Ax: Look Mama, he has an eyepatch.
Me: Don't put stickers on your brothers' faces.
[from the other room] Me: What are you doing in the sink?
Ax: Ohh, just wasting water.
Ax: Mama, what is this?
Me: It's a teaspoon.
Ax: I'm going to itch my butt with it.
Moving on . . .
We've had quite a time here with the ear infections, and Eero will be visiting the good-looking ENT doctor on Tuesday. Good for him and me. Magnus will also see him, and then they all have their 9 month check-ups, so we're excited to see how much they've grown. Magnus seems to be super serious about eating and catching up to his brothers. I think he's tired of being called the little guy.
That's most of the news here I guess. I will attach some pictures now, because I think that's all people are really interested in anyway. Then I will attach my columns to this post, and will write again next week after we know their sizes.
This is Axel two Thanksgivings ago, which I happened upon just now when looking for the pictures I took of the boys yesterday.
This is us two Thanksgivings ago, with one of our most successful cooking experiences together. See Jesse's pie to the right? We're gonna try again this year for a repeat of beautiful turkey and pies, but that seems unlikely. Stay tuned.
Eero loves Cheerios, and likes to yell at the box when it appears before him.
Rex also loves Cheerios, but in a more subdued way.
Magnus probably likes Cheerios the most, but you wouldn't know it from this picture.
High chairs are now overtaking our kitchen/dining area. Booo.
My last two columns . ..
Parent Initiation
Like most people, I could categorize myself as a lot of things; I am a student, a pianist, a baker, and a writer, apparently, to name a few. Of course I am also a daughter, sister, wife, and, I have realized, a parent. This would incite a sarcastic, “Picked up on that, did you?” from some people, my husband being the first . . . of course I know I have birthed four children and been defaulted into caring for them, but lately I feel I have crossed many rites of passage into the exclusive Club Parenthood.
This really hit me yesterday when one of the babies (who can remember which?) coughed sweet potato puree in my face. Nice. As I toweled off and he laughed, I thought of all the things that have happened lately that only those with children have to, I mean, get to, experience.
A few weeks ago I awoke to the sound of dry heaves and ran into the next room to find Axel puking in his bed. I won’t go into the gory details, but it was the kind that made me want to vomit myself. It was so random and unprovoked, and he was fine the next morning, but as I stripped the bed in the dark and took the disgusting sheets to the washing machine, I knew I was a real mom.
Ever been kicked in the head while you’re sleeping? Me, too! Somehow the Hurricane is mild enough in the night to climb up into our bed without waking us, but when he returns to a sleeping state he is as turbulent as he is in wakefulness. I learn of his presence when I get kicked, elbowed, or cracked in the nose as he flops around unconsciously. “When did Axel get in bed with us?” I ask Jesse the next morning. “He crawled right over the top of you!” he often says to me. I must have been tired for some reason . . .
Though we are a pretty messy bunch I try to keep us from being too dirty, but everything still gets covered with a thin, crusty coating of kid debris. The furniture and flooring has become an abstract of milk, frosting, and mustard, among other things. We could try not eating in the living room, but that seems unlikely as Jesse and I have always done that. When I was young my mom had white carpet put in our living room and only she and Dad could eat or drink in there. Dad spilled his coffee shortly after that.
The house is not the only disaster area. All of my purses seem to develop a permanent layer of Cheerios in the bottom, and have at least one fruit snack or Junior Mint adhered to the lining. Okay, the Junior Mints may be my fault. Our vehicle, which when clean is quite impressive, has the same problem, and even if I vacuum it out, popcorn and French fries and chunks of granola bars magically reappear.
One of my favorite movies is Parenthood, a Steve Martin classic, and while I thought it was comical in my younger years, I am now emotionally involved in it as a parent. We’ve regularly compared Axel to the kid who runs around with a bucket on his head. And like that kid, he’s happy. I highly recommend the movie to anyone with children. It will pull on your heartstrings and, for most people I would guess, make you feel a little better about your own family, reminding us all that everyone has his own problems.
I also find myself enjoying different television shows as a parent. I still adore Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex & the City, but I connect much more now to family-oriented comedies. I am a combination of Debra from Everybody Loves Raymond, living a stone’s throw from my outlaws, and Jill, Tim Allen’s wife on Home Improvement, living with too much testosterone. We own these shows in entirety on DVD, and when I need some sympathy I pop in a couple episodes. That way no one else has to hear me whine.
A few months ago a baby peed on me as I was changing his diaper on the floor while Axel drove a remote control car back and forth across my feet. I had to wonder what my life had become, and I briefly longed for the days when the house stayed relatively clean and we went to the movies whenever we felt like it. But, like any good show, I am in the end reminded of the joys of parenting. Three charming babies entertain each other on the floor, at least until the scratching and hair-pulling starts. Our preschooler puts his own clothes in the hamper when he takes them off, without being reminded. I almost cried the other night when he was proud to show me how he could write his own name (well, close enough). And of course, there’s the chance hug accompanied by, “I always like you,” which is Axel’s highest compliment. I guess we’ll keep them.
Our Ongoing Battle with Time
Traditionally there are two specific occasions I wake up very early on purpose: the Easter sunrise service and Black Friday shopping. In the last few years this has expanded to include other early morning shopping trips, which is not necessarily because I want the deals but because I’m so excited to shop. Sometimes, like over the last weekend, I was just excited to leave the house.
I’ve never claimed to be a morning person. For many years as a young person I would shuffle down the stairs each morning and not speak until I had my chocolate milk (this must be where Axel gets it). If we were out of milk or Nestle Quik, watch out. My dad, who got up early with a smile on his face to do chores, drink coffee, and watch the early morning news, loved to get under my skin about my unpleasantness.
I married another non-morning person, so we never rose earlier than was absolutely necessary. It makes our kind sound lazy, but we’ve figured out that we are night owls who prefer to stay up later and wake up later. We’re not actually getting more sleep than the morning people, our waking hours are just shifted a little.
As many of you know, having children changes all this. Now that we are no longer in charge of when we wake up, we are both night owls and morning people. Medical professionals push new parents especially to sleep when their babies sleep. That’s nice in theory but most parents, new and experienced, know that the only time to get anything done is when the little ones are sleeping. It would be tough to maintain the responsibilities of daily living if we napped and went to bed when our children did, and forget any extras like making phone calls or completing household projects.
We have never needed to keep a regimented schedule at our house and so bedtime with Axel (our practice kid) was never a hard and fast rule. We were also living in a wide-open basement for the first year of Axel’s life and so, with no walls or doors to shut out light and sound, he went to bed when we went to bed. With a completed home and for the sake of our sanity we’ve made it a point to be better about bedtimes with our triplets, and they are very good sleepers.
It’s been said at our house that if all babies were like Eero, people would have more babies. He is pleasant and content 98% of the time, and since he was two months old has slept for 12 hours straight night after night. Even when he wakes up in the morning he just plays with his blanket and babbles until we take him out of the crib.
Rex has become ever calmer since coming home from the NICU (where he was known to the nurses as “T-Rex” for being a little feisty). We can’t really complain about his sleeping either, going for about eight or nine hours until waking up to eat, and then sleeping for another couple hours after that.
Magnus, the little fighter, has had some minor medical issues that have prevented him from eating as much as his brothers and therefore has woken up to eat more regularly. He has however made great strides in this area and can now be counted on to sleep almost as long as Rex.
We had been putting the babies to bed, one at a time, between 8:30 and 9:30, which increasingly moved up to between 7 and 8:00. Now enter daylight savings time. I’m guessing this is all too familiar to parents of young children. It really wreaks havoc on their sleep schedule. The one hour time frame of 7-8:00 automatically jumped to somewhere between 6:00 and 7:00.
After a day of taking care of three babies and a three year old, we are more than happy to take these crabby kids to their cribs a little earlier. The time change affects Axel just a little – he was in bed about 10:00 before so now it is 9:00. It would be suggested that we go to bed then and catch up on some sleep, but sometimes we just want to watch primetime television in peace or talk to each other without being interrupted by whiny babies or Axel asking us to make another fort out of the cushions.
The problem with all of this is, of course, that if the babies go to bed at 6:00 they are up between 5:00 and 6:00 the next day. Remember how I said we’re not morning people? Monday morning all six of us were on the couch watching old Transformers cartoons by 5:15 (Jesse had the remote). The chocolate milk was flowing. I only like to get up for mega bargains or the Resurrection, not old boy-oriented cartoons. Stupid daylight savings time.
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