Fire and Empathy

Latefordinner goes to job 2 on Sunday afternoons until the evening. Also, the neighbor kid who is NOT COMPATIBLE with my kids comes to his grandparents next door every weekend. They don’t know what “not compatible” means, only that they’re kids and neighbors and that means they should “play”. Their play is mostly fighting, because they exclude Binker. He tries to play with the big kids, but he is just four, and not quite there yet. I do my best to stop him, but he gets really pissed off and even offended when I try to create activities with me and Squishy that are separate from them. So short story long, I spend Sundays putting out fires between asshole neighbor kid and my boys. I send that kid home at least four times a weekend. I actually (sort of) slammed the door in his face when he rang the doorbell during dinner. I am that bitch neighbor mom who doesn’t let my kids in his house because they smoke inside and he can’t share his skittles with my kids at 9:30 a.m. (WTF?!). We ARE building a fence. Boundaries, man. It’s time.

There was a short explosive period of time today that I need to talk about. I had called the boys in for dinner (early, just to get rid of that kid). I had nuggets and fries in the oven (Don’t judge. We also had brocoli, ok?) Tuna was playing the piano, which is awesome, except he started to freak out about forgetting a song from the winter and couldn’t find the music and needed me RIGHT THEN to help him find it and THEN after I found it he needed help reading the music because the notes were NOT RIGHT.

At the same moment, Binker yells that he needs Squishy out of the bathroom where he is pooping. I am ready to talk about how we need to show the baby how we go potty, etc. when I find this scene: Squishy is sitting in a puddle of urine because apparently Binker did tuck but, the pee came out between the bowl and the seat. Squishy is sitting and splashing in Lake Binker #247. I strip and wash both of them, and the floor (I made him wash the stool, for those of you who tell me to make him clean it), and the oven timer goes off. I leave both babies naked in the bathroom, tell Binker to flush and wash hands, and go to the kitchen. As I take out the nuggets, four of them fall to the bottom of the oven and one catches on fire.

Seriously?

Tuna is still playing the piano loudly throughout this scene.

Naked Squishy comes running into the kitchen. I manage to get the tongs out of the drawer and beat the nugget fire out with one hand while holding the baby back from the oven with the other. (No joke, I did that. I was a ninja.) With the fire out and oven still open, I grab him and secure him behind gate number 1, which keeps him in the living room. Back to the kitchen, I fish out the other nuggets, and Binker starts yelling “MOMMY! I NEED CLOTHES!” over and over and over. Meanwhile, Tuna is still asking for help with his music, then figures it out (phew!)

Finally, I manage to get us all to the table with hot food and cold water. Tuna is the only one with clothes on.
Then he says, “Why do I feel like I want to cry right now?”
And I stop everything, look at him, and say, “Well, I think you are feeling me. I am feeling very frustrated right now. That is called Empathy–when you feel someone else’s feelings.”

I took a big breath, and realized what a unit we are, even when everyone is flailing. We are seemingly out of control sometimes, and the need for me to be in multiple places at once is overwhelming. I did feel like crying. But, our connection as a family is growing as they grow, and my boy showed such emotional maturity tonight. I am so very proud of him.  I have greater hope that our family bond will outweigh the fighting.

My sensitive boy then said, “Well, I love you, and you’re the best mom ever, and I hope that makes you feel better.”

And it did.

 

 

I realized a few things tonight:
1. I hate Sundays.
2. In order to not hate Sundays, I have to take the boys on excursions from now on to keep us busy.
3. The circus monkeys that drive me crazy also bring me peace.
4. My Sunday cyclone started with flaming nuggets, and my baby’s words were the center of the storm.
5. Never underestimate the power of your words (something I have been teaching him for a long time, and he re-taught me tonight)
6. Never underestimate the power of a child’s awareness.

Veronica Salizar

This isn’t really a blog post, it’s more like an important announcement.

Since it’s my blog and I do what I want, I am choosing to change Friend A’s name to Veronica Salizar. “Friend A” did not do her any kind of justice, and I was not happy with it from the naming. Therefore, Amazing friend will henceforth be known as Veronica Salizar (because that’s her favorite, and we should all just change our names to our favorites).  And so it is. That is all. Carry on.

Urine Feet

Raise your hand if you have ever changed a diaper. Ok, I see most of you. Now raise your hand if you have ever changed a diaper in the car. Still a bunch of hands. Now raise your hand if you have ever found yourself out and about without anything but a swim diaper and had to change a poopy diaper in the car and then go into the store where the swim diaper leaked in the cart while you were buying diapers? Oh heyyy, I’m raising it!

Now let’s talk further about excrement, particularly urine. I know, FUN, right!? You can see up there in that awesome picture that I am washing my foot in the kitchen sink. This was taken after I had sprayed the bottom of my foot with vinegar. I had to actually put my foot under water to wash it with soap, because there was PEE in between my toes. I had to hop to the sink after I had stepped into the bathroom, you know, to go pee, and landed right in a puddle. It wasn’t just a little drip, it was a PUDDLE of urine. I had to yell for the vinegar spray and a bunch of towels because if I stepped out of the bathroom I would track urine through the house. So I waited…(we had Amazing Family over, which is actually my Amazing Friend’s family, whom I will now call “Friend A” from now on. She needed a name for sure, because she seems to inspire these posts quite a bit. For example, she witnessed me yelling “I AM SICK AND TIRED OF STEPPING AND SITTING IN PEE!!, and then took this picture of me with “urine feet”.)

Everyone was busy with our backyard campout. Kids were playing, Friend A was, I dunno what she was doing, the men were talking about lumber or fire or something, and I was standing on one foot in a puddle of urine. So I screamed this time for the spray and towels, instead of yelling. Tuna and Friend A came to my rescue, and I cleaned up Lake Binker on one foot.
Now, this is primarily a Binker problem right now, but I’ll tell you what–I have been sitting or stepping in pee since I have lived with boys, which started with my little brothers, then Latefordinner, then these monkeys. I am starting to get paranoid about sitting on toilets, and afraid to touch anything in my own bathrooms. I had to throw away two rolls of toilet paper the other day, which were inside a plastic bag next to the toilet, because one of them managed to aim the hose right into the bag. Seriously? If it’s in there, it must be everywhere, man. It’s out to get me, man. I really would rather just get new toilets at this point, because the pee has found the hidden spots on the toilets that weren’t meant for urine. Even toilets have their limits. Also, the walls, and anything in a five foot radius of the toilet. Yes, radius. I swear that stuff is IN the walls. I think he does it on purpose. He “forgets” to tuck when he’s sitting? No! I think he likes watching it fly across the room in a lovely arc and make a lake of urine for me to step in!
I am going to record myself and just press a button when I hear someone go into the bathroom:
“Tuck your penis!”
“Put your pee in the water only!”
“Aim your penis down into the water!”
“I can hear your pee hitting the back of the toilet!”
“Wipe it up if you drip!”

Ok, so this rant must have some purpose…hang on while I find it…

Eh, it’s mostly just a rant. I have fought and taught and wrestled and wiped and cleaned and cleaned again. I have gagged and blown cool breath on bright red butts through cries of pain and slathered miles of butt cream on rashes and changed diapers on standing squirming toddlers, and wiped poop on and off toilets for almost a decade now. I have stepped in sat in sopped up wiped up pee from multiple and varying surfaces. I have done. my. time. and I’m not even done. I could say I will use this against my boys when they are older, when they have kids and complain to me…but I surely will not. I see all of this as part of this awesome madness called parenting. When my grandkids need diapers, I will change them just as selflessly as I have turned off my sense of smell for this decade.

However, if I have to pee when my grandkids need a diaper, I will hand them off. Because in that picture, I still hadn’t peed, and if I have incontinence because I held my pee for my boys’ urine pools, I may use it against them.

Mom mom mom mom mommy mommy mommy mommy

Times three, and often all at once.