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Kaylee discovered Legos a couple weeks ago, and she thinks they are A.W.E.S.O.M.E.  Part of the attraction may be that they are the tiny Legos, and her brother is absolutely forbidden to touch them for at least a couple more years and she knows I will never say, “But sweetie, can’t you just let Brother borrow that for a minute?” right before handing a Lego spaceship to Robbie and letting him get his baby drool all over it.

So she and Rob have been digging out his little Lego kits that he accumulated over the years, including three or four Star Wars and Harry Potter Lego sets I gave him at birthdays and Christmases over the years, and they have put them together in a private little daddy-daughter bonding ritual that is achingly cute.

On Sunday, I took Kaylee and Robbie to visit some good friends from high school, and Kaylee was excited to find a big box of Legos on the living room floor.  After she got over her fear of all the scary adults and their scary children, she decided to get down to business and build some shit.  Except that when she builds things, she actually just hands Legos to her daddy, and he puts them together. Since he wasn’t there, she settled for me.

Of course, every single piece she handed me was a large, flat, thin sheet that was obviously intended to form the base of some magnificent structure, but when combined with a bunch of other large, flat, thin sheets only creates one large, flat, slightly thicker sheet of Lego boringness.  She kept handing me stuff, but lost interest after I failed to produce a functional AT-AT.

Later, we picked Rob up at home and headed over to his mom’s house, and on the way Kaylee said earnestly, “Will you play Legos with me?  Mommy’s not very good at it.”

That little rat.

When we got to my mother-in-law’s house, Kaylee, Rob and Uncle Tim put together some Harry Potter Lego sets, and at one point Kaylee even declared that Uncle Tim wasn’t especially good at Legos, either.

“Is Mommy better at Legos than Uncle Tim?” someone asked.

“No.”

All day today, she carried around a complex Lego sea plane — bringing it with us to the grocery store and Target despite my best efforts to convince her that such things should remain at home.  Once in a while, she’d break off a wing or the tail section and hand it over so I could repair it.

“If I keep fixing this for you, will you start saying I’m good at Legos?” I asked after the eleven millionth time I stuck the wing back on her plane.

“No,” she said. Then she paused, reconsidered and decided to placate me — but only a little.  “But you’re good at fixing them.”

Thanks, kid.  Thanks a lot.

The scene: Kaylee, Robbie and I are driving home from somewhere.  Robbie is exhausted, and therefore screaming his adorable little head off.  I have started singing in order to calm him down.

ME: Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.

(Robbie gets quiet.)

ME: Up above the –

KAYLEE: Stop singing!

ME: Robbie likes it! (continues singing) Up above the world so high, like –

KAYLEE: Stop it!

ME: Would you rather listen to me singing or your brother crying?

KAYLEE: Brother crying.

For some reason, this summer has decided to attack our family with illnesses.  Rob had a stomach bug a few weeks ago.  Robbie had a stomach bug a week and a half ago.  Kaylee had a 103.5 fever on Friday.  She now has a clogged mucous duct under her right eye that makes her look like she has a tumor.  I have a perpetual stuffy nose because my allergies are more determined than Claritin is.

As the hilarious Amalah recently said: Welcome, summer! You asshole.

Friday night was the first time we’ve had to medicate Kaylee in a while, and I’d recently tossed all of our old Tylenol because of the recall and replaced it with generic stuff.  Since Kaylee is now a Big Girl, I bought her children’s acetaminophen instead of the little dropper bottle for infants.  Somehow I thought she’d be excited to drink her medicine from a little cup instead of getting it squirted into her mouth.  You never know about these things – kids’ brains are weird.

So on Friday, I was sitting next to her on the couch, wondering why there was something extremely hot touching my leg, when I looked down and realized that the hot thing was Kaylee’s foot.  The rest of her?  Also really hot.  So I poured her a teaspoon of sulfuric acid and asked her to drink it. Or at least, that’s what you’d think from all the screaming.

She would not drink it.  But as I mentioned, her fever was really fucking high, and I really needed to force it down her throat.

The kids’ Awesome Doctor had given me two syringes for putting Pedialyte in Robbie’s mouth when he was sick, but I hadn’t needed to use them.  So I got the idea of using one to give Kaylee her medicine.

I sucked Kaylee’s acetaminophen dose into a syringe and tried to talk her into taking it that way.  She didn’t even pause in the screaming.

I used my vast store of baby-raising knowledge to come up with the next plan.  I’ll just squirt it into her mouth by the back of her tongue like I used to do, I thought. No problem. Then she’ll realize she was screaming for no reason, and I’ll be able to give her medicine peacefully forever and ever yay.

Hey, did you guys know that a dose for a three-year-old is a lot bigger than a dose for a tiny baby?  Sure you did.  So did I, in retrospect.  But I wasn’t thinking about that when I squirted the entire dose in her mouth all at once and made her choke and gasp and sputter and cry way harder.

I am the best mom in the world.

Also, she’s never going to let me near her with medicine again.

Friday was also the day I took Kaylee to the Awesome Doctor to get her eyelid lump checked out.  She prescribed antibiotic eye drops as a precaution to prevent a secondary infection, and putting those in Kaylee’s eye has been totally smooth sailing.

Not really.  I just slipped into wishful thinking mode for a second there.

The eye drops have been worse than the Tylenol. Not only have we had to pin her down and get control of her flailing arms, we’ve also had to pry her eyelids apart.  This is so much fun I could just throw up.

(I know it’s supposed to be easier if you have the kid close her eyes and put the drop in the corner, and then open her eye and voila!  That doesn’t work if she starts screaming before you can get near her. Clearly, we just need to develop our ninja skills so we can sneak up and medicate her before she notices we’re there.)

Ok, now I’m going to take a huge risk and tell you that last night, for the first time, Kaylee let Rob put a drop in her eye without too much fuss.  It’s a risk to say this because one thing I’ve learned in writing about my kids online is that, the moment I write about an improvement or problem in Kaylee’s daily existence, it immediately becomes not true anymore.

Rob had Kaylee all worked up into a giggly little mess because of some game they were playing together – a game I don’t like to watch because I’m convinced it’ll end in a catastrophic head injury – and then he interrupted it to say it was time to take her medicine, and they could go back to playing once she let him put a drop in her eye.  Such is the power of this game that she let him do it.  I was in the other room, and I didn’t even hear wailing.

So obviously, there’s only one solution.  I have to let Rob give Kaylee all her medicine from now on.

It’ll be tough, but I’m ready to make that sacrifice.

For the past couple of days, Kaylee has been an absolute joy to be around, despite the fact that she was getting very little attention because we were so focused on her screaming, sickly baby brother.  She smiled, she laughed, she kept herself busy with her crayons and her made-up games.

She was truly wonderful.

We’d come to think of this as the norm – maybe, just maybe, the angry teenager we’d seen of late decided to take off, leaving this happy-go-lucky angel in her place.

On Monday, Robbie was finally all better, and we looked forward to spending the last day of our three-day weekend with our healthy, happy family.

As we prepared to leave the house this afternoon for an early dinner at Grandma’s house, Rob turned to Kaylee and said, “Let’s get ready to go.”

“Shhhh!” she hissed, shooting him a dirty look. “Stop talking!”

“Oh,” he sighed. “There’s the girl we know.”

We should have known it was too good to last.

I have a couple of somewhat lengthy posts in mind to write, but it ain’t happening today.  Both of my kids did their damnedest to make me insane today, culminating with a complete refusal to go to sleep by a certain four-month-old boy.  Ultimately, at about 9:45, I left him to scream his head off in his room while I went to my office to try to write a freelance article.  As you can guess, it’s super easy to concentrate on writing when your baby is crying his heart out across the hall.  So all that motivation to actually say something this evening is gone.

So here, have a photo:

Or two:

Ah yes, now I remember why I like them so much.

Some days you just need a reminder.

We’ve been toying with the idea of scrapping naps from Kaylee’s everyday schedule, because she’s been sleeping less at night than she used to, and whenever she does take a nap she wakes up in such a bad mood that I’m not allowed to speak to her for an hour lest I spark a temper tantrum.  She becomes a … word Rob says I’m not allowed to call my daughter.

But on weekends, we’ve been having trouble setting aside the time for her naps, and there have been many days when the nap has been skipped altogether.  Late afternoon can get a little rough, but it’s really no worse than the post-nap funk I’m used to enduring.  And then the big bonus?  She sleeps 12 hours at night instead of nine.  So instead of dragging her to bed at 10:45, we’re now starting the bedtime routine at 8 p.m. or so and she’s sleeping until the same time in the morning, or even later than before.  That part is, of course, awesome.

So this week I decided to experiment with keeping her up all day.

Have you guessed that there’s a drawback?  Because there is.

Her genius mother didn’t really think about the fact that, by keeping her awake all day, I would have to stay awake all day, too.  No more taking catnaps while my kids are passed out.

Look, I know that sounds whiny.  I get that.  But when you’re getting up at least two times a night with a baby, and then at least once a night with the toddler, sometimes you need a goddamn nap.

Except, I wasn’t normally napping anyway, so that’s why it didn’t cross my mind to worry about that part.  What really didn’t occur to me was that I would be expected to play continuously and energetically during the entire time that was normally devoted to napping, so that by the end of the day I would desperately need a nap.  (The lunch/nap prep/nap/nap recovery part of the day was lasting from approximately noon to almost 4 p.m. every day.  That’s a lot of playing.)

Even that wouldn’t be a big issue, except Robbie has joined in the effort to make us miserable.

He used to follow Kaylee’s wake-up schedule, more or less, getting up at 7 a.m. at the very earliest, and sometimes sleeping in until 8:30 or so.  This week?  5:30.

Again, I know I’m being whiny.  Other people’s kids get them up that early every single day.  But parents wrap their own schedules around their kids’ sleep habits, so mine was wrapped around waking up at 7:30, and between me and Rob, one of us is always losing two hours of sleep now.

We could go to bed earlier to compensate, but when would we play video games and watch television?  Come on, people, focus on the right priorities, jeez.

Rob took the kids to his mom’s house yesterday, and I joined them in the evening for dinner.  Having skipped her nap, Kaylee was in full-on drama queen mode by the time I got there.

I could tell because right after I rang the doorbell, Rob opened the door for me and Kaylee saw me and burst into tears.  Rob figured out that he hadn’t followed his script somehow, so he closed the door on me, thinking Kaylee had wanted to let me in.

That never works.  Once you deviate from one of Kaylee’s plans, you don’t get a do-over.  She spends at least the next 20 minutes making you grovel for her forgiveness.  (Or at least making you beg her to stop sobbing.)  So when I got there, I had to hold Kaylee for a while and let her cry into my shoulder because her terribly mean father forgot to let her look through the peep hole.

Things carried on like this for a while, with Kaylee swinging wildly between being deliriously happy and being angry for who-the-hell-knows-what.  When she’s in this mood, she’s just as likely to revel in being tickled as she is to throw a tantrum because you had the gall to offer her chocolate milk.

Kaylee finished her dinner before the rest of us and wandered off, occasionally stopping back in to see if we were all ready for dessert yet, and then getting annoyed and running off when she had to wait for me to finish my steak.  (Which I hadn’t finished yet because she’d needed help with something.)

And then finally her ridiculously slow mother had the courtesy to stop eating so grandma could bring out the cake already.

“Hey Kaylee,” Rob said as she wandered into the dining room.  “Are you ready to have some cake?”

“Stop talking!” she said angrily, and stomped from the room.

Rob turned to me and sighed. “I see myself spending a lot of money at Hot Topic when she’s a teenager.”

Lately, every time Kaylee wants something that I don’t want to give her, she adopts a puppy-dog expression and says, “pleeeeeease” in the cutest little voice you ever heard. It almost makes you want to let her have ice cream for dinner or jump off the dining room table, just because she’s adorable.

Then yesterday, while I was trying to get her to take a nap, she started whining in that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard way about how she didn’t want to take a nap. I told her rather sternly that I was tired of her doing this every day, and that she had to take a nap whether she wanted to or not. Naturally, she burst into tears. When I asked why she was crying, she sobbed, “because you’re mad at meeee.”

Well played, kiddo. Now I felt like a total asshole.

Or as Rob put it, she’s been leveling up her manipulation skills.

Ever since I had to endure a Three-Hour Glucose Tolerance Test From Hell, I’ve been having a weird problem that I never had when I was pregnant with Kaylee.  Basically, I’ve been feeling like I’m starving to death.  At first, it was almost all day every day, and now it’s just a couple of times a day.  But when these moments strike, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.  During the first couple of days I did actually try to fill the void with food, but after one experiment involved eating an entire Qdoba burrito (with queso!) and still feeling like I was going to collapse from the hunger, I realized that eating wasn’t doing any good.  (Although admittedly, I do still go ahead and eat some Halloween candy sometimes.  Hey, the candy’s not going to eat itself.)

Until I got the results from the test back, I thought maybe it was a sign that I really did have gestational diabetes.  But then I tested normal – which is good for the kid, because he was facing a lifetime of guilt trips over making his mother forego sweets for the 2009 holiday season – so that couldn’t be it.  I also mentioned it to my doctor, who had nothing to say but, “Huh, that’s weird.”

Then the other day, I was lying in bed first thing in the morning, feeling perfectly fine.  No hunger, no feeling like I was about to pass out from the lack of critical nutrients.  Then the baby shifted and kicked me in the general vicinity of my stomach, and suddenly I was willing to cook and eat one of my dogs to make the hunger go away.

So.

My unborn child has already figured out how to push my buttons, and he’s already found the one that makes mommy give him candy.

That little shit.

Just for that, the next time he kicks me there, I’m going to eat nothing but Brussels sprouts and liver for the rest of the day.

…

Ok, yeah, I’m lying.  I’ll probably stick with Snickers.

Kaylee ends up sleeping in our bed with us most nights, largely because we’re too lazy to insist she stay in her own. When it’s 3 a.m. and your 2-year-old wants to sleep in your room, it’s easier to give in than it is to start a battle.

To be honest, I kind of like sleeping with my little girl cozied up next to me. I like waking up to her sweet face in the morning, watching the way the sunlight glints off her fine blonde hair, and on the days when I wake up first, I like seeing how completely innocent her face is when she’s sound asleep.

BUT, there is a small problem with this arrangement. The kid is only 33 inches tall and 23 pounds, but she can take over a king-sized bed in seconds. And it’s usually my side of the bed she wants. I often wake to find her hand on my face or her leg draped over my arm, and once last week I woke up to her sticking her finger in my ear. When she does this in the middle of the night it’s no problem — I just move her. But if it’s after the sun has come up, well, I just live with it. I think most parents of young children can understand that I’d rather chew off my own arm than wake my child early. If I have to sleep with a finger in my ear in order to get up at 7 a.m. rather than 5 a.m., that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Rob doesn’t often have this problem, because for whatever reason, Kaylee always chooses to make her land grabs on my side of the bed. Because of that, I think he thinks I exaggerate when I tell him how hard it can be to sleep with Kaylee in our room.

We all napped together today because we had a pretty terrible night last night, and after about three hours, I woke up to this:

If it’s not clear from the blurry iPhone photo, Kaylee has one hand on my face, and the other arm is stuck up my sleeve, with that hand on my neck.  She’s also scooted all the way off of her pillow and onto mine, meaning that I – at seven months pregnant – was balanced on a tiny sliver of the edge of the bed. And you know what?  We stayed that way for half an hour, even though I get all squirmy when people touch my neck.  Because she was asleep, and that’s the best condition for a toddler to be in.