As a kid, I was always amazed by those escape artist type magicians. I couldn’t believe they could get all the stuff off, while underwater, while a hungry hungry hippo was coming towards them. (Hippos… one of the deadliest animals on earth. No seriously. This factoid brought to you by the letter P, and the number 1.)

I am no longer enamored by escape artists. Their twisty ways, their ability to shuck off chains, their double jointedness. Not cool at all.

The reason is this:

Recently the J-man started wearing 2 piece pajamas to bed, because we couldn’t in good conscience stuff him into the sleepers anymore. You will remember the Hulk. Now though, he has learned that it is VERY easy to take those pajamas off, especially the bottom part. From there, it’s a quick journey to taking off the diaper/pull-up, and throwing both onto the floor. This usually ends (heh, ends) badly - Mama and Daddy have to wash all the sheets, the pajamas, and the J-man because of the gallon of urine all over everything.

Yesterday after non-nap we had to change the sheets. This morning, J-man had managed to take off the pajamas sometime between the last time I checked on him last night, and before he woke this morning… so the pull-up and pajama pants were still completely dry, while the pajama top, sheets, last vestige of the bumper pad, mattress? soaked. I had two sets of sheets (we do sheet/mattress cover/sheet, although that will change since he can soak through all 3 at this point), a blanket that had been almost under the crib, but not enough that it was missed when he peed off the side, and pajamas. I washed them all, washed down the mattress and re-made the bed. I also gave the J-man a bath (completely confused him) which he was not happy about - so he peed on the floor of the bathroom while I was running the water!

When naptime came, I remembered those blanket sleepers we had - they are slightly bigger than the old lightweight sleepers, so we put him in one of those. Ha! Let’s see what you do now!

Here’s what he did: he somehow managed to un-tape the diaper on one side, then slide it completely down the other leg and wedge it into the foot of the sleeper. He did actually nap. He woke up in a puddle, with a soaking wet sleeper (except of course for the footie part where the dry diaper was!). David Copperfield has nothing on my kid.

2 sheet changes in one day is too many. Tonight, he’s stuffed into one of the old sleepers. We’ll see if it works.

Some days start horribly and show no sign of improving. The day easily could prove to be a total write-off. Being one beat off the normal daily rhythm can send your kid into meltdown. Some days, your only real goal is to make sure everyone is alive when the day ends and that any damage to property isn’t permanent. The only way to salvage anything positive might be to find even the dumbest thing in your day that didn’t go wrong.

Here are five things you can do to ensure that your day has at least something like that in it. The sad thing is that each of these has actually happened to us. Like they say, rules exist because someone broke them - like the fact that you can’t mail yourself through the US Postal Service.

1. Look down and make sure you are wearing something more over your behind than just underwear before you walk out to your mailbox. This is particularly positive if your mailbox is at the end of a driveway and you have a lot of neighbors.
2. Speaking of underwear, when you pick up your clean undies from the laundry basket of clothes you didn’t put away, before you try putting a pair on, make sure the cat (or other animal in your house) hasn’t peed on them.
3. Find some way to covertly figure out whether your child is still clothed before the laughing in your child’s room in the morning that may indicate that he stripped down and decided to stand up butt naked and pee all over the wall begins. Bonus points - If you install said device (say a video monitor), try not to aim the camera such that you might see something you’d really rather not, particularly at 6:30AM when you aren’t sure whether you woke up in the right house.
4. Assuming your kid stayed clothed, if you go to pick them up in the morning or after a nap and they are wet, verify the nature of the wetness before proceeding. Remember, it is difficult to see colors in low light, and this is very valuable data to have.
5. Don’t put the diaper cream you keep in the bathroom on your toothbrush. As a safety fallback, verify the nature of the substance on your toothbrush before putting it in your mouth.

Yeah, it’s a reach. But some days setting the bar incredibly low can help you feel like you accomplished something.

And you gotta admit that diaper cream doesn’t foam well on a toothbrush and putting on clean, dry underwear is better than the alternative.

Well, gotta go. My kid is laughing in his bedroom…

Because the J-man has recently gone to wearing 2-piece pajamas (I’m telling you, we tried to keep him in sleepers for as long as possible!), we have had some issues.

Some of it is good: the J-man is learning more about self-care. He is very good at putting his arms through shirt sleeves, and working hard at stepping into shorts. He definitely knows that his socks go on his feet, but will just lay them over a foot because he can’t figure out how to open the top.

Also good: J-man is learning to help take his shorts off. He can already rip his socks off - mostly through effort because he likes to be barefoot whenever possible. He doesn’t like taking his shirt off though, and will fight that.

However… Saturday morning when Tim got up with J-man, Tim walked into the nursery, and the J-man was there with a shirt on. No pants. No overnight pull-up. Lots of pee (crib, sheets, remaining part of the bumper pad). Saturday night, when I put the J-man down, he stayed awake for a while. I joked to Tim that I should check on J-man to make sure he was still wearing clothes. I JOKED! And then I walked in. Little man lying there sound asleep… wearing a soaked shirt, with soaked sheets, and the pants and pull-up on the floor. Bare ass shining brightly. Picking up a wet, sound asleep toddler, trying to get him clean and into new pajamas, stripping the bed and putting on clean sheets, all while trying not to wake him? Awesome.

Well, probably not… Though I could probably poll some former college friends and they might provide some corroborating evidence for this.

J-Man literally put the ‘gross’ in ‘gross motor skills’ tonight. After hurling up his entire dinner intake and probably parts of previous meals, he proceeded to walk up the dozen steps to our upstairs all by himself for the first time, holding on to the bannister and nothing else, and much of it with just one hand. Go him! Stairs have really been hard for him to deal with.

He also struggles with stepping into clothes, and stepping into his big boy diapers (pull-up types) after his bath is very difficult. He could knock over a two-ton grizzly bear with one hand but standing and holding up his foot a fraction without holding on to something for support is very hard for him. But he managed his best ever at it tonight - I guess with some nebulous benefit from blowing chunks. I suppose lightening the load a little helped his coordination.

So he’ll either wake up starving at about 3AM or spew off the side of his bed tonight just our luck, but maybe not. Who knows what brought this on. Sometimes it happens.

To provide some symmetry to the whole thing, one of the cats coughed up a fur ball on the blanket on our bed. There is no indication it improved the gross motor skills of whichever one did it as they are both conked out in their respective sleeping spots at the moment.

Well, sometimes eventful is a good thing.

On a better note, we’ve just about finished the home classroom and figuring out what kind of home therapy program we’re going to do in complement to his school and regular therapies. That’ll require either many posts or separate pages, but I’m working on it. So better programming with less gastrointestinal content is coming soon!

So, here I was today at the Yes, We Can! preschool (yeah, not really its name, but that’s a good name for it anyway). I was talking to a couple of the other moms and one of them pulls down the waistband of her two-year-old daughter’s shorts a fraction.

“Look!” says Mom1.

“Oooohhhhh!” says Mom2.

WTH? thinks Dad1 (um, me).

Um, oh! I get it now! thinks Me some indeterminate number of seconds later.

“Oh! How about that!” says Me out loud with some combination of genuine and feigned interest, the exact ratio of which I’ll leave up to the philosophers.

We proceeded to have an intelligent conversation about Dora underwear and potty-training achievements.

I’m not making this up.

Excuse me while I run to the store to buy something with camo on it. I think there’s a 24-hour Army Surplus down the road somewhere.

Dear Son,

How is it possible that you are our child? Just because you look JUST like me, except you have Daddy’s build (and bits), I still think maybe something happened at the hospital (even though one of us was with you the entire time, plus you had the baby lo-jack) and they gave us the wrong baby.

Why would I think that? You don’t nap. Mama and Daddy would kill for a nap most days, while you are quite willing to go weeks without napping. At this point I believe it’s been over 2 weeks since you napped. You just play in your crib, singing along to yourself and, as previously noted, chewing on whatever you can find. If Mama weren’t working, she would absolutely be able to nap while you were playing safely in your crib, but Daddy can’t. (Let’s face it, Mama is a champion at sleeping.)

Noggin is running a theme that talks about how much better the adult world would be if it ran like preschool. There would be naptime!

Anyway, please sleep so you aren’t cranky by 6:00 pm.

Love,
Mama

Dear Son,

Yesterday we learned that putting you down to nap (HA!) without a shirt is a bad idea. We already knew that having you wear a shirt only results in you chewing it to the sopping wet point, and then being unable to sleep because your shirt is, well, sopping wet. Yesterday though, we learned that you were able to do something that we thought was impossible for everyone* to do - you tried to nurse from your own chest. The way we knew you had tried this? and tried HARD to do this?

You gave yourself a hickey on your chest.

While the point of hickies given by someone else has always escaped me (hi, you’re bruising me. Can you stop now?), I never would have thought anyone would do that to himself. It doesn’t seem to hurt you, and as long as CPS doesn’t come calling, nobody but us and the one other person who reads this blog will have to know… but seriously? Stop doing that!

Love,
Mama

*yes, yes, I know. I could probably do this. However, since I can also nurse around corners at this point, I truly don’t think I’m the norm.

Ed. I don’t know what the First and Second Kinds of pillow fights actually are, but I bet they’re not as good as the Third.

In a sign of just how exhausted I am, the night before last, I woke up in the middle of the night with a survival-life-or-death kind of instinct that I REALLY needed to yank the pillow out from under Mary’s head and put it back again very quickly - think yanking a tablecloth out from under a bunch of dishes.

I have no earthly idea why I felt like I had to do this or what literally dreamed-up reason was behind it. Apparently, according to Mary, I did it with speed and agility not normally seen in someone who is 99.99% in deep REM sleep.

Mary - whose what-the-hell reflex augmented the sharpness of her memory about this whole episode - says I yanked the pillow out and put it back so fast that her head didn’t have time to fall back down again before I’d stuffed it back under her. I couldn’t do this awake if I tried.

The scary thing is, I actually remember doing it, and then trying to explain to Mary what in the hell I was thinking. I’m sure I made up an eloquent and well-reasoned argument for it, but the obvious truth is, I have no freakin’ idea.

Other than I’m so tired right now that I can doze off while walking.

Today was one of the few days per month (yes, I said MONTH, people… er… person) that I have to go in to the office. It means I have to wear pants (instead of jeans, you weird people who think I work withou… oh, right) and I tend to try to look nicer by straightening out my hair and wearing make-up.

So I had to get up at the ass-crack of dawn instead of just the plumber’s crack that all women who wear low-rise jeans get whenever they sit down. That was harsh.

The rest of the day though? It was lovely.

My team and I all collaborated on several issues, and it was nice to be able to work with people who don’t feel the need to constantly one-up whatever it is that you are saying/doing. We also documented some highs/lows from the past two weeks, which is why I’m throwing around words like “collaborated” and “documented.”

We were all in funny moods today. The best was when we went to lunch together at a Mexican restaurant and M, my coworker, was talking about getting a combo. He then mentioned that he really liked that song. We were all, “What song?” M: “You remember… Combo Number 5.” He was serious.

For the rest of the day, my coworker R couldn’t look at him because if she did, she would start laughing, and then the rest of us would start laughing… and then eventually someone would snort, and that would make us start laughing again.

Also nice? Having toast with butter and honey for dinner.

It was a lovely day.

When the going gets tough, just remind yourself how freakin’ cute your kid is!

J-Man’s Easter Report:

The Easter Bunny doesn’t bring candy because, well, I won’t eat it. I only eat snacks that are in the tortilla chip food group. I loved my book. I was pretty whatev about the Little People boat and extra pirates. The plastic eggs looked pretty while flying off the couch.

Daddy looked sad. He said he asked the Easter Bunny for a Little People Noah’s Ark with the extra Pirate Pack instead.

Arrrrrrrrr!!! We’re being attacked by a freakin’ giant monkey!

Just so you know, if the vomit has big enough chunks of chicken nuggets, you should consider removing those chunks from the clothing/towels BEFORE you launder them. Otherwise you may end up picking freshly washed and rinsed chunks of chicken nugget vomit out of your washer, then feeling the need to bleach both the machine and your hands.

Also, it is a good idea to remember that you actually laundered those clothes/towels on Monday, and not leave them in the washing machine until Thursday. Otherwise you may end up picking not-freshly washed and rinsed chunks of chicken nugget vomit out of your washer, then feeling the need to bleach both the machine and your hands, and then having to re-launder those clothes anyway.

And, seriously son? Jeopardy, while the best game show ever invented (including Match Game, where they were always drunk or high), is just not on every minute of every day, and when you pick up the remote control and hand it to me, sometimes I can’t find it for you. We already DVR Signing Time and The Wonder Pets for you, and every “when nature revolts” show for Daddy. Can I please keep my 2 movies that I still haven’t had time to watch on the DVR, and not have them deleted for lack of space? Kthxbye.

Our occasional walk through the pictorial history of our pride and joy.

In other words, “show me some dang baby pictures!”

[From a couple of years ago]

Thank ya, thank ya very much.

There is no spoon…

Honestly, if we could figure out a way to use human gas as an energy source, the Flashlight household would never have to pay for electricity or auto fuel again. The J-man excels at passing gas – both loudly, and the silent-but-deadly (SBD) kind. His favorite time to use the SBD weapon is when I’m rocking him and he’s nursing before bed. He turns on his belly and turns his head to nurse, hunches up his little behind… and then it hits me. There have been times that I gagged. For a child who eats next to nothing some days, he can sure be a little stinker! Then, he laughs!

Today’s word was a variation on a previous word of the day: GaGoMaMo – which for those of you who don’t speak J-man-ese, equals, More Go Mama. I heard it a LOT when J-man was out on the swing for an hour this afternoon.

The cough and congestion seemed much worse this morning, but then seemed better this afternoon. He’s still eating very little, and not wanting to eat nuggets at all, so I’m wondering if his throat is hurting. Again, now would be one of those times when you desperately want your child to speak!

As a personal aside, I went into work last week to help out my old team. Annoying Coworker was there, and for some reason feels the need to ask me if I really disliked him when we worked together. He asked me this when we were still working together as well. The answer hadn’t changed… He truly seemed shocked when I told him that I thought he was annoying, and that he seemed to spend a lot of time trying to get under my skin. There was a time when I would have tried to “help him” understand what he had done, but you know, he’s 35 years old. If he hasn’t gotten by now that most women hate sexual innuendo and being told they don’t actually understand what feminism is all about while trying to work on a team of 95% men, he’s not going to get it. So, no, I didn’t like you then, and I don’t like you now. This isn’t going to change!

J-Man has always been a music lover. For a long time, it was the only thing that would help him calm down and relax when he was upset or couldn’t sleep. Singing still helps with certain things, like attempts at teeth brushing, but songs or anything lyrical (like Seuss books) also help engage him into paying attention and doing a little talking.

We have a ridiculous number of music channels on our digital cable. One of them was playing James Brown’s “Living in America”. I would imitate (badly) James Brown’s trademark “ow!” and Little Man started saying “ah-ow” after me. We had a blast! Then came some serious father-son bonding.

The next song was “Brickhouse”. I would sing “Brick! duh, duh, duh, duh… house!” and he would say “ow!”

Mary was in the kitchen rolling her eyes. I was in the floor howling. J-Man thought the whole thing was hysterical. Now all I have to do is say “brick” and he busts out laughing.

There are days you’ll do whatever it takes to get your kid to talk. Might as well have some fun doing it.

Ow!

I found the Amalah blog and laughed till I almost cried. Her son is in Early Intervention too with speech delays, sensory issues, and the like. It really helps to know other people are out there struggling through this. I so needed a good laugh after this past week.

A bucket of Advil hasn’t put a dent in the tent-stake-through-my-eyeballs headache I’ve had lately. Some laughter seemed to help, though. Thanks!