Halloween traditions

Lyla is currently upstairs in her crib, happily kicking the bars. Earlier she sprint-clomped from the living room couch to the bed in the guestroom and back, no exaggeration, eleven times. Then she roared like a lion around the entire first floor, a psycho toddler-dervish who at times literally whirled.

And to think that three lollipops ago, she was a just a bumblebee who didn't feel much like trick-or-treating.


But we pushed her along the corridor of the Eden Prairie mall, through the throngs of other kids who all seemed to know exactly what to do, and up to the first candy-giver we could find. Into the empty pail plunked a box of Dots, at which point Lyla mistakenly thought it was time to eat them.

"Peez."


"Lyla, Halloween isn't about consumption. It's about accumulation."

"PEEZ!"

"Plus, Dots are squishy little throat plugs."

At this point, Julie swooped in and carried Lyla to the next candy distributor. Thankfully, it was something Lyla could eat.


That yellow lollipop lasted almost half an hour. She met the fire department's mascot.


She rode in the yellow bus.


And she held out her bucket for more candy.

I don't remember having this much fun as a young trick-or-treater. But then, Halloween was never about fun; it was about urgency. We didn't use plastic pumpkins, but pillowcases. Around the neighborhood we'd run, intolerant of anyone with side cramps or curfew, gasping "Trick or treat!" greedily. We'd leap off the porch the instant a transaction ended and then cut through the yard to the next one.

I suppose it was fun, in the same way the Army is fun.

Nothing topped the Halloween blizzard of 1991. House after house, amazed citizens dumped handfuls of candy into our bags, saying things like, "Oh my, you boys are so brave" and "Here, just take the entire bowl."

Halloween didn't typically end with eating candy. It ended with counting, sorting, and swapping. It ended with complex data analysis. Eating came later.

But today, eating came first. When Lyla sucked her lollipop down to a nub, we switched her to a root-beer-flavored Dum Dum. At first she heartily objected, but we watched as her Halloween paradigm slowly expanded to allow root beer onto its list of acceptable tastes, right next to yellow. Later she had a blue one, and it blew her mind.

As I mentioned, we came home and Lyla was totally wired. But she hasn't kicked her crib in several minutes, so it appears she has finally crashed. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to try out a new Halloween tradition: stealing candy from a baby.

Situation

Lyla managed to turn the light on in the nursery at 6:25 this morning. Here she is saying "Dada, shirt on!" Just because my pec-to-ab proportion is the inverse of The Situation's doesn't mean I should be forced to think about it before the sun rises.

No molars? No common sense? Taste the rainbow!

Lyla came home with a Halloween treat bag containing candy and that coloring book. She finished dinner and was allowed one Kit Kat, and it was like we suddenly entered the land of bizarro-eating. I didn't know she could be that conscientious with food, like Charlie Bucket with a Wonka bar.

The bag also contained Skittles, but I hid those in a cupboard.

Between last night and this morning, I endured seven hours of parent-teacher conferences. Most of the conferences were pleasant, but a couple of the parents were a little too passionate about the need for their little darling to get (not earn, get) an A. Those conversations were exhausting. "Your kid will have an A the second he deserves one," are the exact words I should've said, but of course I flowered it up while my chest tightened.

It wasn't as bad as I'm making it seem. These are parents who care about their kids. They're not adversarial toward school and teachers, just involved and concerned.

So I need to figure out how to dial myself down to "involved and concerned" when I ask Lyla's daycare director on Monday why the hell they're sending Skittles home with toddlers.

Sticker obsession

If there's ever a national sticker shortage, we might have to change nations.

Parent-teacher conferences were tonight, and I'm exhausted. I had a nearly three-hour stretch with no lull, just parent after parent after parent. When I finally had two consecutive seconds with no one at my table, I ran up to my classroom to douse myself with hand sanitizer.

So I missed seeing Lyla this evening. Julie did mention, however, that before bed Lyla spent several more minutes feeding the sticker obsession.

Lylazilla

While Julie talked on the phone to her sister in their secret twin language, I convinced Lyla that for Mama's foot to reach its full beauty potential, it needed a lot of stickers.



In other foot-related news, you know how Godzilla stomps all over the poor Japanese? Picture Godzilla seated in the bathtub and you will get an approximate sense of Lyla's bathtub conduct.

Her legs: UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN BOOM BOOM BOOM SPLASH SPLASH SPLASH SPLASH.

"Lyla, you're getting Dada wet."

"Hee hee hee hee!" BOOM BOOM BOOM.

On and on. I finally dragged her out when the water turned cold and she began to shiver.

Ordering

Lyla's mornings have gotten busier since I built that table. Have I mentioned that she digs through that box of letter magnets, finds the L, and says Lyla? She also knows that D is for Dada, M is for Mama, and that G is for Grandma and Grandpa. Sorry. I'm not a big fan of when people brag about how smart their kids are.

Do you think she could test out of the first half of kindergarten?

In other news, the weather outside sounds apocalyptic. I stopped at home after school to let the dogs out and discovered the whole neighborhood's power was out. At daycare I asked Lyla if eating at a restaurant sounded like an acceptable plan.

"Westwant!"

"That's an odd pronunciation."

"Yeah."


"Do you want macaroni and cheese, or chicken nuggets?"

"Titten nuddets."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"Are you just repeating the last food I named?"

"Yeah."

"Do you want chicken nuggets, or macaroni and cheese?"

"Mac and teese."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"Do you want macaroni and cheese, or chicken nuggets?"

"Mac and teese."

At this point the waitress offered to come back.

"She'll have the macaroni and cheese."

"Mac and teese! Appo toss."

"With apple sauce."

"Mihk."

"And milk."

Same level of despair

When we arrived home from daycare, I decided Lyla might benefit from a mini-lesson on how toasters and microwaves work. "The waffle is cold when it comes out of the freezer," I began, letting her touch one. "Oops, we don't put it in the mouth yet. It goes in the toaster."

"No."

"See, we push it down, and the toaster makes it hot. Um, let's move on. Feel this frozen chicken nugget."

"Ticken nuddet!"

"Yes, feel how cold it is?"

"Yeah." Her eyes became worried and distrustful.

"We put it in the microwave, and it becomes hot. Then we wait for it to cool."

At that moment the combined efforts of the toaster and microwave blew a fuse. I ran downstairs to reset the circuit breaker, then bolted back up to the kitchen.

"Ticken nuddet waffle!"

"They're not quite done yet, but almost. We just push 30 seconds over here and press the little handle down over here. Hey, do you want some cereal and raisins while we wait?"

Lyla felt that idea was full of flawed reasoning.


And in other news, once dinner was properly scarfed, Lyla headed to the living room. Julie and I sat in the kitchen and chatted about our respective days when suddenly we both sensed a palpable quiet. I exited the kitchen expecting to find Lyla cutting her hair or smoking a rolled up magazine, but instead she was fully engrossed in transferring stickers from a pumpkin to a book.


Eventually, after approximately 47 back-and-forths from pumpkin to book and vice versa, the stickers lost their stick, and we learned that non-sticky stickers inspire the same level of despair in Lyla as unprepared waffles and chicken nuggets.

So bottom line: we need Colorforms.

Pumpkin party

We had a bunch of very diminutive humans over this afternoon for a pumpkin decorating party. Maybe next year we'll hand the kids carving knives as soon as they enter the house, but this year it was all about stickers and markers.

Our house isn't huge, so even with eight toddlers it felt like everywhere you turned there was another one. Also, the fact that they never sat still gave the illusion that there were 80 or 90 of them.

We should've videotaped the whole thing and done a study on the group dynamics of toddlers. It's tough to describe here how they interact, or rather avoid interacting. They're definitely interested in one another, but the whole "Hello, I'm Lyla. Nice astronaut costume. What's your name?" skill set feels far off on the horizon somewhere. Instead there's a lot of parallel play, interrupted periodically by minor sharing-related disputes.

But it was fun and gave us a reason to gussy up our house. Lyla was a polite hostess and, again, an excellent bee.


And after everyone left, she put some stickers on the couch.

Room and board

I warned that a timeout was coming if the couch jumping continued and suddenly Lyla slid off the couch, skipped over to the county jail, and checked herself in.

I blame the jumping on the refrain "No more monkeys jumping on the bed." It accomplishes the opposite of its message, just like when adults tell teenagers to abstain from smoking and sex.

We do need a proper timeout chair/rug/stump. The Pooh chair from Grandma is way too fun, which is perhaps why Lyla places herself in timeout. Once we change it out for an upside-down rusted colander, the politeness will flow like the Colorado.

In other news, Ikea can suck it.


Nowhere in the instructions for these little chairs did it state (or rather imply graphically) that the chair's base was not a square but a trapezoid and that there was only one correct way to affix the little doodads to the stick levers. I did finally crack the code, in spite of Lyla's attempts to help.

The big-girl room is coming along. It's a work in progress, but you get the idea.


That window has a good lock, but I'm still nervous about it. Maybe I'll board it up--which will also help when Lyla's a teenager and I tell her not to smoke or have sex.

Curtains

Before I painted it today, Lyla's future big-girl room was the color of the inside of Oscar the Grouch's nostril. Now it feels like you're standing in the sun. It's so bright that it'll never be dark in there.

Which means sleeping could be an issue. Dang it, I should've painted it black.

Julie painted one coat of trim and began to feel cramping that a shriller person might have interpreted as minor contractions. This happened with Lyla-fetus, too, but it never led anywhere besides getting induced at 41 weeks.

As I type this, Julie is at her Donna Reed sewing machine making curtains for the new room. Bom-chicka-wah-wah. It's Friday night, and the mood is right. For making curtains.

You know, come to think of it, I bet that trip to JoAnn Fabrics to buy the material for the curtains eliminated any hankering our future son might've had to enter the world early.

The slide factor

Today and tomorrow are MEA break, which means school is canceled so teachers from every nook of Minnesota can attend a conference in St. Paul.

Well, the suckers attend.

Julie took these days off as well so we can do a grand switcheroo in our house in preparation for our fetus's transformation into a baby.

Remember Julie's "closet" that is actually an entire bedroom? That's becoming Lyla's big-girl room. We're painting it tomorrow. Julie's clothes will move to our bedroom, mine will move downstairs, and the nursery will get boyified.

Julie noticed that while our bedroom closet's shelving would allow her to hang her clothes, sliding them back and forth would be impossible due to some overzealous vertical support dealies. Somehow during the years that I occupied the closet, the non-sliding was a non-issue. With Julie, it is a gargantuan issue, a foot-stamping deal breaker. So this afternoon I got out the drill, the pliers, the tape measure, and some useless tools, and I replaced the entire infrastructure of the closet to make it more slidey.

Hopefully she doesn't think it's too slidey.

Not terrible

Pajama day at daycare rocks. You just wake up the kid, throw a new diaper on her, give her some food, and you're on your way. Theoretically. In reality, it's not less work than any other day because Julie insisted that we de-pajama the child and re-pajama her into the infinitely more fashionable owl-in-yellow-scarf number in the above photo.

Lyla was hyper when I picked her up this afternoon. The kids were all in the gym doing whatever they do, and Lyla ran right past me and out the door into the hallway, sprinting all the way back to her new room. I huffed and puffed in after her.

"Lyla, we should probably go bye-bye."

"No bye-bye. Book!"

She ran to a little chair and picked up a (gag) Barney book.

"Bah-nee!"

Then she was off, book in hand and out the door into the hallway.

"Lyla, put the book back, please."

She tossed it in the general direction of the door and was off, back toward the gym.

"Lyla..."

It's like she was one of those pull-back toy cars after it's been pulled back and let go.

Finally I got my hands on her and threw her over my shoulder like a sack of very squirmy potatoes. Back at the discarded book, I leaned over with her so she could grapple it with her little claws, then walked with her to the chair, where she relaxed her grip and watched it bounce off the chair and onto the floor.

"Uh oh."

"It's fine. Hey, should we go home?"

"Book floor." She pointed at it and nodded emphatically.

"Hey, do you want to go home and eat pasta?"

"No home."

She'll be two years old in exactly one month. Can you tell?

Big koala girl

Lyla napped in the Koala room today with no binky, never even asked about it. Tonight Julie and I were in the nursery with her before bed, complimenting her on her maturity.

"And you slept without a binky!"

"Yeah!"

"Like a big girl!"

"Yeah!"

"Because Koalas don't use binkies."

"Yeah."

"And you didn't even cry?"

"Yeah."

"You were a big girl."

"Yeah!"

So we decided to ride the wave further.

"Do you want to be a big girl in the crib tonight?"

"Yeah!"

"A big girl without binkies?"

"Yeah!"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah!"

Lyla threw me her binkies. I hid them in the room across the hall. Julie placed her in the crib.

Five seconds later, Lyla started to cry. Within one minute the crying escalated to dead-puppy sobbing. Then suddenly she was silent.*

*Because I entered the nursery and plugged her with binkies.

Koala

Tomorrow is Lyla's last day in the Bubble room before her triumphant graduation into the Koala room. In the Koala room she will rub elbows with men and women with mature worldviews like her own ("More mac tseese. More!") and leave behind the infantile concerns of days past ("No spoon. WAAAAH!").

We're using the transition to kick her daycare binky habit. "In the Koala room, the men and women do not use binkies," we told her and then watched her face as her brain slowly digested itself.

"Lyla?"

No answer.

"Lyla? Are you okay? Come on, snap out of it."

"More mac tseese. More!"

And as I've mentioned in several other posts, I'm thrilled about the toilet. This afternoon when I picked up Lyla, the Koala teacher said to me, "You're the one who had questions about the toilet, right?"

"Yes," I replied. "Well, not really questions, actually. Just, I'm just very excited that there's a toilet."

I hope I didn't come across weird, as if we don't have indoor plumbing at home so this will be Lyla's chance to poop without holding a shovel and flashlight. "Say it with me, Lyla Ann: Poop at school and pee at home. Poop at school and pee at home!"

I digress. My prediction is that before Christmas Lyla will have seen so many of the men and women strut into the bathroom to use the toilet that she will come home demanding practice sessions.

"Dada, toe-let."

"Very well, daughter. Right this way."


On another subject, at what point did we cross the hair threshold from cute to feral?

Don't answer that.

Fashion do's

This is the only jacket Lyla will wear, so therefore we need a new jacket since really it's more of a sweatshirt. The problem is that she's becoming very particular about clothing, not unlike her mother.

The number one fashion must in any jacket is pockets. Perhaps Julie feels the same way; you'd have to ask her. But now that Lyla has discovered the existence of pockets, her one pocketless jacket is as offensive as spitting in public or the Yankees.

And a zipper. She has a lovely vest with buttons, and her last vest-related interaction was this: "No vest! Dat-et! Zip-up!" Then she threw herself on the ground.

So we're on the lookout for a winter coat with pockets and a zipper. And probably it will need to be pink. And have a cookie in one of the pockets. And a monkey in the other one.

Stripping

Lyla is immoderately pleased with her new ability to shed clothing. She's like a spring-breaker in South Padre.






I think she'll be left-handed. There's the counter-clockwise spin. The removal of the right sleeve first. The intelligence common to lefties.

Plus, the chick's got class, clearly.

Since shirt removal is now up there with trying on Mama's necklaces on the list of fun things to do, I think we'll skip Mardi Gras this year.

Teeth and terror

"Tseese."


"My see it!"


"Nigh-night."

Last night Lyla woke up at 3:00 and got back to sleep around 4:00. It's either night terrors or teething, perhaps both. What do babies have night terrors about, anyway? Monsters? Getting pushed at school? MPR's pledge drive?

Teething?

Maybe she saw a Michele Bachmann ad.

Waking

The lovely child decided at 4:00 AM that she was awake for good. All attempts to cajole her back to bed ended in spectacular failure. So I brought her downstairs for cereal and milk (it was either that or a frontal lobotomy) and positioned her highchair outside the bathroom so I could shower.

At 5:30 or so, I finally convinced her to give sleep another shot. "We're just going to sway here," I told her in the nursery and turned off the lights. Eventually she put her head on my shoulder. Then I ran through the list of everyone who was sleeping: Mama, Grandma, Tulip, Lori, Jodie, Anja, Jen, Scott, Grandpa, Elmo, Santa, Jesus, etc. "Can I lay you down on your tummy?"

"Yeah."

Julie woke her up at 7:15.

Now it's 8:00 PM and Julie's up there with her again. Lyla just randomly started crying without any clear reason and did not want to be put back to bed. We're starting to think she's having bad dreams. Yikes.

Easily entertained

A couple weeks ago, Daisy claimed one of Lyla's baby blankets as her own. Today, Lyla claimed it back, holes and all.







In this last one, she's saying "Dat-et," which means jacket. Clearly this child does not need expensive birthday presents.

Twins

We're not having twins. Sorry if that title threw you. The Minnesota Twins suck, by the way. I'm just saying.

Speaking of things that involve three strikes and playing shitty, Lyla almost got sent home early from daycare today. Had she Hershey-squirted her pants a third time, we would've gotten the dreaded phone call. So we're keeping our fingers crossed that Lyla keeps it under wraps tomorrow. Her mood is fine and her eating is fine. She's probably teething and swallowing so much saliva that it's, well, you know.

Julie has informed me that she cannot under any circumstances leave work tomorrow. There's too much efficiency that needs maximizing and too many project plans that won't be as impactful without her synergy. If I get the call, meanwhile, I'll have to get my remaining classes covered by God-knows-who. It's a logistical conundrum.

And on the other side of the world, since we're on the subject of twins and logistical conundrums, Julie's twin sister Jen and her new husband Jason had to figure out how to get from Switzerland to Paris despite a Metro strike. But after a detour through Germany they made it and are now sitting in some bistro eating bread and chocolate and drinking wine.

So clearly we're leading parallel lives: their Metro strike is our child with diarrhea. I'm not complaining; it's just that our life is a different kind of honeymoon.

Spanglish

"Lyla, what did you do on the playground today?"

"Up stairs down slide whee."

I think we're in a conversational rut.

Right now, Lyla is about as proficient in English as I am in Spanish. Both of us can tell you that we don't want a hamburger but that please play baseball fun. And we know a bunch of other words that allow us to point at stuff. "Window!" Lyla will say.

"¡La ventana!" I'll reply.

That will change soon. In about a month and a half, Lyla will move into the older toddler room, where young men and women spend hours every day elaborating on various subjects. Perhaps we should enjoy the relative quiet while it lasts.

Fumes

I didn't have the heart to explain to Lyla that a cow drinking milk is sort of like cannibalism. Cownibalism.

At Baker's Square this morning an older guy in the next booth zombie-moaned the entire time we were there. "Unhhhhh. Unhhhhh. Unhhhhh. Unhhhhh. Unhhhhh." When the waitress came to his table, I think he ordered brains.

When we got home I painted a second coat on the porch steps. Julie and Lyla tidied the garage and periodically came porch-side to swoon at my manliness.

Lyla discovered the sled that she loathed last winter.


She likes it better now, but she might have just been smelling the fumes.

Back in high standing

Anja came over with her mom today. The girls got along well, with only occasional toy-related drama.




Meanwhile, two buddies and I painted the front porch, restoring my high standing in the household. That'll probably change tomorrow, but I'm enjoying it today.

Left and right

Julie came out of the bathroom this morning to a proud little girl who had put on her own shoes. Later, when pulling her out of the car seat at daycare, Julie realized they were on the wrong feet.

Any guesses as to what she's looking at in the following photos?




Any guesses? Bueller?

It's her big-girl bed.


The big move happens in three weeks. Hopefully she doesn't topple out of her crib before then.