Two kids + three years = ALL THE ANSWERS

Want to potty train your children? It's super easy. Just wait until they suddenly tell you that they need to poop (this will, of course, happen before they're old enough to distinguish between poop and pee, so everything is called "poop"). Then let them sit on the potty. Don't make a big deal, don't push them, and by all means, never remind them that they should be using the potty. They'll just do it all by themselves, whether you were actually ready to potty train or not.

Because this is what happened with M, and what appears to be happening with K (who is, by all accounts, way to young to be effectively using the potty, which she is occasionally using, well, effectively).

And because it happened just that way with my kids, I'm sure it will be just that way for everyone else. Isn't that how parenting advice always gets passed, anyway?

Adages, mantras, and cats... oh my!

Today, post-swim and pre-M's pick-up, K and I stopped in at the pet store to peruse the animals. Our first stop was the cat kennels. K loves cats. She likes to point and coo and sometimes shriek, all happy so long as the cats keep their distance. Which they did. Cages and all, you see.

So we're walking along, cooing and pointing, and I'm barely able to contain her. All the while, I'm talking to her about how pretty these cats are, how much they want a home, what great friends they would be. Then one lean black cat stretches his way from his bed and says hello. My voice cracks, my eyes well up, and I'm struck speechless as K continues to wrest herself from my grip.

He looks just like TM. And all at once, I realize: I still miss my cats.

And now I'm having to explain to our cat-loving daughter that we did have cats, that they were good friends too, and that she would have loved them. As I love them. Still. And yes, it was just as depressing as it sounds.

It brings new insight to my existential ramblings from earlier this week. Of course we must continue to grow, regret, and grow more. It's thanks in part to hindsight. Common sense calls hindsight 20-20. Seen in retrospect, we always find things we would or should have changed or done differently. But really, hindsight is blind as a bat. Because hindsight only allows us to look back on an established road from further along. Of course we see things that we would change, but it's based solely on the road we walked. Suppose we had changed those things. Then we'd have taken a different road entirely, and, months or years later, we'd be looking back wanting to change that road too. Hindsight can't show us anything except how we've changed between the point where we made those decisions and the point where we ended up.

I see the cats in the pet store, I see who K has become, and I regret. I wonder if we gave up too easily, if the cats' departure was really the only solution, and whether waiting it out would have ended up with us just as happy. But I don't know anything. Seeing something we would have changed in the past, I'm not sure that that's wisdom. Because, for example, we could have kept the cats. And K could have gotten into the litter as a baby and would up with toxoplasmosis. or she could have found their food and choked to death trying to eat it.

I know what you're thinking: yeah, well, those things are so totally unlikely. But they could have happened. I look back and I see a road of happy things that we didn't have and wish that we'd had them. Why? Because what we had wasn't perfect. Because I know things now that I didn't know then. Because time has passed, and not only is hindsight blind, but it's often rose-colored too. But if we'd kept the cats, I can guarantee only that I'd be looking back with the same sense of wonder: what would have happened if...

I think it's only natural to analyze your life as such. Or maybe it's just my nature. When I read Choose Your Own Adventure as a kid, I used to dog-ear the decision pages so I could make sure to come back and find out what I missed. The not-knowing tortured me. But life is so unforgivably forward moving that there is so much we're always not-knowing. Maybe I should have used those books as practice earlier on, because I'm obviously not very good at it now.

One other adage for today: Forgiveness is letting go of the past you wish you'd had. I can't remember where I heard this, but props to the source because it's been one of my mantras lately. And forgiveness and forgetting and moving forward are all tied up together. So maybe it's not so much about figuring out when and if we stop changing (and regretting) but learning how to move past those regrets and embrace who we've become and where we've ended up. And in that case, we're looking not just for the candidate with experience, but also with the right temperament to be in the moment, attuned to the moment, and without baggage from moments past.

But baggage or not, I still miss my cats. I may say blithe things like They really are just pets and We honestly had no other choice, but somewhere, they know the truth. Thanks, guys, for being so much more than just pets, so much more than an easy choice. It just means you were really worth something, then and always.

I was only gone a couple hours

You always know you're in for a good story when you arrive home to find your husband on the phone with poison control, your screaming daughter naked but for a diaper, and your son pantomiming vomit at your husband's feet.

On the plus side, it turns out blue potato bush is only a little poisonous. And it was just one little berry. And M knows how to help in an emergency, quickly coming to daddy's rescue with a new outfit for K and several rags. He even cleaned up the floor.

All in all, just a slightly blip in an otherwise lovely weekend.

Existentia... what was I saying again?

I'm a young mom. I'll admit it. I wonder sometimes if my kids would have been better off with a slightly older mom, one with slightly more life experience/maturity/etc. It certainly would have been different for them.

I know it would have been different because I often look back on things I've done--ten years, one year, one month--and realize how differently I'd handle the situation now. So I know I've grown, changed, and matured, all hopefully for the better, each step one layer closer to unshelling that gem of a person inside.

My question is, then, is there really a gem hidden inside? That is to say, is the some solid person under there that I will eventually find, dust off, and set free to conquer the world in all her wisdom? Do we ever reach an age where the curve of our maturation has settled to such a point that we are no longer really changing at all? Or is this process of unshelling one that will continue until we run out of shells, only to find nothing there at all (which, I assume, would correspond nicely to our transition to the next frontier: "Oh, I see, I'm all out of material. Restart, please!")?

The reason this question has been weighing so heavily on my mind of late is the ever present ELECTION we are all enduring. I'm for a particular candidate, who, while wholly qualified, has much less experience than the other, also wholly qualified, candidate. But when people bring the discrepancy between their two experience levels to my attention, I just don't really care. "I know," I say, "but O**** does have experience, and he will have lots of help in office, and I can't imagine that at their stage of the game it will make that much difference anyway."

But it all depends: have they both either reached or come close enough to that inner gem, or is one only halfway through that unshelling process that the other has worked the rest of their life to complete? And if that one is farther out, will he regret these big decisions that he makes? Will we regret these big decisions that he makes? Or, then, is it just as likely that the more experienced fellow will regret things too?

Okay, so I'm full of questions, existential questions that seem too circuitous to manage, to big to fully comprehend. But it's about my regrets too. Will I ever reach a point where I stay the same? Or will I constantly be shifting, changing, growing, right to the very end? Because that's a nice thought too, in that I can also be improving (and, trust me, there is obviously lots of room). But my kids weren't really meant to be some guinea pig experiment thrown in the mix.

Sigh. Double sigh. And now it's time for chocolate. Because of all the things I've looked back and wondered over, eating chocolate never seems to be one of them.

Addendum to my job description

Adding: Back scratcher
Duties: Scratch back as requested
Advisories: Switch to rubbing only when specifically asked, do not scratch too hard, do not veer onto any tummy area lest there be copious amounts of tickled laughter (followed by harsh reprimand)

Which all makes me feel a whole lot better. I'd always assumed that nails were made for a higher purpose than opening cans of soda and flicking stuck-on crumbs from the kitchen floor. Now I know.

The Great Pumpkin (Patch)

If you were, perhaps, planning to take your kids to a pumpkin patch, and one of them was all dressed up in a fluffy fleecy costume, be advised that said fleece with attract any and all hay in the general vicinity. Pumpkin patches abound with hay.

Copious amounts of hay on a black and white costume will result in people complementing you on the very cute cow, which will only generate ire and dismay since you went to a lot of effort to coordinate your kids as a firefighter with his dalmation.

All the people commenting on your cow/dalmation will cause your cow/dalmation to become very bashful, which means you will be carrying the animal for the rest of the visit.

Hay is very itchy when it's attached to a cow/dalmation butt that now rests on your bare and sweaty arm. Such discomfort will make a once fun pumpkin patch excursion a little less worth the two very small pumpkins you have to show for it, especially since these pumpkins took all of five seconds to select and were quickly forgotten in 1.5 days.

You will, of course, immediately wash the outfit upon your return home, only to find that the hay has actually settled in quite nicely, at which time you will spend the next two weeks intermittently picking hay from the tiny fleece nubbins in a desperate attempt to make the costume wearable again by Halloween.

Just, you know, in case you were wondering.

Celebration, on a small scale

K hit twenty pounds yesterday, just a week shy of turning seventeen months. You'd think this wasn't blog-worthy, but really, when else can you stand on a scale, only to have everyone in the room erupt in clapping and cheers? K wasn't sure what she'd done, but she was very proud to do it. M's just glad I no longer have to pester him to find out what K is doing in her car seat, and, well, I'm just happy to see my little baby girl finally break her our glass ceiling. I can only hope it's the first of many.

Maybe, possibly

When your child has wandered off, and you find them curled up in the dark bathroom between the toilet and the sink, it might just be time to put them down for a nap.

At least it was free

Big weekend for us: the first trip for everyone to the Miramar Air Show. We were careful to go early, pack light, and leave before (most of) the meltdowns. Everything went off according to personality. M enjoyed examining each and every entry, although he refused to go into any individual vehicle for fear that they might move, start, or otherwise endanger himself or others. K, on the other hand, wanted to drive off into the sunset--the bigger the mode of transportation, the better.

The next day, we shuttled over to B's office to watch the Blue Angels from a prime vantage point. It was hard to keep the kids focused on the airplanes when there were cool things like Daddy's Keyboard and Daddy's Dry Erase Board, but every time they came in formation, K cooed at the window and M studied them seriously.

At last he asked, "How big are they?"

"They're just like the planes we saw yesterday," we replied. "Not the big-big ones, but like the medium ones."

"What planes?"

Hmm. "The planes from yesterday? At the Air Show? The ones we walked in and looked at?" To which M responded with a blinky blank stare.

Incredulous, we started asking about individual planes, hoping to spark a memory, like the police helicopter or the air transport. No dice. He did remember the fire truck (which was just like the fire truck we see every week outside our local Vons) and the big white Packer (which was the Budweiser delivery truck, and no, not part of the show).

But we did all have fun at the time, which, with two very small children, is always good enough for me.

Mystery of the Day

We have a lot of miscellaneous mess around out house, constantly, despite my rather well-intentioned vigilance. I'm happy to consider it a consequence of two small children. But sometimes I wonder, like when I find dry erase marker on the telephone's keypad. Were we trying to dial with the pen, or perhaps just tracing numbers for fun? And why were we using the dry erase markers at the desk, instead of on the dry erase board five feet away? And what exactly were we doing with dry erase markers anyway, since they are usually a parent's permission activity and otherwise tucked away on a (supposedly) unreachable shelf?

The only thing I do know is that someone (I) was obviously not paying enough attention to those aforementioned children.

Now where did the permanent markers get off to?

Don't count on it

"Look, Mommy--I'm at the beach. I have my turtle friend and my duck friend and we're playing in the sand and we have beach toys too!"

"Hmm, I see that. Very creative. But it's still time to take a nap."