Fear and Loathing In The Diaper Pail

God, whoever said, “One kid is a hobby; two is a job” was right. And I say that with an infant who pretty much just sits there. I’m really still only chasing after one.

Lucas is a good boy. Good-natured, likes to smile. But he’s gassy. So very, very gassy. And a gassy baby is an unhappy baby. He’s on soy formula, because milk formulas made him constipated (NOTE: a constipated baby is an even unhappier baby). But now he’s just this gas bomb. I’m telling you, we could eat beans straight from a Mexican latrine all day and just blame it on him.

Still, he’s easy. He doesnt complain about anything (except gas). He doesnt roll over or crawl or get into anything. He doesnt whine and he doesnt defy me. Babies are easy. Toddlers are HARD.

At any rate, I’m so burned out on kids today, I dont even want to talk about them. I want a margarita and a Full-Moon Fish Sandwich while sitting near the open-air doors at Sloppy Joes down in old Cayo Hueso. Bone Island, yo. I’m talkin’ KEY WEST, my homies. I also want to show you my clematis.

I’m a clematis fan. Love them. I have four clematis plants, three of which are new and nothing to write home about. But THIS one is my baby. This will be its third summer. The first one I got one measly flower. Last summer I got maybe four, somewhat less measly flowers. This year …

BA-DOW!!

I’m just so pleased.

So I know it’s not a big, grand announcement, but I’m tired and I’m headed straight back to bed after this, while I can get some Zs before Liam gets up from his nap. Hopefully.

Lucas Alexander was born March 24 at 9:02 a.m. He was 9 lbs, 3 oz. and 21 inches long. He’s the spittin’ image of his big brother and he’s got a sweet disposition. His only vice is sleepin’ all day and partyin’ all night, so he’s slowly killing his old man, who walks around like the living dead. I’m deflating day by day and I’ve lost 20 pounds in this past week and a half.

MORNING OF:

A FEW HOURS LATER:

WITH BIG BROTHER LIAM:

CHILLIN’ ON SOME POST-OP ICE CHIPS:

If you’ve noticed a change in the tides or phases of the moon lately … it’s me. Sorry about that. I have developed a significant gravitational pull and several small satellites now orbit around me. I also have a decent-sized colony of tiny, parasitic fish that swim near me wherever I go, cleaning off barnacles and algae.

You wanna hear something totally gross?

I can feel the baby’s shoulders digging into my hip bones when I sit down. It’s so disgusting. They feel all round and pointy at the same time.

When you’re pregnant, your doctor measures the size of your belly from the top of your uterus to the bottom in centimeters to determine whether the baby is growing at an approriate rate. The number of centimeters corresponds roughly with the number of weeks you are pregnant. For instance, if you are 34 weeks pregnant, then your belly should measure about 34 centimeters.

I’m 37 weeks pregnant (I prefer to say, “In my 38th week,” because it sounds further along) and yesterday my belly measured SMALLER than it did last week because the baby is so far down and to the back. My docor said his head is “on the launching pad,” by which she must mean my bladder. He’s all kneading on my organs and sticking his bony little shoulders into my pelvis. Blech. I’m going to go lie down now, so my belly is sideways on the bed, and not cramming up my innards.

 12 days, y’all. Recognize.

So Liam turned 3 last week. He had two preschool Valentine’s Day parties and not only did we celebrate his birthday on his birthday, but he had a party for his friends (note: do not try this at home) and another party for our family. It was a weeklong debauch of candy, cards, cake and presents, which I’m sure he believes is 100% devoted to him and his miraculous birth. We still nearly have an entire cake’s worth of leftover cake, which we are working our way through steadily each night. It’s wrong to waste food, after all.

Anyway, for his birthday, Liam’s uncle and aunt (my brother and sister-in-law, respectively), presented Liam with a gift certificate to a store called Build-A-Bear Workshop. Now for those of you who aren’t around children, or never enter a mall, or perhaps you enter malls, but do not have this store in your area, Build-A-Bear Workshop is a store where children make their own stuffed animals and then accessorize them with a bunch of overpriced crap. We would never take Liam to Build-A-Bear on our own, but as a gift, it’s not such a bad idea.

The store is more of a concept, where the lucky child picks out an unstuffed animal of his or her choice. An animal skin, as it were. There are bears and dogs and Fredbird the Redbirds (St. Louis only) and a pretty cute turtle whose shell was really a backpack. Liam chose a dinosaur and instantly became attached to it. After choosing an animal, the child takes it to a stuffing machine where a nice teenaged girl sticks a large metal tube in the animal’s back and fills the animal with stuffing. Then the child picks out a little fabric heart and places it inside (awwww … barf) and the girl sews up the back of the toy. Then the kid takes his new toy to a “washing station”, which is a pretend bathtub with showerheads that blow air and the kid is supposed to brush and fluff the animal.

Then it’s on to the real moneymaker of the joint, the spot where you can pick out clothes and accessories for your animal at exorbitant prices. There’s T-shirts, pants, shoes, sunglasses, strollers, cars, Halloween costumes, police uniforms, ballet tutus, you name it. Liam picked out a T-shirt with dinosaurs on it for six fricking dollars. So there it was, his new dinosaur with a dinosaur shirt.

Next, you take the toy to a computer kiosk and make a “birth certificate” for it. I could kind of taste a saccharin bile in the back of my mouth that my parents must have tasted when I got my first Cabbage Patch Kid. Adam filled out the form and when it came to the part where you name the dinosaur, we asked Liam, “What’s his name?” Liam has never named a toy in his life. Any named toy is purely descriptive, such as “Blue Blanket” and “Blue Bear.” So it came as no surprise that Liam decided to name his dinosaur “Dinosaur.”

So fine. Dinosaur the dinosaur it was. Complete with dinosaur shirt. We took it to the register, plopped down the gift card and were on our way.

Liam fell in love with his dinosaur. He held it the whole way home and slept with it that night. He napped with it then next day and slept with it again the next night. We took a picture and emailed it to my brother and sister-in-law so they could see what he picked out. He napped with it again yesterday and then he woke up and here’s where the story gets interesting.

Apparently during his nap, Liam had a vision or an epiphany, and decided, for the first time ever, to name his beloved toy a true, proper name. And the name came to him while he dreamed and that name, my friends, was Crack.

The conversation went like this, and as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up:

MOM: Hey there! Did you have a good nap?
LIAM: Where’s crack?
MOM: Crack? What’s crack?
LIAM (presenting dinosaur toy): Here he is!
MOM (incredulous): This is Crack? Your dinosaur’s name is Crack?
LIAM: Yeah!
Mom stifles emotional combination of weeping and snickering.
SCENE

And that’s that. The toy’s name is Crack. Liam took Crack out to dinner with us that night. When our friends asked, “What’s your dinosaur’s name?” He replied, much to their amusement, “Crack.” He hugged Crack, and kissed him and said, “Thank you, Crack.” Then he hugged him some more and said, “I love you, Crack.” And then when we tucked him in when we got home, I had to kiss Crack goodnight.

LIAM AND HIS ROCK-SMOKING FRIEND

A-HA! I have completed my transformation from merely dorky to full-nerd status by completing what is widely considered in the nerd canon to be THE definitive piece of nerd-lit: The Lord Of The Rings. Now, few people know this, but in literary circles, The Lord of The Rings series is commonly referred to by Tolkien’s original title, “Hobbits ‘n Shit”.

 Anyway, what a nerdy book. The story was great, I did enjoy reading it, but it’s full of big-time nerd hits like elves and dwarves and wizards and giant elephants and swords and magic talismans and whatnot, not to mention all the “Behold!” and “Alas!” and “Lo!” and unnecessarily long descriptives. Or maybe that’s just my inner journalist screaming, “Get ON with it already! WHERE WHEN WHY HOW, is it SO hard?”

A typical passage reads something along these lines, “And lo! The blade of Aragorn, which Once was Broken But Now Was Reforged shone forth with the blaze of a thousand suns and behold, score upon score of orc-necks where hewn from their bodies and at the mighty blast of The Great War-Horn of Minas Plus Division, which was crafted under the Black Mountains of Terrible Horrible Doom at the end of the Second Age, the remaining host of Sauron fled into the blackness, their fate never to be known to man. Or half-man. Or Elf. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

Well, that’s all I have to say about that and all you LOTR purists who are “trolling” (get it? ha ha!) around here can save your hate mail, because I know EVERYONE knows that the great war horn was ACTUALLY crafted between the First and Second Ages. It’s called creative license, Prom King.

When he gets a set of dinosaurs for Christmas, complete with a cave that has a skull that doubles as a trap door for catching unsuspecting caveman figurines and his pretend play follows this dialogue:

DINOSAUR 1: Hi! How you?
DINOSAUR 2: Fine! How you?
DINOSAUR 1: Fine! Kiss?
(puts dinosaurs’ faces together)
DINOSAUR 2: Mwah!
DINOSAUR 1: Thank you!
DINOSAUR 2: OK! Let’s go Grammas!

QUESTION OF THE DAY: How do you say no to this face?

ANSWER: You don’t. You give it whatever it wants and then kiss it a whole bunch and let it have lots of cookies.

Not much up here these days. Christmas has kept me busy. Every time I turn around there’s something else I forgot to buy, or prepare, or cook.

The baby’s also starting to wear me out more, as I head into the last lap here. Baby 66% downloaded. I am pretty sure I’m gestating an actual ninja, as he regularly attempts to kick and punch his way out of my abdomen. He’s way more active (and mean!) than Liam was. When I lay on my left side, he lets himself sink to the bottom and it weighs a ton and feels totally gross. Then he’ll decide he’ll head southbound, and plant himself really low, which makes me have to pee. Although it is easier to breathe.

Liam still hasnt completely come to grips with the whole New Baby Concept. He knows, but I suspect he doesn’t truly believe. And he probably won’t until the baby’s here. I think my belly freaks him out. I showed it to him while the baby was kicking, so he could see my belly move and before he could even see anything, he said, “No, no tummy! Shirt on!” and pulled my shirt back down. He’ll have nothing to do with it. Unless he needs to kick it during a diaper change, or dig his elbow into it when getting out of a chair we’re sharing.

So it snowed the other day and Liam had a pretty good time playing in it with Adam. I took pictures, but declined to be photographed myself, as I resemble the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Actually, if you want an idea of how I look, you can pretend the snowman here is me. Except he has more of a tan.

Urgh. I’m tired. Nobody wants to hear me complain about how I’m tired and I’m too tired to complain about it, so that’s why I haven’t written in years. When Liam naps, I nap. But today, I’m not tired right this second. But I probably will be by the end of this.

 So I can’t even remember where I left off. Something about being pregnant. That was ages ago. Although I’m still pregnant. It’s another boy, so that’s cool. I’m five months plus and we’re just starting to get Liam involved. Asking him if he wants to be a big brother and how he has a little brother in mommy’s tummy, but he won’t come out for a long time. I think he only half gets it. We should probably get a book or something. But if you ask me, there’s over three months before the baby comes, and that’s an ETERNITY to a 2-year-old, so why make him wait forever? A few months to get it through his head is sufficient.

Because Baby 2 is on the way, we’ve decided to fix up the larger front bedroom for Liam and reuse Liam’s current room as the nursery again. It’s much smaller and it’s closer to our room. But we want this room for Liam to be done well in advance of the baby’s arrival, so Liam doesnt equate new baby with getting kicked out of his room into this new strange room. We want him to have time to get used to the new digs. However, the front bedroom has been literally trashed. When we moved in, we ripped up the carpet and baseboards and never touched it again. It even still has the previous owners’ ugly lace sheers on the window. The walls look like hell and there’s no closet doors. We’ve been using it as an office/dumping ground. So last night we moved three years of homeless crap and computers down to the basement and then vacuumed up three years of dust bunnies. Huge, rabid, ravenous dust bunnies.

We let Liam stay up while we moved things out, rather than try to move silently while he tried to sleep. After we got everything downstairs, I put Liam to bed and went back down to help Adam clean up and organize. Adam looked at me and observed, “You’ve got cheese on your boob.” I look down and there’s this dried piece of cheddar from God only knows where stuck on my chest. Don’t even ask, because I don’t know. To which I could only reply, “Story of my life.” Which, as it turns out, would be a pretty good title. “There’s Cheese On Your Boob: Sandy’s Life Story.” Look for it at your local bookstore.

It only took two years, seven months and three weeks, but Liam is finally done teething! Those bottom two molars are officially IN!! Woo hoo!

Past couple of weeks there’s been a lot of night wakings and he’d been stuffing his whole hand in his mouth to gnaw on his fingers. I guess this explains that.