Too clever by half

I often buy a little treat for Thomas at the grocery store. Debate amongst yourselves whether or not this is a valid parenting technique. The truth is, I like to, so I do. Usually he's allowed to have a small part of it and then it goes up in the cupboard for bribery/threats later on as needed. "Don't want to take your bath, huh? I hear the sound of a dozen peanut M&M's plunging into the abyss of the garbage..."

Because Thomas is as addicted to sugar as I am. Clearly, I have passed on this unfortunate predilection. I have to be pretty clever about what I do with the leftover treat, or I will find it, entirely eaten, within a few hours.

Today I bought some little chocolate squares with raspberry filling. Yum. Thomas got one in the car, but once we were home, they were off limits. However, before I even realized he had located them in the grocery sack, he had taken off with the package. He couldn't get the plastic wrappings off them, though, so I was able to get them back unscathed. I told him, "No more today. You already had one in the car."

We have a rubber bathtub faucet cover that is shaped like a hippo head. It's to keep little riotous bath takers from clubbing their noggins on the tub faucet. I was putting the rest of the groceries away when I was confronted by the hippo head, peering discreetly around the corner of the kitchen.

"Hello, my name is Hippo," said the hippo head in a deep voice. "I'm not Thomas. Can I have the treat?"

I confess I nearly rewarded Mr. Hippo with some chocolate. Quite nearly. After I recovered from laughing myself sick.

Weddings, weddings, everywhere...

A big congratulations to Steve and Hanna, who just announced they are getting married. Steve has been Nate's best friend since grade school and up until a few years ago was a bit of a free-wheeling bachelor. All it takes it the right woman, though (eh, Nate? Har) and once he met Hanna, he admits he fell devastatingly in love. Four years later and he was writing "Will you marry me?" backwards with candles in her parents' backyard. Hanna stood on the balcony facing away, with a mirror in hand so she could read it. They are having a Hawaiian wedding next March. Steve and Hanna, we wish you a lifetime of joy and love together and we are really hoping we can work the logistics to see you in Hawaii next year!

Also on the good news list, my friend Miriam got her birthday wish: her boyfriend of five years, Paul, proposed. She was getting a LITTLE impatient, but he managed to make it before the deadline...2 minutes to midnight. He proposed at Rockefeller Center, the place where they first kissed. They are also getting married next year. Miriam and Paul, congratulations on the many happy years you have ahead. And welcome to the BMC marrieds club! :)

On a personal note, six years ago this Saturday, I myself tied the knot with the love of my life, Mr. Nathan Poulsen. Nate proposed to me on the sidewalk in front of his sister's house only two days after I had met his entire family for the first time (he is the youngest of eight!), very spur of the moment. Not so spur of the moment, though, that he hadn't already procured his grandmother's wedding ring set for the occasion. Six months later we got married in the Salt Lake Temple. In the years since then, we've moved eight times, Nate has gotten five degrees, we had one child pretty uneventfully and then had another in one of the most terrifying times of our life. I have always known that Nathan is amazing, but the absolutely heroic way he took charge of events while Seth and I were both in the hospital still humbles me. Nathan, love, sweet, superhero, you are my best friend, the only one who knows all my secrets, the one I share all my thoughts and desires with. I would follow you anywhere. I promise to even iron you a few shirts tonight. Now THAT'S love.

"For you sir, five million dollars" and other tales from the trenches

Since we are both former and future suburbanites, I thought we ought to collect some of our favorite New York stories--funny and freaky alike--so we can remember just how far removed from ordinary life living in the city can be. As they say, "you get all kinds".

I'd love it if our city friends would also drop us their favorite crazy NYC stories.

My personal favorite (in the freaky category):
I was waiting at the subway elevator at 207th St. with Thomas and an older Asian fellow. Thomas, of course, was chatting away at this man since no amount of threatening and telling stories of dangerous adults seems to deter him from telling every person he meets everything about him and us. The man was smiling indulgently. As we got on the elevator, the man turned to me and said, "Your son, he is very smart."
Me, flashing a brief, tired smile: "Yes."
Him: "You want to sell him?"
Me: "Excuse me?"
Him: "How much would you sell him for?"
Me: "He's not for sale."
Him: "Ah. But if you do sell him, how much would you want?"
Me: "Nothing! He's not for sale!"
Him: "Five million dollars?"
At this point, I've got my hand on Thomas's collar and have yanked him hard behind me. "He IS NOT for sale."
The elevator, FINALLY, makes it to the street level and opens. The man is still smiling at us. "Have a nice day," he says, sounding, I swear, disappointed.


Nate's favorite (in the funny category):
Getting on the subway after work, Nate was approached by two teenagers, a boy and a girl, who launched immediately into a well-rehearsed story about being on the street, desperately hungry, and needing cash now. Nate was coming home late so he had gotten dinner at work, the leftovers of which he was bringing with him. Rather than give them cash, he told them, "Well, I've got some gnocchi and some tiramisu here." When he said "gnocchi" the boy's face screwed up in disgust and he rolled his eyes at the girl. "I guess we'll take the tiramisu," he said, so Nate handed it over and the two went on their way.


We managed to catch this guy, wish we had gotten a picture, on one of our first trips to Central Park. We were following what sounded like a woman singing opera and ended up at his "prayformance". He had made up the language he was singing in, as well as an entire imaginary geography and set of peoples, "The Festad", maps and descriptions of which are available on his website www.skthoth.com (though I see right now it's down for repairs). A documentary about his life won an oscar a few years ago. The music was okay (and his falsetto really impressive), but the overall silliness made staying for more than a few giggling moments impossible. We did leave him a little money, though, I think.

Contra-indicated

One thing I love about young kids is that they're comfortable with their own contradictions. As an adult, I feel compelled to put all my competing ideas and desires into a single logical framework and I usually get called out on it by Nate. Not to mention the serious disconnect between so much of what I say and what I actually do.

Thomas today told me that he "loves trying new foods". I asked him what "new foods" exactly has he tried.

"Cake. And chocolate pudding."

I happened to mention the fact that I fixed a very nice vegetarian burrito filling last night that he failed to even look at, let alone taste.

His answer: "That's a new food I don't like trying."

I don't know how you argue with that. Kinda like Bill O'Reilly's SNL caricature stating, "I think Space Mountain is the tallest mountain." The mind fuddles around all the ways that is...just...crazy.

My usual counterargument is tickles.

Thomism

Nate (calling for Thomas through the house): "Thomas! Thomas!"
Thomas (found straddling the banister of the stairs): "My name is Tom. And I'm a cowboy."

Disconnected

A little over ten years ago, my autonomous being began to dissolve. Wires (and more recently, no wires, just signals) have been creeping and crawling into my life so slowly, I was lulled into distraction, taking on more and more connections until my transformation into (Warning: Star Trek reference coming up) Locutus was complete. I had no idea. I just thought I had put on a little weight.

And then we moved and all those little wires got snipped. Naked (literal) panic ensued.

Today, our friendly neighborhood verizon guy, Greg, came over for about eight hours to install fiber optic cables in our home and reconnect me. I have spent the last few days in information limbo, unable to communicate with friends by any method other than mail. Actual, in the mail, mail. I had to look up a place of business in the physical yellowpages. If New York was burning down in my absence, I had no way of knowing. My sister had gone out on a blind date on Sat. night and I had yet to know how it had gone! Quelle horreur!

Despite the somewhat personal information emerging on this blog, I'm actually a pretty private soul. I rarely talk on the phone. I tend to get (very) behind on my email correspondence, and I have only twice engaged in a comment conversation on a website (one was an article on slate.com that rated charities, so I felt compelled to mention that LDS Humanitarian services gives one hundred percent to its charitable causes because the lay people who run it aren't paid and someone flamed me about the Mormon church sucking the life out of its members with tithing demands, ending with an expletive that rhymes with "Truck View!"). I don't have a myspace page. I can't stand friendster, linkedIn, and other networking sites. Anyway, I thought an old pre-intertube fuddy-duddy like me, I was autonomous still--that the cell phone in my pocket was for emergencies and that I use the web only for news, kind of like a personal Walter Kronkite. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

I'm beginning to appreciate the old mentality of community, when the only social contact a person could get was with the locals within a few blocks of you. I'm fascinated by the explosion of friend-seeking behavior the internet has spawned, where we have to know and know and KNOW people. Our social appetites seem voracious, beyond greedy. And yet, for all of it, I sense a continuing loneliness in the constant connection.

Thomas has made instant friends with the little boy who lives next door to us. A flesh and blood friend. He's been my guide this past week in an internetless world. He might lament not being able to play on pbskids.org, but it's not the same disconnect for him that it's been for me. He's so fearless--"Hello", followed by "Can you play?"

I'm logged back in now. I just can't let the craving for friends out in the world eclipse meeting friends here. Being too connected is its own form of disconnect.

Of course, I'm posting this on a blog, so maybe the irony of it all will force the observation to collapse in on itself, creating a black hole and sucking me and this computer into it, obliterating all my ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!.....

blip.

qualifications

Nate would like me to qualify the "I hate you" story. His words, verbatim, "I was very tired after working hard all day FOR OUR FAMILY." Thomas added, "You're right, Daddy. You're right!"

I'm offering my affirmative defense of Extreme Emotional Distress, brought on by Too Little Sleep. The jury's still out.

Awake...

It's 4:00 am and T-minus one day before the move. I can't sleep. I woke up about 3 am, in anticipation of Sethie crying. For the first five months of his life, he slept in his car seat due to acid reflux. He got so comfy in there he was sleeping from 7 pm to 7 am straight. Oh how I bragged about it. About the time he started rolling over, we knew we needed to transition him to his crib. He's never slept all the way through the night since.

I always said I would be one of those people who wouldn't tolerate their kid waking up in the night. I never had to try that theory on Thomas--he was (and remains) a deep sleeper, so deep in fact that as I was stumbling over to pick up Sethie a few nights ago (we are all in the same room right now because our boxes are stacked up in Thomas's room--even more fun!), I actually stepped on the poor child and it didn't even solicit so much as an "umph!" from him. So he slept through the night pretty much at three months and has never looked back. I've always been inclined toward the heartless, let-them-cry-it-out method, but that was before I had a share a room with a sobbing baby in the middle of the night. Not to mention, Sethie has perfected the art of playing chicken. Challenge to him to a "stop your yapping" contest of wills and I'll bang my head through the actual wall before he stops crying on his own and goes back to sleep.

Thomas inherited his sleeping prowess from Nate. I tell the story of Thomas as a newborn waking up every hour for the first few days of his life and how it had me rattled, but Nate slept peaceably through it all, even the time where I was hitting him in the arm to get him up saying, "I hate you!" over and over again (Note to readers: I don't actually hate my husband. This is what only an hour of sleep at a time turns me into). Oy. The things we do when we're tired. Well, the things I do. Sleep has always been one of the sweetest pleasures for me--and I hate having it interrupted. Nothing better than to stay in bed until the morning is half over, with a breeze coming in the window, wrapped up in fuzzy covers. I suppose some day the kids will be out of the house and I can do that again, but by then I'll be having dinner at 4:30 pm and waking up promptly at 6 am to do whatever it is old people do at that hour. Knit? Tai chi? Watch Cosby show reruns?

I am feeling a little panic in my heart--just a twinge, a mite, a single jalapeño of panic. Is it because we're moving? Maybe it's because all the stress of the last year is being packed into these last sleepless moments, where I feel that something something must go wrong or it wouldn't fit the pattern. Tomorrow we run into Riverdale to pick up the truck and we plan to sneak it into a parking space in front of our building while all the cars are out for alternate side street sweeping. How diabolical! I have some last minute errands to take care of, too--returning Michelle's tupperware which I've had since Sethie was born, installing Heather's memory which I promised I'd do before I left, taking the leftover veggies in my fridge to Iris (she makes a good home for a butternut squash)...these are my goodbyes, I suppose. We didn't have a going away party. We just told everyone this week "It's Saturday" and felt abashed at the dropped jaws. I'm no good at this, really. I just can't keep all the details straight in my head and other people are the first to suffer my ADD. I've got a santa's bag full of emails to respond to, too, and I keep saying I'll take care of it when I get to the new place, but maybe I should just send out a general broadcast of my ineptness so everyone will know "it's not you, it's me". Really.

4:30 am now. I should go back to bed. The bedroom is cheerily silent--no fidgeting babies, no four-year-old's nightmares. Poor Thomas--after he saw a bug in the backyard of our new house, he's been obsessed with them. "Ah bugs, mommy, bugs on my face!" he yells in the middle of the night. He has to have seen bugs before, here in the city, right? We waged righteous battle against a house centipede not too long ago and it didn't give him nightmares. Kids' fears seem to change in an instant. There's a moment, I think, when we realize that there are actual things in the dark--we just can't see them. I still get weirded out by strange shapes in the hallway, things I may have left out and forgotten were there. How much worse for a little boy to whom the world is large and out of his control. How nice it must be to have a mommy you can cry out to, who scoops you up and soothes you.

I still touch Nate in the middle of the night--just put my hand on his chest, feel that compression of breath, bury my nose in his ear. We always need someone bigger than us, to handle the things we can't seem to handle. I suppose that's the only way we can learn to sleep through the night, when we can fully trust that someone is there, every moment.

Okay, I get you, Sethie. I get you.

Sethie takes a snooze on my coat, under the bleachers at Thomas's preschool.

Thomas Tidbits

I've been inspired by the wit and wisdom collections of Desi and Lexi, so here are a few Thomisms off the top of my head:

Nate (leaving for a week in D.C.): "Thomas, you're the man of the house now."
Thomas: "Does that mean I get to use the knives?"

Thomas: "Superman is a grown-up, right Mommy?"
Me: "Yep. That's why he's called Superman, not Superboy."
Thomas: "But he was little once, right? Like Ninja Turtles? Like Baby Ninja Turtles?"
Me: "Uh..."

Thomas: "I want to play tag with Baby Seth!"
Me: "Well, Baby Seth is too little to play tag, Thomas. He can't run around like you can."
Thomas, poking Sethie: "Tag, you're it, Baby Seth!" He puts his arm under Sethie's hand. "Oh, you got me Baby Seth! You are good at this!"

Thomas, showing his policeman action figure and his piggy bank. "This policeman wants all my money, Mommy. He's corrupt."

Nate: "Thomas, how much do I love you?"
Thomas: "Daddy, when I say, 'just a little bit', you have to tickle me, okay?"

Walking up the subway stairs today: "Ah, smell that fresh country air!"

In an elevator yesterday next to a woman giving us horrified looks:
Thomas: "Mommy, my foot hurts."
Me: "I'll look at it when we get to our apartment."
Thomas: "Okay, but, mommy, don't cut my foot with scissors! Don't cut my foot with scissors!"

Thomas, opening the door for me: "Here you go, lady."

Dropping off itty-bitty clothes

On Monday, I went back to the NICU to drop off Seth's preemie clothes--where we got them in the first place. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel, trudging down the hot sidewalk next to the complex that is Columbia Presbyterian. Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital looks magnificent--the front entrance is wide and swooping with a long divided ramp that is loomed over by a huge, brightly colored wall. It's sort of overwhelmingly friendly, that wall. Feels like it's saying, "I love you and I could crush you."

Last time I had a parent's pass. This time I had to check in. "Who's the patient?" they wanted to know at the guard's desk. For a second, I didn't know what to say. Sethie was strapped to my chest (that most ubiquitous of New York-style childcare: wearable babies) and I nearly said, "He is." But I remembered the bag in my hand and held it up helpfully. "Dropping off preemie clothes."

He didn't really care. He had already filled out my visitor's pass. If I had said, "The Dalai Lama", he still would have handed it to me. Why did he ask in the first place? Just to see if I could come up with a name in a reasonable period of time and not that I was just here to ogle random sick children?

Seventh Floor. NICU. I felt all kinds of giddy stepping off the elevator and I guess I stood too long by the receptionist desk, looking at the multiple doors because the receptionist actually--gasp--looked up from talking with her friend to ask me what I needed. She pointed me through the doors to the right and I found our old social worker sitting at her desk, talking on the phone. She put her hand over the mouth of it long enough to coo over how big Sethie has gotten and to thank me for the clothes. I trotted back out again. Back down the elevator. Back past the big wall. Back out to the street.

Seven months ago, I was crying in the car because I was only spending two hours a day with Seth. I was crying not because I wanted to spend more but because I didn't want to and I felt like I should. There were women there who spent all day sitting by the incubators of their children. I couldn't do it. Not just because it would be impossible with Thomas, but because I didn't know what to do there. I held him. I fed him by bottle. I awkwardly tried breast-feeding, often with nurses and feeding specialists giving me tips, poking at me. Then I went home and tried not to think about it until the next day.

I wonder now if that's why he's so needy, why he cries if I set him down for too long. Does he remember my ambivalence? Does he actually remember hanging out in an incubator, being efficiently, but maybe coldly, jostled by professionals at diapering and feeding times, except for that rare hour of the day when Mom showed up? I don't know. Clearly there are some guilt issues on this topic.

Does it matter now? I'm wearing him all the time. Nothing he loves more than being jiggled along, strapped to my chest. He fell asleep as we walked back to the subway.

Baby, baby, stay with me.

A Few Thoughts Pre-Jersey

On Sunday, Jordan Gunther told Nate, "Know why New Yorkers are so grumpy? They keep telling themselves there's a light at the end of the tunnel, but the end of the tunnel is New Jersey."

Note: the Gunthers are moving to Utah after many years in New York. Neither one grew up there. Good luck guys!

Thomas has been telling people that we will be moving to a house and that next door lives his new friend, chicken noodle man. While this seems to be cheering him up immensely about the move, I've kinda got the willies.

On a sad note, I was explaining to Thomas that we will be moving and that means leaving our old friends behind, but we will be able to make new friends in our new place. Thomas said, "I know. I will have to find a new Desi." A new Desi! Fleeting friendships--if only we could move to another place and just pick up a new version of the people we love. I have to figure Thomas will find a new buddy that loves bashing and being bashed in the head as much as Mr. Desmond Jones, but then again maybe not.

Maybe this love affair will disappear with the sunset behind us as the moving truck pulls away (yes, yes people, I KNOW that New York is EAST of Princeton, just go with the imagery, however awkward...), or maybe Thomas and Des will meet up in a future life and not knowing their own history, rediscover and reinvent that meeting of the minds (and fists). Note to Thomas, I still keep in touch with my best friend from kindergarten, but once we stopped playing with My Little Ponies, we found it a little harder to keep the same intensity level.

And what am I going to do? How will I find a new Heather (and Heather!), a new Kendra, a new Iris, a new Melanie, a new Tasha, a new Laura, and Amy and Jessica and Sandra and... sorry, I'm hyperventilating. Paper bag. Breathe in, breathe out. Friends, if you know any doppelgangers in the Princeton area, let them know I'm coming.

Lest I be stuck with Chicken Noodle Man.