To Pee or Not to Pee?

Last week my bestie and I took our kids to a local corn maze. We quickly ushered the kids to the hayride as we watched the school buses descend on the parking lot like a horde of bees. After the hayride we decided to eat our packed lunch before said school groups took over the picnic area. The eating area at this farm is a long, covered but open on the sides building filled with picnic tables and plastic swimming pools of raw corn kernels for the kids to swim in, throw at each other, and shove up their noses before eating lunch. The floor is covered with hay, which is really where this story begins.

Rosie took the older boys to the car to get our food while I stayed behind with the younger kids. The trip to the car takes maybe 4 minutes so I didn't see a problem with 6 young kids and pools of corn. Surely that would keep them occupied for 4 minutes. 20 seconds after Rosie and the boys left, the little kids got bored. Suddenly I had 4 toddlers to keep an eye on, making sure no one ran out to the adjacent playground or grabbed one of the chickens pecking around in the hay.

I hear an innocent little voice behind me - "Mama, I can pee here?"

As I turn to answer, I see that Noah has pulled down his shorts and underwear and is already peeing onto the hay/floor, right by a picnic table.

"No!" I tell him but he's not at an age where he can stop once started. He stares at me with crystal blue eyes and continues to soak the floor around us. Really, I can hardly blame the little guy. If there's one thing he loves, it's peeing outside. Anywhere he can make his mark on the earth while feeling the cool breeze on his behind is a happy place. Also, there are chickens. And as the saying goes "Where there are chickens, there is chicken pee." Once you realize the chickens are peeing, you begin to think to yourself "Am I all that different from a chicken? They're allowed to pee here, I should be too. What makes them so special?"

I feel myself prickle with sweat as voices of school group move closer, the excited din that accompanies children about to dine on lunchables and juice boxes. Noah is not stopping no matter how much I order him to stop, nor does he seem fazed - indeed, he has the slack look of relief that accompanies emptying one's bladder.

I pick him up and try to figure out which direction I could go where we won't draw attention to ourselves but still allows me to keep an eye on the 5 other children. I'm turning in different directions, slightly panicked while he pees on -  like a ghastly helicopter of pee. Finally I set him down next to the building, facing the playground. He is still peeing (Moons of Jupiter - how much liquid has this kid consumed today?), the front of his shorts now damp from our relocation. I stand in front of him, trying desperately to mop my glistening brow and look as nonchalant as I can. Trying not to look like I'm shielding a person urinating by the picnic tables.

It seems to be more of a boy thing (although Tali tries her darnedest to pee outside with Noah), this desire to pee outside. I have friends who nod their heads when I tell them about these incidences - their sons love nothing more than a good tree, waiting to be christened.

With trick-or-treat approaching, I just want to conclude by asking parents to be extra vigilant. Kids, especially boys, will be bombarded with nicely trimmed hedges and inviting lawns. Tomorrow night, ask yourself - It's Halloween, do I know where my toddler is peeing?

Free Vacations are the Best Vacations

Matt's in St. Louis now on business but I'm sure whenever he reads this post he will mutter under his breath - "It's not free." Which is technically true because the trip is considered a gift in the eyes of the government and is taxed as such.

Matt works for Edward Jones and one of the pros of the company is the diversification trips. It's a really big pro. Diversification trips are like a bonus - do a good job, win a trip. We have friends in the insurance business and they take similar trips. It usually takes a long time to qualify for these trips, like years. Matt has been back at Edward Jones for about a year and just won a trip. I'm really proud of him because he does work very hard and is always chock-full of integrity and honesty and stuff.

It's here that Matt would be all truly humble and try to downplay winning the trip: "It's an office where most of the clients already knew and trusted me...the company gives a lot of points towards the trip during the first year...it's hardly my doing at all..."

I really don't understand people with no ego. If I was talented like Matt (understanding investment stuff, building furniture, driving planes, playing instruments, racing bicycles, etc), I would be simply unbearable. You'd never hear of the end of me gloating and I would eventually be like the Kanye West of my town.

Anyway, Matt won a trip!

In case you couldn't tell from either knowing me in person or only on the blog, we are fairly thrifty people:

1. We eat oatmeal 6 out of 7 mornings. Not the expensive packet kind, either. Scooping generic oats out of a canister type oatmeal. The one cereal morning is usually off-brand low sugar cereal but it thrills my kids immensely.

2. The only time we eat out is when we have a giftcard or it's a super special occasion or someone else is paying.

3. We haven't seen a movie in a theater since before we had children. Even anniversaries are brought to us by Netflix.

In fact, the other day I showed Noah the Buzz Lightyear costume I got him for Halloween. He asked "Did you get this at a garage sale? Or from Walmart? Or from Mamaw?"

The kid knows what's up at our house. Those are really the only three options for new stuff.  (If you're curious, the costume did indeed come from a garage sale - $5!)

Needless to say, we don't go on fancy vacations. We're not fancy people (in case you couldn't tell from the myriad of blog posts that mention bodily fluids or dried animal genitals or me falling into a puddle for no apparent reason). And here we are, going to Maui.

The diversification trips are pretty amazing. You get to pick from, like, 40 places. Places like Rome, Japan, Aruba, New Zealand. You can win two trips a year. And if you win them both, you can combine them into one long supertrip. A Supertrip! Trips like 11 days at the Hilton in Bora Bora. Bora Bora! Or you can cash out your trips and have a pile of money instead!

Are you getting sick of the exclamation points yet?

Matt told me when he first started at Jones (9 years ago) that I would get to choose the first trip and that we would go without the kids, although many of the trips are family-friendly. Even though he would happily cash out the trip and do something exciting, like invest it in a high yield bond or something, he's content to pay the taxes and enjoy wherever it is I chose to go.  I've always wanted to go somewhere tropical and some of the tropical trips included places like Aruba, Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Caribbean cruises, Anguilla, Costa Rica, several of the Virgin Islands and Hawaii. We could choose either Kona or Maui. Maui just sounds better, you know? The spots for the trips fill up quickly and some of our first picks were taken. My best friend told me she's always going to make fun of me for telling her "We settled for Maui."

The trip includes airfare, a week at the Fairmont Kea Lani (Rooms - all suites - start at $529/night! Can you believe that - we bid for rooms on Priceline. We're like $60/night people), breakfasts, dinners (including a luau!), and a rental car. I hope we can try to pretend we're classy but we'll probably give it away when we show up in Goodwill clothes and gawk at the lobby.

We're going in March so I have like 5 months to get something resembling a decent body shape and to train myself not to squeal in classless wonder when there is (I'm sure) bottled water in our room.

"Name brand bottled water! I'll bet they even have flavored oatmeal for breakfast..."

Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Kids - Oh, My!

It seems to be a magical threshold when children turn from 2 to 3 - they cross over into preschoolerhood and leave their toddler years behind.

No. No, not really.

Take, for instance, going to church with a three year old:

If I am wearing a skirt, he will absentmindedly run his hand up my leg while standing next to me, taking the skirt up with him.

♪Come thou fount of every blessing...♪

(mutters under breath) "Stop putting your hand up my skirt!"

♪tune my heart to sing thy grace.♪

Then there is the awkward apologizing to the people behind you - "Oops, sorry about that, what with the skirt and the leg and the hand and all. Nice to meet you, by the way."

If I'm wearing jeans, he'll quietly sit behind me while I stand to sing and trace the rhinestones on my back pockets (that's right, I said rhinestones. Glamorous.) Having someone trace designs on your behind while you sing hymns is really as odd as it sounds.

And the biting. Oh, the biting.

My older two kids never bit anyone, as far as I can remember. Which really doesn't mean much. My own mother, when asked how she handled certain situations with us as young kids, will say she honestly doesn't remember much. I got enough spankings to realize that raising me was so traumatic that my mother blocked out memories of my childhood as a self-preservation technique. And really, I can't blame her. I have fuzzy memories of my older two as babies. Some stand out because they were so very sweet or so very horrific but most of it fades into a pleasant, buttery blur in my mind.

Anyway, it came as quite a shock to me that Noah uses his teeth more than his words. Or, alongside his words: "No, Tali!" *bite* "That's my car!" *nibble*

She, of course, does the same to him. Having children who bite really puts a damper on my feeling like a good parent, or even an adequate one. If there's anything that consoles me, it's the thought that someday, years and years from now, one of my children will say to me "Mom, how did you handle it when we fought?" And I will put down the book I will be reading, wrinkle my brow in concentration, take a sip of my frozen drink, and say "You know, I really don't remember you guys fighting much at all."