I am all about the bribery and/or threats

Today's bargain:

• If I finish this blog post before my daughter finishes her homework, tomorrow I get to send her vegetables instead of a few pieces of Halloween candy in her lunch.
• If she finishes her homework first, she gets ice cream for dessert (and Halloween candy in her lunch tomorrow).

I would feel bad about making this sort of deal - after all, isn't motivation and perseverance part of what homework is supposed to be teaching her?  But let's be honest.  My kid's homework isn't exactly thrilling, and she's easily distracted by pretty much everything.  Too much noise, too little noise, people nearby, no people nearby, needing a sharp pencil, admiring how sharp her pencil is now, having to go to the bathroom, having to hide in the bathroom to use the iPad she's not supposed to have until after homework is done, needing a snack, needing a different snack, needing even more snacks because meals are something other people eat ... all of those things derail her from the "let's finish your science notes in less than two hours" train.

It's handy to have something I can say in place of the usual, "Are you actually working on your homework?"  I already hate the sound of my voice asking that question, and it's only November.  One of us is going to explode if I have to keep that up until June.  But not keeping on her back just leads to procrastination, bedtime meltdowns when she panics about what she didn't accomplish, and bad grades that give her headaches and stomach aches and a bad case of "I don't want to go to school."

For some reason, it's less annoying to both of us for me to say, "Wow, you really don't want ice cream tonight, do you?" every time I see her staring at a wall.  She bolts back to the table and gets back to work when ice cream is involved, let me tell you.  "Which kind of veggies should I send tomorrow?" is a little more passive-aggressive, but I'm willing to go there if it gets the assignment done.  And as a side benefit, trying to keep her motivated means I actually have to write a post, which I probably would have blown off otherwise.

Homework isn't the only area where I'm using a carrot-and-stick approach.  Another fun motivator I instituted this year: If I have to drive her the 30 minutes to school (because she dawdled and left home too late for the 5 minute drive to the bus stop) I will spend the entire drive to school lecturing her about all the human sexuality stuff her school doesn't cover in health class.  If we leave the house in time to make the bus, I keep my mouth shut and we listen to the radio.

I made it through female anatomy, male anatomy, consent, and non-heterosexual relationships before she realized I was serious and I wasn't going to run out of material any time soon.  I even had a video all loaded up on my phone to supplement one of the discussions - it was epic.

I have also offered to send pictures of her (very obviously uncleaned) bathroom to the mother of the boy she liked, and threatened to send photos of her carelessly discarded clothing to her grandmother so she knows not to buy Liza any more nice outfits.  I'm kind of a bitch sometimes.
 
But hey, if it works, I can play the Evil Mom card occasionally.  I certainly wasn't getting anywhere with my other approaches.  Maybe eventually I'll figure out some way to motivate my child that doesn't involve threats of embarrassment and/or withholding treats.  In the meantime, I'm hoping she gets lazy in the mornings again.  I don't want to have all those pictures of STD symptoms saved on my browser for nothing.

Turning my family room into a sweat shop

Why yes, I am encouraging my 5-year-old to help me iron fabric scraps so that I can rend them into useful sizes before I store them.  And she loved it so much, she wants to do it again tomorrow morning.

Am I awesome or what?  Now if we can just get her trained to do Jason's collars and cuffs, Daddy will look much more dapper at work :)

Whatever it takes

A week or two ago, Liza started to get harder and harder to put to bed. Normally we read to her, turned on some music and snuggle in bed with her for a few songs, and then left while she was still groggy and she fell asleep on her own. But shortly before her birthday Liza began fighting the process, wriggling around like a fish on a hook while we snuggled, then sneaking out of bed and coming downstairs multiple times. Never mind that she can't get to sleep because she won't sit still for more than 3 seconds, and the light is on, and she's got 75 copies of My Big Backyard strewn all over her bed. It's enough to make me think that our old joke about needing a "sleep hammer" wasn't so far off.

Finally I told her that now that she's 5, she's old enough to put herself to bed. We'll read to her, and turn on her music, and maybe tell her a story while she lays there, but once we leave, she's on her own. She can get up and read, play in her room, whatever - as long as she does it quietly, and stays in her room, and puts herself to bed when she's done. Arguments that she can't do that were met with calm reminders that she already HAD done it for several nights, when she fell asleep in the middle of her pile of magazines with a flashlight in one hand and a bunny in the other. Arguments that she wasn't tired were met with a story that explains why she's having such a hard time relaxing ...

Inside your brain is a little guy whose job it is to keep you awake. He's very small, and he's got a sword to keep the Sleepies from getting in your brain. The guy is pretty funny - he's not wearing any clothes except for a pair of underwear, and sometimes a cape, and he likes to dance to Elvis music.

The Sleepies are pretty funny, too. They're tiny purple fluffy sheep that can fly and smell really, really good. There are a lot of them, and all they want to do is come and take a nap in your brain, but the guy with the sword won't let them, so they have to be tricky.

So one of the Sleepies reaches into his wool and pulls out a radio, and when he turns it on, Elvis music starts to play. This makes the guy with the sword want to dance, so he ends up dancing around with his sword, waving it around to keep the Sleepies back. But he can't fight the music for long, and ends up doing some really fancy dance moves, and when his attention is on the dance, some of the Sleepies sneak through.

All of that dancing makes the guy with the sword kind of tired, so he has to take a break, and he leans over and rests a little on his sword ... and some more Sleepies sneak through. Then he gets up and dances some more, which makes him more tired, and he has to sit down and rest a bit ... and some more Sleepies get through.

Finally, there's only one Sleepie left, and it's the head Sleepie. He looks at the guy with the sword, and he says, "You've been doing a good job, but you look really tired. I think it's time for you to take a rest." And the guy agrees, and he lays down and snuggles with his sword, and the Sleepie walks past him up and joins all the other Sleepies in Liza's head. And all of the Sleepies lay down and take a nap together, which makes Liza feel very sleepy, and she can finally rest.

Of course, it's better in live performance, what with the silly dance moves and Sleepies sneaking up her pajamas and into her head and everything. I'm thinking it's got movie potential ... Tom Hanks as the guy with the sword, Shaun the Sheep as the head Sleepie ... it could be box office gold, I tell you.

In the meantime, now that Liza has acted as editor by reading over my shoulder while I type, I think I'd better finish this up. After all, we have a guy with a sword and some flying purple sheep that smell really good to draw up to illustrate our story ....

Queen of Questionable Judgement

It sounded like such a good idea. Liza has been getting so good on her bike with training wheels, it's hard to keep up with her on foot. She's not up to the point where she can ride along with an adult next to her on a bike, so maybe I could just go along on rollerblades. But the sidewalks in our neighborhood are too bumpy to blade, so I'd have to skate in the street while she rode on the sidewalk ... and every time she needed a little push to get started, I'd have to clomp up somebody's treelawn, push her, then clomp back down to the street.

Okay, so maybe we should just go to the paved bike trail near our house. It's completely away from the street, almost completely flat, and both wide and deserted enough that we could go side-by-side most of the time. But it's out in the full sun all day long, and it's deserted enough that if something happened, it could be hours before somebody happened along to help out.

Okay, so maybe the bike trail at the Metropark (the part near the 21 on the map). Yeah, it's smooth, separate from traffic, and in the shade, there's a fair amount of bike/blade/jogging traffic, and the part near the beaver pond is mostly flat with a few gentle rises. We're set!

Things went fine for a while. She's still learning to stay on the right side on a shared path, so I had to do a fair amount of nagging about that, but otherwise, things were fine. I even managed to negotiate the copious amounts of storm debris (oops, hadn't anticipated that) without wiping out me or my daughter. She even made it up and down a few rises with only a few surprised squawks and a couple gentle pushes from me to get back up the hill.

We went one way for a while, then turned around and went back to the car. Since we hadn't been out long, I suggested we explore in the other direction. The rise that way turned out to be higher, and I had to push her the last few yards to the top. "No problem, on the way back I'll just get her to stop on her way up and we'll walk the bike down so she doesn't end up careening out of control and end up in the beaver pond."

As I am thinking this, Liza is coasting down the back of the rise, which is gradual but rather long, and she's picking up speed and hollering louder and louder as she goes. She's not strong enough to use the hand brake on her bike yet, so the only way she has to slow down is to either coast to a stop, or drag her feet. I'm yelling at her to put her feet down to slow down, she's yelling that she can't, I'm telling her that of course she can, she's not paying attention to where she's going, and she drifts off the right side of the path. In slow motion she's careening through the greenery, legs cartwheeling wildly in the air on either side of her bike, and when she finally coasts to a stop, she falls over ... into a patch of poison ivy.

Meanwhile, I'm simultaneously avoiding sticks, trying to slow down on damp pavement, shouting directions, and kicking myself for coming to this path, so I don't see where a tree root has popped up the asphalt into a 6" tall speedbump all the way across the path. I hit that going at a good clip, and I manage to remember to throw myself forward onto the pads (as if I really had a choice when my feet got knocked out from under me that way). I skid a yard or two on knees, wrists, a couple fingers, and I think the fastener on my jeans shorts, judging by the bruise I have on my stomach.

Now I'm checking myself for major injuries, Liza is crying and wandering around in the poison ivy, and I swear, the bike is on it's side, the back wheel spinning like a scene in a bad movie. I wipe the blood off my fingers, wade into the greenery and pull out the kid and the bike, and we start the slow trek back to the car. I give up on trying to skate and push the bike, and I put on my backup sandals that I had stuffed in the basket on the front of Liza's bike. Except, of course, those sandals had landed in the poison ivy, so I had to leave my socks on to prevent spreading the oils to parts of my body that hadn't been exposed yet.

That's when the high school cross country team ran by.

Bet they'll be talking about us for a while ... muddy kid who is dawdling along, picking one of every type of leaf she can find near the path, being drug along by one arm by her muddy, bleeding mother who has a pair of muddy rollerblades under her arm and a pair of white athletic socks on under her expensive leather sandals.

After explaining to her 14,000 times that we need to hurry so we can go try to wash off the poison ivy oils, I finally get her back to the house and hose us both down with liberal amounts of hot water and soap. Our clothes are in the washer on HOT right now, which means my jeans shorts will probably shrink so much they'll fit Liza. And I get to spend part of my weekend wearing rubber gloves and washing down Liza's bike and my rollerblades with hot, soapy water.

All because I wanted to go for a bike ride this morning.

******

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the sum total of our injuries from this little exercise: I have a 1/8" long cut on one finger, and Liza has a non-bleeding scratch on one leg.

Score!

After climbing up on the bathroom counter and using the sink (and my new Dirty Sanchez soap) as a footbath for the fourth time today, Liza remembered that she can't actually get down from the counter without assistance, at which point she began screaming for me to come give her a towel.  I was in the middle of taking the trash out to the curb and had a giant steaming bag of used cat litter in one hand, so I told her she was going to have to wait.  That was when her head exploded, or at least that's what the outraged screams sounded like.  

When I got back inside she was still in full-on harpy mode, so I carried her to her bedroom and told her that we'd discuss the situation once she calmed down.  Oh, and by the way, that particular tone of voice means that it's time for you to get some rest.

I DO NOT NEED TO RESSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!

Um, yeah, that statement pretty much clinches it that you do.  Let me know when you've decided to quit screaming and writhing like a child possessed.  

I went down and read a book for a while, waiting for the mumbling and kicking of walls to subside.  When I got to the end of the chapter I realized that she had been up there for much longer than a usual time-out, and usually she asks to come out after a few minutes of navel-gazing and wall-thumping.

She had crawled into bed, pulled the covers over herself, and gone to sleep.

Praise Jeebus!  Yard sale pricing, here I come!

Today was all kinds of not awesome

It didn't start off too badly, what with actually getting my shopping list made in less than four hours and getting to take a shower while the kid was parked in front of the television.  I dropped Liza off at school, ran over to the grocery store and shopped like a bat out of hell, in hopes of a) having something other than month-old cheese and mayonnaise in the fridge for dinner tonight, and b) getting done fast enough to actually accomplish something at home before having to pick up the kid.  I blew through the store like I had rocket fuel for breakfast, then I found the shortest checkout line and I waited ... and waited ... and waited.  Trust me to find the line manned by the four-foot-tall, 90-year-old woman with no urge to hurry and no desire to just type in the damn SKU already, if it didn't scan the first six times, it's not going to change now omg I'm going to kill her keep smiling keep smiling so she won't see it coming.

Ahem.  Despite that delay - did I mention it took 15 minutes for me to check out?  And there was no one in front of me in line?  Gahhhhhh - I managed to find a few minutes to get caught up on computer stuff, but I lost track of time and had to drive a bit faster than usual in order to not be horribly late for Liza's pickup time.  She was the last kid there, of course, and was on the teacher's lap with a paper towel in her mouth and tears in her eyes.  Apparently there had been a miscommunication about exactly who was getting off of the playground see-saw when, which ended with Liza falling off and biting her tongue.  And subsequently drooling blood all down the front of her shirt - you know, the Hanna Andersson shirt that I finally managed to convince her to wear despite her pleas of "But that's the shirt I wore on the letter E day when I threw up all over the floor at school!"  Dude, that was in October.  Get over it.

Or, not.  Guess that shirt really is bad luck.  Here's hoping the blood comes out as easily as the puke did!

My afternoon plans of shopping for more flowers for the yard were shot thanks to Bleedy McSwollentongue, so we went home and nursed her with a popsicle and some cuddles, which seemed to clear things up nicely.  After a while of reading and playing on the couch, it suddenly occurred to me that yesterday was the 10th, which meant today was the 11th (wow!  the intellect involved in making that leap!), and somehow that sounded like the day that Liza was supposed to get her picture taken with the rest of her dance class, but I thought that was on Tuesday?  I shuffled upstairs to check the paperwork, and yes, she needed to be at the studio in costume and full makeup in, um, half an hour.  And I still hadn't altered the dress or hat to actually fit her.  Ulp.

You have never seen someone get a kid ready for a photo shoot so fast in your life.  Into the shower - out of the shower - into a robe - tons of hair gel and bobby pins - add hairpiece to make her bun look less pathetic now that she's got short hair - shorten straps on costume - make hat somewhat close to actually sort of fitting after the fourth alteration - powder/blush/mascara/eyeshadow/lip gloss - find tights and tap shoes - pack extra gel and hairspray and bobby pins - write a check to get a copy of the photo I'm killing myself to get the kid into on time - and, done!

Yes, I drove her to the studio while she was wearing underwear and a bathrobe.  She doesn't own any shirts that open wide enough to get over the Massive Bun of Plastic Hair without messing it up, and there wasn't time to finagle anything remotely clothes-like, so we went for speed.  If only I could have found some really large sunglasses and a very small dog for her to bring with her, she'd have looked very divalicious.  Except the robe is a really pilled polarfleece one I got for $2 at the resale shop ... but I don't think anyone noticed, mainly because they were so shocked that I had actually given in and done Liza's hair the way the Hair Nazi studio owner had decreed.  I have been threatening for weeks to boycott the ugly slicked back bun hairdo - seriously, it took dozens of pins to contain Liza's hair in that style for the 45 minutes I needed to get her to the photo shoot and back, it's not going to work any better when she's got to be in a dance recital for three hours with no adults around to fix it when she decides it's fun to throw herself backwards bunfirst at the floor.  I am very curious what the Hair Nazi would do if we showed up for the recital with her hair pulled away from her face but not up in a bun ... I sort of think the pile of abandoned tap shoes in the studio waiting room is left from previous students who decided to be conscientious objectors to the hair policy.

Yeah, so, anyway ... we pulled up at the studio so fast that I think little cartoon smoke clouds were spurting out from behind our tires, and I had the kid stripped naked and into her costume in about 45 seconds flat.  We got there 10 minutes after we were supposed to show up, but at least 10 minutes before they were scheduled to actually take the picture, and she looked reasonably presentable, so I consider it a success.  The place was a madhouse, and the costume hats are like four feet wide, and I spent the next 15 minutes utterly convinced that she was either going to wipe out some little kid with that hat, or it would get stuck on some parent's coat and rip the fake hair right off of my kid.  But neither happened, so all of that extra hair gel and all those spare bobby pins were for naught.

After her photo we got her into some regular clothes and drove home, where she asked for a snack and then fell asleep face-down on the couch, leaving a Frisbee-sized puddle of drool on the slipcover while I fixed dinner.

And now I'm looking at the list of summer activities I've thought of having Liza try, trying to work out a schedule for that which includes a couple activities on different days but leaves plenty of free time for just hanging out ... it's going to be, um, fun.  I feel like an air traffic controller trying to fit 453 things into five slots, and oh, look, here comes Air Force One.  Because it all sounds fun, and she has actively said she wants to try all of it, and I could sooooo use a break a couple of times a week to actually complete a thought without having to answer 14 versions of "What if?" worst case scenario questions ("But what if Jimmy finds out about my party, and he comes, and HE wants to go on everything first?"  Dude, the party was over a week ago, and Jimmy didn't come, and you got to go on everything first, so just leave it the fuck alone, okay?).  But since I'm not going to be able to fit gymnastics, dance, cheerleading, yoga, swimming lessons, theatre classes, dinosaur classes at the natural history museum, and a summer camp at the Lake Erie Nature Center all into one summer, something's got to give.  

I think it may be my brain.

Stir crazy

Why, you might ask, was I standing on a chair on Saturday with a sheet wrapped around my waist?

Isn't it obvious?

I attended Liza's "costume party" as Mother Ginger from the Nutcracker ballet.

Just because I don't live in Austin doesn't mean I can't have dreams of taking on a legendary role, right?

Also: after exhausting the entertainment possibilities of fingerpaints, marble painting, easel painting, chalkboards, crayons, markers, dot-to-dots, and about fifty other projects, this starts to look like a perfectly acceptable crafty snack idea:

Because every kid needs more food-coloring-filled, chocolate-covered marshmallows, am I right?

Oh, my, I love it when mind games work on the kid

Can't get the kid to help clean up? Pile a bunch of stuff that's supposed to be in her room on the side of the stairs. Start whispering and tell her she's a secret agent and the evil secret agents have laid a trap for us on the stairs, and the only way to defeat them is to take 5 things off the stairs and put them away in her room. Then laugh discretely at a 3-year-old's version of being stealthy.

Kid about to have a meltdown because you can't find the magic wand that matches her new pajamas, and it's too late to start a real search for it before bedtime? Tell her you'll look for it in the morning, and that you know it's important to her so you'll write yourself a note, and then write in huge block letters on a piece of scrap paper, "FIND WAND." Watch with amusement as she inspects the note carefully, pronounces it okay, and traipses off to bed with no wand. Smack self in the head at the lost opportunity to write "GO TO BED YOU LITTLE WHINER" instead of whatever you told her was on the note. Realize that she knows enough sight words now to call you on it, and decide it's best you stuck with the truth

Funny story

On Monday we stopped for lunch somewhere near Frederick, Maryland, where we had the chance to sit next to a family so classy the father felt it was appropriate to go out to lunch with his wife and teenage daughters while wearing a bright orange, ratty-looking t-shirt that declared "If it's got tits or tires, it's gonna be trouble."

One of the sons? boyfriends? sitting with them had very short, dark, curly hair, and despite his very light-colored skin, Liza decided he looked exactly like Barack Obama. I bet he would have really appreciated that, if I hadn't shushed her before she screamed it at the top of her lungs.

She loves that tomato plant a little too much

Last night was awful, sleep-wise. After the fifth time we had to go into her room (all after 3am), we gave up and brought her into our bed. Since her usual mode of sleeping in our bed involves snuggling with me while kicking Jason in the crotch, he elected to sleep in the guest room. I still ended up several hours short of "enough," and Jason has apparently been sleepwalking around work all day.

This morning I was apparently dead to the world, since I didn't even notice when Liza got up. Usually she's all about dragging me out of bed, too, but for some reason today she didn't bother. And while her room has a kid-proof lock on the inside**, ours doesn't. Liza had the run of the house for a while until I finally awoke from my stupor.

Eventually she woke me up, though, and things proceeded as usual for a weekday morning. While I was downstairs getting her breakfast ready, Liza was sitting at the table looking out the back door.

"I forgot to close the screen door all the way when I checked the tomatoes this morning."
"That was last night that you checked the tomatoes, sweetie, and it was probably me who left the screen door like that."
"No, I checked them this morning."
"Are you sure? You unlocked the door and went outside this morning?"
"Uh-huh. There aren't any more ripe tomatoes."
"Wait, show me how you got the door open."

And she hops up from the table, flips open the lock on the sliding glass door, and heaves the door open. Which she's never managed to do on her own - the screen door, yes, but she's never had the muscle to get the glass door open.

Son of a bitch.

Guess we're going to be using the extra lock at the top of the doorjam from now on, although if she sees me use it she could reach it if she climbed up on one of the dining room chairs. And we're going to have to investigate getting a new lock for the front door, too, since there's no reason she can't open that one if she feels like it.

And we're going to have to get a spare child-proof lock for our bedroom door, I guess, because this whole "hanging out by herself for god-knows-how-long in the morning" thing is not acceptable.



** Apparently, this makes us both evil and negligent parents, at least in the view of quite a lot of moms over on cafemom.com . Their thought is that the kid couldn't get out of the room if there was a problem like a fire or something. Apparently, keeping my child safely contained in her room makes me one step above somebody who chains their dog to the back step in the middle of winter. My thought is that there's more chance of something catching on fire if she's wandering around the house on her own. And if there's a fire or something, she's not going to have the presence of mind to try to get out of the house anyway, and since it's only on the inside of her room it doesn't slow us down getting in there. Plus, it prevents this whole morning wandering thing from happening every morning, since she wakes up at erratic times and I would literally have to wake up at 4:30 to be sure I was always awake before her. And if I had to do that, dying in a fire would be the least of her worries, trust me.

I am the most brilliant parent EVER

Okay, so my daughter has atrocious table manners. Won't eat, throws tantrums, leaves the table before the rest of us are done, whines, wants to sit on my lap for the whole meal, interrupts any conversation that doesn't involve her but won't participate in any conversation in which we try to include her, etc. It gets REALLY bad when she goes on a food strike and will only eat like one meal a day, such as, um, the last two weeks. We've tried distraction, rewards for good behavior, coloring books, ignoring her, time-outs, just about everything short of beating the living crap out of her, to no avail. It had gotten to the point where I was actively dreading trying to eat dinner as a family, she was being so unpleasant.

Then in the library yesterday I had a total brainwave - the easiest solution to this problem EVER.

Kid-appropriate audio books.

I mentioned to her today at lunch that we were going to listen to stories at dinnertime, and at dinner I racked up the CD and told her she only got to listen if she stayed in her chair and behaved herself.

For fifteen blissful minutes, all we heard was a story about a kid detective finding a friend's missing drawing. She sat still, she listened intently, she didn't fidget, she didn't interrupt, she didn't throw things, she didn't whine, she didn't ask to sit on my lap ... nothing.

The only time she spoke was to ask for more of her dinner after she had cleaned her plate. True, we had resorted to serving her miniature waffles with (all fruit) jam sandwiched between them, but still - she NEVER asks for seconds of anything other than candy or juice.

********

If you're going to try this for your family, try to find a book that's got several short stories on one CD, so you can tailor the playlist to fit how long you want dinner to last. Otherwise, you'll get sucked into the whole "just one more chapter" thing, and that NEVER ends well. This might also work for older kids who complain about having to sit through the whole meal instead of calling their friends or whatever - pick a longer book where they'd miss important stuff if they leave early or miss dinner one night.

Also - your mileage may vary, since my child is obsessed with books and stories and regularly forces me to tell her the same "fairy getting lost" story EVERY FREAKING TIME WE DRIVE FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES.

Ack! The cuteness! I can't take it anymore!

When Liza was a baby, the surest way to get her to smile during photo shoots was to pretend to sneeze. This was especially effective if Jason was doing it - he can really ham it up.

Fake sneezes are so 2006, though, and I've been working on a new way to get her to not grimace as though in pain (her version of a forced smile) every time she sees the camera. And today I think I stumbled on the answer.

Burps.

Let a good loud one (or even a pathetic breathy one) rip, and the kid giggles like mad while looking straight at you.

I knew some of the skills I learned in marching band* would come in handy someday.

*burping on command, pretending to play when my slide has frozen in place, marching backwards really fast while holding my upper body completely steady so I don't cut my lips to shreds on my mouthpiece, proper house-toilet-paper-rolling techniques, consuming four donuts without puking or getting the shakes, and looking dignified despite the huge feather mohawk on top of my helmet.

The pee fairy

For the last few weeks, Liza has been going to bed later and later each night, using a series of increasingly long and ridiculous stalling techniques that have Jason and I contemplating spanking, alcoholism, and/or child abandonment. I need water! I need to go potty! I need more snuggles! My leg is hanging out! I need to go potty! I need another book! I need another song! I need Mommy! I lost my bunny! I need to go potty! Yeah, and we need some time to watch old X-Files episodes and steal from the stash of candy you collected at the parade last week, so get the hell in bed.

Our usual routine is that Jason puts Liza to bed, doing all the singing and snuggling and stories, since by that time of day I'm not only tired, I'm tired of the kid, and I'm much more prone to lose it than he is. We kind of alternate who gets stuck going back in to settle her down, based on who is less likely to kill her in the next 15 minutes. The stalling and stalling and stalling was getting really annoying, and even Jason was having a tough time keeping his patience when we had to go in 6 times on Thursday night and she didn't get to sleep until 10pm.

Friday night Jason went out for drinks with a friend, and I was in charge of bedtime. Things go much differently when I'm in charge by myself, as I generally am a LOT more willing to listen to screaming than he is, and I have no problem being Evil Parent. I told Liza very clearly that I was going to do her whole bedtime routine, including books and songs and a story and snuggles and a trip to the potty and a glass of water, but when I left and shut the door, that was it. Period. I was not going back in there unless the house caught on fire or a wolverine snuck in through her open window (I think I left that part out of the actual lecture).

So I left, and she started screaming. I need water! I need to go potty! I need more snuggles! My leg is hanging out! I need to go potty! I need another book! I need another song! I need Mommy! I lost my bunny! I need to go potty! And I went downstairs and knitted.

After 5 minutes I went up and told her that I was still here, I loved her, but I was not going in, and she needed to go to sleep. I watched her go to the potty (again), rinsed out the potty, said goodnight and shut the door. This got me incoherent raging and kicking of walls, which settled into just kicking of walls, and she was asleep 15 minutes later. Score one for Evil Mommy!

Saturday night Jason was home, and I gave Liza the same lecture. Blah blah, not coming in, Daddy's not coming in either, go to sleep.

"Daddy will come and get me." (with a smirk)
"No he won't."
"Yes, he will."
"No, he won't, because if he tries to, I will sit on him until he gives up and stops trying to get to your room."
"You can't sit on Daddy!"
"If it means getting you to sleep earlier, yes I can."

Fifteen minutes of screaming, and she was asleep.

***

Last night, after five minutes of screaming, I stuck my head in Liza's room. She said she had to got to the potty, which is always her first stage of stalling, and despite the fact that she JUST WENT FIVE MINUTES BEFORE, she usually manages to actually go again, so it's not like we can ignore it if we ever want her to be potty trained at night.

"You're a big girl. You use the potty by yourself every day. Get out of bed, use the potty, wipe your butt, and get back in bed. We'll clean out the potty in the morning."

She was quiet after that, and Jason and I got to watch a movie. A whole movie. Including trailers. Hallelujah!

Jason checked on her before we went to bed, and she had done just what I told her, getting her diaper back on and even getting the sheets over her and everything. All he had to do was rinse out the potty and we were good to go. Score!

When Jason called this morning, I told him that Liza's first concern when she woke up was that we had to clean out her potty. I told her that Daddy had done it in the middle of the night.
"You should have told her the Pee Fairy came and took it away." Ha, ha, very funny.

Tonight we had no problem getting her to bed - as Jason was leaving the room, she said she had to pee, so he told her to go and get back in bed by herself. He went in a few minutes ago, and she was curled up under her covers, bunny under her arm, potty full of pee. He carried out the potty and asked me, "Should the Pee Fairy leave a quarter in her potty?"

No, I don't think so, but thanks for the disturbing mental image of a urine-soaked sprite sneaking into my house every evening.

Evidence

Just in case I ever need to prove to the child welfare people that it's not MY fault the kid is going to end up in the emergency room with two dislocated shoulders.

Nothing says "lazy Sunday afternoon" quite like a Linkin Park song, am I right?

A couple things that suck about parenting

1. When you try to be a good parent, and you save some of your kid's art that you especially like, and after leaving it sit on the kitchen counter for weeks you finally put it on your desk so you can hang it on the wall in your office later that day, and then your kid chooses that night to spit water all over your desk, so not only do you have to spend 10 minutes sucking water out of your keyboard, but the painting titled "a kid and her mommy holding hands and walking in the river" is completely ruined. Damn you, watercolors!

2. Listening to your kid talking to herself and realizing that her imaginary friends don't want to play with her because she's wearing the wrong kind of dress. And that's before she even finds the Cinderella book, mind you.

3. When your kid discovers the "big kid" Disney books on the high shelf and wants to hear them over and over and over again, and you have to spend an hour explaining "Why are there mean sisters who rip up Cinderella's dress? Why is Cinderella crying? Why can't she go to the ball in that dress?" Bonus parenting points if you manage to read parts of Bambi SO FAST and with so little inflection that the separation-anxiety-plagued kid doesn't understand that Bambi's mom ends up D-E-A-D as a doornail, shot by someone who looks suspiciously like her grandfather.

4. "Why did they put the chain on Dumbo's mom's leg?" "Because she got angry, and they didn't want her to hurt anyone." "She got angry? Like you do sometimes?" "(sigh) Yes, like I do sometimes, only usually I don't pick people up and shake them and incite stampedes." (pause) "Why did they put the chain on Dumbo's mom's leg?"

5. "Why is the mother being not nice, mommy?" Twenty-minute-long discussion with a 3-year-old about how people aren't always nice = why Jason owes me a mom's night out sometime very soon. And alcohol. And chocolate. And very, very nice yarn.

Confessions

1. After exchanging the defective one for a new one at the store, I spent almost an hour playing with the black light in the Urine Gone! kit. I am all CSI'd out, having seen in horrid detail exactly how many spots the cats have barfed on, how far stuff sprays out of the toilet when you flush, and how much lint we have on every surface in our house. The floor on Jason's side of the bed lights up like the Milky Way under a black light. Kinda cool, until you realize that I just vacuumed on Friday. Eeeew. Dyson, anyone?
2. After scrubbing my bathtub for two hours early last week (no, not kidding, and eeeeew) I finally realized that the mildew problem we have stems partly from the previous homeowners, who covered up their mildew problem by putting white caulk over the yucky areas, then smoothing it to look like grout. Only now the caulk is peeling off, exposing the mildewed and/or chipped grout underneath, and it's pretty much impossible to get that stuff clean. Ultimately the damage to the grout means we're going to need to regrout the tub someday, but I'm not up for doing that right now ... so when I was exchanging the Urine Gone! kit at the store, I grabbed a Grout-Aide grout and tile marker as a temporary fix. I was fairly sure that it would suck, but for $7, it was worth a try. Yes, I know, I'm just covering up the problem again, but daaaaaaaamn, you should see how sparkly white my grout is. This stuff works (as long as you don't look toooo closely, especially at the area where I used it to cover up the unremovable stain/chipping from the bottom of the tub). It's so much fun, I'm wishing I had more mildew so I had more stuff to cover up ... but then again, that might be the fumes talking.

Apparently tonight is "Shill for As Seen On TV" night on the blog. So, do you think the AquaGlobes actually work? Might have to try some in the hanging baskets by the front door, since I'm getting tired of watering them every other day and it's only June.

Oh, and while I'm in the confessional ... I've reached the point where I'm totally bribing my kid to stop peeing on the floor (and in the car, and in the yard, and in the bathtub ...).

• Pee on the potty = coupon for 5 minutes of computer time before bed.
• Pee anywhere else = lose a coupon, unless they're all gone already, at which point I start chopping off body parts ... er, taking away dessert, followed by bedtime books, followed by body parts.
• Make it through the whole day (until 6:30 or 7) without peeing anywhere other than the potty = get a present from the basket of $1 junk I bought at Target and gift-wrapped and put in a place that's really obvious yet inaccessible to small children.

The last three or four days she made it until about 4:30 or 5 with no accidents, then went and hid somewhere and purposely peed on the floor. I'm sorry, but it's not an "accident" if you're playing in the yard, have been asked 400 times if you need to go potty, and you suddenly drop what you're doing so you can climb up the ladder and pee all over the floor of your swingset. Also not an "accident" if get up off the potty and run into the garage to pee on the same spot on the floor two days in a row. Can you say, "power play?" Because I can, and I ALWAYS win. I've got 30+ more years of experience in being stubborn ... I can't make her pee on the potty, but I can make her life a lot less fun when she doesn't. Bwahahahahahaha!

And today she got her first potty present (water balloons), so there's a possibility this might actually work. Of course, now that I've written that we're having success, she's going to sneak off and take a crap in the front seat of my car, but hey - at least I can be happy for tonight, right?

Landscaping for the Lazy

Here's a quick hint for anyone installing play equipment that will only be used for a few years (like toddler sets and sand boxes) - install it someplace you want to put a flower bed eventually.

You may remember that last fall we took the Bermuda Tree Triangle of (Lawn Mowing) Doom and turned it into the site for Liza's plastic castle? Well, part of the reason it's there is because when she outgrows the castle, I've got a date with a large shovel and a gross of hostas that are going into that same location. In the meantime, the castle and all the foot traffic do a great job of killing off the grass and weeds in preparation for the garden.

We've got even less lawn to mow this year, and the castle has a new neighbor ...

I got all motivated and actually prepped the ground underneath the sandbox so that when we're ready to plant in a few years, the soil will look more like soil and less like PlayDoh than the surrounding area. Hopefully. And any time Liza throws sand outside the box, it's just helping to improve the surrounding soil.

And if you look real closely at the left side of the photo above, you'll see that an old friend has finally found a new home ...

Poor Bessie has been sitting in a pile on our deck for a year. I bet she's glad to be back in action!

Attack of the inadvisable activities

Because it's not like we've got brand new floors and have recently painted all the walls and woodwork or anything ...

Parenting Cliff's Notes

"Oh, and in case she asks, Noreen is the magic Coordination Fairy that lives in her bottom dresser drawer and helps Liza and Mommy pick out outfits that match."

Thanks, chief, I'll keep that in mind.

Noreen?? I'd have gone with Stacy or Clinton myself.

cabin fever

Liza has been getting the crazies every evening just about the time I need to start fixing dinner, and they last pretty much until we hit her on the head with a hammer to make her "sleep" around 9pm. They only got worse once we started packing up the living room and dining room stuff, to the point where she's been running around like a maniac, bouncing off of walls, especially right after dinner.

Last week we got in the habit of having Jason take care of the dishes while I devoted my full attention to keeping the kid from ending up in the ER. Her favorite games at the time was jumping in and out (and in and out and in and out) of the "swimming pool" made inside my legs when I sat on the floor with the soles of my feet together, and "riding the train." At some point she told me she wanted to dive into the pool, and she would have done it, too, if I hadn't tackled and redirected.

So introducing "cliff diving" was the logical next step, right? Because there are worse ways to burn off energy than doing somersaults off a side chair onto some sofa cushions.

And then, of course, we had to go for distance.

And height.

Jumping over sofa cushions - the game the whole family can play!

So remember when Liza was little and screamed 24/7 and I would occasionally refer to her as evil or possessed? Well, you be the judge. I'd say the comparison is pretty good.

(Couldn't find a shot of her on top of the building at the end of the movie with her hair blowing around her. Trust me, it's the same as Liza's, only brown and more moussey).