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I had a bit of a day yesterday.  I sort of want to explain and I sort of don’t, so I guess I’ll just say it’s a money thing, where I feel like we’re being hit, and hit, and hit again.  And yesterday’s hit was a big one, followed by two bills in the mail – one unexpected and the other one simply bigger than expected – all with the knowledge that we have a surgery to pay for next week and a shit-ton of hail damage to pay for on our car.  (Too late to back out of that last one, as I filed the claim two days ago.)

There is surely a way out of our difficulties, but yesterday I was too caught up in the being distraught to be interested in forming any kind of plan.  I was distracted for a while by my pseudo-sister-in-law, who came over with beer and her own tale of woe, for life is kicking her a little bit at the moment, too.

It’s weird when this stuff happens and all you want to do is wallow in it, but you can’t because you still have kids, and they still need their dirty diapers changed and they still need their snacks and they still need you to give them hugs and keep them entertained.  Several times, I’d be lost in my thoughts, worried about credit cards and the mortgage and all the shit that comes with being a grown-up, and suddenly Kaylee would walk up to me and do something silly, reminding me that I have something more important than money.

But always, always, the money issues pop right back into my head, and at the end of the day I stood in the kitchen and hung my head, while Rob wrapped his arms around me and told me everything would be all right.  Then we went upstairs to get Kaylee ready for bed, and as usual she stalled by insisting on playing a game.

In the game she chose last night, she stood at the end of our bed and waited, and Rob’s and my roles were to surprise her by suddenly putting out a hand and shoving her down.  It sounds cruel, but it makes her laugh her head off.  She gets up, we (gently, carefully) push her down.  She laughs.  We laugh.  We do it again.

I love making my daughter laugh.

But also?  There’s something uniquely cathartic about knocking a toddler over.

I don’t know what that says about me, but it can’t be good.

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.

The scene: Rob and I are eating dinner while Kaylee runs through the living room and dining room, screeching because she’s tricked one of the dogs into chasing her.  (She is carrying a tortilla chip, which is likely the dog’s only motivation.)  A quesadilla sits at her place at the table, virtually untouched. Rob and I have given up on trying to get her to eat it.  We probably should have dyed it black.  We’ve taken advantage of her distraction to put something on TV other than Sesame Street, but we can’t really hear it over all of her insane laughter.

KAYLEE: (runs to the back door) Can I go outside?

ME: Not tonight, sweetie.  It’s getting dark and it’s cold outside.

KAYLEE: I really want to go outside.

ME: No.

We continue eating and watching the newest episode of “Glee,” and after a few minutes realize we can actually hear the television.  Clearly, something has gone wrong.

ROB: Did she go outside?

A glance over to the back door reveals the curtain billowing out as a cool breeze wafts in. I get up and peek out the back door.  Kaylee is sitting on the porch swing in a tank top and panties.

ME: Yep.  She’s playing on the swing.

KAYLEE: Hi Mommy!  Can I have a Kit Kat?

ME: (to Rob) So, do I make a lesson out of this because she didn’t listen to me, or do I let her play on the swing for a few minutes?

ROB: … You could just let her play so we can finish watching “Glee.”

ME: (after a quick glance at Kaylee’s uneaten quesadilla) Yeah, let’s do that. She’ll come in when she gets cold. (Hands Kaylee a Kit Kat.)

END SCENE.

Some of you may remember Sam Winchester, the life-size tiger stuffed animal that Kaylee inherited and then came to love a little over a year ago.

Well, I’m an asshole, and I donated Sam to Goodwill about a month ago.  In our old house, Sam could sit up on a plant shelf in Kaylee’s room, totally out of the way.  He gave the illusion that he was watching over my daughter, and plus, who doesn’t like tigers?  But once we moved, there was no convenient place to put him anymore.  We eventually just dropped him in the middle of Kaylee’s bedroom floor and left him there, free to ambush us when we came to check on her in the middle of the night.  It was not a good spot for a tiger.

So one day in January, I left the kids with my parents and I sorted through Kaylee’s toys looking for things to donate.  Mostly I stuck with toys she doesn’t play with, but Sam was the big exception.  I just knew she was going to throw a fit when she saw that he was gone, but I couldn’t stand having him around anymore either.

But then the weirdest thing happened.  Kaylee came home from Gram and Papa’s house, and she didn’t say a thing when she went into her newly Sam-less room.  And she continued to not notice, to the point that I thought I’d totally gotten away with it.

Until, of course, this morning.

Out of nowhere, Kaylee came into our room first thing this morning and said, “Where’s my big tiger?”

Both Rob and I paused for a long time, not saying anything.  Maybe she’ll just drop the subject, I thought.  But she persisted.

I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly, being that it was the crack of 8:30, but I said, “Your tiger went to live at the zoo.”

Hey, it sounded much better than, “Mommy gave your tiger away when you weren’t looking.”

But what I wasn’t considering was this: Kaylee gets to go to the zoo all the time.  We have a family membership, so the zoo is like her second home in the summertime.  Naturally, she thinks we’ll be able to visit Sam whenever we want.

So she said, “Oh, let’s go to the zoo!  We’ll feed the giraffes and get my tiger!”

Advice to other parents in the same situation: The tiger went to live IN THE JUNGLE.

Again, we thought that we could just let it go and she’d forget about it.  She gets all sorts of crazy ideas in her head all the time, so she wouldn’t be too sad if this one didn’t come to pass.  So our strategy for the morning was to make no sudden movements, and make no mention of the tiger.

This worked fairly well for a while.  It seemed to slip her mind, and she happily busied herself eating breakfast and watching Sesame Street.

Every morning before Rob leaves for work, he makes sure to give Kaylee a hug and a kiss, and this morning required him to kneel down in front of the TV, where Kaylee was studying Elmo and Abby’s knight costumes.  By this time, we believed we were in the clear.

Suddenly, with no warning, Jake Jabs appeared on the television screen, sitting next to a real live tiger.  “Tiger!” Kaylee shouted.  Then the screen showed a child sitting next to the same goddamn stuffed tiger that I just gave away.  “It’s my tiger!  We can go to the store and get him!  And we’ll get my bed with the pink ladder!”

Jake Jabs is officially on my shit list.  Especially because I couldn’t figure out how he managed to use his evil powers to infiltrate Sesame Street, which is usually aired without commercials.  (It turns out Kaylee must have hit a button on the cable box and changed the channel.  That, or Jake Jabs did it with his mind.)

I have a long summer ahead of me.

At my baby shower when I was pregnant with Kaylee, my friend Lisa gave me four board books from the “Baby Be of Use” series.  I have “Baby do my banking,” “Baby mix me a drink,” “Baby make me breakfast” and “Baby fix my car.”  You can also get such titles as “Baby plan my wedding” and “Baby get me some lovin’.”

These books, along with “The Inappropriate Baby Book,” were my favorite baby shower gifts, but Kaylee was never particularly impressed.  It took a long time to get her interested in books, and now all of a sudden she’s fascinated.  Naturally, we thought it was an ideal time to put those gifts to use and make her earn her keep.

I didn’t realize how much of the books she was actually paying attention to, but the other day we were reading stories before her nap and I heard her say, “Mommy wants a martini. Daddy wants a margarita.”

Apparently I’m teaching my daughter to be an alcoholic.  I prefer to think I’m just teaching her how to enable my alcoholism.  Maybe by the time the baby’s born, we can have Kaylee actually mixing the drinks.  Then I can finally achieve my dream of being a stay-at-home alcoholic mom.

It’s important to have goals.

So, Kaylee is asleep right now and I just put a cake in the oven.  This is not the sort of thing I do often, so while I was mixing up the batter I was feeling pretty good about myself.  Because of this cake, I am now a stay-at-home mom who bakes cakes.  I am awesome.

Then I went to get the Baker’s Joy spray out of the pantry to spray down the cake pan.  There were two cans, so I grabbed the first.

Hmm, I thought. This has been in here a while.  I’d better check the date. … Oh my god, it’s use-by date was in 2005.

I knew I’d bought the other can more recently, so I used that one to spray down the cake pan, and then decided to check its date, just in case.

It was newer.  It only expired in 2006.

… I’m pretty sure it won’t kill anyone.

Overheard in our kitchen about 10 minutes ago:

Kaylee: Pink ice cream?
Me: You want some pink ice cream?
Kaylee: Yeah.
Me: I don’t know, it’s only 10 a.m. … Oh well, today’s all about decadence and candy anyway. I’m pretty sure that’s the true message of Easter.

Thanks to Jake Jabs’ weird obsession with large, wild cats, Kaylee has a near-life-sized stuffed tiger in her room.  (My parents found it for a bargain price at American Furniture Warehouse and bought it for the grandkids to climb around on.  They gave it to Kaylee when they decided it was taking up too much space in their living room, and that it was too creepily lifelike.)

So now he hangs out on a plant shelf near Kaylee’s vaulted ceiling, surveying the room with those eerie tiger eyes.  His companion is a large monkey that I won for Kaylee at Elitch Gardens, and we now refer to the two as Sam (tiger) and Dean (monkey) Winchester.  The reason behind that involves a long explanation that only “Supernatural” fans would understand, and which caused Rob to wonder aloud whether spending all day alone with just Kaylee for company is really good for my mental health.

Anyway, the point is that Kaylee loves Sam.  He’d sort of become a background fixture in her room until recently, when her cousins visited and asked to play with him.  Once he was brought down to the floor where he could be climbed on, have his tail tugged, and be kissed on the nose, Kaylee realized she had found a new friend.  And so I’ve been taking him down for her every day, in a process that involves jumping up and down until I can get a handful of tiger paw, and then hoping he doesn’t hit a lamp or a baby when he plummets to the floor.  (I’m too lazy to walk the 20 feet to the dining room to get a chair to stand on.)  So far I’ve only pulled one neck muscle, which I consider to be a triumph.

Sam now spends about half of his life on Kaylee’s bedroom floor, being pounced on by a toddler.  She’s still too young to articulate her thoughts, but I imagine that Kaylee’s pretending to ride Sam through fields of candy and popsicles.

The thing about Sam, though, is that he looks very real.  Like, a lot.  When Kaylee is bouncing around on him, sometimes she’ll hit him just right so his head jerks up suddenly, making me want to knock my daughter to the ground and cover her with my body to protect her from an impending tiger attack.  Sometimes, when she’s squashing his head with her whole body, his face almost seems to say, “Look at me.  Look what I’ve been reduced to.  I will find you one day, Jake Jabs, and I will eat you.”

I have become convinced that Sam secretly comes to life at night and prowls our house.  Maybe sometimes he gets Kaylee out of bed and they go off on adventures together, with her riding her magic tiger’s back.  Maybe they lope off into a land of fairies and unicorns and team up with hobbits to defeat Lord Voldemort.

Or maybe, just maybe, I need to get out of the house more.

1. If you put two yellow tablets and one red tablet of Elmo’s “Fizzy Tub Tablets” in your daughter’s bathwater, it will look exactly like she’s bathing in a tub full of urine.  Next time I’m going to put a bunch of red tablets in there so it looks like she’s bathing in the blood of virgins.  (I no longer have a job.  I have to entertain myself somehow.)

2. Watching “High School Musical” right before bed is a bad idea.  (It’s probably a bad idea any time, but it’s a particularly bad idea when there’s a chance it will make you dream about musical numbers all night.  And a horrible idea when it makes you leap out of bed and run into your crying child’s room at 4 a.m., convinced that she’s involved in some bizarre, High School Musical-related emergency.)

That is all.

So yesterday I lost that battle.  After about 45 minutes of listening to Kaylee cry, I gave up and rocked her to sleep, letting her sleep for about 20 minutes in my arms.

Today I decided to make it more like daycare, where she used to sleep on a cot in the middle of the playroom.  We went to Target this morning and bought a Disney Princess sleeping bag, which I spread out on the living room floor with her pillow and blankets.  When naptime rolled around, I tried to convince her to lie down there and go to sleep.  She thought her time would be better spent playing with the ornaments on the Christmas tree.

I lay down on her sleeping bag for a while and pretended to sleep, which wasn’t terribly convincing because few people can sleep through a toddler climbing onto their back and trying to ride them like a horse.  I tried several more tactics and nothing worked at all.

And finally I just lost my shit, and I yelled at her.  I’ve never yelled at her like that, and I could tell it scared the hell out of her.  I instantly felt terrible, and I turned away for a minute and started crying.

When I turned back, Kaylee was lying down on the sleeping bag, sobbing into her pillow.  While I rubbed her back and she finally dozed off, a children’s song about how your “M-O-DOUBLE-M-Y” makes everything better started playing on iTunes.  I guess that was karma or God or whoever taking the opportunity to get in a good dig.