No It All

Once upon a time, in a town not so far away, there was a boy named Jacob.  He was a very smart little boy– he always tried very hard and never gave up because he knew that’s what would make him smarter and smarter.  And he ate lots of lettuce to grow big and strong.

So one day, Jacob was playing at school by himself in the playhouse.  He was grilling pizza and preparing hot tea when he heard a cry for help.

(Loud crying)  “Oooooowwweeeeeeee!  I bonked my head.”  (sniff, sniff)

Jacob heard the crying and knew it was a job for SUPER Jake!”

Inside the playhouse, he spun around three times (swooh, swooh, swooh) and emerged… wearing green jet shoes, a jet pack, his flowing green cape, and his swoopy super hair.

Super Jake flew into the air and scanned the playground with his far-away eyes.  Who was calling for help?  Suddenly, he zeroed-in on the trouble: Clarky had zoomed down the slide too fast, landed on his bottom, and bonked his head.  He was crying and needed help.

Super Jake swooped down, landed by the injured boy and declared in his deep, super voice, “Don’t worry Clarky– Super Jake is HERE to SAVE the DAY.”

“It looks like you’ve fallen off the slide and bonked your head.  I bet it hurts so bad.  I will go get a teacher and some ice.”  Super Jake flew off to get Miss Leti and then ran faster than a speeding race car to the freezer for an ice cube and a paper towel.  He soared back to Clarky as Miss Leti was helping him to his feet.

Super Jake gave Clarky the ice, made sure he was OK and “bumped-it” farewell.  “My job is done here.  Super Jake is off to help kids and rescue animals everywhere!”  Miss Leti called, “Thank you sir!”  And he flew into the sky and was gone.

Super Jake swooped back in (there’s a lot of swooping when you’re a super hero) through the backdoor of the playhouse when no one was looking.  He quickly spun around three times (swooh, swooh, swooh) and he suddenly had on his trail shoes, his jet pack was gone, his cape had disappeared, and he had regular curly hair again.

Jacob wandered out of the playhouse with a look of bewilderment.  “What’s happening?”  The group of kids on the playground gathered around him, “You just missed Super Jake!  He was here and he helped to save Clarky.  Where were you?”

Jacob shook his head, “Man, I always miss Super Jake.  I was just grilling pizza in the playhouse.  Maybe next time…”

And no one knew, the secret identity of Super Jake.

The End

I recently got out my all-time, number one, favorite baby book for Nake.  It’s called Yummy Yucky by Leslie Patricelli and it’s suspenseful, relatable and one of the funniest books we own.  Really.  We flipped through the pages that originally endeared us, given its likeness to Baby Jacob… Blueberries: Yummy!  Blue crayons: Yucky.

Then we got out the newest addition to our Patricelli library, No no Yes yes.  Jake was instantly drawn-in to this modern classic.  “no No (screaming wildly and running away from Daddy), yes Yes (holding Daddy’s hand and walking at a leisurely pace).”

We turn the page and I say, “no No…”

Jacob fills-in, “Putting your finger up your nose.”  And then adds, nodding his head decidedly, “Only Daddy.  Only Daddy, can put his finger up your nose.”

no No yes Yes by Leslie Patricelli

Breaking News… Breaking News… Breaking News… Breaking News… Breaking News… Breaking News…

I’m going to go out on a limb, CNN-post-Supreme-Court-Obamacare-decision-style, and declare Jacob OFFICIALLY POTTY TRAINED.  Sure, I’m tempting fate.  But I just ate a chocolate chip cookie and I’m feeling daring.

He jumps up and heads to the bathroom without prompting.  He lets us know when he has to go.  He mastered the art of the roadside and “off the deck” during our recent trip.  And I’ve lost count of the days since our last plastic baggie dirty clothes care package from school.

Now, we still talk him into a Lightning McQueen pull-up every night.  But that’s more about our laundry reduction initiative than our commode coaching campaign.  Someday we’ll worry about weaning me off of pull-ups.

Based on a quick review of my incredibly handy baby blog records, Jacob used his potty for the first time on January 23, 2011.  Just 535 short days from introduction… to success.

They say the first one teaches the second one.  You’ve heard them say that, right?  Hello?

I guess Miss Dulce doesn’t think her messages are getting through via the typical channels…

When I was little, I remember my mom worrying that my brother might have diabetes because the kid was constantly glugging down water.  It turned out he was just thirsty.

Lately, it’s crossed my mind with Nake.  I just spent more than a week where I must have heard the word “agua” skeighty-eight times.  I think that’s all he said to me over the course of our entire vacation.  Then I had an epiphany:

Agua no longer means water.  It now means anything you consume.  As in, “I want another slice of that agua.”  Or, “pass me more agua on the cob.”  Or, “Agua on the rocks… make it a double.”

So we finally made it home after 9 adventure filled days in Central Pennsylvania.  Our internal clocks are super out of whack so forgive me if I have to come back and revise this post when it’s not four minutes until midnight, east coast time.

Some of the highlights from our trip:

• Watching Nate’s cheeks bounce as he spent hours running up and down the “not so” flat rock in front of the cabin.
• Jake and a bucket of minnows.  Hopefully he has forgotten the part where Uncle Geoff threw “his friend” into the pond and its immediate dinner demise.
• The unbeatable “warshers” team of Bill and Jaimie: We Are.  Billaimie.
• Texas Sheet Cake.  Aunt Rox is my hero.  Next time let’s make the pieces bigger and/or don’t give me grief if I eat four.
• Coffee and bacon breakfast apps… every morning.  You snooze, you lose.
• “Oh, my name is Skippito Friskito, [clap-clap]
  And I’m off to the school for perritos, [clap clap]
  ‘Cuz I’ve got a good hunch
  That I’m going to have lunch
  With a grande ol’ bunch of poochitos.” [clap clap]
• Shelley gently persuading the rattlesnake to leave camp.
• The wonderful service at the Gamble Mill and real wine from Paso Robles.
• The duck that from 200 yards away, bee-lined it straight for Jacob when we arrived at the Bellefonte park… only to find out he wasn’t a local and instead of bearing gifts of bread, he chased after it like a rabid lion.
• The second consecutive day of duck visiting at Bellefonte park when a particularly pushy duck bit me in the bottom when I wasn’t looking and then Jake protected me by chasing it so fiercely it had to take flight and land across the river.
• Jacksonville Road.
• The baby fawn, baby turkeys, baby duckies, a baby horse, and Baby Devon.
• Jake grabbing a spastic mouse by its tail as it tried to escape from the confines of the canoe.  The good news?  He asked before he did it.  The bad news?  Granddad said sure.
• The late night cooler-eating bear incident.
• Natesy clapping enthusiastically after every act of the traditional pond dock firework extravaganza.
• Gas-grilled s’mores made with marshmallows the size of beer cans.
• The serendipitous State College Fourth of July parade.
• 90 minutes of alone time and fishing at 2-mile.  Further alone time included my daily 4 minute shower.
• As Jake described it to Miss Dulce, “Our plane broke in Denburg.”

There is a terrible, terrible lie among us.  A societal untruth that is running rampant.  It’s gone viral.  Whether this deception is deliberate is unclear.  What is clear is that I have uncovered one of the great myths of our age:

Girls change clothes more than boys.

HA!  Unequivocally false.  Categorically counterfactual.  Studies suggest the exact opposite to be true.

Boys seem to ruin their clothes at every meal, every recess, every art project leading to a teacher-induced wardrobe change 2-5 times… per day.  Little baggies of dirty dungarees come home like a never-ending stream of care packages.  Sometimes the reason is “his shirt got wet.”
“Pardon me?”
“We had to change his shirt because it got wet.”
“I’m fairly certain it’s 85 degrees out in San Jose in June… it’ll dry.”
Meanwhile they unwittingly deliver load after load of unnecessary laundry… in case we’re looking for something to do all weekend.

Tonight I was doing laundry and James asks me, “Did you check the pockets for rocks?”
“Mmmm, no.”

Meanwhile, every night I find a rock or two somewhere— next to the coffee maker, on the windowsill, perched at the foot of Jake’s bed.  I stealthily sneak to the backdoor, make sure there are no little eyes on me, and then quickly chuck these stones into our neighbor’s crazy high school ivy that is advancing into our side yard.

So I put the wet laundry into the dryer and discover the following abundance of riches abducted from Room 4 in the bottom of our washing machine:

That’s five rocks, a small bit of gravel, three plastic golf tees, a princess mirror, and an unidentifiable grey shield-shaped piece of plastic.  Oh, and a little purple rubber ducky.  I blindly grabbed the ducky in the depths of the dark washing machine… which after Grandma’s story of washing Jake’s underpants while I was out of town… stopped me dead in my tracks.

You’ll have to ask her to tell you that story.

So this morning we woke-up and James made the purple sippy cup for Nate, AGAIN, and the green sippy cup for Jake.  Of course, Nate immediately commenced with his wailing, howling and grieving for the loss of his bottle.

I began to waiver.  I felt my resolve waning.  It was 6:00am.  Can I really hold-out longer than this one-year-old?  Am I tough enough?  Will this little cherubic combatant wring every ounce of purpose out of me?  Do I have what it takes?…

Then Daddy had an idea, “Hey Jake, pretend you’re drinking it.”

“MMMMMmmmm.  I’m going to drink this whole baba all gone.  No more for Nakesy!”  (His spontaneous improvisation was impressive.)

It was like the fox and the crow.  (Note: Both James and I tried this same tactic last night without so much as a pause in the protest.)

Our little crow smiled and laughed in his usual way, quick grabbed his new big boy baba from his brother, climbed up into our bed, laid down on my pillow and drank the entire thing.

Nathaniel is changing, right before our very eyes.  He went from skirting rooms like a criminal, to a timid peninsula, to an unstable island—almost in a matter of days.  And now he is running.  His knees might be locked, but he is definitely running.

He’s also got an unexpected head of blond curls, long golden eyelashes and the most angelic pout.  So it comes as quite an unpleasant change in our daily routine when our dark-eyed cherub is… constantly screeching.

This week I read a community comment on BabyCenter.com about moving from a bottle to sippy cups cold turkey and I was inspired.  Dr. Antsy recommends making the switch at one year, so I figured Nate has had a three month grace period.  Jacob literally switched instantly to his sippy cup the day after his first birthday.  (I think standards weaken exponentially with each subsequent child.)

Food milestones have always been insanely easy with the insatiable one.  But Nate, Nate has always been a different story.  If I think back, I remember how he refused to drink his bottle during his first week of daycare.  You don’t want to know what desperate and unrealistic scenarios the brain of a new mother is capable of conjuring.  That transition was rough, as were the days following a holiday, anytime I went out of town and well, every Monday.

So, back to cold turkey.  Last night we offered him a sippy cup of milk instead of his bottle.  He was so mad he just shrieked and cried and stomped around angrily.  He wouldn’t even taste it (even though he drinks water from sippy cups every day).

This morning we offered it to him again.  He vehemently shook his head “no,” flailed around, arched his back and flung himself about in despair.

Tonight we made up the sippy cup and put it on the living room table.  When he saw it, he commenced with the screeching, sobbing and circling the living room.  His anger led him on a solo tirade through the kitchen, down the hall, back to the dining room and into the laundry room where he just stood behind the stroller and uttered angry, cryptic profanities.

Hell hath no fury like a cherub scorned.