I am not your monkey because I am not here to entertain you today, but rather to seek ur knowledge and drink ur branes. You are MY MONKEY today. Answer my query, monkeys! And try to keep the feces-flinging to a minimum. QUESTION: How old were your kids when they stopped insisting on being carried everywhere? Did you indulge this insistence until they got over it themselves or did you ever just put your foot down and make them walk places on their own? And if you did that, how did you deal with the boneless-floor-puddle-thing? Leashes? Shoulder-socket transplants? Games of chicken on the Capital Beltway? Noah wants to be carried EVERYWHERE. I cannot get him to hold my hand and walk to the car or the mailbox or even just stand there by the ATM while I dig around for my wallet. This is particularly true in wide open and unfamiliar places, but he'll still pitch fits at the top of the stairs in our house because he wants me to carry him. "Up?" he asks, over and over, until it is NO LONGER A REQUEST, WOMAN. UUUUUPPPPP. A long time ago a certain occupational therapist was vaguely horrified... Read more →

Whenever I happen across a blog entry about someone's kid having the stomach flu, I always cluck sympathetically, and then CLICK CLICK CLICK AWAY EW PLEASE DON'T TALK ABOUT YOUR KID'S VOMIT. Commence clucking, y'all. And the little X up in the corner over there will show you the way out. Noah woke up wailing around 3 am last night. "A MESSTH! A MESSSSSSTH!" he sobbed, pointing despair at his bed. He cared much less about the messth he made in our bed an hour later, and an hour after that he was over messthes completely and viewed our proffered plastic trash can as just getting in the way of his good time, man. This continued all night and morning and well past the time when it finally occurred to Jason that he had a JOB he could go to instead, fuck this noise. (Tangent! Did you know that the Noggin network airs 24 hours now? [Much to the despair of dozens of tweens who depended on the 6 pm switchover to Degrassi reruns, I'm sure.] But did you know that this is a LIE and an ILLUSION and if you actually do decide that all you need in the... Read more →

When you have a speech-delayed kid, you will be constantly warned not to imitate their pronunciation, no matter how adorable it may be. When they butcher a word, you are supposed to model the correct pronunciation. You will be told this is very, very important. I have a very, very hard time remembering this. "Buddy, do you want some muck?" I ask while pouring the milk. "MMMMMMUCK!" he shrieks and nods his head. "If you are a good boy, I bet you'll get a baboonay," I tell him at Trader Joe's. "Yaaaay baboonaaaay!" he shrieks and eyes the balloons at the register. When I tuck him at night, he asks for his neenee. "Of course Mama will turn on your neenee," I say just before pulling the string on his favorite music box. That one is probably my favorite, since he calls ALL music -- instrumental, vocal, Snoop Dogg -- neenee. Jason (who gets nagged with more child language development bullshiteese than anybody in the world -- "Stop! You're playing the Director Role! That's not the Tuned-In Parent! You're not O.W.L.ing it! Observe! Wait! Listen!") hears me do this and raises a silent, judging eyebrow. "But it's so cuuuute!" I... Read more →

Or, Turf Wars Among the Small Ones Or, Geez, Amy, Maybe You Should Turn Up the Heat? I SENSES WEAKNESS. You think I care, dogthing? I HAS A TENT. SHADOW DOG IS SHADOWY. YET...OMFG IS THAT KIBBLE? Mwa ha ha. Mine. All mine. There was a brief stand-off...and then... Blue Steel FTW! aka I Will Fuck You Up And Good, Dogthing. *sniff* (Okay, so this was terribly non-dramatic in the retelling, and not nearly as amusing as actually watching the every-changing-custody of the sunbeam, and wow, I'm actually now kind of ashamed that this is the sort of thing that I regularly depend on to kill a good 45 minutes of the day, so I'm just gonna go ahead and post some pictures of my kid.) Yes, I know he needs a haircut, but obviously we are just WAY TOO BUSY. Read more →

"What are you eating?" "Olives." "Olives." "Yes. Black olives. What?" "You are eating olives out of a bowl. With a spoon." "Well, eating them straight out of the can is too messy. Plus I could cut my hand." "You've put a lot of thought into this, haven't you?" "I've been working from home a long time, dude. I've picked up a few tricks." "If I were the Internet I would swear you are pregnant right now." "I am 100% not pregnant. And you don't even want to know what I ate when I was pregnant." "You ate Indian food. And chicken nuggets." "Yeah, IN PUBLIC. Then I would come home from work early and eat an entire package of sliced pepperoni." "Ew." "God, it was so good. Also those little snack sausage things. I would wrap them in Kraft Singles." "I never bought you snack sausages and Kraft Singles." "You also never really looked in the vegetable crisper." "Wow. Today has been really enlightening." "You know what these olives need? Some goddamn Triscuits." Read more →

The holiday season is officially over, as we finally threw out all the Thanksgiving turkey leftovers this morning. They were, uh, not in the freezer. Ah, traditions. Read more →

So I quit Lunch Bunch yesterday. And the one-on-one occupational therapy. (The eyeballs of several trolls just rolled completely out of their heads and out into traffic. Quick! Run after them!) I pretty much knew it was time to quit after last week, and then Noah's success in his Thursday Non-Lunch-Bunch class confirmed what I already suspected: Noah did not like his occupational therapist, and she didn't quite seem to like him very much either, and no, the marriage could not be saved and was probably doomed from the day she walked into our house and then tried to rub his face with the duckie washcloth 15 seconds after saying hi. We moved OT from our house to the early intervention center. We added group therapy and a special ed teacher and yet, no progress. I should have listened to my gut and just called and requested a new therapist. But lo, I am pussy, hear me puss out. I kept giving it one more week, another try, another chance for Noah to snap out it because dude, she hasn't touched your face in months! Chill out. Eat some pudding. Then last week she called him a brat. She. Called.... Read more →

Yes, Internet, I fully and openly admit to coasting. Both emotionally and editorially. I have not updated since Thursday, greedily allowing the comments to build and build and pile up, checking in every hour or so to boggle at the number and inform Noah that OVER 200 PEOPLE -- WAIT 250! WAIT WAIT 271! -- give a rat's ass about the fact that he had a good day at the Mock Preschool For Children Who Can't Talk Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too. Also? We've just been so good over here. Noah's little day of victory lifted us all -- even Noah seems to be happier and more confident, like...like he's some kind of actual human being whose quality of life is affected by his speech and sensory problems. And here I thought all this stuff was dumped on ME for the sole purpose of pissing ME the hell off. Huh. He's talking up a storm and busting out with some fairly random vocabulary -- I guess that one time we made mucus Christmas cookies made a fairly big impression on him, because he's constantly asking about the ROLLY PIN and COOKAYS. Mostly the COOKAYS. "Cookay?"... Read more →

I'm afraid if I try and do that thing where I put on my little serious writer's cap and try to write something eloquent and/or witty I will actually ruin this moment because I just can't wait to get the words out and tell everyone that Noah didn't cry at class today at all and I was in the next room the whole time supposedly getting taught how to teach my kid to talk but I really spent the whole time listening for his screams and when I didn't hear them I asked one of the veteran moms if the rooms were soundproof and she said no and I didn't believe her but when we went to join our babies for the goodbye song Noah was running around with a big smile on his face and then he ran to the teacher and sat on her lap while we all sang goodbye to him off-key and horribly and then he SAT ON A CHAIR NEXT TO HER and clapped along to the song and waved bye-bye to his friends and said "Again?" after each kid's turn and when we sang goodbye to a child named Kay Noah said "Kay!" and... Read more →

Last spring Noah was burned pretty badly on a playground slide. I remember the details exactly -- how fearless he was when he scaled the equipment, how he obediently plopped his bare chunky legs down on the tall spiraling slide while I nagged from below (SIT! SIT! Good baby!), how he slid just far enough to realize that the morning sun had made the slide intensely hot, but too far to stop and climb back up to the top. He froze, his arms and legs went stiff against the sloped sides. He pulled his palms off the slide and wailed in pain, only to inch a little further down the slide, which hiked up his shorts and exposed even more soft white flesh to the heat. And me? Oh. I just panicked. I started to scale the slide from the bottom but couldn't get my footing in my flip-flops. (Why it never occurred to me to kick my stupid shoes off, I will never know, I am probably one of those mothers who instead of lifting the car off my trapped toddler in a fit of super-human strength, I'll run around in circles screaming and then inadvertently set off the... Read more →