“I wasn’t spitting! I was just blowing air with my mouth!”
“I’m not kicking you! I’m pushing your leg with my foot”

He argues. You know, my kid who just turned two like a minute ago? He also negotiates, pushes, and wants to discuss everything, from where he’s gonna sleep… (in your bed, dude. The answer is ALWAYS in your bed. But that doesn’t stop him from casually saying “I’m just goin to sleep on the couch…” like that has ever happened even once.)

…to where we are going next (No, I don’t WANT to go to that restaurant. I want to go to Nina’s house.)…

…to whether he has to ride in his carseat (ALWAYS, Nicolaus) to whether or not he may drive the car.

When he gets in trouble he makes excuses — his favorite is “Aw, I was just teasing you…”, and blames others for his woes. He is fascinated with book characters who are naughty. Peter Rabbit is his hero, I think because his mother tells him to do one thing and he turns around and does the opposite. And survives! And look, she makes him tea at the end! Tea is a grown up drink, with caffeine. Peter Rabbit has the whole thing alllll hooked up as far as Nicolaus is concerned.

We keep having these moments where he looks right at me and does something he just got in trouble for. Earlier today he was in the bath and he started dumping water out of the tub. I kept telling him not to do it. We’ve been through this before, I’ve even tried swatting his hand for it, but he doesn’t care. So today he kept doing it until finally I took the cup away. No matter, he has plenty of water-dumping devices at his disposal. He looked at me and cheerfully grabbed a plastic boat and used it to dump more water out of the tub.

Without a word, I picked him up out of the bath and took him, dripping wet and naked to his time-out spot. He was HORRIFIED. I guess he thought the bath was some kind of force field against time outs? He complained “I’m COooooLD” and sobbed. I felt bad about that so I brought him a towel and wrapped it around his shoulders but told him to stay there.

Oh MAN. He howled and howled. When I came to get him a couple of minutes later he told me indignantly, “You just DUMPED me out of the bathtub! You just dumped me.”

“Yes I did. You got in trouble. Why did I do that?”

“Cos I was pouring waterrrr.” Then he brightened and added proudly, “All over the place!”

There’s no point to this post really. He’s awesome and fun and I love him but wow. If this is any indication of what his teenage years are going to be like, I am in trouble.

My mom’s advice — remember that my mom is a hippie who all while we were growing up subscribed to the theory that children need a beautiful friend to gently guide and walk with them through life — today my mom advised me to spend the next year being a total hardass. I don’t think she actually said hardass, but it was still very impressive to hear her advocating any sort of discipline at all. Ah, the weary voice of experience. The weary wisdon of a woman whose 19-year-old son, while DEFINTELY NOT a stoner, has no interest in moving out or getting a job or doing anything other than breeding exotic chameleons in his bedroom (not a euphamism for anything normal I swear) and playing video games. Oh and smoking lots and lots of marijuana.

Hell, I might go wake Nicolaus up right now and put him on another time out just for good measure.

The first few times it happened, I tried closing the bathroom door so as not to upset Nicolaus. He banged on the door shouting “Pardon YOU Mama! You are coughing. Pardon you. SAY PARDON ME, MAMA!”

And I’d weakly mutter “Um, pardon me Nicolaus.” and then as soon as I went back to the task at hand he’d start demanding that I pardon myself again. That was bad enough, but then one time he managed to open the door and actually see what was going on in there. His reaction was basically: COOOOOoooooool!!! So now if he suspects I’m about to be sick he cheerfully says, “I’m going to WATCH!”

And I start to argue even though I used to make fun of parents who argued with toddlers, but I argue because getting sick is such a private, awful moment, and somewhere in the back of my mind I worry that it could somehow traumatize him to see his poor sweet mother in such a vulnerable state. But the little freak won’t stop insisting that he’s going to WATCH ME.

So I do my best to convince him to go play with knives or do pretty much ANYthing other than watch me get sick. But eventually I don’t have what it takes to stand there and discuss heaving with a two year old anymore. I turn around, do my best to block his view, and throw up into the toilet.

He stands, totally silent, and watches. Then he says, very quietly, “What you doing Mama?”

“I’m just… I’m just getting sick, sweetie. It’s okay, I’m okay.”

Then he busts out laughing because I totally guessed the wrong answer, “Nawww! Mama! You are just spitting out a drink!”

Oh.

And earlier I went to flush it and he got all upset because — I swear this is not my child — “Ohhhh! I was just going to tinkle on your barf!”

There Nicolaus, revenge. You can harrass your poor sick pregnant mother, and I? I can tell the world all the horrifying things you say and do and maybe print it out someday and give it to your prom date. Assuming you outgrow enough of this weirdness to ever get a prom date.

Applesauce! I gave you applesauce. The mildest food ever, not counting the c-word and we all know how you feel about c-words. I even bothered to eat it at room temperature so the cold wouldn’t disturb you. Cold things seem to disturb you. But no matter. Room temperature, all-natural, unsweetened applesauce… wholeheartedly REJECTED. You are one ungrateful little lentil-bean-sized punk.

Why does putting a sheet on a twin mattress always feel like I'm the victim of a practical joke? Is there a trick to it? And don't suggest having my toddler hold the corners on one side down while I pull the elastic over the other sides because believe me, I've tried that and he just giggles when the corners all pop off anyway and then he shouts, "I'm helping you!"

A few scattered things.

1. Another blood test yesterday, Beta levels still rising. This is looking very good all around. I’m starting to relax and enjoy the pregnancy. You know… other than the part where I’m pretty sure the baby is poisoning me.

2. Seriously. Dude. POISONING ME. All food is now disgusting, yet I must eat continuously or risk dry heaving – a sensation I once heard someone refer to as the exact opposite of an orgasm. Let this be a lesson to all you young, single girls out there! This is what marriage leads to! Now you know why Disney movies always end with a wedding – yay, they kiss, the end. Nobody wants the unpleasant job of inking in the part where Ariel is puking her guts out because someone said the c-word to her.

3. The c-word — and I’m only going to type this once because it’s bad enough that everyone keeps saying it to me over and over when just the thought of eating c-words makes me queasy is ((*crackers*)). You will not see that word again on this journal because c-words are totally nasty and I hate them now.

4. Yesterday my parents took Nicolaus to the airport. Ohmygod you guys. He LOVED the airport. They said he stood, very serious and watched several airplanes take off and land. He was so quiet they weren’t sure he was enjoying it very much. Then after a few minutes they put him down and he began to dance. And wave his hands in the air. And ZOOM ZOOOM ZOOOOOM. He said the word ZOOOOOM four hundred thousand times over and over and over and over until he fell asleep at 10:30 pm.

5. The other night, I was putting him to bed, and he pointed and asked very knowingly, “What’s in your tummy Mama?”
What?? How the heck would he know to ask that? It’s not like I’m showing. I’ve lost two more pounds in the last week.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s in your tummy.”

“Uhhh… What do you think is in my tummy?”

“Sumpin’” I don’t know what I’d expected him to say. Uterus maybe? Embryo?

“Something’s in my tummy?”

He nodded in the darkness, “Es.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe there is something in my tummy. What’s in your tummy?”

“Pineapples. I just ate em.” Ohhhh!

He continued, “And I shared my pineapples and we shared em and you probly have pineapples in your tummy too.”

Man, for a second there I was totally creeped out. Duh, the kid’s not psychic — we’re talking about food.

6. This isn’t my story but it must be shared. Tonight I was talking to one of the moms at Nicolaus’ dance class. She’s 8 weeks pregnant, so we were sharing stories of things you can/do/should/shouldn’t eat during pregnancy which you may have noticed is really the only thing I can seem to talk about lately. Pretty tiresome, I know – it’s like I’m that one guy who is stoned and everyone else is sober and I can’t stop talking about my feet – but I can’t help it. I come here to say all kinds of profound things and all I can think about is the state of my stomach. Maybe it’s because I’m being poisoned by my fetus, or maybe I’m just on a sick little kick right now. But tonight this woman told me a story that I feel should be shared because it strikes a deep, timeless chord of the sort that binds all women together throughout history.

When she was several months pregnant with her first daughter, she discovered Krispy Kreme. Almost by accident in fact, and she was so moved by the experience that she couldn’t understand why everyone doesn’t eat Krispy Kreme donuts all the time, every single day. By LAW maybe. I nodded because like many people, my life had been similarly changed by my first Krispy Kreme experience (which – as an interesting historical sidednote – is what that Jimi Hendrix song was about.)

So the next day on her way to work she stopped and bought a dozen donuts because she thought “Others must learn about these!” She was going to spread her sugary new religion to her coworkers. But when she pulled into the parking lot she was horrified to realize that she had already eaten four donuts. To console herself, she ate two more. Then she looked at the box and realized “Oh NO. I can’t walk in there with half a box of donuts! How embarrassing.”

She did the only thing she could do. She sat in the car and ate every single donut in the box. What choice did she have?

Then she called her husband and tearfully confessed, “I just ate A DOZEN donuts all by myself!”

I almost cried and hugged her right there in the lobby of the dance studio, because I have been there. Not literally there, in a parking lot eating donuts, but her story was a beautiful, perfect metaphor for that time I ate an entire large pizza all by myself.