The Balloon

When Owen turned 3 last year, we got a Lightning McQueen helium balloon that made its home on our ceiling for almost two months. It became a fixture when it lasted week after week. At almost two months, it started floating around the house, following me wherever I'd go --- eventually.

This birthday balloon has been hanging around our house since February 26. We decided to see how long it would last. After hanging on our living room ceiling for almost two months, this week it decided to follow us upstairs. Now it's in hover mode, dancing from room to room. It's a little creepy but I've kind of grown fond of him.

A photo posted by Erin (@fitbottomedmama) on Apr 22, 2015 at 6:46am PDT

It was an interesting study in the air currents in our house. It made it all the way upstairs to the bedrooms and we discovered the ceiling fans were not friendly to our friend. It floated by me as I sat in the kitchen one day and eventually disappeared into the basement where it hovered for a couple of more weeks until we finally said goodbye.

This year, when Owen turned 4, we got the identical Lightning McQueen balloon and another one. Lightning made it even longer than his predecessor and it was only a couple of weeks ago that we bid him adieu. The second one was still hanging solid on our dining room ceiling a whopping four months later.

Emery has been sleeping phenomenally since about April. Not a peep overnight; it has truly been bliss. I wasn't aware that she has just been saving up for a rough night. And of course she waited for the ideal week to strike. A week when I was dealing with pink eye, a sinus infection and an ear infection. I go for the trifecta when I get sick. It's just not worth it if I can't get every single one of the toddler diseases at one time.

So I wasn't feeling especially awesome the night she decided to wake up at 3 a.m. I'd already woken up to take Owen back to bed after he'd snuck in with me. So I laid Emery back down and was trying to get her to fall asleep when I heard Owen yelling "Daddy!" Alan goes in and finds Giraffee. Helps Avery go pee. In the meantime, I've left Emery's room and hear Alan go in to try to soothe her because whatever I did didn't do the trick. She was still highly unhappy with life, so I went in and made the mistake of bringing her in bed with me. I couldn't breathe, my eye was matted shut and I just wanted sleep. But in Emery's mind, it was 8 in the morning and she was ready to party. I dozed a little and Em would beam at me whenever I'd open my eyes. At 5:45, I'd had enough, and I knew she'd be miserable if she didn't sleep longer, so I threw her in bed, and of course she cried for 2.4 minutes before passing out cold and exhausted. Kicking myself for not putting her back in bed sooner, I tried to settle down and fall back asleep even though the sun was already shining in my face.

Just as I was falling asleep after three hours of bullshit, I'm jolted awake. THWACK THWACK THWACK. I bolt upright to find that our friend the helium balloon has chosen that moment out of more than FOUR MONTHS OF MOMENTS to make its way upstairs and find its way to our ceiling fan. Have you ever heard a ceiling fan hit a balloon on repeat? It sounds like a helicopter is landing in your bed but more violent.

Alan, bless his heart, was in deep slumber, and because I wasn't, I was able to more quickly assess the situation, grab the stupid balloon and throw him in the closet.

It's a testament to how sick I was and my level of dedication to sleep at all costs that I managed to fall asleep again after that. This balloon didn't get the freedom to roam around the house to find his own resting place. I found his damn resting place in our closet.

Good Intentions, Poor Execution

Alan and I learned a long time ago not to bite off more than we can chew when it comes to outings with the kids. We go for frequency over duration in almost everything. We buy season passes to nearby attractions --- the zoo, Sesame Place --- so that we can go all the time but don't have to stay long. Outings are much more successful if, for example, we hit the train, the sea lion exhibit and the touch tank and maybe a few other animals at the zoo as opposed to doing all the things and dealing with getting exhausted kids back to the car. At Sesame Place, we show up soon after it opens at 10, hit a few attractions, maybe an Elmo Live Show if we're feeling crazy, and let the kids nap on the way home in the car. It's so much better than having to fit a year's worth of action into a single day, even if it feels like sometimes we're driving an hour just so Avery can ride a carousel. (That girl has never met a carousel she didn't like. We've tried them all. She still contends that the carousel was her favorite ride at Disney World.)

What I'm saying is, when they're done, they're done. Stick a fork in them, they're through.

Besides the bigger events like that we do, I try to do fun little side trips now that it's summer. We'll hit the pool or the splash park, maybe the little nature center to see dead animals and live snakes and nearly empty fish tanks. Today at camp they made handkerchief parachutes and I thought, hey, it'll be fun if I take them somewhere really high where they can throw them off. Like the high school bleachers. Then we can bike in the big parking lot. Simple but fun!

As soon as Emery woke up from her nap, we loaded the bikes and a toy shopping cart in the car, grabbed two water bottles and headed to the high school. What fun this would be! An empty lot for us to ride to our hearts' content.

Owen literally crashed his training-wheeled bike within 20 seconds. So fast that I hadn't even gotten Avery on her bike yet. And when Owen gets injured, it's done. There's no shaking it off, no moving on. It was tears and trauma and screaming and not letting me touch him for the next 60 seconds. I know it was 60 seconds because that's how long Avery decided to ride her bike. "I'm done." Swallowing my fury and frustration, I load the bikes back into the van and decide we'll at least go on a walk, with Owen dramatically limping along the way.

We walk up to the high school track, climb the bleachers, throw the parachutes off. They were not super impressed.


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We continue our walk, around the football field. Around the baseball field. Owen limping along. Avery expending all of her energy rolling down hills. Emmy being herself, being super happy and agreeable despite the 85 degrees. We round the outfield and we see two fawns staring us down, so I had to get a little video as we scared them into crashing baseball practice.


Even through his injuries, Owen was asking to go to the playground that is near the high school, so we made the trek back toward the car and then another football field length over to the playground. We found a bouncy ball, so we hit the blacktop and Avery and I fought each other for it. Avery trying to capture it is proof she takes after me.

It didn't take long for us to be done with the playground after our long walk, so we were headed back to the car when I realized my keys were missing.

What's one thing you don't want to lose when you've got all three kids out on a hot day when you've walked a mile around in the grass and all over tarnation? Your flipping KEYS that's what.

I patted my pockets about 50 times because surely I couldn't be so stupid. My phone and a wet wipe filled with Owen's tears were all that remained. We get to the car and I'm hoping that surely they're in there because that really was the best case scenario: Alan would come home about half an hour earlier than planned and rescue us, and we'd sit and wait and drink our bottles of water. But then I distinctly remembered having my keys in hand, beeping the car locked as we headed off on our walk.

I call Alan alerting him to the possibility that I lost my keys, thank God that we'd grabbed our water bottles out of the car, and we set about the task of retracing our steps. With three kids who, remember, were ready to get in the car and go home. Whose faces had been red and flushed for like a day already at this point.

We head all the way back to the playground because maybe the bouncy ball chasing had jarred them loose? That would be second-best-case scenario. Then we wouldn't have to do that whole mile-long walk again. Ha! Because that would be crazy! But deep down I knew I'd have heard them fall on the ground on the blacktop, and sure enough, they were not there. I cry a defeated internal cry and remember: the deer.

I'd taken my phone out of my back pocket to get video of the deer. Surely that was where they had fallen out. I wouldn't have heard them land on the grass, and it was the only thing that made sense. Just guess where we saw the deer? Pretty much at the opposite end of the complex. Around the football field and almost all the way around the baseball field. This time around, I had the added fun of carrying Emery the whole way.

Sleuth Avery declared it The Case of the Missing Keys, but she is a poor Sherlock because when we got to the spot where we had seen the deer, she walked within a foot of the keys and didn't see them. She was distracted by the deer, who we'd seen again in the outfield and managed to scare back to where they came from.

I've never been so happy to push the buttons on my keys and have the doors of the van slide open. It's always a little bit magical, isn't it? Or maybe that's just my dehydration talking.

Tiny Miracles

By 12:29 a.m. yesterday morning, I'd already been woken up by all three kids. Actually, Owen and Emery had woken me up, and then I ran into Avery on the way back to bed and she scared the bejesus out of me. All was fine until 3:30 a.m. I had been vaguely aware of Owen crawling into our bed, but while he kicks Alan, I barely notice him. So 3:30 hit and Emery was crying so I went in to check on her. The back of my shirt felt wet, so I thought I must have been sweating a lot as I slept. It wasn't until I got back to bed that I realized it wasn't sweat at all. What clued me in was a giant puddle of ice cold pee all over my bed. Emery was still crying as Alan was returning Owen to his own bed and I vaguely remember saying something like, "Why does life suck so bad?"

We dealt with the urine-soaked bed and managed to make it until our alarm went off without the kids needing more assistance or spraying us with more bodily fluids. We even managed to hit snooze. And then Avery came in, mad that it wasn't Friday.

So we handled the morning routine, and I got the kids all off to school and got home to work for an hour or so before I had to head out to pick up Owen. Parent teacher conferences have ensured four half-days of school in a row. And when a "full day" is three hours, well, the half day means I'm spinning around to pick him up as soon as I drop him off.

After we picked up Avery from school later that afternoon, I decided we'd go to Michael's crafts because I needed a zipper to fix Em's winter coat and I needed paint for a project I've been needing to do since September. So off we go to Michael's. Owen brought his giraffe lovey along for the trip. I warned him, really I did. But when someone says "...but he's my best friend..." you stupidly give in on occasion.

Giraffee. The one, the only.

Let me back up. We went on vacation this summer to Newport and Boston. Alan and I aren't sentimental about a lot of things --- we're not "stuff" people, we don't buy each other fancy gifts (except for the occasional 10th anniversary ring, #omgisnthethesweetest?). But when it came time to check out of the Great Wolf Lodge and we discovered our umbrella stroller was missing, we were bummed. It's just a stroller --- we bought it for $15. But we felt like we were leaving a man behind. We knew where and when we'd seen it last and couldn't fathom how it got left somewhere. So as we were about to drive off, I walked the property in a quick search. I checked lost and found and filed a report, knowing it was probably a lost cause and not worth the shipping anyway. But we felt defeated.

I later got a call from the security officer and lo and behold, they had found it. Nowhere near where we had left it, but I can't even tell you how happy I was when it landed on our doorstep. Ridiculous, right? Sentimental over a stroller.

So, Giraffee. Owen's giraffe lovey. He's had it since he was a newborn and he's slept with it ever since he turned one. He would rub its little ears to his nose as he was drifting off to sleep and it's been his security pal for a long time. He's left it outside and I've gone out to the sandbox to find it at bedtime. He's left it out front, in a tricycle storage compartment and I've tracked it down. We've gotten damn good at finding the thing --- trapped in the Bat Cave elevator; stuffed in the bottom of the Lego bin. I can feel around in the dark and know the instant my hand bumps into it that I've found Giraffee.

Giraffee, as much loved as he is, rarely leaves home. He'll bring it in the car occasionally, but we don't let him take it in anywhere. We've had a couple of close calls, but Alan and I are vigilant: Giraffee must stay safe. Giraffee must stay in the car. But this day, Giraffee slipped by me. Giraffee made it into Michael's.

We bumbled around the store, getting what we came for and a few things we didn't. Herding ourselves around a craft store is like herding bulls in a china shop. Or trying to direct tornadoes. We got to checkout and I had two packages of buttons that I didn't put in the cart, so I was telling the store clerk that I was glad that at least he didn't put them in his pockets when I heard Owen say, "Where's Giraffee?"

I had a panicked, physical reaction.

MAN OVERBOARD.

First, the basics: Did you have Giraffee? Did you really bring him into the store?

Owen (hopeful): Maybe he's in the car...

Logic: That is not a possibility when you brought him in the store!!

Avery is certain Giraffee is in the store. She holds her hands out, like, "wait, I'm thinking," and says "I know where Giraffee is! I'm remembering where he put him! I think by the buttons..."

I breathe a momentary sigh of relief, but I know that is only half the battle: We must actually get Giraffee back into Owen's hands.

Owen knows this is serious.

We retrace our steps, me, glancing at the Christmas decorations that we had been looking at to make sure it wasn't hiding among "Joy" and "Noel" signs. We get back to the zippers and Avery points to a shelf: "There. It was there."

The shelf was empty.

I take a deep breath. I'm thinking. Store manager. Lost and found. Retracing steps. WE WILL FIND GIRAFFEE. NO GIRAFFE LEFT BEHIND. As I'm thinking, Avery is putting it into words, out into the world.

"HAS ANYONE SEEN MY BROTHER'S GIRAFFE LOVEY." Arms spread out as they were when she had her epiphany at the checkout. A woman down the aisle says, "Oh, did you lose your animal?" and I'm about to tell Avery that we need to keep retracing our steps when an older lady turns the corner from the next aisle. She's holding Giraffee.

I almost hugged her. Instead, I thanked her profusely as I explained that it wasn't the baby's but it was Owen's and it would have been tragic had we lost it. She hadn't known what it was when she found it --- and I don't know whether it was on a shelf or if she found it on the floor --- but one thing is for certain: this lady was a miracle. A saint. Saint Michael's. I love her dearly. I want to be friends with her.

Disaster averted, we head to Target. Let's press our luck right? Just kidding --- Giraffee stayed in the van and we went in to buy the one thing I needed --- sunglasses, because I'd found mine face down on the kitchen floor with a scratch on them. So we get sunglasses first thing, then grapes and cleaning supplies and body wash and a new coffee pot. Then we get to checkout. I pull out my credit card. Where are the sunglasses? The conveyor belt was sunglasses-less. The one thing I went in for.


Then I get home, and try to fix the zipper. After doing a victory dance around the house because I'm so awesome, I can fix zippers, I discover that --- womp womp --- I am not a zipper fixer. And Emery needs a winter coat ASAP because they take morning strolls at school. And it's 9 p.m. So off to Kohl's I go. I get the coat. I try on boots where I discover that I'm now officially so old that I'm like "hell to the no I will not wear boots that aren't super comfortable" (but not too old to say something like "hell to the no"). And then I found $10 in the parking lot.

That $10 was not a storytelling trick to redeem my story, Nikki, although it has gone off the rails. But to say: Some days start with pee puddles, end with exhaustion, and have tiny miracles sprinkled throughout. 

Working on Our Team Spirit

A few weeks ago I started singing the Rock Chalk Chant, thinking Emery would like it. Crazy me. She didn't like it. Not only did she not like it, but she'd get a pouty lip, tear up and cry every single time. I did it a few times testing to see if it was a fluke, and she'd get upset each time. So the other day, I decided I had to capture it on video. She usually doesn't make it through the very first "rock chalk" but this time she held strong until the second time through. It's both so cute and so incredibly heartbreaking.



It makes me tear up too, so maybe she gets it from her mama.

Bleachable Moments

One of my favorite things to do with all three kids is to go to public restrooms.

No, I'm sorry, I got that wrong. What I meant to say was that going to public restrooms with three kids under 5 years old is enough to give me a heart attack. Yes, that sounds more correct.

It was a beautiful day recently. We hit a park and got Alan to join us for a picnic. And because I didn't want to go home (the house stays cleanerish and there are fewer toys to fight over), we decided to stop at another of our favorite parks on the way home. Pretty soon after we got there, Owen started to do the potty dance. So off to the bathroom we go!

Emery is in the stroller, so we carefully maneuver into the restrooms. Luckily, at this park they're fairly well maintained, but they're still public park bathrooms, so I bark my standard, "Don't touch anything!" orders. I park Em outside of the stalls. Stall door open, I line toilet paper on the seat for Owen and hop him up onto the toilet. "Don't touch the toilet!" I implore, as he puts both hands down on the toilet to steady himself.

Owen starts squirming, scared of the automatic flush. It flushes despite my best attempts to keep it from doing so, Owen hops down and we pull up his pants. It's about this time Emery starts crying. Because nothing lessens the good old blood pressure like a baby crying.

Avery's turn! Baby's crying, let's get this going! Here comes Avery with sticks in both hands. Because if sticks are one thing, it's helpful. I throw the sticks to the ground. Avery gets going on the toilet, and I vaguely hear Owen talking to Emery. Oh, that's sweet, I think. Avery wraps things up and we come out of the stall. I see Owen, bless his heart, helping Emery get her pacifier to her mouth.

Scenes flash before me: Hand. Toilet. Pacifier. Baby.

I remove the pacifier while thanking Owen for helping and try to lower my blood pressure back to normal. We head over to wash our hands (and the pacifier).

I don't know if most of you know this, but hand washing time isn't just time to get clean. No. It's the time when tiny humans get to start stressing about the hand dryers. Because warm, blowing air is the stuff nightmares are made of, according to both of my children. So we soap up, and luckily Avery can be convinced to dry her hands in the Devil Air Dryer. Owen, however, cannot. He's like, "No, I'm cool, I'll just drip dry." He shakes his hands as if to demonstrate that they're basically pretty much already dry and no loud dryer is needed. I wash my hands and the pacifier and turn around. To find Owen with toilet paper in his hands drying them. Toilet paper of unknown origin.

We wash his hands again and head out.

No sooner do we hit the play area than Owen starts to potty dance again. "Owen," I say. "Did you even go to the bathroom?" Like I even needed an answer.

Off we went again.

Green Bean Horror Show

Emery recently started eating solids. Here is what she thinks of green beans.

I think she could be teach a class on facial expressions. Each one has a distinct vibe to it. There's horror, disdain, repulsion, gah!, meh!, ugh, and blah. She is seriously one of my favorites.

Grocery Store Throwdown

Alan and I went to the grocery store together some time ago. I can't remember exactly when it was; occasionally we'll take the kids to the store with us, but in this particular memory, there is no rambunctious kid(s), nor is there grocery-kid-stress. (Grocery-kid-stress is a legitimate thing; I took my mom to the store with the kids when she was visiting and she said she felt like we were sprinting. It's because I do because you never know when the kids will melt down, and it's always a race against the clock.) So if I had to guess, it was a trip to the store when it was just us and Avery --- so a few years ago, maybe?

Before I get to that, let me tell another tale. It adds depth to the story because it'll let you in on some of the Jersey flavor I get at the grocery store. I was at the store with Avery and Owen over the summer, pregnant at the time with Emery. I had the two kids in the car cart, and that thing is unwieldy. It occupies the kids with the fun steering wheel and race car, yes, but damn if that thing isn't impossible to steer. So I steered right into an endcap of baking chocolate. I knocked at least a hundred of them off, leaving my cart and tons of chocolate blocking the aisle. The kids and I started to pick them up and put them back on the shelves, and this older gentleman, I mean, man because he was not gentle, came upon the scene. He looked at us, gave an audible sigh, and headed in the other direction to go down another aisle. Now, he was in no way obligated to help me, but he didn't have to be so put out and such a drama queen about it. After all, I was the one picking up all the chocolate; all he had to do was walk around.   

Anyway. Alan and I were grocery shopping. I was pushing the cart. I came to the end of an aisle and a lady was parked with her cart perpendicular to the aisle so that she was completely blocking my way. I said excuse me and while she didn't say anything, the hostility was palpable. And the look she gave me...it was an event. And she took her sweet time moving out of my way --- like 15 seconds, which, when you're having a standoff at the end of a grocery store aisle, is an eternity. It was so long that I actually considered the possibility that she might not move, which is just a Seinfeld-type of thing because people aren't that crazy in real life. So Alan and I had a moment of "What in tarnation just happened?" and then we went about our day.

So the other day I was grocery shopping. I had gone through the baking aisle for flour, but had forgotten Bisquick so I had to head back. A woman's cart was in the middle of the aisle, so I couldn't get by on either side. I said excuse me like a normal human, and the lady goes, "Are you actually going to buy anything on this aisle?" Only yelling. She was yelling. Taken aback just a bit, I gave a half-laugh-scoff and said, with attitude and a frown, "Yeah, it's right there, why?" She went on to yell at me that I'd already been down the aisle THREE TIMES. (False. She was a liar.) I said, "Yeah, SOMETIMES PEOPLE FORGET THINGS AND HAVE TO GO BACK."

After I'd procured my Bisquick and gotten safely to the next aisle, I could still hear her ranting and raving. I was wondering what I had done to piss her off so severely on my first pass down the baking aisle, but I don't think her craziness was about me. Because I remember her dropping swear words as I'd walked by the first time and thinking I was glad the kids weren't with me, and that time I'm pretty sure she was cursing about a product not being in the right location. Plus, she had bright blue eye shadow and it was applied in triangle shapes, so I think the crazy ran pretty deep.

As funny as it is, I was really bothered by the whole situation. I mean, I knew people in Jersey like to get seriously outraged for no apparent reason, but I dislike confrontation to a fault. When I get to do the shopping by myself, it's peaceful. I'm not supposed to be yelled at. If I wanted to be yelled at, I'd just go home and take away Halloween candy or something.

Alan did make an excellent point though as I was recounting the story. "Why was SHE in the baking aisle for so long?" I'll insert the joke about her being around the nuts here, but I have a feeling she is a Chronic Aisle Blocker who tries to stir up trouble. She simply has to be the same lady who blocked the aisle for me so long ago. There cannot be more than one of these people around. One thing is for sure though: If she makes a habit of that blue makeup, I won't forget her face again.