Post Call Parenting

Do not believe your spouse when he/she claims they are not tired after being on call. "I'm fine," they might claim, "I actually got some sleep last night." This is what Marc told me on Friday when he got home. When pressed, he wouldn't tell me how much sleep was "some" but I was suspicious. Nevertheless, I decided he could probably handle the boys for a few minutes while I ran to a grocery store to grab one forgotten ingredient to make dinner. When I got home, the house was eerily quiet and I walked in to find this:

That's right. Marc was asleep on the couch with Elijah actually sitting on top of him and looking at a Where's Waldo? book while Gabe and David John were quietly putting together puzzles in a cooperative manner. What made me upset was not that Marc was asleep on the job, but that he was asleep on the job and the boys were STILL completely well-behaved while he was "watching" them! If I tried this the house would be destroyed in sixty seconds flat. What is it about daddies that children are just more obedient when they are around?
This makes me wonder if I can leave the kids with him on a regular basis when he's post call. I'll just have him sleep on the couch and I can have the rest of the day to myself... maybe this is a good thing after all.

From the Mouths of Babes

Marc is on call tonight which reminded me of day in December when Marc was also on call. As he was getting ready to leave for his long overnight shift, I got all weepy. Pregnant women are allowed to do that. Marc gave everyone a hug then went out the door. Gabe came over and sat by me on the couch, put a hand on my knee and asked, "Mom, what's wrong? What do you want?"
"Oh," I said, "Mommy is just sad because I don't want Daddy to leave. I want him to stay home."
"Mom," Gabe replied in his most patient let-me-explain-this-to-you voice, "Daddy is a doctor. He has to go to work."
"Yeah Mom!" piped in Elijah from the kitchen where he was coloring a picture, "There's always more sick kids!"
I started laughing as my own words of comfort came back at me from the mouths of my 3-year-olds. They really can be very adult and profound when they choose to be.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Sometimes, it seems as if they comprehend everything. At other times, I wonder if anything I say or do lodges in their brains at all.
How can a little person spout words of wisdom one moment and then throw a screaming tantrum the next moment because one of their Cheerios fell on the floor?
Is there a switch in their brains which gets toggled throughout the day? Is there a quota on higher function usage so that one can only have a certain number of rational acts in a given time period? I really don't know. Where is the research on this? Since there seems to be a lack of research, I've started keeping field notes on the behavior of 3-year-old boys in their natural habitat. I've made a list of behaviors and tried to categorize them as Rational Good Citizen Behavior (RGCB) or Crazy Feral Wolf Behavior (CFWB). Maybe we can find some patterns. I also have some that are ambiguous, maybe you can help me figure out which category they go in.

Rational Good Citizen Behavior
1. Elijah showed Gabriel a scab on his foot. Gabriel exclaimed "Oh Elijah! You have an owie. That looks like no fun. Let me see it." Gabe then proceeded to do a thorough examination of the owie including checking for tenderness and reminding Elijah not to pick the scab off.
2. Elijah has lately taken responsibility for holding David John's hand whenever he needs help going up or down a couple of stairs or when we are outside and there is potential for running down the driveway toward the street. He always says in a kind voice, "Come on David John! Let me hold you hand." David John prefers to hold Elijah's hand over mine.
3. When Gabriel was sent to time out for purposely grinding into the floor yet another piece of cereal with his cowboy boots he responded, "Yes Mom. You are right. I need a time out." When he got to his room he even pushed any toys out into the hall so that he was not violating time out procedure. He shut the door and asked me to start the timer.
4. After nap time yesterday all of the boys got some jelly beans. David John rapidly consumed his and then started crying because they were gone. Elijah gave David John fully half of his jelly beans so that David John would not be sad.

Crazy Feral Wolf Behavior
1. After waking up at 6 AM, Gabriel clawed Elijah's face because "Elijah keeped saying that it was too dark and it was not wake-up time yet so I had to scratch him."
2. Elijah started a physical fight over breakfast because of a difference in opinion about the lyrics to the song "Itsy Bitsy Spider". Apparently knowing whether the song says "Out came the sun" or "Up came the sun" is of prime importance.
3. Gabriel asked for some cereal (Cheerios and Kix) just so he could throw it all over the floor, put on his cowboy boots and have a romping good time making satisfying crunch sounds and grinding the cereal into a fine powder which I then had to sweep up.
4. Elijah frequently tantrums when he drops something on the ground. (Today it was a fruit snack and then later a crayon.) Ironically, when he tantrums he also falls on the ground crying and moaning but seems unable to retrieve the item sometimes inches from his hand.

Ambiguous- please help classify
1. Gabriel dumped out two decks of cards in the living room for seemingly no reason. I asked him why he did that. His response, "Mom, I had to dump out the cards so I can pick them up and get money." I've never paid him to do a job, but maybe this the beginning of business sense? Create a demand and then meet it?
2. Gabe and Elijah discovered that some rubber stretchy toys they have will stick to the ceiling if you throw them hard enough. The tricky part is getting them down. Elijah thinks he has a system. He gets a stick horse and waves the stick part in the air in the general direction of the ceiling. Although the stick actually comes nowhere near the height of the ceiling, eventually gravity kicks in and the rubber toy falls down anyway. The funny thing is that Gabe and David John both get Elijah if their toy is stuck on the ceiling and ask him to "get it down".
3. Elijah dropped a black-eyed pea on the ground during dinner on Monday. He wanted to retrieve it, but couldn't locate it. "Here," said Gabe, "let me help you." Gabe got one of his own black-eyed peas and threw it on the ground. "Now you can pick it up," he said. However, before Elijah could get it, David John pounced on it and ate it. Gabe was about to throw yet another on the ground when I stopped him.

Okay people. Theories? We could make some serious money if we can figure out the cause of Crazy Feral Wolf Behavior and eradicate it. Although, there is something endearing about the insanity too.

Snow Day

Before February is over, I thought I should post these pictures of our fun in the snow. Sadly, it took Cleveland until February to produce a day which had a wind chill of higher than 20 degrees so we could actually play outside. February has been a blessed month in that it has at least provided us with a variety of weather instead of the consistent sub-twenties gray days which lasted all of December and January. I will take the crazy snow storm, ice storm, and ridiculous thunder and lightning storm which happened this month because we also had several days in the 40s and even saw 50 plus degrees once or twice.
It seems as though, since Punxsatawney Phil declared it an early Spring, Spring has really been fighting hard but just can't quite stamp out old man Winter. Keep at it Spring, we're all pulling for ya. In the meantime, here are the pictures that remind us that winter can be fun.


Pictured here are Elijah and Gabe the snowman builders. They were actually very helpful this year in making our little snowman. They did most of the work, I just had to reshape a little and make sure the face stayed on. They were appalled that our snowman did not have mittens. We seem to have a shortage at present and I couldn't spare any for our poor snow friend.


This is David John the anti-snowman. He primarily spent his time trying to eat chunks off of Frosty and periodically made a dash for the street so that I had to leave our snowman project and chase him down.


We tried sledding down the small hill in our backyard with moderate success. The boys really loved it when I pulled them around on the sled. It was quite the workout for me. The three boys together total 90 pounds not to mention the 20+ extra pounds I'm already hauling around. Phew!


Here is Gabe in outside timeout. Just teasing- he called it his snow house and showed off how skinny he is by slipping in and out of the small gap between the gate and fence.


Finally, here is the evidence of the slave labor we get out of the boys. After David John shoveled the entire driveway (pay no attention to that suspicious snow-blower parked in the garage), I had him mop all the floors in our house.

Thus Saith Elijah

Every night we read some scriptures from the illustrated scripture books with the boys. We always ask a question afterward to make sure that the boys were listening and understood. Lately we've been reading from the illustrated Doctrine and Covenants. We recently read about a revelation given for Emma Smith. We asked the boys, "What was one thing Jesus told Emma she should do?"
Appropriate responses would have included be happy, teach the people, read the scriptures, learn and write, etc. Elijah's response?

"Jesus told her she needs to make dinner!"

We obviously have some work to do before he starts dating.

Domestic

I've had a few successful cooking ventures lately so I thought I'd share.
Last month, I started making pizzas from scratch with the awesome pizza stone and peel I got for Christmas (thanks Mom and Dad!) and a little advice from my friend Holly who is a homemade pizza pro. I am still working out how to get the dough into pizza shape. My first attempt turned into a rectangle which conveniently fit exactly on my cutting board.

The second was more or less pizza-shaped, if a little lumpy.

It was this second, roundish, delicious pizza which caused Marc to exclaim, "Wow honey! You're so domestic." I guess I have the rest of my life to work my way up to Domestic Diva and then eventually Domestic Goddess, right?

My second big cooking triumph happened on Saturday. I decided that Marc and I would have our Valentine's dinner then since Sunday was the only day in a two week span that he would not have to get up at 5 am and go to work. I chose the signature Philippine dish chicken adobo. I have attempted this before, and Marc was always kind about it but it was never right. This time I started with all whole ingredients including a whole chicken that I butchered myself (I mean, it was dead and plucked but I cut it up using a cookbook diagram and a really big knife.) and according to Marc it's the closest thing to his mission adobo that he's ever had. Success! Here it is on a plate with some strawberries I dipped and some edamame.

My final cooking challenge was more of an issue of help than of a difficult recipe. I let the boys help me make sugar cookies for our friends and neighbors on Valentine's Day. Here is the "helpful" trio.

It was an adventure in repeated sanitization as the boys would inevitably touch their nose, the floor or the trashcan and have to be rescrubbed. David John also really loved to throw the cookie cutters on the floor so that they had to be washed over and over as well. Using the hand mixer to make the dough was a big hit and they all had a great time decorating. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of all the cookies before they were given out. This is the plate that stayed home with us, but most of these are cookies that I decorated under direction from the boys. I don't have any photos of the hilarious and adorable lopsided multi-topping cookies they did themselves.

Anyway, the cookies tasted good and it only took me one hour to clean the kitchen afterward. I guess I really am becoming domestic.

Cookie Caper

On Sunday I made some no-bake cookies.

Someone was clearly trying to get those cookies via any means possible. Apparently the tipped-over chair, deflated inflatable chair, cushion and potty had failed.

Aha! Caught in the act! He was trying to bring in more chairs but couldn't get them around the corner to the cookie counter.

After more attempts and many sad faces we finally gave in and let the poor guy have a cookie. As soon as he figures out how to right our tipped over chairs we'll be in trouble. Watch out cookies!

Adventures in Potty Training

As my friend Sarah Smith is fond of saying, "Potty training is a Special Time."
It seems like such a simple concept. When something comes out of the lower half of your body, please go to this room and sit on this special chair. However, there is nothing simple about it unless you happen to be one of those lucky parents whose children just potty train themselves. In other words, you are the parent of only very well-behaved girls.
For us this potty training adventure began shortly after we moved to Cleveland and we are only now seeing success. Let me just say that despite potty books and logic stating that children can be trained at 18 months, despite your desperate want to use all the money you are spending on diapers to vacation in Europe, despite the fact that all of your friends seem to have potty-trained children do not be discouraged if your child is not. It will happen, seemingly by magic. One day your child will just get it and you will step out of the world of diapers and into the world of underwear, accidents, and potty etiquette.
Potty-training is a Special Time. It is a time when all of the subjects you've been taught to politely avoid will be the main focus of your dinner conversation. It is a time when you will ooh and aah over things that are smelly and more than slightly disgusting. It is a time when your children will start conversations with strangers with phrases like, "Hi! Today I made a really big poop in the potty!" It is a time when your children will give each other potty-themed nicknames. "I'm the poop one, you're the pee one and he's the toot one."
It is a time when you will come to dread hearing "Uh-oh." What this phrase really means is "Mom, I left a puddle on the library carpet." It is a time when you might hear "Mom, the whole thing won't go down!" which means that your child has unrolled the entirety of a brand new jumbo roll of toilet paper and attempted to flush it down the toilet. The toilet will be completely clogged while a mound of dry toilet paper is still sticking out the top.
It is a time when "Mom, I made a mistake. I missed." means that there is pee on his underwear, pants, socks, footstool, bathroom floor, trashcan, hand towel and bathmat but none actually in the toilet. It is a time when your child might stand up during his church children's singing time in the very front row and moon everyone so he can scratch his bum. When you hurriedly try to pull his pants back up he will yell, "Stop, Mom! There's something wrong with my underwear!"
Yes, potty training is a Special Time. It's a good thing we are saving so much money on diapers because when all the adventures are over, and I know we're just getting started, I'm really going to need a vacation. If you need me, I'll be somewhere in Europe.