Daring Young Mom

So I’ll do it in my blog.

Confession #1: I let my daughter put Ketchup on ANYTHING if it will get her to eat food.

Conversation this afternoon as the fridge door stood open:
Laylee: Is that Ketchup Sauce?
Me: Nope. It’s Mirin.
Laylee: Is that Lemon Juice?
Me: Yes.
Laylee: Is that rice?
Me: No. It’s diced garlic.
Laylee: Is that Ketchup Sauce?
Me: No. (It is a bottle of chocolate sauce but I decide its best not to open up the Pandora’s box that is….a liquid form of the “c”word in our very fridge.)
Laylee: Is that Ketchup Sauce?
Me: No. That’s Teriyaki.
Laylee: Oh, is it for Carrie?
Me: No. It’s not Carrie’s Yaki.
I close the fridge.

Confession #2: Since I was in elementary school, I have eaten Kit-Kat bars like this:

Confession #3: We have already re-bought Halloween candy “for the trick-or-treaters” twice this season.

Whew! I feel so much better getting that off my chest.

Side-note: Blogger ate this entry right after I typed it and uploaded all my photos the first time. Laylee was sitting on my lap when Blogger lost its mind. I asked her to get down because “mommy needs to whig out now.” She got down but stood at my feet pleading, “I wanna wig too, mommy. Please. Please can I have a wig too?”

Okay, here’s another link to Heather’s blog. I just love this entry. It’s too flippin’ true.

In a moment Dan will come in and he will say its bedtime and I really should go. We have to get up for church at ridiculous o’clock in the morning to get everyone ready and out the door by 8:30am. But I don’t wanna go to bed!

Do you ever feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when he and Andie MacDowell stay up all night so that the inevitable next day will not come, he will not have to face that Sonny and Cher song, Ned Ryerson (Bing!), Punxatony Phil and all those crazy people one more day?

Sometimes I feel like that. I was at a party tonight, the ending to a fun but much too short Saturday. I did not want to leave. We were the last people there, they were putting their kids to bed, our kids were on the verge of major meltdown and I just planted myself and refused to leave. It was 3 hours past Laylee and Magoo’s bedtime when we finally shuffled out of there, the last guests at a really fun party.

I just had this feeling of dread. If we leave now, then we have to go home to our messy house. If we go home to our messy house, then we have to clean it and go to bed. If we go to bed, then we’ll have to wake up, go to church, have a nice but much too short Sunday, go to bed again, get up again……and the weekend will be OVER!!! AHHHHH!!!! Then that Sonny and Cher song will come on the radio, we’ll have to get up, Dan will go to work and we’ll start all over again. No, we definitely cannot leave this party!

I am addicted to weekends. Today:

-Got up and went to a women’s church service day with Magoo and Karli.
-Heard some great talks and beautiful music, got all stoked to do better and be nicer to people.

-Took Magoo home for a nap and returned to women’s thingy.
-Called Karli on her cell phone from within the church because I couldn’t find her.
-Sewed 3 teddy bears for orphans (No, I am not making this up).
-Ate a boxed lunch salad with friends where we taught my good friend L, who grew up in Honduras, how to play MASH to foretell her future. She will marry David Letterman (not her first choice), live in an apartment, drive a limousine and have 4 children (she is married, turns 40 next week, has two kids, lives in a nice house and drives a sweet minivan).
-Got into a discussion about the merits of Oprah and whether or not she ever makes anonymous donations.

-Drove home with Karli by way of the library (where I picked up the book Blackbird recommended for Laylee) , the post office (where I mailed a frugal reader book) , the DQ where we ordered frosty treats to balance out the salads.
-Read Laylee library book multiple times.
-Cuddled with my shmoop.
-Went and got my hair cut short because it’s still falling out and now I look like a short-haired witch.
-Cuddled with my shmoop.
-Made a yummy cream-cheesy sausage dip for L’s 40th birthday party.
-Socialized with great friends while the kids played and were read to by adorable older children.
-Turned on the light in the room where Laylee was playing the piano and she said, “No. The light has to stay off. I’m playing Dark Music.” This may be one of my favorite things she’s ever said.
-Told Laylee it was time to go home and she said, “No, I have to play some lots of songs.”
-I said, “Okay, you can play one lots of songs and then we have to go home.”
-Laylee said, “Please, can I play 5 lots of songs?”
-I couldn’t resist so she played a song with words something like, “then, I go to nursery and na na ra ma so shusi ma na oh oh and there was bugs on the floo-oor. The End.”
-I said, “Okay, that’s one lots of songs.” And she corrected me, “Nope. That was lots of 5 songs. Let’s go!” and hopped down.

Now we’re home, Dan’s in bed and I’m typing until my head stops spinning, thinking about the wonderful minutiae of my day. Laylee is still talking to Ducky. She’s telling him, “You don’t hit people. You don’t hit people. You just go to bed and eat lunch and have a star-shine, and have a wall, yeah a wall, and a nightlight and a room, and a diaper to wear on your bum, a diaper to wear when you’re a baby. The end. You are my little baby weeOOOOOOOO. We don’t hit people.”

Is it just me or does everyone want to keep baby monitors in their kids’ rooms indefinitely just so they can hear what they DO in there? Her conversations are fascinating.

Lately she’s been giving Ducky a lot more positive reinforcement than negative and that’s a relief, “You did a GOOD job Ducky. Does that make you feel glad? Does that make you feel glad if you’re obedient, Ducky?”

I wonder if I went to bed if it would make me feel glad. Hmmmm? Maybe so. My shmoop is in there…and my pillows.

OOOOOOHHHHH! By the way, you know you’ve “made it” in the internet world when you type the words — high waisted jeans- into msn search and your site is the TOP HIT! Yep, I’m famous for talking about mom jeans. Yippee!

And goodnight.

Little-C (Laylee) loves stories more than anything in the world. The other night we found her in bed like this. I swear we did not pose this or even turn the page on the Doctor Seuss book. It was just too perfect. When we pulled back the covers, we found about 20 more books in bed with her, several under her body. That’s our Little-C, avid reader and book hoarder. Her choice of pages to stop on does seem a bit narcissistic.

Laylee begins every day by waking up, closing her door so she won’t get caught being awake and then turning on her light and playing for about a half an hour. I can’t bring myself to go in there because it’s so cute to listen to her talk to herself. After a little while she ventures out where she finds me and says in a wide-eyed, head-shaking, I’m-so-surprised, can’t-believe-it-myself sort of voice, “I’m AWAKE!” She then runs to me. I pick her up in a huge hug and say, “Yay! Now we can eat breakfast and play!”

This is the way our day starts every morning that I’m up before her, which is more often now that I’m walking with Sandra again. Otherwise, the only difference is that when she finally comes out of her room, she comes into my bed and says, “I’m AWAKE! Please get up on the carpet Mommy.” This makes me feel like a lazy slacker piece-of-cheese mom so I’m trying to beat her in the wake-up department (beat, meaning win – not in the please call the authorities now sense of the word). It’s a goal.

I’m still cheap. I accepted my free gift of books and flashcards from Readers’ Digest Families and returned the one I had to pay for. Then I canceled my subscription. I hate when parents drill their kids relentlessly with flashcards but they’re fun for Laylee to play with and we made a game out of her telling Magoo what the different numbers were. Yesterday it went like this:

I show her a card – she responds.

“Six!”


“Two!”

“Three!”

“Five!”


“COOKIES!”

I will give you a rare peek today at my husband and his complete adorableness. I try to limit these as not to make you weep with frustration at your own husbands’ lack of promise. So, Dan was trying to add my blog feed to his aggregator at work. Somehow Blogger had a bug (I know everyone is now shocked! Blogger, have a bug? NO!!) that was bringing up some other random blog when he typed in my address. He wanted to email them about the bug but they said he had to have a blogger account first. So he set up his own blogger site. Check his links and then try and tell me he’s not the cutest man on this planet.

Finally, my show and tell. Not much to see here. I keep most of my medicines and exciting things locked far away but here’s the unchanged-to-make-myself-look-cooler version of the cabinet. This is a weird one Blackbird, but very telling. Click on the picture to read the deets. Enjoy, folks.

I love dressing up. My first year working at a public library I somehow conned the entire staff at my desk into dressing up as characters from the Wizard of Oz. I think it was more about humoring the new Associate Librarian than about a real desire to wear a lion’s mane to work, but they looked great and we (at least I) had a really fun time.

A year later, I was married and pregnant so Laylee got her first Halloween costume. We went as an 8-ball. Someone suggested that since Dan was tall and skinny, he should go as the pool cue. Considering the new life burgeoning within my womb, that costume seemed a tad Freudian for my liberal-arts-educated mind to handle. Instead, I made him a green shirt with 6 pockets.

The following year, Dan dressed up as his boss. They are computer guys and all wear t-shirts and caps every day. So Dan used crayons to draw his boss’s college and hockey team logos and pinned them to his own hat and t-shirt. Voila! You could hardly tell them apart. It was pretty much hilarious. But for our church Halloween party, he humored me and dressed up as a dwarf to carry Snow White around. Is it just me or does she look exactly like Magoo in drag?

The following year I chose Eyeore because — hello! So darn cute. And again Dan played along with the weird hats. Aren’t we precious? I was a few months pregnant with Magoo and already showing because he was – and is – a giant.

This year I really wanted us all to dress up as characters from my favorite show, The West Wing. Magoo could easily pass for President Bartlet. Just give him a 3-piece suit and some reading glasses. Dan and I would be the bodyguards and Laylee could….um….be……Congressman Matt Santos, Latino for President?

Well, I could get everyone on board with my plan except Little-C. She apparently has developed a mind and opinions of her own.

How about C. J. Craig?
Nope.
Donna? She’s so cute. You know she ends up with Josh.
No can do.

Since she’s never seen the show and I suspect she’s an aspiring right-wing extremist, we settled on dressing her as a woodland fairy and Magoo as a sumo wrestler…….until we read the little ghost story board book that Grammy sent in her Halloween package.

Now there will be no more discussion. Laylee MUST BE A GHOST! Never mind that I’ve already spent mega-bucks buying the fabric and billion little flowers for her fairy costume. Never mind that she was gonna be so cute and everyone would gasp and say, “No! You made that? You are a woman of unspeakable genius!” every time they saw her in the costume.

It took me a couple of days to get over myself and realize that if the kid wants to be a ghost, she can be a ghost. If she wants to dress up in a sheet with a hole cut out for her face to peek through — no assembly required — that is just fine. It shouldn’t be about me.

Heather, one of my favorite new bloggers, has a great post about our need to dress our kids to stoke our own egos. You should check it out.

When I have pictures of the ghost and the fat man, I’ll post them. As for me and Dan, I think we’ll keep a low profile this year…..unless anyone has a good idea for funny hats, especially funny hats relating to ghosts and large men in loin cloths.