Take one silly, teething baby ...

Add one dollhouse potty WITH ATTACHED BOWL BRUSH ...















Laugh heartily. (At least it's not a real toilet brush):

I went to the dentist a few days ago, lugging both little people there with me (hey, the dentist said I could, so why not). Shockingly, they both behaved like their toy privileges depended upon it, which they kind of did.

But here's the best part of the trip: As I was leaving, walking down a very long hallway as MJ and Little L peered into each exam room and watched the drills (is there a worse sound, I ask you?), a dental hygienist bolted out of her patient's room, followed us up to the reception desk and stopped me.

"Where," she asked, all urgency, "did you get those jeans?"

I looked down at my sweet Old Navy low-risers, which just that morning I had pondered tossing out because of the tears in the hems at the bottom. (I flipped the rips up and wore them anyway, because that's how I roll.) Wow. Good thing I didn't, I thought.

"These jeans?" I asked her.

"No, no," she said, still with the urgency in her voice, "I meant those jeans."

She pointed to the ones on my one-year-old.

"I just had to come down here and ask," she told me. "I just love them."

This actually happened, people. I got out-vogued by a kid who can't even walk yet. What does that say about me?

Did I mention? My littlest girl turned one while we were away, and because she is just that special, she was feted in two countries. Here's a shot from her USA party, in which she got groovy with her cake. Yum!

















And here she is rockin' it Canadian style:

Earlier this week, before my sweet baby crawled in front of the toddler train that is our MJ and wound up with her left arm in a splint, I was packing for a week at a cottage in Canada with the Bunker-in-Laws, and the 16-hour drive time associated with the visit. We haven't done a BBQ in a while, but this had seemed like a good time to ask this question:

How do you survive long car drives (or travel in general) with your little ones?

I'm keeping the following suggestions for the next time we attempt this trip. (And, in case you're wondering, MJ went up to LL Cool Baby the day after and said, unprompted, "I didn't mean to hurt you, Baby. Are you feeling better?" Then, while hanging out at the GrammyBunker so LL could get the TLC she needed from moi, she called and asked, "Is Baby OK?" Yes, she is. She's a little frustrated, but in another week, she and her arm sprain should be back to normal. Sigh. It's been a long, hard week.)

Some travel tips:

Laura: Get a DVD player. We drove 13 hours once without one, and by the end of the trip we wanted to kill each other. The next trip, we bought one of those portable ones from Best Buy or Target, and although by the end of that trip, we wanted to kill Elmo, at least we could laugh about it.

Also, instead of giving them meals, I believe nothing beats boredom better than snacking (sadly). So I got like a zillion of small tupperwares (like the take and toss ones) and filled them with stuff like fruit cut into small pieces, Cheerios, Goldfish crackers ... pretty much anything you can think of.

Also, I had a bin full of toys on the floor I could reach into and toss into the back. Some brand new, some old favs. The Doodle Pads from Target worked really well, and books. Then again, last trip we took it was just me and Lucas, and he screamed for 2 hours before collapsing from exhaustion.

But try the dvd player and some ear plugs. Maybe you'll get lucky. :)

Barb: {Ironically, Barb had just returned from a 13-hour drive that should have taken nine. Let me see if I can summarize her findings: 1) Repeated viewings of The Little Mermaid will drive you mad; 2) Even if you take five other videos with you, your children will only watch one, over and over, for the duration of the drive. This, for me, would be nothing different from my everyday life, in which Carsdominates every minute of our days. Additionally, by some odd stroke of Netflix ordering, this week we got both Drillbit Taylor and The Darjeeling Limited in our mailbox. Tomorrow I suspect we'll get an invitation from the Wilson's for Owen's birthday party.}

Becky: Fast-food drive-thrus! I would have said a mini-DVD player, as I think it's essential, too, but when movies fail to entertain or calm the tears of my daughter during a long ride, french fries always do the trick. On a recent trip to Maine, my daughter woke up screaming, "I don't want to go to Maine!" I didn't blame her, she'd been sleeping in her car seat, head flopped slightly forward, for a couple hours. So her body probably ached, and we were on some highway in Massachusetts, three hours from our destination--it seems we're always three hours from getting where we need to be--and she just screamed and screamed. I feared, this was it. We couldn't go any further. My vacation plans were useless. A week with just the two of us? What was I thinking?

Then, a Wendy's billboard. I cruised off the exit, Amanda still crying in back, and pulled into the parking lot. She wouldn't get out of the car, she wouldn't let me near her. She was so mad.

Ok, ok, I thought. French fries. She learned that word after mama and dada, thought anything we drove thru meant french fries. At an ATM, she'd say from her car seat, "French fries?" The same was true for tiny paper bags; those mean french fries too. So at Target pharmacies, she'd ask from the shopping cart, "French fries?"

Over the screams, I told the Wendy's person I wanted a kids meal and Combo #1. I needed food too to get us through this crying fit, and french fries do work wonders.

She still cried as I paid, grabbed the order, pulled into a parking spot. Then, I was able to unbuckle her, and I quietly ate my french fries. A minute or two later, as the crying wound its way out of her system, she said, "French fries?"

My baby is 11 months old today, which is so hard to believe. With MJ, I recall time passing sort of slowly through her first year. With so much to learn and, every day, something new happening in the world of this little person -- first cereal, first smile ... even her belly button stump took four weeks to disappear (and, disconcertingly, we never actually found it ... yikes) -- the first 12 months of her life floated deliciously by, and I can honestly say I savored each one.

It's been harder to do with Little L, though I've tried, and though I've been all-too-conscious of trying. That's because MJ continues to have firsts herself, the subtle kind that show up in a grown-up remark, a comprehension she didn't have the week before, even a new kind of beaming smile that grabs up the world around it in a knowing way -- different from that baby smile, the one of joy over simple motions happening in the space around her, of a person she trusts making an entrance into the room, for example.

And so my mind is always split. But in short, quiet moments, I do savor the things that make a baby a baby for such a short time; the ones I still conjure in my mind, I suppose, when I end a request or an answer to one of the many "Whys?" I hear every day from MJ with the term of endearment, "baby."

And here's one of them, one that doesn't last long: The snaggletooth smile, via Little L today. Yes, I know you get a version of these later, when they start to lose their teeth ... but are they ever quite like this again?

I think my toddler is a better mommy than me. At least yesterday.

Little L had a little cold, but was miserable in that way that makes a parent miserable,too. She didn't want to be awake, she didn't want to sleep, she didn't want to play, she didn't want to sit still. After a long night of Randy and I passing each other in the hallway ...

"Hey."

"Hey."

"I'm going to get the big one."

"Yeah. I just came from the little one's room."

... over and over again, because every time LL woke up with a runny nose or a need for a cuddle, MJ woke up too ... the parents were spent. This one in particular. Once roused for good yesterday morning, I fought not only a 9-month-old's first illness and a 3-year-old's needs for whatever a 3-year-old feels she needs from second to second, but also a raging headache, the limitations of two hours of sleep and the absence of a daddy who had to put in extra hours working on a project from home.

[sigh]

This is what I get for bringing up last year's beach debacle on Friday. Nice one, loser Beth.

I think I momentarily lost that amnesia you're supposed to get about your own aches and pains when one of your children has an ache or pain, too. I was grumpy and frustrated, and when Randy took a break from work to come down and help me get them ready to take to the doctor's office, I responded to his question about something small with a retort that proposed that everyone, and particularly grown-ups I live with, stop asking me for things. Not my finest moment. Sometimes you just know that, for these waking hours, you're not going to be very good, and you make silent promises to yourself that if you get through the day, you'll be better tomorrow. More patient, more selfless, more, more, more ...

More grown-up. More like your toddler:

After lunch, I put a whining LL on the floor to play. Which took her whining to new decibels. As I stood and assessed whether her pleading look -- "C'mon, I'm in bad shape. Aren't you going to do anything to help? Pick me up! Waaaaah!" -- meant that I couldn't take a moment to visit the restroom after all, the 3-foot-half-inch cavalry arrived. MJ, who has taken to speaking less like a baby and more like a young woman asked to tea by the queen, calmly walked over to her sister, knelt down, encircled her ribcage with two tender arms and showed that at least one of us hadn't forgotten how to give even when the giving isn't pleasant.

"It's OK, Baby," she whispered. "You're OK. Look, here's a nice toy for you to play with. See? You're OK." And she was.

Over the past few days, MJ and LL Cool Baby have really been rockin' the sisterhood thing, from complaining to companionship. When MJ leaves the room, she exits to much squawking and protesting and general bitching on the part of LL. Today I found her with a handful of MJ's hair in her chubby little hands, and MJ laughing beside her: "Mommy, she pulled my hair! Ha ha ha!" (Not so funny, if you ask me. It took a long time to grow that hair.)

Every time MJ gets up from a nap or up for the day, the first thing she says is, "Where's my baby?" And, of course, she continues to point out to everyone who visits or enters the room after a long absence -- including her parents -- that LL exists: "Mommy look!" she says, pointing in LL's direction, "It's a baby!"

Appropriate faux excitement ensues.

But by far the best thing I've heard from these two playing together is MJ's Rob Schneider impression. Adam Sandler fans will recall his line from ... well, every Adam Sandler movie ever made, "You can do it!" Lately, MJ will bait LL to follow her into the hallway, saying "You can do it!" as she army crawls her way toward her. It's not just the phrase, but the way she says it, with the rounded vowels and the whole bit. It's truly as if she means to do an impression of him, and I'm fairly certain she's never seen a single Sandler movie.

"You can do it, bab-eee! You can do it!"

She slays me.

I sometimes think our worldviews mimic the landscapes we grow up around. When she moved to North Carolina from Kansas for graduate school, my friend Julie used to talk about how "freaked out" she was by the trees here, and how they blocked the view. It's hard to understand what she means by that until you go to Kansas and see the difference for yourself: Look to your left, look to your right, and you can see for miles unobstructed. And it makes sense: Julie, a sports psychology professor at Southern Illinois, has a knack for seeing the big picture, the forest for the trees.

I grew up in the shadow of the mountains you see in the picture above, and I vividly recall sitting on the swings at the school playground and trying to "touch" the tops of them with my toes each time I flew forward. I did a lot of dreaming when I was little, a lot of imagining, bold and often improbable thoughts inspired by those heights.

So when we were driving home from a trip to West Virginia yesterday, we stopped at an overlook to show MJ and Little L the view. I walked LL over to show her the trees and the little stream below, and for some reason I started telling her about the poetry that she could find here, if she let herself find it. And here is what I love about my baby: She looked up at me as I talked, and then back at the mountains, and then back at me, as if to say she completely understood, and that it might just be the most fascinating thought she'd ever heard. You could say we had a moment.

Even at Little L's little age, she shows just how different she will be from her older sister. I always imagined, when I was carrying LL, that she would be just like MJ. I couldn't think of any other face on a baby of mine, so surely she would look exactly like the first. Surely she would have the same personality and quirks and baldness as MJ, the one and only experience I could draw from.
I was so wrong.

They've been different from the beginning, from how they came into the world to how they approached it once they did. Not just because LL has hair and MJ did not; not just because MJ was a reserved baby and LL is a professional squawker. MJ thinks, studies, considers, ponders; she inspects. The moments when she is most free come when she is at home with Randy and me, where her comfort level is steady and her environment already tested.

LL reacts. She goes head-first; she trusts more readily, smiles more easily, complains more lustily, craves interaction like a nighttime bottle.

She is the life; MJ, the soul.

One of the great joys of being the mother of two girls is taking them both to a party with other kids. And I'm not being sarcastic; I'm not talking about the part where you run from one room to the next, making sure each is safe and/or not destroying the furniture or sitting on the family dog. I mean the other parts, watching them come into their own, and thinking about it later: how beautifully different their personalities are, and the little ways in which those differences were revealed earlier that day.

At our talented friend Janice's house yesterday, celebrating little Maya's third birthday, Little L looked as if this was the social event she'd been waiting for all year. She laughed. She smiled. She sat in a circle with toddlers who were not MJ and mommies who were not Mommy and looked as free as I've ever seen her. Not just happy, but gorgeously happy, glowing from her sweet little toes to her sparkly blue eyes, looking from person to person, listening to people talk and smiling at them, at the room, at everything around her. "Oh Mommy," she seemed to say, "thank you so much for bringing me here. This is the best."

MJ was just as content but played mostly by herself, in corners and nooks and crannies, behind trees and bushes that were different from the ones at her house, carefully exploring, contemplating, imagining how the things she saw and felt fit with the world she knows. Every now and then, she would check in with the other kids to see what was happening, what new piece of information might need to be filed away in her little scientist's Rolodex. A game would start; she would be there for the beginning, but gone before the end, on to the next adventure.

LL looks for social connection; MJ searches for worldly connections, the ways in which swatches of information transform into quilts of experience.

The other great part about a kid's party? The clean-up. If there's one thing MJ will commit to, and bond over, with another somebody her age, it's her love of birthday cake. It also bonded nicely to her clothes. For mommies, the party never ends.

When MJ asks to go to the park, and is told she has to wait for Little L to wake up from her nap, she decides to take matters into her own hands. She walks over to the baby monitor, puts it up to her mouth like a walkie-talkie, and screams, "Babee! Babeee! Wake up! It's time to go the park!" She also hasn't figured out just yet that Little L is a "she" and not a "he" or an "it." But she still, without fail, lets everyone who walks into the room know she has a little sister -- including Randy and I, who are only too aware of this fact.

"Mommy, look!" she'll say, pointing to Little L playing on the floor, "it's a baby!"

Today, for whatever reason, is National Siblings Day. It's a strange thing to celebrate (although no stranger than Eight Track Tape Day, which is tomorrow), but I'm willing to do it. Somebody has to. Above are pictures of Little L and MJ; my sister Melanie and me (I'm the little one); and Randy (also the little one) and one of his siblings, Kevin. Good times.