Infomal Education

A couple weeks ago I was taking the kids to spend the day at what we call "the dinosaur museum," because for all it's other merits on geology, the history of earth, and Arizona's history and natural beauty, all we really care about are the dinosaurs. Especially the robot T-rex that opens and closes its mouth.
I'd never taken Sam before, and I'd been promising for weeks. Since I'm too cheap to pay another $10 bucks so Daniel could go with us (seriously, seems a little steep for people who I wasn't expecting to give a flying fig about 99% of the exhibits, but I digress), it was just me and the kiddos.
It was also a bit of a drive to a different town. On the way there, Sam said, "Hey, mom, maybe on the way back from the museum, we could swing by the aquarium and check that out." (FYI, the aquarium is in yet another city the other direction, but that's not the point).
I said that one major activity was enough for the day, and pointed out that it would be too expensive to go both places, because they both cost a bit of money. I can honestly say that fact that I find fish and sea life totally disgusting did not factor into the decision at all.
Sam sighed and said "Does the 'quarium cost 18 monies?"
Surprised, I answered, "Yes, I think that's exactly what it costs. How did you know that?"
Sam replied, "I know SOME stuff, mom. I know some stuff."

I guess she does, but I'm still mystified as to how.

A few days later in the grocery store Sam pointed at some of the sugary cereals we are trying to quit buying and wean off of.
"Hey mom, can we get this cereal? It is a good source of fiber AND whole grains!!!"
Again, with the crazy "knowlege" out of nowhere? I had an idea where she heard this slightly misleading info, however, but I asked how she knew that anyway.
Sam looked up at me and said "Well, I watch a lot of commercials."

That's just fabulous. Way to make me feel like super mom, Sam. Thanks. I really wish it didn't cost extra for the kids cable channels without commercials. Because, lets face it, I'm not going to take away all the TV, that's just crazy talk! I'd never shower alone again (even with the TV, odds are about 70% I'll get a visitor staring at the glass door asking for a snack or something). If I ask for privacy, but Sam considers it "really important" she's come barging in with her crochet blanket over her head, so I can have my privacy. When I ask her how she runs in like that without bumping into things, she says she can see through it. When I ask how I'm getting privacy if she can in fact see through it, she asks why I would want her to bump into things and looks as me like I'm the crazy person here. Then I sigh and vow to wake up at 5am before Daniel leaves to get a solo shower. The next day, I will not get up at five. It's a fun little game we play.

Anyway, it may not be what I think she's absorbing, and it may not be what I want her to be picking up, but yes, Sam is always learning. The only problem is, after she busts out random trivia knowledge like how much the local aquarium costs, it becomes even harder not to lose it when she says she "forgot" she was supposed to put her toys away after seventeen reminders. Or when she says she forgot that we discussed her bursting in with a blanket on her head is not actually "respecting mom's privacy" after all.

I know what her little brain is capable of, and so does she--making mom's brain explode.

Memory

Yesterday, Sam was waxing nostalgic about her summer in Utah during lunch.
"Hey, Mom. Do you remember when we were in Utah, and I ate that red snowcone and lots of junk food at the party, and then I came down in the night and threw up all over you in your bed?"

Uhhh, vividly. And some stops on Memory Lane needn't be revisited, Sam. Thanks, though.

Of course, during the same lunch she asked me why food turns into poop and then wanted to know how that process works, so unbelievably enough, I actually began wishing to go to back to talking about her Tiger's Blood snow cone vomit.
Sometimes, I have to either bust out laughing or let out a deep sigh from my toes when I look at my life. I usually choose the laughter, which is probably why Sam seems to have more rather than less of these moments as time goes on. She's working her audience.

Turnabout is Fair Play

Sam loves to get her brother's attention by screaming "PEYTON!!!" at the top of her lungs. It gets him to look or come over about 50% of the time, not that Sam is going to try to find a more efficient method any time soon.
Peyton has decided he's a little tired of it.
Last week, when Sam bellowed "PEYTON!!!" he bellowed right back:
"PEYTON!!"

It was the first time I've ever heard him say his own name. Now, if he'd yelled back at me like that, it would probably irritate me to no end, but in this case, I just couldn't stop laughing. Sam looked so confused.

Of course, Sam isn't the only victim of Peyton's mimicry.  I was standing at the bottom of the stairs trying to get Daniel to drop down some laundry for me, so I yelled "Daniel!"
Suddenly, Peyton appears next to me at the bottom of the stairs and yells "Dan-o!"
It looks like we have to be careful what we shout at our house, and maybe when I yell up the stairs, I should stick with "Daddy" instead of "Daniel" unless I'm okay with my husband and son being on a first name basis.

He is growing up so fast!

Early Intervention Therapy

While Sam is pretty good about cleaning up after herself, she prefers to do so accompanied by whining, and several attempts to quit long before the job is done. She ascribes to the kid philosophy that if there are 13 Barbies on the floor, and she picks up 2 of them, her room is magically "clean."  She also has so many "treasures" that have to be visible in her room at all times, that we finally had a long talk and purged the number of stuffed animals she can actually sleep with down to 10. Before the purge, she was pushing 40, and I was afraid she'd fall out of bed in a bid to make room for yet another stuffed Easter duck. For the record, I have absolutely no memory of 90% of these ducks entering our home. Where did they all come from? I blame the grandparents.
In other words, Sam, like virtually every other four-year-old in America, behaves like a hoarder.
I'm not at all concerned about this being lifetime behavior at this point (as a former collector of vast treasures, and messy room keeper myself), but at the same time, I figure it's never too early to explaining the hows and whys of keeping things clean to kids. Plus, my husband (possibly the only kid in history to travel through the preschool period without hoarding and messy tendencies) always appreciates a good word--cough, cough, sermon, cough--on the benefits of tidiness. I figure Sam is better off hearing it from me instead of her father, who gets all glassy eyed with religious fervor when he speaks about Windex and Clorox, and lets not forget Armor-All, the patron saint of proper car care.
It was with all these things in mind that I didn't turn the channel immediately when Sam wandered downstairs during an episode of one of those "Hoarders" shows. Full disclosure: I'm not sure which one it was, "Hoarders" or the other one exactly like it but not called that on TLC, so we'll just call it "Hoarders." I figured I'd wait to see if she noticed it or had any questions.  After a few minutes, I caught her watching and she started asking me about it.
So, we had a really good talk. We talked about why it's important to clean up our things, and how we don't want our house to be more comfy for bugs than people (because unfortunately it was a very infested episode). We talked about how we have to try to make sure not to love our things more than people in our homes, and that is really hard for some people. We talked about how Daddy and I want her to learn to clean up her own things, because someday she'll be big and grown up and we want her to know how to take care of her stuff long before she has her own house. We discussed what it would feel like to come home to a house full of bugs and stuff vs. coming home to a house that is clean and peaceful and full of people that love you. It was a good talk, and she had lots of questions.
She also hopped right to and has been cleaning things much better and without complaining lately! What a difference 15 minutes of a reality show can make! I was even thinking that I might be able to persuade her to prune her collection of egg cartons--each filled with exactly 12 "special rocks" from the yard--down to a more reasonable amount of space taken up in her closet. Like, maybe only 10 cartons. The possibilities were endless!
Then, today on the way to preschool as we wound through our old neighborhood, Sam looked out the window and asked thoughtfully,
"Mom, what do you think? How many of these people's houses are super nasty? Like if they moved, would there be tons of bugs?"
So for all the good we got out of the episode, Sam really is just looking around wondering how many people are secretly disgusting. Which, I've got to admit, is pretty much what I get out of "Hoarders" and those types of reality shows too--how many people in this world are more messed up than me?
All our new found love of a clean home comes with a side of smugness I guess.
Not that any of that is going to stop me from pulling out an episode of "Toddlers and Tiaras" if Sam ever accuses me of being a bad mom. Every time I do NOT spray tan my children or make them wear false teeth, I'm earning that smugness, darn it!

My son, the comedian

Today while changing Peyton's diaper, I got hosed down. It's probably only the fourth time in his life I've been sprayed (as opposed to Sam who managed to pee on me hundreds of times in her first few months of life alone), but oddly enough, it's the second time in the past two months.
As we get closer to potty training age, I get more convinced he's doing it on purpose, but I digress.
Anyway, things were going perfectly smoothly when he decided to turn on the hose.
I said, "Oh man, Peyton! It is not funny to pee on Mommy!"
Judging from his absolutely riotous laughter immediately after I finished speaking, he strongly disagreed with my assessment.

Apparently, peeing on mommy is the penultimate funniest thing he could possibly do, second only to opening the toilet lid and sneaking toys in there, so the next person that lifts the lid finds a bunch of surprises waiting for them. Thankfully, he usually laughs at himself so loud that I'm able to figure out pretty quickly from the echo that not only is he in the bathroom, but there's toys in the toilet.

Next on the shopping list, childproof locks for the door handles. If only we had knobs, instead of levers. He can't turn a knob to save his life. We could have bought a couple more weeks at least without Peyton-induced mayhem.

On a related note, I think the next Allstate mayhem commercial should be a 17-month-old boy. I don't know where I get inspiration like this, sometimes, the muse is just with me.

In A Nutshell

Things have gotten a little crazy over here, but I did have an experience this morning, that I feel perfectly encapsulates my parenting experience in a nutshell.

In the car, from the backseat, I hear a little noise, and then I hear Sam.
"Oh, excuse me, please!"
Me: "Okay, Sam, you're excused." In my head, I'm thinking how polite that was, and maybe the things I'm teaching are finally sinking in. These thoughts were interrupted by Sam again,
"Yeah, I said excuse me, because I did a wicked big fart, and it smelled really bad like poop over here."
There we go. Well, that was a little less polite. Thanks for the information, Sam. I also didn't know she could use the word "wicked" like a Bostonian. So much education in one small sentence, and all of it aimed at me.

Yep, that about sums it up.

Carly vs. the Smoke Detectors pt. 1

According to my handy new blogger interface, this will be my 200th post on this blog! Also, according to my new interface I am a slacker. No, it didn't say that exactly, but the fact that I had no idea blogger had totally changed it's look made that perfectly clear to me.
Sorry about that. I've been doing more Facebook updates with the crazy stuff Sam (and now Peyton!) say, which is easy, because it forces me to keep it short. Not something I'm good at.

Anyway, since this blog is called "It's My First Day!" and I'm still pulling stupid rookie stunts 200 posts later, it seems only appropriate to start sharing my most embarrassing "rookie" mistake to date, and of course, it starts on a major holiday.

This year on Christmas morning, we were having my mother-in-law over for breakfast and then rushing off to church. As a sidenote, I'm pretty sure Mormons are one of the only religions that celebrate Christmas, yet don't go to church on it--and in the event that Christmas falls on a Sunday, as it did this past year, we shorten our services. It's kind of funny if you think about it, but we are big on family, and spending as much time with them as possible on holidays. I like it that way, but I can see why other religions think it's weird.
But this post isn't about church on Christmas. This is about my crazy Christmas morning. First of all, since I was cooking a souffle my aunt has made ever year that I can remember and it seems morally repugnant NOT to have it, I had to get up extra early to put it in the oven. You have to put it together the night before and the next morning it cooks for 90 minutes. So I was up well before the kids on Christmas morning. If it wasn't for church, it would have been a brunch and I would have been make-up free and in PJs all morning, but instead, I got up super early, put in breakfast and was showered and ready before the kids even surfaced. Soon Sam bounced up, and while Peyton would have rather slept in, Sam was about to explode so we woke him up and the kids got to go see what wonderful things Santa had left behind.
As expected, getting Sam's presents out of the box was a colossal pain in the butt (why, oh why, oh WHY, do they have to sew doll's hair into the cardboard, and on a related whine, why does Rapunzel have to have so much hair!?) Anyway, the morning was going as expected. Daniel and I were using knives, scissors and various weapons trying to free the new toys from their packaging without swearing, and when we finally got things out, Peyton would rather play with the boxes we just worked so hard to dismantle. You know, pretty basic Christmas morning stuff. We let the kids goof off, we opened gifts, I got dressed in my church clothes. It was a good morning.
Finally, it was time to get the souffle out and put the cinnamon rolls in the oven. Which I did, although I noticed one drop of the souffle bubbled over and hit the bottom of the oven.
Generally, that is not really that big a deal. The one drop burns and it smells a little gross, but then it's all burned up and you and your appliances go about your life and eventually you buy some easy-off to clean the black spot on the bottom of the oven that you vaguely remember was dinner three weeks ago. Right?
Not on this Christmas morning.
The smoke detector went off.  I went to do what I had seen my visiting grandfather do every single time my grandmother cooked at our house growing up, and used a dishrag to wave the smoke away from the detector so it would calm down.
Not gonna happen. Apparently in new houses, all the smoke detectors are wired together, and within seconds all the detectors in the house were wailing like crazy. Sam kept freaking out about a fire, and Peyton didn't care for all the noise. I couldn't get the "smoke"--which we couldn't see or smell any of--away from the kitchen detector, and they would not stop. Plus, it was still really early, and I was really afraid of waking up any of our neighbors for whom sleeping in was their Christmas gift.
Finally, Daniel decided to try turning off the breaker to see if once they were quiet, they would stay off.
Which would have worked, in theory. Except that smoke detectors have back up batteries.
So not only did Daniel have to turn off the power to the house, he had to get a ladder, and one by one take the batteries out of the detectors. At this point, they would let out a sad little shriek and finally die. Turns out, we have a lot of smoke detectors.
It also turns out that when you turn off the power to the house a couple of things happen--1) It goes dark, 2) all the electric clocks die, and 3) the oven (containing your Christmas cinnamon rolls, remember?) dies too.
It was obvious we couldn't turn off the power and keep it that way. Hoping that stopping the noise, and not being able to see or smell any smoke would be enough to keep the smoke alarms from starting up again, we turned the breaker back on.
We made it about 5 more minutes--just enough time to reset all my clocks FYI--before the horrific chorus started up again.  We figured that even though it was a minuscule drop that had burned, and there was no evidence at all of there being smoke in the house, our detectors must be really sensitive. I had opened the oven to check on the very confused cinnamon rolls to see if they were salvageable right before they started up again, so there must still be smoke somewhere!
We did what anyone needing to air out their house in a hurry would do. We turned off the breaker again to get rid of the noise, and then we opened our windows.
Soon, we were all freezing. We tried to turn the breaker back on three more times, only to have the chorus of alarms start up again. Our house was so cold, not only was the heat off because of the lack of electricity, but all the windows were wide open.  The whole family was bundled up, but that couldn't last. My mother in law gets cold easily, and in general I don't really consider it good Christmas hospitality to not only freeze your guests out, but serve them mostly raw cinnamon rolls while they listen to loud sirens wailing throughout their meal. Call me old-fashioned.
I was totally panicked. I had reached the point where I could no longer do a single thing to get ready for breakfast without electricity. I'd even had to go into our food storage to get water bottles because, guess what? The ice maker and water dispenser in the fridge requires electricity.
At this point, a random thought entered my head that I would not enjoy being Amish. Then again, I wouldn't have had the smoke detector issue in the first place since technically, it was technology that had caused this whole mess. I spent the next few minutes internally debating whether being Amish would have made this whole event worse or better. I didn't come up with an answer, but I think my thoughtful staring freaked Daniel out a little.

We couldn't think of who to call for help, it being Christmas morning and all. There wasn't an actual fire, obviously, so it seemed like a jerk move to all the fire department on Christmas morning. Calling any of our friends away from their families seemed equally bad. Google was little help in the few minutes we could try using it between breaker shutdowns. We were stuck. We were worried that even if we could stop them, we would leave for church and they would start up again, making our neighbors angry. It was hard not to laugh, the whole thing was so ridiculous.

Finally, minutes before Daniel's mom was supposed to arrive, we tried one more time to turn on the breaker and heard blessed silence. We cautiously went about our preparations, turned up the heat and found some slippers and jackets to offer our guest. No more alarms sounded.

We got through breakfast okay (despite cinnamon rolls that were burned on the bottom and slightly raw on top), and while I was tensely waiting for the sirens to start again, they didn't.
Daniel stayed home with a runny-nosed Peyton to stand guard over the house, and Sam and I went to church, but they remained quiet.

Finally, we figured that we must never so much as overcook toast again, but at least the Smoke Detector Saga of Christmas 2011 seemed to be over.

I had no way of knowing it was just beginning.