One thing you'll notice about the lovely Lennons is their ability to blend, with their equal tones and equal physiques. We've had to work hard on our tight harmony and seamless unison, and are doing fine there, but it's not quite as easy to disguise the fact that we are three nubile teenagers and a newly-minted 41-year-old who's had seven children. Fortunately, our early-70's setting serves us well: we have floor length dresses with sleeves that cover the telling part of the arm. Stage makeup, too, can work wonders, as can squeezy shapewear.
Another bar to my word count is my 2-year-old. 'Nuff said, I know, but allow me to expand. This guy is nuts. He's taken to climbing, as in, someone found him standing on the stove the other day. (The stove was not on, FORTUNATELY.) He drags chairs or stepladders to where he wants to be. Recently I found him on top of the toy shelf. He'd climbed up the sides, throwing toys on the floor as he went, and was perched happily on the denuded fifth shelf, six feet up. Right now, before 8:00 on a Saturday, he is sitting on my lap, banging on my keys. Yesterday I heard a banging, and turned from the computer to find him banging on the arm of a chair with the uber-sharp knife which he'd climbed up into the fridge to take from the birthday cake platter. So I took it from him and put it away, and when I came back he was stabbing the chair with an alcohol marker. He's so bad during the day, and at night when he's finally asleep, I'm exhausted. And that's assuming that I don't fall asleep trying to put him down, because I was too old to train him up to sleep in a crib at 6 months like I did for everyone else, and now he's still in my bed kicking me and flinging an arm across my face all night.
Good thing he's cute.
7 comments:
Well, he is cute.
Cuteness, a survival mechanism :)
Your toddler descriptions always make me take a breath and shake off my own toddler's craziness. As he has moved toward preschooler-hood, he doesn't just stab things with knives - he takes the big old bread knife to CUT THE CRUSTY BREAD to make his sandwich. Even if I've *already* cut him some, because I'm trying to outmaneuver him. And clearly we have things like ladders and stepstools specifically because we recognize that short 2 & 3yos can use the extra help getting to the things that have inexplicably been set on a high shelf, almost as if we didn't want them to get them.... I almost said "need" the extra help, but as your toy shelf story shows, there is always another way.
Someone I met in college had a fascinating and terrifying story about how he and his brother managed to climb the gas stove to get something higher up. Their efforts turned on the stove and then knocked a wooden spoon into the flame, so that by the time their poor mother realized something was up, the cabinets were all aflame.
I'm biding my time by re-reading Stillwater, which is having a deleterious effect on my attention to my own children ;) but I am trying to limit my binge-reads to lying-down-for-naptime. Go will power!
...and is that a cape? Superhero or other adventure?
Mandamum, shoot me an email at darwincatholic @ blogspot.com, and I can hook you up with something easier than reading through the Stillwater archives.
MrsDarwin, I tried to email and my email bounced :-( Do I have it right that it's your blog title at blogspot dot com? So same as blog name but with an AT symbol instead of the first period?
Oh wow, it's as if I'm working on half a brain. The reason it bounced is because I gave you the website, basically. The email is darwincatholic@gmail.com. Lordy, someone give me some more coffee.
Wow about the 2 yr old. We only had 1 climber, our 2nd. I turned my back once, and, when I turned around, she was standing in the middle of the dining room table, a look of triumph on her face, squeezing a cube of butter through the fingers of her raised fist.
She'll be getting married in May.
That you write at all under those conditions is amazing.
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