When McPantses was a littler girl than she is now, she used to say, “But, it’s hahd to do, mommy! It’s HAHD TO DO!”

Here are two things that are pretty hahd for me to do lately:

nurse Third with a 4 yr old face about 1 1/2 inches from my bosom stuffed in the boychild’s mouth

pump milk with the same face in the same location, but add to that a pair of hands feeling up the bottles filling with milk and an awe-filled voice saying, “Wow, that meeeilk is really warm!”

There is such a thing as too much closeness, child.

Also hahd: nursing a child who has started popping off the teat to flirt and stare and google up at me. That’s a damn cute habit I’d forgotten completely about. It makes the usual milk runoff pooling in my lap a bit more tolerable.

No matter how many times you and your splay-toothed offspring grin at me and Third when we are out and about and say something harmless like, “Hey thar, Betty Sue, yew think she’d mind much if we took that baybay off her hands? I know yew’d shure love a baybay tuh have around tuh play with” I will never be able to do more than clench my teeth and pretend to smile at you.

I know you are trying to tell me I have a cute baby.

But when you say stuff like that, I still want to clutch him closer to my chest and take off running and screaming. I cannot help it.

Don’t joke about stealing my baby. It makes me even twitchier than usual. It’s taken years for me to stop having the baby-stealing nightmares about the inlaws and they haven’t joked much about stealing McPantses since she started with the fart jokes.

And, in the interest of time and space, I won’t bother to start in on the fact that you should never touch someone else’s “baybay” without being invited first by the baybay’s parents. Seriously. There’s a good chance you may draw back a bloody nub if you do. I’m not much removed from the rednecks of the world myself.

Back off.

Love,
Third’s Mommy

My mother just told me that when I was McPantses’ age, a woman who had a daughter the same age told my mother, “I’m sorry to say this, but your daughter is the biggest bitch I have ever met.”

I am doomed.

Doomed, I say.

My mother finds this hysterical. She has whisked McP off to help feed the roses in her back yard. The Husband is out buying a ceegar and I am left with Third and the pig butt all to myself.

1. Can I request a daily written list of McPantses’ food likes and dislikes? That is how often they seem to change. I am pretty sure a doting grandparent somewhere would happily take dictation.

2. Is it weird that it makes me almost gleeful to freeze eight bags (at 4 oz. each) of milk this a.m.? I save it up during the week and freeze on Saturday a.m. I sometimes freeze a stash on Monday or Tuesday, too. I pump for about 5 – 10 minutes in the a.m. before work and at work for the one feeding Third has at daycare.

2 1/2. Is it weird that after pumping, I think to myself, I just lost 8 ounces! Sometimes I will run and weigh myself afterwards, just for kicks.

3. Is it weird that I sometimes check up on the ever-growing milk stash in the freezer? I think there are 50+ milksicles in there.

4. Is it weird that when I check or when I freeze another big stash like I did this morning, I think to myself, there’s another full day he can have breastmilk if I drop dead. I’m practical that way.

5. But, is it weird that while I am practical that way (I would never, for instance, buy birth control pills in bulk in case I dropped dead, but that’s no longer a concern*) but at the same time, I hoard stacks of my favorite hard-to-find sketch pad? If I drop dead, I certainly won’t need those!

6. It secretly irritates me that the people the Husband usually plays golf with always pick him up 20 – 30 minutes early. This morning, I’d just gotten a bra on (the faboo Tarjay camisole/tank nursing bra–$16.99!) and they showed up, long before I got the Husband to put clothes in the dryer. I like to suck as much housework as humanly possible out of him before he goes to play golf. When he gets home, he’s smelly and exhausted and pretty much no good to me at all.

7. Is it reasonable that I am going to Target this afternoon for a huge glass canister (I want to get rid of the enormous ugly plastic bag of birdseed on the counter) and some cleanser even though I could get them cheaper at Walmart? Who wants to visit Wally World when they can go to Target instead?

8. More often than I would care to admit, I leave the clean clothes wadded in a laundry basket for so long that the cat starts to sleep in them and I just give up and rewash them. One laundry basket full of clean clothes is, today, on its third unnecessary washing. If I don’t fold clothes straight out of the dryer, it doesn’t usually get done.

9. Finally, McPantses has given her brother a fairly sissy nickname (we are a parenthesis-abusing, nickname-giving family, you know) and I now use it all the time myself. I don’t think I’ve heard the Husband call the boy Charlie FooFoo yet, but I bet it’s coming.

Have a swell weekend. There is a Boston Butt with my name on it smoking away at the chichi deli I visit almost daily. I am fetching it after Target. McPantses said, “Butt? BUTT?” and collapsed into laughter. I decided there was no need to tell her it was pig butt. I’m sure that’s on the food dislikes list somewhere.

Mmmmm, pig butt.

* To steal a funny from my friend Chickie, the next kid at this house will be named Law Suit. No more birth control! Waahoo!

In order to bitch and moan about something that’s really bothering me, I have to make a confession first. Sometimes I watch Entertainment Tonight. I hate to admit it, but there you go.

For the last few weeks, the show has obsessed over Mary Kay Letorneau’s wedding. They seem to be talking about it (complete with on-site interviews) every time I turn the damn show on. The other night, they showed footage from the wedding reception, complete with the couple’s daughters getting into a big fight over the bouquet and sobbing after they ripped it in half.

I’m still quite hormonal and I teared up when I thought about the family Letor–hell, can I just refer to her the way I do in my head?–Madame Pedophile abandoned to have sex with a child.

Because that’s what she did, after all. She’s a convicted pedophile. She cannot teach children. She had sex with a 12 yr old boy. We’re charring Michael Jackson’s testicles over an open flame (and rightly so) for allegedly doing the same thing.

How in the samhill can an entertainment show celebrate this wedding in such a manner? I think if it were a man marrying his victim, we wouldn’t be seeing this circus. The show talks about how many wedding gifts the couple has received from strangers all over the world and how Madame Pedophile and her child groom might write a book one day about the forbidden love that started all this.

Who would buy that book? Who is buying them gifts? What fools want to celebrate their hothothot-just-can’t-be-denied love that transcends time/fate/age/jail? Who are you freaks and what is the matter with you? Would you want your child’s teacher to take such liberties (and boy, that’s phrasing it loosely, isn’t it?) with your twelve-year old? NO? Well, no kidding. So stop this lunacy at once! I absolutely insist.

I hate myself for watching the show, but I do, at least, usually change the channel (eventually).

What is wrong with us that we can celebrate the day a pedophile marries the man she fucked when he was a young boy and she was his teacher? She was in a position of authority over a child (because age twelve is and always will be CHILD to me) and she had sex with him. Even if the law didn’t forbid it (and it should), shouldn’t our conscience prevent us from such vile actions?

The very thought of it makes me want to vomit. The double standard is troubling and the implications of the television coverage are ghastly.

And if it were Mister Pedophile marrying his victim, Entertainment Tonight wouldn’t be telling me that the bride wore Vera Wang.

Gag me. And stop it, already, Entertainment Tonight. Get back to your moment-by-moment coverage of other important news, please.

I just got a 10 minute lecture from McPantses about how all the mommies of the babies at her school (where Third is in the baby room now) use bottles with regular milk and not breastmilk and how regular milk in bottles is what’s best for babies.

That, my friends, is what all the mommies at school told her. The world according to McPantses is a rather strange place. I can’t believe the kid who loves to open the freezer door and check out the milk stash lectured me on “milk” versus breastmilk.

I’m always torn on how much info to provide because I have this vision of her spouting back what I’ve said verbatim to someone else. Do I tell her about formula versus breastfeeding and how babies don’t get milk until they’re a year old, etc.? If I do, she’s a ticking time bomb where people who feed their babies in a non-breastfeeding way come in and as much as I hate being lectured by my kid, I know other people would probably hate it more.

After about 8 minutes of lecturing, I cracked, tho. She knows. She now thinks breastmilk in bottles is best. A tiny part of my brain thinks she’s saying this not to bug me but because she really wants to help feed her brother.

I may check into whether or not GWB would like McPantses to solve his social security problems. I’m pretty sure she could tackle world peace, too, and still get to bed on time.

The rub is that according to my mother, I was the exact same way as a child. I was equally as loud and obnoxious and almost physically unable to stop talking. She thinks payback is divine. My mother concedes that I did not make up epic-length tuneless ditties and sing them nonstop like McP does. That particular habit of hers makes me want to tear my hair out.

When Third goes to bed at night, around 11 p.m., he starts off in his crib. I sleep in a big bed in the nursery. He sleeps from three to five hours (once he slept a full six hours) in the crib, usually. The past few nights, not so much. I got a two hour sleep last night before he first woke.

When he starts snorting and snuffling and grunting and thrashing about, I bring him to bed with me and we nurse with him sacked out across my body. Then I try to move him back to the crib when I wake up from that sleep, but it never works–we both pass out so quickly in that nursing position that he doesn’t get full enough, I think.

Soooo, he comes right back to bed with me and we nurse with him snuggled next to me. The Husband calls it the Suckling Pig Position and it makes him laugh to see us. Third and I can stay that way for the rest of the night, but I have to have a pillow propped against my back to support the slightly odd position. My breasts are biggish right now and my nipples are stretchy, but Elastigirl, I ain’t.

And oh, the nipples. Serving as another human being’s human pacifier for most of the night means that I have a pair of little ripe cranberries attached to my bod. Gone forever are the days of pink pencil erasers perched atop bosoms that needed no support. As little as 5 1/2 years ago, I could have gone out with no bra and a pair of those useless round bandaids over my nips (not a big fan of nippleage through shirts if at all possible).

Usually I am pretty tired in the mornings and Third is ready to sleep more. This morning, though, we were both awake at 5:30 and that gummy grin just made my day, even that early in the a.m. He’s blowing bubbles and cooing all the time, which helps the a.m. wakeups a lot.

Miss Libby (the more maternal of our dogs) is enjoying her new duty every morning–she clambers into bed with McPantses and snuggles next to her and lays her massive doggy head across McP’s bod and does some magic doggy thing to wake the kid up in a good mood.

As The Husband put it, Third is now peacefully sleeping after staying up all night partying. He wonders if it’s because I’m in there that the boychild continues to wake so much.

Meh. Possibly. Either way, it’s not like I’m doing this again, EVER.

EVER.

So I’ll stick it out for a few more months, at least. I have a decent concealer for the undereye circles that get a little darker every week.

p.s., I turned 33 on Monday and I can say with complete cheerfulness that I look the most horrendous I have ever looked in my life. My hair needs hilights desperately and is this tangly rat’s nest of too blonde at the bottom and mottled darkish at the top with tons of wiry white hair springing from the top and standing straight up. Add to this dark circles and dry skin (why why WHY the dry skin? I am sucking down 2 – 4 LITERS of water a day, for God’s sake!) from head to toe and you’ve got a mother’s face only a kid could love.

Happy Birthday to ME!

Not really.

The marble jar is a hit at my house. We’ve had 48 hours of delightful family time and no meltdowns or screaming. Even the “yelling across the house” form of communication seems to have decreased a bit and HOO BOY, the clean room.

Not only did she clean the daylights out of her room–she also cleared a stack of board books out of her big bookcase to go in Charlie Crabcake’s room. She brought books to me in stacks of three and explained exactly what Charlie would love about each book, stopping to dwell on the funny parts. She brought a Nick Bantock pop-up book of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky that I have been reading to her since infancy and said that it might scare the boychild a little, so we decided it should stay in her bookcase. Plus, it’s not really a board book, so it doesn’t fit the description.

She initiated the book switch, which I thought was wonderful. I guess it helps that it makes more room in her own bookcase, which is full to overflowing.

In other Mcpantses news tonight, baby Polly dolly is asleep in her own “crib” for the first time since she was adopted from the department store hospital nursery. One of the neatest things about having a 4 yr old is watching her work out things on her own and she is working through siblings and babies at once. She rocked Polly and hugged and kissed her (according to The Husband*) and played a lullaby for her by squeezing the dangly stuffed heart that hangs from the hood of the wicker baby doll bassinette the inlaws gave her and tucked Polly away for the night.

Did you know, by the by, that the boychild now sleeps the first chunk of the night in his crib?

Coincidence?

You tell me.

* Many thanks to the Husband who wrangled both kidlets while I had a nap tonight. I slept the sleep of a thousand kittens and even got an extra hour. Instead of the single hour I requested, I got two full hours of uninterrupted sleep in a near-silent house. I’m not sure how he got two children, two dogs and a snarky cat to be so quiet, but I suspect some combo of benadryl and Knob Creek. Only he knows for sure.**

** Oh, good Lord, I am kidding. He just has the magic touch.