Everybody loves Goldfish (Especially Kathleen)

Recently, we have been having... struggles... with getting to Kathleen to bed. She goes happily enough but getting her to stay in her bed without getting out again and pushing bins over to her sister's crib or pushing her own bed around or rummaging through her drawers or drawing (with black pen) on the walls and window sills or screaming or talking at the door or asking 20 times to go to the bathroom is a problem.

First we tried taking her blanket away, but that raised such terrible howls that it was being counter-productive (it was waking Sophia up, and she was the whole reason Kathleen was supposed to stay in bed). Then we tried sending her to time-out in the basement. That worked for awhile, but then the fear wore off. Yelling didn't work, and neither did threats. The two hours following Kathleen's bedtime were beginning to become my most dreaded, instead of looked-for, two hours of the day.

And then I remembered a story that my mother had told me. There was a particular Primary class in her ward that had absolutely horrendous behavior. They wouldn't sit. They wouldn't listen. They wouldn't be quiet. They chased every teacher off that thought about taking them to task. Until a new teacher came to town, a devious teacher that knew the psyche of 8 year-old children. He brought an egg crate into class and labeled each cup with a class member's name. He filled each cup with an equal number of jelly beans. And then when a child would act up in class, he would simply look at that child, and begin eating their jelly beans. My mother commented that nobody had ever seen such an obedient Primary class after this teacher took them to task.

I am an ardent admirer of deviousness, especially when used on small children, because they can always resist brute force. So a few nights ago Kathleen got a cup filled with goldfish. The goldfish, we told her, would be all hers in the morning provided that we didn't have to come into her room and tell her to go to sleep. However, every time we came in, we'd eat a goldfish. After two goldfish consumed by me, Kathleen has come to realize that we aren't kidding.

And so silence reigns supreme again at bedtime and I am happy.

Oh Boy!

After almost three years of motherhood I have started to get the hang of child rearing; I can give false choices (would you like to eat your dinner or go to bed?), I can bathe two at once, I can even clean poop off diapers.

So when I became pregnant with the third, I figured that we'd just add one more to the equation (plus a little household help) and life would continue on.  Then I got an ultrasound while visiting my parents.

At least I'll have household help to clean up the inevitable disasters.

Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

This last weekend, my entire family gathered down in North Carolina for my youngest brother's high school graduation.  Nine years ago at my own graduation, I did not have the same feelings about my family as I do now - I think that immediately following graduation I took off and did something with friends.  Who wants to hang out with family anyway?

Now, however, with time and hopefully added wisdom (and also a precipitous drop in the number of friends nearby) I have come to not only appreciate but really enjoy spending time with my family.  I enjoy it enough that I will pack up my two children with all of their stuff all by myself so as to be ready the minute Brandon gets out of work so we can spend six hours driving down to see my family for two days before turning around and driving another 5 1/2 hours back up to Arlington to spend Monday recovering and nursing a sick child (somebody always gets sick on trips).

When I was a child I couldn't understand why we would go through such rigamarole and drive the incredibly impossible time of five whole hours just to see family for a few days.  But now I  understand.

Everyone had a wonderful time, and Kathleen adored her uncles Sam and Mike, and she used her last half hour of freedom to convince Mike to swing her in the swings one last time.  She and cousin Nathan had so much fun hugging that they almost fell off a bridge into my parents' fish pond.  Sophia enjoyed having a whole new house with staircases to explore.  And I enjoyed spending time with my siblings, their spouses and children and my parents without any fights.  For the entire weekend.

The Lies We Tell

As a child, I suspect that my parents entertained themselves greatly by telling me all kinds of whoppers.  Great disappointment came one day when I looked in the mirror and discovered that my eyes did not change color when I blinked as my parents had always lauded me for.

Today, Kathleen, Sophia, and I went down to the nurse's office at FSI to get 'poked,' as Kathleen terms it.  Sophia took things fairly well, finding solace in her thumb and blanket.  Kathleen, who had been talking all week about the Swedish Fish she would get as a reward for bravery, did not as evidenced by her screams and attempts to kick the nurse.

This evening, as I was putting Kathleen down to bed, a health exam nurse (for life insurance - yes we really are becoming adults) came to our house.  Not being up to her usual bedtime antics, I told Kathleen that if the nurse heard her, Kathleen would get poked again.  I haven't heard even a rustle.

Unexpected Expenses

As Brandon is a member of the Foreign Service, our lifestyle varies somewhat from the typical middle-class American.  A lot of aspects in fact are very desirable - we don't pay rent or most utilities, we get paid plane tickets back to the states to visit family, when I come back to deliver #3 I'll get a stipend to pay for food, our moving expenses are always paid for, we live in foreign countries that have inexpensive hired help (thank heaven!!), we live in countries that have a favorable exchange rate (for Americans),and we don't have a mortgage or car payments.  One our acquaintances in Cairo termed this lifestyle "sacking cash."

A few days ago, however, I stumbled on a particular downside to the move-around-the-world-on-the-goverment's-dime lifestyle - luggage.  When I graduated from high school, my parents gave me a set of two American Tourister suitcases.  I used those suitcases a lot.  They come home with me every summer and Christmas stuffed to the zippers (back in the good old days of two 75-lb bags per flight [and 3 if you flew Southwest]), carried my life out to Vienna, around Europe and Turkey, and back, carried it out to Egypt and back, and on numerous and sundry smaller trips.  But when we made the move out to Arlington, Brandon and I realized that the suitcases (including Brandon's suitcase that had schlepped his things around Ukraine for two years) had reached the end of their usefulness.

And that is how I found myself on my favorite shopping tool - the internet - contemplating the order of six (yes - six!!!) brand new very expensive Pathfinder suitcases.  All of which are now marshaled in my basement awaiting travel orders to Egypt.  And the cost?  If we put them in our 1996 Honda Civic, they'd be worth about half the value of the car.

But until that baby comes...

When I was quite pregnant with Kathleen (quite a while ago now), Brandon's family had a reunion.  The Sherwoods live in southeast Missouri about an hour away from Branson, the place where Las Vegas stars to go die.  In addition to shows, Branson has a theme park, Silver Dollar City, which comes with the requisite roller coasters.

I enjoy roller coasters, but the park has rules about 7 1/2-month pregnant women riding roller coasters.  I vowed, however, that the next time I was able to go to an amusement park, I would not be so pregnant, and I would not be taking Kathleen with me either.

About 1 1/2 hours south of us lies Kings Dominion, one of the many amusement parks scattered along the East Coast.  Neither Brandon nor I had had the opportunity to go to any roller coasters since that time with his family, and I wasn't going to let this opportunity pass because who knows when the next time will come?  There certainly aren't roller coasters in Egypt - between the sand and lack of maintenance the roller coasters would be defunct in a month.

Last Saturday, I took our opportunity.  Our neighbor girl, Clara, was happy to babysit our little darlings while Brandon and I took off for the day.  I have a firm policy about children who have to ride in strollers and amusement parks.  They're not allowed.

We had a wonderful time, and rode every large roller coaster in the park.  Despite all of the twisting, looping, dropping, high-velocity roller coasters he encountered, Brandon was only scared by the upside-down Pirate Ship and vowed he would never ride one again.  He muttered something about bars failing and splatting on the ground below.

And the best part about our outing?  We didn't have to wipe a single bottom, not once did we tell someone to sit down, and when we got home the girls were in bed, asleep.  And that was worth every single penny we paid Clara.

More Fun!

As a younger version of myself, I never wanted a large family.  My secret hope and dream was to somehow be an only child.  Although I was the second of five and new this to be a technical impossibility, I still dreamed.  When in high school and of an age, I would only babysit for a certain family that paid enough to drag me from my friends because cuddling babies never really appealed to me.

However, when Brandon and I married, I realized that somebody else had different plans for me (and no, it wasn't Brandon - he would like everyone to know that).  So despite firm avowals that children wouldn't even be mentioned until our first anniversary, Kathleen was born three and a half months after that anniversary.  The second anniversary was baby-free, but I spent the third anniversary 8 1/2 months pregnant.  And this anniversary?

Yes, it wasn't spent alone again.  After having had two warm-weather babies, we're welcoming the next one in mid-December, in enough time for me to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my birthday exiled to North Carolina under competent medical care while Brandon spends a lot of time in a big, empty apartment in Cairo.

One day our life will calm down, and by then we won't know what to do with ourselves.  Until then, however, we will enjoy the fun.

Milestones

When Kathleen was born, Brandon and I lived in a 1-bedroom apartment.  We had no room for a real crib, so she slept in a Graco pack-n-play.  Following that apartment, we moved to a 2-bedroom duplex and thought about buying a real crib.  However, we weren't sure where and when and who would be paying for our next move.  

So Kathleen vacated the pack-n-play, now a little dished out on the bottom, for her little sister Sophia.  Despite 9 additional months of residence in our duplex, we never got around to buying a real crib for Sophia either because when plans were finally made clear, any crib that we would have bought would have gone into storage anyway.

One day last week, however, something came in the mail.  It was heavy, it was 

made of wood, and when we put it together, it looked suspiciously like a crib, the kind that has to be bolted together and can't fold up to fit in one's trunk.  Yes, after over two and half years of children, we finally own a crib.  It's not full sized, but it also isn't made of polyester fabric either.  We all have to take baby steps.

Memorial Day Weekend

When Brandon and I married, we set some ground rules for our life together.  Birthdays are important.  He mows the lawn.  We eat meals together at the table.  And holidays are not allowed to be used for anything but holiday-making.  So in that spirit, we headed down to Maryland to my aunt and uncle's house last weekend.

In the TV series Wooster and Jeeves, Jeeves is always going to someone's large house out in the country for a weekend house party.  That is what Brandon and I did.  My aunt and uncle live in beautiful spacious house on a hill overlooking Breton Bay in southern Maryland.  They own a sailboat, a motorboat, have a verandah overlooking the water, and a long, straight driveway that leads to their brick house surrounded by large lawns and gracious trees.

We arrived Friday night and caught up with my parents and brother Mike.  Then we said hello to the cousins-in-residence J.J., Julia, Robbie, and Greg.  After that I admired my cousin, Linsday's, soon-to-arrive baby, said hello to her husband Colin, and met a friend of the family's wife who he brought up for the fun.  

The next morning all of the males in the household + the young men from my uncle's ward + the young men from another ward had a 4-hour paintball war.  The girls went on a walk.  In the afternoon we all went sailing, and that evening the all but the parents went to Lindsay and Colin's summer residence (Colin's parents' house) and watched a movie with their projector.

Sunday we went to church, took long naps, and talked much too long into the night.  Monday was more boating, more friends, and more food before straggling home and trying to stay awake on the drive.  After so much fun, Brandon and I put the girls to bed shortly followed by ourselves promptly at 8:00.  We're still recovering.

Dorothy Never Knew

This morning, while trying to keep the girls quiet as breakfast arrived, Brandon started singing.  He often does that, and Kathleen especially likes it.  Sometimes when she's trying to stall during dinner, she'll suggest we all sing 'Popcorn' or 'Happy Birthday.'

This morning Brandon brought out a new song and started singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'  He has a nice singing voice, and I enjoyed the early-morning serenade and the girls stayed quiet.  Evidently too quiet.

I sat down at the table and we all folded our arms to pray (well, Sophia just looked around in confusion like she does every time we pray).  Only then did we notice Kathleen's face crumpling and hear the beginning of high keening.  Then she started bawling.  'That's a saaaaad song,' she sobbed to us.  'Sing a happy song.'  And her tears wouldn't stop falling until we had sung her several 'happy' songs.

Who knew 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' could bring a two year-old to tears?