Why, hello ladies......, originally uploaded by mslaura.

Here is Adrian standing at the toybox yet again.

He's not so glued to it this week. This week he's all over the place. He's a super-fast crawler now. He zooms around on a route that includes:
* the dog's bowl, fun to splash in
* Julian's toy box (shown above)
* under the dining table, easy to get stuck there in all the table and chair legs, beware!
* cling to mom's legs in the kitchen
* baby toy basket in the living room
* eat magazines out of the magazine rack
* eat paper out of the recycling baskets
* gnaw any other appealing, inappropriate items (ignore pacifier and all appropriate items for gnawing)
* attempt to pull trash can over on top of self

Adrian has a bunch of nicknames. We call him "Sandbag", "Termite" and "Billy Goat Gruff". The last two are due to his proclivity for gnawing on paper and other materials.

I came into Julian's room the other morning. Adrian was crawling around gnawing everything in sight in Julian's room. Julian was shooing him away and strumming his guitar at the same time, singing, "Baby Brother, don't biiiiiiiite my toys....Baby Brother, stop biting everything in my roooooooom!"

And very melodic it was, too.

I've had a couple of hard days with the kids. Julian has been going through a SassMaster phase where he has to say NO to everything I ask him to do, or else he just ignores me.

It's all normal 3.5 year old behavior (according to my new book: "Your Three-Year-Old, Friend or Enemy?") but completely maddening.

Here's our typical interchange:

ME: "Do you want some blueberries on your cereal?"
JULIAN:
ME: "Do you want some blueberries on your cereal?"
JULIAN:
ME: "DO YOU WANT BLUEBERRIES OR NOT?"
JULIAN: "No!"
ME: "OK then, geez!" I start to put the blueberries away....
JULIAN: "AIIIEEEEE! I want blueberries! Blueberries! "

That stuff goes on all day long. I pretty much want to stick a fork in my eye rather than deal with him by about 6:00pm. Luckily he's super sweet and funny when he's not driving me utterly insane.

Two nights ago Adrian refused to sleep. He was up squirming and writhing and demanding to nurse while scratching me and pulling my hair and kicking me. O joy. I was ready to put him out in the backyard for the raccoons to carry away. OVER IT. I got so pissed off that I went and got Dan and practically threw Adrian into his arms. "Here you go, I'm DONE with him!"

At which point Dan's back went out and he sunk to the ground in a writhing heap. I plucked Adrian out of his arms just in time to avoid him going down as well. After I had established that Dan wasn't dropping dead of a heart attack or anything like that, I grabbed the now screaming baby back, and went off to my rocker to sulk miserably while rocking EXTRA FUCKING FAST to work off my super-peeved state. Finally Dan recovered enough to take over and get Adrian to sleep.

After *that* joyous night of no rest, last night Julian was the one who didn't sleep. He had napped in the car a little bit that day, and if he naps even a little bit, there's no sleeping before 9:45-10:00pm. It's horrid. At least he wasn't screaming or kicking or fussing. He just hung out in his room and occasionally came in to ask us about some book or some stickers. I finally grabbed him around 9:45pm, cuddled up with him, and he went to sleep.

Ah the joys of coming back home after vacation. We go three hours away for a week and it's like we just got home from a month in Australia. Total mayhem and readjustment.

I had to work at Julian's preschool today, and wrangling ten 3-4 year olds was the last thing I wanted to do, let me tell you. While wearing a non-napping 25-pound sandbag on my back, no less! Thank god it was only 2.5 hours. Whew.

The teacher was reading No David! to the kids, and she got to the page where David is taking his clothes off and his mother is yelling "No David!" at him. At that point she says, "...and we are not naked at home except when we are taking a shower or changing our clothes, right?"

Um, no. Wrong. If the weather is warm my kids are usually bottomless. They would be completely naked, but you know, the sun is kind of strong so they need to wear shirts.

If I weren't still somewhat mortified by my post-partum body, I'd be naked a lot more too. I'm still naked quite a bit at home. Dan too. What's wrong with that? We LIVE there. Very odd for a hippie granola school, this anti-nakedness talk.