because Thursday I had another patient with a nice bump at the nape of the neck with a nice little puncta in the middle. This one emptied more like Silly String or Cheez Whiz, but that same tell-tale odor hung in the room afterwards. I wish the Ear Lavage Fairy would send a few people my way, that has the same delightful ookiness factor, but without the smell.

Thea is being a 'five-day' kid at school, practice for starting Kindergarten in the fall, so today was just me and Micah-man. He's going to be banned from grocery shopping soon, at least from going with me to the Lawrenceville ShopRite. Damn the grocery stores with their displays of balloons and Beanie Babies. Micah is currently in a Mylar balloon and puppy phase - and unlike Thea who is steadfastly loyal to her two white tigers, Micah is a stuffed animal polygamist. He has his #1 lovey, Bunny Bear, and then he has a small horde of sister and brother stuff animals that he also seems to be devoted to, and his philosophy is the more, the merrier. If all of his 'favorite' stuffed animals were put in his crib, there would be no room for Micah.

I was privilege to Micah's first in-mall sit-in outside of Pottery Barn Kids on Monday, protesting his mother's lack of sensitivity to his need for a life-size toy dog (and mind you, if this were the real deal, wagging its tail in front of him, he'd be quaking in his booties and clawing his way up my leg and into my arms.). I was scoping the sale items and he found two dogs, a Jack Russell and a Boston Terrier, both life-size and he was in love. He carried the Jack Russell around the store, playing with it in the PBK toy kitchen, babbling away to it, until we put it back ($34 for a stuff animal, I love my son, just not in that way). I put it back, picked Micah up and strolled out of the store and then put him down again. And he promptly sat his shapely little butt down on the pavement and pouted. So he got picked up, tucked under my arm like a football and carted back to the car. Mommy can be such an insensitive b*tch a times, all in a day's work - one more thing he can share with his future therapist if he ever gets through being adopted, the ears issue and whatever other trauma to his psyche we have inflicted on him.

Tool Time

A few weeks ago, my darling boy yanked the kitchen phone's cord, which connected to the wall via a plastic connection in a metal frame (made for a wall-mount phone) ; the plastic did not resist the boy tugging on it with all of his almost 30 pounds and a piece of plastic holding the cord in the socket snapped off. And the phone wouldn't stay plugged in without a small quantity of packing tape.

So...I went to ACE Hardware, home of the helpful hardware man, who must've been on a coffee break and was replaced by the idiot, pimply-faced adolescent hardware man wannabe who pointed me to a $5.98 replacement - not an exact copy the part (which I dutifully brought along in my Teutonic "I want one JUST LIKE THIS" mode). Once home, with screwdriver in hand, I found that the nitwit had steered me to a connector with SIX wires and in the wall was FOUR wires, so once all was said and done, screwed and connected, there was still no dial tone. May his face remain a festering topographical map of the Rocky Mountains well into his twenties.

So...a few more days go by, and Micah and I went to Home Depot on our Monday shopping rounds. I wanted the above-mentioned thing for the phone and a winder-up thingy for the garden hose, which had been sitting on our front walk like a trip-and-fall lawsuit waiting to happen. This time I found a phone wall receptacle, manufactured by GE, which definitely brings good things to life because the packaging was transparent so I could easily see that there was a red wire, a green wire, a yellow wire, and a black wire - all for the bargain price of $4.99. We went home and the screwdriver came back out and lo and behold, the phone works. I am so proud of myself, therefore I'll keep the story of how much I hate the Self-Checkout at Home Depot and the bad words that I said over what was an amazingly slow and time-consuming pain in the rear of a process to myself.

So...Micah's tab is now one toilet and one phone receptacle, so his first five years or so of allowance is basically a big IOU. His tab stands at about $500+. Plus time lost for two ER visits.

Photos to follow - I've go to put them on the computer first. Another day, I am done. I brought the kids' medical charts home tonight to put their immunization histories into their medical records - now I just need to find my immunization history and fill in all the dates and shots.

The 7th Ring of Hell. . . .

. . . is located, not in the depths of Hades, but in Hillsborough, NJ at a place called Boro KidZone. Monday both kids' schools were closed for Presidents' Day, so I was looking for something to do with them since the weather was rainy. The local Moms' Club that I belong to (but have never gone to any meetings of) sent an email about Boro KidZone, so I thought we'd try it out. Big mistake. Huge.

It's an indoor play center located in an industrial park with one of those enormous inflatable bouncy castles, enormous inflatable slide, a climbing wall, some stuff for smaller kids and one of those Habi-Trail-like structures that kids can climb through, slide down, play in the ball pit, whatever. Nothing wrong with any of this - though other than the structures, the interior decor was about as visually stimulating as the inside of a microwave oven.

What really roasted my goat were the dozens of parents sitting on chairs, noses stuck in books or newspapers or engaged with their cell phones or lap tops while their adrenaline-crazed, ill-mannered spawn ran rampant through the facility. Thea climbed up in the structure and then was on her way down and missed a little soft block so she dangled before climbing back up, which scared her to the point she was crying. I gathered up Micah and talked her to a place where I could help her climb down, but herds of these miserable ill-mannered brats were crawling over her, over me and on top of Micah while we were doing this. Not a single "Excuse me" or anything. Not one, even the older ones, stopped to help - so in addition to lousy manners, they had the empathy of sea sponges as well.

What also bugged me was how unengaged the vast majority of the parents were. They just wanted a place where they could let their children run wild, burn off some energy while they did whatever. Only a few were actually playing with their children which is lazy and pathetic.

Once calm was restored after the climbing structure fiasco, Thea tried out the bouncing castle but came out because she said someone had said "something mean" to her. By then I figured out that of the two of them, I had to make sure to keep a closer eye on her, Micah can pretty much hold his own - you push him, he'll either holler or push right back. And while hanging out at the bouncing structure watching Thea give it another try, Micah engaged a girl in playing basketball and catch with him. A girl who looked somewhere between 15- to 16-years old. In hip huggers. With boobs, earrings, make-up. Once Thea was ok with bouncing around like a ping-pong, I went over to check on him, and the girl (who did seem nice) says to me, "Oh, we're just playing and talking." His BAHA was off - too noisy and too many rammy/rowdy kids around, so I felt a slightly evil compunction to tell her that he has microtia/atresia and isn't yet the most brilliant conversationalist (although he will occasionally say "Tickle bellybutton" though you have to know it or understand (from his lifting your shirt and trying to find your navel.) My bad on that one for doing it to him, so now he's going forth to do unto others) and "Dog, 'oof, 'oof."

For $9 per kids, we got out two hours worth, but usually if Thea, once she warms to something, will fight leaving. This time both of them got their shoes on and were perfectly willing to get out of there, and we won't be going back anytime soon.

Enter The Year of the Rat

Be forewarned, this post contains references to urine, feces and snot, and their roles in my recent life. If it's not your cup of tea, stop reading now and move on to a blander blog.

The Lunar New Year is off to a rather inauspcious start at our house. Wednesday Thea's school had a performance at the Princeton Senior Resources Center. She went to the rehearsal the day before, had been singing the songs around the house and in the car and was otherwise totally ready. Until the moment arrived, the children all marched out and she crumbled like a house of cards and started to cry.

And she spent the remainder of the performance on my lap.

The next day the performance was repeated at school for the Lawrence Day School students (Ying Hua and LDS share the same building), and she participated in the entire show. So much for rearranging schedules, having Steve home to do Micah's session with Ela, etc.

Thursday came and I arrived home to find that a glazed earthenware bowl that had been my grandmother's had an accident. The bowl had survived twelve years of me using it while I lived in DC, the moved to Philadelphia and two moves once in Philadelphia, the relocation to Princeton and seven years here. I loved that bowl because I can see my grandmother grating cabbage - and she always let me have some with just the vinegar and oil on it, before the mayonnaise went in and made it yucky.

And I know that it's people that matter, not possessions - but that bowl was a link to a person, and that person was enormously important to me.

Steve said it was in too many pieces, but he kept the pieces in a plastic bag - and it wasn't quite as bad as the "totally shattered" that he told me. Five large pieces, one shard and a chip, and with Elmer's glue and 3M tape, the bowl is back. Nurses and tape, baby - miracles can happen.

All of the above is almost insignificant compared to Friday's events. Thea was annoyed at the computer and threw two major tantrums - one of which I called Steve so he could listen in on the tirade. She got a 15 minute time-out from using the computer twice, and howled like I was pulling her eyelids over her head until they touched her butt. By dinner she was back to good humor - which was a good thing since Steve was trotting out to a bridge tournament. The whole theme of any of her tantrums is I WANT IT AND I WANT IT N-O-W. And since my membership at Our Lady of Instant Gratification has lapsed, it really gets her going. During one of the snot and tears tirades, I had to get a tissue and wipe her face and get her to blow her nose, only to have her scream at me I WANT MY BOOGIES BAAAAAAACK. Much as I would have like to have obliged, I might not have been willing to return them to the same orifice from which they emerged.

After dinner and clean-up, Thea went upstairs to get ready for bed. I was downstairs, stripping off Micah's clothes to throw in the wash. He indicated that he also wanted his diaper off. It was soggy and warm, so I figured I had a few seconds to dump it in the garbage and grab a new one. A few seconds for the little hoser to unleash the contents of his bladder onto the kitchen floor, and then try to splash around in it.

So after mopping up after the mess, kicking myself for my stupidity, I went upstairs with him. Thea was on the potty, I went to get my pajamas on and grab Micah's pajamas and undershirt, seconds really, just a few seconds.

During which Thea got off the potty, after pooping, giving Micah the opportunity to shove the toilet brush in and stir up a nice batch of turd soup, and then walk around the bathroom carrying the dribbling brush.

Nasty boy. And Thea, who usually starts hollering if he looks at her funny for thinking about hitting her some time next week, remained silent throughout this, so as an AWACS system, she is somewhat selective and therefore sucks.

So the two little beasts got tossed in the tub, I washed off my feet, and since it was after 9 pm and my mother is usually asleep by then, I was unable to call and ask her what was her magic formula for not killing my brother and me because I needed that particular incantation and I needed it N-O-W. Thea paddled around in the tub for almost an hour, relieving me of having to do bedtime stories.

Saturday, other than making them breakfast and getting them dressed, they were Steve's problem. I went to see Juno, probably the first movie that I've gone to in almost two years - it was great, but I could have lived without the ten minutes of commercials before the previews. Much more annoying than the music and slide-show advertisements from back in the day.

Tonight I settled for The Nanny Diaries on PPV. The book was better.

So much for Lunar New Year, I'm already looking forward to the Year of the Ox.

Potty-less in Princeton

I'm shamelessly riffing off of one of my favorite blogs, http://www.cluelessincarolina.blogspot.com/. If you read the Crayola Factory post, you're aware that on Friday, my dear sweet Micah flushed a small plastic bottle down the powder room commode. This is the potty of first resort when you have a four-year old whose executive planning skills doesn't include making time to use the bathroom. Out of commission for the weekend, hike to the upstairs bathrooms, plan ahead.

The very nice plumber came Monday afternoon, gave the toilet the equivalent of an endoscopy with the snake, pulled the toilet, gave it the equivalent of a colonoscopy and said that there is the perfect place for something this size to wedge itself, beyond the reach of the snake. So the toilet got taken - likely to be replaced on Wednesday. The plumber's boss called and said they'd give it one more try in the shop before declaring it dead.

So right now we have a gaping hole in the powder room floor, stuffed with half a roll of paper towels to prevent sewer gas from making its presence known and morning will bring either the old almond porcelain toilet back to us, or a new white one. For the sake of expense, I hope it's the old one, but since the plumber said that it was likely a lost cause and new toilets do not come with seats, the kids and I went to Home Depot and bought a toilet seat - and a new kitchen faucet.

This was after schlepping for the third trip to UPS in Hamilton/Trenton to try and pick up my prescription pads. They must be signed for and handed to a live person, so what I usually do afte the delivery notice arrives is get on the UPS web site and have them held for pick-up. It's been a fairly routine, every six month occurance since I started working at the family practice in 2001. Wednesday the delivery came, and since we were all at the ophthalmologists' office, the notice was on the door. That night I put the hold notice in the computer. Thursday morning Micah and I go to UPS on our way down to Columbus. Hours have changed, the pick-up/drop-off place now opens at 11:30. Bite me, UPS.

So we stop off on the way home from work/day care on Thursday and the package is out for delivery, whoever is in charge of pulling it FAILED to do her job. Bite the other butt cheek, UPS.
Friday, we bailed and went to Crayola, so another day lost - for a package that allegedly will only be held at UPS until December 5th. Finally on Monday after picking up Thea at school, we went one more time and got the package. Fortunately, my supply of Rx pads is not completely used up so I was only flipping out over the number of trips there in a world where gasoline is almost $3/gallon.

Crayola Factory & National Canal Museum

What do you do when your toddler flushes a four-ounce bottle of his sister's juice down the powder room toilet, flooding the bathroom? You mop up and decamp for greener pastures. Actually we were on our way to going to Easton to the Crayola Factory when Micah found a four-pack of Thea's juice somewhere on its way upstairs and decided to see if the four bottles and his bottle of formula would sink, swim or flush. Thea pulled two out of the toilet, I found one in the foyer, and the fourth is likely lodged somewhere beyond reach. The plumber will be coming on Monday, and his fee will be deducted from a future allowance payment.

Anyway, Crayola is just a bit more than an hours' drive from Princeton, and the route goes right past the drive-thru D-n-D, so coffee was also part of the agenda. Thea warmed up to Crayola pretty quickly - there are just so many little projects to try out: we got modeling clay, made gingerbread puppets, paper-bag puppets, went to this area that projected her movements onto a screen in various colors and speeds. She tried out her Super Spy dance moves and was impressed with the results. Micah liked the area that had lots of plastic balls that you dropped into a bin, the balls rode up on a screw-like device, went on rails over to a series of plastic ramps down into the bin where they could be retrieved and the process repeated, and repeated, and repeated.

An elevator ride above Crayola is the National Canal Museum, which was very cool - very hands on: Thea could take a model of a canal boat and move it through a series of locks up and down, loading coal along the way, until the boat arrived at the other end. She took it very seriously, unlike the three boys on a school field trip who were playing Battleship with their canal boats.

They could also build their own canal using a series of plastic walls and sending bathtub boats through the chutes that they created. Thea got to steer the tiller of a mock-up of a canal boat, which made a platform move and she tried pulleys to lift a 32 pound barrel to see which pulley system made it easier to lift. I almost enjoyed all of this more than Crayola, especially since there were fewer people around.

After we made the obligatory stop at the Crayola Factory Store, we had lunch at Perkins and then drove home. Micah was asleep before we got to the bridge over the Delaware River, and Thea conked out after a few rounds of games on her Leapster.

"You have a messy house."

This comment I got from a little playground friend of Thea's who had stopped by to see if she could come out and ride bicycles. I hope tact comes in to his life soon, because if he lets fly with another comment like that around me, he won't live to see his next birthday much less get invited to Thea's birthday party. The house was in total disarray last week from Thursday through Saturday because the living room was rearranged to put up the play yard for Micah. But it was neat piles of stuff, not wading through debris or even anything close.

A victim of reordering our world to incorporate Micah was the chair that matches the sofa. There will be no memorial service for this hideous doesn't-know-if-it's-a-chair-or-loveseat, and the couch should be nervous because it's made out of the same butt-ugly fabric. Once the play yard was up and the living room put back in a little bit of order, the parts of the crib were pulled out from under furniture throughout the house, and while Steve, Micah and Thea were out in the pool, I put the crib back together. Only eight screws, but a pain in my neck. Thank goodness for an old Nordstrom's hatbox that I used to prop the bottom/spring thing to be able to keep it within reach of the screw holes instead of growing an extra set of hands.

Anyway, the bottom line is Micah has a room, even though he's still camping in the Pack-N-Play in our room. I've been rocking him to sleep in there, and once a few more things are exiled to the attic or wherever else we can stash them, and the baby monitor gets plugged in, he'll move.

Micah had his first visit with the local ENT last Wednesday. The guy had the personality of a paper clip, but his office staff was nice. And I met another family with a child with bilateral microtia/atresia. The little girl is now six years old and is entering mainstream first grade. Thanks to surgery, she went from moderate/severe hearing impairment to mild impairment. She also had the plastic surgery to create auricles, and even though I'm not as concerned with the cosmetic aspect as restoring as much of Micah's hearing as possible, the appearance of those ears was amazing. On September 6th, Micah is scheduled for an audiogram to test his hearing.