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Since Laylee’s gone back to school, Magoo has become my little shadow, following me around everywhere, inviting me to join him in game playing and talking nearly nonstop. It’s like he couldn’t get a word in when Laylee was home and now he’s gonna let it all fly. He’s also pretty emotional. I think he misses her, while enjoying his new found, and soon to be cut short, alone time with Mom.

This morning he had a play date with a friend which was really orchestrated for my benefit so I could take a morning nap for a couple of hours. My friends are really good to me. After my baby shower last night I started feeling guilty about the fact that more than half the people in attendance had given birth in the last couple of years and I did very little to help any of them. They’ve all been taking care of me left and right and this morning through tears, that I’m sure have nothing to do with hormones whatsoever, I made a pact with myself to start helping people and being less selfish… and buy them cute onesies (for their babies to wear) and make them funny hats and stuff… maybe learn how to felt or quilt.

Anyway, Magoo sort of threw a fit when I picked him up from his play date which was not too distressing for me because it meant I could peg him as “tired” and give me him an afternoon nap. We laid down together on my bed and he asked me to rub his back. I had him roll over on his tummy and started to rub.

“Here,” he offered, “I’ll open it for you,” and he pulled up his shirt so I could rub his actual back. After a few minutes, he rolled over and pulled up the front of his shirt.

“Boys don’t have breasts,” he declared.

“Yep.”

“But I just have these two breast buttons,” he said, pressing on them.

“Those are called nipples.”

“Nope. Mine are called breast buttons,” he said matter-of-factly. “You have some too.” He reached for the neckline of my shirt. I held it in place.

“I know where they are,” I told him, “They’re kind of private.”

“Hmph.”

We lay there for a few more minutes before he looked at my arms and observed, “Girls have girl hairs on their arms and boys have boy hairs on their arms.”

I looked down at his arms and he got a self-conscious look on his face.

“Well you can’t see mine right now because they’re too small and tiny.” Then his face got resolute. “But they’ll grow.”

So at 4 years of age, he’s already defending his manliness… to his mom. Raising a boy is gonna be pure awesomeness.

I fluffed some stuffed animals and placed them in her crib just for the effect when she sees it for the first time. I know little babies are not supposed to sleep with a bunch stuff in their cribs until they’re much older and that they’re supposed to sleep on their backs and be bathed just enough but not too much and not eat solid foods or drink alcohol in their bottles for the first few weeks of life. As I was putting the freshly-ironed curtains up on the rod, I heard the kids start again.

[read more at Parenting.com]

Sometimes I wonder when they will get a clue. I already know the answer but I ask it hypothetically to the universe in general and to my husband specifically. “WHEN WILL THEY GET A CLUE?!”

The answer is – 20 years from now when they have kids of their own and suddenly realize that I wasn’t just nagging them for my own amusement but was trying to teach them to be responsible citizens and often because I actually needed their help.

Today was a day spent working, working and being in pain, working and being in pain and begging, sometimes yelling at my kids to help me just the tiniest bit. I wasn’t asking them to polish the silver or wax the floors or give me a mani-pedi while I watched soaps. I was feeling the shooting pains as my ligaments pulled and expanded, limping on hips and a pelvis that may not hold up much longer under this kind of pressure, gagging with a sudden resurgence of morning sickness and working my butt off to clean the house. I was asking them to pick up their ratchen fratchen toys that covered the entire main floor. I was repeating myself over and over until even I was sick of the sound of my own voice.

At some point in the afternoon I considered changing Magoo’s name to some glass-shattering word from the mermaid dialect, anything that would cause him to show the slightest sign that he could hear it as it was coming out of my mouth. He is completely deaf to the sound of my voice unless my voice is whispering sweet nothings about chocolate, gummy worms or time for game play on the Wii.

But if I’m calling him, even yelling from as little as 3 feet away, he bounces along playing and making strange little man noises, giving me no notice at all. It seems like the worse I feel, the worse the deafness gets.

Laylee, on the other hand was willing to work on and off with very little coaxing or threatening but seemed intent on bullying and tormenting Magoo as she went, causing him to bawl and collapse and then come running to me once he’d regained his strength. I took my frustration out on them and they took theirs out on each other. It was a lovely afternoon.

Then Dan came home exhausted from work and I complained and whined and tattled on them like a spoiled child. So he took them off to bed. Last I heard, someone was crying. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Dan and I’m pretty sure it was in response to something like the threat of no stories if they didn’t pick up the pace a bit.

It’s days like this that make me glad we can reset overnight and start fresh in the morning. And maybe I won’t wake up 4 times tonight. And maybe I’ll feel better in the morning. And maybe they’ll decide they like me and each other. And maybe I just remembered there’s a chocolate bar in my purse. And maybe I’m done blogging now.

Dinner. Tonight. Canned soup. Crackers. Cold cereal for desert. Best dinner conversation in possibly the last 2 years.

Dan was at a meeting. I managed to find some canned soup that was less than 2 years past its Best-By Date. I warmed it in the microwave and we sat down to chow. Each kid counted out 10 Better Cheddars to eat with their soup. Laylee thought it was okay to eat but not much to look at.

Magoo thought it was disgusting unless I fed it to him spoon by spoon like a little influenza patient from the olden days where influenza would likely kill you if someone didn’t sit by your bed spooning broth into your pie hole.

“I want to eat it like a robot,” Magoo began. “Robots are really smart and they can look like they’re made out of bottles.”

“Oh yeah?” Laylee chimed in, “Well pigs are really really smart. I’m gonna eat my crackers like a pig.”

Both kids started snarfing crackers like a couple of rabid hogs and I let them with some bland statement about how I was glad they weren’t doing that in front of anyone else because we at least wanted to pretend that being a Thompson meant you had polite table manners. I’m not sure if they heard me over the snorting, chomping and laughing.

I’ve been a little nostalgic lately about the fleeting nature of childhood and putting up with perhaps more than I should because seeing little kids and imagining that I’ll soon be done with them makes me a cry a little in public sometimes. I can chalk the public crying up to being pregnant and no one seems to mind, especially since they don’t have to witness what kind of heathen dinner habits the crying leads to once I get home.

I told Laylee I didn’t think pigs were really that smart. Besides Wilbur, I told her that I thought most pigs were kind of dumb.

But she knew different. Ms. Sweetsie had read her a book about pigs in kindergarten and how they were creatures of untold genius. She said she wished she had a brain like a pig.

“But I’m a robot,” argued Magoo, seeming to say that the two could not coexist at the same dinner table.

I continued to feed him and he continued to talk about robots between bites.

Laylee said that pigs were so smart that they could probably use their hooves (she illustrated these by clamping her hands into tight fists) to pick flowers in the meadow if they wanted to. She mimed the action of picking flowers sans-phalanges.

“That’s why I want a pig’s brain.”

“Do you like the soup?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s great.”

“It’s good if you chew it like a robot.” Magoo demonstrated what mechanical soup chewing would look like.

“If it were ever really cold in the winter and my hands froze until they were black and we had to cut them off so I had no hands at all, I’d need to have a brain as good as a pig so I could still pick flowers in the meadow.” Again she mimed the two-fisted flower picking. “That would be really cool.” Slurp.

“Yes. That would be very fortunate,” I responded.

Yep. I’m sure.

Last week I had 11 people ask me this. Most were strangers. They were serious. A few were friends. I think it was an attempt at commiseration.

At one point I was walking through the swimming pool dressing room fully clothed when I heard someone yell out to me from the other side of the room, “You’re about ready to pop, eh?” I turned around. When you look like me and someone yells something like that from 50 feet away behind your back, you know they’re talking to you.

“Yep.”

“I bet you get sick of hearing that.”

“Yep. Especially since I’m not due for another 6 weeks.”

“Oh HONEY!”

Indeed. Honey-child. Sistah-friend. GIRRRLLL. I am large and whale-like.

She told me I looked great, which I decided to believe because when someone is looking at you with pity and telling you how fabulous you look, they have to be telling the truth, right? Honestly. I feel cute when I’m pregnant. My body shapes itself in a way that announces our upcoming joy and sleepless nights and doesn’t leave anyone any room to wonder if I’m just packing away too many Peanut Butter Twix bars.

So it seems that the physical therapy and water exercise are paying off. I feel less like the lower half of my body is being snapped in pieces and more like a late-term pregnant woman, experiencing late-term pregnancy “discomfort.” It’s been a huge improvement.

In exciting news, it looks like this baby’s big like Fat Boy Magoo. At my last appointment she was measuring about 5 lbs by ultrasound and if she follows the trends and doubles in weight the last 6 weeks… OUCH! So the doctor plans to take her a week early! This thrills me. The last two times my due date just meant the date where I’d start asking for an induction and waiting with even more impatience.

Now I have a cut-off date in my head that makes the last minute antsyness and uncomfortability more bearable. We spent some time today looking at pictures of the other two when they were fresh and new and I can’t wait to meet little Wanda.

Hopefully we’ll find her a real name in the next month.

Yesterday Seattle hit an all-time high temperature of 103. It’s humid and hot and we’re all boiling in our way-too-pregnant skins. In an area with fewer than 13% of the homes having any kind of cooling system, we’re sweating and relying on help from our friends to keep us from dropping like flies.

“My kids want to beat the heat too but they disapprove of my particular methods. Magoo doesn’t want to stay at Costco forever. Laylee asked me to “try harder” to make the house feel cool.”

[read more at Parenting.com]

Yesterday in church we were sang Onward Christian Soldiers as the closing hymn and as we finished, I leaned over to Dan and whispered, “KABOOM!”

“What?” he looked at me in confusion.

Oh. I thought he knew. Remember at the end of the Little House on the Prairies TV series when they marched through Walnut Grove singing that song and then they used dynamite to explode the entire town to keep it out of the hands of the big bad developers who were forcing them out of their homes?

Yeah. Dan doesn’t remember it either. When I told him about it, he said it was probably a plot device by the set construction guys so they wouldn’t have to dismantle the whole set once the series was over. A few sticks of well-placed dynamite, some hymn-singing citizens, one giant detonation lever, and their work was done.

I’m a bit cynical about that and also unsure if any of it really happened. The last time I watched the show I was probably 10 or 12 and you know what happens when I recap shows I haven’t seen for years and years. Either way, that’s how I remember it and I cannot sing or hear that song without picturing the whole town going up in an explosive inferno.

I wanted to actually make something for dinner, like a real meal that didn’t come in a box and did not contain any magical life-vest-orange mystery dust.

Read more at Parenting.com.

We’re getting a new roof today. I’m not talking new shingles. They’re actually tearing off our entire roof with what sound like giant nail files and throwing it into a bin placed conveniently below one of our front windows. Dan woke the kids up this morning to reassure them that everything was okay when the home pedicure started . OKAY?! OKAY?! There are giant pieces of crap flying off our roof into a bin and WE CAN WATCH IT FROM THE FRONT WINDOWS???!!!! They consider it to be more than “Okay”. This may be the best day of their lives.

We have a giant “bird’s” nest in the attic and every year in the spring some morning around 4am we hear a terrible splintering splitting noise as the giant “birds” come back to rip the cedar shakes off our roof and re-enter their home. The nest is located right above our bed so we know when they come back and it’s an unnerving feeling. We’ve had the ancient disintegrating roof cleaned and repaired but the “birds” always come back and our roof cleaner has gotten to the point where he won’t come back to clean until we hire someone to put on a new roof. It’s on the verge of falling to pieces.

When we had our inspection done on the house before buying it, the inspector (who was apparently fully owned by our shrewd realtor) told us the roof was only 5-years old. This helped push the deal through but was a bit disheartening when we moved in, had leaks and found out that it was actually 20 years old and remaining on its deathbed only through frequent resuscitation and hospice care.

So we stretched out the inevitable for 3 years and now we start the joy, the adventure, the second mortgage that is a new roof.

Well, when I told the contractors bidding on the roof job about the “birds,” they all laughed at me. They said there was no way that any kind of bird could tear up a roof like that. It had to be something with hands… like a raccoon… an animal which builds giant nests… like a raccoon. They asked if there were any raccoon sightings around. “Oh yeah,” I said. “They live in the forest behind our house and we see them in our yard all the time.”

Yeah. Apparently they don’t live “in the forest.” When we told the kids that raccoons were living in the attic, they could not have been happier. But they were also terrified with excitement. “What if they claw their way through the ceiling in the night?!” they grimace/grinned.

“Yeah. What if!?” I periodically think as I lay in bed at night listening to the house creak and staring up at the ceiling.

So this morning as Laylee saw the first large piece of brown debris fly over the edge of the house she exclaimed, “OH WOW! I bet that was one of the raccoons!” PETA be merciful. Mama needs a new pair-a-shingles.

My abdomen has gotten to the point where it both looks and feels like a tightly-packed rubber bag full of small and very active ninjas.

It’s a strange feeling and one I know I’ll miss when it turns back into vacant jelly belly in just over 2 months.

Baby Wanda and I are becoming very close in all the ways and although I sometimes still think she’s a boy, rarely feed her vegetables and can’t for the life of me think of a suitable offline name for her, I find myself liking her very much… especially when she keeps the nunchucks and throwing stars stowed safely in her back pocket.