Nap Time

Has anyone ever noticed that when you really want your kids to do something is when they decide they don't want to? Even if it's something they regularly do, like take a nap.

For the past few days I have been using the hour or so that my girls take a nap to lay out in the back yard and read my book while I soak up some sun, with the proper SPF of course. It's great, I make sure they're fed and they drift right off to sleep leaving me all that time to myself, and today I was especially looking forward to my hour of solitude. I had been on a cleaning frenzy all morning and was anticipating my iced coffee and the next chapter of New Moon, so I fed the girls lunch, changed Mia's diaper (after chasing her down and pinning her to the couch), tucked Leila in her bed and Mia in her crib. I grabbed my beach towel, my book and my cell phone to keep track of time and claimed my spot in the back yard. When I went back in to get my iced coffee, I noticed that their bedroom door was open so I poked my head in and saw that Leila had escaped. I called her name and heard a giggle coming from behind the living room chair.

"Okay Leila, I found you, now it's time to take a nap," I tell her as I walk her back to her bed. She lied down without a fuss and I closed the door behind me and went back outside. The warm sun felt great on my back and the breeze that blew by every so often kept the heat from being unbearable. After reading a few pages I realized I was more tired than I thought, so I decided to take a short nap instead. I fluffed up my towel, got comfortable and closed my eyes--then I heard the screen door open.

"Mommy?"

Ugh, really? I thought. "What, Leila?" I asked.

"I got pee-pee, " she said, which meant she had to go to the bathroom. So I got up, helped her in the bathroom and put her back to bed as quietly as possible.

By then I was watching the clock because the moment Mia wakes up, my break is over. I go back outside, lay back down and close my eyes. A cloud passed over the sun, easing up the heat on my face and the rustling of the trees in the wind was lulling me to sleep. The sounds of the neighborhood were now just background noise as I drifted off--

"Mommy!"

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! I thought. "What now, Leila?"

"Mommy, I'm up."

Really? I thought, because I would have never guessed. "Why are you up Leila?"

"I don't know, I'm up!"

"Well, go lay down. You need to take a nap," ...so I can take a nap, I finished in my head. I got up again and put her to bed, checking to make sure Mia was still asleep, and she was. I ran back outside threw myself on my towel and shut my eyes hoping to be able to get at least a 20 minute power nap. I drifted off quicker than I expected, and in my dream I heard a voice in the distance. I quickly realized it was Leila calling me.

"MOMMY!"

"Come on, Leila, you need to take a nap already! Get in the bed!" I tell her, without getting up.

"Mommy--"

"Leila! Go!"

"--but Mia's awake."

Great. So much for that nap.

Scenes From a Mall

Staying home with your kids is not easy. In addition to brushing teeth, changing diapers, making meals, giving baths and cleaning up messes, we also have to find things for our kids to do all day. It is not until I had to entertain a one- and two-year-old that I realized how long 12 hours can really be. So far, I've been doing quite all right. There are those days, however, when I am bored out of my mind, to which my husband suggests "Why don't you take them to the mall?" Like it'll be fun or something. I have already been down that road, dragging someone along with me to help, and it didn't have a great outcome. Nonetheless, since it has been such a sweltering hot week and we are without air conditioning, I thought it would be nice to do something different and take the girls to the mall to cool off.

I get the girls ready, which includes a WWE match with Mia to change her diaper and put clothes on her, I pack the diaper bag and head out the door. I make sure the double stroller is still in the trunk of my car, and proceed to put the girls in their car seats. I put Mia in first because she is more likely to run out into the street if I turn my head for a second. Once I get her to sit still long enough to fasten the buckles, I turn my attention to Leila who is busy collecting a beautiful dead leaf bouquet for me. She comes to the car after the fifth time I call her and after she's strapped in we're on our way.

The AC in the car is on full blast and I'm still sweating. I have never looked so forward to going to an air conditioned mall before. The parking lot is pretty packed for a Thursday afternoon (of course) so the closest spot I could grab was far enough to require a shuttle to the mall entrance. I pop my trunk and remove the double stroller which is roughly the size of a city bus, brush off the indeterminable food crumbs from the last time we used it, plop the girls in and make my mile-hike to the front door of the mall. I struggle to open the first set of non-automatic doors and push my limousine through without getting stuck because the girl standing outside is too busy talking on her cell phone to hold the door. As I reach for the handle on the second set of doors I anticipate the cold air rushing to meet me like the frigid air of the freezer when you open it to get an ice pop, and when I swing the door open I feel... nothing? There is no cold air! It is only about 10 degrees cooler than it is outside. I am now so upset I begin to curse everything under my breath: my parking spot in the boondocks, the doors that didn't open automatically, the dingbat who wouldn't hold the door for me and the cheap mall that couldn't get its air conditioning working properly on a day like this.

Regardless, I already made the trip out, so I figure I'll go in anyway, hoping that each individual store has its own climate control. As I enter my first (and eventually last) store I am welcomed by a wall of cool air. I make my way to the first rack, and before I can even find my size in a black skirt Mia starts to cry. I have no idea why, she has on a clean diaper and she just ate lunch, so I give her a sequined tank top to play with while I go back to looking for my size. Of course, since Mia is holding something, Leila now wants to hold something, so I give her another one of those sequined tops and look to see that Mia is gnawing on the security tag. I take the shirt away & throw it back on the rack as Mia simultaneously begins to cry again. One of the sales ladies walks by and gives me that "Why did you even bring these kids to the mall?" look. I sneer at her, abandon the rack of black skirts and venture deeper into the store.

As I push my double bus, I can feel the wheels gliding, so I look down and notice that I have been dragging a sundress across the length of the store. It is now covered in clumps of gray dust, so I quickly shake it off, squish it into the nearest rack and keep moving. By this time, I am blindly grabbing things that even remotely look attractive to me, making sure they're my size and throwing them onto the stroller in the hopes that my children might be quiet long enough for me to try them on. One can always hope, right?

Well, no such luck. I make my way back to the fitting room. The largest room is being occupied by someone who has no need for a large room. Leila and Mia have re-started their whining as the fitting room attendant asks me if I want to wait for the big room. I give her the "Are you kidding me?" look and she shrugs her shoulders. I ask for the last fitting room, so I can just park the stroller in the hall and keep my door open. Now the attendant is looking at me like I'm crazy. "Listen, my kids are cranky, and I just wanna get outta here," I say as I rush past her to the last room.

In between encore performances of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", "Itsy, Bitsy Spider", and the ABC song, I am able to try on what I believe to be three shirts, two dresses and a pair of jeans. In my harried state, I have no idea if any of these items looked good on me, or if I even indeed try them on. Mia is now screaming bloody murder and Leila wants the graham crackers that are in the diaper bag which is underneath the stroller. I decide to just call it a day. I give the clothes to the attendant and stroll toward the front, not caring that Mia has stuck out her arm in attempt to knock down everything we pass. The minute we exit the store beads of sweat start appearing on my forehead. I get stuck behind a lady who is walking so slow she is practically in reverse, but is so large that I can't go around her. When I finally reach the mall exit a little old man walking with a limp stops to hold the door open for me and my large double stroller--just about the only nice thing about our whole adventure. I can't say I'll be so nice the next time my husband tells me to take our daughters to the mall.

Independence Day

My daughter Leila is no stranger to independence. She has been claiming it since the day she was born, refusing to breastfeed on schedule, getting me into trouble with the nurses who threatened to give her a bottle if she didn't start feeding every two hours. Since then she has moved on to bigger, more annoying battles. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't appreciate that she is a strong-willed little person who takes control and isn't afraid to try new things, it's just the way she goes about doing it sometimes.

Her new answer to everything is "Mommy, I do it!" She insists that she put on her own shirt, which nine times out of ten is on backwards and stretched out by the time she gets it on, she tries to put on her own shoes though she hasn't yet mastered the left/right thing, she wants to wash her own body during her bath though she concentrates mainly on scrubbing her tummy, and she wants to wipe her own bottom after she uses the toilet, even though her arms are still a smidge too short to reach properly and I always have to double check. She also wants to brush her own hair, brush my hair, feed her sister and change her sister's pamper. Today, however, she took her independence to a new level. She was playing with her dolls in the living room when Mia came over and tried to grab one of the dolls. Leila yelled "No!" snatched the doll from Mia and pushed her away. Mia, still a little wobbly on her feet, fell down. Before I could even say anything Leila stood up, looked at me and said, "No, Mommy, I do it," and began to walk away. "Where do you think you're going?" I asked her. "I'm going in Time-Out," she told me as she went into her room and closed the door.

Neighborhood Geographic

I am posting this from somewhere deep in the Amazon. My back yard is a jungle (except for the 4-foot strip of grass that my husband was able to cut this morning before the lawnmower died). The crickets are buzzing uncontrollably in the 100-degree heat, and the air is so thick with humidity I can barely breathe. Princess, our dog, was swinging from a vine earlier before the sun zapped her energy and she melted into a puddle under the tree. My children (Leila with a frizzed-out Tina Turner 'do, and Mia with a 'fro straight out of the Jackson 5) are sweaty savages running wild through the house in their undies. In the faint distance I can hear the ice cream truck lurking. It's playing its high-pitched mating call, patiently waiting to lure the innocent neighborhood children in so it can blind them with its colorful decals and strike by pumping them full of high fructose venom and then drive away, leaving the poor young ones to suffer their sugar attacks, running around blindly, foaming at the mouth, speaking in tongues and destroying everything in sight before they wind down into a comatose state and fall asleep. The jack-in-the-box music is getting louder! Must...protect...children...

The Latest Dirt

If you have small children, you probably know that it is nearly impossible to go to the bathroom in peace. By "in peace," I mean peacefully, without interruptions, without a little person following you to the commode and either getting into the products under the sink or literally hanging on top of you while you try to handle your business. Once I ran to the bathroom and quickly locked the door behind me, thinking I had beat the system, only to have to listen to 3 straight minutes of "MOOOOMMY!MOOOOMMY!" as both my daughters banged on the door. I can't win.

Today, I was misled into thinking that all the times I'd said "Please leave me alone for two minutes while I use the bathroom, PLEASE!" had finally sunk in. The girls were watching Blues Clues, so I quietly snuck down the hallway. As I closed the door behind me, I was sure one of them had heard the click and would come running after me, but I was in luck! No pitter-patter of feet down the hallway. I should have known it was too good to be true. I washed and dried my hands and made my way back to the living room and just before I rounded the corner I heard Leila shout "Miiiiiia!" I let out a deep sigh, poked my head around the corner and saw that Mia, in the few moments I was in the bathroom had single-handedly emptied and spread around the living room half the dirt from our potted plant. There is no such thing as a free lunch. My two minutes of solitude had cost me a 10 minute bath and a five-minute sweep job. Fun times.

Researchers have just found that Insanity is indeed genetic. You get it from your kids.

Remote Location

We all, at one point, have conducted a search party for the television remote. It happens. We carry it into another room without thinking, don't notice as it falls to the floor, or squish it into the depths of the couch cushions. But the worst fate that a remote can face is at the hands of a baby. Especially a one year old baby... named Mia.

My husband has the day off today, so he woke up with the girls so I could "sleep in" until 9:00. At some point between 7:30am when the girls woke up and 9:00am when I got out of bed, the remote had disappeared into thin air. My husband had already been searching for it by the time I got up and after I brushed my teeth I joined the search party. We looked everywhere: in the usual places (in the couch, under the couch) and in the unusual places (in the fridge, in the bathroom) as well as every possible hiding place in the girls' room. We turned up nothing, all the while listening to an infomercial for the Ab Roller on the home Shopping Network (how the TV ended up on the channel, I have no idea.) Finally, we gave up. I figured, I always find something when I'm not looking for it, so I turned off the TV using the power button on the box, and began to do other things. About 20 minutes later, as I was just about to go sit at the computer with my cup of coffee to check my email, my husband says, "I found it!" I rush into the living room to see where the forsaken remote had been hiding the whole time and I saw it inside the computer printer. Not on top, or under, but inside. Mia had apparently wedged it in where the paper comes out. We know it was Mia because the printer is her current obsession, and Leila would have told us where it was, had she been the one to put it there, because she was demanding to watch Dora the entire time we were looking for it. So we called off the dogs. The search is over...until next time.

Wildflower Surprise

As I sat outside today, watching Mia disappear through grass as tall as she is and and shaking my head as Leila played with "sand" (really the dry dirt from a hole dug by Princess, our dog), I was thinking of the nicest way to tell my husband that he needs to mow the damn lawn already. Poor Mia looked like she needed a machete to cut her way through the brush to make it back to the patio, Leila was smart enough to play in the only clearing in the the yard (the aforementioned hole) and if I listened hard enough, I could hear the bugs telling all their friends in the neighborhood that our back yard is the jackpot to colonize. Just as I was about to send my husband a friendly little reminder text, Leila comes from around the patio table and says "SURPRISE", as she hands me the prettiest little bouquet of flowers. As I looked around to see who's garden she could have ripped them out of, I realized that they came from our very own yard. Apparently, if you let the grass grow, ahem, long enough, little wild flowers emerge. And I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill dandelions, I'm talking about tiny blue flowers and what look miniature daisies and others that resemble itty bitty pink buds clustered together. It was such a pleasant surprise that I took a picture of my wildflower bouquet and decided to give my husband a break... for now.

Anyone who uses the phrase "It's like taking candy from a baby," has clearly never tried to take candy from a baby.

Where's Daddy?

Today around 4 o'clock:

Leila: Mommy, where's Daddy?
Melissa: He's working, baby.
Leila: No, Mommy, where's Daddy?
Melissa: He's at his job.
Leila: No, is he in the kitchen?
Melissa: No, he's at work.
Leila: Is he on the couch?
Melissa: No, he's not on the couch. He's not here, Leila.
Leila: Is he in my purse? Let me check...
(Melissa laughs hysterically as Leila opens her tiny purse to check for her 6 foot 2 father, and when she doesn't find him there, proceeds to look under the TV, under the rug, and in her bedroom closet.)

20 Minutes 'til Lunch

It's almost lunchtime. I have managed to turn Dora off without incident, and the girls have turned their attention to creating their best tornado damage simulation in the living room. I see toys strewn on the floor that I didn't even know they owned. They are communicating in a language that apparently only they understand, probably brainstorming a way to reach the bubbles I put on the top bookshelf. I see that that the storage bin has now been converted into a passenger car of some sort, and Leila is dragging her sister all over the house. During that process, Leila has now managed to break her princess shoe and has balked at the idea that we throw it out because it can't be fixed, her exact words being, "NO THROW IT OUT! I FIX IT!" "Fine," I tell her because the next 5 minutes she spends trying unsuccessfully to mend her shoe will buy me more peace and quiet to think about what I am going to make for lunch...

Call of Duty

As I sit down to write, I find myself entranced by the sweet sounds of gunfire and the melodic shouting emitting from the television as my husband plays XBOX. How calming, relaxing and soothing are the wall-rumbling grenade explosions. And every time he shouts a profanity when his character gets shot or dies, I think I fall in love with him all over again. Better yet, sometimes he yells so loudly that he might just wake up our sleeping angels, which would be a joy to me as we would be able to spend even more time together as a family. Perhaps we can even teach the girls how to argue with random adolescents as their father plays online. Oh what fun that would be! I pity the woman who is not able to experience the excitement of being second to such a fine entertainment system. I gladly give up my television time to watch such an intense game, which I am not allowed to play. Thank you, Call of Duty, for so delicately enhancing my marriage.

Diaper Duty

My daughter Mia, who turned one in May, has never enjoyed having her diaper changed. Not even as a newborn. What she does enjoy, however, is running around the house as I trail behind her with the box of wipes and flopping around like a beached fish through the whole changing process causing much more of a mess than necessary. I have probably gone through more antibacterial soap in the one year of her existence than I have in the 29 years of mine. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but seriously, one would think that after doing the same thing five times a day for over a year, one would get used to it-- or at least give in! Short of investing in a lasso and some hogties, I don't know what to do to keep her still long enough for me to remove, wipe and replace. I've tried offering her distractions, singing songs, making a game out of it-- nothing works & I'm fresh out of ideas. Actually, maybe I'll teach her to change her own diaper. I'd like to see her try an run away from herself!

In Mom We Trust

Anyone who's ever had a mother knows (often times later than sooner) what an important person she is... how integral she is, was, or would have been despite circumstances. Anyone who is a mother knows how superhuman we have to be just to even ATTEMPT to be good at what we do. After all, we are chefs, maids, doctors, negotiators ("If you eat 3 more bites, you can have a cookie."), storytellers, fortune tellers ("I predict that if I put my coffee on the table, the baby will yank it down by the table cloth."), teachers, and keep-trackers (is that a word?) of all things domestic, before we even leave the house! If that's not the work of 3 superheroes I don't know what is. And at the end of the day we have to remain cool, calm and collected to set a good example for our children... right? Well, in theory, that sounds great, but any demanding job can have a person at their wit's end, and Motherhood is no exception. And because I know I'm not the only one who never received the Official Kid-Raising Manual, I am willing to share my stories with you all, and please feel free to do the same. Peace be with you (I mean that!).