Snow in All The Wrong Places

It began on January 5th....and the saga of Josh's quest to be an Official Junior Potty Meister First Class continues, and as far as he's concerned, it "ain't about the deed, it's all about the title"...For about two weeks, my home revolved around a queen-sized Neat Sheet, and a nearly nude boy. Okay, it's tacky -- I know it's tacky, but what the most useful information (read "least annoying") had said is that little boys need to know what to look for before they can, ahem, "deposit it" accordingly...and that sometimes the simplest route is to permit them to run wild and free. In accordance with that plan, we spread out the Neat Sheet (and I swear, every person with a toddler should have one -- liquid beads up on it, and it's very easy to clean) in the living room, turned up the thermostat, and cranked on the Mario Cart. Watching him leap about in this state, I was reminded of this ornery cheer from my childhood. I would like nothing more than to pass it on to you, but my darling husband and father-in-law have overruled me emphatically with much glaring and frowning. "Just because you think it's hysterical doesn't mean anyone else will find humor in it." Blah. It was merely a variant on the "I'm a little teapot" song with a wildly different ending, but again, they say no...someone, somewhere will get all hackled up, and I'll end up on a pillory somewhere in a Third World Country getting forty cane lashes.

Josh isn't quite impressed with the potty training, but he's being a good sport -- most of the time. He hates diaper changes...fights me like a wild boar on the changing table (and I've got the nearly dislocated shoulder and vertebrae to prove it), and thinks his training pants are itchy, but he's getting a kick out of the cheers and odd little songs I've been singing lately ("He peed in the potty, He peed in the potty...He's got to wash his hands!!!! Whoo!")... and has now gone a day and a half in real big boy underwear without incident. We've promised him stickers and (some) candy in the short run, a Jack-in-the-box-with-a-hat and the chance to go to a day or two of daycare in the long run...and he's excited about that. However, the routine of 30 minutes off the pot and 15 minutes on, all day, every day for the last week is taking it's toll. It's boring. He's bored. I'm bored. First, his existence was distilled to a large blue square on our floor and now it's set to a timer, and my life has has become that of a human-leash ("Get back on that sheet! JOSH! BACK ON THE SHEET!!!" or "The timer's gone off...Time to potty.") Sometimes, he gets the idea...and the peasants rejoice...and not just the peasants. Of all the many conversations I never thought I'd have, the strangest ones involved asking my family members to cheer riotously for bodily functions...I've actually called them up long-distance for a three minute "Yay, Josh!" spiel and the words, "Yaaaaaay! Poo! Gooooo, Poo!" actually came out of my mouth for about twenty minutes the other day. It is a strange alchemy, having a child. It turns you from an erudite, educated person into a brain-melted, Poo-cheerleader. And of course, now, when he does something, he must tell EVERYBODY. We received a call from "Uncle" Joe the other day -- a friend we haven't seen in ages, and before I had the chance to explain anything, Josh had the phone and was telling our bemused friend what he had just accomplished in the potty. He'll even tell strangers in stores...the other day, we hit Wendy's and he regaled the ladies behind the counter with his tales from the land of potty. "It was a Biiiiigggg Poo!" Kind of hard to top that in conversation, I tell you. Thankfully, Josh seemed to have a "Eureka!" moment at the mall a few days back and finally realized that if he told me that he needed to go potty (in the Oh-My-Gosh-That's-So-Adorably-Cute-kid-toilet they have) that we'll clip right on over and he can do whatever he needs to do...and I will loudly and excitedly make a fool out of myself for his amusement as his reward. I saw my behavior in a mirror recently, and I am beginning to secretly suspect that I've been possessed by a particularly hyper cocker spaniel. Make that a particularly hyper cocker spaniel on crack.

Right now, our goal is just to get the day shift dealt with, but as soon as he knows what he's supposed to do, we'll hit the night shift. He's pretty good about getting on the big potty most of the time (he lost patience with the little potty after about a week), and we haven't had too many catastrophes...but we still have to pounce on him quickly...he gets so excited when he does something that he has a tendency to hop about the house with his pants around his ankles before we can complete the "tidy-ing ooop" process... It is is opinion that he must immediately dance the Dance of the Exuberant Nekkid Boy...which seems to be his variation of Irish Step Dancing throughout every room in our house... (Yes...take a breath and picture that please...because believe me, that image pops up behind my eyelids at the darnedest moments) followed by M'OWee, his furry groupie...who is just as excited as he is, and just as talkative. Koda would like to get excited, but that would mean moving from his perch on the warmest vent in the house.

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Uggggghhhh. My hair has been driving me crazy...no, let's be honest, it's been driving me almost completely psychotic lately. It's been too long...my bangs are too long...it catches me in place whenever I lie down or get up. It feels like an army of spiders crawling on me. So, the other day, Jon took me in to get a trim...I just asked the girl to lop it off...and it feels like I've lost a pound of hair...It was soooo nice. Would have been even better if the prior length hadn't contributed to an ear infection that seems to be running amok from my right ear canal down along my jawline. Toss in an unhealthy dose of the sleep bruxism (jaw clenching) that I've picked up in the last two and a half-years, and the end result was my face feeling as though I had lost a slapping contest with a cast-iron shovel. Thank God, the ear infection happened when Jon was here, or I don't know how I would have made it through. Since I had been through this experience before, I knew that the doc and the dentist can't really offer much in the way of help beyond a mouth guard...(Yep, get that picture firmly in your head...every morning I wake up looking like a droolin' gorilla with bad eighties hair...I know, that's an oxymoron...all hair was bad in the eighties.) so, I did a lot more Advil than I should have (and large glasses of milk to sort of buffer my stomach a bit), cozied up to our heating pad and allowed Jon to turn into SUPER-RESEARCH-MAN...his second favorite alter-ego (his first is a perky character named "Bob") .... Faster than a speeding modem...capable of obtaining huge quantities of input in a few, brief seconds, looking quite a bit like Clark Kent...and running interference between my face and a very concerned, and God-love-him, a very-wanting-to-be-helpful-Josh, who kept giving me very sweet, but very insistent squish hugs on the overly sensitized right side of my face..."Poor Mommy. Mommy is sad. It will be okay, poor Mommy." Each loving pat on the cheek was like getting slammed by an electrical current in the face. The bones in my cheek and jaw were just screaming...and for two nights, I couldn't stand up or sit down or do much of anything because of the vertigo from the infection and the slow stabbing pain...it was like someone had a volume control jacked into my jaw, just below my right ear, and kept twisting the dial up and down. Sometimes, I'd have about thirty minutes of feeling nigh-on human...and then the dial would crank, and the jaw and ear would shriek back out. Meanwhile, Jon came across one website that offered some useful information...and a hell of a lot of WTF? I had tried hydrogen peroxide once in my ear...that was stupid, it was like acid, and the fizzing bubbles crawling up my ear canal made me cringy and even more ill. One suggestion from a pharmacist was a capful of vinegar and rubbing alcohol...I thought that would burn like a "sunny beach", but I was soooooo grateful to be mistaken....We poured a little in my ear...and it was a kind of "Why YES! I AM SO AWAKE RIGHT NOW!!!" feeling as the cold liquid made it's way in, but the combo of the acid and the alcohol finally got my ear settling down, and with my ear becalmed, my jaw started easing up as well. As Jon rubbed my back and tried to help the pain-hackles ease back down, he regaled me with some of the other "tried and true" methods on the website. Most of them involved putting a potato in my ear or some type of mustard, garlic, or olive oil -- As I wondered exactly when and more importantly, why my ear had become an all you can eat salad bar...he started telling me about the suggestions involving lit cigarettes and bodily fluids. I still in too much pain to glare appropriately at my husband, but he did make it clear that some other person had posted this as information...and that he was an innocent stander-by and had nothing to do with this foolishness. (Yes, it's a real site: http://naturalcurereviews.com/remedy14-1-earache.html ). I told him I'd rather have my face continue to implode and cave in. He agreed that an imploded face would definitely be preferable, but continued to offer some more of the more bizarre suggestions...and I laughed, even though my face was likely more rictus than playful smile at the time.

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A few days ago, we got a few hours out to let the boy run himself down at the mall playground, and for the first time in his life someone was pointedly mean to Josh. The good news is that an hour later, two big boys were pointedly wonderful to him...-- the bad news is that he doesn't seem to remember the darling boys...only the bad girls - even after so much time has passed (I regret to say that I might be partly responsible for that because I was angry about the situation, and he remembers my being angry about the situation, but really it was like watching a puppy get kicked in the head.) They were positively hateful. They'd march up to him, jut their chins into his little confused face and yell, "We are NOT going to play with YOU." One shoved him down deliberately, and he cracked his head against the playground slide before I could get to him. When I called to Josh to try to play with someone else, and leave those girls alone, the same little twerp came running up to me to tattle that Josh was "spitting" at her...(for the record, he knows how to razz berry, not how to spit...) but I told her that while his spitting wasn't a good thing, I knew she was also bullying him and shoving him, and that wasn't nice either, and that the best thing she could do was to keep herself and her friend away from him -- Yeah, I know, like that was going to work. I wanted to talk to the mother, but she was barely focused on the girls...and I was so angry, I knew I could not confront her calmly, so I did the next best thing I could think of...I took Josh and we went everywhere else in the mall...and waited for them to leave. When those girls went after Josh, his response was to reach up and try to hug them, and my heart broke. I'm so afraid he's going to end up copying some of my baggage. Usually, when people are awful to me without a real reason, I don't know how to react except to try to "fix it or alleviate it" with more effort on my behalf...usually to my own detriment, and generally with no positive results (On the other hand, if I've actually done something to earn the venom, well, I'm perfectly content with suggesting that the other party should take a moment to suck my nose and move on, and then I just wait for the problem to sort itself out). This time around though, I was just ticked. I know it isn't technically appropriate adult behavior to want to go "gloves-off"on a seven-year old (though I was so riled that for a brief moment it seemed like a really pleasant and glow-y idea), but it didn't take much imagination to see the kind of person she was, and was going to become. To distract myself, I imagined life fifteen years in the future...when Josh will 6'7", tanned, gorgeous and atheletic and articulate as all hell...when the girls like those two would be doing absolutely everything they can to get his attention, and they would only be minor blurs in his peripheral vision as he walked right by them, surrounded by a swarm of warm, wonderful people. It amuses me to daydream that he'll have it more together than I ever did...It is my dearest wish that he be happy...and that he will somehow be able to brush off the little idiocies of the snarky people better than I've ever been able to. Since that incident, I came across this lovely quote from St. Francis of Assisi : "First do what is necessary, then do what is possible, and soon you'll be doing the impossible." It's been giving me a great deal to think about...and it's also helped me feel much more hopeful about any similar issues down the road.

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We've been trying to strategerize a Date Weekend lately, but things have not been going smoothly, as usual. One weekend with Josh at Mom's had to be rescheduled due to a prior commitment (i.e. -- a painting party at Jay and Dev's "Villa on 6th" -- rumor has it that they have done a kicking job on the place) and all of the other weekends in January had to be cancelled due to freak winter storms that just hurled in out of nowhere. It's hard to say who needs the break more, but Josh is not taking these delays kindly. The other day he made one of his frequent demands to go see "Gramma Marsha, NOW!", complete with a smash-hug and batted eyelashes. When I tried to explain that the weather was bad and we couldn't go out, he got out of my lap and marched forcefully over to the window. Once there, his stance stiffened, and his finger pointed angrily at the yucky weather outside. "You stop, Weather. You stop being bad now! You be good! I wanna see Gramma Marsha, so you be good, Weather, you start being good right now!" You tell 'em, Kiddo. See, I figure that if Josh is as determined with ol' "Mom" Nature as he is with ol' "Mom"->Me (CanIPlayMyGame?!CanIPlayMyGame?*squash hug, his nose smashed against mine*CanIPlayMyGame?!!!!), she'll wear down soon enough and succumb to his demands. Jon's kind of hoping that the snow stays at least on Harry's hill for a little while longer...as he managed to convince me to go sledding the other day (I haven't been intentionally on a sled since I was in my twenties)...and really feels the need to get some silent film shots of my, ahem, much-vaunted "grace and skill" for posterity. Silent, because I was saying many unfavorable things about Jon, specifically and personally, as I careened and jounced down the hill (picture a walrus valiantly trying to outrun an avalanche, and you've got enough of a picture in your head)...Truth is I LOVE sledding. I really do. What I forgot that I don't love is the Oh,YeGodsI'mAwakeNowThatISREFRESHING feeling of about three pounds of snow rapidly crammed into my every crevass as I finally rolled and thumped to a stop at Jon's feet. Since I was the only one NOT in layers, and since the snow had no intention of melting away politely, I was disinclined to repeat the procedure, even though Jon begged, bribed, and swore that I should make one further attempt, he even mentioned that repeating the process would easily guarantee that I would win the big prize on America's Funniest Videos, but I was adamant that even that financial compensation was not worth it, and I, and my snow-encrusted bottom went home.