Back when I was a diligent blogger, i.e., when I rarely took time to clean house and my car was always late for an oil change/inspection/etc., things would happen that I knew I'd want to write about, and I would scramble for a notepad to write it down before I forgot. (I still have to write EVERYTHING down, mind you, and here's a sampling of what appears on my kitchen calendar right now: "clean oven," "rose bush trellis," "philosophy." Yes, I have to remind myself to clean my oven, as if the crumpled pizza carcinogens smoking from its bottom aren't reminder enough. And don't get too excited about that "philosophy" bit; I have not taken up higher studies just as my beloved fall television schedule gets underway. That refers to the skin care company philosophy.)

ANYWAY, as I was clearing out some junk today, I came across a little mini- notation I made several months ago, little bits of dialogue MJ and I had shared. Without further ado, and so I can cross something off my to-do list (which feels so great to-do, ahem), I present "The Tale of the Boon" and "Perfect," two slices of life with MJ:

MJ has a ridiculously good memory. A month or two ago, she got a green dolphin balloon at a birthday party, and toted the thing around the rest of the day. She also toted it out onto our deck, where, predictably, inevitably, she lost it to the clouds. Today, we were sitting on the deck, and she looked up at the sky and said, "Mommy, where's the green 'boon?" It took me a very long time to figure out what she was talking about, and when I did, I reminded her that we'd lost it when she'd let go of it.

"Oh," she said, "Maybe the air took the 'boon to the boys to play with."

I have no idea who the boys are.

And on that same day, she had been sprawled out on the kitchen floor coloring with markers -- a little bit on paper, mostly on herself. She hopped up, ran past where I was standing at the stove and into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came out -- inexplicably wearing her backpack -- and said, "There Mommy. I washed my knees. All the marker's off. I'm all perfect."

"You're perfect?" I asked.
"Yeah, I'm all perfect," she said. "I'm all clean and fluffy."

The cutest. Just the cutest.

... or, "What Happens When a Little Girl Mixes Her Toys," aka, "Why I Love My Toddler: Reason #3,675," a photo essay in four parts:

Despite his rusty exterior, Mater likes to sleep in a fluffy canopy bed in a pink room. He keeps his potty chair nearby, though, for emergencies.  













Even cars get tired sometimes, as these minis show. Or, as MJ calls them, "baby cars." And where do baby cars belong? In cribs, of course.

 

Grilling in the living room is not advised, but at least Ramone is keeping a safe distance from the BBQ here.

After a nice long nap, it's good to get outside to the playground. Maybe take a trip down the slides.

"Mommy, I could help you," says MJ, climbing up on a bar stool and inspecting what I'm up to. She says this, most of the time, before she even knows what it is I'm up to. I feel like I could use this to my advantage somehow, but that's for another day. On this particular day, I'm chopping onions, which she, as always, pronounces to be "beautiful."

"That's OK, baby, I've got this one," I tell her. But she stays and watches and critiques, until she gets bored with watching and critiquing, and then she gets creative. With the chopped onions.

The husband likes his ice tea maker almost as much as he likes his clothes hamper empty and his dresser drawers full. Unfortunately, he likes to leave it sitting around, too. So, I mean, I can't really help it if a few of the tiny little chopped onions might have ended up in the filter basket. It wasn't my idea, after all, and I did say, "Oh, MJ, onions don't belong in the ice tea maker. Do you want to make Daddy's tea taste icky?" I may have been laughing at the time, or smirking conspiratorially, but I tried, people. I tried.

And she may or may not have been bowling earlier today with the apple he's currently chomping on. It's hard to say.

As he was leaving for work yesterday, Randy asked MJ and me what we had planned for the day.

"Oh," I said, with genuine enthusiasm, "we're going to have lots of fun ..."

He laughed. Not an "Oh, good, wish I could be there" kind of laugh, but rather a cheerful snort. A chortle, if you will. A disbelieving snicker, you might say. Now, give him his due: He had been up since 3:30 a.m. with MJ, when a fake need to use the potty turned into a need for toy cars and who knows what else. So the idea of having any sort of fun when watching this particular toddler for the next eight hours was, admittedly, not a viable notion to him. But I really did have plans for the day. Good ones.

Which is, of course, where I went wrong. Randy had plans to sleep all night, after all, and look where that got him.

So the new read-along book I wanted to do with her ended after two pages, when she figured out this was the same story she could watch in movie form on the DVD player. I used to love read-along books when I was little, so surely she would, too? Nope. Not so much. But then again, what good is a read-along when you can't read yet?

Then there were the muffins that I thought we could make together. Like any kid who hasn't yet realized how much work is involved in cooking, MJ always wants to help in the kitchen. We have a toddler cookbook by Annabel Karmel that makes this task seem like a glorious mother-child bonding moment. Witness the shiny happiness on this page:

But what MJ did instead of pouring and stirring was to make "apple boats":

... which is altogether cuter than stirring and pouring, but was not in the recipe, aka, "the plan."

The day went on like this. I had a vision of how our day might go; she had an altogether different idea -- not worse than mine, just a different interpretation. A different plan. No plan, in fact.

A lactation consultant once told me that women who demanded (or demand) excellence from themselves in the workplace are often surprised or frustrated by the ways in which they can't control the daily tasks of motherhood. It starts when you devise a birth plan that gets shot to h-e-double-hockey-sticks as your labor doesn't behave right, and continues each time you make a plan, big or small. In my workplace, there were rules and etiquette and meetings and benchmarks. In parenting, there are questions, journeys, unknowns. Being prepared doesn't mean crossing off a checklist of to-dos; it means understanding that you might just have a better time at Chick-fil-A's customer appreciation day than your kid, who actually turns out to be afraid of the main attraction: The guy dressed up in the cow costume.

In fact, if motherhood were a job you interviewed for, it would be the only occasion where "I'm a perfectionist" would be a proper response to the question "What would you say is your greatest weakness?"

As a freelance writer, I knew the steps to putting together an article. I could envision the research, the reporting, the transcribing, the brainstorming, the writing, the editing. As a mother, the best days I have are usually the ones where one random activity takes us to another one, when I don't concern myself with entertaining her so much as I let her be entertained.

Most of the time, I know this; I've learned it through months of practice. But there are days still when I have to relearn it, relinquish control, rewrite the plan, and make apple boats instead of apple muffins.

MJ walked into the bathroom yesterday without pants, holding a suspicious soggy something between her thumb and forefinger -- which she then gave to me inside out, even though I had just washed my hands.

Nice.

"Here Mommy," she said when she handed me the most ridiculously soaked Pull-Up ever, "it's broken."

And with that, she breezed past me and plopped herself down on her potty.

So there's a little insight into this potty-training toddler's mind: She seems to believe one uses the potty only as a last resort, when you've run out of room in your pants. Awesome.

Still, it's progress. I'll take it.

I am clearly not cut out for the "have baby, will travel" set. I always seem to be just a step behind everyone else when it comes to meeting the current standards of mother-child excursion preparedness.

For the past few weeks, we've been new gym members. (Technically, new members of an old gym we used to belong to, back in the halcyon days of semi-ripped ab muscles and good posture.) In those four weeks or so, I've been in three-and-a-half times, which is about the number of instances per week I had planned to go. The half, by the way, constitutes the trip when I worked out for 10 minutes before the child care folks came and got me to retrieve my absolutely-out-of-her-mind-with-stranger-anxiety 11-month-old, which is not to be confused with the trip when I never made it out of the child care room because she was in full meltdown mode 15 seconds after we entered. I sat in the room for an hour, playing with toys I could have been playing with at home, while Randy finished his workout. But that? The frustration over actually wanting to workout and actually wanting to leave the baby behind for a while to do so, and being thwarted every time? That's a different story for a different time.

This story is about how I went back in to retrieve my children yesterday morning. Bawling, splotchy, shaking, heaving, squealing, angry and frightened baby? Check. Waiting for me at the door. Well-adjusted, happy, couldn't-care-less-whether-Mommy's-around-or-not toddler? Hmmm. Being held. Looking pouty. Nice Gym Nanny looking at me with mingled pity and concern -- not for MJ, I guessed, but for her mother, her wholly inadequate and unprepared parent who apparently missed the memo that said her kid -- and all other kids -- is incapable of going ONE HOUR without having something to eat and drink. One hour, people.

Me: What happened?

Nice Gym Nanny: Well, she wanted a snack, and we couldn't find hers (waves a hand in direction of a counter that is literally packed with little Take-and-Toss bowls with goldfish crackers, each lovingly labeled with child's name before the mother/father left home to exercise.)

Me: Oh.

Nice Gym Nanny: Yeah. So she was really disappointed.

And so, I guessed, was Nice Gym Nanny ... in me. This is one of the reasons that I never bothered much with Gymboree classes and the like when MJ was even smaller than she is now; the idea of having to pack up her and half of her belongings to go somewhere else to play for 30 minutes seemed like unnecessary work for an 18-month-old with very simple needs. And now, packing a small lunch at 9:30 a.m., complete with masking tape monogramming (do you know how long it would take me to find masking tape around here?) seems like a lot of unnecessary work for a mother with a very simple need to sweat out all the spent patience clogged in her SAHM-y pores.

Am I being whiny and petulant? Yes. Most of the time Sometimes, that's what a blog is for.

I'll be honest. Some days I can't remember to brush MJ's hair before we go to Target. What I'm saying is: I'm soft. I need training. Boot camp. I'm a Type-L (for "lollygagging") parent personality living in a Type-A world. I'm pretty sure preschool in the fall will be as much about preparing Mommy to play nice as it will preparing MJ to do the same. They should charge me double. (But don't tell them I said that.)

Pop quiz time! What do you see in the following picture? (Hint: You're a TODDLER.)

a) a tea bag;

b) a "dwink" envelope (or "mail-ope," as MJ says);

c) a letter of the alphabet;

d) a bag of cookie seeds

Well, it's d, obviously. This happened to be sitting on the counter while we were making chocolate chip cookies this weekend (mmm ... chocolate chip cookies), and:

MJ: "Mommy, this would grow good cookies."

Me: "It would what? Grow cookies?"

MJ: "Yeah. You could grow nice cookies with these. These are seeds you can grow some cookies with."

Me: "Yeah?"

MJ: "Yeah. You put them in the ground, and ... and ... and they grow cookies!"

She slays me, I tell you. She just slays me.

So, we've been reading this book called The Mixed-Up Chameleon by Eric Carle -- very cute story about a chameleon who tries to be many different animals, but in the end, finds he is happiest as himself. A great message.

But when we reached the page in the book where the chameleon looks "gray and dull" because he's "cold and hungry," MJ disagreed. Her take-away message: "He looks that way because he's old."

Nice one.

Now, for the record, I'm not teaching her that older folks are gray and dull. I blame this guy: That's Fred from Cars -- yes, more Cars; this is getting to be such an obsession it will have it's own Bunker blog category soon. Fred is one of the lesser-known characters, but when you're collecting all these little guys like she is, you have to start slow. Work up to Tow Mater and Sally and Doc. Give her something to look forward to. Anyway, she asked me why Fred's body was all bumpy and beat up, and I told her it was because Fred was rusty.

"Why?"

"Well, because that's what happens when cars get old," I said.

I sincerely hope she doesn't tell her grandparents they're rusty next time she sees them.

While I was having my teeth cleaned a few weeks ago, I learned that first morsel of information from my dental hygienist; I learned the other one from my mom, while complaining about the number of plates of perfectly good food I dump into the trash each week after putting them in front of MJ.

I am a colossal non-flosser. They hand me the little white box of free floss at the end of each cleaning with such optimism, such hope that I'll actually use it. It's nice, really, to see someone show that much belief in you. But every six months I go back, and there's no hiding it, not even with the last-minute flossing I do the night before the cleaning. I always come clean:

"Have you been flossing?"

"Uh, not as much as I should. I mean, you know, occasionally." Except never.

Well, dental karma is catching up with me, because now that my teeth are officially old -- that's what she told me, that the crud on your pearlies is loose when you're young and hard when you reach middle age (and then loose again when you're an Advanced AARPie) -- I have a toothache in my left jaw that is KILLING me. Well, only when I chew on it, or drink anything cold. Or grind my teeth. Yeah, I do that, too.

So during the sharing of this information with the Bunker grandmother -- you may know her as GrammyBunker -- she throws this out for me to chew on: "Yeah, well did you know your taste buds are old, too?" Thanks.

G-to-the-B said that little people have not only more taste buds than we do (in the sides and roof of their mouth, which you gradually lose as you age), but sometimes, more sensitive ones, according to this article and others, which I ran to the Internet to find.

Apparently there is a gene that directs some kids to an aversion of bitter-tasting foods. Which I can totally see. But my preschooler also seems to be genetically predisposed to hate hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chicken tenders (chicken tenders!) and virtually anything else I make her. Her cerebral cortex seems to be powered entirely by macaroni-and-cheese and the ubiquitous, all-powerful cheese stick. I wonder if there's a gene for being a pain the proverbial bum at dinnertime. Pretty sure she got that one, too.

Sometimes I forget about all the little things that MJ doesn't know about yet, the little things about childhood. Like losing your teeth, for example. Last night, while she and her six-year-old cousin (who is in town visiting) were trying to get to sleep, Cousin M sat up in bed and said, "See? Look? I lost my tooth!"

MJ perked up. I was sitting behind her, and even from that perspective, I could tell by the way she held her little blond head that she was bewildered. She craned her neck forward to get a better look at the Jack-o-Lantern grin before her. She pondered. She sat starkly still. I smiled to myself as Cousin M continued talking, a rambling, sweet, little-girl-who's-been-in-the-car-all-day kind of information unload, and MJ settled back under the covers.

A few minutes went by. Cousin M was chatting some more, but when she fiddled a bit with her teeth, wiggling a loose one, MJ sat bolt upright and moved away from her, a look of ... well, horror, I guess, crossing her face.

"What's wrong, sweet pea?" I asked her.

"He ..." MJ began, sweeping a hand in the direction of her cousin -- have I mentioned we have a problem with our pronouns? -- "his teeth are lost."

"I know, sweet pea, she lost some teeth, but it's OK. That's what happens."

"Why?" MJ asked, not with the usual toddler curiosity, but rather with a hint of repulsion at the thought.

"You lose your baby teeth and grow big girl teeth," I told her. She grasped her bottom front teeth with her thumb and forefinger, both checking to see if they were still there and if they were flexible. You could see in her expression that she was trying to make sense of this strange notion. She moved in to get a closer look at her cousin's teeth.

Cousin M obligingly grinned widely, a Cheshire cat smile, as MJ peered into the holes and thought who knows what. That they had been stolen? Lost in a fight over a stuffed toy? It was hard to know, but fascinating to think about.

"Yeah," Cousin M explained through her smile, "your mommy lost her teeth, too, and now she has big teeth."

At this, MJ came over to my mouth to confirm, to look for holes, still wearing a look of horror and confusion. I thought she might start shaking any moment. So that first trip to the dentist I've been meaning to schedule? Yeah. That should be interesting.