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We had a blast last week at Grandma’s house, a place where Mom and Dad have to work hard to stay oblivious to the crazy things the kids are doing.

[Read more at Parenting.com]

We do not have the cable. Our television has two wires on top of it in the form of an antenna. Sometimes it’s dressed in foil. We decided to try and live without cable for a few months when we bought this house… 3 years ago. Once you go without that bill for a while it’s just so hard to justify adding it in again. Do I really need to watch reruns of Trading Spaces whenever I’m a wee bit bored? Do I need it $40 worth? Am I enjoying reading books and you know, having a life?

So we stuck with our rabbit ears. When we heard that the digital transition was coming, we got our magic box and waited. When it finally happened, we lost channel NINE! THE PBS WAS NO LONGER WITH US! Channel 9 is our favorite channel not only for the great documentaries, motivational speakers and antiques road show, but also because it has cartoons the kids can watch and learn something from with no offensive content and no obnoxious commercials.

Well the digital box didn’t pick up PBS but it did pick up a station playing reruns of the A-Team and Airwolf and one that seems to play Dances with Wolves about half the time. There was also a cartoon station called Qubo that I was excited for. It could be just like PBS in the mornings only different.

The difference comes in the lesser quality of the programs and the fact that it’s chock full of commercials and not just commercials but annoying obnoxious commercials about selling all of your spare gold to make a fortune or infomercials about fabulous must-have beauty products.

I left the kids watching Qubo for the first time and went upstairs to take a shower. When I got back, Laylee was bursting at the seams.

“I just saw the BEST. COMMERCIAL. EVER!”

“Oh yeah?”

She then proceeded to describe a magical product she had discovered called something like “Heel Magic.”

“It’s a kind of a stick that you rub against your feet and it takes off all the cracked dead skin and yucky stuff. You can have perfect smooth feet. Dad can use it. You can use it. We can all use it and our feet will be beautiful!

“It only costs $20 and it comes with a nail file and all this other free stuff!”

“Wow. That’s pretty cool,” I said.

“But it gets better. If you order NOW, it only costs $10! I mean $20 is pretty good but $10 is practically nothing.”

I told Laylee seriously, “You know I hate those kinds of commercials. They always make the stuff they’re selling look way better than it really is. I’m sure that magic heel stick really isn’t as good as they say it is.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right. But imagine if it WERE. Then we’d buy it for sure.” She looked dreamy.

So, um, no unsupervised Qubo watching for now. My kids are just way too easily shaped by the media they see. And besides, Dan figured out which direction to point our antenna and pick up channel nine. We have to sacrifice one of the major network stations to get nine but it’s not hurting us any and the kids are back to learning to read via the magical blue box of light.

Today I took the dreaded glucose test, or as the instructions on the bottle of sugar-water read, the test that you just fit into your daily routine without any inconvenience. (I’m paraphrasing there a bit.)

The bottle basically says to go about your business as usual, eat your breakfast and/or lunch as usual, then wait exactly two hours, then drink the bottle of putrid sugar water that’s supposed to be lemon/lime flavored but really tastes like rancid sugar dissolved in barely-potable water. You must drink it all in 5-10 minutes, stand on your head, not vomit, begin driving the 40 minutes to the blood draw facility where you should tell the employees exactly when you finished drinking it so they can take out half of your body’s total quantity of blood at exactly 60 minutes past the time that you finished your last drop of liquid. You should continue not vomiting and not eating until after your blood has been taken.

I’m not sure what all those vials of blood were for. I know one is to test for gestational diabetes, which is what the sugar-water is for. (Am I the only person who thinks of Edgar’s wife from Men in Black when I say “sugar-water”?) I suspect the other 13 vials are either just to make you feel like your whole trip was worthwhile or to continue the Jane Austeny tradition of “bleeding” someone to get the oogies out of their system.

I had an OB appointment directly following the glucose test in the same building so I wanted to plan to get done with the blood work and to the doctor at precisely the correct time, which meant I made a plan where I followed the directions backwards from the time of my appointment, figuring out when exactly I had to eat breakfast in order for all the planets to align.

It worked. My blood has been taken and I visited with my doctor. I told him that the test went fine but I’d rather have taken my glucose in some other way, like by eating a pound of peach rings. He said someone has actually calculated the exact number of jelly beans a pregnant woman has to eat to equal the amount of glucose in one of those drinks. I told him that next time I’d take the jelly bean route.

“Next time? There’s going to be a next time?” he said with raised eyebrows.

“Well, you know, if,” I backpedaled. I told him that a next time would be much more likely if he could help relieve some of the symptoms I’ve been having lately. So I’m off to physical therapy, water aerobics with old people, and he even gave me a little something that’s supposed to stop me from waking up coughing on my own stomach acid at night. Such a helpful lad.

Only 12 more weeks to go, peeps.

Dan and Magoo went “camping” last weekend. Read all about it over at [Parenting.com].

They walked slowly and with apparent effort and their gait actually reminded me of the way I walk right now, pregnant sick and slightly crippled. They made me think about how similar many of my symptoms are to the symptoms of old age, the indigestion, the swelling, the upset stomach, the painful joints and general discomfort. “At least my pain has a timeline,” I thought. 9 months of this and my body will start to bounce back.

Older women experience symptoms equal to or worse than I’m experiencing but their due date is never or at least not in this life. Maybe they’ve earned the right to be cranky. I’m so glad that so many of them don’t take advantage of the excuse. I can’t say as much about myself.

Read more about my encounters with old ladies at [Parenting.com]

When I don’t blog for a long time, I’m usually having a great time and too busy to post or I’m having a rough time and I just can’t bring myself to write about it. This past week’s been a little of both.

I had fun running our Elementary School Fundraiser all last week, in the school 4 of the 5 days last week and then had family in town over the weekend.

Then the past few days I’ve been having a rough time. I’ve written about it [over at parenting.]

Laylee’s a recovering perfectionist. She works at not needing everything to be perfect but feels a moral imperitive that some things must be.

And although she’s very imaginative, she’s also quite a realist for a 6-year-old. Imaginary play is one thing but she knows what’s real and what’s not. She’s happy to tell you if you’ve got a minute or 30.

For the longest time when you asked for her favorite color, she’d say “pink” but then she started feeling bad about all the other great colors she was leaving out so she’d just sort of rotate through them when asked. “Hmmm… My favorite color today is pink… and yellow… and orange.”

Then she got sick of the whole favorite color construct. Who really actually has a favorite color anyway and isn’t the choice sort of arbitrary and riddled with indecision? Laylee’s solved these problems by creating what she calls a Favorite Color Chart.

She picked buttons that include all of her favorite colors and rotates through it every day. “Now I don’t have to choose what my favorite color is every day. I just look at the chart. Sooo… my favorite color the first day of the chart was yellow. That means today it’s purple. See? Easy.”

Now I’ve always thought I was pretty advanced in my organizational geekishness, carrying a Franklin Planner from the time I was 16. Laylee’s gonna need a pocket PC by next year sometime.

This weekend Laylee and Magoo were playing with the hose in the back yard. They called it swimming because a largish sort of plastic dish was near them and water was being employed but basically they were just having fun soaking things and each other while standing on dry land.

At one point Laylee had control of the hose for about 5 minutes. She was standing a few feet from Magoo and whipping him in the face with the water stream repeatedly. I listened and periodically watched from the kitchen window. THWACK! AAAHHH LAYLEE STOP! THWACK! NOOOOO LAYLEE! THWACK! LAYLEEEEE NOOOOOOO!!!

Magoo stood there facing her, taking the beating again and again. He wasn’t so much yelling at Laylee as he was yelling her name at me, willing me to come out, throttle her and save him. I kept thinking, “Back up a couple of feet. Remove yourself from danger. You’re four now. Stand up and be a man.” But their repetitive little game of Torture and Victim continued until eventually I popped my head out the porch door.

She looked up guiltily as she saw my face, lowering the hose to waist level.

“Laylee. Do you think you could be kind to your brother?”

“Okay,” she said sweetly.

Magoo smiled as the water ran down his face for hopefully the last time. “Laylee, could you please fill my bucket up with water?”

“Sure Buddy,” she chirped, lowering the hose into his bucket and crouching down to smile at him.

Magoo only glanced at me for a split second with a toothy grin and raised eyebrows before standing and using his upward force to splurch Laylee in the face mercilessly with the bucket water.

As I closed the door I could hear her siren of misery being raised to the sky as she stood, mouth agape and eyes squeezed shut, the water cascading down her face and dripping from her hair.

Let the summer fun begin.

The kids didn’t die on the Titanic but you couldn’t tell that to look at them on Sunday during church. Both of them fell asleep during the first hour of the meeting. Magoo was sitting bolt upright between my parents in his little bowtie, snoring with abandon.

Laylee had flung her body face-down across my lap with the statement, “It doesn’t hurt me when you rub my back.” I took that as an invitation and began rubbing back and forth in what was apparently a sleep-inducing rhythm because when the meeting was almost over, I pulled her upright and she flopped over coma-like into Grammy’s arms.

It’s been months since Magoo last fell asleep in church and years for Laylee. My parents joked that they must be the most boring grandparents on earth to cause both kids to conk out like that. I think it had more to do with over-stimulation, days of constant attention, gifts and activity and late nights spent staying up until it was dark enough for Papa’s glowing spinning psychedelic plastic flashlights to have maximum mind-bending effect.

I was practicing doing Laylee’s hair for her ballet recital and Magoo was wearing a bowtie in anticipation of his aunt’s upcoming wedding. They both kind of look like they passed out after the mini-prom. At any rate I was grateful for a camera with a silent shutter. Wouldn’t want to disturb their slumber… or you know… annoy the other church goers who were still able to pay attention over the sound of Magoo’s snores.

My friends with big families love to help prepare me for this next little munchkin by telling me horror stories about the adjustment going from 2 to 3 children. They’re trying to be helpful but I’m afraid they don’t quite understand the concept of “help.” “Good luck,” doesn’t really count as a well wish if it’s followed by the implied, “You’re sure gonna need it,” and it’s even worse when they come right out and say, “Your life will soon be a raging inferno of chaos and despair.”

Then they give a knowing smile. It’s all quite lovely, really. Word on the street is that although the adjustment from one to two is rough, adding another kid is mind-blowing. I’ve been listening to this for years with half an ear, thinking that it can’t really be as bad as everyone says. Now that I’m in the runaway train car of pregnancy with no turning back, I’ve started to remember some of the horror stories I’ve been told. It’s not hard really because the minute my bump started to grow, so did the cheerful warnings and words of happy consolation. They’re always smiling when they tell me these things, as though happy that I’m finally gonna “get mine.”

The thing is, I am happy that I’m finally gonna get mine. We’ve wanted this baby for a long time and possibly another one to follow shortly thereafter. We both knew our family wasn’t complete and although the age gap between two and three is wider than the gap between one and two, it’s not for lack of desire. My brain and body just weren’t ready yet. I wonder now if they ever will be or if I’ve already used up the prime baby making juice that was in me. My body is not handling things as well as it has in the past. My hips and pelvis have already started separating, thanks to the gigantic Magoo and his 10.5 pounds of girth. I’m having pain very similar to what I experienced after he was born but at a fraction of the intensity. It gets worse every day though and the bones in my pelvis and hips just feel bruised all the time. I hobble way more than a 5 and a half month pregnant woman should.

Then there’s the brain stuff. I’m hanging in there. I’m functioning but I’m definitely not at my peak. I can feel that things are a bit “off” but not enough to warrant major medical intervention or prescription changes. If this goes the same as it did with Magoo, it will be more than two years before I can wean completely off brain meds and feel normal again and what then? Start this whole thing over again?

It scares me.

We’ve always thought we’d have 4 kids but I question that number every day of this pregnancy. I’m still throwing up, though far less frequently. I’m emotional and in pain and it’s hard to think clearly about this decision when I feel this way. Dan keeps reminding me that we have plenty of time before we have to decide but I like my life planned out in neat little rows five to ten to eighty years at a time. I like at least the illusion of being in control.

Magoo and this baby will be four and a half years apart. I kind of want this baby to have a sibling closer in age. I would love for Magoo to get a brother. He’s already crying about the possibility that when the baby’s a little older, he’ll have to move into a room all by himself.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend who often has Laylee and Magoo over to play with his son. We were discussing the fact that the kids generally get along well when they’re playing in twos but when there’s an odd number of children, someone always gets left out or mistreated. Yesterday it was the two boys ganging up on poor Laylee. Just as often Laylee and Rowan gang up on Magoo because he’s the youngest. Am I doomed to live the life of a bouncer or referee if we stop at three kids?

I want the best possible family.

The problem is, I don’t know if it’s best to give my kids one more sibling or to be a more consistently sane and healthy mom for them. We’ll pray about it. We’ll weigh our options. We’ll see if I go as crazy after the birth of this child as I did with Magoo.

Today I’m just going to breathe and appreciate the family I have, Dan, Laylee, Magoo and little Wanda jumping on my pelvis while she swims around in her own urine. It’s not a bad little band of five.