Arden started swim lessons last week and continued them this week with me.  As I climbed into the pool with a trembling 19-month old child, I waited for her to start screaming.  It didn’t take long.  While the other parents happily played Ring Around the Rosy and Humpty Dumpty on the Wall, Arden screamed, kicked, fought me, and flailed.  I immediately became the bubonic plague during Puking Water and Snot Round 1.  Round 2 and 3 just put me over the edge.  I had to get her into this “elbow hold” where you pin their arms next to their body with your hands holding their arms together near the elbow. In theory, it’s supposed to give you “control” so that you can pull your baby through the water, flip her on her back, or help her swim without grabbing you.  In reality, Arden nearly kicked my ass, she was so strong.  It took every ounce of my strength and willpower to keep her in the hold and continue on with the class. Every time we made eye contact, she looked like a caged animal, terrorized and beyond fear.  The only thing she seemed to enjoy was floating on her back, the one thing that the teacher told us she wouldn’t like.  She nearly fell asleep when I had her on back.  She was entirely exhausted. 

She’s one of the older children in the class which just made me feel guilty.  I should have put her in the class last year. The 9 month olds are doing better than she is - they adapt to the water more quickly, learn the hold their breath more quickly, and don’t have near the amount of fear that Arden does.  It’s the perfect age to start, apparently.  I must have missed the book on that one. 

It was one of those agonizing periods where as a mother you realize that you must perservere, even against the wishes of your child, because you know it’s better for them if you do.  The instant gratification (and instinct, I might add), is to immediately remove your child from whatever situation is traumatizing them, wrap them in your arms, and comfort them.  In a way, this class is more for the parents than the children.  Nothing is harder than seeing fear in your baby’s eyes and firmly saying “1,2,3, you’re going under the water now . . . ” while pushing her squirming body under the water for the count of 5.  It’s totally unnatural and a little more than stressful.

HOWEVER.  We spent a lot of time at the pool since Friday, and Arden is over her fear of the water, and is actually enjoying the baby pool and not wanting to get out. She seems better when she falls down or gets a mouthful of water, and she was retrieving toys off the bottom.  Mike took her into the big pool with the rest of us today and she wasn’t screaming, so that’s a good sign. I didn’t try to put her under the water again or have her get the wall, because I felt like one trauma event for the weekend was enough.

Thankfully after swim lessons, we had tickets to see Sesame Street Live.  I don’t know who liked it more - Arden or Lily.  They both had a great time and danced like maniacs.  Lily got a small stuffed Cookie Monster and has been obsessively carrying it around with her since Saturday morning. 

Lily’s been a complete trip this weekend, saying some of the funniest stuff I’ve heard her say.  She was telling me that at school, she tells Marcus when he’s behaving badly, “Marcus, you BEHAVE!  Right now!  BEHAVE, MARCUS!”  She did this while waving her hand around and pointing her finger (a la Jennifer Yeager).  She looked like a mini-version of her teachers and had the tone of voice to match.  She also told me tonight that she was going to be a mommy someday and she was going to be exactly like me because I’m so “nice”.  It’s so cool that your own kids think you’re awesome because they don’t know what else to compare you to. 

My favorite Lily moment was last night, when she refused to eat her dinner.  Mike had purchased some yummy poundcake and I told her that she wasn’t getting any unless she ate.  She decided to test me, and finished her dinner without eating hardly anything on the plate.  Later she came in clutching her belly and told me, “Mama, my tummy is so empty, it hurts.”  I told her that she was welcome to have some fruit or cottage cheese or some leftover flank steak.  She told me, “My tummy won’t be empty when there’s cake in it . . . ” complete with a devilish smile.  I stifled my laughter and told her that there was no cake in her immediate future and she settled for a pear.  Ah, the joy of communication . . .

We’ve continued to work on the house little by little, including doing what we always do - spackling every freakin’ hole and repainting.  I really hope that the people we are buying from treat their houses the same we we’ve treated ours.  Moving into this particular house and cleaning up someone else’s disaster area was not fun, and I can only hope that the sellers won’t be the same.  I am aggravating with myself but as Mike said, it’s the right thing to do.  It really is. 

Tomorrow we’ll head out to the new pool at Wyndham and see if people are friendly or stuck up.  Or a combo of both.  We’re supposed to tackle the attic tomorrow as well.  Good times! 

Happy Memorial Day everyone . . .

It was an interesting and productive weekend for the most part.  Friday night Mike and I had a “date”, since Mom and Dad were in our neck of the woods so we could leave early Saturday morning for the March of Dimes WalkAmerica event.  We tried to see Da Vinci Code but of course it was sold out.  It was weird to see protestors standing outside the movie theatre. I haven’t even read the book so I really have no idea what all the fuss is about.  I didn’t even know Catholics protested anything other than abortion, but apparently they do. Strangely, most of the protesters looked like they were in high school. 

We had a nice time and ended up at Poseidon.  If there ever was a chance to get Mike on a cruise, it’s been blown now by seeing that movie.  He picked it - not me. 

Saturday morning my mom, Lily and I hit the road around 7.30 and picked up Sara at Jennifer’s house.  We all caravaned to Williamsburg for the event.  The weather was gorgeous and the 5k course wound its way through the College of William and Mary, what I hope to be the future alma mater for Lily and Arden. I love the campus.  All of us completed the walk in good time, even my mother, who was convinced she wouldn’t make it due to her back surgery.  She had no problem completing the course.  Lily had a lot of fun too and bonded with Jennifer’s Uncle Phil, who basically is “Grandfather to the World” (Jennifer’s unofficial title is “Hostess to the World”, so I’m not surprised Uncle Phil has a similar role).  Lily even rode on his shoulders for some of the way and gave him a big sloppy kiss goodbye.  Awww.  Who wouldn’t love a Lily Kiss?

Speaking of Jennifer, we received a beautiful copper-roofed birdhouse for Christmas from the Yeagers last year.  A family of bluebirds made a nest in it almost immediately after we hung it, and we noticed a few weeks ago that the babies had hatched and were creating a noisy ruckus from their house every time their mother came near with various food items for them.  As I was cleaning the grill yesterday, I heard one of the babies chirping but not from the house.  Turns out he had gotten curious and while checking out the world from the peephole of his house, he had fallen out.  He could only fly a few inches off the ground and only for a few seconds at a time.  With Mike’s help I was able to capture him but we were unsuccessful in getting him back in his bird house.  In the meantime the mother kept dive-bombing me to show me her intense displeasure. 

We ate dinner and kept an eye on him.  He stayed right under the birdhouse and his mother occasionally hopped down to the ground and fed him.  We decided that if he was still there once the girls went to bed, we’d try one last time to get him back in the nest.  Around 7.30 we checked and he was still there, trying to fly and making a lot of noise.  I finally grabbed him as gently as I could and stuck his beak into the hole of the house, and he was in.  From what I can tell, they are all still there.  We think there are three or four of them and they look like they are within a few days of leaving the nest permanently.  That was my good deed for the weekend. 

I still felt like on Friday our karma or luck was way out of whack.  When the heating people showed up to assess our leaky, recalled gas furnace flue vent, they determined it wasn’t going to be covered by our homeowner’s warranty, even though the warranty company had assured it would be.  Three angry phone calls and one hour later, I had accepted the fact that we were going to be paying $1350 to get it fixed.  Later that evening I hopped on the internet trying to figure out who I could send a nasty note to (beside the Home Warranty company - I had already drafted that one).  Turns out the government is paying for part of the recall and all we’ll be responsible for is around $200-$230, which is the part that the original manufacturer used to pay.  They pulled out of the recall program in November, those irresponsible corporate poo-heads . . . They’ll be getting one of my letters, too.  I just think that if you manufacture a part that could potentially kill an entire family with carbon monoxide poisoning, you ought to make an effort to let the homeowners know it’s an issue.  We’ve lived in the house since ‘03 and never received anything about it.  Still, it made me very happy that our responsibility will be for a couple of hundred bucks as opposed to $1350. 

I took this as a sign to mean that our luck may be changing, and possibly nothing else in the next few weeks is going to blow up.  April and May has been a difficult month for many people I know.  I hope that things are going to mellow out a bit for all of us.  If not, then I hope I am able to deal better with whatever comes my way. 

Arden has entered a happy phase, right around the time that Lily has regressed back to the horrible, screaming, Exorcist-child style temper tantrums.  We had 3 or 4 of them yesterday.  One of them was so volatile and loud that she actually fell fast asleep when she was able to calm down. It drained her energy.  When she doesn’t get her way, she falls apart.  However, now when she falls apart, she won’t move, and she holds up her arms and screams at the top of her lungs, “Mommy, CARRY ME!”  This happened as we were leaving the playground at Wyndham yesterday.  A family walked by us and the mother looked at Mike and said, “Come on, just give in!”  She was totally kidding and we all started laughing.  I offered to give her Lily for a special free price, but she wasn’t interested and said she’d had enough of her own.  I ended up dragging Lily into the car kicking and screaming. The entire way home she screamed in this horrible, hoarse voice, “CARRY CARRY CARRY ME HOLD ME HOLD ME MOMMY MOMMY HOLD ME HOLD ME HOLDMEHOLDMEHOLDME”.  I looked back at her and said to Mike, “Satan’s spawn is in the backseat with us.”  We cracked up. What else can you do at that point?  My only hope is that it truly is a phase, it will pass, and we can really laugh about it then.  It’s just frustrating to feel like you are done with the regular tantrums and find them coming back with a vengeance.  In terms of parenting, Mike and I do a lot wrong, but one thing we do right is that we are consistent and firm, and we never give in when we say we are going to do something.  So how come this isn’t working better???  Why does she still fight us, even though she knows she will not, nor has she ever, gotten her way when we’ve laid down the law on any particular issue?

Mom of course has a million reasons why - she’s tired, she misses her grandparents, she realizes it’s Sunday and she doesn’t want to go to school, she’s read Nietzsche and realizes the futility of the human race, etc.  I finally said, “Mom, she’s 3 1/2.  Maybe that’s the reason.”  I’m tired of trying to figure out the whys of Lily. I just want to know how to fix it. 

Lily started back at Morgan Swim School today in her second year of swim lessons.  She was less afraid and only cried for a few minutes during the lesson.  They don’t allow you to be in the area during the lesson, but I could hear her from outside the door.  I must have PMS or something because during the lesson, I read some of the articles about the school and one of them made me cry.  Basically it was about a parent who’s 2 1/2 year old drowned, and how when she had her second and third child, she was determined to make swimming as important as potty training.  The woman who runs the school is tough as nails - her nickname is the “Swim Nazi”, she has 11 kids, and has home schooled all of them - but her approach works and Lily has done very well there.  She was already back in the water tonight, picking up where she left off.  By the end of the summer last year she was swimming a few feet at a time under water. Most importantly, if she were to fall into a pool, she could swim to the pool edge and pull herself out.  It was pretty amazing to see a 2 year old be able to save herself from drowning. 

I’ve been spending my evenings online at DirectBuy trying to research the items we need to purchase for the new house.  In my usual anal retentive form I have a humungous spreadsheet of everything we need to do and buy on it, as well as a word document with pictures of all the items I’ve picked out so that Mike can look through them and say no to the ones he doesn’t like.  My theory is that the half day we take off to spend at DirectBuy ordering the stuff will be much faster and more organized.  I’ll let you know if my theory works.

We had a mellow weekend which was nice after two weeks in a row of constant house showings and open houses.  We messed up the house, threw dirty laundry around, and brazenly allowed the girls to leave their toys around on the floor.  We’re wild, I’ll tell you.  We had a good time at the park on Saturday.  Arden isn’t into the swings but enjoyed learning to slide and attempting to follow Lily around.  Lily loved the tire swing until she forgot to hang on and went flying off it, landing on her side and scraping up her chin.  She cried for a few moments and got over it. She’s pretty tough.  Arden, on the other hand . . .

During “naptime” yesterday, Mike went up to Lily’s room to see if he could get her to sleep.  She asked him which Care Bear he’d like to cuddle with.  He told her the red one.  She smiled at him, tucked the purple one into the crook of his arm, and said, “Um, you can have DIS one.  I have the red one.”  He cracked up.  They spent the rest of naptime making the Care Bears hair into mohawks, slicks, and Einsteins.  I think Mike had a better time at the beauty parlor than even Lily. It was pretty cute.

We are convinced that Arden is going to be a dancer.  I’ll try to capture more of her insanity the next time she’s doing it.  She even dances now when Lily is screaming the ABC song at the top of her lungs.  It’s not melodic, but that doesn’t seem to bother Arden much. 

The morning started off with a temper tantrum on Lily’s part. I was home this afternoon waiting on some movers to give us a quote, and turned on Dr. Phil.  It was entirely disturbing, featuring this mother who went completely ballistic with her children. She was a stay at home mom and literally cussed her children out, beat them about the head, slapped and shoved them, and used a stick occasionally to beat them when they were really bad.  She was a screamer, too.  I resolved once again to try not to yell at the girls.  I’m not saying I’ve got rage problems like that woman, but Dr. Phil’s point was that all mothers could see a bit of themselves in her.  She’s just a very extreme example.  So I took a lot of deep breaths tonight when Lily mouthed off or threw her toothbrush at me and tried to be calm and very, very firm, instead of very, very loud. 

Lately Lily has been in such a hurry to get off the potty she is neglecting to wipe.  A number of times now she has discovered later that she is, uhhhh, not as fresh as she’d like to be, and informs me of such in very loud tones, usually while in front of a group of people.  On Tuesday before we sat down for Dora the Explorer LIVE Pirate Adventure, Lily stopped by the bathroom with her daddy.  This time, he was the lucky one to find that she had huge skidmarks from her earlier bathroom poop break.  He did the best he could with thin toilet paper and some sink water.  We keep reminding Lily not to forget to wipe, as well as telling her that if she needs help, we are always there for her.  I’d rather spend the next few months helping her wipe than experiencing moments like the one we had in Arby’s, where she told me her butt hurt, checked it out, and then held up her hand which was unfortunately covered in poo.  This, in the middle of a very crowded restaurant. I’ve never moved so fast in my life. 

Lily is just in a hurry for life.  She can’t be bothered with the little things when she has bigger fish to fry, like a night out at Dora or a jamocha shake to taste (Grampa’s).  She doesn’t let anything get in her way. In a strange way I admire her enthusiasm for life and the speed at which she flies during the day.  And honestly, it’s also very nice when she crashed at night - she goes from wide awake and chattering to passed out and snoring with only a few minutes in between.  We’d like her to slow down just a tad.  It would certainly help with the amount of laundry I do. 

We had a great time at Dora and Arden stayed home with Aunt Loie.  I think Aunt Loie got the good end of the deal, however.  When we arrived home, she was crashed on the chair and a half, fireplace blazing, with a big cozy blanket over her.  I was a bit jealous, having come from 20 minutes stuck in a VCU parking deck, a large crowd of 3-5 year olds and a lot of stinky popcorn being thrown everywhere.  Lily really enjoyed herself and did a lot of feet-stamping, flag-waving and clapping.  Dora’s cousin Diego looked like he was about 45 (I think he’s supposed to be around 10 in the show), Swiper was distinctly and flagrantly gay (I’m suprised his handkerchief over his eyes wasn’t rainbow-patterned instead of black - we kept expecting him to sashay over to the corner and scream “Out and Proud!”), and the Map, who on the show sounds like a crabby New Yorker, was in the live version very female, with a very squeaky, high-pitched, chipmunk sounding voice.  Mike made some very crass comments during the show into my ear which made me guffaw outloud and generally act poorly.  I guess if he’s still making me laugh after all this time, it’s a good thing. 

Apparently Arden walked today for Judy - repeatedly. She even stood up without pulling herself up on anything and walked across the room. However, by the time I got there, she was done with any form of walking. To be fair, one of Judy’s youngest daycare charges decided not to sleep at all today and kept the rest of the children awake by screaming at the top of his lungs all day. Arden had a brief cat nap this morning but had been awake non-stop since 10.30 am. By the time we got home, she wanted nothing to do with anything except her cart. I decided to be smart and move the cart out of her way, thinking that if I removed what I felt was her “crutch” she’d have to walk. Nope. I put it on top of the dining room table and she made grabby hand motions at it, clung to the table and cried pitifully until Mike got home and relented.

This brings to mind a funny story that Pauline told me - Lily’s first daycare provider. I said something about how sad it must be for parents when their kids roll over, crawl, say their first word or walk when they’re not with them. She smiled and said, “It never happens here.” I didn’t get it at first and said, “How can that be?” What she meant was that she never TOLD the parents if it happened, so they could pretend in their fantasy land that their children had all of their “firsts” in front of them, in the comfort of their own home. In a way, I appreciate Judy’s honesty - she’s a no BS kind of person. If Arden is crabby, she tells me. If she drove her nuts, she tells me. And if she took her first real steps in Judy’s playroom, she’s certainly going to tell me that, too.

But back to the cart. The push cart was good for Lily, who used it long enough to get her feet under her. I’m convinced that Arden’s become dependent on it and as long as it’s around, she’d rather use that than her legs.

I also realize that whenever I get obsessive about something with my kids (like Lily’s nail biting), it’s not until I let go of it that it happens. In a few months when Arden is roaming around I’ll wonder why it was such a big deal. I think it bothers me so much for a couple of reasons. The first is that selfishly, I’m really tired of carrying her everywhere. Other people in attempts to be helpful say “At least you aren’t chasing her around.” Yep, correct. However, at this point I’d rather chase than carry. The second is that although Lily and Arden haven’t ever been physically precocious, nor have they been behind. They are always just average (tribute to Risa: when people brag to her about how smart their kids are and go on and on about them, Risa tells them her own kids are average and boring - the gushers usually get the point and shut up). Regardless, average is good. I think I’m still paranoid because so many bad things have happened to friends and acquaintance’s children that every time there is a blip I think that this is evidence of some permanent medical issue. I know that this is ridiculous but at least I come clean with my paranoia and weird thoughts. There is a lot of insanity that appears to be inherent with motherhood. Paranoia and guilt seem to always be on the top ten list of things that have changed about me since dilating to 10 centimeters.

Anyway, I’ll keep you all posted on Arden’s progress assuming there is some. Tonight, however, we bypassed our usual attempts to get her to walk and put her straight to bed sans wild rumpus. She was angry but she needed to sleep more than anything else. She is far too young to not be sleeping all day!!!