Unfinished Homework

Miles was sick last week: sore throat, headache, low-grade fever, so he missed 3 days of school; peed on our good leather sofa twice with the excuse of being too sick to get up and go to the toilet; had his fair share of Wii, Lego, and reading time; and otherwise enjoyed himself once the Advil started coursing through his slender little veins. This morning we had some re-entry problems.

My mother was visiting from the much warmer place that she calls home, and Alec had his 5th birthday party Sunday that went very well. But Miles doesn't like it when he isn't the center of attention. And he really doesn't like it when his brother gets all kinds of presents that he wants for himself. And he really really doesn't like it when, do to extreme procrastination, he has to sit at the kitchen table after the party to finish his homework, while Alec gets to play with his new toys.

To make a long, audibly taxing, shrill story short, he didn't do his homework. This morning, he spent 5 minutes on it, but his heart wasn't in it, to say the least. This morning I took him to school so I could talk to his teacher. Miles had the body language of a boy going to his execution. I felt terrible for him. He sat right at his desk and busied himself with the work on his chair while the assistant teacher and I spoke in hushed tones, and the word consequence was bandied about. He gave me a little rabbit kiss as I was leaving, and I could feel his nerves. In any case, I had to dash off to Alec's conference so I couldn't stick around to watch the other shoe drop.

OTHER SHOE: The pediatrician just called me while I was writing this post to say that Miles does in fact have strep. poor guy. So he's headed home again.

When I got home from work Miles was furious. "I had to waste time in the nurses office waiting for Yenny, when I could have been eating lunch with my friends!" To which I appoligized. Miles then said, "I just want to go to school!" which I took as a very good sign that he enjoys it so much.

Update: April 3
However, the next day and for the a total of a week, Miles had to stay home popping Amoxycillan, Advil, and Alec. The latter, was his scapecoat for feeling so bad. But Alec got a few pops in at Miles, and we almost had full blown war on our hands. Thankfully, Miles and Alec are both in school today! I hope that peace will reign again.

Flippers, Amelia Earhart, and DSS

Alec's birthday went over without a hitch. He got a special birthday hat at school. The teachers had to give him some quiet time to settle himself because he was so excited about being the birthday boy and thus the true center of his little universe for 24 hours. Our au pair picked him up with a friend after school and the two had a rocky play date that culminated in Alec pulling his favorite fuzzy green blanket over his head and telling his friend to go home.

He ended his day in the claw foot tub where he tried out his new shark kickboard, flippers and goggles. He was so tired after his bath that after Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, and two readings of The Horse in Harry's Room he fell asleep as if I'd turned a switch.

Thank goodness because Hadley was at the hospital for his sleep study being pasted with electrodes.

Miles, bless his self-sufficient 7 1/2 year-old self, was happily playing with his Sponge Bob Crabby Patty Lego and reading about Anne Frank and then Amelia Earhart while I was busy nursing Dahlia and then supervising Alec's "swim." I found it intriguing that he was reading about 2 doomed females, and the other book on his docket was about card tricks which he has been practicing for weeks since seeing a very impressive magician at his cousin George's bar mitzvah.

Dahlia tried to climb the stairs again but only made it up one and then fell landing with a thud that I’m sure almost prompted the neighbors to call DSS. After that she nursed for a long time, played with Miles a little and went grudgingly to sleep.

Cake

When I am hungry, which is most of the time, I like to think about what types of cakes my children would be. Well, two of them do have birthdays within this 3 week window, so I have been thinking about cakes for that reason, lest you think I am totally depraved.

Miles would be a beautiful angel food cake laced with Grand Marnier and covered in berries of every type and shavings of white chocolate over everything like a thin layer of snow. Miles loves snow more than most people love chocolate, and his complexion is pale with blonde hair, so angel food seems to embody him, and yet he has gravity and a sense of humor, hence the berries and blizzard of white chocolate.

Alec would be a petite but tall layered cake with alternating rounds of flourless chocolate cake, because he is dark and so intense, and strata of moist pound cake with big vanilla buttercream light sabers piped around the sides. The zebra-like cake would then be topped with a spotted horse because it symbolizes Alec's love of animals and his unbridled nature, as well as his opposing personality sides: alternatingly loving and laden with conflict.

Dahlia, hmm. She is harder to characterize because her personality is still emerging. She is sweet and surprisingly long, so I would have to say that Dahlia is a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, probably multilayered as well, and finally festooned in dahlias of the palest pink with reddish centers. The cake would have a handle for her to grab to pull herself up to its height so that she could eat it from the top down.

Bacon, Hotella, Kwassums, Cucumbers and Sprite

This is the menu that my son devised for his birthday today. For those of you who don't speak Alec-ese that translates into lots of grease, sugar, and all his favorite foods in one meal: Hotella=Nutella, Kwassums=Croissants. He has been looking forward to this day for months already. And finally the count down is over. He is 5. For him this means a day blessed with said foods, lots of Lego-oriented presents, a Wii game, some books, a kick board that looks like a hungry shark with flippers and goggles to boot. All these are evidence that he is special, that we love him. In this past year, with the birth of his baby sister and his somewhat homicidal reaction to her, that message has sometimes gotten lost.

This morning, he brought his baby sister a kwassum and cuddled with her without trying to pull her limbs off. She cuddled him right back. Peace abounded. Hope for a more harmonious year dripped about like sticky soda.

He walked around the kitchen in his ski underwear (that he has worn since December as if it were a hair shirt) and talked into the camera as he filmed a movie of the breakfast table.

On the way to the car he was even happy that he bumped his head on our Camry's passenger side mirror. Well, at first he almost cried, but I picked him up and said, "You did that because you're growing! Now that you're five your head is taller." He giggled at this evidence that he was a person to be reckoned with, a person whose head was actually taller than he remembered. Hadley and I drove him to preschool together equipped with a posse of vanilla cupcakes and a bag filled with all the accouterments to decorate them. He pranced about his classroom like a little king, on his toes, nose high.

I can't help wondering if this mood will carry him to give up his hair shirt soon, or possibly grow into Dahlia's knight instead of her tormentor. I have faith that these may come to pass.

Alec has the soul of an artist or a Sicilian as Hadley and I like to joke, and as Hadley likes to say makes him a Holz--after my temperament and that of some of my predecessors. Whereby he can be the most charming person on the planet, so full of life, love, and fun OR an angry, paranoid, petty criminal. At five, this last tendency has made it a hard year for him and us. Keeping him from dropping things on Dahlia's head, detaching said limbs, wrecking Miles's Lego, and refusing to wear any clothing if his ski underwear isn't on underneath have been just some of the ways Alec has marked his fifth whirl around the sun.

By the way, I call his ski underwear his hair shirt because he wears it religiously, fearing who knows what evil fate if he should be caught without it. We have had to carry him naked to school without on those few days when it was still in the wash. In a Boston winter this is no small feat. He recanted each time, getting dressed in the Odyssey with the spirit of a tortured saint. Furthering the hair shirt theme, his long underwear has rubbed his skin raw. Since he started wearing it he has come out with eczema all over his belly and underarms that nothing but Vaseline laced with a trace of cortisone will get rid of.

Today he is wearing his hair shirt. But spring is underway and his head is growing. And in his sugar plumped cells change is afoot.

Procrastination will get me only so far

Well, I've been talking about blogging about motherhood for years now.  And aside from my time on the AOL owned Blogging Baby which is now called parentdish.com, I've kept my musings to my oldschool journal, or poured my heart out in emails. Each time I went to create a blog, different excuses paralyzed me.  So here's me giving up a little bit of my deeply entrenched perfectionism in exchange for just getting my thoughts on this subject out there in the blogosphere. And here's me flipping the bird to Procrastination and all its evil tentacles.

Hope for Trash Can Babies

Every once in awhile, a news story appears in my web browser that perfectly captures my mental state at the time. That's not to say that I ever seriously contemplated trashing my kids or giving birth on an airplane and forgetting to mention it as I exited the plane. But this story from New Zealand about a Samoan woman really caught my imagination.

"The television station said authorities discovered something was wrong after she approached them saying she had misplaced her passport. They noticed she was pale and blood-stained." 

What I'd like to know is how she gave birth in a tiny plane bathroom without alarming everyone on the plane. And how did she fit her baby in one of those tiny airplane waste bins that are always overflowing with paper towels? Thank goodness they're both safe and reunited.

Or maybe reunion is not such a hot idea if the woman shoved her newborn into the trash and got off the plane? 

A brief search on Samoa did not give me any more information. As far as I know it is not a known ritual in any human culture, but you never know what the trend might be in the South Pacific these days. No offense meant to any Samoans reading this, I am merely trying to shed some light on a very nearly tragic situation.

Speaking about trash can babies, remember the Wisconsin teen who birthed her baby in the bathroom at prom and after throwing him away went out to keep dancing? I wonder what music was playing when she left the bathroom and thus her baby whom paramedics couldn't resuscitate.

There are many instances of just this sort of thing. In fact I came across an anti-choice/pro-life site that listed them as examples of more immorality on the part of today's would-be mothers. But I am loath to admit that the authors of this site touched on a larger issue: in a society where trash can babies are relatively common, how can we provide a safe place for these babies? Preferably one well away from the trash bin.

Now surely, there are some who might argue that the birth itself rendered these single mothers so angry at their progeny that their instinct to destroy the outcome of such a process was natural. But I am an eternal optimist, and I like to look for a more positive angle in the messes that are these trash can baby tales. 

For all the horror stories and images out there promoting the idea of birth as a painful-ordeal-from-Hell requiring strong meds and doctors, the truth is that these women had unassisted births. Moreover, births that did not require them to call out alarming others. Births that worked, up to the point that the trash can reared its gaping maw. But my point is that the unspoken positive in all this is that even under the extreme duress that these women were under, their bodies did what women's bodies do--have babies naturally without a slew of high-tech gadgetry and OCD medical procedures.

Let's focus on the positive, people! And may I suggest that if waste bins are becoming the rage in secret births, let's put ones in public bathrooms that are big enough for babies and equipped with blankets + an automatic call button that would alert the authorities when a baby is placed in one.