Everyone at The Tot Lot is a Communist

Yesterday at the Tot Lot Milo became fixated on another little boy's push toy, which Milo insisted on refering to as "popping thing" because it looked a little like a popping lawnmower toy he'd been playing with last week at his grandfather's house. Milo was contentedly bogarting the toy; he'd pulled it over to a far corner of the Tot Lot, away from the grabby hands of the other kids, and glared at anyone who came near.

Eventually a bold, much younger little girl toddled over and started laying her paws all over the toy. And for the first time in his life Milo looked at her and yelled "No!" He tried to move the toy away from her, but she followed him.

"Milo," I said, against my will and ever fiber of my being. "It's not your toy, so you have to share."

About half an hour later Milo was playing with a little toy car near the slide. Another little girl crawled over to him, eying the car. Milo looked at me and started to cy.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

Whimpering, Milo said, "Share."

"You don't have to share the car," I said. "You just started playing with it. You just had to share the push toy because you'd been playing with it for a long time."

I sighed. I could barely make sense of the sharing rules, so how could I expect Milo to? I think the rule at the Tot Lot should be NO SHARING ALLOWED. Kids should be able to bring their toys and smack anyone who comes within a two foot radius. After all, you don't have to share in real life. It's not like I might be standing in line for a bagel when a perfect stranger approaches me and says it's now his turn to use my iPod. Imagine a world where this happened. Where there was no private property, and if you saw someone walking down the street wearing a sweater you liked you could just yell "My turn!" and grab the sweater. It would be chaos! Anarchy! Or Stalinist Russia. Take your pick.

New Lows in Parenting

A few weeks ago Milo developed a rash on his face. It looked a little like teenage acne -- tiny raised red bumps all over his cheeks. Over the course of the day the rash seemed to fade so I didn't worry about it too much. The next day the rash was back, worse than it had been the previous day. Also Milo was super crabby, and not sleeping well. But again, over the course of the day the rash faded. I called the pediatrician just in case, but missed their return call that evening. No big deal, I thought.

The next morning Milo woke up with his body entirely covered in the red rash. It was on his stomach, all over his back, and you could see the beginings of it on his arms. I flipped through the "How to Raise Your Child and Also Here's A List of Major Infectious Diseases" book and found the following options for Milo's rash:
1. Rubella
2. Measles
3. Fifth's Disease

Steven called the pediatrician that afternoon, but they were already closed for the day. We had the option of paging the doctor in the case of emergency.

"It's an emergency," I said.

We paged the doctor.

Was it actually an emergency? Who knew? If it was rubella, maybe. If it was some random weird rash, then no.

The doctor called back and said it sounded like Milo was having a reaction to something that was touching his skin. Had we changed his clothing recently? Detergent? Had he gotten into anything we could think of? No, no, and no.

But he had been drooling a lot lately. Maybe it was from sleeping in drool? I figured I'd change the crib sheet just in case. I walked into Milo's room, put my hand down on his crib sheet, and felt something weird, rough, and grainy. I flipped on the light and stared at my hand. It was covered in sand. The kid had been tracking in sand from the sandbox, and then sleeping on a beach for a week. Oh yes.

All Me, All The Time - Christian Blog Edition

A really nice review of AMPU by Annabelle Robertson, who I had the good fortune to be seated next to at the Southern Kentucky Book Fest, is up on her blog at Crosswalk. It should be noted that I witnessed Annabelle convince multiple unmarried, un-engaged strangers to buy her book, The Southern Girl's Guide to Surviving the Newlywed Years. Now THAT is author promotion.

Your Love is Better Than Ice Cream (Maybe)

More pictures from this weekend's ice cream extravaganza on Flickr.

Summer Reading, In Case Anyone Is Interested

I am currently trying to figure out what I'm going to write next, so I'm doing a lot of reading, mostly about motherhood and the different ways people write about it. Also I'm reading satire because that might be something I want to do. Maybe. I don't know. In any event, I'm open to suggestions.


This weekend I finished The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Undermines All Women. As a result I now either want to start organizing women to lobby Congress for government-sponsored daycare, or I want to write a business plan for an affordable national daycare chain that also does your laundry and grocery shopping. Either way, this book has changed my life in some significant way that has yet to be revealed. It's a little dogmatic at times, but definitely a must-read for mothers. One of the authors has a terrific article up on In These Times about why women don't like Hillary Clinton. So, I pretty much want to be Susan J. Douglas, is what it boils down to.


I also finished The Brambles a few weeks ago. It was, um, okay I guess. It's hard for me to tell with fiction. The characters were well-drawn, but not much happens, and I felt like there was a lot left unsaid about motherhood and, like, why the characters did what they did.


And I read some chick-lit and in case anyone wants to write some, here's the formula: woman who hates her life makes a new friend, changes her life for the better (usually involving miraculously getting a new job), and also finds a guy. Or gets pregnant and has a baby. Either ending works.


Right now I'm making my way through David Lodge's Small World, which is funny primarily if you're married to someone getting a degree in literature, but also a good lesson on how to write terrific satire. I've only just started the book, but already there's a character named Miss Maiden who specializes in phallic imagery in literature. Somehow that doesn't seem as funny when I write it out, but trust me, it's funny. Expecially if you've ever had a conversation a literature professor.

Next up, based on assorted recommendations: Little Children, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, I Don't Know How She Does It (re-reading it), Life's Work, and Rattled. Any suggestions? Please let me know.

More Evidence That The People Who Design Clothes Hate Women

Summer is here and I have no clothing. What in hell did I wear last summer? So I surfaced in SoHo from the fashion-exile that is Park Slope only to discover that this summer big floofy dresses with no waist are in style. And also dresses with hemlines approximately three centimeters from where your underwear starts. So your choices are, look like you are pregnant/concealing a small armada, or look like someone trying desperately to recapture the five minutes when you were 15 and had no cellulite.


Why, fashion industry, WHY?? Not fair not fair not fair.


Steven and I joined a gym about a month ago and quite frankly, I'm in good shape right now. My arms are toned, and I've even gotten rid of as much post-pregnancy stomach pooch as I probably could ever hope to without plastic surgery. So for the love of all that is holy, give me something I can wear!

I've seen women walking around in these dresses, and no one looks good in them. Super-skinny girls look even more board-shaped, and girls with boobs look like ... um .. what's a nice word for bloated?

So women of America, unite! Do not give in to the tyranny of the fashion world! Burn your floofy dresses. Storm into J. Crew or Banana Republic or whatever mall is closest to you and scream at the top of your lungs: "I am a woman and I have a waist!". That'll show them.

Housekeeping at Nineteen Months

Is it possible that another month has gone by already?

Here's a sample of what's been going on over the past month: On Saturday morning I got up with you, opened the door to the playroom to let Oscar out, and discovered that his water fountain had been making grinding noises all night and he looked like he was about to eat his own tail. So I took his water bowl and both you and Oscar trailed behind as I went into the kitchen to fill it up. I was back in the playroom, plugging it in, when I heard a loud crash in the kitchen. Then you came tearing down the hall yelling "Hug! Hug! Hug!" which could only mean you thought you'd done something wrong and were about to be yelled at.

I walked back toward the kitchen and discovered that you had picked up a canister filled with flour off a low shelf, attempted to walk with it down the hall, and, of course, dropped it and spilled flour all over the hallway. It was much too early in the morning to get angry, so I just sighed and said, "It's okay, it's just flour, let's just sweep it up."

You raced down the hall to the playroom and seconds later were back with your broom and mop. Which about sums it up. You get into things, but you also like to clean. I'm wondering just how long this cleaning obsession can possibly go on for -- it's been nearly a year, and it has only progressed. You now have your own spray bottle, in addition to a vacuum cleaner, two brooms, one mop, and a dustpan. You would think you live in house where someone actually cleans.

The big development this month, though, was sentences.

"Mama, stand up," you said to me one afternoon as I was lying, collapsed in exhaustion, on the living room floor.

Other sentences quickly followed.
"Bonk head crib," you said after you whacked yourself on the crib railing. "Fan on. Shoe off. Hold spatula. Get in. What's your name? Mama. Welcome, Mama."

That last one threw me until I realized you had no idea what it meant and were just repeating the welcome song they sing at your music class, although you did know to put my name into it.

You've also started getting interested in numbers, and you can count to four. Or at least, you can say the numbers in the correct order up to four, and then you throw in other random numbers, so a lot of the time you end up saying "One two three four eight five!" You're still figuring out what it all means, though. Sometimes you'll point to something and say "one" followed by pointing at something else and saying "two," and then returning to the first thing you pointed at and saying "three." So ... you're not quite there yet.

Drawing is the other big thing you've started doing over the last few weeks.
"Crayon!" you yell sometimes, and race down the hall to bring back a crayon. Then you hand it to the nearest adult and demand, "Draw!".

"What should I draw?" said adult will ask. And the answer is always something totally un-drawable.

"Alpaca," you'll say. Sometimes, said adult will get lucky and you'll ask for a sheep.

We've been spending time over the last few weeks watching videos of your first few months on this planet. I guess there's enough distance now that we can look back and laugh, and you find it fascinating. You seem to understand that it's you up there on the television. You point at say "Milo. Baby Milo." You've also become obsessed. Sometimes when we ask what you want to do now you run to the television and say "Baby Milo!".

While you still have bouts of doing really boring things like spending twenty minutes putting rocks in a pail and then taking them out again, the more you're able to talk the more fun you get. We still tell stories at night about what you did that day and what you're going to do the next day, and you've started to recognize schedules and things that usually happen. You know that on Saturdays we go to the supermarket ("Car! Salami!") and on Sundays we go to the pool ("Kick kick kick! Splash!"). You have favorite songs ("Row row row boat," "This old man," "Bridge down key") and you suddenly seem to be interested in playing on your piano a lot. You like doing somersaults, being tickled, and playing with water fountains.

In other news, your nanny is leaving to go be a dancer for the Boston Celtics. So, that'll be something you can brag about to all your hormonal 14-year-old friends one day.

Love,
Mama

First Haircut

Yesterday Milo got his first haircut. I think the haircutting lady thought I was insane for not cutting his hair sooner. She kept saying, "It's so long" over and over. I don't know, it didn't seem that long to me. Also I have a phobia about getting my own hair cut. Also I thought I could do it on my own, which is why your hair always looked sort of lopsided and strange.

At first Milo was all excited because he got to sit in a little red fire engine. He grabbed the steering wheel and made honking noises. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw the glint of the hairdresser's shears, and in an instant he started howling. I think he thought she was going to decapitate him. He cried through most of it. She cut off all his curls, which I loved, but I guess they'll grow back. Anyway people will stop thinking he's a girl at least. So, Milo, you used to look like a little toddler -- now you look like a financial analyst. Oh well. It's only hair.

Before:


After: