something new

I was listening to a book on tape with Lena tonight, and I learned something new.

Apparently I have been mispronouncing "chaise lounge" for 20+ years. (Hint, it's not "chase lounge".)

In other news, I am just as enamored with the Ms. Piggle Wiggle books as I was when I was 10 or so. I remember being in Woods Hole, MA for the summers, and every trip to the library I would check out more of the Ms. Piggle Wiggle books, and I would just read them over and over and over again. I got them for Lena to listen to at night, and right now I am literally in my room, with the lights off, listening along with her in the next room. Forget March Madness, forget Netflix. Ms. Piggle Wiggle's Farm.

Yeah, screw it, I'm getting back in bed with her.

Later, y'all.

Credit

When Lena says thank you to someone, unprompted, or when she shares a toy with a younger kid, or she doesn't run out into the middle of the road when there are cars around, friends or passersby might compliment me on how well-behaved Lena is. They might even go so far as to say that I am doing a good job as a parent. 

Ha. Well let me tell you. 

Last night, Lena was being a complete monster at bedtime. It was late, she she was over-tired, the usual suspects. And then she comes out with this gem:

You are a bad mommy.

She's standing at the door of her room, sherbet orange pajamas with neon yellow and green butterflies on them, snot running into her mouth and tears running into the snot and she just yells the worst thing she can possibly think of at that moment:

You are a bad mommy. You hurt my feelings. 

In retrospect, this is cute, right? The world is so easily black and white, people are bad and they are good, and the worst thing you can be in the world is bad and the worst thing you can do to a person is hurt their feelings. 

Here's what I didn't do, and what I wanted to do. I wanted to say, Look here kid, You are hurting your own feelings. If you had just listened from the beginning, and oh, you know fallen asleep, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in right now. 

Instead of releasing this passive aggressive vitriol, I took a deep breath, counted to ten, sat on her bed, and got her to sit on my lap to calm down. To which she then says, I need some water. 

Now. Unbeknownst to her, I had already gotten her ice water, her beverage of choice in the evening. So as I got up to go get the water from her bedside table she says, her face buried in the pillow, No, I want cold water. 

It is cold water, I say. Look, there's even still ice in it.

And I pick up the water and sit down next to her on the bed holding it out to her. 

Of course, she didn't actually want water, she really just wanted to ask for something and to have me go away and have to get it for her so she could regroup and decide what her next tactic of bedtime delay would be--so I'm sitting on the bed, holding the water, and Lena is just sobbing into her pillow.

Friends, 

It took every fiber of self-control that I had to not dump that cup of ice water on that kid's head. 

And honestly, I really just need a little credit for that. 

Picture of maturity

Sometimes I wish that reading aloud burns calories. Lena now has this great bedtime routine that involves me reading to her for an hour until she falls asleep. I have discovered that I'm actually able to use this time for something other than reading. When I'm reading say, Peter Pan for the 24th time, I've discovered that my mind can start to wander, and I can think of other things, and then every now and then I am jolted back into the story with no memory of the previous pages. Once, I actually thought I skipped a page, and when I went back Lena said that, no, I had read that page already. Weird right? Reading blackouts? Does anyone else get these?

The other thing I've found myself doing, is finding the most innocuous sentences from Lena's books and turning them into something far more salacious.

(This kind of is like in the app Draw Something. EVERYTHING LOOKS SO PHALLIC TO ME.)

My favorites are from Green Eggs and Ham. Spoiler alert Sam is trying to get Our Hero to try green eggs and ham, and the nameless main character doesn't want to try them. Sam then proceeds to pedantically offer many different scenarios in which our Main Character would want to try green eggs and ham.

Then this line appears:

Would you, could you with a goat?
I would not could not with a goat.

HA! Get it? He would not could not with a goat. Hahahahahaha. It never fails!

Then from The Butter Battle Book, in which there exists the intrinsic prejudice between Yooks and Zooks, and Dr. Seuss tries to illuminate how arbitrary our distinctions are between people, and why all kinds of warfare are ultimately counter-productive. (He fails at this, with regards to Lena. Lena proudly names herself a Yook, because she indeed eats bread with the butter side up.)

But then there is this gem of a line, as Our Hero the Grandfather is about to drop the bitsy big boy boomeroo onto the Zooks, but then he sees Van Itch jump up on the wall with a bitsy big boy boomeroo as well:


"I'll blow you," he yelled "into pork and wee beans!"

teehee.

He said, I'll blow you.

That's it, I'm done here.

Who ever decided to give me a kid (Don't answer that.)

And come on! Everyone else is thinking this, right?? I can't be the only one.