Profound Motherhood Moments #2

I have these things I write on Facebook, my Profound Motherhood Moments. I just hit #50, so I'm rounding up the last 25 and sharing them here. If you're not a Mother, you may still find these apply to your relationship with your kids (as a dad) or your pets. Here is the first list

26. A baby who will fight a kleenex like it's a zombie velociraptor intent on eating her brains slowly and painfully will then turn around and blissfully wipe boogers on your shirt.
27. After spontaneous sloppy baby kisses are planted on your cheek, you would do well to check in a mirror, lest ye enter the doctor's office with a blob of boogers stuck to your face.
28. Babies totally don't "get" Daylight Savings Time. Spring forward and fall back are ignored by the diaper set.
29. To use my powers for good or evil? I forestalled the temper tantrum with a game of peekaboo 5 times (good) and then I let it happen and recorded it (evil). Watch this space for a video link
30. A stay-at-home-mom on vacation is just a stay-at-condo-mom, BUT your afternoon walk to the park is a walk on the beach, and your spouse makes lunch! It's a good life!
31. That cool jazz riff I'm singing as I putter around? Came from a Leap Frog music toy. My baby's stuff is officially hipper than I am.
32. (From Rose) We survived the first year and we're still sane. Except I just ate a half-chewed banana discarded by the baby. (imagine Animal from the Muppets here) AAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH
33. You may prefer to eat the nicer loose oranges over the bulk-in-a-bag ones, but you will also be cleaning up after someone who thinks nothing of dripping orange juice from both elbows and her chin simultaneously
34. Do not feed cabbage to a person who lacks molars
35. From now on, when I use the phrase, "it's better than a poke in the eye with a fork," I will be speaking from personal experience. Toddler with fork-1, Momma's cornea-0.
36. I will continue to maintain that glitter is the herpes of the craft world. As evidence, my son spent about 5 hours at the glitter-festooned residence of his girl cousins today, and when I changed his diaper, there was a fleck of glitter on his man business, glinting brilliantly at me. Once you have a glitter outbreak, you'll be fighting them the rest of your life.
37. What is it about newborns and 21-year olds that makes them think "party at my crib til dawn!" is a good idea?
38. You never know how fast you can get from the front to the back seat of your car until you spend a moment trying to figure out how many labrador retrievers are attempting to share a car seat with your newborn.
39. I frequently mock the guitar solos in classic rock, mimicking them in a nasal nee-nee-neer voice. Zoe is in the back seat, copying me, using her foot as an air mic. I am totally winning!
40. No matter how beloved my eldest child is, she may *NOT* bogart the bacon. There are some table manners she is expected to learn, even at this age.
41. Growing bicuspids is a pain in the face, but it opens up your world to some delicious foods. Today, pistachios!!!
42. that very first social smile absolutely melts your heart
43. On the plus side, my hair is long enough to trail in a pile of spit up on my shoulder. On the minus side, my hair trailed in a pile of spit up on my shoulder.
44. The optimal nursing position for a baby with a toddler sibling is anything that places baby's head closer to the arm of the couch than to the sibling's pointy flailing elbows and knees. If you have to switch ends of the couch when the baby switches sides, it's worth it.
45. Wine packed for road trip is wedged between stacks of diapers and padded with burp rags. Victory!
46. Decide ahead of time how big a puddle of spilled milk will make you cry and put less than that in the toddler's cup.
47. it's okay to get in the fridge and raid yesterday's sippy cup for milk to cream your coffee if the toddler has a cold and can't drink the milk anyway.
48. (courtesy of Rose) Motherhood is really meant to teach you the cornucopia of things you can do one-handed while tending a kid with the other.
49. Things that are just as endearing the second time around - discovery of the feet, learning how to work the pacifier/thumb (they go cross-eyed!), grabbing you by the hair and pulling you in for a big, sloppy, wet chomp on the nose.
50. If they're gonna call them milestones, they should be a minimum of a quarter mile apart. Guess who found his feet and cut a tooth all in the same week?

At War

Scene: The kitchen. I am washing dishes while Rose, Zoe, and our yellow lab keep me company.

Rose: Thanks for making scones this morning.

Me: You're welcome. Blah, blah, blah...

*Sound of a spitball flying across the room behind me*

Yellow lab moves surreptitiously to the corner of the kitchen and eats something off the floor.

Me: Did you just spit the end of your scone across the room for the dog to eat?!?!

Rose: holding up Zoe to demonstrate My hands were full!

Me: You are a five-year-old boy!

Rose: spits again

Yellow lab, ready for it this time, catches the hunk of scone out of the air and noms it down.

Rose: Look, she caught it!

I am paralyzed.

Rose is laughing.

Me: The two sides of me are at war over whether to be appalled or impressed. I think they just tied.

Bananas

Have you ever noticed that "Going apeshit" is just a rude way of saying "Going bananas"? I wonder which phrase came up first, and which way it was altered? Did someone alter it to make it more polite? Or alter it to make it more rude?

Stuff like this is bouncing around in my head these days, probably because since figuring out thumbsucking, Zoe has also figured out Sleeping Through The Night. It's freed up parts of my brain that haven't been seen in almost 4 months! This is the most phenomenal development since our adoption. It's a bigger deal for Rose than it is for me, which is kinda backwards since I'm the one who woke up to nurse every couple of hours in the night. I don't know if it's because of my time at the Air Force Academy, which firmly instilled the lesson that Any Sleep Is Good Sleep, or if it's a raising thing, or just an inborn personality trait. I think of a good night's sleep as any night in which I get relatively close to 8 cumulative hours of sleep. Rose thinks of a good night's sleep any night in which her approximately 8 hours of sleep is not interrupted by climate changes, blanket theft, puppymares, crying babies, beeping alarms... You get the idea. So even on nights when we would get 10 or 12 hours in the sack and a good 8 or 9 of them asleep, Rose would wake up complaining that her night had been awful, and I would wake up thinking it had been pretty great. So, two conclusions: getting Zoe to sleep through the night was going to be crucial to restoring sanity to our homelife, and Opposites Attract (thank you, Paula Abdul).

We're going on a week of Sleeping Through The Night now, so I'm almost confident saying "Yes" when people ask if she's doing so. The next question, of course, will be "Is she teething?" When we have to start saying yes to that one, I'm sure it'll be back to bananas at our house, but for now we're enjoying our rest.