​This week after a run-in with a ridiculously antagonistic person in my life that made my blood boil, I decided we needed to dance and bounce out all that negative energy. “We” meaning me and my two adorable charges, R and C. These delightful girls are my sanity, joy, and reason to get up many mornings. R is three, and C is her one-year-old sister. I take care of them every morning while their mommy teaches part time. To exorcise all that animosity threatening to suffocate me, we blasted “Swan Lake” and piled pillows and blankets, and we jumped, pirouetted, spun, and bounced on my bed while Tchaikovsky vanquished all those bad vibes.

The kids are wearing their complimentary Carter's sleepers. They're also modeling booties Aunt Cyndi's friend crocheted for them. They were not amused.

​By day as I lay on our couch when I was pregnant, trying to keep my contractions to a minimum and to put off being admitted to the hospital as long as possible, I watched the show Live with Regis and Kathie Lee (my one hour of TV I allotted myself in the daytime so I wouldn’t get incredibly depressed or fry my brain). They were giving away mini-vans. I really, really wanted to win one of their mini-vans. We only had one car and it was a small sedan. Many times each week without fail, I mailed in their requisite postcard so that I could be entered into their drawing. 

Third Grade: The kids in their uniforms ready to go to school.

This week we remembered what happened seventeen years ago on another Tuesday, on September 11. Every year when that date comes around, it is a somber day. We all remember where we were when the planes struck. It changed our lives irrevocably.
 
This past Tuesday, a friend on Facebook asked for memories of 9/11 and it was a solemn task, yet part of the ongoing healing, to go back and reflect on the day, its impact, and how it changed our lives. 

Not long ago, Pierce called to ask me details about applying a butterfly bandage to his roommate’s leg. The two young men had been biking home from the liquor store with a six-pack of beer and his roommate hit some gravel and the bike flew out from beneath him. He landed on the bottles, which broke, and a shard of glass cut a nice gash down his thigh. Pierce was wondering if they could avoid going to the ER and do like I’d so often done when Pierce was growing up and just tape the thing shut.

​The kids are all very far behind in speaking, from what every other mother tells me their two-year-old is saying. But the kids are picking up new words quickly. At least one per day. We are at the difficult stage where they try to say a lot of things, and I have no idea what it is they want to convey, and we all get frustrated. One will say, for example, “Baw, baw, baw,” and I can’t figure out for the life of me what it means in that particular context. 

​Cooking and I are not good friends. But I’ve tried to not ruin my children’s enjoyment of cooking (or eating, considering the many failures I’ve tried to make them eat). I knew they had the potential to make a party of cooking one day when they were two. They had a Betty Crocker mini-set of kitchen appliances which kept them concocting dishes long before it was safe for them to use real appliances. It included a toaster that really popped fake toast, a blender that when you pressed the button whizzed around whatever little toy you could fit into the pitcher, and a hand mixer that spun the beaters back and forth with every push of the sprocket-driven button. I knew they were ready to have their first cooking lesson when I came back into the bathroom one day when we were potty training and they had the hand mixer in the little bowls of the potty chairs and were whipping up what they’d put in there. (And it wasn’t water from the faucet.)
 
Our first cooking lesson: You don’t cook in the bathroom. And certainly not with what you find in the potty.

We moms (and mums) sometimes have bad days when we know we just screwed up royally and surely added another six months to our children's future and inevitable therapy sessions. I call them "Bad Mumdays."

Tomorrow I’m scheduled for a hysterectomy. Today, trying to prepare for being out of commission for a while, I cleaned the house. Sent the kids outside. Scrubbed and mopped and glowed the kitchen floor, cleaned the bathrooms, etc. Molly came in and needed to ​poop. I told her to use my bathroom because I hadn’t cleaned it yet and I was still cleaning the kids’ bathroom. After a bit, she called to me in a nervous voice, “Mom?”