Notes from Mother’s Journal, II

It was close today, you guys. We almost didn’t make it out of the house. I was thisclose to just saying, you know what? I know it’s sunny and spring and shit? But we are going to play inside. Scratch that; YOU are going to play inside and I am going to make-believe I am in a coma. Trombone is on the third day of a cold and Fresco is on the first and I at least like to have clean noses when we leave the house so it’s wipe, wipewipewipe okay let’s GO wipe wipe wipe. Happy Earth Day from my house. I think in the past calendar year we have used enough tissues to feed an entire village of people who eat tissues.

Then we have the potty, which is in the downstairs bathroom, which bathroom is the size of a closet because it is meant for one person to use at a time. Trombone likes to use the potty but he likes you to read him a story so I’m in there, sitting on the toilet lid with my leg up against the doorjamb as a wall to keep Fresco out of the bathroom. Which leg he, of course, sinks his four teeth into with a ferociousness not seen since Hannibal Lector. Fresco has his own agenda,

(full stop)

which is to climb up on the chair we use as a step stool for Trombone at the sink and then, once he’s up, he likes to smear his hands all over the sink because that’s how far he can reach right now and shout about how fun it is and then sometimes for some extra ick-factor he licks his fingers.

So there are three of us in the bathroom; one of us keeps getting up to look behind him to see if there is poop, the other one is balancing precariously on a chair over a stone floor and one of us is reciting Mr. Brown Can Moo and it’s a good thing she knows it by heart because her hands are occupied keeping everyone from near disaster, concussion and bodily fluid catastrophe.

This morning to keep him out of his brother’s poop, I ended up sticking Fresco in the buggy out in the kitchen and buckling him in.

And when I regained consciousness…

I know, it’s an Air Farce joke but it’s relevant. Truly.

Quick question to distract you: How many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches can one child eat before something bad happens? I believe Trombone is on peanut butter and jelly sandwich number 7 in a row. I am less worried than I am fascinated. How long can this go on? Stay tuned, I will let you know.

We went out and Fresco tossed his hat out of the buggy about eight times per block. I am determined not to lose this particular hat, I really like it, plus we have lost a thousand million hats in the past few months. I am drawing the line at this one, so I backtracked about a thousand million times to get it. “Hey, lady, you lost a hat,” is now officially the number one thing people yell at me on the street. A distant second place goes to, “Cool buggy!” and trailing at third, “Boy you sure are busy!”

The dude at Starbucks took my cup and said, tall? And I said, actually it’s a grande because I have learned that the baristae like it when you know how many oz are in your travel mug. And he said, well you get a tall for free and his co-worker said, because it’s EARTH DAY so I said tall, yes, tall is what I want. Then he filled the cup up to the top for me. I like that guy. I don’t fetishize Starbucks coffee at all but uptown the Mizzle there is not a lot to choose from. Some days “You burned this coffee!” is better than “You brewed this coffee last July!” you know?

We soldiered on to the Sunshine Park, this awesome little field + swings + sandbox and toddler play structure park smack dab in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. It was renovated last summer and I was sad because pre-reno, sure, it only had the swings but it had picnic tables and a bench and post-reno it had only a play structure and a sandbox and nowhere to sit if you were me. But today when we got there, there were two new benches! Perfect. I sat on a bench and didn’t get sand in my underwear and drank my coffee and didn’t even spill it – the last time I went to this park with a cup of coffee I put it down on the grass to run off and stop Fresco from leaping off the slide and when I came back my cup had tipped over and the grass was all soggy with coffee. That was a sad day. But today was not. We even remembered our buckets and shovels.

There was a pair of brothers at the park and it was amusing to me how each older sibling (Trombone and the other guy) felt free to treat each others’ younger sibling as his own. And the younger siblings, accustomed to hearing “No it’s MINE!” were undeterred by perfect stranger older brothers ordering them around and continued their merrymaking apace.

Why yes I am writing Victorian fiction now, why do you ask?

And so, the cold wind blew the cobwebs out of my brain and the mean out of my mouth and that whine out of the children and when we came home we were smiling, even as Trombone asked me why why why about everything, “Oh how curious he is,” I thought, graciously.

After all, that is the point of going out for a walk, right? In my world it is.