carl in casimirland.

Caz, Carl and I were standing in line at the library when someone commented on Carl's adorableness and Casimir responded by hitting Carl in the face. While I was dealing with that, she took care to inform me that, just wait, it gets even harder when they're teenagers. Just wait. I hadn't heard anything like that before, but two more complete strangers told me the exact same thing in the next 24 hours. Thanks universe. I got the message already. I'll try to appreciate how easy this really is right now.

Casimir went off to his Yia-Yias for a sleepover again today so mommy doesn't go crazy. All I have to do is say to him before bed, "Tomorrow Daddy is going to take you for an overnight at Yia-Yias!" And the next morning, he wakes up and says, "Ready. Go. Yia-Yias!" before he even spits out his paci. He wasn't going until late afternoon, but all day long he was ready.go.Yia-Yias. I thought we did neat things, but I guess he can't wait to get the heck out? Suddenly sharing the limelight with someone who cries so much (that would be Carl, though I do more now, too) has got to be tough. I tell him to "pack" so that I can take a shower and Carl can recline in the bouncy without getting hit, and then I find Casimir's entire wardrobe and car collection piled in the front hall by the door. It's cute, but also about as subtle as just shouting, "I am So Out Of Here. SAYONARA."

My mom has always told me about her youthful stays at her grandparents at the exciting funeral home they ran in St. Paul. She says they're some of her fondest memories, but only now at age 67, while babysitting for me, did she finally realize that she was probably sent off to the funeral home so often not just for her own enjoyment but so her own dear mother didn't go crazy when she had a new little baby. The cycle of life.

I don't know how I wasted time before the Internet, but I must have somehow. Anyway, I think I became the last American with a computer to hop on ebay, and boy, was I giddy with bargainy delight in minutes. It's not like I really need another site to surf or addiction to foster or place to throw money, but oh the bargains. I found the $70 shoes I bought last spring selling brand spanking new for $10, apparently by some charity designer shoe god working through ebay. Unfortunately my feet expanded to a size 15 practically after pregnancy, so I couldn't have bought them there anyway. But I found brand new $80 shoes for Casimir for two!dollars! and I've been just glowing with my fiscal acumen and bragging to anyone who will listen about my big find. Not that I would normally buy Casimir European sneakers for $80, but won't we be flying high now?

I remember one day in high school, lounging at my friend's older sister's house one afternoon and watching her fish new item after item out of a Marshall's bag. I'm just such a bargain hunter! Look at this! Look what this cost! Are you a bargain hunter, too? she asked. Uh, why? I just made my parents pay full price. I was such a snotty ass teenager. And now, here I am, and I get natural highs from a good deal. Because, two dollars! And now I can't stop checking out ebay.

The Wiggles are coming to Peoria and Paul was talking about taking that two hour drive so we can go again. It sounded like a swell idea until we remembered that that road trip would actually include our kids. Sometimes it's hard to think straight. But they put on such a fabulous show in Chicago. I knew when we pulled our Nissan sentra into the parking lot of minivans and SUVS and saw all that heightened security that we'd be in for a good time. I'd like to go again. And next time I'll remember my "Mommy loves Greg" sign, so they can single it out with all the tots' other signs.

Everyone around here poops at the same time, but rarely sleeps at the same time. Cheeky devils.

I used to be such a reticent, reflective soul, and now it seems that once I start talking to someone over two, I can't stop. Oh, you asked a question about the kids sharing a room in our house? Let me answer, and then segue into how the size compares to our last apartment, and then perhaps mention what we were looking for in house shopping, and what the house we almost bought had to offer, size-wise, and then let's discuss housing in general and move on from there and just keep going! Shut up!

I'm puzzled by so many things today. There's the mystery of why so many famous women choose to unnecessarily undergo major abdominal surgery to give birth instead of labor because they think labor might be "too painful," and they're just not good with pain. I guess having your body opened up doesn't hurt at all? There's the mystery of why there aren't dead bodies strewn about the street in Evanston, because every time I'm a pedestrian there I cross at the light and look both ways and nearly get run over, and every time I'm in the car driving carefully there, I'm forced to slow at green lights by pedestrians sauntering across the street without a glance in any direction for big metal moving things. How do those people not meet fenders? And there's just the blatant weirdness of parenting and going from mental anarchy by 8am where everyone is crying and I'm wondering how the hell I'm going to make it til bedtime, to sweetness and light and all Mary Cassat-calm by noon.

I read the "news" on my internet home page today so that I don't have to read People Magazine's headlines in the grocery checkout (Costco doesn't have them anyway) , and got to read about Britney Spears' new perfume, which she describes as "completely magical," a blend of "enchanting scents and flavors" and with "a hint of cupcakes." That is so excellent. I would actually love to smell like enchanting cupcakes, if they could bottle it. I used to want to work for make up companies and have the job of naming the make up, so I could sit around all day and come up with things like "slutty red" or "plumacious" or "fluffmuffin pink. " Then I decided it'd be better to write copy for wine or coffee distributors, and go on about "full-bodied" beverages and "boldness" and crisp flavors emblematic of a naked romp in the French countryside or a Kenyan forest. But I think this would be even better, to write for perfume companies. Is that a real job? Of course it is. Some idiot is doing it somewhere, and I want in. And what will my perfume be, when I'm famous? Would it be"magical" and "daring," reminiscent of a drunken helmutless motorcycle ride through the night? Or would it be "adventurous," with a bit of "gypsy," a dash of "mystery," and a "hint of pound cake." Either way, everyone would love it.

I have this one nondigital, stone aged camera that has been sitting in my drawer unused ever since we got with the program and bought a fast, instant! and brilliant digital camera after Casimir was born. I think I took a picture once every 14 months or so with this old camera, but it kept jamming or freezing, so I finally gave up and deposited it in a drawer with the film unfinished. I decided to finally finish it up, ten years later, with fotos of my second child. And I still couldn't get through to the end of it, and ended up taking like five pictures of an unsmiling Carl in my lap and then a couple of the wall in irritation when it started jamming again, and then that was it. It was done. I got it back and that's when I realized that this film actually stretches back to when Paul and I were first dating in 1996, and offers up a lame little occasional snapshot along the time line of our lives together. There's a picture of Paul looking like Harry Potter, sitting on a tree stump on some walk we took, still wearing his giant glasses, mop of short hair and looking (at 25) not a day past 13. Then there's some random ones, some of Casimir as a newborn, and now some bad ones of Carl. I think I'm going to stick another roll in there and aim to finish it before my 40th birthday.

I know this is really an unimportant thing to whine about, but I wish I could watch or listen to the Katrina coverage without being exposed to dreadful analogies. You know the openers that go along the lines of: The city has become a deadly gumbo, filled with toxins and waste; or The putrid water simmers like a toxic soup. It's a flood. I know they have wonderful food there, spiced richly with the culture and spirit of New Orleans, but we could do without the bad food-referencing journalism just this once. How you can connect a flooded, ravaged city with gumbo is beyond me.

I am having issues with boys and roughhousing lately. I'm discovering that many young boys and older toddlers, if they are boys, are given an enormous amount of roughhousing leeway, and can even be referred to as "good" as they chokehold each other on the lawn at cheery family parties and whip light sabers around, shouting "Show me what you got!" I don't know. I don't want to be the mom who forces her child to read a library book in the corner, and Casimir is active and loves to run around and play chase. But I've spent half my time in the last two years saying the words "gentle!" and explaining in simple terms the perils of hitting or pushing. And then he plays with slightly older boys who go all bananas and everyone is totally down with that. Trying to explain a lot of glaring inconsistencies when he's only two is kind of tough. Do I say, "We don't push! Pushing isn't nice and can hurt! Unless of course he's bigger and older and pretending it's fun. Then OK. Push him hard then." Right.

You don't say.
Casimir is talking in complete sentences these days, with predicates and conjunctions and everything, and throwing right back at me all the words and phrases I commonly use. It's so exciting the way his speaking gets more advanced with each new day, but I know I'm going to miss some of the early toddlerisms. I was a little sad when he started saying "diaper" instead of "dipey." Sometimes we even preserve his early words, out of respect for his native language. We've passed on the evil pacifier habit to poor little Carl, but we call it a "biddy," because that's what Casimir called it before he could pronounce paci. We sometimes call the computer the Coopoo, which is one of the last Casimirisms to go, and I'm not ready to stop hearing it yet. It's a much cuter word than "computer," and than what I usually call it, which is either "the confuser" or "that fucking computer."

Heck!
And I dropped a tupperware tub of leftover orzo the other day, face down, and said Omigoodness! I knew I arrived when that happened. Before long, I was Omigoodnessing all over the house, as was Caz. And I probably wasn't goodnessing in bad situations any more than I had previously been crapping or gawding or fucking, but the number of exclamations just became exposed because of their sudden purity. I was so proud. So reformed. So wholesome. And then Casimir dropped something this morning and said, "Goddamnit." He's only said it once or twice before, so I was a little surpised. One step forward, two steps back. I still think hearing a few swear words will not be as psychologically harmful as all that spanking our parents' generation did, but I still aim high. Unfortunately though, I think it's going to take a lot more goodness to unteach a couple bad words. shit.

I've been vegging out on CNN lately, particularly on the days that I don't get out much, to remind myself that there is a world beyond the diaper changing table. The only downside was that, aside from having to put up with newscasters repeated use of the lean-forward-and-nod-head-hard-every-five-syllables method in large doses, I of course went to bed with thoughts of missing persons and bad political situations. And that was before the hurricane. Postpartum flakiness makes me particularly prone to worry and waves of teary empathy, but now I can't even turn on the TV. Everyone is deserving of sympathy, but when I'm watching with a baby sleeping in my lap, it's not hard to imagine how additionally horrible that would be with a baby in your lap to care for in addition to yourself and any others. I think: I can't imagine waiting in traffic for hours to evacuate, and then I can't imagine waiting in traffic four hours WITH KIDS. I can't imagine waiting hours to get into some stupid superdome with no air-conditioning or bed or assurance of safety for days. And then I think, I can't imagine waiting it out in some darkened, hot superdome WITH KIDS. Then contemplate each scenario, with kids, and it just makes it even more heartbreaking. Thanks, motherhood.