I’m sitting in the middle of a major disaster area. It looks like a wrapping paper factory and a Toys R Us had a mid-air collision and the remains of both landed squarely in my great room. Don’t ask me how that would happen. I’m delirious over here. Cut me some slack.

Christmas with a two-year-old is awesome. It is insane and messy and emotional and overwhelming and so, so, so much fun!

The poor little guy doesn’t know what to do with himself; there are so many new toys to play with and he just keeps bouncing from one to another like an itty bitty pinball until he’s just too overwhelmed and then he just starts crying. Toddler TILT! It doesn’t last long, though. It just takes a little cuddle from mommy or daddy, a little cleanup to get some distractions taken care of, and he’s ready to go again. Right now he’s napping. Recharging those little batteries of his so we can take him out to ride his new bike or to scoot on his new Skuut later today.

As for me, I’m getting ready to play the new Zelda game (which I practically have to fight my husband for the right to do so I must rush and finish this before he snatches the controller back) while I wait for the turkey to cook. I’ll deal with the aftermath of the wrapping paper factory/toy store explosion later.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas is coming. It is damn near almost here. And I? I am NOT ready. Somehow I thought I had, like, another week at least but, no! I don’t! In fact, due to our long-standing family tradition (which I’ve forced my husband to adopt) of opening presents on Christmas Eve that’s…*counting frantically on fingers*….WHATEVER! Christmas! IS! COMING!

I tried to plan ahead this year. I did well with gift shopping for family members to whom I needed to mail things. However, that didn’t matter so much when Mother Nature intervened and caused mail service to actually cease in some parts of Colorado where my packages were destined to go. The word “blizzard” is not mentioned in the oft quoted ”Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

I thought I planned far ahead enough for my husband’s gift but I, apparently, did not. I found out yesterday that it will not arrive until next week. Surprise! So now I need to think of a creative way to present to him what he’s going to be getting so at least he has something to open.

And then there’s Dax. We haven’t gotten him anything yet. Not one thing. Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat. We have yet to spend even a ha’penny on the boy. Don’t feel too badly for him, though; the dozens of packages spilling out from underneath our Christmas tree that came from other family members should keep him busy for awhile. And it’s not like we don’t intend to buy him anything. We just haven’t done it yet.

There’s more to it than the gifts, of course. It’s the whole spirit of Christmas which seems to have eluded me this year. It’s like it just hasn’t quite caught up to me yet. I think part of that is because I usually take vacation this time of year and so I am not distracted by work-type things and this year….well, not.

So, yeah. Christmas is coming. And I’m not ready.

But this weekend we’re thinking of taking Dax to the skating rink and we’ll get his Christmas gift and I’ll get the turkey for our Christmas dinner and I’ll turn off my work laptop and put all the related issues and concerns to bed until Tuesday and maybe that will do the trick.

Happy holidays to you and yours. May you be ready for whatever you wish to celebrate this season.

Parenting Truth #475: Sometimes you have to take what you think you know and throw it out the window. If what you think you should be doing ain’t working, do something else.

We’ve been really lucky with Dax. He’s not what you would call a difficult child in any sense of the word. That being said, he certainly has his difficult moments where Cat and I have been challenged to find ways to deal with less than savory behaviors.

That’s a nice way of saying that our son can sometimes behave like a tiny little hell beast.

Recently there have been a couple of solutions that we hesitated to try because they were in direct opposition to everything we thought we “should” be doing. But in what can only be called “complete desperation”, we tried them. We tried them and they worked. Well.

I’m purposely being vague here because I don’t even want to tell anyone what we’re doing. See, I’ve learned that people are very opinionated and very vocal in some situations about what you should and should not do with your child (lest you absolutely RUIN them for life) and I’m afraid someone is going to tell me that my brilliant solution for getting Dax to go to bed without screaming until he’s hoarse is going to turn him into a serial killer so I’m keeping it to myself. (Unless you have a toddler with sleep issues and you, too, are desperate. Then you can ask me and I might tell you. I got this gem of advice from a mommy of four so it is tried and true. And it doesn’t involve doping the child in any way.)

We’re finding that, in general, the path of least resistance is best with this kid. In other words, the less you fight him, the better off you are. This means that the secret is to keep things from getting to the point where you have to fight with him. It’s all very “if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest-what-is-the-sound-of-one-hand-clapping-riddle-wrapped-in-an-enigma” if you know what I mean. Ah, yes, Grasshopper. Can you snatch this pebble from the palm of my hand?

It also means that sometimes you have to stop yourself right in the middle of what you are doing and completely change what it is that you are doing because what you are doing is just making everything worse. In other words, you sometimes have to do the exact opposite of what you think……….

Oh, snap. Hold up. No. Do you know what this really is? It is the “Costanza Method” of parenting! Remember the episode when George decides that he’s just going to do the opposite of what naturally occurs to him which eventually ends up getting him that job with the Yankees?

Tune in next week when I give up on trying to catch up on the scrapbooking I’ve neglected, opting instead to just ”yaddah yaddah” over a huge chunk of my child’s first two years of life. I call it the “Lobster Bisque” approach to scrapbooking.

We’re trying to get rid of our cats.

The nice way to say it would be that we’re trying to “rehome” them, but I’m just going to shoot straight with you here: we’re trying to get rid of them.

See, here’s the deal. Our cats were sort of like our kids before we actually had a kid but ever since we brought the wee human child home, the furry children have slowly become…well…pets. This is, I admit, a raw deal for them. It means that they don’t get the attention they used to. Not even close. And this does not please them.

A lot has changed since I had a kid. Pre-kid, if one of the cats got pissed off at us (as cats are wont to do) and decided to show us their displeasure by, oh I dunno, peeing on something, we’d sort of shrug it off and figure we deserved it and “cats will be cats” and so forth. Now? Let’s just say the cats are lucky they haven’t been shorn completely bald and turned out into the neighborhood to be publicly shamed by the other cats (which would be so very humiliating for these snooty “indoor only” fellows who enjoy grooming themselves at the sliding glass door in view of those scruffy outdoor beasts who wander through our yard from time-to-time). Rather than do that, however, we yell at them. Because that makes loads of sense. Yelling at a cat. Might as well invite the moon over for cocktails.

The bottom line is that the cats have become a source of stress and that just sucks for everyone. We haven’t turned into Evil, Cat-Hating Monsters so we don’t intend to suddenly turn them into outdoor pets or to take them to the pound. Rather, we’d like to find a loving home for them.

To that end, I posted a couple of ads online. And that, my friends, is where things got really weird. I started getting lots of responses, written by people who clearly do not list the english language as their primary one, filled with tragic stories of pets who had been lost or who had met with their demise just before the holidays. These people were often willing to “pay anything” to bring my pet (never any mention that there are actually two of them and that they are cats) to whomever was looking to replace poor lost/deceased Fluffy or Spike. I was repeatedly assured that my pet “was not going for an experiment, pet mill, or lab testing”. Which, you know, I hadn’t even thought of but thanks so much for putting that into my head. Um…..yeah. This is not remotely suspicious. Not at all.

The other sort of response that disturbed me was similar in that the grammar was the same and there was always a tragic story involved but there was not so much money involved and no promise that my pet wasn’t going to a pet mill or to a lab. Rather, they seemed very, very interested in how much my pet weighed and they asked how much I was charging for them. I couldn’t help but wonder if they wanted that by the pound. Are cats good eatin’?

So now I can’t help but think that the only people who are going to respond to an ad placed online are going to want to experiment on or eat my pets and that’s just not going to fly. In the meantime, I’ve been reaching out to some of the rescue organizations around here to get some tips from them and trying to forge some sort of cease fire with the kitties.

But the next time one of those little fuzzbutts pees where they shouldn’t? I’m going to read them some of those email messages. Maybe then they’ll realize we’re not such jerks after all.

Next week: I share my recipe for Bad Cat Casserole.

Sometimes I wish fertility problems caused some sort of obvious disfigurement so that it would be painfully obvious to even the most casual observer. (Nothing horrible or anything, because infertility is bad enough as it is. Unless you don’t want to have any children. Then I guess it might be kind of nice because you can save money on birth control. But, you know, if you want to have kids and you’re having trouble doing that? It sucks. Nice parenthetical tangent, huh?)

I know I’m really quite lucky because I do have a child. I honestly can’t explain how we got so lucky. Really. I can tell you that we have fertility issues galore yet I have a squirmy little cutie-pie chugging down 2 percent and kicking me gently in the thigh as I type this. I can also tell you that we’ve not been remotely as lucky attempting to have another one.

What this means is that I frequently find myself fielding questions about when we’ll have another one. Interestingly enough, I’m rarely asked “if” we will….just when. That’s because it seems to be widely believed that having only one child is a bad, bad thing. Seriously. Of course, I’m basing this solely on things people have said to me to others within my range of hearing. Things said not because people are miserable assholes who want me to feel miserable but because I don’t have a distinguishing rash or even a tshirt indicating something to the effect of “Would like to have another child but ovaries are unwilling.”

Examples:

- Only children are always weird. I think it is irresponsible/selfish to have only one.

- The best gift you can give to your child is a sibling.

- I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to have only one. That’s just so unfair/selfish.

- You better get on it and give Dax his little brother or sister. You aren’t getting any younger. (Wow. This one gets extra   points for insensitivity, dontcha think?)

I don’t understand why people think they have a right, in the first place, to comment on how many kids someone else may want to have. I hear this complaint from a couple of my friends who have chosen to not have any kids at all. I know! The horror! Perfectly healthy women NOT having babies? Can you imagine? So irresponsible/unfair/selfish, no? And they are NOT getting any younger. The nerve.

Yeah. I guess I choose to believe that most people don’t mean to be asshats when they say these things. At least I hope they don’t mean to be. And I just think that if they knew that there’s a reason I’m not already pregnant with child number two then they might keep these comments to themselves. Of course, there are some (one) very special people (person) in my life who are missing the filter in their brains that alerts them to the fact that they are about to say something incredibly insensitive before they have the chance to actually say it but that is an entirely different entry altogether (THAT IS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ENTRY!) so I’ll just leave it at that.

We had to go the the pet store this weekend to replenish the kitty litter and it just happened to be the day that Santa was there to have his picture taken with the pets. Oh, yes. People do take their pets to have their pictures taken with Santa. You didn’t know that?

Dax noticed Santa right away and wanted to go over and say hello. Even though I explained that Santa was on a very important mission, that of…um….well, letting the pet mommies and daddies have holiday photos, Dax would not be deterred.

Santa seemed cool enough. He waved from across the room. He even gave a hearty “Ho! Ho! Ho!” and waved us over to where he sat waiting for the pet store photographer to do whatever it was she needed to do to get ready to take pictures of the pooches. The pet mommies and daddies eyed us suspiciously as we approached.

Dax greeted Santa as he does every dude in St. Nick duds. The kid acts as if he and the man in red go way back. “Hey Santa,” he said all casually. “What’s your name,” Santa inquired in a very bad Santa voice. Dax looked perplexed. He looked at me as if to say, “This? This is not Santa. I know Santa and this is not him.” So he said. “Um. Nemo?”

Excellent work, son. When you feel uncomfortable it is absolutely ok to use evasive maneuvers.

The conversation just went downhill from there. Santa seemed awkward and uncomfortable and Dax could very clearly sense that. Also, the natives were getting restless and a woman holding a tiny chihuahua she had dressed in a weensey pink tee shirt was shooting us the stink eye as if she thought we were going to crowd in front of her. Did I not realize this was a photo shoot for furry children? What was I doing there with a human child?

Finally Santa sort of poked at Dax and asked if Dax wanted to sit on his lap. Dax said no and Santa replied, “Mercifully.”

Seriously.

So we backed away slowly and the chihuahua’s owner shoved the dog unceremoniously into Santa’s white gloved hands, shot us one more glare, and then stood next to the photographer and yelped at the thing to “Smile! Smile for mommy, Paris! SMILE!” in a voice that I’m surprised humans could actually hear it was so high pitched.

I hope precious little Paris left a tiny poo in Santa’s lap.

Sitting in the coffee shop, talking over a shared low-fat blueberry muffin, she says, “You’d never know it by looking at me but I used to be thin.”

She shifts in her chair in the way that those who are almost painfully uncomfortable in their own skin do. She never looks directly at you the entire time she tells her story.

When she was very young she was a gymnast and a dancer but she was never good at either. She always felt as if her body was something she wore rather than something she was; it felt uncomfortable and unnatural and clumsy. She was always moving it this way and that, twisting and bending, leaping and flipping but it was as if she was working a marionette from the inside.

When she was about ten-years-old her mom started to comment on her figure and telling her that she needed to lose ten pounds. She had never thought of herself as fat but she immediately began to look at herself in a completely different way. No wonder she felt the way she did in her body. It was too much. So she started to diet and from that moment on she was perpetually trying to lose those ten pounds. She says she remembers always being fat but when she looks back at pictures she sees a perfectly healthy and normal girl until years later.

By sixth grade she learned to purge. By Junior High she’d mastered that and included restricting, chewing and spitting, and diet pills. It was the beginning a lifetime struggle with her weight because all those tricks she used to try to make herself thin just seemed to backfire and she would end up gaining weight. Then she’d starve it back off again and be thinner for awhile before gaining everything back and more. The highlight, she says, was a few years after college when she sat on a therapist’s couch and was told that if she weighed any less she would be hospitalized.

“Were you afraid?” You ask.

“I was thrilled.” She says. It meant that she was on her way to being thin. She said she pushed the therapist to say more because she wanted to hear the actual word “anorexia” applied to her. Instead of leaving that day concerned that maybe she was taking things too far, she left feeling like she’d really accomplished something because surely nobody would refer to a fat girl as anorexic.

You’re afraid to ask her if she wishes she could go back there again because you already know what the answer is.

How did I not know about this?

So, tell me. Is it hilarious or just in really poor taste to add this Palmer Cash tee shirt to a Christmas wish list to which my mom has access?

Is it funnier if I tell you that she and I bickered a bit last week over the fact that my parents used corporal punishment and I choose not to spank or otherwise hit my son and my mom seems to take offense to my choice somehow. Ok, so perhaps she takes offense to the fact that I am vehemently AGAINST corporal punishment because of the way I was disciplined when I was growing up and I am quite straighforward about that fact. (I could try to be more delicate when expressing my desire to avoid hitting my child but I can’t seem to help myself. Must be all them beatin’s I got when I was a kid. Can’t he’p myse’f.)
Ok…so, maybe that wouldn’t be funny. *snicker* Oh, yes. It totally would still be kind of funny. I mean, it’s not like they were really beating me when I was a kid. It’s just that the whole “to spank or not to spank” seems to be a bit of a sensitive issues with, y’know, certain people.

Hmmm….

So, would it be funny, then, if I sent it to my brother (who turned out the exact opposite of me and who figures we actually did turn out fine and so uses corporal punishment to discipline his three boys) and asked if he thinks they have it in his oldest son’s size? How ’bout if I asked him to stop whoopin’ them with the wooden spoon long enough to measure them with it to see what size they might need?

My brother would actually probably think that was kinda funny as he and I have been able to have civil discussions about this in the past and we also delight in giving each other shit from time to time. His wife, however, who once lectured me on how spanking is “biblical”, would not see the humor.

Ok, fine. I won’t put it on my wish list and I won’t email the link or any pictures to anyone.

How ’bout if I just buy the shirt and then wear it to the next family reunion?