Week 16: Naughty or Nice

Mac peed in my bed. This has not happened in well over a month. I wake up at 9:00 a.m. to, “M-o-m-m-y! M-o-m-m-y.” He is lying on the sofa, wearing nothing but boxers and socks and covered in the sofa blanket. He is cold. Why he is spelling out my name to call for me I have no idea.

Sailor doesn’t want to eat breakfast.
Sailor doesn’t want to get dressed.
Sailor doesn’t want to clean up the playroom for his playdate with Jack this afternoon.
“I don’t feel good,” each boy whines.
I give them each a dose of Tylenol.
It does not curb the whining one bit.
Mac says he doesn’t care if the playroom is messy for Sailor’s friend.
I say, calmly, “Ok.”
I bring a garbage bag to the playroom and fill it with the contents of the floor, which includes Sailor’s outfit from yesterday, and quite a few StarWars things. Mac comes in and tries to rescue a few StarWars figures. I tell him, no, I will take care of them. I set the full bag in the kitchen, near the trash.
Sailor cries.
Mac sits, stunned into stony silence, for several minutes. Perhaps he is in mourning.

We can’t find parking at Mac’s talking doctor’s office today. We try the garage. We make it to the top floor. Mac is afraid. “We’re going to fall off!” But Sailor has a different opinion, “”I’m not afraid! This is cool!” And so Mac has to agree.

Sailor cries through most of the wait for Mac at his talking doctor. He is hungry, but he doesn’t like the way the macker cheese smells. He wants the fruit snacks. I won’t give in. He finally does. He eats most of the macker cheese and some Boca burger. I let him have the poisonous fruit snacks. Nobody listens when I say, “Put on your coats and let’s go.”

“Santa is watching you on his SantaCam,” I threaten for the millionth time today. I don’t know how long I will be able to play the Santa card with them. They seem not to care or not to believe or something.

While we wait I read to Sailor. “Read the story of Repretzel,” he requests. I make him repeat his request a few times just to hear him say “Repretzel” again and again.

We walk back up the stairs in the garage, where we have never parked before. “This is a passion,” Sailor says. I realize he means “passage.” Despite my attempt to correct him he has trouble with this word and I love how cute he is.

Mac asks me, “What is a crease?” I tell him it’s a line where something is folded. No, that’s not what he means. “In the movie last night,” he says, meaning the public television movie he was watching downstairs, “they put a crease on the skull.”
Crease. “You mean curse?”

Mac eats quesadillas – a “case of ideas,” we decide to call them -- and apples in the car. We are on time for school. Hurray! But Mac has forgotten his backpack at home. I guess perfection is too much to ask for.

I drive through McDonald’s for free coffee. I drive home. Sailor sleeps through the majority of his play time with Jack. His mom and I have a nice chat while Jack and his baby sister play. When Sailor wakes he is in a foul mood, as I expected he’d be.

It’s gotten colder out again so we drive to get Mac from school. Sailor wants to go in the stroller. Why do my children think everything is their choice?

“My brother isn’t out of school yet,” Sailor tells me. We are double parked, waiting for the bell to ring. Mac runs up behind me and nearly knocks me over. I have Sailor in my arms. We’re trying to keep warm. We’re freezing. Mac runs off. For 15 minutes I play cat and mouse with him. In the car I tell him he cannot continue to run off after he finds me. I explain that it’s rude and inconsiderate and that it makes me sad. I also remind him that it’s too hard to chase after him with Sailor either in my arms or in the big stroller. I don’t think he’d like it if I just left without him, so I ask him to please just ask me if he can play if that’s what he wants to do. He looks sad, dejected. I feel bad. He says he doesn’t feel well again. I need him to understand some rules of safety.

We drive through ridiculous holiday traffic to look for a penguin cookie cutter. Sailor wants to make “Happy Feet” cookies for his class party on Thursday morning but I can't find penguin cookie cutters anywhere. And I don’t know if I can find cookie baking time anywhere either! The week ahead, being the week before Christmas (“Look, Mom, we are right on top of Christmas,” Mac notes, looking at the kitchen calendar, where he sees that Christmas is a week from today.), is crazy busy.

We have three play dates, several parties, two “last days of school,” I have dinner plans tonight and Friday night, a family Hanukkah dinner at my parents’ house tomorrow, we have to help my friend with the twins…. I’m so tired just thinking about it all. At least my holiday shopping is complete! Except I keep getting holiday cards from people I have removed from my list. And the problem is, while I still have enough stamps left, I am all out of those smashingly gorgeous cards I made last week. And I just don’t feel like making more. Nope, I just don’t feel like it. Besides, I know I made roughly 80 cards and at this point we have about 25 cards hanging up decorating our home. Materialistic? Me? At this time of year? You betcha! It’s all about the toys for the kids and it’s all about the cards for me!
I made my boys "Naughty and Nice" charts this morning and so far they are appearing very naughty. They were definitely so not well behaved today and I don't know why except that they were probably tired. Which would have been easier to use as an excuse if they hadn’t both still been awake and putting a definite cramp in my evening with my pal Chad at 9:45. They both went to sleep finally at 10:00, which means another like today, tomorrow.

I have no idea how to drive my point home with them. We are just not getting anywhere. I will have to try a different approach tomorrow. Despite the fact that tomorrow night we will be downstairs eating potato latkes and lighting candles with what is left of my dad’s side of our extended family (between the ones who are dead, the ones who don’t like us and the ones we don’t like there are very few left!).

I will sleep on the sofa tonight. I have no sheet-changing energy in me.

It’s Wednesday night and I am looking for my entries for Tuesday and Wednesday not realizing it is just the mid-week point. So much is going on during this week before Christmas.

Tuesday we drop Sailor at school and he doesn’t cry! Mac and I work another field trip at the art studio. Mac wants to make his own lunch. He chooses a cheese sandwich. I hand him two slices of Muenster and let him have at it with the mustard, new organic mayo and bread. He makes quite the sandwich. He is pleased with his own effort and finds his work quite palatable. We get Sailor and are early to school. I have brought along the video camera to make a stop-action film of Mac and his classmates lining up in front of school. Why? I don’t know. I do know that I look like some bizarre kindergarten stalker sitting in my car, bringing my camera up to my eye every time a student arrives. But the video comes out cute. Only later do I realize I have taped over most of the footage of our Sunday evening trip to Zoolights and my dad singing. I don’t have a career in movie-making, apparently.

I have made two attempts to get Sailor a haircut appointment today but have been warned that we can come in and wait – for a loooong time. I take the risk, as Sailor has won the haircut lottery. I had to decide which boy would get the holiday cut. Mac’s hair, tho long, looks not too bad. Sailor’s hair does not suit him when long. So he wins! We drive over to the overpriced kiddie cut salon. The place is practically empty. Our favorite European haircut guy is waiting in the wings. “We are here to get on the very long waiting list for a haircut,” I tell the receptionist. About 30 seconds later Sailor is in the seat “playing” a video game and chewing a huge ball of bubble gum. By 1:00 we are on our way home and Sailor falls asleep. A state in which he will remain til around 4:30.

I have received Christmas cards from people I have taken off this year’s mailing list. And so I have to send out more cards. Which means I have to make more cards. Reason number 47 why I should have gotten my cards done as Costco.

The family Hanukkah dinner is not as bad as I’d thought it would be, given my distaste for family gatherings as such. In fact, at the point where I tell the story of Mac seeing a grade-school version of Fiddler on the Roof last week and later telling me he remembers one of the songs, “Ohio! Come to life!” and we all break into a full length version of the soundtrack of Fiddler (I do a mean Fruma Sara!) we all agree we are having a good old fashioned good time. Sailor comes to me late in the eveing and says, “I haf’ go poopy --“ and before I can suggest he go he says, “With you.” We stay too long, stay up too late and all too soon it’s 3:00 a.m. and Sailor is wandering the house looking for me, looking for somewhere besides his room to sleep. Why my children hate their own rooms so much is beyond me.

At 8:15 Wednesday morning I call the sparkelqueen and ask her not to send over the cleaning girl. I am too tired, I feel sick and I just can’t get it together to have a cleaning girl show up in 15 minutes. We spend the morning laboring over Sailor’s Happy Feet cookies. I call downstairs for advice on which of two cookie recipes to use and answer my own question when, upon further inspection, I find that one recipe calls for 7 cups of flour. I don’t think I even own 7 cups of flour. But while I am on the phone by boys take it upon themselves to get up from breakfast and wander the kitchen in search of anything to do but eat. And then we have a semi-bad morning. It seems both boys forgot to turn on their listening ears today and I about lose it when, mid-cookies, I ask Sailor to put something away and he says, “I don’t want to.”

I gather up gifts, tuition checks, sippy cups, FTK polo, an invitation, cards and a borrowed pair of underpants, and we head out for the afternoon. And Mac has left his backpack in the house. He earns a loud lecture on responsibility. We are late for kindergarten.

We are late for helping my friend with her twins. And when my friend and her three-year-old arrive back home I find she is having not much of a better time with her boys’ weird moods than I am having with mine. And then one of the twins throws up on me. Have I mentioned that Sailor and I have a Christmas party to attend this afternoon? And even if I were to drive home for clean clothes, 90% of my wardrobe is in one of the 5 baskets of laundry in the hallway right now. Sailor and his buddy are not getting along particularly well this afternoon. It starts when I make Sailor a pbj sandwich and put it on the Cars plate and his friend wants to know who took his plate. Later when his friend is yelling at one of his baby brothers, Sailor is bothered. I tell him kindly, “Sailor is asking you to stop,” and the answer I get back from the little buddy is, “And I’m not stopping.”

We get Mac from school, drop him at FTK, make it to the party, where Sailor is, predictably shy until about 5 minutes before we have to leave and where I am told by another mom how put-together I look despite everything I have to deal with taking care of two small children alone and the divorce and everything, arrive late to FTK and miss the “live performance” the children have just put on for the parents, making me incensed that they couldn’t have waited another minute or two. I am all of about 3 minutes late and class is technically not even over yet. I try to hide my fury.

At home the boys decide to camp out in the living room. They jump into pj’s and unroll their sleeping bags. I whip up scrambled eggs and toast and anticipate a quiet and quick end to a long day. Until I remember that there are several dozen penguin-shaped gingerbread cookies in the kitchen that need to be frosted. Then the phone rings. Then we remember we haven’t lit the Hanukkah candles and when we do they keep falling out of the menorah, lucking extinguishing themselves on their way to the frame covered mantle. And then Sailor is jumping off the furniture and I turn off the tv and ask him to get into his sleeping bag.

He says, “I hate you!”

I am lost. I just baked and frosted 3 dozen penguin-shaped gingerbread cookies when I really wanted to be sleeping and now he says he hates me?! I am supposed to be the mom, which means I am supposed to be able to shine my armor and let it protect me from such assaults. Well, my armor shines but apparently it does not work too well. Sailor is in his room crying. Short peeps of sound. Very irritating. I go in. “What’s wrong?” he has his hands on his ankles. “My rankles hurt.”

I cannot even fathom a reason why a child’s ankles would hurt unless his pj’s were too tight, and his are not. It’s an excuse. A cute one. But not enough to draw out my sympathy. It’s been too hard of a day. I have done too much for them to be treated this way, and yet I am their mom and certainly I deserve whatever I get. Tomorrow is another day. Maybe it will be a calmer one. Of course, Mac has asked if he can stay up all night and I flippantly say, “yes,” and now he is wandering around complaining he is bored. I think I’ll cut his hair!

Thursday morning is Sailor’s last day of preschool before the two-week winter holiday break. We arrive armed with 2 dozen plus one Happy Feet cookies, a stocking full of peanut M&Ms for S and bottles of wine for Sailor’s other two teachers. Sailor is dressed smartly and sporting his pro hair cut. He is adorable and not too unhappy to be at school today. S says she is going to set out all the treats and let the kids graze through the morning. I want to stay!

Mac and I drive off to the apartment of one of his friends, another French boy in his class. He has been invited to play for the morning and whether the mother likes it or not I have invited myself along. The boys and a little brother play swords and then switch to a computer game, which I am not pleased with, though they promise to play for just a few minutes. They stop only when lunch is served. Mac devours a piece of fish and says, “I want another piece of chicken.” I feed him some of my Indian dish, which he turns his nose up at but then when he realizes he is still hungry and there is no more fish to be had he finishes most of the small portion on my plate. His friend opens his mouth and I shovel my last bite into his little mouth, much to his mother’s horror. Mac then devours a Haagen-Dazs bar. We dash out in the rain to get Sailor. Five days before Christmas and it’s 50 degrees out and raining. Sailor is ready for us, wearing his Hoho hat and a bit of something sugary on his face. We dash home for a moment to regroup and then head to the big school. Mac has a gift in his backpack for his reading buddy, who is in 4th grade, so I have chosen Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by one of my favorite authors, Judy Blume. I hope he likes it. He gives Mac a card. Mac has a holiday sing-a-long at school this afternoon but there is some confusion over whether or not the parents are supposed to attend. The weekly bulletin reads, “Parents are welcome to join us…” and the office secretary tells me parents are allowed to come but that this is for the children, not the parents. Miss H tells me it will be very crowded. Sailor and I head to Target. I figure if he is still awake in an hour we will head back. Of course he is still awake an hour later. We are at Target! And we are shopping. Sailor finds a bracelette/ring set for Nana’s birthday next week and I find sweaters for my sister and me in the kids’ department. Some bread. Two padded envelopes, which is what we came for. And GrandDad. Who has lost Nana. This is a fortuitous meeting, as we all get in line together and my dad slips me a $20 as we check out.

We’re too late for the sing-a-long but too early to get Mac. We drive to the school as Sailor falls asleep. I clean out my car. The rain is coming down so hard I can’t see out my fogged up windows. My car looks great when I am done. If only I had a little vacuum cleaner in here. I call my sister, catch up on some other calls, read a kids’ craft magazine, and then it’s time to get my boy. Sailor wakes up and tells Mac we got him a chocolate milk from Starbucks, which we have not. Sailor had asked to, but the timing was off. We drive home carefully in the rain. The boys want to watch a video. I decide they have to earn it. We decide to take the garbage cans in before it gets dark or any wetter outside. We are soaked by the time we come in. I tell them they have to help me haul 7 loads of laundry to the basement. We do the chores together and they earn the privilege of watching Tarzan, which Sailor continues to miss-call Xanadu.

I am making a pre-Christmas Spaghetti Fest for us and my sister. Why? Why not. It’s cheaper than going out and it’s the only food we have left in the house. And the kids are already in their pj’s since they were wet from the garbage cans.

Sailor runs to the table, excited for a great meal. “But there’s no spegli yet!” Mac has trouble with his table manners, completely forgetting the intricacies of fork use. So I remove his meal. He cries. I return his meal. I expect more mature eating habits, especially as his 3-year-old brother is demonstrating proper use of his fork as we speak!

My sister is over and the kids aren’t getting 100% of my attention. Which means they are giving 200% of their effort to getting it. Mac gets yelled at for … bargaining with me about who is to clean up the dinner dishes and who is to set out dessert. This is not a democracy, I tell him. He doesn’t get to choose. I feel guilty and set out cookies and make the good hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream.

We light Hanukkah candles, using up the last of our candles a day early. We read stories. It’s after 9:30 when the boys finally poop out on the living room floor, our new make-shift bedroom. It’s much cozier than everyone being spread out all over the house. But also much messier. Between the Christmas gift piles, the sleeping bags, the pillows, and the toys, the room looks like a pajama party gone awry. I’ll have to get this all cleaned up in the morning before the cleaning girl comes. I set my cell phone alarm for 7:15, watch the end of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and go to sleep. We sleep well.

I wake up Friday morning at 7:14. I try hard to fall back into REM before my alarm goes off at 7:15. Mac has to be at school at 8:53 this morning for a rare morning kindergarten. The whole class is going to see a play called The Stinky Cheese Man in the auditorium . It sounds disgusting but the kids are excited. Mac is so agreeable to going to school whenever. He doesn’t complain about having to get up and go. Yet. I know I will be doing a fair share of complaining next year! Notes home have instructed us to dress our children for the theatre. I put Mac in navy corduroys, a belt, a pinstripe shirt, tie and saddle shoes. “Look, Mom, this shirt has a little knight riding a horse. I’ve never noticed this before.” It’s a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt of course, but I don’t say so because that means nothing to him. Nor would it mean anything to him if I said I got it at a garage sale. It’s pouring rain and despite my best laid plans, we are going to have to drive to school. But wait, please let me get my short hair dried to perfection before I step out into the rain. Please. And then let me pull my hood up over my head to trap the humidity in so the back and right side of my hair can flip up instead of down, like the left side. Please!

We arrive by car just as the bell is ringing, but we can’t get out of the car because there is a traffic jam and no place to park. Two cars ahead of me pull into illegal spots and I follow suit. After all, there are plenty of cars stopping on the west side of the street, which is strictly prohibited after school. I don’t know the a.m. rules. I run Mac in and get him into the line outside his classroom. I linger a moment and remind him he has two gifts for Miss H in his backpack. I check with the teacher to be sure she is ready for this crowd of 54 children. I would love to stay and help out, but it’s not as if I can just leave my car parked illegally, my preschooler at home with my parents, my friends who are on their way to play to fend for themselves, and my cleaning girls to figure out what I want cleaned today. Miss H assures me she will be fine. I kiss my handsome small man and head back out into the rain. As the crossing guard escorts me across the street I think about how nice it would be of me to bring him a small package of cookies when I come back to pick up Mac at noon.

“Don’t ever park there again!” he barks, as I reach my car.

I’m eating your cookies, Buster! “I’m a p.m. kindergarten parent, not a.m. and I don’t know where I am supposed to be in the morning,” I defend myself to the man who sees us every single day at 12:35 and every single day at 3:15.

“What I just said,” he barks back.

Why do I want to cry? Bah humbug. It is times like this that I wonder why I have enough power in me to yell at my children when they do wrong but cannot muster the nerve to tell this man that I am not 12 years old, I am parent! I can be spoken to kindly and politely and I will understand. A simple, “Please don’t park so close to the crosswalk next time,” would have been sufficient. I try not to be livid.

Both my mother and my friend, who arrives late with Sailor’s best galpal, laugh at me when I tell them I got yelled at by the crossing guard.

Sailor and his girl play so well together despite having not seen each other is quite some time. He is so good with familiarity.

He wants to stay with GrandDad and watch tv when I go pick up Mac but GrandDad doesn’t answer his phone, which catches me off guard. It’s momentarily warm out and I want to walk to school. I toss Sailor into the dry side of the stroller and run off to school. We have to take a slightly zig-zagged route, as there are deep puddles at many of the corners. This should be a great snow storm, Christmas is in 4 days. But instead it’s raining cats and dogs. Mac has chocolate on his face when he comes out of school. He has had a delightful morning, even getting to sit beside his girlfriend during the play. Sailor sleeps on the way home. Mac is hungry. I arrange green beans in a frame around the edge of a square plate, set quesadillas in two corners and fill the middle space with SmartDogs au ketchup. He devours the plate of food and I give him more. Sailor shreds a dog with a butter knife, a la, “I want to cut something.” The afternoon plans include dropping the boys off with my sister so they can finish shopping for fabulous things for me, and having afternoon tea with my mother and a pregnant friend of hers who is 8 years my junior. But first, my dad has asked me to bring up their Christmas tree. Today is December 22nd. About time, ya think? I sing a little song to myself about where I might find said tree in our basement full of everything. I locate it in a most obvious place: in the laundry room in a large Rubbermaid bin beneath another large Rubbermaid bin marked “summer clothes.” The bin is heavy and wide and the path leading out of our firetrap basement is nothing if not extremely narrow. I make it upstairs without knocking anything over or impaling myself on anything and am about to drop the 50 pound bin on the living room floor when my mother says, “No, not in there, in here.” So it lands with a thud in the dining room. On the front porch I learn that my father has been invited along to the tea, which my mom had said was something she and I were going to do together. Whatever. I shove my twice-child-bearing hips between Mac’s jumbo car seat and Sailor’s and let my mom drive us off to meet my sister. The pregnant wife and her husband greet us and are most gracious hosts. We tour their miniscule condo and I see a cradle, still in its box, and then I hear discussion about how they might need to get a changing table or use the desk that is too large to move from the soon-to-be nursery. Hm. At Thanksgiving I had offered these charming folks use of our cradle, which, 31 moths after Sailor stopped sleeping in it, is still set up beside my bed, now holding books, toys, pajamas, sheets and files, and the changing table that is disassembled and taking up a great deal of space in my 2nd closet. Whatever.

We drink coffee, tea…. We eat sweets. I am on a sugar high and feeling oddly out of place with this couple, who are roughly my age but friends of my parents. Do these people not realize my parents’ ages? Do they miss their own parents, who are overseas? Or do they just not see how strange this all is?

My children are home wrapping my gifts with Aunt M. They are unhappy to hear that she and I are going out for an early dinner. Our “company Christmas party.” Sailor says, “But I didn’t have you.” Mac tells M he didn’t get to see me all day. I feel guilty and want to take them along. But I don’t. I leave them with my parents and head out. We sit at the tapas bar and eat small portions of strange foods and I down three glasses of sangria. We discuss business and how we might get Sailor into kindergarten the year we think he should be in and what we are going to wear on Christmas day and how it won’t hurt to put a few hundred dollars more onto my already debtful credit cards to give Mac a pretty, livable room in January. Which puts us in the mood to shop. Stuffed to the gills (she) and slightly tipsy (me) we leave for impromptu last minute Christmas shopping. We buy Mac all manner of clothing from GAP and Children’s Place: sweaters, socks, hoodie, hat, baseball cap…. And I think I have probably thrown the balance of gifts off again so I buy a pair of very babyish blue footy pj’s for my baby, who is three. And then we do Old Navy. Neither of us spends much but neither of us leaves empty handed, either. It’s dangerous to go post-sangria shopping on the Friday night before Christmas when stores are both open late and not at all crowded and EVERYTHING IS 50% OFF!!!!!

It’s 9:20 when we get home. And my children are still awake. “They are really tired,” my mom tells us, “they really need to get to bed.” My sister tells me she almost says aloud the words she can see play in my head, “Then why are they still up?”

Sailor tries my leftover calamari and likes it. I put him to bed. He doesn’t want to be left in the dark. I leave his light on. Still he cries. He sounds like a very sad baby. I walk him back into his room three times in a row. By the time I have read stories and been through this ordeal – I mean, routine – with Sailor I am too late to read a story to Mac. He is asleep. Sigh. Someday I will get this right. A routine. Something that works well for our little family. But it’s so hard to be everywhere and doing everything at once. I know my children will forgive me for having to do the best I can at doing the job of two parents. They are good boys and I love them dearly. And based on their actions and words I can see the feeling is mutual.

I hang up a few more Christmas cards. The other day I went through my address list and noted that I have only received 30-some cards. To the 80-some that I hand-made and sent out. Grumble grumble. I clean out the boys’ humidifiers and wonder at the brownish water and little pieces of debris I keep finding in there. In mine, too. Are we breathing in something bad for us? I need to put clean sheets on my bed. I hate this job. Really hate it. Which is why I stayed married so long – he didn’t mind the task!

Today marks the end of Mac’s first semester in kindergarten. Sailor finished his first semester of preschool yesterday. We are officially on winter holiday break. (The television is on break, too, by the way!) Mac has been in school for 16 weeks. When he was in my belly for 16 weeks he was not yet showing anyone he was there. I was wearing my own clothes still. At 16 weeks into kindergarten Mac has made his way from A to N adding lower case letters to his repertoire and his penmanship has improved greatly. He has attended a handful of birthday parties and play dates, he has befriended a 4th-grader (did I ever write about the time Mac and I were walking in the school hallway and his 10-year-old reading buddy passed by and “high-fived” my five-year-old?!), learned to read a few words, can sing two songs in French…. Oh he is just learning so wonderfully! As is Sailor. Sailor is such a big boy at school, so well-behaved. He pays attention and follows directions, I am told, and he is able to tell me what he does each day (which Mac never could or would do after his very 1st day of preschool). My boys are truly thriving in their schools. They are fabulous children. I love who they are and I love who they are becoming. The only one I am not quite sure of is myself. Am I doing a good enough job for them? Am I enough for them? Are my expectations to high? Too low? Am I too disorganized? Do they have enough unstructured playtime? Too much? Do we read enough? Do they watch too much tv despite my no tv rule? Do I still yell too much? Do I make them help out too much in the house or not enough? Are we having fun? Are we? I think the real answers lie in their peaceful faces as they sleep, in the happy way they first wake up every morning, in the huge grins they greet me with when I pick them up from school, in the way they want nothing more than to be with me when the day is done. Are they loved enough? Most certainly. Am I? Absolutely!