Fine Young Fauves

For the last two weeks, we've been embroiled in the start of school. The first week, it was logistically awkward, because Isaac had only mornings and Elias had one hour a day with me there. The times overlapped, but still I was spending a lot of time here and there killing time, and of course it provided no succor at all for my exhaustion problem.

This week has been a little better, because Isaac is now in full days. Elias has phased up to two and a half hours a day, with me not in the room but in the hall. So I've been hanging out with the other mothers… you've got Hysterical Mother ("everything in my house is bolted to the wall"), Mother Who's Had Work Done (those are NOT real), and Likely Friend Candidate Mother, and many others, so it's been sort of an interesting Cawfee Talk type assemblage.

However, today we are not at school. I dropped Isaac off and brought Elias home, where now he sleeps. I should be sleeping too and in a few moments I will partake. The last few nights, Elias has been sleeping very badly and torturing me by waking me up all the time. I asked him at one point if something hurt and he indicated it was an upper back molar. He also had a runny nose and a very sore toe, upon which he had dropped a large flat rock during one of our many cricket hunts. (The amphibian population is in a state of constant flux; at the moment we have a grey tree frog and one small toad. Going to the pet store all the time for delicious crickets is a pain, but so is hunting for our own crickets. And I can tell you that, after a long hard day, staying up and catching ants one by one to feed a hungry frog is a lot less fun that it sounds.) But the real problem was that last night we were up half the night with another terrifying croup episode.

I was about three minutes short of calling 911 at one point, and Ben and I spent an hour or so with me holding the very ill boy and Ben reading things on the internet about croup. At various moments it seemed that I would need to take him to the ER. But ultimately we got it sorted out, airway working again, and got a bit of sleep in the 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. range. However Elias is clearly sick (good cheer and cuteness notwithstanding) and so I'm home with him today and chillin.

Next week looks pretty bright, though. If all goes well, next week I will be allowed to actually LEAVE the school building, with both boys in it, and go someplace else! Sweet freedom, Earl Grey and the New York Times await. Child-free walks in the woods and writing time! I'm very excited. Two and a half hours a day may not seem like much, but coming on the end of two solid years of total personal-time deprivation, it's a WEALTH.

Elias, too, seems incredibly happy to be a school boy. The first few days, when I was in the classroom with him, he didn't stray far from my lap. He would venture a short distance to see some play-doh, or a little basin with water and toy fish, but if the teacher so much as glanced at him, he would come running back to me for safety. But this week, he owns the place. At the door I've been trying to get his attention to tell him that I'm going to stay in the hall, and I'll be here if he needs me, and he's like WHATEVER! Who cares!! I'm busy! He's got mopping to do (with this adorable tiny mop); he's got paint to spread around at an easel and its environs, baskets of farm animals and insects to be dumped out and sorted; gold balls to be dropped into a huge plastic bottle; a mirror to be squirted and squeegeed; a sandbox to be explored; and much much more.

It's an idyllic place. I think that all last year, dropping Isaac off, it pained Elias no end that he was not allowed to stay and touch and fondle everything in sight. Now he can. He just seems totally in his element. The sight of eight toddlers on a field of green is soothing to the eyes. He's with his peeps. He hasn't cried or needed me at all, not once. Indeed, I'm totally irrelevant when he's there. I once read something about "Motherhood is working for your own obsolescence." This is an important step along the path.

What a fine fellow! As his teacher put it, "He's wonderful!" We'll get this croup thing licked, and then he'll be back in action soon. 

Is it just me, or have the last two weeks been nearly unmanageable? Isaac is like a miniature blond Travis Bickle . He's perpetually shirtless, cut, and hostile, ready for a fight. "You talkin' to ME?" His little body is now so wiry, and tight, and his muscles by far the most clearly defined of anyone in the family. His behavior is intermittently horrible: rude, uncooperative, provocative. It's not even about tantrums these days. It's about RAGE.

For his part, Elias is bent on self-destruction. His newest innovation: getting furniture to fall on himself. The other day it was "quiet time" which I now flat-out insist upon, futile though that clearly is. I was beyond exhausted, half dead, lying down. Isaac was watching a video (if his mind rots, I truly don't care. I CAN'T care. This is the only way he sits still for more than three minutes.) Elias was playing quietly. He and I were upstairs, with the gate closed. Which means that his playing area was limited to our bedroom, and the bedrooms of the two boys, both of which are about as child-proof as possible. So then inevitably there's a dreadful crash and scream. I bolted vertically and horizontally towards the sound– there was Elias. He had opened the drawer to his dresser (which thankfully is quite small), and climbed in it. The dresser had tipped over on him, pinning his legs in the drawer. I extricated him from that, determined that he was unharmed, and began setting the dresser back upright. At that moment I noticed that the lamp had fallen over too, and broken open such that there was an exposed wire sticking out. Elias was now grabbing at that wire, and the lamp was still plugged in! I got that away from him in time…

I told my mother about this and she replied, "Sheesh– his guardian angel must be working overtime."

Was Isaac this awful? I can't remember it being this horrible to try to keep him safe. But when I look back upon it, several things were different. First of all, I only had Isaac. So, if I needed to simply follow him everywhere at all times, I could do that. Secondly I had Zimbabwean Sheila 7 hours a week, so I could go get a cup of tea and collect my thoughts at regular intervals so I wasn't always in a state of total frazzlement. Thirdly I had dottering old Dorothy once a week. She was nearly ineffective as a cleaning lady, but the one thing she did well was laundry. She would get the laundry completely caught up, and put clean sheets on the bed, so that there was some sort of possibility of household functioning. Yes… so the reality is I now have two children and much less help. Also, I still have Isaac and he's about the most difficult person I've ever met, and I include famous tyrant Diana Trilling on that list. 

One thing I've been realizing about myself lately is that I have an introverted streak a mile wide. The way I need to regroup and recharge is basically to read– doesn't have to be a long time, even a half hour a day non-contiguous. I didn't know this until it was completely taken away from me. When people are up in my grill 14 hours a day, and I'm not exaggerating, I get irritable. I get stretched beyond my limit. I get maxed out on interaction in and of itself. Add to that a child who is apparently trying to get bad attention any way he can (smashing tomatoes on the patio, whipping a wet diaper at my face) and it's a formula for unhappiness.

I tell you, I've been sorely tried.

And oddly I think of myself as having quite a LONG fuse. I'm not a hot-head, really. Except lately. Recent example: yesterday my friend Martha called to talk about going to the Natural History Museum with the kids. I opened my computer to check the weather. This was literally a three-minute conversation, to the benefit of the children, no less. And there was Elias, trying his damnedest to push the off button and make my computer shut down, while at the same time Isaac was stepping on the chord trying to unplug it. Can I tell you how outraged this sort of thing makes me!? Can they just back off for five minutes???  

No, apparently not.  

One point made by the spirited child book is that your ultra perceptive spirited child is the barometer of the household. He will absorb and display whatever the others in the house are feeling. The last two weeks Ben has been in really a pressure cooker at work.  Avoiding all details, it's been MEGA tense. Ben has done his utter best to contain it, but there's no doubt that it's spilled over into the house. Perhaps Isaac is something of the house's living id. 

At the same time, there's the OTHER Isaac. The normal and good Isaac. This is the sunny child who is such a great conversationalist. On good days, we have a lovely time together. Wednesday, for instance, we spent the whole day doing nothing, never happier nor busier. We were working on a project I've had on the back burner for ages– hanging this wind chime on the play structure such that kids can play it with a stick. It's one of those tuned pipe wind chimes and it plays I think an E flat chord. Isaac embraced the project, we got out the drill. Elias played around happily and Isaac and I worked as a team without any fighting.  

In the midst of this totally bucolic afternoon, we ran across the most wonderful luck. Hiding right in the middle of the play structure, in this odd little place Isaac would never have looked into were it not for the chime project, was an amphibian!  He was totally concealed by his lichen-dry wood-disguise, but Isaac saw his eye blink! So then the excitement was on to catch him. Much screaming and running about ensued, with the frog hopping huge distances to elude us, and also doing this amazing thing where he hopped high into the air and then stuck, velcro-like to the side of something. At one point, he did this and stuck securely right on my shoulder. I'll admit to getting hysterical, but nonetheless I also caught him in a critter tote. He has yellow underpants!  He's slimy! He's a gray tree frog .

So we spent the whole rest of the day making his habitat and learning about his needs, laying around in the grass trying (fruitlessly, pretty much) to catch him crickets. We got him a big fern to sit on, and indeed he's changed himself completely from gray to green. (My mother says she saw one once on a hubcap, doing his best to become silver.) My favorite Isaac quote for the day: "It's hard to be a glutton with no food in your belly!" (referring to the little hop toad we also have rooming in with Froggy.)

THAT Isaac is great. That's the brilliant, charming, handsome, winning Isaac that most of us know and love. The other, evil Isaac… wow. He's hell on wheels. He's been out a lot lately. I'm wondering if the BIG transition back to school is starting to take effect already? Causing (hopefully) temporary insanity? I can only hope that school, which will start for him half days on August 25th, will help. 

It's hard to say why Blackie, one of our new balloon-bellied mollies (fat weirdly shaped goldfish type creatures), died. Probably abrasions due to getting tangled in the net during release. Maybe our slight problem with ammonia. In any case, he died a few days after joining our aquatic community. He seemed fine at bedtime, but by morning was lying on his side on the blue gravel. Isaac was sleeping over at his grandpa's house that night. I spent the day after Blackie's death wondering how and when it would be best to break the news to Isaac.

I decided to wait until he was home and settled in. When I told him, "I have some sad news: Blackie died," Isaac paused for a moment and put his head down. I thought maybe he would cry. But after a few seconds to absorb the blow, Isaac came out with, "Can I cut him up?… PLEASE?… I want to see his stomach and his bladder."

So. I struggled inwardly with this question. Is it really moral to carve up your pet and friend? And yet, on the other hand, maybe Isaac is inherently a scientist, and should I really stifle his interest in anatomy? He's not exactly out robbing graves. I mean, Blackie died of natural causes. Maybe Isaac is going to be a doctor. Anyway, after some debate, I said yes. I brought the cadaver down and gave Isaac the best knife I could find for the purpose, which was not at all a scalpel. Then I left. What ensued was too horrible for me to deal with. Blackie's body was so tiny, and hard, and the knife was so dull, and Isaac so unskilled, it was not a pretty sight.

I went into the other room and sat on the couch, having armed my child. Insane. The Dangerous Book for Boys authors would have been proud. But… educational, no doubt. So then Isaac yells joyfully, "I found his bladder!! It's bright yellow!" I waited some more. Finally he came in and announced that it was over. I took Blackie's battered carcass outside and buried it near the grave of Silveryback, our first aquatic loss.

I don't really like having an aquarium.

Meanwhile, Elias is continuing his research into electrical engineering. As you may recall, I recently walked through the entire house carefully replacing all the outlet covers. So the other day, Elias comes running in carrying two outlet covers! Look what I did! he non-verbally exclaimed. I went in to see what was up. He had managed to get the covers off the very outlet where he had been sticking the key. The new outlet covers I got were the special easier to remove variety ("save your nails!" the package exclaims.) But what value if the tot himself can save his nails too? I found one of the old-school impossible to remove kind and put it into the outlet in question. "Can you get that one off?" I asked Elias. He began to work the problem. He struggled with it for a few moments, then began to sign "Help." "Okay," I said. "That's the kind we'll get." I have now replaced them all again hopefully for the last time.

What is it with this kid and outlets?

He tried to break his neck on the playground yesterday, too. Upon arrival, while I was setting down my diaper bag, he climbed up this big-kid ladder, and fell between the rungs. I saw him fall, but I was a good twenty feet away. He fell straight down, maybe four or five feet. But he landed cat-like on all fours, and apparently the wood chips were enough to prevent serious harm. He sobbed in my arms for a few minutes, and then went back to trying to kill himself, giving me twenty-five more gray hairs before we called it a night.

This evening we were sitting side by side on swings and Isaac mentioned in an off-handed way, "I have aquatic telepathic powers with matches: if I just THINK about wet matches lighting, they get wet, and they catch fire." Now this is a superpower that will surely come in handy someday! Like, when camping in the rain. Or even camping in dry weather– because as you will note, the matches will telepathically get wet and then light nonetheless.

We're back from vacation down south. Much to report, and yet so very tired. It's not the lolling around on the beach that is tiring, per se, it's all the getting there and getting back. And while there, it's all the chasing of children, the endless imperative to keep them from harm. The beach has obvious dangers for toddlers and kindergartners alike. The boarding house itself seemed especially fraught with stairs and splinters and potential ways to break one's little neck. Also, there were other guests to consider. Although it was officially "kids' week" and the other parents all pitched in and were patient, ours were the youngest kids there. This created a familiar impossibility of ever finishing a meal or a sentence without having to run off after a stray child. 

All the sunshine and sand were so restoring, though. I even liked the heat (most of the time) and the furious rainstorms. I saw this lightning over the ocean one night– it was GOLD and it didn't just strike the black water quickly– it SAT there, a jagged vertical bar for an extremely long time. Must have been way out there though– I never did hear the thunder.

Elias is in an especially self-destructive phase. Some of his new ways to harm himself: running into pillars, dropping things on his feet. Yesterday, our first day back, I was inundated with landlady tasks and unpacking and catching up on everything. The dryer at the rental house was broken and I was on the phone trying to get someone to fix it. (So it begins!) Meanwhile Elias took my keys and wandered into the other room. When I got off the phone he beckoned me to come see what he was doing. When I got into the living room, I nearly had a heart attack. He had poked a key deeply into an outlet. So deeply that it was just hanging there…! Why he was not brutally shocked, I can only suppose was because he chose by sheer luck a car key. It was too fat to go in there all the way, and it had rubber handle on it, which perhaps provided insulation.

OH GOD.

So in the midst of everything else I went out and bought two new packs of outlet covers and walked the whole house, covering them all again. We did this a year ago, but somehow over time half of them had wandered away. (You use the outlet, and forget to put the cover back, repeat.)

I now have both boys for three solid weeks, with no respite, before school begins. Ben is absorbed in union negotiations, which are making him miserable, and thus he needs support from home, as opposed to shouldering burdens the minute he walks in. That is to say, Help.

I've been having serious trouble with Isaac too. I spent my scant spare time at Pawleys reading "Raising Your Spirited Child." That is, "the child who is MORE intelligent, perceptive, sensitive, persistent and energetic"– Isaac to a T. Apparently 10-15% of children are thus blessed/afflicted. Really the book is a godsend. I think it has helped me a lot. We've been having horrible tantrums and rages (both of us) in recent months. From my point of view he is just relentless. From his point of view, who knows? In any case, I hope that the new perspective I gained from reading this book will help. 

We now have a code word: "I'm heading into the red zone." to tell each other when the madness is coming back. If possible, we can then leave the situation, stop the inputs at their source, and prevent the horrible explosion from happening. We can try this thing I call a "gentle out" (instead of a time out– timeouts stopped working a month or two ago, when Isaac starting using them as an opportunity to destroy his room.) That's where I take him to a quiet place and try to calm him down by rubbing his back and talking to him quietly. I have managed to head off some tantrums this way.

But this sort of thing is not always possible. Just yesterday, we were shopping for groceries, and Isaac's behavior was spiraling downward. He was running, climbing in and out of the cart. He grabbed the coffee bean dispenser and dumped out way more coffee beans than were called for, he gave Elias a cup of water, and Elias dumped it down my back and all over the floor, etc. My goals retreated to just getting the bare minimum so we could make dinner, but still this proved almost impossible. Finally we were at the point of being out the door, thank god, and heading for the car, when he really lost it. Like the lying down and kicking kind of lost it. My goal was to get us physically to the car (meanwhile, as I was trying to talk Isaac down, Elias in the cart was pulling my hair). Pushing the cart with one hand, trying to restrain/carry/prevent Isaac from getting hit by a car with the other hand. At least Elias wasn't trying to get free from the cart at the same time. 

Oh lord give me strength.

Someone tell me it's just a phase.

But looking at it, there were reasons that it went like that. It was our first day back, and Isaac was freaking out just from the transition home from vacation, and to the new reality of three weeks of nothing before school starts. And there were all the errands. Piling up. Needing to be done. All the in and out of stores and places, getting Lena and Zane Grey from the boarding place, and so on. 

I don't know how I could've handled it better, given the imperatives to get at least the critical things done. But I suppose it helps to understand where it all went wrong, at least. It's no mystery. The question now is how to make the next three weeks tolerable and avoid killing each other. At this moment it's day two, early morning, and Isaac is still asleep. I will now try to take many deep cleansing breaths and prepare for the day. Elias is climbing on me though, and not exactly a non-issue. He's a handful too!

Maybe in a few days we'll settle in though. Could it be nice to have three weeks of freedom? Maybe?  

Recently my dad and step-mom came for a visit, and they very kindly brought my old typewriter for Isaac. It is a Sears model, c. 1965 I would guess. Thus is was something of a relic even when I was using it in the early 80s in high school. Isaac took to it immediately– the typing, the mechanics, the wonderful clicks and taps, the carriage, the ding of the bell– all of it captivated him. He started out carefully typing things with grown-ups helping him spell, and then moved on to typing his own invented and often nearly inscrutable writings. Then it died… it began only typing on the "stencil" setting, and refused all pleas to change back to using ink. I even got it a new ribbon. … So I just planned to take it to the typewriter repair place (apparently there still are a few in existence), but hadn't gotten around to it. Then, it was miraculously healed! As swiftly and mysteriously as it had set itself on permanent stencil, it went back to normal. So now Isaac is typing again. Mostly the happy marginless pages of solid text, heavy on the fffggghhhjjj type keys near the center.

The other day he came running upstairs to show me an important missive he had typed. It said:

WE WOT $

and

WENED$F FOR CU R CUCHRE

He read these messages to me– "We want money" and "We need money for our country." TRUE!! How true… but WHY?? I have no idea what prompted him to compose these items.

In any case, this has been a week of financial logistics. We just finished the renovations on the old house, costly but needed. And now we are landlords– the tenants actually moved in yesterday!! Wow! We have a rental property. This has been a short-term financial ouch in the hopes of longer term financial health. We recoup the investment not by rental income, per se, but by not having to sell the house right now at a fraction of its value. 

Anyway, in the midst of all this check-writing, it was not a good week to learn that we need a new well. Yes– out here in the sticks we have no city water to turn our noses up at. We have well water from our own private, diseased hole in the ground. IN our case, it was apparently dug back sometime before 1940 (as far back as the records go), and seeing as our house dates from 1830, it's hard to pin down just how old and decayed it is.

This was an issue back when we bought the house, and I instinctively suspected that the well would poison my children. I had it tested 9 ways to Sunday, and only after double shock treatments with bleach did it come back negative for bacteria. But the water consultant and the health department gave it all a pass eventually, and seemed indeed to be puzzled by my dread of it, so finally I just put in a big reverse osmosis system for drinking water and let it go.  We were told at the time that it would need to be shocked with bleach annually, and more than a year had passed. Meanwhile it had begun to be noticeably stenchy (rotten eggs– yum!), and it was time to change the filters on the R.O. system anyway. So a couple weeks ago I called the water treatment man and had it checked out. Positive for bacteria again– yippee– and "not potable." TUrns out the R.O. system was only approved for potable water and so we had to begin drinking bottled water again immediately. 

The water treatment man had a big $$$ cha-ching system to sell me. In any case, because I didn't really trust him all that much, I decided to call the county health department water person for a second opinion. Thus is was on Wednesday I think that the incredibly nice and thorough and nice county water guy came and looked into the well pit (it's not supposed to be in a pit) and looked at the corroded pipe and declared that we need a new well!! The next day he came back and actually climbed down into the pit himself to take some damning photos of the horrible situation. Seems the holes are not only big enough for bugs to get in, but even mice. And… did I mention that we have mice? Like tons? And that mouse poop can have some fun live parasites it in? And we have small children?

So… ARG.

Ben and I have had some marital discord over it, because he's very weary of the huge sucking sound in his wallet. It remains to be seen exactly how this will play out. Meanwhile we're drinking bottled water, carrying cups around to brush teeth. Yesterday we had a play date and kids playing in the hose and I was getting an ulcer with worry about whether they would drink from the wading pool. Isaac began sucking on the drawstring of his swimming trunks just to terrorize me.  

Is there ever a good time to need to drill a new well? Probably not…

On the good side, our French girl Alice (ah–LEES) is a gem. We LOVE her. She's a delight. She's leaving on Wednesday, though, and then I think small hearts will be broken around here. i don't think I can lure her back next year, either– she's already booked to the hilt with her schooling. seems she;s about to begin SEVEN years of working her butt off in order to get a degree in business. She just finished HS and this seems a little harsh, but apparently in France that's how they do things. Anyway, it's been great to have her for this week and tempts me ever more that an au pair would be a good invention. I know I could've refinanced the mortgage, managed the last phase of the rehab, dealt with the well issues, and all that, with Elias complicating things greatly, but I can report that doing it with another person on hand was a LOT better!! 

Oh yes, and Elias chose this particularly demanding week to need a sudden trip to the ER. Briefly, a horrible cough came over him that was the sort of thing that sends chills down your spine. It was Tuesday afternoon when he woke up from his nap. It was a high-pitched, constricted, strangling sort of cough, combined with retracting ribs and flared nostrils. That is, all the signs of not getting enough air– and pretty near out of the blue. I called his doctor to see if I could get him in there, and the nurse I was talking to heard him over the phone. She said, "You have to take him to the Emergency Room right now." This was not ideal, because I also needed to pick Isaac up from camp. Could I take my medical-emergency boy to camp and get Isaac out of the pool? COuld I leave Isaac there for 2-3 hours while I handled this and Ben finished up his work? No. So I called Ben, pulled him out of a meeting, and he had to drop everything and run up to get Isaac. 

This freed me up to just deal with Elias, which was what i needed to do. However, by the time I got him to the ER he was basically fine again. My thought was simply that it's asthma and boy number two is afflicted just like boy number one. Anyway, it wasn't asthma– and just when I was concerned that I was insane, a kindly and very experienced old doctor came in diagnosed it: croup! People toss around the word "croup" to mean any sort of bad nasty cough, but it's got a technical meaning and it's HORRIBLE. And indeed, the little airway can become so constricted during an attack of croup that it can be life-threatening. Steroids… back home… and onward with the week.

EEk. What a week.

My mom sent me this photo under the above title, and it cracked me up so I will share it with you.

I showed this to Isaac and he understood the problem right away. "That's a POSSUM!" he said with a bright smile. "They have more teeth than any other mammal!" Seems he met one at school one time and even got to pet it. I met one myself one time, too, ironically in the city. One dark night on our porch Lena dog was battling it. I didn't know what it was, until it literally played possum. Lena set it down saying, "Huh? You died?" and it got up and ran away. You would think the bald, prehensile tail and the little hands, to say nothing of the pointy face, would tip these people off that it's NOT a cat, but… oh well. 

Life here has been 100% frantic lately. It's my new little project of renovating our extra house and becoming a land lady. It's on top of all the normal insanity around here, and it's been especially overwhelming this week. The kitchen is going in, the carpet is coming out and new is going in, the fridges have been swapped between the houses, the lease has been haggled over ad nauseum, the tenants are packing their stuff to move in, and a week from now this will all be done (please lord). We will be landlords and the constant problem of having two enormous mortgages and double utilities will be reduced. The mortgage crisis has slammed Cleveland extra hard and now, at least, we can get out of the  market and forget about the whole thing until such time in the future the economy rights itself. (Might be a while…) Now one need only refinance to get the mortgage payments to an amount under the rent income. Negative cash flow go away!

Elias can now say "baby!" and "cookie!" in standard English. He also has upgraded his "yeah" to "yesh!" which is beyond cute. Speaking of beyond cute, can I tell you that he feeds his trucks and tucks them into little beds? I mean… seriously…

We let the spider and the little toads go, and got a fish tank with two mollies and one male beta. We had a rough start with all of it, and I handled the whole thing very badly, not doing research or advance prep or thinking it through all that well. So one of the mollies died– RIP Silveryback. Isaac insisted that he be buried with a cross to mark his grave, and we said a few words. Goldyback and Bill (the beta) have been carrying on stoically. We also got some water conditioning drops and some stress treatment and a nice pump. The two remaining fish seem to be doing great, although Bill chases Goldyback around constantly.  We need to get Goldyback some sort of hidy hole because Bill seems to feel that the whole tank is his territory. (Beta's aren't supposed to be aggressive to fish of other types.) But it's a new hobby, pretty much launched. We have three new little toads that Isaac caught the other day, just for old times' sake.

Other than that, we have a French girl coming to stay with us for ten days starting on Monday. A guest and sort of a helper-outer. We'll see how it goes. She's supposed to be pretty nice, so I have long-term designs on getting her to be our au pair next summer. More on that as it develops. In the meantime… the house is a complete mess after a week of running through and dropping things off, picking things up, and running out again. Or on the phone for hours coordinating things while Elias runs amok. Ugh. I'm exhausted, but there are many things to clean before i rest.

In keeping with our recent collection, now a brimming 11, of tiny toadies, we have added a truly scary invertebrate to the mix. She's a wolf spider , about two inches across including legs. That is to say she could eat any one of our toads for a light snack. It creeps me out to even have their cages near each other. Her body alone is a chilling one inch long and … um … how to put this… meaty. I had the misfortune of running into the the little dear yesterday morning down in the basement. She was playing hide-n-seek with me while i trying to do the laundry. Her favorite hidy hole being under one laundry pile or the other, and my fun game was finding her… losing her… finding her again! Hello!

So let's review my options: a) kill her– surely a gruesome job, with all the legs and guts that would entail, to say nothing of the moral implications… she was carrying lo these 500 babies on her back at the time; b)  go away from the basement never to return… tempting but impractical. ..  I have no Hungarian laundress to beribbon princess slips, make strudel, or otherwise (see Joy of Cooking), and thus the laundry is my bag… I'm down there many times per day; or c) catch her and give her huge revolting scary self and all 5 million of her little ones a nice home in the country. So I went with C. 

I was on the phone with my mom at the time, and when it comes to advice about how best to live capture a giant and powerful insect with many legs and biting mouth parts, she's the one you want on hand to talk you through it. I simply set a large and sturdy mason jar over the beast, then slid a layer of paper under it, tipped it over, and voila! A new pet!

Isaac was not home at the time, but can I tell you how PLEASED he was with my derring-do? His first imperative was to figure what she eats and procure some of that. In short he wanted to see her eat crickets. I was… ill. TRULY ILL at the thought. Frogs and toads I'm fine with. But this is much more squeamish making. But he was so persistent and so interested in the project that when we were out doing errands I allowed us to stop by the cricket store (there is one) and get six hapless victims. We also got a mini critter keeper, called the critter tote, for her to live in during her– god willing– brief stay at our home.

He named her "Mrs. Carry" because she's carrying so many young on her back. I nicknamed her "Mrs. Scary" because she scares the hell out of me.

So this morning I agreed to combine the crickets with their death warden. Then over the course of the morning we watched at least two sickening and prolonged interludes in which Mrs. Scary sucked the life out of the poor little bastards. Also, as I feared, the babies suddenly decided to take leave of mama and wander away far and wide. I did take the precaution of covering their critter tote with a layer of tissue paper such that escaping through the little breathing holes would be more challenging. But. Impossible? Hm.

All day I've been advocating letting her go as soon as possible, like NOW. But Isaac is loath to part with such a prize. (Indeed he insisted on bringing her critter tote to sleep beside his bed.) His plan now is to parlay the whole situation into a fish. He'll let all his wild pets go and I'll get him a fish. This is seeming more and more like a generous offer! A fish would be way, way better than this.

I took some photos. In these you can see the babies on her back, and her in the very act of sucking the life blood from the cricket. I can tell you that if you are prone to the heebee-jeebies, or the willies, or the creeps, for god's sakes don't click on them.

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We have the most astonishing good fortune when it comes to toads.

Maybe a month ago, Isaac was gouging a hole in the garden with the "jet" setting on the hose, when he discovered a wonderful little hop toad. Or maybe excavated him from his burrow. He called me over and together we captured the toad and put him in a mason jar. Isaac named him "Mr. Lumpy." The next day he brought Mr. Lumpy to school "to show the children" (Isaac is always very interested in the children– as if it's a group he doesn't belong to.) Our original idea was straight catch and release, but we ended up keeping him for a week or so. I bought him a critter keeper at the pet store– I went in and announced "I need a home for a small toad"– which yielded immediate results. I also bought a dozen small crickets to feed him. The pet store man suggested that I feed him only four crickets and four worms on the first day, but i had no handy place to keep the crickets so I just threw them all in. I figured he would eat his fill and the rest would hang around waiting to get eaten when he got hungry again. But inevitably he gorged on them all and then was so full he could barely walk. Subsequently I learned from toadilytoads.com that toads are natural gluttons, and this is part of what makes them so adorable. 

We enjoyed having Mr. Lumpy around– Isaac slept with him beside the bed, carried him to the table for meals, etc. But when we were going out of town, we decided to feed him a feast of crickets and set him free. However toads tend to stay around. I've seen him outside a few times, and the other day he was sitting halfway in a hole and he let me pet him! He's gained a lot of weight since I last saw him, but he was so tame that I have no doubts that he's the same good old toad. 

So then last weekend we were out for a walk with my dad and step-mom, who were here from out of town. For some reason, Isaac was having a long, continuous tantrum the entire way. He didn't WANT to go on this walk at all– not here, not on this path, not with his bike, not this direction, and so on and so forth. It was really getting tiresome. Ben had taken him back towards the car a couple times and was struggling in general over every detail of it, when lady luck smiled on us. A tiny, TINY toad hopped across the path. It was so tiny that at first glance I thought it was a little cricket. When I realized it was a toad, I'll have to admit that i was awed and fascinated. After a while I decided to try to distract Isaac from his foul mood by suggesting that we catch some of the toads and put them in his canteen to bring him. This project was a big success. We caught four and decided that was enough. We came home and set up a habitat for them with leaf litter and a few ants. Then over the last week we've caught six more– even Elias caught one!

Isaac named them "The Smooth Brothers." Individually their names are Cherry, Fruit Fly, Tongue, Hop, Lightning, Zeppo, Mr. Climb, Elias, Abraham (named by this lady who was here when Elias caught it– she was so impressed!) and the tenth is as yet unnamed. Indeed, it's gotten so that I see them here and there and just — don't catch them! I think our critter keeper is at capacity. Isaac's plan is to keep them until they are "big enough to take care of themselves." Which… well technically they are able to do that now, although I can see that nature's plan is to go with sheer quantity and hope that some of them survive. Their tininess is actually sort of a challenge in terms of husbandry… I put some ants in there, and found that the ants were much bigger than many of the toads. I put in a housefly and saw that it was the same size as some of the toads. The best way to feed them, it turns out, is to catch them and dump out their old leaf littter. THen throw in some new, with all the tiny eyelash-sized worms and almost invisible fruit fly like bugs and what not that I assume they eat when out in the wild.

Yesterday we caught them into a jar and I took a photo for you. That dime is for scale!

PS: my friend Sam is visiting and wants to be included in this blog post. "Why stand in the way of my only chance at fame?" has asks. Well, if you put it that way– of course. Sam is free to ride my coattails to glory.

Recently a well-to-do lady I know described someone else as "not some underprivileged drudge who can't afford help." Since then, although the remark was not directed at me, I've been unable to get that particular phrase out of my head. I'm an underprivileged drudge! I remark to myself as I haul my 400th load of laundry up from the basement. I'm an underprivileged drudge! I exclaim as I clean out the diaper pail and the cat box.

And most of the people I know are also underprivileged drudges! I've been trying to figure out what I can do with my wonderful new title. It's tempting to emblazon it on a t-shirt and wear the bold words, UNDERPRIVILEGED DRUDGE on my bosom.  Or perhaps a new blog, underprivilegeddrudge.com, would be a gathering place for those of us who can't afford domestic help to share the trials and triumphs of our sorry little lives. 

It reminds me that a while back I wrote a piece I titled "The Drudgery Report" and sent it in to Babble.com. The editor there said they'd had enough on housework (although she praised the title) back when "To Hell With All That" came out. (The book is about housework, primarily, but written by an at-home mom WITH a nanny and cleaning people, which certainly cuts down on her street cred in my book.) I wrote this back in November. In the last month or so I've had the house cleaned by someone else… TWICE. It's really golden! Now am I NOT an underprivileged drudge? I don't think so… because a real privileged non-drudge would have a nanny running after the kids all day and a housekeeper in here more like three days a week, not just once in a great while. A real privileged non-drudge would be able to get a pedicure and play tennis at the club, and have lunch with friends and go shopping. It's so nice to have the floor scrubbed and the toilets cleaned at least every other week, and now that we have a dishwasher life is a lot less hopeless, BUT there still are beds to be made, dishes, cooking, groceries, and lots and lots of laundry to do each day. I still find myself rather baffled as to how anyone else does this. … Anyway, here's the piece:

The Drudgery Report
I love my kids. Scrubbing toilets, not so much.

I’m tired. That special I-haven’t-had-a-good-night’s-sleep-in-five years, I’m-covered-with-mashed-avocado sort of tired. I have two exhausting yet beautiful children (Isaac, 5 and Elias, 1)  and one beautiful yet exhausting house. I’m sitting here and wondering how it ever came to pass that child-rearing and home-keeping were combined into this single impossible job. There may not be two occupations on Earth that are less compatible. 
    When I focus on the house and actually try to keep it tidy and functioning, the children are huge pains in the ass. Elias is now a toddler, and so he can follow me: I put books on the shelf, he throws them down into a pile; I fold the laundry, he unfolds it; I wipe off the table, he climbs up and spills milk, peas, and applesauce all over it, and so on. Meanwhile Isaac is unattended: he’s decided to stand in the sink up to his ankles in soapy water and pee his pants. When not melting band-aids to hot light bulbs, he’s popping pomegranate seeds  all over the dining room so that it looks like a scene from a Brian DePalma movie.  With their help, I can clean all day and end up with a messier house than I started with. Did Sisyphus ever have it this easy?
    When I focus on the children, the house is a huge pain in the ass. How can I take them to the zoo for an afternoon of fresh air and intellectual stimulation when the sink is full of dishes? How can I set up an interesting art project or science experiment when dinner is not made and no one has any clean clothes for tomorrow?  Rest assured, I avoid many fun things that we would like to do because of the mess that would follow. Mothers working outside the home, I know, are subject to guilt on many fronts. So are those of us working inside the home. Even we can’t do it all.  I submit to you that one of the easiest ways to keep a house clean is to leave in the morning, get everyone out, lock the door, and go away for 12 hours. It’s a lot harder if you’re actually using the house all day.
    I read in a recent New York Times article that, in the 1960s, the average housewife spent 34 hours a week on housework, and 11 hours a week on childcare. This statistic shocked me—it made it seem as if the house were the point of the job, and the children mere adjuncts. The job title was “housewife” and I guess they took it literally. The children were apparently sent out to play, or if too young for that were parked in playpens. No one worried about infant brain development, or childhood abduction, or life-threatening injury. They would presumably come home if someone broke an arm or a creepy man offered them candy. The main goals of the housewife were apparently spotless whites, gleaming linoleum, lemony-freshness and wholesome, well-balanced meals. Betty Freidan was right about this—to think that this would fulfill anyone was really ridiculous.
    Those of us relatively affluent, well-educated women who make up the opt-out revolution call ourselves “at-home moms.” Which is to say, it’s not about the house. The house is a mere adjunct. It’s about the kids.  The kids are our full-time job. Unlike the cleaning, the kids are not menial. They are not a waste of our talents and education. The kids are important and a labor of love. But who—I ask you—who is supposed to take of the house? 
My husband Ben works, of course, to bring home the bacon. Cleaningwise, he pitches in when he can, but there’s not a lot of time in the two waking hours between dinner and bedtime, and he really needs to focus on our boys. On weekends he likes to tackle bigger projects like cleaning out the garage. He’s a great neatener, a great cook, and all around a lovely man, but there’s a sharp limit on what he can really do, simply because he’s not here. (I’ll leave the gender politics for another essay.)
We used to have a cleaning service, actually, and all this was a lot easier to manage. (Although there was still much that they couldn’t do.) But this spring we bought a new house, moved, and have yet to sell our old house. The squeeze of two mortgages in a horrible housing market, and the pain of two sets of repairs and utilities, have combined to make it impossible, for now, to pay anyone to help. No childcare, no cleaning people. Just me: mano a mano with a mountain of laundry. With two kids velcroed to my legs or loose in the house creating more and yet more chaos, I find myself wondering, how in the hell does anyone DO this? And I have it so incredibly easy compared to most. I know that. I’m not a single mom, for Pete’s sake. I have a stable marriage and financial security. I only have two kids—what if there were seven? What if we lived in the olden days? Yet I feel set up for failure. I feel that there’s no way to actually succeed at doing these dueling jobs. 
Don’t they nap? You’re wondering. Well, Isaac is in school full days and it’s about a 45 minute drive round trip, twice, to drop him off and pick him up. So Elias tends to sleep in the car. When we get home, there are rare occasions when I can get him into the house still sleeping, or get him back to sleep. But we’re talking about maybe an hour that would qualify as child-free cleaning time each day.  I often clean like a dervish during these times. But it makes me feel like Cinderella after the sisters have left for the ball. Sometimes I really wish I could sit down and have a cup of tea.
My friends who work outside the home look at me and say, “You must have so much time for making cupcakes and knitting!” And I look at them and say, “I never even get to go to the bathroom by myself! I consider myself lucky if I get my hair brushed at some point!” From where I’m sitting, the freedom to have a half-hour lunch and read the paper, or to think your own thoughts on the bus on the way to work, look pretty luxurious.
Maybe is the problem that the expectations for our interactions with our children are so much greater than they once were. Every hour of the day must include sensory stimulation, language development, fine and gross motor skills and intellectual growth, so it seems. The first three years are so important! And since raising the kids is “all” I am doing, I feel determined to do it “right.” The guilt I feel for parking the boys in front of a DVD is extreme, even if I must in order to get the dinner started. (NB: I’ve been steadily bribing him with raisins so that I can write this.)
How do others do it? Pay someone? Reduce your standards to the barest minimum? (Trust me: I’m not a neat-freak.) Put the house before the kids and just let the fend for themselves? (When they’re older, maybe?)
Lately I’ve been trying an experiment that seems to be at least reducing some of my frustration and bitterness. When I put a stack of folded laundry in my son’s drawer, I say “I love you.” Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That he’ll have something clean and comfortable to wear to school, and that providing it for him is a loving act? When I wash the dishes or make the beds, I try to think of it as a gift to myself. Later on when I come in and find that work done I think, “Thank you, me from three hours ago! That looks terrific!’
It seems to be helping a little bit. But I’m still open to suggestions.
 

I wouldn't want you to get the impression that just because I tend to write more about Isaac there's nothing going on with Elias. On the contrary. He's quite a little spitfire, a handful, and does it all while looking amazingly, perfectly cherubic. 

In addition to his cuteness, there's his personality. He sparkles. He's just in constant motion, and nearly always in trouble of some kind. This reminds me of a moment when Isaac was about three, and a passerby looked at him and said, "Let me get this straight: he IS Dennis the Menace." Yes. Elias has a little of the devil in him, too. Like, say, putting the camera in the dog water (yesterday), or hitting me over the head with a stuffed orca while I'm on the phone, or drawing on ALL the walls in the house and running away full speed when caught. He does things like suddenly grab a bag of chips and dump it all out on the table, and then when I stand up to clean that up, suddenly c\grab a glass of water and dump that out on top of the chips. He's REAL FAST. When we were at Vassar, I had my friends Colin and Donna watch the boys while I did a little quick shopping in the Vassar store. Donna followed Isaac around, and poor Colin was tasked with Elias. He would pass by periodically at a brisk walk, arms laden with miscellaneous items Elias had thrown down or handed him. "This is insane!" he would cry, and keep moving. "How do you do this?" How indeed. With the three of us adults on the job, I was able to pick out a t-shirt. Now, imagine me trying to get a whole list of groceries, single-handedly, with both boys. 

Elias also is painfully accident prone, and no day goes by without some disfiguring bruise or cut, usually on the face. (Modeling– I think not.) He does thing like standing up on the easy chair I'm sitting on and then somehow falling down between it and the wall, smashing his face into the windowsill. Or running towards a video game at a restaurant, and pitching forward so that the corner of a foot-tall platform hit him square between the eyes. Or repeatedly going under the table and standing up… CONK. (Maybe he's beautiful but not too bright?) I guess this is all part of learning to walk/run/deal with the world, but it's pretty hard to watch. And although I can manage to rescue him from harm nine times out of ten, there's always such a pure volume of times per day that he still manages to get some pretty serious damage on a regular basis. 

Meanwhile– oh, the communication!! He's a wizard. He's constantly sending and receiving bits of information, and clearly loves to connect with people, but just almost none in standard English. His signing skills are pretty good. He knows signs for… eat, more, hot, worm, bee, hurt, butterfly, dog, fall down, thank you, one Tum please (he made this sign up due to a pressing need) nursing, water, and much more, as well as a whole range of barn and zoo animal sounds and several made-up references to Thomas, Bob,  Wiggles, and Diego. (I am not happy to admit any of that.) He has put together adorable sentences, like "Isaac is calling you, Mama." Which he explained by saying his word for Isaac, Aaah-gn, and then enacting the calling of Mama. He said, "Aaah-gn: Mama! Mama!" He loves Isaac and Daddy. Sometimes when we are alone Elias will ask out of the blue, "Aaah-gn, Dad'n?" And I'll explain, "Isaac is at school and Daddy is at work." This seems to satisfy him.  

Isaac is suddenly enamored of the annoying Go Diego Go! series, which his little friends at school seem to like for some reason, and I guess parents tolerate because it teaches Spanish. Anyway, Elias has been calling it "Go-go-go!"  which is not too far off the mark. He calls yogurt "aa-oo-ga," and seems indeed to be calling it, coaxing it gently forth from the fridge when he goes over and croons, "aaa-ooo-ga!" He likes to talk about how snakes bite and turtles swim in the water and bees can hurt you. 

He babbles steadily and, as if the universal translator or Star Trek is broken and coming back online, random words pop into view– like "Hot" or "nap." Or "binoculars!" We were sitting around the other evening and Elias saw them on the mantle. "Binoca!" he said, pointing. It's incredibly helpful now that he can say "Yeah" and shake his head no. At the very least we can play 20 questions until we figure out what he's wanting.

Often, he wants to talk about an incident in which Percy (Thomas the Tank Engine's green colleague) ran right through the chocolate factory and got covered with chocolate. He describes this dramatically in pure baby, with lots of emphatic gestures. And I say, "Are you thinking about Percy? Getting covered in chocolate? — What a mess!' And then he beams with joy because I know what he's talking about (and also, probably, because the chocolate-covered Percy is a pretty funny sight.) Yesterday he was apparently telling his Percy story (he sings a few bars of the Thomas theme to let me know that's the topic) and then signed FROG. This tipped me off that he was now talking about a similar incident in which Thomas was pushed off the tracks and on to a raft, with a frog looking on. "And the frog was watching him?" I asked. He laughed and his eyes twinkled, with "You got it!" written all over his face.