Week 23.

I am furious. Absolutely furious. Before bedtime tonight Mac wants to do his homework, which involves a small bit of coloring. Sailor decides he wants to color, too, and attempts to deface Mac’s homework. I supply him with a coloring book. They sit on the playroom floor coloring while I have a quick chat on the phone with my sister. I am cool with the work they are doing because quite frankly Sailor is doing a bang-up job coloring in the lines of a Spiderman picture. He tears out the picture so I can scan it and email it to his doting aunt.

We get pajamas on. We read The Cat in the Hat Comes Back and Dr. Seuss’ ABC’s. Sailor is hungry despite it being a mere hour or so past the end of dinner, which he ate well. I pour a bowl of cereal. Mac is hungry despite two helpings of dinner. I pour him a bowl of cereal. Sailor slips because, like his big brother, the Velcro on his butt that is meant to keep him on his seat is non-functional. He falls and bumps his ribs. Water spills all over Mac’s chair and the floor. I react and then realize Sailor is hurt. He snuggles in my lap to finish his cereal and we hustle off to bed.

Sailor is in bed and I am picking up his room. There is always a floor of debris in there by the end of the day. I pick up books and socks and jeans…. That is when I see it. As I stretch out his jeans to see if they are still clean enough to avoid the laundry basket, I notice the rip in the knee of the little pants. At first it seems innocuous. After all, he is the third boy to wear these jeans and it stands to reason that he may have worn out the knee. But it doesn’t look like a rip. It looks like a cut. “Mac cut it,” Sailor offers. “Sailor asked me to,” Mac rebuts. I am incredulous. I am speechless.

“WHAT?!”

And I then recall having heard Sailor say something about, “We were cutting pants and shirts.” Which I had assumed to mean that they were cutting the shapes of pants and shirts out of paper.

What do you say when your children do something so terribly naughty? Something you know for certain that they know better than to do.

“What else did you cut?”

“My jeans,” Mac offers, “But just at the bottom part where it was already ripped in the back from walking on it.”

I send Mac to bed and he goes. I say good night to Sailor. But not before letting them both know that they have punishments coming tomorrow. And, that they owe me money for Sailor’s jeans.

Sailor is crying, and I tell him it is ok to be upset.

In Mac’s room I examine the shirt he was wearing. I see no evidence of foul play, which is good for Mac, as he was wearing a relatively new shirt. “Did you cut Sailor’s shirt, too?”

“Yes.”

Back in Sailor’s room I pull the damaged shirt form the laundry basket. Sure enough there is a slice in each sleeve. Sailor is asleep so I bring the shirt to Mac. “Did you do this yourself or did Sailor cut some?”

“Sailor cut the part right there,” he says, poking his finger at a hole right in the front of the shirt. I am livid. I turn into the kitchen and toss the shirt in the trash.

I pull Mac’s jeans from his laundry basket. The back of one leg’s cuff is scissored badly. “Is this what you did?”

“Yes.”

I pull on both sides of the rip and pull the pants apart all the way up to the back pocket.

Have I mentioned that I am furious?

I let them know that they owe me money for the two pair of ruined jeans and shirt.
I also let Mac know that he is not to use scissors again until he is 6, which is in three months. This is not his first infraction of the law of scissors. Last year he cut a piece of a boy’s hair in one of his classes at FTK, and then later in the summer he cut a hole in the front of a brand new shirt he was wearing. I cleverly stitched the shirt in many places with bright colored thread, saving the shirt from the garbage heap. But this time is too much.

“Sailor told me to do it.”

“You are the big brother and the one responsible to tell him that, no, we do not cut our clothes.”

Sailor’s shirt and Mac’s pants are in the trash. I will sew a patch on Sailor’s jeans. I am furious indeed. Such naughtiness is unacceptable. Such naughtiness will not go unpunished. But what punishment is appropriate for a 5- and 3-year-old?

In the morning I have an epiphany. The best punishment for my 5- and 3-year-old is a week without their beloved StarWars toys. They take their punishment like men.

I pick Sailor up from school on Thursday and he has his face painted with a black nose and whiskers. He looks absolutely adorable. As do his classmates. Apparently they are celebrating Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Sailor is also sporting a red construction paper bow tie, which he has painted with something that makes dots. The overall effect is quite cute. We decide that when we get home he can put on his official Cat in the Hat costume, or has he calls it, his Cat-a-Hat suit.

Except that getting home presents more of a challenge than one might expect. As we wait in the car for Miss H to open the door for the kindergarteners (it’s raining cats and dogs outside) Mac and Sailor ask if they can push buttons. They push everything from defrost to the stereo eject and when Mac pushes the button to search radio stations the next number up plays just static. “That’s just the water, right Mommy?” Ah, the water station. So when Mac exits the car and I attempt to start it up something goes wrong and nothing happens at all. Shoot! We are stranded outside the big school in a rain storm. And I don’t really want to walk home. Besides, or as Mac says, DEsides, if I leave my car unattended in front of the school I will have a ticket to deal with, or better yet, they will tow it away (which might indeed be actually better – if they would tow it to the garage!) One of the French moms is still outside and I ask her if she can jump my car. Alas, my hood is stuck shut again. I pull hard and nothing happens. Dang it! I realize my lights are still on and so after 5 tries the car turns over as if nothing happened. You see, my ten-year-old Honda is due for about $1000 worth of maintenance, which I do not have the money for. Thus I am bound to find myself in these situations more and more often, until….

We are home and Sailor is asking for his Cat-a-Hat suit. Which I dig out for him. It’s in a garbage bag in my closet with all the other costumes that I confiscated a while back because neither of my children would put them away after pulling them all out to find the one they wanted. It was not an isolated incident. It happened three times in one week. So, bye-bye costumes. Because there is not enough junk in my closet already.

Sailor is fussy, crabby, whiny while I struggle to help him into his costume. Nothing is right. The leg will hurt the (teensy tiny) booboo on his knee, his shirt sleeves will go up if I don’t let him take off his shirt, waah, waah, waah. He is really tired! And we’re off for a nap. Which he has no intention of taking. He cries and fusses and refuses and claims he is not tired. “I don’t want to take a nappy” he says. Over and over and over like a broken record. I am Patient Mommy today and I perch on his rocking chair, laptop and coffee in hand. He cries until he finally changes his tune. “I am too HUNGRY to take a nap.” Of course I have offered him pizza at least 7 times in the past hour. I tell him where he can find his lunch (in a Tupperware in my bag). He gets his lunch, brings it to his room, sits on his bed and eats the slice of Trader Joe’s Margherita pizza in silence. And them my wonder child puts the crust in the Tupperware, sets the Tupperware on the floor, lies down and pulls up the covers. And I know that he really is a good boy. And I know that he really is a tired boy. I love him so. Before I finish this paragraph he is asleep.

I need to give the pediatrician a ring. Mac woke up in the middle of the night because his CD was stuck on a song and the repetition was bothersome. He came to my bed to tell me he had a bloody nose, but in my cozy state of sleepiness I merely mumbled, “Lie on your back.” In the morning, my cell phone, which seems to know when I need to get up early and when I do not, starts alarming. I let it go off 4 times before getting up at 7:22. I am out of the shower when Sailor comes in to tell me that Mac had a blood nose. “Had or has?” I ask. “Had,” Sailor tells me.

Mac shows up at the bathroom door covered in blood. But I see that it is dry and so we set about washing his face and hands and stripping off his Sponge Bob pajama top. We check his room and find blood on the pillow, sheet, and of course on the down comforter. There are large spots on the floor in his room. I feel sick. Not because of the blood itself but because it looks like a massacre occurred. And because I know that nose bleeds can be innocent and not so innocent. I think it’s time to call the doctor. I wait till 9:00 to find out that they don’t open till 10:00. although Mac seems tired and out of sorts a bit he claims to feel fine and I am reluctant to spend $20 on a copay to find out that he just has a cold. But when his nose springs a leak again right as we are about to leave to pick up Sailor from school I rethink the whole doctor thing. Especially when he gets so scared he wants to stay home from school. I fully expect him to have another gush while he is at school this afternoon.

Sailor comes to my room at 10:30 tonight. Creeps in and starts to crawl. He is sick. He woke up from the nap and stayed with my dad for 45 minutes and by the time I got back he was “freezing.” I bundled him up but he would not stop whining. We did workbooks with Mac and while both boys did great work, Sailor would still not stop whining. It finally occurs to me that his whining and the way he is breathing are fever induced. I take his temp. 101.5. So here he is shivering in my bed and he wants to know: "Mommy, what’s in donuts?"

Sick kids are the sweetest children on Earth. Sailor has a fever again and has asked me to stay in his room with him while he falls asleep. “You can even bring your ku-pewter,” he offers. He is rolled up in a baby comforter and he says he is too hot. His fever is not horrible but he didn’t like the Motrin last night, said it made his throat hurt. And I think if I remember correctly from my childhood a fever is a good thing because it fights the virus/bacteria that is making ya’ sick. So every time we suppress our kids’ fevers with the red-dye-#40-artifically-flavored-saccharin-laden-pediatrician-approved-pain-killer-and-fever-reducer, we are not allowing the little body to heal itself. Am I right? Thus the lingering of the illness. This way, Sailor’s little body is working hard to fight off the yucky germs and he should be better in no time. Don’t worry, I won’t let his fever become dangerous. I am bright enough to recognize that the short term benefits outweigh the long term damage. But I still don’t want to pump my baby full of crap.

Mac has had five bloody noses in 2 days. Am I worried? You betcha. But I am working hard to hide my concern from the little man. Tonight he comes out of bed to tell me he can’t breathe. His nose is so full of stuff that he can’t get a clear breath in. So we sit down in the bathroom with tissues, Q-tips, saline, and a flashlight and I get to work. He hates what I am doing. He does not complain though. And at the end of a good long 10 or 15 minutes I teach him how to blow his nose. He finds my example inexplicably hilarious. But he can do it. And his nose is clear enough to safely pull air into his lungs once again. And what does this amazing child do as soon as he is able to breathe clearly again? He throws his arms around my neck and tells me I am the best doctor ever. I have found little to be more gratifying than my children thanking me for making them feel better through some gentle but persistent and unpleasant procedure. Like the time when Mac was 2 ½ and he had gotten an eye infection from the then baby Sailor. I had to administer horrible eye gel to both eyes three times a day. It was a battle each time and he hated every dose. But when the medicine was done and his eyes were all better as promised, my tiny miracle thanked me for the yucky eye medicine. It was then that I knew I had a special child on my hands.

They are asleep now. It is snowing. Has been since before 4:15 this morning. That’s when I got up to pee and bring Sailor milk. I didn’t shovel today. Didn’t have time. Didn’t feel like it. Will do it tomorrow.