Pee School

Milo potty-trained himself in one day! He is the stuff of legend at his preschool: Miss Jess told Jason that Milo was potty training prodigy (we're going with "POTTIGY!"). The kid spent a whole day in various train/mouse/superhero undergarments that he, on the whole, did not soil — his first real day of potty training at school. This after a Sunday of no less than seven (7) pairs of drawers. I'd hear him across the house yelling, "I GO PEEPEE!" and sprint...only to arrive to a warm puddle and a wry smile: "I peepee." Indeed. I need a laundress.

8

Lucy is eight years old! I started this post with maudlin and graphic recollections about what I was doing at this very moment eight years ago, but I decided instead to write about Lu. We think a lot as parents about our role in helping our children become good people, and with this in mind, I surveyed my child:

Lu is a highly relational creature. A billboard we drive by, a story on NPR, something they’re reading in language arts, weather reports, overheard conversations between adults: she is always trying to relate the information to experiences in her own life. Making connections is her most persistent narrative.

When Lu says something, she will repeat it until you have responded in some way (and nodding your head doesn’t count). She wants to be heard.

She argues and negotiates constantly. Jason has banned the word “wait” from our family vocabulary and if he could ban “but,” I think he would. This kid is ready for the Supreme Court.

She empathetic and kind and melodramatic and impulsive. She is both flamboyant and nuanced in her communication. She reads social cues well. She cares about other people, but she wants to (and likely will) have her own way.

Her curiosity is exhausting (to her and to us). Her creativity is boundless (ask to see the wallet she made out of duct tape).

She is an optimist with a consistent capacity to forgive. She can be in a wailing heap on her bedroom floor over some injustice of the mother regime one minute, then saying “Mom, can we start over?” the next.

Knowing how much I admire and love the person Lu already is, I am forced to reconsider my job as a parent: maybe I’m not supposed to help her become anything, but to keep safe all these great qualities so she can be, into adulthood, all that she already is.

#perspective

I was on a work call when I pulled up in the driveway tonight (late. sigh). Lu was riding her scooter, circling near my car and making a funny face every time she got near my window. When she signaled me to roll down the window, she was polite and experienced enough to stage whisper, "MOM, WHY ARE YOU STILL SITTING HERE ON THE PHONE?" And I said, "Go ride some more, kid. I am enjoying watching you, and I'm almost done."

She rode manic circles, still waving with every round. And after two minutes, I got out of the car and paced around the driveway as she rode, still on the phone. During one pass, she intercepted a shred of conversation: the word "hash." As in "hashtag," as in Twitter strategy, as in let's talk social media, as in my job — and she said "HASHBROWN??!!!" and started cracking up and rode her bike around saying "hashbrownhashbrownhashbrown." At which point I had to get off the phone because everything I was talking about was instantly less interesting than breakfast potatoes.

Sometimes

Sometimes, when you are very busy with your very important life, and your baby son (who is very busy being a boy and not a baby) wants your attention so much he says "Mommymommymommy" in several different charming voices, then puts both his tiny hands on your cheeks and turns your face toward his to look right into your eyes (he is scowling up through long blond bangs that need a trim and long blond eyelashes that are really too much) and says, finally, "Mommy " You stop.

This pause gives you room to think, "This is a good life. And this kid really should run for office."

Then you are back to the brushed nickel drawer pulls and the laundry and the current legal environment surrounding Pinterest. But you are smiling.

Lice. Twice.

When I checked Lu's head on Saturday and found lice AGAIN, I nearly cried. When I found a bug on Milo I actually did. We began the process of lice treatment all over again, only this time, I did what I should have from the start: instead of going for the most expedient, chemical (read: nuclear) option, choose the thorough, non-toxic, actually effective route. Otherwise known as Lesson 1: do whatever Mary Ellen, internet detective, diplomatically suggests you do in the first place. And this new method did work — Lice Ice is this minty, all-natural gel that coats the hair and suffocates the bugs and eggs. Milo enjoyed his menthol mohawk. Lu howled for about 6 of the 9 hours she wore the Lice Ice, offended by the smell, the stiffness and how bad her hair looked. Not that it mattered what she looked like: no one invited the people of the Louse House anywhere on Saturday.

When I washed their hair and combed it out Sunday (Milo sat patiently, as long as I gave him an M&M every 45 seconds), I was confident we'd beaten the bugs.

Until I took Milo back to school Monday. After I casually mentioned to the school director that he'd HAD lice, she marched him up to her office to inspect his head. And found a few nits. Ejected.

That's when I called the Texas Lice Squad, this group of hair hygienists who wear scrubs and magnifying masks and pick the bugs out or your money back. They checked all three of us, found nothing on me, one possible nit on Lu and a handful on Milo. "Pretty clean," they said admiringly, but treated us anyway and charged us $168. Worth every penny and then some. I don't clean my own toilets or my own teeth — why could I be trusted to get these heads clean? Lesson 2: with this and so many other tasks in my life, I should really just hire the experts.

Does Your Head Itch Yet?

Lucy told me she thought she had lice on Wednesday. "My head ITCHES!" she said. I filed this under Dramatic Fake Illness, alongside "I can't see" (wants glasses), "My ankle stings" (wants out of PE) and "My finger is broken" (wants out of PE and after-school gymnastics). Then when I was volunteering in her Spanish class Friday morning, I watched her sit and scratch. And scratch and scratch her head. If she had been a dog, she'd have lifted her hind leg up there to scratch it. My own head began to itch as I helped make the Mexican hot chocolate. I shuddered, realizing we might have a problem.

After I left Spanish, I returned to my work and...forgot. The deeply skeezed out part of my psyche was overtaken by the busy Pollyanna part (this is the same coping mechanism that allows me to spend so much time in hotels without pondering the existence of bedbugs). Lice shmice, my brain said.

But this morning on the couch, cuddled up with my darling children watching "Curious George," Lu lay her head in my lap. So sweet, until I noticed this rash blooming from around her ears and neck. I shuddered. My scalp began to itch. I got Internet and a flashlight. One look confirmed the lousy truth. For those of you who don't know (and I hope you never do), lice are harmless. But they are really fucking gross. Bugs on your head? Yes, actual bugs. Crawling. On your head.

The first thing I did — after making Lu get off the couch and away from us and all fabric surfaces — was to send an email to the people Lu may have infected in the past two days. This seemed like the mommy version of calling recent *ahem* partners to tell them you'd been diagnosed with a harmless but gross STD.

Then, I went to CVS to get some lice treatment (The shame! I swear the checkout dude scratched his head after he put the box in the plastic bag.) Then, we shampooed and doused and poisoned. Then, like ma and pa gorillas, we picked the bugs from Lu's head. This was an hours-long process.

Good news: none of the rest of us seems to have it (despite a desperate case of psychosomatic lice for yours truly). More good news: she was a trooper, and we had a fun day rewarding all her cooperation with the nit-picking. Bad news: if for some reason this treatment fails, the next remedy has us slathering her head in mayonnaise under a shower cap overnight. Gross as that sounds, it's better than bugs on your head.

The Negotiator, Jr.

A couple of days ago, Milo was merrily jumping on the couch, and stopped when I caught him. Me: "Milo, no jumping on the couch." Milo: "I not jumping, I wiggling." [Wiggles to prove it.]

When you tell him it's time to do something he doesn't want to do, whether it's going to bed or changing his diaper, he holds up one finger and says, "Two minutes." In fact, his tell when he's got a poop is that I hear him across the house saying, "Two minutes."

When he wants an item he's not supposed to have, he looks up at you from under a veil of blonde bangs and whispers, "Can I have this?" And you let him have it. Because you cannot resist.

Resolved: Write

Instead of using my New Year's resolution to flagellate myself (and yes, I still need to get organized, be happier, eat more vegetables and drive with more courtesy), I am going to keep it simple: write. Recently, for the first time in maybe 15 years, I rediscovered the joy of writing. Which is not to say I haven't written in 15 years — I (sort of) write for a living. But I hadn't plunged into a writing project this way. I wrote with the abandon and enthusiasm that I did when I was a kid banging out really bad novellas on an Apple IIc, being told by my mom to GO TO BED. I had fun. More of that in 2012.

Now that I have confessed, gentle readers, all 11 of you, whose support I need...pretend I merely made a resolution to exercise (which I did — exercising the creative muscle). In advance I will tell you:

No, I am not writing for any reason other than my own pleasure. No, it will not be published anywhere. No, it is not about you. No, you cannot read it.

Like you would an exercise program, help me with your enthusiasm for my efforts, with no expectation of evidence of my results?

Christmas Break(down)

We had a lovely break filled with family and friends and fattening food. Really, we did. And not to dismiss the cheer and gratitude, which we had a lot of, we also had 15 days of togetherness, with alternately too much and too little activity. We were about ready to kill each other yesterday. So I was thrilled to send Lucy off to school. I was less than thrilled when she walked back in the door 15 minutes later: SCHOOL DID NOT START UNTIL TODAY. Leaving us with another day to occupy her very busy brain, which we were able to do with Honour's help. Milo, mercifully, did have school, but when Lu and I picked him up, he was worn out from the re-entry to his normal routine.

I took them both to the Gap (mistake — my apologies to the people trying to buy cheap sweaters in peace), then to Central Market, where Milo gave me a big wet raspberry and smacked my forehead, earning a timeout in the pasta aisle (apologies to those people as well). Lucy's real shenanigans didn't start until we got home, when she and Jason fought over whether she should clean her room or watch a movie on the iPad. She "ran away" (to the backyard), leaving this note:

They're both at school today. With the professionals. Where they belong.